Like a Boss

by Adam Rakunas

  I shook my head. “I’m not going to run off and leave you stranded, okay? I just have something to do.”

  “That you can’t do inside? Where it’s safe? And there’s tea?”

  “I need privacy.”

  Onanefe narrowed his eyes, then shook his head. “Look, I understand about habits, okay? I’ve had plenty of friends who get hooked, and–”

  “Oh, fuck you,” I said. “You can take your concern and sanctimony and shove ’em up your ass, okay? I am not an addict off to get a fix. I have something I need to do at six o’clock, and if I don’t, things will get unpleasant for both of us.”

  He cocked his head. “What, are you some kind of werewolf?”

  “None of your business.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “I don’t know you!” I turned and got in his face. “You miraculously showed up at my flat when it was on fire, then you miraculously said I owe you a boatload of money. You know what that sounds like to me? A setup. A great big setup to relieve me of something, and I don’t have the time, the energy, or the network connection to figure it out. What I do have” – I jabbed a finger in his shoulder; his cheek twitched at my touch – “is a pain in my ass and an appointment at six. Guess which one is more important to me now?”

  I took a step back. “Besides, if there’s anyone who shouldn’t have to prove trust, it’s me. I saved your ass from getting crushed. You don’t get to lecture me about trust.”

  He gritted his teeth, and his eyes unfocused for a moment. When he looked back at me, he nodded. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. You got something to take care of, okay. I just –” He bit his lip and looked away. “I know your reputation, that you’re this badass, that you don’t take any crap. But I saw something else in you today. You worry. You care. You give a shit. And right now? Santee needs more people like that. And it fucking kills me to think that you’re going to take that bottle and wander out here and–”

  “– and all that can wait for five minutes. I promise.” I patted him on the arm and walked away as quickly as I could without making it look like I was running.

  I passed an abandoned food stall, the coals under the grill smoldering. A corner of the stall’s dark blue awning flapped loose. I set the bottle and candle down next to the grill and set myself up. The awning came down with a few sharp tugs. The stall’s owner had left all her tools out, including a bundle of rags for cleaning the grill. I wrapped a rag around a spatula, dipped it in a bowl of cooking oil, then set it on the grill. It whooshed into flame, and I lit the candle. I plopped on the ground in front of the candle and threw the awning over me.

  I blinked up the time: five fifty-nine.

  There I sat, underneath a canvass tent in the ruins of one of the biggest markets in Santee City. There I was, me and my candle and my bottle and my wrecked brain as my city and probably my whole planet spun out of control. I saw my place in the middle of all that mess, one lone woman who had people hounding her for money or favors or blood. This was not where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in my flat, listening to the Six O’Clock sounds of Brushhead, the beeping of the tuk-tuk horns, the ringing of the bells at Our Lady of the Big Shoulders, and the glorious sounds of the muezzin at the Emerald Masjid. I wanted to hear people working and living and loving, not the hostile silence that surrounded me.

  I took a breath and cracked the seal on the bottle. The smell of Old Windswept, that smell of pear and cinnamon wafted upward, overpowering the must and smoke. For a moment, I knew right where I was: in a makeshift tent in Bakaara Market in Howlwadaag, on the northeast edge of Santee City. I let my mind’s eye fly upwards, above the haze and the crowded streets, above the network-dark buildings and cafés, up and up past the orbital anchor and out into Occupied Space, higher and farther than the ripples of today’s madness could travel. I was a speck, an invisible dot on an invisible dot in an ocean of stars I could never comprehend, but I knew where I was. I drank, took a breath, then took a second drink. Why not?

  I threw aside the tent. Where I wanted to be was a long way from where I was. I would get there. I would get Onanefe and his crew squared, I would get Letty squared, I would get this entire goddamn planet squared… it would just have to wait until I was done here.

  Onanefe was right where I’d left him. I handed him the bottle. “Done.”

