NINETY-THREE: The Only Sign

 

93

 

The first time Maricel Alcantara caught a glimpse of her own future, she was five.

The jeepney put them out in front of the hospital on a hot, sunny day. Her mother was gripping her fingers with one hand and helping her grandmother with the other.

“This is the wrong entrance,” her mother said, staring up at the tall building. “We have to walk.”

“We can’t be late,” her grandmother fretted. “If we’re late—”

“Nothing bad will happen. We won’t miss it. And if we do, it’s not like a long time ago. We just reschedule in a few weeks.”

“What happened a long time ago?” Maricel asked.

“Nothing terrible, baby,” said her mother. “When people missed their appointments for special medicine, they just had to wait a lot longer for their next turn. Your lola remembers that. Now it’s all easy and not so serious.”

They walked across a parking lot. Maricel’s white dress shoes—the ones they’d bought for her cousin’s wedding—collected their first scuff when she kicked a piece of stray gravel.

The scuff occupied her attention, even with everything else going on. She was afraid her mother would see it and chide her for ruining the good shoes.

When they reached a set of metal doors covered in logograms, she stood on one foot and wobbled around, trying to hide the damaged shoe under her skirt.

“Don’t play like that, Maricel,” her mother said, feeding a long paper card into a slot. “You’ll fall.”

“What do the doors say, Lola?” Maricel asked, still wobbling.

Her grandmother didn’t answer. She was staring at the entrance. “What if they don’t let us in? What if we’re too late?”

The doors opened.

As Maricel’s mother took her hand again and tugged her through them, a voice seemed to fill the whole building. “Good afternoon, Maricel.”

“Someone is talking to me!” She didn’t know if it was a man or a woman.

“That’s the System. It only does it in special places and on special occasions.”

Maricel stared up at the wood carving hanging from the ceiling. It was a multi-toned sunburst, backlit with gold. “Mama, is it going to give us magic powers?”

“Heavens no!” said her mother, laughing a little. “We’re too old, and you’re too young. And that only happens to a tiny, tiny number of people, anyway. It’s nothing any of us will ever have to worry about.”

Oh, that’s right. Her family had explained it several times before today, but she’d gotten excited by the System speaking.

Her grandmother was having trouble with her memory. It had happened to Lola’s mother, too. She had been sad, scared, and sometimes mad since it started. But now it would be all right.

They’re going to help her. That’s why she’s here.

A man in a strange outfit opened another set of doors for them, and they entered a room full of people. Some were sitting, some were milling around, a few were in wheelchairs.

“It’s so crowded,” her mother said, gripping her hand more tightly. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought Maricel. They said it was fine, but—”

A hand fell softly on Maricel’s head, and she looked up from her scuffed shoe to see her grandmother smiling at her. “Other families are here. And she helps me feel brave.”

“I’m very brave,” Maricel said.

“Well…it is an experience for us all I guess. Maricel would you like to try some juice? I know you said—”

“Wevvi!” Maricel’s eyes fixed on the heated drink dispensers her mother was looking toward.

One of her friends had bragged that she’d gotten to drink it before. And that she’d seen an alien before. And now Maricel would be able to say, “So have I!”

“It’s going to taste just like wevvi-flavored lollipops, and you don’t like those,” her mother murmured. “I don’t know why you suddenly decided you had to have it.”

But she wove through the crowd and returned a moment later with three paper cups full of a lukewarm, white drink that smelled like spices. “Don’t spill it,” she cautioned as she handed Maricel one.

Maricel held the cup in both hands and took a sip.

“I love it!” she declared. She had decided to love it already, so there was no going back now.

“You do?”

“It’s sweet.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m going to drink all of it.”

Several minutes later, she was sitting on one of the hard chairs that filled the room, keeping the damaged shoe tucked out of sight behind her ankle and sipping from her mother’s serving of wevvi. She was determined to finish off every drop available to her so that she wouldn’t look like a liar.

The Artonan finally appeared.

“It’s not one of the wizards,” her mother said, more to herself than anyone else. “Looks like a regular person. Unless wizards don’t always wear the fancy clothes?”

The Artonan was going to be a wizard when Maricel told her friends about this, that was for sure.

There was a short speech she was too bored to listen to after the first few sentences, and then they started the recitation.

“Can I say it, too?” she whispered after she’d listened to the adults speak a couple of lines.

Her mother nodded and held a finger to her lips. It was a confusing combination of gestures, but Maricel decided it meant she could join in the reciting as long as she didn’t talk about other things right now.

Repeating after the alien, she said she was a citizen of Earth, a resource world under the protection of the empire. She reaffirmed her personal commitment to the Contract in general. She agreed that in exchange for everything Earth had received in the past and would receive in the future, the Artonans could have…

“What are ‘select warriors and attendants to work under the…’ um…the something ‘of the Contract’?” she asked her mother while they waited for their turns to touch a large glass panel at the front of the room. Whenever anyone pressed their hand against it, it glowed, and the Artonan gave them a polite little nod before they passed into the next room.

“They mean Avowed.”

“Avowed?”

“Superheroes. And the other people who live on Anesidora.”

“Ohhhh…” Then a much more worrisome thought popped into her head. “Why do you have to say the words? Are you sick, too?”

Her mother squeezed her hand. “No. I’m healthy! I just wanted to have it recorded and get it out of the way in case I do ever get sick.”

“I didn’t have to say it when I got my shots.”

The shots had happened a couple of weeks ago, and they were a subject she brought up as often as possible, to remind her mother of the fact that she had not shed even a single tear.

