by J. P. Smythe
It’s not a question. It’s a deal.
“What do I have to do first?” I ask.
She smiles. “That’s the hardest part,” she says.
FOUR
Alala doesn’t give me a name, she gives me an address. A guard that she says is perfect for this—same coloring as me, in case there’s anybody glancing at screens and faces to see if they match. He lives out in the suburbs. Because the city is a wheel, I know how to find him—the outside edge of the city where I live, the poorest part, with the houses spooling inwards and upward. There are very few places that aren’t new, that aren’t designed to house everybody—those who can afford it, at least—in the most comfortable way possible. The richest can afford to keep the beautiful, centuries-old mansions. Sometimes you spot one nestled between tower blocks: old stone instead of glistening plasticrete. People won’t move themselves somewhere different if they can stay where they are, where their history is. History is where people feel safest.
It’s not that different from being on Australia. When I imagined leaving the ship, I imagined a total change, a life that I wouldn’t recognize. That was when everything was still a promise, a hope, a dream—when knowing that the new life, the better life we were looking for might come to pass. And then we found it—the new world, same as the old world in so many ways. There are walls around me that I cannot climb, towers hundreds of stories high that overwhelm me.
A. Australia was hellish: dirty and terrifying, threatening and broken. It’s cleaner here, and there are police making the streets safe. Food is abundant, and I don’t mind eating the replicated stuff—even as the people who grew up here moan about the lack of real beef, of real chicken. There are people who want to help me. There’s a way forward and I can see it.
It doesn’t mean I’m not scared.
I find the address Alala gave me. I’ve never been to this part of the city before. I never had a reason to. It’s an estate, an entire complex, a kind of neighborhood: buildings grouped around each other all forming one large area. The towers here are older, a little less impressive. No built-in security here aside from the cameras, and very little sign of any private guards. As you get deeper into it, you can see that it’s not as comfortable as other parts of the city: the paint is chipping, the grass overgrown or barely growing at all. These buildings are cheaper to live in because they’re older and shabbier, because they’re less desirable. The government needed to build these places when they started working on making the cities hospitable. They didn’t care if they were nice, just that they did the job.
Ziegler has explained it as being an act of government: Everybody had the right to a roof, was the rule. Only after enough people had died was it actually practical to offer everyone left a place to live. Not everybody made it into the cities, though. Those who couldn’t contribute—or didn’t want to—were left outside the Wall. Outcasts. Ziegler says he spoke to some of them once for a story. There’s no hope, no getting into the city. Because when you’re that poor, that lost, there’s simply no way to come back from it. Nobody’s going to give you a job because you’re unskilled and out of touch with the world as it is. You’re opened up to disease, because so many things thrive in the heat; it’s likely you’re not healthy because the sun will have whittled you away. Being out there? It’s a death sentence.
This man I’m coming to find—he must be grateful to live here, as shabby as it is.
I sit at the back of the bus, keeping my head down, my face hidden. The clothes Ziegler gave me have a hood that I can pull down over my face so I can act as though I’m sleeping. It reminds me of my outfit from the last days of Australia, the one that I made myself. I wonder, as I stare at my hands, at the corner of the window that I can see without exposing my face, if I’ll ever be in a situation in which I don’t need to hide. Not yet, that’s for sure. At any stage, any of the cameras—the ones in the bus itself, the ones on the streets, the ones in eye augments—could recognize me.
As far as the people here are concerned, I’m a criminal, just like everybody else who landed from my ship. They’ll want to pack me off, take me away, lock me up.
The towers we pass in this part of the city are so much more dilapidated than Ziegler’s. His is far nicer, far cleaner. There’s an attempt at making it feel as though it’s a part of the city’s heart: clean and white with reflective windows and balconies with flowers and plants on them. In this part of the city, the people don’t have those luxuries. There are work terminals on street corners, where the queues to get picked for construction jobs or landscaping or wall maintenance happen. There are people here that I vaguely recognize from the docks lining up with the rest in their best clothes so that the employers might not realize that they live where they live and give them some paid work. Save enough credit, you’ll drag yourself out. Spend too much, you’ll plunge back down. That, Ziegler says, is the real wheel of the city.
My target—that’s the word that Alala used to describe him, refusing to use his name—isn’t paid enough to be of any real importance. He’s just a worker, just a guy who does whatever in the Archives, which is good. His home won’t have security measures. I asked her how she picked him and she said that he was perfect—not even much taller than I am. She knew him because he did some work for her once. (“Terrible liar,” she told me. “Nothing but false words. I don’t like this. He owes me money, so.” That’s her reasoning—this is how his debt is going to be repaid.)
