Veil Page 17

  “Look how clever this very solution is to a problem so many claimed was impossible,” said Tommy. “Future generations will figure things out, or they won’t, which means they didn’t deserve to. Evolution at work.”

  Tommy was enjoying this, reveling in his nihilistic savvy.

  Zia brushed off her pants, repressed the terrors lurking in her heart, yawned dramatically, and stretched like a cat. “Well, this has been horrifying,” she said. “But your extradition order doesn’t come through until tomorrow, and I’ve had quite enough of listening to you mansplain your big plans. Great to see you’ve so impressed yourself, Tommy boy.”

  “This isn’t about me, it’s about you,” snapped Tommy, and his voice lost its affected humor. “Do you want to be tortured to death in front of each other or live out your lives in the isolated luxury of your own compound in Riyadh? I have the company. I have the both of you. But Santiago has the access codes for the Project Svalinn command module that runs the clandestine injection and pulls the data. Ben needs them. I need them. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Either you give up the codes to me of your own volition and the judge goes lenient on you both, or I let my interrogators rip them out of you, fingernail by fingernail.” He stood abruptly. “Think about it. When we arrest you tomorrow morning, I expect a decision. In the meantime, we’ll be jamming all transmissions and shooting down anything that isn’t one of your gorgeous little drones. Nothing like a little quiet time to sharpen the mind.”

  Tommy strode off across the beach, kicking up sand. He stopped a few meters away, and half-turned back toward them. “Oh,” he said. “And Zia? Fuck you and your little cabal. I’m glad Galang’s dead. He was a mouthy little fag. You, Aafreen, Kodjo, all of you deserve each other.”

  Zia stared at him, speechless. A shadow of self-recrimination passed over Tommy’s face, as if he wanted to take back what he’d just said, but stubborn pride replaced it and he spun and stalked over to the Zodiac. The commandos piled into the boat behind him and they backed off the beach, reversed direction, and roared out into the oncoming waves.

  The surf eroded their wake, distorting the spreading V, and Zia marveled that Tommy might resent exclusion from a group he disdained, that he envied their lot as outcasts even as he cast them out, that for all his talk of the primacy of relationships, he so misunderstood friendship that he believed it to be a right, not a privilege. When you held yourself above reproach, the whole world was to blame.

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  Zia and Santiago stared out to sea long after the Zodiac had disappeared from view. Waves crashed and crumbled and shushed up onto shore, leaving behind gleaming crescents of wet sand when the water sucked back out to rise into another break. The sky was a blue dome overhead and Zia could feel the volcano rising up behind them, imagine its slope extending down, down, down to the ocean floor. Standing on an island meant standing on the exposed peak of a seamount. Tommy’s ship was so large, so solid, that it appeared unaffected by the rolling groundswell, a manmade island untethered from the Earth’s mantle.

  Father and daughter wordlessly began to trudge back up the beach. All color seemed to have been washed out of the world, faded by the strength of the afternoon sun. The sand shifted under every step. The heat thickened the air and left them listless.

  Vivid sensory impressions flickered through Zia’s mind. The sickeningly sweet taste of a date plucked from a finely wrought bowl in the hermetically sealed Riyadh mansion where she and Santiago would live out their lives reading and arguing, forgotten by the wider world and visited by escorts when they pleased their jailers. The feeling of soft but immovable restraints on her wrists, neck, and ankles accompanied by the faint smell of ammonia and disinfectant in whatever theater of pain SaudExxon’s professional sadists performed in. Sitting next to her father, their legs dangling in the pool, clinking champagne flutes in a final toast before swallowing a deadly cocktail cobbled together from the island’s pharmacy, waiting for their souls to recede ever so slowly into the glorious tropical sunset.

  “Comemierdas,” said Santiago. “All of them.”