  He held the bottle up to the failing light and sloshed the rum. “Looks like you barely started.” He unscrewed the cap and sniffed. His face mellowed. “You mind?”

  I shrugged. “Help yourself.”

  He took a long pull, then coughed. “Ho,” he breathed. “Strong, but smooth.”

  “That was from the first batch I made after I took over. I was terrified I’d get it wrong, send the whole place under.”

  He took a sniff, then capped the bottle. “You got it right. Madame Tonggow would always send us off with a bottle after we delivered. Everyone else on the crew cracked theirs right away, but I never opened mine. Figured I’d save them for special occasions.”

  I laughed. “You know there’s a market for the stuff she made? You could probably sell those bottles and get a better chunk than what you think I owe you.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Fifty thousand yuan worth of rum?”

  “Try a hundred K.” I shook my head. “Collectors are weird. They came sniffing around after I took over, offering me cash for used barrels. They all wanted a piece of her.”

  He nodded. “Madame Tonggow would talk about stuff like that. People always coming from the Co-Op, pestering her about selling bits of equipment or buying into weird schemes. She’d give ’em that smile, the one that says, ‘Yes, dear, that’s nice. Now shove off.’”

  “I wish I’d spent more time with her. I was so focused on buying the distillery that we didn’t do much more than talk business.” I looked at the bottle and contemplated another pull. I contemplated a lot of pulls. Bad things were happening out there in the growing dark, not just in the Market, but in the rest of the city. I really had to keep myself sharp.

  I took another pull and handed him the bottle. “She probably could have helped me deal with those assholes from the Co-Op. Did you know they wanted my cane?”

  Onanefe coughed as he finished his swig. “Maybe I should send them the bill.”

  I snorted. “You’d have even less chance of getting it, then. The Co-Op Board got caught up in some stupid speculation scheme, and with the labor stoppage…”

  Somewhere in the back of my brain, a thought came loose and bumped into a whole lot of other thoughts, like a pachinko ball plinking its way down the pegs. “The Co-Op doesn’t have cane. The cane isn’t coming because you guys have stopped working. You’ve stopped working because you haven’t gotten paid.”

  “What’s that?”

  I focused on Onanefe, fighting through the buzz. “Who else hasn’t been getting paid?”

  He opened his mouth, then clamped it shut as he sat back. “Well, everyone. All the crews.”

  “Heirloom and industrial?”

  He laughed. “We don’t discriminate. We get a call to cut, we go.”

  “But it wasn’t like you were getting paid for one and not the other, right?”

  “Right. Why?”

  “Because…” I put my head in my hands and squeezed. This was too much to think about with those three shots of rum and a long day in the sun. I was so tired. My skull hurt. I didn’t want to piece this all together. I wanted someone else to do the work and let me go back to my distillery and my horrible job in the bowels of the water works.

  The horrible job that paid off my crushing debt. The debt that would go away if I did what Letty asked, but I couldn’t do that anymore because the strike had taken on a life of its own. I couldn’t stop it, Saarien couldn’t stop it, Letty sure couldn’t stop it. The only way to stop a strike was to give the people what they wanted or wait until they broke. And since there had been no list of demands…

  “She wants this to happen,”
I breathed. The high from the rum evaporated, leaving me sick to my stomach. “She wants the strike to happen, and to burn itself out. Why?”

  “Who is ‘she’?”

  “The Prez.”

  “Letty?”

  I nodded. “She burnt my building down on purpose.”

  “She was there?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Do you know her? And I mean know her as a person, not as the Prez?”

  Onanefe fiddled with his mustache. “It’s complicated.”

  “Don’t you dare tell me you were an item, ’cause that’s the last bit of weirdness I need right now.”

  “Worse. We were political partners. Back in the day.”

  I cocked my head and smiled. “Holy crap. You’re with the FOC, aren’t you?”