I followed him home yesterday and he didn’t see me. He didn’t notice as I crept behind him, as I walked past his bus stop where he waited for a bus that was five minutes away, as I ran so that I could get onto the same bus at the next stop down the road, or as I sat right behind him. When we got off, I stayed twenty steps behind—far enough away to avoid suspicion. I kept my head down. When we reached his apartment, I watched him climb up the stairs on the outside of his block—these buildings too old, the elevators seemingly broken, nobody caring to maintain or fix up this part of the city, tired and creaking concrete covered in so many coats of now-peeling paint. The climb left him exhausted. I watched the lights flicker on as he passed them, until the light outside one front door went bright and he went inside. I watched his windows to check that he lives alone and I saw only one shadow moving around inside— making food, going between the two rooms that he calls his own. I watched him shut the blinds (the building is too old for dimmable glass, even) and turn the lights off when he went to sleep.
I waited a few more hours to make sure he didn’t have a partner who worked night shifts or anything like that. I needed to make sure.
It gives me a strange feeling to be here in this decrepit old building. It feels like I’ve been here many, many times before.
The rows of balconies going upward, the gangways between them, the paths that wind their way through, the soft noise in the background—a buzz of generators, of power lines—the connections that run through everything here. And in the middle of this particular block—four towers arranged so that they’re all just about facing one another—there’s an area of green at the base between the buildings, it might have once been parkland. I wonder if they ever grew anything here, if there were ever plants and flowers and crops, pear trees and a stream of some sort, if they ever worked that land.
I struggle not to think of the people who live here as living in berths. I imagine living here and feel afraid of the Pit. The image of it keeps coming back to me like a shadow, the darkness at the bottom so powerful.
There are no guards here, no sentry points or cameras; it’s not like in Ziegler’s building. Here you have a broken door up to an exposed stairwell and then you climb. It goes up and up, right to the top. Everything is dark, the lights only coming on as you pass them. Makes it harder to be sneaky—but then, nobody seems to notice or care. They watch out for themselves.
Be selfish. I hear my mother’s voice in my head for just a moment and I remind myself that this is what I’m doing, that all of this is for m
y benefit. Fine, I’m trying to find Mae. I don’t know what’s happened to her, where she’s been taken. I imagine trials, examinations, probing. I think of the stories about the surgery floor on Australia, the stuff the doctors did to people.
In the museum at the Smithsonian there are bodies, skeletons. Humans from back before they were even humans, before they were able to walk around and talk as we do, wear suits and work and live. In my worst dreams, I worry that this is what’s in store for Mae. Survivor of the Australia. See how she’s developed. That she’ll be killed, stripped to bone, put in a museum. We’re shorter than the people here, I think. On average, they seem bigger, taller than we were on the ship—apart from the Bells, that is. The people here are healthier, their breathing better. Mae will be an anomaly to them.
As I climb the stairs, the lights flicker. I can hear them as they come on, a soft ticking. Outside the target’s door, I look for a way in. Just a finger-pad attached to an elaborate series of locks, four of them, each covering a quarter of the door. It’s very secure.
I grab the door handle and try it gently, but it doesn’t budge. The door is metal of some sort—dented in places, the paint chipped off where somebody (years ago, going by the rust in the cracks) once tried to break through. Force isn’t going to work, I can tell that. I can’t even hack the lock. I’d need his finger for that.
It’s an hour before I see the bus pull up on the street outside the complex. He’s the only person who gets off. I watch him walk up the path through the bit of wasteland in the middle of the buildings. He pulls off his re-breather while he walks and coughs—a small clearing of the throat really, but the noise echoes around the towers, bounces off them, repeating and repeating.
I stay crouched on the landing outside his apartment. I hold my breath. Stay still. Wait.
A woman leaves a tower in the adjacent block and I track her. She pays no attention to my target. She has a child with her, a little girl. She’s quiet, head bowed, hand holding her mother’s. Down in the wasteland is the remnants of what I’ve learned is probably a playground: some metal frames, a round wooden thing with a shattered top that turns a little when you touch it. I imagine that, once upon a time, there was more noise in this part of the city. Maybe it sounded happier then. I stop looking at her and return to my target as they pass one another: no eye contact, both of them with their heads down.
My target gets to the stairs in his building and I lose track of him behind the concrete walls. I lean over the ledge and watch the lights flick on as he passes them, climbing up floor by floor, getting closer. I can’t have him being wary. I look for somewhere to hide only now—I’ve left it so late, I’m slacking—and there’s nowhere, nothing. The flickering lights will give me away. I look over the edge and glimpse him in the windows that line the edges of the stairwell. Like the little girl, his head is down, staring at his feet. Okay.
There’s a way to do this.
I grab the edge of the handrail and climb over. Then I let myself drop so I’m just holding on, hanging seventeen stories above the rusted playground below. Everything pulls in my arms as I hang. He won’t see me here, maybe only the tips of my fingers as I cling to the railing. I used to do this all the time on Australia. Maybe I’m not as strong as I once was. I look down as I feel my fingers twitch, as I feel sweat on them, as I feel my grip slipping.
Don’t die.
“I won’t,” I whisper under my breath. I can hear his footsteps now, the echoes of them on the floor, bouncing off the walls, his breathing behind them—one breath for almost every footstep—then the soft rip of him pulling his gloves off to expose his fingers. Then there’s the buzz of him pressing his thumb to the pad and the whirring of locks. A small, quiet voice—the same voice that comes from Ziegler’s car when you talk to it.
