Текст книги "Darwin's children"

Автор книги: Грег Бир

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

There were lots of stories in the camps. Few of them were true, but most were scary, and the kids could get ominously bored.

As they drove through a razor-wire fence and over a moat, Stella felt something sad and cold grow in her.

Memory.

She did not want to lose her focus. She stared through the window, resenting Mitch for coming. Why now? Why not when she had her act together and could tell him she had accomplished something worthwhile? Life was still too confused. The last visit with her mother had been painful. Stella had not known what to say. Her mother had been so sad and full of needs neither could satisfy.

She hoped Mitch would not just sit and stare at her over the table in the family conference room. Or ask pointed questions. Or try to tell Stella there was hope they would get together again. Stella did not think she could stand that.

Stella dipped her head and rubbed her nose. She touched the tip of her finger to the corner of her eye and then to her tongue, out of sight of the rearview mirror. Her eyes were moist and the tears tasted of bitter salt. She would not cry openly, however. Not in front of a human.

Miss Kantor stopped the truck in the parking lot of the flat brick building, got out, and opened Stella's door. Stella followed her into the hospital. As they turned a corner, through a gap in the brick breezeway she saw a long yellow bus drawn up beside the processing office. A load of new kids had arrived. Stella hung back a few steps from Miss Kantor as they passed through the glass doors and walked to the detention center.

The door to the secretary's office was always open, and through the wide window beyond, Stella thought she would catch a glimpse of the new kids from the shipment center. That would be something to take back to the deme; possible recruits or news from outside.

Suddenly, irrationally, she hated Mitch. She did not want him to visit. She did not want any distractions. She wanted to focus and never have to worry about humans again. She wanted to lash out at Miss Kantor, strike her down to the linoleum floor, and run away to anywhere but here.

Through Stella's brief, fierce scowl—a more intense scowl than most humans could manage—she caught a glimpse of the lineup of children beyond the secretary's window. Her scowl vanished.

She thought she recognized a face.

Stella dropped to remove her shoe and turned it upside down, shaking it. Miss Kantor looked back and stopped with hands on hips.

The nosey on her belt wheeped.

“Are you scenting again?” she asked.

“No, ma'am,” Stella said. “Rock in my shoe.” This pause gave her time enough to chase down the memory of the face in the lineup. She stood, shuffled awkwardly for a moment until Miss Kantor glanced away, then shot a second look through the window.

She didknow the face. He was taller now and skinnier, almost a walking skeleton, his hair unruly and his eyes flat and lifeless in the bright sun. The line began to move and Stella flicked her gaze back to the corridor and Miss Kantor.

She no longer worried about Mitch.

The skinny kid outside was the boy she had met in Fred Trinket's shed in Virginia, when she had run away from Kaye's and Mitch's house.

It was Will. Strong Will.

13

BALTIMORE

Kaye shut down the displays and removed the specimens, then carefully returned them to a preservation drawer in the freezer. She knew for the first time that she was close to the end of her work at Americol. Three or four more experiments, six months at most of lab work, and she could go back to Congress and face down Rachel Browning and tell the oversight subcommittee that all apes, all monkeys, all mammals, probably all vertebrates, even all animals—and possibly all forms of life above the bacteria—were genetic chimeras. In a real sense, we were all virus children.

Not just Stella. Not just my daughter and her kind.

All babies use viruses to get born. All senators and all representatives and the president and all of their wives and children and grandchildren, all the citizens of the United States, and all the people of the world, are all guilty of original sin.

Kaye looked up as if at a sound. She touched the bridge of her nose and peered around the lab, the ranks of white and beige and gray equipment, black-topped tables, lamp fixtures hanging from the ceiling like upside-down egg cartons. She felt a gentle pressure behind her eyes, the cool, liquid silver trickle down the back of her head, a growing awareness that she was not alone in the room, in her body.

The caller was back. Twice in the past three years, she had spent as much as three days in its presence. Always before, she had been traveling or working on deadline and had tried to ignore what she had come to regard as a pointless distraction.

“This isn't a good time,” she said out loud and shook her head. She stood up and stretched her arms and bent to touch her toes, hoping exercise might push the caller into the background. “Go away.” It did not go away. Its signal came in with even greater conviction. Kaye started to laugh helplessly and wiped away the tears. “Please,” she whispered, leaning against a lab bench. She tipped a stack of petri dishes with her elbow. As she was rearranging them, the caller struck full force, flooding her with delicious approval. Kaye shut her eyes and leaned forward, her entire body filled with that extraordinary sensation of oneness with something very close and intimate, yet infinitely creative and powerful.

