Love Minus Eighty (33 page)

“Is the feed broken?” Lycan asked.

“I’m guessing no. I think the artist is making a point about the relationship between art and reality.” Veronika tried to call up the artist’s statement, but the artist’s statement read, in its entirety, “Artist’s Statement.”

Lorelei pinged Veronika.

Can’t talk, busy
, Veronika subvocalized.

“How profound,” Lycan said. He was getting better at sarcasm. Veronika mused that he must be spending too much time with her.

This can’t wait
, Lorelei sent.

Later. I’ll contact you asap
, Veronika sent.

Lorelei materialized via screen, an entourage of at least two thousand screens squeezed behind her. “Bonjour, Lycan. Vee, we need to talk.”

“I told you, I’ll contact you as soon as I’m done here. Some privacy, please?” She was the rudest woman Veronika had ever met, a complete and utter narcissist.

“Go ahead,” Lycan said, waving. “I’ll be fine.”

“No, she’ll be fine.”

“Kilo is dead,” Lorelei said. “As in, Do Not Revive. Not coming back. And do you know who’s getting all of his money?”

Veronika froze. “It’s not Sunali, is it?”

“Bull’s-eye.
Not
Sunali.”

“Kilo told her she wasn’t getting anything.”

“Yes, he did,” Lorelei said. “And he kept his word. Do you want to know who he left every last dollar to?”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t you,” Veronika said, “or you’d sound more excited and less bitter.”

“Bridesicle Watch.” Lorelei injected each syllable full to bursting with disdain. “Sunali’s fucking
charity
. Save the fucking bridesicles.”

“
What?
” Veronika and Lycan shouted in unison.

“Sunali can’t touch a dime,” Lorelei said. “It’s all in trust to the charity.”

“Why would he do that?” Lycan asked.

“He didn’t say,” Lorelei said.

“Because he felt shitty for leaving Sunali in the minus eighty all that time,” Veronika said. “This is his repressed way of saying he’s sorry, that he was wrong.”

Lorelei guffawed dryly. “Right. More likely he did it to torment us, leaving all that money just out of our reach.”

Veronika was reminded of something Kilo had said, the time she’d been at his deathbed. She burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Lorelei asked.

“ ‘I’m giving it all to my favorite charity.’ ”

“What?” Lorelei asked.

“That’s what Kilo said to Sunali. Don’t you remember?”

“No,” Lorelei said.

“This is good,” Veronika said. “You’re part of that charity.
Holy shit
, you could pull off any protest you dream up.” Veronika didn’t want to come right out and mention Lorelei’s idea—the march of the ten thousand bridesicles—in front of a thousand witnesses. If Sunali actually tried it (and now she had the money to do so), Veronika didn’t want to be hit with complicity fines.

Lorelei waved impatiently. “I guess.” She turned, looked up. “None of this is why I really pinged you, though. I came to tell you I’ll no longer be needing your services.”

Veronika tried not to show how stunned she was, but she knew it was written all over her face. Lorelei had just outed her, in front of a crowd, and she’d done it via screen.

“What services?” Lycan asked.

“Ask Veronika,” Lorelei said, and vanished.

“What services?” Lycan repeated.

Several hundred of Lorelei’s viewers stayed behind to watch.

“Wait. Give me a second.” Veronika tried to sort out what had just happened. Parsons must have decided it was time to shake things up. She thought she’d made herself too valuable for Parsons to throw her under the bus, but evidently she’d miscalculated. Maybe Parsons saw her as a threat; he might be afraid Lorelei would begin to rely more on her than on him. So it was time to out Veronika in dramatic fashion.

Then, for an encore, they would tell Nathan.

“Shit.” She opened a screen on Nathan. He was blocked—in
the bathroom of Stain’s Coffee Shop. She turned to Lycan, blurted, “I have to go, I’m really sorry, I’ll explain later,” and took off toward the exit.

She headed toward the micro-T station, running as fast as she could, because having this conversation via screen would be very wrong. Come to think of it, Lorelei might be rude enough to fire Veronika via screen instead of IP, but she wouldn’t tell Nathan that Veronika had been coaching her via screen. She had to wait until she could see Nathan in person. Which meant Veronika needed to get to the coffee shop first. As she ran, Lorelei’s spin-off viewers were drifting effortlessly beside her. Her life was suddenly a spin-off of Lorelei’s—what a revolting prospect.

