by J. P. Smythe
That’s when I hear the voice, cracked and stammering—a local accent, somebody who’s lived here their whole life.
“Alala’s searching f’you.” The girl is sad looking, her skin a mess as she staggers up to me. I’ve seen her before, in the junkie line. A lot of them look the same, but she sticks out. Her hair is pulled straight back, hiding where there’s a bald spot. Fallen out or torn, I can’t tell. Whatever she’s on is responsible in one way or another. There are a lot of bad (or maybe just stupid) things that people do to themselves here—not exclusively in the docks or the other slum areas, but we get the cheapest, nastiest versions of everything. In the rest of the city, people manage their habits and addictions. Here, they run rife and they’re ruinous. This one scratches and pulls at her own skin, and her eyes are runny and weeping, and her nails have dried blood underneath them. “Told me t’find you, fetch you t’her.” She waits for me to say something. I’m still catching my breath. “And here y’are.”
“Tell her I’ll be along.”
“She says t’give you a message. This is why you’ll want t’see her. She says she’s got what you wan’ed. Tha’ make sense?” What I wanted. The Archives? Mae? I feel my heart race with something like excitement, even though I know I shouldn’t let it. She touches my arm, a loose grab at me for attention, and I flinch away from her. “So you have t’go now.” It’s not a request.
I head toward Alala’s house and the girl follows me just a few steps behind; I can hear her dragging one of her feet. She’s slower than I am, but I don’t like her being there. You can’t watch your back if you’re facing forward, and there’s nobody here to watch my back for me. I think for a moment about how it once was: Jonah and I, side by side, knives out and teeth bared. If he were here now, I wouldn’t be doing this alone.
It’s darker in the shadow of the Wall. Even when it’s daytime, the sun doesn’t quite reach here. It’s blocked on one side by the Wall and on the other by the buildings in the hub of the city itself. It’s like we’re in a perpetual dusk we can’t escape from. We’re still hours away from nightfall but it feels like the sun has already set. I turn and look at the girl because I still don’t trust her. She blinks at me and rubs at her eyes with her sleeves. Her hands—her whole arms—shake as she tries to clear her vision. She’s not a threat, I realize. She’s just desperate.
Alala is waiting for me, foot on an upturned barrel, doing something with her boot. She clicks her fingers as I get closer. “Come, come,” she says. “You’re slow today, little girl. Zoe’s been looking for you, on her toes all morning.”
Zoe must be the junkie. Alala palms something to her, something so small it’ll last her an hour and then she’ll be back again, desperate for whatever Alala sees fit to dole out. “Get inside,” Alala says. She’s smiling at me, but there’s no sound of it in her voice.
She shuts the door after me then puts a chair across it so it won’t open. We won’t be disturbed. She leads me to the back where I saw the woman giving birth before. On the table where she once laid, there’s a thin gray tray—metallic, reflective. On top of it is the box from before, the one that had caught the blood. Alala reaches into it, pulls out three items, then lays them out on the table for me. “You got these out of my home, you understand? You know the trouble that I had to go through for these?”
“And I’m grateful,” I say.
“You be more than that. You owe me, little girl. You said that, remember?”
“Of course,” I say.
“So I need favor from you. I have many things from the Archives that would be useful, you understand? More useful than where to find your daughter.” No sense in correcting her. She won’t listen or simply won’t care. “So I will get you in there, and you will . . .” She waggles her fingers in the air, some approximation of an action that I don’t understand. “You will make this happen. Get information for you and for me, you understand?” This whole time, she hasn’t lost that empty smile. I wonder what emotion it’s hiding.
“Okay, so, now,” she says, and she bends down and picks up something. She’s wearing thin blue gloves that show her flesh through them, the veins and bones of her swollen knuckles. The thing in her hands is a needle: a hypodermic. “The ID chip is in here. I have changed the picture on it, so it is your picture now. If cameras see you, they will be fooled. It is also your genetic information. So they scan that, it will get blood tested, and it will be you. So only you can swipe it. But not your fingerprint! That is his, still.”
She holds the needle up. “Give me your wrist,” she says, and I do. I have to. She presses the needle to it and squeezes. I feel a sharp pain, like being bitten by an insect. “Done,” she tells me. She rubs the place where the chip went in then turns my arm over and squeezes my index finger. She picks up something else from the tray with her free hand—a thin film of pink flesh, it looks like. She spits onto it, the saliva coming out from between her remaining teeth, her nearly blue gums. She rubs it and sucks the remaining spit back up into her mouth with a slurp. “Needs wetness,” she says, “activates the glue.” Then she lays the film on my fingertip and presses it down. “Good.”
I look at it. It looks like my finger, but something’s subtly different. Something in the swirls, where before mine were like a shell. This one has harder, thicker lines. There’s a scar on it that I don’t have, a nick down through the lines. “It’s perfect. It works perfectly. His finger on yours. Don’t get it wet—then it might rot; it might ruin the pattern because of the glue,” she offers, like that explains everything. “And now, the eye,” she says, and she picks up the final tray. At first I don’t see anything in it but some liquid, a thin film. She takes another syringe from a sterilized packet. “Open your eyes,” she says. “Head back, hold them open with your fingers.”
