Love Minus Eighty (23 page)

Lorelei pressed her hand to her forehead. “This is
platinum
. I’d break twenty thousand eyes if my people were watching this. Can’t we lift the block and start again?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“
Because what I’m planning is illegal.
” He pointed at
Lorelei’s two-dimensional button nose. “You have to keep this quiet.”

Lorelei huffed, but seemed to be working her system while she swiveled to face Veronika. “So how are you, Veronika? Good to see you.”

Veronika looked pinched as she engaged in small talk with Lorelei, but she kept at it while Lorelei carried on at least one secondary conversation, presumably with Sunali. It felt like forever before Lorelei finally swiveled back to face Rob.

“There’s a frozen-fruit place called L’Orange Dreams on the Upper West Side of Low Town. Seven p.m.”

Rob nodded. “I’ll be there. Tell your stepmom ‘thank you.’ She may be saving a life.”

Sunali popped into the backseat next to Lorelei. “Tell me yourself. What’s going on?”

Rob filled her in, painfully aware that time was passing.

“I love it,” Sunali said when Rob finished. “Keep me posted. Wait, you don’t have a system.” She swiveled to face Veronika. “
You
keep me posted.” She made it sound more like a directive than a request, and disappeared before Veronika could respond.

When Sunali was gone, Lorelei said, “I’ve got to get back to my people. I feel lonely without them.” A quick “
Yadalanh
” (Apache), and Lorelei vanished as well.

“She feels invisible without them, is what she means,” Veronika muttered as she pulled back into traffic.

“Hold on,” Rob said. “I’ll drive. You need both hands to start working on the profile.”

Veronika pulled over and they swapped places. It was the first time Rob had driven since his red-letter day. He felt slightly out of control, as if the car might spin out and slam into something, or someone, at any moment.

When they reached Veronika’s apartment, Rob asked, “What can I do while I’m waiting to meet with Peter?” The hours were going to crawl if he spent them doing nothing.

“I need a few really torrid clips of Winter, each no more than thirty seconds long. We need to depict her as youthful, full of energy, happy, sexy.”

Rob frowned. “Where am I going to get clips of Winter?”

Veronika blinked slowly, as if she was dumbfounded that Rob had to ask. “Let’s see.” She pressed a finger to her lips. “Do we know anyone who records everything and once spent a lot of time with Winter?”

Rob put his hand on top of his head and laughed. “Nathan.”

Veronika worked her system. Nathan popped up.

“
Guten Tag
. What’s the context?” Evidently Lorelei’s foreign-greeting thing was catching on, at least with Nathan.

“We need you to send Rob every second of recording you have with Winter in it.”

Nathan waited, maybe for them to burst out laughing so he knew it was a joke. When they didn’t, he said, “What for?”

“I’m creating a profile for Winter. Here—” She rummaged through a cluttered drawer in the wall, retrieved a portable boost bracelet. “Download it into this.”

“Hang on,” Nathan said. “Cryomed won’t let you change Winter’s profile—”

“We’re way past that.” She waggled the boost bracelet. “Every second. In here.”

“Give me some time to edit first. I’m not sure what’s in there.”

Veronika closed her eyes, turned her face toward the ceiling as if requesting patience from the divine. “Fine. You’ve got three seconds! Winter’s crèche is on its way to the thawing room in fifty-six hours, Nathan.”

The image chilled Rob to the core, to have it broken down into hours. It was true, wasn’t it?

“You don’t think they reuse the crèches, do you?” Veronika asked Rob. “That would be gross.”

Rob ignored the grisly question, looked at Nathan’s screen, waiting for his answer.

“It’s done. For your eyes only, Cousin, okay?”

“Absolutely. Thank you.” Rob wondered what else Nathan thought he would do with recordings of himself and Winter.

Nathan’s screen swiveled to face Veronika. “Let me see what the profile looks like so far. I knew her—I can give it a personal touch.”

“I’m giving it a personal touch,” Veronika said, sounding miffed.

“Let him help, if it’ll get done quicker,” Rob said.

“It might be quicker, but it’ll suck more,” Veronika snapped, but she waved her readout so that it was visible.

