Like a Boss

by Adam Rakunas

  I held up my bound hands. “Don’t you think someone would notice this?”

  She shrugged and gave the cane one more blast with the blow torch before tossing it toward me. “Details are for conspiracy theorists. Good-bye, Padma. Thanks for the vote.”

  I didn’t watch her get in the lorry; I was too busy struggling to get my hands free. Letty had used a good, local-pressed zip tie, not the crappy Big Three kind that snapped if you looked at them funny. All I got was skin burns from trying to flex my way free. A stand of dried cane exploded as the flames touched it; sparks stung my cheek. I buried my face in my shoulder as the heat grew and grew. I was now in the middle of an ever-encroaching ring of fire, and I was so fucking angry about that I could only lie on my back and kick at the ground.

  You’re going to die here, whispered The Fear.

  I stopped struggling against the zip tie and hissed, “No.”

  No, I was not going to fucking die here. No, I was not going to give in to The Fear. No, I was not going to let Leticia Arbusto Smythe win, not when I could find a way out so I could march back into town and kick her ass all the way into the ocean. No, I would get out of here and kick Letty’s ass all the way past the Red Line.

  Of course, that meant escaping a ten-meter-tall ring of fire. The afternoon winds had started, and the flames roared higher with every gust. The smoke grew so thick I could barely see the orange of the fire. For once, being stuck on the ground gave me a small advantage. The air stayed clear down here. That gave me a little bit of time.

  If I couldn’t break the zip tie, I’d have to cut it. I tried reaching for the multi-tool I always kept in my cargo pocket, but I didn’t have the reach, of course. So, I’d have to get some reach. That meant getting my arms in front of me.

  I hunched over as far as my spine would allow and scootched my ass through the loop of my arms. My back began to holler as I pushed my chest towards my hips. What kind of horrible yoga move would those freaks at the Mermaid’s Kick have called this? Buddha Contemplating Her Navel? Inner Facing Idiot? I pushed my shoulders out, sucked my gut in, willed my body to get through the hoop…

  I had my arms just far enough before my back flexed. My wrists caught on my hamstrings, and I could move no farther. I was stuck on my back, looking like a trussed-up hog. Another cane stalk exploded into fireworks, and a hundred white-hot needle-points stabbed my neck and face. The fire was getting hotter and closer, and I was going to melt like a caneplas bottle…

  That was it. I didn’t have to break the zip tie. I just had to weaken it.

  I rolled side-over-side toward the flames, getting a faceful of dirt with every rotation. Sweat poured down my face as I got closer to the fire, and ash now mixed with the soil, hot and soft. I coughed and spat the whole way, half-blind until I couldn’t get any closer to the heat. I held my wrists at the crackling flames, pulling at the zip tie and praying it would move enough.

  I strained, and my wrists burned, both from the heat and the bite of the caneplas. My whole body was slick with sweat, and my face felt like a mud mask. I pulled my arms as far apart as I could, hoping for just enough room to slip my legs through. I could tell the zip tie wasn’t budging. Hot as it was, it wouldn’t melt the caneplas. I had to get closer. You can’t do it, cackled The Fear. You can’t get out of this, because you’re not willing to sacrifice. You’d rather hide in your miserable hole in the sewer, clutching your rum and letting the universe spin on without you. You’re nothing, and you’re going to die–

  “Fuck you,” I said and plunged backward into the fire.

  It hurt. Sweet Working Christ, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done anything that hurt like the fire. It wasn’t like getting punched or stabbed or tased; it was waves of pain flashing over my neck and wrists, cutting through my trousers and deck jacket. I could feel blisters forming on my hands, but I held the zip tie in the fire until I felt it give. I screamed as I brought my arms up past my knees, to my ankles, over my boots. I flopped out of the fire, rolling and rolling until the flames on my jacket and trousers were out.

