Nicola Griffith (26 page)

“After five. They’ve just let me out. Kept asking me over and over what had gone wrong. And how I’d known how to fix it.”

“You didn’t tell them?”

“I told them part of the truth: that I’d been reading the manual a lot lately because I was worried that Hepple’s idiotic games were going to hurt the plant somehow.”“What did they say?”

She laughed. “Not much. Then they sent Hepple from the room.”

“He was there?”

“Not for long.” When she smiled her eyes wrinkled upward, like a cat’s. She stretched. “I feel good, Bird. I don’t think he’s going to work in this city again.”

“You told them about the bugs, the nutrients?”

“Everything.” She yawned. “Thought you’d like to know: Someone from the command-post staff, the documentation people, said they’ve traced the spill up-line to some off-road drainage in the north of the county. Well away from any manufacturing complex
and
off the usual transport routes. The official opinion is fly dumping.”

“Right.”

She nodded. “As far as I’m concerned, this was planned.” She yawned again. “Before I forget, tomorrow’s shift is twelve hours: four till four. With overlap.”

“That’ll be fun.” I tried to imagine the chaos of overlapping shifts, with both shifts overtired and irritable.

“Yeah. But the pay’s good: time and a half for the whole twelve hours.” Another yawn. “Gotta go. Those leeches sucked me dry. You’d think it was my fault things went wrong. ‘So tell us again why you think the glucose line malfunctioned, Cherry.’ Over and over. Jesus. And I hate it when they call me Cherry.” She reached to the side to cut the transmission, then stopped. “I didn’t tell you earlier, Bird, but I think between us we did a good job. It was hard to not tell them what you did. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I do.”

“Good, because it’s too late to change your mind without making me look like an idiot. I’ll see you at the beginning of the shift.”

No one had ever said to me before,
See you later, at work.

TWENTY

When Lore gets back to her suite after swimming with Sarah, she is exhausted and has the faint beginnings of a hangover. The light on her screen is red: she has a message. She ignores it. All she wants is a shower and several hours’ sleep.

She is climbing into bed when the phone chimes. It takes her a moment to recognize the family-emergency override tone. She drags the sheet from her bed to wrap up in.

“Yes?”

“Lore . . . Lore. . .” The screen remains blank and whoever has called her is sobbing. “Lore. . .”

“Tok? Tok, is that you?” The screen suddenly flashes into color: Tok’s face is swollen and ravaged with grief.

“She’s dead. Those bastards. Oh, Lore, she’s dead. . .” He says more, but his tears thicken the words beyond sense.

“Tok, please.” Who was dead? “Take some deep breaths. Tell me—”

“She was trying. God, she was . . . She killed herself, Lore. Can you imagine that? Feeling so bad you don’t want to wake up ever again and eat breakfast, you don’t want to look up ever again and see tiny white clouds in the sky. Just wanting to forget. That bastard. She . . .” More weeping.

Lore’s heart feels so big she can hardly breathe. “Tok, who’s dead?”

Tok looks up, astonished. “Stella. She killed herself. She. . .”

Lore does not hear the rest. She is flooded with relief that it is not Katerine. Tok is looking at her. “Why? Why did she kill herself?”

“Because of what that monster did to her. Almost every night. She only started therapy six months ago, Lore. She was finally facing it. But then I think it just got too much, I think she looked ahead and saw this thing, this black swamp inside her, this cloud that looked like it would stain her life forever, and couldn’t face it. Well, I can face it. I’m going to make that monster pay. Come back home, Lore, wherever you are. I need you. We’ll do this together.”

Lore just looks at him, horrified. What is he talking about?

“I’ll contact you in a day or two, tell you where I am. I’m going to put a stop to it. This has gone on too long.” He reaches to the side and his picture blips out.

Lore stares at the blank screen, unable to move. What is he talking about?
Stella is dead.
What does he mean? Who is the monster? A quick image of Greta and a locksmith glide through her memory. She shakes her head.
Stella is dead.
She has a sudden image of Stella and her friends standing around the net screen, drinks in hand, vying to send money to some amateur charity.
Stella is dead.

