by J. P. Smythe
I think about Jonah. My hand starts to shake.
I can taste my own blood in my mouth. I’ve been chewing the inside of my cheek. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing that for—long enough that all I can taste is the bitter metal wetness on my tongue, running down my throat.
Ruby is talking and I’m not listening, just nodding, agreeing. I can’t panic. I just can’t. Act like you belong here and people will assume that you do. Confidence, shoulders back, head high. Don’t slouch. Carries herself like she knows this place. Like I used to be, on Australia. Back then, as nightmarish as it was, at least I knew what I was doing. How to survive—how to thrive, even. Almost. I remember running through the ship, climbing the stairwells, working in the arboretum, fighting the Lows—
No, I tell myself. Be here.
“How long’s your shift?” I ask Ruby.
“Same as everybody else,” she says. “Another eight hours and then I’m home and sleeping through the best hours of the day.” She laughs again, which I like. The sound of it, the casual way that some people use it—spilling out of their mouths, their throats, their very being, as if it’s something that they simply have to share with the world. Ruby’s one of those people. “I’m like, you know, vampires? From the stories?”
I don’t. I’m not even sure I’ve ever heard that word before. “Sure,” I say.
“Well, I’m like them. We only come out at night. That’s what we are: vampires who get time and a half.”
She laughs again. God I love that sound. It’s relaxing.
I tell myself that I should laugh more, or try to.
She holds the door open for me. It’s old and wooden, manually operated. Inside, the room is cavernous—every surface seemingly made from some sort of polished white stone.
“Through here,” she says. “This is where you come first, okay? Straight in here. So—you’re late at the front gate, pay gets docked. You’re late to your station, pay gets docked.” She lowers her voice. “Benefits of working topside: I’m logged in all the time—means you can slack off a bit more. Get tired? Power nap somewhere and you’re still logged in. You get the chance, you move up here with me. It’s not as glamorous, but I need my beauty sleep.”
She walks me beneath staircases that rise on either side of us, curling around the room. There are three doors along the back wall, metal shutters on the front. She yanks the middle one up. “This is you. You get tired, don’t feel like you can’t have a break; come up here to rest or whatever. Hard down there; no windows, all that recycled air.”
I don’t say that all the air is recycled in the city. People forget about the Wall. What it actually does. She presses a button set into the wall and the doors open. She stands back and watches as I step inside.
“Press to go down,” she says. “And maybe you come find me when you’re done? We can grab breakfast. You ever worked this shift before? That’s what happens. You get used to having breakfast for dinner. And when you wake up, you get to have breakfast for breakfast as well. Best meal of the day and you get it twice.” She waves as the doors close.
“It was nice to meet you,” I say. I blurt it out, desperate to get all the words through the rapidly closing space in the doors. I want her to know that—because she’s so friendly, so kind. She’s not getting anything out of this, she’s just a good person.
“Hey, you too!” And then “Chan!” like a shout, but to remind herself of my name.
The door slams. At first it seems like nothing’s happening. There’s a gentle rumble to the floor maybe, but I can’t tell if I’m imagining it. Noiseless. I wonder if I’ve done something wrong, then my ears pop and I know that this box—with me in it—is going down. I can’t even feel it.
I haven’t thought my plan through. It was rushed; that was stupid of me. On Australia, you wanted to do something—to get something done—you just did it. Action first, then deal with the consequences. It’s how everybody lived; and if you didn’t, that was on your head.
The rules are different here.
The doors open onto an empty space, low ceilinged and barren. Every wall is concrete—unpainted and raw—with a bank of boxes, wires spooling off them, standing in the middle of the room. There’s a metal cage surrounding the boxes—all that black metal reminds me of banisters, of stairwells, of grated floors—and in the middle of it, a terminal. This must be the Archives. It’s not like any of the terminals from the rest of the city. It’s more like the stuff on Australia. It’s old, really old. I can see a keyboard attached to it—an actual, physical keyboard. It makes me think of the stuff in Ziegler’s apartment: a piece of archaic technology, like a relic, but preserved perfectly. The boxes around it hum, whirring lights and buzzing noises, thin gray devices in racks. The place is lit by strip lights so bright it hurts to look at them and yet somehow that light is swallowed before it can do any good. The air tastes old, like it’s too dry somehow.
