“What’s it like, knowing you’re guaranteed to live to a hundred and fifteen or twenty?”
The question drew Winter from her reverie. She looked at Rob, really looked at him with those green eyes, her face so very alive. “I’m not sure yet.” She dug at the emerald like she was trying to pry it loose. “I haven’t had time for it to sink in. It’s been hard enough adjusting to being alive again. I’ve been in touch with other women who’ve been through this; they’re the only people who can understand what’s happened to me. That’s been helpful.”
Rob nodded. “Have you been in touch with Idris?”
“Oh, sure. We went shopping after I got out. I didn’t have a thing to wear. Some inconsiderate person gave away all my clothes when I died.” She dropped her head, thinking; her hair gliding down to frame her face. Rob wanted to reach out and touch that hair, soft across his fingers. Instead, he laced his fingers and clenched his hands together on the railing. “It’s been a little awkward, trying to reconnect with Idris. She wants to pick up right where we left off, like it never happened. Like nothing’s changed.”
“I guess it’ll take both of you time to adjust.”
“I guess.” She was biting her lip, gone again. If Rob hadn’t watched hours and hours of Winter’s previous life, he might have thought this was who she was. Maybe it wasn’t surprising she wasn’t the same, after all she’d been through, married now to an old man she barely knew. Rob hated that old man, utterly despised him even though they’d never met. He only hoped Winter despised Red as much as he did. If she liked him, if somehow she learned to love him… he was afraid to ask, but he had to know.
He tried to sound casual. “So, what’s he like?”
“Redmond? I haven’t seen him since the honeymoon. He works, spends time with his kids. He’s been married five times. He spends most of his free time building his video game collection.” She laughed, but dryly—not the infectious laugh he’d heard so often from her past life. “Did I mention Red has one of the largest early video game collections in the world?”
“You did not. How exciting.” He tried to match her droll, mock-cheery tone.
“He does. One day you’ll have to visit the island and let Red show it to you. For hours and hours.”
Rob laughed, but Winter only shook her head. It seemed like he’d never get to hear her wonderful laughter.
“Big sigh,” she said.
That got Rob laughing again. “You do realize your lungs work now? You could, you know, actually make a sighing sound.”
Winter broke into a reluctant smile, but went on looking at her hands. “While I was dead, I kind of got used to describing my affects rather than actually carrying them out. Much easier. In fact, I’m thinking about narrating all of my movements and just sitting still most of the time. ‘I stand, I walk to the window. Put my hands on my hips.’”
“Just don’t try to eat that way.”
“Good point.”
Winter craned her neck, looking toward the underside of High Town, thick with shadows, buttresses crisscrossing the framework. “I never thought I’d be so happy to see that roof. I always found it oppressive, but now it’s comforting.”
Rob eyed the strings of apartments dangling below the ceiling. He could pinpoint Lorelei’s if he wanted, the place where all of this had started, leading to this moment.
He looked at Winter, the pinkness rising in her cheeks in the cool evening, the barely perceptible flutter of a pulse in the hollow of her neck. “This is incredible, being able to spend time with you without that timer hanging over us,” he said.
“Head nod,” Winter whispered, and for the first time, Rob felt as if he was standing next to the woman he’d grown so close to. Her eyes grew soft and teary, and he could see she was with him, fully.
Then she turned, looked off toward the lake. “Let’s go on a trip. My treat. Or Red’s treat, if you want to get technical.”
For a moment, against all reason, he thought she meant a trip in a car, or a train, and his heart leaped at the thought of packing a bag and spending two or three days, alone with Winter. Of course, that wasn’t what she meant. She was working her system. “Where do you want to go? Anywhere in the world. Pick somewhere expensive.” She’d gone back to looking through him as much as at him, the feeling of connection vanished.
“Won’t he be upset if you take a friend on an expensive trip?” For some reason Rob couldn’t bring himself to say Red’s name. It hurt every time Winter said it. Rob wished she’d call him something else. Preferably “the impotent old bastard.”
Winter laughed dryly. “He won’t notice. Here, look at this.” She moved her readout into the air so he could see it. It included her account balance: almost a half million dollars. “That’s what’s left of my allowance for the month.”
Rob couldn’t take his eyes off the readout. “That’s hard to believe.”
“I know. When I died, I was twelve thousand dollars in debt, and it seemed like so much money.” She closed the readout. “Come on, let’s go everywhere.”
They spent five minutes in Paris, soaring over Notre Dame, popping into the Louvre long enough to see the Mona Lisa; two minutes hovering beside Mount Everest, watching two climbers scale an ice wall; one minute inside the dead city of Bangkok with its eighty-foot-high walls, where no living thing had walked in forty years, thanks to the nanopocalypse. Their last stop was an open-air virtual bazaar on the moon, where screens examined virtual merchandise set on virtual tables that was being hawked by other screens. Not one particle of moon dust was disturbed, because none of it was really there.
“Wow,” was all Rob could say when they returned to the relative ordinariness of Central Park.
“I know.”
“How much did that cost?”
Winter checked, raised her eyebrows. “Something like eleven thousand. Not bad, really.”
Almost all of it would be toll fees, set to limit the number of screens surrounding attractions like Big Ben and the Sphinx at any one time. From what Rob understood, opening a screen on the other side of the Earth cost the provider no more than opening one a foot away from you, yet for some reason the farther away you opened a screen, the more you were charged.
Eleven thousand, for a few minutes’ entertainment. Rob thought of how hard he had had to work to raise nine thousand to visit Winter for five minutes.
He caught Winter looking at him. When she saw him notice, she closed her eyes, smiled a neutral, unreadable smile. He sensed that the next words out of her mouth would be that she had to get going, that it had been nice seeing him, and maybe they could do it again at some other undetermined time.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he said before she had time to say it, “but you don’t seem like the same person I used to look so forward to visiting.”
Winter worked her system, as if checking on something she’d just thought of.
“Did I do something wrong?” Rob asked.
“You mean, besides running me over?”
The comment stung, even though her tone was light and ironic. “Besides that, yes.”
Her fingers stopped tapping. She let them drop to her sides. “Besides that, you worked yourself to the brink of exhaustion every day for almost two years to keep a promise to a stranger, then for an encore you did the impossible—you figured out how to get her out of there.” She lowered her voice to a near whisper. “No, Rob, you didn’t do anything wrong.”
He had no idea how she’d found out about his work schedule. Maybe just an educated guess. “Then why are you acting like you hardly know me?”