Kelley Eskridge (24 page)

Later, she roused muzzily to the clangor
of raised voices in the hall, and wondered if she had in fact poached
someone else's deal. She didn't care. Let them find another place. She
was safe. She turned over and went back down into the dark.

She woke alert and hungry in the small hours
after midnight, and propelled herself into a marathon of activity. The
first street vendor she found taught her how to use her datagem in the
credit reader, and she bought a steaming sausage on a sourdough roll,
slathered it with mustard, and ate it where she stood, not bothering to
catch the brown drips that spattered her and the sidewalk. She carried
a second back inside and ate more slowly while she plugged Crichton's
palmtop into the apartment's network port and puzzled out the
unfamiliar operating system; then she began locating city services on
the net to arrange for utilities and e-mail. She wasn't surprised to
find that the net service provider for her zone was Ko, but she didn't
like it. The only surprise was her own hesitation over her choice of
e-mail address: finally, she shrugged and requested

jackalsegura
; and smiled wryly to
herself
when the database told her that she was
Accepted
.

She registered her apartment and virtual
address with Crichton. She sent Irene Miller the most rigorously formal
e-mail she could devise, declining the program's employment contract;
she had to rewrite it four times to filter out the obvious fuck-you
subtext, and she was remotely interested to find herself still weighing
these sorts of concerns.

She saved the most difficult transaction
for last. She located the web site of a nearby storage facility,
negotiated a month's rental; then she took a deep breath and, still in
her most formal style, sent a request to Ko Facilities Management to
release and ship her personal goods. She shouldn't waste the money on
storage—she didn't intend to leave anything in it—but she couldn't bear
to give Ko her actual address. It was an odd contrast, her physical
secrecy and her open, almost contemptuous presence on the net; she
didn't understand it and decided not to try. When she'd worked up the
nerve to send the message, she became aware that it was full day, and
she was hungry again.

She ventured a little farther from the
building this time, and found a small grocery shop relentlessly stocked
with prepackaged meals and processed foods. “Vegetables?” she asked,
and was pointed to the row of cans and vacuum-sealed plastic bags in
the middle aisle. The combination of low availability and high prices
told her a lot about her new situation. She knew that as she explored
her immediate territory she would find it a mosaic: determinedly proud
neighborhoods, worn and tired but well-scrubbed and inching toward
economic security in two or three generations, divided along
inexplicable sudden lines from hardscrabble angry poverty and areas of
aggressive despair. There would be a large, crumbling public clinic
somewhere in a five-mile radius, the only one that would offer public
health services. There would be two or three trendy clubs where locals
served upper-class patrons who parked their cars in guarded lots while
they enjoyed the frisson of the danger zone. There would be some really
good ethnic restaurants where she might or might not be welcome. Power
outages would happen here first and be repaired last. The police would
always ride in pairs; and, indeed, she saw her first matched set cruise
by as she returned to her apartment with two carrybags of provisions
and the most expensive can opener she had ever owned.

She had messages waiting, and that was a
tremulous moment. It made her too aware of where she was: sitting on a
rickety chair in a room that smelled wrong and was still her only place
in the world. All the energy she'd generated from being brave about the
shopping, competent about the apartment and the utilities, vanished
utterly and left her deflated and sad. Accepting the messages meant
accepting it all: that life had turned around and broken her when she
wasn't paying attention, and that these e-mails were for some new
Jackal who had to find a different shape from the pieces.

She stared at nothing for several
heartbeats; then she heard a particularly insistent tugboat
toot-toot-tooting on a near canal, and it sounded so like a harassed
caretaker saying

no no no
! to a
maniacal two-year-old that she had to smile, in spite of everything.
And then she saw that the drab room was speckled with sunlight, and she
pulled herself out of the chair and opened the window. The air smelled
faintly of sausages, and there was enough breeze to stir the flap of
one of the carrybags. She could paint the room a pale yellow to catch
and hold the light; she could put a small desk there in the corner;
when they sent her things, she would have music again, and her set of
wooden spoons, and maybe even the thick wool socks that she had always
worn in place of slippers. Everything did not have to be different; she
did not have to be entirely new. Okay, she thought, okay; and sat down
to read the mail.

