Bound God

Chapter 4: The Golden Boy

**The Golden Boy**

The elevator came. Behind him, somebody said his name.

Coin turned with his thumb still on the button. Vance was coming down the corridor toward him with his keys still out, and the kid at the water fountain had come off the wall.

Then Vance saw the kid, and his face did something Coin had never watched it do. The weather went out of it. For two full seconds there was nothing in the man but being glad, and he looked younger than his age and faintly embarrassed about it, and then it was a face again.

"Robin," he said. "You're early."

"I had nothing on."

"You never have anything on."

Vance put a hand on the kid's shoulder and turned him half a step, which was how the introduction got done.

"Adrian. This is my grandson, Robin." A beat. "Robin, this is Adrian Banks. He's one of mine. He's the one who's in the lab before I am. The other two haven't beaten him into the building all semester."

Robin didn't say hello. He had looked at Coin once already, in the corridor, and had nothing to add to it.

Up close the ear had more in it than the corridor had given him — silver, small, a row of them up the left rim, enough of them that he stopped counting somewhere in the middle. The jacket had never hung on a rack in a mall. He stood like somebody who had been told he stood well.

Coin's read on him took about four seconds, and he spent no pride on it: a kid who got handed the posture along with the car. Fine. What he wanted, standing there, was lunch, and the only open question was whether asking for it was going to cost him anything.

"You'll eat with us," Vance said. Vance was not a man who asked.

Coin did the arithmetic in about half a second: free, an hour, the paper wasn't going anywhere, and he hadn't put anything in his mouth since last night. "That's not — I mean, if it isn't a problem."

"Master Banks," Robin said, and something moved at the corner of his mouth. "By all means."

Nobody had said that word to him in his life. It came out of an old book, and Robin laid it down like a card he'd been holding since the hallway, and Coin heard exactly what it was for. He decided, right there, to spend nothing on it. He wanted the lunch. That was the whole of his position on Robin Vance.

They went out the west door into air like a hair dryer and walked the two blocks with Vance talking and Robin answering in halves and sometimes not at all, the two of them sliding into a rhythm built over a thousand meals. Coin walked on the outside of the sidewalk, which is where you walk when you don't know whose arm to take.

***

The place was a diner off the corner of campus, booths along the window, a ceiling fan turning with an opinion on everything. Three iced teas arrived before anybody's menu was open, and Robin took the booth facing the door without appearing to choose it.

"Anything you don't eat?"

"No."

"Good."

He ordered for the table, with one pause where he glanced up and Coin said, "Whatever," and that was that. Fries came that nobody had asked for and everybody ate. Coin turned his glass a quarter turn inside its own ring of water and studied the rim of it like the rim might have something to tell him.

"You're almost done," Robin said. "What then?"

"Depends." Coin set the glass down. "Maybe a job. Maybe another year."

Which was true and carried nothing in it, and he knew that. He had a version of that answer with whole sentences in it. He wasn't going to hand it to a kid who'd finished with him before the introductions.

Most people who did what Coin did had the same problem in a room like this, and it wasn't shyness. It was the exchange rate. What he was actually good at converted to nothing in here; what converted was a father with a name, a jacket, a house somewhere with water in front of it. You went quiet about that, or you went loud, and both came out strange. He'd been sore about it for about a year and then stopped, on the grounds that sore was also something the room could see.

Vance put his fork down with a click.

"Tell him what you won."

"Grandpa."

"Tell him."

Robin turned to Coin and said it flat, the way you read a label off a jar. "Junior nationals. Programming. Sophomore year of high school."

"Eleven hundred kids," Vance said. "He took the whole thing. And then he and I had a disagreement, and he informed me he was finished, and now he studies —" the fork came back up "— finance. There's a seat in that room for you any Tuesday you want it. That offer has not moved."

Robin didn't look uncomfortable, which was worse than if he had. "You've had that speech ready for two years," he said. "It's not a tragedy. You old guys want the box drawn before you know what's going in it."

Disagreement, Vance had said. Box, Robin had said. Neither of them had said what it was actually about. Coin put both words in his pocket, took no side of it, and left the question where it was, because it wasn't his table and the food was coming.

After that the two of them talked. A cousin's wedding. A car. Somebody named Ellen, who was either selling a house or having a baby. Vance tried once to bring Coin in — the mapping layer, the two databases that didn't know about each other — and Coin gave him four flat words about it and the conversation slid back into the family inside a minute, which suited him.

He ate what Robin ordered and then he ate what Robin didn't finish, and he was happier than he had been all week.

Then he caught Robin looking at him. Not the corridor look: this one ran a beat past where a look needed to stop, and it came with his fork going down on the plate, the first thing he'd set down all meal. Coin looked back with his mouth full of somebody else's potatoes, shrugged, and kept eating.

He had no idea what that was. He also had no idea what the check was going to look like, and one of those was going to be settled before they got up.

The check came, and Robin put two fingers on it and slid it up the table to his grandfather without reading it, and Vance paid with a card Coin never got a look at. Free, then. It had been free the whole time, and Coin had done the arithmetic twice just to be sure of it.

Outside on the sidewalk, Vance walked him five steps off from the door.

"Sorry about that," he said. "We talk over people. It's a family disease."

"It was good. Thank you." Coin shifted the laptop strap on his shoulder. "The paper goes in your box in the morning."

"Before me. That's how I like it."

"I've got the center at two."

"Go." Vance was already turning back toward the kid. "Tomorrow, Adrian."

Coin shook his hand. With older people he did that almost by reflex. It wasn't fear — there wasn't a man in that building he wouldn't have said his whole mind to, given a reason.

***

His phone said 1:30 when he got the cab, and 1:34 when they'd gone four blocks, which meant two o'clock at the center was going to be one of those arrivals where the door was already swinging and he came in sweating.

He opened the forums on his phone, because the forums were part of the job, including the parts of the job nobody paid for. He went down the list fast, in order, the way he did everything, looking for the one item that didn't sit flat. Politics, business, and the forums that watched both: a move in one showed up in the other two by morning. The hacker boards were not the exception they liked to think they were — if anything they ran tighter to the other two, not looser. Reading the day ahead of time was cheaper than being surprised by it.

Tonight was on the same list. The bar at eight; the boss wanting two more people who could hold their tongues around a guest he wouldn't name; that was two calls Coin hadn't made and didn't intend to make. Troy hadn't scheduled him, which settled where he'd be at eight whether he'd settled it or not.

AK had been arrested. The coverage made it sound serious.

Coin put the phone in his pocket and got out. The center was right there behind its glass doors, with its air conditioning and its hourly rate.