Long Dark Dusk

by J. P. Smythe

  I spot her a few rows over. The people who live in those sheds are putting out their fires hissing as she runs past; but I can make her out just enough to keep track of her. She’s barely my age—younger, I would guess—and I can’t see the baby, not at first. Then movement from the pack on her back—that’s where it is. Easier to bundle it away than carry it, I suppose. I wonder what exactly set it off crying this time: food, sleep, the desire to be anywhere but here. The mother is panicking. She’s looking around, gasping as she runs. She’s making this panting noise, the air puffing from her mouth like smoke. It’s hard to run in the cold, I’ve learned. There’s still no sign of the police. If I were her I’d be less worried about running. I would be trying to keep the baby quiet.

  But she’s not me. She’s lived here a lot longer. Maybe she knows something I don’t. I have to change direction, feet slamming onto patchwork rooftops to keep up. I’m leaping to another row when I hear the sirens in the distance.

  Damn. Out of time.

  The girl runs toward where Alala lives, over by the entrance, by the fence. Maybe she’s going to try and get out of here, past the wire fences, past the gray-brown of our concrete and into the poorer parts of the suburbs. Maybe it’ll be easier to hide there. But it’s not like they’ll stop chasing her. They’ll catch her, and she’ll barter. They always barter.

  I follow her; she’s silhouetted by the glow from embers of extinguished fires. As she turns to hush the baby, to soothe it, I see her face in the light of the moon. She’s younger than I first thought. Thirteen or fourteen. She shouldn’t be in here, shouldn’t be running. She shouldn’t be in this situation.

  I have to get her attention. The police are coming closer. I can hear their sirens and their tires on the graveled tarmac near the entrance to this part of the city.

  “Hey,” I shout, but not too loud. I don’t want to get made, not if I can help it. There’s every chance that the police want me just as much as they want her. Maybe even more. “Hey!” She turns and looks at me while she’s running, and she stumbles. My fault. She’s on her knees, scrabbling, the baby really howling now. The jolt kicked it into a whole new level of panic.

  “Go away,” she says. She doesn’t want my help. They never do.

  Then I hear the engines, unnaturally loud. They’re here on bikes, on trucks. Their approaching lights bob wildly, throwing shadows up all around me.

  “I can get you help,” I say, but I’m not even sure that’s true at this point. Still, it’s worth a shot, better than giving up before you’ve even had a chance. But she doesn’t stop. She hesitates. Maybe. I can see it in her shoulders, her spine. Maybe.

  But she’s too late. We both are. The vehicles—two bikes and a truck, both armored far more seriously than you need to deal with a teenage girl and her illegal baby—screech to a stop in front of her. The remains of somebody’s shanty, plowed through and destroyed, hang from the front of the truck—fabric and fragments of metal piping. Technically, nobody’s allowed to live here. The police don’t care what damage they might cause. The vehicles rumble, which is intentional. They can be silent, but the police use the sound when they want to intimidate whomever they’re chasing, when they want you to know that they’re unbeatable, inescapable. It’s a growl of intent.

  The back doors of the truck open and the officers scramble out. The two on the bikes step down, leaving their engines on and pointing the lights right at the girl. She shields her eyes with her forearm. I duck down to lower the chance of them seeing me. I don’t want them to force me to make my move. That has to be my choice.

  Miraculously, the baby’s quiet. The mother could still talk her way out of this—as long as they don’t search her backpack. I stay back and down, and I watch. The police are all dressed the same, men and women, doesn’t matter. Thin black-fabric uniforms, little plates across their mouths for air. The only bit you can see is their eyes; the police are fitted with augments to help them track others, to see in the dark, to react faster. Silly, though—augmented body parts make for an easy target. Take them out, and whoever they belong to is temporarily out of action.

  The police spit orders at her. I don’t hear what they say, only the fizzing static of their mouthpieces, the high-pitched residue of whatever it is they’re actually telling her. When they direct their orders at you, it comes out as a targeted sound—like they’re talking inside your head. They’re telling her to put the baby down, I’m sure. They’ll take that first and then her, won’t want the kid caught up in any sort of crossfire if there is some. They won’t want to damage it.

