Xvi (26 page)

“She’s just being protective.”

“Of Derek?” Sandy scanned the top of my “box” dresser and picked up a couple of my text chips. “Can’t blame her; he’s gotten pretty cute.”

“Derek looks like he always has. You never thought he was cute before.”

“Yes I did. But he was crazy about you. Bet he still is. If you wanted him ...” She snapped her fingers in front of my nose. “All the guys like you. Zeb asked about you just last week. And that ultrahot guy from your art class ... you know the one, he’s got purple streaks in his hair ...”

“Grayson?”

“Yeah. He told me to tell you he was sorry about your mom.”

“Tell him thanks.” Grayson and his friends had never talked to me the entire time I was in school with them. Weird. “You know, Sandy, you could’ve been a little nicer to Mike.”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s kinda sweet, in a ... well, you know.” She must’ve thought better about making some rude remark regarding him. “I did tell him I’d call him about going to the zoo sometime. It’s cool that he can get us into the barns and stuff. And I do like that he knows all about cows. I guess he’s not so bad.” She pondered Mike for a moment, then tossed one of my chips at me. “You’re taking L & L? We’re reading stupid plays by some guy named Shakespeare who’s been dead for over five hundred years. What did he know about anything, huh? And I guess it’s completely out of the question for you to ask Ed to pick me for FeLS?”

“Sandy, are you crazy?” I slapped my hands to my head. “How can you even ask that? Weren’t you listening last night?”

“What? That you guys are all Non—”

I dove across the bed, landing on top of Sandy. “What’s wrong with you? Do you want the entire world to hear?” I whispered.

“Where’s that ma—”

I clapped a hand over her mouth. “Where’s what? My math homework? You want to see what we’re studying here?”

“I’m not going to tell anybody anything, Nina. Didn’t we go through this last night?”

“Sandy, sometimes you say things without thinking.” I was waiting for an outburst—none came.

“Sometimes I do, don’t I?
XVI Ways
says a little ditziness is charming to guys.”

“It can also get you in big trouble,” I whispered.

She ran her fingers through her hair and flounced it around for a minute. “Look, Nina, I intend to get into FeLS, one way or another. I’m not smart enough to get a scholarship, and FeLS is the only way out of low-tier hell, okay?”

“It’s not everything it’s supposed to be,” I said, remembering Mrs. Jenkins’s warning. “How come girls who go into it never come home again?” I thought about Joan.

“What do you mean never come home again? Jolianna Whitcomb came to the school right after you left. She said it was the most amazing experience she ever had.” Sandy’s eyes widened. “And you should have seen what she was wearing. Ultrachic all the way.” She clutched her arms around herself. “I’m going to look like that, too. And guys ... she had tons of digis of her with the cutest guys in the solar system. She ate lunch with some of us, and told us, strictly secret, that she has sex whenever she wants to, with whomever she wants. She said her first was Tylo! Can you believe that?” Sandy flopped back on the bed. “Having sex with the Tylo.”

“Sandy, there’s more to life than having sex with vid stars. And what does Tylo need a Female Liaison Specialist for? He’s got tons of people who are always with him. And one girl coming back out of how many? At least fifty that have gone from our school in the past year. Where are the rest? Like Mike’s sister, Joan, where’s she?” I almost said I’d seen her, that she was homeless, but that whole encounter still freaked me out. The vibe I’d gotten from the woman who was with her was that Joan wasn’t just messed up; she was in danger, too.

Sandy propped herself up with one arm. “Who cares? Don’t you see? If I’m a FeLS, I’ll get to wear ultra clothes and hang out with vid stars and have all kinds of money. Nina, I don’t want to live in Cementville all my life and marry some tier-two loser and end up like my mom. If I get the chance to leave, I’m never coming back.”

She was right. Girls like us didn’t have choices. We were either super smart or artistic and got scholarships so we could enter a profession, or we ended up stuck in the kind of life we grew up in. Unless we were lucky enough to get some tier-three or -four guy to fall in love with us. Even then, they probably wouldn’t marry below their tier. Sure, they’d have sex with anyone, but they married into their own, or higher if they could.

