Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  She winked and waved Cadie past. Cadie fluffed her dreadlocks back and decided she needed the coffee, for something to do with her hands if nothing else. And even burned, it was real coffee—a luxury not to be spurned. She filled a ceramic mug, added milk—organic, local farm, no BGH, from genetically random free-range cows—and decided it wasn’t burned enough to really need the sugar.

  It was a stalling tactic, she knew. Every time. She anticipated the visit all day, rushed to get here, and then it was all she could force herself to do, not to scramble back out the door without going in to spend her carefully allotted, scientifically calculated time with Firuza.

  She turned and made herself face the one-way glass. Firuza, age five and a half, bent over a child-height table, her fingers and smock smeared with bright primary colors. A dab of yellow stood out against Firuza’s cheek.

  Cadie took a long drink of complex, slightly acrid coffee to brace herself, touched the biometric pad by the connecting door, and went in to her daughter. Firuza looked up as Cadie paused just inside, a sunny grin warming her expression. “Mom!”

  The word was like a needle through her breastbone.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Cadie said. She dropped her jacket on the chair beside the door, crossed the room to Firuza, and buried her nose in the little girl’s hair. She breathed deep, the clean tang of Ivory soap and the thick scent of gouache.

  “Whatcha painting?”

  Firuza wiggled blue-smeared fingers. “Clouds,” she said.

  Cadie dropped down beside her, bony knees pressing hard on the linoleum floor, and angled the paper a little so she could see better. Clouds, behind a tree, and the yellow sun. The tree was intact, regular, growing smoothly into the contours of a green finger-smudged hill. There was another one a little further away, a blurry brown animal which might have been a bear or a dog or a pony. “Who’s this?” Cadie asked.

  Firuza gave her the sort of look one normally reserved for mental midgets and random incompetents. “It’s my dog Archie.”

  Cadie, wise to the ways of children, did not inform Firuza that she did not have a dog. There was a crèche dog, but his name was Rudolf, and he was a golden retriever, not a giant brown blurr of hair such as this appeared to be. “Your dog?”

  Firuza nodded, solemnly. “The one we’re gonna get when I can come live with you again,” she said, and smeared blue paint all over Cadie’s most rogue dreadlock.

  CADIE stopped at James’ desk on the way out to collect her effects and pay the bill. By the time she made it back down the corridor, the sky was periwinkle.

  She leaned against the crèche’s misleading facade and took a moment to reconstruct her own. The pause was more than a breather—it was her opportunity to observe her surroundings before descending to her bike.

  No one in sight.

  She unlocked her wheels and slung her leg over without incident. But as she was rolling down the sour-smelling alley to a cross street where evening traffic drifted past, a silhouette detached itself from the left wall and stepped gingerly towards her, both hands upraised beside its head.

  Cadie hesitated, hip-shot, one leg stiff on the pedal as she coasted forward. Stay or go? She had the speed to jolt past him, knock him aside and go spinning out of the alley. Detroit had some little up and down, but nothing like when she’d lived in San Diego. He’d never catch her on foot—

  Something jingled on the figure’s wrist, casting rainbow sparks of light against the grubby walls. “Cadence Grange?” he said, and though his voice wasn’t quite the same as when he’d been shouting after her, she recognized it.

  Cadie stood on the foot brake, the bike wobbling slightly as she balanced it to a halt. “Who wants to know?”

  HE said his name was Homer, which—once they were ensconced in a booth in a greasy spoon—prompted Cadie to ask, “Who names their kid Homer anymore?”

  “My parents were Simpsons fans.” He took a bite of what passed for hamburger these days and wiped mayonnaise off his chin while Cadie studied him. He looked about mid-twenties, lightly freckled across the tops of his cheeks, his hair sticking out this way and that in tiny random twists about two inches long. His T-shirt bore a sweat stain around the collar, his forearms were tendon-cabled below the rolled-up cuffs of his cargo jacket, and a Marine Corps ring like a smaller cousin of the one Cel wore glinted heavily on his hand. Before he sat down, she’d noticed his boots were scarred across the toes, deep enough to show the steel caps in one or two places, and the laces were knotted together where they’d worn thin. Now she spotted the calluses on his hands, the chipped fingernails.

