The Churn (4 page)

And in an unlicensed rooftop coffee bar that looked down over the human-packed streets, Erich hunched over a gray-market network deck the owner had bolted to the table. He was trying to keep his panic from showing, wondering if Burton had heard about the capture of his deck, and hoping that wherever Timmy had rushed off to when they'd heard of Liev's arrest, he'd get back soon. The coffee was black and bitter, and Erich couldn't tell if the coppery flavor was a problem with the beans or the lingering taste of fear. He sat on his newsfeed, set to passive for fear that his search requests would be traced, and watched as all around him more traps snapped shut, his gut knotting tighter with every one.

When Lydia heard what had happened to Liev, her first action was to put on her makeup and style her long, gray-streaked hair. She sat at the mirror in her bedroom and rubbed on the flesh-toned base until the lines in her skin were gone. She painted her lips fuller and darker and redder than they had ever been in nature. The black eyeliner, reddish eyeshadow, rust-colored blush. Despite the danger she was in, she didn't hurry. A lifetime of experience had drawn connections in her mind that linked sexual desirability, fear, and fatalism in ways she would have recognized as unhealthy if she'd seen them in someone else. She pulled her hair around, piling it high and pinning it in place until it cascaded, three-quarters contained, to her shoulders in the style Liev had enjoyed back when he had lifted her up from the working population of the house and made her his own. She thought of it as a last act of fidelity, like dressing a corpse.

She shrugged out of her robe and pulled on simple, functional clothes. Running shoes. Her go-bag was a nondescript blue backpack with a three-month supply of her medications, two changes of clothes, four protein bars, a pistol, two boxes of ammunition, a bottle of water, and three thousand dollars spread across half a dozen credit chips. She pulled it down from the top of her closet, and without opening it to check its contents, went to the chair by her front window. The curtains were pale gauze that scattered and softened the afternoon light, graying everything. She pulled a sheer yellow scarf over her hair, swathed her neck, and tied it at her sternum, the ironic echo of her old hijab. Then sat very still, feet side by side, ankles and knees touching. Primly, she thought. She waited in silence to see who would open her door, a security team or Timmy. The darkness, or else the light.

The better part of an hour passed. Her spine hurt, and she savored the pain, keeping her face placid. Smiles or grimaces, either one would disturb her makeup. Then footsteps in the hall, like someone clearing their throat. The door opened, and Timmy stepped in. His gaze flicked down to her back, up to her face. He shrugged and nodded to the hall in a gesture that said,
Can we go?
as clearly as words. Lydia stood, pulled on her pack as she walked to the door, and left her room for the last time. She had lived there for the better part of a decade. The necklace that Liev had given her the night he'd told her he was moving on, but that she would be cared for, hung from a peg in the bathroom. The cheap earthenware cup that Timmy had painted with glaze when he was eight years old and given her for what he'd mistakenly thought was her birthday remained in the cupboard. The half-finished knitting that an old roommate had left when she disappeared twenty years before sat hunched in a plastic bag under the bed, stinking of dust.

Lydia didn't look back.

“My spirit animal is the snake,” she said as they walked south together They went side by side, but not touching. “I shed my skin. I just let it slough away.”

“Okay,” Timmy said. “Come on this way. I got a thing waiting.”

The waterline was cleanest near the new port. There, the ships and houseboats rested in clean slips made of flexible ceramic and the bones of the drowned buildings had been cut free and hauled away. With every mile farther from the port, the debris grew less picturesque, the charm of the reclaimed city giving way to the debris of its authentic past. Little beaches formed over asphalt, gray sand swirling around old blocky concrete pillars standing in the waves green with algae and white with bird shit. The stink of rot came from the soupy water and the corpses of jellyfish melting where the tide had left them.

Timmy's boat was small. White paint flaked off the metal where it hadn't been scraped well enough before being repainted. Lydia sat in the bow, her legs folded under her, her chin high and proud. The motor was an under-the-waterline pulse drive, quiet as a hum. The water in their wake was louder. The sun was near to setting, the city casting its shadow on the waves. A handful of other boats were on the water, manned by children for the most part. The citizens of basic with nothing better to do with their time than spend the twilight on the water, then go home.

