LITMIR.BIZ

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      When Chad and Sharis were married, in a judge’s office in downtown Dayton, Chad’s little brother had been the only person from either of their families at the wedding. Both of Chad’s parents and all Sharis’s family were dead. At that time Chad had had a fantasy that his Sharis would change her name, because a name as famous as hers could never be her own. Now, years later, it seemed to Chad that the only real Sharis was his wife.

      Chad read some more about Sharis the gigastar. “I can’t trust a thing in this article,” he said, shutting off his holo-screen and setting his perc on the table next to the chair. He stood and stretched his arms over his head, touching the ceiling. “How can I, when they can’t get a simple date right?”

      “Got it,” Sharis said. She was proud of her life-editing, because she gave every week a shape. She considered clients only on referral, and in the last two years her client list was full. She made twice what Chad did as a professor. “Now,” she said turning, “what’s this about my age?”

      Chad walked toward her, bent over and kissed the part at the top of her head. “Are you lying to me about your age?”

      Sharis sighed. “Okay. You’re right, I’m not thirty-two. I’m twenty-seven. I didn’t really finish high school. I added five years after the Gridding because if I said I’d just turned fourteen I’d’ve ended up adopted or something. It doesn’t matter. I’ve always been very mature.”

      The bones in Chad’s legs turned to water. He sank onto the bed. “So when I met and married you, you were … fourteen?”

      Sharis nodded impatiently, raked her fingers through her hair. “My birthday’s right, I just moved the year back.” She punched another button, and the Schneiders resumed.

      Impossible. Chad saw Sharis’s legs swinging against the bleachers. The day Chad met her he went home and looked on the Internet for the distinction between “haughty” and “insolent.” She was part of a group of young women, all refugees from the Grid, clustered on the fourth row of a stack of bleachers at a city park, yet she—with her hooded eyes, high cheekbones, her swinging legs and sweep of hair—was the only one he thought of as above him, although all of them were above him, on their perch. He interviewed them looking up, an odd sensation for a man so tall. Chad was a roving reporter then for the UD television station, working on his doctorate on weekends.

      “Your name?” Chad had asked, his microphoned hand stretched in the air.

      “Sharis Sunbury.”

      “Can you tell us about your most frightening moment?”

      Sharis said, “I wondered when I’d get to wash my hair.”

      That night in bed, Chad couldn’t keep Sharis Sunbury out of his mind. Was she shallow as a puddle, or was she impossibly deep? The other girls had been unsurprising. One had seen an old man “pass out cold”; another kept talking about her family’s dog. Those girls went on TV.

      Three months later, Chad and Sharis were married. She didn’t have her identity papers, but she had signed an affidavit. The notion that Chad had married a nineteen-year-old still surprised him (and yes, maybe titillated him, too). But … a fourteen-year-old?

      “What difference does it make how old I was?” Sharis asked now, flicking a paper clip across her desk.

      “Is it love or lust?” Chad had liked to say, rolling her on top of him. She had a way of arching her back and lifting her pelvis, sliding herself down onto what she called his maypole.

      “Love,” she’d say. “Lust. I don’t know.”

      “Good God,” Chad said, standing again and walking toward the window. “I could have been arrested.”

      “And as long as we’re being all truthful, I’m really Cheryl May Smith. I mean, that was the name I was born with. But when the army people dropped me off at that church, I decided to change my name to Sharis Sunbury.”

      Of course she had changed her name. Chad turned and moved closer to her, aware that he was using his size to make himself a presence in the room.

      Sharis said. “How boring is Smith? They didn’t have any ID on me. I could be anyone.”

      “But your parents had just …” Chad lifted his hand to his forehead. “I could have changed my name to Gamble,” he said, not sure why this seemed important. His father had offered once, very seriously, to change the family name from Gribble to Gamble, and his mother had just laughed.

      Sharis said: “After what my parents did, why should I want their name?”

      Chad felt as if the floor beneath him had suddenly gone soft. He didn’t know if he’d be able to stay upright, if he could walk properly, if to cross the room he’d have to grip the edge of the chest of drawers. He had thought he was his wife’s protector, but for years she’d been protecting him. What kind of fourteen-year-old could do that? Who was this woman, really? How much tougher was she than he was?

      “I see your point,” Chad said, sounding calmer than he felt. “You’ve been through a lot.” A lot—he started to laugh almost hysterically at that description.

      “It’s not that big a deal,” Sharis said.

      Chad bit the inside of his lips to stop himself from sounding giddily deranged.

      “I promise you,” Sharis said. “I’m exactly the same person.”

      TUURO’S JAIL CELL was painted white and always cold. The air-conditioning never stopped. The bail was high, and no one Tuuro knew could afford it. He thought sometimes the pastor would show up with bail money, but the pastor never came. There were other prisoners in the jail—Tuuro heard them through the walls—but Tuuro was kept apart. He was in a center cell of a row of five cells facing five other cells; in this pod, Tuuro was the sole prisoner. Tuuro lay on his cot under the blanket with both his shirts on and his arms wrapped around himself and dreamed about his daughter, Lanita, and making her nine-minute eggs. Rare thing at age thirty-three for a Melano man from Dayton never to have been in jail. Well, now he was normal.

      The lawyer English visited. He came into the common room and spoke through the bars into Tuuro’s cell. “Good news,” English said. “The genetics cleared you of the rape.”

      Tuuro didn’t move under his blanket.

      “You could thank me,” English said, and Tuuro remembered cradling the boy’s buttocks and rubbing them with oil. The anti-rape, Tuuro thought, and yet at that time the boy had been dead. When he was raped he was alive. My God. Who would do such a thing? That must be sin, Tuuro thought. A thing a person would give anything to erase.

      Tuuro sat up on his cot, pulled the blanket around him like a cape. “Will they let me out, then?” There was a whomping noise, and a fresh blast of cold air shot out from the vent above the door. Outside Tuuro’s cell, Kelso the guard stood at the door to the pod and stared at the seam between the wall and the ceiling.

      “There is a charge.” English looked embarrassed. “Not murder, they don’t have the evidence. Desecration of a corpse. I know”—English took in Tuuro’s stare—“it’s a crazy charge. No one at the office believes it either. You had nothing to do with the dogs! All we can figure is that they’re wanting to flush out Nenonene.” English glanced toward Kelso and gestured to Tuuro to stand and come to the bars. “He was very attached to this grandson,” English whispered. “Supposedly he wants to visit the boy’s grave.”

      “The general, Nenonene? He wants to visit Dayton?”

      English smiled tightly, his eyes searching the cell behind Tuuro. Is he looking for a camera? Tuuro thought. But when English spoke his voice resonated with the wistful admiration Tuuro had heard before—but not from a white man—when people mentioned the Alliance general. “He’s not your average person, Nenonene.”

      When English left, Tuuro curled back on his side again, his hands rubbing his arms. The

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