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Vanessa is eleven years old, almost twelve, at a funeral for a woman who isn't dead. She knows Visser One isn't dead, because she was sitting quietly in the corner working on homework while her mother spoke with the Pool Ship to confirm that Visser One had been successfully retrieved from her broken ship. The fact that this whole thing is a big waste of time makes her wiggle impatiently in her seat, her black mary janes scuffing the floor while she scowls.
Her mother places one hand on her knee and gives her a gentle but significant look. Vanessa stills.
She thinks back to the conversation she had had with Ahris, when Marco had quit showing up to school because his mom was dead.
("She's not dead, though." Vanessa had said. "She's just been assigned off planet, right?"
"Right." Her mother confirmed. "But Marco doesn't know that. So you can't say anything to him, alright?"
"Visser One didn't tell him?" Vanessa asked, horrified. "But he's probably so sad!"
Her mother had paused, hands tugging through the long red locks that belonged to her host. Now and then Ahris would swear she was going to buzz it all off, but Vanessa knew it was one of those things about having a human body she secretly loved. Then she had pulled Vanessa in close to her side, the way she always did when she needed her daughter to listen.
"Remember what I told you about voluntary hosts and involuntary ones?"
Vanessa nodded. "Some people like having a yeerk with them and some don't. The empire doesn't have enough voluntary bodies for every yeerk, so there are a lot of involuntary hosts and that's why there are people like the history teacher in the cages while Mr. Chapman helps me with homework."
"That's right," Her mother had confirmed. "Well, Marco's mom isn't like McKenzie and I. Eva is involuntary, so her family can't know about Visser One. That's why they think she's dead.")
The speaker at the front is giving a talk on what a good mom Eva had been, how much she had loved her family. Vanessa thinks about the time she had seen Visser One shoot a taxxon and leave it to be eaten by its coworker because she had tripped over one of its many spindly legs.
Marco's dad looks like an empty shell of a person. Vanessa stares at him and wonders if that's how McKenzie looked after Vanessa's dad died. If so, no wonder she had decided to become a host. Mr. Chen-Lopez really needed to pull it together. He was making Marco do all the work, accept all the condolences.
Vanessa slid to her feet and wriggled away from her mother's touch, running all the way up to the front until she stops breathlessly in front of her classmate. Jake is standing next to Marco, eyeing everyone that comes up to the two of them as if he would like to take Marco far away so Marco never had to be polite to anyone ever again.
"I'm sorry about your Mom, Marco," she says, pushing a braid off of her shoulder.
Marco nods as Ahris finally catches up, gently leading Vanessa away.
Marco thinks Vanessa means sorry your mom is dead. What Vanessa really means is I'm sorry your Mom's not voluntary so you have to lose her.
She knows there's something bad in that logic, something not quite right. But Marco looks so sad and broken that Vanessa really wishes his mom was like hers, that Visser One was as good at being a mom as she was at being a yeerk. It's really too bad that she has two moms in one body and he has zero moms now.