Harmony (42 page)

“But it’s way out of your way,” I objected.

Sam draped a heavy arm across my neck and smiled at me lazily. “Nothing like a little exercise before bed to help you sleep.”

Tua took Crispin’s hand, hauled him to his feet.

Margaret swallowed a yawn. “Makes sense to me.”

Sam was making me nervous. I was delighted to make friends with the Eye, but I hadn’t thought of getting physical with them. I tried to slip out from under his arm, but as I rose, he moved with me. He pinned me in the crook of his elbow and hauled me in a crooked line across the stage, laughing a throaty man-laugh when I resisted.

He was drunk and I didn’t want to embarrass him. I aimed a subtle jab at his bruised ribs. He winced and drew me tight against his side. “Hey. It’d help if you played along a little.”

I eased my struggles. “Hunh?”

His winey breath was warm against my cheek. “Trust me.”

In the shop, the crew was wheeling in
Crossroads
scenery to be repaired in the morning. A shipment of pipe and fabric had arrived in the vacuum-tube bay. Drawers and lockers slammed. Sam backed me up against the half-open loading door, under the curious stares of the entire shop. He leaned in close, listing, his balance insecure.

I pushed uselessly at his chest, too aware of the comfortable fit of his body against mine. “Sam, what are you—”

“Hush.” His fingers toyed clumsily with the fastening of my coveralls. I shoved his hand away. The crash of fresh lumber being racked behind us hid his quick murmur and the impatient spark in his eye from all but me. “Okay, okay. I need a key to Micah’s studio. I hear you have one.”

“Key?” I echoed stupidly.

“We need a terminal. With guaranteed privacy.” He dipped his head and left a line of butterfly kisses along my neck with a finesse no drunk should be capable of.

My breath caught as biology betrayed me. “Why?” I demanded, too loudly. Over his shoulder I saw one of the men jerk his thumb in our direction with a leering shake of his head.

“To send the citizens of Harmony a message.” He drew back to look at me, his stance unsteady, his eyes amused and speculative.

“What kind of message?”

“Call it a… a counter e-mail.”

“On Micah’s line?”

“No one will know. That’s a promise.”

His half smile made me angry. “Why didn’t you just ask me? Why the damn charade?”

He tiled his head toward the busy shop but kept his smile on me. “Wouldn’t want them to think you
like
me here whispering in your ear…”

Mali and the others crowded through the loading door. Sam pulled away, grinning. I stared at my feet. Peter and Margaret passed, called out their good nights.

Mali eased up beside us. “How’s it?”

“I think we have a team player. What do you say, Gwinn?”

“I don’t want to get Micah in trouble.”

“Nor do I,” Mali returned.

Cris nosed in behind him, trying to appear nonchalant. “So. We gonna do this now?”

I felt trapped. I didn’t know how to refuse them, or why, if Micah would truly not be compromised.

Mali absorbed my sullen confusion. “You needn’t worry. It’ll look just like we were walking you home.”

Ruth trotted into the shop from the big theatre. Sean came after her, shouting orders to the crew.

“No time like the present,” urged Sam.

As he snaked an arm about my waist, I stepped aside. “I can manage by myself, thank you.”

He backed off, but the half smile remained, mocking me obscurely.

* * *

It was Mali and Sam, Cris and Tua and myself by the time we reached the studio. A gang of school kids yelled at us from a brightly lit soccer field along the way, but the dark presence of the Eye discouraged pursuit. Moussa escorted Jane and Songh to the dorm. The rest doubled back home to Cora’s. In the dense shadow of Micah’s guardian beech, Sam produced a tiny penlight and I unlocked the studio gate. I half expected to find Micah hard at work, but the courtyard was fragrant and still, the windows dark. The thick stones of the stoop shone from a recent shower. A cricket chirped in the bougainvillea.

“Nice place,” said Sam as I unlocked the front door. He brushed my hand from the switch plate. “Better not.” He passed Cris the penlight.

Cris hesitated. “You’re sure this is safe? Micah’s not going to…”

Scanning the dark room, Tua located the silhouette of the console. She squeezed Crispin’s arm. “I’ll tap into the public network, leave our message in Monday’s e-mail, and get out fast before anyone notices.”