  Santiago had taken Zia to the US Open for her ninth birthday. She had been giddy with anticipation, excited to spend time with a father who always had people and business demanding his attention. They arrived in time for the hotly anticipated Walsh vs. Ye quarterfinals, but at the beginning of the second game Santiago took a work call. The attendant asked him to be quiet, Santiago argued with him hotly and then disappeared into a corridor to continue the conversation, leaving Zia to watch the match, mortified and alone. At the time, she’d believed that her father’s unpredictable anger was the flip side of his genius, the keen edge of brilliance. Later, she realized that his rash outbursts weren’t inevitable side effects of his creativity, discipline, and independent-mindedness. His short temper was nothing more than a short temper. People put up with it because of his success, cutting him slack he didn’t deserve. Now, for the first time, seeing his clenched fists, tight shoulders, and how his gait stiffened, Zia recognized that the wrath he unleashed on others was displaced rage at a world that defied his efforts to tame it.

  Zia herself wasn’t angry. Despite everything, she wasn’t even scared. She was empty, hollow, fragile, her soul a painted eggshell. She couldn’t even bring herself to hate Tommy. He’d murdered Galang. He’d framed her and her father. He was hijacking Interstice and the geoengineering program to salvage a fading empire for personal gain. But the more he set himself up as her nemesis, the more tragic she found him. To care enough about hoarding power to be willing to kill, to repress your basic humanity to such an extent that this seemed a fair price to pay, a person who’d reached those extremes deserved pity more than anything.

  Having nothing to look forward to, Zia looked back. Tommy had spent boarding school screening his privileged peers, leveraging those relationships later to advance his own cause. Why hadn’t she suspected him earlier? How could she have allowed herself to fall for Tommy’s act? Fuck you and your little cabal. There had been a strange hurt in the look Tommy had thrown her as he marched off across the beach, as if all his bluster, all his scheming, was nothing but a false front to cover up rejection. Zia remembered bouncing up off the bed, donning her clothes, and telling him “we’re done” as soon as he’d judged her choice of friends. She hadn’t wanted to realize that her lover was a social climber blinded by an insecurity that rendered every relationship a rung on a ladder up which he could never quite escape the gravity well of crippling self-doubt. In retrospect, the signs were obvious: the snide comments and dirty looks that stemmed from internalized privilege, the way that believing himself to be exceptional had been a way of degrading others, how desperately he cared what other people thought of him. In dumping Tommy, Zia had felt so righteous, so sure of herself, so like her father when he tore apart someone else’s idea with absolute precision.

  What had seemed righteous then now looked petty and misguided. She had blamed Tommy for judging her friends and had responded by judging him even more harshly. She hadn’t tried to change his mind, to flex her empathy to accommodate a boy born into corpomonarchy, to show him why treating friendships like realpolitik was ultimately self-defeating. Zia had indeed channeled Santiago, but instead of her father’s courage, she’d tapped into his very worst quality: a capacity for capriciousness and the desire for absolute control. In doing so, she had reinforced the perverted beliefs that she so stridently claimed to oppose. She’d exorcised Tommy, and now here he was with that original kernel of rejection in full flower. A life worse than wasted walking a trail he’d chosen but she’d help blaze.

  “Comemierdas,” Santiago repeated under his breath as they walked back through the villas and to Zia he seemed appallingly old and impossibly young all at once, as if age distanced you from childhood only to ferry you back.

  Secrets. Power plays. Warships. Extradition. A planet wrapped in the sheerest of veils. Zia needed to find some purchase
on reality in the midst of this madness. She focused on the rustle of palm fronds, the hawk riding thermals off the volcano’s ridgeline, the white chalk lines against the dark red clay of the tennis court.

  “Want to hit?” she asked.

  “I—” A flurry of expressions passed across her father’s face. “You know what, why not?”

  If these were their last few hours of freedom, they might as well enjoy them.

  They found rackets and balls in the little clubhouse and lined up on opposing baselines. Zia bounced the ball once, twice. On the third bounce, she stepped into it with a forehand shot straight down the middle. Santiago returned it and Zia sidestepped and responded with a crosscourt backhand. And then instinct took over and they were rallying, the ball rocketing back and forth across the net, rackets hissing through the air to find it, shoes skidding on clay. Slowly at first and then with burgeoning clarity a rhythm began to manifest. Like dancing partners feeling their way through a song, Zia and Santiago fell into sync with each other, every lob, volley, and slice contributing a piece to an emergent pattern.

