Maine stayed on the tram past his usual stop, continuing to the outskirts of town, out in the no-man’s land east into the desert. It was the deep-dark of night, 11:49 by the time he arrived at the Covina stop, the last place the city trams ran.
His brain was tired.
To avoid thinking about Beatrice during the group, he had thrown himself into Kaley’s explanation of the quantum foam, and now he couldn’t keep from using what he had learned as a backdrop for how he felt about Beatrice. Energy in the vacuum of space, decaying into particles, and those particles and their anti-partners meeting and annihilating within the span of such small space-time units as to be impossible to detect.
Couplings.
Pairings.
Matings.
Mutual destruction that kept an infinity of worlds going.
He couldn’t help but think of Beatrice as one of those particles, exploding full of fire into his world, then, rather than being allowed to crash into him, being mined of her passion and left to fade.
He walked down Donovan Street, past card clubs and pharmaceutical lounges from which thick chords of music pounded. A housing complex lay ahead.
The night was cold now.
Maine headed for the running track here — his favorite track, his favorite place to come because they didn’t light it, and so he could run in darkness, run through the night under nothing but stars.
As tired as he was now, he needed it.
He hopped the fence with ease.
He sat on a hard bench and fished his running shoes from his athletic bag, hearing Coach H’s voice in the talk he gave the team before every season.
“It starts with your feet, people. Everything starts with the feet.”
Then he would proceed to show the runners how to get their socks properly positioned, how to roll them over toes so they wouldn’t bunch up, how to bring them down the foot, over the heel. Then how to loosen the shoe and slide it properly into place, ensuring that tightening the fasteners didn’t cause creases in the socks.
“I don’t want any whining or complaining about blisters,” Coach H would say. “Blisters are a sign of a poor craftsman.”
Maine went through the ritual of this process as if he were born to it.
He stripped off his jacket, then stood up.
The air was cold enough that it stung against his bare arms, and stung when he breathed it in. Anxious about followers, he glanced over his shoulder to the entry gate.
No one was there.
He pulled each foot up behind his leg to stretch his quads, then got to work on the hamstrings and his core. The arms came next. When he was done, he scanned the grounds again, finding himself still alone.
This time he laughed at himself.
“Phantom pressure,” he said out loud. “You’re getting paranoid.”
Until he’d met Beatrice, no one else had really cared about his insane need to feel the stretch of his legs. Other than Coach H, maybe. No one else paid attention when he described the feel of his heart pumping or the scour of air scrubbing the inside of his lungs. Beatrice had, though. She’d wanted to ride along. She’d wanted to know.
She’d wanted to know more, too.
Gone deeper.
“It’s dangerous to want to win so badly,” his mom had told him when he’d talked about racing. “You want something like that too bad and they’ll take it away from you.”
But Mom was wrong, wasn’t she?
If the need to win was all it took to bring the CIO down on anyone, he’d have been cut a long time ago. They didn’t care about the need to win if it didn’t come with something else.
Striving to win a race didn’t cause people to revolt, he thought.
The CIO would care about his yearning to get away from his family, though. They would note his request, and that his parents were still able to care for him. Is that what happened to Beatrice? Had she gotten too bold in her interest in flaunting boundaries? Too independent for her own good?
The idea pissed him off.
He thought about that as he jogged down the track.
He had no choice. He wanted to win. He wanted to be the best.
But what if it were him? What if they had left Beatrice alone, and instead had taken away his need to win, his desire to compete that he felt so deeply in his bones he couldn’t separate himself from it?
What would she have thought?
What would she have done?
Maybe he was too young to understand love, but all he could say for sure was that something inside him hurt, and he wished more than anything else that Beatrice was here to talk to about it.
He wanted to think she would have fought for him.
That she would have done something.
His pace picked up down the straight, then he leaned into the turn.
A tear streaked from his eye. His vision blurred, but he didn’t care.
The track was dark anyway.
