“Ten or fifteen minutes.”
Sunali tapped on her palm for a moment. “In other words, over the past hundred and ten years, you’ve been alive a total of about ninety minutes.”
“Yes,” she said, barely above a whisper. Now she saw why it mattered. Phrased like that, it was chilling. She didn’t want to think about it.
“What about before you came here. Was there anyone in your life, besides your sister and mother? A lover? A close friend?”
“A close friend. Her name was Jeannette.” She hoped Sunali wanted to talk about Jeannette, that she wanted Mira to reminisce about her life at great length. That would be comforting.
“What was Jeannette’s last name?” Sunali asked.
“Zierk.”
Mira had the most astonishing thought. She couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her until now. Jeannette had worked for the military, just like Mira. Preservation had been part of Jeannette’s benefits package, just like Mira’s. “Sunali, would you do something for me?” It felt as if everything rode on the question she was about to ask.
“Of course. What is it?”
“Would you search for her, to find out what happened to her?”
“I was just about to suggest that. When was she born?”
“Two thousand four.”
Mira was not as anxious as she thought she should be as Sunali checked, probably because her heart could not race, and her palms could not sweat. It was surprising, how much emotion was housed in the body instead of the mind.
A smile spread across Sunali’s face. “She died in twenty forty-five, twenty-two years after you. She’s in the main cryo facility.”
“She’s here?”
“Well, not here in the dating facility, but nearby. You didn’t know?” Sunali consulted the readout, pulling her palm close to her nose, then pointed. “She’s about a thousand meters that way.”
Mira wished she could lift her head and look where Sunali was pointing. “Can you do something for me? Can you wake her, and give her a message from me?”
Sunali looked surprised. “Mira, I don’t know…”
“Please?” Mira said. “It would mean so much to me.”
Sunali tilted her head to one side, then the other. “Okay. Sure. I guess. I’ll have to end our session—it will take a while.” She stood, paused. “What message should I give her?”
Mira wanted to ask Sunali to tell Jeannette she loved her, but decided against it. Better that no one knew, not even someone who understood what it was like to be in this place. “Just tell her I’m here, that I’m close. Thank you so much.”
Mira woke to Sunali’s smiling face. “Jeannette was excited to get the message. I mean, out-of-her-head excited. I thought she’d leap out of her crèche and hug me.”
“What did she say?” Mira tried to sound calm. Jeannette was near. Suddenly everything had changed. She had to figure out how to get out of here.
“She said to tell you she loved you.”
Mira sobbed. She had really talked to Jeannette. What a strange and wonderful and utterly incomprehensible thing.
Then Sunali asked more questions. During the pauses, when Sunali was thinking or even taking a breath, Mira thought about Jeannette, who had just told Mira she loved her, even though they were both dead.
34
Rob
By the time Rob got home from meeting with Peter, it was after eleven. He went directly to his room to continue watching Nathan’s recordings.
As Winter leaped to life in his room, Rob recalled how horrified he’d been the first time he’d seen her face on his dad’s little handheld. Now, despite the sting he felt seeing her so vibrantly alive, there was also pleasure. He was the cause of all the horror that had befallen her, but he was more than that now. Exactly what he was to her, and what she was to him, he wasn’t sure. But it was something substantial, unlike any connection he’d ever had with another person.
He watched Nathan and Winter’s first face-to-face. Evidently Nathan pulled out all the stops the first time out—he’d finagled virtual passes to watch someone brought back to life. Rob had seen a hundred recordings of revivals (who hadn’t?), but few got to witness such a personal moment in real time. Rob had no idea how Nathan had managed it. After that, they went to dinner at an underground restaurant called Beneath, where the food was harvested from vertical gardens that ran right through the restaurant and even deeper underground.
It surprised Rob that Winter always seemed to be laughing. Veronika had said to find clips where she was happy; that would be no problem. Laughter came effortlessly to her—not laughing seemed more of an effort. He should have expected the living Winter to be profoundly different from the dead, terrified Winter he knew, but it was still a shock. He barely recognized her, as if the serious, somber Winter he’d been visiting in the minus eighty was a completely different woman. It was a little disturbing, actually, but watching her made Rob ache to see her again, in the bridesicle place, if that was the only option. To see her alive, breathing, laughing… that would be indescribable.
This had to work.
Because Nathan recorded all the time, most of the clips were nothing more than the two of them riding somewhere in Nathan’s Xero, or sitting at a bar. With time short, Rob sampled random slivers, backing up to watch potentially interesting ones in their entirety, seeking the few gems that would bowl over potential suitors.
It was a jarring experience, because as it turned out, Winter had been a human being, fraught with the usual flaws and quirks that you rarely saw visiting someone in the minus eighty. She had a quick temper to match her easy laugh. Once Nathan and Winter took Nathan’s nephews to a zero-G park. Nathan took off with the older nephew, who was maybe fourteen, to experience the wilder attractions, ditching the sulking seven- or eight-year-old. Winter was right to chide Nathan for hurting the little guy’s feelings, only she didn’t chide him, she got in his face and screamed at him.
And then there was her spending habits. She didn’t care much about clothes or vehicles or other material things, but she would drop three hundred dollars on a meal, another two on a play, then pull Nathan into a club with an eighty-dollar cover for a quick drink. Rob had no idea how she could afford her half on a teacher’s meager salary. At one point she joked about being hauled off to a debt camp, and Rob wondered just how much debt she was carrying when she died.
None of this dampened the urgency Rob felt to save Winter, but it did make him wonder if he’d professed his love for her based on an idealistic image of who she was.
At around three a.m., Lorne came in carrying a Superfood omelet. “How’s it going?” He handed Rob the plate and sat down.
“All right,” Rob said without looking away from the recording. “Tell me what you think of this.”
Rob paused from wolfing down the omelet to show a clip where Winter called Nathan into her kitchen, opened the cabinet above the sink to reveal a space neatly divided between brightly colored cereal boxes on one side and liquor bottles on the other.
“This must say something profound about my psyche,” Winter said, deadpan, as they peered into the cabinet.
“What’s a psyche?” Lorne asked.
“Kind of her mental makeup.”
Lorne laughed out loud. “I like it. Funny.”
“I think so, too.” It wasn’t one of his finalists, though, because not everyone would know what a psyche was. He’d had to look it up himself.
Rob went back to sampling. Lorne hung around for a while, watching silently, then slipped out.
Winter had a distinct walk. She was slightly knock-kneed, reminding Rob of a colt; her hands gave a little twist at the end of each step. It was an unself-conscious walk, feminine without straining to be so. She tended to walk quickly, evidently eager to get wherever she was going. Often Nathan was left scurrying to keep up with her.