By the time she reached the micro-T station, she could barely breathe. Wouldn’t it be ironic if a second woman Nathan knew died while running?

She was almost to Stain’s when Nathan finally unblocked. She set a baffle to keep Lorelei’s followers from tracking her, then popped open a screen as Nathan exited the loo.

“Hey, I’m on my way to see you. Meet me halfway?”

Nathan seemed amused by her breathless condition. “No prob. Toward the micro-T station?”

“Right.”

“What’s going on? Why are you out of breath?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

Screens began popping up around Nathan—Lorelei’s viewers, guessing correctly that Veronika would go straight to Nathan. Still no sign of Lorelei, though.

Huffing hard, Veronika spotted Nathan up ahead, half a block from the coffee shop. “Is your vehicle around?” It was the closest location where they could escape Lorelei’s spin-off viewers.

Nathan nodded, gestured down Thirty-Fifth Street.

Still
no sign of Lorelei. Maybe Lorelei was intentionally letting Veronika speak to Nathan first, to build tension in her grand performance.

“So what was important enough to get you to sprint? You know, you’re pretty quick.”

“I’m quick. Yes, thank you. That’s exactly what I am.” Nathan’s Chameleon opened and Veronika slid into the passenger seat. “Put up a block?” Nathan shrugged; the screens that had followed them right into the vehicle vanished.

“So here’s the thing,” Veronika began, as soon as they were alone. She was still out of breath, and the topic of conversation was doing nothing to calm her elevated heart rate. She took a deep breath, let it out. “Lorelei has been employing me as a coach on your face-to-faces with her.”

Nathan laughed. “That’d be the day. As if she needs a coach.”

“Nathan”—Veronika moved her face close to his—“I’m not joking. A lot of the things Lorelei said were lines I fed her.”

Nathan tilted his head slightly, as if trying to hear her better.

“I’m surprised you didn’t recognize my rapier wit.”

“You’re serious?” He laughed, but stiffly.

“Deadly serious. She asked me to do it, and I had reservations, but in the end, I didn’t see the harm, and she was willing to pay well.”

“She was willing to pay well,” Nathan parroted. He bit his thumbnail, thinking. “It didn’t occur to you that it might make me look pretty foolish, a dating coach out with someone who was making heavy use of a dating coach?” Nathan gestured at the screens hovering outside the one-way glass. “With a couple thousand people watching?”

“You know Lorelei did it just to ramp up the drama. That’s the price you pay for going out with a screen whore.”

“You could have said no. Evidently you don’t mind the drama all that much, either.” His tone was controlled, but he was angry. Veronika couldn’t remember ever seeing Nathan angry.

“She already has a full-time coach, so it wouldn’t have changed anything if I said no.”

Nathan blinked in surprise, waited for her to elaborate.

She’d been anticipating this moment, she realized; she knew it would come eventually, and in her fantasy it had played out just like in
Cyrano de Bergerac
. Nathan would recognize that it was the person who’d spoken the words that he loved, not the vapid package parroting them.

Veronika propped one foot on the dashboard. “Maybe I’m just tired of playing the role of the buddy. I thought it would be nice to play a different role, even from behind the scenes.”

Nathan sighed, rubbed the dark stubble on his cheek. “If you’re suggesting I’ve been playing with your emotions, I don’t think that’s fair. I’ve always been up-front with you. I’ve never messed with your head.”

“Yes, you have.”

The sun was low in the sky, casting a blinding circle of reflection on each vehicle parked along the street. The shadows of pedestrians stretched almost to the end of the block as they glided along.

In the distance, a long, lithe figure stepped out from a side street and headed in their direction, thronged by thousands of screens. “Oh, Christ.” Heads turned to watch this incredibly tall, incredibly popular woman. Who was she? She must be famous. Of course she was. If you had that many screens following you, you were de facto famous. And Lorelei knew
it; she moved with the easy, confident grace of someone who was no longer striving to be famous, but simply was.

“Here she comes.”

“Here she comes,” Nathan agreed.

“Are you going to storm out of the car and confront her for making you look foolish, a dating coach going out with someone using not one but two dating coaches?” Veronika knew the answer, but wanted to make him say it.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I love her, and if I want to be in her life, I have to accept her lifestyle.”

It hurt to hear him say it. He barely knew her; how could he love her? “Those sound like her words, not yours.”

