Miri felt a strange reluctance to watch the Earth broadcasts, a reluctance she certainly had not felt before today. But again she nodded. Her grandmother smelled of some scented soap, light and clean; her long hair, bound in a twist, gleamed like black glass. Miri put one hand shyly on Jennifer’s knee.
“And one more thing, dear heart,” Jennifer said. “Twelve is too old to cry, Miri, especially over hard necessity. Survival alone demands too much of us for tears. Remember that.”
“I w-w-will,” Miri said.
The next day she saw Joan, walking from her parents’ dome to the park. Miri called to her, but Joan kept walking and didn’t turn her head. After a moment, Miri lifted her chin and walked in the other direction.
20
The five young men crept toward the chain-link fence, keeping to the shadows of unpruned bushes, trees, and an abandoned and sagging bench in what might once have been a park. The moon rode high in the east, gilding the fence with silver. The fence links were wide apart, worked in scrolls that were both uneven and insubstantial; the fence was undoubtedly only a marker, with a Y-field providing the real security. If so, the field’s faint shimmer wasn’t visible in the darkness and there was no way to assess its height.
“Throw high,” Drew whispered from his powerchair to the boy next to him, whoever it was. All five wore dark plasti-suits and black boots. Drew could only remember three of their names. He had met them this afternoon at a bar, shortly after he’d drifted into town. He guessed they were younger than his nineteen; it didn’t matter. They had Dole credits for liquor and brainies, so why should it matter? Why should anything matter?
“Now!” somebody yelled.
They rushed forward. Drew’s chair caught on a clump of tough, uncut weeds and he pitched forward. The straps caught him and the chair righted itself and drove on, but the others reached the Y-shield first. They hurled their makeshift bombs, made with gasoline foraged from an abandoned field-style farm. No one but Drew had known what the stuff was, just as no one but Drew had ever heard of a “Molotov cocktail.” He was the only one who could read.
“Shit!” screamed the youngest boy. His bomb hit what might have been the top part of the energy fence, exploded, and rained fire and plastic back onto the dry grass. It caught. Two of the other bombs did the same; the fourth boy dropped his and ran screaming. His shirt had caught fire from an exploding fragment.
Drew raced his chair to six feet from the fence, pulled back his arm, and threw. His heavily muscled arms, the result of unremitting exercise, sent the bomb sailing over the top of the Y-fence. Grass on both sides of the shield blazed.
“Karl’s hit!” someone yelled. The three other boys rushed back toward their scooters. One of them tackled Karl and rolled him, screaming, in the grass. Drew sat in his chair, unmoving, watching the fire and listening to the alarm shriek even louder than the burning boy.
“Someone to get you out, fartsucker,” the deputy sheriff said. He released the Y-lock and banged the jail door open. Drew looked up insolently from the foamstone cot, a look that vanished when his rescuer entered.
“You! What for?”
“Expecting Leisha again?” Eric Bevington-Watrous said. “Too bad. This time you get me.”
Drew drawled, “She get tired of bailing me out?”
“If she isn’t, she should be.”
Drew studied him, trying to match Eric’s cool contempt. The furious boy who had fought him beside the cottonwood might never have existed. Eric wore black cotton pants, ruffled bodystretch, and a black bias-cut coat, all conservative but fashionable. His boots were Argentinian leather, his hair barbered, his skin glowing. He looked like a handsome, decisive donkey used to running things, while Drew knew he looked like a Liver gone too bad to do any Living. Which he was. Stepping outside his own field of vision, which was the only way he cared to see anything these days, Drew saw Eric and himself as a smooth cool ovoid floating beside a ragged misshapen pyramid, every point dented or spiked or saw-toothed.
Who had done the misshaping in the first place? Who had crippled him? Whose fucking charity had shown him just how worthless he was next to all the fartsucking donkeys in the world?
“What if I don’t want to be bailed out?”
“Then rot here,” Eric said. “I don’t care.”
“Why should you? In your take-charge donkey suit and your Sleepless superiority and your aunt’s money?”
Eric was beyond that kind of taunt. “My money, now. I earn it. Unlike you, Arlen.”
“It’s a little harder for some of us.”
“Oh, and aren’t we supposed to feel sorry for you because of that? Poor Drew. Poor stinking crippled petty-criminal Drew.” Eric said this in a disinterested tone, so adult that Drew blinked. Eric was only two years older than Drew; not even Leisha managed that much detachment.
Would either of them be here in this cell if she did?
The thought was a spiny worm, sliding through his mind, leaving a trail of slime that glowed even in the dark.
“Jailer,” Eric said, “we’re going.”
No one answered. No one mentioned criminal charges, lawyers, bail money, the whole legal system that was supposed to function with equal justice for all men fucking-shit equal.
Drew dragged himself on his elbows across the floor and climbed into his chair, parked just beyond the bars. No one helped him. He followed Eric—why not? What the fuck did it matter if he were in jail or out, rotting in this one-scooter town or rotting somewhere else? By his sheer indifference he demonstrated the stupidity of either choice.
“If you really thought that, you’d stay here,” Eric said over his shoulder, not breaking stride, and Drew had his face rubbed in it all over again: They were just smarter. They knew. Fucking Sleepless.
A groundcar waited. Drew turned his chair in another direction, but before he moved it Eric had slapped a Y-lock over the control panel on the chair’s arm.
“Hey!”
“Shut up,” Eric said. Drew aimed a right cross but Eric was quicker, and had the advantage of mobility. His fist caught Drew under the chin, not hard enough to break his jaw but sufficient to send pain lancing through his face clear to the temples. When the pain receded slightly, Drew was manacled.
He started cursing, summoning every filth he had learned in eighteen months on the road. Eric ignored him. He picked Drew out of his chair and threw him in the back seat of the car, already occupied by a bodyguard who righted Drew, looked him deeply in the eyes, and said simply, “Don’t.”
Eric slid behind the wheel. This was new among donkeys: driving themselves. Drew ignored the guard and raised both arms, manacled together, over his head to bring them down hard on Eric’s neck. Eric never even turned around. The guard caught Drew’s arms at the top of their swing and did something so painful to his shoulder that he collapsed, blinded by agony, in the back seat. He started to sob.
Eric drove.
They took him to a Liver motel, the kind rented for brainie or sex parties on Dole credit. Eric and the guard stripped him and dumped him into the cheap, oversized bathtub meant for four. Drew’s head went under. He breathed water until he could pull himself up; neither of them helped him. Eric poured a half bottle of genemod dirt-eaters into the water. The bodyguard stripped, climbed in with Drew, and started to scrub him down.