by J. P. Smythe
I stand up and walk away just as the mist settles in. It comes every morning, a haze of vapor, plumes of white cloud that spurt out from the generators in the Wall and settle in over the edges of the city. Eventually, as the sun creeps into view above us, the air warms up and the cloud dissipates. I pull the edge of the scarf that’s covering my shoulders over my mouth to protect me.
The buses are running but they won’t be full of commuters yet, which means there’s a better chance my face will be caught on camera. I don’t have my hood. I don’t even have a hat—so that means hair down, over my face. It needs a wash. It’s a bit of a joke for me to even have hair. I’ve never had it this long, not in my whole life. On Australia, we cut it regularly because there was such a high chance of lice. But it’s been growing since the moment we landed. I haven’t had to cut it. I can’t tell if I like it this way or if it’s just easier not to bother. And when I see the local people— their hair done so elaborately, dye jobs and highlights and all of these other augments and processes that I don’t understand—a part of me wants to feel like that could be me. That maybe doing it would help me fit in.
I take to the streets that don’t have cameras: store entrances, throughways, on-ramps that never go anywhere and just seem to join one avenue to another. As I walk—the pavement cracked and ignored, the roads pretty much empty—I watch the streetlights twitch out, their brightness giving way to the darkness of the dawn; the buildings cast more of a shadow than the night itself for a few moments. Some are so large that you can walk in the shade of them for so long you forget what time of day it is.
I had imagined that when we landed there would be a horizon—a far-off place that I could stare at and wonder what was there, what was so distant that I couldn’t yet see it. That’s what I wanted. Now I live in a city surrounded by a wall a hundred feet high. There’s no horizon. There’s no distance.
Cars and commuters pass me. They rush. They don’t worry about the fact that they’re trapped here. We were told what life was like before Australia left Earth the first time: that people were free, that life was open. The world was swollen, sure—but everything was allowed to swell more. The swelling was our right, our destiny. Now I know how much we can be lied to—the capacity for those in control to tell us what they think we want to hear, to keep us from the truth. These people don’t even know how free they are. There have been calamities and there have been traumas. Technology halted for a while because everything—everybody—was focused on saving the planet. We were their backup plan—people sent into space to see if that was viable. If all else failed, would being trapped in a box in the stars be enough? If the climate couldn’t be controlled, humanity would have abandoned Earth.
Instead, they abandoned us.
I get angry as I walk. I notice that my feet are hitting the pavement harder. The city gets cleaner, shinier as I walk toward the center. There’s better lighting, even if I don’t factor in the sun. The streets are wider as I get to the shopping district, and this isn’t even one of the bigger shopping centers. It’s mostly market traders, a few smaller shops, a couple of much bigger stores that sell clothes. I head to one of these. No need to wait for them to open. Nothing like the markets here, with set times. The automations mean that almost everything is available around the clock. Doesn’t matter what I want, when I want it. All that matters is that I can afford it.
That’s another thing I hate—there’s no haggling here.
The clothes are all described in terms that I still barely understand six months after I arrived here: They’re all active or enabled, lights blinking as you walk past them, colors shifting, hues going from darker ends of the spectrum to lighter, the fabric twitching almost, begging to be bought.
I enter the one with the least obnoxious sign, the least loud music pumping out of the doorway. “Good morning,” a girl says, smiling at me. She works here, you can tell. Her outfit’s a mess of colors, like ink in a painting being pushed around, like a blurred tattoo. She’s my age—taller, skinnier (of course she’s taller, everybody’s taller here). There’s not an ounce of muscle on her: all sinew, all bone. “I love your shrug,” she says. She means the tatty fur wrapped around me, the one pinned with a ludicrous safety pin. “Is it custom?”
“Yes,” I say, the words stumbling out of my mouth. I don’t know why I don’t tell her the truth. That it’s all I have—a loan—that tomorrow I’ll be dressed as I always am. Or—no, I do know. She likes it, so she doesn’t see me for who I really am. Right now, I don’t live in the docks. Right now, in this moment, I belong.
