Long Dark Dusk

by J. P. Smythe

  Usually he turns up at the docks a few hours later and then we’ll go to his apartment and talk. We have to be careful, he tells me. There’s a lot of violence in this part of the city and we need to be wary of getting caught up in it. We trade. I keep him up to date about what I’ve seen. He takes notes, records my stories while we eat food that he pays for.

  He’s always trying to find out details about the crime, the terrorism. Anything I hear I report back. And when that’s done, he asks about me about Australia. He wants to know about living on one of the prison ships. He’s writing a book, he says, about the penal system, how it got to the point we chose to send people to space. And more than that, what we do with prisoners now. It’s a different world now. Now everybody’s useful, nobody’s expendable. They just have to be taught to be better.

  There’s something he told me about freedom of the press, the ability to protect a source. Nobody can ask him who I am. He can claim that I’m actually a fiction, an amalgamation of voices, an approximation. I’m not a single person. But the book? It’ll be the truth. He says that too many people don’t hear the truth.

  He had a wife and a daughter. The daughter died; I know that because the room that his visitors are allowed to stay in was hers and there’s a holo of her on the side, of her laughing and giggling, and when you touch it you can hear the sound of her voice and how young she was. Younger than me. The wife isn’t here anymore and he won’t talk about her. But I can see that there’s something in all of this, in his story and in mine. Some truth about her and what happened. Alala told me that all men are obsessed with the women they’ve loved.

  “Obsessed men do drastic things,” she told me, and then she told me stories from when she was a younger woman, about her ex-lovers. She laughed at her own stories far too much.

  I can get ahold of him whenever I want, but if Ziegler wants to find me, there’s no way of letting me know. He offered to get me a chip, but I don’t want one. I like being “off the grid,” as he calls it; I like the freedom of being able to cut myself clean away if I need to. I like the idea that if somebody wants to talk to me they have to find me first.

  Today I spot him before I even hear whispers that he’s looking for me. He’s dressed in a suit that’s far too rich for these parts and far too flimsy. If you’re a native of the docks, you know that you need a heavy coat. You can tell he’s out of place here because he’s shivering. But more than that, he looks like money. There are no ragged edges to him. His hair is slicked back, aged to an almost perfectly white color, and he’s got a mouthpiece on, a thin beige mask strapped to his jaw. He doesn’t want to breathe our air, and who can blame him? It’s colder here by the vents, much harsher on the throat, leads to sickness.

  Ziegler nods at me as I head toward him. He’s got cups in his hand and a bag with something in it, and he holds them out to me like an offering. An apology for something that hasn’t happened yet, it feels like. No smile. That’s not how he does it.

  “Been looking for you. I thought we could have a catch-up,” he says. His accent is thick and sharp. Alala says that it’s money that does that, makes him sound rich, different from the people in the docks, even more different from the people who lived on Australia. “I’ve gone and stumbled onto something you’ll want to hear, I reckon.”

  “Mae?” I ask. I’m aware that I say her name too quickly. I trust him, but if I’m too eager, he could use that. All I have to barter with him is information and favors of my own. I don’t want to have to give all my good stuff up at once.

  “No,” he says. “No, not Mae.” He looks sad. Maybe it’s because he knows what she means to me. Or maybe he doesn’t look anything and I’m just projecting. “Not yet. I am getting there, let me assure you; but nothing quite yet.” He sees the dismay in my face. He’s said before how bad I am at hiding it. I’ve got to get better at that, at lying. Everybody lies here, all the time. On Australia, I think we were worse at it. It was a lost art we’d forgotten about for the most part. We were used to baring our teeth, our fangs, our tongues. Here? Seems like the truth is held back for as long as it can be, as long as it needs to be.

  “My car’s around the corner. This is going to take a while.” He puts a cup into my hand, pulls the lid off for me. I smell the bitterness of the coffee. “But trust me, Chan. It’s worth it.” Every time we meet he uses my name again, like that’s going to persuade me. In print, I’m anonymous, a contact. In person? He can’t get enough of saying my name.

