The Games

Chapter FOURTEEN



Vidonia had never been to the Stratus, but after shooting down Ben’s initial suggestion of a place called Scantily’s, she knew she could do much worse for a night out with the boys. Besides, after a quick look around, she decided the place had atmosphere. It was dark where it was supposed to be dark, and bright where it was supposed to be bright, and the smell of food was almost intoxicating in and of itself. Alcohol was good for many things; the first of these was forgetting. They could all do with a bit of that.

They were shown to a table on the central level, well above the gyrating throngs of twentysomethings in the dance pits below. From where she sat, Vidonia could feel the subtle thrum of techno-bump in her stool but couldn’t make out the words. Perfect.

When the waiter came, they were each required to hand in their credit cards for attachment authorization. Any lawsuits rendered against the bar for their behavior after being served alcohol could now be directly attached to their personal lines of credit. The policy tended to keep the number of drunken shenanigans to a minimum. Nothing helped people second-guess their behavior like the cold hand of the establishment in their back pocket.

Silas ordered the first round. Vidonia took a sip. The drink was sweet and syrupy, and laced with enough alcohol to stagger a horse. She tipped it back, feeling the beat of the music coming off her chair, watching the people laughing at the next table. Waiters and waitresses in bright suspenders and ever-changing flat-screen buttons snaked sideways down the narrow aisles between the tables, carrying round trays of drinks above their heads. Somewhere in the distance, “Happy Birthday” was being sung, while across from her, Ben had already half killed his drink. Despite his earlier enthusiasm, like her, Silas seemed to be taking it a little slower.

“You want to eat?” Silas asked.

She shook her head.

“Yeah, me, either.” Silas turned his attention to Ben. “You really look like shit.”

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean the burn. You’re peeling,” Silas said.

Ben nodded with the music. He’d been out in the sun again earlier this week, and now the alcohol had brightened his red skin another shade. He smiled. “The Karmic result of the sins of colonialism,” he said, in his best English accent. “What can you do?” He held his arms up in mock resignation. “My ancestors should have paid closer attention to local lighting conditions before disseminating themselves throughout the world. I hear it’s cloudy in northwestern Europe today. Oh, wait, that’s every day.”

“Ever hear of sunscreen?” Vidonia offered.

“What kind of a man wears sunscreen?”

“Pale men,” she said.

“Would Eric the Red have worn sunscreen?”

“Why do you think they called him Eric the Red? And he never ventured farther south than Greenland. Imagine how he would have handled a Southern Cali summer? They may have called him Eric the Peeler.”

“Good point,” Ben said.

“Or Eric the Melanoma,” Silas added.

Another round of drinks came, and this time Ben paid. “To SPF three-fifty,” he said, offering a toast.

“Here, here,” Silas said.

Vidonia hadn’t yet finished her first drink, so she clinked glasses and took a long last swallow. The warmth spread outward from her stomach almost instantly, seeping along her arms to her fingertips. She wasn’t usually a drinker, but when she did, this was the tightrope she liked to walk, with the buzz knocking just at the edge of her perception. She smiled, and it must have been too large, because Silas smiled back, giving his head a little shake.

“Feeling okay?” he said.

“Great. It’s been a while.”

“Did you hear about the Brannin?” Ben asked Silas.

“What about it?”

“So then you didn’t hear.”

“Hear what?” Silas asked.

“It’s going back online again.”

“What? When?” Silas almost choked on his drink.

“Next week.”

“I just talked to Baskov today. He didn’t say anything about it.”

“I’m not surprised. He doesn’t have anything to do with it this time. From what I hear, he’s washed his hands of Chandler altogether. An economics group is funding the run.”

“Jesus, what the hell for?”

“Not sure exactly. Something about logarithms and stock-market research. They’re looking for an investment edge.”

“Well, the Brannin gave us an edge. A sharp one, right in the back,” Silas said.

“Here, here,” Ben offered another toast.

Vidonia clinked glasses again and started on her next drink, sipping deeply. Silas slew his in long gulps and didn’t place the glass back down on the table until it was empty. The glass looked like a thimble in his hand, and she was amazed again at the size of him. God, he was big—so different from John. Normal-size John. Familiar John. Back-home John.

Vidonia tried not to think about the large man to her left, and she decided instead to veer the conversation into less risky territory. For a while, she had some success with both.

She brought up Olympics past, and for a while they laughed about the scandals that lived there. The Y-chromosome women, the Chinese swimmers with their paddle feet—an abnormality the Chinese had tried to pass off as natural birth defects, in all four swimmers. Looking back, it was all so funny now. Just as the gladiator event disallowed any human DNA, the rest of the Olympic events disallowed any manipulation of the contestants at all. With the level of sophistication achieved in the tests today, it was simply impossible to get away with stuff like that, so nobody tried anymore. Instead, they channeled all their energies of manipulation into the one event where it was legally sanctioned.

