“You…,” Hutch said, then paused, bit his lip. When he spoke again, he had a buzz of outrage in his voice. “You cooked a batch.”
“It’s got plenty. Lots.”
“You. Stupid. Fuck,” Hutch said. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you just handed me? How am I going to move that much shit? Who’s going to buy it?”
“But you get it free.”
Hutch pointed the gun at the satchel.
“I flood the market, and the prices go down. Not just for me. For everybody. You understand that? Everyone. People start coming up from Dhanbad Nova because they hear we’ve got cheap shit. All the sellers up there start wondering what I mean by it, and I’ve got drama.”
“You could wait. Just hold on to it.”
“I’m going to have to, right? Only it gets out that I’m sitting on an egg like that, someone gets greedy. Decides maybe it’s time to take me on. And boom, I got drama again. Cut it how you want, kid. You just f**ked me.”
“He didn’t know, Hutch,” Leelee said. She sounded so tired.
Hutch’s pistol barked once, shockingly loud in the small space. A gouge appeared in the floor next to Leelee’s knee like a magic trick. She started crying.
“Yeah,” Hutch said. “I didn’t think you wanted to interrupt me again. David, you’re a sweet kid, but you’re dumb as a f**king bag of sand. What you just handed me here? It’s a problem.”
“I’m…I’m sorry. I just…”
“And it’s going to require a little”—Hutch took a drag on his cigarette and raised the pistol until David could see him staring down the black barrel—“risk management.”
The air in the room changed as the door behind him opened. He turned to look, but someone big moved past him too fast to follow. Something quick and violent happened, the sounds of a fight. David was hit in the back, hard. He pitched forward, unable to get his hands out fast enough to stop his fall. His head bounced off the sealed stone floor, and for a breathless second, he was sure he’d been shot. Been killed. Then the fight ended with Hutch screaming, crates crashing. The crackle of plastic splintering. David rose to his elbows. His nose was bleeding.
Aunt Bobbie stood where Hutch’s crate shelter had been. She had the pistol in her hand and was considering it with a professional calm. Leelee had scooted across the floor toward David, as if to seek shelter behind him. Hutch, his cigarette gone, was cradling his right hand in his left. The index finger of his right hand—his trigger finger—stood off at an improbable angle.
“Who the f**k are you!” Hutch growled. His voice was low. Feral.
“I’m Gunny Draper,” Aunt Bobbie said, ejecting the clip. She cleared the chamber and grabbed the thin brass glimmer out of the air. “So we should talk about this.”
Leelee pressed her hand against David’s arm. He shifted, gathered her close against him. She smelled rank—body odor and smoke and something else he couldn’t identify—but he didn’t care. Aunt Bobbie pressed something, and the top of the gun slipped off the grip.
“What’ve you got to say to me, dead girl?” Hutch asked. His voice didn’t sound as tough as he probably hoped. Aunt Bobbie pulled the barrel out of the gun and tossed it into a corner of the room, in the narrow space between some crates and the wall. She didn’t look up from the gun, but she smiled.
“The boy made a mistake,” she said, “but he treated you with respect. He didn’t steal from you. He didn’t try to track the girl down on his own. He didn’t go to security. He didn’t even try to sell the product and get the money.”
Leelee shivered. Or maybe David did and it only seemed like it was her. Hutch scowled, but a thoughtful look stole into his eyes.
Aunt Bobbie plucked a long, thin bit of metal out of the gun and then a small black spring and tossed both behind a different crate. “You’re a tough guy in a tough business, and I respect that. Maybe you’ve killed some people. But you’re also a businessman. Rational. Able to see the big picture.” She looked up at Hutch, smiled, and tossed him the grip of his gun. “So here’s what I’m thinking. Take the bag. Sell it, bury it. Drop it in the recycler. It’s yours. Do what you want with it.”
“Would anyway,” Hutch said, but she ignored him.
“The girl’s debt’s paid, and David walks away. He’s out. You don’t come for him, he doesn’t come for you. I don’t come for you, either.” She tossed him the empty top half of his gun, and he caught it with his uninjured hand. From where David was, hunched on the floor, both of them looked larger than life.
“Girl’s nothing,” Hutch said. “All drama and easy to replace. Boy’s something special, though. Good cooks can’t be swapped out just like that.”
