She spent the rest of the night studying for her bar exams. The bubble stayed with her. She recognized exactly what it was: joy.
It was going to be all right. The contract, unwritten, between her and her society—Kenzo Yagai’s society, Roger Camden’s society—would hold. With dissent and strife and yes, some hatred. She suddenly thought of Tony’s beggars in Spain, furious at the strong because the beggars were not. Yes. But it would hold.
She believed that.
She did.
7
Leisha took her bar exams in July. They did not seem hard to her. Afterward three classmates, two men and a woman, made a fakely casual point of talking to Leisha until she had climbed safely into a taxi whose driver obviously did not recognize her, or stop signs. The three were all Sleepers. A pair of undergraduates, cleanshaven blond men with the long faces and pointless arrogance of rich stupidity, eyed Leisha and sneered. Leisha’s female classmate sneered back.
Leisha had a flight to Chicago the next morning. Alice was going to join her there. They had to clean out the big house on the lake, dispose of Roger’s personal property, put the house on the market. Leisha had had no time to do it earlier.
She remembered her father in the conservatory, wearing an ancient flat-topped hat he had picked up somewhere, potting orchids and jasmine and passion flowers.
When the doorbell rang she was startled; she almost never had visitors. Eagerly, she turned on the outside camera—maybe it was Jonathan or Martha, back in Boston to surprise her, to celebrate—why hadn’t she thought before about some sort of celebration?
Richard stood gazing up at the camera. He had been crying.
She tore open the door. Richard made no move to come in. Leisha saw that what the camera had registered as grief was actually something else: tears of rage.
“Tony’s dead.”
Leisha put out her hand, blindly. Richard didn’t take it.
“They killed him in prison. Not the authorities—the other prisoners. In the recreation yard. Murderers, rapists, looters, scum of the earth—and they thought they had the right to kill him because he was different.”
Now Richard did grab her arm, so hard that something, some bone, shifted beneath the flesh and pressed on a nerve. “Not just different—better. Because he was better, because we all are, we goddamn just don’t stand up and shout it out of some misplaced feeling for their feelings…God!”
Leisha pulled her arm free and rubbed it, numb, staring at Richard’s contorted face.
“They beat him to death with a lead pipe. No one even knows how they got a lead pipe. They beat him on the back of the head and then they rolled him over and—”
“Don’t!” Leisha said. It came out a whimper.
Richard looked at her. Despite his shouting, his violent grip on her arm, Leisha had the confused impression that this was the first time he had actually seen her. She went on rubbing her arm, staring at him in terror.
He said quietly, “I’ve come to take you to Sanctuary, Leisha. Dan Jenkins and Vernon Bulriss are in the car outside. The three of us will carry you out, if necessary. But you’re coming. You see that, don’t you? You’re not safe here, with your high profile and your spectacular looks. You’re a natural target if anyone is. Do we have to force you? Or do you finally see for yourself that we have no choice—the bastards have left us no choice—except Sanctuary?”
Leisha closed her eyes. Tony, at fourteen, at the beach. Tony, his eyes ferocious and shining, the first to reach out his hand for the glass of interleukin-1. Beggars in Spain.
“I’ll come.”
She had never known such anger. It scared her, coming in bouts throughout the long night, receding but always returning again. Richard held her in his arms, sitting with their backs against the wall of her library, and his holding made no difference at all. In the living room Dan and Vernon talked in low voices.
Sometimes the anger erupted in shouting, and Leisha heard herself and thought, I don’t know you. Sometimes it became crying, sometimes talking about Tony, about all of them. Neither the shouting nor the crying nor the talking eased her at all.
Planning did, a little. In a cold, dry voice she didn’t recognize, Leisha told Richard about the trip to close the house in Chicago. She had to go; Alice was already there. If Richard and Dan and Vernon put Leisha on the plane, and Alice met her at the other end with union bodyguards, she should be safe enough. Then she would change her return ticket from Boston to Conewango and drive with Richard to Sanctuary.
“People are already arriving,” Richard said. “Jennifer Sharifi is organizing it, greasing the Sleeper suppliers with so much money they can’t resist. What about this townhouse here, Leisha? Your furniture and terminal and clothes?”
Leisha looked around her familiar office. Law books, red and green and brown, lined the walls although most of the same information was on-line. A coffee cup rested on a printout on the desk. Beside it was the receipt she had requested from the taxi driver this afternoon, a giddy souvenir of the day she had passed her bar exams; she had thought of having it framed. Above the desk was a holographic portrait of Kenzo Yagai.
“Let it rot,” Leisha said.
Richard’s arm tightened around her.
“I’ve never seen you like this,” Alice said, subdued. “It’s more than just clearing out the house, isn’t it?”
“Let’s get on with it,” Leisha said. She yanked a suit from her father’s closet. “Do you want any of this stuff for your husband?”
“It wouldn’t fit.”
“The hats?”
“No,” Alice said. “Leisha—what is it?”
“Let’s just do it!” She yanked all the clothes from Camden’s closet, piled them on the floor, scrawled, FOR VOLUNTEER AGENCY on a piece of paper and dropped it on top of the pile. Silently, Alice started adding clothes from the dresser, which already bore a taped paper scrawled, ESTATE AUCTION.
The curtains were already down throughout the house; Alice had done that yesterday. She had also rolled up the rugs. Sunset glared red on the bare wooden floors.
“What about your old room?” Leisha said. “What do you want there?”
“I’ve already tagged it,” Alice said. “A mover will come Thursday.”
“Fine. What else?”
“The conservatory. Sanderson has been watering everything, but he didn’t really know what needed how much, so some of the plants are—”
“Fire Sanderson,” Leisha said curtly. “The exotics can die. Or have them sent to a hospital, if you’d rather. Just watch out for the ones that are poisonous. Come on, let’s do the library.”
Alice sat slowly on a rolled-up rug in the middle of Camden’s bedroom. She had cut her hair; Leisha thought it looked ugly, like jagged brown spikes around her broad face. She had also gained more weight. She was starting to look like their mother.
Alice said, “Do you remember the night I told you I was pregnant? Just before you left for Harvard?”
“Let’s do the library!”
“Do you?” Alice said. “For God’s sake, can’t you just once listen to someone else, Leisha? Do you have to be so much like Daddy every single minute?”
“I’m not Daddy!”
“The hell you’re not. You’re exactly what he made you. But that’s not the point. Do you remember that night?”
Leisha walked over the rug and out the door. Alice simply sat. After a minute Leisha walked back in. “I remember.”
“You were near tears,” Alice said implacably. Her voice was quiet. “I don’t even remember exactly why. Maybe because I wasn’t going to college after all. But I put my arms around you, and for the first time in years—years, Leisha—I felt you really were my sister. Despite all of it—the roaming the halls all night and the showoff arguments with Daddy and the special school and the artificially long legs and golden hair—all that crap. You seemed to need me to hold you. You seemed to need me. You seemed to need.”