Love Minus Eighty (29 page)

He tried to sound casual. “So, what’s he like?”

“Redmond? I haven’t seen him since the honeymoon. He works, spends time with his kids. He’s been married five times. He spends most of his free time building his video game collection.” She laughed, but dryly—not the infectious laugh he’d heard so often from her past life. “Did I mention Red has one of the largest early video game collections in the world?”

“You did not. How exciting.” He tried to match her droll, mock-cheery tone.

“He does. One day you’ll have to visit the island and let Red show it to you. For hours and hours.”

Rob laughed, but Winter only shook her head. It seemed like he’d never get to hear her wonderful laughter.

“Big sigh,” she said.

That got Rob laughing again. “You do realize your lungs work now? You could, you know, actually make a sighing sound.”

Winter broke into a reluctant smile, but went on looking at her hands. “While I was dead, I kind of got used to describing my affects rather than actually carrying them out. Much easier. In fact, I’m thinking about narrating all of my movements and just sitting still most of the time. ‘I stand, I walk to the window. Put my hands on my hips.’ ”

“Just don’t try to eat that way.”

“Good point.”

Winter craned her neck, looking toward the underside of High Town, thick with shadows, buttresses crisscrossing the framework. “I never thought I’d be so happy to see that roof. I always found it oppressive, but now it’s comforting.”

Rob eyed the strings of apartments dangling below the
ceiling. He could pinpoint Lorelei’s if he wanted, the place where all of this had started, leading to this moment.

He looked at Winter, the pinkness rising in her cheeks in the cool evening, the barely perceptible flutter of a pulse in the hollow of her neck. “This is incredible, being able to spend time with you without that timer hanging over us,” he said.

“Head nod,” Winter whispered, and for the first time, Rob felt as if he was standing next to the woman he’d grown so close to. Her eyes grew soft and teary, and he could see she was with him, fully.

Then she turned, looked off toward the lake. “Let’s go on a trip. My treat. Or Red’s treat, if you want to get technical.”

For a moment, against all reason, he thought she meant a trip in a car, or a train, and his heart leaped at the thought of packing a bag and spending two or three days, alone with Winter. Of course, that wasn’t what she meant. She was working her system. “Where do you want to go? Anywhere in the world. Pick somewhere expensive.” She’d gone back to looking through him as much as at him, the feeling of connection vanished.

“Won’t he be upset if you take a friend on an expensive trip?” For some reason Rob couldn’t bring himself to say Red’s name. It hurt every time Winter said it. Rob wished she’d call him something else. Preferably “the impotent old bastard.”

Winter laughed dryly. “He won’t notice. Here, look at this.” She moved her readout into the air so he could see it. It included her account balance: almost a half million dollars. “That’s what’s left of my allowance for the month.”

Rob couldn’t take his eyes off the readout. “That’s hard to believe.”

“I know. When I died, I was twelve thousand dollars in
debt, and it seemed like so much money.” She closed the readout. “Come on, let’s go everywhere.”

They spent five minutes in Paris, soaring over Notre Dame, popping into the Louvre long enough to see the
Mona Lisa
; two minutes hovering beside Mount Everest, watching two climbers scale an ice wall; one minute inside the dead city of Bangkok with its eighty-foot-high walls, where no living thing had walked in forty years, thanks to the nanopocalypse. Their last stop was an open-air virtual bazaar on the moon, where screens examined virtual merchandise set on virtual tables that was being hawked by other screens. Not one particle of moon dust was disturbed, because none of it was really there.

“Wow,” was all Rob could say when they returned to the relative ordinariness of Central Park.

“I know.”

“How much did that cost?”

Winter checked, raised her eyebrows. “Something like eleven thousand. Not bad, really.”

Almost all of it would be toll fees, set to limit the number of screens surrounding attractions like Big Ben and the Sphinx at any one time. From what Rob understood, opening a screen on the other side of the Earth cost the provider no more than opening one a foot away from you, yet for some reason the farther away you opened a screen, the more you were charged.

Eleven thousand, for a few minutes’ entertainment. Rob thought of how hard he had had to work to raise nine thousand to visit Winter for five minutes.

