I remembered what it was like to be afraid all the time—hell, I still felt afraid all the time—and so I hated them for the way they used fear as a tool, but at the same time, I loved their energy. There was a time when I was the kid on the corner shaking my ass at whatever ganger passed, cracking jokes, taunting the serious ones and encouraging the silly ones. That kind of bravery comes from a place of powerlessness, from having nothing to lose. Everything looked like up from where I was back then, and in its strange way that can be liberating.
A part of me whispered there’s never been anywhere but the bottom, for me, that it’s always been nowhere to go but up. So where did that feeling of liberation go?
I didn’t want to go back to those times. I’m not trying to glamorize living on the street, sucking crusty dick in return for barely enough calories not to starve. I’m not trying to say it’s a party. Having nothing is not the same as having nothing to worry about. A lot of my bravery was a lie I told myself to make it through the night. There was a part of me, though, on that walk, with those three, that missed being able to summon up the bravado, false or otherwise. Only the terrorized can achieve fearlessness.
Some street kids—real kids, not the Buster teens, and not Fiono, whose age I pegged at twenty—fell in behind us, singing the songs they make up down here about the gangs and life and dangers to avoid. Like kids everywhere, they make up stories about what scares them, what to stay away from, who’s in charge and why. The songs they sang sounded half-familiar to me because they were based on the songs I heard when I was working these streets. They’d been remixed and rewritten over time, the names changing with the shifting tides of gangs and turf, but the tunes and the themes were preserved from one half-life generation to the next. Very quickly our little foursome turned into an informal parade of Lower Market Market street kids singing and skipping and waving scraps of cloth. Fiono looked a little offended as the Busters joined in on the songs, loving the attention, the grand show we were putting on. Like the one said, it would make a great story for them to tell the others. Fiono took himself seriously, though, so all this abraded his sensibilities, his notion of himself as a slicer who was going places.
“Don’t look so sour.” I hit him with a small smile. “They’re making noise because they’re scared of you.” I nodded forward and back. “And of them. If you were nothing, they wouldn’t need to warn each other of your approach.”
Fiono blinked. He’d never thought about that before. He probably was, once upon a time, one of these kids, too, but he’d never let himself examine that experience. He was too young and too focused on gang captaincy or new knives or his own dick or whatever else he saw as the measure of success. Most slicers only wanted to get rich enough to eat when they felt like it and fuck whom they wished, and eventually to die in a close fight after grievously wounding their opponent. I would probably outlive Fiono, given his current career, but he was still a person. He still deserved a moment of kindness as much as the next living thing.
“Don’t try pillow talk with Fiono,” the one in front said with a sneer. “Better’n you ‘ave tried to put a smile on those pretty lips.”
I started to say something smart, I don’t remember what, when I realized we were there: the fruit seller’s stand. Time to get back to work.
10
To call the fruit seller’s business a “stand” is to break that word, good and hard, maybe irreparably so. It was as close to a permanent structure as I can imagine someone having up this high on the walks: white canvas walls stretched over a wooden frame, with thick wooden support beams and dozens of square meters of floor space. I had no way even to estimate what it cost. The materials alone would have been expensive, plus the power, plus getting it put together, plus paying off whomever necessary, plus ongoing protection from the gangs. This guy was rich beyond imagination. He had wealth no one else in this place would ever see.
But he was still subject to the whims of the wars going on around him, the battles fought over a few meters here and there. He had no visible muscle outside and no assistants inside. He was on his own, relying on buying what he needed when he needed it from whoever ran the catwalk that day.
When we stopped, the Busters took a moment to produce a little call—something rather like the caw of a bird—and bowed to me in unison. The street kids all clapped and cheered and took off at a run in all available directions. “Delivered with a string around it,” the one in front said to me. “And a show and a half put on to boot. Be seeing you, bub.”
