“And if I say no?”
“I’ll kill you,” Aunt Bobbie said in the same matter-of-fact tone. “I’d prefer not to, but that’s what happens if you say no.”
“That easy?” Hutch said with a scowl. “Maybe not that easy.”
“You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse. And David is my beloved nephew. If you f**k with him after this, I will end every piece of you,” Bobbie said, her own smile sad. “No disrespect.”
Hutch’s scowl twitched into a flicker of a smile.
“They grow ’em big where you come from,” he said and held up the disassembled pistol. “You broke my gun.”
“I noticed the spare magazine in your left pocket,” she said. “David, stand up. We’re leaving now.”
He walked ahead, Leelee holding him and weeping quietly. Aunt Bobbie took the rear, keeping them going quickly without quite making them run and looking back behind her often. When they got near the tube station, Aunt Bobbie put a hand on David’s shoulder.
“I can get you through the checkpoint, but I can’t get her.”
Leelee’s eyes were soft and wet, her expression calm and serene. Filthy and stinking, she was still beautiful. She was redeemed.
“Do you have somewhere you can go?” David asked. “Someplace here in Martineztown where he can’t find you?”
“I’ve got friends,” she said. “They’ll help.”
“Go to them,” Aunt Bobbie said. “Stay out of sight.”
David didn’t want to let her go, didn’t want to lose the contact of her arm against his. He saw her understand. She didn’t step into his arms as much as flow there, soft and supple and changing as water. For a moment, her body was pressed against his perfectly, without a millimeter of space in between. Her lips were against his cheek, her breath in his ear. She was Una Meing for a moment, and he was Caz Pratihari, and the world was a heady, powerful, romantic place. She shifted against him and her lips against his were soft and warm and they tasted like a promise.
“I’ll find you,” she whispered, and then the moment was over, and she was walking a little unsteadily down the corridor, her head high. He wanted to run after her, to kiss her again, to take her home with him and fold her into his bed. He could feel his heartbeat in his neck. He had an erection.
“Come on,” Aunt Bobbie said. “Let’s go home.”
From Martineztown to Aterpol, she said nothing, just sat with her elbows resting on her knees, squeezing one of the bullets she’d taken between two fingers, then running it across her knuckles like a magic trick. Even through the chemical rush of relief, he dreaded what would come next. The disapproval, the lecture, the threats. When she spoke, with five minutes still before they reached Breach Candy, it wasn’t what he’d expected to hear.
“That girl. You saved her. You know that? You saved her.”
“Yeah.”
“You feel good about that. You did a right thing, and that feels good.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“That good feeling is the most that girl will ever be able to give you.”
The tube car’s vibration was almost imperceptible. The monitors had tuned themselves to a newsfeed, unable to find any common ground between him and his aunt. David looked at his hands.
“She doesn’t like me,” he said. “She just acted like she did because he told her to. And then she knew I had money.”
“She knew you had money and she knew you were a good guy,” Aunt Bobbie said. “That’s different.”
David smiled and was surprised to kind of mean it. Aunt Bobbie leaned back, stretched. When she shifted her head, the joints in her neck popped like firecrackers.
“I need to move out,” she said.
“Okay,” David said, suddenly finding himself wishing she wouldn’t. Too many losses today already, and this was one he hadn’t even known would hurt. “Where will you go?”
“Back to work.” Bobbie flipped the bullet up and caught it, then juggled it across her fingers again. “I need to find something to do.” She pointed at the news on the monitors with her chin. It was all about Earth and Mars and angry people with bombs. “Maybe I can help.”
“Okay,” David said again. Then a moment later, “I’m glad you stayed with us.”
“I should take you free-climbing,” she said. “You’d love it.”
David only saw Leelee one more time. It was his second year in development, about three weeks after he’d turned eighteen. He was in a noodle bar with the three other members of his team and their advisor, Dr. Fousek. The wall was playing a live feed of the football match from the Mariner Valley with the sound turned low enough to talk over. The table screen, on the other hand—they’d tunneled into the arrays at the upper university, and between bottles of beer and tea and black ceramic bowls of noodles and sauce, their latest simulation models were running.
Jeremy Ng, his dorm mate and the only other biochemist on the team, was shaking his head and pointing at the imagined surface of Mars that the computers back at their official labs were generating.
“But the salt—”
“Salinity’s not an issue,” David said, his frustration clear in his voice. “That’s why we put the sodium pumps in, remember? It won’t build up across the membrane.”
“Gentlemen,” Dr. Fousek said, her tone both authoritative and amused. “You have spent fifty hours a week arguing this for the last seven months. No point rethinking it now. We’ll have solid projections soon enough.”
Jeremy started to object, then stopped, started again, and ground to a halt. Beside him Cassie Estinrad, their hydro systems expert, grinned. “If this really works, you guys will put the terraforming project a couple decades ahead of schedule. You know that.”
Dr. Fousek raised her hand, commanding silence. The simulation was almost done. Everyone at the table held their breath.
David couldn’t say what made him look up. A sense of being watched maybe. A feeling of unease crawling up the back of his neck. Leelee was there at the back by the bar, looking toward him without seeing him. The years hadn’t been kind. Her skin belonged on a woman twice her age and the elfin chin now just looked small. She had a child on her hip that looked about six months old and still too unformed to have a gender. She could have been anyone, except he had no question. A thin, electric jolt passed through him. For a split second he was fifteen again, on the edge of sixteen, and reckless as a fire. He remembered the way her kiss had felt, and almost without meaning to, he lifted his hand in a little wave.