Chapter Three

Alan - Omelettes Without Breaking Eggs

In which it is the morning after the night before – Scott Tracy plans a trip – John Tracy writes a list with one name on it – Virgil Tracy receives a shock – Gordon Tracy answers a question with a question and pancakes and nachos heal old wounds

No matter what Gordon says, Alan's not stupid. He knows that he's being pulled out of school.

The teachers all seem to know before he does. Coach benches him, gives his spot in all the scrimmages to Watts. Mr Bering stops him from putting his name down as a candidate to run for student council. On the last day of term, Ms Olin, his favourite teacher, gives him a beautiful stereogram of MGC1300, her favourite galaxy. He asks the principal if anything is wrong and she tells him, no, of course not and gives him a worried smile.

He's so certain that something is wrong, that when his dorm mate, Ken, declares he's starting a band and would Alan play lead guitar, rather than just being psyched, he tells Ken that maybe they ought to wait and hold auditions after spring break.

Then Grandma turns up with a borrowed pickup and he's sure.

His gran has always given it to him straight. After all, she's the one who set him right about the birds and the bees when a reconnoitre of his older brothers got him nothing more than a lot of blushing and stammering from Virgil, a link to some anatomical diagrams from John and a story about teeth in unlikely places from Gordon. But now even she seems evasive.

"Try not to worry about it, kiddo. Let's get you settled in for the week, then we'll talk to your dad. You've got plans for spring break, don't you?"

He sure does. Kyrano has promised to fly him out to the Great Barrier to go scuba diving and in the middle of the week he's hoping to catch a pretty epic Aquairiad shower. After three months away, he's looking forward to being home under familiar skies. John says there was a time when he thought of those stars as strange, but Alan can't remember very much about when he was very small and they all lived in San Francisco. To him, his stars have always been the southern stars.

And when he gets home it's great, because his brothers are here, all of them safe and home under one roof in the way they haven't been for years. And it's amazing. He can finally finish rebuilding that bike he started with Scott three summers ago, and show John the pictures he took of Jupiter this spring and go swimming with Virgil in the sea caves on the western shore. And they can all sit around until after midnight playing Texas Hold 'Em for jelly beans and he won't even care if Gordon wants to play too.

That's how it is supposed to be in his head. Except in reality it's not like that at all.

He's awake hours before dawn, alive with anticipation. It should be the first day of break, Christmas morning sort of anticipation, but it's not. It's the other kind, where there's a core of dread, buried in the good feelings like a Macadamia nut in the middle of a chocolate. It's what Virgil used to call, "getting a case of the Fourthies".

He keeps thinking about the way Scott had gripped the neck of his t-shirt until his knuckles were white when he hugged him and how John's face had looked as he lied to him and the way Dad had stood out on the balcony as they had all drunk their cocoa, and had taken a long time to smoke a single cigar. His dad doesn't smoke.

A little before six he gets up and pulls back on his t-shirt and shorts. It's always a good idea to get up early on the first day of break and cook your own eggs before Grandma can offer to cook them for you.

The sunrise is a daub of raspberry paint on the horizon. There's a pool of spilled milk on the floor. He mops the milk up and gets out the skillet. A minute later he hears soft footsteps on the stairs.

He looks up, wondering who it will be. Not Dad, he always takes the back stairs down to the gym in the morning so he can field calls from the London office before close of business there as he works out. Not Kyrano either, or he wouldn't hear him coming. He worries for a second that it may be Gordon, on his way to the pool, but it's Scott who trots down the stairs, in running shorts and a Yale hooded sweat shirt.

"He-ey." Alan cracks two eggs into a bowl. "Want a cheese and bacon omelette?"

He knows last night was terrible, knows that Scott didn't stay for him or John or anyone else but only because Grandma made him, knows that John's weird and jumpy, knows that Virgil was out until well after three, heard his shower running for forty minutes when he came back. Knows that something has happened and that they're not telling him, because they think he can't handle it, because they think he's a kid.

He beats the bowl so hard it rocks towards the edge of the counter and he has to reach out and steady it. He knows all this, but it doesn't mean he's giving up. "Or I can do 'em scrambled."

"I think I'm going to go for a run first." Scott's not looking at him.

"Hey, I could go with you." He turns the hob off. "My mile's getting faster all the time. I could show you–"

"Maybe next time, Alan." Scott's tone kills any argument.

"Oh. Okay." Alan breaks another egg into the bowl, but cracks it too hard, so shell splatters into the bowl and yolk goes all over his hand.

