He had to make a plan. Maybe he could talk to Hutch after all. Not say Leelee had talked to him, just that he was worried about her. That he wanted to find her. Because that was true. He had to find Leelee, wherever she was, and make sure she was all right. Then he had to finish his datasets. It was almost two hours to Innis Shallows and back, but if he just planned to work through lunchtime, or else eat in the labs, he’d only be losing one hour for travel. He had to think about how to find her once he was there. He wished there was someone to talk to. Even Hutch. There wasn’t, though, and so he was going to have to solve this on his own. Go out, ask, look. She was counting on him. For a moment, he could feel her head resting against him, smell the subtle musk of her hair. So yes. He’d go do this.
No problem.
Only one tube ran to Innis Shallows, back and forth along the same stretch. Since the sabotage of the tube system, there was more security present, men and women with pistols and gas grenades scowling and walking through the cars. The tube station at Innis Shallows didn’t even have the usual perfunctory signs announcing that the end destination was Aterpol, like there were only two kinds of places in the universe: Innis Shallows and anywhere else. The official stats said that six thousand people lived and worked in the Shallows, but walking out of the tube station, David still felt overwhelmed. The main halls were old stone behind clear sealant. White scars marked the places where decades of minor accidents had dug into it. Men and women walked or rode electric carts, moving up ramps from level to level. Most ignored him but a few made a point of staring. He knew he didn’t belong there. His clothes and the way he walked marked him. He stood for almost a minute in the center of the corridor, his hand in his pocket, fingers wrapped around his hand terminal. Behind him, the soft chimes of the tube preparing to leave again were like a friend’s voice: Get on. Get out of here. This is dumb.
He would have, too, turned back around and gotten on the tube and headed back without spending more than five minutes in the neighborhood. Except for Leelee.
David scowled, shook his head, and trudged down the corridor, heading off to his left for no reason. His throat felt tight and uncomfortable and he needed to pee. After about twenty meters of cart rental kiosks and monitors set to entertainment newsfeeds, he found a little restaurant and stepped in. The woman behind the counter could have been a Belter: thin body, too-large head. She lifted her chin at him and nodded back toward half a dozen chipped formed plastic tables.
“Anywhere you want,” she said in a thick accent David couldn’t place.
David didn’t move, looking for the courage to speak for so long the woman raised her eyebrows. He yanked his hand terminal out of his pocket and held it out to her. He’d gotten a still from the message Leelee had left him. It wasn’t great, but the shape of her face was clear and she wasn’t in the middle of a word or anything.
“I’m looking for her,” David said. He sounded terse in his own ears. Almost resentful. “You know her?”
Her eyes flickered down and she shrugged.
“Don’t know her. You want to stay, you got to eat. Anywhere you want.”
“Her name’s Leelee.”
She hoisted her eyebrows. David felt a blush rising in his cheeks.
“Do you know where I could look for her?”
“Not here?” the woman suggested. David shoved the terminal back into his pocket and walked out. It was a stupid plan. Walk around the tube station, asking people at random? It was dumb and it was humiliating, but it was Leelee so he did it. The hour was blank stares and shrugs and the growing sense that everyone he talked to was embarrassed for him. When the tube car returned, he’d found nothing. He sat alone on a formed plastic bench. The monitor shifted to a video review by a pretty girl whose voice made it sound like she was shouting every word. “Dika Adalai’s best story ever!” David looked up and down the sparsely populated car and came to the conclusion that he was the one who’d triggered the review. It said something about who the ad systems thought he was. What he cared about. Like they knew.
He pulled up his hand terminal. Made another connection request, and Leelee didn’t answer. He pulled up her message, playing it low. I need help, okay? and Don’t talk to Hutch. Only there wasn’t anyone else to talk to.
He spent the afternoon catching up on his datasets, horrified to realize how far behind he’d let himself fall. He ran through number and correlations, checking the data against expected norms with the practice and contempt of long experience. He needed to put in extra time. Get everything taken care of. If he fell too far behind, Mr. Oke would start noticing, and if there was a full audit, the extra lab work he’d done for Hutch would come out, and then he’d be screwed. He weighed calling in a favor from Steppan, but his mind kept shifting back to Leelee and the closed faces of Innis Shallows. Someone had to know where she was. Who she was.
He had to work.
For the first hour, reviewing and processing the data felt like hard labor, but then slowly, his mind fell into the rhythm. He managed the statistical input and brought out the correlations, fitting each one into the larger spreadsheet waiting for meta-analysis, and he could feel himself relax a little. The different catalytic mixes felt more like home than home did, and here like nowhere else in his life, he was in control. Between the comfort and concentration of the work and his exhaustion, he fell into something like a trance. Time passed without any sense of duration. When he came to the end of the run, he could have been going for minutes or hours. Either one seemed plausible. He didn’t think to check his hand terminal until he was almost home.
There were four new messages waiting, none of them from Leelee. The first was a correction to the lab schedule, then two posts from a gaming forum he subscribed to even though he barely played any of the games. The last one was from the central educational authority in Salton, the upper university. He flicked it open and his head went as light as a balloon.
He walked into the common room. His mother and father sat before the living room monitor, just far enough away from each other that their legs didn’t touch. On the screen, an older man was leaning forward earnestly. “The Martian project is the single most ambitious endeavor in human history. It is all of our duties to see that the threat of Earth…”
“What’s the matter?” his father said.
David lifted his hand terminal as if that was explanation enough. And then, when they didn’t understand, he spoke. His voice had a distance to it.
“My placement came,” he said. “I’m going to development.”
His father whooped, stood so violently that the couch almost tipped over. As his dad’s arms wrapped around him, lifting him up toward the ceiling, and his mother wept joyful tears into her hands, all David could think was I’m supposed to be happy about this.
After that, everything changed and nothing did. He’d been working toward his placement for the last five sections, or looked at another way, his whole life. He’d known it was coming—everyone had—and still it felt like it had snuck up on him. Surprised him. All of the things that had to happen after—the things he hadn’t bothered thinking about because they were for later—had to be done now. There was the application for living space in the dormitories of the upper university, the coordination of his long-run experiments with Mr. Oke so that some new second-year could step in and see them to completion, and the preparations and purchases that would, in the coming months, lead to David moving out of his room, out of his home, away from his family for the first time in his life. The times when the idea wouldn’t scare him, it couldn’t come fast enough.