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“Are they saying outside involvement?”
“No. Some idiot protestor trying to make a point about how vulnerable we are,” his father said as if he actually knew. “It’s happening everywhere. Selfish crap, if you ask me. We were on our way to making the schedule for the month before this happened. Now everyone’s lost a day at least. That’s not so much when it’s just one person, but there were thousands of people thrown out off schedule. It’s like Dad always says: Three hundred sixty-five people miss one shift, that’s a year gone in a day, you know?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Aunt Bobbie said. “I remember it being nine thousand people miss an hour.”
“Same thought.”
David’s hand terminal chimed its tritone and his heart raced, but when he pulled it closer, it was only the lower university’s automated system posting the lab schedule for the next week. He looked through it without really taking it in. No surprises. He’d get his work done somehow. He killed the sound on his terminal and switched back to Leelee’s message just to see her face, the way her shoulders moved. She licked her lips again, looked down, and then up. He heard her voice in his memory. Not the message she’d sent him tonight, but the last thing she said the night the tube broke down. Just thought you’d come play and I was wrong.
Oh, God. Had she been thinking about having sex with him? Wouldn’t Hutch have been angry? Or was that why Hutch had sent them away together? Was that what this was all about? Humiliation and a barely controlled erotic thrill mixed in his blood and left the curry seeming bland. He had to find Leelee. Tomorrow, if he hadn’t heard from her, he’d go to Innis Shallows. He could just ask around. Someone would know her. Maybe he could put off his data checking for one day. Or make Steppan do it. Guy owed him one after all...
“Well, kid,” his father said, stepping into the room. David flipped his hand terminal facedown. “It’s late and I’ve got work tomorrow.”
“Me too,” David said.
“Don’t stay up too late.”
“Fine.”
His father’s hand gripped his shoulder briefly, the pressure there and gone again. David ate the last few bites of curry and washed it down with a cup of cold water. In the living room, Aunt Bobbie changed feeds on the monitor. A small, old, dark-skinned woman in an orange sari appeared on the screen, leaning forward and listening to an interviewer’s question with an expression of polite contempt. Aunt Bobbie coughed out a single sour laugh and turned off the screen.
She walked up to the kitchen, massaging her left bicep with her right hand and grimacing. She wasn’t really any bigger than his father, but she was much stronger and it made her carry herself like she was. David tried to remember if she’d killed anyone. He was pretty sure he’d heard a story about her killing someone, but he hadn’t been paying attention. She looked down, maybe at his hand terminal turned with its face to the table. Her smile looked almost wistful, which was weird. She leaned against the sink and began pulling her fingers backward, pushing out her palm, stretching out the tendons and muscles of her wrist.
“You ever go free-climbing?” she asked.
David glanced up at her and shrugged.
“When I was about your age, I used to go all the time,” she said. “Get a breather and a couple of friends. Head up to the surface. Or down. I went to Big Man’s Cave a couple times right before my placement. No safety equipment. Usually just enough bottled air to go, do the thing, and get back to the closest ingress. The whole point was to try and carry as little as we possibly could. The thinnest suits. No ropes or pitons. There was one time, I was on this cliff face about half a kilometer up from the ground with my fist wedged into a crack to keep me in place while a windstorm came through. All I could hear was the grit hitting my helmet and my climbing buddies screaming at me to get out of there.”
“Scary,” David said flatly. She didn’t notice the sarcasm, or she chose not to.
“It was great. One of the best climbs ever. Your grandfather didn’t like it, though. That was the only time he’s ever called me stupid.”
David filled another glass of water and drank it. He had a hard time imagining it. Pop-Pop was always praising everyone for everything. To the point sometimes that it seemed like none of it really meant anything. He couldn’t imagine his grandfather getting that angry. His father sometimes called Pop-Pop “the Sergeant Major” when he was angry with him. It was almost like he was talking about another person, someone David had never met.
“There was context,” Aunt Bobbie said. “A guy I knew died in a fall about a month before. Troy.”
“What happened?”
Now it was her turn to shrug. “He was way up on a cliff, and he lost his grip. The fall cracked his air bottle, and by the time anyone could get to him, he’d choked out. I wasn’t there. We weren’t friends. But to Dad, everyone who free-climbed was the same, and anything that had happened to Troy could happen to me. He was right about that. He just, y’know, thought I didn’t know it.”
“Only you did.”
“Of course I did. That was the point,” she said. She pointed to the hand terminal with her chin. “If you flip it like that when he comes over, it makes him curious.”
David tasted the copper of fear and pushed back from the table a few centimeters.
“It wasn’t anything. It was the lab schedule.”
“All right. But when you flip it over, it makes him curious.”
“There’s nothing to be curious about,” David said, his voice getting louder.
“All right,” she said, and her voice was gentle and strong and David didn’t want to talk about it or look at her. Aunt Bobbie walked back toward the guest room and bed. When he heard her shower go on, he picked up his hand terminal again and checked in case something had come through from Leelee. Nothing had. He put what was left of his dinner into the recycler and headed for his room. As soon as he hit the mattress, his mind started racing. All of the things Leelee might need money for started spinning through his mind—drugs or an attorney or a passage off Mars. As soon as he thought that she might be leaving, he was sure that she was, and it left his chest feeling hollow and hopeless. And she’d told him not to talk to Hutch. Maybe she’d done something to piss him off, and now she had to get away before he caught her.
He drifted to sleep imagining himself standing between Hutch and Leelee, facing him down to protect her. He’d run the scenario from the start. He walked in on the two of them fighting, and he pushed Hutch away. Or was with Leelee and Hutch came after her. He tried out lines—Hurt her, and I’ll make your life hell or You think you’ve got all the power, but I’m David f**king Draper, cousin—and imagined their effects. Leelee’s gratitude shifted into kissing and from there to her taking his hand and slipping it under her shirt. He could almost feel her body pressed against him. Could almost smell her. The dream shifted, and it was all about getting the datasets finished, only Leelee needed the money to change the results of her pregnancy test, and the bank was in a tiny crevasse in the back of his living room, and his hands were too thick to reach it.
