She was in a dark place, the light catching her from the side. In the background, a rai song was playing, all trumpets and ululating male voices. She licked her lips, her gaze flicked to the terminal’s control display, and then back to him.
“David, I think I’m in trouble,” she said. Her voice shook, her breath pressing into the words. “I need help, okay? I’m going to need help, and I know you like me. And I like you too, and I think you’ll help me out, right? I need to borrow some money. Maybe…maybe kind of a lot. I’ll know soon. Tomorrow maybe. Just send a message back if you can. And don’t talk to Hutch.”
A woman’s voice called from the background, rising over the music, and Leelee surged forward. The display went back to default, and David put in a connection request that timed out with an offer to leave a message instead. Grunting with frustration, he put in another request. Then another. Leelee’s system was off-line. He had the powerful urge to get to the tube station and go to Innis Shallows in person, but he didn’t know where to find her once he was there. Didn’t even know for sure she’d been there when she sent the message. Curiosity and dread spun up a hundred scenarios. Leelee had been caught with some product and had to bribe the police or she’d be jailed. One of Hutch’s enemies had found her and was threatening to kill her if she didn’t tell how to find him so now she needed to get off planet. Or she was pregnant and she had to get to Dhanbad Nova for the abortion. He wondered how much money she’d need. He imagined the smile on her face when he gave it to her. When he saved her from whatever it was.
But first he had to fix his data and get home. No one could know that something was happening. He set the hand terminal to record and placed himself in the center of the image.
“I’ll do whatever I can, Leelee. Just you need to get in touch with me. Tell me what’s going on, and I’ll do whatever you need. Promise.” He felt like there was more. Something else he should add. He didn’t know what. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it, right? Just call me.”
He set the headers and delivered the message. For the rest of the evening, he waited for the chime of a connection request. It never came.
When he got home, it was near midnight but his father and Aunt Bobbie were still awake. The living room monitor was set to a popular feed with a silver-haired, rugged-faced man talking animatedly. With the sound muted, he seemed to be trying to get their attention. David’s father sat on the couch, the mass of his body commanding the space from armrest to armrest like a king on his throne. Aunt Bobbie leaned against the wall, lifting a thirty-kilo weight with one arm as she spoke, then gently letting it descend.
“That’s how I see it,” she said.
“But it isn’t like that,” his father said. “You are a highly trained professional. How much did Mars invest in you over those years you were in the Corps? The resources that you took up didn’t come from nowhere. Mars gave something up to give you those opportunities, those skill sets.”
It was a tone of voice David had heard all his life, and it tightened his gut. The man on the monitor lifted his hands in outrage over something, then cracked what was meant to be a charming smile.
“And I appreciate that,” Aunt Bobbie said, her voice low and calm in a way that sounded more like shouting than his father’s raised voice. “I’ve served. And those opportunities involved a lot of eighteen-hour days and—”
“No, no, no, no,” his father said, massive hands waving in the air like he was trying to blow away smoke. “You don’t get to complain about the work. Engineering is just as demanding as—”
“—and watching a lot of my friends die in front of me,” Aunt Bobbie finished. The free weight rose and fell in the sudden silence. She shifted it to her other hand. His father’s face was dark with blood, his hands grasping his knees. Aunt Bobbie smiled. Her voice was sad. “You’re thinking about how you can top me on that, aren’t you? Go ahead. Take your time.”
David put his hand terminal down on the kitchen table, the click of plastic on plastic enough to announce him. When they turned to look at him, David could see the family resemblance. For a moment, they were an older brother and a younger sister locked in the same conversation they’d been having since they were children. David nodded to them and looked away, unsettled by the thought and vaguely embarrassed.
“Welcome home,” his father said, rising up from the couch. “How are things at the lab?”
“Fine,” David said. “Mom said she’d put dinner up for me.”
“There’s some curry in the refrigerator.”
David nodded. He didn’t like curry, but he didn’t dislike it. He put a double serving into a self-heating ceramic bowl and set it to warm. He kept his eyes down, wishing that they’d go on with whatever they’d been talking about so they’d forget about him yet dreading listening to them fight if they did. Aunt Bobbie cleared her throat.
