Broken Mirror Read Online Free PDF Page B

you’ll want to follow me.”
    “You make everything such a chore,” Granma Cynthia quietly scolded, but she took her assigned place.
    Auntie Circe waved the bouquet. “You know the burdens of status. We have to do this correctly. People are here to view the survivors as much as the dead.” She nodded for Victor to begin the procession.
    Victor took a first step and then the next. Just outside the doors, he sidestepped off the walkway, wetting his black dress shoes on the dewy grass.
    “It’s okay,” Ma called. “Come in when you’re ready.”
    The other family members continued into the mausoleum and down the aisle, but Circe remained with Victor outside. He turned away from the open door and studied the arrangement of burial mounds, clustered to fit the contours of the terrain, trying to spot where the first Eastmore to be buried outside of New Venice would be laid to rest.
    “I know this is difficult for you,” Auntie Circe said.
    Victor looked at his wet shoes. “We fought. The last time I saw him, he said I could live a normal life. Ridiculous.”
    “I’m sure that was painful to hear, especially coming from him. Father wasn’t well in the end. You have to try to see past his failings.”
    “Maybe I could, if Oak Knoll was still there. I thought I would work there eventually, helping people, finding cures.”
    “Gene-Us is a great company,” she said.
    Victor barely heard her. “He ruined everything.”
    “That wasn’t him. It was his dementia.”
    “I don’t see the distinction,” Victor said.
    Auntie Circe grimaced and said, “Conflict is inevitable. What matters is that you remember your love for each other. I’m sure he forgave you.”
    “You don’t get it,” Victor said. “ I’m still mad at him .”
    “I’m not going to tell you what to feel,” she said. Her voice was stern, but a slight smile, visible by the barest lift in her cheeks, softened her expression. “There’s a lifetime for you to get over that. But today’s the only day you can say good-bye to him. Remember, death is simply a new start.” She entered the mausoleum.
    Strange words. What kind of new start? She couldn’t mean Granfa Jeff would be reborn in a religious sense. Aunt Circe had bizarre, somewhat occult interests, yet she didn’t hold to anything as banal as religion or believe in the afterlife. Maybe she meant the Eastmores would start anew, freed from their overbearing patriarch.
    Victor stepped inside. Members of Clan Eastmore, as his granfa had called it, lined up to gawk at the body. The benches on either side of the aisle were more than fully occupied; they were stuffed. A few people turned to look at Victor as he walked by, including his supervisor at Gene-Us, Karine LaTour, but he ignored them. Nervous buzzing in his legs threatened to overtake his whole body. He didn’t dare meet anyone’s eyes.
    The coffin, thankfully, was high-lipped so that Victor couldn’t see the body yet. He kept the flower arrangement blooming behind the coffin at the center of his field of vision. Two colorful bird of paradise flowers —always two— poked from a bunch of white carnations. Each step seemed weighted, and his knees began to shake.
    This shouldn’t be happening. Granfa Jeff should be alive and helping Victor deal with his condition. Oak Knoll should be a functioning hospital. How many people were going without care or getting second-best treatments now? Victor should be following in his granfa’s footsteps and changing the face of medicine. It had all gone so wrong.
    His parents, cousin, and granma viewed the body and took their seats in the first row. The moment came when there was no one between Victor and the coffin. Victor stepped onto the dais and looked down at his granfa’s corpse.
    A familiar face, long, lean, and intelligent, even in death. The skin resembled café con leche and seemed lighter than Victor remembered, his freckles more pronounced. He supposed that was to be expected.
    But as