  My hands were tomato red, and the stench of burning hair (Jesus, my hair) filled my nose. I got to my feet, only to take in a noseful of smoke. Down I went, flopping over the older Jennifer’s legs. She gave a tiny cry, and I gave one back. I scrambled off her, then knelt by her head. “Hold still, okay? Just–”

  She coughed blood. Blood dripped from her nostrils and her mouth. The front of her shirt was a red, sodden mess. The bolt, a twenty-centimeter coral steel shank, stuck out her sternum. She swatted at me as I tried to gather her shirt to press into a bandage. “Useless,” she hissed, a little more blood dribbling from her lips.

  “Shut up. We’ll get out of here, and we’ll all kick Letty’s ass.”

  She snorted and winced. “So stupid. Believing… stupid.” Jennifer gurgled, and I pulled her into my arms. Bleeding out was bad enough, but drowning in her own blood… that was no way to go.

  “Is she going to set off more bombs? Jennifer, I need to know.”

  Her head bobbled, like a newborn’s. Her eyes lost focus and closed.

  I gripped her hard. “Jennifer, I will find your sister. I will find her. But you have to help me.”

  She opened her eyes long enough to sneer. “Useless. Too soft.” She coughed again, and she died. I set her down and checked on the other Jennifer. She had taken a bolt right through the heart.

  I went through their pockets and found my multi-tool in one of their pockets, along with their tiny rebreathers. They also had four packets of CauterIce. My fingers were useless, so I tore at the first with my teeth. My lips went numb as some of the gel spattered out, but I didn’t care. I squirted it on my hands and sighed from the orgasmic relief of not hurting. I used up the other packets on my neck and face, even rubbing a little on my scalp.

  Now all I had to do was not get roasted alive.

  The fire had swollen in the afternoon winds, and the smoke sank lower to the ground. My thin layer of clear air was vanishing fast as it fed the fire from the roots up. I remembered what Marolo had said about slash-and-burn drills: Dig, cover, hold. Digging wouldn’t be a problem; the soil was loose. But cover? The Jennifers had nothing I could use. Their clothes were just as flammable as mine.

  But their skin wasn’t.

  I worked as fast as I could, kicking dirt with my boots until I had a space big enough for me to curl up. I dragged the Jennifers over, leaving a trail of bloody mud behind. The cane crackled, all those hydrocarbons burning bright and hot, even in their undistilled, unprocessed form. There was a reason cane burns were controlled on Santee; this stuff was meant to power cities and starships. This wasn’t going to burn out quick and clean.

  I lay down and pulled the Jennifers over me. I bit down on the rebreather and did my best to follow my old EVA training: nice, relaxed breathing was the way to go. I had put the Jennifers on their backs, which made my shelter only slightly less creepy. I closed my eyes and thought about how cool the air was… until I remembered why the air was so cool. Then I just screwed my eyes shut even harder.

  The shelter got hot for a moment, and the stench of burning clothing filled my nose. There was no point in blocking out what was happening to me, but that didn’t mean I had to embrace the situation. Fuck that. This was a horror show, and even The Fear had the decency to shut up. Some of this was my fault, sure, but I wasn’t the one who’d shot these two women. I wasn’t the one in charge of a bombing campaign. And I definitely wasn’t the one who’d shut off the money spigots. Everyone back in town, hungry, angry, just wanting to get paid. Hell, I’d wanted to get paid, too, if only so I could throw my salary into the gaping maw that was my debt. Even if I sold my distillery, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. What would I get? A few million yuan, maybe? What could I do with that?

  I could pay everyone for a week with that.

  I stopped breathing for a moment. What was the number Letty had thrown at me? I tried blinking my pai back to life, but
my eye was still screwed up. I thought about squirting the last of the CauterIce in there, then realized, no, that was an incredibly stupid idea. I’d have to rely on my good ol’ inboard memory.

  I pictured the scene in my head: there was Letty, there was one of the Jennifers, there was me. Letty was waving the bottle around, saying the Union was broke, that it took… dammit, what was the number? Two million? No, it was two point eight million yuan to keep everyone paid for a week, bennies and all.

  And how much had Vikram said I was worth? Two and a half, easily, just from the cane alone. Throw in the actual product, and three is a fair offer.