She does not know how long she sits there, but when someone knocks at the door and she gets up, she finds she is stiff. She expects Sarah, and opens the door without checking the peephole.

Two masked figures burst in. One takes her arms and the other points something at her face. There is a funny smell, and the floor comes up to hit her.

TWENTY-ONE

I opened my eyes again at eleven in the morning and thought it was the message tone that had woken me. I was halfway out of bed before I realized it was the door.

Someone was knocking on my door.

This was the first time since I had lived alone that anyone had knocked. It made me think of Uruguay.

“Hold on.” I found a shirt, padded to the door. “Who is it?”

“Why, who’re you expecting?”

Tom. Even so, I made sure both chains were fastened before I opened the door a crack. “I’m not dressed.”

“We don’t mind.” He held up his hand. I saw it was attached to some kind of string. “Brought you a present.” A leash. And a dog. A black, stocky-looking thing with a startlingly pink tongue.

“No. I can’t—”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist,” he said cheerfully. “He’s not to keep. Just to borrow for an hour or two every day. Can we come in?”

I opened the door and the dog dragged Tom in. “Sit down while I dress.”

“I’ll put the kettle on.”

“Fine.”

I went into the bathroom and showered quickly. I could hear the dog’s claws clicking on the floor as it padded about, sniffing things. When I came out of the bathroom, rubbing my hair, it sat down and panted at me. Its entire hindquarters shuffled back and forth as it wagged its tail.

I patted it cautiously on the head. It wagged harder. “It looks young.”

“He. He’s eight months old. His name’s Gibbon.”

“As in
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
?”

Tom smiled. “Knew you had an education. Now, hurry up and comb that hair, tea’s ready.” I did, then checked to see if I had any messages. Just one, a notice from the plant, reiterating what Magyar had already told me: tonight’s shift had been extended.
For the next three days,
the notice said. No
please
or
thank you
, just an assumption that we would all cooperate.

We sat at the table by the window. The dog sat on the carpet, watching me carefully.

“I got him yesterday. From the pound. I thought to myself, ‘Tom, you’re getting old. More to the point, you’re thinking you should
feel
old and lonely. You need something to look after.’ I decided a dog would be just the thing.”

“But. . .”

“How am I going to walk a young, healthy dog like this every day? That’s where you come in. I saw you dragging yourself in the other night, and I said to myself, ‘That lass needs a bit of fresh air, something to take her mind off things.’ And then I heard about the bit of bother at the plant last night and thought a walk by the river would do nicely.”

I thought Tom thought entirely too much. And then I wondered how he knew I worked at the plant, and realized too late he’d been guessing. I smiled wryly. “By the time I get him to the river we’ll both be exhausted and it’ll be time for me to head back.”

But Tom had evidently been thinking about that, too. He actually folded his arms in satisfaction. “Bet you didn’t know you could reach the river not two minutes’ walk from here.”

I acknowledged defeat. “You’d better tell me how.”

I got to work early. Twelve hours was a long time to spend in a skinny, especially when there was cleanup
and
overlapping shifts arguing about jurisdiction, and I wanted to be prepared.

Tom had been right about the walk. The fresh air and exercise had stretched the tension kinks out of my shoulders and put vigor back in my veins. Although I knew it was all in my mind, I felt cleaner, as though the breeze had blown away the stain of aliphatics and aromatics from the spongy tissue of my lungs.

I sighed as I took my time sliding on wrist supports and strapping on my waders. Now I was going to clog everything up again.

“It’s going to get worse,” Kinnis said cheerfully. He hadn’t even sealed his skinny yet. “Lot of work to do.”

“I hear these daytime jerk-offs have only got a few more troughs up,” Meisener agreed.

“Less than forty is what I heard,” Cel said as she started stripping off her street clothes. “Hey, Kinnis, you were dumb as a rock on the net last night.”

“Yeah? At least I looked good, not like you, you ugly cow.”

