Veil Page 12
Her friend was dead. They would never talk again, never trade gossip, never tease each other about their love lives, never question what they had been put here to do. A familiar void opened inside Zia. Death didn’t destroy the past, it stole the future. It snatched away all the could-have-beens, all the we-should-definitelys, all the next-times. It made you realize all the things you wanted to say to someone, wanted to thank them for, and then gagged you.
It was too late.
It was already too late.
It was always too late.
Zia climbed faster, relished the acid burn in her muscles, the ache of her swollen throat. When her mother had passed, Galang had been there for Zia. He had helped her obsessively excavate her mother’s files like a deranged archeologist who studied fossils in a secret attempt to resurrect them. He never pressed Zia to talk about her grief, never asked why she wasn’t talking to her father, never encouraged her to see a therapist. Instead, he was just there for her. Side by side, they’d compiled Miranda’s interviews and field observations, reconstructed her shorthand, and posthumously published the annotated rough draft of her manuscript. By immersing herself in Miranda’s world and helping to share her story, Zia had felt closer to her mother than she ever had in life. When the book finally hit shelves, earned critical acclaim, and leapt to the top of bestseller lists, it felt like losing her all over again. Now Galang was gone and Zia did not know what to do with the sucking vacuum inside her.
Her father’s villa appeared—a sleek human artifact pushing back against teeming green.
Zia stepped through the door and heard him shouting.
“For the last time, Ben, I’m not giving you admin access. Why the hell do you—”
Zia couldn’t hear the other side of the call.
“For fuck’s sake, I give you all the data your models can eat. When have I not implemented your suggestions? Name a single goddamn time.”
Santiago’s interlocutor must be Ben Munroe, the chief scientist on Project Svalinn who was stationed at the Atlantic base that mirrored this one. It made Zia think guiltily of Himmat. She needed to let him know she’d be gone for a while yet. Selai was right: it really was time to promote him.
“Don’t pretend you’re a product designer, we don’t need faster iteration. The timescales here are nothing like consumer software, so stop spouting bullshit at me. I’m already stuck dealing with the fallout from Cory Doctorow’s latest digital rights manifesto and I’m not in the mood to coddle you.”
It sounded like their relationship was about as functional as most of Santiago’s.
“No, I said no. We have protocols for a reason and I think that funding this entire fucking program, including you I might add, gives me the right to make some executive decisions.”
Appealing to your own authority was never a good look.
“Seriously, this isn’t the time to throw another of your fits. The board ripped me a new one this morning. They haven’t been this uppity in years. I suspect there might be some activist hedge fund vipers angling for something. So don’t act mutinous unless you’re ready to crawl back to academia. Now, fuck off.”
Santiago ripped out his earbuds and tossed them on the counter in disgust.
“Tough day at the office?” asked Zia.
He spun. “Zia, sorry you had to hear that. I—” He took three long steps toward her and reached out his arms, then hesitated for a vertiginous moment and dropped them uncertainly.
“I’m so sorry about Galang,” he said. “I know you were close.”
Zia saw her own pain and confusion reflected in his eyes, and hated him for it, hated him for not wrapping her in his arms, for his conviction in everything but connection, hated herself for feeling all of that and more and doing nothing about it. Memory and twisted logic piled up until Zia felt like she and her father were peering at each other through spyglasses from the ramparts of doppelgänger emotional fortresses. This was the moment when Miranda would step in and bridge the gap between them, which made everything worse. Their mutual awareness of her absence was a call to arms.
“Yeah,” she said, more harshly than she meant to. “We were.”
“I—I don’t know what to say,” he fumbled, color rising in frustration.
“Maybe start with ‘I will never be able to live with the guilt of Galang being killed because of me, so I am endowing a foundation in his name and have already started ramping down Project Svalinn.’”
“Oh come on,” said Santiago. “What makes you think his death had anything to do with us?”
