The first was a Smokeless, still sealed in its box—a box, her husband assured her, that was printed with the invisible bar code identifying it as an OLE Canteen purchase. The item inside the box looked exactly like a Smokeless, and it weighed, within a tenth of a gram, the same as a Smokeless, but it was not a Smokeless. It contained an illegal chemical called Quicksilver, which, if sprayed into an attacker’s face at close range—a sprayer was built cleverly into the fake Smokeless, the valve only visible upon close scrutiny—caused unconsciousness within seconds. The length of that unconsciousness was highly variable: a few minutes, at least, but often much longer, and there were cases of brain damage and even death reported. “Don’t smoke it by accident,” David had said, barking harsh laughter, when he gave it to her.
The other item, packaged to look like a NicoClean replacement cell (complete, too, with Canteen bar code), was a fifteen-gram vial of Salt. “A little pick-me-up,” David had said, and Marta accepted it with effusive thanks, knowing that these two going-away gifts had probably cost him a small fortune, and that the point for him was as much the extravagance as the usefulness of the presents themselves. He liked knowing he could cheat the system, that he had the money and the connections to make it easy. He also liked knowing that Marta had thirsts only he could quench, thirsts that kept her occupied and compliant, thin, dependent. The second-hardest thing she had ever done was quit Salt cold turkey; the hardest was hiding the fact she had quit from her husband and pretending, for six weeks now, that nothing had changed. She still accepted his “gifts,” still emerged from the bathroom pretending to feel that clean, radiant calm way down deep into the whorls of her fingerprints, when she was actually so depressed, so tired, that simply coming to a stand felt like a chore. And her stomach was still so riotous, even now after six weeks, that getting most of a meal down was a misery, the aftermath often agony.
She had purchased an actual Smokeless and NicoClean replacement cell at the Canteen, thinking that she would need to get the purchase on record, and she thought now about putting those into her bag instead. She had been smoking since getting here—partly to establish a precedent for bringing the Smokeless past the checkpoint, partly to take some of the edge off her sudden break with not just the Salt but also booze—and she wouldn’t mind having the option once they were out in the woods. A way to calm her nerves. She could lock the Quicksilver and vial of Salt in her room safe, along with her jewelry and her zonecard, and no one would be the wiser. But she hesitated.
She would feel safer with the Quicksilver. As for the Salt, perhaps she shouldn’t tempt herself. But her gut told her to bring it, that it could never hurt to have something valuable on hand. A carrot as well as a stick. She’d learned, as the wife of David Perrone, that there was a time for both.
—
“I’m going to need you to go out of town for a while,” David had told her. This was in September.
“Out of town?” she said vaguely. It was six o’clock, an hour before their dinner reservation, and they were both in the living room, sipping vodka tonics, each tuned to their feeds and not speaking much to the other. Scrolling with her thumb pad, then tapping the screen gently with a nail, she checked on the boys, Sal and Enzo, who were both in Wilmington, attending classes (they claimed) at the university. Sal was at the Sand Dollar Tavern, where he had already spent, she saw, a hundred credits on happy hour longnecks and appetizers. Sweet lord. And Enzo wasn’t showing up on her feed at all, which only meant that he wasn’t currently spending money—or maybe he was with Sal, and Sal was putting it all on his tab. His tab—well, his father’s. I hate how you watch every single little thing I do, Sal had complained his freshman year, when Marta had called to express concern about the fact that he was at a gaming parlor when she knew he was supposed to be attending his Psych 100, and Marta had said, Well, when you have your own Deep Pocketz, you can have all the freedom you want.
“Not immediately,” said David. “It’ll take time for certain things to go into motion. A month or two. And not for long, just until things quiet down some.”
Marta blinked and paused her feed. “Wait. What?”
“I’m just being overly cautious.”
“Overly cautious about what?”
He exhaled, bull-like, through his nose. “Can you unplug for thirty seconds here? I’m trying to tell you that something has come up. We need to get you somewhere safe until my business is settled.”
Marta swallowed the rest of her drink so fast that an ice cube went down her throat and slivered like a stone through her esophagus. “Wait. What about the boys?”
“I’ve been looking into it. Enzo’s been hounding me about some semester abroad thing. Italy or England, but I’m leaning toward England. It’s going to cost a fortune, but security’s tight there, real tight, and the quarantines are stricter. And they have the Edu-Passes already, so we could have them there by the end of the month.”
For a split second Marta felt a burst of hopefulness and joy—a break in the dark clouds that had been hanging over her since the boys left home for college three years ago. “I haven’t been to England since I was a girl. There’s so much in London I could show them.”
David’s face grew still, and his lip curled in that way she had grown to hate. “Marta.”
“What?”
He shook his head with exasperation. “For one thing, I don’t want everybody I care about in one place. That puts you all at greater risk. For another, I can’t have you all going off to Europe at the same time without me. It would seem suspicious.”
“So you’re separating the boys?” The thought unnerved her.
“Of course not,” David said. “I might as well cut their hearts out.”
What about my heart? she thought of saying. Instead, in a voice edged with a wearisome (even to her) bitterness, she said, “But everyone gets along just fine without me.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ. You know we couldn’t get the paperwork to get you over there with them before November, anyway, and that would be too late to do any good.”