Love Minus Eighty (35 page)

There were four or five bumps under Nathan’s shirt, at the shoulder. He was doing bugs to ease his pain.

“How are my two geniuses today?” Nathan asked.

“I’m peachy.” Veronika checked the time. Any minute. Nathan had no idea what was about to happen; Sunali’s people had been deadly serious about leaks, and understanding just how important the element of surprise would be, Veronika had told no one, not Nathan, not Rob, not her sister. It would be fascinating to watch Nathan’s reaction. To watch
everyone’s
reaction, for that matter.

Lycan gasped, wide-eyed.

Veronika followed his shocked stare and spotted a woman approaching their table. Only it wasn’t a woman, it was the projection. The bridesicle was shivering, her skin white with a blue tinge, her hair caked with ice. Nathan lurched to his feet, his chair clattering to the floor as he hurried to help the woman, who looked about to collapse.

“What’s the matter with you?” Veronika asked Lycan, who was all but trembling, his face gray.

“I know her,” Lycan said.

“Please, help me,” the woman said. “Please, I’m afraid.”

Nathan reached for her outstretched hand; his own hand passed through it. He sank to one knee, like he’d been punched, his breath rattling.

“I’m so lonely and afraid,” the bridesicle pleaded. “I don’t want to be in this box anymore.”

“Oh, that is magnificent,” Veronika said as the bridesicle
limped toward her. She glanced at Lycan, who was shaking more than Nathan. He was making a keening sound in the back of his throat. Veronika went over, shooshed like a mother. “Why are you so upset?”

Lycan’s attention was drawn by something a few tables away. Veronika followed his gaze, toward another copy of the same bridesicle, making the same desperate plea to another patron. Lycan seemed mesmerized by the sight of her. “Of all the women to choose from, they chose Mira.”

Lycan’s answer to her previous question suddenly registered. “Wait, did you just say you
know
her?”

That got Nathan’s attention as well.

“You recognize her?” Nathan said.

Lycan nodded, his eyes fixed on the apparition.

“From where?” Veronika asked. She watched, fascinated, as six or seven bridesicles wandered the courtyard. The nearest one turned, headed toward Lycan. Lycan leaped from his seat and hurried toward the arched exit.

“You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?” Nathan asked Veronika.

“Yes. But we were sworn to secrecy.” She raised her voice, called, “Lycan, wait,” but he kept going. She opened a screen beside him.

A bridesicle wandered around a corner, stepped right into Lycan’s path. Lycan skittered around the image, away from her outstretched hands, her bluish fingertips. He was acting like he was seeing a ghost, like she was haunting him alone, rather than the entire city. Yet if the bridesicle had been someone Veronika knew who had died, she might react similarly.

“How did you know her?” Veronika asked Lycan, who was heading for the micro-T station.

“We dated.”

Veronika studied one of the wraiths as she stepped around a chair. She was beautiful, her tousled hair midnight black, her eyes almond shaped. “You dated this woman?” She tried not to sound dubious.

“At the bridesicle place. I was curious…”

Now they were getting somewhere. “Lycan,
stop
. Please.”

Lycan slowed.

“Okay, you visited her. Why are you so upset?”

This seemed to calm Lycan, but he still looked miserable as he leaned against a wall. “I did an awful thing. I lied to her, got her hopes up, and then I dashed them. It was right after that when I jumped off the bridge.”

“Oh, sweetie.” Veronika signaled to Nathan that she was leaving, then headed toward the exit. “Stay right there, I’m coming.”

Lycan nodded, wiped his nose on his sleeve.

Now it made sense. He dashed a dead woman’s hopes of escaping from hell, then the woman shows up at his table, pleading for help. Yeah, that could rattle anyone.

What didn’t make sense was why, of all the women at the center, Sunali and Lycan had chosen the same one.

Lycan greeted her with a fierce hug, as if it had been years since they last saw each other, not five minutes.

“Come on, I’ll take you home. You need a double shot of Blue Devil.”

“I don’t like the supercharged stuff.” He sniffed.

