Promissory Note

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “You were shivering,” Micah said. He sat on the floor once more, facing her. He studied her with the same emotionless expression she had come to know so well. “No one knows, do they? Hundreds of friends and you hide it from all of them.”

  She was always tired, afterward, and that lowered her resistance and let her speak the truth. “I was eight when I had the first seizure. My friends…the children I grew up with…they…” She couldn’t finish. The words stuck in her throat.

  “They teased,” Micah finished.

  “They were afraid of me.” The confession emerged from her painfully tight throat in a high whisper.

  Micah let out a breath. “So you hid it and worked to become the most insanely popular person on the ship.”

  “I hid it so I could work.” The confession no longer felt shameful, not after Micah had already witnessed the worst.

  “You would lose your job if they knew?” he asked sharply.

  “Nearly every profession would be closed to me. Even mechanical engineer, because of the machinery.”

  “So you picked one that would be safest.”

  “Where I can work alone, most of the time.”

  “Ah….”

  Her mind glided away again. When she returned, Micah had not moved. Perhaps she had only been gone briefly. He had her journal in his hands. He wasn’t reading it. Merely turning it over and over in his hands, the motion making the muscles in his forearms work.

  He saw her looking at him and hefted the journal. “You forget things, each time, don’t you?”

  Laura swallowed. “Not the big things. Not the important ones.”

  “Things like where you live, though?”

  “And people’s names.” She grimaced. “If my work involved rules and structure, I would lose patches of that, too.”

  “There are protocols with software,” he pointed out.

  “They’re common sense. I can figure them out again, afterward. I write it all down, anyway.”

  Micah looked up as the door opened, somewhere where Laura couldn’t see.

  “Micah Thorn?” It was Erron’s voice.

  Micah got to his feet. “She’s here.”

  Laura couldn’t help it. As Erron bent over her, his eyes troubled and his face worried, she started to cry again.

  * * * * *

  She was always weak and clumsy afterward. Erron and Micah left the room. Laura took her time, stripping the damp garments from herself and working her limbs into the new ones. The old clothes she threw into the recycler.

  Afterward, exhausted, she sat on the sofa. That was where Micah found her. “Erron has gone ahead to open the house for you. I’m taking you home.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  His gaze met hers.

  Laura sighed again. “See, this is why I don’t tell anyone. It screws up their lives once they know.”

  “Such as helping cripples down ladders does?” he asked.

  “That’s not the same.”

  “From where I’m standing, it is.” He bent and scooped her up in his arms.

  “No, Micah, your leg…”

  “Will work well enough for now. Shush.”

  Laura was infinitely relieved to see there was no one lingering in the corridor.

  “The connecting door is mysteriously not functioning right now,” Micah murmured. “They’re all stuck on that side. Not that most of them will notice, anyway. Put your arms around me, so I can balance better.”

  She put her arms around him. “How did you know?”

  He started to walk toward the back door to the suite where the car was kept. “I know something about having your dignity destroyed while the world watches.” His voice was low.

  He put her in the car and even though she listened carefully, she didn’t hear him make any sounds of pain or effort. That let her relax.

  He was silent as he drove the car very slowly through the Aventine out to the Artery, until the Artery guidance system took control. Then he sat back. “Something like this happened last time I took you home, didn’t it? That’s why you didn’t have any strength.”

  “Those are called absence seizures. It’s as if I get lost in my thoughts, only I can’t pull myself out of them. It doesn’t occur to me to try, because it feels as though there’s a memory there, just out of reach. A very important memory, that it is critical I recall and if I can just stretch a little farther, I might be able to grab it and know what is it I’ve forgotten.”

  “Julius Caesar was an epileptic. So was Plato.” He rested his head back against the seat capsule. “In all this time, they haven’t found a cure?”

  Laura sighed. “I’m lucky they can control them as much as they do. In Plato’s time, they would have been uncontrolled and I probably would have been dead ten years ago. There are cures and treatments for most people. Just not me. I’m only glad that most of the seizures happen at night, when I’m asleep. It’s only the fogginess in the morning and…well, other things, that tell me I’ve had another one.”

  “Yet this one happened during the day.”

  “Lack of sleep is deadly for me,” she said tiredly. “So is alcohol.”

  “And stress,” Micah added.

  “Yes,” she admitted reluctantly.

  When they arrived at her house, the lights were on and the front door was open. Erron stood there waiting. “Her bed is ready,” he said, keeping his voice down.

  Micah picked her up again and carried her through to her bedroom and lowered her onto the bed. “This is why you live alone, isn’t it?” he asked. There were no lights on in the room, only the glow from the main room. She couldn’t see his face properly.

  “I lived in a shared slice apartment in the First Wall for a year,” she said as he drew the covers over her. “I had three housemates. The first two couldn’t stand living with me. The third thought she was being kind when she gave me enough belladonna to kill a cow, along with instructions on how to use it.” She yawned.

  Micah’s hand rested on her shoulder. “You should sleep yourself out tomorrow.”

  “I have to work.”

  “No, you don’t. I’ll see to it. Good night, Laura.”

