“Um, no.”
“What do you mean no?”
“Like, no.”
“I mean, you did love me, and you could never tell anyone about it, right?”
He sighed from his cheeks.
“Well, that time, by the pool?”
“What about it?”
“Well, I wanted to…”
“So did I.”
“But I didn’t really…love you.”
“Oh.”
“I wanted you. But that was just…wanting.”
“I see.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, I suppose I’ll go then.”
“Yes. Go on. Go on then. Get out of here. Get wherever you’re going, and don’t come back. There’s too much of you for this place, always going somewhere but ending up nowhere. You’re too good for Stainless Steel Kitchen. You should have maharajahs and riverboat gamblers and Belladonna assassins and interplanetary ambassadors. You should have canal barges and silk-lined airships and gold-plated Praesidium Sailships and big low cars with bars in the back seat. There’s stuff out there that’s worthy of you, and if you don’t go you’ll never find it. So get out of here.”
She turned in the corridor. She told herself it was because she wanted to ask a final favour, but they both knew it was for a final meeting of eyes.
“Romi.”
“Go on. What is it?”
“Can you cover for me?”
“I think I can do that.”
She told herself she must not look back again, but she did it anyway because she knew she was perverse. Romereaux was gone.
Having exhausted all other possibilities, the searchers were returning home for the fingertip scrutiny of crannies and hidey-holes. Sweetness slipped past the denim-clad arses of Sle and Rother’am cooeeing up an airco duct, but Tante Marya patrolling the undercarriage stopped her dead. One glimpse at her face promised a punishment worse than marriage to the Stainless Steel Kitchen. She was head of the Domiety. She had made the match. The shame would be excoriating.
Sweetness ducked down under the porthole as she heard feet clang on the metal steps. She pressed herself hard against the sun-warmed wood. Marya Stuard’s face deformed itself against the glass as she tried to squint out every possible line of sight. Clang clang clang. Away again. But she was out there, between herself and the things Sweetness deserved.
The ripe fanfare of the calliope almost tricked a yelp of surprise from Sweetness. Bite it off, bite it off. Again, the steam organ tootled a riff.
“There she goes, there! Look!”
Romereaux.
“Look, there, going east! Somebody stop her, she’ll be away!”
Feet clattered in the corridor. The opposite door slammed open, the same feet rattled down steps.
“Where where where?”
Again, the calliope parped the alarum. Sweetness dared a peek. Tante Marya was ducking under the carriage—a heinous sin, which every child was warned off on pain of gravest censure. She flung open the door, was down the steps and running. Now one look back. And there was Romereaux, a tiny silhouette standing on the saddle of the big steam calliope, asbestos-gloved hand pointing in exactly the wrong direction.
Serpio took the terrain bike easily.
“What kept you?”
“Things.” Sweetness slung herself up behind him. The engine trembled between her legs. She pressed her belly and thighs against his work gear.
“Is she comfortable?” he asked.
“Who comfortable?”
“Her. Your friend. She doesn’t look comfortable. Half her’s dragging on the ground.”
Sweetness rolled her eyes and mimed heaving some mass on her right side.
“Can we just go now?”
“Certainly.”
He twisted the handle and they went. Like that. Sweetness whooped and Serpio gunned the little alcohol engine and it was fast and dusty and sexy and in a direction she had never travelled before, which was perpendicular, and in all the speed and excitement she quite forgot to worry about the effect of Serpio’s angel-eye on his driving.
12
The rain was gruelling now. Sweetness loathed getting her hair wet, but stuck her head out from under the shelter of the seat. She thought she had heard it again.
“It’s nothing.” Serpio coaxed a small fire of grass stalks and wood splinters. It sent a wan spiral of smoke up to haunt the ribs and buttresses of the underside of the chair seat.
“It’s not nothing if it’s thunder.” She scanned the sky that had slowly curdled from the west until now it was a moiling blanket of grey on grey.
“You don’t get thunder from that kind of cloud.” Serpio was trying to rig a trivet of stones over the now-glowing fire.
“Well, I hope you’re sure, because in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re sitting right under a twenty-metre wooden chair, and not only is it wood, and the tallest thing in fifty kays, it’s also right on top of what passes for the major hill in this neighbourhood.”
“I’m sure.”
“How do you know?”
“I seen plenty of weather.”
“So’ve I.”
I’ve got an uncle fused into the regional signalling grid by plenty of weather, and a relative hit by lightning gives everyone a nose for thunder, she wanted to say but Serpio’s forehead was furrowed and his tongue peeking pinkly from the corner of his mouth as he stacked his stones. “I’m soaked,” Sweetness said instead. “Let me near that.” Wet hair momentarily blinded her. Her foot brushed the tripod of stones. It promptly collapsed. Serpio swiftly plucked the rocks from the fire before they crushed out its last breath. Then with the Zen patience of card-house builders, he set about rebalancing his rocks. Sweetness squatted on her heels and showed her hands to the three flickers of heat and thought about how quickly it had all gone like the weather.
For the first handful of hours the novelty of travel at right angles had thrilled her. Off the track. Beyond the lines. Turn those handlebars and you can go in any direction you like. The track doesn’t take you. You take the track. Maps among the trainfolk are grids, networks, interconnections of coloured lines with black circles. All this two-dimensionality was wooeeeee! stuff. This flat, almost treeless rangeland was full throttle terrain. Glancing behind her—comb black curls out of her eyes—Sweetness exulted at the plume of dust rising up behind her. One part of her soul warned her she was advertising her egress for a hundred kilometres around. Another did not give one fig. Outliers of a great herd of grazebeasts cantered, roll-eyed with fear, from the speeding bikers. Encouraged, Serpio aimed his machine at the heart of the dark wall of the main herd. It parted before him. The terrain bike drove a dust-coloured wedge through the mass of bovine bodies, splitting it in two like an amoeba.
“Woo-hoo!” he hollered.