I walk past the dresses, past the shoes, toward the STANDARDS section at the back. No bells or whistles: t-shirts, hooded jackets, jeans, sneakers. One of each, either in black or as close to a shade of gray as they sell. A t-shirt in something called “Midnight Ink,” which looks like it’s wet, a moody lake, the pattern swirling. In the fitting rooms, I try everything on. I watch them adjust themselves to my body in the mirror: shrinking away from me in places, bulking up in others. The hood extends around my head, smoothly lowering, the technology in the fabric making sure it does what it should.
“Lower,” I say as I rest my finger on the edge of the material. Silently, the tip comes down to cover more of my eyes. “Lower.” You can’t see my eyes at all, can’t see what I’m going to do anymore.
“Miss?” the girl asks through the door. “Miss, can I get you anything else?”
I want to barter. I want to trade. I think about running.
“I’ll just take these,” I tell her. I try and make my voice sound like I’m smiling.
The checkout machine doesn’t take cash, that’s the first hurdle. My credit isn’t quite enough to cover all of my purchases. I press for help, which sends the girl over; then she goes and fetches a manager, who fumbles his words as he tries to unfold the notes I give him, presses the authenticator strip to check that they’re not fakes, then scans them against stolen banknote records. He watches me the whole time. Cash apparently makes him suspicious.
“This takes a while,” he says, his tone suggesting an apology that never comes. “It’s inconvenient.” It’s only inconvenient because he doesn’t trust me, because he decides that he has to run five or six different checks to stop his store being even slightly out of pocket. “We don’t have change,” he tells me, when he’s finally satisfied that the notes are legit. “I can give you store credit.”
That’s when I see the arm bracer hanging from a rack at the side of the counter. Thick black leather—or something close to it. It has spikes, but they are softened down, the tips sanded off. No one could hurt themself on them. I pick it up and turn it around in my hand, feeling the tautness of it.
“How much?” I ask, and the manager puts it under the scanner. It’s less than I have left over. I tell him to bag it up.
Outside, I find a stoop, sit down, and don’t care who watches. I pull my t-shirt on, then discard the fur from Alala into the bag my new clothes came in. I pull the jacket on, yank the hood over my head—again feeling it molding to me—then I pull on the trousers, then the shoes. I let everything adjust. The clothes have forgotten who I am since I last wore them. They only have a memory of a few minutes.
Then I put the bracer on and I think about Jonah. How he had one around his neck when I met him. The bracer tightens around my wrist, pulling itself closed until it’s tight around my skin the whole way, until it’s secure. This is when it catches me out. When something reminds me of him it’s so strong that it pushes me back almost; it knocks the wind out of me and forces me to take stock. A flash of red hair in a crowd, something tied to a neck, a kiss in a holo between people I’ll never even know. Or I’ll hear somebody saying a prayer and I’ll remember his voice; hear it saying that same prayer, explaining it to me. I haven’t thought about him for days. The memories hit harder when that happens.
I learned that the people have his Testaments here, which surprised me. I thought they were a ship thing for the longest whil
e. But Ziegler showed me a copy and it was sort of the same, like a broken, not-as-exciting version. On Australia, they were much shorter. I appreciated that. Also, here there’s not the last bit, the bit about the nine levels of hell. I think that must have been Australia only. Too convenient.
But then the sharpness of the memory fades. With Jonah, it takes triggers to remember. The others? They’re there the whole time. I can never escape thinking about my mother or Agatha or Mae or even—for some reason, as if she’s been burned into my brain, seared and scarred—Rex.
I remind myself that Jonah is dead—and that’s awful and terrible and sad but there are a lot of dead people out there and I can’t cry over them all.
I pull the sleeve of my jacket over the bracer. It’s there, holding me—a pressure that’s so tight it almost hurts, but I can get used to it. It fades into the background.
I need to speak to Ziegler. I need his help.
FIVE
“No,” Ziegler says. He doesn’t even let me finish saying what I need him to do. He slams his hand down, he almost stamps his foot, and he shakes his head. “It’s absolute madness.”
