by J. P. Smythe
Gray stone sprouting patches of grass.
His head tilted downward.
The thud as he hits.
On Australia, you never heard what happened at the end of the fall. Now I know that the sound is wet; I wonder if it’s been raining or if that’s just the ground. I look. His eyes are open and they’re staring up at me. I shut my own eyes—just for a second—to the sound of people screaming. The Lows are attacking them, killing them, hurting them; and I’m trying to help but really what am I doing but pushing everything forward, driving them into danger? And then Mae is there with her dolls, dropping them and watching them fall—one, two—way down into the darkness of the Pit.
I get out. Away from there. I don’t risk taking the bus because maybe I’ll be spotted. I’ve assumed the police are looking for me all this time. I don’t want my face on some screen and somebody nosing around to recognize me. So I walk quickly, head down, to the docks, through routes with no cameras, or on the other side of the road from them. I walk against the traffic so I can’t be seen on the cameras embedded in cars, hood pulled tight, tied off. I’ve got a re-breather on that I took from the target after I had dragged him back to his apartment—his body, his weight, his heft. Stair by stair I heaved him up, his body weighing more than I imagined it could. I smashed the lights in the stairs as I went, praying that nobody would notice me.
Nobody came. It took me so long, but eventually I got him there; to his floor, to his front door, to his sofa.
Dave, I remind myself. He had a name.
The docks feel so much colder than the rest of the city tonight. They always do—it’s been explained to me that what’s pumped out of the Wall comes from some chemical reaction, and the docks are where it’s at its coldest—but I really feel it tonight. My lungs ache from running through the city and my skin prickles when the warmth of my blood pumping meets the chill of the air. I feel the cold in my knees, which ache; my ribs jut out as I run my hands over them, as I check for bruises and breaks. I don’t think I’ve been eating as well as I could. I’m thinner here than I ever was on Australia even though there’s more food here, more variety, but so much of it, while delicious, is worse for you. I’ve been sick a few times—more than my share. Ziegler says that it is because of the germs I never got used to, the bacteria. He bought me medicine and when that didn’t always work, Alala got me inoculations. You need to be on government lists for them, but of course she has her ways.
I call her name as I approach her home. Her door is closed, which means she’s not open for business. It looks polished, the number 39 fastened to the middle in solid bronze, and protected—a lock keeping a clasp shut to one side. That’s her rule: The door is open, you come in. It’s shut—don’t even think about it. I’m surprised it’s shut. Maybe she wasn’t expecting me to work so fast. Maybe she wasn’t expecting me to return to her at all.
“Alala!” I shout. I bang my hands on her door and on the corrugated metal walls around it. It’s dark inside. “Alala, wake up! I need you. Please, please, I need you.” In the distance, somebody else shouts at me to shut up, that they’re sleeping. “Please!” I shout, one last time.
I see light trickle out from the gaps at the sides of the door. I hear noise, shuffling inside. She swears loud enough that I can hear it. I’ve disturbed her and she won’t let me forget it. Whatever price I’m going to pay for her help, it’s probably just doubled.
“Tomorrow,” she replies. Her voice sounds different, her accent thicker. Usually everything she says sounds rolled and curled around her tongue before it leaves her mouth. Tonight it’s harsher, somehow more brittle, the words spat out against a throaty, guttural noise. “Come back tomorrow, junkie girl.” She thinks it’s somebody here for more drugs, somebody unable to control themselves.
“It’s Chan,” I say. I lower my voice, even though there are no cameras here, nothing that can hear us. “He’s dead. I killed him.” She doesn’t reply.
And as if that was the password, I hear the locks moving. She lets me in.
She makes tea. I’m grateful it’s not her poitín again, but right now I would probably drink it. It would numb me and I wouldn’t mind—that’s how people used alcohol on Australia. But instead she takes out tea leaves and a beautiful glass teapot, and she doesn’t say a word or ask anything of me while she brews them. She’s given me a fur to wrap around myself and I hold it close. I keep my satchel clutched in my lap, my knife in its sheath. She pours the tea into a cup then hands it to me, and I sip. It burns my lips. That’s okay.