“You want something?” I didn’t see him I was so distracted by the room. A face is peering out from behind the cage. He’s on his knees, wires in his hands. “I don’t know you.”
“I’m new,” I say, and he nods.
“Everybody’s new. No one has any staying power. You know?” I shrug. I guess. “What you here for?” He stands up and rubs his hands on his uniform. “I’m Todd.” He holds out a hand to shake, looks down. I cross over. My hand trembles until it’s in his and then he pumps it furiously. “What are you here for?” he asks again, dropping contact.
“I’m looking for a name,” I say.
“Got the requisition?” Think, think. He shrugs. “It’s your first day. I’ll cut you slack. Usually we need requisitions because they keep track of everything. But I know, it’s a hassle. Hard to get a handle on all of this stuff. What’s the name?”
“Mae,” I say. He rushes to the keyboard and stands in front of the computer. The screen flicks on, and he starts typing. I spell her name because he had it wrong.
“Second name?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Mae . . . Doe,” he types. I don’t ask what that second word means, because he knows what he’s doing, or he acts like he does. “Nothing,” he says. “No results.”
“Can you try Mae by itself?” I ask.
“You can. But there’ll be a few, I’m guessing. This stuff goes way back. Like, before the apocalypse far.” He looks at his watch. “I don’t have time for it, so you do it? I can trust you?” He grins. “First day, don’t panic. Just breathe.” He goes to the back of the cage again, bends down, starts on the wires. “Go on,” he says.
I step forward and I type her name. Press SEARCH. The results rocket in, hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. I open the first.
ABALETTE, MAE. A date of birth, a location. Names of parents. ABUSED, it says. Beaten. Sexually assaulted. It describes actions that I’ve known about, that I’ve seen happen before, but only up there. Things that people were killed for doing. Mae Abalette’s parents were put on trial but there’s no outcome listed against her name. She was taken away. Reassigned. It says where to—a nice family, a completely different part of the country. She’s safe now.
Not my Mae.
ABALLO, MAE. No definite age, just BABY. Mother a drug addict, living in the docks. Or was living in the docks, died giving birth, so they took the baby away. There’s no sense of what that meant for Mae. Where she went. REDACTED, it says under the section discussing her whereabouts now. No names of who took her—no jobs, no idea who they could be.
As I scan the thousands of Maes I wonder how many people in this database are called Chan, how many were in the past.
I never found out where my own name came from. It was just a name.
ABBOT, MAE. The entries are from all over the place, the dates too. So many of them are decades old, the people they’re discussing dead or long forgotten—lost in the city, another city, the rest of the world. None are them are relevant to me. They are just names.
ABBOTT, MAE. ABLE
, MAE. ABLETT, MAE.
I whisper the names under my breath as I open the files one by one, trying to find her. It’s like an invocation, a spell. Like one of the Pale Women’s prayers, repetitive and rigid, the words clipping into each other as I say them faster. Mae, Mae, Mae.
I read about so many of them and none of them are right. This is going to take hours and hours. And then I remember—I can search in my own time. I’ve got Alala’s device, the flesh-feeling disc that’s in my pocket that will take the results back to her. She can help me. I pull the disc out and set it on the counter. There’s no indication that it’s working until I touch it to move it closer to the computer, then I feel it warming up. I can almost sense the vibrations.
“You given up?” Todd asks from behind the cage.
“No,” I say, “just thinking.”
“We aren’t paid for that,” he says, and then he laughs at his own joke. “Where are you from? You’re not from Washing’on, accent like that.” He exaggerates the local accent when he talks, I can hear him smirking as he says it.
“No,” I say. “Are you?” Answer a question with a question. That’s one of Ziegler’s tricks to defer, change attention, move the inquiry along.
