The Churn

by James S. A. Corey

  “Not good enough,” she said. “Not anymore. You aren’t the boy Erich drinks with anymore. You aren’t even your mother’s son now. Those versions of you are gone, and they will never come back. You are the man who took a job from Burton.”

  Timmy was silent. Far above them, the transport’s exhaust plume went dark. Lydia stepped close to him and put her hands on his shoulders. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. She thought that was a good sign. That it meant she was getting through to him.

  “The world changes you and you can’t stop it from doing so. You have to let go of being someone who doesn’t matter now. Because if you live through this time—just live through it and nothing more—you will be more important to Burton. You can’t avoid it. You can only choose what your importance is. Will you be someone he can rely upon, or someone he can’t?”

  Timmy took a deep breath in through his nose and sighed it out. His eyes were flat and hard. “I think I maybe fucked up again.”

  “Only maybe,” Lydia said. “There still may be time to repair the error, yes? Go find your friend. You can bring him here.”

  Timmy’s head jerked up. Lydia rubbed his shoulders gently, beginning at the base of his neck and stroking out to the bulges of muscle where his arms began, then back again. It was a gesture she had made with him since he was a child, a physical idiom in their own private language. Her heart ached at the sacrifice she was making. The world changes you, she thought. Hadn’t she just said that?

  “Bring him here? Y’sure about that?”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s temporary.”

  “Okay then,” he said. She felt a tug of regret that he had given in so quickly, but it passed quickly. “I’ll leave you the good boat.”

  “The good boat?” she said to his retreating back.

  “The one we came in.”

  The door closed. The gray that passed for darkness swallowed him up, and five minutes later she heard what might have been a skiff splashing in among the waves. Or it might only have been her imagination. She pulled herself into the warm, stinking, plastic embrace of the sleeping bag and stared at the ceiling and waited to see whether he returned.

  * * *

  All through Baltimore, the struggle between law and opportunity continued, but most of the citizens allied themselves with neither side. The unlicensed coffee shop filled with customers looking for a cheap way to make their dinners on basic seem more palatable, and then with younger people who either didn’t have the currency or else the inclination to take amphetamines before descending to the one-night rai clubs on barricaded streets. A few parents came home from actual jobs, proud to spend real money for a stale muffin and give their credits to the gray-market daycares run out of neighborhood living rooms. Very few people stood wholly for the law or wholly against it, and so for them the catastrophe of the churn was an annoyance to be avoided or endured or else a titillation on the newsfeeds. That it was a question of life and death for other people spoke in its favor as entertainment.

  Erich, sitting at the rented deck with a newsfeed spooling past, felt the distance between himself and the others who shared his space more keenly than they did. His sense of dread, of a chapter of his own life ending, was unnoticed by the heavyset woman who brewed the coffee and the thin man at the edge of the rooftop who spent his hours sending messages about tangled romantic involvements. To the other habitués of the coffee shop, Erich was just the crippled man who was hogging the deck. An annoyance and an amusement, and no one would particularly notice or care if he vanished from the world.

  Timmy arrived just after midnight, his broad, amiable smile softening the distance in his eyes. To anyone who didn’t look at him closely, he seemed unthreatening, and no one looked at him closely. He pulled a welded steel chair up to the bolted-down deck and sat at Erich’s side. The newsfeed was set to local. A pale-skinned woman with the Outer Planets Association split circle tattooed on her sternum and Loca Griega teardrops on her cheeks had blood pouring from her nose and left eye while she struggled against two Star Helix enforcers in gear so thick they barely seemed human. Erich smiled, trying to hide the relief he felt at Timmy’s return.

  “Loca,” Erich said, nodding at the feed. “They’re having a bad night too.”

  “Lot of that going around,” Timmy said.

  “Yeah, right? You…heard from Burton?”

  “No. Didn’t try to find him yet either,” Timmy said with a shrug. “You want to hang out here some more, or you about ready to go?”