“You can make an exception this one time,” Veronika said. She jolted in surprise as a bridesicle slammed to the ground a dozen feet from them. She landed with a convincing thud, and lay unmoving as blood bloomed around her face. “Shit, that startled me. Imagine if you had no idea what was happening.”

Veronika opened a half-dozen screens at random locations around High Town and Low Town. There were bridesicles everywhere. Not ten thousand, as Lorelei had originally suggested, more like a hundred thousand. They were incredible. So haunting, so terrifying and beautiful.

Bridesicles leaped from sky bridges, from rooftops, from micro-T tubes. They rained down on Low Town like pale, lovely snowflakes. Never in the streets, though; they’d taken Lorelei’s advice on that front as well.

“Can I ask why you chose this particular woman, out of all of them?”

Lycan shrugged. “Because she’d been there the longest. I thought that would make her different from modern women. Simpler.”

“Sunali must have picked her for the same reason—the longest-suffering bridesicle.” In fact… Veronika used her system to check the info cloud that had been dispersed to support the event, and tapped into one nearby. One of the first things it mentioned was the bridesicle’s status as the “longest-serving detainee.”

As they walked in silence, Lycan now relatively calm, something else clicked into place. “That was why you refused to visit Winter. You didn’t want to go back.”

“I’m never going back to that place,” Lycan answered.

Rob leaned his lute against the wall by the door, marked his clothes and shoved them down the storage tube, unpacked a box of toiletries, a couple of photos, and he was finished moving in. The place was beyond tiny; eighty square feet wasn’t much, especially when you had no windows to help open things up. Maybe a few floor-to-ceiling mirrors would help.

He put in a reservation for the rotating kitchen he shared with three adjoining rooms, then grabbed his lute and went out for a walk. The apartment was small, but the city was large.

A passing businesswoman carrying a boxed lunch dropped a two-dollar coin into his case. Rob nodded thanks, went on singing “Song for Winter.” He played it every third or fourth song, but no one stayed around long enough to notice how repetitive his playlist was.

Off in the distance a juggler was working the granite steps of the Museum of Natural History, but she was too far away to catch more than snippets of his music.

He was beginning to think of this as his bench. It was nice, to have a bench. It wasn’t a busy part of the park, so not the most lucrative location for a busker, but that was all right. Rob enjoyed the solitude.

He was hungry, he realized. Rob didn’t want to go back to his apartment to eat, so he decided to visit the Biryani cart across from the museum. He reached down to pluck some coins out of his case, then froze, startled by an envelope sitting in the case. He picked it up, turned it over to find his first name written on the front. How had it gotten in there? He thought he would have noticed someone dropping something as old-fashioned as an envelope into his case, unless they dropped it from behind him. He slid his finger along the seal, drew out a folded sheet of light-blue paper.

Rob,

I don’t think I’ve written on paper since the third grade, but this is the only way no one on my end can possibly read it.

It’s beautiful. Every time I listen to it, I cry.

The leaves outside my window are rustling like dry paper. The cat, stalking bugs outside my window, is a paper cat. My life is a paper life, the waning sun a light bulb.

As you can see, I’m no poet.

I couldn’t ignore your lovely gesture, but, please, no more.

I miss you.

W

Rob read the note over and over, trying to glean every scrap of meaning from the words, wishing there were more of them.

Mira was sitting beside her father in a movie theater. She was four years old, waiting impatiently for the commercials to end and the movie to begin. It was a Disney movie, but she couldn’t remember which one. The scene was remarkably vivid, but Mira knew it wasn’t real. It was a dream, or a memory, or something in-between.

“Four years old today. What a big girl,” Dad said. “Four is when memory begins.” He was rubbing her little back as he talked; she loved when he did that. “When you’re all grown up, this could be your oldest memory. Us, sitting here right now. This is a good day. Try to remember this one.”

“Daddy,” Mira croaked. She struggled to open her stiff eyelids.

“Hello again, Mira.” It was Sunali.

Mira smiled, her head clearing somewhat. “I was just remembering something my father said to me when I was little.”

“Did you have a good father?”

“I did. I miss him.”

Mira expected Sunali to say she missed hers, too, but she didn’t. Instead she took out a flat screen the size of a pack of gum, held it where Mira could see. “I want to show you what we accomplished with your help.”

