The meteorologist halted in her tracks at the bottom of the steps, perhaps two hundred feet away while people skirted around her, the ocean parting for a pebble. She was gazing up at the sky. It took a moment for Chess to hear that the beeping from the radio had quickened to a high thrummmmm.
He craned his head back. In the dull purple evening sky, he couldn’t see any stars, only electric light bouncing off the haze of pollution. The only thing crossing that sky were the wires and the distant ring of the rock belt, a thread stretched thin across the atmosphere.
Thrummmmm.
“Oh,” Chess said, matter-of-fact. “Well, screw that.”
The look Spider gave him, when Chess snatched the claw away and smashed his nose in with the wooden shaft, was the expression of one who has reared an especially docile lamb, only to discover it has contracted rabies. Bone and cartilage gave way with an untidy crunch. Spider dropped to the ground without complaint. Chess didn’t wait to examine the Slicer’s face, or see the flash of the red scarves seethe forth amongst the crowd. He ran.
His skates hit the rail, sparked at the unfamiliar metal and shape, but took him downhill at a breakneck speed. He barely had the presence of mind to hold the claw up high where it wouldn’t hit anyone. People ducked. Someone yelled.
The meteorologist didn’t have the decency to glance over when he landed in a stumble beside her. This was somehow an immense comfort.
“We should move,” he said to her.
Her eyes were squinted and scanning the heavens. “No, I can’t see it yet, I can’t tell where it’ll land…”
“It’s going to land here.” Chess pressed a finger to the radio, which was screeching now. “Or somewhere around here. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, but I don’t know precisely where, it could be in another street…”
“Look at it this way,” he said desperately. “Do you want to be in the street with it when it hits?”
She looked down at the radio, and over at him. Her eyes traveled to the claw in his hands. He became aware that there was a splatter of blood on one end of it.
“Yes,” the meteorologist said, tucking the radio into her arms. “Yes, I think I see what you mean. Were you aware that that short gentleman is coming towards us?”
“Yeah.”
“Very fast? Looking disgruntled?”
“Yeah.”
She paused, shielding her eyes unnecessarily. “Did you do that to his face?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I didn’t like him. Hold this for a moment.” She pressed her machine into his hand and turned to face the people who were staring at them in open curiosity. Her hands rubbed together like a fly anticipating its meal. He could see her eyes were doing that terrible crinkling at the corners again. “I love this part.”
She cupped her hands and took a deep, crackling breath:
“METEOOOOOORRRR!”
Well, Chess thought, awash in a distant admiration as pandemonium began, that about does it.
Chess Pillai had seen a riot exactly once since arriving at New Synchrodan, on a supply day when there hadn’t been enough to eat due to droughts in the eastern farmlands and a flood on the north side. Muddy resentment had spilled over into fear and fury when a guard had leveled her gun at one of the loudest civilians. Ordinary people, the kind of people he’d seen around town all the time, had climbed over the distribution tables, knocked over boxes, a mess of pounding feet and frightened voices. One swarm of the mob had rallied to push over a food truck, drag out the driver, raid its insides. He hadn’t seen what happened to the driver afterward.
At the time, it had been the scariest thing that ever happened to him. Now, being borne down upon by approximately a thousand panicked strangers, nature in general, and one mad Slicer in particular, he thought it was time to reconsider.
The meteorologist seized hold of him. “We’ve got two minutes!” she yelled into his ear above the din of honking food trucks. “Let’s go!”
Crowd-surfing didn’t come so naturally to her when she was in a crowd she had scared the wits out of, but her machine and his claw granted them some speed. She took them, bumping shoulders, to the edge of the street, next to the long line of upscale apartment complexes, then jerked her head toward an alley a handful of children were sprinting into.
Chess gaped. The alley was at least a hundred yards off, an impossible distance in this stew of bodies. “You gotta be kidding.”
“Do you got a better idea, trash man?”
He cast about wildly, longing for the security of a steep wire. Nearby, he could see the old, paint-chipped side door of the apartment building. Memory gave him a kick. When he was a kid, Chess had seen a photo of an office that had been bombed. The windows had all been blown out and the upper half completely gone, but the doorframe was left standing. The doorframe of this building was about the size of the whirring metal box on the meteorologist’s back. Maybe a little smaller.
“What?” she asked, then, “Hey, whoa, easy! You know how much this thing costs?”
He finished unbuckling the straps on her arms and dragged the tall box in front of the doorway, not thinking to be amazed at its lightness until he felt something hitting his leg. A weight-reducer, locked onto a ring of metal, was swinging from the side like some unfashionable cell phone strap.
In the midst of a minor apocalypse, it felt bizarrely like a betrayal. He unclipped the device and held it up to the meteorologist, slightly accusatory.
“What? It’s like six hundred pounds!” she said, defensive. “Did you think I could carry that alone all this time?”
They left off the argument because there was a far, high whistle coming from somewhere above. The meteorologist jammed herself into the doorway beside Chess without further protest and they huddled behind the machine together.
