by Rob Hart
Struck by an idle thought, she raised the CloudBand and asked, “What’s my rating?” Wondering if that was even a legitimate command.
The CloudBand flashed four stars.
“Fuck you,” she said.
She pulled the multi-tool out of the back of the kitchen drawer, climbed on the bed, undid the tapestry, and got to work. Only a couple of inches left to go, and this time she didn’t stop until she was done, jamming the blade into the ceiling the way she wished she could jam it into Rick’s throat, the square of drywall coming free in a final hiccup of dust, opening into darkness.
She dropped it to the bed and ran her hands around the opening, looking for the strongest place of purchase, and pulled herself into the ceiling. She used the flashlight on her phone to illuminate the space. It was a mess—wiring and ducts everywhere, and a smell, like something was rotting. But there were a couple of feet of clearance, so it would be easy enough to move, and she could make out the placement of the support walls, so she wouldn’t crash into someone’s room.
From here it was approximately 122 feet to the women’s bathroom. She’d been counting.
PAXTON
The man with the unibrow threw a hard shoulder into Paxton, nearly taking him off his feet. He caught himself from falling and looked at the man, expecting some kind of apology, but the man just grumbled.
“Fucking bullshit,” he said. “Been on line for an hour.”
The man stood in the millimeter-wave scanner and raised his arms, let the metal blades spin around him. Paxton glanced over to Robinson, the woman on the screen, who gave a slight nod—no contraband.
No one had any contraband. No one was stupid enough to steal from this place. They knew what it meant. Immediate termination. Not even the opportunity to collect their belongings; they’d be led outside and left there.
Three days now he’d been doing this dance, and Paxton counted unibrow’s shoulder among the pleasant interactions. No one was happy about queuing up to stand on line after a long day on their feet. So Paxton did what he did best: smiled and pretended like everything was okay and hoped he might see Zinnia, but of the thousands of people who had passed him in the last three days, he hadn’t. This might not even be her section of the warehouse.
To pass the time between the whirring blades and the slight dips of Robinson’s chin, he chewed on the three-star rating he’d discovered on his CloudBand after he left Dobbs’s office.
That, and the dots.
It was probably nothing. Maybe Zinnia had been looking for him. It could have been any of the other million possible explanations, rather than that she was following him.
Thinking about stars and dots was a distraction from the screens surrounding them that played Cloud videos on a loop. At the end of his first day, he’d had the scripts memorized. By the second day, they’d bored into his head like a drill. By the third day, they’d become the soundscape to his own personal hell.
Cloud is the solution to every need.
I work for you.
Thank you, Cloud.
At the end of his shift he wandered slowly to Live-Play, where he found Dakota jogging toward him from the direction of an elevator bank.
“What’s the story, kiddo?” Paxton asked.
“Don’t call me kiddo. I think I’m older than you. You and me are on patrol.”
“I just finished my shift,” he said.
“And today is Cut Day. That means every hand on deck. If you don’t want to get back into anyone’s good graces, by all means, say no.”
Paxton shrugged, fell in line with Dakota. “Where to, boss?”
“That’s better. Promenade. We do a circuit. Mostly keeping an eye on the trams.”
“Why the trams?” Paxton asked.
“Lots of people in and out today,” she said. “Stop asking so many questions and move your ass.”
“Fine, fine, fine,” Paxton said under his breath. He tried to outpace his annoyance but found he couldn’t, so he asked, “If Dobbs is done with me, why aren’t you?”
Dakota threw him a sideways glance. “Because you have half a brain in your head, which is three-quarters more than most of the mooks who come through here. You fucked up but I think he was too hard on you. I tried to get you back on the task force but he wouldn’t budge.”
“You mean the task force that isn’t a task force.”
“That’s the one.”
“Well, thanks for trying.”
Dakota shrugged. “At least I got you for the day.”
They reached the promenade, where people passed in tears, carrying duffel bags or roller suitcases, headed for the tram, for Incoming, which, for them, would now be Outgoing.
Dakota’s watch gave a chime. She brought it up.
“Got a code J in engineering,” a voice said.
She pressed the crown to respond. “Copy that.”
“Code J?” Paxton asked.
Dakota offered a stone grin. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
They walked some more. In the space of two hours they didn’t see much. More sad people shuffling away. They took a break to get lunch. Paxton suggested CloudBurger but Dakota wrinkled her nose, insisted on tacos. Not the worst trade-off. They ate in silence, watching the crowds. Two more code J’s came in. Dakota didn’t seem to be logging them or very interested. She just responded in the affirmative and carried on.
After a long stretch of silence, Paxton voiced a stray thought that had been rattling around his head, in the interest of promoting some conversation. “What if it’s like a Faraday cage?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an enclosure used to block electromagnetic fields. It’s named after the scientist who invented it, back in the 1800s. It’s why your phone doesn’t work so well in an elevator. Metal enclosure.”
Dakota nodded. “Signal blocking.”
“We had this thing in the prison. You’re not supposed to have cell phones, right? Big-time contraband. We had these sensors that could detect cell phone signals. So a couple of the skells, they figured out to carry their phones in baggies lined with aluminum foil.”
