by J. P. Smythe
Suddenly I do—like it’s inside my head. I know what it is and I hate it: targeted sound. “Move away from the wall.”
“I told you,” Ziegler says. He shrugs then raises his hands and steps back. “This is what they do, Chan. They keep information from us. They say they’re protecting it from disaster, but they’re really just hiding it from the people.” He looks at the guard. “We’re going,” he says, and he makes a gesture with his hands that I know isn’t exactly kind. He puts his arm around me and turns us away from the guard. “You want to get in there, we’re going to need help. I can’t do that.”
A siren rings out in the distance, in the yard in front of the building. “That means it’s the end of their shift. Watch him,” Ziegler says. “I’ll get the car.” He turns me back around so that I can see the guard. He’s standing with other guards now at the foot of the building’s steps. He takes off his helmet, laughs with his friends. “Car,” Ziegler says, and he waits at the curb for it to come from wherever he parked it.
The guard pulls his gloves off and goes to the gate. He scans his arm on a pad to allow him to leave, a molecular read of his DNA, then leans forward and stares into a device for an eye scan. The gate itself fizzes and pops out of existence for a second and he steps through. It rematerializes behind him. He waves good-bye to his colleagues, doesn’t turn to look at them—he eyes me, though. I’ve seen that look before, where he’s trying to act like he isn’t staring, like he isn’t looking at the bits of me that politeness might have taught him to pretend to ignore a little more. Here on Earth, they’re more subtle about it than they were on the ship, but the intent—the look—is the same. Then he glances away, as if he’s ashamed of being caught. I imagine a partner, children, a life outside of his job.
I imagine him going home to them, having whatever counts as the rest of his day—relaxing or chores or seeing his friends. And then tomorrow he’ll come back here and do this all over again: scanning himself to get inside, having all the access he likes to all the information in the world, information like where Mae’s being kept.
I watch him wander into the distance until a voice behind me breaks my attention. “Get what we need?” Ziegler asks. His car has pulled up, the door hanging open, waiting for me. It shuts automatically and the safety belt snakes across my waist.
“We?”
“You. I meant you.” He leans forward and points out of the window at the front of the car. “Birds,” he says, and I follow his gaze. A flock of them, soaring in the distance. “Take us to Andrews Docks,” he says, and the car starts and pulls away from the curb. We drive through the city streets again and this time, instead of getting cleaner, taller, more impressive, the buildings go the other way. Everything starts to fade, the city becoming worse as we travel toward the place where I live now.
When we stop, he turns to me before I get out of the car. “Don’t do this alone and don’t do it now. Like I said, maybe talk to Alala. If you get taken, if something happens to you, there’s nothing I can do to help you, you know.”
“I know,” I say. And then I’m out onto the sidewalk, the car is gone; I can hear the docks, smell the docks, before I’m even at the fence that divides them from the rest of the city.
As I’m walking home, I think about Ziegler’s promise to help me find Mae and how it feels like it’s slipping away from me, from him. We’ve been working on this for far too long. He’s been looking, and I’ve been waiting. It’s getting hard to be patient.
There was a time when I would just act: see, think, do. Done, and then it can’t be undone. You just have to deal with the aftermath. That’s how I ended up here.
I think about the guard. The security measures are meant to prevent anyone from breaking in, but the guard could probably circumvent them if I forced him to. At night, that’s probably safest—I’ll bet their security is quieter when there aren’t other people around, and the darkness could play to my advantage. I’d have to run. I’d have to have an exit route. I’ll have to know what I’m looking for because the guard would raise the alarm as soon as he had the chance. I’d have to knock him unconscious and that would only buy me so much time. The alarms would go off sooner or later. I don’t know how to shut them down.
Fine. There must be another way.
