by Nancy Kress
“Nothing right now. When I need it, an in-home nurse, which your splendid new medical benefits will pay for. I’m very grateful, Amy. Then perhaps a hospice, depending on how it goes. I meant what I said before, you know. I’m not afraid, and I’m curious about what comes next. Since of course I have no idea and neither does anyone else, despite what some think.”
Amy, to her own astonishment, managed a small smile. “Amelia Whitcomb, scientist to the end.”
“You betcha.” Gran looked at her with admiration and Amy knew she’d made the right decision to keep her emotions under control. That was Gran’s way, and Amy was going to do everything she could to make sure Gran got her every wish for whatever time was left. Even if she had to fight Kaylie, Myra Townsend, TLN, and the rest of the world to make that happen.
Amy’s cell rang. “Hello?”
“One Two Three!” Violet sang out. “Guess what? I just got a call from a dance troupe to fill a guest spot. They saw me on the show. Well, OK, it’s only a sub because a dancer fell and can’t work, but I think it’s an omen of things to come.”
“Are you leaving the show?”
“Of course not. I’m waiting for the real offers to come in. But I think that eventually they will. You know what? I think that bitch Myra Townsend will pull this off. I think we’re all going to be stars!”
Sixteen
TUESDAY
THERE WAS NO sign of stardom on Tuesday morning. The 6:30 a.m. news, which Amy watched with Gran, focused on the TLN merger. A Pylon executive, sounding rehearsed, said, how glad he was for TLN to be “joining the Pylon family,” and that TLN would be run as an independent division, with James Taunton remaining in charge. “Nothing at TLN will change,” he said.
Not quite.
Outside, cold rain drenched Amy as she waited for a bus that never came. More trouble with the citywide transport system. No one in the wet huddle of commuters at the bus stop recognized her, or even glanced at her. Eventually they all gave up on the bus and began to walk, and so did Amy. The few cabs sped past, full of luckier people, and anyway Amy didn’t want to spend money on a cab. She wanted to save all she could for whatever Gran needed.
By the time she reached downtown, the rain had stopped but she was running to not be late. But then she couldn’t get anywhere near the building.
A vast mob of people surrounded TLN. They formed a human chain, arms interlocked, at the bottom of the broad, shallow steps leading to the glass doors. The chain extended around the corners, and more protesters blocked the street, surging forward as yet more rushed to join them. All traffic was stopped. This was not a crowd of polite, sign-carrying demonstrators. There were signs, but they were being waved as if in a hurricane, and many were splashed with red to resemble blood. People shouted and screamed. A man with a bullhorn stood on a makeshift platform, although there was no way to hear what he might be saying over the ear-hammering noise. The signs were violent:
NUKE PYLON, NOT US
DEATH TO CHEMICAL-DEATH MERCHANTS
HOW MANY DEFORMED BABIES ARE TOO MANY?
KEEP PYLON IN DUBAI!
BLOW UP CAMERON BEFORE IT BLOWS UP US
Amy paused across the street from the TLN building, at the far edge of the crowd, uncertain what to do. The building behind her was fronted by a small plaza, decorated with little ornamental trees in pots. Waist-high concrete barriers, disguised as natural-stone gateposts although without gates, ringed the plaza to prevent traffic from leaping the curb and plowing into the flimsy trees. Amy climbed on top of one of the stone posts for a better view.
Police sirens wailed a few blocks away, then stopped, unable to get any closer.
Amy saw Waverly a block away in the other direction, standing beside a long dark car and scowling. A few minutes later Cai and Tommy appeared. They began to push their way through the crowd toward the TLN building, Cai in the lead, both their wide shoulders opening a path forward. Could they cross the protest line safely and get into work? Should Amy try to follow them?
Cops in full-body armor began to penetrate the crowd from the opposite side of the building. Some protestors gave way before them, some did not. The police presence seemed to galvanize the crowd. All at once the man with the bullhorn succeeded in welding their noise into a single chant, which spread throughout the mob: “No Pylon python! No Pylon python! No Pylon python!”