  I had a way to beat Letty. Holy shit, I could sell the distillery, pay everyone on the planet for a week, and end the strike. Everything that had come screeching to a halt would move again: the inspectors would certify the cane, the cutters would harvest it, everyone would process the cane and send it up the cable, because the cable would be working. I could jump-start Santee’s economy, and all I had to do was sell the one thing that kept me sane.

  Excellent idea, said The Fear.

  Except I had my stashes. I had enough Old Windswept hidden all over for the next thirty years. Forty, if I pushed it. “Ha!” I said. The rebreather fell out of my mouth. I scrambled to shove it back between my teeth. I didn’t care that it tasted like dirt; I had a plan, and it was good, and I was going to kick Letty’s ass.

  I waited until the rebreather beeped, letting me know its air filter was done. How long had that been? Thirty minutes? I popped in the second one, but it started beeping after a few minutes. That must have belonged to the Jennifer who’d helped burn my building.

  I pushed the bodies off me and got up. The world around me was ash and cinders, all smoldering in the afternoon sun. The wind had blown the fire northeast. To my southwest was singed cane. I looked back at the dead Jennifers, their clothes burned away and their skin blacked with soot. I pulled them side-by-side and cleaned their faces as best I could before snapping a picture. More evidence. I’d send someone back to collect the bodies.

  I started walking into the wind. The scorched cane was still hot as I slipped through the stalks. When I got to a stand of clean, unburnt cane, I spat out the beeping rebreather and started jogging.

  By the time the sun had dipped toward the horizon, I had spotted a lone comms tower in the distance. That tower meant a transfer station or a loading depot. I hoped it also meant someone who didn’t want to kill me. I pushed through the cane as quietly as I could until I heard people talking. I crawled, the edges of a pourform building looming past the stalks.

  It was a small farm house. A cycle tractor sat in the front yard, kids climbing up its three-meter-high wheels. A five year-old girl, her face lit up in the twilight, perched on the saddle, barely reaching the handlebars. “I’ll stop you, you corporate parasite!” she yelled. “No one can stop the Sky Queen of Justice!”

  I sighed with relief. I had found fans.

  I stepped out of the cane, my hands in front of me. One of the kids spotted me and froze. Then they all looked up, their mouths agape. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Padma Mehta. Are your parents home?”

  “They’re working,” said the girl in the saddle, her voice blank. Then she started and kicked the kids below her. “See! I told you the radio was wrong! She wasn’t dead!” She jumped down and ran to me, though she stopped half a meter short. I could only imagine how I looked with my toasted hair and sooty skin and God knew how much blood on my clothes.

  “Are you really her?” she asked. Her hair was a mess of curls and braids, and her overalls were covered in anime character patches.

  “I am. Am I really supposed to be dead?”

  She nodded. “The Prez was on the radio just before dinner. Said you were a…” She screwed up her face to remember.

  “A traitor!” yelled one of the boys.

  “She is not!” the girl yelled back.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  She looked at her feet. “Laural,” she said, her voice just above a whisper.

  I took a knee in front of her. “Well, Laural, I promise you I’m not a traitor. As sure as I’m alive. Do you believe me?”

  She looked at me, her ocean-blue eyes as big as stars, and gave me a nod. “But I don’t know if anyone else will.”

  “If you help me, I can show I’m not.”

  Her mouth bunched up into a barely suppressed smile. “How can I help?”

  “First, I need you and your friends to run and tell every adult that you saw me, and that I’m going into the city.”

  She nodded.

  “Second, I’m going to need to borrow that.” I pointed at the tractor.

  Laural hopped down and swatted at one of the older boys who held on to the wheel. “She needs this ride! Back off!”

  I climbed up into the saddle. The tractor was just a tricycle with ridiculously big wheels and a whole lot of gears. I gave the pedals a gentle push, and the tractor crunched forward on the gravel.

  “One more thing,” I said as I aimed the tractor toward Santee City.

  “What?” said Laural.

  I grinned. “You gotta give me a head start.”

  TWENTY

  Two hours later, the sun had gone down, and the lights of Santee City came into view. I just kept pedaling.

