by J. P. Smythe
I can feel my mouth trembling. I think it’s my lip, but it’s not; it’s my jaw, my entire lower row of teeth, juddering against the top, as if I’m cold. But Alala’s got her heaters on and it’s not even chilly in here.
“So maybe you need me, after all? Maybe . . .” She pulls out her poitín from the cupboard and takes a swig (doesn’t offer it to me). “Maybe you should not be so quick to dismiss what I can offer you, the deal that I want to make with you now.”
“No more deals,” I say. Or maybe I only think I say, because Alala acts as though those words were never even spoken, as if I don’t have a choice.
“You are going to visit somebody for me. Nothing too complicated. Then you come back, and we are even.” Hands into fists, stretching my fingers. Everything ticks in my mind. I look for my exits. I try and work out what could happen next, not what should.
“Look at you here,” she says, indicating the holo. In it, I have my foot on one guard’s throat while I punch another in the gut. I look impressive—so much so I’m barely sure it’s actually me. “You are quite the asset. And when you get back? Then I give you your little girl’s location. Here is the target.”
She shows me the file she was looking for on the hacker’s computer. There’s an image of a man, older than I am but not by much. Head shaved, with a scar running down the middle of it until his eyes. He has kind eyes, in as much as that is a thing, but dark—not sure if they’re augments or not. He has more scars than just that one, and there’s something wrong with his mouth on one side because it curls up, a scar next to it running across his cheek. There’s a name across the top: HOYLE GRANT. And under that: THE RUNNER. Alala reaches over and spins the image of his head around, so that I can see it from every angle. “Now I have his details, and you can go to him.”
“Who is he?”
“You don’t recognize him? You really have not been here for very long, have you?” She says it like she should be smiling, but she’s not. She’s deadly serious. “You will go to him, okay?” She clears the footage of me at the Archives, types something in, then picks up a small device—a wristband tracker. “Use this to find him, okay? I have put his details in here. He is chipped, you should find him with that.”
“Is he a criminal?”
“Does it matter? You go to him, and you do me my favor.” She says it in such a way that I don’t need to ask the next question. I haven’t needed to ask it this entire time. That won’t stop me, though. My teeth chatter. Everything seems darker than it is, like the sun isn’t coming up outside, like it isn’t morning.
It feels as if everything is going backward.
“What do I do when I find him?” I ask, my voice sounding like it’s not actually mine, my words controlled. She smiles, and I know the answer. Of course I do.
“You kill him for me,” she says. Her face drops back to stone, back to nothing at all. “Maybe then I help you find the little girl you look for, okay?”
I try to leave, try to push through the curtains, but the addicts—still waiting outside her home—stand up and face me. Zoe is at the front, scratching again. She rubs her chest as she sees me, a reminder of what I did to her before.
“Let me past,” I say.
“Alala?” Zoe asks.
I glance at the older woman. She nods, face serious like stone. The junkies—clients, mutes, heavies, whoever they are to Alala—step toward me.
Maybe they haven’t heard that much about me, because they don’t look prepared for me to fight back. As Zoe steps forward, slipping metal bracers onto her knuckles, I think, I should show them the news footage of me at the Archives before they make their move, let them see what they’re getting themselves into.
Zoe rushes first and crumbles easiest, because she’s not a fighter. She’s not the get-your-hands-dirty type, and I only have to hit her gently before she runs, squealing like she’s trapped somewhere. The bigger ones are harder to hit. The tight leather skin of their muscles hurts my fists. They’re drugged, augmented. One of them is holding something—a lump of stone, it looks like. Only when he swings it, I see the metal on the end—the rusted iron jutting from it.
Just before it slams into me, I think how heavy it looks, how impossible it is that he’s swinging it as quickly and easily as this.