A huge banner suddenly dropped from a fourth-story window of the building beside TLN: a vicious coiled snake squeezing to death two helpless children. At the sight of the banner the crowd let out a huge roar. More people surged from side streets, pushing up against those already present, knocking over the potted trees in the little plaza behind Amy. Some of these were carrying TIMES BE TOUGH MAN signs—evidently another demonstration had heard about this one and joined it.
“No Pylon python! No Pylon python!”
Amy grew frightened. She couldn’t get down from the stone post; there was no room to stand. The cops shouldered forward, trying to reach the steps in front of TLN. Amy spied Rafe in the crowd; he was holding a TIMES BE TOUGH MAN sign and shouting something incomprehensible. She could no longer see Tommy or Cai.
Still more people poured from side streets, forcing forward those already there. People closest to the buildings tried to go into them, but many doors were locked against the mob. A second bullhorn, this one electronically amplified and belonging to the cops, screamed for the crowd to disperse. The crowd gave an answering roar, so deep and loud that Amy’s ears rang.
Someone threw a rock at a cop who had reached the steps of TLN. It missed, but the cop pulled a canister from his belt—tear gas?
“Let me down!” Amy yelled. The tsunami of people washed forward—people in the front must be getting crushed! But the chanting went on—“No Pylon python!”—and the banners waved and it seemed that the streets were made of people, were tiled with them, packed together with shouting, contorted, furious faces and shaking fists.
Someone knocked Amy off her perch. She fell sideways, clutching at air, but the people were so close together that she could not fall between them. She rode the tops of their shoulders, flailing helplessly, afraid that if she did slip between them, she would be trampled. She was a piece of flotsam on a shifting, angry sea.
Cops pulled the leader off the rickety platform and carried him away, struggling and shouting. The crowd surged this way and that. To her horror, Amy glimpsed something through a sudden brief gap between the people she rode on: a body. There was a person down there beneath everyone’s feet, a person unable to get up, a person being trampled to death.
All at once the noise lessened. A man tried to throw Amy off his head and she was turned like a flipped burger so that she now faced the platform. Kaylie stood there, taking off her clothes.
Kaylie ripped off her blouse and bra, and the momentary startled reaction among enough people below—especially men—created a brief abatement of noise. A person could finally be heard. A man leaped up beside Kaylie and shouted, “Freeze! Everyone stand still before more of us get hurt! Just freeze and you’ll be safe! We can get out of here slowly and no one will die!”
Not everyone stopped shouting and pushing, but enough did. Kaylie unzipped her pants. Her perfect breasts caught the sunlight and gleamed. The man kept shouting, “Just don’t move! Just don’t move!”
Kaylie tore off her pants. She stood in black lace panties—stolen from where?—and raised her arms above her head. Enough people had stopped moving so that the terrifying surges were arrested.
“Just don’t move! Just don’t move! Now, the people at the crowd edges, move back to let others breathe! That’s it, just move back at the edges!”
The platform wobbled and the man caught Kaylie, steadying her. Her pale, gorgeous body was a beacon, a focal point as the man shouted directions for safe dispersal. Some counter-shouting from the people holding the violent signs was, for the most part, ignored. Most of these people wanted to protest Pylon Global, but not at the cost of d
ying.
The bodies below Amy moved slightly apart, and she felt herself start to fall. But then strong arms grasped her. A voice said, “Steady, Amy, I’ve got you—”
Cai.
In another moment he had her on her feet, crushed between him and Tommy, but with enough room to breathe. His right arm kept her upright. She could feel his muscles stand out like cords. The crowd loosened a little more, and then still more. No tear gas was released. Eventually Cai, Tommy, and Amy were able to wiggle to the edge of the mob and then into a side street.
“Kaylie!” Amy gasped, slumping against a concrete wall. “Is she . . . Kaylie . . .”
“Who’s Kaylie?” Cai said. “Are you all right?”
“Kaylie! The girl on the platform . . . taking off her clothes . . .”
Tommy peered around the corner. “She’s gone. No, she’s OK—a cop has her.”
“Will they arrest her?” Amy said.
