Like Moonlight on Water: Chapter 1
The Fourth Night
Just joining us? Start here for a chapter index and details on how I’m releasing this sequel to Daughters of Men. (Spoilers ahead!)
Chapter 1 begins four days after the final scene in Book 1, where new, unsettling secrets affect Lila’s relationship with her daughter—and herself—while Sal fears the consequences of keeping his promises.
The Fourth Night
I was sitting in his chair again, my fingertips exploring the tabletop like a spider wandering its web. My scars burned, and I didn’t need to look at the clock to know it was nearly nine.
“Mom! Are you paying attention to this?” Eileen called from the couch.
I’d been trying not to, but I nodded and my daughter turned back to her laptop. Its screen cast a piercing light that outlined her blonde curls and Sal’s bulky shoulders, but thankfully the back of the couch blocked my view of the video. And in spite of my mood, I found some humor at her sitting so close to him. She still professed to hate him, but even a willful thirteen-year-old had to relent eventually. They had so much in common.
I swallowed, and focused on tracing the lines in the woodgrain. The sun had set and I hadn’t bothered to turn on the kitchen light, but a lone lamp—and that damn computer screen—gave enough illumination for my aimless purpose.
“Lila, you need to observe this,” Sal said.
Actually, I don’t, thank you very much. “I can see from here. Poor things. Just terrible.” I heard sincerity in my voice, but Sal twisted to give me a flat stare. I stilled my hands and managed a solemn nod. “Horrible.”
“This is a big deal!” my kid admonished.
They were both looking at me now, and their unified reproach made me swallow again. When she was full-grown, they’d easily pass for brother and sister. But right now, they looked more like father and daughter. If Sal was a youthful baby-daddy instead of a twenty-thousand-year-old alien genetically programmed to be a golden Adonis.
“Surely you understand the importance of all pollinators.” Sal’s gravity kept my hands pressed in place.
“Mm-hmm. Food chain. Famine. Entire ecosystems wiped off the face of the earth.” Each of my five scars throbbed against the wood. “I paid attention in Biology.”
My child huffed and turned back around, but Sal didn’t let me off so easily.
“Your breathing is shallow, and you did not finish your meal.”
My stomach lurched, and I winced as if in apology. “I’m sorry. It was delicious, really!” Acid scalded my throat to match my hands. “Just a little…late for me.”
“Leave her alone, alien,” Eileen muttered. “Can’t you tell when someone wants to sit in peace?”
Ah, my sweet girl.
“Even if it’s weird she’s sitting in the dark,” she continued. “In Adam’s chair. Instead of just calling him.”
“Child.” Sal’s reproof was firm.
“Don’t. Call. Me. Child!” She closed her laptop with a slap. “How many times do I have to tell you!”
“Antagonizing your mother is infantile. Therefore, you are acting like a child.”
Amid the bickering, I was able to slip outside and vomit over the edge of the porch. After a couple of quick, unladylike spits, I was settled on the top step and sucking in fresh night air before they’d even finished.
A small dark shape flowed up the stairs, and two gleaming eyes blinked. Pebbles had come to comfort me.
“Com’ere, you sweet kitty.” I stretched my legs down the steps and she leapt onto me, rubbing her face against my stomach and purring. “Such a good girl,” I whispered. “Glad I didn’t puke on you.”
It was a warm evening, but her smooth black fur felt cool to my hands. Over the past few days, this had become our shared routine, varied only by whether or not I could retain my dinner. Next would come the swooping dizziness. But with her in my lap, the sensation would fade before Eileen or Sal noticed. Hopefully.
A single spark of cobalt blue light flickered from the shadows at my feet, then drifted down the stairs to disappear in the evening’s black. Pebbles mewed at its morose retreat, and I sighed. Even my angels were miserable.
My daughter and Sal were still at it, though she was the only one who sounded emotional. He paid too high a price for losing control of his emotions—something Eileen loved to exploit by regularly insulting him. Before her small world had spun off its axis a few weeks ago, her sass had always been on the endearing side of rudeness. But after learning that aliens had been manipulating human evolution for millennia, she’d become incorrigible. And after learning that Sal and his team—his family—believed their actions had triggered the cascade of wars and evils that would end the world, she’d become nearly impossible.
“It’s all your fault! Everything!”
“Perhaps, but that does not negate—”
“God, you’re such a know-it-all!”
“I do not profess to know all. However, my experiences are relevant—”
“Just because you’re an alien doesn’t make you smarter than me!”
