Icons

It’s who we are.

My best-and-only friend and me.

He rummages in his pocket, then pushes something into my hands, suddenly shy. “All right, I’ll hurry it up. Your first present.”

I look down. A lone blue glass bead rolls between my fingers. A slender leather cord loops in a circle around it.

A necklace.

It’s the blue of the sky, of my eyes, of the ocean.

“Ro,” I breathe. “It’s perfect.”

“It reminded me of you. It’s the water, see? So you can always keep it with you.” His face reddens as he tries to explain, the words sticking in his mouth. “I know—how it makes you feel.”

Peaceful. Permanent. Unbroken.

“Bigger helped me with the cord. It used to be part of a saddle.” Ro has an eye for things like that, things other people overlook. Bigger, the Mission cook, is the same way, and the two of them are inseparable. Biggest, Bigger’s wife, tries her best to keep both of them out of trouble.

“I love it.” I thread my arm around his neck in a rough hug. Not so much an embrace as a cuff of arms, the clench of friends and family.

Ro looks embarrassed, all the same. “It’s not your whole present. For that you have to climb a little farther.”

“But it’s not even my birthday yet.”

“It’s your birthday eve. I thought it was only fair to start tonight. Besides, this kind of present is best after sundown.” Ro holds out his hand, a wicked look in his eyes.

“Come on. Just one little hint.” I squint up at him and he grins.

“But it’s a surprise.”

“You’re making me hike all this way through the brush.”

He laughs. “Okay. It’s the last thing you’d ever expect. The very last thing.” He bounces up and down a bit where he stands, and I can tell he’s practically ready to bolt up the mountain.

“What are you talking about?”

He shakes his head, holding out his hand again. “You’ll see.”

I take it. There’s no getting Ro to talk when he doesn’t want to. Besides, his hand in mine is a good thing.

I feel the beating of his heart, the pulse of his adrenaline. Even now, when he’s relaxed and hiking, and it’s just the two of us. He is a coiled spring. He has no resting state, not really.

Not Ro.

A shadow crosses the hillside, and instinctively we dive for cover under the brush. The ship in the sky is sleek and silver, glinting ominously with the last reflective rays of the setting sun. I shiver, even though I’m not at all cold, and my face is half buried in Ro’s warm shoulder.

I can’t help it.

Ro murmurs into my ear as if he is talking to one of the Padre’s puppies. It’s more his tone than the words—that’s how you speak to scared animals. “Don’t be afraid, Dol. It’s headed up the coast, probably to Goldengate. They never come this far inland, not here. They’re not coming for us.”

“You don’t know that.” The words sound grim in my mouth, but they’re true.

“I do.”

He slips his arm around me and we wait like that until the sky is clear.

Because he doesn’t know. Not really.

People have hidden in these bushes for centuries, long before us. Long before there were ships in the skies.

First the Chumash lived here, then the Rancheros, then the Spanish missionaries, then the Californians, then the Americans, then the Grass. Which is me, at least since the Padre brought me back as a baby to La Purísima, our old Grass Mission, in the hills beyond the ocean.

These hills.

The Padre tells it like a story; he was on a crew searching for survivors in the silent city after The Day, only there were none. Whole city blocks were quiet as rain. Finally, he heard a tiny sound—so small, he thought he was imagining it—and there I was, crying purple-faced in my crib. He wrapped me in his coat and brought me home, just as he now brings us stray dogs.

It was also the Padre who taught me the history of these hills as we sat by the fire at night, along with the constellations of the stars and the phases of the moon. The names of the people who knew our land before we did.

Maybe it was supposed to be like this. Maybe this, the Occupation, the Embassies, all of it, maybe this is just another part of nature. Like the seasons of a year, or how a caterpillar turns into a cocoon. The water cycle. The tides.

Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass.

Sometimes I repeat the names of my people, all the people who have ever lived in my Mission. I say the names and I think, I am them and they are me.

I am the Misíon La Purísima de Concepción de la Santísima Virgen María, founded in Las Californias on the Day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, on the Eighth Day of the Twelfth Month of the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred Eighty-Seven. Three hundred years ago.

Chumash Rancheros Spaniards Californians Americans Grass.

When I say the names they’re not gone, not to me. Nobody died. Nothing ended. We’re still here.

I’m still here.

That’s all I want. To stay. And for Ro to stay, and the Padre. For us to stay safe, everyone here on the Mission.

But as I look back down the mountain I know that nothing stays, and the gold flush and fade of everything tells me that the sun is setting now.

No one can stop it from going. Not even me.

RESEARCH MEMORANDUM: THE HUMANITY PROJECT

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / AMBASSADOR EYES ONLY

To: Ambassador Amare

From: Dr. Huxley-Clarke

Subject: Icon Research