I hear a crack from deep inside me. It feels like I’m wet inside all of a sudden; it’s like there’s something actually running down the insides of my body. But there’s no pain, not yet. I know it will come, because it always does. Adrenaline, Ziegler explained to me: It’s like a drug that your brain makes that gets you moving and dampens the rest. Adrenaline blocks the pain, along with pretty much everything else you should be feeling when you’re in a fight, or in danger, or dying. Suddenly I’m not as scared as I was before this fight started.
But adrenaline can only do so much. The big guy swings his weapon again and I move. I’m fast, but not quite fast enough; and I’m hurt badly, I can tell that. So when it hits, it’s not where he intended, the middle of my spine. Instead, it’s in the back of my ribs. No crack this time, but the pain is like falling and landing on your back.
There’s nobody there to pick me up, though. To carry me off, to make me better.
Instead, I’m on the dirt floor staring up at the sky at the edge of the Wall looming over us. Zoe pushes herself to her feet and stumbles in front of me, leaning in and acting like she’s the one who brought me to the dirt. She drives her hand into my face, the blunt of her palm right between my eyes.
There’s another crack, and everything fades to black.
My eyes are open and I wish that they weren’t. I am on my front, and they are standing around me. The feeling of something pulling in my back—like a tooth loose in its socket, but deeper. It’s actually inside me. The doctor is here, the one that Alala uses for mutings. I see medical tools in his hands, thin white gloves pulled up to his trembling elbow; Alala next to him, assisting him; thread between her fingers, the other end of it in her mouth, trapped between her teeth. I’m on her table, her operating table. There’s blood.
“Don’t wake up,” she says. “Do not want to be awake for this, not while he fixes you. You can wake up at the other end, little girl.”
I shut my eyes again. She’s right. I don’t want to be awake for this.
There’s no pain. I’ll die or I won’t. But at least now I can sleep.
Click, click.
Her fingers in front of my face. I can smell the teas that she makes, the sweet perfume of things that don’t naturally grow here in the city but that she can still get her hands on through back channels. She has her ways.
“Don’t worry,” she says. Nothing like that phrase to have the opposite effect. I try to move, expecting rigidity and paralysis, expecting bandages. “You’re fine,” she says. “No problems at all, everything very smooth. As smooth as anybody could want.”
“What did you do to me?” I keep anticipating that I’ll be broken in some way, that there will be something missing, like my voice (taken away, as she has done so many times in the past to so many infants), or something will be changed, like the augments that she gets fitted into people, illegal and unapproved additions to their bodies.
“Incentive. I fixed you, to begin with. You had a broken rib. You want to avoid fighting, eh? It’s sealed now, made okay. No stitches—special glue. Can’t rip, no tearing of your skin, okay? Are you grateful?”
“It’s your fault,” I say.
“Wasn’t my fault that you fought back,” she says. That smile, a slit that could have been made with a knife, cheek to cheek, wider than it should be; I fixate on it and I can see what looks like too-smooth skin at the edges of her lips. Her makeup spreads out beyond where the brighter pink of her flesh ends. I think of The Runner, of his own scarring. There’s something there, a connection. “But I gave you another . . . incentive. While I was in there.”
“What did you do?” I push myself to standing. It aches, but only like I slept badly—joi
nts tugged into strange positions that aren’t wholly natural. I look down at myself. I’m whole, intact. I reach around, trying to feel my back, where they were operating. I think I can feel it: soft skin, smoother than it should be. A new scar.
“Won’t find it like that,” she says. “It is attached to you. It is a part of you.”
“What did you do?” I ask, my voice small, thin.
“I have helped you to help me.”
“What did you do?” This time I scream it and my hand shoots out, almost of its own accord. My fingers wrap around her throat. She is taller than me, but I’m in control.
“I show you,” she coughs. “I show you. Come, come.” I let go of her and she rubs her neck. I can see bruising already. But she hasn’t stopped smiling. The ache in my back grows. I stretch, and there’s no click from my spine. Usually I can get the pain to go away, pushing parts of my body back into place. Not today.
Outside it’s still morning. In the sky, through the membrane across the city, I can see the dulled glow of the midday sun.
