by Clare Moleta
They reached the side of the tanker and flattened themselves against it in the dark. Jas was readying the drill. Li put her container down and moved her hands along the metal, feeling for rivets, then guided Jas to the weak point directly alongside the seam. The warmth of her hand was unexpected. Li shifted forward to keep watch, offering Jas her back, and Jas braced against her and positioned the drill.
The noise was muffled by layers of padding and tape but Li kept scanning, listening for guards. She had a sense that the darkness around the rest area was fuller now than it had been a minute ago, kept hearing tiny sounds out there that she couldn’t account for. Stokes and Dev should have a spare off by now. They’d be rolling it away or going for the second. Jas braced harder against her back, Li felt the last brief resistance in both their spines and then the drill was through. Now she turned around and let Jas guide her hand to keep pressure on the hole while she changed up to a fatter drill bit. That cool, taunting smell came through the metal and she felt the immensity of the pressure inside.
Jas leaned in again and in ten seconds the hole was wide enough. They swapped places and Li uncoiled the tubing and worked one end into the hole, keeping the other end bent over on itself to make a seal. Fed the tube deep into her container so it would fill quietly. When she released the seal the flow started almost immediately but it was too slow. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand. She adjusted the angle, felt a gush of water. Some sound, not too much. She felt Jas tense but she was calm, focused.
The container was half full when Jas nudged her and pointed. Two figures ran past them to the truckstop, bent over, carrying something between them. But not their crew. Three-quarters. Jas blew out between closed teeth, a tiny sound. Hurry. Were there other mosquitoes descending on the convoy? What were the chances of none of them fucking it up?
Full. Li sealed off the tube and eased it out. Jas screwed the lid on and positioned her empty container. Started unwinding her harness. Li hooked up, unsealed, adjusted the flow. More sounds on the periphery now, too many and not quiet enough. Somewhere on the other side of the tanker a guard swore and there was the double click of a gun being cocked. Hard to tell how close. She tied Jas’s harness to the handle of the full container. Turned back. The second one was only half full.
Fryer? someone called from the truckstop, waddaya got?
Close it off, Jas breathed in her ear.
A single shot. A guard yelled, Got one!
Almost full. Someone shouted, Mozzies! and there was more gunfire, less controlled this time. She sealed the tube, screwed on the lid. Heard people run out of the roadhouse, feet pounding in the dust and darkness.
Watch your aim! someone shouted. Keep clear of the fucking trucks.
People were coming out of the dark, closing on the convoy like it was a carcass. A guard yelled, Keep the fuck back! Screams, gunshot. The tubing was caught in the hole.
Leave it, Jas hissed. Just rope up.
But Jas’s own harness was dangling loose. Hadn’t Li done that? She let go of the tube and fumbled for the end of her rope, looped it round the handle and knotted it. When the pain came it was annihilating. Her leg gave way and she fell down screaming. Answering shots in their direction and Jasmine stood over her and stomped on her ankle again.
Li retched, tried to twist away out of range but she was tethered to fifty litres of water. Jasmine grabbed the rope and dragged her back. Li gouged up a handful of dirt and threw it in her face – she yelped and dropped the rope. Steel caps hammered into Li’s shins, sides, belly, jaw. There was no room for these smaller pains through the agony of her ankle but when she tried to take Jasmine’s legs out and bring her down where she could fight, her body wouldn’t do the work. Knife, she thought. A word like mountain. Like fly. Jasmine got on top of her, pinning her arms, banging her head back on the ground and unleashing the tube in her face. She was choking, drowning. The skin flayed back from her bones, couldn’t get her head up. Somewhere outside the water there were hands wrenching at her waist. Then she could breathe and Jasmine’s weight was off her and she rolled over and vomited liquid.
When she sat up, the siphon tube was whipping around near her head and her toolkit was gone. Was that what this had been for? All of it? Li wanted to kill her with her hands. She started crawling after her but there were bodies everywhere in the headlights. Where the fuck had they all come from? They ran towards her and past her, carrying bottles and cups and bags and tins.
She thought she saw a figure hauling a container, right at the edge of the light. Tried to get up but something in her ankle ripped and give way. For a few seconds she hung on the edge of blacking out and when she opened her eyes the figure was gone. Looked back and saw that people had reached the tankers. Two were wrestling over the siphon tube. It came free and water arced up thinly from the hole, catching in the headlights. The crowd made a gutteral sound. A guard fired into their backs and kept firing. Li started crawling away again, just trying to get to the road now, get out of range, but it hurt so much to move. All around her people were running and shooting and shouting and falling.
And then it hit her that Matti could be here, trapped somewhere in this mob. Li turned back, looking for smaller shapes, yelling Matti’s name. In front of the nearest tanker, a man got the gun off the guard and smashed the butt into the side of her head, then he stepped back and fired straight at the tanker. Panic, chaos, bodies falling. But they were just in the way. And now the tanker sprang new leaks and people held up their containers or their cupped hands until they were pushed aside. The smell of blood and water.
That was when she heard helicopter blades, saw the lights in the sky and knew she should have got away sooner.
