She was pregnant. He could feel the new life in her belly. A ghost drifted through the trees, a wisp of sensation. The life in her belly had the same distant feel of preoccupation. She looked up as he approached, but said nothing. A bruise on her throat drew Daniel’s eye, dark on her pale skin. His belly clenched like a fist beneath his sternum.
He sat down beside her, not quite touching her.
“I want to get out of here,” she whispered. “I want to be someone. I’ve got to have a job to do that.”
There was nothing to say.
“Or I could get married.” She tossed her head so that her loose hair fell like water down her back and the bruise on her throat glowed in the pale light. “Why not raise somebody’s kids? If I’m married, I can get an ID number. I can become a real citizen. Why not do that?”
“To Jess?”
“What if it is?” She tossed her head again, her profile stark. “So what?”
“It’s not you.”
His mother had said these words to his father. That sudden awareness silenced him briefly, but he held her angry stare. “You got to be what you want to be,” he whispered. “Jensen isn’t going to give it to you. Or Jess.”
Her sudden stillness was the frozen terror of a blacktail doe caught in a headlight beam. “I have to have the job,” she breathed. “I made him put me with you. Jess… loves me.”
Daniel swallowed, realizing that he had wanted her to deny his words more than he had ever wanted anything in the world. He forced himself to look at her, at the mark of his brother’s mouth on her throat. “Jess is leaving for good in the morning,” he said harshly. “He took a three-year contract with the Wallowah Preserve. He said to say good-bye to you.”
“No.” A sudden gust of wind tore the word from her mouth. Her hand slid unconsciously down to cover the taut flatness of her belly.
The body knew, Daniel thought bleakly. Even if she didn’t, yet. And because he had never before lied to her, not once in all their years of shared play and grief and dreams, he watched belief twist into hurt and acceptance. The pain of it tore at his own guts. She cried, and he couldn’t comfort her. Instead, he walked down through the wind-tossed trees to the greenhouse.
“I want to show you something,” Daniel said as he pushed his way into the damp sulfurous warmth.
“How about later?” Albert looked up from the workbench, his glass knife in his hand, a frown of concentration on his face. “I’m just starting a new batch of clones.”
“You need to see this.” Daniel let the truth of it come through in his words. “Right now.”
“All right.” Albert set down the knife on his sterile tray with precise care. “Are you in trouble?”
“No.” Daniel led the way through the dense trees that bled valuable chemicals when you cut them—because his mother had designed them to do that. So that they would survive, and so would the people who lived here. They wouldn’t die, like the desert horses. Albert followed close behind, sweeping his flashlight beam across the faint path in short irritable arcs.
“My mother changed these.” Daniel let his fingers brush the rough bark of a tree. “She knew the old trees wouldn’t survive, but she took their genes and turned them into something that we needed.”
“I told you that.” Albert paused to catch his breath.
“Then she realized what was happening.”
“Which is what?” Albert sounded irritable. “I loved your mother.” He swung the light beam across the tangled branches of the malformed firs and madronas and cedars. “I thought she loved me. But she ran away. From her work and from me. When I finally found her, she was married to this rube. Had his kid.” Bitterness edged his voice. “What was she doing? Punishing us? Herself? And she loved me.” He shone the light full on Daniel. “I found out that much at least, no matter how much she might want to pretend she didn’t. I proved it to her. You look like her,” he said abruptly. “And you…”
“No.” Daniel raised a hand against the light. “Not here,” he said. “Just a little farther. Then I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
Albert looked puzzled, but it was a mask, and excitement shone through it as he followed Daniel into the scrub. “There was never anyone else in my life,” he said as they reached huckleberry brush. “I never wanted anyone else. I had to come back. To ask her…” He drew a deep sobbing breath. “When I saw you, and I realized… I want you to come with me.” He stepped in front of Daniel, blocking his path. “I took a leave from my university position, but I can go back any time. I’m a doctor, now, with a university. I can get you a scholarship. You can live with me. You can make something of yourself. You don’t have to be a loser.”
“Look first,” Daniel said and stepped around him, pushing quickly through the brush so that Albert had to follow.
He fell silent as they emerged from the scrub into the tiny clearing. “My God,” he said, and then stood silent again, playing the flash beam slowly across the nervous stallion and the grazing mares. After a while, he drew a long breath. Sighed. “Who did these?” he whispered.
“Keri.” Daniel faced him, offering the second lie of his life. “Don’t tell her I told you. She’ll just say somebody else did ’em. They mean something special to her.”
“They’re incredible,” Albert breathed. “She has real talent.”
Daniel looked away struggling with a sudden desire to tell this man that the horses were his, that he was what Albert had come here to find.
Only they weren’t, and he wasn’t either. “I am not your son,” he said. “Dad paid to have a DNA analysis run on me to make sure.” The third he, he thought. The last. Although it was also a truth. “I want to tell you about Keri,” he said softly. “Her mother deserted her years ago. She was a doper and Keri doesn’t have an ID number. You should see the paintings on the walls of their cabin. She uses kids’ watercolors. That’s all. And they’re… incredible. Only nobody is ever going to know,” he said fiercely. “She isn’t ever going to make it. Unless somebody helps her.”
“You mean me, right?” Albert slashed the light beam across the scrub like the blade of a sword. “You want me to take her home like a puppy I found in the woods?”
“You wanted to take me home with you.” Daniel watched him flinch. “That’s why you came here, isn’t it?”
The survivalist’s ghost had followed them from the greenhouse. It wrapped them both suddenly with a chill moment of yearning and loss. Albert shivered as it drifted away. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“You called my mother an artist,” Daniel said steadily. “Keri is one.”
“You want me to save her.” Albert looked down at him, angry. “You think I can do that.”
“I don’t know.” And now he could let himself tell the truth. “I don’t know if she’ll go with you, but she might.” He held Albert’s eyes. “She doesn’t belong here.”
“I don’t… know.”
“And she can show you how to get out of here with your skin in one piece.” He played his last card pitilessly. “They know about you, in town. They know what you’re doing up here.”
“What? Growing endangered plants?” He drew himself up. “That’s a damn crime around here?”
“There are a lot of people around here who work on freelance contracts for the Forest Service. You’re growing those plants for a big timber management company. They’re planting them where they’ll blow maintenance contracts awarded to freelancers like my dad.”