  She asked, “What do you do?”

  “Not, ‘How do you know my name?’ Or, ‘What do you want from me?’” Another bite of hamburger. He was buying time. He pushed the paper basket of fries toward her while he chewed.

  Hands folded around the water-dewed cup of iced tea he’d bought her, she frowned at the fries. Her stomach grumbled, but there was brown rice and beans at home, and if she was lucky the market she passed on the way would have the cheap bruised oranges from Florida she could almost afford. Beans and brown rice and oranges: not the best diet, but it wasn’t missing anything you couldn’t live without for a while. Sometimes, she scored greens as well, or a lemon or lime. She got by. Better than some people did.

  “No thank you,” she said. “I don’t know where that’s been.”

  He laughed, covering his mouth with a napkin. “I’m a blogger,” he said.

  “Huh.” It seemed like he expected more, so she pressed her palms against the table and said, “You make a living at that?”

  He set the burger down—the smell wouldn’t have been all that appetizing, even if she hadn’t been able to see the gray interior, but it still made her swallow saliva—and wiped his hands before fiddling significantly with the frayed cuff of his cargo jacket. “I get by. Since we’re playing first date, what do you do?”

  The coincidence of phrasing made Cadie raise her eyebrows. Screw it, she thought. “Don’t you already know?”

  That could have been a wink, a flinch, or a nervous tic. Whatever it was, he eyed her steadily afterward, his impression sliding incrementally into a frown. He wanted her to break, she thought, to look down or glance aside. Instead, she tilted her chin up slightly and stared down her nose, matching him frown for frown.

  Finally, he snorted laughter, rolled his eyes, and shook his head. “All right.” He reached inside the jacket and palmed something from an inside pocket. Cadie’s hand had already closed around her butterfly knife when he rotated his wrist and revealed a personal omnicommunications device. State of the art, metallic purple matte finish, with a strokable texture. He drew his thumb across it and it popped open, revealing a screen. Her own image slid into focus, digitally sharp, a flash of her downturned finger beside her butt cheek and below that, the registration plate on her bike. “See?” he said. “No mystery about it.”

  She relaxed, incrementally, but didn’t take her hand off the knife. “And this is how you get a date?”

  “No,” he said. “This is how I make an offer. See, I know your name isn’t Cadence Grange.”

  She thought she kept the reaction off her face. She’d practiced in the mirror. But the pierced handle of her knife left raised bumps in her palm as her fist clenched.

  That was fine. Homer couldn’t see her hand in her pocket, and the edge of the table would hide it if her forearm had bulged. “Really? That’s news to me.”

  His grin broadened a little at her denial. “Now how did I know you were going to pull that bluff?”

  He shook his head without taking his gaze off her, a cat intent at a crevice. Cadie wondered if he could hear the knocking of her heart, if he somehow knew about the cold sweat on her palms and the way her stomach twisted in nausea.

  “All right, fine.” He lowered his voice. “Cadence Grange wasn’t always your name.”

  He reached for a fry while Cadie—despite herself—froze like a scared rabbit. He dipped the
fry in ketchup, ate it, and made a face that made her wonder if he was mugging for his audience of one like a bad movie villain, or if he honestly thought he was funny. What kind of narcissism did it take, to try to entertain someone while you were leading her to the gallows?

  He washed the mouthful down, rattling ice as he slurped, and said, “I know that people are looking for you and her. And it would be very bad for you both if they found you. Your real first name is Scarlet, like the color. You are technically still married to a foreign national, and not only is Firuza Grange also an assumed name—I assume because of her kidnapping risk—but she’s also not your daughter.”

  “Stop.” She said it softly, but her voice brought him up short. She is my daughter, asshole.

  The voice in her head that said it was answered by others, though, as always. The one that said, Stepdaugher. And the one that answered, And if she is, why can’t you stand to look at her?