Us landed like a gut punch. “You think it’s a coincidence that someone assassinated him the night before I was going to tell him everything?” asked Zia. “For all your bullshit about owning your mistakes, you can’t accept responsibility for anything, can you?”
“I’m just saying that given the stories he writes, he must have a lot of people gunning for him.”
Zia swept the earbuds off the counter. “And you’re making a new enemy right now.”
Santiago’s eyes followed the earbuds to where they skittered to a stop on the floor.
“You’re overreacting,” he said.
Anger blazed so bright in Zia that it vaporized any response she might have thrown back in his face, leaving a shell-shocked clarity in its wake. Miranda had always said that there weren’t enough china shops in the world for her two bulls. Feuding with her father wouldn’t bring Galang back. Nothing could. What mattered was bringing his killers to justice.
“Look,” said Santiago. “Maybe we need to call this whole publicity thing off, keep quiet until things calm down.”
“That’s the last thing we should do,” said Zia.
Was it possible that her father had had Galang assassinated, that by pretending to accede to her plan and then killing him, he could keep his secret a little longer? No. That was crazy. Santiago could be an asshole, but he wouldn’t call a hit. Zia was spiraling. She tamped down burgeoning paranoia and forced her thoughts into line like a carriage driver reining in spooked horses.
“What have your people dug up on my kidnappers?” asked Zia stiffly—trying valiantly but unsuccessfully to channel Dembe’s indefatigable calm.
Santiago shook his head. “Skilled operators with good infosec. We haven’t been able to determine attribution, but their sophistication means they’re a major player. China, Google, South Korea, Amazon, Chile, Disney, SaudExxon, Ethiopia, maybe the US.”
“That’s a long list, not even considering factions within them,” she said. Far less consequential secrets had led to war. The greatest danger of this geoengineering program was the number of unknowns. People with competing agendas would interpret uncertainty in the way that best served their vested interests. She could only pray that future historians wouldn’t dub Galang the 21st century Franz Ferdinand.
“We’re chipping away at it,” said Santiago.
“Let’s cross reference with anything we can find that relates to Galang’s murder.”
He nodded. “I put our analysts on it as soon as I heard.”
A knot formed in Zia’s stomach. “In the meantime, we need to share your secret as quickly as possible. Making it public destroys its value as clandestine intel. It’s the only way to clear the deck.”
Santiago sucked in a breath. “Look, I’m under a lot of pressure at the moment.”
“You’re under a lot of pressure?”
“The board—”
“I was nearly kidnapped. I still can’t go home to India without Dembe glued to my hip. Galang is dead. Odds are you set off this chain of events by deciding to become an eco megalomaniac. So you may want to reconsider whatever complaint you were about to lodge about your precious board.”
“Oh, please. You’re calling me a megalomaniac because I’m trying to solve a big problem, rather than traipsing around the world handing out ration packs?”
“You’re right,” said Zia, sarcasm corroding her words like acid. “Of course, you’re right. In
stead of actually helping people, we should just commandeer the forces that control their lives. Granting them any agency of their own just gives them an opportunity to fuck things up. I imagine you wouldn’t mind one bit if some stranger started making major decisions on your behalf without your knowledge.”
“Meanwhile, all of your charitable efforts have led to such sustainable social change that when disaster strikes again, people will be able to help themselves, eh? Get down off your high horse. The world is made in the mud.”
“We’re breaking the story.” Rage simmered beneath her words. “If you want your pet project to work, people need to know. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want to be here. But your little secret puts a bullseye on your back, and mine by association. You want to get in the mud, play at pragmatism? I’ll back off the minute I see a credible plan that isn’t doomed to fail because it depends on pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. I’m not going to let you screw over the entire planet with your pipe dream. I never thought daughters were supposed to say this to their dads, but grow the fuck up.”
“And how do you plan to break the story without Galang?”
