“Oh, no, no, no,” Lycan said, eyeing the scene. “Let’s get out of here.”
The big guys who’d unknowingly been serving as their bodyguards had gone left out of the elevator, and they were going straight, so Veronika and Lycan were on their own.
Veronika pulled Lycan into the crowd. “Just act like you come here all the time.” He looked at her as if he’d definitely decided she was deranged, but didn’t resist.
“What’s the farthest you’ve ever been down?” Veronika asked as they passed through the labyrinth of the market, around stone pillars, past booths cut into the solid stone that comprised the entire foundation of Manhattan.
“This is the farthest I’ve ever been down.” A topless woman motioned to Lycan from inside a booth that held nothing but a bed. Lycan held up a hand to the side of his face, blocking her from view. “Can we get out of here? This is crazy.”
“Yes, you might get killed,” Veronika said, deadpan. “You’ve never even taken an armed tour farther down?”
“I’m not a tour kind of person,” Lycan said.
Veronika and Sander had once taken a tour way down, to an underground river twenty stories below street level, where there was nothing but a rat warren of grimy corridors and sewer lines. She was stunned to see people living down there, their homes crevices and long-forgotten pumping stations.
Ahead, Veronika spotted a flashing sign for Biryani Burger. As the article had said, it was nothing more than a bricked-in corner. Veronika poked her head inside the one small square window in the bricks. Two feet to her left, a sweaty Asian man in a dirty apron stood over a filthy fryer. He looked Veronika’s way and raised his eyebrows.
Veronika consulted the article, which had explained the correct way to order. “Two big ones with plenty of everything.”
“Thirty-six,” the man said. Although the article advised her to grow irate when told the price, because regulars and Undertown residents paid around twenty for two big ones, Veronika just tapped her system and transferred the thirty-six.
The man nodded curtly and turned back to his grill.
Veronika lingered in the opening for a second longer, taking in the tiny enclosure, devoid of any decorations save for several paper pictures stuck to the wall, two of them maybe of the cook/owner’s children, four others she recognized as characters from an old TV show called High Town Gardeners.
When the food was ready, the cook simply thrust his hand through the window clutching a half loaf of French bread packed with a paste that resembled sewage, and Veronika took it from him. A moment later, his hand reappeared holding the other.
Lycan accepted his like he was being handed a dead rat. “What are the odds we’re not going to contract botulism from these?”
“Fifty-fifty.” She took a big bite. It wasn’t bad.
Eyeing her accusingly, Lycan took a much more tentative bite, almost a dainty bite. “My father’s a gastroenterologist. If he saw me eating this, he’d have a stroke.”
“Nice guy, your father?” Veronika asked.
“He had to sign off on my revival. Whether that’s evidence of how much he loves me or how much he hates me, I couldn’t tell you.”
“That was only two days ago.” Veronika shook her head in wonder. “It’s hard to believe we’re standing here now.”
“That’s for sure.”
A big dollop of her sandwich’s innards dropped out, just missing her boot. It didn’t matter, there was no way she was going to finish half of the thing, although it was growing on her with each bite. It wasn’t all that greasy, and had a nutty, creamy flavor.
“Just for argument’s sake, if you were to die down here, would your company revive you again?”
“I don’t have full revival as part of my health plan, so there’s no guarantee, but I think so, yes. They’ve taken precautions to prevent me from making another attempt on my life.” He pointed in the air. “Someone’s monitoring me from a cloaked screen most of the time. I’m surprised they didn’t send someone to stop me when you dragged me down here.”
She was curious to know what he did that was so important, but didn’t relish another “I’m not at liberty” rebuttal.
Lycan looked down at his torso, prodded his sternum.
“Are there scars?”
“No. It’s remarkable how advanced their techniques are.”
Veronika eyed his stomach. “It’s so hard to fathom that for a few hours you simply did not exist.”
“I don’t like to think about it.” He looked around, holding his half-eaten lunch by his side, and Veronika realized he was looking for a trash recycler.
“Finished?” A girl of about ten was suddenly standing in front of Lycan, hands out. Lycan set the food in her hands, then the girl turned to Veronika, who turned hers over as well.
“Ready?” Lycan asked.
They climbed into the elevator back to train level in silence. Neither of them said anything for a good ten minutes, but Veronika felt strangely at peace, comfortable in the awkward silence. The thing was, she was sure Lycan suffered through as many awkward silences as she, which shifted at least some of the responsibility to him.
Veronika realized that Lycan had yet to ask anything about her. He had no idea what she did for a living, where she lived, whether she had children or siblings. As they rose, he hummed atonally to himself. It was grating.
“So what’s with the humming?”
Lycan stopped humming. “What do you mean?”
“You hum all the time. It doesn’t seem to be a song, exactly.”
Lycan put the tip of his finger in his mouth, nibbled the nail. “I don’t know. I guess it keeps the demons at bay.”
“‘The demons,’” she repeated as they stepped out of the elevator and headed for the stairs to the surface. It wasn’t a question; she knew what demons he was talking about. The thoughts that threatened to devour you; the icy blasts of self-doubt and despair. She knew them well, and could imagine that if they got loud enough, she might try humming to drown them out too. “Are you on meds?”
Lycan laughed. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh—it had a panicked quality. “Meds. Yeah, I’m on meds.” He pulled up his sleeve, showed her a silver bug attached to his impressive biceps, delivering his meds. “Zoreo. Palquin.” He raised one eyebrow. “How about you?”
The question threw Veronika. Her emotional state, like everything else about her, hadn’t come up in conversation. Was it that obvious? “Perion-e.”
Lycan nodded knowingly. “Good old Perion-e. My verbal-complexity app pegs your IQ at one thirty-eight, so I’m guessing you’re familiar with homeostatic affect theory?”
“It’s one forty-one,” Veronika corrected. Maybe it was petty, but she didn’t want those three points deducted. “Yeah, I’m familiar with it.”
Lycan shook his big head. “Meds aren’t the answer.”
Veronika couldn’t argue. The medical research industry was still trying, still claiming that some med going through clinical trials was going to change everything, but no matter how they messed with receptor sites, neurotransmitter levels, hormone levels, the mind always found its way back to baseline.
“For a while I thought Perion-e was the answer, then I started developing facial tics,” Lycan said.
“I worry about that.” That was the other problem. If a med worked at all, it came with a side effect—a cost that often was as bad as the problem it was meant to solve. Or worse. They’d conquered physical illness, conquered death for those who could afford it, but the mind was another animal altogether. Screwed-up minds always found a way to stay screwed up. Maybe that was because Chan-juan Yang had devoted her vast fortune to cheating physical illness and death. Maybe some other trillionaire needed to devote the same sort of resources to overcoming anxiety and despair.