  They sat in silence for a moment, staring at each other across the worn Formica tabletop, through air that stank of rapidly cooling grease and overcooked hamburger.

  “What do you want?” Cadie asked, when she could gather herself to say anything.

  Homer shook the ice against the sides of the paper cup. The gesture made the tags on his steel bracelet rattle. “I want to help.”

  HOMER’S ride was racked up outside the burger joint, where he must have left it when he came around the corner to fetch her. Cadie had inadvertently locked her own bike a few slots down and she rehearsed her options while she released it. She could make a break for it—no telling how good Homer was on his wheels, but almost nobody could keep up with Cadie through downtown if she really didn’t want to be kept. But if she tried to ditch him, he had her registration, which meant he knew her address of record, and he would have no problem finding out who she ran packages for.

  And he knew where Firuza was.

  Cadie had plans for vanishing, like any good fugitive. But before she could use them, she’d have to shake Homer and get a message to the crèche—which had its own more than adequate security and evacuation policies, the reason Cadie had chosen it over any number of legitimate residential co-rearing facilities.

  That, and Taras wouldn’t get cooperation from the Detroit families, if he came looking. There weren’t any favors there for him to collect, and enough bad blood—Cadie hoped—to make a smoke screen thick enough to conceal her and Firuza.

  Homer might be decoying her someplace private to do her harm, but he hadn’t made an aggressive move when they were alone in the alley outside the crèche, and she certainly hadn’t grown less wary of him since. And if he was working for Taras, then Taras already knew where she was, and by the time she got back to the crèche, Firuza would be gone.

  The possibility made her miskey the release. She dried her palms on her trousers before she tried a second time.

  Taras, though. It would be like him to bring her back so he could make her regret the error of her ways specifically and in detail. But games of cat and mouse, wasting time distracting her, that would be out of character. He’d take her out and get what he had come for without unfortunate sentiment. He was efficient. Focused.

  She’d found it attractive as hell once, before she’d learned what he was efficient and focused about. Before she’d had it demonstrated by way of Erzabet, Firuza’s biological mother, that efficient and focused were only manifestations of ruthlessness.

  When she’d confronted him on his affair, she hadn’t expected his response to be her rival’s corpse. He would have killed Firuza too, if she’d asked: she was sure of it.

  Instead she’d asked for the little girl as a gift, and Taras—magnanimous as always, as long as you kept him pleased—had had his daughter delivered in a basket.

  That was the day upon which Cadie began making her plans for escape.

  No. If Homer were working for Taras, Cadie would already be as dead as Erzabet. Cadie wondered if there were a woman for whom her own murder would now serve as a gift. She wondered whether Taras’ father had wooed his mother with similar offerings.

  She couldn’t trust Homer. She couldn’t trust anyone—Taras had taught her that. But she could grit her teeth and pretend to trust Homer at least as far as she could throw him, at least as long as it took to learn what his game was.

  Pretending to trust didn’t mean being stupid, though. She triggered an emergency code on her omni as she slung one leg over her frame in unison with Homer’s mount-up, and she felt the better for doing it. If it wasn’t already too late, somebody would be getting Firuza out of harm’s way even now. If the staff at the crèche hadn’t been bought out. If—

  —there were a lot of ifs to worry about.

  When Homer pushed off, Cadie followed. They glided into moderate traffic like two fish entering the school. Homer’s ride was as scarred as his shoes, gray-painted and dull looking, but Cadie knew a little about bikes, and the frame under that sloppy coat of primer was titanium alloy. She thought she could name the brand from the silhouette, if there were a sudden quiz.

  Walking with a bike would have been awkward, but so was trying to talk while pedaling through city traffic. Conversation would have to wait for their destination. She still did pull up next to him in a lull in traffic and called, “Where are we going?”

  “The secret clubhouse!” he called back.

  Maybe that grin was intended to be encouraging, to make this all feel like an adventure. Maybe if she hadn’t been shaking with adrenaline and doubt, she could have grinned back.

