Darwin with his red panda ears and tail out laying in bed playing a Switch. Darwin is adorable and chubby and holding a white and black cat [https://64.media.tumblr.com/2c7d33392a94631bd1e0b528e3f38b67/763dcc44f55666df-f6/s1280x1920/68ef2ef3cc8ce05d9d137fe92a6bfd2bd94822fa.pnj]
LAHQ. Terre Department.
Marek shifted his weight uncomfortably in Logan’s office, his mind moving a little too fast. Terre’s Second looked up from his desk and regarded him. In contrast to Logan’s entirely banal administrator’s office, Logan had bright blue skin, orange and pink hues that surrounded his ice-blue eyes, and dark hair. Logan was natural-born, and Mother Nature, while beautiful (much like Logan, Marek couldn't help but observe), wasn't perfect. He had a poison generation knack and in the world outside of labs and genetic alteration, that meant aposematic coloration. Until very recently, Marek would have thought that imperfection wouldn't have made its way into Venus' labs, but that was feeling less certain by the minute, and especially within the past twelve hours.
“You okay?”
Marek smiled and put on a good show of being fine, even though his stomach was in knots. “Yeah, I just don’t have all that many great memories of being in the Vice Principal’s office.”
He took a sip of his coffee and joked with good humor, “That poor Chicago Academy staff.”
“You’re telling me,” Marek agreed, trying to play off his nerves.
Logan watched him with eyes that always seemed to look through you with the kindest of intentions. “It’ll be fine. You don’t strictly need to be here if you’re not feeling up for this.”
Marek shook his head with a forced smile. “No, finding these kids is my responsibility now. I need to see her with my own two eyes. I’m okay.”
“It’s okay to not be okay after what you found out today.”
Marek wasn’t okay. The first set of coordinates that Mackenzie had given them was a cemetery.
A newborn Jane Doe had been interred there fourteen years ago. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. He was supposed to struggle and stress and work inhuman hours, but they were supposed to bring the twenty-one remaining kids home alive.
There was a knock and Logan called, “Come in.”
A young girl, nearly fifteen, with dark hair and big blue eyes opened the door. “You wanted to see me, sir?”
Logan grinned warmly and Marek followed suit. He liked kids just fine, more than fine, even. But Marek had very little experience or interaction with them personally, and always sort of felt like that was a job too important to leave to someone who liked to take things as off-the-cuff as he did.
“Yes. Jane, this is Mr. Marek del Sol, Uranus’ Second. We wanted to talk to you.”
It wasn’t until she’d walked all the way inside that Marek understood how short she was, small and young and deadly serious. “It’s good to meet you,” he said, leaning to nod to her. He waited for Logan to go on, but he didn’t. “You’ve heard about the twenty-five kids that Sol is trying very hard to find and bring home?”
“Yes, sir. The failed probability manips.”
With a glance at Logan and faith that he’d jump in to prevent Marek from doing this so poorly he was causing harm, Marek continued, “Well, it turns out you’re one of them.”
Jane blinked and automatically turned her eyes to Logan, then back again. “I don’t understand. I’m nat-born. Sol found me as a baby.”
“Yup, we found you back then, but we didn’t recognize who you were because we didn’t know anyone was missing yet.”
“Saturn is using her knack,” Logan added, “to find the kids.”
That seemed to change everything. “Saturn? Saturn knows who I am?” she asked, blue eyes going rounder, starstruck.
“Jane here has always wanted to be in Saturn,” Logan nodded to Marek before turning back to the girl. “And according to Saturn, you were the first gen made and the first that Sol found.”
She stared at Marek. “You don’t think I’m the first Sol found.”
He was taken aback. It was true that she wasn’t the first one identified by Saturn. “As far as we know, Sol found you within days of achieving breathe.” Chronologically, she was the first.
Something connected. “Does that mean I’m actually a del Sol?”
“Yes,” Logan told her. “It means you aren’t a Jane Doe. You were named Anise del Sol.”
“Anise.” she cocked her head, as if considering the idea of it.
