“I have to go back on-site for a few hours,” she says, zipping her swim bag. “Will the pair of you be all right until supper? Jean is in the clubhouse.”
“Jean is in the clubhouse,” Danny echoes, a high sweet distortion of their mother’s voice. His bony head swivels toward the stucco entrance.
She smiles. “That’s right. Noel, watch out for your brother.”
She gives them francs so they can buy Fanta and credit for Noel’s tab so he can play netgames. When she leaves, Danny’s skin fades back to slippery gray.
They’d been in Chad for three months already when Noel’s mother told him about Danny. He’d spent the day, like most, climbing trees, hurling a mangy tennis ball against the concrete wall of the house, and watching procedurally generated cartoons instead of doing Skype school.
The first weeks had been the exciting ones, with his mother coming home with stories each night about the team cleaving their way inside the ship to find the stork adults (Gliese-876s, back then, after their star system) dead and decaying, bonded by bone and neurocable to the ship’s navigation equipment, rot seeping slowly outward. Noel had liked hearing about the low keening sound that made some of the other xenobiologists and one of the soldiers vomit, about the dissolving corpses in the dark swampy corridors.
He’d even liked hearing about the warm red amniotic pool where they found the babies who’d been remade, as best the storks’ genelabs could achieve, in humanity’s image, swapping vestigial wings and spiny shells for bipedalism and articulated necks. Babies who grew to child size with slender limbs and overlarge heads, features vaguely neotenized either by chance, a side-effect of the gene alterations that saved them from the ship-wide plague, or by design, like a cuckoo trying to slip its eggs in.
But now his mother wanted to bring one home.
“Danyal,” she said, pulling herself up to the Formica countertop beside him. “The government still wants them all to have Arabic names. But we call him Danny.”
Noel spooned yogurt into his ceramic bowl, listening to a breathless story about the one stork baby who wouldn’t socialize with his siblings, who aced cognition tests and mimicked speech and followed her tirelessly through the lab.
“He’s sort of imprinted,” she said, with the fragile smile Noel had learned to cherish these past three months, learned to cup in his hands like a brittle bird. He felt the question coming before it reached her lips.
“What if he stays with us?” she asked. “He’s not doing well at the center. And you always wanted a brother.”
The word felt like a glass shard in his gut, but he kept his face blank, how he’d learned from watching her. Noel had wanted a brother. It was true. It gnawed at him. Maybe if he’d wanted a sister more, she wouldn’t have died. They wouldn’t have had to cut her out of his mother’s belly. Maybe he hadn’t wished hard enough.
“For just a little while,” his mother said, smile already moving to slip away.
Noel couldn’t say no.
Noel and Danny are swimming circles around the bobbing, plastic-coated lifeguard, making it spin in place like a sprinkler. No matter how hard Noel kicks, Danny is still quicker. They don’t notice the weather turning until the stacks of rust-red cloud wall off the sun. Noel comes up for air in a sudden dusk and the smell of cool wet dirt itches inside his nose. The deserted pool deck is strangely still. Then all at once the trees frenzy, a ripple of whipping branches, and the dust storm the weather probes missed sweeps down over them.
Noel barely has time to pull up his goggles before the stinging sand slaps across his face. He throws out a hand for the lifeguard’s orange floaters but finds Danny’s slick hard skin instead and flinches away. But Danny’s hands clamp to him, and then his legs, and Noel’s chest seizes with a sudden panic: Danny is drowning him. Then Danny vanishes, slides past, and Noel thrashes blindly after him until he rams against the metal bar of the edge.
Someone heaves him up and out of the water; sand pelts his bare back and shoulders. “Inside, vas-y,” Jean’s voice booms in his ear. The big man has already draped a protective beach towel over Danny’s head, and now grips Noel’s arm.
“My tab,” Noel says automatically, looking to where the table should have been visible, not looking at Danny.
“I have it. Dépêche-toi, hein?”
Jean ushers them back across the slippery deck, through a battering cloud of red dust, into the clubhouse. He puts his shoulder into the door to close it behind them. Noel claws sand out of his hair while Danny struggles out of the orange towel. The barrage has left small red welts on his gray skin.
“Wash out your eyes at the sink,” Jean says, pointing to the concrete basin back behind the bar. The clubhouse is dark except for one flickering fluorescent tube in the ceiling and the glow of a plasma screen hooked to the wall. The few UN workers who didn’t leave earlier now slouch to the sunken couches, mumbling bitterly about cell signals lost, windows left wide open, faulty weather probes.
“I had my goggles,” Noel says, tapping one lens.
“Wash the rest of you,” Jean says curtly. “Then help the stork.”
Noel goes to the basin and splashes cold chemical-tanged water over his skinny arms, his chest, his face, rinsing away the dust stuck to his wet skin. When he straightens up, Danny is standing directly behind him. The sight jolts him.
“Don’t do that,” Noel hisses.
Danny says nothing, washing himself in silence. Someone brings two bottles of wine from the kitchen, and someone else finds a preset film on the television, something with arctic explorers on shifting glaciers, and everyone settles in to wait out the storm. Jean clears Noel a space on the far end of the couch, pulls his unharmed tab out of his pocket.
Noel keeps his head bent over the small screen when Danny slips away to the kitchen, but he still sees it happen.
Danny had lived with them for a week when Noel tried to show him Maya’s picture. He took the Polaroid from his mother’s closet, where she kept an album in case digital storage somehow disappeared, which to Noel sounded like the sun somehow going out. It showed Maya’s small face in black-and-white, the face he remembered as scrunched and dead purple.
With the photo clutched to his chest, Noel went to the living room where Danny was playing. Their mother called it playing, but Danny mostly stared at the old die-cast Hot Wheels and Lego kits, except for the time Noel left and came back to find the plastic blocks built into a twisting Fibonacci spire. Now, Danny was crouched on the rug, holding a chewed yellow Mack truck in his spidery hands.
“This is the sister Mom lost,” Noel said, extending the photo. “We lost. The one I told you about.”
Danny gave him a gleaming black stare.
Noel had tried to teach him words, in English, in French, sometimes in the Arabic he picked up from the response center guard. Car. Voiture. Sayara. He’d guided Danny to the porch one morning to warble a near-indiscernible “I love you” to their mother. That had made her happy for an entire day.
“This is Maya,” Noel said, shaking the photo slightly between his fingers.
Danny took it, gently, then eased upright, clicking and clacking, and walked away. Noel blinked. He followed Danny into the kitchen, past the fridge where he’d scrawled Bienvenue Danyal and then Welcome Danny the day Noel’s mother brought him back from the response center, savoring the static crackle under his fingertip and the electricity of anticipation.