A few moments later John comes into the kitchen, also dressed for running. His taupe sweatshirt is emblazoned with MIT. He gives that slight eyebrow raise that is the Johnny version of surprise when he sees them. "Morning." He goes to fill a water bottle from the tap.

"Morning." Scott is stretching out his pectorals. There's something in his voice that makes Alan look around.

"I'm going to take the east trail," says John.

"So am I," Scott looks John up and down and Alan gets a sort of plummeting feeling in his stomach. "Shouldn't be a problem."

John lets out a little chuff of chilly laughter. "I'll see you later, Alan."

"Bye, John."

John sets out at a paced jog up the east trail. A minute later Scott follows him onto the patio, but takes the trail at the pool's two o'clock, same path but counter clockwise.

A minute later a voice calls down the stairwell. "Hey, they gone?"

When Alan doesn't answer, Gordon comes downstairs anyway, ready for the pool. "Phew. You could smear the tension in here on toast, amirite?"

Alan doesn't respond, he goes back to picking chunks of shell out of his eggs. When he looks up again Gordon is still watching him with a funny expression on his face, but he quickly turns his eyes away when Alan notices, pretends that he wasn't staring, gives an elaborate yawn.

"I'm hittin' the water. Save some eggs for me, 'kay, Dude? Thanks, man." He says too fast and then quickly hurries out onto the deck, dives smoothly into the pool.

Alan is left confused again, bracing for the blow that never comes. He watches as Gordon cuts through the water, his stroke easy and unhurried.

Alan puts the skillet away, no longer hungry.

A little later in the morning he tries with Scott again.

When Scott returns from his run an hour later, Alan's in the den, watching news footage from Bucharest on the big holomonitor.

He plays it off casually, as if it were just something that happened to be on. As if he hadn't timed it to coincide with the end of Scott's run. As if he hadn't restarted the footage when Scott took longer than expected.

In his head he's had this all planned out for weeks. How Scott will come into the room and sit there… or maybe there, up against the edge of Dad's desk. How he will watch the footage for a while and then talk about flight pathways and the sick manoeuvres the pilot pulled to get him through the air trenches. And Alan will listen carefully and then impress him with some insightful comment he throws into the conversation, and they will talk shop for a while, like equals and professionals and then Alan will casually slip into the conversation how he coded a Bucharest scenario for the flight simulator and maybe Scott would like to try it out sometime?

And Scott will be reluctant at first, but will try it and then he will be so impressed that he will have to call over John and Dad and even stupid Gordon to marvel at Alan's coding skills, but that will be nothing compared to when Alan gets in the simulator and shows them all his flying. Then even Dad will have to relent on his rule about Alan using the flight simulator, because Alan will have proven once and for all that he doesn't think of the sim as a toy.

And then there's something, something important, that he wants to ask Scott and John.

But when Scott comes into the room he doesn't say anything except "Hi, Al." He stands with his hand on the stair rail and watches the holo-footage, his mouth a thin line.

"Pretty cool, huh?" Alan says after a long pause and then tries one of his pre-prepared insightful comments anyway. "He must be manually controlling his aileron to be able to perform that spin turn," he says confidently, and then, when Scott says nothing adds, "Right?"

"Yeah, maybe," says Scott.

Alan's heart drops faster than the little cargo plane on screen drops to avoid its pursuers. It's not just that the sim is some of his best work. It's not just that he wants to prove to Scott that he can be a pilot just like him, and a computer whiz just like John. Alan's been fascinated by Bucharest since it first happened and he wants to know that Scott feels the same.

Alan had studied the Iron Sky situation in World Politics with Mr Tuin and in Ethics with Ms Simms. He had written an essay for history about how Russia's blockade of the Eastern European bloc had related to The Cold War of a hundred years ago and the Great Global Conflict. Dad had even made him watch the footage from the negotiations in Paris when he was home on break. But he still didn't understand how President Karkof and his Parliament could get away with keeping the blockade in place after terrorists had detonated a dirty bomb in the Romanian capital.

But that's exactly what the Russians had done. Instead of standing down, they had refused to let either the GDF or any international aid agencies into Bucharest to help. They had doubled down on their defences at the borders, filling the skies with drones and impassable air trenches, and made certain no one could get in or out. Then they had gone right back to negotiating the price of soy beans.

When he had asked Dad why it was happening, Dad had paced around his office like a tiger and said, "Ask Edmund Burke," Like that was some sort of answer.

