The Heist by Will McIntosh Page A

died.”
     “Oh my God.” She’d only met Winter a couple of times, but still, the words knocked her back. “What happened ?”
     “She was hit by a Scamp.” He cleared his throat again, trying to steady his voice. “She was out jogging. Two nights ago.”
     A sonorous pseudovoice whispered in her ear that her brew was ready for pickup. She ignored it. “Oh, God, Nathan. I’m so sorry.”
     “We’d only been seeing each other for three months, but she took it pretty hard. She said it surprised her; she thought things were going well.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, right where tears were threatening to break loose. “So now I’m thinking, she went out jogging to feel better. Because I made her feel bad.”
     Veronika scooted her chair, wrapped her arms around Nathan, feeling slightly guilty at how much she was enjoying the hug, the feel of his muscular shoulders. Finally, Nathan let go and straightened up, nodding that he was okay.
     “I’ll be right back,” Veronika said, and went off to pick up her drink.
     When she returned, Nathan was back to work. “This guy rejected the entire profile I wrote for him. Says it’s not him at all. Of course it’s not you, asshole, that’s why you might actually get a few hits.” He sighed heavily, fixed Veronika with his smoky-brown eyes. “Do you ever wonder if this job makes it harder to fall in love? I mean, it forces us to approach things so objectively: attractiveness ratings, desire to procreate, BMI, cognitive patterning, IQ, emotional stability quotient. Sometimes I think I’ve lost the ability to sit across from someone and just know what I feel. That I feel something, or I feel nothing.”
     Veronika didn’t feel that way at all, but she didn’t think Nathan was looking for input. He was working through what happened with Winter, and just needed to talk it out.
     “I don’t know. Maybe what I’m really afraid of is if I ever settle into something stable, I’ll lose my edge as a coach. That if I’m not out there myself, I’ll lose interest in the whole dance.” He looked at Veronika, as if remembering she was there. “Do you ever worry about that?”
     Veronika sipped her brew; it scalded the tip of her tongue, just the way she liked it. “I already hate this job. Being less miserable in my personal life isn’t going to make me more miserable at work.” She looked out the window, down through an oval light-filtering hole just outside that offered her a crescent-shaped glimpse of Lemieux Bridge spanning the Hudson, crowded on both sides by the black roofs of Undertown.
     “Do you follow Spill Your Secrets ?” she asked.
     Nathan shook his head.
     “It’s an anonymous voice-only feed. People post their darkest secrets. A few weeks ago someone posted that they were planning to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.”
     Nathan frowned. “Wait. You’re not saying it was you.”
     “No, of course not .” The comment stung like he’d smacked her. “Do I really seem suicidal to you?” Sometimes she struggled to gauge how she came across to others. Dark and brooding? Fair enough. But did she come across as a neurotic mess who might one day have her toes jutting over the crossbeam of a bridge, looking down at the brown water hundreds of feet below? “And why would I fly to San Francisco to jump off a bridge? People jump off Lemieux Bridge all the time.” Veronika looked it up. Three a week, on average, since suicide was decriminalized and the steel nets were taken down.
     “Sorry. What were you going to say?”
     “What I was going to say was, someone organized an event, and almost a million people from all over the world converged over the bridge, and shouted ‘Don’t jump.’ ”
     “Did she jump?” Nathan asked.
     “The jumper hadn’t specified a time, so he probably wasn’t on the bridge. The thing was, they were doing something meaningful . I was there. I was one of those million screens and it was…” She