“You know, the wise man living alone on the mountain is really cliché,” she said, smiling when she said it so he wouldn’t think she was being mean. “Anyway, I don’t have anything to be scared of.”
“Assassins with pocket nukes for one,” Timothy said, slotting the injector back into its housing.
Teresa laughed, and after a second, Timothy smiled too.
“If anyone’s going to kill me, it’ll probably be Dr. Cortázar,” she said.
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“It’s just a joke. I was watching Holden, like we talked about? And I heard this conversation he and Dr. Cortázar were having.”
“What about?” Timothy asked, idly.
Teresa thought back. What had they been talking about exactly? Mostly she remembered Cortázar talking about how nature ate babies and Holden looking into the camera. But it had been about her father too.
She took in a breath, ready to speak, and the air rattled against the back of her throat and down into her lungs like a billion little molecule-sized marbles banging against the soft tissue. Her respiration system was a cave inside Timothy’s cave, and she was acutely aware of the complexity of her own body and the answering complexity of the caverns around her. Veins and chips in the wall before her fragmented and smoothed together. Gravity trying to tug her down into the floor, and the astonishingly complex dance of the electrons in the stone and her flesh pushing back. She managed to wonder if she’d been drugged before her awareness was overwhelmed by the immediacy and complexity of the air and her body and the increasingly invisible boundary that failed to really divide her from the world …
Muskrat barked anxiously. She’d slumped down on the cot at some point without knowing she was doing it. Timothy stood up, his expression perfectly focused and his recycler forgotten. The repair drone made a weird yipping sound as it tried to stand up, staggering drunkenly.
“That wasn’t just me, right?” Timothy said.
“I don’t think so,” Teresa said.
“Yeah, all right. It’s been fun, Tiny, but you need to head home now.”
“What was that? Is there something wrong with the air in here? Are there fumes?”
“Nope,” Timothy said, taking her by the arm and lifting her to her feet. “Air’s fine. That was something else. And it probably happened to a lot of people, so they’re gonna be scared, and they’re going to want to find where everyone important to them is, and that’s you. So you need to be not here.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, but Timothy was pulling her forward, toward the mouth of the cave. His grip on her arm was like a vise. His expression was blank. It made him frightening. Muskrat followed behind, barking like she was trying to warn them of something.
In the open air, the world was normal. The strange sensations she’d had before already seemed like a bad dream or an accident. Timothy’s reaction was the only thing that made it frightening. He looked up, scanning the sky, then nodded to himself.
“Okay, Tiny. You and the furball head back home.”
“I’ll come back as soon as I can,” she said. She didn’t know why she wanted to reassure him.
“Okay.”
It was the way he said it. Like his mind was already someplace else. She’d had adults treat her like that before—polite and agreeable, but elsewhere. Never Timothy, though. He was different. He was supposed to be different.
“Will you be here when I do?”
“I’ll have to, I guess. I’m not done yet, so—”
She hugged him. It was like hugging a tree. He pulled back, and when he looked at her, she thought there was something like regret in his expression. It couldn’t have been pity.
“Good luck, Tiny,” he said, then turned back toward his cave and was gone. Muskrat barked once and looked after him, as worried as Teresa was.
“Come on,” she said, and started for her secret passage back into the State Building and home. The afternoon was cool. The leaves were starting to retreat back into their winter sheaths, leaving the trees looking stubbly. A sunbird hanging on a low branch opened its leathery wings at her and hissed, but she ignored it. At the horizon, wide clouds bunched and trailed gray veils of storm. If they came this way, the drainage tunnel would be impassable and she’d be stuck outside the walls. She picked up her pace …
The sound of the flier started as a high and distant whine, but it grew louder quickly. Less than a minute after she first noticed it, the sound was a roar. The black laminate body and three cold thrusters appeared over the treetops and fell into a thin meadow, hardly more than a break between trees. When the door popped open, she expected to see the light-blue uniforms of security. She prepared to identify herself and explain that she’d decided to go for a hike. It was only partly a lie.
But while there were two armed guards, the first person out of the flier was Colonel Ilich. He trotted toward her, and his face was dark. The thrusters didn’t cycle all the way down, so when he reached her, he had to shout.
“Get in the flier.”
“What?”
“You need to get in the flier now. You have to get back to the State Building.”
“I don’t understand.”
Ilich’s jaw clenched and he pointed at the open door. “You. There. Now. This isn’t difficult.”
Teresa stepped back like she’d been slapped. In all the years Ilich had been her tutor, he had never been mean to her. Never been anything but patient and supportive and amused. Even when she didn’t do her work or did something inappropriate, the punishment was just a long talk about why she’d made the choices she did and what the goals of her education were. It was like seeing a different man in an Ilich suit. She felt tears welling up in her eyes. She saw Oh, for fuck’s sake on his lips, but she couldn’t hear it.
He made a little bow and gestured her forward like a servant making way for his master, but she felt the impatience in it. The contempt. The anger.
Oh, she thought as she walked to the flier. He’s frightened.
At the flier, Muskrat balked, and before Teresa could coax her in, Ilich assigned one of the guards to go back on foot with the dog. The flier’s door closed with a deep clank, and they lurched up over the trees. Even though the body of the flier had looked opaque from the outside, it was no darker than tinted glass from her seat. She could see the State Building clearly as soon as they cleared the top branches.
“How did you know where I was?” Teresa asked.
Ilich shook his head, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. When he did, his voice had more like its usual tone: patient and gentle. The difference was that now she knew it was a mask.
“You had a locator implanted in your jawbone when you were born. There is never a moment when security doesn’t know how to find you, and your safety is part of my sacred duty.”
It was like hearing a language she almost understood. She could pick out the meaning of each word, but she couldn’t quite make sense of the whole. The idea was too foreign. Too wrong.
“Your father felt it was important for you to have some experience of rebellion and autonomy, so he permitted your excursions so long as they didn’t take you too far from the State Building. He said he was solo free-climbing on the surface of Mars at your age, and that he learned things about himself that way. He hoped you would find use in the same independence and solitude.”
Solitude. He didn’t know about Timothy, then. There was nothing on any world that would make her tell him either. She felt the buzz of outrage in her throat. “So you just let me think …”