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Risa looks to her other arm, which also has a bandage. She can’t remember why.
“We also gotta test you for rabies because of that bite. What was it, a dog?”
Right. Now she remembers. “Coyote.”
“Not exactly man’s best friend.”
The bedroom around her is decorated in gaudy glitz. There’s a mirror in a faux-gold frame. Light fixtures with shimmering chains. Shiny things. Lots and lots of shiny things.
“Where are we?” she asks. “Las Vegas?”
“Close,” her host says. “Nebraska.” Then he laughs again.
Risa closes her eyes for a moment and tries to mentally collate the events that led her here.
After she made the call, two men had come for her in the barn. They arrived after the coyotes had left and before they came back. She was semiconscious, so the details are hazy. They spoke to her, but she can’t remember what they said and what she said back. They gave her water, which she threw up. Then they gave her lukewarm soup from a thermos, which she kept down. They put her in the backseat of a comfortable car and drove away, leaving the coyotes to find their next meal somewhere else. One of the men sat in the backseat with her, letting her lean against him. He spoke in calming tones. She didn’t know who they were, but she believed them when they said she was safe.
“We got a pair of lungs with a doctor attached, it you get my meaning,” the umber kid tells her. “He says your hand’s not as bad as it looks—but you might lose a finger or two. No big thing—just means cheaper manicures.”
Risa laughs at that. She’s never had a manicure in her life, but she finds the thought of being charged by the finger darkly funny.
“From what I hear, you really did a number on that parts pirate.”
Risa pulls herself up on her elbows. “I just took him out; it was nature that wolfed him down.”
“Yeah, nature’s a bitch.” He holds out his hand for her to shake. “Cyrus Finch,” he says, “But I go by CyFi.”
“I know who you are,” she tells him, shaking his hand awkwardly with her left.
Suddenly his face seems to change a bit, and so does his voice. It becomes harsher and loses all of its smooth style. “You don’t know me, so don’t pretend you do.”
Risa, thrown for a bit of a loop, is about to apologize, but CyFi puts his hand up to stop her before she does.
“Don’t mind my lips flapping: That’s Tyler talking,” he says. “Tyler don’t trust folks far as he can throw ’em—and he can’t throw no one, as his throwing arm has left the building; get me?”
It’s a little too much for Risa to process, but the cadence of his forced old-umber speech is soothing. She can’t help but smile. “You always talk like that?”
“When I’m me and not him,” CyFi says with a shrug. “I choose to talk how I choose. It pays respect to my heritage, back in the day, when we were ‘black,’ and not ‘umber.’â??”
Her only knowledge of Cyrus Finch, aside from the TV commercial, is from what little she saw of his testimony to Congress—back when it was all about limiting the age of unwinding to under seventeen, instead of eighteen. Cyrus helped push the Cap-17 law over the top. His chilling testimony involved Tyler Walker describing his own unwinding. That is to say, the part of Tyler that had been transplanted into Cyrus’s head.
“I gotta admit I was surprised to get your call,” CyFi tells her. “Big shots with the Anti-Divisional Resistance don’t usually give us the time a’ day, as we just deal with folks after the unwinding’s done, not before.”
“The ADR doesn’t give anyone the time of day anymore,” Risa tells him. “I haven’t been in touch with them for months. To be honest, I don’t know if they still exist. Not the way they used to.”
“Hmm. Sorry to hear it.”
“I keep hoping they’ll reorganize, but all I see in the news are more and more resistance workers getting arrested for ‘obstructing justice.’â??”
CyFi shakes his head sadly. “Sometimes justice needs obstructing when it ain’t just.”
“So where exactly in Nebraska are we, Cyrus?”
“Private residence,” he tells her. “More of a compound, actually.”
She doesn’t quite know what he means by that, but she’s willing to go with it. Her lids are heavy, and she’s not up for too much talk right now. She thanks CyFi and asks if she can get something to eat.
“I’ll have the dads bring you something,” he says. “They’ll be happy to see you’ve got your appetite back.”