“Please,” I say, as if that will work. Manners will get you everywhere was something that my mother told me. Not quite, I know. Not everywhere.
“I can’t even have this conversation with you. You tell me what you’re planning and I can’t deny anything if they catch you. If they bring me in for questioning? I already know too much.” The café we’re sitting in is heaving with people. A few tables over, a group of girls talk about going to pick up something from a contact in the docks—drugs, probably. That’s usually why people go there if they live in the middle of the city. Their money’s always good. Behind me, there’s a couple fighting about babies: She wants one, he doesn’t. She says it’s almost too late anyway—I’m not getting any younger—so why are they even bothering? Where is the relationship even going?
Even when Ziegler raises his voice, he and I don’t stand out. An older businessman-type—his face bearded, his eyes (every part of his skin, really) tired and sagging—nurses his third refill of coffee as a teenage girl (likely his daughter) hides her face while pleading with him for something.
“So I don’t tell you anything. You give me a ride. You wait for me. When I get out, you take me to your apartment. They won’t think to look for a car. You just need to be there when I finish what I need to do.”
“If you finish.”
“You think I can’t do this?”
“I don’t even know what you’re planning,” he says. But he does, he just doesn’t know the details. Maybe that’s the best way of beating a lie detector: If you don’t know the exact facts, you can still make a convincing denial. But not if they dope him, get the information out that way. And not if he betrays me, gives me up. Doesn’t matter how close you are to somebody: You can’t ever trust them entirely. Not a hundred percent.
“I’m not telling you,” I say. “All you know is that I will be somewhere at a certain time. I’ll call you.”
“How? You don’t have a chip.”
“So I’ll get one.” I hate the idea—but if I have to, I have to.
“Which I’ll pay for? Anyway, it won’t be registered. You’ll be better off without one. Otherwise, the systems will catch you as soon as you’re in the building.”
“Which building?” I ask, smirking. And he smiles as well, because this is almost actually funny. He’s used to sitting back, to trying to fix the system—that’s what he calls it—from the outside. His articles, his books, his beliefs: They’re all intangible, theoretical. What I want to do is not. It is a crime. And it is, I think, intriguing him. “I could get a burner chip. I know Alala’s fitted them into people before.”
“So now you’re getting black-market augments? Look, Chan. This isn’t going to work. It can’t work, you know that.”
And that makes me lose my temper. I’m furious with him. Now is the time to do, not think. “Have you always been such a coward?” I ask, and that works. His face reddens as if he’s been slapped.
“This isn’t that.”
“Because you can’t get in trouble here. Just say you had no idea what I was planning.”
“If you don’t do this, you can’t get caught. And then I won’t have to say a goddamn thing.” He shakes his head. His fingers run through his beard, scratching at the skin, pulling the hairs apart. I can see tiny scars underneath, almost like paper cuts, probably from teenage acne, or cuts from shaving. He still uses a blade to keep the beard in check, close to his face—I’ve seen the razor in his bathroom. Like the rest of his hair it’s gray, white around the corners of his mouth. On Australia, that would have been a tell—you couldn’t trust somebody who didn’t want you to see their mouth. Here, it’s fashion. All the men have beards, or at least augmented follicles to force styles onto their faces. Ziegler’s is his own at least. He’s not pretentious. I’m pretty good at reading people and I know he’ll do what’s best for me. He’ll help me. He just needs more of a push.
“You want your evidence about Australia, you’ll have to help me,” I say.
“Chan.”
“You don’t even know the best stuff yet. You don’t know how I killed Rex, do you? I didn’t tell you that part yet. And I’ve got stories about my mother, and Agatha, about the Nightman, about the Feeders who were around before I was born, who used to eat people. And not like the Lows, not all shady and maybe, maybe, they actually, you know, ate people.”
“Chan . . .”
“I mean it. I’ll tell you everything, straight away, all in one go. I don’t care. Put my name on the front of a newspaper. Put my picture up there. Tell my story. Sell it. Call your publisher. You can have it all.”
