Timothy tossed her a pair of dark goggles and motioned for her to put them on. She did, and put a hand over Muskrat’s eyes so that she wouldn’t be blinded. After a few seconds, the light of a welding torch burst in her vision like a tiny green star. The smoke was acrid and metallic and she liked it.
“Thing is,” Timothy said, loud over the roar of the torch, “there’s only a couple kinds of anger. You get angry because you’re afraid of something or you get angry because you’re frustrated.” The torch turned off with a pop.
“Safe?” Teresa asked.
“Sure, you can take ’em off.” When she did, the cave seemed brighter than when she’d put them on before. Even with the intensity of the light, her eyes had adapted to darkness. She scratched Muskrat’s ears as Timothy went on. “If you’re . . . I don’t know. If you’re scared maybe your dad isn’t the kind of guy you thought he was, you might get angry. Or you’re afraid no one’s got your back. Like Nutless.”
“His name’s Connor,” Teresa said, but she smiled when she said it.
“Yeah, him,” Timothy agreed. “Or maybe you’re afraid he made you look stupid in front of your crew. So you get angry. If you didn’t give a shit whether your old man lived or died? If Nutless and your crew didn’t matter to you? Then you’re not angry. Or the other way? You’re trying to get something to work. A conduit to fit. Been working at it for hours, and just when it’s looking about right, the metal bends on you and you gotta start over. That’s angry too, but it ain’t scared-angry. It’s the other one.”
“So you look at me,” Teresa said, derision in her voice, “and you think I’m scared and frustrated?”
“Yep.”
Teresa’s mockery died, and she hugged her knees. It didn’t fit at all with who and what she thought she was, but something in her leaped toward his word. It felt like recognizing someone. Like catching a glimpse of herself from an angle she’d never seen before. It was fascinating.
“How do you deal with it?”
“Fucked if I know, Tiny. I don’t do those.”
“You don’t get angry?”
“Not out of fear, anyway. I don’t remember the last time I was afraid of something. Frustration was more my thing. But I had this friend, and I watched her die slow. I couldn’t do anything about it. That was frustrating, and I got angry. Started looking for a fight. But I had another friend who straightened me out.”
“How?”
“She beat the living shit out of me,” Timothy said. “That helped. And ever since then, nothing has seemed like it was worth getting too bent out of shape over.”
He rolled a bright silver cone about the size of a thumb in his palm and scowled.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Injector’s getting a little ragged at the mouth is all,” Timothy said. “I can touch it up. Just means I’ll be drinking my yeast patties more than eating them.”
“You spend a lot of time with that thing.”
“You take care of your tools, your tools take care of you.”
Teresa leaned against the wall. The stone was cool against her back. Deep cave temperatures were the measure of the underlying climate average. Mass and depth smoothed out the daily highs and lows—even the annual fluctuations of summer and winter. She knew it intellectually, but she hadn’t understood it until Timothy’s cave. The way it always felt cool in the heat and warm in the chill.
“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.