Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,63

previous incarnations, as a bar, a clothing shop, and a real estate office. Only about a quarter of its ground-floor space was used as an office. The rest of it was storage for outdoor gear of various kinds, the ideal place to raid if civilization collapsed. The stuff was crammed onto a shantytown of shelves that had been made in a hurry by someone with a chop saw and a nail gun. “This is all heavy stuff we don’t like to carry up and down the stairs,” Maeve explained, leading him back to the actual stairs in question: wooden steps leading down into a cool cellar. “Lightweight stuff—like clothing—is down here.”

It seemed on one level like the opening scene of a horror movie in which Corvallis would never make it out of the basement, but having got this far, he followed her down. She took the stairs at a good pace but with certain precautions, one hand on each banister, pitching from side to side a bit more than a person with normal legs, and through her silver spandex garment he could see her back muscles and her triceps working. They reached the concrete floor of the basement, which seemed to have been poured by various drunk or indifferent people on different occasions. Light poured in from windows high in the walls, so she felt no need to turn the lights on. “Watch your step,” she admonished him, which he found curiously touching given that he had legs and feet.

Cardboard boxes of different sizes and vintages had been stacked around the place according to some scheme that wasn’t obvious to him. Some of these were open. They were full of T-shirts, not folded, but thrown in willy-nilly. Most of these were printed with Canyonland Adventures logos, or other tourist-related insignia having to do with Moab, Utah, or the Colorado River. In one corner a rug had been laid out on the floor. On it was a huge pile of shirts all mixed up. The place had the clean smell of new textiles.

“What’s Sthetix?” Corvallis asked, holding up a black T-shirt with a completely different sort of logo—not in any way, shape, or form touristy.

“My dead company. See, if you take ‘prosthetics’ or ‘aesthetics’ and chop off the first bit . . .”

“Got it.”

“It’s from a Greek word meaning ‘strength,’” she insisted, as if he had been disputing it. “‘Prosthetics’ means ‘to add strength.’”

He nodded. “Cool! It’s a cool name.”

She held the compliment at arm’s length for a moment, then slapped it away. “Hard to pronounce. Every. Single. Fucking. Conversation we had was about how to say it, or how to spell it.”

“It’s a good code name,” he said. “When you’re ready to go to market you hire a naming company to come up with a crowd-pleaser.” This appeared to settle her down. “Can I have one of these?” he asked, holding up a Sthetix shirt.

“Why?”

He thought better of explaining to Maeve that collecting swag from obscure, dead companies was a tech industry fetish.

“I like the name, and what it means. And it’s a memento of this day.”

She snorted. “The day Moab got nuked?”

He said nothing for a moment, intimidated by her sardonic force. Everything felt awkward. There was a sense of being on a perfectly good road in a perfectly sound car that was, however, veering into a ditch.

A thing happened where he simultaneously channeled both Forthrasts, Richard and Zula. “No,” he said, hearing his own voice strangely through blood-engorged ears. “The day I rode in the back of a truck with you.”

She actually took a step back, and raised her eyebrows. “You can have one. Make sure it fits.”

“Okay. No peeking.” He pulled his tunic up over his head and tossed it aside.

“Fair’s fair,” she returned. He heard a clank and a thud followed by a hissing, slithering sound. He turned just in time to see her peeling her sun shirt off. This had necessitated shrugging off her red suspenders, so her cargo shorts had impacted the pavement a moment earlier. Now she was down to a garment that he identified, vaguely, as a sports bra, and a pair of granny panties.

“Oh, excuse me,” he blurted.

“You looked?” she returned, mock outraged. “It’s all right. Nothing you wouldn’t see at the beach, right?”

He had turned his back on her and was pretending to sort through T-shirts. “Still . . . I didn’t mean to.”

He could hear bionic footsteps. “Would you like me to help you with that?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

She came