Transit
Li started work in Serkel’s salvage facility two weeks after they brought her in. Any sooner would have been unproductive. She had broken bones in her ankle, torn ligaments and tendon damage. The medic had put her lower leg in a cast but assessed her as otherwise fit. She gave her a bunch of shots and some crutches, and then confined her to Charlie compound for fourteen days. Her status number was printed on a band around her wrist.
The first day, she walked around the fence on her crutches. There was a thick, sweet stink in the air and she saw that Matti was truly out of reach now.
When she was done looking, a couple of Essos had to carry her back to the sleepbox. She lay on a cot, breathing sweat and mould and old blood, and looked at the metal grid on the metal ceiling, at the damp and rust. Someone coughed persistently in a corner. The woman in the next cot lay looking at her out of dark, exhausted eyes. This part is hard, she said. You won’t feel it as much when you’re working.
Her name was Camila. She’d been in Transit for a month. Li turned away and gripped the Saint Anthony medallion. They’d missed it somehow when they processed and tagged her. It was flat and warm, it held her warmth. She traced the ceiling grid with her eyes, working inwards until she got to the smallest box and then starting from the outside again.
* * *
Charlie compound was a concrete toilet and shower block, two twelve-metre shipping containers for sleeping in, and a patch of dirt out the front where the women queued for the shift vans. It was surrounded by other fenced compounds, each one separated by concrete paths and linked by two gates. There was a central compound with a cracked runway down the middle and a concrete hangar where they got fed. Cameras on the fences. Essos, always in pairs. The whole lot enclosed by a rigid mesh outer fence, at least five metres high, angled in and topped with razor wire. Unclimbable.
This was Transit. And Transit was in the No Go. Now it was the highway that was out of bounds – she couldn’t see it from Charlie compound, couldn’t see the perimeter fence either, couldn’t even see the industrial complex north of Transit, where Camila said Li would be working soon. All she could see was fences and all she could hear outside them was dogs.
* * *
The horse was gone, fallen out of her pocket somewhere in the chaos at t
he roadhouse.
* * *
By the time the medic said she was work-ready she’d figured it out. She couldn’t break out of Transit. Every link gate had an individual lockcode. There was nothing in here she could cut the fence with and even if she could dig under it, there were all the other fences outside Charlie. She would never get the chance, anyway; there were always Essos around, the cameras, lights at night.
But the shift vans took labour out of Transit to the complex facilities. The women who worked shift said you could see the highway from the complex, and that trucks and water tankers came and went regularly through Serkel’s own gate in the perimeter fence.
Li believed the stories about jumpers getting inside the XB under trucks. Some kind of harness would help, but if she couldn’t get rope then she needed a truck with tandem axles. She could use the crutches to brace herself across them. Her leg was the problem. In the black fug of the sleepbox she closed her eyes and traced undercarriages, counting non-moving parts, looking for handholds, places she could hook her leg over.
She worked a week in the complex before she had a chance. The van dropped the women off and picked them up in the loading bay but she was never outside long enough to time the coming and going of the transports. And after her first shift she gave up the idea of hiding a piece of rope in her clothes – the bodychecks were too thorough. All she could do was count wheels, notice where the drivers stood and the Essos stood.
Then, at the end of her eighth shift, while the women were walking in single file to the van, two guard dogs got into a fight. In the brief interval before the Essos had them back under control, she stepped out of the line and lowered herself awkwardly under the nearest truck.
They sent a dog after her. It lunged at her in the confined space, snarling and spraying spit, teeth taking lumps out of the air in front of her face. Hitting out at it with her crutch only increased its fury.
You got ten seconds, an Esso yelled, then I’m dropping the leash.
The drivers stood around while she crawled out, dragging her crutches. Some of them were laughing.
The Essos cable-tied her and sent her back in the van with the others. Management had a procedure for non-compliance.
* * *
Onebox was cut down much smaller than the sleepboxes, with a hatch in the door. It had a mattress and a blanket. A bottle of water. A bucket. When they put her in there, Li shouted, screamed, beat the walls and the floor till her skin split and her knuckles swelled. Three weeks since they’d brought her into Transit, the days moving away in a straight line and Matti receding.
Once a day she got food and water through the hatch. The ceiling had the same grid as the sleepbox but it was only light enough to see it for a couple of hours. She huddled in the blanket trying to think her way out of here, and then through every gate between here and maingate, think of a way to get the maingate code, get past the dogs, get back to the highway.
An Esso banged on the hatch, passed in food and refilled her bottle. Stayed there on the other side of the door for a moment.
Can you hear me? You gotta give this up. Hey. Say something if you can hear me.
Li thought she recognised the voice. It was Megan, one of the ones who’d carried her back to the sleepbox the first day. She tried to speak but she had no voice left.
Megan said, You only get boxed one time, that’s procedure. They’re short on labour now but once we do another intake you won’t be worth it for them, even with skills. You been in there three days already, you need to give this up. Show em you’ve learned your lesson. Hey. Whatever you think is out there, it’s not. Not for you. It’s just Transit now.