I stepped out of the line of fire. The next stage would be thrown gauntlets, goggles, raucous laughter. It always made me feel out of place, the way the rest of the shift familiarly insulted each other, threw things, played jokes. They knew it, I think, but I never got the sense that they might gang up on me and herd me out. They could have done, in the beginning, but they hadn’t. Maybe I had been as strange to them as they to me. They wouldn’t do it now; I might be weird, but I had worked with them, helped them. I had been adopted and my difference was now taken for granted—like the slowness of a younger sister who is defended fiercely on the school playground. All of a sudden I liked these people, liked them a great deal.

The shift was hard, but we were used to that, and the two shifts meshed together more smoothly than I had anticipated. There was no sign of Magyar, but without any discussion, our shift took on the heavier, dirtier work. The day shift seemed content to let us. I wondered how many more centuries it would take to break the physically-stronger-equals-morally-superior equation, then shrugged and concentrated on the job.

Once the day shift had left, the work was faster and smoother. An hour before the break, we had almost fifty troughs up.

“Maybe we should slow down,” Cel said from behind me. She was leaning on her rake, surveying the progress. “Time and a half is a hard thing to lose.”

“I wonder how Magyar got that for us.”

“The way I read it, she can get what she wants right now. Did you know she’s been in executive land all night? Rumor has it they gave Hepple’s job to the day-shift supervisor—Ho? Hu? something like that—and offered Magyar his job.”

“On the day shift?”

“Yeah,” she said, misinterpreting my expression. “What would she do with those soft wankers?”

“Do you think she’ll take it?”

“Maybe.”

We broke as usual after four hours. For the first time in a while, I sat by myself in the breakroom. I didn’t like the thought of a new shift supervisor. Magyar and I understood each other. It would be annoying to have to go back to being careful all the time about what I was and was not supposed to know. And Magyar was smart. What if the new one was mean, or petty like Hepple?

The second third of the shift seemed harder than the first, despite the fact that we were on our own. By the second break, Cel’s rumor had gone round and there was intense speculation. No one seemed to doubt that Magyar would take the job—the interest was all about who would take Magyar’s place. I watched the fish and spoke to no one, then went back to the troughs and worked like an automaton.

Finishing at four in the morning felt different from two. Bleaker. Or maybe I was just tired. It was one of those strange, warmish winter nights, when the air is full of moisture and you can hear the wind.

“Bird.” It was Magyar, waiting for me. “I expect you’ve heard the rumors.”

“Yes.”

We walked in silence.

“You won’t ask, will you?”

“No.”

“I didn’t take the job!” She seemed angry. At herself, or me.

I didn’t know what to think, or how to feel. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. It just. . .”

I smiled, I couldn’t help it. “Cel said you wouldn’t know what to do with those soft wankers.”

Magyar grinned back. “Work their asses off.”

We walked some more. I had no idea where we were going.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time: better hours, more money. No Hepple. Then they asked me who they should give my job to. I thought about you. You know more about that place than you’ve any right to. You’d do a good job. But . . . I don’t know . . . you’re not who you say you are.”

“You could have suggested someone else. Cel, maybe.”

“Don’t think I didn’t consider it. But the more I thought about you, the more I thought we had some unfinished business. You lied about your identity to get a job you’re way, way too qualified for. I can’t trust a person who does that.”

“I wouldn’t cause trouble.”

“Maybe not, but how can I be sure?”

I did not point out what I had done last night.

She made a soft sound of frustration. “I like you, but I don’t trust you. Who are you?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Then tell me why you took this job.”

“Because it was something I knew how to do. And it’s inconspicuous enough to avoid attention.”

“From the police?”

I nodded. We walked some more. We were in the dockside area now—the real docks, not the tourist arena.

“What did you do?”

“I think I killed someone.”

Five dangerous little words. They hung there like gnats. If I could I would have leapt and snapped them back, like a dog. For a split second I thought about running. Magyar would not follow me.

Instead, after a brief falter in my steps, we kept walking.

“That’s not everything, is it?”

“No.”

“But it’s all you’re going to tell me.”

“Yes.” I was cold and tired. I stopped walking. “What will you do?”

“Nothing.” I couldn’t see her face, just her breath, pearly against the dark, industrial sky. “You helped me last night. You helped all of us. And I’m a patient woman.”