As Rob slipped out of Veronika’s place to find somewhere private to go through Nathan’s recordings, the two of them were hard at work, bickering like an old married couple as they composed. Rob chuckled, shaking his head as the door slid closed.

In a twilight state between dead and alive, Mira heard a woman’s voice, and was sure it was Jeannette’s. She struggled against the confusion tugging at her, reached for the waking world where Jeannette waited. She couldn’t remember what had happened. Was it an accident? Was she in the hospital?

Then she remembered, and felt a terribly familiar cold dread.

The woman sitting beside her wasn’t Jeannette. She was older, maybe forty, with dark hair, cocoa skin, and a harsh beauty.

“Hello Mira. My name is Sunali Van Kampen.” Her voice was raspy, fitting her face, but her tone was gentle. “I used to be in a crèche right over there.” She turned, pointed behind her, although Mira couldn’t actually see what she was pointing at. “I was there until just a few years ago.”

“So some really do get out.”

Sunali nodded. “But only a few.”

Mira almost asked if Sunali was here to get
her
out, but she knew better. She was never getting out.

“I’ve come to ask for your help, Mira. I’m part of an organization trying to make things better for the women in here. We think you should have more rights, more say in this process.”

“How can I help?” Mira asked, talking over Sunali’s last few words in her eagerness.

Sunali licked her lips, as if she was nervous, though she struck Mira as the sort of woman who was rarely nervous. “Mira, you were frozen in the early days, before it was even possible to revive people. Before this place even existed.”

“I know. I remember.”

Sunali folded her hands like she was going to pray, and leaned closer. “We’ve been doing research. We’re pretty sure you’ve been frozen longer than anyone else here.”

She thought of Lycan, telling her that’s why he’d chosen her, because she was the oldest. “One of the men who visited told me that. Another said I was an antique—that I was becoming a curiosity stored in the basement, not a viable partner for anyone.”

“That’s not true—there’s always hope. I was here for ninety years, and here I am.” She pressed her fingers to her chest, over the spot where her heart was beating.

“How can I help?”

“We’re developing a series of profiles of women who are here, to raise awareness of your situation. We’d like you to be one of those women, if you’re willing.”

“Yes, of course.”

Sunali leaned back, seemed to relax. “Oh, that’s wonderful. I’d like to hear some of your story—who you are, how you got here, how it feels to be here.”

Mira smiled. It was a chance to be alive for more than a minute or two. Time to think. “Whatever you want to know.” She’d give lengthy answers, to stretch the time.

“Let’s start with your time here. Can you tell me how many times you’ve been visited?”

“Let me see.” She went back over the brief flashes that made up her time here, counted nine—six of them visits from Lycan—then went on pretending to count while she thought about Jeannette, about the time they went low-G skiing and two teenage guys tried to pick them up. The world outside the rectangle that comprised her world—even memories of it—seemed impossibly far away. Had she really once done those things, been in those places?

“Nine,” she said when she thought delaying further would seem suspicious.

“And how many of those nine would you guess were the standard five-minute visit?”

Mira couldn’t imagine why that mattered. She waited maybe half a minute before answering. “Probably three. One was only a few seconds, five were longer.”

“How much longer, would you say?”

“Ten or fifteen minutes.”

Sunali tapped on her palm for a moment. “In other words, over the past hundred and ten years, you’ve been alive a total of about ninety minutes.”

“Yes,” she said, barely above a whisper. Now she saw why it mattered. Phrased like that, it was chilling. She didn’t want to think about it.

“What about before you came here. Was there anyone in your life, besides your sister and mother? A lover? A close friend?”

“A close friend. Her name was Jeannette.” She hoped
Sunali wanted to talk about Jeannette, that she wanted Mira to reminisce about her life at great length. That would be comforting.

“What was Jeannette’s last name?” Sunali asked.

“Zierk.”

Mira had the most astonishing thought. She couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her until now. Jeannette had worked for the military, just like Mira. Preservation had been part of Jeannette’s benefits package, just like Mira’s. “Sunali, would you do something for me?” It felt as if everything rode on the question she was about to ask.

“Of course. What is it?”