“Welcome home, Dave.”
“Okay, okay,” he says. “Okay.” He sounds young. His voice has that tone to it, that lilt that says he isn’t happy, not truly. He doesn’t sound like he’s accustomed to his life being what it is. I hear the door creak open.
Okay.
I pull myself up and over the railing in one smooth motion—and my arms sting because I haven’t done that move in a while—but I land on my feet and push forward, arms extended, shoulder primed; and I barge into him, slamming my weight into his back, pushing him into his apartment, driving him into the darkness. We hit something—a chair that crumbles under our weight. The sound of snapping. The guard tumbles, kicks out with his boots. One smacks into my thigh, but that’s nothing. I’ve had worse.
The lights in the apartment flick on, picking up on our movements; he looks at me—terrified, staring right at me. He’s on the floor on his back, and I scramble to get control of him. He’s got a foot and a half on me and he’s probably twice my weight, but again, that’s nothing I need to worry about. He’s slow. I jam my forearm into his neck, his throat. I push just hard enough that he gags. But he can breathe, he absolutely can. There’s just a moment when he thinks that he can’t. It’s more the threat of what I could do than what I am doing. I could push down much, much harder than this. These bits of the body snap easily. I could crush his throat: That’ll stop him and he knows it.
“I need your help,” I say. “That’s all this is. You help me and I can help you.” His eyes are wide and red with welling tears because he thinks that this is it, that I’m going to kill him right here, right now. I feel sorry for him and I don’t know if I should. I don’t know anything about him. He could be a good person, could be a bad one. I don’t know. He’s the first person I’ve ever attacked where I didn’t know that, where I couldn’t somehow justify it. “Do you understand me?” He nods, the flesh of his throat softening around my arm. “Because I could kill you,” I say. This is when I reach down and pull out the knife that I got from Alala when I first arrived. I needed one and she had one to trade.
I ran packages to earn this knife, going to parts of the docks with drugs she was giving to people, packages I hand delivered because Alala gave me food and told me how this place worked; this knife that’s been blunted from rubbing against the sheath that I made for it; this knife that’s been used to cut wires, make food, help me build the tents and shacks I’ve been calling home, however temporary they might be. But I flash it up, hold it right in front of his gaze. I’ve polished it as much as I can so he’ll be able to see himself in it—his eyes reflected along the length of the blade, their redness, the tears on his cheeks, the fear singing out from them. “I’m going to stand up now,” I say. And I do, pulling my arm away slowly. My target breathes heavily, heaving in air as if I’d stopped him from breathing—I hadn’t, I know how to strangle someone—and he rolls over onto his front. He pushes himself up to a crawl, like some sort of animal. I sit on a chair and I feel my own ribs ache a little, my shoulder sore from plowing into him.
“What do you want?” he asks. His voice is staggered, the words with pauses between them, broken down. He doesn’t look directly at me.
“You owe somebody.” His body tenses. Maybe he owes a lot of people. “Alala. You know her. She told me where to find you.”
He nods, his head going up and down, lolling like he’s a doll. I wait for him to push himself to standing. He uses the wall and the sideboard to pull himself up. He isn’t looking at me, which is a bad sign. Not looking means he’s thinking.
He’s going to try something, I know that much. But what exactly I can’t—
He runs. The front door is still open and he charges out, his mass carrying him with a lurch of speed. I’m up only a second after he is and I watch him almost bounce off the edge of the gantry, hurl himself toward the stairwell. He shouts, his voice surprisingly reedy given how big he is, coming back to me on the wind.
“Please! Let me go, I’ll do what she wants!” he yells, his words echoing, beating around the walls, the towers. I don’t know what he did to Alala. I don’t care right now. He’s got something I need and running just means it’s going to be harder to
get him on my side. I’m faster than he is, though. “Tell her I’ll make it right!” he shouts.
“Wait,” I say, because I don’t know how else to stop him without charging him down. He doesn’t give me a choice. He gallops down the stairs, thudding, jumping three or four at a time, trying to take them as fast as possible, slowing at the corners. So I chase him. The corners are where I really gain on him because I swing around them, almost jumping to save time, not missing a step as I hit the ground and bear down on him. At every corner there’s a window looking out, a hole in the concrete waist-high. I wonder what the people down in the city can see of me and him; a flash of us as we tear past.
Two flights down, at one of those corners, he turns his head, cranes his neck to see where I am. I’m right behind him. He spends too long looking for me.
“I didn’t mean—” he starts to say, but he smacks into the wall at the edge of the stairwell, the same stumpy wall and handrail you find at every other edge in the building, and he topples, barely even stopping. He doesn’t even seem to reach for the rail or for me. I’m there, hand out, trying to save him. I don’t know what his weight will do to my arm—wrench it out of the socket, maybe pull it completely off for all I know—but I’m too slow. Or, just as likely, he’s too fast. I watch him fall.
There’s nothing soft down there to cushion his fall. Not even the Pit.