“Your vaccines were different.”

“You said the Artonans made some of them!”

“They did. And I signed a paper that mentioned I agreed to the terms of the Contract then, too. Today is more formal because all of these people are getting special healing, instead of just a few shots. This is a part of it. A ceremony to mark the occasion.”

“There were a lot of shots.”

Her mother grinned and hugged her close. “All right. A lot of shots.”

“Big ones.”

“Huge ones,” her mother agreed, right before she pressed her hand to the glass panel.

It glowed white, and the Artonan person gave her the nod of thanks.

Maricel stood on her tiptoes and slapped her own hand against the panel. Nothing happened.

Very disappointed, she slapped it again.

A hand tapped her on the shoulder. She looked up into a brown face that was a little too purplish to match anyone else in the room. She thought the Artonan was a woman, but it was mostly because they had a colorful embroidered hairband.

“Too young,” the Artonan said in a heavy accent. They smiled at Maricel. “Glow stick!”

From their pocket, they removed a bright pink tube and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” she said.

She waved it around, pretending it was a magic wand, while she followed her mother and grandmother through to the next room.

******

“Maricel, did you hear? Dreaming Bear died.”

She looked up from a video her grandmother had just sent her of her youngest brother trying and failing to feed himself breakfast. He was covered all over in what looked like smashed banana.

One of her friends was running toward her across the expanse of pavement in front of their junior high building.

“Who?” Maricel asked.

“Dreaming Bear! From China. She was trying to bring in a runner our age who was being held for pick-up and transport to Anesidora, and he killed her.”

Oh. Must be a superhero. She didn’t care, but she didn’t mind pretending for Carmen’s sake.

“That’s terrible.”

Carmen nodded. “Anyway….Jacob?”

Maricel groaned. “I haven’t decided. He’s so, so sweet. But I’m not sure I feel like that about him.”

“You don’t have to be sure! He’s perfect for you! Say yes.”

“I don’t—”

“Say. Yes.”

Maricel smiled. “Maybe.”

Carmen slapped both hands to her face dramatically. “Okay okay! Let’s have school.”

“Let’s have school,” Maricel agreed.

Arm in arm they walked toward the front doors. A gaggle of their other friends were gathered in between a pair of palm trees by the entrance. Her phone pinged again, and she looked down at it.

This time her grandmother was forwarding a link to a website for a girls’ swimming club. Maricel smiled. She’d told her lola she thought she should try to find a hobby like so many of her classmates had. Maybe swimming. It seemed like junior high was a time when you were supposed to want some special thing for yourself, and Maricel really didn’t.

She loved hanging out with friends, playing with her little brothers, and spending time in the kitchen with her mother and grandmother, talking about anything and everything while they cooked.

It’s too boring, isn’t it? I’m supposed to want more, I think. Since everyone else seems to.

She’d started telling people she wanted to be a doctor, just so that she wouldn’t sound like she had no dreams at all.

“It’s a lucky thing to be happy with exactly what life has given you,” her grandmother had said last night when she brought up the problem while they were making adobo together. “If you’re happy now, you’ll probably be even happier when you’re a swimming doctor!”

Then she’d laughed and laughed.

******

“Stop squirming!”

“I’m not!”

“Nathaniel! You are wriggling like a fish. How am I going to know if you’re tall or not?”

Maricel knelt beside the door to her parents’ bedroom, trying and failing to look serious. It was evening, and the middle child in their family had insisted on being measured before bed because his teacher had said he might not be the tallest boy in the class and he wanted proof to the contrary.

“You can do it, Maricel!” her step-father’s voice called enthusiastically from the end of the hall.

“Stretch your neck, Nathaniel!” her mother cried.

“If he’s short, we’ll feed him more!” said her grandmother.

Maricel rolled her eyes. “How did I get the hard job when you’re all right here?”

Nathaniel finally stopped bouncing and stood with his back flat against the door. She took the measurement.

She informed him that he was a very average height for a seven year old, and then she tickled him until he forgot to be disappointed about it.

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What do I want to be in the future? thought Maricel, as she drank a glass of water and climbed into bed that night.

A note was stuck to the underside of the shelf over her bed, taped up beside the pictures of her and Carmen wearing matching hats at the end of last year. It was a reminder that she was going swimsuit shopping with her mom next Saturday.

Nothing more than this. I don’t want to be anything more than this. I really am so lucky.

The System chose her that Friday. As an S-rank.

It never occurred to her that she shouldn’t tell her family. She thought she needed their help to keep it secret. She thought it was obvious, from the very moment that inhuman voice whispered in her ear, that it had to stay a secret.

Because Avowed got sent away, and they would never want her to be sent away.

But after days of crying and shouting, and Maricel not understanding how everything was going so wrong when it had never, ever gone wrong before…

…they took her to the consulate.

Her family took her there themselves and made her register. Because it was safer for her, they said. Safer for you and for us, Angel, they said.

Because her powers would be frightening. Because it was the right thing to do. Because they could never hide it forever.

There was a good future ahead of her. A great future. A future where she could have so many extraordinary things.

Please stop crying, Maricel. You’re an Avowed now.

And not just any Avowed. A rare, amazing S-rank. You might see other worlds. Because of you, people like your grandmother get to live full lives. You yourself might live for centuries if you’re lucky.

If you’re lucky.

She never did go shopping with her mother for the bathing suit.

******

Stop crying, Maricel, she thought, lying on floor in a bathroom in Anesidora. She was sobbing beside a tub with a turtle-patterned shower curtain.