He caught Winter looking at him. When she saw him notice, she closed her eyes, smiled a neutral, unreadable smile. He sensed that the next words out of her mouth would
be that she had to get going, that it had been nice seeing him, and maybe they could do it again at some other undetermined time.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he said before she had time to say it, “but you don’t seem like the same person I used to look so forward to visiting.”

Winter worked her system, as if checking on something she’d just thought of.

“Did I do something wrong?” Rob asked.

“You mean, besides running me over?”

The comment stung, even though her tone was light and ironic. “Besides that, yes.”

Her fingers stopped tapping. She let them drop to her sides. “Besides that, you worked yourself to the brink of exhaustion every day for almost two years to keep a promise to a stranger, then for an encore you did the impossible—you figured out how to get her out of there.” She lowered her voice to a near whisper. “No, Rob, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

He had no idea how she’d found out about his work schedule. Maybe just an educated guess. “Then why are you acting like you hardly know me?”

Winter covered her mouth, looked at the ground. She didn’t answer.

“When you were in there, sometimes I imagined what it would be like, the moment we met out in the world. I thought—” His voice hitched; he cleared his throat. “I thought it would be incredible, the best moment in my entire life. That we’d run toward each other laughing. We’d jump up and down, screaming, ‘We did it, we did it.’ ”

Three screens drifted by on the trail below, likely joggers running on treadmills at home.

“Close your eyes,” Winter said.

“What?”

“Close your eyes.”

Rob looked at her, questioning, then closed his eyes.

“Now imagine us jumping up and down.”

“Okay.”

“Where am I, in relation to you?”

Rob opened his eyes. Winter held her palm in front of his eyes. “Keep them closed.”

He closed them. “Where are you? I don’t know, you’re standing right in front of me, I guess.”

“Where are my hands?”

He almost opened his eyes again. Her hands were in his, but he didn’t want to say that. “You’re clutching my wrists.”

“Okay,” she said, though she sounded dubious. “Now roll the scene forward. We’re saying, ‘We did it, we did it.’ What comes next? We stop jumping, and…?”

What came next was Winter melting into his arms, the embrace he’d imagined a thousand times. And if she let him, he would go on holding her until all was silence and there was nothing in the world but the two of them, and he could feel her heart beating against his chest.

“What comes next is we fall into each other’s arms,” Winter said.

Rob opened his eyes. She was watching his face, searching for his reaction. He opened his mouth to disagree, but nothing came.

Her eyes were suddenly bright with tears, her mouth tight. “The thing of it is, I’m married, Rob. I signed an irrevocable life contract. Irrevocable, as in, nothing is ever going to change it. That was the price I paid. I paid it willingly, and I would do it again.” She turned to go. “I can’t fall into anyone’s arms but Red’s.”

“I understand that.” He spoke quickly as she moved away. “I just want us to be friends, like we were when I was visiting you. I
miss
those visits.”

She paused, wiped under one eye with the back of her wrist. “I do, too. More than you can imagine. But it’s a bad idea.” She scrunched her eyes, seemed to be imploring Rob to understand, then she turned and hurried away. As she stepped off the bridge, Rob heard her add, “I’m sorry.”

Sunali looked up when Lorelei and Veronika entered, made a sound to indicate mock surprise. It appeared as if the meeting of the Former Bridesicle Liberation Army, or whatever they called themselves, was already under way. Lorelei and Veronika were fifteen minutes early, so Sunali must have given Lorelei the wrong time.

“This is my good friend Veronika,” Lorelei said as they took seats at the table, several hundred of Lorelei’s cohort taking up residence in the air behind her. It was a dining room table, in Sunali’s dining room—this was clearly not a big operation, nor a particularly well-funded one.

Sunali introduced them to the four other women sitting at the table. All were beautiful, of course, because they were ex-bridesicles. They ranged in age from young to quite old.

Veronika listened to them for a while, trying to get up to speed. Their idea was to do another break-in event in the air over High Town, this time using a recorded plea for
help from a bridesicle still trapped in the minus eighty. They would have to make the recording secretly, since Cryomed didn’t allow customers to use recording devices inside their facility. Veronika thought it was a decent idea, but Lorelei clearly didn’t. She rolled her eyes and sighed heavily as the bridesicle league worked out details.