  He straightened up. “And proud of it. Hell, I helped found our local chapter with Letty.” He shook his head. “Then she took off for the city and joined the Union.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Two Contracts. Ah.” He sighed and looked out into the distance. “We’d spent two years going from one farm to the next, talking with every Freeborn about working together. The old-timers wanted to defer to the Union, but Letty and me, we wanted Freeborn seats at the table. We’d seen our parents and their parents work their tails off, taking pride in how they’d remained free and independent when they were working for jiao on the yuan.”

  He sucked his teeth. “My folks were good people, but they were scared. They didn’t want to risk the little they had asking for what they were worth. Letty and I weren’t scared. We were going to make things better.”

  I looked at the ruins of the Market. “I don’t suppose this is the ‘better’ you had in mind?”

  He uncapped the bottle and took a long, long drink.

  Another thought plinked into my brain. “Were you in Brushhead to meet with Letty?”

  He coughed, and a little of the rum splashed onto his lips. “I really can’t talk about that.”

  That was enough for me. I stood up, wobbly as I was. “You and I are going to end this shit. Right now.”

  “We are?”

  “Yep.” I grabbed his arm and yanked him to his feet. “Whatever secret business you and Letty were going to hammer out, we’re going to make it happen.”

  He winced. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Come off it, Onanefe. You and Letty were going to meet, but Letty set fire to my place. She got to whisk herself away from whatever it was you were going to discuss, and now the strike has turned to chaos. There’s no organization. There’s no discipline. There’s just a whole lot of angry people breaking stuff, and once that blows over, we’ll go right back to status quo. Whatever it was you wanted to change won’t happen unless we make it happen. So come on.”

  “Where?”

  I sniffed the air and caught a whiff of shawarma. “Over there. It’s never a good idea to talk treason on an empty stomach. And you’re buying.”

  THIRTEEN

  Onanefe protested for a few meters, but the sudden smell of roasting eggplant and baking bread perked him right up. One of the food stalls had reopened, and a few dozen people huddled over their plates of kumara cakes and pita. Even the tough-looking security women ate there, their bats tucked under their arms. The man running the stand wouldn’t take our money. “No point in letting this spoil, and the banks are closed, and what the hell,” he said, handing over two plates. “Solidarity, wha’?” I handed him the bottle of Old Windswept. He winked, and the smiley-face tattoo on his cheek crinkled as he took a drink.

  We shoveled food into our mouths. I didn’t bother to slow myself down. This wasn’t a time to savor. It was a time to plan and get angry. “We won’t be able to find her, so we’ll have to draw her out,” I said, wiping the last of the thoom off the plate with my thumb. Oh, a thousand blessings on thoom, that most delicious and anti-social of condiments.

  He munched on his shawarama. “How should we start?”

  “The old-fashioned way would be to just complain to a few people and wait for word to get out on the Public. You get enough complaining and some minion would scurry over to take reports and assure everyone that things would get done.”

  Onanefe rubbed his mustache. “Except the whole city is complaining right now. And the Public’s down.”

  “Right. Which means we have to boost our signal above the noise.” I gave him a nod. “What would you do?”

  Now he gave his mustache such a twirling that the ends began to stay in tight curls. “It’s not enough to complain. We have to get her angry. We have to call her integrity into question.”

  I nodded. “We need focus.” I looked at people around us until I saw what I needed. “And there it is.”

  I grabbed one of the security guards and said, “Hey, you know who I am?”

  She stopped chewing long enough to size me up. She finished and swallowed. “Should I?”

  I pointed at the ink on her cheek, a megaphone. “You used to do Big Three PR.”

  She bristled. “I’m a security consultant now.”

  “And what I have to tell you concerns not only the security of this market, but of the entire Union. The entire planet, even. What’s your name?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  I moved my plate to my left hand and held out my right. “Padma Mehta. I’m with the Stipend and Benefits Reinstatment Committee.”

  She took a moment before shaking my hand. “Thoj KajSiab. What committee is that?”

  “The one I’m starting right now, and I’d like you to join me. What are you getting paid to work here?”