I persuade him. I find something that he wants, and I try and get him to help me. Getting what you want is the same here as it was on the ship: Everybody’s after something. Everybody wants more than they’ve got, doesn’t matter how or what that is. He can’t earn much. I’m not asking for the world, just access to the building. Or even just get me inside, through the gate, and I’ll make it worth his while. But what will that be? No guard is going to risk their job for the cost of a good meal. They’ll want education for their kids or the cost of an extravagant augment. No way I can afford that. And then even when I’m inside, there’s the computer. It’ll be hackable, but only from there, so I’ll need to either have somebody with me or know what I’m doing. And I don’t. It takes me minutes to type anything, even though Zeigler’s been teaching me. I don’t even understand how computers work.
Every plan collapses as I run it around, as I try to pick holes. I’m good at that—weighing up the consequences and seeing them as they are. I think I’ve developed a pretty good sense of what’s realistic and what’s not. Maybe Ziegler’s right. I should ask Alala, see what she says, if she’s got any suggestions.
And then, as I’m walking home, I see her. She’s rushing along, carrying something—a small black case that shines in the blue lights that litter the Wall. She smiles at me and calls to me to follow her. She knows that I was going to find her.
Of course she knows.
“Wait here, just a few minutes,” she says when we reach her house. It’s not fair to call hers a shanty, not really. It’s a step up. She’s got a repurposed cabin, fixed up on cinder blocks. The entrance to it has rotted away, but she’s fixed up an old wooden door. Salvage—but if you had to live here, her home is the one you would want. An electricity junction with a running-water source, the security of the fence at her back, and the cluster of other houses protecting the front. Because of the deals she does, she needs the protection, it seems. She makes people angry, and when people get angry you need security. When I’ve spoken to Ziegler about her, he’s called her “a big fish in a small pond,” which I suppose makes sense. Not that I’ve seen a fish outside the museum, of course. But still I understand the concept, the idea.
The inside of her place is divided into two parts: one where she lives, the other where she conducts business. There’s another transaction already taking place: A worried man, barely older than I am, waits just outside the cabin. He’s got an augment in his throat, a voice box, and there’s a soft mint-smelling vapor coming from his mouth, which lolls open: teeth missing, tongue limp and softened to the point of uselessness. No sense in not doing something with your mouth when you can’t really speak anymore. He has no shoes, toes poking through the holes of his socks. Scars and needle track marks run up his arms, but they’re not fresh. Scars from another life, he’d probably say if I asked him. From what I’ve heard, that life is always there though—waiting, pulling at you until you crumble. The marks on his skin are going to be a constant itch—scars always are.
He doesn’t make eye contact with me, but I recognize him from around. There are only so many people living here. I wonder why he’s here, what he wants. There’s clearly no money on him and he’s nervous. But he’s not here for drugs. It’s something else.
Alala does a lot of trade. I’ve wondered why she doesn’t move to the main part of the city. She’s probably got enough money, given how good business seems to be, and it’s got to be a better life than here. Though she lives here like she already lives somewhere fancier: There are fake furs all over the chairs, a small makeshift kitchen (the units salvaged, I’m sure), with a sink that miraculously has running water, and a direct line down into the city’s electric supply. She’s doing w
ell for herself compared to most in the docks.
The scarred man fumbles with the curtain that divides the two parts of Alala’s place, pulling it aside to let her by. She pushes through fast, a little box held out in front of her. I see behind the curtain and there’s so much going on I can barely take it all in. There’s a woman on a bed, her legs up, screaming but with something between her teeth—what looks like one of the police’s truncheons. There’s a man who I know from here who used to be a doctor but now will patch up wounds or crudely fit black-market augments for the right fee (whatever alcohol or pills you’ve managed to get ahold of), and he’s pulling a baby from between the woman’s legs, his hands clamped around the head. Then Alala reaches out, face devoid of all emotion, to clamp her palm right down onto the baby’s mouth. With the other hand she opens the box, and there’s an injection in there. She takes it out, holds it up, and the man here now—he must be the baby’s father—holds the curtain open.
“Iona,” he says, his voice digitized like the car’s, and it takes me a second to figure out that’s the baby’s new name.
The doctor cuts the cord. Alala keeps her hand clamped on the baby’s face. The doctor slaps the infant and the baby bucks, trying to scream through Alala’s grip. They ignore the mother: She needs attending to, but she’ll wait. The baby is more urgent if they don’t want any alarms to be raised.
