“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 fucked,” she said and grinned at him. “Fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked, fucked.”
“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.
Hutch had made himself out as more of a scholar back then but still with an edge to him. For months, David had thought the man was an independent tutor; the kind of hired instructor a family might bring on if their children were falling behind. David still had seven rounds of lab to go before his placement, so he hadn’t thought too much about Hutch. He’d just become another face in the whirl of the lower university, one more minor character in the cast of thousands. Or hundreds at least.
Looking back, David could sort of see how Hutch had tested him. It had begun with asking innocuous little favors—tell someone who shared David’s table that Hutch was looking for her, get Hutch a few grams of some uncontrolled reagent, keep a box for him overnight. They were things that David could do easily, and so he did. Every time, Hutch praised him or paid him back with small favors. David began to notice the people Hutch knew—pretty girls and tough-looking men. Several of the low-tier instructors knew Hutch on sight, and if they weren’t overly friendly to him, they were certainly respectful. There hadn’t been any one moment when David had crossed a line from being someone Hutch knew to cooking for him. It all happened so smoothly that he’d never felt a bump.
The fact was he would have done the side projects for Hutch without being paid. He couldn’t spend the money on anything too extravagant for fear his parents would ask questions, so he used it here and there—a little present for Leelee or lunch on him for the other students at his table or the occasional indulgence that he could explain away. For the most part, it just sat in the account, growing slowly over time. The money wasn’t precious because it was money. It was precious because it was secret and it was his.
When he had his placement and moved out to student housing in Salton, he’d have more freedom. Hutch’s money would buy him a top-flight gaming deck or a better wardrobe. He could take Leelee out for fancy dinners without having to explain where he’d been or who he’d been with. The workload would be harder, especially if he got placed in medical or development. He’d heard stories about first-year placements on the development teams who pulled fifty-six hour shifts without sleep. Carving out another six hours after that for Hutch might be hard, but he’d worry about that when he got there. He had more immediate problems.
The transport buses were old, wheezing electrical carts, some of them dating back two generations. The drivetrain clicked under him, and the rubberized foam wheels made a constant sticky ripping noise. David hunched in a seat, trying to pull his elbows close in against his body. Around him, the other travelers looked bored and restless. The system was still locked down, his hand terminal restricted to what it held in local memory. He checked it every few seconds just to feel he had something to do. The wide access corridors passed slowly, the conduits and pipes like the circulatory system of some vast planetary behemoth. It seemed like the corridor would go on forever, even though the distance between Martineztown and Breach Candy wasn’t more than forty kilometers.