“I think it suits you more than Jane,” Marek offered in a manner he hoped was as least awkward as possible. Her expression was too serious and too intense for a name so often paired with the word “plain.” There was a manner of devastation coiling in his chest looking at this young woman, who had been a Jane Doe, and then there was this other Jane Doe who had died at the age of only days. That young gen would be the same age as the girl in front of him now. She should be but she wasn’t.
What was the difference between her and the baby who had died? It was just odds, he supposed. Probability.
“Are you okay with me updating your records to your original name?” Logan asked her.
She nodded. “Where did Sol find me? They’ve only ever told me it was in a hospital.”
Marek answered. He’d read the translated, jotted notes from Mackenzie enough times to have it memorized. “You were left in an alley in Skid Row here in LA. A good samaritan brought you to a nearby hospital. Can I ask you a question? It’s okay for you if you don’t have an answer.”
“Okay.”
“You’re a telepath?”
Her eyebrows pinched in confusion. “Yes?”
“Sorry that’s not the question. Here’s the weird thing. You were genetically coded to be a healer, not a telepath, if the probability manipulation didn't work. Does that explain anything to you? Does it make anything make sense?”
Anise stood stock still for a minute. “No. I’m not a healer. Is that why my telepathy is defective?”
“It’s not defective,” Logan corrected, “you’re just still learning to master it.”
“It’s too weak,” she complained. “All I can do is not be able to stop from hearing everything around me, like how you’re upset that the first baby Saturn found wasn’t alive, which is awful and I wish I didn’t know that.”
It was unsettling to hear a telepath just reflect his thoughts back to him. He assumed telepaths all around him always knew more than he would particularly want them to, but generally, they kept it all to themselves as the burden they had to bear. But she was fifteen. She shouldn’t have to. “I’m just really grateful to see that you’re okay and here safe.” He was, powerfully so, and hoped she was getting that through her telepathy too. Not just the painful stuff.
Logan leaned forward. “I’m going to set you up with an appointment to meet with some Pluto and Venus doctors. They want to take another look at your DNA to see why your knack didn’t turn out as predicted.”
“Sure. Maybe they can fix my telepathy.”
“You’re not broken,” Logan chided gently. “I’m going to write you a note to let you out of your classes for the rest of the day. This is a lot to take in.”
“No,” she replied quickly. “Thank you but that’s okay, sir. I wouldn’t want to fall behind.”
Logan checked his watch. “You should be getting to class then.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.” Her smile acknowledging Marek was polite, but pensive. Then, she turned and left.
Marek collapsed into a chair that was too low for a man with legs as long as him. “I was not that adult at fifteen. Or at twenty, for that matter.”
“They’re all more mature than they should be in an ideal world, but even at that, Jane stands above the rest. Anise. That’s going to take a minute.” He tapped a pen and looked at Marek. “Are you okay?”
Sighing, he dropped his head back and opted for honesty. “No. I know this gen died fifteen years ago, but finding that little grave is tearing me up.”
“It didn’t happen fifteen years ago for you. It’s happening right now in your mind, but it was fifteen years ago, and you can’t take on responsibility for any of it.”
“Nancy wants me to track down a psychometrist once they bring her body home, to see if they can find out what happened to her. I'm not built for this. Not anymore.” Marek rubbed at his face. “I'm built for figuring out janitorial budgets and HR initiatives. Not whatever the hell that’s going to be like to sit with. You know I'm working on getting a program started to bring rescue animals to agents housed here in LA? The Uranus Pet Program. The name's a work in progress. Baguette’s going to be the mascot. Gonna make agents feel happier and more at home here—pets boost morale." He sighed. "That's what I'm built for. Baguette Updates. Not this." He shook his head. "I’m sorry, I don’t mean to dump on you here.”
“It’s fine. We Seconds have to stick together. For what it’s worth, rescue pets seems like a really sweet idea and the kids always enjoy your Baguette memos. The kindergarteners get to pick their favorite every week for the bulletin board if they do all their work.” Marek smiled at that, though he felt beyond tired. “And, anyway, it’s not a shortcoming to be affected by this.” The school bell rang. “That’s me.”
