He could see her suppressing an eye roll. “To be an acceptable risk. And if you say, ‘acceptable in what way,’ I’ll slug you. Do you think it’s a good idea to light up?”
“I want to say, ‘good compared to what?’ I don’t know, Natalie. I think—” He swallowed. “I’m pretty sure Billiam is—” He swallowed. “I think he’s dead.” Neither of them looked at the other. Such a stupid accident. “Whatever else, I think it means that the cops’ll be brutal, because a dead person puts the thing in a different category. On the other hand, our DNA is all over that place, and with the deal they’ll make, they’ll come after us no matter what. On the other hand, I mean, in addition to that, or with that in mind, if we light up now, we’re adding corroboration to any inference that says that we were there, which means that—”
“Enough paranoid rat-holing. We can’t light up.”
“How did you get here?”
“A friend,” she said. “I’m sure she got herself home; she’s warm and cozy under a blanket with a cup of tea waiting for her when she gets up.” Natalie sounded bitter for the first time. Hubert, Etc realized he was half frozen and half starving, so thirsty it was like the inside of his mouth had been painted with starch.
“We’ve got to go.” He looked at himself. In the gray dawn light, the dried blood looked like mud. “Do you think I could get onto the subway like this?”
She craned her neck, shoving stray elements of Seth off her lap. “Not like that. Maybe in Steve’s jacket, though.”
“Seth,” he said.
“Whatever.” She shook Seth by the shoulder, a little roughly. “Come on, Seth, time to go.”
*
They arrived at the station at 5:30, Hubert, Etc wearing Seth’s jacket, which was big on him, carrying his jacket under his arm. The first train rolled in and they shuffled in with bleary morning-shifters and wincing partiers. The people with jobs glared at the partiers. The people with jobs smelled good; the partiers did not, not even to Hubert, Etc’s deadened nose. During the zeppelin bubble, he’d had early mornings as they crunched on meaningless deadlines with the urgency of a car crash for no discernible reason. He’d ridden the first train into work. Hell, he’d slept in the office.
Seth’s comedown had plateaued. He was a perfect oil painting of Man with Drug Hangover, in grubby colors, a lot of shadow and cross-hatching. The cold air had turned his bare arms the color of corned beef, but Hubert, Etc didn’t feel bad about having commandeered his jacket. “Look at ’em,” Seth said in a stagey whisper. “So well-behaved.” They were Desi, Persian, white-bread, but all the same, all in their working peoples’ uniforms of respectability. A couple of the employed gave them shitty looks. Seth noticed, getting ready to pick a fight.
“Don’t,” Hubert, Etc said, as Seth said, “It’s the ultimate self-deception. Like they’re going to be able to change anything with a paycheck. If a paycheck could change your life, do you think they’d let you have one?”
It was a good line. Seth had used it before. “Seth,” he said, in a firmer tone.
“What?” Seth sat up straighter, looked belligerent. Toronto’s subways, like most subways, were places of civil inattention. It took a lot to get other people to overtly acknowledge you. Seth had done it. People stared.
Natalie leaned over and cupped her hand to Seth’s ear, hissed something. He clamped his mouth shut and glared, then looked at his feet. She gave Hubert, Etc a half smile.
“Where are we going?” she said. Hubert, Etc was cheered by that “we.” They’d been comrades-in-arms for the night and he had her contact details, but he’d been half expecting her to say that she was going home and leaving him with Seth.
“Fran’s?” he said.
She made a face.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s twenty-four hours, it’s warm, they don’t throw you out—”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a pit, though.”
He shrugged. He remembered when the last Fran’s had shut, when he was a teenager, and when the chain was rebooted as a hobby business by a lesser Weston, amid fanfare about the family and its connection to the city’s institutions. The new Fran’s felt haunted, and the feeling was, ironically, most intense during special events with live servers instead of automats. Live humans bearing trays of food highlighted the fact that the restaurant was designed for free-ranging, dumb robots and a minimum of human oversight. But it was cheap, and you could sit there a long time.
He wished he’d suggested somewhere cool. When he’d cared about this stuff, he’d had a continuous list of places where he would go if he had the money and someone to go with. Seth had that kind of list on tap, but he didn’t want to talk to Seth. He wished Seth would volunteer to go home and sleep off his trauma and drug residue. Which wasn’t going to happen, because this was Seth.
“Fine,” she said.
Her eyes glazed over and she looked at her lap, cupped her hand over the interaction surface on her thigh, checking her messages. This reminded Hubert, Etc to light up, and his own interface surfaces buzzed, letting him know about the things he should be doing. He dewormed his inboxes, flushing the junk and spum. He snooze-barred messages to bug him again later—something from his parents, an old girlfriend, some work he’d chased at a caterer’s.
They were almost at St Clair station now, and as they stood, one of the morning-shift people got into Seth’s space. He was a big guy, fair-skinned, freckled with a large, beaky nose and a conservative collar-length haircut. He wore a cheap overcoat with some kind of uniform under it, maybe medical. “You,” he said, leaning in, “are a mouthy little fuck, for someone who’s sponging welfare and partying all night. Why don’t you go get a fucking job?”
Seth leaned away, but the guy followed him, everyone swaying with the motion of the slowing train. Hubert, Etc’s adrenals found an unsuspected reservoir and goosed. His heart thundered. Someone was going to get hit. The guy was big, smelled of soap. There were cameras on the people and on the train, but he didn’t look like he gave a shit.
Natalie put a hand on the guy’s chest and pushed. He looked down in surprise at the slim, female hand on his chest, clamped his huge hand over her wrist. She whipped her free hand around, bashing him in the chest with her purse, which sprang open and sloshed cold vomit down his chest. She looked as disgusted as he did, but when he let go and stumbled back, she leaped through the closing subway doors, Hubert, Etc and Seth on her heels. They turned in time to see the guy sniffing his hand incredulously, his body language telegraphing I can’t believe you dumped a bag full of barf on me—
“Natalie,” Seth said on the escalators—the other passengers who’d gotten off gave them a wide berth. “Why was your purse full of sick?”
She shook her head. “I’d forgotten about it. I got sick when I saw—” She closed her eyes. “When I saw Billiam.”