Company Town (27 page)

Joel beamed. “I'll bet you could ping him now. He doesn't sleep very much.” Hwa didn't ask how the boy knew that. “Do you think he'll like our present?” Joel continued.

“Aye,” Hwa said. “I reckon he will.”

 

14

Metabolist/Subspace/LynchLabs/ Tower Three

The trip back to New Arcadia was smoother than the trip out. Joel slept most of the way. Hwa used the time to look at some more employee profiles. By the time they arrived, it was early afternoon and Joel was talking about meeting some friends from science club to discuss next steps.

“Do you have your outfit for Homecoming, yet?” Joel asked.

Hwa turned and gave him the finger. “Don't ruin my day. I'm going home.”

“Don't forget the Falstaff paper!” Joel yelled.

The train back was mostly empty, for a Sunday. Maybe people really were leaving. The crowds were a little thicker on the Demasduwit. It was one of those crisp autumn Sundays that made her happy to be out on the Atlantic, where the air was clean and the sky was clear. She let herself be overcharged for a big mess of dandelion greens, yams, and eggs, and she took the stairs up to her place without once encountering the tobacco dealers who made it their usual Sunday afternoon meeting place or the anti-reactor kids with their chittering ads and radiation spam.

The door to her apartment hung ajar. Plastic splintered and threaded away from the jamb. When she touched them, the locks fell through the door. She heard them clunk heavily on the square of carpet remnant she'd scavenged in lieu of a welcome mat. After all, she hadn't planned to welcome anybody. Why was she focusing on that one detail? Why did her mind seem to get smaller, at moments like this?

Every time she told other women about this kind of moment, she told them to walk away.

Don't even stop,
she told the people in her self-defence classes.
If there's something wrong with your door, and you think there's been a break-in, just keep walking. Don't go in. Just go somewhere safe and call for help. You don't know who's in there, waiting for you. You don't know what they're on, or how crazy they are, or what they plan on doing to you. Don't go in. Whatever you do, do not open that door.

Hwa put her groceries down. And her backpack. She rolled her neck. Flexed her feet. Cleared her wrists.

She kicked the door in so hard it bounced off the opposite wall.

No one came running out. No guns started blazing. There was only the echo of the door hitting the wall and the flutter of seagulls from the stairwell and the chaos that was her apartment. She could see it from here: shelves shoved over, display cracked on the floor, bed and pillows cut up with their stuffing spilling like guts in a combat drama.

Her oven was on.

She could see straight into the kitchen from the door, and in the dimness the oven light was the only real illumination. It was for this reason that she went in, and only this reason, even though she knew the invader could be hiding in the washroom. It was the only other room in the place, and the only space large enough for another human being. She didn't even have a proper closet, or proper cabinet, just an old luggage cart with clothes hanging on it. So if someone were still there, they were in that room.

She stepped through the door. One step. Two. Three. Turned right. The washroom door was shut.

She pretended the room belonged to Joel, and checked all the corners and behind the door. No one. She crossed into the kitchen and found her good vegetable knife out on the counter. It was under the shattered remains of an antique lacquered bento box Rusty had given her. Odd, that no one had taken the knife. She gripped it hard, blade facing up, so the muscles engaged in the stabbing would be her stronger underhand ones, not her overhand ones.

She kicked in the door of the washroom.

A reek of shit and piss hit her in a slow, awful wave. The room smelled like hot roadkill. They'd shit in her sink. In the shower. Piss was everywhere, dried and yellow. Her garbage was strewn across it. They'd pissed on that, too. Her toothbrush was in the toilet, stuck in a pile of her tights and rash guards. There was cum on her hairbrush. At least, that's what it looked like. Hwa dropped that in the toilet, too, and then realized she'd just have to fish it out again and walked away.

LOOKING FORWARD TO RAPING YOU, her mirror said, in dried toothpaste.

In the oven were two baking sheets. Both were full of melted plastic and fibreglass. A thin film of gold and silver coated each thick puddle of goo.

They'd melted her brother's trophies.

