The path outside Site-Σ's east courtyard was lined with beautiful ferns, planted in rows so precise that they wouldn't fit anywhere other than the Math Department's site.
"And it took four hours. Four hours, Alex, on a proof that turned out to be a rounding error!" Lia Upasani was still going on, her hands moving wildly in front of her to accentuate her words. This was their usual routine, Alexandria Everest listening to Lia complain about whatever annoyed her that day as they walked around.
"Rounding errors happen."
Lia scoffed. "Not to me they don't."
They reached the fork where the path split, one arm curving past the greenhouse toward the cafeteria, the other cutting straight through into Tactical Math's quadrant.
"Let's loop around," Alexandria said, already moving toward the greenhouse arm. "I don't want to cut through Tactical."
Lia glanced sideways at the other path as they passed it, before turning back to Alexandria.
"Anyway. Did you hear Tactical's finally getting AWD's toys back?" Lia caught up to Alexandria, kicking a pebble down the path. "Whole department's been buzzing about it all week. Apparently the new director wants full cooperation, not the little scraps they used to throw at each other."
Alexandria turned away from Lia, making a face. "I heard something like that."
"Big shift, from what people are saying. Wasn't AWD basically radioactive for a while there? After the whole…" Lia made a vague gesture, the universal shorthand for the scandal, you know the one. "Their old director. Wasn't he—"
"Ezra, my brother." Alex cut her off sharply.
Lia stopped for a moment, letting the pebble roll off the path. She shook her head and continued.
"Right. Sorry. I always forget that's — I mean, I knew, I just." She sighed, cutting herself off. She knew Alexandria's family was a sore subject, even if she didn't know the finer details. "When's the last time you actually saw him?"
Alexandria hesitated for a moment. Lia opened her mouth to take back the question before Alexandria turned to her.
I remember the road up to my father's house better than I remember the funeral itself.
Tío Mauricio picked me up from the airport in a dingy truck that reeked of diesel and coffee grounds. He hugged me for a long time at the curb. He always did when he saw me now. He said my name right. I remember being grateful for that.
Three hours south, he said. Maybe more if the fog rolled in over Cerro de la Muerte.
And it did. I spent most of the drive watching it eat the road ten feet infront of us. Tío leaned forward over the steering wheel like that'd help cut through the fog. He had the radio on low, some AM station playing songs I half-recognized from being a kid. I counted switchbacks instead of making conversation. Fourteen, before the fog broke and the land dropped away into green on both sides. I could see the coffee field as we arrived at the house.
I remember the smell more than any conversation I had that day. It hits you the second you open the truck doors. Thick, sweet, rich. When I was young, I always imagined that's what the whole valley smelled like. San José smelled like any other city. This smelled like a place I was from, even though this was my first time there in ten years.
The house hadn't changed. Same tin roof, rusted at the seams. Same crooked fence that abuelo built and dad never fixed. Someone had strung lights along the porch for the occasion. They were small white ones. Too bright for a funeral, if you ask me. It was broad daylight anyways, so they did little.
Inside, it was full of people I mostly didn't know. Second cousins, an aunt I'd met only once, a man who turned out to be a neighbor and not family at all, though he cried more than most of them. They all knew who I was before I said anything — word travels fast in a family this big — and they came at me one after another with the same warmth, the same careful Alexandria, qué bueno que viniste, the same double-cheek kiss, the same not-quite-question in their eyes that they were too polite to ask. Nobody flinched at my new look or new name. Nobody called me the wrong thing. If anything, they overcorrected. They said it too often, like they had rehearsed something they wanted me to know they'd practiced.
I should have found that touching. I think some part of me did, deep down. But mostly I remember standing in my dead father's living room looking at the wallpaper — small yellow flowers, water-stained near the ceiling — and thinking that I could not name a single one of their birthdays, but they definitely knew mine.
I didn't feel unwelcome, far from it. I felt like a photograph of someone who used to live there, hung back up in its old place for the occasion.
The wake itself blurred into a long afternoon of the same three or four stories, retold by whoever thought they were the first to tell it. Felipito this, Felipito that. Someone's version of him as a boy, chasing chickens barefoot down the road. Someone else's version of him arguing with a professor over a few points on his paper. Nobody told the version of him that I knew. The one that had gotten me a job at the Foundation, the one who signed my transfer paperwork with a frown, the one who called every few months and asked about the weather to make up for an actual conversation. I didn't offer that version up. It felt like it belonged to a different person.
