Directly behind us something metallic clangs, startling us into an about-face. There’s Jackson, standing on top of the mailboxes, both hands on the fire escape ladder. “Not to interrupt whatever the fuck you’re doing, but we really, truly have to go. Now.” He’s not even looking at us. He’s looking over our heads at something. Riot cops, security bots, it doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, it’s coming.
Jessa’s already halfway up the ladder. She looks back down at me. “Mal, come on.”
“One sec.” I glance back out into the street. The unconscious man is gone, hopefully somewhere safe. I don’t see a bloody drag trail leading off from where he’d been lying, and that’s something, I guess.
I turn to the others hiding here with us. There are four left, a few of them apparently having run off somewhere. They look back at me blankly. Shock, I figure. If they had somewhere to go, they’d be there. If they were trouble, they’d’ve shoved past me and climbed up into the hotel without waiting on anything as flimsy as my say-so.
I slap the ladder. “Go,” I tell them. I don’t need to say it twice.
I wait until everyone else is up before I climb.
0015
THEY DON’T LOCK OUT MY IMPLANT THE way Jessa expects them to, like they did to B when she went up on her initial terrorism charge. It doesn’t surprise me. They came, they sent their message, they left. We watched out the hotel window once we were safely in our room, and the stealth mech leaving seemed to be some kind of signal for the rest to disengage and follow. The helicopters dipped down and retrieved their riot cops and sentry bots and drone armies, like the whole ordeal was being played in reverse. Then they lifted off the street and were gone, pelted by water cups and empty soda bottles that hit the projection shields and fell as melted-plastic rain as the helicopters ascended. All that was left was the damage to our streets and buildings, and a tripling of the guard by our water-storage room. Everyone else’s too, presumably.
Later we’ll learn that apart from the burns people got from turning their faces up into this shower, there were surprisingly few injuries. Some broken bones, a lot of bruises and lacerations. Three deaths. Being out there, it felt like there’d be more.
“The more of us they kill, the more customers they lose,” Keisha points out darkly. It’s late, the evening of the incident, and we’re still huddled in our room, living off the combined pool of our individual food hoards. Dry cereal, peanut butter, soy jerky, candy bars. No one dares go up to the roof to fetch our vegetable share. We sit on bunks facing each other, on the floor, in the one chair, by the light of our headlamps, for hours. Dissecting the situation.
“If I were them and I was trying to suppress your video, this is exactly what I’d do,” Keisha continues. “Turn people against you. Make them think this is all your fault.”
“It is all her fault,” Talya says, eating a candy bar. “I still think we should—”
“We’re not kicking anybody out,” Tegan tells her. “Like we even own this place. Enough.”
“You study them,” Jessa says to Keisha. “How do we get out of this? What’s our play?”
“Turn yourselves in,” Talya says. “Maybe they’ll start the water lines back up.”
We all go quiet at this. Most of us agreed to share our water, preloading it into the sink reader from our individual accounts as soon as the power comes back on, an even pool and split. Talya, of course, is resisting, and she’s convinced Tegan to do the same. Ryan argued with them both at first but got nowhere. Anyway, nobody’s preloading anything until the curfew lifts. Which could be in the morning, or it could be never. We’re in uncharted territory here.
Between the remaining seven of us, we have about forty-five gallons. It sounds like more than it is.
“Fuck that,” Jessa says, leveling a finger at Talya. “This is a standoff. They came in here to bully us.”
“Yeah, well, you ever consider it’s working?”
“Only if we let it,” Keisha says.
“There are three hundred thousand people in old town,” Suresh adds, pitching his voice low. Power curfew or no, we’ve taken out our lenses for this conversation, but all it would take is one of those nanodrones to have stayed behind and gone into hiding, gathering intel on me and mine. “Every building with a water line has a water-storage room. If those mains were shut off, they wouldn’t still be behind locked doors and crawling with armed guards.”
“There are six of those assholes down there now,” Allie says. “Jackson took a picture.”
“Somehow I doubt they’re here for the air-conditioning,” Jackson says. “There’s still water behind that door. A lot of it.”
“I’ve seen in through the door one time when it was open,” Ryan says. “That room is bigger than four of this one. Water barrels stacked to the ceiling the whole way back.”
Talya stares, horrified. “Are you out of your fucking minds. Is this really what we’re doing now? Sitting around discussing water terrorism and eating candy bars?” She rounds on Tegan. “Are you really okay with—”
“You know this is what they want, right?” Tegan says to her. “Keisha’s right. They want us to turn against Mallory. Because she called them out on their bullshit. They want us to shut up and say we’re sorry and go back to being—”
Talya pulls a face. “We?”
“—good little happy customers who don’t make too much noise.” Tegan shakes their head, then stares off into space a second, thinking. “But they wouldn’t have come out here if Mal wasn’t onto something. Which means it’s time to make as much fucking noise as we can.”
“Tegan—”
“There’s about four and a half gallons on my account,” Tegan says. “When the power comes back on, I’m going to preload it to the room.”