“It feels like you love me,” she said, shaking with frustration. “So why do you torment me? Why don't you just tell me what you want me to do?” Kaye slid down the bench to a chair near a desk in the corner of the lab. She put her head between her knees. She did not feel weak or even woozy; she could have walked around and even gone about her daily work. She had before. But this time it was just too much.

Her anger swelled even over the insistent waves of validation and approval. The first time the caller had touched her, Mitch and Stella had been taken away. That had been so bad, so unfair; she did not want to remember that time now. And yet this affirmation forced her to remember.

“Go away. Please. I don't know why you're here. This world is cruel, even if you aren't, and I have to keep working.”

She looked around, biting her lip, seeing the lab, the equipment, so neatly arranged, the dark beyond the window. The wall of night outside, the bright rationality within.

“Please.”

She felt the voice become smaller, but no less intense. How polite,she thought. Abruptly, panicked at this new loss, this possible withdrawal, she jumped to her feet.

“Are you trying to clue me in to something?” she asked, desperate. “Reward me for my work, my discoveries?”

Kaye received the distinct impression that this was not the case. She got up and made sure the door was locked. No sense having people wander in and find her talking to herself. She paced up and down the aisles. “So you're willing to communicate, just not with words,” she said, eyes half-closed. “All right. I'll talk. You let me know whether I'm right or wrong, okay? This could take a while.”

She had long since learned that an irreverent attitude had no effect on the caller. Even when Kaye had loathed herself for what she had done by abandoning Mitch in prison and her daughter in the schools, ruining all their lives in a desperate gamble to use all the tools of science and rationality, the caller had still radiated love and approval.

She could punish herself, but the caller would not.

Even more embarrassing, Kaye had come to think of the caller as definitely not female, and probably not neuter—but male.The caller was nothing like her father or Mitch or any other man she had ever met or known, but it seemed strangely masculine nonetheless. What that meant psychologically, she was most unwilling to discover. It was a little too de rigueur, a little too churchy, for comfort.

But the caller cared little about her qualms. He was the most consistent thing in her life—outside of her need to help Stella.

“Am I doing the right thing?” she asked, looking around the lab. Her tremors stopped. She let the extraordinary calm wash over her. “That means yes, I suppose,” she said tentatively. “Are you the Big Guy? Are you Jesus? Or just Gabriel?”

She had asked these questions before, and received no response. This time, however, she felt an almost insignificant alteration in the sensations flooding through her. She closed her eyes and whispered, “No. None of the above. Are you my guardian angel?”

Again, a few seconds later, she closed her eyes and whispered, “No.

“Then what are you?”

No response at all, no change, no clues.

“God?”

Nothing.

“You're inside me or up there or someplace where you can just pump out love and approval all day long, and then you go away and leave me in misery. I don't understand that. I need to know whether you're just something in my head. A crossed nerve. A burst blood vessel. I need solid reassurance. I hope you don't mind.”

The caller expressed no objection, not even to the extent of withdrawing under the assault of such questioning, such blasphemies.

“You're really something else, you know that?” Kaye sat before the workstation and logged on to the Americol intranet. “There's nothing Sunday school about you.”

She glanced at her watch—6 p.m.—and looked up the roster that recorded who was in the building at this hour.

On the first floor, chief radiologist Herbert Roth was still at his post, working late. Just the man she needed. Roth was in charge of the Noninvasive Imaging Lab. She had worked with him two weeks ago taking scans of Wishtoes, their oldest female chimp.

Roth was young, quiet, dedicated to his craft.

Kaye opened the lab door and stepped out into the hall. “Do you think Mr. Roth will want to scan me?” she asked no one in particular.

14

ARIZONA

They did not let Stella see Mitch for hours. First Stella was visited by a nurse who examined her, took a cheek swab, and drew a few cc's of blood.

Stella looked away as the nurse lightly jabbed her with the needle. She could smell the nurse's anxiety; she was only a few years older than Stella and did not like this.

Afterward, Miss Kantor took Stella to the visitor's area. The first thing Stella noticed was that they had removed the plastic barrier. Tables and chairs, nothing more. Something had changed, and that concerned her for a moment. She patted the cotton patch taped to the inside of her elbow. After an hour, Miss Kantor returned with a pile of comic books.