The question stopped Zia in her tracks. Galang had the expertise and the platform required to tell the world about what her father had been up to in a way that encouraged thoughtful debate, that gave this program a chance to be the beginning of a conversation instead of leading to a violent end. If Santiago called a press conference and announced it directly, nobody would trust him or the data he presented. If she approached the wrong journalist, they might seek to milk the situation for every ounce of inflated drama, cultivating outrage that would sabotage any attempt at earnest collaboration. Galang was the only person Zia trusted to do it right who also had the credentials required to be seen as independent. He would have been curious but skeptical. He would have seen that this story did not need to be exaggerated to be compelling, that breaking it was an opportunity to bring people together instead of fracturing them along established ideological lines. With sufficient nuance, perhaps something aside from disaster could be fashioned from Santiago’s preliminary efforts. But with Galang under the coroner’s knife, who could Zia trust to tell such an explosive story with sufficient nuance? To whom would she hand a casus belli on a silver platter? Zia was trapped between risking world war by speaking out, or risking the same by staying silent. She was trapped on this godforsaken island, ensnared in the sticky web of her father’s plans. Vachan had once told her that nobody survives childhood, they just keep going. Zia wasn’t so sure she’d managed to go very far at all.
“That’s what I thought,” said Santiago. “You—”
Zia’s phone rang. Aafreen. “I need to take this.”
She stepped out onto the deck to take the call, not wanting to admit to herself just how much she relished cutting Santiago off. No matter how much he deserved it, lashing out at her father wasn’t going to get Zia out of this. The only real way to take back the reins of her life was to clean up this mess as quickly as possible. She would do what needed to be done, and then do her best to forget he had ever existed.
“Yes?”
“Nothing significant yet,” said Aafreen. “They’re running the bullet through ballistic analysis and trying to crack an encrypted drive they found in his pocket.”
“At least that’s something,” said Zia. “Let me know if you need Interstice support cracking it.”
“I will,” said Aafreen. “But that’s not what I’m calling about.”
Zia gazed out over the richly textured rainforest canopy.
“What is it?” she asked.
Aafreen let out a breath. “His sister is arranging a small funeral in New York next week,” she said. “Kemala asked if you would say a few words.”
A flock of colorful birds burst from a stand of rubber trees, wheeling and screeching as they took wing toward the volcano. Miranda would have been able to name them, no matter how obscure the species. She would have been able to distinguish the males from the females and deduce volumes about their lives from this briefest of glimpses. As it was, Zia could see only birds, and remember her mother’s gleeful explanation that birds were living dinosaurs, refugees across epochs.
“A few words,” murmured Zia, “is the best any of us can hope for.”
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Zia’s prepared remarks vanished like smoke in the wind as she looked out at the array of assembled faces. Galang’s colleagues from the newsroom. Friends Zia had never met. His sister Kemala, fierce and hollow-eyed, steeled against their parents’ refusal to attend. The group chat incarnate, Kodjo and Aafreen and Selai and the rest, the follow-on reunion Galang had wanted realized by his passing. Dembe was stationed in the back by the door alongside bodyguards for the others in this airy Manhattan loft who constituted high value targets. What a strange thing, to live in the sights of unknown enemies.
Panic emerged like a bear out of hibernation—thickheaded and ravenous. There was nothing Zia could possibly say that could capture who Galang was, what he had meant to her, to all of them. People could not be reduced to less than themselves. The only thing she could do was share small, hopelessly inadequate moments that might help coax his soul to surface, and shine a light upon it.
Zia took a shaky breath, felt the Earth beneath her feet, heard the wail of distant sirens, and began to speak. She spoke about shared intimacies, insatiable curiosity, and Galang’s long running passion for pistachio gelato. She spoke about big plans, little jokes, and unrealized dreams. She spoke about boarding school, rules flagrantly violated, and how family wasn’t something inscribed in blood, but forged in life. Oh hush, darling. I’m already packing. Refusing to wipe away the silent tears, she spoke about friendship, loss, and journeys that could only be taken alone.