Pebbles lashed her tail against my thigh, and I knew she was right. Eileen was dragging this out longer than usual, and I needed to put a stop to it. But before I could stand, the porch shifted beneath me. Oh, God, here we go. Sal would have to hold his own a little longer.
Another wave of nausea rolled through me, taking the last of my equilibrium with it. My hands gripped the edge of the steps, scars protesting against the rough wood, and my elbows locked. Pebbles huddled on my lap, and together we waited it out. Hints of salt and juniper mingled in the humid darkness, and the hairs on my arms rose.
I noticed the silence just before the screen door creaked. Eileen touched my shoulder, and the tilting world steadied as she sat beside me.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’m not the one who needs an apology.”
“Whatever. He thinks it’s funny.” As if on cue, a quiet chuckle emanated from the house. “Aliens are eavesdropping jerks!” she called out.
“Sweetie, he can’t really help it with those amplifier things…”
“Enhancers, Mom. Audial enhancers.” She grumped silently for a minute, then sighed. “I miss him, too.” She wasn’t talking about Sal.
“I don’t—”
“Don’t lie.”
I shook my head and roused myself enough to assume my parental mantle. “We’ve been over this too many times, Eileen,” I warned. “Don’t start—”
“I’m not.” Her profile was cloaked in shadows. “Sal explained it to me.”
My heart thumped an erratic sideways beat. “And what, pray tell, did he say?” I risked a glance in the house, but he was still sitting on the couch with his back to us.
In answer, she pried my hand from the porch. “Do the…cuts still hurt?” Her way of reminding me that whether or not Sal was near, our voices were heard—monitored—by Sal’s team.
“Nah, they healed practically overnight.”
Four days earlier, I’d carelessly sliced my fingers and palms with a kitchen knife. And four nights ago, the deep cuts had been cauterized by the touch of a curious alien. Not a physical touch, mind you, which might’ve almost made sense considering the umpteen kinds of crazy that we’d experienced in the past several weeks. Nothing that normal. No, my body had stayed where it belonged—at home with my daughter. But my soul had traveled that stormy night. My fractal, according to Sal. The part of me that yearned to be with—
“Adam is your soulmate, Mom.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I turned and glared through the screen, but Sal’s perfect posture hadn’t changed. Son of a—
“Sal didn’t tell me. I saw it. Before.” She slumped a little. “But when I asked, he explained. About other realities. About how you kept missing each other in this life, but in others…” Her voice trailed off and she leaned against me, pulling my hand into her lap. Pebbles put a paw on her arm.
I could feel Sal waiting for me to take advantage of the opening he’d provided, but I couldn’t do it. “Adam is just our friend, honey. He and Cara both are.”
“Here maybe,” she mumbled.
“Here is all that matters.”
“I miss him.”
“Why don’t you visit tomorrow? I could drop you off while—”
“No.”
“But little Traveler is the cutest—”
“I don’t like babies.”
After that, the only sounds were the hushed rustles of the woods and marsh, and a warm puff of wind that brought the spicy scent of juniper again. I laid my cheek on Eileen’s soft curls, and her fingers tightened around mine.
“What did you see, sweetheart?” I whispered. “Do you see angels like I do?”
She knew to lie and write out the answer if she was worried about being overheard. Pens, paper, and glass dishes with matches were scattered around the house, but she just shook her head.
The couch groaned as Sal stood. His great, muscular frame obscured the back door for a moment, then he was outside and a muffled whump and crackle of brush told me he’d jumped off the porch. I had no idea what he was doing until I heard the crunch of bare feet pounding the gravel road leading away from the house.
“He’s such a weirdo,” Eileen said. “He should buy a bike the next time he jacks an ATM. Where’s he going?”
“I think he’s trying to give us privacy, sweetie.”
She snorted. “As if. It’s like he’s under my skin or something. He’s always there.”
I forced a light laugh, but remembered Eileen’s heartbeat thrumming in Sal’s consciousness. He’d convinced me he would do anything to keep her safe. And with the technology infused in his every cell, the same technology he’d secretly shared with her…he’d done what my grandmother had asked, and more. He would be my child’s protector, long after I’d turned to dust.
Long after her father had turned to dust.
“He seemed disappointed,” she said. “When I told him.”
“Told who, what?”
She let go of my hand and pushed herself up. “I told him I’m not special like you. I don’t see anything anymore.”
The night stretched before him like his endless years, the absence of moonlight a cavernous void pulling him in all directions—and none. He shifted his weight and blood oozed from his left heel onto the pavement abutting the end of the gravel road. His sight was perfect by human standards but no longer exceptional, and something sharper than rock had gashed his foot. Unfortunately, his modulators were already healing the wound.