  “I don’t know where to go,” Erich said, a high violin whine coming in at the back of his voice.

  “I got that covered,” Timmy said.

  “You got a bolt-hole? Jesus, that’s where you’ve been all this time, isn’t it? Getting someplace safe to hide?”

  “Kind of. But, you know, you ready?”

  “I need to stop someplace. Get a deck.”

  Timmy frowned and nodded at the table before them. There’s one right there was in his eyes. Erich pointed at the bolts anchoring the machine to the wooden tabletop. Timmy’s expression went empty and he stood up.

  “Hey,” Erich said. “What’re you…Timmy? What are you—”

  The thick woman who brewed the coffee looked up at the broad-shouldered young man. The coffee bar had been hers for three years, and she’d seen enough of the regulars to recognize trouble.

  “Hey,” the large man—boy, really—said, his voice making the word half apology. “So look. I don’t mean to be a dick or anything, but I kind of need that deck.”

  “You can use it here, you buy some coffee. Or rates are printed on the side,” the woman said, crossing her arms.

  The big kid nodded, his brow knotting. He took a scuffed and stained black-market credit chip and pressed it into her palm.

  “Shit, Jones,” she said, blinking at the credit balance on the tiny LED display. “How much coffee you want?”

  The kid had already turned back to the table where the cripple with the baby arm had been sitting all day. He hit the table with his fist hard enough that everyone on the rooftop turned to look at him. After the third hit, the wood of the tabletop started to splinter. There was blood on the big boy’s knuckles, and the cripple was shifting back and forth anxiously as the table fell to sticks and splinters. The boy pulled her little deck free with a creaking sound. The bolts still hung from it, the wood torn out from around them. Blood dripped from his hands as he tucked the machine under his arm and nodded to the cripple.

  “Anything else you need?” Timmy asked.

  Erich had to fight not to smile. “No, I think I’m good now.”

  “All right then. We should go.” Timmy turned to the woman and lifted his swelling hand to her in a wave. “Thanks.”

  She didn’t say anything, but pushed the credit stick into her apron and waddled back to get a broom. They were gone before she returned, walking down the stairway to the street.

  “That was incredible,” Erich said. “The way you did that? I mean, damn it. Everyone in there was cold as stone, and you were just madness and power, man. Did you see that? Did you see how gassed they were at you?”

  “You said you needed the deck,” Timmy said.

  “Come on! That was critical. You can brag about it some.”

  “Tables don’t fight back,” Timmy said. “Come on. I got a boat.”

  Erich’s relief left him chatty, but he didn’t talk about the fear he’d felt when Timmy had left him. Instead, he filled the trip with everything he’d seen on the feeds, and he told it all like he was telling ghost stories. The security forces were watching the ports, the trains, the transports up to the orbitals and Luna. Eighteen dead today, maybe three times that many in custody. It was news all over the world, and farther. There had even been a lady from Mars who’d come on for a while talking about the history of Earth-based police states. Wasn’t that cool? All the way to Mars, they were talking about what was going on right then in Baltimore. They were everywhere.

&n
bsp; Timmy listened, adding in a few words here and there, but mostly he walked until they reached the water, and then he rowed. The ceramic oars dipped into the dark water and lifted out again. Erich drummed his fingertips against the stolen deck, anxious to reconnect it to the network, so see what was happening and what had changed in the time since they’d left the coffee bar. That being connected would somehow protect him was an illusion, and Erich half knew that. But only half.

  At the little island, Timmy pulled the boat onto shore and marched into the ruins where a light was burning. An old woman was sitting beside a chemical stove, stirring a small tin pot. The smell of brewing tea competed with the brine and the reek of decaying jellyfish. She looked up. Her face was like a mask, the makeup applied so perfectly it shoved her back into the uncanny valley.

  “I found your tea,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Nope,” Timmy said, not breaking stride. “Come on, Erich. I’ll get you set up.”