There was one moment, one half a moment, of infinite wrongness. Chess looked at the meteorologist and saw her eyebrows had drawn together. Both directed their attention at the source of all woe.
The radio had stopped beeping. Instead, on the screen was a cheerful, blinking message: “Caution!! Danger Area!!!”
“Oh, hell,” the meteorologist sighed, right before the world ended.
***
“Sometimes things happen. Then they’re over. That’s how it works. You can’t keep it forever.”
***
Chess’s eyes flickered open and saw: smoke. They closed again, under the consensus that they had seen quite enough for one day and wanted to file for a leave of absence.
He was curled on his side, his hands clamped over his ringing ears. Covering them like that had been very forward-thinking of him, he thought, and he was reasonably certain neither of his eardrums had burst. On the whole, things could have been a lot worse. He wasn’t dead. He could feel most of his body. Quite lucky. Not so bad at all. He really wanted to go home.
Something was hitting him over and over again. Demonstrating her usual capacity for empathy, the meteorologist was pounding on his back in excitement.
“Would you look at that, would you look at that!” she was exclaiming beyond the fuzz of white noise. “That has to be an A-class, B-class at least, I’d like to see those corporate bastards say they don’t have the funding for us after that! Oh, would you look at it!”
Chess looked, reluctantly. Her machine was close by, a husk of its former self. The front had been blasted off and its insides were blackened. No whirring came from it, which felt like the death of some old friend. He chose to blame stress instead of examining that feeling too closely. He looked beyond.
A massive crater split Main Street in two and generated most of the smoke. He could only see a small bit of the hole, owing to the fact that there were at least four food trucks piled between him and it, eviscerated and spilling their guts onto the street. No one was stealing the boxes, which was the clue that no one else was around. New Synchrodan had many quirks, but its citizens never missed an opportunity for food. The hole was pretty far away,
at least, which explained why he was alive right now.
Something rustled around the cardboard. Chess squinted, trying to clear his vision. He could have sworn he heard little wuffs from the pile.
The meteorologist was still babbling. “I bet I can find a pay phone that’s still standing, I’ll call in Retrieval and tell them about this one and the last one, that’s more than enough funding to get all the land equipment fixed, and I bet there’s going to be more, this looks like it’s going to be a meteor shower, if I play my cards right I could get them to finally commission that suborbital flight…”
But Chess wasn’t listening. There, off in the middle of the street, happily adrift in a sea of rations, was Muriel.
***
“God damnit, kid, wipe that look off your face. I wasn’t… I’ve never been good at goodbyes, is all. I don’t know. Sitting around like this don’t suit me. You been good, puttin’ up with me this long, but crashing with someone else ain’t my style. I’ll swing by someday. You just wait.
“You know I’ve never left Synchrodan before? Born an’ raised. You gotta leave the nest sometime, I s’pose. God, but I’ll miss this place. It’s knee-deep in shit and neck-deep in worse ‘n that, but it’s home. You look after it for me, will ya?
“I know it’s not pretty here, this city, but it’s what we got. It’s enough.”
***
It was later.
Chess was still in bed. Muriel hadn’t made him get up this morning, occupied as she was with three full bowls of dog food arranged in front of her. She’d stopped coughing up whatever it was she’d inhaled in the air on her expedition and seemed otherwise fine. He knew he’d have to keep an eye on her for a while. That was okay.
Beyond her was a wall of cardboard boxes. In some accountant’s ledger, the loss of goods from the damaged food trucks due to the Class A meteor three days ago was being put down to natural disaster instead of criminal activity. The jug of water in the corner was fuller than it had ever been, and a box of additional water bottles sat smugly beside it. He’d already filled in the hole Muriel had dug and paved most of the dirt floor of the tower with the cheapest tile on the market, bought with the wad of bills that had been thrust into his hands at the end of that long day.
The Slicer claw rested against an open stretch of wall. Some of the blood had dried in the crevices of the handle. Chess had considered cleaning it off, but decided it looked better that way. It was about time he started keeping something to defend himself with around the place anyway, now that rumors wouldn’t do the trick anymore.
That was okay, too. Chess had plenty of supplies. He was all caught up on sleep and his scratches had healed up. Everything was well. He had nothing to do. There had always been something to do before, but now, the idea of going out to earn money for a rainy day didn’t appeal to him. He didn’t want to go out on the wires for a diversion, either. He didn’t want to do much of anything.
He was aware, distantly, that he was bored. In a strictly clinical sense, this fascinated him. He had never been bored before, not even as a child, certainly not since moving to New Synchrodan. He’d always been delighted or desperate or annoyed or hungry or, lately, terrified. Even when he’d lost the strange passion for swimming through piles of garbage, routine and necessity had always seen him through. Those were gone now, and it was becoming pressing: what did people do when they were bored?