“Would you search for her, to find out what happened to her?”

“I was just about to suggest that. When was she born?”

“Two thousand four.”

Mira was not as anxious as she thought she should be as Sunali checked, probably because her heart could not race, and her palms could not sweat. It was surprising, how much emotion was housed in the body instead of the mind.

A smile spread across Sunali’s face. “She died in twenty forty-five, twenty-two years after you. She’s in the main cryo facility.”

“She’s
here
?”

“Well, not here in the dating facility, but nearby. You didn’t know?” Sunali consulted the readout, pulling her palm close to her nose, then pointed. “She’s about a thousand meters that way.”

Mira wished she could lift her head and look where Sunali was pointing. “Can you do something for me? Can you wake her, and give her a message from me?”

Sunali looked surprised. “Mira, I don’t know…”

“Please?” Mira said. “It would mean so much to me.”

Sunali tilted her head to one side, then the other. “Okay. Sure. I guess. I’ll have to end our session—it will take a while.” She stood, paused. “What message should I give her?”

Mira wanted to ask Sunali to tell Jeannette she loved her, but decided against it. Better that no one knew, not even someone who understood what it was like to be in this place. “Just tell her I’m here, that I’m close. Thank you so much.”

Mira woke to Sunali’s smiling face. “Jeannette was excited to get the message. I mean, out-of-her-head excited. I thought she’d leap out of her crèche and hug me.”

“What did she say?” Mira tried to sound calm. Jeannette was near. Suddenly everything had changed. She had to figure out how to get out of here.

“She said to tell you she loved you.”

Mira sobbed. She had really talked to Jeannette. What a strange and wonderful and utterly incomprehensible thing.

Then Sunali asked more questions. During the pauses, when Sunali was thinking or even taking a breath, Mira thought about Jeannette, who had just told Mira she loved her, even though they were both dead.

By the time Rob got home from meeting with Peter, it was after eleven. He went directly to his room to continue watching Nathan’s recordings.

As Winter leaped to life in his room, Rob recalled how horrified he’d been the first time he’d seen her face on his dad’s little handheld. Now, despite the sting he felt seeing her so vibrantly alive, there was also pleasure. He was the cause of all the horror that had befallen her, but he was more than that now. Exactly what he was to her, and what she was to him, he wasn’t sure. But it was something substantial, unlike any connection he’d ever had with another person.

He watched Nathan and Winter’s first face-to-face. Evidently Nathan pulled out all the stops the first time out—he’d finagled virtual passes to watch someone brought back to life. Rob had seen a hundred recordings of revivals (who hadn’t?), but few got to witness such a personal moment in real time. Rob had no idea how Nathan had managed it. After that, they
went to dinner at an underground restaurant called Beneath, where the food was harvested from vertical gardens that ran right through the restaurant and even deeper underground.

It surprised Rob that Winter always seemed to be laughing. Veronika had said to find clips where she was happy; that would be no problem. Laughter came effortlessly to her—
not
laughing seemed more of an effort. He should have expected the living Winter to be profoundly different from the dead, terrified Winter he knew, but it was still a shock. He barely recognized her, as if the serious, somber Winter he’d been visiting in the minus eighty was a completely different woman. It was a little disturbing, actually, but watching her made Rob ache to see her again, in the bridesicle place, if that was the only option. To see her alive, breathing, laughing… that would be indescribable.

This had to work.

Because Nathan recorded all the time, most of the clips were nothing more than the two of them riding somewhere in Nathan’s Xero, or sitting at a bar. With time short, Rob sampled random slivers, backing up to watch potentially interesting ones in their entirety, seeking the few gems that would bowl over potential suitors.

It was a jarring experience, because as it turned out, Winter had been a human being, fraught with the usual flaws and quirks that you rarely saw visiting someone in the minus eighty. She had a quick temper to match her easy laugh. Once Nathan and Winter took Nathan’s nephews to a zero-G park. Nathan took off with the older nephew, who was maybe fourteen, to experience the wilder attractions, ditching the sulking seven- or eight-year-old. Winter was right to chide Nathan for hurting the little guy’s feelings, only she didn’t chide him, she got in his face and screamed at him.