When the waiter came with the next round of drinks, he set a fourth, smaller shot of cloudy liquid on the table. “Who’s driving tonight, folks?”

Ben and Silas looked at each other, nodded.

“One,” Silas said.

“Two,” Ben said.

“Three.” Silas threw rock. Ben, paper. “I guess I am,” Silas said grudgingly, looking over at the waiter.

“Then this is for you,” the waiter said, and slid the small, milky glass of D-hy toward Silas. “After you drink it, give yourself five minutes before you drive.”

“Yeah, I know the drill.”

Vidonia hated the taste of D-hy, but she had to admit that it had cut down on the number of drunk driving accidents in the three years or so that it had been out. Bars were required to give it out free to at least one member of a drinking party, unless the people could prove they didn’t intend to drive home.

When the waiter walked away, Ben jerked the discussion back around. “So what did Baskov have to say in the limo?”

“Nothing interesting,” Silas said. His eyes turned to a young woman walking purposefully toward them.

The woman stopped at their table and looked between Silas and Ben. She had a clip screen in her hand and appeared somewhat out of place in her blue-and-brown business uniform. “Is one of you Ben Wells?”

Ben’s back straightened, and he suddenly sat four inches higher. “That’s me.”

“Great.” The woman’s expression loosened in relief, and she slapped an envelope down on the table in front of him. “I’ve been trying to track you for the last three weeks, but you never used your card.”

“What’s this about?”

“Sir, if you’ll just sign here”—she held the clip screen out to him, indicating with a finger where to scratch his name—“I’ll leave the package with you and be on my way.”

He ignored her and reached for the yellow envelope.

“Sir.”

Ben tore the end off.

“Sir, you’ll need to sign this first.”

He slid the contents of the envelope onto the table. “Ninety-eight thousand,” he said, holding up the check. “It’s a start. A good start.”

“Sir, you need to sign for that.” She pushed the clip screen on him.

“No.”

The young woman looked confused. “You must—”

“Must what?” His voice raised. “If I sign that, then I give up rights to go after her for the other part she owes me, right? I know how she’s trying to work this. This was my money to begin with, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her keep the other half just because she’s paying this back.”

The young woman glanced around nervously at the people who were beginning to stare. “Sir, you can take that up with a lawyer. This isn’t the place. I’m just supposed to get you to sign receivership, that’s all.”

“Receivership of payment, right? But this isn’t payment. This is just her returning what she owes. She’s trying to pass this off as payment for a car, right? But it’s my car and my money. No.”

“Sir, I have to warn you—”

“Warn me?” Ben stood up, suddenly a tower of indignant anger. His stool teetered backward and clattered to the floor. Around them, the nearby tables had gone silent, though the rest of the club was as noisy as ever. “Two years ago I came home early to surprise her. Well, I surprised her, all right. And the guy behind her. That was my warning. That was the first hint I had that things were different between us. Don’t talk to me about warnings until you walk in on something like that.”

The woman’s face flushed red. Her mouth opened. No words came out, so she closed it with a snap.

The anger seeped from Ben’s face. “There is no point in arguing.” Ben’s voice was soft and measured again. “Let’s play a game, shall we? The game is called Who Gets the Money? Your part of the game is simple. You call your boss and explain what happened—some a*shole took the check and refused to sign for it. Your boss then calls the bank to try and cancel this check as quickly as he can. Someone at the bank then has to block the check on the computer system.

“My part of the game is also simple. I try and get to the bank and cash the check as quickly as I can. Keeping in mind that possession is still nine-tenths of the law, my ex can sue me if she wants the money back. That sounds fair, doesn’t it?”

The woman stared at him.

Ben turned to Silas. “Well, how about you? Does that sound fair?”

“Sounds fair to me,” Silas said.

“Okay, then that’s the game,” Ben said. “Starting now.”

The young woman hesitated for another moment, looking at the faces fixed on her from the circlet of interest that had gathered around their table. Then she started moving all at once, snatching the phone from her thigh pocket and flipping the screen open.

“No, no, no.” Ben shook his finger at her gently. He pointed to a sign hanging on the wall.

No calls allowed in restaurant

Her mouth tightened, and she snapped the phone shut. Gripping the clip screen tightly in her hand, she turned on her heels and angled off through the crush of people without saying goodbye.

Ben turned back to face the table. “Well, I’m sorry, but it seems that something has come up. I’m going to have to rush off. But the drinks were on me; I seem to have come into a bit of money.”

Ben picked up the glass of D-hy, gulped it down with a grimace, then turned and quickly followed the young woman toward the door.

When he was gone, Silas turned to Vidonia. “Care to take odds that he’ll make it?”

“I couldn’t even guess who’s got the better chance.”

“I’d give it even money,” Silas said. “But chances are he’ll just give the check back, anyway, come Monday.”

“He seemed pretty set on keeping it.”

“When a couple spends two years divorcing, maybe they don’t really want to get divorced.”

Vidonia shot him a skeptical look.