You’ll tell me eventually,
she meant. It wasn’t a threat. Not quite.

“Get to bed. Bird.”
Or whoever you are.
“You look worn out.”

I went to the Polar Bear.

The data-slate business stayed tight, and more and more Lore woke up with restraint marks on her wrists, or arms sore from paddling some flabby-legged sixty-year-old. Once, toward the end of summer, she woke up in their flat with a butt plug still strapped inside her, and she rushed to the bathroom and vomited. Afterward she hung limply over the bowl and whispered to the water, “It wasn’t
me
, it wasn’t
me
. . .” But even as her gorge rose again, her skin flushed with remembered heat. She wept.

Sometimes all Spanner would have to do was show her the little bottle and she would nearly come.

By November, they were tricking six nights out of seven, and sometimes more than once a night. They usually took it in turns: one to perform, one to guard. On the nights or afternoons when she was the one watching Spanner fucking some spoiled teenager or limp old man, she felt powerful: she was in charge. She was the one who made sure there were latex and antivirals; she was the one who pulled Spanner off when the client had had enough; she was the one who took the money. She was in charge; she had choices. This might not be love, but she was not being lied to.

They earned a great deal of money, but they always seemed to need more.

The holiday season came again. Lore wandered the streets, ending up by the medieval gate that had been excavated thirty years before. She stared at it, then out at what had once been a dock, long ago. A huge shopping mall, tawdry with age, floated there now. She wondered why modern creations became uglier faster. It was raining. Something about the gray sky and the sturdy shoes splashing through puddles reminded her of Den Haag, of her hand in her father’s as they ran, laughing, from the chauffeured car to the brightly lit store. She had bought Tok an art program for his slate that year. Her father had helped her choose presents for everyone. And she had felt so lucky. Her father was a busy man, with meetings to run and schedules to keep, but here he was, running through the rain with her, choosing presents as though the future of van de Oest Enterprises rested on their decisions, queuing up like an ordinary person at the store café for hot chocolate while they gloated over the presents all snugged up in the bags under their chairs.

Lore smiled to herself, caught sight of that smile in a storefront window, and faltered. It was all a lie, because
he
was all a lie. All her memories of him were tainted, soiled by what he had done to Stella. How could someone do that to another, and smile and smile and pretend love?

She found herself huddling against the cold armored glass of a clothing store. She could not think of a single thing to buy Spanner that would not be a lie, because all their money was a lie.

I don’t know why I went to the Polar Bear—to exorcise some ghosts, maybe; maybe I just wanted some beer; maybe I couldn’t face being on my own—but I did not expect to see Spanner.

She was holding court at one of the center tables, gesturing with one hand, laughing, pausing to drink.

Just go,
she had said last time I saw her. She would rather have suffered that terrible pain than have me in her flat. Yet here she was, waving me over. And here I was, sliding into a seat, nodding pleasantly at the woman and two men I didn’t recognize at the table.

“Lore!” She twisted her head over her shoulder and shouted at the bar, “Bring Lore a beer.”

Judging by the smears on the table and the flush on their cheeks, they had been there a few hours. Spanner’s color was high, too, but I noticed that although she lifted her glass often, she drank slowly, and there was a stop-start quality to her movements. I guessed that as well as the enormous dose of painkillers floating through her bloodstream she must be popping with stimulants.

After a few how-are-yous which meant nothing, I was left out of the conversation while Spanner laughed and glittered some more. It was warm. I settled into a half-lidded somnolence, sipping now and again at my beer, more tired than relaxed. Then Spanner and the others were standing up, shaking hands.

“The weekend? No problem. Yes, it
was
good to talk to you. No, no, I’ll stay and have a chat with Lore here.”

Then it was just us.

“What are you doing out of bed?”

“I’m fine.”

I let it pass. If Spanner could walk, she was
fine.
It didn’t matter what that walking would do to her, how it would damage her for the future; it didn’t matter how many drugs, or how much, it took; if she could walk, she was just fine. It was not my problem anymore. It wasn’t.