[CASSANDRA FRAISER]
The calculator was supposed to be in Drew's coat pocket.
Janet had borrowed it last Thursday for a clinic intake form that required percentage conversions her brain refused to do at the end of a fourteen-hour shift, and she had put it back in Drew's coat the next morning — the way Janet put back the small things she borrowed, instantly and without announcement, because Janet was the kind of person who returned a borrowed pen to the same desk-drawer position she had taken it from. The coat was hung in the front hall closet on the third hook from the left, where Drew always hung it because the second hook was the one that wobbled and Drew had clocked the wobble on his second visit to the house and had silently switched hooks every time since.
Cassandra unzipped the inside pocket at 1430.
The calculator was not in the inside pocket.
A folded paper was.
She took it out. She held it. She thought, for two seconds, that it was probably a list — Drew kept lists; Janet had said so once, in the laundry room, in the kind of half-laugh that meant isn't he ridiculous; Cassandra had filed the half-laugh as data — and she thought she would unfold it just enough to see whether it was a grocery list or a Tuesday-dinner-menu list or something else.
She unfolded it.
It was a map.
The map was hand-drawn. The ink was an amber color — warmer than yellow, less orange than the amber on the dashboard of Drew's car that Cassandra had seen lit one evening when she had been waiting for Janet to come out of the SGC and Drew had pulled up beside her in the parking lot. The shape of the map was wrong for an Earth map. The continents were not continents. The landmasses were elongated and broken up by curves Cassandra recognized as the kind of curves a person drew when they were mapping something that was not flat — when they were trying to fit the surface of something round onto a page.
Worlds. The map was worlds.
She held the page closer to the closet's small window-pane light.
The names were in the margins. Forty-one of them. They were written in the same amber ink, in a hand Cassandra had been seeing on the inside of grocery-list-paper for five Tuesdays — Drew's hand, the careful even printing he used when he was writing for himself and not for anyone else. Some of the names had small notations beside them, dates, the kind of dates Cassandra recognized as recent — three weeks ago, two weeks ago, four days ago.
She read the names.
She read them slowly. She did not know most of them. Twenty-six of them were unfamiliar — names she had not heard at any Tuesday dinner and not in any half-overheard call from Janet to the SGC. Fifteen had a small mark beside them she did not yet understand. Two were familiar.
The first familiar name was MAJ. LOUIS FERRETTI.
Janet had attended his funeral three weeks ago. Janet had come home from it with her hair still pinned up and her face the particular professional blank she wore when she had stood for two hours next to a colleague's grave and held the colleague's mother's hand and not been allowed to grieve in front of either. Cassandra had brought her a glass of water. They had not talked about it. Janet had not said the major's name aloud for the rest of the week. The name was now in amber ink on Drew's map.
The second familiar name was CORDESH.
Cassandra had met Cordesh once. Six weeks ago at a small barbecue at Sam Carter's house — a Tok'ra delegation Janet had been the medical attaché for, three of them in human bodies that did not quite move like human bodies, and Cordesh had been the oldest one in the room. He had asked Cassandra about her physics paper. He had asked because Sam had mentioned it. He had asked because he was the kind of person who asked young people about the work they were doing. He had been precise and quiet and his eyes had had a tired patience Cassandra had recognized because Janet's eyes had it sometimes.
Beside his name on the map, in the same amber ink, in a slightly heavier stroke:
do not let die
Cassandra stood in the closet.
She held the paper for a count she did not measure. She counted the names a second time to make sure the count was forty-one. She counted them a third time. She counted them a fourth time. The count was the count. The amber by Cordesh was the amber by Cordesh. The paper did not change.
She thought, in a kind of internal noise that was not yet a sentence, this is a list of people he is trying to save, and Cordesh is the one he is afraid he cannot.
The thought sat in her.
She thought, after it, this is also a list of people who have already died, and he has been keeping it where his hand can reach it without anyone seeing.
She thought both of these things at once.
She did not cry. She had stopped crying at eleven, after the year Janet had been adopting her, because crying had not been useful and Janet had been doing enough of it for both of them in the supply closets where Janet thought no one could see her. Cassandra had decided at twelve that her response to large information was going to be the slow kind. The slow kind was useful. The slow kind was hers.
She refolded the paper.
She refolded it along the same creases. She made sure the creases lined up. She put the paper back in the inside pocket of Drew's coat. She zipped the pocket. She moved the coat by one quarter of an inch on its hook to bring it back to the position she had taken it from. The hook wobbled. The coat held.
She closed the closet door at 1441.
She walked to the kitchen.
She poured a glass of water.
She drank the water at the counter. The water was cold. The kitchen TV was on with the news anchor's voice low. The anchor's face was the tighter version she had been wearing for three days. The anchor was saying something about a national-security briefing the Pentagon had not yet released. Cassandra reached for the remote and turned the volume down to nothing. The anchor kept talking. She watched the anchor's mouth for a count of seven and then turned the TV off entirely.