“Tell me what happened,” she says, as she sits down opposite me. “Are you sure he is dead?” She shakes her head. “Start at beginning.”
“I went to his apartment. I wanted to persuade him to help, you know.”
“But you killed him.”
“I tried to talk to him—”
“Then he attacked you, so you fought back.”
“I attacked him. He ran away, said something. He was scared.”
“Of a little girl? Some guard he was, scared of such a little thing.” I don’t say that it was her he was scared of.
“He fought, and he ran. And that’s when—”
“How did you kill him?”
“He fell. A long way.”
“Well, now. That’s maybe not your fault. And you weren’t seen?” She stands up, pours herself another cup of tea. “We can find a new way to get you into the Archives. Plenty of guards.”
“It’s not that,” I say. I shut my eyes. I don’t want to look at her. They’re nothing alike, but she reminds me strongly of Agatha all of a sudden. But there’s one major difference: I’m sure that nothing I could say or do right now could shock Alala. She’s seen it all. “I couldn’t just leave him there, not when I was so close.”
All that I wanted was to get him to do the job for us. I was going to tell him what we needed—something really easy, really simple. Take something to the Archives computer, put it inside, and then one of Alala’s people (a hacker) would get the data we needed. Then the guard (Dave) would bring the device back out to us. The hacker would have Dave’s ID card, linked to his blood, his eyes, his pulse—his genetic makeup.
I put Dave’s ID card on the table first. Alala shakes her head at me because the card isn’t enough. “We need DNA, ocular patterns. This is no good,” she says.
So I place his hand on the table, the stump of it wrapped in cloth I took from his kitchen. I hold his right eye out on my palm and I say to her, “I think we can still find me a way in.”
Judging by the look in her eyes right now, I was wrong. I can definitely shock her.
She swears at me, wild-eyed and furious. Using a towel, she stuffs the hand into my bag for me. She opens the door and stands there, a sentinel, waiting for me to leave.
“Get out of here,” she says.
“I don’t—”
“No excuse. He’s a government employee—they’ll be keeping tabs on him. They will know. And now? He has no pulse! Get away from here.”
“They won’t find him,” I say. “They don’t know. I put him in his apartment, and I . . .” Did I shut the door? Did I close the windows?
Did I leave a trail?
“You stupid little girl,” Alala says, and she shakes her head. But I can see something whirring inside her, something happening. She shuts the door and traps me with her, then reaches out and takes the hand back out of the bag. She walks to her kitchen—nothing more than a sink and an old cooker that seems to rattle almost constantly—where she picks up a box from underneath the sink, thick and gray and lumpy, like she made it herself (no hinges, nothing delicate to it). When she opens it, I see several vials—some full of blood, but one empty. She takes this one, pulls the cap off with her teeth, and holds the hand above it.
“Hope you’re not squeamish,” she says, and she looks at me with something like disgust. Then she squeezes the hand—holds it in hers as if she’s shaking it, meeting it for the first time—and blood runs from the
wrist stump then quickly slows to a thick drip. I hear the sound of it pit-patting into the vial. “All we’ll need,” she says after a minute or so, as the flow slows to a stop. She reseals the vial and puts it into the box. “They can’t track it if it’s in there,” she says. She wipes the ID card clean and puts it inside the box as well. “Now the eye,” she says. “And to get rid of this”—she holds up Dave’s hand—“we need ice.”
I follow her out of her house. Somebody is waiting: a girl, a junkie. She’s been nodding off, curled up outside Alala’s house like a cat. As soon as she hears us she’s up and on her feet, her mouth open, her eyes slits. “You’re awake,” she says.
“Not now,” Alala tells her, and I feel special for that second—what I’ve got going on is more important. Alala and I start almost running, darting around the other homes, her holding the hand to her chest while I carry the eye in my palm.