There were people there I recognized without being able to place, moreso than my family. A woman and a man standing near the doorway the entire time, not eating, not really talking to anyone else. Foundation, AWD. You could always tell. They had a way of making the room feel colder just by standing in a corner.
My younger brother, Matias, wasn't there. One of the Foundation people mentioned the why in passing. Some work thing at Site-3, something that couldn't be delayed or missed.
My older brother, Ezra, I saw across the room. He was in the middle of a conversation, his body angled for the door. He nodded absently along to our relative, looking for an escape. Someone placed a hand on his shoulder, and he nearly jumped out of underneath it. I watched this same scene play out three or four times from across the room, without once walking over to talk to him myself. I told myself I was giving him space, but even in the moment I knew that was a lie.
It was on one of those laps around the room, looking for anything to do besides talking to my brother, that I found the book.
It was sitting on a shelf in the front room, wedged between a ceramic Virgen de los Ángeles and a stack of unopened mail, open to a page with a photograph of a mountain so white it looked retouched. I didn't need to read the caption. Even I knew what Everest looked like.
"He fought us for that thing, you know." An uncle I didn't recognize had come up beside me, following my eyes to the shelf. He smelled like aguardiente and cigarettes, the good kind of uncle smell. "After abuelo died. Everyone else wanted it for themselves, sold, whatever, and Felipe just said no. Absolutely not. Practically took it and ran."
"Why?"
He moved to answer, but shrugged instead. "Ask your brother. He'd know better than me." He nodded, unhelpfully, toward the door Ezra had just slipped through.
I didn't go out there to find him. I'd just wanted out of that room, to get some fresh air. It just happened that the porch door, the same door he'd gone through, was the closest to me.
He was standing at the far rail, back to the house, one hand pressed flat against the wood for support. He must have heard the door, because his shoulders locked before he even turned around — bracing to perform fine for one more relative. Then he saw it was me, and he relaxed.
"Alex."
"I didn't mean to…" I gestured vaguely behind me, at the house, at the whole day. "I can go."
"No. Stay." He said it quickly, like it blurted out of him. He heard himself and looked embarrassed. "I-If you want."
I stayed.
For a while, neither of us said anything. The porch lights buzzed faintly overhead, too bright now that the sun had set. Somewhere behind us we heard muffled laughter through the walls, and I remember resenting it.
"How was the flight?" Ezra asked finally.
"Fine. Long." I picked at a splinter on the railing instead of looking at him. "You look like you haven't slept."
"I haven't," he scoffed.
We talked about other things. The flight. Site-Σ. He asked polite, distracted questions about my role at the Math Department. He told me a little about his Department, AWD. Just the broadstrokes, what you'd tell a distant family member. He asked how long I was staying.
"A few days," I replied. "You?"
"I drive back tomorrow. You know how it is." AWD would always need their star Senior Engineer for something.
It should have felt easier than it did to talk to him. We were siblings. We'd grown up in the same house, technically, even if it hadn't overlapped for long. But every question felt like we were both trying to relearn how to talk to each other. I kept reaching for that version of him I remembered. From before he left for college, from before he joined the Foundation, from before AWD had gotten its hooks in him. From before the bags under his eyes had gotten so heavy.
"…well, are you gonna tell me?"
Alexandria blinked, coming back off her train of thought.
"Our father's funeral," she said. "Four years ago."
"Huh. That's a long time ago."
"Yeah."
Lia seemed to sense there wasn't more coming and, to her credit, didn't go looking for it. She started on something else — an Applied Math researcher she couldn't stand, a printer on the third floor that ate her print job — as they made their way back to their offices.
They arrived at Alexandria's first. Lia gave her a quick kiss goodbye, confirmed their plans for tomorrow, and left her.
Alexandria walked into her office, turning on her dim lamp. She sat down on her firm chair and sighed, looking at the paperwork infront of her. She reached down and opened the bottom drawer of her desk, pulling out an old book. She gently set it down, and opened it up to a photograph of a white mountain.