“ X-Men,” she said. “You'll like these. Your father's still being examined. Give me the cotton.”

Stella pulled off the tape and handed it to Miss Kantor, who opened a plastic bag to store it.

“He'll be done soon,” Miss Kantor said with a practiced smile.

Stella ignored the comics and stood in the bare room with its flowered wallpaper and the single table and two plastic chairs. There was a water cooler in the corner and a couple of lounge chairs, patched and dirty. She filled a paper cup with water. A window opened from the main office, and another window looked out over the parking lot. No hot coffee or tea, no hot plate for warming food—no utensils. Family visits were not meant to last long or to be particularly comfortable.

She curled the paper cup in her hand and thought alternately about her father and about Will. Thinking about Will pushed her father into the background, if only for a moment, and Stella did not like that. She did not want to be chaotic. She did not want to be unpredictable; she wanted to be faithful to the goal of putting together a stable deme, away from the school, away from human interference, and that would require focus and an emotional constancy.

She knew nothing about Will. She did not even know his last name. He might not remember her. Perhaps he was passing through, getting a checkup or going through some sort of quarantine on his way to another school.

But if he was staying . . .

Joanie opened the door. “Your father's here,” she said. Joanie always tried to hide her smell behind baby powder. Her expression was friendly but empty. She did what Miss Kantor wanted and seldom expressed her own opinions.

“Okay,” Stella said, and took a seat in one plastic chair. The table would be between them, she hoped. She squirmed nervously. She had to get used to the thought of seeing Mitch again.

Joanie pointed the way through the door and Mitch came in. His left arm hung by his side. Stella looked at the arm, eyes wide, and then at Mitch's denim jacket and jeans, worn and a little dusty. And then she looked at his face.

Mitch was forcing a nervous smile. He did not know what to do, either.

“Hello, sweetie,” he said.

“You can sit in the chair,” Joanie said. “Take your time.”

“How long do we have?” Mitch asked Joanie. Stella hated that. She remembered him as being strong and in charge, and his having to ask about such a thing was wrong.

“We don't have many visits scheduled today. There are four rooms. So . . . take your time. A couple of hours. Let me know if you need anything. I'll be in the office right outside.”

Joanie shut the door and Mitch looked at the chair, the table. Then, at his daughter.

“Don't you want a hug?” he asked Stella.

Stella stood, her cheeks tawny with emotion. She kept her hands by her sides. Mitch walked across the room slowly, and she tracked him like a wild animal. Then the currents of air in the room brought his scent, and the cry came up out of her before she could stop it. Mitch took the last step and grabbed her and squeezed and Stella shook in his arms. Her eyes filled with tears that dripped on Mitch's jacket.

“You're so tall,” Mitch murmured, swinging her gently back and forth, brushing the tips of her shoes against the linoleum.

She planted her feet and pushed him back and tried to pack in her emotions, but they did not fit. They had exploded like popcorn.

“I've never given up,” Mitch said.

Stella's long fingers clutched at his jacket. The smell of him was overwhelming, comfortable and familiar; it made her feel like a little girl again. He was basic and simple, no elaborations, predictable and memorable; he was the smell of their home in Virginia, of everything she had tried to forget, everything she had thought was lost.

“I couldn't come to see you,” he said. “They wouldn't let me. Part of probation.”

She nodded, bumping her chin gently against his shoulder.

“I sent your mother messages.”

“She gave them to me.”

“There was no gun, Stella. They lied,” Mitch said, and for a moment he looked no older than her, just another disappointed child.

“I know. Kaye told me.”

Mitch held his daughter at arm's length. “You're gorgeous,” he said, his thick brows drawing together. His face was sunburned. Stella could smell the damage to his skin, the toughening. He smelled like leather and dust above the fundamental of just being Mitch. In his smell—and in Kaye's—she could detect a little of her own fundamental, like a shared license number in the genes, a common passkey to the emotions.

“They want us to sit . . . here?” Mitch asked, swinging one arm at the table.

Stella wrapped her arms around herself, still jammed up inside. She did not know what to do.

Mitch smiled. “Let's just stand for a while,” he said.

“All right,” Stella said.

“Try to get used to each other again.”

“All right.”