“All my life.”
“And you’ve worked here long?”
“Kinda. They need somebody here for uploads. System’s kept offline. It’s old military hardware, totally unhackable. Doesn’t even have a modem in there.” He laughs. “You won’t even know what a modem is, will you? You look pretty young. Anyway, I’m in here a third of the day every single day of my life. Sundays off if I’m good.” I touch the disc—still warm. Is that it? My only indication? “What’s your story?”
“No story,” I say.
“Nobody has no story. Even I’ve got a story and I’m really very boring.” He waits for me to ask him if I can hear more. I tap keys. I want to keep him down there, out of sight of what I’m doing.
Behind the computer, the buzzing gets louder and slightly more frantic.
It can’t be a coincidence.
“What’s your story, then?” I ask. I wonder if he can hear the nervousness in my voice. He stands up, stretches. His back cricks.
“You won’t believe this, but I was born outside the city. So, I’m Washington, right? But my mom, she was out in the colonies, outside the Wall. We got in when I was three months old, something like that, when she met my dad—not my real dad, but you know, he was there for me, so he is, you know? But then we got a pass. He’s a pretty big deal in the services. Good guy.” He stops talking. His mouth moves like he’s chewing something and he squints a little. “You hear that?” Puts one hand onto the cage. “You still looking for that name?”
He comes around, walking quickly. I snatch the disc from the table, so hot that it’s almost too painful to hold, and I slip it into my pocket, feeling the heat from it through my clothes, burning my skin. He pushes me aside and starts typing—brings up a totally different window, fingers fast on the keyboard, typing strings of numbers and letters I don’t understand.
“Is everything all right?” I ask. I start backing away, very slowly. I don’t want him to notice, in case this is nothing. He stops typing and pulls his hands away from the keyboard.
“It’s fine,” he says, but he’s lying. I can tell. He knows what I did. “I’m just, you know . . .” He reaches to his belt—slowly, slowly—and presses something.
I don’t hear the noise, but I know that he’s sounded an alarm.
When the elevator doors open and the guards pour out, I’m holding Todd from behind—one hand across his chest, the other across his throat. I’m not going to hurt him, but they don’t know that—it’s easier to assume. Six of them. They almost sneak out (as if I can’t see them right in front of me) and get into something like a formation, ready to take me on. No weapons down here—no metal, even for them—so they have their hands out, fists like boxers.
“Drop him,” one of them says. The voice is targeted, so I hear it like it’s inside my head. Underneath it I can hear the sound of their feet on the floor, the slight squeak of their shoes.
“Let me go,” I say.
I probably don’t look like much. Small and weak, they’ll think. They don’t hesitate. One rushes toward me, swings at me. I push Todd at him; Todd howls as he stumbles forward and collides with the guard. Another rushes me and I meet his fists with mine, grabbing them, snapping one hand back until I hear the crunch. I drive my elbow into his face and he crumples. Another two are already running at me; I dive between them, grab their ankles, yank. Their faces thud into the ground. They’re not quite out, but it’s enough. The next guard who piles toward me, I kick in the balls and he crumples. I try the same on the other, but he grabs my leg, so I use that—spinning up off the floor, slamming my other foot into his chest.
I am about to finish what I started—the disc in my pocket has cooled and I have no idea if I’ve got what I needed or not—when one of the other elevators pings. The doors open and there are more of them.
But these are different—not guards but police—ten, eleven, twelve of them. They rush out. These ones are armed. They point their guns at me. The guns fizz with the pulse of the electrics in them, blue tips like the strikers. This is real hardware. They never use this stuff when they’re just chasing junkies through the docks. This is actual weaponry for an actual threat. They don’t tell me to give myself up; they don’t even give me the chance. Fast as I can, I run behind the terminal and put it between me and them, hoping they won’t want to risk hitting it. They fire and I feel the pulses loose in the air, the tingle as they miss me. The pulses veer in mid-air, designed to track their targets. I’m lucky.