Marek nodded. “I’ll get out of your hair. Thank you for listening. I’ll call you and Rafe if I get any new Venus Twenty-Five info coming out of Mackenzie’s office—except Rafe lives with Mackenzie so that’s…LAHQ’s weird.”
Logan laughed at that as he fidgeted with some papers. “No more than you.”
“Touche. I’ll be in touch.” He was going to need a drink to get to sleep that night.
---
LAHQ. Terre Department.
Having only recently been awarded an office all his own, Darwin liked to spend the first few minutes of every morning tidying whatever he’d left out of place the day before. Refiling, straightening, wiping up coffee rings on the off-white formica desktop. The office was small and in the deep basement levels of Terre where the air was stuffy and warm. Today was particularly easy since he’d spent yesterday on location in Seattle, so there wasn’t much to clean up.
He had just sat down at his desk when Ollie stuck his head into his doorway.
“Hey,” he said, letting himself in. “Can I pick your brain on something?”
“Yeah, sure,” Darwin replied, his eyes flicking to his laptop to scan over his inbox briefly before minimizing the window so it wouldn’t distract him.
“You did the eval visit on that Neptune team yesterday, right?”
He had. There had been a lot of sweating involved and he’d leaned heavily on the list of questions he’d written up on the plane there, which helped. Evals were one thing, but being around Neptune agents made him nervous. Well, Neptune made everyone nervous—except for other Neptune agents.
The team from Seattle, relaxed in their home environment, weren’t outwardly intimidating—unlike the stern-faced agents who policed the halls of LAHQ. But still, if someone Darwin was riding an elevator with complained to him that they were feeling lousy that morning because they’d gotten a little too stoned the night before, that was fine. Nothing would come of that. But you couldn’t do that in an elevator with a Neptune agent. It’s not like Darwin had a head full of desires to break rules. He liked rules. They made his day easier because he knew what to do. But still, being around Neptune agents made him feel guilty, watched, and small.
Darwin realized he’d zoned out a bit too long. “Yeah, I did. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Did a teleporter bring you?”
Darwin nodded, feeling his stomach churn at the memory. “On the way back.”
“Yeah, that’ll mess your guts up real good for a while.” Ollie gave him a pitying smile. “So what were your thoughts?”
Darwin shrugged. He hadn’t filled out the paperwork yet, opting to curl up, nibbling on dry crackers to ease his nausea the night before. He was sort of waiting to see what came out of his fingers when typing up the report to make a call.
“They have a good team dynamic,” he found himself saying. “Nice location and a big house. But—” Darwin bit his lip thinking. “The team leader is a natural-born and he’s religious.”
Ollie nodded. “That’s not strictly prohibited by the Corp.”
“Sure, but it’s discouraged. So that’s something to think about. But on the other hand,” Darwin was getting a little lost in his own thoughts, “that could be a positive thing, to bring some normalcy for a kid who’s been living out in the world.”
“Good point. So do you think you’ll recommend them?”
Darwin swallowed. “Yeah, I think so,” he replied, surprising himself. He wanted desperately to change the subject. “Is that what you wanted to pick my brain about?”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Ollies’ eyes flashed. “No, actually, sorry. Need more coffee I guess. I did my eval on that team out in Nevada and I have some reservations. I was hoping you could help me sort them out.”
“Me?”
“Well, yeah. I’m on the fence with it. Location is pretty remote, but they seem nice enough. A little stiff, but whatever. The ex-Entropy agent gives me some concern, though. But if the other two can balance that out, then I’ll probably push them forward. So I wanted to ask you about Reeve. He was in your class in Academy?”
Darwin began to sweat. “Yeah, what about him?”
“Well, the records on his Reintegration are sealed, so I was hoping you could give me some insight into what actually happened to him.”
“I don’t—” Darwin felt a droplet of cold sweat run down his side and he felt a wave of embarrassment. “It’s hazy,” he admitted, finally.
Ollie blanched. “You were one of the students. Shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”
Darwin shrugged. “Tangentially?”
“But you had to get Reintegrated?”
Darwin nodded. “He wasn’t my mentor, but he took an interest in me, I guess.” He spared a moment to try to remember which of his friends had been the ones mentored by him, but it was like grasping at fog.