“Are they treating you well?” Mitch asked.

“They probably think so.”

“What do you think?”

Shrug, long fingers wrapping around her wrists, making a little cage of her hands and arms. “They're afraid of us.”

Mitch clenched his jaw and nodded. “Nothing new.”

Stella's eyes were hypnotic as she tried to express herself. Her pupils shifted size and gold flecks passed like fizz in champagne. “They don't want us to be who we are.”

“How do you mean?”

“They move us from one dorm to another. They use sniffers. If we scent, we're punished. If we cloud-scent or fever scent, they break us up and keep us in detention.”

“I've read about that,” Mitch said.

“They think we'll try to persuade them. Maybe they're afraid we'll try to escape. They wear nose plugs, and sometimes they fill the dorms with fake strawberry or peach smell when they do a health inspection. I used to like strawberry, but now it's awful. Worst of all is the Pine-Sol.” She shoved her palm against her nose and made a gagging sound.

“I hear the classes are boring, too.”

“They're afraid we'll learn something,” Stella said, and giggled. Mitch felt a tingle. That sound had changed, and the change was not subtle. She sounded wary, more mature . . . but something else was at work.

Laughter was a key gauge of psychology and culture. His daughter was very different from the little girl he had known.

“I've learned a lot from the others,” Stella said, straightening her face. Mitch traced the faint marks of lines under and beside her eyes, at the corners of her lips, fascinated by the dance of clues to her emotions. Finer muscle control than she had had as a youngster . . . capable of expressions he could not begin to interpret.

“Are you doing okay?” Mitch asked, very seriously.

“I'm doing better than they want,” she said. “It isn't so bad, because we manage.” She glanced up at the ceiling, touched her earlobe, winked. Of course, they were being monitored; she did not want to give away any secrets.

“Glad to hear it,” Mitch said.

“But of course there's stuff they already know,” she added in a low voice. “I'll tell you about that if you want.”

“Of course, sweetie,” Mitch said. “Anything.”

Stella kept her eyes on the top of the table as she told Mitch about the groups of twenty to thirty that called themselves demes. “It means ‘the people,’ ” she said. “We're like sisters in the demes. But they don't let the boys sleep in the same dorms, the same barracks. So we have to sing across the wire at night and try to recruit boys into our demes that way.”

“That's probably for the best,” Mitch said. He lifted one eyebrow and pinched his lips together.

Stella shook her head. “But they don't understand. The deme is like a big family. We help each other. We talk and solve problems and stop arguments. We're so smart when we're in a deme. We feel so right together. Maybe that's why . . .”

Mitch leaned back as his daughter suddenly spoke in two bursts at once:

“We need to be together/We're healthier together

“Everyone cares for the others/Everyone is happy with the others

“The sadness comes from not knowing/The sadness comes from being apart.”

The absolute clarity of the two streams astonished him. If he caught them immediately and analyzed, he could string them together into a serial statement, but over more than a few seconds of conversation, it was obvious he would get confused. And he had no doubt that Stella could now go on that way indefinitely.

She looked at him directly, the skin over the outside of her eye orbits drawing in with a pucker he could neither duplicate nor interpret. Freckles formed around the outside and lower orbits like little tan-and-gold stars; she was sparking in ways he had never seen before.

He shivered in both admiration and concern. “I don't know what that means, when . . . you do that,” he said. “I mean, it's beautiful, but . . .”

“Do what?” Stella asked, and her eyes were normal again.

Mitch swallowed. “When you're in a deme, how many of you talk that way . . . at once?”

“We make circles,” Stella said. “We talk to each other in the circle and across the circle.”

“How many in the circle?”

“Five or ten,” Stella said. “Separately, of course. Boys have rules. Girls have rules. We can make new rules, but some rules already seem to be there. We follow the rules most of the time, unless we feel there's an emergency—someone is feeling steepy.”

“Steepy.”

“Not part of cloud. When we cloud, we're even more like brothers and sisters. Some of us become mama and papa, too, and we can lead cloud, but mama and papa never make us do what we don't want to do. We decide together.”

She looked up at the ceiling, her chin dimpling. “You know about this. Kaye told you.”

“Some, and I've read about some of it. I remember when you were trying out some of these . . . techniques on us. I remember trying to keep up with you. I wasn't very good. Your mother was better.”