The doctor takes the syringe from Alala, his hands still dripping with the mother’s blood, and he places the needle right up next to the baby’s neck.
“Firm,” he says, “hold her firm.” Alala keeps her hand over Iona’s mouth, even as she struggles. She’s just been born and doesn’t know what’s going on, nothing but panic. The doctor slides the needle into her soft flesh, his hands remarkably steady—I’ve seen him when he’s not working and he shakes as though his body has a constant shiver running through it—and there’s absolutely no resistance to the needle, the injection is delivered straight into the throat. The baby struggles more. You wouldn’t think something so small could be so much trouble, but she’s wet, sopping with whatever she was born in, fluid and blood and mess. So easy to drop. The needle comes out, the point of it wet with new blood.
“Try,” the doctor says. Alala—who still hasn’t said a word—pulls her hand away slowly and the baby’s mouth arcs open, suddenly free to breathe and scream in equal measure.
Only no noise comes out. I can’t even hear the desperate sounds of her inhaling air, trying to heave it into her new throat, trying to understand what’s happening. But then, why would she know any different? If she’s never made a sound, she won’t know what she’s missing—not until she’s older, frustrated at her own inability, at the choice that somebody else made for her yet likely kept her with her parents and stopped the Services from taking her somewhere else, to another life.
“Good,” the doctor says. “Good.” He wipes his hands on his tunic then looks at the mother. She’s lying back, eyes lolling, craning her neck in order to see her baby. “That was good work,” he says, but it isn’t clear who he’s talking to. He takes the baby and places it in its mother’s hands. “It’s for the best,” he says, and he sounds weary as he says it because he knows that maybe that’s not true. She won’t speak again. She was born here in the docks, after all, and this is the only way of making sure she’s quiet, that the Services won’t find her. They’d take her away if they found her. And nobody gets them back after they’ve been taken.
I wonder if Mae would have been quiet. I wonder if she would have known how to keep her head down, stay silent. I wonder if I would have had to force her to, to take measures to make sure that she did.
But I let her get caught, get taken away to wherever they end up being taken.
I shut my eyes for a second. I think about my punishment; how I failed her and everybody else.
“Sensible, isn’t it?” I hear the words and it takes a second for me to realize they’re aimed at me. It’s Alala’s voice and she’s right in front of me. I look at her, then through the curtain as it closes. I see the family reunited: the nervous man cradling his new and silent daughter, his wife exhausted but almost happy that this has gone as well as it could possibly go given the circumstances. Alala clicks her fingers in front of my face to get my attention. “You look worried. You in the same way as her?” She means the mother. She puts her hands in front of her belly, puffs out her cheeks, waddles, then collapses in laughter. “Sit down, sit down. Stop looking so worried, silly girl. Tsk.” She kicks one stool out from underneath the table and another for herself. She lowers herself down to it, this long moan coming as she breathes out, hand pressed against the small of her back.
“I need something. Or, if I can get something . . .”
“You can always get something,” she says, “depends on how much you want it, that’s all.” She’s hard to give an age to. She’s older than Agatha was I think, but they obviously grew up in such different places, such different ways. Alala’s skin is weathered in some places, smooth in others. She’s lived here in the docks for a while—not her whole life, but that’s a story I haven’t yet managed to be told. But then there are augments, treatments that people buy to make themselves look younger. Possibly she spent some of her money on her face. Maybe she’s even older than she lets on. Her body creaks in a way that isn’t like Agatha’s did or how mine has done—not because it’s been pushed, but because it’s just degrading. Everybody has a story and hers is one that I’m desperate to know. Did she start here or out there? Her accent is different from everybody else’s, that’s for certain. She didn’t come from this city, not originally, just as I didn’t. She’s had longer to adapt, though. “So,” she says, “what is this thing?”
“I need to get into the Archives,” I say. The best thing about Alala? She knows secrets and she keeps them. She and Ziegler are both good at that, but for totally different reasons. “I need to get access to the Archives.”