  We walk to the fences that mark the edge of the docks. This part of the city used to be an army base. It was flooded and so they abandoned it, and now it’s as big a flat piece of tarmac as you can hope to find for the city’s homeless. Leaving here is such a brutal change. It’s like there’s a line drawn at the edge of the shanty towns and tented warehouses, and then there’s absolute order and structure. No warehouses, no slabs of concrete, no people scurrying about like rats. Suddenly the city is structured and ordered, grids of streets full of houses or lost-cost tower blocks that creep higher and higher into the sky the closer you get to the middle of the city.

  Ziegler’s car is parked up on a side road, a clean silver cylinder, an egg clinging to the edge of the road. As he walks close to it, it recognizes him. On the curbside, a door folds away from the side, the vehicle opening itself to let us get inside.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Ziegler,” the car says. “Did you have a nice time?”

  “Fine,” he says, as he climbs in. His seatbelt automatically snakes across his lap. As I sit next to him, the car scans me as well.

  “Hello, Guest,” it says.

  “Hello,” I reply. I hate the voice of his car. Everything here is run by the same computer, Ziegler tells me. I don’t quite understand it, but it’s everywhere. It’s called Gaia. The only reason it talks, Ziegler tells me, is to make people feel comfortable with the idea that they’re no longer in absolute control. Ziegler’s hacked his AI to keep his car off the grid, though. It’s no longer on the same network. It doesn’t remember who you are, doesn’t ID anybody. Ziegler says that’s how he protects his sources. Everything with him is built on suspicion. And, truth be told, that only makes me all the more curious.

  “Take us home,” he says. “Doors unlocked, okay?” He does that for me, because he knows I hate the thought of being trapped. He asked me why once. I told him that I wanted to know that there was always an exit in case I needed one. He told me that he likes them locked because he prefers the security. Still, he does it my way.

  The car moves off and down the road. Not that you can tell if you aren’t looking out of the windows. It’s so quiet. One of the hardest things about being here has been getting used to the sound—or rather the lack of it. The first few days, I couldn’t sleep because I missed the engine noise. Even when I was in the guards’ section of Australia I could at least feel it: the rumble of the engine through everything, a vibration so constant you almost forgot that it was there. In comparison, everything in the city is so quiet and still. They’ve made it peaceful—Ziegler’s told me that was the point when they started to rebuild. People don’t shout. If there’s noise—like from the police vehicles or from alarm sirens—it has a purpose. There’s no noise just for the sake of noise.

  Ziegler unfastens his breathing mask. It’s delicate, a new model with little purifying tanks on the side. Mine is paper, cheap, throwaway—given to us in the outskirts as the scantest protection from the harsh air, in pity packets sent from the rich to take care of the people they don’t otherwise seem to give a damn about. He takes mine from me.

  “I should get you a better one of these,” he says. He turns it over in his hands, prods it hard enough to find small tears in the fabric. “I don’t imagine this one does a thing to save your lungs.”

  “If you give me a better one, somebody’ll only try and steal it,” I reply.

  “Oh, and I’m sure you couldn’t protect yourself.” That’s the first smile of the day. Same pattern as always. He’s
stoic and stone-faced until he gets more comfortable, then the smiles come. By the time I leave him, he’ll be beaming. He passes me the bag he’s been carrying and I tear it open. It’s full of pastries. The buns aren’t cheap ones, and Ziegler acts like it isn’t a big deal that he brings these when I meet him, but he doesn’t know what it means to me. Always be grateful, I tell myself. A sensible rule for life.

  “You’ve been well?” he asks. I nod, my mouth full of pastry. “I saw something about an incursion last night. Pockets of violent dissent, the report said. Injured cops, stuff like that, bundling it in with the Amber alert . . .” I don’t make eye contact with him. He’s got good instincts—he’s called me out before—and he knows that my not looking at him is as good as a confession. “I don’t care if you were involved, you know.”