She turned the oven off. Sank to the floor. Felt its heat on her back. Smelled the molten metal and alloy and whatever else it was that they made those things out of. It was probably toxic. It was probably giving her cancer, right this very minute. Somewhere in her body the assembly line was going all wrong and the cells were dividing toward her doom.

She didn't care.

Outside, someone shuffled past her door, and then shuffled back. The old homeless guy. He was a skinny white man who wore a tattered yellow slicker and boots with no socks. “Are you all right, Miss?”

Hwa wiped her eyes with the ball of her hand. “Not really, no.”

“You had a break-in?”

She nodded.

“You gonna call the cops?”

It occurred to her that she didn't really have to call them. Not if she didn't want to. That was the other thing she always told other women:
Call the police. Start a paper trail. Establish a pattern.
Now she understood why some of them never did. Because it felt so useless. So stupid. What would she tell them?
I broke some guy's finger and he called his buddies and they fucked up my place and they say they're going to rape me. Yeah, you're right, Officer. I probably shouldn't have broken his finger. This is all my fault. Sorry for bothering you.

It wasn't like those trophies would ever come back together. It wasn't like the cops would help her clean up. It wasn't like she'd ever really feel safe here, ever again.

“You know, if you don't call them, and the super finds damage later, you lose the deposit,” the old man said.

“That so?”

He nodded. “Happened to me, once.”

Hwa stood up. She grabbed some clothes off the rack. “You know what? You stay here tonight. I'll be back later. Maybe.”

*   *   *

Nail led her down to the subspace alone, which meant she didn't hear about her backpack or her groceries until she was inside the door, where Rusty stood waiting to take her coat.

“My goodness,” he said. “Look at all that.”

“Sorry.” Hwa set her things down in a pile. “Rusty. I'm really sorry.”

“Whatever for, Miss Go?”

Hwa swallowed hard. “Just dropping in like this. I haven't been around much, and I know that, and I couldn't make it to Layne's funeral, and … I've been a bad friend.”

Rusty frowned. On him, it looked like just a gentle pinch of his lips and a quirk of his pale eyebrows. Like a curious Corgi, almost. “I believe you can tell my mistress that yourself, Miss Go.”

“Aye.” Hwa smoothed her hair and tugged her shirt into place. “Is she in?”

“Yes. Let me show you through.”

Mistress Séverine sat in her office, contemplating a massive display of spreadsheets. It looked like a register of complaints. “Hello, Hwa,” she said, without turning around.

“Hi.”

“How's the new job?”

Hwa found herself standing taller. “I'm sorry I didn't make it to Layne's funeral.”

Séverine shook her head softly. Her white hair swept back and forth, back and forth, against the lace back of her dress. “No one blames you for that. You were there when it happened. Attending the service would be too much to ask.” She waved away a document and another bloomed up to replace it. “You didn't answer my question, my dear.”

“About the job?” Hwa licked her lips. “It kinda sucks, actually. They're making me go to Homecoming.”

Séverine twisted. “Oh, that's not such a bad…” Her manicured hand met her lips. “Why, Hwa, what's happened?”

It was useless, trying to keep secrets from her. Mistress Séverine had a sixth sense. Maybe even a seventh one. She just knew when you were vulnerable. It was her trade.

“My place got broken into.”

The Mistress crossed to her and clasped her gently by the shoulders. She took Hwa's chin in her hands and turned it to the left first, and then the right. “Well, are you hurt?”

“No. They were gone by the time I got there. They did a number on the place, though. There's shit—sorry—everywhere. And they melted my brother's trophies.”

“Animals.” Séverine smoothed her hair. “Just
animals.
”

“They left a threat on my mirror. They said they were going to come back, and, uh…” Hwa let the other woman see her eyes. “Finish the job.”

“You don't even have to say it. Not if you don't want to.”

Hwa nodded. “Thanks.”

Séverine moved to her desk and opened the top left drawer. She fished out a bottle and shook it. A smile crossed her face. “Do you know who did it?”

“Aye. Got a pretty good idea.”