A musky odor permeated the lesser smells of asphalt and pines, and he heard movement in the ditch to his right. A nocturnal predator, too small to challenge him. Most of the creatures of this world held evolutionary memories of his kind, and even the territorial carnivores refused to engage without provocation. The animal retreated into a low copse of wax myrtle.
He needed a release. Pain. The scalding heat of meted punishment, justly earned for what he had done. Yet the triggering emotions still would not come. For all the times they cursed and burned him, he was bereft now. Guilt was its own type of misery, but he deserved agony. Despair was too weak, too cloying in its slow destruction. Though even if death was an option, he could not—would not—abandon her to suffer alone.
He turned south and settled into the ground-eating stride of a distance runner. Even without the moon, the pavement’s texture guided him. And he knew the route, having traversed it just days ago. Turning east past the smells of decay and river marsh, he continued on quiet streets lit only by intermittent porch lights until he reached the highway. Headlights pierced the night and left a deeper black in the wake of red tail lights. After a quick crossing and a few more winding streets, he slowed. Ahead, water lapped in rustling grasses, and a cooler, salted breeze skimmed his body.
No lights shone in the home’s street-facing windows, but the dog met him at the gate with a cautious sniff.
I am only here to observe, he told her.
Still hesitant, she followed him around the back, then planted herself at the glass doors with a whimper. Her eyes reflected the small lights edging the patio. Questioning. Fearful.
You know we do not harm children.
Another whine.
His own eyes pricked with moisture. Never intentionally.
Her golden fur rippled with a shiver. In their long alliance with humans, her species trusted his kind the least of all animals. She knew she could not stop him. And he knew she would die to protect her people.
He thought of Lila, and called to mind her scents of chamomile and thin skin warmed by a midday sun. All those she loves are under my protection.
The dog’s tail lifted, and she padded to a window behind a large sago palm. Through the fronds, he saw the adam stretched on the couch. The dog nipped his pants leg, and he corrected himself. Adam. With the baby asleep on his chest.
The fireplace hosted a row of low flames, casting flickering light on the two forms. Either man or child must have needed the comfort of ritual fire. Possibly both. A sheen of tears glossed the infant’s exposed cheek, and Adam slowly rubbed its back with the languid motion of an exhausted caregiver.
Sal stepped back and looked up at the girl’s dark windows. Had she accepted her role, or did she regret her decision? The Servants would be closely monitoring the child…but they would not be attuned to other risks.
He rejoined the dog. Cara had chosen to do a great kindness for a selfish reason, but she had also gifted this man with an opportunity to heal. The dog’s head bobbed up, and Sal nodded. Bloodline. Her tail wagged once, then she settled on her haunches.
Together, they watched the two humans—the dog woofing in approval when Adam cradled the child closer and kissed the top of its head. But Sal only felt a hollow sadness, seeing the mother in the infant’s round cheeks and pursed lips. She had been so young, still a child herself, and he had not protected her. And now, in his hubris, he may have set in motion another tragedy.
A low growl rumbled in the dog’s throat and she rounded on him, head low to the ground.
He turned his palms outward and raised his chin to expose his neck. Yes. I caused her death.
The dog’s attack was snarling, vicious—and brief. Her teeth barely scraped his arm before his modulators flung her aside with an electric shock. Yelping and writhing to her feet, she charged again, but Sal deflected her gently. I do not want to harm you.
Hackles raised, the dog snapped at his ankles, barking and growling in a clear order to leave her home. Inside, the baby wailed and then a floodlight illuminated the yard. Sal retreated to the edge of the house as Adam threw open the doors.
“Betty! Here girl!” Adam whistled, making the infant scream louder. “Betty! Come!”
The dog bared her teeth in a last, murderous snarl, and with a wry smile, Sal turned away. I would let you if I could.
With a huff, the dog obeyed her human and Sal heard the dull click of a deadbolt. But the floodlight remained on. Adam’s instincts were as honed as the dog’s—and more lethal. The child’s cries were localized in the living room, but no doubt Adam was roaming from window to window with the quiet tread of a trained hunter. Sal’s lips stretched again. Maybe the human and dog would both have a chance one day.
Pausing only to consider the shape moored at the end of the pier, Sal settled into his own noiseless tread. The boat was another worry. If Lila had attached to it—or worse yet, to the ocean—her uncontrolled transits would be even more dangerous. For three days she had thwarted his efforts to begin the necessary work. But fear of drowning could be a powerful motivator. Since, apparently, saving the world was not.