And then there were all the things left unsaid. How Galang had seen through the masks behind which people hid their true selves, and yet somehow managed never to lose his affection for humanity. Squeezing Galang’s shaking hands as he confessed how after he came out to his parents, they had sent him to boarding school to keep him away from his little sister. How Zia had lost Galang when she needed him most, how much she feared that his death might herald countless others, how much of an imposter she was standing up here eulogizing a friend she might well have condemned.
Like the last grains of sand in an hourglass, Zia’s final words tumbled out and she was done and standing up there by herself in front of the solemn crowd and she was as lost as she’d ever been and had no idea where to go or who to turn to and half-suspected she might just fade into the aether but then Kemala, who looked so like Galang and yet so different, was standing and pulling Zia into a hug that was infinitely more articulate than any speech, that grounded her in reality, that illuminated the tentative, silly, profound bonds that they all shared, and that the pain of severance stemmed from the joy that Galang had brought to the world, the love he had showered upon them all.
A hand touched her arm as Zia made her way back to her friends. She did a double take. “Tommy?”
“That was beautiful,” he said, voice husky.
With his sandy hair, tan skin, piercing blue eyes, and impeccably cut suit, Tommy looked like the Platonic ideal of the man his high school self had been destined to become. She remembered sneaking up to the roof of the chateau to hook up under the glittering alpine stars and how basking in his undivided attention had made her feel like her life meant something, that she was special, that she mattered. He told her stories about hawk hunting with his uncles and playing football under the famous air-conditioned domes that surrounded Riyadh like a string of pearls. They spun out elaborate fantasies of shared futures that ranged from pioneering nuclear fusion to seeking enlightenment in hidden monasteries to pulling off art heists of unprecedented ambition. And then there was the moment that shattered those sugar-glass visions, when he had propped his head up on his elbow and asked her why she was friends with those plebs, told her that she s
houldn’t waste time with losers who came from powerless families in weak countries, that they weren’t worthy of her.
The fact that he had meant it as a supportive intervention was the worst part. His arrogance was so unselfconscious. She hadn’t wanted to shake off the afterglow of sex, hadn’t wanted to wrap herself in the sweaty, sticky sheet, hadn’t wanted to ask him to leave, to demand it when he protested, to threaten to scream when she saw a shadow that might be violence in his eyes.
“We’re all going to miss him,” said Tommy with a sad smile that made Zia despise herself for harboring decades-old resentment. She wasn’t the same person she’d been in high school. Surely, Tommy wasn’t either. They’d all been selfish, generous, kind, cruel, confused, coddled, tortured teenagers. They’d all acted like jerks at one point or another. And it was hard to imagine anything more soul-sucking than being born into the SaudExxon aristocracy. Holding a grudge was exactly the kind of behavior she was apparently still judging Tommy for. And who was Zia to monopolize grief at Galang’s untimely passing? How shamelessly petty. Old bitterness washed away in a cathartic rush. What was death, if not an opportunity to forgive?
“Thanks,” said Zia. “We will.”
It had been a very long time since Zia had included Tommy in any kind of we, a semantic embrace that Galang would have underscored in the script of her life, scribbling feverish notes in the margin about every ending being a new beginning.
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During the reception, the crowd broke up into groups, sipped pinot noir, and recounted memories of Galang in hushed voices. Kodjo told them about how Galang had been there to listen and provide counsel when his wife sued for sole custody. Selai laughed at how Galang would always go cross-eyed when she talked about physics too much. Daniela reminisced about going clubbing together and seducing the prettiest boys with theatrical ploys. Li Jie reminded them of Galang’s absurdly overzealous deployment of exclamation points in text conversations. Zia shared how much he’d helped her with Miranda’s manuscript, how it would never have been published without his support. Tommy joined the circle and Aafreen shot Zia a significant look but he told them how Galang had been the first openly gay person he’d ever met, and how it had felt to befriend someone who made you question the way you’d been raised.