by Rob Hart
“What about family?” Paxton asked.
“My mom is still around,” Zinnia said. “We talk on Christmas. That’s about the most we can manage.”
“I’ve got a brother,” he said. “We’re like that. Get along okay but don’t go out of the way to see each other. Which…I don’t know….” Paxton trailed a thought but the beer was getting in the way. He wondered if he ought to just drain his glass, apologize, and head back to his place. Cut his losses before he bled to death.
“What?” Zinnia asked.
There was something about the way she asked it, like she didn’t need to know but still wanted to. Paxton breathed in, then out, and found it. “Being here, it almost feels like being on another planet, doesn’t it? Like, you couldn’t even just walk out of here. Where would you go? You’d die of thirst before you found civilization.”
“It does feel like that, yeah,” Zinnia said. “Where are you from?”
“New York,” he said. “Staten Island, originally.”
Zinnia shook her head. “Oh, New York. I don’t like New York.”
Paxton laughed. “Wait, what? Who doesn’t like New York? That’s like saying you don’t like…I don’t know, Paris.”
“It’s so big. And filthy. No one has any personal space.” She scrunched her shoulders together, like she was walking down a crowded hallway. “Paris isn’t so great either.”
Paxton swung his arms around. “You think this is better?”
“Now, I didn’t say that,” Zinnia said, that eyebrow going up, but then coming back down, relaxing. “This…it’s like…I don’t know….”
“It’s like living in a fucking airport,” Paxton said, dropping his tone, as if someone might hear it and admonish him.
Zinnia laughed. It was a fast little laugh and it slipped between her lips like it was coated in oil. Her eyes went wide, like the sound had surprised her. As if she wished she could pull it back. But finally, she said, “Exactly what I thought the first night here. Airport chic.”
Zinnia knocked back her vodka, waved over the bartender for another. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be going hard in the paint tonight.” She stuck a finger in the air. “And don’t give me any of your chivalry bullshit. Next round is on me.”
“I like a woman who doesn’t fuck around,” Paxton said, immediately regretting it, like it was too much, but that eyebrow went up and it suddenly looked completely different. It looked like a check mark, and it framed a big beautiful brown eye; he could see white all around the iris.
“So,” Paxton asked, feeling bold. “Any particular reason you’re not fucking around?”
“Feet.”
“Feet?”
“I made the dumb-ass mistake of wearing boots on my first day.” The bartender put down a fresh glass. “Thank you.” She took a sip. “Because I didn’t have sneakers. I have them now. Wish I would have thought that through. I imagine you’re on your feet a lot, too.”
Paxton wondered whether he was allowed to talk about the task force. He didn’t think it was a secret. Dobbs hadn’t told him not to tell anybody. And sometimes talking things out helped. Plus, it might impress her, that he’d gotten pegged for a special assignment as soon as he walked through the door.
“Apparently this place has an oblivion problem,” Paxton said. “And they think because I used to work in a prison I might be useful. Like I might be some kind of smuggling and contraband expert. Which isn’t really true. But hey…it’s better than just standing around. I like solving problems.”
“Is that why you became an inventor?”
“I don’t know if I could call it that,” he said, placing his hand around the base of the beer, looking down into the foam. “I only invented one thing. And even that was just taking a bunch of products that came before it and figuring out how to make them better.”
“Yeah, but you did it.”
He smiled. “And now I’m here.”
The words came out cold, brittle. Zinnia tensed. Paxton knew it wasn’t in keeping with the vibe he was trying to maintain, but he couldn’t help himself. He turned a little, away from Zinnia and toward the beer, the memory lodged in his throat like a hot coal.
A flash in the corner of his vision. Zinnia raised her glass.
“I’m here, too,” she said, giving a little smirk, a tilt of the head.
He tapped his glass off hers and they drank.
“So tell me more about this gig,” Zinnia said. “Have to figure you get access all over the place.”
“I guess? It’s been less than a week. I’m sure there are some doors I can’t open. But I haven’t come across any.”
“You should see the warehouse,” she said. “You can’t even see the end of it. And this isn’t even all there is. There’s a whole other set of buildings I don’t even have access to.”
“Right, yeah,” he said. “It would be cool to see those.”
“I would love to just take a walking tour of this place. See the whole thing, you know? It really is incredible.”
The smirk crept onto her lip again. It disappeared when she sipped her drink. Paxton wondered what she was asking. Did she want him to take her on a tour? He didn’t even know if he was allowed to do that. Was she angling to get him somewhere alone?
“Not sure I can swing that, but if I can, I’ll let you know,” he said.
“Fair enough,” she said. Disappointed.
“But, who knows. I can ask.” He glanced at Zinnia. “So. You said next step from here is teach English in another country, right? Is that what you want to do, full stop?”
She shrugged. “Cost of living is pretty low in other countries. I’m a bit tapped out on America, in a general sense.”
“It’s not great, but it’s better than a lot of other places. We still have clean water.”
“That’s what fire and iodine tablets are for.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. Truth is, I’m a little jealous. Might be nice to get away.”
