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  Mother would come running out to tell me they made a mistake and we’d have waffles and cocoa to celebrate.

  Instead it was big old Mrs. Simpson from across the street with a casserole, she was on our front porch, sniffling. She could hardly wait to say You poor thing, and she got upset because I wouldn’t cry with her and I didn’t let her inside. I had to take the casserole to make her go away. Mother was still in her room with the shades down, Don’t bother me. She didn’t come out for supper so when it got dark I had casserole and went to bed because tomorrow I had school.

  Next day Sister Marcella popped out of the double front doors at St. Paul’s too fast, like she’d been lying in wait. She knelt down in the middle of the sidewalk right in front of me so I couldn’t get past. Kids started piling up behind. I guess she wanted to hug, but this dry cleaning smell came up from her habit along with other smells so I couldn’t. Her face kept sliding around. Oh, don’t! Sister Marcella, don’t cry. Thank God she didn’t. It was just an almost, which was good. Then she opened her mouth and words fell out. “Oh you poor child, you’ve lost your father,” like it was something I did.

  Then she pinned a Miraculous Medal on my collar and told me to be brave, right out where everybody could see. Kids stared, all but the ones that wouldn’t look at me.

  The Friday paper was on the bulletin board so it was the first thing everybody saw. His picture was up there on the front page. It didn’t make it true, but now everybody knew. I don’t know why it made me feel guilty. You just do.

  I got through the rest of that year thinking, If one more kid in our school got the telegram, at least there would be two of us, but that year, nobody did. Hope made me savage. In fifth grade, I thought at least one transfer kid would come and I’d see it in his face. He’d walk into our classroom and we’d both know and I wouldn’t have to be the only one. I hated it. Other kids’ fathers got blown out of the sky or shot dead in combat all the time and our school would have a Mass for him, but we are not the same. When they tell your mother that he’s Killed in Action, at least you know.

  Missing is still out there, no matter what they say.

  You miss him every day. Even after you find the telegram she kept: AND PRESUMED DEAD you play out the possibilities. You think, One day he’ll walk through that door. You keep thinking it long after you look up and do the math. You’re the exact same age he was when he got lost. Older, then much older, but still … Then you consider what time has done to him, what he looks like now and what he needs, but that’s OK. You won’t care what he looks like or how hard it is, when he walks in that door you’ll be glad. You spin out the years thinking, I will take care of him.

  By the time Mother Immaculata was done that day there were three of us standing in the red tape box, watching the ordinary people follow Mother Immaculata back into the building, row on row, leaving us exposed— two big kids from the middle school: this girl Dorcas and Bill, who’s tall as a tenth grader, and me.

  * * *

  At the top of the ramp Mother Immaculata sees the last row up the ramp and back into regular life inside. Then she turns and gives us a look. We shuffle, not exactly looking at each other, frightened and excited— You too!— and ashamed because we’re both girls but we’re nothing alike, gaudy Dorcas with your uniform skirt rolled way up above your knees.

  No. We are alike, we just didn’t know.

  Mother Immaculata doesn’t say our names, but we can feel her eyes on us. We have our orders. “You wait.”

  Either the tarmac grows or we shrink.

  When the doors shut on the mother superior her building goes away, leaving us three alone on the playground. For reasons. There’s nothing in sight to remind us where we are, which town in what state, or even what country. There’s just us three eddying on the tarmac, and at the far end of the playground, a bus. Did that bus pull up while we were watching Mother Immaculata direct traffic away from us, or has it been out here the whole time?

  It’s a gray steel cylinder with darkened windows, sleek as a bullet and all of a piece, everything tightly sealed until we’re close enough. Odd: it hasn’t moved. Neither have we, but here it is. The doors pop open.

  It’s for us.

  We climb on board, in hopes.

  The doors whish shut on our heels and the motor starts before we can make it up the steps, but you get used to that. When you’re a kid you can’t ask for explanations. You do as you’re told.