Cai said, “They shouldn’t. She kept a bad situation from being a tragedy. I don’t think anyone was actually trampled.”
“Yes, there was,” Amy said. Again she saw the body beneath panicked feet, a human being treated as if he or she was no more than a rug.
Tommy said, “Do you know that girl?”
“She’s my sister.”
“Your sister!” Cai said.
At his tone, Amy looked up. He said, “She was incredibly brave. And unbelievably gorgeous.” Cai’s face glowed as it had never glowed for Amy. His blue eyes held excitement and longing. All at once, he blushed. “Will you introduce me?”
Amy could only nod while people surged past her, shouting words she didn’t understand.
* * *
Amy took a cab back home. Alex had called all of them on their cells, asking if they were all right. The moment her cell rang, Amy had a phantom: Alex dressed as a knight in black armor, seated on a horse and waving a sword. She was too shaken and too dispirited to think about the phantom. “Amy! Are you all right?”
“Yes. I was . . . yes.”
“Where are you?” Alex demanded.
“A side street, I don’t know the name. With Cai and Tommy.”
“Out of the crowd?”
“Yes.” Around the corner and down the street she could still hear shouting, sirens, chaos. People ran past her, but not in those frightful surges of packed humanity. That nightmare of being tossed on the top of the crowd, that glimpse of the body trampled beneath . . . A shudder ran over her from neck to knees.
Alex said, “Go home. Take a cab if you can find one—TLN will reimburse you. None of the three of you is hurt?”
“No.”
“Stay at home until you hear from me. I have to call the others.” He clicked off.
Tommy said, “Who was that?”
“Alex. He said for all of us to go home and stay there until he calls. But I can’t. Kaylie—I have to find Kaylie.”
Her cell rang again—Kaylie. Amy clutched the phone hard. “Where are you? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Kaylie said. “I’m inside your building with a cop. He—”
“Are you under arrest?”
“No, no. They just want me to stay inside until it’s safe. And until I get some clothes.” She actually giggled.
Anger washed over Amy, so strong that she knew it wasn’t caused only by Kaylie but by Amy’s own helplessness. But Kaylie was the immediate target. “This isn’t a joke!”
“Not to me,” Kaylie said in a different tone, and hung up.
Cai said, “Is she—”
“She’s fine,” Amy snapped. “She’s always fine.”
Cai’s eyes widened at Amy’s anger, but he said nothing more. Tommy fastened on the point that mattered to him. “Alex says to go home? For all day?”
Cai said, “I’ll take you, Tommy. But I think the chance of getting a cab is zero. Amy, we’ll walk you home.”
“I don’t—”
“Just shut up for once,” Cai said wearily, “and let somebody else make some decisions, OK? Come on.”
The three of them walked uptown in unpleasant silence. People still pushed past them, but not dangerously. Ten blocks away, a cab stopped to let someone off, and Cai leaped forward to yank open the door. “Hey!” The cabbie said, “I already got a fare waiting!”
“Yeah, us,” Cai said. “Amy, give him your address.”
The cabbie scowled, measured the size of Cai and Tommy, and shrugged. He pulled away from the curb.
Amy said, “I don’t have any money.”
“I got it,” Cai said curtly.
She knew that he didn’t have much money either, and that neither he nor Tommy lived anywhere near Amy. But she said nothing and just stared out the window at the city, still wet and soggy from the morning rain, until she could no longer hear the sirens behind her downtown.
* * *
Myra leaned forward in her leather chair in the screening room. “Stop right there—no, back up—yes, there. Can you enlarge the lower left quadrant?”
The tech sitting at the computer keyed rapidly. On-screen, a section of the crowd zoomed forward. Rafe came into view, holding a bullhorn and shouting.
Myra frowned. “It’s pretty grainy.”
“Well, after all,” the cameraman sitting next to her said petulantly, “it wasn’t like we had setups. This isn’t bad for footage we got just by chance.”
Alex, on Myra’s other side, said quietly, “You can’t use it, Myra.”
“That’s not your decision.”