The device Ziegler gave me—the electro-magnetic pulse—I can use it. That’ll mean no more hacking the computer, but it’s going to have to be enough. I can’t get taken, not now. I reach down into my pocket, wrap my fingers around the EMP, and I squeeze.
The sound is strange, like every other bit of noise is sucked out of the room. The lights pop to black. The blue of the police guns disappears. The computer shuts off with a grinding noise, and everything goes dark and silent.
It only lasts a moment. Then the police rush toward where I was, howling at one another, trying to get lights working, to get communicators and their augments up and running. Relying on their voices in the absolute darkness to guide them toward one another, toward me, to hunt me.
I stay quiet; they don’t. They give themselves up too easily.
I know how to fight in the dark.
The power comes back to show them lying on the ground, clutching themselves and each other, trying to muster the energy to fight back. I’m breathless. This was a big fight, bigger than I’ve had in a while. That won’t be the last of them, I know—especially not now. I get into the elevator, and I hammer the button to go up, to get me back to ground level. There’s only one escape route, which means there’s probably more of them waiting for me when I make it to the ground floor. I picture the waiting guards—their bodies making a wall of riot shields and weapons, armored up, faces blanked by their helmets. More guns, most likely.
I roll my shoulders, crick my back. Something changes when you know there’s a fight coming. There’s a change in the air, like before it rains.
Maybe that’s why I like the rain so much.
Clank.
The elevator jars, shudders, stops. A voice comes through the intercom, buzzy and faint. “Remain where you are. You will be attended.” I can’t tell if it’s Gaia’s voice or that of an actual person; just that it’s cold and efficient. Then there’s a thud, something on the roof of the elevator rolling around, then a hissing and smoke pouring in from the cracks in the roof. I recognize this tactic. I have been on the other side of it. But this smoke stings, burns my eyes as soon as it touches them, and I can’t see. I cover my face with my arm. The smoke sinks into the elevator. I have to get higher, I know, above the smoke. I cough, a retching from deep inside me that
feels like my lungs are being tugged out. I look up: cracks, where the smoke is coming in. A hatch in the elevator ceiling.
So many things in this city feel like reminders of what I’ve done before. Nothing but callbacks to a life I tried to leave far, far behind. Yet apparently I can’t ever escape.
I leap up, spring off the wall, hurl myself at the ceiling, slam my forearm into the hatch. It clatters open. The smoke comes in faster, pluming down, followed by the thing that’s making it all. It drops to where I’m standing; and I leap again, coughing and spluttering, trying to keep my eyes shut. I grab the sides of the hatch. I pull myself through. The air is clear on the roof of the elevator, all the smoke having sunk down. But my eyes aren’t working right; everything’s in duplicate, triplicate. I can’t actually lock on to anything: Something’s in my vision and then it’s suddenly gone, spiraling off and out of my view and I can’t pin it down. It’s dizzying. I’m dizzy. I try not to collapse.
I stumble. There’s a gap between the elevator and the wall, a hole I could drop down and fall into. That would solve their problems.
Nobody gets killed in this city; that’s a rule. They made it after they lost so many people when the planet was wrecked. They decided not to kill anymore, in any situation. Nature is senseless so humans have to be sensible. All their weapons incapacitate. You’re never totally broken—you can be changed, fixed. At least Australia’s rule was punishment or death. There wasn’t any waiting. Here, they want you productive, part of the infrastructure. It’s more than a city and a people—it’s everything about life here.
From the corner of my eye I see it, fastened to the wall. A ladder. They won’t think I’ve made it out of the elevator, I have to count on that. I stagger toward it, feel around until my hands hit the rungs, trying to get a good enough grip that I can climb. I wrap my hands around the metal bars and put my feet on the lower rungs, but I can’t coordinate my movements; my feet keep slipping, like my legs are loose somehow, not quite able to lock as they should. I start to heave myself upward anyway. My muscles aren’t working properly; they’re not as strong as they were. Not as able. But still I go up, rung by rung, crawling. Like I’m a baby desperate to stand, trying to reach its mother.