Mira drew in a breath, startled by how different the city looked in the recording. It was still recognizable as High Town, probably during rush hour, but the pedestrians were
gliding
along the sidewalk with careless ease. Vehicles small and large threaded among each other in a dizzyingly complex dance. Dozens of colorful tubes lined the buildings, crossing high over the streets. Still more vehicles glided along the outsides of the tubes. There were scores of drones hurrying about, resembling big plastic bugs.

Then Mira spotted herself on the sidewalk, her skin ghostly white, her lips as blue as a bruise, her hair and eyelashes frosted with ice. She walked up to a man sitting on a bench sipping coffee from a pouch, and said, “Please help me. Please, I’m afraid. I’m so lonely and afraid. I don’t want to be in this box anymore.” Then she reached out toward the man. Her hand passed through him, and the man gasped. Gaping at her, he said something that Mira didn’t hear, because her attention was on another Mira approaching a small crowd waiting for a micro-T. “Please help me,” this Mira said. “Please, I’m afraid. I’m so lonely and afraid.”

“My God, What are they?” Mira asked.

“They’re just images.” Sunali put the screen away. “I’m sorry, I forget how long you’ve been in here, even though I went through it myself. They’re only images, but people are fooled, because it’s illegal to display full-body images like these in public. And for added impact, whenever the images
came into contact with someone, we made it so the person felt what you were feeling when you made this recording.”

Mira wondered if she would even be able to function in a world like that, if ever she did get out. “Did you get into trouble for doing this?”

“Oh, yes,” said Sunali, sounding nonchalant. “I’ve been slammed with huge fines, a few injury lawsuits, although my foundation paid all medical bills resulting from the event. Prison isn’t out of the question, but I can probably buy out my sentence instead.” She waved it away. “I don’t care. No one was badly injured or killed, so I’m happy.”

Mira wasn’t sure what to say.

“
Everyone
is talking about it, Mira. There’s a dialogue going on, from micro to macro channels, about bridesicles.” Sunali reached out as if to touch Mira, her fingers brushing close to Mira’s shoulder. “Everyone is talking about
you
. The whole world knows who you are.”

“You gave them my name?”

Sunali shook her head. “They used your likeness. It matched a photo of you from the US Army archives.”

“Does that mean I might get out of here?”

Sunali ran a hand through her hair, which was clumped into big strands that reminded Mira of Medusa. “It’s hard to say. But it’s possible. It’s possible.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “Anyway, I wanted to show you what we’ve accomplished, you and I.”

Mira had grown sensitive to summing-up words that meant she was about to be dead again. Words like
anyway
. As far as she could tell, Sunali had no reason to visit again, so it might be years, or decades, before Mira was next revived. The thought of her body lying frozen in this wall, with her not asleep, not unconscious, but simply nonexistent, was
intolerable. “Please don’t go yet. Can I have just a few more minutes?”

“Sure. Of course.” Sunali waited, eyebrows raised.

Mira didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want these minutes to talk about her plight, she just wanted to
be
for a few more minutes. More than that, she wanted to see Jeannette, missed Jeannette so badly it burned. What it would mean to hear her voice, just once.

“I miss her so much,” she said aloud.

“Who?” Sunali asked.

“Jeannette.”

Sunali nodded understanding.

“Please, can you wake her again? Can you tell her I’m thinking about her?” Mira searched Sunali’s eyes, desperate. “You know what it feels like to be where I am. You know what it must mean to me, don’t you?” She still wasn’t used to begging people for things, things as basic as being alive, or seeing the woman she loved.

Sunali nodded. “Yes, I do.” She thought for a moment, then stood, her screen clutched in both hands. “Hold on. I doubt Cryomed is going to like this, but fuck them.” Then she was gone, without ending Mira’s session first.

Mira was elated to have time to be awake, time to think. She wondered why Sunali had left her alive this time, and what Cryomed wasn’t going to like. Surely they didn’t care if she and Jeannette communicated through Sunali. She couldn’t wait to hear what message Jeannette would send to her, wished she’d had time to think of a message more profound to send to Jeannette than “I’m thinking of you.”