There was a confirmation from Crichton
that her address information had been recorded; no arrest today, Jackal
thought almost cheerfully, and saved the message to a folder she
labeled Stay Out Of Jail. There was a return message from Ko, which she
opened before she had time to get too scared. It was unsigned and
generic, and told her that her request for retrieval of stored material
would be granted upon receipt of advance packing and shipping charges,
as quoted, and that her goods would arrive at her location within two
weeks of payment verification. She paid the bill. That wasn't so bad,
she thought, she could deal with Ko; but maybe that was only because
for her, Ko was now an empty place. She had rubbed out all the people
while she was in VC. Snow and the web and her parents were gone. No
more people for Jackal. Don't think about it, she told herself, and
felt like crying again, so she made herself get up and put away her
food. Then she heated some vacuum-packed fettuccine alfredo and ate it
with a roll; she didn't like the taste, but the carbohydrates steadied
her. She'd have an hour or so before she got tired again. She should
have bought some beer, and she needed to get back on a protein-rich
diet if she didn't want her blood sugar freewheeling. And she had to
get a new palmtop, and maybe a low-end desktop. She'd have to find
other places to shop if she wanted to have any money left. That meant
transport schedules and city maps. She needed paint. A phone. Newsnet
access. A microwave. A budget. She made herself a cup of tea and
started a list.

And so she entered into a time of strange,
dislocated freedom; she ate and slept as necessary, and in all the
moments between, she worked fiercely and with the clean satisfaction of
getting things done. She made herself into a project: the
reconstruction of Jackal Segura. Her wish list was enormous. She
categorized it and then began to explore the city, on-line and by
transport, finding her way to one neighborhood after another, comparing
prices and weighing alternatives, making notes on her new palmtop: it
took much longer than it should have, because she would suddenly get
the shakes in a busy store or on a crowded sidewalk, and would have to
find her way back to her apartment in a controlled panic.

When she had enough data, she ran a draft
budget and sliced the list in half. She agonized over the shade of
yellow, the white and green for the bathroom: she picked a deep muddy
blue for the bedroom because as a little girl she had always wanted a
room like an underwater cave. She held a brief memory of that other
Jackal; then the hundred things still to do pushed it almost casually
from her mind and she went on with her spackling and sanding.

Occasionally, someone would pound on the
wall or underneath her floor, and she would know it must be late. Then
she would turn to quiet chores—configuring her new desktop, washing
down the kitchen shelves, haphazardly hemming curtains for the window,
so badly that she had to rip out the stitching and redo the entire job.
She could not rest until everything was done.

Her belongings arrived from Ko, and it
took her almost a whole day to move them from the storage space to her
apartment, one crate at a time on a rented hand truck that she
maneuvered slowly along the sidewalks. She was managing the crowds
better now; there were whole days when she didn't get scared by the
press of other people. Today she was able to nod to the Laotian grocer
sorting canned goods in his shop window, and raise a hand to the
sausage vendor each time she reached her building. A group of
neighborhood gang kids watched her interestedly throughout the
afternoon from their place on a stoop four buildings west of
Shangri-La. On her last trip, one scooted out to meet her, right hand
casually riffling a butterfly knife through its paces.

“Ho,” the young woman said, slender blades
fluttering.

“Hello,” Jackal answered. She did not want
to stop, but the girl had placed herself in the middle of the sidewalk.
Jackal braked and silently cursed the loss of momentum.

“Whatcha got?”

“My things,” Jackal said economically.

“Nice things?”

“Not really. Nothing you'd be interested
in.”

“You never know,” the girl said
conversationally. “What will you do if I am interested?”