“What the hell did this teacher do? Was there some kind of abuse?”
“No, no, nothing like that. He broke Academy containment laws and took students out into LA for lessons in the real world after school hours. Driving lessons, metro rides, things like that.”
Ollie’s mouth opened briefly before remembering how to work it. “How? How could someone just walk kids out of the building and not get immediately stopped?”
“He was a telepath.”
“It would take one helluva telepath.”
“He was. You know how sedatives weaken telepaths? He used to drink constantly just to bring his telepathy down to a livable level. I remember he always had a bottle of red wine in class.” Darwin froze up, surprised that he’d remembered that.
Ollie shook his head in wonder, but got a wry twist to his mouth. “Man, though, I remember my first ride on a subway after I left the Academy. I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
Darwin shifted his feet. “It’s fuzzy. It feels weird talking about it.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to touch a wound. Thank you. It does help to know the indiscretion was leaving the Academy and not something darker. Plus, if you went through it and they’re trusting you to be on the student care team, that really solves that reluctance.”
Darwin nodded. He worried about whether it was okay that he had said that much, but figured that the safe placement of a student was the best possible argument for delving into that tangled mess of fog that was that year of his life.
“Hey,” Ollie said, brow pulled together. “I’m gonna get some coffee before I bang this eval out. Want to come with, or I can bring you back one?”
Darwin pointed at his screen, though his finger had a tremor. “I need to get on this, but I’d love a coffee, thanks.”
He smiled. “You got it. Sorry again.”
Darwin returned the smile with an effort. “Don’t worry about it.”
When he was gone, Darwin pulled up the eval form for the Seattle team and stared at it with a sigh. It was going to be another long day.
---
Present Day. Beatty, NV.
While Reeve was working on another mission report in his office, his laptop pinged to notify him of a communication along Sol’s secure channel. He hesitated a second, his hand hovering, seeing that the message was coming from Uranus’ Second, himself, and also included the head of Terre on the email. One click and every plan, every moment, and every aspect of their lives shifted. He read the message, then sat back in his chair and exhaled a long breath through his nose. He read it again. Closing the laptop, he went to go find the others.
He found them in the living room, sprawled on the couch in front of the TV. He stood in the doorway watching them and realized that his own eyes were wide, dry, and painful from not blinking. He closed them tight, scrunching up his face before setting his features in what he hoped was a calm and collected shape.
“Guys,” he called, forcing himself to walk into the room, “turn that off.”
They shifted to look at him. “Why?” Hannah asked, picking up the remote.
“Just turn it off.” He was unreasonably worried that his voice was about to crack.
Gareth shrugged and she switched off the television. “An assignment?”
Reeve’s eyebrows rose. “Yes?” he hazarded, sitting on the coffee table in front of them. That made Gareth sit up, his brow furrowed.
Reeve pushed up his sleeves. “Okay, two things.” He cleared his throat. “There’s a new head of the Venus Department. The last Venus has been erased for performing unethical experiments on gens.”
Gareth lowered his chin and looked up at Reeve curiously, “Okay, that sucks, but why are we freaking out?” Hannah gave him a smack on the leg. She and Reeve were both gens, and her pain at this was loudly present in his head.
“Aside from it being clearly terrible,” Reeve replied, letting his words bite, “we care because these experiments involved a batch of gens who were abandoned out in the world.”
“Wait, what?” Hannah yelped.
Reeve swallowed. “Apparently the gens were intended to have a probability manipulation knack, and instead of waiting to see if the knack had properly implanted, the former Venus put infants into situations which could otherwise be lethal. If the probability manipulation took, then they would instinctively bend reality to survive despite the odds. And if it didn’t, they…Well, the department wouldn’t have used up resources.”
Hannah leaned forward at the waist, her face contorting. “That is seriously fucked up!” Reeve nodded, feeling sick.
“I know I’m new,” Gareth began, “and Sol’s pretty deep into your mad scientist stuff, but that doesn’t sound like—” He tailed off and Reeve could feel that Gareth’s stomach had knotted up.