“They do this. Breaking up can be easy; they’re making it hard. Back and forth, every few months.”

They sat, sipping their drinks.

“It looks like it’s just you and me now,” Vidonia said, not quite sure why she liked the idea. “Do you want to get out of here?”

“Sure,” Silas said.

Vidonia lost their tie-breaking round of rock, scissors, paper, and when the waiter brought another shot of D-hy, she drank it down like a good sport.

Five minutes later, as she climbed behind the wheel of Silas’s sports car, she turned to him, saying, “It’s been a while since I’ve driven a pure combustor. My car is technically a hybrid, but it drives like a fuel cell.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just go easy on the accelerator; you’ll be fine.”

She turned the key, and the engine shook to life. A thrill shot through her as she put the transmission into reverse and backed the car out. As she turned left onto the boulevard, she goosed the pedal and her head jerked back against the headrest.

“Easy,” Silas said.

She couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. “How do we get to a beach?”

“It’s a forty-minute drive.”

“I’ve never seen the Pacific. Do you want to go?”

The awkward smile spread across his face now. “Sure, why not?”

Once she merged onto the highway, she ate up the yellow dashes as quickly as she dared. At one point, the speedometer crested eighty-five miles per hour. It was the fastest she’d ever driven, and Silas only looked across the seat at her with amusement.

When the silence threatened to turn awkward, she said, “That was an interesting scene back there at the bar.”

Silas nodded. “There have been a couple others like it.”

“Bad divorce,” she said. “And how about you? You’ve never talked about yourself. Are you married?”

“Was. I had a good divorce, though. Smooth as silk. Before long, it was like we’d never been together.”

“No kids, then.” It wasn’t a question. “Who’s the blond little boy I saw on your desk?”

“A nephew. My sister’s son.”

“He looks a little like you, just painted up differently.”

“Yeah, I’ve been told that before. He’s got the bones from my father’s side. Chloe and I never wanted kids, though. For different reasons. I’m just opting out of the whole system.”

“What system is that?”

“The dog-eat-dog biological arms race. When you do what I do for a living, it jades you a little, I think. Everything alive struggles to leave something of itself behind. I’m leaving myself behind in other ways.”

“It sounds like you’ve given it some thought.”

“I can only remember my father in bits and pieces. That kind of thing makes a person think. Besides, I love my nephew. There’s no void to fill.”

Vidonia nodded and drove on in silence.

She was rounding a curve beside a long, low hill when she first heard it. She rolled her window all the way down, and in the distance, she could clearly make out the sound of breakers. She hadn’t realized how close they’d come already to the edge of the continent.

“Pull over here,” Silas said.

She eased onto the gravel on the side of the road, and when she cut the engine, the sound of the ocean was a hiss in her ears. She could smell the sea salt.

The path down to the beach was steep but well worn, and Silas reached for her hand at one point when she stumbled. She didn’t let him take it back when they stepped onto the sand. Hand in hand, they strolled toward the rolling surf. It was so beautiful. White, frothy bands of foam slid toward them across a smooth floor of sand. A three-quarter moon glinted off the water in the distance.

“So what about you—ever been married?” he asked as they walked.

“No.” Her tone left a “but” lingering unsaid at the end of her answer, and she knew he sensed it, because he pressed on quickly, “What about family—any brothers or sisters?”

“I have one living sister, but we haven’t talked in years. We’re in different worlds now.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Is it?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he laced his fingers deeper into hers.

As they walked along, they splashed at the undulating waterline, and she wasn’t sure if she kissed him or he kissed her, but they were suddenly kissing, standing there, and it was perfect and soft, and she loved the way his height made him seem to be simultaneously above her and at her side. The water moved over their feet, sinking them in the wet sand. Anchoring them. Their kissing grew more fervent now, and she could feel the need in him but could feel also that he was holding back and, finally, pulling away. And then they were walking again and not talking anymore; and that, somehow, was perfect, too.

When they finished making the climb back to the car twenty minutes later, he led the way, guiding her gently up the slope by her hand. This time, he opened the passenger-side door for her. He climbed in the driver’s side and, with a backward glance over his shoulder, pulled back onto the road, headed for the Olympic compound.

In the soft green glow of the dash light, she considered the man beside her. At first glance he looked almost too large for the car in which they sat, as if it were something he wore instead of something he rode in. But then, perhaps, that was the point; and she decided that if the car was a suit that he wore, she liked the cut.

“Could you stop at the next gas station, please? There’s something I need to buy,” she said.

Thirty minutes later, they pulled onto the laboratory grounds, and Silas walked her up the stairs to the door of her living quarters. At the threshold, they kissed again, moving together. She twisted the knob behind the small of her back, and when the door clicked open, she pulled him into the darkness.

They were only voices now, and breathing and touches. Big hands moved along her body, and she pulled him across the room by his shirt until she felt a bump against the back of her legs. The room was small. She sank onto the bed.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

She was, and she let her hands be the answer.