  I can see the police’s hands, all twitching fingers wavering near their sides. No weapons, to reduce the chance of an accident. They’ll try to persuade her to go with them of her own accord; they might even tell her that they’ll allow her to keep the baby, just somewhere cleaner and nicer. She might even bite, even though she’ll know it’s a lie.

  It’s always a lie.

  I see one of the cops put his hand on the hilt of his weapon. The thin blue light that says it’s activated blinks once, twice. The mother can’t see that from where she’s standing. She begins to kneel, swings the pack to her front, and opens it so that she can put the baby down.

  It’s a show of trust. She raises her hands.

  I surrender.

  How can she be so stupid? How can anybody be so stupid?

  I weigh my options. I’ve escaped from nine at one time before, easily. A month or so back, I made it away from twelve of them. Barely escaped, but I made it. Amazing what you can do when you have to. I must get their attention, get them away from her. If I can get their attention they’ll scan me, tag me. If I’m lucky, I’ll be higher up on their list of priorities than the baby is.

  I shout to get their attention. They look up at me—all but one of them. I see the little lights in their eyes flicker. “Get out of here!” I yell at the girl, but she doesn’t listen. She doesn’t take the baby and run. She cowers, pulling the infant tightly to her. “Move!” I scream, but the girl stays still.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. Somebody gives you a chance, you take it. At least, you should. That’s how Australia worked.

  If I run, they’ll take her anyway. They’ll chase me and I’ll either lose them or injure them; then I won’t find her when I’m done because there’s no way she won’t already be locked up, barred, and tagged. Everything will have been for nothing.

  And I am so, so sick of running.

  Different tack. I jump from the roof to close the gap between me and the police. I watch them scan the area, their eyes darting around the place faster than real eyes would, the little blue-hued reflective glint of their pupils trying to find escape routes, alleys, hiding places and prepping for pursuit.

  That’s not my plan, not this time.

  I know how to fight the police. Hit one hard enough on the bone between their eyes, right at the top of the nose, and it does more than hurt their skull. Something in their augments scrambles. It’s a flaw in their design: They’ve been outfitted with cheap tech—the government too skinflint to bother getting them anything up to date. Smash one, then another, then boot yet another in the crotch. Doesn’t matter what gender you are, that’ll crumple you. I slam my fist into throats, push their faces down onto the gravel.

  It starts to rain, which is typical. Just a sprinkle, nothing setting in. I tear weapons from their hands, throw them into the darkness, smash mask plates, poke eyes. Whatever works. The rain is hot like the showers I used to love. Haven’t had one of those in a while. Too long. The warm water is nice—satisfying even, though it makes it harder for me to see. The augments give them an advantage in the rain, but I’ve always worked best at a disadvantage, with my back against the wall—gives me a reason to take risks.

  They fight well because they’ve been trained. They’ve spent their whole lives working at getting better at fighting, building their skills, harnessing their aggression.

  But then, so have I.

  I leave on
e of them awake, head still lolling, mouth more than a bit drooly. He tried to hit me with his striker; he went for the back of my head. But I snatched it and jabbed him in his own neck with it so hard that it crunched something in his throat before the electrics even sparked through his system—but he’s conscious, just about.

  “Where were you going to take the baby?” I ask him. He makes a noise but it’s unintelligible. He tries to pretend that he doesn’t know that he’s about to pass out. This is how it always is: You have to fight for information, no matter how little you actually get. They’re linked via audio to their control, who’s probably listening to everything they say. They have to make it seem like I’m torturing them. And even when they do give up information to me, it’s rarely anything that useful. It’s all the same stuff, over and over. I press my hand to his throat where I injured him before. His eye—his one good eye at least, the light gone out from the other—staring right at me. Suddenly, the power of speech returns to him and he tells me what I already know, croaking out the words.

