I close my eyes, pretending to sleep. I’m not in the mood to chat.
She checks the bandage on my leg. It’s one hell of a bandage. Gently she begins to cut away the tape and gauze and pressure mesh. It doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t make me happy, either.
“Oh my God!” she says.
She has laid the flesh bare and her first thought is to call up a deity.
I risk a slit eye to see what horror she’s witnessed.
She’s not looking at my face. She’s staring down at my leg. And she’s not horrified, exactly.
She’s amazed. She’s moved. She’s seeing something she never expected to see and can’t quite believe is real.
I’m afraid to look, because I know that something must be very wrong.
Or, just possibly, very right.
– 8 –
SOLO
The Spiker complex has an amazing gym. Everyone is constantly nagged to stay in shape. I don’t need to be nagged and I don’t need to be coached. I need to be left alone.
I run on the inside track. I run barefoot; I prefer it. The soles of my feet make a different sound, nothing like those three-hundred-dollar running shoes, groaning as all that shock-absorbing rubber takes the impact. My feet are almost silent.
I run and then I hit the weights, the crunches, all that. I like weights—they’re specific. There’s no bull in weight lifting; you either get that seventy-pound dumbbell up to your chest or you don’t. Yes or no, no kind-of.
After weights I go into the dark, smelly side room where the speed bags and heavy bags are. The rest of the massive gym complex is spotless and bright and gazed-down-upon by screens.
The boxing room—well, there’s just something seedy about the sport that comes through, even if the designer you hired insisted on a lovely shade of teal for the ring ropes.
Pete’s there, all ready to go.
Sometimes I go rounds with Pete. Pete’s older than me, maybe twenty-five. I’ve never asked. But he’s one of the geeks so we tend to get along well. We speak geek, or we would if we didn’t have slobbery mouthpieces in and weren’t beating on each other.
Pete’s not as quick as I am, and he looks softer and spongier than I do. But damn, when he connects you know you’ve been hit. You know it and you have to acknowledge it as your brain spins inside its bone cradle trying to reconnect all the switches.
I kind of love it.
It’s obviously crazy that I enjoy getting punched. But I do. You take a hard one to the side of your head, a shot that makes you feel as if you aren’t wearing sparring headgear at all, one that rings the bells in your ear, and then you come back from it, still swinging? To me that’s one of life’s finest moments.
Hit me. No, I mean hit me hard. Turn my knees to overcooked linguine.
And I take it and come back with a combination? Prodigious.
I’m done and covered in sweat. From the hair on my head down to my feet, wet, shiny, panting, grinning, wondering if I’m going to get feeling back in the left side of my face.
“Wimp,” Pete says.
“Weakling,” I respond.
“I don’t feel right beating up on a little girl.”
“Don’t feel bad, Pete. Keep at it and you may learn to throw a punch that actually connects some day.”
With our ritual abuse concluded, we make an appointment for the day after tomorrow. Pete heads for the gym’s showers; I head for my quarters.
My quarters, my place, my space. It’s on Level Four, where Spiker maintains rooms for visiting scientists and dignitaries. Some of those rooms are amazing. My quarters do not justify the word “amazing,” but they aren’t bad.
In any case, this place is a major improvement over the boarding school in Montana that Terra shipped me off to after my parents died. Some kind of tough-love dude-ranch high school for troubled kids called Distant Drummer Academy. I wasn’t troubled—unless you count being orphaned overnight—and I wasn’t in high school, but Terra provided them with a nice diagnosis of severe ODD. And a hefty donation.
Oppositional Defiant Disorder? Yeah, I can do that.
I lasted eight days.
After they kicked me out, Terra gave me two options: I could live at her place, or I could live at Spiker.
We both knew which one I’d choose.
I have a single room, but it’s big enough for a queen-sized bed and a sofa, TV, desk, beanbag chair, and mini kitchen. Except for the two framed photos on my desk, it’s as sterile as a hotel room. I like it that way.
I barely notice the photos anymore. There’s one of my parents at a podium, my mom in a shimmering green evening gown, my dad in a tux. They’re accepting an award, flashing smiles. And there’s one of me and my mom reading a book together. We’re in some kind of waiting room, sitting on orange vinyl chairs. I don’t remember where it was, or why we were there.
But then, I don’t remember much of anything.
Next to the mini kitchen is a small bathroom. That’s where I strip down, soap up, and shower off.
That’s where I start thinking about the girl.
Like I don’t know her name: the girl. Please, Solo. I know her name. Evening. E.V. to her friends.
Eve.
There’s a problem with that name, Eve. You say “Eve” and you think Garden of Eden, and then you think of Eve and Adam, naked but tastefully concealed by strategic shrubbery.
Except at this particular moment, my brain is not generating shrubbery.
So, basically, that’s despicable. The girl had her leg chopped off. She just got out of surgery. So I add shrubbery.
And yet the shrubbery doesn’t stay put. It’s moving shrubbery. It’s disappearing shrubbery.
Which is deeply wrong of me. I step back under the twin showerheads and blast myself with hot water. Maybe I should make it cold water. But I don’t want to.
“That’s the problem with you, dude,” I say, speaking to myself. “You suck at doing things you don’t want to do.”
I don’t feel bad speaking to myself.
Who else have I got?
Solo isn’t just a name, it’s a description. I have no actual friends. I have some online ones, but that’s not quite the same.
I’ve never had a girlfriend.
When I touched Eve, she was the first girl I’d touched since coming here to live six years ago. Unless you count women scientists and techs and office workers I’ve accidentally brushed in the hallways.
Sometimes I do count those. It’s a normal human behavior to count whatever you have to count.
“Back up, man,” I tell myself softly. “She’s a Spiker. She’s one of the enemy.”
The microphones won’t pick up what I say with the shower running. I know these things. Even though I’m not supposed to. For six years I’ve lived and breathed this place. I know it. I know it all.
And I know what I’m going to do with it.
As soon as Eve is gone.
– 9 –
Three little days, but oh my God, can they be long.
Time is relative. An hour spent watching paint dry is much longer than an hour getting a massage.
Which is exactly what I’m doing. Getting a massage from Luna, the massage therapist.
Luna doesn’t touch The Leg.