For nine days the GDF and the international media had piled up at the edge of the Russian ring fence, like an audience at the edge of a circus ring, as viral feeds beamed from inside Romania showed people dying for want of clean water. No one seemed to be able to do anything.

Until a single aircraft, alone, unmarked and definitely unauthorised had run the barricades and managed to break through, avoided being cut down by the drones and disappeared into Romanian airspace. It had been some of the most amazing flying Alan had ever seen. What's more, 24 hours later the news had leaked out that the pilot had delivered an industrial water purification system to the heart of the capital, and that the system had been enough to provide clean water to nearly everyone in the city for the twenty-one days until the siege ended.

The mystery pilot was the biggest hero to Alan's class since Captain Lee Taylor had come to pay them a personal visit. Everyone wanted to know who he was. Alan had been the mystery pilot's biggest, most feverish fan. He had studied the footage intensely, until he knew the patterns of every bank and roll. After two days of sleepless studying he had announced – and when he thinks about it now he feels a hot, awful spike of embarrassment – had announced confidently to the class that the pilot had definitely been his brother. When Tony Wan had called him a liar, he and Alan had nearly got into a bust up about it.

Except when he finally got to talk to Scott, Scott said no, it hadn't been him, that he had no idea who the pilot was, and had got all grumpy and sarcastic and had said that unless he had an identical twin he didn't know about then his whole unit had observed him there on manoeuvres the day of the Bucharest flight and that people needed to stop bugging him about this.
Three months later someone had named the pilot as Deacon Dell, a former airman who had been decorated in the Battle of Marrakesh in 2041 but had spent the rest of his life in and out of mental institutions with PTSD. Then the news came that he had been shot down two days after his amazing flight, while trying to leave Bucharest.

For two days Alan had been so sick with humiliation that he had wanted to curl up in a tight ball under his bed and not come out. Even his best friends had teased him about it. Tony Wan had been twice as insufferable as usual

"Hey Tracy, we don't know Captain Scarlet's real identity, is he your brother too?" or "Hey Tracy, no one's taking credit for eating the last bag of corn chips, maybe that was your brother."

The thing was, even knowing what he does, Dell's flight is still some of the best flying Alan's ever seen. And even knowing what he does, Alan can't help think that Dell flies just like Scott.

"He's amazing," says Alan, hoping against hope.

"Yeah," Scott says "Amazingly stupid. You shouldn't watch that stuff. It'll rot your brain."

"Why not?" But Scott just goes down into the kitchen without another word.
Alan lets the film run for a little longer, and is suddenly aware that someone else is in the room. He looks up. Virgil's standing right behind him, his arms crossed.

"Heya, Virg."

Virgil looks down, blinks twice. They haven't seen each other in a while. He looks tall, almost as tall as Dad and John. The colour seems to have drained right out of his face.

"Alan?" Scott calls from the kitchen.

"Turn that off," Virgil barks.

"What? No."

"Goddamit, Alan." Virgil leaps off the higher level, over Alan's head and down into the well of the sitting room. There is a resounding crash. Virgil grabs the remote, and by association, Alan's fingers, crushes them against the black plastic as he wrenches it away. He shuts the holoscreen down, panting, like he's just defused a bomb.

Getting yelled at by Virgil is like getting bitten by a waggedy Labrador retriever. It hurts more because it's so unexpected. He cradles his hand against his chest. "Jeez, Virg."

Their three other brothers arrive up the stairs at a run. "What the hell was that?" Scott wants to know.

"Nothing," snaps Virgil. "I dropped something."

All of them, including Virgil, look around for something that might explain the noise.

"Was it the piano?" hazards Gordon.

Virgil chucks the broken remote on the couch. "I've got a headache. I'll be in my room. Welcome home, Alan. Sorry."

He makes for the stairs. Alan can hear Gordon's voice as he follows him upstairs. "What the hell was that? Why are you picking on the twerp?"
Virgil's reply is too soft to make out, but a second later Gordon stomps back down the stairs, looking like he's been punched. Scott and John share a look, then both seem to remember like this is something they are not to do, because they each look away.

Alan brushes past them, runs upstairs to his room. Someone calls his name, Gordon he realises to his bewilderment. "Hey, Alan, come on, wait."
He throws himself onto his bed, feels stupid, stupid, stupid, because the whole stunt with the Bucharest stuff was like something a kid would do, like leaving on your favourite album or TV show where somebody was bound to hear and hoping they'll come up to you and say, "This is amazing. You're so smart for having found this." It's stupid and immature and no wonder Scott saw right through it.