Aunt Bobbie started working the bullets out of the magazine with one thumb, dropping each one into her wide, powerful palm. “Everyone’s replaceable in work like yours. You’ve got four or five like him already I bet.” She took out the last of the bullets and put them in her pocket, then passed him the empty magazine. “David’s the one that got away. No disrespect. Not a risk to the operation. Just worked out until it didn’t. That’s the deal.”
“And if I say no?”
“I’ll kill you,” Aunt Bobbie said in the same matter-of-fact tone. “I’d prefer not to, but that’s what happens if you say no.”
“That easy?” Hutch said with a scowl. “Maybe not that easy.”
“You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse. And David is my beloved nephew. If you f**k with him after this, I will end every piece of you,” Bobbie said, her own smile sad. “No disrespect.”
Hutch’s scowl twitched into a flicker of a smile.
“They grow ’em big where you come from,” he said and held up the disassembled pistol. “You broke my gun.”
“I noticed the spare magazine in your left pocket,” she said. “David, stand up. We’re leaving now.”
He walked ahead, Leelee holding him and weeping quietly. Aunt Bobbie took the rear, keeping them going quickly without quite making them run and looking back behind her often. When they got near the tube station, Aunt Bobbie put a hand on David’s shoulder.
“I can get you through the checkpoint, but I can’t get her.”
Leelee’s eyes were soft and wet, her expression calm and serene. Filthy and stinking, she was still beautiful. She was redeemed.
“Do you have somewhere you can go?” David asked. “Someplace here in Martineztown where he can’t find you?”
“I’ve got friends,” she said. “They’ll help.”
“Go to them,” Aunt Bobbie said. “Stay out of sight.”
David didn’t want to let her go, didn’t want to lose the contact of her arm against his. He saw her understand. She didn’t step into his arms as much as flow there, soft and supple and changing as water. For a moment, her body was pressed against his perfectly, without a millimeter of space in between. Her lips were against his cheek, her breath in his ear. She was Una Meing for a moment, and he was Caz Pratihari, and the world was a heady, powerful, romantic place. She shifted against him and her lips against his were soft and warm and they tasted like a promise.
“I’ll find you,” she whispered, and then the moment was over, and she was walking a little unsteadily down the corridor, her head high. He wanted to run after her, to kiss her again, to take her home with him and fold her into his bed. He could feel his heartbeat in his neck. He had an erection.
“Come on,” Aunt Bobbie said. “Let’s go home.”
From Martineztown to Aterpol, she said nothing, just sat with her elbows resting on her knees, squeezing one of the bullets she’d taken between two fingers, then running it across her knuckles like a magic trick. Even through the chemical rush of relief, he dreaded what would come next. The disapproval, the lecture, the threats. When she spoke, with five minutes still before they reached Breach Candy, it wasn’t what he’d expected to hear.
“That girl. You saved her. You know that? You saved her.”
“Yeah.”
“You feel good about that. You did a right thing, and that feels good.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“That good feeling is the most that girl will ever be able to give you.”
The tube car’s vibration was almost imperceptible. The monitors had tuned themselves to a newsfeed, unable to find any common ground between him and his aunt. David looked at his hands.
“She doesn’t like me,” he said. “She just acted like she did because he told her to. And then she knew I had money.”
“She knew you had money and she knew you were a good guy,” Aunt Bobbie said. “That’s different.”
David smiled and was surprised to kind of mean it. Aunt Bobbie leaned back, stretched. When she shifted her head, the joints in her neck popped like firecrackers.
“I need to move out,” she said.
“Okay,” David said, suddenly finding himself wishing she wouldn’t. Too many losses today already, and this was one he hadn’t even known would hurt. “Where will you go?”
“Back to work.” Bobbie flipped the bullet up and caught it, then juggled it across her fingers again. “I need to find something to do.” She pointed at the news on the monitors with her chin. It was all about Earth and Mars and angry people with bombs. “Maybe I can help.”
“Okay,” David said again. Then a moment later, “I’m glad you stayed with us.”
“I should take you free-climbing,” she said. “You’d love it.”
David only saw Leelee one more time. It was his second year in development, about three weeks after he’d turned eighteen. He was in a noodle bar with the three other members of his team and their advisor, Dr. Fousek. The wall was playing a live feed of the football match from the Mariner Valley with the sound turned low enough to talk over. The table screen, on the other hand—they’d tunneled into the arrays at the upper university, and between bottles of beer and tea and black ceramic bowls of noodles and sauce, their latest simulation models were running.