“I can’t,” I say. She presses the needle to the liquid and sucks it up into the chamber.
“Temporary augment,” she says, “changes your eye patterns. Very temporary, only a few hours. Like when children have the color changed.” That’s a fashion thing, a gimmick—almost a tattoo into the eyeball, changing the shape and shade. I’ve seen it and been disgusted by it. We change enough without meaning to—why change things about ourselves if we don’t need to? It’s like the Lows, ruining themselves, damaging each other. Like Rex. And why would anybody want to be like her?
“I can’t,” I say.
“You have no choice,” she tells me, the smile gone. “This is what needs to happen.” Her words come out focused, almost spat out, one syllable at a time. “Hold your eyes open, little girl. I do not want to blind you.” She comes at my right eye first. My fingers—pressing my eyelids back—tremble and flinch, my reflexes forcing the lids shut. I’m terrified. It’s not often I’m scared, but my eyes work—and they’re mine. And if I lost them for whatever reason, how would I find Mae? How would I even survive here?
“There is not time for this,” she says.
“I’m trying,” I tell her.
“Look away from me. Do not focus on me, on the needle.” I breathe deeply and hold it. I keep my eyes open and I stare at the far side of the room. I stare at the corner where the wall and the floor meet, just out of my vision. I can see blood on the ground there, dried and black, and I wonder where it came from. Who it came from.
I think about Mae and Agatha and Jonah, and how important what I need to do is, how necessary.
I feel the needle press against my eyeball and then wetness—a rush of liquid flowing down my cheek—and then I can’t see anything but dark red for a second. Alala touches my cheek with a cloth. She wipes away something and I don’t know if it’s blood or tears.
“One is done. Now for other.” So we repeat the process, me still looking at the same place, this time trembling slightly, trying not to cry. Now that the vision is gone from one eye I can’t see the blood. Now I can only see the edge of my own nose. My skin, the freckles on the bridge of it. I flinch much less this time, and when it’s done she
tells me to blink. I do, over and over. “Okay, better. Two minutes. Take two minutes. Keep them shut, and then open.”
I sit in the darkness I’ve made for myself and listen as she clatters around her home. I hear the sound of her drinking from her bottle—which I’m grateful she’s only doing now, not before she stuck the needle in my eye—and of her preparing something, tidying away what was on the table. Then she pats me on the leg.
“Open now,” she says, and I do. I can’t see the blood on the floor anymore, and it takes a few seconds for my eyes to focus; then my vision is back as it was—exactly the same. Not only that, but everything is clearer. I can make out details that I couldn’t earlier. I look at the blood on the ground and see that it’s not blood. It’s paint—old and faded, chipped away from whatever this place was used for before it was Alala’s home. And Alala herself: She’s older than I thought she was. I can see the details on her face as if I’m right up next to them, examining them, poring over them.
“I can see,” I say.
“Of course.”
“But better. I mean, I can see better.”
“I put other augment in the liquid. Adaptive, to fix problems. You don’t know you have astigmatism?”
“No,” I say. She starts laughing.
“Little girl, where did you come from that you don’t know that? My eyes, steady as anything. Perfect. My parents wanted me to have perfect eyes, so they had them fixed. You know that? Did your mother not try and fix you?”
“She did,” I say. But I don’t give her any more than that because I don’t want to talk about her, not here, not with Alala.
Alala explains the plan again, once more like I’m an idiot. I will press my hand to the pad. It will read my genes, scan my fingerprint. All the while, I will lean forward to let it scan my eyes. The door will open—no alarms, no surprises.
“If you get caught, you can’t get out. The security is tight for a reason.”
“Okay,” I say. I try to not play with the fake skin on my finger. There’s a loose part at the very edge of it, a lip, and all I want to do is pick at it. Willpower, I tell myself, it’s not that hard. “How long will this last?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the eyes. The—” I hold up my finger to her. “How many days will they last?”
That sets her off laughing again. “Days! Not days. Hours, little girl. Hours is all. You have to go tonight,” she tells me, and she cackles. I think about the stories we used to tell on Australia about witches. At times, Alala is exactly how I imagined them to be. “Last things,” she says. “You need his uniform, because this?” She points to what I’m wearing. “This will not do. You need to look like him. Will be adaptive, so just get it. Easy.”
Easy, she says, but it was on him. He must have a spare. He has to have a spare.
“Now when you get to the Archives, this is what you need.” She holds something in the palm of her hand out to me. I didn’t see her bring it out or where it came from. It is a small metal disc, thin and black. She hands it to me. “Safe, safe,” she says. I lay it on my palm and feel a soft tremor, as though it’s vibrating slightly. It’s cold as anything and doesn’t feel like it’ll warm up either. “You put this onto drives in Archives, on computer. Just as long as it is very close, it will do the rest. It copies material we need, for you and for me.”
“Mae’s location?”
