“Tomorrow morning. You’d better pack all your stuff, all the same. Oh-seven hundred, weather permitting, the car will pick you up at the dorm.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. He wasn’t going to have days to get ready, then. And, pack all your stuff. Nunn thought he’d be staying Upabove, then.
He’d think of something. He’d surprise them.
He’d make them fly him back.
Make them. He hadn’t had a great deal of luck making anybody do anything. He’d gotten in here only because he’d been a straight, clean student since he’d reformed, and because he’d half-killed himself scoring high on the exams, but that was getting into the program. Now, in a lawsuit, they weren’t going to look at his future. They were going to look at his past, which was nothing but trouble. All his records were going to end up in court, public. They were going to ask how somebody with a juvenile record had gotten into the program in the first place. Everything he’d lived down was going to reappear. All his records. A drug-dosing mother. All his sessions with station cops. His psychs had vouched him clear of that; if only he could show a clean record in his work down here he might have a chance.
Instead he’d lost equipment and been late. He’d picked one hell of a time to slight the rules down here… with the lawsuit coming up again, and himself going under the psychological microscope again to try to prove, no, he couldn’t go to space, he wasn’t fit to go to space. He was too fragile to be deported.
How could he simultaneously prove he was rehabbed enough to be down here and not fit to go with his relatives and get shot at along with his mother’s ship?
And what did he say when they asked him what he’d been up to reporting late? I lost my head? I was infatuated with a girl? And drag Bianca’s name into it, and let her Family in on it?
He hated his relatives with a fury beyond reason. He hated all humanity at the moment.
He went out the doors, one after another, realizing, in a colder panic since the test that brought him here, that they—the they in station administration who lifelong had ordered him around—could now get him up to the station for their own convenience in their lawsuit, but they might not get around to bringing him back all that quickly, even if all things were equal and he hadn’t just gotten Bianca Velasquez into trouble—a shuttle ticket up, they’d pay for. Down, he couldn’t afford. That meant even if things went absolutely flawlessly, his lawyers were going to have to sue to make them send him back, which would take time, a lot of time.
They could ruin his life while they messed around and made up their minds. They were ruining his life, just filling out their damned forms and sending him up to the station again because the law said he had to be in court to say so.
Seven hundred hours. That was when the shuttle broke dock, flew, did whatever it did. He heard the shuttles go over in the early mornings when the staff was having breakfast. They’d roar overhead and people would stop talking for a few beats and then they’d go on with their conversations.
Where’s Fletch? they’d say tomorrow morning.
Bianca would miss him for a couple of weeks. Maybe longer.
But what good would it do?
He’d never see Melody and Patch again, and they damned sure wouldn’t understand where he’d gone. The monsoon was coming. They could die in their long walk and he wouldn’t be here, he wouldn’t know.
Rain washed over him and lightning whitened the door of the men’s dorm as he opened it and shoved his way through into the entry. In a shattered blur of white he saw the usual pile of clean-suits for the cleaning crew to take, all the masks hanging, clustered on their pegs. His mask should join them. He should unsuit, go in, pack, as he was told.
But he didn’t want to unsuit. Not yet. Not yet for going inside and facing the questions he’d get from supervisors and the others in the program when he started packing up. Emotions would answer. And that was no good, not for him, not for his future. He wanted an hour, one hour, to walk in the rain—just to get himself together, not to have a fight with Marshall Willett on his record.
And he’d reported to the Base. He’d checked in with Admin. He wasn’t on anyone’s list as missing any longer. You could be outside. There wasn’t a curfew on. If he wanted to get wet, it was his choice, wasn’t it?
His mask was on one cylinder.
Hell, he thought, and opened another mask, one on the pegs, and borrowed one, in the thought he’d annoy someone, but nothing against the necessity of getting himself a chance to cool down before he had to deal with anybody.
Then, to be safe, he borrowed one from another mask—it would risk whoever it was to take both, in case they were stupid enough to ignore how light the mask was and go out thinking they were set…
But then he wasn’t as trapped. And in a fit of anger he raided a third and a fourth mask. A fifth and a sixth. He wouldn’t be trapped. He was going to miss that shuttle. Maybe his lawyers could fight it through the court: they’d take his side, and it was time for them to earn their station-given stipend. Get himself up there in reach and some court order could get him set aboard his relatives’ ship, and then no court order could get him off. That was one thought. The other was that right now he wanted not to have to see Marshall’s smug face and that most of all he wanted not to have to tell Bianca that he was sorry, he wasn’t like other people, lawyers owned him and they could deport him if the courts didn’t rule he was mentally unstable.
In which case they’d throw him out of the program anyway, and the station would give him some makework job because his mental state made him unemployable at anything else he was qualified to do.
He resettled his mask. He’d stuffed his pockets with cylinders until they wouldn’t hold any more. He walked out the door into the rain and the lightning of a world that, until a quarter hour ago, had been happy and promising him everything he could ever want.
He walked down the puddled gravel path toward the river, and no one stopped him.
If they caught him he could still lie and say he’d left the saw and only then remembered it and didn’t want to leave the Base with a black mark on his record. He still had an escape. He always left himself one way to maneuver.
But he was scared this time, more than all the other times he’d been snatched up by the system. He’d usually had enough of whatever home they’d put him into, and it was certain by the time he’d heard it taken apart and analyzed and argued pro and con in court, that he was ready to be put elsewhere. You couldn’t maintain an illusion that you were normal when your foster-family got up in front of a judge and answered questions about their private lives and your private life, and lied right in front of you to make them sound better and you sound worse.
And you’d say, in a high childish voice, That’s a lie! And sometimes the court believed you, but by then you knew it wasn’t better, and wouldn’t ever be better, and things that hadn’t been broken before the lawyers got into it would be broken by the time they got through hashing it up in public. Or if there was anything left of ties to that family he’d break it up in his own stupid actions—he’d go immediately and get in trouble of some kind, just to hit back, maybe, because it hurt. He could see that from where he was now, and after Melody had told him that truth about himself. He’d always come out of the hearings worse than he went in, usually with a family in ruins—and this time—