“It’s not,” he said firmly. “It’s completely counter to what Sol was established to do, which is why the old Venus has been erased.” Reeve laced his fingers together in his lap. He was measuring his breathing, a slow count. It forced his speech into an even and deliberate pattern. It made him sound professional, which he needed, because that was the last thing he felt.
“This happened years ago and they’re just uncovering it now and tracking these gens down. That’s,” he breathed out, counting, shifting his eyes to look up at the ceiling. “That’s what the evaluation was actually about. We’ve been assigned to be a foster team for one of them. That’s the second thing.”
His teammates were silent, staring. The flurry of their unorganized thoughts buffeted him like a gust of wind. He narrowed the focus of his mind in order to block out Gareth’s thoughts, as he’d promised, no matter how loud or panicked they were. Instead, he concentrated on Hannah. She was filled with wordless emotion, a painful empathy and fear. There was a lot of fear in the room, much of it his. It made his tongue feel swollen. He watched her sit back, looking deflated.
“When?” she asked. He was grateful for the practical nature of the question.
“ASAP. They’ve used a tracker to find him and we’re supposed to go meet up with the Comet team. They want us to pick him up—Terre said that it would help improve bonding, help him trust us more if we were the ones to do it.” His composure was breaking down. “I don’t know.” Reeve watched Gareth’s hands become fists.
Hannah hadn’t moved. “How old is he?”
“Fourteen.”
She coughed at that. “And they’re just finding this now?”
Gareth’s mind was like a storm, a writhing thrashing thing that Reeve had to grit his teeth against to keep from allowing it in, digesting the screaming white noise. He saw Hannah sense Gareth’s energy change too, and she turned to him, putting a hand lightly on his arm.
“Reeve?” Hannah was looking at him, her brows drawn together, probably feeling the state he was in. He’d been silent too long.
“Sorry.” He shook it off. “His name on file is Alexander del Sol. He’s in Reno.”
“Just tell me it’s not another telepath,” Gareth muttered.
“It’s not.” He wanted it to be good news. Instead, he sighed and continued. “He was generated with probability manipulation with a backup of telepathy, but the intel they’ve sent says he doesn’t have either of those knacks, somehow—my guess is that whatever they did to encode probability manipulation skewed things. It says he’s a psychometrist.”
Gareth’s eyes snapped from the floor to Reeve’s face, but it was Hannah who broke the silence.
“So he can touch something and know its history? Touch a person and read their past?”
He nodded, keeping his eyes just to the left of Gareth, not meeting his eyes.
Gareth. Reeve imagined that this would be emotionally hardest of all for him. Even if they didn’t always get along, he and Gareth understood each other that way. They both had pasts that they needed to leave behind. Gareth was already unlucky, as a man who preferred to be closed off and private, to be stuck with two people who could always sense his emotions. It was easier with the empath side of things. Telepathy was his sore spot. Gareth and Hannah were close, which Reeve was glad for—Gareth had a past and should have someone to stand in the thick of it with him. It was only going to get harder.
Gareth nodded sluggishly and shifted as though to stand up. Reeve knew that meant he was going to go on one of his drives and come back looking like he’d rolled around on the floor for one reason or another. Reeve caught at his arm. It felt like his heart was frantically pumping something vile through his veins instead of blood, something that made his stomach churn.
“Not yet. You can go. You can do what you need to do, but not yet. We need to talk about this. We can’t put this off and you should be here for it.”
Gareth’s eyes slid off of Reeve, over to the direction of the door, and came back again. He stayed in his seat and shook off Reeve’s hand with a gentle but practiced twist.
“I thought you said we didn’t qualify to foster?” Hannah blurted out.
“Apparently we made a very good impression.”
“Now what?” Gareth asked, voice hoarse.
“He’ll need things. Clothes. I don’t know, kid things. And we’ll need to get the spare bedroom set up and the house kid-proofed. No guns laying around and shit. I’d like to leave for Reno first thing tomorrow.”
Hannah ran her hands down her face, dragging down the corner of her bottom lip. “Holy shit,” she breathed. “Holy shit.”
