the water gently lapping at its tiled edges. It was only then that Amy realized it was the same house where she and Greer had spent the night.
“This place,” said Amy. She angled her face toward the buzzing trees. Rich sunlight warmed her skin. “It’s so beautiful.”
“It rightly is, Miss Amy.”
“But we’re still inside the ship, aren’t we?”
“In a manner,” Carter replied evenly. “In a manner.”
They sat in silence, sipping the cold tea. Beads of moisture dribbled down the sides of the glasses. Things were coming clearer now.
“I think I know why I’m here,” said Amy.
“I’m expecting you do.”
The air had suddenly chilled; Amy shivered, drawing her arms around herself. Dry leaves, like bits of brown paper, were blowing across the patio; the light had lost its color.
“I been thinking on you, Miss Amy. All the while. Me and Wolgast, we had us a talk. A good talk, like you and me is having now.”
Whatever Carter was going to tell her, she suddenly didn’t want it. It was the leaves that made her think it: she was afraid.
“He said he’s yours. That he belongs to you.”
Carter nodded in his mild way. “Man says he owes me, and I reckon that’s right, but I set store by him, too. He’s the one give me the time to figure it. An ocean of time, Anthony, that’s what he said. I took me some there at the start, never said I didn’t. Was the hunger made me. But I never could set with it. Wolgast was the one give me the chance to make things right.”
“He’s the one who sealed you in the ship, isn’t he?”
“Yes’m. Asked him to do it when the hunger got too bad. He would have sealed his own self up too, except for you. Go look after your girl, I said. That man, he loves you with his whole heart.”
Amy became aware that something was in the pool. A dark shape slowly rising, parsing the surface of the water to take its place among the floating autumn leaves.
“She always there.” Carter gave his head a slow, sorrowful shake. “That’s the pity of it. Every day I cut the lawn. Every day she rise.”
He fell quiet for a moment, his kind face adrift in grief. Then he gathered himself and faced her squarely again. “I know it ain’t fair to you, the things you got to face. Wolgast know it, too. But this here’s our chance. Never come another.”
Her doubt became certainty then, like a seed breaking open inside her. She had felt it for days, weeks, months. The voice of Zero, summoning her. Amy, go to them. Go to them, our sister in blood. I have known you, felt you. You are the omega to my alpha, the one to watch and keep them.
“Please,” she said, her voice trembling. “Don’t ask me to do this.”
“The asking ain’t mine to do. Telling, neither. This here’s just about what is.” Carter hitched up in his chair, removed a handkerchief from his back pocket, and held it out to her. “You go on and cry if you want to, Miss Amy. You owed that at least, I reckon. Cried me a river myself.”
She did; she wept. In the orphanage she had tasted life. With Caleb, and the sisters, and Peter, and all the others. She had become a part of something, a family. She had made a home in the world. Now it would be gone.
“They’ll kill us both.”
“I reckon they’ll try. I known it from the start.” He leaned over the table and took her hand. “Ain’t right, I know it, but this here is ours to carry. Our one chance. Ain’t never come another.”
There was no way to refuse; fate had found her. The light was fading, the leaves were blowing down. In the pool, the woman’s body continued on its slow passage, floating and turning in the eternal current.
“Tell me what to do.”
49
The first real snow of winter arrived, as it always seemed to, in the middle of the night. Sara was sleeping on the sofa when she was roused by a tapping sound. For some stretch of time this sound mingled in her mind with a dream she was having, in which she was pregnant and trying to tell Hollis about it. The scene of this dream was a perplexing jumble of overlapping locations (the porch of the house in First Colony where she had grown up; the biodiesel plant, among the roar of the grinders; a