Human Sister

up her neck, across the right side of her face, onto her right arm, and stops.
    She slowly raises her head. She does not look behind her. She lifts her right arm and places her right palm in the shadow of my head.

Sara

    W hen Grandpa returned from his meeting with General Renner, he told Michael and me that he had to go back to work on the Cinnamon Project the very next day. General Renner had told him there were people whom he loved who might get into trouble—big trouble. For example, illegal drugs might be discovered in their car or dorm room. Grandpa was also privy to classified secrets, secrets that might be found on one of Grandpa’s computers where they didn’t belong, a computer, say, that also harbored encrypted messages going to Chinese internet addresses. “You see, Professor Jensen,” Renner had concluded, “there are many things that can easily happen to you that are much worse than working for me.”
    Grandpa then told us we should immediately begin preparing to go to a secure hiding place. He gave two reasons: First, he felt that Michael was no longer safe in the house. Several scientists associated with the Cinnamon Project had already had their homes searched—“secured from foreign spies” was what they had been told. Grandpa had influential friends in government, such as Senator Franklin, so he might be treated preferentially for a while, but for how long? Second, Grandpa continued to be “worried sick,” as he put it, that the androids might retaliate with biological weapons, and that though Michael and I might be protected, Elio wasn’t.
    “Where would we go?” Michael asked.
    “There are some deep-sea mining modules out in the Pacific that were secreted away by my father when he controlled Magnasea. Until he took me there about twenty years ago, only he and some pre-Sentiren robots that were long ago deactivated and left at the site knew of these modules. He was a survivalist who stashed away precious metals and other things for the Götterdämmerung he predicted but never lived to see.”
    “How long can we live there?” Michael asked.
    “Many years. Dad called the place Anzen, a Japanese word for safe. Of course, this assumes that everything there—food, fuel, and so on—has been well preserved. But at the near-freezing temperatures at the bottom of the ocean, my guess is that most everything is in nearly as good a condition now as it was the day it arrived. Additionally, we will be taking nutriosynthesizers and recyclers, so even if the foods stocked at Anzen have spoiled they can be broken down into feedstock molecules for the synthesizers.”
    “You never told me about this place,” I said, wondering whether he’d known all along that it might come to this someday.
    “It is not something one wants to contemplate—having to go into hiding in a dark, cold place under the sea. I didn’t want to lay such a burden on the imagination of a young girl. I was over seventy when your great-grandfather first told me about it and about some of the many circumstances that might force us to go into hiding there. It is one thing to know intellectually that terrible things can happen. It is quite another to see and feel the cold, cramped place into which one might be forced to retreat. The wars, the plagues—all the possible horrors—suddenly took on a new and terrifying reality for me.”
    “How long will we have to stay there?” Michael asked.
    “At least through the end of the military actions next fall. Perhaps longer.”
    “When are we going to tell Elio?” I asked.
    “When he comes home for his usual visit tomorrow night. But I want him to continue going to school right up to the time we leave. Everything we do outside of these rooms must appear perfectly normal.”
    “You’ll be going, too, won’t you?” I asked.
    “Yes, of course. If you and Elio disappear, certain people would want to know why and where to. I would be questioned, and we know I wouldn’t do well against the algetor.”
    “What about Grandma?” I asked.
    “She’s not healthy enough to endure the hardships we’re likely to face. We’ll simply tell her that we have to be gone for a while, and that it would be dangerous for her to know anything more. Fortunately, she’s been kept in the dark, so if she’s questioned, her interrogators would quickly determine that she’s not lying when she says she knows nothing about any of this. There would be no reason to subject her to the algetor.