He was home.
His legs pumped, his feet pounded the composite surface, his arms and legs punching space like a machine. Breathing came in through the nose, out through the mouth. His muscles corrected for the torsional swing of his pelvis that he and Coach H had worked on earlier this morning.
There, in the mist of his vision and with his body pressing to use every bit of energy, he felt a remnant of Beatrice, a freewheeling essence that blazed against his mind as clear and brilliant as the stars that blazed against the nighttime sky above him.
He came out of the corner, picking up speed as he headed down the long stretch of track ahead. His timer was running, but he paid it no attention.
He was running under the stars.
As he ran, the image of Beatrice faded, and it was like the stars themselves had gone out.
When Maine woke up, late the next day, the sky was as overcast as his mood. He slid out of bed and went to the kitchen, knowing he’d overslept, but almost not caring. He’d dreamed of Beatrice and woke up feeling unhappy because of it.
His legs were tender, and the muscles of his shoulders were tight from his late run. He put his feet on the floor and cupped his hands together.
No.
He couldn’t leave it sit like that. Couldn’t just leave the Beatrice he knew behind.
There had to be a way.
His mother was in the kitchen, scanning a holo. She laughed at a joke.
As he went to the cabinet, his movement caught her eye.
“Hello, sleepyhead,” she said.
“We’re out of cereal.”
“Dad probably ate the last of it.”
He scowled and began gathering bread and eggs.
“Yeah,” he said. They were out of butter, too, so it would have to be just jam on the toast. “But does he know where the damned requester is at?”
She paused the holo.
“We don’t use that kind of language in this house.”
“Yeah, well. We apparently don’t know how to order food in this house, either.”
Her silence drew his gaze.
“Don’t give your father a hard time. He’s having problems with his heart, you know.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“How can you not know that?”
“It’s not like he tells me anything.” Maine would have said more, but he could feel the prickles rising in his chest, and the battle lines were already clear. His mother wouldn’t have Maine calling his father lazy or listless or any one of a hundred other names that Maine would like to call him. When he was younger, Dad always had a hundred things going on, but now he was embarrassing for his lack of interest in pretty much anything.
Mostly, Maine just wanted to have breakfast and get out of the house.
“Doc bot gave him new pills,” Mom said. “Says maybe he should sleep sitting up.”
Maine most definitely did not say: Maybe he should lose about half his weight. Instead, he walked to the dispenser and pulled a bag of plum-orange juice, then got the pan heating and dropped bread into the toaster.
“Are you okay?” his mom said. “Looks like you’re limping.”
“I’m fine.”
“You were running again? I thought you were with group.”
“Both.”
He broke eggs and dropped them in the pan. The aroma and the sound of the eggs sizzling made him even hungrier. He thought about Beatrice as he stretched his legs. He hoped his mother would drop it.
“I swear I don’t see the attraction of either,” she said, though. “When I was a kid, I didn’t know anyone who spent time learning for no reason — and someone who said they actually wanted to run like that would have been laughed out of the neighborhood.”
“Not now, Mom.”
“I’m just saying. We never needed—”
He pounded his fist on the countertop.
“Really, Mom. Not now.”
They sat in one of those awkward silences that make it feel like the entire world had stopped rotating on its axis. His mom breathed a nasal breath, then let it out. She glanced at her holo before turning back to him.
“Is there anything I can do to help you?” she finally said.
More than anything, Maine wanted to tell his mother that yes, there was something she could do.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, sliding his eggs onto a plate. “No. There’s nothing you can do.”
The toast popped.
He spread jam over the surface, and as he ate, his mom returned to her holo.
He chewed and swallowed each bit properly and in control. That was how he was training. Control to everything. Each step in its proper spacing. Each bite with its proper purpose. When he finished breakfast, he cleaned up and put the dishes away.
He had been truthful with his mother. There wasn’t anything she could do to help him save Beatrice.
There was, however, something he could do.