  He tells me there’s no way to find out where the kids have gone—that information is all special requisition stuff. It’s the same thing they always say. He tells me his name because that’s what they’re taught to do. Tell them your name, because it makes you more human. You’re less likely to get killed if they know your name. Not that I’d ever kill him, but he doesn’t know that. I don’t kill, no matter what they might think about me.

  I hear the sound of backup: a whirring in the wind and the scream of sirens.

  Now there’s no choice but to run.

  The girl is gone and her baby with her. She must have run while I fought the police. She didn’t wait to thank me, but I don’t blame her. I run back toward my home and I shout as I go, telling the people hiding behind their walls that the fight isn’t over. Most people here are scared. I knew somebody once who would have called them cowards, but the truth of it is that these people are surviving. You do what you have to do. As my mother once said to me: Be selfish. That’s the path of least resistance.

  The only time I ever tried to not be selfish, I ended up down here. So now I’m doing exactly as my mother said. And it was selfish of me, helping this girl. The police have information I need. Not the girl’s fault I didn’t get it.

  I pick up the pace and head toward the Wall. At least it’s a target you can see from wherever you are in the city, like a point on a compass. Faster, feet slamming onto the concrete so hard they hurt. Don’t go near the rooftops. If they’re in the air, that’ll get you spotted faster than anything. It’s easier to stay down and bolt forward past the warehouses even as the lights of their vehicles start flooding the streets behind me.

  Up in the sky, framed against the slight red tint of the dawn, birds fly in formation; a sharp V, an arrowhead soaring on the gusts coming from the Wall.

  I stop when I reach the water in front of the city wall. There’s nowhere to run now; the police are too close behind me. The water here is frozen where it touches the Wall itself. Patches of ice spread out across its breadth forming precarious bridges over the water that you don’t dare walk upon. The only thing this water is good for is drinking. It’s too cold to swim in; after a few minutes, hypothermia will set in. But a few minutes are all I need, if I’m lucky. If I get this right.

  We call this area the docks, because once that’s what it was. Before the Wall was built, ships came here. Before that it was an army base, and before that probably fields, farmland, forest. Now the bits that made it a dock are mostly gone. There’s no pier, no walkways, just concrete collapsing at the edge and the remains of an old crane that’s mostly been torn apart for scrap. I sit on the ground where the water meets the land and I lower myself in as quietly as possible. It’s horrible. My whole body arches away from the cold and I struggle not to squeal as I go in. I push myself to a drifting floe of ice and sink down until only my mouth and eyes are above the water. I can see lights approaching the water’s edge. I wait until they’re close, until I have to actually hide from them.

  When they’re close enough, when they’ve jumped down from their vehicles and are scanning the area, I force myself to go totally under. The cold is murder on my eyes, but I don’t dare close them, not even for a second. So I look down through the water, and I can see so far. Not to the bottom, it’s too dark; but I can see a fault line that tore the land, the city, into pieces; I see the remains of people, of possessions, of lives.

  Those people didn’t know what was happening to them when they died. Not a single part of it was their choice.

  I hold my breath and pray that my body doesn’t let me down—not now, not when I need it the most.

  The gasp when I break the water after they’re gone is wonderful. It hurts because it’s so very cold, but I try and stay down in case they’re still milling around. I wait, bobbing about in the water, attempting to stay motionless even as my limbs start to ache. It’s only when I absolutely have to that I pull myself out. I kneel on the solid ground for a moment. I can’t stop shivering. I need to.

  Just outside one of the warehouses, I find a fire that’s still lit and sit next to it as everybody else starts to poke their heads out to make sure the police have gone. I warm my hands and arms; I lean in over the coals, just for a few moments, just to feel the heat on my face and listen to the sizzle from my hair as the water slips off.

  Then I’m off before anybody can ask me why I’m so wet or, if they saw me before, why I was being chased.