What was this scene to be, Veronika wondered? Maybe Lorelei would claim the whole thing was Veronika’s idea? That seemed fairly pedestrian, unworthy of the (Veronika ran a count of the screens congregating outside) thirty-seven thousand six hundred forty-four people taking time away from their own pathetic lives to watch Lorelei live hers. What would Veronika recommend, if she were still on the inside? She’d go with a tearful apology.
Nathan, love, I was so afraid you wouldn’t like me for me, so I asked someone who knows you well to help me.

“Wow, that’s a lot of screens,” Nathan said.

“Yup. And it’s showtime.” Veronika opened her door and stepped out. A real, live crowd of people had formed on the sidewalk, drawn by all the screens. They were leaning this way and that, trying to see what was going on.

When Nathan stepped out to meet Lorelei, the look of bright-eyed love on his face devastated Veronika. He and Lorelei embraced on the sidewalk, Lorelei turning her head
as she squeezed him tight. With traffic whooshing by, and the live crowd muttering, Veronika couldn’t hear Nathan when he spoke. Sighing in frustration, she opened a screen among Lorelei’s fans rather than sidle over and appear nosy.

“—had me fooled,” Nathan was saying.

“Well, I didn’t mean to fool you,” Lorelei replied. “I didn’t employ her as a coach in the traditional sense. She served as kind of an adjunct—advising and arranging more than guiding.”

Oh, what complete bullshit. And, irony on top of irony, they weren’t her own words—Parsons was obviously feeding them to her.

“Hey, modern life,” Nathan said, shrugging. He looked around. “Do you want to grab a bite? Maybe we could invite Vee.”

Lorelei canted her head, smiling sort of wanly. “The thing is, Nathan, I fired Veronika partly because I don’t think things are working out between us. I’m just not feeling it, you know?”

A dozen conflicting emotions coursed through Veronika as Nathan reacted, his mouth tightening into an involuntary grimace. Lorelei put a hand on Nathan’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Nathan said. “That’s fine. Sure.”

Joy. Anger. Relief. Sympathy. Veronika had never felt so conflicted. Break up with him—Veronika hadn’t considered that one, maybe because she couldn’t imagine breaking up with Nathan. But, yes, that would ramp up the drama.

Lorelei gave Nathan a big, fat consolation hug, still sporting that sympathetic-yet-smug half smile.

Anger. Veronika decided it was definitely mostly anger she was feeling. Well, shit, if Lorelei wanted drama, Veronika would give her some drama.

“Do you even know what ‘adjunct’ means?” Veronika asked, sauntering over.

“I’m sorry?” Lorelei said.

“You told Nathan you were employing me as a sort of adjunct, and I’m wondering if you know what it means, or if you simply parrot the exact words Parsons feeds you, with no idea what you’re saying.”

Lorelei rolled her eyes, just like the mean girls in high school used to. “You think you know me. You think you know why I live a public life. Why I went out with Nathan. Why I’m breaking up with him.” Her fingers flew for a few seconds—a graceful, lightning-quick flourish of systemwork Veronika was certain was for her benefit. “I may not be as transparent as you think.”

Veronika folded her arms. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think Parsons just fed that entire speech to you. I bet he fed you this line as well…” She worked her system, painfully aware of her own lack of grace and style, until she located the recording she wanted—from the argument she’d had with Lorelei the first time they’d met—and enlarged it so everyone could see and hear Lorelei self-righteously proclaim, “
And just for the record, all of my lines are my own material.
”

No one reacted. No one seemed to care that Lorelei had lied through her teeth, to all of them.

“Who’s Parsons?” Nathan asked.

“Parsons is her other coach. Excuse me—her
director
. He feeds her every syllable that comes out of her smarmy little mouth.” Veronika made a show of looking around. “Maybe he’s in the crowd right now.” She worked her system, enlarged a picture of him in the air. “Here he is. Has anyone seen this man?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Lorelei said. “I was going to explain, but you didn’t give me a chance.”

“Oh, you were going to explain?” Veronika folded her arms. “Why don’t you explain?”

She turned to Nathan. “I have been working with an adviser. Again, not a coach in the traditional sense, but someone to help me navigate the complexities of living a public life, and… I’ve fallen in love with him.” She turned toward the crowd. Parsons stepped out, head down, hands in pockets. His grand entrance.