Even as she did it, she worried about Akron, and wondered what was happening with Tam and Gretyl and Seth.
[XIII]
SETH’S ALARM ROUSED him to check on the snow every hour, first to see if it was safe to get moving; second to ensure he wasn’t entombed under an immovable drift. The other two set theirs at twenty-minute offsets. He managed to doze off the first hour in the uncomfortable cocoon. The chime woke him with a violent start. He experienced near-panic while he tried to figure where the exact fuck he was. Terror so adrenalized him that he wasn’t drowsy when he went back in, so he played an old acoustic minigame he’d been addicted to as a kid, matching the rhythm and pitch of the tones in his earbud with finger-taps and whistles.
The suit’s interface surfaces were three generations removed from the ones the game was designed for, and were specialized for wildly different purposes to the surfaces he’d grown up with. The game was a lot harder until he tweaked the way the interfaces registered.
Playing made him nostalgic for the hundreds of hours he’d logged on the game, until he remembered why he’d stopped playing – he’d beaten another kid, Larry Pendleton, to whom he was peripherally connected, part of the same massive grade-nine class at Jarvis Collegiate. He didn’t know Larry well, but they sometimes were in the same groups, and he’d figured Larry was, if not cool, at least not a turd.
But then Larry said, “Hey, good game, Seth. Guess you’ve got a natural advantage, though.”
Everyone either didn’t understand what Larry meant, or pretended they didn’t. Seth understood, immediately: “Because you’re black, you’re better at rhythm games. Because you know, black people got rhythm, everyone knows—” Seth saw Larry dropped the remark in a way calculated for plausible deniability, wiggle room to claim it wasn’t racial, that Seth was being over-sensitive and social-justicey.
The unspoken deal with his white friends was he wasn’t allowed to talk about being black, except for the lightest of jokes. To acknowledge he was the black guy in their white crowd was tantamount to accusing them of racism: Why am I the only black face here? It was a deal everyone understood and no one spoke of, especially the Asian and Desi kids in their cadre, because everyone was supposed to be race-blind and being the Angry Minority was a buzzkill for everyone.
He boiled with shame and anger at fucking Larry Pendleton, who was decades away in default and maybe dead of something antibiotic resistant or in jail or working a precarious job and hoping he didn’t get fired, which was all any of them were doing. But he jammed down the shame and anger of pretending he hadn’t noticed the racism, pretending he wouldn’t always be probationary.
He spent the hour thoroughly asking himself whether he was a black guy or a walkaway, or a black walkaway, or something else, or all of the above. It was not a question he often asked. Thinking about it made him angry. He didn’t like being angry. He liked being funny and horny, carefree, perennially underestimated, which had many advantages. Being thought of as harmless – “he’s a black guy, but he’s cool, doesn’t make a big deal of it” – was something he’d cultivated early on. It meant he heard and saw things his black friends didn’t see. A lot of it was casual racism. Some of it was good. He got to be more than his skin.
Being stuck in a box was driving him fucking crazy. All he could think about was skin-color. He couldn’t even see his skin in the dark. Then there was the rhythm game, Thumperoo, which he’d played the whole time, until his wrists felt RSI-ish.
He checked the time. Forty-one minutes until he was scheduled to stick his head out. He sighed. His wrists hurt too much to keep playing and –
The hatch opened and above him grinned the face of Tam, sun glinting off her visor, obscuring one of her eyes and one of her cheekbones. But he’d know those lips anywhere.
“Come on, Sleeping Beauty. Prince Charming’s here to wake your ass up.”
She helped him out. The storm-clouds had blown away, leaving blue skies, darkening with impending dusk. Slanting late sun made the fresh powder glitter like it had been dusted with diamond chips. Gretyl stood in powder up to her thighs. She flopped on her back and made an angel. “Thank god that’s over. Vuku jebina!”
He cupped his hands over his visor – for effect – and howled.
“The wagon won’t make it back until this freezes or melts. It’s snowshoes from here.” Gretyl brushed snow off the tarp they’d put over the survival gear when they’d dumped it out to make room for their bodies.
She tugged at the tarp. Seth and Tam slogged over to help. They sorted through the neat bundles until they found snowshoes. None of them had ever assembled the shoes, and they couldn’t figure it out. Seth rooted further until he found an aerostat and sent it up, looking for walkaway signals to bridge to the suits. They watched it putter, spinning and tacking, receding to a dot on the darkening sky. Their suits started to make welcoming, subliminal interface buzzes as they in-spooled and out-spooled messages. They brushed away the incoming alerts for a minute, clearing stuff until they could get the snowshoe FAQs.
Gretyl got there first. She threw a shoe frame atop the snow in a particular way, so it landed partially embedded, then she clicked a mechanism none of them had figured out was clickable until they saw the video. The shoe sprang open and sent powder up in a pretty flurry, lying flat on the surface. She spread the bindings, then did the same with her other shoe.
Seth and Tam got their shoes spread out, too. They all engaged in involuntary slapstick as they struggled to put them on. Eventually, Tam came to Seth, who had fallen into the snow and was half-submerged with legs in the air. She seized one of his feet and shoved it into the bindings, then did the other, then hauled him upright. He lifted the shoes clear of the snow and set them atop it, and found to his delight that he stayed on the powder, which creaked beneath the shoes’ webbing. He gave Tam a double thumbs up and she handed him her shoes and flopped onto her back and stuck her feet in the air.
He wasn’t as good at putting them on as Tam but that was okay. The clear skies, the entombment in the cargo pods, and the thought of a walk through the woods on these cool-ass outdoor prostheses made them giddy. He wished he could take her into a pod, get naked, and fuck her brains out. It was a comforting randiness. The suit was surprisingly accommodating of his erection. He contrived to brush his hand over Tam’s crotch as he helped her up – this was something they did often, with the ardor of school kids who’ve just found their first fuck-buddies and can’t believe that they’ve got all the ass they want on tap, 24/7 – but the suits were too padded for him to tell if she had a boner, too. He decided she did – she’d changed her hormones recently and hard-ons were a welcome side-effect of the new regime they both enjoyed.
They held hands – she squeezed, which made him even hornier – and approached Gretyl, who scowled at her shoes, having tramped a wide circle as she tried to put them on. They flanked her and she looked from one to the other.
“Oh no,” she began, then Tam put one snowshod foot behind her and Seth pushed and over she went, legs in the air, howling in mock-outrage. They clipped the shoes to her feet as she giggled, pulled her upright.
Seth looked at his heads-up, pulled up the way-finder, and pointed. “Thataway,” he said.
They tramped on. As the sun set, they activated nightscopes, and watched the starlight and enhancement algorithms turn everything milky, glowing – a fairyland.