I reminded them of the deal, that they would stay with me because the man I was going to visit needed to see I had friends, and they reluctantly—after a few rhetorical jabs at me and anybody else who happened to be around—agreed. Fiono leaned against a nearby post, that knife flicking into existence again. He didn’t look at the Busters, didn’t look at me, and didn’t look at any of the other locals who abruptly found something else to hold their attention. I smiled, turned, and walked into the tent.
The place had electricity. That was one of the first things I noticed about it. Another thing I noticed was that it was clean: so clean it was practically sterile. I could have imagined a Spiralist operating theater in here, no problem. The place was sparkling white with hints of green here and there. It was extremely manufactured as environments go, in stark opposition to the rough and tumble, slapped together in situ nature of everything else in the Lower Market Market. Cleanliness and green hints and curved display stands showed fruit of every shape and size, all kinds, things I had seen in books and things I had never heard of. The names were common and uncommon, rare apples from Nurmer’s central mountains piled in a little triangle next to a basket of spikefruit of the variety that grows pretty much anywhere there’s enough sun and time. Every color of nature and quite a few of the engineered variety was on display. Prices varied wildly, but mostly they were on the high side for the Lower Em. This was a guy who could get enough variety to draw in an unlikely clientele, the sort of money normally scarce in this neck of the woods, but also wanted to skim as much as he could off the natives around him. I imagined his place being one of the few locations in Autumn where money and need mix rather than collide.
The guy himself was older than I: fifty, at a guess, with skin a much darker shade than mine. His hair was straight and wiry white mottled with faded black. It all said one thing to me: vain Artisanal Human. He was getting older and he hated it. His clothes were fashionable hand-me-downs from a couple of years ago. His apron was sparkling white. He liked himself, but he liked his image of himself even more. He was standing behind the counter, polishing the top with a white rag. He looked up as I strode in, my jacket billowing behind me, and his eyes flicked past me to the Busters and Fiono looking dangerously idle outside.
“Day,” he said, by way of greeting. He had spotted me as an Artie, too, and he wasn’t thrilled to see me. He fancied his shack drawing a better type of customer. For him, Plus Baseline—the vast majority of humanity—was absolutely the bare minimum for social acceptability.
“Day.” No need to waste time. “I hear you’ve got everything. That true?”
He smirked. He might not like a fellow Artie showing up, but he’d let me stroke his ego. “If I don’t have it, I can get it,” he said with a shrug. “That’s why I’m successful.” He gestured expansively to indicate his domain. “Do you have something specific in mind? I can tell you right away whether I have it.” And then you can get the hell out of my shop. He didn’t say that, but his eyes did. It was easy to imagine a guy like this smacking around a set of street cheeks like Yuri.
I smiled a little. “Nauclea fruit.” I looked him right in the eye when I said it. “Small, brown, bumpy. Might have some stems sticking out of it, might not. Pale white with whorls of seeds when you cut it open. I read about it in a book.”
His eyes went cold and hard, and he looked back at the gangers I’d brought with me, still standing outside.
He started to say something, but
I cut him off. “Save it, old dad.” It felt good to be the one taunting another about his age for once. “A friend of mine was in here earlier. I don’t know what you told him, but it scared him enough to make him not be my friend anymore.” I kept approaching, walking slowly, my coat open to show I didn’t have any weapons. I hoped he took it to mean I didn’t feel I particularly needed any other than the ones nature gave me. “So now I’m here, and I’m going to talk to you about Nauclea fruit, and then I’m going to leave.” I nodded my head backward. “And my friends out there are going to go home bored, and everybody’s going to have a better day for it. Understand?”
That was how I knew for sure he wasn’t his own operation. He looked again at the gangers outside. In my imagination, at that moment Fiono looked up, and the Busters noticed, and they all three smiled at him. I don’t know. But I want that to be how it happened.
