The door clunked when Ern knocked on it. He’d never known a door to clunk before. It was a satisfying sound.
He looked around the hallway, hoping he didn’t have to stand out in the warm too much longer—metaphorically speaking.
Hopefully someone was here. Doc and Molly hadn’t been in the bar, or in the restaurant, and the concierge couldn’t remember a couple matching their description going outside for a walk, certainly not one person in a transit suit and one person not.
Waiting out here made him nervous. Being exposed in public was always a bad idea. Made you look disreputable. CARE didn’t like people who were disreputable. They would come by to ask questions. Sure, there was no CARE in this city, but they had to have some kind of enforcement division.
But there still wasn’t anyone else in the hall.
The door clicked behind him.
He turned around to see Molly’s pale, mottled face peaking through a crack.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s all right.” Her voice was thick and cold. “You’d better come in.”
He did. She bade him take a seat on one of two low-backed soft chairs, gesturing for him to be quiet because Holly was asleep in the next room.
Molly had brought his food up from the bar. She left him alone while she warmed it up at the room’s food station, and the ambrosial scent of pepperoni, cheese, garlic, and basil filled the room.
It wasn’t as good as the pizza that Doc had introduced him too, but as he ate he formed a theory that there might actually not be any such thing as “bad pizza.”
Molly paced nervously while he ate.
He chewed and swallowed in silence. It was easier to let the pizza fill the space than to kick-start a conversation. He needed the food so badly that its presence made it impossible to think about anything else.
As he was polishing off the last few bites of crust, she pulled the other chair around to face him and sat in it.
“Thank you for coming back,” she said.
Ern shrugged. “Where else am I gonna go?”
“So, you want to help?”
“With what?”
“With the plan.”
“Molly, how do you know Doc?”
She sighed. “It’s complicated.”
“I’m starting to think that everything’s complicated.”
“More than you know.”
Ern smiled ruefully. “That’s not surprising anymore.”
“Doctor Arthur Nast,” Molly sighed, “is famous in the underground.”
“Famous?”
“Not as a medical doctor. He wasn’t one back then.”
“Back...when?”
“Before he came here. Oh, he did some volunteer work at a community clinic back home, so I suppose he was always interested, but his first doctorate is in history. When they did what they did to you, when you were a baby? He taught at the high school, always teaching a little more than he was supposed to. When he went home, he wrote literature—lessons in revolution and political game theory, which we distributed in the underground. Our whole movement is built on his writings. He didn’t leave Nast Central because of what they did to you, not exactly. We forced him to go.”
“Why?”
“Your mother was going to give him up. And she did. But she waited till the end.”
Ern gritted his teeth and scowled.
“Don’t do that. She did the best she could. Any mother would have done the same.”
Ern snorted. He didn’t believe that for a second. He’d never seen any mother from Nast Central with that kind of tie to her children. Well, except perhaps for Molly.