Gareth pursed his lips and held Reeve’s eyes. “If you can handle it on your own, you should go alone to pick this kid up. I’ve been recruited. The fewer people there the better. It’ll feel more like an invitation and less like an ambush.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Reeve said looking down. He stared at his own hands for a moment, spread his fingers out, palms up. He had no idea what he was doing. There were things a psychometrist would know about him that he had been taking great pains to hide.
“I’ll make sure I’m back by tomorrow morning,” Gareth continued, “so Hannah and I can get things ready while you’re gone. And Hannah,” he turned to her and let out a breath, “he’s fourteen years old.”
The realization hit Reeve like a bell being rung. He’d truly been living with her for too long.
“So?” she asked, confused.
Gareth’s eyes widened and he looked her up and down expectantly.
“You have to wear clothes,” Reeve sighed.
“What?” She looked to Gareth. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Gareth threw his hands up in the air. “He’s a fourteen-year-old boy!”
Hannah wheeled on Gareth, “You’re a nineteen-year-old boy!”
“Yeah, and this,” he motioned to her naked body, “is sometimes still a big problem!”
She puffed out her cheeks. Still glaring at Gareth, she stuck her arm out and pointed one finger at Reeve, nearly poking him in the face. “Reeve doesn’t care!”
“Reeve is really strange!”
“Guys!” Reeve took her hand in both of his and moved it down. “I’m not saying forever, but you are going to need to wear some clothes. Let him get settled first.”
“But—”
“You can either wear clothes because you know you should, or you can wear clothes because you think you want to.”
Gareth choked on a laugh and she sat up straight. “You wouldn’t.”
He looked to Gareth and tapped his own temple. “Would that upset you?”
Gareth pressed his lips tightly together against another laugh and shook his head. Reeve turned back to Hannah.
“Hannah, do you feel like wearing clothes for a while?”
“Yes.” She blinked. “Hey, stop it!”
“I’d love to. This is a boy who is going to be picked up by a stranger, brought to a new home, told that a huge corporation genetically engineered him to have a superpower, that a renegade element in the company tried to kill him, and now he has to train to work for them for the rest of his life. He’s probably going to be terrified. The dress code can wait a week.”
“Goddamnit. Fine.”
Gareth caught his eye. The noise in his head condensed into a sense of questioning. Gareth was taking steps to work with his telepathy. They were making slow progress, the two of them, but it made Reeve feel more at ease every time.
“Yeah,” he told him. “Go.”
Gareth stood and made for the door. Hannah watched him leave. She knew better than to go after him. They were odd friends, but best friends. She drew her knees up to her chest and looked back over to Reeve.
“Can we do it?” she asked. “Can we foster a student?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. He didn’t.
---
Pahrump, NV.
Hannah scrunched up her face as she rolled her cart through the boy’s clothing department of the store. “What do fourteen-year-olds wear? What size even are they? Is there a size tiny?” She felt clueless and she watched a look float across Gareth’s face that said help, I’m lost and I need an adult.
Same, dude, she thought to herself. She said, “What do you think?” holding up a t-shirt with a NASA logo on it. He shrugged. She sighed. She tossed it in the cart. Rinse and repeat. It was how everything had been going since Reeve got the news.
She and Reeve had cleaned out his office last night while Gareth did his solitary wanderer panic thing. Then early this morning, pretty much minutes after Gareth walked in, the two of them had taken the actual reasonable car to drive into town while Reeve made his way to Reno in his ridiculous flashy monstrosity. She felt kinda bad for Reeve, thinking about him trying to convince this kid to go with him after rolling up in that thing, but he didn’t seem to think it would be a problem, so who was she to knock it.
Gareth had circles under his eyes—it was obvious that he hadn’t slept. She’d barely slept herself. Especially after feeling the seemingly unending bundle of nerves and anxiety radiating from Reeve the whole time they were moving furniture. Dude seriously needed a drink and a hot bath, as far as she was concerned. It was exhausting being an empath around these two.
While she and Reeve were moving furniture and playing tetris in Reeve’s room, trying to fit his desk to his liking (she rolled her eyes even just thinking about his pickiness), she had spent the entire time coaching him through his freak out. He was a control freak and barely let her touch his stuff, but eventually he’d relented for the sake of time.