Cris blinked at her as before a glare. “You will?”

“Cover my tracks completely.”

Sam nodded proudly. “Never seen the like of her.”

“But if they catch you—”

“They won’t.” Tua smiled into his eyes, drew him through darkness toward the console. “You want to watch?”

“Oh yes, you bet I do.”

She slipped into Crispin’s chair while he held the light for her. Her fingers settled to the keypad as if no machine could be unfamiliar or keep its secrets from her. Cris hovered to one side, Mali to the other. I shut the door and stayed by it. Sam waited beside me, as if guarding both the door and me but so close I could hear him breathing. Would he grab me if I moved away? I wondered if I should be afraid of him.

“What kind of message?”

He stirred as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Just a little something to give them pause. Something they must never know came from anyone’s console anywhere. Something that should seem to appear in their lives like”—I started as his shadow reached for me, but it was only to pluck a rose from the breast pocket of my coveralls—“like magic.” He offered the rose in formal presentation. Its pure whiteness glowed in the faint light from the windows. “The charade was for me,” he murmured.

“We’re there,” Tua announced from the console.

Cris gave up little sounds of amazement. “Teach me to do that!”

“Maybe later.” She leaned into his shoulder to give up the keypad but kept her eye on the screen. “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”

Mali bent to the console without hesitation. His fingers worked the pad as smoothly and familiarly as hers. They’ve done this before, I realized.

And beside me, Sam said with something approaching gentleness, “Because even the magic needs a little help sometimes.”

LESSONS:

“I’m going on to Cora’s,” Cris said to me at the turnoff to the dorm. An antique gaslight stood sentinel among the oak trees. Tua moved ahead along the shadowed lane to wait with Mali and Sam. He jerked his head in her direction. “Staying the night.”

I stared at him, too astonished to be angry.

He shrugged. “Just something I gotta do. It’s not every day, y’know…”

“You are welcome to join us.” Mali’s voice floated out of the darkness. What did they have in mind? I glanced down the path at Sam and then away.

“No, thanks. I’ve got an early call in the morning.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” said Cris.

“I’m going in to work on my
Lysistrata
.”

The harsh gaslight exposed the heat of Crispin’s eagerness. “Okay, then. See ya.”

“Just like that?”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

I felt performance pressure there, facing a domestic squabble in front of three waiting shadows, and found I hadn’t the heart for it. Beneath the burn of embarrassment lurked relief. “No, I don’t think we will.” I turned on my heel and took the brick-paved footpath to the dorm.

It was only a few hundred yards to the door, but the path was an S-curve hedged with tall boxwood. I used to find this quaint and comforting. Now the hedge was dark and every bird a mysterious rustling in the leaves. Besides, if I walked a little faster, maybe I could outrun my humiliation. I was practically running by the time I rounded the last curve, a lucky accident. Five teenaged boys lounged against the pillars and railings of the Gothic porch. Light shone in the window of the closed door, silhouetting the head and shoulders of a person inside.

“Here’s one coming now,” said one of the boys.

“And it’s a girl. I get her first.”

“No way, man. I saw her.”

I kept running, anger displaced by terror. My momentum broke their ranks as they closed around me. One grabbed my arm. I yanked him with me. He tripped and fell hard on the stone steps. Hands snatched at my clothes. I yelled at the shadow behind the door. The door flew open as one tough plastered his hand across my mouth. A small horde of hollering apprentices exploded through the door to shove the boys off and bundle me in to safety.

Yolanda caught me as I tumbled into the entry hall. “Gwinny, Gwinny, you okay?”

“Yeah, I…” I looked back at the door. Someone had fashioned a crude bar bolt to secure it against ramming.

“You’re the fourth one we’ve rescued tonight. Jeanie was the first. She got beat up pretty bad.” She consulted a list taped to the wall and checked off an item. “Mark’s got us counting heads, so looks like… where’s Cris?”

I sighed as I headed for the stairs. “You know, Yoli, I don’t really want to talk about it. Take my word for it, he’s all right.”

Mark had left a note on my door. “3,200 so far. Like magic. If we get 5,000, we do the T. C. exec. board meeting Monday. How are you?”

