Free Regenesis by C. J. Cherryh

have said that.”
    “Sometimes I just want to break his neck.” She gathered up her papers, shoved them into the folder she was taking upstairs and got up slowly. “And you’re not supposed to hear me say things like that, so I didn’t, but it’s so, anyway. Damn him!”
    Yanni was off doing legislative business in Novgorod. And Justin didn’t want to ask what had happened. He just folded up his briefcase and wished he had a quick fix for what bothered his sole student. By what she said, it wasn’t kid business, though her reaction wasn’t helped by lack of sleep.
    “You just take care of yourself. Don’t take any kat tonight. Relax.”
    “I’m trying,” she said, and sighed and gave him a pat on the arm as if he were the child, at thirty-odd to her eighteen. “You’re right. I know you are. Probably the answer’s obvious as hell and I’m being terribly thick­headed. Is it a trick question?”
    “I’m somewhat interested to see what you’ll come up with. I don’t want to spoil it.”
    “You think I’m a fool.”
    He laughed; that proposition was so unlikely. But it was the perpetual self-doubt of a young genius mind that never found peers to compare to. “You’re my science project. I’m determined to see the outcome. Keep going on it.”
    A very heavy sigh. She took up her briefcase and hit the door button. Florian and Catlin were waiting for her, dark and light, doubtless having tracked the whole four-hour session with the endless patience of their profession. Grant was on his feet, too, across the hall, not in possession of the coms Florian and Catlin used, but taking his cue from them. Grant was supposed to have been busy in the Education Wing office, but he habitually came over to Wing One to gather Justin up around this time.
    The sets parted company, he and Grant, Ari and her bodyguards, taking their separate ways at least for the evening. They lived next door to each other, met for lessons in this little downstairs office in Wing One, because it was just more comfortable, and because her security didn’t want her walking about outside Wing One lately, no matter that Wing One was largely depleted of shops, of restaurants, of diversions—even its lab now mostly gutted of equipment. They kept to their separate apartments and didn’t socialize, beyond that.
    Teaching her was how he earned a living these days, doing his regular work in psych design two whole days a week, back to back, Thursdays and Fridays, and then five days of afternoon sessions with Ari. His teaching her had been Ari’s idea—her insistence, in fact; and that job had its moments of interest, flashes of brilliance, even excitement, when Ari chased some idea through the undergrowth of other opinions, and when, sometimes, she sparked his creativity, and opened windows for him into her own esoteric field. That was a reward he couldn’t have bought for any price. Some days, many days, Grant sat in on the sessions, and gave his own opinions, and they argued with Ari over coffee and sandwiches—those were the good days.
    This hadn’t been one of them. Nor had the day before, nor the day before that, not since Yanni had left, now that he added it up. She turned in her lessons, and her notes, and her projects—his briefcase held her current one, which was a huge integration, nearly town-sized: he was supposed to run that for her on the lab computers—another plus: there was no shortage of computer time, not on young Ari’s budget. Slip your own projects in whenever you want, she’d told him, and that casual little gift could be worth more than the extravagant 10k a month he drew on salary as the director of a non-existent research wing.
    But she hadn’t been herself for a week, and Yanni—Yanni, off in Novgorod, seemed to have done something she didn’t like.
    He didn’t like to think about the outside world. Didn’t like to think that politics down in Novgorod could ever affect him again. But he was connected to Ari.