“Mmm.” Séverine shook out a pill from the bottle and offered it to Hwa. “You take that. You've had a scare, and you need to rest.”

Hwa blinked at the pill in her hand. “Will I sleep?”

“Later, you will. It's very slow, this one. We'll feed you, to help it along. I'll have Rusty make a big cioppino. And bread! We'll eat bread. As much bread as you want. And a big olive oil cake for dessert, with honey. And Manhattans to start. Then an old vine zin I've got kicking around. Oh, darling, don't cry.”

Naturally, Hwa started sobbing right that second. Séverine patted her hair. “It's all right, dear. It happens to all of us. It's happened to me, once or twice.”

Hwa only sobbed harder. Her throat hurt. Her eyes hurt. It was much worse to think of this happening to the people she knew. To think of all the women this had happened to, before her. All the women who had read those same words in some other place, at some other time. Maybe not for the same reasons, but the reasons didn't matter. What mattered were the words. The threats. The people who made them. And their hate.

“It's a sign of success, actually. If they're trying to intimidate you, you must be doing something right.” Séverine handed her a glass of water. “You should tell your employers that you might not be available for the next little while.”

Hwa nodded. It was the last call she wanted to make, but the Mistress was right. There was no way around it. She wiped her eyes again. “Thanks. Thanks for everything.”

Séverine reached out and stroked Hwa's face with just her fingertips. The bad side. The stained side. She was the only one who would ever touch it. “You are so much bigger than this bullshit. Remember that.”

Hwa squeezed the tears out of her eyes. “Yes, ma'am.”

When the door closed behind Séverine, Hwa pinged Síofra.

“How's the laundry going?”

“Not great. My place got, uh, tossed. Probably some guys from Security. You know. In retaliation.”

A long, long pause. Dead air. “Did you hear—”

“I heard you.”
His voice was iron.
“Where are you? I'll hire a boat.”

Hwa shook her head, then remembered he couldn't see it. She mastered her breathing. Thought of the master control room. The buttons and switches. The screens, with her apartment on them. Her first real place. Tae-kyung's trophies. Christ.

“I have a place to stay.”

“You have a place to stay right here. You know that.”

Hwa squeezed her eyes shut. She had considered it. Wanted it. Just show up in Tower Five, at his door, the smell of jasmine and honeysuckle, the mossy dimness of his hallway. Just fob herself in and tell him everything and damn the consequences.

“That would go badly for you, wouldn't it?” Hwa asked. “They'd know, I mean. If I stayed the night. You'd get in trouble.”

“Stop protecting me. I'm not the one who needs protecting.”

“We…” Hwa didn't know how to finish the sentence. She decided on another truth, instead. “I just wanted to stay with a woman, eh? I needed some, er, girl time. Someone who gets it.”

A long pause. A defeated sigh.
“Of course. I'll run by your place and set up some flies on the wall, just in case.”

“Okay. Thank you. But, you should know, this homeless guy is in there. Watching the place.”

“I'll try not to scare him.”

“Thanks.”

Another pause. Why was she letting this continue? Why was she just waiting for him to talk? They had nothing to say to each other, really.

“They miscalculated, Hwa. We're going to use this against Silas. We are going to show this to the board and get him demoted.”

Demoted. That had a nice ring to it. It was something, anyway. “Well, you'd better take some sample kits, if that's your plan,” Hwa said. “There's enough DNA there to convict most of Silas's division. Maybe not Beaudry or the others who came with us to Terra Nova, but all the other lackeys.”

“DNA?”

“You'll see when you get there. I apologize in advance. Bring some, uh, gloves. And maybe an allergy mask.”

She was talking just to prolong the conversation. She knew that. The drug was in her, now. Its progress spread easy warmth all through her limbs. It made him easier to talk to. Made her less nervous.

“I'll call you when I'm finished there,”
he said, as if having read her mind.
“We'll talk again. Tonight.”

“We always talk again.” Why was she saying this? Why make this admission? What good could it possibly do? “You're like the last person I talk to at night and the first person I talk to in the morning.”