By the time they reached the platform, Leelee had gone quiet. He led her to a formed plastic bench that was intended for three people, but was snug with just the two of them. It ticked and popped under his weight, and Leelee flinched from the sound. There were small, distressed lines between her brows. The arrival board listed six minutes for the tube that would eventually get them to Innis Shallows, the seconds counting down in clean-lined Arabic numerals. When Leelee spoke, her voice was tight. He didn’t know if it was from sadness or the expected side effect of the drug.
“Everybody’s so angry,” she said. “I just wish people weren’t so angry.”
“They’ve got reason to be.”
Her focus swam for a moment, her gaze fighting to find him.
“Everyone’s got reasons to be,” she said. “I’ve got reasons to be. You’ve got reasons to be. Doesn’t mean we are, though. Doesn’t mean we want to be. You aren’t angry are you, David?” The question ended almost like a plea, and he wanted to tell her that he wasn’t. He wanted to say whatever words would smooth her perfect brow, and then take her back to her room in the housing complex and kiss her and have her strip off his clothes. He wanted to see her na**d and hear her laugh and fall asleep, spent, in her arms. He coughed, shifting on the bench. “You aren’t angry, are you?” she asked again.
The soft tritone sounded.
“The tube car’s here,” he said, forcing a smile. “Everything’s going to be fine. Just relax, right?”
She nodded and tried to pull away from him.
“It’s all red. You’re red too. Like a great big cherry. You’re so smart,” she said. “So you never try the stuff yourself?”
On the tube car, things weren’t better. This leg of the trip was an express for Aterpol, and the men and women on it were older than he was by a decade. Their demographic weight had the public monitor set to a newsfeed. In some well-appointed newsroom on the planet, a thin, gray-haired man was shouting down a swarthy woman.
“I don’t care!” the man said. “The agent they weaponized came from some larger, extra-solar ecosystem, and I don’t care. I don’t care about Phoebe. I don’t care about Venus. What I care about is what they did. The fact is—and no one disputes this—the fact is that Earth bought those weapons and—”
“That’s a gross oversimplification. Evidence is that there were several bids, including one from—”
“Earth bought those weapons and they fired them at us. At you and me and our children and grandchildren.”
The doors slid silently closed and the car began its acceleration. The tubes themselves were in vacuum, the car riding on a bed of magnetic fields like a gauss round. The lurch of acceleration was gentle, though. They’d cover the distance to Aterpol in twenty minutes. Maybe less. Leelee closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the car. Her lips pressed thin and her grip on his arm tightened. Maybe they should have waited for her to take the pill until she’d gotten to someplace quieter and better controlled.
“And Earth also provided the tracking data that shot them all down,” the woman on the screen said, pointing at the gray-haired man with her whole hand. “Yes, a rogue element in the Earth military was involved, but to dismiss the role that the official, sanctioned military played—”
“Sanctioned military? You make it sound like there’s a civil war on Earth. I don’t see that. I don’t see that at all. I see Mars under a persistent, existential threat and the government sitting on its hands.”
“Tell me a story,” Leelee said. “Talk to me. Sing me a song. Something.”
“I’ve got music on the hand terminal if you want.”
“No,” she said. “You. Your voice.”
David tucked his satchel between his feet and turned toward her, dipping his head down close to her ear. He had to hunch a little. He licked his lips, trying to think of something. His mind was blank, and he grabbed at the first thought that came through him. He brought his mouth to the shell of her ear. When he sang, he tried to be quiet enough that no one else would hear him.
“Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen…”
Leelee didn’t open her eyes, but she smiled. That was good enough. For ten minutes, David went on, quietly singing Christmas carols to Leelee. Some he got into and didn’t remember the right words, so he just made things up. Nonsense that fit the rhythm of the music, or nearly did.
The detonation was the loudest thing David had ever heard, less a sound than a physical blow. The car pitched forward, rattling against the walls of the tube, throwing Leelee into him and then back. The lighting flickered, failed, and then came on in a different color. They were stopped between stations. The monitors clicked to a pinkish-gray as they rebooted, then glowered back to life with the emergency services trefoil.
“Is this happening?” Leelee asked. Her irises were tiny rings of brown around deep black. “David? Is this happening?”