What?
Veronika sent Lorelei.

Their idea is lame.

Well, tell them!

“Your idea is lame,” Lorelei nearly shouted. Five heads swiveled to look at her. “A big dead face in the air, doing a PSA.” She waved her hands in the air. “Ooooh, how modern. That’s not going to get anyone interested. It won’t get passed on, won’t get picked up by the micros, let alone the macros.”

Sunali raised one eyebrow. “Well. Thanks for your input. Can you guess what painfully obvious question I’m going to ask now?”

Veronika could.
Do you have a better idea?
she sent to Lorelei.

“No, I don’t have a better idea,” Lorelei said, propping a knobby bare knee on the table. “But what you’re planning is a waste of time.”

Sunali made a show of rearranging the specs suspended in the air beside her seat. “We’re paying a consultant who has data that says you’re wrong. We’re not as out of touch as you might think, sweetie.” She swept long bangs out of her eyes, turned back to her committee.

“Wait,
I know
.” Lorelei leaned forward, pressing her palms on the table. “Don’t do one big one, do ten thousand little ones! And not in the sky, at ground level. Have the bridesicle go right up to people in the streets, pleading for help.”

“Then they’d be nothing but ads,” the oldest woman,
probably in her midsixties, said. “No one would even see them; their systems would filter out the ads.”

Lorelei shook her head. “Who said anything about screens. Full figures.”

Veronika winced. The league of ex-bridesicles chuckled merrily at Lorelei’s naïveté.

“Do you have
any
idea what that would cost?” Sunali asked. “First, we’d have to pay a rogue programmer to engineer ten thousand illegal full-body projections, then we’d have to pay ten thousand fines of eight hundred dollars each, in advance! Plus lawsuits, because the projections are bound to cause injuries, wandering into the streets. People could die.”

“You’re talking about tens of millions,” one of the other ex-bridesicles chimed in.

Lorelei clicked her tongue in annoyance. “You could program them to stay off the streets.”

“It’s still way beyond our operating budget,” Sunali said.

Lorelei leaned back, folded her arms. “Fine. Then put a big frozen face in the air.”

Still, it was a chilling image: ten thousand frozen, blue-skinned women wandering the streets, pleading for help. Lorelei was creative, at least. Or maybe it had been Parsons’s idea.

Low Town. Streets crowded with people, some of them up from Undertown, smelling dank and edgy. Vehicles untethered, at the mercy of drivers. Old, straight, square buildings. All of it set in the mottled shade of High Town. Veronika loved coming to Low Town; the grittiness of it felt exciting, a little dangerous.

She kept hoping Nathan would pop in and ask her what she was up to, just so she could say she was hanging out with Lycan again. So he knew she wasn’t sitting at home playing
Wings of Fire
.

A flashing green arrow appeared in her visual field, directing her down Houston Street. They were meeting on Spring Street in the heart of Greenwich Village, at Lombardi’s, the oldest pizzeria in the city.

It wasn’t romantic. She didn’t want it to be romantic, but she wouldn’t mind if Nathan thought it was. Which was pathetic—she knew Nathan couldn’t care less if her
relationship with Lycan was romantic or not. Still, she’d like him to know.

As she turned onto Spring Street, she finally gave in to temptation and pinged Nathan.

What’s up?
he sent.

Nothing. Having pizza in the Village. Just thought I’d check in.

Excellent. Who you with?

Just Lycan.
She tried to sound casual.

Is that becoming something?

I don’t know. It’s in that blurry area.

I know it well. Have fun.

Veronika closed the link. Mission accomplished. Yeah, he’d sounded devastated. She spotted Lycan through the window of Lombardi’s, sitting at a table, sort of wringing his hands. He stood when she stepped inside. He looked… distressed.

“Are you okay? You look a little…” she trailed off, reluctant to label how he looked.

“Panic attack,” he said, and gave a “What are you going to do?” shrug.

“I just love anxiety. Any idea what set it off? Work?”