They were a boat’s length behind Russell. Ahead, Veronika could see the finish line—a blue line bisecting the spot where the lanes ended. “Another hundred meters. Give it all you’ve got—leave it all on the field.”
They closed a few inches with each stroke as the finish line grew closer, closer…
Russell broke the virtual tape about four feet ahead of them, but Veronika whooped anyway. Lycan squeezed his eyes closed and laughed as their boat cruised along on momentum.
“Another twenty yards and you would have had me,” Russell called, paddling alongside them. “Wow, you just don’t tire.”
Russell asked Lycan if he’d ever rowed competitively, invited him to join the rowing club, shot him a link.
“See?” Veronika said as Russell rowed off. “See?”
“Yes,” Lycan said, smiling at Veronika, blinking away the sweat trickling down his brow. “I see.”
Reading people was part of Veronika’s job, and what she thought she read was that Lycan was developing a crush on her. That would do wonders for her shrunken, pathetic ego—for a genius to have a crush on her, but it also made her uneasy. It was possible she was feeling a slight reciprocal crush, but for some reason, whenever she tried to imagine herself holding Lycan’s hand, or lying in bed with him, it felt wrong. Odd. Maybe because it felt like she was cheating on Nathan, and how neurotic was that? Chances were decent that Lycan would never move beyond harboring a secret crush, if that’s what it was, so hopefully it would never be an issue.
47
Rob
The drone lowered another load of electronic crap into Rob’s bin.
“Thank you, kind drone,” Rob said. The drone wandered off, not equipped with a mouth. Or ears.
About twice a day, Rob decided to quit. When four a.m. had come the day after his meeting with Winter in Central Park, he’d found himself up and preparing for work. He’d just allowed his body to go through the motions out of habit, let his feet carry him to the reclamation center, let his hands pluck the color-coded electronic treats. He had no desire to touch his lute, less desire to reconnect with long-neglected friends, sipping beer, discussing the issues of the day.
The exception to his utter lack of interest in others’ company was, for reasons he didn’t fully understand, Veronika. He felt comforted by her. Maybe it was because she didn’t mind that he was morose, often uncommunicative. She seemed at her best when faced with that kind of sadness, maybe because she lived it, pining for Nathan. If only Rob were in love with Veronika. But he wasn’t.
He tossed the husk he’d just picked clean into the plastic chute and pulled his next victim toward him—one of those drone vacuums you see in old comedies, running over people’s toes and bumping into shins.
Eventually he would get over Winter. Until then, best to stay busy, to be so tired at night he fell asleep before his mind could get working.
When his shift ended, he put one foot in front of the other until he was standing at his front door. He quietly let himself in.
His father was in the bedroom, speaking in low tones to Rob’s “mom,” telling her about his day, maybe updating her on the news. Dinner was on the stove, some sort of stew, stingy bits of meat on round socket bones. It was definitely not vat grown; something had screamed and bled so meat could make this relatively rare appearance at their table. Rob wasn’t hungry, but he pulled a bowl from the dispenser and ladled in some stew. His dad had gone to the trouble of making it, some sort of animal had given its life, the least he could do was eat some.
“I didn’t hear you come in.” Dad got himself a bowl, filled it with stew, and sat across from Rob at the aluminum folding table. “How you doing?”
“Good, Dad. Good.”
Dad ate noisily while Rob cast about for some innocuous topic of conversation to break the silence. His mind rebelled, unable to generate any topic except Winter.
“You’re doing good, huh?” Dad said, eyeing him over his raised spoon.
Outside, a neighbor’s dog barked hoarsely.
“No, Dad. Not good. Miserable. Wretched.”
“Let me ask you something,” Dad said through a mouthful of stew. He waved his fork at Rob. “If you’d met Winter at a bar—if she happened to be sitting in the seat next to you and you got talking—you really think you’d feel the same?”
Rob smiled sadly, the meat suddenly dry in his mouth. Lorne was suggesting it was their situation, not Winter herself, that caused the flame to be so hot. “I know I would.”
“I just don’t see that you have much in common.” Lorne reached up and wiped the corners of his mouth with his fingers. “Penny and you had more in common, and you didn’t even seem bothered when that ended.”
“Yeah. If only we could control what we feel, and who we feel it for.” Rob looked out the windows, at the tall yellow grass and the big mound of dirt in the backyard. He sighed, looked at Lorne. “Let me turn the question around. Would it have mattered how you met Mom? Wouldn’t you have known, no matter what?”
Lorne set his spoon down. He loved to talk about the days when he was courting Rob’s mom. “When I saw her for the first time, walking into town with her family, guiding an old broken-down four-legged drone that was carrying everything they could heap on it, it was like recognizing someone I already knew. It was like, ‘Oh, there you are. Where’ve you been?’”
Rob laughed. “That’s a nice way to put it. That’s exactly how I feel. It’s as if the universe made a mistake and forgot that we’re supposed to be together.” A lump grew in his throat. He tried to eat some stew to give it time to relax, but it was as if his chest and throat were clamped shut. It was so painful to think about Winter, yet she was all he could think about. No matter how he tried to wrestle his mind toward another topic, it fought its way back.
Lorne was staring out the window, his mouth set in a familiar tight line of grief. Rob had brought up his mom, now Lorne was off on his own loop of painful, useless thoughts.
“I know Mom felt the same about you. I think of you two and it gives me faith that two people can be in love their entire lives.”
Lorne surprised Rob by responding with a dry, bitter laugh. “It’s never that simple, except in stories.”
“What do you mean?”
Lorne studied Rob for a moment, then folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Let me tell you a story about true love.”
Lorne took a moment, evidently considering how best to begin. Rob couldn’t imagine. “Let me tell you a story about true love?” The words sounded so strange coming from his father’s lips. It just wasn’t something he’d say. “Never turn away a customer,” sure, or “We’ll get along just fine.” Not “Let me tell you a story about true love.”
“Remember when you lent me that voice-analysis thing, where you could tell when someone was lying?” Lorne asked.
“Sure. Then almost immediately it became obsolete.” A week after the lie-detector system app was released, someone came out with a tone-scrambling application, so whenever someone tried to use the vocal-stress application as a lie detector, the target’s system scrambled their vocal tones. “What about it?”
Lorne stood, picked up his and Rob’s bowls, and turned to the sink. “You let me borrow it to see whether Shorty Pepper was watering the fuel he was selling me, and it turned out he was.” Spoons clinked as Lorne washed them in the bucket of water sitting in the sink, his back to Rob. “The problem was, I kept the damned thing running when I came back into the house.” He shrugged. “Forgot I had it on.”
Rob had no idea where this was going, but his father’s distress in telling it was so obvious, Rob could barely breathe.