“Did they find anything more about the tube thing?” she asked. David could tell from the shift in her tone of voice that she’d put up the white flag. His father took a deep breath, letting it out slowly through his nose. David’s curry tasted more of ginger than usual, and he wondered whether Aunt Bobbie had made it.
“Newsfeed says they have leads,” his father said at last. “I imagine they’ll get someone in custody by the end of the week.”
“Are they saying outside involvement?”
“No. Some idiot protestor trying to make a point about how vulnerable we are,” his father said as if he actually knew. “It’s happening everywhere. Selfish crap, if you ask me. We were on our way to making the schedule for the month before this happened. Now everyone’s lost a day at least. That’s not so much when it’s just one person, but there were thousands of people thrown out off schedule. It’s like Dad always says: Three hundred sixty-five people miss one shift, that’s a year gone in a day, you know?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Aunt Bobbie said. “I remember it being nine thousand people miss an hour.”
“Same thought.”
David’s hand terminal chimed its tritone and his heart raced, but when he pulled it closer, it was only the lower university’s automated system posting the lab schedule for the next week. He looked through it without really taking it in. No surprises. He’d get his work done somehow. He killed the sound on his terminal and switched back to Leelee’s message just to see her face, the way her shoulders moved. She licked her lips again, looked down, and then up. He heard her voice in his memory. Not the message she’d sent him tonight, but the last thing she said the night the tube broke down. Just thought you’d come play and I was wrong.
Oh, God. Had she been thinking about ha**ng s*x with him? Wouldn’t Hutch have been angry? Or was that why Hutch had sent them away together? Was that what this was all about? Humiliation and a barely controlled erotic thrill mixed in his blood and left the curry seeming bland. He had to find Leelee. Tomorrow, if he hadn’t heard from her, he’d go to Innis Shallows. He could just ask around. Someone would know her. Maybe he could put off his data checking for one day. Or make Steppan do it. Guy owed him one after all...
“Well, kid,” his father said, stepping into the room. David flipped his hand terminal facedown. “It’s late and I’ve got work tomorrow.”
“Me too,” David said.
“Don’t stay up too late.”
“Fine.”
His father’s hand gripped his shoulder briefly, the pressure there and gone again. David ate the last few bites of curry and washed it down with a cup of cold water. In the living room, Aunt Bobbie changed feeds on the monitor. A small, old, dark-skinned woman in an orange sari appeared on the screen, leaning forward and listening to an interviewer’s question with an expression of polite contempt. Aunt Bobbie coughed out a single sour laugh and turned off the screen.
She walked up to the kitchen, massaging her left bicep with her right hand and grimacing. She wasn’t really any bigger than his father, but she was much stronger and it made her carry herself like she was. David tried to remember if she’d killed anyone. He was pretty sure he’d heard a story about her killing someone, but he hadn’t been paying attention. She looked down, maybe at his hand terminal turned with its face to the table. Her smile looked almost wistful, which was weird. She leaned against the sink and began pulling her fingers backward, pushing out her palm, stretching out the tendons and muscles of her wrist.
“You ever go free-climbing?” she asked.
David glanced up at her and shrugged.
“When I was about your age, I used to go all the time,” she said. “Get a breather and a couple of friends. Head up to the surface. Or down. I went to Big Man’s Cave a couple times right before my placement. No safety equipment. Usually just enough bottled air to go, do the thing, and get back to the closest ingress. The whole point was to try and carry as little as we possibly could. The thinnest suits. No ropes or pitons. There was one time, I was on this cliff face about half a kilometer up from the ground with my fist wedged into a crack to keep me in place while a windstorm came through. All I could hear was the grit hitting my helmet and my climbing buddies screaming at me to get out of there.”
“Scary,” David said flatly. She didn’t notice the sarcasm, or she chose not to.
“It was great. One of the best climbs ever. Your grandfather didn’t like it, though. That was the only time he’s ever called me stupid.”
David filled another glass of water and drank it. He had a hard time imagining it. Pop-Pop was always praising everyone for everything. To the point sometimes that it seemed like none of it really meant anything. He couldn’t imagine his grandfather getting that angry. His father sometimes called Pop-Pop “the Sergeant Major” when he was angry with him. It was almost like he was talking about another person, someone David had never met.