“Every location. All the names, all the places. Everything we need. I have information in there, you have information in there. So you get and you bring back. My people will do the rest, read the results, find out where you get your little girl back.” She closes my fingers around the device. “Is very easy. Very short time to do. You do, you get out of there. Through door, come back here. All will be . . .” She smiles and she shrugs, as though this is nothing to worry about, as though there’s nothing dangerous to it. I can hear the rain outside. The walls muffle the sound, but now that I’m listening, the storm—and the heavy thunder, when it happens—echoes everywhere. I stuff my hand into my pocket to keep it dry. The pocket closes tightly around it, a seal around my wrist.
“You’re sure this will work?” I ask her.
“Little girl,” she says, leaning forward to kiss me on the cheek, “would I lie to you?”
There are children outside the guard’s apartment block—on the strange, bare patch of grass that might once have been a playground. A few of them are throwing a ball around and a couple others clamber on trees and wooden posts and the remains of something made of concrete blocks. It is strange to see so many children. Their parents are on one side watching, nobody caring about the rain. Rain is rare enough that it’s quite nice, really.
I wonder if this is the sum total of the children who live in this apartment block. Once there would have been many more. Before the Wall went up, they would have pretty much swarmed all over it.
I make my way up the stairs. I get a few glances from the parents, but they go back to watching their children—they don’t want to let their kids out of their gaze. I can’t imagine what that must be like—afraid your child will be hurt or killed, of being left childless with no way of having another. There’s no way to pick your life up after that. I remember a woman on Australia that my mother knew; she lived a few floors down. She lost her kid one day, when the child fell off the edge. No one pushed her or threw her. It was just a tumble like kids have, but with a finality to it. The mother had another. Straightaway she was pregnant and months later there was another little girl, same name as the first. It was like tempting fate almost, but maybe she saw it as putting right what went wrong.
And Bess—Bess, who lived next door to me. Her son went missing and she went to Rex. She found solace there somehow. Betrayed me. I never found out what happened to her son, where he went, if he was alive or dead.
I can’t even remember his name now. I try and find it somewhere deep inside but it won’t come. I grit my teeth. My jaw aches I’m thinking so hard.
I pass the window, the gap where the guard went over. I search inside myself for what happened, for whose fault it was. I promised Bess that I would find her son. I promised.
I said that I wouldn’t hurt Dave, and I did.
What was the boy’s name?
I get to the top of the stairs and the memories keep coming, like a flood that I can’t dam even though I wish I could. It’s the smell. I’m sure I can catch it on the air even here: the stench of the Pit at the bottom of Australia, the rot of bodies, of blood. I remember wading through it, dragging the others, trying to give them something safe that they could own—that we could all own. That smell is here now, faint as anything, but here—right outside the guard’s door. Whispering at me from the gaps between the door and the frame.
I didn’t know bodies decomposed so quickly. My hand shakes. I tell myself it’s okay, that it will all be okay. Or at least that this is necessary.
Even as I tell myself that, I think how easy it is to lie to ourselves.
I try the handle to the door, but it is locked. I totally forgot. When I left here before, I flicked the latch as I shut it. Okay.
I take a breath and jam my shoulder into it. It swings open, giving way almost too easily, the latch snapping off the doorframe. My shoulder howls at me—a pang of an injury healed long ago, but my body loves to remind me of my past.
“Dave, there is a guest,” the voice of his home system says.
It knows that he’s in the apartment already. It thinks that he’s just sitting there, doing whatever. About to stand up, get on with his day.
The smell from him is a fog. It’s a wave. I clamp my hand across my mouth and gulp back to stop myself from retching. How long has he been dead? A day? Nothing can smell like this in a day. And how can it bother me? On Australia, it was weeks, months, years’ worth of death and decay, spilled into liquid. The smell was everywhere and I didn’t bat an eyelid.
Maybe I’ve forgotten, just as I’ve forgotten Bess’s son’s na
me. I spent hours—days—thinking about him, searching the ship for him; and the memory of his name is not even on the tip of my tongue. It’s just not there. Like this smell, I don’t know what’s making me feel more sick: wanting to retch through the weird almost-taste in the air or the fact that I never found him. The fact that he died and it’s on me—just like Dave, now.
His body, propped up on the sofa, head lolled to one side.
Bess’s son? Who knows where. Certainly dead.
Dave looks fine. He still looks alive, if not the color that he should be. There’s blood on his face from where I struggled with his eye. I shut his eyelids because I couldn’t bear to look at the hole I’d left, the mess I’d made. His remaining hand rests on his lap, holding the wrist of the other arm. I don’t know why that made sense to me, but I didn’t want it hanging limp at his side. I put them onto his lap, folded. Neat.
I’m finding it hard to keep my own hands under control. They are trembling so much they don’t even feel like they’re mine. There’s a picture hanging on the wall, a printed photograph (not a holo—an actual, tangible thing) of the man before me. He’s younger in the picture, thinner, with more hair on his head. He wears a smile on his face that I just can’t imagine on him; it’s a look so simultaneously calm and joyous that I have to distance it from him right now, distance it from me. He’s holding onto the shoulders of what must be family members—an older lady, a younger lady, an older man propped up in a chair. I can see Dave’s face in theirs—some single through-line in their noses, their cheeks, the shapes of their heads—the things that made them family, that he inherited.