Timmy ran them along the coast for a time, and then turned east, out toward the vast ocean. The moon had set, but the lights of the city were bright enough to travel by. The islands had once been part of the city itself, and now were ruins. Timmy aimed for one of the smaller, a stretch not more than two city blocks long by three wide humped up out of the water. A few ancient walls still stood. The boat ran up onto the hard shore, and Timmy jumped out, soaking his pants to the thighs, to pull it the rest of the way up. The metal screeched against the rotting concrete sidewalk.

The ruin he led her to was little more than a camp site. A bright yellow emergency-preparedness sleeping bag lay unrolled on a foam mattress. An LED lamp squatted beside it with a cord snaking up the grimy wall to a solar collector in the window. A small chemical camping stove stood on a driftwood board placed over two cinderblocks, a little unpowered refrigerator beside it to store food. Two more rooms stood empty through the doorway. If the house had ever had a kitchen or a bathroom, it was lost in the tumble of rubble beyond that. Outside, the city glowed, the violence and bustle made calm and beautiful by even such a small distance. The wail of the sirens and angry blat of the security alerts became a kind of music there, transformed by the mystical act of passing above waves.

Timmy pulled off his water-soaked pants and dug a fresh pair out from under the sleeping bag.

“This is where you go?” Lydia said, putting her hand on the time-pocked window glass. “When you aren't with me, you come to this?”

“Nobody bugs you here,” Timmy said. “Or, you know. Not twice.”

She nodded, as much to herself as for his benefit. Timmy looked around the room and rubbed his hand across his high forehead.

“It's not as nice as your place,” he said. “But it's safe. Temporary.”

“Yes,” she said. “Temporary.”

“Even if Liev does tell 'em about you, it's not like it's over. You can get a new name. New paper.”

Lydia turned her gaze back from the city, her right hand going to her left arm as if she were protecting herself. Her gaze darted to the empty doorway, and then back. “Where's Erich?”

“Yeah, the meet didn't happen,” Timmy said, leaning against the wall. She never ceased to be amazed by his physicality. The innocence and vulnerability that his body managed to project while still being an instrument of violence.

“Tell me,” she said, and he did. All of it, slowly and carefully, as if worried he might leave something out that she wanted to know. That she found interesting. The low rumble of a launch shuddered like an endless peal of thunder, and the exhaust plume rose into the night sky as he spoke. It had not yet broken into orbit when he stopped.

“And where is he now?” she asked.

“There's a coffee bar. The one at Franklin and St. Paul? On top of the old high-rises there. I got him there when it was done. They've got a deck there you can rent by the minute, and since his got taken, I figured he'd like that. Gotta say, he was pretty freaked out. That DNA thing? I don't see how that's gonna end well. If he's right about how Burton's gonna react…”

Lydia shook her head once, a tiny gesture, almost invisible by the light of the single LED lamp. “I thought you were his bodyguard. You were assigned to protect him.”

“I did,” Timmy said. “But then the job was done. Burton didn't tell me I was supposed to go to the bathroom with him for the rest of his life, right? Job was done, so the job was done.”

“I thought you were his friend.”

“I am,” Timmy said. “But, y'know.
You
.”

“Don't worry about me. Whatever comes to me, I have earned it a thousand times over. Don't disagree with me! Don't interrupt. Burton asked you to protect Erich because Erich is precious to him. The particular job he assigned you may be over, but worse has come to the city, and Erich is still precious.”

“And I get that,” Timmy said. “Only when they got Liev—”

“I have lived through the churn before, darling boy. I know how this goes.” She turned to the window, gesturing at the golden lights of the city. “Liev was only one. There will be others. Perhaps many, perhaps few, but Burton will lose some part of his structure to the security forces or to death. And the ones who remain afterward will become more important to him. He is a man who values survivors. Who values loyalty. What will he think, dear, when he hears that you left Erich to come spirit me away?”

“Job was done,” Timmy said, a little petulantly she thought.

“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?”