“Her face . . .” Stella began. “I see her face when I become mama in cloud. Her face becomes my face.” Her brows formed elegant and compelling double arches, grotesque and beautiful at once. “It's tough to explain.”

“I think I understand,” Mitch said. His skin was warming. Being around his own daughter made him feel left out, even inferior; how did it make the counselors feel, their keepers?

In this zoo, who were the animals, really?

“What happens when someone disagrees? Do you compel her? Him?”

Stella thought about this for a few seconds. “Everyone is free in cloud, but they cooperate. If they don't agree, they hold that thought until the time is right, and then cloud listens. Sometimes, if it's an emergency, the thought is brought up immediately, but that slows us down. It has to be good.”

“And you enjoy being in the cloud?”

“Being incloud,” Stella corrected. “All clouds are part of each other, just smeared out. We sort the differences and stuff later, when the demes catch up. But we don't get to do that often, so most of us don't know what it's really like. We just imagine. Sometimes they let it happen, though.”

She did not tell Mitch that those were the times when nearly everybody got taken to the hospital to be sampled, after.

“Sounds very friendly,” Mitch said.

“Sometimes there's hate,” Stella said soberly. “We have to deal with it. A cloud feels pain just like an individual.”

“Do you know what I'm feeling, right now?”

“No,” Stella said. “Your face is kind of a blank.” She smiled. “The counselors smell like cabbages when we do something unexpected./ They smelled like broccoli when we caught colds a few days ago./

“I'm over my cold now and it wasn't serious but we acted sicker to worry them.”

Mitch laughed. The crossed intonations of resentment and wry superiority tickled him. “That's pretty good,” he said. “But don't push it.”

“We know,” Stella said primly, and suddenly Mitch saw Kaye in her expression, and felt a rush of real pride, that this young woman still came of them, from them. I hope that doesn't limit her.

He also felt a sudden burst of longing for Kaye.

“Is prison like this?” Stella asked.

“Well, prison is a bit harder than here, even.”

“Why aren't you with Kaye, now?”

Mitch wondered how he could possibly explain. “When I was in prison—she was going through rough times, making hard decisions. I couldn't be a part of those decisions. We decided we'd be more effective if we worked separately. We . . . couldn't cloud, I guess you'd say.”

Stella shook her head. “That's fit, like drops of rain hitting each other. Slipskinis when the drops fall apart. Cloud is a bigger thing.”

“Oh,” Mitch said. “How many words for snow?”

Stella's expression became one of a simple lack of comprehension, and for a moment Mitch saw his daughter as she had been even ten years ago, and loved her fiercely. “Your mother and I talk every few weeks. She's busy now, working in Baltimore. Doing science.”

“Trying to turn us back into humans?”

“You arehuman,” Mitch said, his face going red.

“No,” Stella said. “We aren't.”

Mitch decided this wasn't the time or the place. “She's trying to learn how we make new children,” he said. “It's not as simple as we thought.”

“Virus children,” Stella said.

“Yes, well, if I understand it correctly, viruses play all sorts of roles. We just discovered that fact when we looked at SHEVA. Now . . . it's pretty confused.”

Stella seemed, if anything, offended by this. “We're not new?”

“Of course you're new,” Mitch said. “I really don't understand it very well. When we all get together again, your mother will know enough to explain it to us. She's learning as fast as she can.”

“We're not taught biology here,” Stella said.

Mitch clamped his teeth together. Keep them down. Keep them under lock and key. Otherwise, you might prime their fuse.

“That makes you angry?” Stella asked.

He could not answer for a moment. His fists knotted on the top of the table. “Of course,” he said.

“Make them let us go. Get us all out of here,” Stella said. “Not just me.”

“We're trying,” Mitch said, but knew he wasn't being entirely truthful. As a convicted felon, he had a limited range of options. And his own sense of resentment and damage reduced his effectiveness in groups. In his darkest moods, he thought that was why he and Kaye were no longer living together.

He had become a political liability. A lone wolf.

“I have lots of families here, and they're growing,” Stella said.

“ We'reyour family,” Mitch said.

Stella watched him for a moment, puzzled.

Joanie opened the door. “Time's up,” she said.

Mitch spun around in his chair and tapped his watch. “It's been less than an hour,” he said.

“There'll be more time tomorrow if you can come back,” Joanie said.

Mitch turned to Stella, crestfallen. “I can't stay until tomorrow. There's something . . .”