There’s a pause where it seems like she’s mulling it over and then she laughs, slapping her knees, tears leaking from her left eye. The other eye stays dry. I wonder in that moment if it’s even real.
“It’s very hard to get in there, little girl,” she says. “Very hard. Harder than anything you have done before this.”
I stay calm. I explain about the guard I watched, the security there. “I thought we could persuade him to get them, to get the files for us,” I say.
And for some reason that sets her off laughing again. It’s a good minute before she stops, composes herself, tries to speak, and then goes right back to her laughing.
I explain the entry process: watching the guard leave the same way that he must have gone in, the DNA scan on the arm, then something with the eyes. As I talk, Alala pulls the fake, ratty furs from the back of the chair over her shoulders. She’s got heat in here, small radiators that look like they’re decades old, maybe even older, but she barely uses them. She reaches underneath her chair and pulls up a metal bottle, a cork stuffed into the mouth. “You ever drink poitín?”
“No,” I say.
“I make it myself. Bit like vodka.”
“I’ve never drunk that either,” I tell her, and she uncorks the bottle and lifts it to her mouth and swigs, holds, and glugs. I can see the muscles in her throat as she swallows. She gasps when she’s done.
“You aren’t even old enough to drink here. Pah. Start small,” she tells me, her voice sounding breathier. She hands me the bottle. “Don’t want you getting sick in my home.” I lift the bottle to my mouth. I can see something floating in the liquid, not alive and not dirt. More like fibers. I wonder what she uses to make this stuff. It doesn’t seem to smell of much of anything. Actually, no, that’s not true. If there’s a smell, it’s of something far cleaner than it looks; like the smell of the middle of the city, of the whitewashed buildings and the stripped-clean streets.
I mimic her, open my lips, pour it in. It burns; reminds me of some of the worst drinks on Australia. Back there
, it was a thing with some people who worked in the arboretum to brew alcohol. To use whatever we grew, let it ferment, turn it into something that could—for even a few minutes—dull the pain, take you away from where you were and what your life was. And the Pale Women used to make their own grape wine, claiming it was the blood of the savior, channeling their faith by getting drunk. I never tasted it, though. And I’ve never tasted anything as harsh as what Alala’s waving in my face now.
“Good, eh? Good.” She stands up, walks over to me, holds the bottom of the bottle as I hold the rim against my lips, and she tilts it. “You have to drink it faster. Doesn’t work if you dawdle.” And while I sip, while I try to stop it just rushing down my throat, stripping it clean (or so it feels), she tells me what I wanted to hear. “I will help you get into there. But no, no. You cannot persuade him.”
“I can,” I say.
She shakes her head and tuts. “We pick a different guard, not the one you found. Who cares about him? I don’t know. I get you a name, somebody who owes me, so they do you a favor, give you what you need. Use his ID, get in when it’s dark, when the patrols aren’t watching. Lots of access points. Won’t raise an alarm. No, that’s good. Better. Sneak around, wearing a uniform. But you are so short! And you are a little bit funny looking, you know? You don’t look like you’re from here. Only people from Washington get to work in the Archives, because they don’t trust the rest of us.” She pronounces Washington with the t dropped, Washingun, like the people here do. Strange, how different their words sound to mine. “Grow more inches. Taller, taller. Get a leg augment.” That’s a joke, and I know that I’m not the tallest of people, but her words actually sting a little.
“No, you stand on the toes of your feet, like a dancer.” She does a little tippy-toes jig, tottering left to right, and then collapses into her laughter again. Her throat sounds like she lived in the Lows’ part of Australia, that same ragged, wheezing laugh that constantly threatens to tear itself up into a cough. She swigs from the bottle again, to dampen the sound. “Go at a strange time. You be clever about wearing a mask, cameras won’t get a fix on you.” She offers me the bottle again, and I raise my hand. I’ve had barely any and already there’s a softness to the edge of my vision, a dampening in my head. “But yes, I can get you in. You get what you want. You get out.” She smiles. “You get what you want—maybe you get what I want as well, maybe?”