Then there was FeLS. Whatever secrets they were keeping, most low-tier girls wouldn’t care, they just wanted out of their lives. I shuddered when I thought about how “out of her life” Joan was.

Sandy kept going on and on about FeLS and all the places she would travel to and how she’d send me digi-cards of all of them. “You’ll be so sorry you didn’t even apply,” she said. “You still could.”

I shook my head. “It’s not for me, Sandy.”

She covered the small details of all of her boyfriends and everything that they’d ever said or done until Gran called us for breakfast. Afterward I was going to walk to the station with Sandy, but Gran insisted I let Pops and Dee do it.

“I need Nina’s help with something.”

“What’s that?” Pops asked.

“None of your business, old man. Now, you three get out of here or Sandy will miss the express.”

“Can we stop at Toy Planet on the way back?” Dee asked.

“Sure nuff,” Pops said. “Let me get this leg on good ’n tight.”

He didn’t see Sandy wrinkle her nose as he made a few adjustments. I hugged her and whispered, “At least think about not getting chosen, okay?” She promised to talk to me later and that was that. Pops grabbed his cane and they went out the door.

“I do believe that leg is bothering him more than usual,” Gran said to me when they were gone. “He takes that cane almost all the time now. Then again”—she sighed—“maybe he’s just getting older—like me.” She went to the chiller and reached above it for the scrambler. I panicked.

“Gran,” I confessed, “I borrowed the machine last night. I think I broke it. I put it back, but. ...”

“Here’s how to take care of that.” She showed me a tiny button on the bottom. “Do this.” She jabbed it with the tine of a fork. “Now it’s good as new.” She switched it on. “We need to do some talking, don’t we? About Ed.”

“How did you ... ?”

“I don’t think he’s back for Dee—he could’ve taken her from Ginnie at any time. After Alan died, the government refused to give Ginnie survivor benefits because his body hadn’t been found. You and she were living with us and the financial burden was difficult. All we had were Pops’s disability payments.”

I wondered if Dee and I were too much of a burden now.

Gran must have noticed the expression on my face because she said, “We get survivor benefits. When they finally declared your father dead—eight years after his disappearance—Ginnie signed the credits over to us to put in trust in case anything happened to her.”

“She was afraid something would happen to her, wasn’t she?”

“I think she was,” Gran said. “She got a job as executive assistant to the vice president, at Rockford Stone’s headquarters in Achelon Towers.”

I couldn’t help interrupting. “I know. It was a tier-five job. What made her become a tier-two service worker in a cafeteria?”

“Patience, dear, I’m getting there.” She eyed the light on the scrambler; it was still green.

“She had a respectable job and didn’t go near any of her and Alan’s old friends.”

“Jonathan Jenkins.”

“Yes, Jonathan, Jade, Brock and Elise, they all kept their distance for obvious reasons. Although this little baby”—she patted the scrambler—“got plenty of use for a while. Ginnie was never seen in public with them, but they did talk—often.”

“But . . . Ed?”

“He and Ginnie met at an interplanetary conference on the moon. He was working for the government on a deal with Rockford Stone on mining ocribundan from Mars. She was so beautiful. I’m sure he fell for her on the spot.” She cleared her throat. “It had been four years since Alan’s death. I’d told her that she was too young to pine for him forever and you needed a father. I just was never sure about Ed.”

“But he was married and has kids. Why did she even go out with him in the first place?”

“She didn’t know about his family until after she was pregnant.”

“He was so mean, Gran.”

“He never hit her until after Dee was born.” She shook her head. “I urged her to leave him. I was afraid for her and for you girls.”

The scrambler started its low beep and the light was blinking red.

“It has to cool down,” Gran said. “One reset won’t keep it going long enough. These old scramblers are about as temperamental and cantankerous as me.”

“There are things I have to tell you, Gran. Important things. Can’t we try?”

“If they’re that important, we can’t risk being heard. Patience, dear.”

I had no patience.

Gran promised we could try again after lunch, so I wolfed down a nut butter sandwich and some chips. As if eating fast would speed things up. I couldn’t stop thinking about everything that was going on.

What ended up taking my mind off the scrambler was a call from Sal.