  * * *

  The inside of the bus is even darker than the steely shell. As we come up the steps Dorcas tries, “hello?” Nobody speaks. We blunder down the aisle all pardon me, excuse me, looking for seats. Nobody moves, even when Bill fake-loses his balance and bumps them so he can fake-apologize.

  We go along in the dark, following beads of light in the floor to our seats in the very back row. It’s so dark in here that we can’t make out who the others are, only that they’re kids and they won’t talk to us. Whether they’re asleep or drugged or just pretending is never clear. We’ll never find out where these kids were or what they were doing when they got picked up or why they were picked up in the first place or why we’re all in here together, although I can guess. That’s OK, I think as we stumble into the back row, but I hate that it took us forever to get here, and these are the last seats in the bus.

  And that there are so many people in here. From the outside the bus doesn’t look that big, but there’s no bus driver to steer by, no teacher herding us, nobody to ask. When you grow up without explanations, you don’t ask. You keep doing what you have to do.

  As if he is watching. In hopes.

  * * *

  Days go by, at least I think it’s been days. Food happens, I think, but I can’t know if it really does. Sometimes the bus fills with the smell of food, people farting, shifting in all the rows ahead of us, but the only ones I hear talking are Dorcas and Bill and me, and only a little bit. It’s questions, like why they won’t talk to us and when is the food, although we never get hungry. The bathrooms are right across the aisle from us, but nobody comes and I don’t have to go.

  * * *

  As we ride along we wonder, but we don’t really want to know. It’s enough to be running along ahead of the sad outcasts we were in the last place. Every few hours or days Bill or Dorcas will ask where this thing is going and we name places we used to live and places we want to see, just not the one we really care about, in part because we don’t know exactly where that is. We don’t ask each other who we’re looking for because that’s too personal, but we all know why we’re here.

  All the regular kids went back into the building that day, everybody but us. I think the war orphans left that place shortly after the telegram came to their house, unless the service sent somebody to break the news. Poor kids, their fathers got killed, this won’t make it better but at least they know. And the rest? Ordinary, so they belong at St. Paul’s. His job was essential to the war effort on the home front or he was too sick to serve; either way he didn’t have to go. Either he never went to war, or it ended, and he came home, we don’t know.

  I know that they made Dorcas and Bill and me wait in the red tape box because we don’t belong in that school.

  There is no real place for us. Mother Immaculata thought one thing, but we know another. Not dead.

  They just don’t know where he is, is all.

  So here we are parked side by side by side in the back row of the bus, sitting in here in the dark and it’s nothing we did, it’s who we are. Then the silence gets too heavy and we talk. Or I think we do.

  Bill starts. “So where were all the kids whose fathers did get killed?”

  “What?”

  “You know, back on the playground.”

  It comes out of Dorcas in a wail. “I don’t know, I Don’t Know.”

  I do. “They don’t go to our school.”

  “Oh.”

  Bill pushes: “Is that better or worse than this?”

  Dorcas is quick. “Oh, it’s
much worse.”

  Not me: “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  Change the subject, Jessie. Change it fast, but don’t ask the next question. It’s too personal. Never ask us where we were when we got the telegram.

  Don’t make us tell you what that was like.

  I ask the question that it’s OK to ask. “Where did they say he was when it happened?”

  “Chosin.” It comes out of Bill like a cough.

  Dorcas whips her head around, all puzzled. “What’s that?”

  “You don’t know?”

  I think, but do not tell her, Different war.

  Bill turns to me. “Yours?”

  “Coral Sea.”

  “Where was yours?”

  Dorcas finally gets it. “Manila Bay.”

  We all do. Bill stands up and yells at the backs of a hundred heads on the unmoved, unmoving bodies slouched in seats ahead of us because they got on the bus before we did. He yells loud enough to reach everybody in every row all the way to the front of the bus and Mother Immaculata and all those ordinary kids back at our old school.

  Shouting, “Where did they tell you they lost him?”

  And the answers come from every row, all the way to the front of the bus. When they do, it is stupendous.