“Did that work?”
Paxton shrugged. “Depended on the carrier, how well they lined the bag. Apparently they got the idea from booster bags, which is a shoplifting thing. Take a bag lined with foil, go into a store, put stuff in the bag; it blocks the sensors that would go off if you tried to leave without paying. Anyway, a new cell phone tower went up right next to the prison, and it stopped working. Signal was too strong.”
Dakota finished the final bite of her last taco, wiped her mouth with a napkin, and dropped it on a tray. They got up and dumped the empty wrappers and napkins into the trash, made their way into the hallway. Dakota was nodding her head like she was listening to music.
“So you think these geniuses are wrapping their arms in foil?” she asked.
“I doubt it,” he said. “It worked okay. It wasn’t foolproof. But maybe it’s something like that.”
Paxton’s and Dakota’s watches crackled to life. “Code S, code S, Maple lobby.”
“Party time,” Dakota said.
“What’s a code S?”
“Squatter. Someone who won’t accept a cut.”
“What do we do?”
“Figure it out.”
They took off at a half jog. As they approached the Maple lobby, the crowds grew thick with people stopping to watch the commotion. It didn’t take long for them to find it: a group of six people—two reds, two greens, a brown, and a blue—lying on the ground, playing dead, letting their bodies go limp as a brigade of blues tried to drag them toward the tram. The area was strewn with bags, some of them torn open, clothes and personal items flung about. Paxton kicked a pink tube of deodorant out of h
is path. From the scrum, he could hear the people on the floor yelling.
“Please!”
“No!”
“Just give us another chance!”
“Christ,” Dakota said. She dashed toward the fray as Paxton caught sight of Zinnia making her way to a hallway leading to a set of bathrooms. The sight of her made his brain short-circuit a minute, until Dakota yelled at him, “C’mon!”
He snapped out of it, ran over, found Dakota taking the arm of a middle-aged woman, dragging her toward the tram.
“What exactly are we doing here?” Paxton asked.
“Get them on the damn tram car and let the team at Incoming sort them out,” she said.
“Is that really the best use of our time?” He dropped to a knee next to a middle-aged blond woman and said, “Miss, I’m Paxton. Can you tell me your name?”
She looked at him, her eyes welling with tears. She began to work her mouth, like she was going to speak, but instead spit a wad of saliva onto his face. Paxton closed his eyes as the warm spray splattered his cheek.
“Fuck you, pig,” she said.
They were surrounded by security officers now, a wall of blue that kept anyone on the outskirts from seeing what was happening on the floor. Dakota looked around to verify this, then pressed her thumb into the woman’s neck, just above the clavicle, and pressed hard. The woman screeched and tried to jerk away, but Dakota had a good grip.
“Get the hell up,” she said. “Game’s over.”
“Please stop…,” the woman said.
“Dakota,” Paxton said.
“What?” she asked, looking up at Paxton, increasing the pressure. “They don’t work here anymore. Doesn’t matter what we do to them. And the sooner we get this done, the better, because—”
From behind them, there was a scream.
Paxton leapt to his feet and sprinted in the direction of the sound. It had come from the tram tracks. There was a bigger crowd now, standing around the steps leading to the platform, a tram pulled halfway into the station. Paxton pushed his way through until he made it to the edge.
The tram conductor, an older man with a bald head, was leaning out and looking at the space of track in front of him, his face slack. About fifty feet down was a jumble of something that, as Paxton drew closer, he realized had been a man.
Paxton hopped onto the track and made his way in the man’s direction. He didn’t have to get close to know he was dead. Too much blood. He was completely still, one leg bent at an inhuman angle, like the knee had pivoted completely the other way. Something at his wrist caught the light. His CloudBand was decorated with glittery dice.
Paxton stood over him, his head giving a little spin. There was a scratch and shuffle next to him. He turned to find Dakota, staring down at the body.
“That’s a code J,” she said.
“J is for ‘jumper,’ ” Paxton said.
Dakota nodded. “Was hoping you’d make it through your first cut without having to deal with one. But I guess that was wishful thinking.” She raised her watch. “We got a code J, Maple track. DOA.”
Paxton dropped into a crouch, put his hand to his mouth. It was not the first dead body he’d seen—the prison hadn’t been a nightmare, but there had still been a few ODs and assaults that went too far. And just because he’d seen some didn’t mean he wanted to see any more.
“C’mon,” Dakota said. “We got to clear the area.” She paused. “Better him than us, right?”
Paxton tried to speak, but found all he could muster was a single word, and even that got caught in his throat.
No.
ZINNIA
Zinnia spent fifteen minutes waiting in the ceiling, peering through a crack between the tiles, waiting for the bathroom to be empty. This, after two jolts from loose wiring and a nice scratch on her knee from some shoddy masonry.
The air had settled, but Zinnia’s lungs still felt heavy with the debris she’d kicked up dragging herself through the narrow space. She’d watched people come in to shower or use the toilets in waves, but finally, there was one woman left. She washed her hands and then made her way out the door.