“It doesn’t have to be. Just think for a minute. Putting this on the show would be exploiting a civic tragedy. A woman died in that mob, Myra. Trampled underfoot. And there are a dozen other people in the hospital. You can’t use this as a scenario even if you find clear footage of all six of them. First, it would be ghoulish. Second, it’s hardly good PR for TLN, seeing as those protestors were objecting to our merger with Pylon. Third, it would cause a national outrage.”
Myra said, “First, ghoulish is good for ratings in this show’s demographic. Second, the protestors are the villains here—they trampled that woman, we didn’t. Third, outrage is what this network does. Or have you forgotten that in your sudden moral superiority? You, who used to produce porn?”
On-screen, Kaylie climbed onto the rickety platform from which a cop had pulled the protest leader. The cameraman said, “There, bottom left edge—is that Violet?”
“Don’t zoom in yet,” Myra said. “We’ll look later.” Her gaze stayed on Kaylie, who ripped off first her top and then her lacy black bra. “That one knows how to command attention.”
Alex said quietly, “Porn has nothing to do with this. On my old show nobody died.”
Myra wasn’t listening. She watched Kaylie as half the crowd swung their gaze to her voluptuous nakedness, allowing the man with the bullhorn to seize their attention long enough to prevent more deaths.
Myra said, “Too bad she’s not a player on the show.”
Alex said with sudden harshness, “You know about her—she’s been phoning both of us nonstop. She’s fifteen. Underage.”
“A shame,” Myra said. She drummed her long manicured fingernails on the tabletop. “Really a shame. I think we might have auditioned the wrong sister.”
Seventeen
WEDNESDAY
WHEN AMY REPORTED to work on Wednesday, the front of the TLN building showed no sign of yesterday’s mob. Amy felt heavy-eyed, having watched TV news far into the night. Over and over again came grainy shots of Kaylie, captured on a hundred cell phones held up in windows or on the edges of the crowd. Kaylie herself had not come home, phoning to say excitedly that “some people from the protest” were putting her up for the night. Before Amy could object, Kaylie had clicked off.
Violet met Amy by the employees’ entrance to TLN. “Hey, you don’t look so good, One Two Three.”
“I’m fine.”
“If you say so.” Violet offered no comment about Kaylie, for which Amy was grateful. Ins
tead Violet said, “So tonight’s the second half of our great debut. Can I watch again at your place?”
“Sure.”
Inside, the security guard consulted a tablet. “Ms. Kent, Ms. Sanderson—you report this morning to Room Five-forty-six.”
Amy said, “What’s Room Five-forty-six?”
“Fifth is a studio floor,” the guard said. “I don’t know what the room is.”
It turned out to be Hair and Makeup.
“Well, well,” Violet said. “Are we under orders to get makeovers? Just so long as nobody cuts my hair.”
The room was full of actresses being worked on for various shows. Amy recognized none of them, but then she didn’t watch the melodramas that were TLN’s staples. A small man with a head as bald as an egg rushed up to them.
“Ah, yes, Amy and Violet. I’m Enrique. Let me see. . . .” Experimentally he lifted a hank of Amy’s barely combed hair. “Tragic, really tragic. When were you last shaped?”
Amy demanded, “Did Myra order a haircut for me?”
“That and more. Much more. You will leave here a different person, my dear. And a far prettier one. You, Violet—you’re not doing too badly already but those brows—no, no.”
“Bring it on,” Violet said. “Just don’t touch the hair.”
Enrique called an assistant, who led Violet away. Enrique said to Amy, “I will do you myself—you practically need an intervention. This way. I see hours of work ahead of us. Can I get you some tea? Mineral water?”
“Coffee, please.” She felt resigned, even though she didn’t really like being fussed over. This was what Myra had ordered. And it was better than reviewing more children’s learning games. Put the bug on the rug.
“Coffee—no, no. Bad for both the complexion and the teeth. Perhaps that is why yours so badly need whitening.”
Amy, who thought her teeth were sufficiently white, settled for mineral water. Then she settled in for eight hours of being fussed over.
The first five hours were the worst. Amy’s hair was washed, colored, frosted, cut, blown out, all of which involved multiple products with multiple odors both good and bad.