I stop talking when the waitress appears at Ziegler’s shoulder. He likes this place because they have real people serving you, nothing automated. In the kitchens there’s somebody actually making the food and putting it on the plate. He likes that. Me? I couldn’t care less beyond the fact that it makes this place much more expensive. The waitress smiles because she’s working for tips. She has a pencil behind her ear that she never employs, using her finger to tap orders into her pad instead. Ziegler’s told me that the pencil’s an affectation, like it’s part of the uniform. It’s how things used to be done—people used to write orders down with pencils on pads of paper—so pretending to do it is what’s fashionable now. It’s a reminder of a time they never knew.
“Coffee?” asks the waitress, and Ziegler nods. She refills his cup from a big glass carafe she’s carrying. “And you?” she asks me. I smile up at her with my best there’s-nothing-to-see-here smile.
“Juice,” I say. “Apple, please.”
“Right with you.” And then she’s gone. I look at Ziegler’s face, and I see that I’ve lost him, if I was ever even close to having his support for my plan in the first place.
“You can’t do this,” he says, and then he corrects himself. He knows full well that I can. “I can’t do this. I can’t help you. There’s too much riding on it.”
“Nobody has any guts here. Why am I surprised you don’t either?” And then, to kick him harder, as hard as I can: “No wonder you’re alone.”
He blinks that back, but holds firm. I can’t even tell how much that hurt him. “You’re still a child,” he says, “and you don’t know what you’re doing. I know that I can’t stop you, that I can’t persuade you.” Not going to stop him from trying, I know, just from the way that he says it. “But you have to remember: You’re building a life here. I can help you get a job, a real place to live. I can help you start over. I’ve told you that.”
“I don’t want that. All I want is to save Mae.”
“Sure. But maybe this isn’t the way to go about it.”
“Tell me what is, then. Just tell me.” I’m nearly shouting, now. He’s made me angry. But not with him, not exactly. It’s just this place, this entire situation. I’m angry that I even have to persuade him. Th
is isn’t the way that it was supposed to go. As the waitress brings my juice and he blows to cool his coffee, I think that maybe he knows that. He can see that I’m desperate and yet he still won’t help.
Here’s how it was meant to go: I was meant to step off the ship, having saved the lives of people that I cared about, good people who did nothing wrong, who didn’t deserve their fate—the curse that had been put upon them. I was meant to look back at everything I had lost—my mother, my childhood, even Agatha, so recently departed—and still see something resembling the future I had dreamed of. Mae would be there and we would be a family. Family is what you make it, that’s something I learned. It’s not blood. It runs deeper than that, and stronger.
That’s how it was meant to go.
But it didn’t.
So what I have to do next is not my choice.
We stand on the sidewalk. He calls for his car and we wait. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t even look at me. He knows he’s let me down. We both watch as the car comes around the corner, as it slides toward us. You can’t hear it until it recognizes him and speaks to him.
“Mr. Ziegler,” Gaia says, as the door opens for him. He stands next to it, one foot inside.
“Are you coming?”
“Are you going to help me?”
He shakes his head. “Anything else, you know I’ll help you. And you know that I want to publish the book. It’s important, even if you don’t think it is.”
I don’t say anything more. I need his help. I’m alone here—that’s what he’s forgetting, or what he’s ignoring.
I watch him get into his car and pull away from the curb—silent as anything, more silent than if he was walking.
The docks feel, for a second, like home, like a relief. I ran the whole way, not because I was being chased or because I had to, but because it felt good. When I’m running I’m in control: of my breathing, of my feet on the streets, of where I go. The hood on my sweatshirt reacted to the exercise, pulled itself off my head as I sweated and got warmer from the run. The clothes split vents in the fabric to let the heat out. There are no cameras in the docks. Here, I don’t need to worry if somebody sees my face and I can let the sweat run down my cheeks, down the back of my neck, and I can feel it chill in the coldness of the air. I stop and breathe and feel the air cooling me down.