“Zoe?” Alala says, and the girl stirs. She’s asleep on the ground a ways away, propped against a wall, half-buried under a blanket. She’s spacey, blanked out. Her mouth hangs open, dried saliva all down her chin, dripped onto her chest. “Lovely Zoe, get up and come here. Come here, now. You want another shot? On me?” Alala talks the girl to her feet, watches her push herself to standing. I don’t know if she has an actual home, somewhere else that she goes to. Maybe this is all she has; she sleeps close to Alala, close to where she always needs to be. This is where she gets her fix, and Alala might protect her, maybe. Maybe their relationship is closer than I imagined. “You wake up now, the next one is free,” Alala says to her.
Zoe tries to slap herself half-jokingly; she gets it wrong, misses her own face. It’s too hard. “You’re still here?” she slurs, looking at me. Or, looking below me—her gaze askew, as if she can’t quite home in on exactly where I’m standing.
“She won’t be here for long,” Alala says. “She is going to do a job for me.” I don’t know why Alala thinks I’ll just kill somebody for her. I haven’t killed anybody since I thought I killed Rex, since she—
No. The worker from the Archives. Dave. He died, and maybe I killed him. Maybe I’m to blame for that. That’s what she knows—that I broke him and brought her his pieces, so we could break in somewhere else, to steal something that I wanted, that I needed. She doesn’t care what I feel about how I got them, whether I’m responsible for his death or not. She doesn’t know how much I care. She’s seen me fight, seen me move. That’s all that matters to her.
Zoe stands in front of us, her face still. Her body wavers from side to side, a doll threatening to topple over.
“Brace yourself, lovely Zoe,” Alala says. “I am sorry.” She points at Zoe with the finger that’s normally missing its tip. But now it’s not. The tip is back—a metal end, an approximation of what a finger might look like, clunky and gnarled. She switches the finger, only slightly.
Like flicking a switch.
Zoe drops to the ground and screams. It’s a delayed noise, her mouth open long before the noise comes—she wasn’t prepared and it was a shock, a total shock. Now the noise is struggling to come up. It finally brings with it bile, spit, and vomit; and she’s totally powerless. She moves the best she can. That’s the worst part of watching her in pain: knowing she’s really battling to get to her feet, to push herself up, to fight against whatever’s going on inside her body. But she fails, and she slumps down, her face slamming into the hard concrete of the ground. Her teeth break at the impact, blood spilling from her mouth. Her head rocks back, and she gasps in air. Then, thud! Face back down into the dirt.
Alala twitches her finger again, and Zoe falls still, not even a tremble to her.
“This technology . . .” Alala says. “It is so old. Outlawed. Radio bands. You know what a radio band is?”
“No,” I say. I grit my teeth.
“They were how we used to send information, before they found it was dangerous—like radiation. Once, way way back, people would listen to music through these bands on the air. Then we learned we could control things with them. The birds. Then we could control people. Now? I can make her dance for me.” She walks over to Zoe, nudges her with her foot. “I can do so much more with her. You want a demonstration?”
“No,” I say.
“That is a good choice. She is a customer. A good customer.” She looks around. One of the lunks—the one who hit me with the rock, I realize, who’s muscled out of his skull—is standing a short ways away, hands all over some poor girl, places that they shouldn’t be. “This one, though. He owes me more than he can ever pay back. And I can use his augments for somebody else. A repossession.” She nods to the other junkies, and they nod back.
They swarm him. They pile onto him from behind, drag him away from the girl and out of the house, drag him through the makeshift streets holding him by his ankles; Alala makes me follow. He struggles too much, fights back, so they drop him and kick his head until his tongue flops out of his mouth and his eyes glaze. Then they drag him by his ankles, face down in the dirt. Alala leads them—and me—through the docks, down past the houses. “I put one in him when he had his muscles augmented. It’s safer, this way. You need to make sure that if you want somebody to do something, they understand that I have insurance.” She points at his twitching body. “See? A scar, like yours.” She’s put one inside me. I look at the other junkies, the ones carrying him, and they’ve all got the same scars. This is how she controls people. “You kill this Hoyle Grant, and we’re even. I take it out. Then I help you get your little girl back.”