It’s so soft that I think about squeezing it just to see if it will pop.
Suddenly I feel sick.
I tell myself that it’s not my fault that he—Dave, the target—died. He shouldn’t have run. He was afraid—whatever he was into with Alala made him scared of her. He was unfit, out of shape. It would have happened sooner or later, I’m sure. If it wasn’t me it would have been someone, something else. But I have needs. I had to do something. What I’m doing is bigger than him. It’s more important.
It’s crucial, for Mae’s sake.
I tell myself that it’s not my fault, but I know one thing that I simply can’t shake: He wouldn’t have run down those stairs if it wasn’t for me. I might not have killed him, but I certainly helped him die.
Alala walks through the shanty town and people try to speak to her—she’s almost a celebrity around here, and she never comes this far into the docks, this close to the water and the Wall—but she brushes them off. Head down, eyes forward, she keeps moving ahead. She’s got one of her furs wrapped around her like a shawl and it keeps slipping. I rush to keep up with her stride and put my hand on the fur, to steady it, and she almost leaps away from me.
“Do not touch me,” she says, and then, still not looking at me, powers forward. “You have no idea what you are going to owe me, Chan.”
She’s always known my name, since the first day we met. But I think that this might be the first time she’s ever actually called me by it. I’m shaking, my arms wrapped around myself, but still, I’m shaking.
The wall juts from the icy water, the most impenetrable barrier. One hundred stories high, dotted with lights that mark out the hatches and vents for the climate generators. It’s nothing like Australia, not really, because you can only climb the Wall if you’re working on it, if you’ve got the equipment. The noise of the generators is overwhelming today. I’m sure it’s never been this loud before, and something inside me almost feels like it’s itching. Somewhere deep inside me I’m still stuck, still trapped. I swapped one prison for another.
No, I tell myself. This is action. This is moving forward, taking control. Saving Mae. Saving myself.
And yet here I am, letting somebody else talk me through the things that have terrified me, that I have done wrong—fixing my screw-ups, holding my hand as I try to pick up the pieces.
Alala stands at the edge of the concrete. The ice has holes in it. It doesn’t always—it depends on how hard the air conditioners in the Wall have been working—but today we’re lucky. “The cold should freeze this,” she says. She looks down and I can tell that we’re both thinking about the bodies that we know are down there, those trapped in the ice even though we can’t see them through the darkness. People drown out here and their bodies sink to the bottom of the bay and the cold keeps them from rotting. And there they stay, forever.
The lights from the red beacons that mark the Wall along its length are barely enough to see by as Alala hurls Dave’s hand out toward the Wall. I hear the splash as it hits the water, but I can’t watch it sink. “You used your own knife?” Alala asks. I can hear the shivers in her teeth, the slight chatter as she speaks. “Throw that as well.”
I take the knife out of the sheath and I hold it up. The blood is gone, as best I can make out. I remember—I wiped it on my clothes, on my side, under my arm. I wanted the blade clean. I tell her this and she sighs.
“Then you have to throw those also. The cold will kill the isotope they use to track.” She softens, puts her hands onto my biceps and squeezes. “Just get it done and then we will get you warm.” She reaches out with her fur, jabbing it toward me. I take it and I stand there. “I won’t look,” she tells me, and she turns away.
I wrap the fur around me and take my clothes off. My only good clothes. I kick them into the icy water. They don’t even make a sound as they sink.
“I will take care of the next part,” she says. We’re back in her home and I’m wrapped in more layers of fake fur. She’s given me stuff to wear—garish things that look like they were once hers until they became a little too threadbare; they’re Alala’s style, her taste (or lack of it) in even more faded glory. “I will talk to the hackers. Leave it with me. Come back tonight. It’s morning, too early to do anything now.” She’s right. There’s the cold, red light of morning in the sky. Somehow the entire night has been and gone.
“What do I do next?” I ask, but I know the answer.
“You have to go into the Archives and get the information you need.” She pats me on the knee. “This is a window, an opportunity.”
