3

Lila Easterlin

June 30, 2029. Savannah, Georgia.

Lila’s toothbrush was wet. She studied the other toothbrushes in the cup, trying to figure out who they might belong to in order to rule out suspects, running through all of the people who now used this bathroom, and trying to decide who was most likely to use someone else’s toothbrush.

None of the toothbrushes looked like it belonged to her cousin Alfe, the hick from West Virginia she had met a grand total of twice before he and his family showed up on their doorstep last month. Toothbrush in hand, Lila stormed through the house, skirting bedding and mats, piles of clothes and suitcases, until she found Alfe eating a bowl of Lucky Charms, her favorite cereal, which she’d been rationing for the past six months because it was probably the last box she’d ever have.

Lila held her toothbrush in front of Alfe’s nose. His beard looked dopier by the day, all patchy and scraggly on his narrow, hawklike face.

“Did you use this?” she asked.

He ate a spoonful of her Lucky Charms, studying the brush. “I might have.”

“This is my toothbrush.” She curled her lip. “I can’t think of anything more disgusting than brushing my teeth with a brush you just used to dislodge bits of food from your mouth.” She shook the toothbrush for emphasis. “This is mine. Don’t use it again.”

“But I don’t have one,” Alfe said, raising his shoulders.

“That’s not my problem,” she nearly shouted.

Her father appeared in the arch between the kitchen and living room, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “What’s going on?”

Lila folded her arms defensively. “He used my toothbrush.”

Her father looked at Alfe, who said nothing, then back to Lila. “Okay. Alfe, I’ll find you a toothbrush. You—” He pointed at Lila.

“Don’t point at me. I didn’t do anything.”

He kept his finger poised an inch from her nose. “Don’t talk like that to Alfe.”

Lila sighed heavily, tempted to point out that Alfe was also eating her cereal, but she knew that would go nowhere.

“Is he a starfish?” Dad asked, pointing at Alfe.

Lila closed her eyes, willing herself to be calm. “No.” This was her dad’s favorite routine. We have to pull together, blah, blah, blah. She got it; she just didn’t want her toothbrush in Alfe’s mouth.

“Then he’s on your side.”

Lila nodded, knowing Dad would only belabor the point if she argued.

Dad smiled, satisfied. “I’ll find you a toothbrush,” he said to Alfe. Lila watched him walk off, disturbed by how skinny he looked, how little he resembled the stocky, jowly man Lila had known all her life.

“I don’t know how he can do what he does every day and still be so positive,” Alfe said, shaking his head in wonder as he watched Lila’s father walk away.

Lila studied Alfe for a moment, deciding whether she wanted to reply. She decided she didn’t really have a choice, given that he’d said something nice about her father.

“He’s always been like that. Three days after my mother left us to become a Fire Monk, he was helping me make a Halloween costume, and one for himself. Not that your wife leaving you to join a cult compares to disposing of thousands of bodies every day.” Lila used to be embarrassed by what her father did for a living, back when being a mortician was about applying eyeliner to corpses. Now that it was about finding locations for mass graves and collecting DNA samples so relatives might one day know where their loved ones were buried, she felt better about it. “Sometimes people ask me why he’s not fighting in the war.”

Alfe snorted. “That’s a pretty stupid question.”

“I know.” It was the first time she’d said more than hello to Alfe since he arrived, and now she felt shitty for making a big deal out of the toothbrush. He might be okay.

“Did you see your mother much?” Alfe asked.

Before the invasion, he meant. That went without saying. “Now and then. She’s too serene for me. Puts me to sleep talking to her.” She didn’t want to talk about her mother, so she thought of another topic. “Was it hard getting here from Blacksburg?”

Alfe nodded. “We had one really bad moment. We stopped at a lake to get water, and when we went down to the lake, there were two starfish standing in the water a hundred yards away, filling some of their weird sacks.”

Lila felt a crawling sensation. “Holy shit. What did they do?”

Alfe put his hand over his mouth, shook his head. “They turned and stared at us. They seemed as surprised to see us as we were to see them, although we know that’s not likely.”

“What did you do?” Lila whispered, knowing she would have nightmares about this.

“We ran like hell back to our truck.”

“They didn’t chase you?”

Alfe shook his head. “All I can think is, they decided we weren’t worth the trouble. Or maybe it was because it was a mother and three kids. Because, you know, sometimes they leave the kids alone.” Lila nodded. She’d heard stories of Luyten letting children go. “But while we were running away, I just kept thinking, I’m about to die. Any second now I’m going to die.”

Lila studied Alfe’s face for a moment, then held out her toothbrush. “Here.”

“Oh, no, that’s okay. Your dad said he’d get me one.”

She kept the toothbrush out. “If he does, you can give it back to me.”

Alfe took it and thanked her. Lila went off to see what her dad was up to.