“I’m delivering a dual trannie to a customer out in the country. Want to come along? We can take the express back.” I mentioned it to Gran, and she practically shooed me out the door.

Fifteen minutes later I was in the lobby, hiding behind one of the fake plants that flanked the doorway. I scoped out the street. When I didn’t see anything resembling Ed or his green transport, I went outside.

Standing in a sheltered patch of sunshine, shielded from the legendary Chicago winds, I was warm. It felt more like spring than almost winter. I basked in my little bit of sun until I heard a beep. It was Sal in a shiny blue dual transport.

“Wow! This is really cool,” I said.

Sal hopped out. “We modified the engine—it goes to one-twenty in sixty seconds. And the exterior ... you like?”

He paraded me around the vehicle, pointing out the gold flecks in the Hawsworth blue paint. And showed me that when the light reflected a certain way you could see a deep pink flower with a thorny stalk encircling the transport.

I felt an overwhelming urge to trace it with my finger, but I didn’t dare touch. “It looks like Wei’s tattoo.”

“Yep, it’s a thistle.” Sal opened the passenger door. “Madam ...” He bowed low with a sweep of his arm.

I giggled, sliding into the seat, which immediately conformed to every curve of my body.

“Comfort Style,” I murmured. I’d heard about the features of Comfort Style in verts, but never imagined I’d ever get to sit in a tran that had it. I felt guilty about enjoying the luxury. It didn’t seem fair to relax when I had so much to worry about.

Sal got in on the other side. “Give it a sec, it will warm you up, too. Ready?”

While Sal wove through traffic, I alternated between exploring all the luxuries surrounding me and checking out the window for green trannies. Inside there were individual entertainment devices, a dashboard chiller, and separate light diffusers in each window. Outside, there was reality—Cinderella girls, FeLS, sex-teens, and Ed.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught Sal watching me. After I’d ooh’d and aah’d over every little gadget, he said, “Then there’s this.” He pressed a dial marked
temp
.

I looked around to see what had happened—nothing. “And?”

“And,” he said, “we are now shielded from any listening or tracking devices.” He beamed with pride.

“You mean, we can talk about anything and no one can hear us?”

“Click on your PAV.”

I tried. It didn’t work. “A traveling DZ.” We were driving down State Street, where every store’s verts tried to outdo the others’. The verts were inescapable, even when you were in a trannie. But there we were, sitting in complete silence.

“No verts—Mike would hate it.” I laughed. “Whose car is this anyway?”

“My aunt Rita’s, we’re going to her place.”

Rita—it took me a second to connect. That was the name on Ginnie’s list. Before I could ask him anything about her, we merged onto the Cementville expressway and a wave of sadness washed over me. “This reminds me of going home.” There was a catch in my throat.

Sal reached over and squeezed my hand. “We’ll only be on here for a few miles; then we switch over to Angola Works West.”

I turned to the window, watching the countryside fly by. We sped past Mill Run Farm. I remembered the last time I passed it, the night Ginnie died. I caught a glimpse of the horses, tails flowing out behind them as they galloped across the meadow. We turned west and I forced myself to concentrate on the present.

“Want a Sparkle?” Sal pressed another button on the dashboard and the chiller in front of me popped open. A metal arm held up the drink. After I removed it, everything closed up again. I relaxed into the seat, which was practically cuddling me. This is tier ten all the way, I thought.

Sal steered past a little old couple in a 2100 DT. They reminded me of Gran and Pops, and I thought of my conversation with Gran earlier. “I found out more stuff about Ed.” I filled him in on everything Gran and I had discussed.

“I’ve been doing some investigating, too, and I think Aunt Rita will be able to fill in a lot of the gaps. That’s one reason I wanted you to come along.”

“What’s the other?”

He glanced over at me and his eyes met mine. “To have you close by.”

A rush of warmth spread over me that had nothing to do with the Comfort Style seat. After last night, I no longer had any doubts about Sal’s motivations—I knew he liked me for me, and not my father.

Sal scanned the traffic. “Hang on.” He flipped a lever under the dash and we shot down the road like a comet. The g-force pinned me to my seat.