February 1984 · St. Agnes's Home for Children · 01:51 hrs
Sister Agnes finished her evening prayers at half past one, as she always did, kneeling on the worn floorboard beside her narrow bed until the cold in her knees became instructive. She had been doing this for thirty-one years. The prayers were the same prayers, the floorboard was the same floorboard, and the cold was the same cold — the deep, patient cold of an old building that had decided long ago to accommodate winter rather than resist it. She was content. She was, in the particular way of people who have accepted the shape of their lives, genuinely content.
She was wrapping her shawl more tightly when she saw the shadow move across the frosted glass of the corridor window.
She was not alarmed — she had been at St. Agnes's long enough to have seen most of what poverty and crisis could bring to an institutional doorstep, and she had developed, as a consequence, a relationship with unexpected events that was less fear than firm practical interest. She went to the front door and opened it against the wind.
The cold came in immediately, carrying snow and the smell of the open fields that surrounded the building on three sides. The storm moved through the archway in horizontal sheets. And there, beneath the dry stone of the arch, was the basket.
"Sweet Mother," Sister Agnes said — the profanity of shock and tenderness mixed equally. She was down the steps before the sentence was finished, scooping the basket up and pressing it against her chest and turning back for the warmth of the building.
She brought him to the kitchen, because the kitchen was always the warmest room, and she placed the basket on the heavy oak table under the lamp and drew back the blanket.
She had expected tears. In thirty-one years, they always cried. The ones left in the cold, the ones left in the dark, the ones left with nothing but the evidence of someone else's impossible decision — they always cried. It was the right response to the situation. She had warm blankets ready and a bottle that could be prepared in minutes and thirty-one years of practice at receiving grief she had not caused.
The child looked at her.
He did not cry. He looked at her with a pair of blue eyes that were, in the lamplight, the most awake eyes she had ever seen on a face that young — eyes that had a quality she could not immediately name and would spend the next several weeks attempting to describe to herself before settling, finally, on the word ancient, which was not the right word but was the closest available one. The cold did not seem to have reached him. His color was good. His breathing was even. He looked at her with the patient, complete attention of someone who has been expecting this encounter and is prepared to wait while she catches up.
Sister Agnes, who had been a practical woman for sixty-two years and intended to remain one, felt a shiver travel the length of her spine that had nothing to do with the cold she had just come in from.
"Well," she said, because something needed to be said. "Aren't you a brave one."
She noticed the glint at his chest. She reached into the blanket folds and extracted the half-locket, holding it to the lamp.
ALEN. Small, precise capitals, engraved with care by someone who wanted the name to last.
"Alen?" she said. She looked down at him. "Is that your name, then?"
The child blinked. Slowly, deliberately — the way a person blinks when they are confirming something to themselves. Sister Agnes tucked the locket back into the blanket, against his chest, where whoever had placed it had clearly intended it to stay.
"All right then, Alen," she said, in her most practical voice. "Let us get you warm."
∗ ∗ ∗
Thirty thousand feet above the storm, a telephone rang once.
"Report," Albert said.
He was sitting in the forward cabin of a chartered jet, in the window seat, in the dark. Below the cloud layer, somewhere in the geometric flatness of the Midwest, a storm was running its indifferent course over an orphanage in a dying town, and he had been watching the cloud layer for forty minutes with the focused blankness of someone who is not looking at clouds.
A silence preceded Alex's voice. Not the silence of connection lag — the connection was clean — but the silence of a breath held slightly too long before a sentence.
"It is done," she said.
Two words. He understood everything contained in the gap between them — the forty minutes she had been driving back through the storm alone, with the other half of a broken locket pressed into her palm. He did not acknowledge it. Acknowledging it would not help either of them.
"Were you observed?" he asked.
"No. The storm covered the approach. There is no secondary surveillance in the area. The placement is clean." A pause. "He is inside. He is warm."
Albert said nothing. He looked at the clouds.
Outside the window, the dark moved past at speed, featureless and vast.
"It was the logical course," he said finally.
"Yes," Alex said. "Logic."
She ended the call. Not because there was nothing more to say. Because what remained to be said existed in a register that neither of them had ever been trained to use, and there was no point beginning now.
Albert set down the phone. He looked at the cloud layer for a while longer. Then he looked at his own reflection in the dark oval of the window — the dark glasses, the controlled face, the suit that made him look like someone who taught virology at a state university — and he looked at it for a long moment, the way you look at something you are cataloguing for the last time.
Then he turned away and opened the research file on the seat beside him and began to work.
∗ ∗ ∗
Below, in the kitchen of St. Agnes's Home for Children, a woman who had been thirty-one years in the care of abandoned things wrapped a small, improbably alert child in a warm blanket and held him close while the kettle boiled, and the storm ran itself out against the windows, and the night moved toward morning.
The boy named Alen looked at the lamp with his old, clear eyes.
He did not cry.
He waited.
Seeds planted in the dark do not die.
They simply wait for the conditions to change.
— END OF PHANTOM GENESIS —