He was with Uncle Walter, whose burn scars seemed to get worse as he healed, rather than better. His face was nothing but a mottled red and white blur. They’d picked up the local news, which was now the only news, on the antenna her dad had fashioned out of junk car antennae. The picture was snowy, flickering in and out, confined to a small patch on the wall to conserve energy.

The newswoman was broadcasting from what looked to be someone’s living room. She was a Clarise Wilde look-alike, from the brief period when it became fashionable to try to look as much as possible like one superstar celebrity or another, using plastic surgery. Now it just seemed embarrassingly old-fashioned and self-centered.

Using a printed map pinned to the wall, she explained that the starfish had seized control of the Bluffton/Beaufort area, so travel between Savannah and Charleston was no longer possible. They also continued to attack and board ships leaving the port, usually coming across from Hilton Head. Sometimes they used their own craft, which resembled colored amniotic sacks spitting bolts of lightning; at other times they were in human boats they’d seized.

The picture flickered and stretched, giving the Clarise Wilde look-alike a thin, otherworldly appearance.

“Man, I miss satellites,” Uncle Walter said.

So did Lila. All those channels, so clear you could barely tell the pictures from the real world. Much more than that, though, she missed her direct feed. She missed being connected to a hundred friends at once. It would be easier to cope with the terror that gripped her all day, every day, if she had her friends to lean on.

She also missed being good at something. She’d been such a good VR engineer and navigator, better than any of her friends, anyone in her entire school. The feed had been her world, and then, suddenly, it was gone, and so was everything Lila cared about, everything that made her special.

The TV image flickered and died, along with the overhead light. In a distant room, someone cursed.

Uncle Walter checked the time. “Did we even get an hour that time?” He said it in an even, almost conversational tone. No one complained. Even when they were complaining, they used a tone that made it sound like they weren’t. Only Lila complained.

Since it was going to grow stiflingly hot inside rather quickly, Lila went outside. She sat under the crepe myrtle—the only tree in their tiny fenced-in yard—and tried not to think about how close the starfish were. She put in her earbuds, played a song by Park Zero. Usually his voice lifted her spirits. Today, though, she remained tense, uneasy.

They were surrounded now. For the longest time the starfish had kept to the wilderness areas, appearing only to sabotage a rail line, a power station—places Lila would never go, so she was safe. Now they were everywhere.

Lila wandered toward the fence, trying to get her mind off the Luyten, although the knot in her stomach was always there, whether she was thinking of them or not.

There was a truly impressive pile of junk in the alley behind the low stone wall. Someone had cleared all of the crap out of her pack-rat father’s garage—probably to make room for refugee friends and relatives—and dumped it in the alley. Lila went to the fence to take a closer look.

Her dad must be heartbroken, to have all of his useless junk evicted after he’d spent thirty years letting it pile up. There were vehicle wheels and doors, engine parts, ancient video screens, busted solar panels from the time before the big solar plant was constructed south of the city. Lila hoped the starfish were enjoying all that power.

The back door slid open. Lila would never get used to the harsh sliding sound it made when it was opened manually. Dad joined her at the fence.

“This might be the only bright side to what’s going on. I finally had a reason to clean out the garage, and help carrying all the junk.”

“I was just thinking about how heartbroken you must be. All of this good junk you might need someday.”

“Yeah,” Dad said laughing. “Someday.”

Lila reached over the fence and lifted up a cylindrical object. “What’s this?”

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Lila dropped it. It clattered off a long-obsolete medical diagnostic fMRI kit and wedged against an old TV screen.

“Find something productive to do,” Dad said, not unkindly, shooing with his hands as if she were a puppy. “If there’s nothing around here you can think of, go down to Civil Defense and volunteer. They’ll find something for you.”

Lila didn’t want to go to Civil Defense. She didn’t want to be around a lot of people, have whispered conversations about which city the starfish had overrun, what human weapon they’d figured out how to convert for their own use. She picked up another piece of junk, an old solar panel, and turned it over, looking for a date. There was none.

If only the war were taking place in the virtual world instead of the real one. She’d probably be in Washington, D.C., right now, designing weapons systems, or sabotaging the enemy’s capabilities. She knew VR tech inside and out. This hard tech—Lila turned the panel on its end, ran her thumb along its thin edge. It was a mystery.

“So what’s it going to be?” Dad asked.

Lila set the solar panel down, leaned over the fence, and fished an identical panel out of the pile. If she had to do something productive, maybe she should take a crack at this old shit, see if she could make it useful again. There must be similarities between tinkering inside the feed and tinkering with actual chips and circuits. The technology was fifteen years old—how complicated could it be?

Lila spotted a bunch of solar panels, shoved aside a stuffed penguin doll she’d gotten for Christmas when she was six, and started stacking them along the fence. The satellites might be down, but they still had the standard home library downloaded on the handheld. Surely there were all sorts of old tech manuals available.

Her father was waiting for some sort of reply.

“Go away,” she said. “I’m working.”

Dad walked away, shaking his head.