I went up to his room to tell him, but he’d hung his “
GONE FISHIN
” sign on the knob. I went back to my empty bed, hoping he was having a better time than I was.

* * *

Sunday morning it rained, the longest continuous rain I’d ever seen in Harmony. I got drenched biking to the studio, but at least the rain kept the teen muggers indoors.

Micah was in before me, sitting at his desk with his shirt stuck to his back, shivering in the damp. I made him exchange the shirt for his dry smock. The warm olive of his skin was sallow, his eyes dark and tired. For the first time I worried about his health. I wished Rosa would hurry up and come home, to bully him into taking care of himself.

“Crispin’s not joining us this morning?” he asked. “Or Jane?”

“Cris is at Cora’s.” I did not offer an explanation. Micah raised an eyebrow, then let me work in peace.

It was strange to be back in a cramped white space after so many long days in a big black empty one. The studio was so clean. The drafting tools seemed too small for my work-roughened hands. My fingertips were sore. After working with such intensity in the scale of the
The Gift
, I found myself thinking bigger on the drawing board. And without Cris around making me self-conscious about what he’d think, several problems that had plagued me about my
Lysistrata
design simply melted away in the face of this broader vision. It was like, well, magic.

This being the first good thing to happen in quite a number of days, I let the joy of it overtake me. “I can actually
do
this!”

“Good,” murmured Micah absently.

“I don’t mean just
Lysistrata
, I mean all of it!”

He must have heard something special in my babbling. He put down his own pencil and came over. “Well, let me see.”

I flattened my palms across the glowing sketcher. “Oh, there’s nothing here, it’s… I mean, I’m beginning to see how it works. How it works for me, how to put it together, all of it! It’s there, in my head!”

“Then say a prayer right now that you hold on to it,” he said dryly. “Revelation is a slippery thing.”

I gazed at him, inarticulate with all the pushing and shoving going on inside me.

He smiled. “Well, it is.”

“Oh, Micah, I’ve felt like such a failure.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t make this project work right and I couldn’t help with Sean or get things going for you at the theatre and—”

“Wait. What’s going on at the Arkadie has nothing to do with you,” he said sternly. “It has nothing to do with
Design
. That’s Execution, or in this case, the failure thereof. Design is here”—he tapped the drawing board, then pressed his hand to his chest—“and here. In theory, Design and Execution should never be considered separately. In practice, you must separate them on occasion or the conflict will… break your heart.”

I reached over and hugged him one-armed. “Micah, you’re amazing. Thanks so much. For everything.”

He patted me awkwardly. “Don’t thank me yet. Revelation is just the beginning.”

* * *

At noon, the Master and his apprentice put Design away and readied themselves for Execution.

I told Micah about the gangs at the dorm, and he insisted I walk with him as far as the Barn, where he was due for a run-through. We said we’d walk in order to stretch muscles aching from the previous day’s physical labor. In truth, even Micah, as articulate as any about the need for tourism and the Open Studio policy, could no longer bear to ride the Tube during weekend tourist hours.

It rained on and off the whole way, in ten-minute, angry downpours. The dome was the sullen color of lead. Beyond it I could see sun and blue sky Outside. The stingy gray light did nothing to improve my mood as I told Micah about the Eye’s ritual mourning and their disillusionment with the Arkadie. “I bet half of them don’t even show for rehearsal.”

In a particularly vicious pelting, we took shelter under the branches of a spreading magnolia outside some citizen’s quaint wickerwork gate.

“Do they do things by halves?” Micah mused.

“They’re fighting a lot among themselves lately.”

“Performance anxiety, now that we’re getting close to it?”

I shook my head. “They know they’re getting the shaft here.”

Micah looked unhappy. “Is that what they think?”

“Well? Aren’t they?”

Half the Eye was missing when we arrived at the Barn.

This time the game was circle catch with a giant ball of wadded-up white paper. The object, at least in Pen’s mind, was to lob this missile as hard as you could at the person opposite you. We watched as he juggled the melon-sized wad on his palm and sidearmed it viciously at Cu. Cu caught it against his belly with a soft explosion of breath, then slammed it down in disgust. Pen’s catcalls followed him as he stalked away from the circle.

At the production table, Liz and her assistants paged madly through their scripts. Smaller wads of paper littered the floor around them.