Once they’d emptied the room and it sunk in that they didn’t have furniture for a foster kid, he’d literally sat himself down in the middle of the floor and heaved a dramatic sigh Hannah could only describe as cartoonish. The worst part was that being an empath sometimes made it hard to just give in to her urge to ruthlessly make fun of moments like that. She sat down next to him and rested her head on his shoulder instead. It was the first real display of physical affection between them—Reeve was usually so stand-offish that she avoided his considerable bubble. He didn’t seem to mind just then, though.
She asked, “What is it?” Her enunciation was a little slurred from her cheek being smooshed against his shoulder.
“I don’t know how to buy a mattress.” He swallowed, and she genuinely wondered if he was holding back tears. “I don’t know how to buy furniture.”
Hannah sat up. “You buy them at a store, Reeve. It’s not that bad.” She tried to keep her voice soft, but a laugh escaped her nonetheless. “We weren’t all raised in the Academy. I’ll tell you what. You go get some sleep, and Gareth and I will get it all taken care of as soon as he gets back. We’ve got this. There will be a bed for our bouncing baby boy by the time you bring him home tomorrow night.”
And now, here she was at the closest mega store (an hour from town) with a cart full of flat-pack furniture, and realizing that she had no idea what fourteen-year-old boys wear. And she hated to admit it, but Reeve had been right about the mattress. She knew there was a way to get one quick, but this was Beatty in the middle of nowhere. They’d just have to set up the medic cot in the kid’s room for now and take care of it later. Better to have him pick out his own mattress anyway.
Thank god at least one of them had a level head.
Gareth shook her from her thoughts as he held up a shirt she’d mindlessly put in the cart a minute ago. “What the fuck is this?” he asked.
She shrugged, looking at the shirt. It was blue with a train on it. “A shirt?”
“It’s for like, a six-year-old, Hannah. Look at it.”
“Well I don’t know!” she said, exasperated. “It’s not like I’ve done this before. I’ve never been a fourteen-year-old boy, for the record. Unlike some people.”
Gareth sighed and put the shirt back on the rack. “Okay,” he said, rubbing his temples. “So what do we know about him? We know he’s been living on the streets. He’s a psychometrist, so here’s hoping these items didn’t come from the worst sweatshop imaginable. What else?”
Hannah sighed, “He’s fourteen.”
“Yeah, got that.”
“Um,” she said, biting her lip.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Okay,” Hannah said. And then she wasn’t sure where to go from there, so she said, “Okay,” again. She looked around. “Let’s just get one of each.”
Gareth barked out a laugh. “One of each what, exactly?”
“We’ve got the company card, right? Let’s just pick some shirts you think would look cool to a fourteen-year-old and get one in each size and call it a day. We can return the ones that don’t fit.”
Gareth shook his head. “You’re insane.”
Hannah shrugged again and started grabbing shirts off the rack until Gareth chipped in and started helping discern between what was apparently “dweeb” material and what he thought the kid might like. Occasionally, she’d pick something terrible on purpose just to hear him make another joke about her lack of knowledge around clothes. It was good to hear him laugh.
The more they shopped, the more they realized they needed. It felt weird choosing underwear. Bedding was harder to decide on than she’d have thought (left to her own devices, she would have just bought the first thing on the shelf and called it a day, but Gareth had other ideas). He would need a hamper, a lamp for his bed-side, a toothbrush, a mirror. At check out they looked like they were buying a matching wardrobe for a weird Noah’s Ark-style children’s cult where you needed to have one member of each size, but they needed to all match. It would have been embarrassing if it weren’t so funny. The part that was embarrassing were the three times they had to go back to buy one more essential thing they forgot about. But by the time the last false start to their trek home rolled around, Hannah reached over and plucked the car keys from Gareth’s hand, got in, and started the car. “We have furniture to put together. He’ll be here at the end of the day and it’s not a short drive home. Whatever we forgot won’t be the end of the world.”
She knew that Gareth hated letting other people drive, but she didn’t care. She wanted to pick the music this time. They’d manage.
***