Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

A little shadow crossed his eyes at that, and Leah frowned. He’d been out the past two evenings, after Genie was in bed and Leah was supposed to be. Both times, she’d heard him talking to Jenny Casey on the phone before he left, but she didn’t know whether he’d gone to see Aunt Jenny, or Elspeth.

She waited for him to start talking again.

He glanced over at Genie, still waiting with her bookbag in one hand and her other on the doorknob. “Do you want to play hooky, petite chouchou?”

She nodded, and he looked back at Leah. “All right. I’ll go in for the morning. You girls can do your homework while I get things halfway squared away, and then we’ll kidnap Jenny and Elspeth and have lunch with them. Then the three of us will go up the tower or out to the castle or something. Go peel your uniforms off. Let’s go!”

Leah grinned, and didn’t manage to make it around the table to hug her dad before Genie landed on him, squealing.

Leah lifted her head as her dad paused with one hand on the doorknob and turned back to his daughters. “Stay out of trouble while I rouse the women for lunch, ladies.”

Leah held her finger to her lips as the office door closed behind him. Genie looked after him, and then back at her sister, hissing, “Leah, qu’est que tu fais?”

“It’s a surprise, Genie,” she answered, ducking under her dad’s desk. It was easy to slide a data slice containing the information Penelope had e-mailed to her into the reader on Gabe’s terminal. She accessed it and the drive spun up. Leah counted under her breath. “Like a birthday present, kind of. Whatever you do, don’t tell him, okay? Or you’ll ruin it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Leah shot a nervous glance toward the door and pulled the data slice back out, circling around the desk to get back to the table where Genie sat. “You won’t tell?”

Genie shook her head. “Cross my heart. Will he like it?”

“He’ll love it.” Especially if I get my college paid for, she thought, and grinned. “Where should we make him take us for lunch?”

Leah leaned back on velvet grass, watching a single sugar maple leaf drift lazily earthward. An updraft caught it, swirling it sideways, and she turned her head to watch it fly. It drifted toward the grown-ups at the picnic table, and Leah watched with amusement as Aunt Jenny reached out, apparently without noticing, and plucked it out of the air. She giggled, and Jenny turned. “You want more chicken, kiddo?” The remains of a bucket of fried chicken sat on the far end of the table.

Leah shook her head. She heard a calliope nearby, and wondered idly if Genie would let her get away with using her as an excuse to ride the newly installed antique carousel. Leah, of course, was much too old to go on merry-go-rounds by herself. Genie was asleep under the tree, though, sprawled like a puppy.

Jenny got up and walked over to her, crouching down with a grunt. “Don’t get old, Leah.”

“That’s a silly thing to say, Aunt Jenny.”

Jenny frowned. It made the scars on the left side of her face look rippled and shiny. “You’re right. Forget I said that. I take it back: get old.” The frown turned into a grin. “Get old and fat and terrible and smelly and lord it over generations of grandchildren, and tell them about your terrible old Aunt Jenny, who was worse and smellier, and are you sure you don’t want any more biscuits either?”

Leah started laughing at smelly, and by the time Jenny got to grandchildren she was poking Leah in the belly and Leah was giggling so hard she fell down and rolled on the grass, trying to scream softly so she didn’t wake Genie up. Jenny scooped her up as if she weighed nothing and stood, and Leah saw her wince as her knee clicked audibly. “Because if you don’t want any more biscuits, we can go and feed the rest to the ducks, n’est-ce-pas?”

“Aunt Jenny!” she squealed, scandalized. “I’m too big to be carried.”

“Well, if you wanna be put down, there’s a perfectly good pond over there. Looks muddy, too.”

Yelping, Leah slung her arms around Jenny’s neck, feeling the familiar weird bumps at the base of her skull as Jenny carried her back to the picnic table. The steel arm felt warm from the sunlight, and Jenny’s body was hard and strong. Leah’s dad was just pulling his hand back from where it had rested on Elspeth’s wrist, and Leah hid a grin against Jenny’s neck and gave him a big wink. He blushed. Not your girlfriend. Yeah, whatever, Dad.

He coughed. “I’ll want that back when you’re done with it, Jen.”

“Hah,” she answered. “I’ve heard that before. Leah, get the biscuits, please.”

Jenny wasn’t even breathing hard when she set Leah down beside the lake. The birds were Canada geese, mostly, the only ducks a mallard or two, but she crumbled up the biscuits and threw them in the pond anyway, watching the birds quarrel and chase each other. Beside her, Jenny reached into the pocket of her windbreaker and pulled out a little brown bottle. Leah watched out of the corner of her eye as Jenny opened the cap and shook a tablet into her hand.

“What’s that, Aunt Jenny?”

Jenny gave her a guilty look. “Something my doctor wants me to take,” she said. It was yellow and about as big as the head of a big sewing pin, but Jenny weighed it in the palm of her metal hand as if it were much heavier. “I’m not keen on the idea.”

Leah almost thought Jenny would throw it out over the water, and imagined the ducks diving after the little pellet. Instead, Jenny flipped it up onto the back of her thumb, where the nail would have been on a real hand, watching the process intently as she often did when doing fine work with her prosthesis. She’d explained to Leah that she couldn’t feel anything with it, and so she had to be extra careful how she touched things if she didn’t want to break them.

She squinted at the little yellow pill and whispered, “Banzai.”

As she popped it into her mouth, Leah saw her dad around Jenny’s shoulder. He was watching across the green lawn of the park, and his face was twisted in a bitter frown as Elspeth leaned toward him across the picnic table, her hand on his shirtsleeve.

It’s a subtle effect at first. Mostly, I notice the pain dropping away, and the world becoming a little sharper-edged through my good eye. The wind tastes more clearly of heated asphalt from the expressway, of pond weed, cut grass, and the smell of sun-warmed fresh water, which is not at all like the smell of salt sea. It strokes my skin like a tickling hand, drawing a shiver up my spine.

Five minutes later, as Leah and I walk back from the edge of the pond, energy burns through me, bringing with it a sane, strange kind of calm. I feel pantherlike, powerful, as if I could lie in wait all day and move on an instant. Fatigue and aches vanish. I try to limit the spring in my step, knowing Gabe will recognize it for what it is, trying to tell myself I hate the way the little yellow pill makes me feel: lighter, younger, confident. Faster than God.

It doesn’t help. He grimaces and stands as I come up. “I suppose you need to catch the subway back.”

Elspeth gives me an odd look, rescuing me a second time as I fumble for words. “I need to head back, anyway,” she says. “I’m going to visit my dad after work, and I need to make a dent in the queue in my in-box. Why don’t we let Gabe and his girls have their afternoon off, and we’ll catch up with them for dinner?”

Gabe looks me in the eye, and I know the promise he wants. I can’t make it. “VR this afternoon,” I answer. “I’ll be too whipped to do anything but crawl into bed, I’m afraid. You kids have fun without me.”

“Call if you want us to bring over takeout.” His eyes don’t leave mine. Tension tangles in the air between him, Elspeth, myself. Leah picks up on it even if she’s not quite old enough to get it — she bounces from foot to foot, watching our faces.