Reached

longer than we previously thought. There might have been a mistake in the record keeping.”
    “Keep trying to get them back,” I say. “Give them the full two days of medication.”
    The medic nods. I pick up the miniport and relay the information to the Pilot. “What do you think?” he asks me.
    “I don’t think we should wait any longer,” I say. “I’ve trained the others here to make the cure. They can oversee their own labs in other Cities if we set them up. But we haven’t figured out how to synthesize it yet. Do you have enough bulbs?”
    “We’ve found enough to begin,” he says. “We need more.”
    “You’ve seen the data we’re getting,” I say. “Time matters.”
    “What do you think we should we do first?” he asks. “Send it out to the other Cities now, or start here and then work outward?”
    “I don’t know,” I say. “Ask Cassia. She can sort it out best. I’m going back to the medical center to see the patients for myself.”
    “Good,” the Pilot says.
    I walk over to the medical center. There’s another patient I need to see whose data wasn’t included in the initial report. They haven’t been tracking her because they don’t know about her. The other medics nod to me when I come in but they leave me alone, and I’m glad.
    The painting above her is the same one, that picture of the girl fishing. Lei stares up at the water, and I smile just in case. “Lei,” I say. That’s all I can get out before her eyes move the slightest bit and focus on me.
    She’s here.
    She sees me.

CHAPTER 56
    CASSIA
    D on’t ask your mother about your father or the flowers right away,” Xander told me. “Give her a little time. I know everyone says we don’t
have
any time, but she’s been under much longer than Ky. We’ve got to be careful.”
    So I take his advice. I ask her no questions, I am only there, with Bram, holding her hands and telling her we love her. And the cure works on my mother. She seems glad that I am here, and to see Bram, but she is in and out, a different return than Ky’s. She was longer gone.
    But she is strong. After a few days, she speaks, her voice a whisper, a little seed.
“You’re both all right,”
she says, and Bram puts his head down next to her on the bed and closes his eyes.
    “Yes,” I say.
    “We sent something to you,” she tells me. “Did you get it?” She looks at the medic who has come to change her line, and I can tell that she doesn’t want to speak too openly in front of him. And she doesn’t mention my father. Is she afraid to ask because she doesn’t want to know?
    “It’s all right,” I tell her. “We can talk here. And I did get it. Thank you for sending the microcard. And the flower—” I pause for a moment, not wanting to rush her, but the time seems right. She brought up the gift. “It’s a sego lily, isn’t it?”
    She smiles. “Yes,” she says. “You remembered.”
    “I’ve seen them growing in the wild,” I say. “They’re as beautiful as you said they would be.”
    She is holding on tight to this talk of flowers, as I did before, when I was afraid and alone. If you sing and speak of blooms and petals that come back after a long time of being winter-still, you don’t have to think about things that don’t.
    “You were in Sonoma?” she asks. “When?”
    “I wasn’t there,” I say. “I saw it growing someplace else. Was it in Sonoma that you saw the flowers?”
    “Yes,” she says, no hesitation, no uncertainty. “In Sonoma’s Farmlands, just outside of a small city called Vale.”
    I look back at the medic and he nods to me before he slips out of the room to relay the information. The crop was in Sonoma. My mother remembered.
    There is so much I want to ask her, but that is enough for now. “I’m glad you’re back,” I say, and I put my head on her shoulder, and the three of us are together without him.

    “Do you still have the microcard?” she asks later. “Could I see it again?”
    “Yes,” I say. I pull my chair closer to the bed and hold up the datapod so that she can see the screen.
    There they are again, the pictures: Grandfather with his parents, with my grandmother, my father.
    “In parting, as is customary, Samuel Reyes made a list of his favorite memory of each of his surviving family members,” the historian says.
    “The one he chose of his daughter-in-law, Molly, was the day they first met.” The historian’s voice sounds full and proud, as if this is a