He frowned and paced into the adjacent yard, dismissive of an anxious mastiff peering from between curtains. Your humans do not interest me. Two cats joined him at the next house, and then a third, padding silently in and out of shadows, restless and milling like his thoughts.
Empathy, she possessed. Intelligence. Courage…of a sort. Obstinate commitment. To the child, which he understood, but also to her role as Giver. It limited her.
He scowled and bent to inspect a child’s plaything lying in a clump of switchgrass. Even muted by night, bright orange and red plastic formed a cheerful representation of a weapon, complete with a large trigger for uncoordinated young fingers.
A silver tabby circled for a better view of the offensive object, but raised one paw as if to say This? What else did you expect?
He grunted and stood. His very existence had sullied this world, though he had been designed to enlighten it. For tens of centuries that bleak irony had numbed him. Subjugated and inured him to ignoble tasks and causal horrors prescribed by his team. Yet she chose to be less.
The cat laced his ankles in a soothing flow of motion, but he would not be calmed. Perhaps other humans had evolved with the same abilities—but she was known to the Servants now. Known to the others.
A crackling heat began to spread from his core to his skin, and the tabby backed away.
His own visual enhancers had documented the duration and behavior of her fractals. Electromagnetic and gravitational anomalies accompanied her like sparks near flame. She had integrated alternate lives into her memories—and somehow conceived a child from one of them. He paced back to the street, and another cat appeared from a patch of woods.
And Lila should never have been able to initiate an empathetic merger with him—much less control it! Sweat slicked his skin and fire licked his lungs; but the pain was tolerable. Too tolerable and receding too quickly.
Madeline had kept the extent of her granddaughter’s abilities a secret with loving cruelty. And when that had nearly failed, she had sent the child away. Had their onetime friendship still been intact, he would have known. But he had respected Madeline’s hatred and had allowed her to sever their connection when the twins were born.
But perhaps…perhaps she had never blamed him for her daughter’s condition. Perhaps she had sensed the child to come and had cunningly used his guilt to hide Lila in plain sight…? A fey child, psychologically damaged by the gruesome death of her father. A child labeled as imaginative—and delusional. The grandchild of a woman who had discarded a healthy son to keep a sick daughter. A woman who had no qualms about giving up a child she claimed had abilities. A woman the Servants had observed for so many decades that their attention was cursory at best.
He paused in the center of the street and turned east, then west, searching. He was missing…something. Madeline’s gift for strategy had always been formidable, but this…? And then to call him to her deathbed?
But not to help Lila. No, Madeline had directed his attention to the baby about to be born. Fretted over recurring hallucinations of the infant wasting away in her youth. Inconsolable, until he vowed to provide the modulators that could cure any ailment. Any ailment, except that which the modulators themselves caused.
The cats ringed him, curious at his indecision, and he walked west again.
Even in Madeline’s last moments, she had repelled his attempts to soothe her suffering—or merge and share her journey to death. Unforgiving to the end. Or protecting her secrets. Perhaps sacrificing one child to save another. Again. But which? And why?
His steps quickened, and the cats fell back with soft mews of concern. Something was wrong.
Eileen.
The pull of her was at once kinetic and magnetic; and his body shifted forward, leaning into a powerful sprint. The cats yowled, and their brethren ahead repeated the calls, echoing along the shortest path through wood and marsh. He should not have left her alone!
Had her instability escalated? Had he underestimated Lila’s despondency? They knew the Servants had been tasked to monitor them closely, but if either had verbalized more than he could explain…
He leapt over a fence and splashed along a drainage ditch, disturbing an alligator in its hunt. The reptile snapped in annoyance, its ancient memories a proud rebuke to mammalian superiority—alien or terrestrial.
A small colony of ferals yowled to his left so he clambered up the muddy slope, though he felt Eileen to the right. Trees and brush had been cleared to make way for a new housing development, and he resumed speed as the cats raced alongside him to the end of their territory. He trusted their night vision more than his own, and within moments, rough pavement was underfoot again and they melted back into the night.
Pebbles bounded up and turned to run with him, but he sensed only questions, not anxiety. She had not been aware of anything out of the ordinary for her humans. Indeed, his enhanced hearing now registered the all-too-familiar sounds of a rebellious tantrum.
He skidded to a stop. “Unbelievable. That child!”
Pebbles sniffed at a bloody streak on his ankle, ears perked and tail high.
“It is not humorous,” he fumed.
The cat disagreed.