  “Fifteen yuan an hour.”

  “And no hazard pay?”

  KajSiab made a face. “For what?”

  “Are you kidding? For the riot!”

  The women looked at each other, their faces bunched up in worry. KajSiab cleared her throat and leaned in. “We’re, uh, not supposed to call it that.”

  I looked at the smashed produce on the ground and the tattered tents flipping in the evening breeze. “What was it then?”

  KajSiab swallowed. “A spontaneous human outburst incident.”

  I laughed. “Where did that come from?”

  KajSiab swallowed. “Look, this is a really weird time, okay? We get discounts on food for our families by working here. If we upset our boss, we’re out of a gig. And this is the best gig I can get right now.”

  I nodded. “I’ve been hearing that a lot. Which is all the more reason for you all to be pissed off. This isn’t how things are supposed to work here. It’s bad enough when the Big Three are messing with us. This is a Union job, isn’t it?”

  KajSiab and her co-workers gave me small nods. “The manager didn’t want to pay police rates.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re getting hosed.” I felt that warm glow of righteous indignation I used to get from my old organizing days. Some WalWa middle manager would try to cut back on hours or say they had to freeze wages, and I would get to march into Thronehill and whale on the Corporate drones until money fell out of their ears. It was a glorious feeling to have that rage back, all made just a little nauseating by the fact that I was defending Union people from a Union screwing.

  KajSiab’s face got a little harder. “Then what do we do?”

  I smiled. “The first thing you do is talk with everyone who works with you and get names and times of meetings. We can’t pull up anything from the Public to back up your testimony, but we can sure as hell start preparing things.”

  She snorted. “More talking?”

  “No, focused talking. Because after we’re done here, we’re going to find out who else is in the same boat as you. Who else isn’t getting their fair wages? Who else is having their livelihoods stolen through paperwork? I’ve seen a lot of angry people all day, and, believe you me, we got allies out there. But if we want the Prez’s ear, we need to be prepared. Are you in? Or do you want to go back to scrounging for leftover tabbouli?”<
br />
  The security women made faces as they weighed their options. “The tabblouli’s not that bad,” said one.

  “The quality of the food isn’t the point,” said KajSiab, flexing her arms. “This woman’s right. What happened today was a full-on riot, and we got sent out here with no armor, no instructions, no police backup.” She nodded and put a meaty hand on my shoulder. “I’m with you, Padma.”

  The other women all piped in with a chorus of, “Me, too”s. I sighed and flushed away a little more of my buffer to make room for whatever they were about to tell me. I made sure to keep everything Vikram had said. One of these days, I’d have to get a memory upgrade, even if it meant letting some tech jab needles in my eye. I hadn’t needed to remember much before, but now? Now meant having to remember everything.

  By the time the shawarma stand was out of food, the security women had brought over other merchants, and they told us about how they’d had to pay extra rent for security measures that never arrived. “We’re ruined!” said one, a middle-aged guy with welding spot scars up and down his arms. “I put everything into my business, and it all got washed away by those looters! And now I can’t find the Market manager or my Union rep or anyone!”

  I nodded and blinked in his testimony. “I’m going to make sure you get restitution. Can you find anyone else who’s gotten nailed by this… what did you call it?”

  He snorted, and his tattoo – an old clipper ship – moved like it was rolling over a massive wave. “It was an ’enhanced logistical fee.’ Never heard such garbage before, but Luc, y’know, the Market manager, he said I couldn’t keep my stall if I didn’t kick in.”

  “You know anyone in your Ward who had to pay it?”

  “Only everyone,” he said. “Didn’t matter what their trade was. Hell, even my wife, she runs a kindergarten, she had to pay. What, the kids are gonna riot? Please.”

  I nodded. “That is indeed some serious bullshit. And we’re going to take this right to your manager, and then to whoever told him to put the squeeze on you, all the way up to Letty Arbusto Smythe. ’Cause you know this is because she’s falling down on the job.”