“So why not do it?”
“Do what?”
“Get away.”
Paxton paused. Thought about it. Sipped his beer. Placed it down. Glanced around the mostly empty bar. At the shiny landscape of Live-Play beyond the entrance. He didn’t know how to answer the question. The way she said it made it sound as if it were as easy as picking up the pint glass and placing it to his lips. Like it was a thing you could just do.
“It’s not that simple…,” he said.
“Usually is.”
“How? Say I left here right now, walked out the door. What would I do for money? Where would I go?”
She smiled. “That’s the thing about freedom. It’s yours until you give it up.”
“What does that mean?”
“Think on it.”
She took another sip and smiled, the muscles in her face going a little slack. She was feeling the booze, too. And she was testing him. He liked it. So he told her, “All I know is this: I can’t get out of here soon enough.”
Which was exactly why he’d been ignoring the CloudBand’s request that he sign up for the pension system. Soon as he did that, he was admitting that this was the endgame.
“Amen to that,” she said, throwing back the last of her drink. “Speaking of, can we walk around a bit? I know I’ve been on my feet all day, but now it feels like my legs are getting stiff.”
“Sure,” Paxton said. He pounded his beer, closed his tab, tapped through the pay screen on his watch so he could leave a tip. Zinnia did the same. He followed her out of the bar and she seemed to have a destination in mind.
“Where to?” Paxton asked.
“I’m in the mood for some video games. You like video games?”
“Sure.”
They made it to the t
op level and entered the arcade Paxton had visited with Dakota, where they shook down Warren. She made a beeline for the back and stopped in front of Pac-Man. She took the controls in her hands, but then let them go. “I’m sorry, this is one-player.”
She clearly wanted to play. Next to Pac-Man was a deer-hunting game, with big plastic shotguns—one orange, one green. “It’s okay. Go ahead.” He picked up the green shotgun. “I’ll take this one.”
“You sure?” she asked, even though she had already started playing.
He swiped his watch across the sensor and cocked the gun. “Sure.”
Zinnia jerked at the controls. Paxton turned to the video screen, which displayed a bucolic field. Forest in the distance, babbling brook. A deer bounded out; in real life maybe it would have been a few hundred yards away. He aimed and fired. Missed. The deer made it to the end of the screen untouched and disappeared.
“You like video games?” he asked.
“I like this one,” she said. “I think I’m going to try and get the high score.”
“And what’s that?”
“The highest score ever is over three million,” she said. “The high score on this one is a hundred and twenty thousand. It’ll take some time but I can beat that. Not tonight. But I figure I may as well get some practice in.”
Another deer. Another miss. “Something to do?”
“Something to do.”
Paxton focused on the game. Watched another deer come into view. This one stopped at the stream to drink. Almost as if the game felt bad for him and was throwing him a freebie. He aimed, fired. The deer fell over, a small spray of pixelated crimson erupting into the air.
Good Work!, the game said.
Zinnia glanced over. “Nice.”
She turned back to the screen, her jaw clamped, the tip of her tongue sticking a little out of the corner of her mouth. She played the game as if she were performing brain surgery.
There was movement in the corner of his eye. Someone moving toward the rear of the arcade. Paxton thought it looked like Warren. He holstered the gun in the machine, and before he even realized he’d committed to it, he told Zinnia, “I’m going to hit the restroom. Be back.”
“Sure thing,” she said, not looking away from the game.
Paxton did a quick map of the arcade in his head. Went past Zinnia and around a bank of game cabinets that would give him a view of Warren’s corner, without making it too obvious that he was standing there.
He leaned around and saw Warren counting something in his hands, looking up, but in the opposite direction. Paxton waited a little bit, long enough he got nervous Zinnia might think he was taking a shit, which was not an image he wanted to instill on a first date, but then another man appeared. Paxton stepped back to make himself less visible, though the space was dim and the distance was great, so geography was on his side.
It was a short man. Shaved head. Broad shoulders. Thick arms. Weight lifter, for sure. Brown polo. A tech worker. The two of them spoke. The man in brown tugged at the sleeve of the long-sleeved shirt under his polo, pulling it over his wrist. When the man in brown retreated, Paxton ducked behind a game cabinet before Warren could turn and see him.
He remembered what Dakota had said, about people fooling the tracking on the watches, so he moved to the far end of the arcade and tried to circle around to the front, so he could see the face of the man in brown, but he found himself in a dead-end alcove of video game cabinets. He moved back the other way and realized that he’d have to move past Zinnia on his way out the door and explain what he was doing, and even then, the guy would probably be long gone.
Well, at least he had something. A partial description was better than none.
Anyway, why run after him? He wasn’t on shift. He had something slightly more important on his plate. Paxton made it to Zinnia as she took her hands off the controls, oblivious to the amount of time that had passed.
“I’m rusty,” she said.
“That’s okay,” he said. “It’ll come back to you.”
“You hungry?”
“A little.”
“How do you feel about ramen?”
