Burning Paradise

Leo looked from the pistol to his father and back again. “Really?”

“Before we get started, let me ask you a question. Have you been sleeping with Cassie Iverson?”

Leo stared and said nothing.

“At this point you’re allowed to tell me it’s none of my business.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“I ask because I know your loyalties might be divided right now. You want to protect Cassie. Naturally enough. But she doesn’t need your protection. There’s nothing dangerous about this. I’ll show you. You can see how it works. Maybe you can help when we do the others.”

Beck pulled his chair away from the desk and rolled up the cuff of his pants. Then he dampened a tissue with alcohol and swabbed a patch of pale skin on the calf of his left leg.

“The body of a sim has to appear fully human, and it has to be able to pass as human even after trivial injuries, bumps and scratches and so forth. That’s why the largest deposits of green matter are protected by the skull and torso. At the extremities, the green matter runs thi

He pushed the needle into his leg. The penetration was painful but not unbearable. “The green matter is protected by a membrane where it interfaces with human muscle and fat, so I need to make sure I’ve actually penetrated the sac, if it exists. It takes a certain amount of pressure.” He pushed until he felt the electric scrape of the needle against his femur. “If you want to make sure I’m not cheating you can do the rest yourself—pull back the plunger and aspirate a little blood—”

“No,” Leo said in a choked voice.

“Then I’ll do it.” He allowed a few drops of blood to well into the

barrel of the syringe. Red and quite human. He withdrew the needle. A bead of blood swelled from the puncture point. He daubed it with a tissue and covered the spot with a bandage. “That’s it. Okay? When we finish here you can tell your girlfriend and her nervous aunt how simple it is.”

“Maybe so, but—”

“Now it’s your turn. Roll up your cuff.”

“Do you really think—I mean do you honestly think I’m one of them?”

Beck dropped the used syringe into a wastebasket and peeled a fresh one out of its sleeve. “I’m not doing this because I suspect anyone of anything. I would prefer to trust my instincts. But people get killed that way. And if sims come into existence by parasitizing a woman’s womb—”

“You think I parasitized my mother’s womb?”

Beck paused with the syringe in his hand and gazed steadily at his son. “No. Of course not. But we have to be sure.”

“You wouldn’t be doing this if she was still alive. If she was still alive maybe you wouldn’t have gone so fucking crazy.”

“That’s a disappointing answer.”

It was an insult Beck would never have taken from anyone else. And it was grotesquely untrue. Mina had never had that kind of influence over him. Beck had married her when he was a student, not long after he had been introduced to the Correspondence Society. If he had ever loved her—and he believed he once had—that love had been undermined and ultimately destroyed by her contempt for his work. They had talked about divorce, but before they could act on it she had been killed in the accident that carried her car down the steep embankment of a California turnpike and into a sturdy spruce, one branch of which penetrated both the windshield and the pale pink arch of her throat.

Beck had been thinking about the accident lately. For years he had tried very hard to forget it, but recent events had provoked some unavoidable speculation. At the time of the accident Leo had been five years old. “Do you remember the day your mother died?”

“Not really.”

“You were with her.”

“Not in the car.”

No, not in the car, at least not when the accident happened. The story, as the State Police pieced it together from Leo’s teary account, was that Mina had pulled over to the verge because the boy needed to pee. (They had been many miles from the nearest rest stop and Mina would never have insisted that Leo simply hold it in; in Mina’s view, Leo’s needs had to be met as soon as they were a

The truck had missed the idling car by a generous margin, but Mina, constitutionally nervous and surely startled, had apparently put the vehicle into gear and tried to steer it farther from the road. Maybe she had stepped too hard on the accelerator, or maybe she had been looking over her shoulder instead of watching where she was going. In any case the car had gathered speed, sledding on wet summer grass to the brink of the embankment and then over it. When the police arrived they found Leo standing in the bushes, his jeans rank with urine and tears ru

“Do you remember where she was taking you that day?”

“No. And I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

“She was taking you to the doctor.”

“I wasn’t sick.”

“I know you weren’t. I told Mina so. But she wouldn’t believe me.”

Leo had been a healthy boy, but in Mina’s eyes he was perpetually fragile and endangered. On that July day she had been concerned about a bump on Leo’s leg where he had bruised it jumping a rail fence in a friend’s backyard. Their family doctor had diagnosed a simple hematoma and told her the lump would disappear in a few days, but Mina somehow talked him into scheduling an X-ray at a local hospital. She had been driving Leo to that appointment on the day of the accident.

“I know I haven’t been particularly successful as a father.” For nine years between Mina’s death and the 2007 murders Beck had clothed, fed and schooled his son to the best of his ability. But it wasn’t in his nature to be a nurturing parent. His methods had been strictly pedagogical. “I’ve always trusted you. That’s not in question. But you have to take this test, Leo. We all do.”

“You think I might have killed my mother?”

Beck wasn’t sure how a five-year-old Leo could have accomplished that, given the circumstances. But Leo was the only witness to what had actually happened. “I just need you to roll up your cuff, son. I need to see a drop of blood. That’s all.”

Leo looked at his father, at the syringe in his father’s hand, at the pistol on his father’s desk. “I don’t know who the fuck you are anymore. Maybe I never did.”

Cassie joined Aunt Ris on the sofa opposite the door where Eugene Dowd stood guard. Beth sat cross-legged on the carpet, thumbing through a Spanish-language celebrity magazine; Thomas sat next to her, brooding.

Cassie needed to tell Aunt Ris how she felt about Leo. She was on the verge of making a decision Aunt Ris would almost certainly resist, and Cassie wanted her aunt to understand it even if she didn’t agree with it. She was afraid of many things at this moment, but she was most afraid of seeming ungrateful or unloving to the woman who had traveled so many thousands of miles to find her. “Volunteering to go in there first,” she said, “that’s the kind of thing I learned to expect from Leo—”

“It bought us a little time but it doesn’t really help. Not as long as Eugene’s blocking the door. Maybe if we could get out an upstairs window or climb down from the balcony… but I’m not sure Thomas could manage it without falling.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll take the test. If Leo isn’t hurt, I mean. If he says it’s okay.”

“Maybe Leo trusts his father, but I don’t. And I’m not sure I trust Leo.”