“Be good to her, Connor,” Sonia says, gently. “And don’t let Beau get to you. He just likes to be the big man.”
“No worries.”
He descends, and she closes the trapdoor above him. The basement smells like teen spirit, as the old prewar song goes. For a brief moment he has a flashback without words or images—just a swell of feeling—back to the first time he was herded down those steps two years ago. The invincibility he was feeling when he woke up is now tempered by the cold concentrate of that memory.
Risa’s at her little first aid station tending to a girl’s swollen, slightly bloody lip. “I bit my lip in my sleep—so?” the girl says, instantly on the defensive. “I have nightmares—so?”
Once the girl is tended to, Connor sits down in the treatment chair. “Doctor, I have a problem with my tongue,” he says.
“And what might that be?” asks Risa cautiously.
“I can’t keep it out of my girlfriend’s ear.”
She gives him the best Oh, please look he’s ever seen, and says, “I’ll call the Juvies to cut it out. I’m sure that’ll take care of the problem.”
“And it’ll give some other poor soul a highly talented sensory organ.”
She allows him the last laugh, studying him for a few moments.
“Tell me about Lev,” she finally says.
He’s a bit deflated to have the playfulness so totally squashed out of their conversation.
“What about him?” Connor asks.
“You said you were with him for a while. What’s he like now?”
Connor shrugs, like it’s nothing. “He’s different.”
“Good different, or bad different?
“Well, the last time you saw him, he was planning on blowing himself up—so anything is an improvement.”
Another kid comes to Risa with what looks like a splinter in his finger, sees the two of them talking, and goes away to take care of it himself.
Connor knows he can’t get out of this conversation, so he tells Risa what he can. “Lev’s been through a lot since the harvest camp. You know that, right? Clappers tried to kill him. And that asshole Nelson captured him, but he got away.”
“Nelson?” Risa says caught completely by surprise. “The Juvey-cop you tranq’d?”
“He’s not a cop anymore. He’s a parts pirate, and he’s nuts. He’s got it out for me and Lev. Probably you, too, if he could find you.”
“Great,” says Risa, “I’ll add him to my list of people who want me dead.”
Suddenly, with the specter of Nelson in the conversation, Connor finds bringing the conversation back to Lev is now a relief. “Anyway, Lev hasn’t grown any—except for his hair. I don’t like it. It’s past his shoulders now.”
“I worry about him,” Risa says.
“Don’t,” Connor tells her. “He’s safe on the Arápache reservation, communing with whatever it is that Chancefolk commune with.”
“You don’t sound too happy about that.”
Connor sighs. When Connor and Grace left the Rez, Lev was filled with all of this crazy talk about getting the Arápache to take a stand against unwinding. As if they ever would. In some ways, he’s just as naïve as the day Connor saved him from his tithing. “He says he wants to fight unwinding, but how can he do it from an isolationist reservation? The truth is, I think he just wants to disappear someplace safe.”
“Well, if he’s found peace, then I’m happy for him—and you should be too.”
“I am,” Connor admits. “Maybe I’m just jealous.”
Risa smiles. “You wouldn’t know what to do with peace if you had it.”