  They walked through a doorway without a door and into a small room. It was even less comfortable than the one with the old lady. There was nothing on the floor but the glue marks where there had once been carpeting. Mold grew up along one wall, black and branching like tree limbs. Timmy put the deck on the ground. His knuckles were black with blood and forming scab.

  “You be able to get signal here?” Timmy asked.

  “Should be. May need to find a way to power up in the morning.”

  “Yeah, well. We’ll come up with something. So this is your room, okay? Yours. That one’s hers,” Timmy said, pointing a thumb at the lighted doorway. “Hers. She asks you in, you can go in, but she asks you to leave, you do it, right?”

  “Of course. Sure. Christ, Timmy. Your place, your rules, right?” Erich smiled, hoping to coax one in response. “We’ve always respected each other, right? Only, seriously, who is she? Is that your mom?”

  It was like Timmy hadn’t heard him. “I’m gonna get some sleep, but come morning, I can go back in, get some food. And I’ll check in with the man.”

  Erich felt his belly go cold. “You’re going to talk to Burton?”

  “Sure, if I can find him,” Timmy said. “He’s got the plan, right?”

  “Right,” Erich said. “Of course.”

  He opened the deck, ran it through its startup options, and connected to the network. The signal strength wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful. he’d been in half a dozen basement hack shacks with worse. He opened the newsfeed, still set to passive. The glow from the screen was the only light. Erich was cold, but he didn’t complain. Timmy stood, stretched, considered the skinned knuckles of his hand with what could have been a distant sort of ruefulness, and turned to go back to the old woman and the light.

  “Hey, we’re friends, right?” Erich said.

  Timmy turned back. “Sure.”

  “We’ve always watched out for each other, you and me.”

  Timmy shrugged. “Not always, but when we could, sure.”

  “Don’t tell him where I am, okay?”

  * * *

  Security crackdowns, like plagues, had a natural progression. A peak, and then decline. As terrible as they might be at their height, they did not last forever. Burton knew this, as did all of his lieutenants, and he made his plans accordingly. Burton moved through his safe houses, playing shell games with the security forces. The first night, while Erich and Lydia slept in their respective rooms in the little island ruin and Timmy tried to find someone in the organization to report to, Burton slept in a loft above a warehouse with a woman named Edie. In the morning, he moved to the storage in the back of a medical clinic, locking the door and hijacking an untraceable connection so that he could speak to his people with relative safety. Little Cole had closed down her houses, locked away her reports, buried a month’s supply of drugs, and taken a bus to Vermont to stay with her mother until things died down. Oestra was still in the city, moving from place to place in much the same fashion that Burton was. Ragman and Cyrano were missing, but it was early enough that Burton wasn’t concerned yet. At least they weren’t in the newsfeeds. Liev and Simonson were.

  And there was other evidence, indirect but convincing, of where the little war stood. Even in the first morning after the catastrophe began, security teams were calling on Liev’s underlings, sweeping them up for questioning. Some, they held. Others, they released. Burton had no way of knowing which of those who had been set free had cut deals with security and which had been lucky enough to slip through the net. It hardly mattered. That branch of the business had been compromised, and so it would die. The demand for illicit drugs, cheap goods, off-schedule medical procedures, and anonymous sex could be neither arrested nor sated, and so the thing that mattered most for Burton’s little empire was safe. Would always be safe. The question of how to feed the city’s subterranean hungers was only a tactical one, and Burton could be flexible.