  I had kept the tractor off the road, pushing through the cane at a snail’s pace. The tractor was meant for hauling bundles of cut cane, not as personal transport. It was a ridiculous machine, the kind of thing that popped up all over Santee through ingenuity, stolen parts, and sheer pig-headedness. It would have worked just fine on the gravel paths back to the city, but I needed the time to think and plan. A plan might keep me from getting killed for real.

  A plan might help you get to Six O’Clock, said The Fear. I just kept pedaling.

  The only thing on my side was the fact that Laural and her friends had fast feet and big mouths. Rumors obeyed their own special laws of physics, and those laws got torqued when kids were involved. All the adults in the kampong would certainly know of the unscheduled and unauthorized burn, and having the kids tell them that I had emerged from the embers would get other people talking. Eventually, those people would talk to whomever Letty had told that I was a two-timing, back-stabbing, double-murdering villain, and then the debates would start as both stories started wrestling with each other. Letty may have had access to the Public and all of our pais, but even she couldn’t stop the residents of Santee from bullshitting with each other.

  Of course, Letty had a whole lot of bombs on her side. I just kept pedaling.

  Any other night, and I would have probably loved to ride like this. The evening breeze was cool and strong, straight from the depths of the kampong. All that green from the leaves, all that funk from composting bagasse, all that sweet tang from the cane itself. All those billions of hectares of industrial and heirloom, enough energy to power starships, cities, one-night stands. I’d come out here so many times, but tonight felt different. And not just because I was in peril.

  I pulled the brakes. The tractor came to a gentle stop. I stood up in the pedals and looked around.

  Behind me, the last of the orange faded from the sky. Above me was a canopy of deep purple, lit by a billion stars. When I was a kid, sitting on my parents’ veranda after dinner, I’d look up at those stars and think about visiting all the planets orbiting them. I knew most of them were uninhabitable rocks, but I wanted to go anyway, just to see the sky from a different world. I would hop from one world to the next, spending my days collecting views of constellations that no one else would see or care about.

  No one bothered to name the constellations when they landed on Santee. Not even the first Breaches did, and their souls were lit up by the poetry that comes with liberating themselves. There were songs and paintings and shadow puppet plays about everything that happened to the first people to get themselves windswept, but none of them had looked at the stars and made pictures out of the points. I had ne
ver understood that. They were so busy creating their own mythology, why wouldn’t they keep going all the way past the sky?

  I took in a breath, letting the smell of cane fill my head. The sky spun, all those stars upon stars, all those billions upon billions who called Occupied Space their home. Somewhere there were other versions of me: the Indenture fighting her way up the Corporate ladder, the Union stalwart punching that Indenture in the face, the little girl looking up at the night sky. If we could talk, what would I tell them about my life? What would I ask them about the choices I had to make? What would I say to them?

  I turned my eyes to the eastern horizon, the city lights flickering in the heat haze. There was none of the blue glow from the streetlamps; all of the light must be coming from people’s houses. A few streaks of orange reached for the sky – fires, probably. Whether they were from more tuk-tuk bombs or from people torching each other’s neighborhoods, I’d have to find out when I got to the city.

  My city. My beautiful, messed-up city. I loved this place when it was in a good mood, hated it when it became sulky and selfish. People didn’t always work together. The weeks after signing the Contract always saw an increase in bar fights and street knifings. Some idiots would try to make guns, saying the Ban was a relic of another time; that people had to protect themselves. It took a few arrests and angry block meetings to remind everyone that we had to protect each other from the Big Three, not from ourselves. God, no wonder the Freeborn always scorned joining the Union. A week without pay and the idea of solidarity dissipated like a fart in a hurricane.

  I looked back at the kampong. I knew the way to Tanque, but I wouldn’t go there. I couldn’t go there, not when Letty was tearing Santee down just because she couldn’t think of another way out. People had been pissed at me for making the hard choice. They could sure as hell do the same for Letty, seeing how making hard choices was her job. Messing with our pais, letting the city slide into chaos – that was the kind of crap we’d expect from the Big Three, not our own. I was going to make her answer for everything she had done to me, to the Jennifers, to all of us. And I was going to do it by showing her how wrong she was.