  She thought she might have replied, but didn’t know for sure.

  For the first time in weeks, she slept properly and deeply. It only served to ensure she was awake enough in the morning to remember the whole humiliating mess.

  She didn’t go to work. She didn’t go to the Aventine, either. The idea of looking anyone in the eye and speaking like a normal person made her feel ill.

  Chapter Nine

  Laura forgot that Micah would notice her absence. She realized she had forgotten when she heard the little car below.

  She had spent the morning reading through her journal, picking up pieces and putting them back into place in her mind. She had slept the afternoon away and now she was on the roof, tending the garden, her thoughts idling in neutral. Sooner or later, she would have to grapple with the unpleasant changes that had been put in place. Just not today.

  When she heard the car, her heart sank. She looked over the edge of the roof as Micah climbed out. He was moving as smoothly as usual, with no sign of stress in his leg. He looked up at her.

  “I’ll come down.”

  “No. It’s better we talk up there.”

  Laura’s chest tightened at that. “Very well.”

  Micah climbed the ladder slowly, taking his time. He didn’t look around when he reached the top. He stepped onto the roof and moved to where she was standing by the front parapet.

  When he reached her, he stood with his hands by his sides, just looking at her.

  Laura could feel her cheeks heating. She dropped her gaze away from his.

  His hand came under her chin, forcing her to look at him. “Don’t.”

  “I can’t help it. You’ve seen how…broken I am.”

  “I’m broken, too. Do you remember that?” His eyes were steady.

  “I remember,” she
admitted.

  He bent and kissed her and Laura’s breath escaped her in a rush as the power of the kiss swept through her, making her tremble. He drew her up against him and it was much better than she had thought it might be like to be held by him. He was hot against her and she could feel the strength in his arms.

  His lips let her go. “You’re shaking,” he breathed.

  “I’m…scared.”

  He brushed her hair back over her shoulder, then caught her face in his hand. “Me, too,” he murmured. “One step at a time, Laura. We figure it out as we go along. Can you do that? Do you want to?”

  “More than anything, yes.”

  His smile caught her breath. It reached his eyes and the deep black grew warm. “Tomorrow, then.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I’ll see you at the office.” He let her go and moved away from her, walking backward. “One step. Then we breathe and check to see if we’re still standing. Then we can take another.”

  “Tomorrow, then.”

  * * * * *

  As far as the rest of the ship was concerned, life went on untouched by any of the massive changes that flipped Laura’s world upside down. On the outside, nothing altered. She went to work, then went to the Aventine to work on the research, then she went home again.

  It was what was happening inside her life, in the areas that only she and Micah got to see, that all the change happened.

  Micah was still the surly, silent coder who everyone in the front office loved to be afraid of. It was a shield that kept everyone out and Laura couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it for what it was long before he had lowered it and let her in.

  Even behind the shield he was still reserved, still cautious. They understood each other, though. There were no more secrets between them.

  When there was no one to see, Micah kissed her. A lot. He took every opportunity to press his lips to hers, sometimes pinning her up against the wall in the corridor outside his office, sometimes pressing her into the big chair in the corner of his office and bending over her, taking his time and stealing her breath, her heart and her mind.

  He had a way of leaving her blinking in surprise and delight. He would pull away from her, a tiny smile playing at the corner of his mouth and heated pleasure in his eyes, as if he knew very well what he was doing to her.

  Yet when anyone else was near she watched him retreat, the life die out of his eyes and the scowl return.

  When Micah could not kiss her, they talked. His job was not a sinecure. While he seemed to be able to do a thousand things at the same time, he still had to concentrate to do it. “After tankball, after the accident, I made myself learn this. I sweated it out. I learned it the hard way, while the most gifted coders can read binary before they can talk,” he told her. “It just means I’m more conscious of my flaws than they are.”

  She spent more time in his office, watching him pace as he and the AI, Arri, reviewed code, project deadlines, staff assignments and all the myriad responsibilities he had as the chief coder.

  When he could spare the time they talked about his research. Supply and demand was not a sexy subject, yet Micah made her understand how something as simple as barter drove the culture of the ship. “It was one of the contributing factors that led to the riots that made Jonah Solomon captain, nearly ninety years ago,” Micah said. “Everyone thought it was because rations were too strict, except people barter with rations and if they don’t have them, supply and demand stagnates and society collapses.”

  Micah became even more insistent that she return home at eight every evening. “Sleep is critical for you,” he said. “No more late nights.” So she would make her way home as she had always done, with Micah standing and watching her leave. Only now, Micah called her just before she slept and she would fall asleep with his voice in her mind.

  Her bed in her tiny house became a dead end to her day. She would sometimes writhe upon it in frustration, but she had no intention of trying to move beyond kisses. Not yet. Not until she was ready and not until she knew that Micah was.

  This tiny rate of progress was safe. It wasn’t comfortable, yet it was the only way this would work. She had to get used to the idea that Micah was building himself into her life, a centimeter at a time.