“Noted,” says Keisha. “And I agree. If there’s a time to make noise, it’s now. Not just us right here. Not just the hotel. I’m talking about all of old town. Everyone who’s been hit by this. Because if this is how Stellaxis deals with people airing out their dirty laundry for them, you kind of have to wonder how much of it they still have hidden away. If she wasn’t onto something—something big—they never would have responded like this. This is a show of force. To keep the rest of us in line.”
“So we, what?” Talya says. “Have some kind of protest, and the company magically gives us back our water because they see how much we really, really want it?”
“Yes,” Tegan says. “That’s exactly what we do. And we get online and we tell everyone what happened here. Stellaxis just cut off our water because we hurt their delicate corporate feelings. No way can that be legal.”
“Legal’s what they say it is,” Allie replies. “You know that.”
“Well, it’s fucked up.”
Allie raises both hands in mock surrender. “No argument here.”
“Do you know what a firebreak is?” Keisha asks out of nowhere, and we all turn to look at her. This country averages three hundred and fifty thousand wildfires per annum. Of course we know. It’s how you stop something too big to handle, or at least slow it down, when all else fails.
“That’s what we’re doing,” she continues. “What we have to do. We’re the firebreak. They want to run over us and keep on going. If they shut Mal up, if they shut us up, they’re going to do the same thing to the next person and the next town, and the next one, and the next. We draw the line and we hold it.”
Talya makes a face. “By… burning down old town before they can? They never said they were going to do anything like—”
“Don’t be so literal,” Tegan tells her. “This is serious. They’re going to do something. What we have to do is get ahead of it and set the terms of how it’s going to go.”
“What does that even—”
“It means we hold that protest,” Keisha says, “and we all record it. We get everyone to record it. We stream that entire fucker live from five thousand different angles, and we show the world what Stellaxis does when they get
backed into a corner. Not just New Liberty. Not just the supercities. Not just Stellaxis territory. Everywhere. It’s a company. They have to care what they look like to their customer base in the rest of the world. We just need to get proof out past their reach and hope it runs. See how they innovate their way out of that.”
Jessa, uncharacteristically quiet until now, finally speaks up. “I got video. Of the mech. When it threatened Mal. It was looking right at us. It wanted us to see.”
“I hope you streamed that,” Suresh says.
Jessa shakes her head. “They’d already cut the power.” She taps the pocket screen she still has not let go of. “Saved it, though.”
“So post it! Even if we don’t get power back tomorrow, we’ll put you on a bus to the city and you can post it there. I’ll buy your ticket.”
“I’ll go half,” Keisha says.
“I’m in too,” says Tegan.
“Oh, I’ll post it,” Jessa says, but there’s something strange in her voice. “I just gotta figure out how to frame it as a piece. Like we did with Mal’s.”
“The one that started all this,” Talya mutters, but nobody replies.
“I’ll go talk to some people I know in the school,” Ryan says. “They’ll be all over this. They’ve pretty much been waiting for an excuse.”
“I’ll tell my friends upstairs,” says Jackson. He gets up, then sits back down. “Wait. Tell them what exactly?”
Nobody answers. It comes to me that they’re waiting for me to speak. I’m the one who set this rolling, after all. I’m the nail that the company is trying to hammer back down into place. Whatever happens next, they’ll find a way to revisit it on me. That much is terrifyingly obvious.
“Tell them why this happened,” I say at last. “All of it. Tell them how Stellaxis has been lying about the operatives and the water scarcity and who knows what else, and how I tried to make people know the truth, and how Stellaxis retaliated when I made it hard for them to quietly make me disappear. And tell them I’m not backing down. I’m going to make more videos. I’m going to find a way to get them out past where the company can shut them down, like Keisha said. I’m going to tell people all over the world what happened here today. I’m going to make as much fucking noise as I can—” I nod to Tegan, who nods back—“until they come here themselves and stop me.”
It sounds insane. I’m listening to myself, and I sound like a person with a death wish. But I’m over the shock and the fear now, or mostly. It’s been pushed back to—if not the background, at least the middle distance. In the foreground, I’m pissed.
“I’m never going to be able to organize a protest,” I admit. “That is a much higher ratio of people-to-idea than I will ever know what to do with. It’ll fall apart before it gets off the ground.”
“We got that part,” Tegan says. “Keisha, I know you’re with me.”
Keisha nods. Then Suresh and Allie and Jackson and Ryan do too.
“We’re in,” Jackson says. “All in. You guys didn’t see that mech. It was right there. They might as well have stabbed a note into our door that said OBEY OR DIE.”
“I think you mean DISPERSE,” Allie says, grinning.
“Or COMPLY,” Ryan adds.
“Should’ve complied,” I murmur.
“What’s that?” Jessa asks.
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
“I didn’t even know Stellaxis had those now,” Suresh said. “That’s a Greenleaf design.”
“They’re running low on SecOps,” Ryan says. “Guess they’re diversifying.”
“You want your water line back?” Tegan asks Talya. “This is how you get it back. They can’t hear you pouting from way over there.” They gesture at the window in the vague direction of the city. “You’re pissed at Mal. I get it. But all of this—” a slow up-down sweep of Talya, fidgeting with her candy bar wrapper—“is misplaced. They cut our water off because of Mal’s video. They’ll cut it off next time one of us steps out of line. Or maybe the next shot won’t aim for the sidewalk. You’re smart enough to know that.”