  “I know,” I mumble.

  “I care that you’re not hurt.”

  “Just some bruises. They hit pretty hard.”

  “I’ve got good painkillers. Remind me to give them to you before you leave.” I won’t need to remind him, though. He always remembers what he promises. He never writes anything down because he says that’s how people get caught. He doesn’t leave even a fragment of an evidence trail; he just puts it all into his brain and out it spools, as and when he needs it.

  We don’t talk for the rest of the journey. The car’s safe, but only just. You can’t be sure who’s listening in, I suppose; though why they would bother with us is beyond me. There are real criminals out there. Every day there are more stories about violence on the news. Some days it’s worse than others. A month after I got here, there was a bomb at the north edge of the Wall, in the train system that people use to get to the other cities. It took out a station and two trains, sucked the ground in like there were no supports and left a giant hole.

  Terrorists. I’d never heard the word until then. The news kept updating the body count and I thought about the Lows, how they were responsible for more deaths than that in the last month of our time on Australia. Terrorists. Maybe that’s what they were the whole time. They hurt others to cause terror. After that, the police upped patrols along the Wall and all the other places that felt like they could be more dangerous. The poorer high-rises, the ones that nearly reach up to scrape as high as the Wall does, they’ve been hit just as hard.

  I stare out the window. Ziegler has left the glass transparent for me because I like to see the city shining the way that it does. As you get past the outer suburbs—where the people have much less money, where the buildings are lower quality—the city becomes brighter. There’s more light here, where the sun breaks out of the shadow made by the Wall, where it creeps over the top of us. Then we move to more expensive parts of the city and the buildings change; older brick buildings give way to glass, every side reflecting everything else, mirrors upon mirrors. When two mirrored buildings face one another, you can see them repeated in their own reflections, going on and on forever. It’s beautiful.

  When they had to pick up and start again, after the quakes and the floods and the fault lines, the people who lived here wanted to make life better for those who survived. In most of the city, they’ve managed it. The only concession to what happened is the wall that surrounds us. Depending on who you are, you think of the wall in different ways. Ziegler calls it the Bastion. In the docks, we just call it the Wall. Different words for exactly the same thing. It’s an eyesore, a twenty-foot-tall lump of mole-gray stone that holds us all in. They didn’t even try to make it look pretty.

  We move fast enough through the streets that they blur. We pull up to a junction and I get just a second or so to focus my eyes before we’re off again and everything smudges back together. I see people walking around, masks on their faces for extra protection—going to work, eating food as they go, carrying bags, wearing clothes that I’m getting used to now but that were almost alarming when I first saw them. Neat as anything, cut in ways that I didn’t know you could do and still have them actually hanging off your body. And shoes that look so painful I can’t understand why anybody would wear them or how people walk in them.

  Then I think about my own shoes, about how they were lost after they took us all when we landed—how they took my clothes, my weapons. Everything. All the things that I had to go through to earn those belongings, those belongings that were mine and that I loved, and they were taken from me. Just like Mae.

  Somewhere in this city, they’re all still here. Somewhere.

  “You look like you’re keeping well,” Ziegler says, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Healthy, I mean. You’ve been eating well.”

  “There’s a kitchen near the border with Morningside,” I reply. “They’re good, do a serving in the evenings. For people who can’t afford other places.”

  “I know them,” he says, “They’re good people. They do what they can. I’ve contributed to them.” I don’t know if I’m meant to thank him for that or not. Like I should be grateful. He pats his legs, both hands onto his knees. He’s still got a ring on his finger that you use to show you’re married. But he’s not married anymore. She’s not here, at least. He very clearly lives alone. But I don’t like to ask what happened. Not my business. His hands are older than his face, wrinkled skin all over, bunched up by his wristwatch. There’s blemished skin on his knuckles, up to his arms, going under his shirt. He looks old. Old for here and old for Australia. But I can’t pin it down more than that. “I even worked at that kitchen, a few years back. Over one Christmas.” He looks at me, scrunches his mouth up. “You know about, uh . . .”