By noon, he was still trying to come up with an answer when he heard a soft grinding noise somewhere beyond his walls, which soon stopped being soft and became very loud instead. Muriel stopped snoozing at the end of his mattress and barked at the ceiling, her tail wagging furiously. Chess sat up as the sound stuttered to a clanking halt close by his tower. When no more noise was forthcoming, he grabbed his mask and, as an afterthought, his claw. He went up the ladder to take a look.
He’d never seen a gondola up close before. They were always slow and rusty from what he’d seen at a distance, but this one had been cleaned up to look next to new. It was also a lot bigger than he would have thought, about half the size of a truck.
The conductor inside doffed her hat to Chess to show hair cropped close to her neck while she leaned on a lever set into the gondola’s floor. Her mask was sheer black, no chance of being government issue, and her eyes were sharp ovals.
There was one other figure inside the vehicle as well. She looked a lot smaller than Chess remembered without a big metal box strapped to her back.
The meteorologist tipped the conductor a bill and hopped out the door, onto the tower roof. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said.
“No skin off my nose,” the conductor replied, tucking the money into her jacket. She lit a cigarette and wandered off to the other side of the gondola to wait. Chess watched her go. She couldn’t possibly smoke through the mask. Could she?
“Hi,” Chess said, for lack of anything better to say.
The meteorologist saluted. “How are you? How’s your dog? Have you heard any word on our small friend?”
“We’re fine, and no, not yet. I haven’t seen him since the meteor. Why do you ask?” A thought struck him. “You’re not here to tell me he’s dead, are you?”
“Oh no, I very much doubt it,” she said breezily. “Retrieval brought a couple ambulances along with the reconstruction crew after we left. A couple amputated limbs and a great many broken bones from the panic, but no fatalities that I heard of.”
He wasn’t sure if the appropriate response to that was relief or disappointment, so he changed to a safer subject. “I suppose you’ve been busy, with the whole shower going on.”
She clapped her hands and bounced on her heels. “Yes! Two more since I saw you, an E and a D, and I think there’s going to be another C tomorrow evening, but I can’t be sure. I’m assistant supervisor until it all stops, did you know? We think we’ve found a patron, an older man whose father was around when the market was dipping, he says he’s willing to fund a flight to the belt if we give him a percentage of the specimens. We’re still in negotiations — he wants a third of the A-class and one of the entire smaller ones, which definitely isn’t happening — but it’s all looking really…” She stopped. “There I go again. You’ve got to stop me when I start doing that, I never realize it until it’s too late.”
“No,” Chess said hastily, “no, I don’t mind. It’s nice to have someone to talk to.”
“Well, we’ll talk about something else,” she said, resolute. “How about Big Nick? Are you still waiting for him to come back?”
Chess scratched his head. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. He’s been gone for years, it’s about time I let it go.” Chess shrugged. “I’m thinking about moving somewhere else in the city.”
She perked up. “Yeah? Where to?”
“I don’t know yet. Somewhere I won’t get my throat cut in the middle of the night. I’m hoping I’ll think of someplace soon.”
The meteorologist laughed at that. They both heard a loud cough from the gondola, and the meteorologist sighed. “Well, I just wanted to stop by. I was on my way to the lab for some tests on the E-class. They can’t start without someone from my department overseeing them.”
“No,” he agreed. “You said they were going to let you on a flight?”
“It’s looking like it,” she said, brightening once more. “I’ll bring you back one of the little rocks. Some of them float even at ground level, did you know that? No one knows that around here.”
He was no exception, apparently. “Which ones?”
“They’re the ones that look kind of like they’re igneous, you can get some light out of them if you…” Complete dismay bloomed across her face. “Hey, I have to go! Stop distracting me, you know asking me stuff like that distracts me.”
“I guess you’re right,” he said, then added, for no real reason, “You’ll have to tell me on the way.”
Her head turned, one foot already planted
on the gondola. “Really?”
“I don’t have a lot to do,” he admitted. “And maybe it’s time to move on from some other stuff, too.” He held up a hand. “One thing, though.”
“What?”
“Can I keep Muriel? She’s the worst.”
The meteorologist’s face lit up. He accepted her hand as she helped him onboard, chattering away.
“Actually, I was hoping you’d be interested, because we have this loft in the main lab, and you wouldn’t have to move in or anything if you decided you didn’t want to, but we could use this big old hollowed-out computer tower for a little dog house and we could really do with a repairman onsite, there’s this one computer with a melted hard drive or something that no one’s ever called in a technician for and I’m sure it has to be an easy fix, plus there’re a bunch of radios like mine that are having the exact same problem with retrieving the signal and it’s been such a pain, especially now that we’re having a real shower, but now that you’re along I’m sure it’ll all be fine and I know you’ll love my assistants. Oh, this is going to be so much fun!”
And maybe it would, Chess thought, or maybe it wouldn’t, not for all that long. And that was okay, too. He was starting to believe that it really was okay.
The conductor pulled the lever and the gondola groaned into a steady pace to the orange-clouded sky.
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