“I’ve never had ramen.” She laughed and Paxton fumbled for a save. “I mean, I’ve had those cheap little packages of ramen that taste like salt.”
She put her hand on her hip a little. Cocked it out. More comfortable now. Wanting to take him to a third location. “They got a ramen place here. Want to check it out?”
“Sure,” Paxton said.
They exited the arcade and walked toward the restaurant. Paxton glanced down at Zinnia’s hand. The way it swung at her side. He thought of taking it. To feel the smoothness of her skin. But that would be presumptuous, and he decided against it, happy at least to spend a little more time with her this evening.
ZINNIA
He was sweet, and eager to please, like a puppy. Worse, he made her laugh. In that brief little burst, the airport thing, it had felt like he’d stolen something from her.
But she liked it a little bit, too.
Zinnia had meant to shut things down after the drink. But the more he talked, the more she felt she could tolerate him. The arcade and the follow-up meal didn’t make her regret staying out. The company was better than the food, at least.
The ramen was okay. All the parts were there, but it lacked the alchemy of place. That special touch that came from someone who studied the dish like it was a passion, rather than the reality of it: a small white woman in a hairnet and a green polo scooping out a premeasured portion into a bowl and sticking it into a microwave.
At the end of dinner Zinnia decided she could use some rest, but she let Paxton walk her to her dorm, and as they lingered in that end-of-date space she decided she wouldn’t mind so much if he leaned in to kiss her.
He didn’t lean in. He smiled that goofy, bashful smile, and he took her hand and he kissed that, which was just so fucking lame. She blushed, more out of embarrassment for him.
“I had a lovely time tonight,” he said.
“Me too.”
“Maybe we can do it again sometime?”
“Yeah, I think we should. At the very least, it’d be good to have a drinking buddy.”
The word buddy made Paxton deflate. She’d chosen it specifically, so as not to let him get too familiar too quickly. This was a delicate balance. She could benefit from a relationship with him. He wasn’t repulsive or obnoxious. He smelled nice. Hell, he seemed like the kind of guy who might actually care whether his partner got off.
She left him with a sly smile—the kind that suggested something else might be in the offing—knowing it would blur the lines, and it did, because he smiled back with a very clear sense of relief.
Zinnia made for her room, where she stripped down to her underwear and sprawled out on the bed—as much as she could sprawl on the narrow mattress—and stared at the ceiling, wondering about who exactly it was Paxton had been following in the arcade.
The way he excused himself, something was up. That was obvious from the jump. It wasn’t hard to sneak behind him, even though she hated to leave a game half-played.
The arcade was a jumble of shadows and tight spaces. He was watching a handoff of some kind. Drugs, probably. Which meant he was the kind of person who liked to work off-hours.
She wasn’t tired enough to sleep so she considered logging into the television, to apply for the Rainbow Coalition, which stood the chance of netting her a promotion at some point, increasing her level of access around the facility. But she had just enough booze in her system that she didn’t want to look at words.
She sat up, rubbed her sore quad muscles, then her aching feet. Shower time. Not so much to clean up but to stand underneath the hot spray. She pulled on a clean pair of sweats and a T-shirt—something to ch
ange into after the shower—slid into flip-flops, and grabbed a towel. Made her way down the hall, where she found an out-of-order sign on the women’s bathroom, so she swiped into the gender-neutral bathroom.
Two of the stalls and one of the urinals were marked off with yellow tape. She made her way to the rear, to a small locker room with a line of two dozen showers, each one with a curtain. All empty. Zinnia picked the last one in the row. She stripped down, folded the clothes and placed them on the bench closest to her, hung her towel from the wall. The cold air raised goose bumps on her skin.
She stepped into the shower and swiped her CloudBand across the sensor next to the faucet, starting the five-minute allotment of water. An anemic spray erupted from the spout, frigid at first, snapping her muscles tight and snatching her breath, the lingering drunkenness from the night cracked in half like a stone.
It warmed up quick, and as the timer wound down she considered paying the extra few credits to extend the shower time but figured she’d save that luxury for another night.
Thank you for being green! was emblazoned above the sensor, which beeped to notify her she had thirty seconds left.
“Fuck you,” Zinnia said.
When she was done she turned off the faucet, which rattled in the handle, and flung the curtain aside to find a man sitting on a bench.
She pulled the shower curtain back and reached for the towel, wrapping it around her torso. She was embarrassed, but that quickly made way for anger, because he was watching her stall. She stepped out. He was wearing a white polo shirt and jeans. Barefoot. His sneakers sitting next to him, socks balled up and placed inside. Pudgy, red face, dark hair. No towel. And still, staring at her. The band of his watch was stainless-steel mesh.
“Can I help you?” Zinnia asked.
“Just waiting for my turn.”
She looked down the row of shower stalls, all still empty.
Zinnia’s brain went into kill mode, breaking his body down into pressure points. All the locations she could hit to elicit a pain response. But that was a sure way to get herself turfed, so she took her clothes so she could dash for the privacy of her room.