  “Tikrit,” and “Manassas,” “Da Nang,” “Belleau Woods,” “Benghazi,” “Agadir…”

  The names of all the old wars and certain new ones and wars we haven’t heard of yet come out in a blast, cries that go on and on, as though whatever the nail is, Bill hit it on the head.

  For the first time the bus stops.

  Ahead of us, the others cough and shift in their seats, embarrassed. Reassembling themselves. There’s the confused stir of someone standing, way up there in the front of the bus, followed by the doors whishing open, the hush of footsteps stifled as the thoughtful person or people hurry down and out. Then the doors whish shut and clamp tight so we can shove off.

  In the back row the three of us scramble to change places, shuffling ourselves like a deck of cards so we can take turns craning at the window, but there’s nothing to see. It looks darker out there than it is in here. The bus is moving again, everything dark and everybody silent, sending the three of us back into our own heads where we sit, curled up tight around our hopes. The bus stops again, long enough for someone new to get out. It’s probably time for the third row to line up at the exit, but at the next stop, nobody leaves. I don’t hear that gasp the doors make when they whish open, or the rush of somebody pounding down the steps, which is a puzzle. At least nobody gets on.

  At the next stop so many people get off that I can’t count them and all my blood backs up in my head: Me next, me, me!

  Dozens get off and nobody comes back. A good thing, I tell myself. It could mean …

  Oh, Jessie. Don’t.

  But the next time we stop kids seem to get off in no particular order, from the front of the bus, the middle of the bus, anywhere in the bus; they scatter before the doors clamp shut on their heels while the rest of us ride on, and I begin to think …

  I don’t want to think.

  Bill says it. “We’re never getting off this fucking bus.”

  If John Paul Jones had a wife and kids that he left behind to fight for whatever; if he never came back, they’re probably sitting up there in the dark somewhere near the front of our bus. Waiting. We aren’t all the same age, in fact we’re nothing alike. We are none of us the same person. What we are is people whose fathers got lost in some war, frozen at the age we were when we first heard. It won’t matter when this happened to us or which war, the only thing that matters is, lost can mean anything. No matter how long you live or what they tell you later, he’s still out there and— you mull the unfinished sentence as you run on, listening for the rest.

  Author’s Note: I’ve carried the story of the Marie Celeste in my head since I was, oh, ten, and first read the story. She was discovered adrift in the open sea in the late nineteenth-century— everything shipshape, gear neatly stowed, food on the stove and dents in some pillows to suggest that lives there had gone on undisturbed, until …

  Seamen boarded the ship and discovered that with no signs of violence or disaster, all hands had vanished. The thing about the missing— lost colonies from the Roanoke Colony to the passengers of jumbo jets that are never found and servicemen declared Missing in Action— is that they’re never really gone. They don’t leave anything behind, no physical clues to the disappearance, no cryptic notes for history to decipher, not even truncated last transmissions or black boxes, no bodies, translated: no proof of death. At any minute they could walk through that door.

  In a way, the missing never die. Like all lost colonies, like all those lost servicemen, like every loved one who vanished without a trace to prove otherwise, They’re still out there.

  —KR

  About the Author

  Kit Reed is the author of the Alex Award–winning Thinner Than Thou and many other novels. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, as well as the Shirley Jackson Award, and has been a James Tiptree, Jr. Award finalist. She is also a Guggenheim fellow. Kit Reed lives in Middletown, Connecticut, where she is the resident writer at Wesleyan University. You can sign up for email updates here.

  TOR BOOKS BY KIT REED

  Enclave

  The Night Children

  The Baby Merchant

  Dogs of Truth

  Thinner Than Thou

  @Expectations

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  “Military Secrets”

  About the Author

  Tor Books by Kit Reed

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  WHERE

  Copyright © 2015 by Kit Reed

  “Military Secrets” copyright © 2015 by Kit Reed. This story first appeared in the March 2015 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Getty Images

  Cover design by FORT

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-7982-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-4668-7049-9 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781466870499

  First Edition: May 20
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