“It is, and it’s all right,” he said. “I’m here. We’re fine.”
David checked his hand terminal, thinking that the newsfeeds might tell him what was going on—power failure, rioting, enemy attack—but the network was in lockdown. An almost supernaturally calm male voice came over the public monitors. “The public transport system has encountered a pressure anomaly and has been shut down to assure passenger safety. Stay calm and a maintenance crew will arrive shortly.” The message was less important than the tone of voice it was spoken in, and Leelee relaxed a little. She started to giggle.
“Well this is f**ked,” she said and grinned at him. “Fucked, f**ked, f**ked, f**ked, f**ked.”
“Yeah,” David said. His mind was already jumping ahead. He’d be late getting home. His father would want to know why, and when it came out he’d been in Martineztown, there’d be questions. What he’d been doing there, who had he been seeing, why hadn’t he told anybody. All around them, the other passengers were grumbling and sighing and arranging themselves into comfortable positions, waiting for the rescuers. David stood up and sat down again. Every passing minute seemed to relax Leelee and shunt that tension into his spine. When he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of the tube doors, the boy looking back seemed furtive and scared.
Half an hour later, the emergency hatch at the end of the car creaked, popped, and opened. A man and a woman in matching blue security uniforms stepped in.
“Hey, folks,” the man said. “Everyone all right? Sorry about this, but some jackhole broke the vacuum seals. Whole system’s going to be down for about six hours, minimum. Some places longer. We’ve got service carts out here that can take folks to transport buses. Just line up single file, and we’ll get you where you’re going.”
Leelee was humming to herself as David drew her into line. He couldn’t get her to Innis Shallow and get back home. Not with the tubes down. He bit his lips and they moved forward one at a time, the other passengers vanishing through the emergency hatch and into the temporary airlock beyond it. It took forever to reach the front of the line.
“Where are you two headed?” the security man asked, consulting his hand terminal. It was working, even though David’s wasn’t. The man looked up, concerned. “Hermano. Where are you two headed?”
“Innis Shallows,” David said. And then, “She’s going to Innis Shallows. I was taking her there, because she’s not feeling so good. But I’ve got to get to Breach Candy. I’m going to miss my labs.” Leelee stiffened.
“Innis Shallows and Breach Candy. Step on through.”
The temporary airlock was made from smooth black Mylar, and walking through it was like going through the inside of a balloon. The pressure wasn’t calibrated very well, and when the outer seal opened, David’s ears popped. The hall was wide and low, the dull orange emergency lights filling the passage with shadows and leaching the color out of everything. The air was at least five degrees colder, enough to summon gooseflesh, and Leelee wasn’t holding his arm anymore. Her eyebrows were lifted and her mouth was set.
“It’ll be okay,” he said as they came close to the electric carts. “They’ll get you home all right.”
“Yeah, fine,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I’ve got to get home. My dad—”
She turned to him. In the dim light, her dilated eyes didn’t seem as out of place. Her sobriety made him wonder how much she’d really been feeling it before and how much had been a playful kind of acting.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Not the first time I’ve been tripping in public, right? I can behave myself. Just thought you’d come play and I was wrong. Hard cheese for me and moving on now.”
“I’m sorry. Next time.”
“You call it,” she said with a shrug. “Next time.”
The driver of the cart for Innis Shallow called out, and Leelee clambered aboard, squeezed between a middle-aged man and a grandmotherly woman, and waved back at David once. The middle-aged man glanced at David, back at Leelee, then down at the girl’s body. The cart lurched, whined, and lurched again. David stood, watching it pull away. The mixture of shame, regret, and longing felt like an illness. Someone touched his elbow.
“Breach Candy?”
“Yes.”
“Over here, then. Damn. You’re a big one, aren’t you? All right, though. We’ll fit you in.”
It was two years almost to the day since David had met Hutch at the lower university. David had been in the commons, the wide, carpeted benches with their soft, organic curves welcoming the students eating lunch. At thirteen, David had already been biochemistry track for two years. His last labs had been in tRNA transport systems, and he was reading through the outline for the carbon complex work that would take up his next six months when one of the seniors—an olive-skinned boy named Alwasi—had sat down beside him and said there was someone David should meet.