“Okay, look,” the guy said, and all of a sudden, he was all drawl. He’d been neutral Autumnite up to now, maybe a twang of Nwang around the vowels, but in an instant, he slid all the way back to the old country. It sounded awfully familiar to me: that Artie verbal syrup I ran away from all those years ago, the result of having spent too many nights afraid I’d hear it behind me, calling my name, trying to take me back to the reservation where that accent was allowed to fester until it got so old it was considered heirloom. I suppressed a shudder as he yammered on in it. “My friend, you are a fellow Artie. Listen, I did not mean to harm your acquaintance.”
I stepped closer and put the tips of my fingers on the surface of the high counter between us, right above my belly button. “He didn’t tell me you hurt him.” I smiled very faintly. “Did you hurt him?”
The fruit seller quickly edited. “Frightened him. Only frightened.” He waved a hand low and quick. “But look, this is not something I can talk about. I am not at liberty to discuss it.”
I arched my eyebrows at him.
“Look,” he said, “speak to me Artisanal to Artisanal. Understand me. We are…” He gestured at the world outside. “We are at the whims of these people. I don’t know anything about Nauclea. I don’t even know what they are.”
I leaned backward a hair. “So why bust my friend’s chops about it? Why send him packing? You scared him so bad, he’s pissed at me.” I leaned back in. “And I am not someone you want pissed off.” I nodded backward again, at the gangers, and at the bluff I was playing in this massive gamble.
“My friend,” he said, but I interrupted him.
“I’m not your friend. You call me sir.”
He hated that. He hated me for that, and he hated taking orders, but he glanced at the gangers again and swallowed the hate. “Sir.” It tasted foul in his mouth. “I can’t have strangers coming around asking questions. I am in a precarious position. We all are. We!” He gestured to indicate him and me, two of us together, arm in arm as brothers, back to back against the world. “When someone I do not know comes around asking nosy questions, waving money, it gives others the wrong idea. These walls, they are not walls. The Market hears everything. I give people one wrong idea with one wrong visitor, and things get bad for me fast. The rich, they stop showing up. The gangers, they start asking for more. The trash, they start thinking they can hang around.” He shook his head at me, looking sad. “Look at this. And now I have gangers—two gangs, who hate each other—and another strange man in here asking questions, and now everyone will talk. Fri—" He caught himself. “Sir. You are destroying my business already. No one else will come in here all of today.”
The truth was, I bought it. Almost. An Artie in business for himself, living on the edge, courting a mix of clients high and low into a market they all thought wasn’t good enough for them: it did sound familiar. I felt that way myself. There were cases I turned away in better times because I didn’t want to be the detective who was willing to do anything. Of late, I’d proven over and over again those times were gone, that I was, in fact, willing to do anything, most of it twice if needed, and I knew a part of me chafed at that. The part of me that hadn’t quite accepted I was dying, that part of me still gave a shit about my reputation.
My features must have softened. I must have gotten lost in thinking for a moment. My eyes wandered around his old face, his sagging vanity, the designer seconds he’d dug out of some dumpster somewhere. Maybe I wasn’t done feeling empathy today. Maybe if I could forgive a street slicer like Fiono for the short and violent life that was all his imagination could architect, the furtive moments of ecstasy between stitches, I could forgive this guy for being cruel to Yuri when his image of himself didn’t have room in it for a gigolo asking questions.
“My name is Adolfo.” He held out a hand, fingers slightly splayed in the old Artie way, and I took it. “My name is Valer—"
I stopped. The skin in my hands was smooth. I looked down. The backs of his hands were firm and pink and youthful, the hands of a much younger man. I looked back up at his face. The skin around his eyes looked slightly pinched. The jowls along his jawline were uneven. “Sorry. My name is Valerius.”
“Valerius,” he said with a smile. “A good name. An old name.” At his hairline, barely visible, I could see black hair growing in. New hair: new, thick, shiny, youthfully black hair. It wasn’t dyed. His roots were dark and glossy like the furious mop of a man in the blush of life.