And his brothers. He doesn't know what to do with his brothers. His brother the astronaut and his brother the fighter pilot and his brother the artist and even his brother the stupid asshole. When he was younger it seemed like if the five of them were together they could do anything and now it's like the five of them together can't even be together.

In his head he can hear the engineers again, laughing. What if they were right?

The thought hurts so much that he has to push it out of his head. He snatches up his game-mitt and his headphones and plays through nine levels of Sasuke on ninja master mode.

There's a heavy knock on the door.

"Yeah?" says Alan.

The door slides open and Gordon's standing out there, swinging off the door frame, swaying gently on the balls of his feet. His hair is still wet. "Yo," he says.

"What do you want?" Alan glares at him.

"Wha'? Me? Nothing," says Gordon and pulls the door closed again.

A second later there comes another knock.

"What?"

The door slides open again. Gordon puts his finger in his ear, scratches, drops off his toes. "You wanna come for a hike or something?"

Alan hits pause on the game. In three years Gordon hasn't done one thing to be nice to him, hasn't invited him anywhere or to do anything without an ulterior motive. Gordon isn't like Scott or John or Virgil. Gordon can't be trusted.

"Okay."

He's on high alert for the first twenty minutes, his heart rate hitting ninety, waiting for the rain of water balloons filled with mustard to fall or to step on a dog poop landmine. Maybe Gordon's learned a new alligator snare in Tallahassee and wants to try it out on him, or wants to take him to the highest point on the island and strand him there.

Or maybe he just wants to be out of Dad and Grandma's earshot before he turns on Alan and screams at him, like he did two summers ago, that Alan is a pathetic know-it-all little worm and that Mom would still be here if it weren't for him.

But nothing happens. They don't even go for a proper hike. They get as far as the southern beach and Gordon plonks himself down on the sand and doesn't move. He just sits there for twenty minutes, digging his bare toes into the sand and watching the horizon.

The storm's blown itself out but the wind's still up, teasing the palm fronds and working the waves into a frenzy. Nice surf weather, except the island never gets good breakers.

Alan sits next to Gordon, afraid to move or to talk in case it might set him off. But presently a doctor fly lands on his big toe and he can't help but scratch.
Gordon looks at him as if realising he's there for the first time. And under his tan Alan can see he's flushed. Alan braces himself.

"Alan?"

"Yeah?"

"Sorry, man."

Suddenly, it's like Alan's swallowed his gum, because there's a big sticky lump in his throat that makes it hard to talk or even swallow. It's lucky the lump is there because otherwise he thinks that everything might come pouring out of him. School and Ms Olin's gift and the pile of unpacked boxes stacked in his room and even the whole Elysium II sim and the things he heard those engineers say.

Instead, talking carefully around the lump, he says, "You're dumb."

Gordon chortles and gives him a dead arm, but in an amiable way. "Don't ever change, Al."

And Alan grins and is very careful not to wince because, ow, a right hook from Gordon hurts. And the gum lump doesn't ease up, but the other one, the one that's been gnawing at his guts for a long time, loosens a little.

It has never occurred to him before that maybe his brother isn't gone for good. Maybe beneath this sullen, sneering, dismissive guy, the one who rolls his eyes whenever Alan talks and calls him, "the kid", Gordon still lurks. Maybe, if he digs a little deeper he's still there, the guy who would build pillow forts with him, and lie with him under starry skies giving names like The Drunk Triangle and The Spilled Popcorn to constellations Alan already knew as the Hydrus and the Small Megallanic Cloud, and come into his room on cloudy nights absolutely because he wanted to check Alan was okay and definitely not because he was nervous of the thunder.

He misses that guy, the guy who knew all the best pranks and would team up with him to try them out on their older brothers.

Of course, mostly they tried them out on John. Alan had never once been brave enough to prank Scott, never had the courage to do more than hold the dye balls or the ladder for Gordon. Afterwards he would go lie on his belly in the loft, listening for the sounds of Scott screaming blue murder and using words Grandma definitely didn't know that he knew and Gordon crowing before coming to join Alan to lie quietly in his hiding place until the danger had passed.

You could prank Virgil too, but he would just take hair dyed blue or a butt full of termite bites with a placid shrug and then weeks later, when you had forgotten there was any danger, you would find all your shoes superglued to the floor.

Sometimes, as they lay in the darkness of the loft, they would discuss the ultimate prank, the one that did the impossible and finally got Dad, but even Gordon at the height of his powers had never caught their father out.
Alan sneaks a look at Gordon, but Gordon's got his gaze fixed on the horizon and it occurs to Alan that maybe this Gordon, isn't that much different than the Gordon who used to lurk in his doorway after midnight and ask Alan if maybe he wanted some company until the hurricane blew itself out.