  So did the rest of the ship. “We won’t always be able to keep this just between us,” Micah said. “Not forever. While we’re taking baby steps, we should take them all.”

  The very first step, the one that terrified her the most, had no intermediate stages she could use to creep up on it. It would be no easier for Micah, either, although they both agreed it was necessary.

  After weeks of circling around the issue, trying to find an easier way, Laura threw up her hands. “Let’s just jump,” she suggested. “There’s no way around it. Let’s blast through it.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, smoothing a lock of her hair back.

  “No, so don’t ask me again.”

  He kissed her instead.

  That week, when Tivoli, Keton, Anika and Simon and all the regular crowd met at the beverage garden in the Aventine, Laura took Micah with her. “It has to be your friends that we tell. I don’t have any,” Micah said.

  “You have a roomful of coders who think you’re a genius.”

  “They believe I will shut down their plumbing if they screw up,” Micah growled. “If you think they don’t already know about us, you haven’t learned as much about coders as I thought you had.”

  “No…! How could they know?”

  “How long is it since they made any offensive jokes about me?” Micah asked, a wise look on his face.

  Laura opened her mouth to answer, then shut it again. “They didn’t say anything!”

  “Because you didn’t and I won’t. Watch. You’ll notice conversations drying up when you walk back in the room, just as they do when I go in there. They’re not saying anything to you. They will be saying plenty when you’re not there. We’re talking about coders, though, who are strange to begin with. Your friends are normal and nice and if we want to have any sort of life at all, Laura, then we have to tell them.”

  Laura gripped Micah’s hand as she led him up to the big group of tables that had been slotted together.

  Conversation broke off as they approached and Micah squeezed her fingers.

  “Hey, Laura!” Tivoli said, letting his chair legs fall back to the ground properly. “Wow, I thought you would be tied up working for the monster for years yet! He let you go?”

  Keton cleared his throat with a harsh noise that sounded loud over the completely silent table.

  “Tivoli, this is Micah Thorn. Micah, Tivoli. Keton and Anika and Simon, William, Horner, Debney, Vasen and Augusta.”

  Tivoli turned a deep red color and Keton patted him on the shoulder.

  “We’re both taking the night off,” Laura said evenly. “You’re so sweet to worry about me, Tivoli. I do work my fingers off for the monster.” She smiled at Micah and she could see the amusement in his eyes, even though no one else would be able to. “Is there room for us at the table, or should we find another one?”

  There was some hasty shuffling of chairs and another pair found for them.

  The next hour stretched on endlessly. Laura was usually relaxed in the company of these people, only she couldn’t draw a full breath now. Micah sat mostly silent by her side, while she tried to catch up with everyone’s news. At the end of the hour they had agreed to, she got gratefully to her feet and said goodnight.

  Micah nodded at everyone and picked up her hand again. As he walked her back to the train platform he gave a soft laugh. “Not fun, but necessary. Now they know.”

  “Can we not do that again?” she asked.

  “Not for a while,” he agreed. “First, we ride out the consequences of tonight.”

  “The gossip? You’ve been living that down for years,” she pointed out.

  “They’re your friends and they care about you,” Micah said. “I don’t think
they’ll content themselves with just saying nasty things about me.”

  Laura found out how right he was the very next morning. Tivoli called her just after she had woken, his voice strident. “You’re going out with the monster, Laura? What are you thinking?”

  “He’s not a monster.”

  “You were scared spitless of him! What sort of a person likes scaring people?”

  “Why do you say he likes it? He has no control over what people think of him.”

  “If he didn’t like scaring people, he would have done something to change things a long time ago. He gets pleasure out of it, Laura. That’s the man whose hand you were holding.” Tivoli looked wise and for a moment, much older than he was.

  She tightened her resolve. “There’s a lot you don’t know and it makes a difference.”

  Tivoli stared at her. “You’re wasted on him, Laura. If you want a partner, there are hundreds of men better than Micah Thorn.”

  “I trust him,” Laura said quietly. “That’s not something I can say about the hundreds of others.”

  Tivoli’s features tightened. He was angry, now. “Don’t you understand? No one likes him!”

  “I like him.”

  Tivoli gave up with a heavy sigh. “Well, I’ve said my piece. When he breaks your heart, you know where to find us.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said truthfully. Because it was Tivoli and because he was perhaps her closest friend, she tried to explain. “He’s already proved I can trust him, Tivoli. He’s not the man you think he is.”

  “No?” Tivoli said, his normally happy features shadowing and his mouth curving down. “Then he’s not the man the entire ship thinks he is. You must be the only one who can see the truth. For your sake, I really hope that’s the case.”

  Her conversation with Tivoli shook her confidence. He had been so firm in his belief that Micah was the brute everyone believed him to be, it made her question her own wisdom. Was she ignoring danger signs just so she could have what she wanted?

  And she wanted Micah. With each passing day she became even more convinced of that one fact.

  When the calls and the visits from concerned friends continued, she started to wonder if the sheer number of people telling her to stay away from Micah Thorn was evidence on its own. Surely, if most of the ship knew something to be true, then it had to be true?