  Thought sublimated into presence.

  Time dilated.

  There was only the next stroke.

  And then, like a screech of feedback interrupting the climax of a song, something broke the flow. At first, Zia didn’t understand. Then she saw that Santiago was flagging. His clothes were soaked with sweat, his feet were almost but not quite getting him to where he needed to be, his grip was too tight—killing the little bird and torquing his shots. Zia tried to accommodate by slowing down her groundstrokes and hitting directly to him but she could see Santiago denying his own exhaustion and rather than falling into a new, slower tempo, he forced himself to keep the previous pace so that the rally advanced in jerks and hiccups, like a water strider across a pond.

  Zia lobbed a shot into the corner and Santiago sliced the backhand return straight into the net. She reached for the extra ball in her pocket but her father sank to his knees, pressed his forehead against the strings of his racket, and began to rock back and forth, his gasps for breath interspersed with a high-pitched keening.

  Startled out of her flow state, Zia hurried around the net to kneel beside him just as Dembe sprinted up from where she’d been stationed courtside. He was hyperventilating and his signature white t-shirt was sopping wet where Zia touched his shoulder. His hands were shaking from gripping the handle so hard and he never stopped moving—rocking back and forth like a bobblehead.

  “Breathe,” said Zia, injecting her voice with a calm that belied her inner terror. She had never seen him like this, never seen him so utterly out of control. “Breathe.” This was her father. The rock. Caster of shadows she fought to get out from under. He didn’t break down—he fixed other people’s problems for them, whether they liked it or not. He had just lost the company he’d dedicated his life to, the secret project he’d pursued to honor his wife, his belief in his own infallibility. “Breathe.” She remembered how outraged she’d been when she discovered Santiago had assigned her covert security, how maddening his supreme confidence always was. She’d always secretly wanted to see him break, to see his conviction collapse under its own weight. In the event, she wished he would regain his self-possession, once again become the father who might drive her crazy, but always had a plan. “It’s going to be okay. Well, it probably won’t be okay, but if you die on me, it’ll be even less so.”

  He unclenched his grip and the racket fell to the ground. Empty hands shaking, he waved Dembe away and turned to Zia. The strings had pressed a grid of red indentations into his forehead like a waffle iron—bars of the cell of the mind.

  “Mija.” His voice was thick, words forced out between shallow sips of air. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. I’m sorry I didn’t make the time. It’s the only thing that mattered, and I messed it all up.”

  “Papi, relájate, I—”

  “No.” He clutched at her forearm, squeezed. “No. I’m the one who sent you away to boarding school. Your mom didn’t want to, but I convinced her it was important for your future, so you wouldn’t have to endure what we had to overcome. And all the time I’ve been telling you what to do, what to think, when I should have been telling you how proud I am of you for creating the life you wanted to live for yourself, how proud I am of who you are. And after your mom… afterward I should have been there for you. That’s what she would have wanted. That’s the only thing she really would have wanted. I even stood in the way of you and Galang publishing her manuscript, which was such a beautiful thing for you to do but which I couldn’t bear because it reminded me that she was gone. I’m just—I’m sorry, mija. I’m so sorry.”

  Like a key into its lock, something slid home inside Zia. There were so many other things they should be worrying about, so many other things they should be doing, but she belatedly realized that the aspect of this surreal disaster that was the most insane was that she and her father had barely spoken to each other since her mother’s death. Instead of coming together they had grown apart, shutting themselves away in their own private worlds to grapple with their own private loss. Zia had told herself that it was because Santiago was controlling, because their conversations so often ratcheted up tension instead of dissipating it. There was truth to that, but the kind of truth that only served as a convenient excuse smeared across something deeper and darker. Zia was scared, terrified of the magnitude of her grief and her inexplicable guilt, afraid to face a world without Miranda. Santiago was too. So they sought to evade the memories each evoked in the other even at the cost of their relationship.

