Death of Grace Drake

Grace Drake died of a ruptured brain aneurysm at the age of forty-nine, a week after she had agreed to leave Seattle and join her husband, Boyd Drake, in Bixbus. She had argued against the move for three months. Her decision, reached at the kitchen table of the family home in Ballard with her daughter, had been relayed to Boyd through Killerton Enterprises only days before, and she had begun drafting her resignation from the events firm where she had worked for more than twenty years.

She rose early that Sunday, made coffee, and began preparing breakfast. Her daughter, Jenna Drake, then twenty-one and living in her own flat across the neighbourhood, was due to come round to eat with her. Her son, Ethan Drake, eighteen, was asleep upstairs.

Grace collapsed in the kitchen shortly before Jenna arrived. Jenna let herself in by the back door a few minutes later and found her mother on the floor beside the stove. She called for an ambulance and attempted to rouse her, and her shouting woke Ethan, who came down to find his sister kneeling over their mother. Paramedics reached the house within ten minutes and took Grace to Swedish Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead later that morning.

Jenna and Ethan were alone at the hospital. Their father was in Clivilius, and there was no way to reach him other than through the company that had recruited him. Jenna telephoned her aunt, Diane Lawson, in Tacoma, who drove north with Grace's mother, Margaret Lawson, and reached the hospital early that afternoon.

The message to Boyd was left with Killerton's office that evening. It crossed in the next communications window and reached him two days later, in the Tent Community in Bixbus, as a few lines on a printed sheet. There was no question of his returning for the funeral. No one but a Guardian could cross from Clivilius to Earth, and the journey Boyd had made ten months earlier had been one way.

Jenna and Ethan spent the night at the house in Ballard with their aunt. The coffee Grace had made was still on the counter when they came back from the hospital, and the laptop on the kitchen table was still open to the unfinished letter.