“Go,” Stella said, and stood. She came around the table as Mitch got to his feet and hugged her father again, brisk and strong. “There's lots of work for all of us.”

“You are so adult now,” Mitch said.

“Not yet,” Stella said. “None of us knows what that will be like. They probably won't let us find out.”

Joanie tsked, then escorted Mitch and Stella from the room. They parted in the brick corridor. Mitch gave her a small wave with his good arm.

Mitch sat in the hot interior of his truck, under the low Arizona sun, sweating and near despair, lonelier than he had ever been in his life.

Through the fence and across the brush and sand, he saw more children—hundreds of them—walking between the bungalows. His hand drummed on the steering wheel.

Stella was still his daughter. He could still see Kaye in her. But the differences were startling. Mitch did not know what he had expected; he had expected differences. But she was not just growing up. The way Stella behaved was sleek and shiny, like a new penny. She was unfamiliar, not distant in the least, not unfriendly, just focused elsewhere.

The only conclusion he could come to, as he turned over the big engine in the old Ford truck, was a self-observation.

His own daughter scared him.

After the nurse filled another tube with her blood, Stella walked back to the bungalow where they would watch videos after dinner of human children playing, talking, sitting in class. It was called civics. It was intended to change the way the new children behaved when they were together. Stella hated civics. Watching people without knowing how they smelled, and watching the young human faces with their limited range of emotions, disturbed her. If they did not face the televisions, however, Miss Kantor could get really ugly.

Stella deliberately kept her mind clear, but a tear came out of her left eye and traveled down her cheek. Not her right eye. Just her left eye.

She wondered what that meant.

Mitch had changed so much. And he smelled like he had just been kicked.

15

BALTIMORE

The imaging lab office was separated from the Magnetic Resonance Imager—the Machine—by two empty rooms. The forces induced by the toroidal magnets of the Machine were awesome. Visitors were warned not to go down the hall without first emptying their pockets of mechanical and electronic devices, pocket PCs, wallets, cell phones, security name tags, eyeglasses, watches. Getting closer to the Machine required exchanging day clothes for metal-free robes—no zippers, metal buttons, or belt buckles; no rings, pins, tie clasps, or cuff links.

Everything loose within a few meters of the Machine was made of wood or plastic. Workers here wore elastic belts and specially selected slippers or athletic shoes.

Five years ago, right in this facility, a scientist had forgotten the warnings and had her nipple and clitoris rings ripped out. Or so the story went. People with pacemakers, optic nerve rewiring, or any sort of neural implants could not go anywhere near the Machine.

Kaye was free of such appliances, and that was the first thing she told Herbert Roth as she stood in the door to the office.

Slight, balding, in his early forties, Roth gave her a puzzled smile as he put down his pencil and pushed a batch of papers aside. “Glad to hear it, Ms. Rafelson,” he said. “But the Machine is turned off. Besides, we spent several days imaging Wishtoes and I already know that about you.”

Roth pulled up a plastic chair for Kaye and she sat on the other side of the wooden desk. Kaye touched the smooth surface. Roth had told her that his father had crafted it from solid maple, without nails, using only glue. It was beautiful.

He still has a father.

She felt the cool river in her spine, the sense of utter delight and approval, and closed her eyes for a moment. Roth watched her with some concern.

“Long day?”

She shook her head, wondering how to begin.

“Is Wishtoes pregnant?”

“No,” Kaye said. She took the plunge. “Are you feeling very scientific?”

Roth looked around nervously, as if the room was not completely familiar. “Depends.” His eyes squinched down and he could not avoid giving Kaye the once-over.

“Scientific and discreet?”

Roth's eyes widened with something like panic.

“Pardon me, Ms. Rafelson—”

“Kaye, please.”

“Kaye. I think you're very attractive, but . . . If it's about the Machine, I've already got a list of Web sites that show . . . I mean, it's already been done.” He laughed what he hoped was a gallant laugh. “Hell, I've done it. Not alone, I mean.”

“Done what?” Kaye asked.

Roth flushed crimson and pushed his chair back with a hollow scrape of the plastic legs. “I have no idea what in hell you're talking about.”

Kaye smiled. She meant nothing specific by the smile, but she saw Roth relax. His expression changed to puzzled concern and the excess color faded from his face. There is something about me, about this,she thought. It's a charmed moment.

“Why are you down here?” Roth asked.