  My home here isn’t unlike my last: three walls, a roof, a floor. A bed, although I had to work pretty hard to make it what I needed it to be. I got a mattress from the waters at the edge of the docks—somebody threw it there, I don’t know why and I don’t really care—and I let it dry out. But it was too soft, it made my back ache, so I had to put wood inside it. My back hurt less after I made it harder. I also traded for a sheet of filthy torn fabric, but once I’d scrubbed it clean it revealed a pattern that’s really quite beautiful. It took me a while to adjust to the colors. They’re everywhere. There’s nothing dark about being here, not during the daytime. There’s a lot of sunlight, so much brightness coming down from the city between the city walls. It’s almost blinding.

  I found the docks quickly when I first got here, mainly because I had to. The docks are the part of the city that nobody else wants. The ground is too unstable to build on, and they’re too close to the Wall, to the air conditioners that keep the rest of the city cool. They’re useful for the homeless, though, for shanties and shelters. Big, unbroken concrete slabs on the ground, then a load of old buildings that have been repurposed. There’s a lot of metal around, a lot of shards of glass on the ground. This is where you live if you’ve managed to stay inside the city itself after you should have been kicked out or if you’ve managed to avoid being chased out. If you make it out of here, you get a place in the suburbs. But that costs.

  It looks like Australia at a glance—people living in cramped conditions, no sense of there being anything permanent about where they live, everybody suffering. But it’s different. There’s something missing here. At least on Australia we had the arboretum—and a sense of unity, I suppose. We might have been terrified, but we were all terrified. Every floor, every section, whatever gang or cult you had allegiance to, everybody was scared. Here there’s no fear. Instead, they’re resigned. They live hand to mouth, day by day, remembering when things were better. They struggle to eat and stay warm, they pray that the fans in the Wall won’t set too much of a chill in over the night time, that the police won’t come and raid and put out the fires, that there might be a job for them in the morning—a lot of good people so beaten down it’s like they’re barely here.

  They remember when things were better, and they pray that things will change.

  So maybe that’s something I share with them, at least.

  TWO

  I know a man who lives much farther into the city, well away from the docks. His apartment is almost centra
l, in a part where you wouldn’t think ordinary people could actually afford to live. His building isn’t as tall as some though, and that’s something I’ve discovered: height costs here. His name is Ziegler, and that’s all he calls himself. Always that, nothing more. We’re on a single-name basis.

  Ziegler.

  Chan.

  He used to be a reporter, he says, which was a good job. He wrote stories, telling people what was going on. And then that was lost, pretty much, because there are direct feeds for everything; eye in the sky stuff, he calls it. Pie in the sky. He said that like a joke when he first told me about himself, and he laughed, but I didn’t. I didn’t get it. Even after he explained it.

  He writes articles and books about the city, so he finds people to talk to from the outskirts: women, men, whoever. He buys them dinner and he records their stories. He lets them sleep in his apartment for the night. He has a spare bedroom painted in a soft pink color. The bed is small, but it’s better than being outside. And he gives his informants clothes; if not new then at least clean, better than what they were wearing when they went there. I got a new outfit once; he let me pick from the wardrobe. Only the wrapped-in-plastic ones were off-limits.

  Ziegler and I have a system. I go to one of the contact points outside the docks, and I send him a blank message that’s totally innocuous. He said to never use names, never give too much information away. They’re watching everything, he said. He’s pretty nervous about this stuff. He set me up with an ID, a name that isn’t mine and that I don’t recognize—Peggy Wolfe, somebody who I’m sure once existed but now no longer does, except for when I walk into shops as her or order a coffee on a credit chip Ziegler’s given me—but it logs me in okay. As long as I don’t have to use gene testing to get in anywhere or use anything I’m fine; and the docks’ contact points are run-down and beaten up, so they don’t register any issues with my ID. They haven’t been in good repair for years, I’m told, probably never will be. As long as they work there’s no sense in changing them. No benefit. So I type in my details. Username: PEGGY WOLFE; Password: AGATHAJONAHMAE. He told me to pick something that I would remember. If I forgot it, I’d be screwed. I told him I’d never forget those names.