Read Online Synners by Pat Cadigan - Free Book Online Page A

work," he muttered.
    Likewise, hotwire, said Caritha's voice in his mind.
    The lock released, and he went down the hall to the elevators.

5
    "You should have come to me first, Sam-I-Am," Fez said congenially.
    Sam shrugged. "I guess I took a stupid pill this morning."
    In the chair across from Sam, Rosa took a second doughnut from the box on the table between them and then offered the box to the young blond kid sitting on the couch. Fez's grand-nephew Adrian, just in that morning from San Diego, a real bolt from the ether. Fez had never mentioned having any family. The kid was fourteen and looked twelve, and there was something funny about his almond-shaped eyes. They seemed slightly out of focus, as if he'd taken a hard knock on the head moments before. A stunned fourteen-year-old. Sam imagined she must have looked the same way when she'd first been emancipated. The freedom was all you thought about, and when you finally got it, you were scared shitless. Welcome to the world, kid.
    "Don't suppose you ate much else," Fez said with some amusement.
    "Oh, I managed a little something," Sam told him, finding a stray rice grain on her pants. She rolled it between two fingers and then, for lack of anything else to do, put it in her pocket.
    "The usual seaweed and grass clippings?" asked Fez.
    "Seaweed and sushi rice."
    Fez glanced upward. "Let me have a look in the larder. Maybe I can serve you something real. Besides doughnuts." He went to the kitchenette, a little alcove with a cooktop, zap-box, and midget-fridge built into the cabinets. Sam knew it well. She'd learned to cook there.
    "You know how he gets about seaweed," Rosa said, wiping powdered sugar from the corners of her mouth.
    "Yah. Fez's four food groups—meat, dairy, vegetables, and doughnuts." Sam sighed and let herself slump farther into the easy chair. "God, I'm tired. Those stupid pills really take it out of you."
    "I wouldn't know," Rosa said loftily, and then winked. Sam laughed a little. Rosa probably didn't know. She was a canny little woman who had already achieved elder-statesperson status in the electronic underground by the time Sam had bumped into her on the nets three years before.
    She'd met Fez right around the same time, along with the rest of them— Keely, Gator, poor lost Beauregard, Kazin, many others, some of them long since vanished, canned or on the move to keep from getting canned. Like Keely, perhaps.
    "You know, I thought you'd come for your laptop first thing," Rosa said. "I couldn't believe you'd gone off without it to begin with. Like someone taking a trip around the world stark naked with no luggage."
    Adrian giggled and then covered his mouth, embarrassed. Rosa turned her wry, lopsided smile on him. "It's okay, kid. Underneath their clothes everybody's going around naked." The boy giggled again and looked away from her.
    "Don't torment Adrian," Fez called from the kitchen. The zap-box hummed and clicked off. "Try to remember that you two were once nervous junior citizens without a shred of savvy."
    "If you can prove I was ever that young, I'll pay you a hundred thousand dollars," Rosa said.
    "Listen to the old lady of twenty-four," Fez said, coming out of the kitchen with a large mug and a spoon. "Once you'd have paid me a hundred thousand dollars to prove you were ever going to get this old." He presented the mug and spoon to Sam with a slight bow. "Navy-bean soup, in lieu of green eggs and ham."
    "Yuck to both. "Sam frowned at the lumpy tan mess in the mug. "I told you, I ate."
    Fez stabbed the spoon into the soup and curled her hand around the mug. "I find it hard to, um, swallow seaweed and rice as a meal. Iodine's fine in its place, but you need something sticking to your ribs, which are still easily countable."
    "You peeked," she said, which brought a small flush to his cheeks and sent him bustling over to the couch to sit next to his grandnephew.
    Fez was about sixty, as near as she could tell, with a cloud of white hair that