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Hutch had made himself out as more of a scholar back then but still with an edge to him. For months, David had thought the man was an independent tutor; the kind of hired instructor a family might bring on if their children were falling behind. David still had seven rounds of lab to go before his placement, so he hadn’t thought too much about Hutch. He’d just become another face in the whirl of the lower university, one more minor character in the cast of thousands. Or hundreds at least.
Looking back, David could sort of see how Hutch had tested him. It had begun with asking innocuous little favors—tell someone who shared David’s table that Hutch was looking for her, get Hutch a few grams of some uncontrolled reagent, keep a box for him overnight. They were things that David could do easily, and so he did. Every time, Hutch praised him or paid him back with small favors. David began to notice the people Hutch knew—pretty girls and tough-looking men. Several of the low-tier instructors knew Hutch on sight, and if they weren’t overly friendly to him, they were certainly respectful. There hadn’t been any one moment when David had crossed a line from being someone Hutch knew to cooking for him. It all happened so smoothly that he’d never felt a bump.
The fact was he would have done the side projects for Hutch without being paid. He couldn’t spend the money on anything too extravagant for fear his parents would ask questions, so he used it here and there—a little present for Leelee or lunch on him for the other students at his table or the occasional indulgence that he could explain away. For the most part, it just sat in the account, growing slowly over time. The money wasn’t precious because it was money. It was precious because it was secret and it was his.
When he had his placement and moved out to student housing in Salton, he’d have more freedom. Hutch’s money would buy him a top-flight gaming deck or a better wardrobe. He could take Leelee out for fancy dinners without having to explain where he’d been or who he’d been with. The workload would be harder, especially if he got placed in medical or development. He’d heard stories about first-year placements on the development teams who pulled fifty-six hour shifts without sleep. Carving out another six hours after that for Hutch might be hard, but he’d worry about that when he got there. He had more immediate problems.
The transport buses were old, wheezing electrical carts, some of them dating back two generations. The drivetrain clicked under him, and the rubberized foam wheels made a constant sticky ripping noise. David hunched in a seat, trying to pull his elbows close in against his body. Around him, the other travelers looked bored and restless. The system was still locked down, his hand terminal restricted to what it held in local memory. He checked it every few seconds just to feel he had something to do. The wide access corridors passed slowly, the conduits and pipes like the circulatory system of some vast planetary behemoth. It seemed like the corridor would go on forever, even though the distance between Martineztown and Breach Candy wasn’t more than forty kilometers.
He was supposed to be in his labs at the lower university. Even if all the public transport was locked down, it wasn’t more than a half-hour walk from there to home. David figured he could claim to have been in the middle of something and that it had taken longer than he’d expected to finish up the work. Except that was the excuse he’d been giving to cover the extra time he’d spent cooking for Hutch. His mother had already started wondering in her vague accusation-without-confrontation way whether he was losing focus on his work. If they found out he’d been outside the neighborhood, it would be bad. If they found out why, it would be apocalyptic. David cracked his knuckles and willed the bus to go faster.
It was easy to think of Londres Nova as existing only along its tube lines, but the truth was generations of colonists and prototerraformers had made a webwork of tunnels under the airless permafrost of Mars. Whole complexes of the original tunnels had gone fallow—sealed off and the atmosphere and heat allowed to flow away into the flesh of the planet. Supply passages linked to electrical maintenance lines. There were shortcuts, and the bus driver knew them. Just when David was about to weep or scream with frustration, he saw the edge of Levantine Park and the northernmost edge of Breach Candy. The bus was going faster than he could walk, but just knowing where he was, being able to map his own way home, made the frustration a little less. And the fear maybe a little more.
I didn’t do anything wrong, he told himself. I was in my lab. There was a security alert and the network went down. I had to finish the experiment, and it took a little longer because everyone was trying to find out what had happened. That’s all. Nothing else.
The fifth time the bus stopped, he was as close to his family’s hole as he was going to be. He lumbered out into the corridors of his hometown, his head down and his shoulders tucked in toward his chest like he was trying to protect something.
The family lived in a series of eight rooms dug out of the stone and finished with textured organics. Rich brown bamboo floors met soft mushroom-brown walls. The lights were indirect LEDs alleged to match a sunny afternoon on Earth. To David, they were just the color house-lights were. A newsfeed was muttering in the common rooms, so some portion of the system must have been taken off security lockdown. David closed the door behind him and stalked through the kitchen, fists against his thighs, breath shallow and fast.
Aunt Bobbie was alone in the den. In any other family, she’d have been huge. For a Draper, she was only about the middle of the bell curve in height, but athletic and strong. She wore a simple loose-cut outfit that lived somewhere between sweats and pajamas. It mostly hid the shape of her body. She looked away from the video feed, her dark eyes meeting his, and killed the sound. On the screen, a reporter was speaking earnestly into the camera. Behind him, a lifting mech was hauling a slab of ferrocrete.
“Where’s Dad?” he asked.
“Stuck in Salton with your mom,” Bobbie said. “The blowout was on that line. Security’s saying they’ll have everything moving again in about ten hours, but your father said they’d probably be taking a room and coming home in the morning.”
David blinked. No one was going to give him any grief. It should have felt like relief. He shrugged, trying to get the tension out of his shoulders, but it wouldn’t go. He knew it didn’t make sense to be irritated with his parents for not being there to fight with.
“Do we know what happened?” he asked, stepping into the room.
