One hundred and nineteen, one hundred and twenty…
She’s gone.
“Enough,” Captain Saito says. Do I imagine the pain in her tone? She never looks at Second Sister, growing smaller by the second, as the soldiers solidify the hermium barrier. “You’re dismissed.” She waves us away, though some soldiers linger.
“Earth endures, Mars conquers,” a few intone. Captain Saito does not join them.
Many turn on their heels and leave, thankful to escape this horror. If only we Sisters could dismiss our nightmares that easily.
“First Sister, let’s go,” Ringer says, but I pull away from him and stay with my other Sisters. At some point, he must leave; when I reach for him again, I do not find him, but I also know he must follow the order to return to work.
But I cannot move.
I watch until Second Sister is gone, until I can no longer pick her out amidst the other space debris.
When I finally tear my gaze away from the barrier, I find Aunt Marshae on the dais. Her eyes, as hard as diamonds, slice into my skin. Without words, I hear her speak, her lips curled into that whisper of a smirk that I saw when she wore her true face. Do not become her, she says.
PLAY: 03
I know you don’t get it, why I hate my father. I mean, I’ve seen your home life, and I know your past. Your parents are openly dysfunctional, which is totally different from a family who has scripted dinnertime conversations. Yes, the val Akira family has built worlds. But how many bodies have they stepped over to make them?
Do you remember that one year for our annual leave we went to my house instead of yours?
[Laughing.]
First of all, did it ever occur to you how weird it was we spent our breaks together? Other Rapiers and Daggers would go home separately, spend the week with their families, and return, most of them relieved that they wouldn’t have to pretend to like Mama’s new vat-grown whale recipe or listen to Daddy’s shitty work accomplishments as if they mattered anymore. But we never split, not once during our six years in the Academy.
The military paired off kids, creating a unit where one could rat out the other for disloyalty or whatever, but with us, something stuck. They had created some facsimile of family that was stronger than blood, because, despite our differences, we were kindred. We both understood what it was to grow up before we ever should have had to.
Isn’t that what growing up means, learning to be disappointed by your parents? You’ve said it is accepting them as human, but that’s the same damn thing, Lito. Seeing your parents as humans instead of the perfect, loving caretakers of your childhood is accepting disappointment and learning to live with it.
Childhood is a lie. The end.
[A heavy sigh.]
I’m sure you don’t like that thought.
Anyway, one year we went to see my family instead of yours. I think this was the year before Luce moved into her own apartment, or maybe it was the year after, I don’t know. I just remember the way we all crowded around the low table in my family’s private dining room, legs tucked beneath us on tatami mats.
For the majority of the meal, I felt like I was practically glowing. After years of being apart from my family, the visit was going so well. I know I had annoyed you the week before, prepping you endlessly for this, and I was happy you remembered everything. You’d removed your shoes at the door. You’d bowed properly, arms held at your sides. You’d even brought a gift for my father, though now I can’t remember what it was. But everything changed when you pointed out the empty place at the table, set as if we were waiting for just one more guest.
Did you see it then, I wonder, when my father’s mask slipped—the rage of the monster you woke when you destroyed his carefully preserved facade?
Guilt swarmed me until I feared I would cry. I should have warned you about that empty spot, should have coached you to ignore it. But how could I tell you about it, when we had lived a lie for so many years that I had forgotten what it was to look truth in the eye?
“I’m s-sorry,” you stammered, sensing my distress through the implant, but my father, mask back in place, smiled at you.
“It’s for my wife,” he said, gesturing to the spot at the table, “when she joins us.”
You must have wondered, after everything I had told you about my mother not being part of our lives, why my father said that. Why he acted this way. My mother’s place was set as if we were just waiting for her to arrive home late from work. Like she’d come trotting in, slipping off her shoes and tossing her designer bag somewhere she’d inevitably forget it. You couldn’t know it, but her spot was always set like that, despite there being not one single picture of her throughout the sprawling multilevel townhome.
But you said nothing more, and neither did he. Then the meal continued, as if you’d never pointed it out at all.
When we left, I remember you telling me that my father wasn’t how you’d imagined him. A CEO, a scientist, a man who collects Earthen-Japanese artifacts and enjoys the sitar-heavy classical music from Mars. You wouldn’t expect that man to also find enjoyment in heavy weights and a protein-rich diet. He’s powerfully built, my father, handsome, with wide shoulders and a lightly lined face and dark hair that has a single streak of white above his forehead, as if even age is afraid to mark him.
Does he use geneassists to keep himself youthful? Probably. Can you see the evidence of that on his face? Not one bit. Not like my mother, who changed herself so much and so often that Jun once started crying because she mistook Mother for a new lover of Father’s, some imposter he had brought home.
But the reason my father isn’t how you’d imagine him is because he’s the greatest storyteller there is.
When we were children, Father used to tell us stories of foxes that his father had been told by his father, and on and on and on, all the way back to an ancestor who probably wasn’t even remotely interested in science. Some of the stories we can trace from Mars to Earth and that bow-shaped island called 日本, or Japan, but some of them my father made up himself, as if he stands alongside those ancestors and believes his words are as worthy as theirs.
I loved the trickster stories, the way his face lit up as he told them with a smirk that I tried hard to imitate. Jun also loved the stories where the foxes got the better of people, especially proud warriors. Maybe that’s why I was always closest to her. Shinya liked the stories of fox spirits that acted as guardians. Fitting, given that he immediately went to the Academy and tested into the Command division like a good first son should.
Hanako, despite being the youngest, liked all the stories that mentioned a wide variety of foxes. Sometimes they were white, sometimes they were black; sometimes they had nine tails, and those were the most powerful of all. She would listen with her lips pursed like she would be able to solve why there were so many types, like she was trying to codify millennia worth of spirits. I liked watching her almost as much as watching my father when it was story time.
Asuka, a romantic despite her scientist heart, liked the stories of shape-shifting foxes who would turn into beautiful women and marry unsuspecting men. But I hated those stories.
Every time my mother left and we feared she was gone for good, never to return, those were the stories Father would tell. The fox women in the stories would have a soft, round mouth like our mother, or large black eyes like our mother, or a smile that revealed long canines, just like our mother’s did.