Winter covered her mouth, looked at the ground. She didn’t answer.
“When you were in there, sometimes I imagined what it would be like, the moment we met out in the world. I thought—” His voice hitched; he cleared his throat. “I thought it would be incredible, the best moment in my entire life. That we’d run toward each other laughing. We’d jump up and down, screaming, ‘We did it, we did it.’”
Three screens drifted by on the trail below, likely joggers running on treadmills at home.
“Close your eyes,” Winter said.
“What?”
“Close your eyes.”
Rob looked at her, questioning, then closed his eyes.
“Now imagine us jumping up and down.”
“Okay.”
“Where am I, in relation to you?”
Rob opened his eyes. Winter held her palm in front of his eyes. “Keep them closed.”
He closed them. “Where are you? I don’t know, you’re standing right in front of me, I guess.”
“Where are my hands?”
He almost opened his eyes again. Her hands were in his, but he didn’t want to say that. “You’re clutching my wrists.”
“Okay,” she said, though she sounded dubious. “Now roll the scene forward. We’re saying, ‘We did it, we did it.’ What comes next? We stop jumping, and…?”
What came next was Winter melting into his arms, the embrace he’d imagined a thousand times. And if she let him, he would go on holding her until all was silence and there was nothing in the world but the two of them, and he could feel her heart beating against his chest.
“What comes next is we fall into each other’s arms,” Winter said.
Rob opened his eyes. She was watching his face, searching for his reaction. He opened his mouth to disagree, but nothing came.
Her eyes were suddenly bright with tears, her mouth tight. “The thing of it is, I’m married, Rob. I signed an irrevocable life contract. Irrevocable, as in, nothing is ever going to change it. That was the price I paid. I paid it willingly, and I would do it again.” She turned to go. “I can’t fall into anyone’s arms but Red’s.”
“I understand that.” He spoke quickly as she moved away. “I just want us to be friends, like we were when I was visiting you. I miss those visits.”
She paused, wiped under one eye with the back of her wrist. “I do, too. More than you can imagine. But it’s a bad idea.” She scrunched her eyes, seemed to be imploring Rob to understand, then she turned and hurried away. As she stepped off the bridge, Rob heard her add, “I’m sorry.”
45
Veronika
Sunali looked up when Lorelei and Veronika entered, made a sound to indicate mock surprise. It appeared as if the meeting of the Former Bridesicle Liberation Army, or whatever they called themselves, was already under way. Lorelei and Veronika were fifteen minutes early, so Sunali must have given Lorelei the wrong time.
“This is my good friend Veronika,” Lorelei said as they took seats at the table, several hundred of Lorelei’s cohort taking up residence in the air behind her. It was a dining room table, in Sunali’s dining room—this was clearly not a big operation, nor a particularly well-funded one.
Sunali introduced them to the four other women sitting at the table. All were beautiful, of course, because they were ex-bridesicles. They ranged in age from young to quite old.
Veronika listened to them for a while, trying to get up to speed. Their idea was to do another break-in event in the air over High Town, this time using a recorded plea for help from a bridesicle still trapped in the minus eighty. They would have to make the recording secretly, since Cryomed didn’t allow customers to use recording devices inside their facility. Veronika thought it was a decent idea, but Lorelei clearly didn’t. She rolled her eyes and sighed heavily as the bridesicle league worked out details.
What? Veronika sent Lorelei.
Their idea is lame.
Well, tell them!
“Your idea is lame,” Lorelei nearly shouted. Five heads swiveled to look at her. “A big dead face in the air, doing a PSA.” She waved her hands in the air. “Ooooh, how modern. That’s not going to get anyone interested. It won’t get passed on, won’t get picked up by the micros, let alone the macros.”
Sunali raised one eyebrow. “Well. Thanks for your input. Can you guess what painfully obvious question I’m going to ask now?”
Veronika could. Do you have a better idea? she sent to Lorelei.
“No, I don’t have a better idea,” Lorelei said, propping a knobby bare knee on the table. “But what you’re planning is a waste of time.”
Sunali made a show of rearranging the specs suspended in the air beside her seat. “We’re paying a consultant who has data that says you’re wrong. We’re not as out of touch as you might think, sweetie.” She swept long bangs out of her eyes, turned back to her committee.
“Wait, I know.” Lorelei leaned forward, pressing her palms on the table. “Don’t do one big one, do ten thousand little ones! And not in the sky, at ground level. Have the bridesicle go right up to people in the streets, pleading for help.”
“Then they’d be nothing but ads,” the oldest woman, probably in her midsixties, said. “No one would even see them; their systems would filter out the ads.”
Lorelei shook her head. “Who said anything about screens. Full figures.”
Veronika winced. The league of ex-bridesicles chuckled merrily at Lorelei’s naïveté.
“Do you have any idea what that would cost?” Sunali asked. “First, we’d have to pay a rogue programmer to engineer ten thousand illegal full-body projections, then we’d have to pay ten thousand fines of eight hundred dollars each, in advance! Plus lawsuits, because the projections are bound to cause injuries, wandering into the streets. People could die.”
“You’re talking about tens of millions,” one of the other ex-bridesicles chimed in.
Lorelei clicked her tongue in annoyance. “You could program them to stay off the streets.”
“It’s still way beyond our operating budget,” Sunali said.
Lorelei leaned back, folded her arms. “Fine. Then put a big frozen face in the air.”
Still, it was a chilling image: ten thousand frozen, blue-skinned women wandering the streets, pleading for help. Lorelei was creative, at least. Or maybe it had been Parsons’s idea.
46
Veronika
Low Town. Streets crowded with people, some of them up from Undertown, smelling dank and edgy. Vehicles untethered, at the mercy of drivers. Old, straight, square buildings. All of it set in the mottled shade of High Town. Veronika loved coming to Low Town; the grittiness of it felt exciting, a little dangerous.
She kept hoping Nathan would pop in and ask her what she was up to, just so she could say she was hanging out with Lycan again. So he knew she wasn’t sitting at home playing Wings of Fire.
A flashing green arrow appeared in her visual field, directing her down Houston Street. They were meeting on Spring Street in the heart of Greenwich Village, at Lombardi’s, the oldest pizzeria in the city.
It wasn’t romantic. She didn’t want it to be romantic, but she wouldn’t mind if Nathan thought it was. Which was pathetic—she knew Nathan couldn’t care less if her relationship with Lycan was romantic or not. Still, she’d like him to know.
As she turned onto Spring Street, she finally gave in to temptation and pinged Nathan.