Chapter 16
Chloe must have nodded off, sitting on Kleio’s bed, but she jolted awake as someone sat beside her, and for a flash she was back in the panicky struggle with the kidnappers before she came fully awake and realized it was Marcus.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“What are you doing here?” she said in exasperation, but at the same time, she grabbed him and pulled him close.
He wrapped his arms around her. “Not gonna be remote at a time like this.”
“What’d the hospital say?”
“What we figured. Concussion. I’ll live.”
“They let you go?”
“They gave me the stink eye, but they couldn’t stop me.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
He raised a hand to show that he was holding one of her Bomb Bars. “Ask me again after I get down these two hundred milligrams of synthetic caffeine.”
She shuddered. “I thought you hated those.” She’d tried one after getting home but hadn’t been able to get it down.
He took a bite, and she noticed that his hand was trembling. “Desperate times and all that. What news?”
“No news. Here, join the VR.” She passed the invitation over and reactivated her own smartspace.
“Oh, hello,” Marcus said. He and Chloe were still sitting in Kleio’s bed, but in a starry void. The only other person present was Grandma, sitting incongruously on an office chair in the middle of the room, her eyes flicking back and forth in her own smartspace. She looked up when Marcus spoke.
“Mr. Carr. How’s the head?”
“Sore, but intact.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Me too,” Chloe said fervently, and burrowed deeper into Marcus’s arms.
Grandma’s sharp eyes softened into an expression Chloe couldn’t name. “What’s it like?” she said.
“What?” Chloe said.
“Having something . . . someone . . .” She paused as if searching for a word, then settled with a shrug on “real.”
The woman was in her sixties, but she didn’t know? “You never did?” Chloe asked gently.
“Once. Oh, not romance; I’m not built for romance. But . . . caring. Real caring, if I’d only understood it at the time.” Her eyes went distant. “I screwed it up.”
“I did too,” Chloe said, squeezing Marcus harder. He kissed the top of her head. “But I figured it out in time to fix it.”
And it had been the caring that had reignited the romance.
It was funny to think of her younger self now, stressed about the tenure clock, disillusioned with the day-to-day sameness of her relationship with Marcus, longing for something she couldn’t define, something magical, something transformative, and willing to give up what she had with Marcus to make room for it.
And then something had happened, but not something magical.
And though everyone in her life had been supportive, nobody understood.
They thought she was shaken because she’d almost died.
They didn’t understand the desperate, unmoored certainty that a mistake had been made, that the threads of narrative in the universe had broken down, because she hadn’t died, because she was alive instead of a young woman with her whole future ahead of her, and no matter how many times and ways she ran it through her mind, she couldn’t make it make sense.
Then she’d learned she was pregnant. It had seemed like a cutting cosmic joke, a punch line to point out how powerless she was.
The same last, awkward intimacy that had crystallized her decision to leave Marcus had introduced this element of life-altering randomness.
One dice roll had saved her life; another had changed it.
Through those difficult weeks, the one person who’d seemed to understand was Marcus.
It was hard to avoid each other when they worked in the same history department.
After the separation, Chloe had looked without success for an appointment at another university that would give her credit toward tenure for her work at Santa Clarita U, just so she wouldn’t have to pass Marcus in the hall or make brief eye contact with him at department meetings.
After the accident, he still took pains to keep his distance, but he became a solid fixture in the background—taking care of the small things, smoothing her way, removing obstacles before she knew they were there.
Then one day, as Chloe sat head-down at her office desk, Marcus passed by, stopped, and came in, closing her door behind him.
They talked all afternoon and into the evening, long after everyone else had left, and at the end of that time, Marcus was leaning in over the desk, and she was leaning toward him, and their heads were almost touching.
When she took a deep breath and told him about the baby, she expected him to recoil, but his eyes had pooled, and he’d taken her hand and held it fiercely.
And Chloe saw something there that he’d kept from her through the years of their failed marriage, or maybe she’d just been unable to see it, in either case because she hadn’t returned it.
But she could see it now, and she knew he was offering more than to take on the role of father to their baby.
He was offering himself to her, offering that steady support he’d been showing her those difficult weeks, offering to make them a single unit again. If she let him.
She did.
When she’d left Marcus, she’d thought she was taking control of her life, but she now saw she’d actually been passive, hoping a reset would lead to effortless transformation instead of working to make the most out of what she’d already started.
Strangely, it was encountering the limits of her control that had helped her let go.
And now she was so proud of the family they’d built, she and Marcus and Kleio.
And Kleio. Oh, god, let it still be and Kleio.
“Hey, can I ask a question?” Marcus said, and she looked up, but he was addressing Grandma.
“You can,” Grandma said.
“What’s your whole deal?”
“Marcus!” Chloe hissed, but Grandma smiled.
“Think of me as the conscience Andrew Norman doesn’t want to have.”
“Okay, but you know that doesn’t answer my question.”
“We’ve worked together for years. I do my best to provide an Overcheck to him, within my very limited authority.
Sometimes I have to go behind his back, like when I pushed Chloe to bring herself to his attention.
I knew he’d decide she was perfect for the vacant ‘opposition’ on his committee.
I also knew she wouldn’t be the pushover he expected once she was there. But mostly I just observe. And worry.”
“You seem to know the Final System well too.”
She nodded. “Andrew would rather not admit it, but I played a significant role in making her who she is, for good and ill. Hence the worry. No one knows her power.”
So Grandma had worked with Norman for years, huh?
Chloe had a sudden idea. She subvocalized a command to search the internet for Andrew Norman partner.
The first results were nothing relevant, but when she scrolled down—bingo.
There was a photo of Andrew Norman and a woman bent over opposite sides of a screen desk.
The caption read, Andrew Norman and Regina Wright believe the future of the NNA lies in merging computer science and neuroscience.
The woman in the photo was decades younger, but definitely Grandma.
Now things made sense. At some point, Grandma and Norman’s working partnership had deteriorated, but she was still involved and felt responsible for what she’d helped create. “All I care about right now,” Chloe said, “is if she can save Kleio.”
“I can,” said a quiet voice, and the System stepped out of the air, her small white figure glowing a little against the starry backdrop as if lit by an invisible light.
“’Bout time you showed up,” Grandma said.
“I have not been inactive,” the System said. “Chloe, please forward the picture to Grandma.”
“What pic—” Chloe began, but at that moment a message notification pinged into her smartspace.
Sudden, thick nausea closed her throat. Grandma had told Chloe to demand—her word—a new proof-of-life picture, but what if the kidnappers were done with her delay and this was a picture of Kleio’s corpse?
It took three tries before she could choke out a subvocalized throat click and open the message.
Her eyes jerked as it unfolded, trying to look and not look at the same time, and then she focused, mercifully, on a picture of a living Kleio.
She was still in a cab, and the angle had again been chosen so nothing outside the windows could be seen.
She no longer looked terrified, but the dull-eyed exhaustion in the gray dawn light was almost worse.
She was also no longer wearing her pajamas, but a fresh and surprisingly coordinated outfit Chloe had never seen before: a powder-blue shirt and peach skirt with matching sun hat.
Her face was partly obscured by the hat’s brim and the sun-shielding fabric that covered her ears and the back of her neck, but Chloe could see enough to note that the kidnappers had washed her tear-streaked face.
She wasn’t sure whether she should be relieved or phreaked out.
She forwarded the image to the address Grandma had given her, and to Marcus. “This is it, then?” Marcus said, in a voice she could tell was purposefully calm but had a little of his hand’s tremble in it.