  The temptation, of course, was to fight back, and in the following days, some did. Five soldiers from the Loca Griega left a bomb outside a Star Helix substation. It exploded, injuring two of the security contractors and damaging the building, and all five bombers were identified and taken into custody. Tamara Sluydan, who really should have known better, organized street-level resistance, starting a two-day riot that ended with half of her people hospitalized or in custody, eighteen local businesses looted or set afire, and the goodwill of her client base permanently damaged. Burton understood. He wasn’t a man without passions. If someone hurt him, of course he wanted to hurt them back. Phrases like “even the score” or “blood for blood” came to mind, and each time they did, he made the practice of tearing them apart to himself. “Even the score” was the metaphor of a game, and this wasn’t a a game. “Blood for blood” made it sound as if through more violence, past wrongs could be balanced, and they couldn’t. The hardest lesson Burton had ever learned was to endure the blows, accept the damage, and let someone else strike back. Soon, very soon, the crackdown would shift from its great, overwhelming force to individual struggles. It was in his interests to see that those struggles were with the Loca Griega and Tamara Sluydan, not with him. As soon as the enemy was clearly defined in the collective mind of Star Helix and Burton’s name and organization were not central to their plans, the storm would move on and he could begin to reopen the folded fronds of his business.

  In the meantime, he moved from one place to the next. He told people he would go one place, and then arrived at another. He considered all his habits with the uncompromising eye of a predator, and killed the ones with flaws. Anything that connected him with the patterns of the past was a vulnerability, and wherever possible, he chose to be invulnerable. It wasn’t the first time he’d been through this. He was good at it.

  And so when it took Timmy the better part of a week to find him, Burton’s annoyance was balanced against a certain self-centered pride.

  The office was raw brick and mortar, newsfeeds playing on five different screens. A sliding wooden door stood half open, the futon where Burton had slept the the night before half visible through it. Oestra, whose safe house it was, sat by the window looking down at the street. The automatic shotgun across his legs seemed unremarkable. Timmy had been searched by three guards on the street, and he’d been clean. Even if he’d swallowed a tracking device they would have found it, and the big slab of human meat would have been bleeding out in a gutter instead of smiling amiably and gawking at the exposed ductwork.

  “Timmy, right?” Burton said, pretending uncertainty. Let the boy feel lucky he’d remembered that much.

  “Yeah, chief. That’s me.” The openness and amiability was annoying. Burton glanced toward Oestra, but the lieutenant was squinting at the brightness of the day. Burton scratched his leg idly, his fingernails hissing against the fabric of his pants.

  “You got something for me?”

  Timmy’s face fell a little. “Just news. I mean, I didn’t have any stuff. Nothing to deliver or anything.”

&nbs
p; “All right, then,” Burton said. “What’s the news, Tiny?”

  Timmy grinned at the irony of the nickname, then sobered and began his report. Burton leaned forward, drinking in all the words as fast as they spilled from Timmy’s lips. When Oestra risked a glance back, it was like watching a bird singing away while a cat stood in the too-still pose of a carnivore waiting to pounce. The details came out in no particular order: Erich was in a safe place, Timmy had been taking food to him, the fake profile deal had been interrupted by the security crackdown, Erich’s original deck was gone but he had a replacement, the police probably had his DNA profile now. Oestra sighed to himself and looked back out the window. On the street, a half dozen young men who hadn’t just condemned their friends to death slouched down the street together.

  “He’s sure about that?” Burton asked.

  “Nah,” Timmy said. “We didn’t hang around and watch them find the deck or anything. I figured it’d be better, you know. To get out.”

  “I see.”

  “Erich wanted to go get it. Grab the hardware, I mean.”

  “That would have been a mistake,” Burton said. “If security had the deck and the man, that…well, that’d be bad.”

  “Was what I thought too,” Timmy said.

  Burton sat back, the leather of the chair creaking. Back past the bedroom, Sylvia started running the shower. Sylvia or Sarah. Something like that. One of Oestra’s, provided with the bed. “Where’s the safe house?”

  “I’m not supposed to say,” Timmy said.

  “Not even to me?”

  The boy had the good sense to look uncomfortable. “Yeah, not to anyone. You know how it is.”

  “Is there anyone there with him?”

  “Yeah, I got a friend there.”

  “A guard?”

  “Not really, no. Just a friend.”

  Burton nodded, thinking hard. “But he’s secure?”

  “He’s on the water. Anyone starts coming in, he’s got a boat and about a dozen decent places to hide. I mean, nowhere’s a hundred percent.”

  “And you’re protecting him.”