  “I know what Christmas is,” I say.

  “Of course you do. Of course.” We had it on the ship. The fat man in the red suit: just another story that we told ourselves. Same story down here as we had up there; only here it’s presents, jolly old men. On Australia it was protection. Protection from reality, even for a single night. “Anyway, I worked there. Did what I could.” And then he’s silent again and I don’t push the conversation.

  Outside the car, everything is clean and everybody looks happy.

  His apartment block—THE ROYAL, it says on the sign above the entrance—is taller than Australia by what must be a couple of times. Rows and rows of balconies, all with the same frosted green glass in the front of every single window. We drive underground, through gates and past the security terminals, and the automatic scanners scan Ziegler’s eyes while I lie down on the seat so they don’t try and scan me as well.

  “Hello, Mr. Ziegler,” the security terminal says in Gaia’s strange, strained mechanical voice, a few pinches away from actually sounding human. Then we park and rush through the parking garage to the internal elevator, which is so fast to rise that it makes my stomach churn—as if I’m hungry even though I’ve just eaten. And then we get out on his floor, the fortieth, and walk down the corridor, which has a carpet that’s patterned and soft and slightly too worn at the edges. He sometimes says the same thing as we walk down it: “I bought this apartment years ago when it was cheaper and I can’t even afford to think about moving away from here now,” or a slight variation on those words. And then he opens his door and stands back and lets me go in first.

  His apartment is different from the rest of the city. Everything elsewhere is clean and white and glass and plastic. But here, the units are made from dark wood and the shelves and surfaces are dusty. Most of the apartment is just one big room. You couldn’t be surprised in here. There’s no corner you can’t see into. Comfortable seats, a table, a kitchen. Around the walls on one side there are bookshelves running as high as the ceiling. I reach into my pack and pull out one of his books and I find the space on the shelf where it came from—this perfectly hollow space—and I slide it back in. Everything has its place in Ziegler’s apartment. It’s always obvious where something goes.

  “Did you enjoy it?” he asks. He’s been giving me books to read. I’m getting better at it, but there are so many words I don’t know that he’s given me another book to look them up in. Tha
t one was a gift—mine to keep forever, he said.

  “It was good,” I say. So he reaches over my shoulder and pulls another out, the next in the series.

  “This one is better,” he says. There’s a lion on the front and a little kid—a young kid, blonde—clutching a sword. Behind her, there’s a snow-covered forest. “This is where it all kicks off, where it gets really . . . I don’t know. I loved it when I was your age.” He means when he was younger than I am. He acts like I’m not seventeen. I don’t look my age, I know. I’m smaller, sharper. When I see people my age here in the city, I barely recognize them. We’re like a different species.

  He goes to his kitchen, opens the refrigerator, and pulls out two bottles. He throws me one as I sit on his couch. Raspberry soda. I have discovered that I hate raspberry, but I don’t say anything. “Listen,” he says. “I won’t beat around the bush. I told you I’ve found something. The other survivors, from your ship? I think I know where they were taken.”

  I read his articles first, the stuff that he wrote about the day that Australia crashed into this city. They’re anonymous, published under the name “The Truth,” and there’s a little shadowy outline of a figure next to that name, which turns and looks at the reader and tips its hat when you look at it. Ziegler tells me that’s a thing from way back. The reporter in the shadows, telling the truth to the people. Reporters are all about uncovering the struggles that the people in the city face, the real things that go on below the surface. He says over and over that the city isn’t perfect, but so many people are trying to make it so, in their own ways. And he’s trying to get the word out about them and about the people that are stopping it from happening. That’s the important thing, he tells me. I have read all his articles, all his books. It was a crash course in this world through Ziegler’s eyes. He seemed like a good person—somebody who sees injustices and wants to do something about them.