"Hey," he tries, "Wanna go stick all of Scott's furniture to the ceiling?"

One of Alan's earliest memories is sneaking downstairs and seeing Dad light a piece of precious paper on fire. He remembers watching with fascination as the flame caught and spread, and the corners of the burning sheet curled upwards. The change in Gordon's expression is just like that. He grins.

"Nah," he says, "Scott's lurking around too much. We'd never have time to get more than minor furnishings up there. It's no good if you can't do the bed too. But I do like your moxy." He gives Alan another tap on the shoulder, which would hurt like hell if Alan's arm wasn't still numb from the first thump.

"Let's retire to the kitchen and refine our thinking."

They race each other back and Gordon still beats Alan, but only by a few seconds and then they make themselves a massive lunch of mango and blueberry pancakes and chocolate milk. Gordon demolishes three stacks by himself. He shrugs it off when Alan asks him if he wants poached chicken instead, because, you know, Olympics, and reaches for another cinnamon muffin. "These are better for my soul."

Then they retire to Alan's room and plot and scheme and play an epic seven hour session of Girl Guides Versus Aliens and only come out to raid the kitchen for ice-cream and nachos and then play another marathon session of Cobra Ops: Special Missions and Gordon even lets Alan have the sniper rifle. They challenge a famous Singapore syndicate to a duelplay and when Alan takes out the infamous ganker Spir079, with a killer headshot Gordon actually fistbumps him.

And between co-ordinating their strikes Alan tells Gordon about school and Gordon tells him all about Tallahassee and has Alan snorting chocolate milk through his nose with his impressions of Coach and their Ukrainian physio.
And later still, when they've laid waste to the competition and discarded their controllers, Gordon's impressions turn into ones of Scott and John and even Dad and they talk until the sun is starting to peak through the window.

Gordon's head drops onto the beanbag and he gives a drowsy stretch. "I'm beat. I'm gonna sleep like a baby, you know?"

"Hey, Gordy?"

"Yeah, man?" Gordon doesn't raise his head, doesn't even open his eyes.

"Do you think there's something wrong with us?" It's like someone has turned the sound down on his voice on him, because it comes out only a little above a whisper. And if he expects any response at all it's for Gordon to roll over and murmur, "Well, there's nothing wrong with me, anyway."

But Gordon's eyes snap open and a second later he's up and crawling across the floor and jabbing his finger in Alan's face. "Who told you there was something wrong with you? Was it someone at school?"

"Not at school, no."

He hears the engineers' laughter ringing in his ears. "Poor kids. What do you think the odds are even one of them survives to adulthood without turning out loopy as a corkscrew?"

But he doesn't say this to Gordon, because Gordon's already vibrating like a plucked guitar string.

"I'll kill them!" Gordon's cracking every knuckle. "Is this why Dad–?"

"Is it why Dad what?"

"Never mind." Gordon jabs his finger in Alan's face again. "Don't let anyone ever tell you there's anything wrong with you, Alan. There's nothing wrong with you. You're great. You're perfect, even. Urgh!"

For a moment Alan thinks that he's never seen Gordon like this, but that's not true, is it? He's seen it one time, when Mr Hawkins had said those things about Virgil being the apple that falls far from the tree and Gordon had overheard and hadn't seemed to care that Mr Hawkins was a teacher and Gordon was 13. In the end Alan, Gordon and Virgil, who wasn't even in the junior school anymore, had been hauled to the office and Dad had had to be called and there had been long, stern lectures and after it was all done Dad had bought Gordon an enormous ice cream sundae.

A hiccup of laughter escapes Alan, and then another. It stops Gordon in his tracks. "What?"

"You're just so like Scott, when you act like that."

Gordon staggers, mimes being shot, sags back onto the beanbag. "Argh! Critical hit. How could you, Al? I thought we were friends."

"Are we?" asks Alan in his turned down voice.

"Are we what?"

"Friends?"

Gordon murmurs and stutters and finally grabs a pillow and flings it at Alan's head. "Go to sleep, Al." He slips back into the beanbag.

Alan's head slips back onto the pillow. The square of the window is lightening and there's a warmth in his chest. He wants to ask Gordon one more thing but maybe he'll just close his eyes first…

Alan sleeps.

The next morning he wakes late.

When he does all four of his brothers are gone.