Nemesis Games

“We don’t talk about it,” a young man’s voice said sharply. Cyn looked at the door. Thick with dread, Naomi turned too. The boy looked terribly old and terribly young at the same time. His skin was darker than Marco’s, and his hair had more curl. The eyes were the same, though. And the mouth. Something huge – larger than oceans – moved in her chest. Emotions she’d buried rose up, and the rip threatened to pull her away. She tried to hide it, but she had to put a hand flat on the table to steady herself.

He stepped into the room. The sand-colored shirt was large on him, but she could see that his body was in the place between the coltish growth of adolescence and the thickening muscle of a man. One of the figures on the bunk stirred and turned, but didn’t otherwise react.

“We don’t talk about it until we’re safely back. Not even in here. Not at all. Sabez?”

“Savvy mé,” Cyn said. “Just thought since —”

“I know what you thought. It passes, but we don’t talk about it.”

For the first time, the young man’s eyes turned to hers. Her own struggle was mirrored in his eyes. She wondered what she looked like to him. What was in his mind and heart where hers was joy and guilt and a venomous regret. This was the moment she hadn’t allowed herself to want. She’d known it was coming since the message from Marco arrived on Tycho. She wasn’t ready for it. He made a small, quick smile and nodded to her.

“Filip,” she said carefully, as if the word were fragile. When he answered, his voice could have been her echo.

“Mother.”

Chapter Ten: Amos

The high-speed rail station in Philadelphia was near the center of a middle-income commercial area. Wage earners wandered the streets between strip malls, buying the semi-fashionable clothes and petty luxuries only available to those with currency. Only not too much currency. High-end shopping would be somewhere else, protected by security designed to keep people like these out.

Even on Earth, there were people with money, and then there were people with money.

It was weird for Amos to think that he might have enough in his account to pass for the latter. It amused him to imagine wandering over to some highbrow shopping center in his unstylish Belt-made clothes just to give the sales staff a fit when he dropped a couple grand on something useless. Maybe a nice solid platinum drink shaker. For that once or twice a year when he felt like drinking a martini.

Maybe later. After.

He headed out of the mall and toward the residential district that his hand terminal’s map said Lydia’s old house was in. At the short, tunnel-like exit he was accosted by a boy of eleven or twelve wearing a cheap paper jumpsuit, the kind that basic kiosks dispensed for free with a thumbprint. The boy offered him a variety of sexual services at rock-bottom prices. Amos grabbed the boy by the chin and tilted his face up. There were the fading yellow marks of a not-too-recent beating on his cheek, and the telltale pink around the eyelids of a pixie dust habit.

“Who’s your walker?” Amos said.

The boy yanked back away from his hand. “Don’t touch for free, man.”

“No troubles. I’m not a grabber. Just who’s walking you? He around?”

“Don’t know what you mean.” The boy started looking around for an escape route.

“Yeah, okay. Get lost.” Amos watched the boy run off and felt something pressing at his stomach like the onset of a cramp. He couldn’t help out every street kid he came across. There were too many of them, and he had other work to do. Frustrating, that. Maybe the kid would find his pimp and tell him about the big scary guy who grabbed his face. Then the pimp would come looking for him, to teach him a lesson about not fucking with the merchandise.

The thought put a smile back on Amos’ face and made the knot in his stomach go away.

Lydia’s house was thirty-seven blocks from the train station in a low-income neighborhood, but not in a government housing block. Someone was paying actual money for the place, which was interesting. Amos didn’t think Lydia could have cleaned up her records enough to qualify for job training. Maybe the husband was a citizen with the skills and clean background to get a straight job. That was interesting too. What kind of guy living an honest citizen’s life marries an aging gangster like Lydia?

Amos walked at a leisurely pace, still sort of hoping the pimp would track him down and make an appearance. An hour and a half later his hand terminal told him he’d reached his destination. The house didn’t look like much. Just a small one-level that from the street was an almost exact copy of every other small single-story house in the neighborhood. A tiny garden filled the narrow space between the house and the sidewalk. It looked lovingly tended, though Amos couldn’t remember Lydia ever owning a plant.

He walked up the narrow path through the garden to the front door and rang the bell. A small, elderly man with a fringe of white hair opened a moment later. “Can I help you, son?”