There’s a long silence while Talya’s face undergoes at least three costume changes that I can discern. It’s like we’re watching her dig down through all the slapped-on layers of anger and bitterness to the glowing reactor core of whatever lies beneath.
“I thought,” she says at last, “that when we came here, it was over. We were safe. Nobody else was going to come for us. I thought old town was different. Its buildings stay up, you know?” Tegan opens their mouth, but Talya forestalls them with a gesture. “And don’t tell me no buildings came down today. That’s not the point. This was just a warning. It’s only going to escalate from here.”
“So help us,” Tegan says. “The more eyes we put on this, the harder it is for them to keep it quiet.” Without looking away from Talya’s face, Tegan says, “How many views on Mal’s videos?”
“About a hundred and fourteen million on the big one,” Jessa says, “last I saw before the company had it taken down.”
“When did that happen?” I ask.
“I checked on it right before the water line went out, and it was gone. Sorry I didn’t tell you. A riot in the hotel lobby’s pretty distracting, turns out.”
“There are reshares circulating on tons of other sites,” Allie says.
Jessa nods. “Greenleaf newsfeeds.”
“Weirdly, no. Indies mostly. Blogs, social media.”
“Outside the city?”
“Some. And people keep reposting the original. At least they were when I checked before curfew.” Allie jabs a thumb into her own sternum, adding: “I can vouch for at least one person who’s gonna share the hell out of it in the morning.”
“And that right there,” Tegan says, “is what they don’t like. They want to come in here and try to scare us? Cut the problem off at the source? Fine. Let them come. We’ll make sure the whole fucking world is watching when they do.”
“All because Mal wanted to help a couple of operatives who’re probably going to die anyway,” Talya mutters, but softer now. I don’t know if the edges are ground off her anger, and maybe I don’t want them to be.
I realize I don’t even care if she hates me. She also hates what this corporate war did to her family and her home, and that’s good enough for me.
“It’s bigger than that now,” I tell her. “Yes, I did, and I do, and I’d make that same video again and again forever if I thought it would save them, but right now it’s bigger than 06 and 22 and the other ten or forty-six or however many others that are already dead because nobody did anything to stop it. Here, today, Stellaxis made it bigger.”
“It was already bigger,” Keisha says. “They made us part of this when they smashed our homes and killed our families and sent us here. And now they take our water, just like that, to punish us. They own us as much as they own the operatives. Them coming here today was to remind us of that fact.”
This hits the mark I failed to. I don’t know how people like Keisha and Jessa can do this, say the right thing at the right time, so effortlessly. I shut up and let her take over.
“It was always all of us,” Keisha continues. “All of us together. The difference is that now we know it.”
“There are water lines in every town and camp and city in the country,” Jackson adds. “People will listen to us when they see what happened here today. Because they’ll know they could be next.”
Tegan takes Talya’s face in both hands. “I miss them as much as you do,” they say, and I know they’re not talking about anything the rest of us are privy to. Tegan’s a few minutes older than Talya, but both were old enough to remember when the war chewed up their family and spat them out alone. Whatever wreckage of whatever life they walked out of, they walked out of it together. “What would Mom say if she saw you giving up when things got shitty?”
Whatever Talya replies, she mumbles it too low for me to hear. Not my business anyway. I decide to leave them to it. Besides, I can
feel Keisha staring at the side of my head, waiting for me to turn. Video, she mouths at Jessa and me, and Jessa gives her a totally made-up salute that’s at odds with the weird unease in her face.
“Come on,” I tell her, tilting my head toward Talya and Tegan, who’ve retreated to the back of the room to sit in a corner together and talk in hushed voices about something that keeps making Talya sound like she’s about to cry.
We go sit in our stairwell instead. “I’ll post it,” I say. “Give me the file and I’ll post it first thing in the morning. I don’t need the next mech trying to figure out which one of us to aim at.” Then, because I don’t know what I should say to the naked relief on her face, I lie: “You’d just fuck up the narration anyway.”
* * *
IN THE MORNING, the power’s back on. Maybe they figure we’ve learned our lesson. Maybe they’ve just realized we can’t very well contribute to the economy if they shut us off. Doesn’t matter. We all preload our water to the room (even Talya, astonishingly, though she doesn’t look too happy about it), and then I post Jessa’s video. Turns out she started recording even before the mech showed up. There’s footage of the riot cops with their forcefield projectors, security bots tagging people, that one guy getting flung backward into the front of the movie theater across the street. The works.
A preliminary search has shown us that a few other people found low-tech workarounds like Jessa did and posted footage of their own. I hope it spreads like hell, faster even than the speed of corporate suppression.
My voice-over for Jessa’s video goes like this:
“Within six hours of my exposé going live, Stellaxis Innovations sent what amounts to a strike force to shut off my building’s water line. Not just my water line but every water line in old town outside New Liberty City. Because they felt threatened. Because they wanted to bully me into backing down. They’d already taken down my video, but enough people had saved and shared it that they felt they had to take more drastic measures. What does this look like to you?”
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