* * *
They let her out after six days. She went back on shift, showered when they told her to, slept when they told her, went to Medical, waited at the link gates, waited in the food queue. She kept count of the days and waited for something to change, for some disruption or breakdown that would give her a way out, but everything was the same, over and over.
And then finally she understood. Matti was lost to her. Not dead, not yet. She could still feel her in the world, still waiting for Li to come and find her. But Li would never come. That was what Megan had tried to tell her. There was no leaving here.
* * *
Serkel’s logo was everywhere in the complex and on the trucks. A green arrow circling round on itself. Sometimes the words Renewing excellence stencilled undeneath. Li saw it in the camp, too, rebranded over the old airbase signs or printed on discarded packaging. Serkel was Company, like Quench and Homegrown and XB Force were Company. Serkel bought waste by the shipping container from the global tech companies and military, and salvaged the gold and silver, copper, aluminium, plastic, glass and steel. Government waived the import charges and Company wore the cost of the ships that didn’t make it. It sold back the metals and minerals or used them on its own production lines. Dumped the rest up in North, or at least north of the XB. It was a good set-up, she thought. The transport overheads would be high but labour costs were minimal: everyone in Transit was on the points system, even the Essos. Making target covered your food and accommodation, basic medical, transport. Beating target earned you bonus points for readybars, soap, pads, koffee, sweetener, gum. Li had spent points before she had any, gone deep into debt for her medical, and she couldn’t see herself breaking even.
Some of the metals and plastics from salvage went to the other facilities in the complex where Serkel manufactured medical supplies and ammunition. Megan said they were helping the Wars effort. In the salvage facility, Li mostly worked with hand tools, indifferent to their easy availability and range and quality. The crates of cell phones held no more interest than the ancient television units. She just took them apart, sorted the reusable components. There was wakey for the double shifts, or something like wakey. It didn’t even cost points.
The Essos bodychecked them after every shift. There were things you could pick up in the complex – sharp edges, poisons – but Management had procedures to limit opportunities for self-harm.
* * *
Twenty-six women shared Li’s sleepbox. It had ventilation grilles but no insulation or heating. Stank of feet and mould. The women worked different shifts and brought their different stinks back with them in their hair and skin and camp-issue jackets. Dump stink or chemical stink or gunpowder stink. They slept in shifts too, one woman got up off the cot and another woman lay down on it. You were never alone. It didn’t matter to Li. It would have mattered once but it didn’t now. Not the noise or the smell, not the skin diseases they picked up in the shower block, the respiratory sicknesses they passed, one to the other, or the way her ankle itched and festered inside the cast. Not the rank shitbox. Not the snarling out in the dark. Not the fights or the shaming or freezing out – the pack closing against one woman until it was another woman’s turn. The dripping ceiling and the icy burn of the walls didn’t matter. The snoring and crying and fucking and heads banging against metal at night. It didn’t matter when her period came back and half the women in the box were bleeding at the same time, scavenging cloth and paper, leaking and staining their shared bedding. As the cold season closed around them, they pushed the cots together and slept piled up like dogs, sharing heat. It didn’t matter to Li because her privacy didn’t matter now, her mind didn’t matter.
And because there was consolation too. They told their stories in the dark. Li didn’t talk much but she listened to each precise accounting of loss. Anna and her sister had run for a truck and Anna didn’t make it. She stood on the road and watched her sister slip and go under the wheels. Lumena had two children under Replacement. The ballot claimed them both – one was on the Front, the other had been on a ship that didn’t get there. Kathy’s father died of prostate cancer, slowly, in a makecamp. Jun had been separated from her whole family in a gate riot outside Fengdu. Susanna’s girlfriend was beaten to death. Camila paid her way onto a boat and when it started sinking she dropped her baby into the outstretche
d arms of a man in the water but a wave broke over him and her baby went down without a sound.
Azzi cried, listening. She said, My boy was terrified of the sea. He read books about sharks. I gave him sedatives to get him on the boat, but when we were in the water, he couldn’t stay awake. I tried to hold him up but he was too heavy.
Before Transit, Li had been alone with her grief, hauling it around like combat gear. Out there no loss could approach hers. Who had she thought she was? In here, their losses rubbed against each other, blunting the edges and smoothing into one thing. The lost were dead or they were alive, they were status unknown. They belonged to no one in particular, and spread out like that, they were easier to bear. What had she thought she wanted? She didn’t want to be alone.
* * *
Rest day was the hardest. There were so many hours. She had to concentrate on keeping her thoughts small, they slipped the fence and got out where the dogs were.
* * *
A man called her name through the fence. It was early morning and she had just got off the van at the end of her shift, was walking back to the sleepbox with the others, single-file along Charlie fence, and it took her a minute to lift her head. He was standing up against Delta fence, holding onto the wire with both hands. Rich. All that separated them were the two fences and a metre of concrete. He said her name again but she didn’t want to remember him, all her work now was not remembering. She walked into the sleepbox and lay down on a cot that was still warm and she looked up and started counting the grids, but she saw his face again outside the fence at makecamp, heard him laugh and call her wild woman. If you get caught you can’t help her. She hunched over, hit her head against the wall. She tried to beat back the memory but it was right there, all of it, all the time, waiting to steal her oxygen.