Then we reach the edge of the docks, the water not quite still—the ice shifting, melting a little in places where it’s warmer.
Alala’s people pick up the lunk and haul him up over their shoulders and then heave him into the air, out over the water. He smacks into the water and starts to sink, still unconscious. I thought the body reacted to water—woke you up when you were submerged, some last-chance survival mechanism. I keep waiting for it to kick in for him, to save him.
I turn my head. I don’t want to watch him die. But she reaches over and grabs my face with one hand, turns it toward the water. With her other hand, the metal finger, she points to him. His body finally twitches back to life as he fights against the cold water. He struggles, barely visible through the broken ice that floats on the water’s surface. She flicks her finger, and there’s suddenly an explosion—a geyser of water blowing up into the air, then raining down all around us. Carrying with it fragments of ice and his body.
“Please take it out of me,” I say. I don’t want to beg. I will.
“When you have done the job. But you had better go, little girl. The Runner waits for you and I wait for you. Let us say . . . six hours. Six hours—if you’re not back here with his blood on your hands, I find you.” She comes close to me and she kisses me on one cheek, then on the other. She holds me close, presses something into my hand: an EMP, just like the one that Ziegler had, the same black-market tech. At least I know how it works, this time.
“You will need this. Don’t be afraid to use it. And hurry back, Chan. Bring me evidence. Because if you do not come back here—if you run—I will save your little girl myself. I will find out where she is, I will go to her, and I will bring her up as my own. You understand what that means?” I nod. I don’t, not really, but I’ve got an idea. “Zoe, she came to me for help when she was a little child, and I helped her. ‘Save me,’ she asked.” She mimics her voice, but it’s nothing like the truth. It’s some pastiche of a begging addict, like some punch line to a joke. “So I did. If you want that for your precious Mae, then disappear. Then never see me again.”
Then she’s gone. She walks off, back to her home. Her people go with her, or disappear into whatever parts of the docks they live in. And I’m alone, the water around me freezing on the ground, some of it red from the de
ad man’s blood.
I don’t know what to do now.
No. I do. I do.
The tracker on my wrist twitches as I half-run through the streets, letting me know when to turn, when to carry on. I repeat the information Alala gave me, over and over. Willis Tower. Financial district. Hoyle Grant. The Runner.
I know nothing about him, nothing at all. His face. I don’t need to know anymore, not now, not yet. Out of the docks, through the housing—the towers, the quieter older suburbs. I think about what happens if I don’t stop running, if I go farther than I have before. I could get out of the city. I’ve never left. They always say, “Don’t leave. It’s hellish out there. It’s hot and it’s ruined.”
I’ve wondered, of course, if that’s another lie. Maybe now is the time to find out. Only that will leave Mae here, and Alala wasn’t lying. I could see it in her eyes—she will find her and she will punish her somehow.
I promised that I would save her.
I walk along the edge of the freeway that heads into the center, that cuts right through the city. There’s no sidewalk—few cameras, either—and nobody who’ll recognize me. That’s my worry; that somebody will recognize me and the police will come—or the birds (that would be worse).
I step onto the bridge, in the part of the road reserved for cars having problems. As the traffic passes, drivers and passengers crane their necks and stare at me. I need to get off this track, but it is the shortest route to where I need to be. Getting a bus wouldn’t be safe—too many cameras. I have to walk this. I keep my head down, like always. I wonder if I’ll ever be head up. They slow down sometimes to see what I’m doing. My hand is in my pocket, clutching the EMP. It’s soft, squishy. It’s strange but weirdly comforting knowing that I could squeeze it harder and everything around me—cars, buildings, birds in the sky, maybe even the Wall, if I was close enough—would just stop when I made it.