Zinnia moved the ceiling tile aside and dropped to the floor. Climbed on a bench and replaced it. The ceiling was low enough she should be able to get back up. It wasn’t fun, but it worked, because when she stepped into the hallway, there was not a team of blue shirts standing outside the door, which was what she half-expected to find.
She checked her pocket for the eyeglass case and pulled down the sleeve of her sweater, so that it wasn’t obvious she wasn’t wearing the watch.
People were distracted by Cut Day. If there was a time to do something, it was now. It wasn’t just that she wanted to get the fuck out of there. Though, after finishing her assignment, she might come back to beat the shit out of Rick. Just for fun.
A few people were heading toward the elevator bank. She followed. When they got onto the elevator, there was a jumble as everyone reached forward to swipe their wrists past the sensors. Plenty of cover. Zinnia pushed toward the back, held her arms behind her.
The elevator made a stop on the next floor—two more people got on—then on the next. Zinnia rolled her eyes, stopped herself from audibly sighing. Of course. Now’s the time for a parade.
As the doors opened on the lobby, she briefly considered finding a lighter and setting something, somewhere, on fire. That was always a tried-and-true way to create cover. Her mind always went to fire, ever since that little blaze in a police station trash bin saved her from the death penalty in Singapore. But as soon as she stepped onto the shiny floor of the lobby she realized she didn’t have to worry. A group of people were mounting some kind of protest, lying on the ground, refusing to be moved, as security officers tried to pull them to their feet.
Perfect. Zinnia made for the hallway. Everyone was watching the altercation.
She glanced behind her to make sure the coast was clear, and as she reached the CloudPoint she dropped into a duckwalk, which would take her under the eye of the camera. When she was clear, she went to the bathrooms. Neither of them had doors, just an entrance with a tight turn, so that if you leaned forward, you could see inside. She peeked into the men’s room, which appeared empty, then went into the women’s bathroom. A pair of wedge sandals was visible under one of the stalls. Great. She picked a stall and sat on a toilet, counting her breaths while she waited for the other woman to finish, flush, wash her hands, leave. It took longer than she would have liked, but at least no one else came in.
On the way out she gave another glance into the men’s room. Still empty. She made her way down the hallway, walking quickly, watching for movement, eyes on the end of the corridor in case someone popped up. A few people flashed past, but they were all on their way to watch the scene by the tram.
She stuck close to the wall and dropped into a crouch, then fell to her knee at the base of the CloudPoint and stuck out her foot. She undid her shoe with one hand, letting the laces flop onto the floor, as she reached for the eyeglasses case with the other. She thumbed it open and took out the pen, jammed it into the lock cylinder. Gave it a hard twist. The thin metal panel popped open.
Inside was a tangle of wires and computer chips. She rooted around, looking for a free slot, running her fingers along the surfaces she couldn’t see, her heart picking up pace now, wondering what she would do if there wasn’t one.
More people walked by the doorway. No one turned in.
But eventually someone would.
She felt a recess. Empty space under her finger. Risked a glance down.
No, not right.
Kept searching.
She was about to give up when she felt it, a small rectangular gap, and she slid the gopher in, counting to ten in her head, then went to eleven, just to be safe, and
pulled it back out.
Step one.
She tied her shoes and shoved the panel closed, as her heart went full jitterbug. She walked a few feet forward on her hands and knees, then stood up to full height and hustled out of the hallway, back into the lobby. She moved over to the elevators and was shifting from one foot to the next, waiting for the crowds to disperse, for a large group of people to get on, which would increase the likelihood of someone going to her floor, when Paxton came walking from the tram, headed to the hallway.
It was actually less a walk and more a shuffle. His hands hung down limp at his sides. Twice he stopped and looked at them, but from this distance Zinnia couldn’t tell why. She moved behind a map kiosk, so he wouldn’t turn around and see her standing there.
PAXTON
Paxton waved his hands under the sensor for the sink, wanting more than anything to get the sticky, drying blood off his skin.
Nothing happened. He cupped his hands and moved them up and down, then in a circle. Still nothing. He waved. Saw his face reflected in the flat silver fixture.
He balled up his fist and hit it. Once, twice. Leaving smudges of blood on it, so he couldn’t see himself anymore.
He had checked the man’s pulse even though he knew he was dead, even though there was so much blood. One of the paramedics who showed up vomited at the sight of the crumpled body and ran off, so Paxton helped the other paramedic load the jumper’s body into a bag. It was like handling a sack of loose change.
He closed his eyes. Breathed in through his nose. Stuck his hands repeatedly under the faucet. Finally, a weak stream of water dribbled out. He wet his hands, covered them with soap from the dispenser, and scrubbed. The water was lukewarm and he wanted it to be scalding. He wanted to take off the top layer of skin. Even when his hands were pink and clean, they didn’t feel that way.
He left the bathroom and passed the CloudPoint, the bottom panel of which was swung out. He leaned down and closed it, but the door wouldn’t close all the way because the lock wouldn’t engage. He ran his finger along the lock, found a small piece of white plastic wedged inside.