Days.
2167
Andie wanted a pet. She couldn't really pinpoint when she'd started wanting one, but she supposed the desire had only grown after the arrival of Lucky. Unfortunately, a horse wasn't much of a pet. Oh she liked to ride her well enough—but you couldn't cuddle with a horse, couldn't play fetch. You couldn't take Lucky into the house, or anything like that. Besides, though she rode Lucky a lot, the horse really belonged to her mother. Andie needed a creature of her own.
But she had no success on convincing her mother of this.
"I don't think so, sweetheart," her mother said when Andie had broached the topic. Jo squirted a bit of something into a petri dish and capped it, tapping the auto-label on the top of the dish and placing it into an incubator. "A pet is a huge responsibility and most of the time, it's the parents who end up taking care of a pet once the kid has gotten tired of it."
"I won't get tired of a pet!" Andie protested.
"You will, just like any new toy," Jo said, peeling off her gloves and heading to the back of her lab, toward her greenhouse. Andie followed. "But unlike a new toy, you can't neglect a pet. They need enormous amounts of attention and energy; they're almost like children."
Nothing Andie said made any difference—even appealing to her father didn't change the verdict, who basically said the same thing. So Andie stopped asking, telling herself that it wasn't the right time, and give it a couple of weeks, let her parents think she'd forgotten about it, and she'd check again.
Only she never got the chance.
One weekend, they took a rare family trip into Toscani. Jo needed to pick up some specialized equipment for her lab and even Erik was in a socializing mood, so they decided to make an evening of it, leaving Gabby and baby Isaac with a neighbor. It was a short trip, but still festive. Andie loved seeing the city; the different people—even a few aliens walking around. Erik rattled off the names of the ships coming in and out of the spaceport, Andie craning her neck to follow them with her eyes, wondering with a brief, strange longing, where they were going and what they were doing. She'd never been on a ship, not even a shuttle, though Aunt Essie promised loads of times to take them off-planet when they were old enough and she had sufficient shore leave.
Andie wondered absently what made someone "old enough." Erik was seventeen and she was thirteen. Wasn't that old enough? She'd even started her period earlier this year, technically making her an adult, at least physically—though none of the adults she'd seen looked the way she felt sometimes: like a walking blob of over-long legs, pimples, and stringy hair. Still, though. She wondered if she should e-mail Aunt Essie to remind her of her promise.
Her mother got her equipment without any fuss, and as a treat, they picked up dinner at a restaurant. The Shepard family rarely ate out: New Independence didn't have a lot of restaurants, just one or two local dives that their mother didn't trust the appearance of, and plus was too much of a hassle when the auto-chef did most of the work anyway. And her father liked to turn the auto-chef off once in awhile and cook for them too. But her parents seemed fine with this place and everyone ate until they were stuffed, and piled back into the car to head home.
The clouds rolled in just as they left the outskirts of the city behind, darkening the skies, and sending a chilly breeze blowing in the windows of the ground car. Before long, the clouds opened up, dumping sheets of rain that quickly obscured the road ahead.
Matt pulled over into a parking lot of a gas station. "Might as well wait it out. Downpours like this never last long."
Erik turned his omni-tool on and was soon engrossed in a game. Andie plastered her face to the window, her eyes going out of focus as she watched the rain trails make patterns on the safety glass. She liked how a lonesome drop would get pulled into a miniature stream that flowed down the window, down the car door, and onto the ground, it was almost like watching some kind of dance. She sat like this for awhile when movement outside turned her focus outward. They had parked off to the side of the station, near a dumpster, and there was box beside it, its roof collapsing from the weight and force of the rain. A small, wriggling something was at the mouth of the box. Andie gasped and before her parents could look around, was out of the car.
She heard her mother's startled yelp but kept going, feeling her hair and clothes get plastered to her face within seconds. The small, brown puppy she'd seen at the mouth of the box, shied away from her. It was a shriveled, half-starved thing with patchy fur and gummy eyes, small enough to probably still need its mother's milk—maybe as young as a few days old. Andie picked him – she checked quickly – up and tucked him inside her jacket next to her t-shirt. She was soaked all the way through, but next to her body had to be warmer.
The outcries from her parents when she returned to the car were what she expected, and she let them run their course, feeling a sort of secret joy as the puppy nuzzled her.
"What," Erik said suddenly, into the tirade about pneumonia and wet car seats, "is that?" He pointed at the tiny black nose sniffing its way out of Andie's jacket.
The car got suddenly silent.
"I rescued him," she said defiantly. "He's mine."
"No, absolutely not," Jo said. "Good grief, Andie. What are you thinking bringing that into the car? The thing probably has rabies."
Andie curled her shoulder protectively over the puppy and swiped her dripping hair out of her eyes. "He does not! Mom, he's just a baby. I'm not putting him back outside in that storm. He'll die."
Matt blew out a breath and shared a look with his wife. She sighed. "Fine. We'll take him home, give him a meal, and next opportunity we get, we'll give him to a shelter to find a good home."
Andie opened her mouth to protest, but Erik kicked her leg and a text message from him popped up on her omni-tool. "Quit while you're ahead, genius."
So she nodded, sat back, and simply enjoyed the feeling of warm life cuddling against her. Andie frowned. That was strange, the warmth seemed to be traveling down…
Jo sniffed the air. "What is that smell?"