  Zia sat down heavily, then leaned back until she was lying directly on the clay. Santiago flopped down beside her. She sank into a churning mass of memory. The smell of Miranda’s shampoo. The silvery glitter of moonlight off the still surface of an alpine lake. A few bars of an otherwise forgotten salsa tune. The taste of bone broth. Lying awake to the incessant, deafening rhythm of her own beating heart. The stories Zia told herself about herself loosened, the identity their scaffolding supported going all wonky, betraying how insubstantial it really was. The sun beat down from above. Heat radiated up from below. The Interstice satellites orbiting overhead would see their forms spread-eagled on red clay, ten thousand unthinking, unblinking eyes logging, tagging, and collating data to create a digital mirror world to which they were the bridge—a bridge Zia couldn’t reach through the electromagnetic tempest of Tommy’s jamming. Tomorrow Zia and Santiago would be at Tommy’s mercy. With those satellites in hand, the rest of the world would be too.

  “The aerosols,” said Zia. “Do they change the color of the sky?”

  “Not perceptibly,” said Santiago, his voice slightly calmer. “Sunsets are a little redder, but the human eye wouldn’t be able to distinguish the blue we’re seeing from the blue we would be seeing without the program.”

  “But it is different, even if we can’t see it.”

  “Any change in atmospheric chemistry affects refraction and scattering in one way or another,” said Santiago. “So technically, yes.”

  The subtlest shift in the shade of blue heralding a different future.

  “Remember when Mami took me to the Grand Canyon? She scooped up some water, let it dribble through her fingers, and told me how each of the tiny molecules in each of those little drops might seem insignificant, but that over time it was they and only they that had carved out the vast rock walls rising up on either side.”

  Santiago’s hand found Zia’s and squeezed. Grit bit into their sweaty palms.

  “I once asked her why she wrote,” said Santiago. “She told me how willows suck toxins and heavy metals from the soil. They’re so effective at cleaning their environment that they’re used for phytoremediation on lands we’ve polluted. She said their tresses do something special to the quality of the light when they hang over flowing water, create a permanent golden hour inside their embrace. Medicines like aspirin were derived from their bark. These beautiful trees aren’t
just growing up, they’re giving back all the time in countless ways. That’s what she wanted her writing to do, to be: a willow tree.”

  A cloud metamorphosed overhead, refusing to take a stable shape, driven across the heavens before a wind they could not feel.

  “When I joined my first humanitarian aid mission, part of it was that I wanted to give back,” she said. “But another part of it was that I just wanted to… disappear. I just couldn’t even…”

  Santiago’s grip tightened and Zia squeezed back until it hurt. They had each buried themselves in the world to hide the ugliness of their pain.

  “I’m sorry too,” said Zia. “Sorry for all the horrible things I’ve said. For disap—”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for. Nothing.” His voice was raw, fierce.

  “Some leónes we are,” she managed. “Abandoning each other to the hyenas.”

  “Too fucking proud,” he said.

  “Too fucking proud,” she echoed, the last word disintegrating into something between a laugh and a sob.

  The cloud shifted, split, reformed. The heat was viscous and all-consuming, displacing thought, demanding everything for itself. The satellite footage that haunted Zia’s dreams surfaced in her mind, Gilberto stumbling out of the jungle, the skinny guide barely able to keep his footing as he supported Miranda, half-carrying her across a barren patch of earth to the nearest cement-block building. They were visible for less than thirty seconds. Jungle. Stumble. Building. Jungle. Stumble. Building. Jungle. Stumble. Building. A thousand loops. A million. The loop of a lifetime. A lifetime of loops. Neither Zia nor Santiago had ever set foot in that cursed rainforest.

  “I miss her so much,” said Zia, the admission prompting a Gestalt switch that reversed the joy and pain of grief, foreground and background of the selfsame loss flipped so that she could no longer see it the way she had before.