Love Minus Eighty (13 page)

“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.

“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?”