Nemesis Games

“You know the difference between a code and a cipher, Holden?”

“What?”

“A code and a cipher. Cipher, you encrypt text so that no one can tell what the words in the message are. A code, you say the words right out in the open, but you change what they mean. Anyone with a smart computer and a lot of time can break a cipher. No one can break a code.”

It hurts most if there’s something true in it.

You can tell you’ve found a really interesting question when nobody wants you to answer it.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” she said.

“Would coffee improve whatever it is?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” she said.

“You know what I really missed when I was in the Pit? Anything that actually meant anything. They fed me, and they kept me alive, and we had this kind of support group thing where we could talk about our childhood traumas and shit. But I couldn’t do anything that mattered. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t talk to people outside the prison. I was just being and being and being until sooner or later, I’d die and they’d put someone else in my cell.”

She leaned forward, her elbows on the workbench. She’d burned the side of her thumb on something – a soldering iron, the barrel of a gun, something – and the skin was smooth and pink and painful-looking. “I won’t go back there.”

He couldn’t tell if the release in Erich’s eyes was relief or disappointment. Maybe both. Lydia would have known. Or Naomi. Or Holden. Alex, probably. For him, it was just a little change in muscle tension. Could have meant anything.

“So now you’re friends.”

“Friendly acquaintances,” Amos said. “I don’t have all that many what you’d call friends.”

That was really the woman who’s running Earth now?”

“Until she lets ’em have an election, I guess. I never really paid much attention to how that whole thing works.”

There aren’t any new starts,” Bobbie said. “All the new ones pack the old ones along with them. If we ever really started fresh, it’d mean not having a history anymore. I don’t know how to do that.”

“That’s a plan, then,” she said, but didn’t move. Her slur was going away, which meant she probably wasn’t bleeding into her brain. So that was one problem he didn’t have. A