“I can’t,” I say to her. No question, I’ll get caught.
“Cannot is not a word where I come from. You know that? My language, closest thing is Will not. A choice.” She tuts.
“There must be another way,” I say. It sounds like begging. Balking.
“You will not back out, little girl. No, no. You owe me, now. This is a deal. I save you and you help me.” I haven’t seen this side of her. People talk (but of course they do) about how she’s a nasty piece of work, about how she’s been involved in things that no one would ever admit to. Rumors that sounded like lies until this moment; until I see this look in her eyes that says that she is not kidding around. That I have absolutely no choice.
“Okay,” I say. I’m shaking—my hands, my fingers, every bit of them. I try to stop it, putting one hand over the other. My skin feels even colder now than it did before, when I was naked at the water’s edge.
“Will anybody find him? They cannot find him before you finish this.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He’s in his apartment.” I propped him up on his sofa. He’s sitting, facing the door, waiting for somebody to come in.
I wonder when he’ll start to smell. I wonder when his work will ask why he isn’t there.
I hadn’t thought about all this before. I hadn’t considered it properly.
“Chan,” Alala says. She clicks her fingers in front of my face. “They could find him. We need to fix, okay? And when we have, I will let you find out where your daughter is.” I told her that Mae was a little girl that I needed to find—not my daughter. That’s her assumption and I don’t correct her. More than that: she will let me find Mae. Her words, like she’s in control— which I suppose she is. “I tell you, because I help you? You will do favor for me. Very big favor.”
“I owe you,” I say, and she nods. I think about the target—Dave, he had a name—and how scared he was, what he was actually running from. Me—yes, but something else. Whatever it was that he owed to Alala—that made her pick him.
I haven’t tested her yet, but I’m fairly certain that Alala doesn’t forget a debt.
I’ve got some credit left over from what Ziegler has given me in the past. I hoard it, have been hoarding it for a time like this when I actually finally really need something. It’s on a chip registered to my fake name, and Ziegler puts money onto it when he thinks I might need it. I haven’t had the chip implanted because I can’t bring myself to. I don’t want to put it in my body. So I have that and some cash—actual money, which
is a real rarity here. It’s legal currency but nobody ever uses it. It tends to get you glares if you try, that’s what a hassle it is. But it’s what I’ve got.
I’m cold, and that won’t change unless I do something about it. The wind and breeze from the Wall cuts right through this whole place, billowing out gusts that seem to find exactly where I’m coldest and make it colder. They say it’s sweltering outside the city walls, so hot it’ll cook food if you leave it in the sun for a while—cook you if you stay in it longer. I watch the usual crowd waiting for Alala to wake up, waiting to get their fixes. She went back to sleep leaving me outside her cabin, telling me to wait just as they do. I pace to try and get myself warm but it doesn’t work. Some days are colder than others. I had one set of clothes and I need more. Alala’s cast-offs don’t fit; they jangle when I move, rattle almost. I could buy clothes from the people who live here but there’s no point. Those things will only fall apart. I have a blanket wrapped around my waist, tied off as a skirt and Alala’s fur around my shoulders.
I feel ridiculous.
I leave Alala’s as the junkies start getting anxious, arm-scratching and signing at each other. So many of them are muted, because that’s what living here—being born here—can mean. They don’t get the choice to speak. And the drugs—they’re not from Alala, not originally. She’s not the reason they’re addicted. She just profits off their addictions. I’ve seen what happens when they go into withdrawal. My first week here: the pain in a man’s face as he scratched at himself, his skin rotting off his frame.
From where I’m standing, if you look straight up all you can see is the Wall. But in the distance, above it, there’s the sky, the color of it changing as night gives way to dawn, which gives way to the rest of the day. And the birds—the morning birds—starting to flock, casting shapes. Arrowheads, wings, clusters of galaxies that form, explode, and form again against the pale blue that’s starting to creep through the reddened black, advancing into its territory.