“I will dislocate your left knee,” Jackal
answered immediately and as calmly as she could. She could hear Neill
say good, Jackal, specific examples are always more convincing.

The girl grinned. “Okay,” she said.
“Welcome to the neighborhood.” She stepped out of the way.

“Thanks,” Jackal said. “Delighted to be
here.” She grunted as her sore shoulder took up the strain of
restarting the hand truck. She left the kids whooping on the stoop
behind her, their laughter punctuated by the castanets of the flicking
knives. It was the closest thing she'd had to a personal conversation
since she had left Crichton.

She unpacked and arranged all her precious
things in a seven-hour burst of adrenaline focus, smiling in delight to
see them emerge from their wrappings. She opened a box and found
Frankenbear, and was overcome by the memory of her first minutes in
VC-Ko, reliving the astonishment and the way she'd felt as if a huge
wind had blown her wide open. Then she sat Frank on her dresser and
went on with her unpacking. There were some interesting omissions: all
of her jewelry, many of her books, a letter opener that had belonged to
her

abuelo
, other small items.
Well, she would write to Ko and get someone in Facilities Management on
the case. Or maybe not; maybe better to be grateful that the price for
this particular reclamation was no higher.

And then, quite suddenly, it was over. The
clock on her desk told her it was two forty-seven in the morning; she
wasn't quite sure of the day. There was nothing more to do. The list
was complete, the work finished. The apartment smelled vaguely of new
paint and lemon cleaner, overlaid with street grease borne on the night
breeze that belled the new curtains slowly in and out. It was very
quiet: no tugboats, no transport engines whuffing along the street, no
shouts or laughter or screams. There was a faint sound of music from
far away, a bit like flamenco guitar. She turned off the lights and sat
in the chair that she had placed so that she could see both the door
and the window. She breathed; and the quiet filled her up.

14

SHE WOKE IN THE CHAIR THE NEXT
MORNING WITH A
stiff neck and no feeling in her right leg, her
desktop calendar gently beeping to remind her that she had her first
parole appointment with Crichton in two hours. She panicked and tried
to dash for the shower, and yipped as the prickles ran up and down her
leg with the returning circulation; she saved herself from falling at
the cost of a wrenched wrist. Then she forgot to double-check the
transport route before she left, and had to guess where to transfer. It
made for a tense ride.

She finally found herself about a half
mile from where she needed to be: in spite of the bad start and feeling
like a wrung-out paint rag, she had enough time to walk the rest of the
way. She felt a bit like she had been running at top speed and just
smacked into an invisible wall; stunned, and not quite sure that she
had stopped moving. It took a while to realize that no one was paying
her any attention. Perhaps it was her clothes, rumpled and musty from
their journey in a Ko shipping crate; or maybe the stoop of her
shoulders and the way she had straight-armed her hands into her jacket
pockets. She lifted her chin and stood taller. It made her feel better,
and no one pointed or stared. As she made her way through the trickle
of shoppers and couriers and businesspeople rushing to appointments,
she finally noticed that it was a beautiful day; thin white sun washed
over the dense blue sky like yolk inside an eggshell; light flecked the
glass-fronted buildings; the air was cold, especially at corners where
the wind tumbled about before gathering itself for the next run down
one of the canyon streets.

Crichton's office, when she eventually got
through the security checkpoints, was the shabby room she remembered,
still devoid of any personal touch save the same mug, with what looked
like a fresh chip along the base, and a number of self-adhesive notes
stuck to the wall, curling at the edges from the heat pumping out of
the floor vent beside the desk. There was also a new filing cabinet in
the corner, by far the nicest piece of furniture in the room. Jackal
assumed it held the folders that had been threatening to take over the
office. She wondered why people still used paper files; she herself was
very happy to manage all her information electronically, but most
people she had known at Ko still kept some paper records. And, in fact,
there was Jackal's folder, primly closed on Crichton's desk.