She sat at the kitchen table. She opened her physics textbook. She wrote three lines of the problem set. She wrote a fourth line. The fourth line was the wrong answer because she had stopped paying attention to the problem at the third line and she did not erase the fourth line. She left it.
Drew came through the front door at 1700.
Cassandra heard the door at 1659:48. She heard him hang the coat. She heard him pause in the hallway — the small pause he did at the closet to make sure the second hook was empty before he settled the coat on the third — and she heard the coat settle. She heard him walk to the kitchen.
She did not look up.
"Hi, Drew," she said.
She kept her eyes on the textbook.
"Hi, Cass."
"Calculator's in the drawer." She lifted her pencil and pointed it at the small drawer by the toaster without looking up. "Mom put it back yesterday."
"Thanks, kiddo."
She lifted her eyes then.
Drew was at the kitchen door. His coat was off. His shirt was the same shirt he had been wearing yesterday, which meant he had not been home for the night. His left thumb was on his right forefinger. The motion was the slow tight circle she had clocked the first time she had ever met him on the porch at 1400 on day fifty-seven, and which she had been keeping a private count of since — twenty-seven times across five Tuesdays, three times she had clocked at the casual angle she pretended she had not been watching for, once that he had stopped before she had been able to clock it.
The motion lasted three seconds.
He saw her see it. He saw her decide not to mention it. He did not stop the motion. He let her see him let her see.
"How's the paper," he said.
"Almost done."
"Need a check?"
"No."
"Okay."
He went to the drawer. He got the calculator. He slid it into his pocket. He took an apple from the bowl on the counter and he ate half of it standing at the counter the way Janet ate when she was on a short window. He set the half-apple on the counter. He kissed the top of Cassandra's head — quick, the way he had started doing it three weeks ago without asking permission first because he had finally decided it was allowed — and he went back through the front hall and out the door at 1707.
Cassandra did not move for a count of twenty after the door closed.
She looked at the fourth line of the physics problem.
She erased it.
She wrote it again. The new line was the right answer.
She thought, in the closed quiet of the kitchen with the TV off, he saw I saw. He did not ask. He is letting me decide.
She thought, after it, I am going to tell him at the next Tuesday dinner. I am going to do it where Mom can hear me do it if she chooses to listen. I am going to tell him without telling Mom first, and the not-telling-Mom first is the part of this that is going to be on my ledger forever.
She closed the textbook.
She put it away.
Janet came in at 1842.
Cassandra was at the kitchen table with her sketchbook open and a pencil in her hand and a drawing in front of her of nothing in particular — the kind of drawing she did when she needed her hands occupied but did not want the occupation to require thinking. She had drawn fourteen overlapping circles and was beginning a fifteenth.
Janet set her bag on the floor by the entry. She came into the kitchen. She kissed the top of Cassandra's head — the same place Drew had — and she went to the kettle and put it on.
"You okay, Cass?"
The kettle clicked. Janet was at the counter, her back to the table. Cassandra had four seconds before Janet would turn around, and the four seconds were the longest four seconds Cassandra had experienced since the morning the people from the SGC had told her her planet was gone and her family was dead and she had a new mother whose name was Janet Fraiser.
"Yeah, Mom. Just tired."
The lie was clean. It came out at her standard register. She did not even hear it as a lie until the half-second after it had finished, when her mouth registered the unfamiliar shape of having said it. She had not lied to Janet across five years of being adopted by her. She had withheld. She had deflected. She had said I don't want to talk about it. She had not, until 1842 on day one hundred and four, said something to Janet that was not true.
Janet turned at the counter. She looked at Cassandra for one second. The look was Janet's quick clinical sweep — pulse-tone in the voice, face-color, eye-movement, the kind of assessment Janet did on patients she was triaging without asking them to undress. The sweep landed at tired, mild and the look did not press.
"Okay," Janet said. "Soup at seven."
"Okay."
Janet poured the kettle into a French press.
Cassandra resumed the fifteenth circle.
Her hand was steady. The lie sat in her like a small cold thing she could not put down. She knew the lie was the first instrument she had picked up since the day at eleven when she had stopped crying. The instrument was the same shape as crying. The shape was the thing I am not allowed to show my mother right now. She held it.
She finished the fifteenth circle.
She started the sixteenth.
Janet, at the counter, had the small radio on at a low volume — public radio, the local station — and the announcer was reading the same Pentagon-brief-deferred story the kitchen TV had been on earlier. Janet's hand on the counter went very still for two seconds during the announcer's third sentence and then resumed moving. Cassandra clocked the still. She did not raise it.
She thought, with her pencil moving and the cold thing inside her, this is the first secret I have ever kept from my mother. I will hold it through Tuesday.
She finished the sixteenth circle.
She started the seventeenth.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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