  As it was, if she’d been carrying a stick, she would have spoked the motherfucker.

  HE only made her chase him for about ten kilometers by the odometer on her handlebars. Traffic, growing lighter in the dark, had all but dried up by the time they pulled in to the driveway of an unassuming, treeless ranch house with the interstate running through its back yard. A bike rack stood by the door, screened from the road by a piece of weathered stockade that looked like it had been assembled from salvaged fencing materials. Four bikes—none of them quite as battered or nondescript as Homer’s ride—were already racked. Homer dropped his into the fifth slot and engaged the lock.

  Cadie followed suit, but rather than locking in she just touched the key and let her hand slide off again. Sometimes, the option of a quick getaway was worth a little risk.

  She took two deep breaths to slow her heart and put herself at Homer’s shoulder as he centered before the door. The tags on his left wrist rattled when he reached for the handle. A biometric scanner concealed in the knob glowed blue through his palm for a moment before the lock clicked.

  Homer swung the door open and stood aside. “Ladies first.”

  “Oh,” Cadie said. “I don’t think so.”

  How many women are injured or die because they’re not willing to seem impolite?

  She waited while Homer considered, nodded, and stepped in front of her. Sending him in first wasn’t a lot of protection, but at least it meant he wouldn’t be between her and the door if there were an ambush. She thought about trying to jam the lock as she passed through, but the attempt would be obvious and the chances of it working were small. She settled for leaving the door ajar, and was momentarily surprised that he didn’t reach behind her to latch it.

  The only person waiting inside the cozily-lit living room was a woman of average height, her gray hair pulled back in a bun and secured with chopsticks—a hairstyle Cadie wasn’t sure she’d seen in over a decade. Not in America, anyway. Cadie knew her bias against men was unreasonable. She knew she shouldn’t have felt a tickle of relief, but logic didn’t enter into it. Women were comforting. They meant safety and allies.

  “Please,” the woman said. “Take a seat.”

  Cadie stayed beside the door, making no effort to conceal her assessment of the living room and its contents. A little box of a space, furnished in thrift-shop chic. The green velvet sofa was at least a hundred years old, and probably had not been reupholstered in half that. T
he wallpaper was peeling, and as Cadie’s eyes adjusted, she realized that the lamps on the end tables generated their shimmering light from kerosene, not electricity.

  “No, thank you.” She wanted to fold her arms, but it was smarter to keep her hands free in case she needed them. “Who are you?”

  The woman smiled, but did not rise. “Stephanie Shearer. Yes, before you ask, it’s my real name.”

  Whatever that means. It sounded like the sort of name an unimaginative writing team would assign to a superhero’s girlfriend.

  Cadie said, “That’s a precise but useless answer. What do you want from me?”

  She felt Homer shift his balance slightly away. So he respected Shearer, and was possibly a little afraid of her response to Cadie’s defiance. Either that, or he disapproved of the defiance itself, in isolation from Shearer’s potential response.

  Shearer pursed her lips. “You’re Scarlet Boyko.”

  “I’d prefer,” Cadie said, icily, “not to hear that name.”

  Shearer said, “So how did a nice California girl wind up married to the Russian mob?”

  “It’s a long story.” Cadie could picture the conversation like intersecting fingers, locked at the base but pointing in incompatible directions, pushing against one another. They could fence forever, and get nowhere. “Look. Stephanie. You already have me at a disadvantage. You know who I am, what I’m worried about. You have to have a pretty good idea of what I can do for you, or you wouldn’t have had Homer here contact me. You can’t imagine that I’m going to hand you any additional advantages until you give me a corner to stand on, here. What do you want from me?”

  Shearer’s hands rippled on the arms of her worn cane chair. “Trust.”

  Cadie shook her head as if to clear her ears, but her understanding of the word still hanging almost visibly in the air between them didn’t change. She had to restrain herself from glancing sideways at Homer, as if to share an eyeroll with him. Not that he was a likely source of solidarity, but—any port in a storm. “You’re nuts.”