“Can we talk?”
“What about?”
“I don’t know. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay.”
Huffing from exertion, Veronika stopped. “Will you just please stop walking?”
Lycan stopped, turned to face Veronika, waiting for her to say something.
“I have to know how you were saved.”
Lycan sighed heavily. “When I canceled my freezing insurance, I neglected to indicate in my will that no one else could revive me.” He shook his head grimly. “Evidently I’m valuable enough to my company that they footed the bill to drag me back.”
Veronika looked around at the flow of pedestrians. “Can we sit somewhere?” She gestured toward a little fenced park jutting over a drop.
Lycan rolled his eyes. “I have to go now.”
“Just for a minute. Please?”
Lycan heaved a sigh, looking defeated. “By all means,” he said with mock enthusiasm. “Maybe we should order tea and cakes.”
Veronika led him to a couple of seats in the park, then wasn’t sure what to say. After what happened on Lemieux Bridge, something should be said. Something. She wasn’t sure what, though.
“What do you do, that you’re so valuable to your employer?” she asked. If Veronika jumped off a bridge, she’d be lucky if L-Dat sprang for flowers.
“What’s the difference?” Lycan said.
Veronika shrugged sharply. “I’m just asking. You know, I didn’t push you off that bridge. Stop acting like I did.”
Lycan relaxed a bit, though his pinched expression suggested he wasn’t conceding her point. “I’m a neuropsychologist. I’m working on a project with some commercial potential.” He grunted softly. “Evidently more commercial potential than I knew. They paid almost thirty million to revive me.” There was a note of pride in his otherwise acid delivery as he stared down through the latticework of the sidewalk at the black rectangles of Low Town roofs, at the frenzy of traffic, the barely discernible moving specks that were people. The braided material that formed the floor of the park was designed to maximize the amount of light that filtered down to Low Town, but it also served to make sitting in the park an ungrounding experience, as if you might fall at any moment.
“I was an expensive fix because when I hit the water, my ribs punctured most of my vital organs.” Lycan’s tone, and the look he gave Veronika, suggested this was somehow her fault. “They missed my heart, however, so it was a much more painful death than I’d anticipated. Almost as painful as the moments leading up to it.”
“I’m sorry. I meant well.”
He watched Low Town for a moment, then looked back at Veronika. “I know I shouldn’t be taking this out on you, but you were so certain that it was your business. You were so concerned that I stay alive. Well, I’m alive. Now what do I do?” There was no anguish on Lycan’s face as there had been on Lemieux Bridge. He seemed not so much despondent as genuinely lost, as if he expected an answer to his question. Which was not good, because Veronika didn’t have one. That life was better than death seemed obvious to her, but that didn’t mean she thought life was particularly awesome.
He waited for her answer, his wiry eyebrows raised. When it didn’t come, he stood. “I have to get back to work.” He turned to leave, then paused. “You’re right, though. It wasn’t your fault at all.” He made the sign of the cross in the air with his hand. “I absolve you of the residual guilt you’re obviously feeling. Good-bye.”
“Hold on.” He obviously wanted to be left alone, but somehow Veronika couldn’t let him go.
“What?”
“Why did you do it?”
Lycan rolled his eyes toward the sky. “I don’t owe you an explanation.”
“I know that, but…” What was the “but” here? A vague plan formed in Veronika’s mind. “You asked me, ‘What now?’ I can’t tell you why life is worth living, but maybe I can show you, if you’ll let me.”
Lycan’s cheek protruded where he poked at it with his tongue. “What are you planning to show me, exactly?”
Veronika looked around. “Where were you headed right now?”
“To lunch.”
“Let me take you to lunch, somewhere you’d never go on your own. Let me show you the world with fresh eyes.” She’d heard that line somewhere, maybe in Wings of Fire. Lycan didn’t seem the type to have a plagiarism detector on his system.
Lycan burst out laughing. “You’re going to take me to lunch?”
“That’s right. Come on.”
When Lycan made no move to follow, Veronika grasped his sleeve and tugged. “Come on.”
Reluctantly, Lycan took a step. “At least they’re unlikely to fire me if I take a long lunch,” he muttered.
The only thing was, Veronika wasn’t sure where to take him. She knew most of the restaurants in High Town, and quite a few in Low, but what sort of restaurant choice could possibly constitute a life-affirming change in one’s usual humdrum routine? As they walked, she frantically scanned recent articles on restaurants in Manhattan.
“So, what do you study?”
“I study the links between the brain and consciousness.”
Veronika gave him a look. “I know what a neuropsychologist is, I mean specifically.”
“I’m not at liberty to talk about the specifics. You probably wouldn’t understand what I was talking about, in any case.”
“Ooh, so you’re like a secret-agent neuropsychologist.” Veronika couldn’t resist the sarcastic retort, even though she was supposed to be showing Lycan why life was wonderful.
She found what she’d been looking for: it was an article on the cuisine of Undertown, titled “The Edgy Side of Local Cuisine.” That would be an adventure—eating in some seedy corner walk-up that served authentic Undertown fare. Veronika headed for an elevator. Maybe this would help Lycan and maybe it wouldn’t, but it was certainly lifting her muddled mood. There was something liberating about being with someone even more lost than she, being the one who had it together, relatively speaking.
In the silence of the elevator, Veronika noticed that Lycan was making an odd sound—an atonal humming. She glanced at him and found that he was studying her, his expression suggesting he was trying to determine whether he was in the hands of someone who was deranged. Typically when you looked at someone and caught them staring at you, they looked away, but Lycan went on looking until Veronika felt so uncomfortable she looked away. He went on humming. Maybe humming wasn’t the right word for it. He went on making noises in the back of his throat.
When they reached the subway entrance that would take them into Undertown, Veronika paused, reconsidering. The eatery she’d picked out, Biryani Burger, was about a five-minute walk through a dodgy underground neighborhood, and big as he was, Veronika didn’t think Lycan would scare off potential muggers and rapists with his round-shouldered gait and baby face.
“You’re not thinking of going down there, are you?” Lycan asked, motioning toward the subway entrance up ahead.
Veronika spotted five largish men wearing High Town boots heading for the subway. She grabbed Lycan’s elbow and tugged him toward the men. “Come on.”
Over Lycan’s hissed protests, Veronika got in step behind the men, close enough that the casual murderer might assume they were all part of the same party. She squeezed into an elevator with them as they descended from the train level down to the market level, where Biryani Burger was located.
As the elevator opened, they were hit with the clattering, the claustrophobia, the jostling and dimness of an Undertown market. Veronika’s system was set to filter unpleasant sensory input, but the system seemed overwhelmed, unsure how to filter when everything was an eyesore. It was dimming the cacophony, but various sections of the market flickered from artificially serene scenes of well-dressed shoppers to the real scenes of desperately poor, filthy people engaging in commerce that bordered on brawling.