Adolfo was an Artie, sure, but one who’d had genetic enhancement. He was a violation of every social and legal taboo our society held regarding the treatment and cultural placement of what I might, in the strictest biological terms, have called “my” people. Adolfo was a walking, talking, glad-handing exception to the same rules that said I got to die from pancreatic cancer in order to preserve the prim notion of sanctity a bunch of fundamentalist busybody political throwbacks imposed upon my genetics.
My hand tightened around the fruit seller’s own, and my other shot out to grab the neckline of his apron. I yanked him toward me, summoning strength I wasn’t sure I still had, pulling him off-balance against the counter between us. Close to his face, my teeth showing, I growled. “Tell me how you got approved for treatments, friend. You threatened my man because you’re up to something and you want—or you’ve been told—to keep people like him, and like me, off your trail. Whatever it is, it’s big enough you got paid in illegal DNA, and there aren’t a lot of places that can come from.” His eyes went wide, and the color drained from his flabby face—flabby but starting to draw itself back in here and there. In six months, he’d bear a decent resemblance to himself when he was twenty-five. If he had kids after that, they would legally be People Plus. I hated them, too, and he hadn’t even shot that load.
I went ahead and rolled the big dice. “I need to know who in the Spiralist Church is backing you, and don’t pretend you don’t know. Somebody walked you into that clinic and signed off on your papers. I can start with them and climb from there.”
In the mirror behind Adolfo, I could see Fiono and the two Busters perk up at the commotion I’d started. I met the lead Buster’s gaze in the mirror and shook my head once to either side in the old way, the Artie way, a little of Adolfo’s overstated pidgin hucksterism rubbing off on me. Then I shook a hand to tell them no. She nodded. This was her turf. The others would follow her lead, even Fiono, if he knew what was good for him. Apparently he did.
Adolfo’s eyes went hard and beady, his mouth a thin flat dash between the parentheses of his ample cheeks. His expression went from concerned businessman to rock-solid Lower Market Market realist in less time than it took him to blink. “Get out.” His voice was low and controlled, but keeping it there took work. “Get out and they may not kill you after I tell them.”
“You’re going to tell somebody something alright.” I made sure he knew I meant it. “News flash, Adolfo: your precious Church benefactor can’t lay a fucking finger on me.”
“The law is no obstacle to these people.” He was genuinely calmer. He thought I was operating under the delusion of Artisanal
exceptionalism. “They take what they want. They go where they want. They do what they want. There isn’t a man or woman alive beyond their reach.”
I let myself ride the reflex and laughed once, a little puff of breath in his face and a smile. “Nobody’s got that kind of reach. And it wouldn’t matter if they did. I’m a dead man anyway.” His gaze shifted in some way, so I let him in on my last card. “I’m dying, Adolfo, and nobody can save me. I spent months trying to find a Spiralist I could buy with money or dick or both, whatever it took, and nobody would treat me.” I patted my own side. “Funny thing, corruption’s all over the place except when you need some. So this baby’s going to kill me pretty soon. But before I go, I’m getting some answers about Nauclea fruits. I want to hear about the chimps.” I was rolling more dice because it was now or never. He was going to throw me out and get my ass killed sooner than my body could do it to itself, or he was going to get talked into telling me everything, whatever that was. I couldn’t hold anything back for later because there wouldn’t be a later. “I want to know what this has to do with avenging angels and the attack that brought down Splendor and whatever it is that’s endangering Autumn right now.”
His face stayed as still as stone. I hadn’t budged him.
“Or I start screaming, and those three gangers out there become the three gangers in here.”
Still nothing.
“And we do this.” Then I threw him back against the wall and stepped over to an island spikefruit, covered in thick beige skin and spikes like tiny horns. Then I reared back and hit him with it, hard, in the meat and bone on top of his shoulder. Adolfo cried out in pain, his mouth gaping open for a long moment after his voice died. Buster Prime out front watched me, hands on her hips to go for weapons if she needed them, but she didn’t move. I hadn’t told her I needed her yet, and she probably wanted to see if Adolfo could fight so she’d know what to charge me after.
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