Up The Tower (6 page)

“You can look through it all you want, I guess,” he waved nonchalantly at the copbot. He hoped she didn’t see how much it meant to him—she would be more likely to mess with it then. “But down the way there’s five or six more boxes with even more stuff that’s all yours. Probably lots of copbot tech. I don’t think the fire got everything.”

The copbot chirped disagreement. “The fire got
everything
, Samson. That is what the self-destruct flashes of the PL series do! It is one of our finer features. We also have grappling hooks, metal parachutes, ejectable storage—”

“Stow it, will you?” Samson clanged his fist against the copbot’s shoulder. “Clearly, this thing doesn’t know what it’s talking about. You oughta go check the warehouse. Or hey, go check the Crowboys’ hideout. They’re all wiped out. I’m sure you could help yourself to their stash.”

That got their attention.

“All of Garrett’s boys?”

“Yup.”

“The Crowboys?”

“Those are the ones. They’ve got plenty that’s in need of some...whatever it’s called. Redistribution of wealth. Go have at it.”

Storey motioned to her boys. They set to work, opening the bladed, spiked gate for Samson and pushing past him. As Samson crossed past Storey, she grabbed his shoulder—covering it with her big meaty fingers.

“That’s a dangerous load you got there. You want any help getting it up?”

He shook his head. Better not to risk any of Storey’s boys with him while he traveled.

“All right then. Good luck with that. You tell Crash, now. You tell him I helped you.”

“Yes’m.”

Samson walked past her to the stairwell and began his long ascent.

* * * * *

I
t had been a bad day for Ana so far. It was going to get much worse, but she didn't know that yet.

On her mind mostly was contradiction. The sun was shining, some birds called out distantly from the trees littering the streets. She would have liked to pretend they were singing for her, but that was silly and dumb and beneath her now. It was a warm day, encroaching on hot but not actually hot, and this disappointed her because hot would have suited her just fine. It was nice when the temperature matched your mood.

So yes, contradiction. She did not like the contradictions. Ana had been raised to believe everything had a place, and in those places, everything should match. Even her shoes matched her purse, the gold buckles of which were the same material as her earrings.

She stomped down the broken sidewalks of Junktown, St. Louis's premiere hellhole region. Every building was a shell—and if someone lived inside the worn-down brick and soggy, bloated wood corpses around her, then probably they were paying rent to a gangster. She knew that Junktown had once been something special, a well-to-do neighborhood with a different name, everybody under the protection of the water industry, but that was well before her time.

His words still trailed from one end of her stunned mind to the other.

You're too small-time for my game, honey. Really, I just don't think you'll fit with my life.

That she didn't fit was the whole point—where Ana did fit was being a pretty face at a nowhere university that was putting her family into a steady stream of debt at the tune of six figures a year. If she was lucky, she would pay the debt off by the time she was fifty—just long enough to make her wonder whether she would be able to retire at eighty-six.

But the real whole point, really, what it really was, the true point, was that she wasn't lucky, not anymore. Not without Raj.

And what if nothing fit? Had Raj considered that? Had he considered about what part of
her
would no longer fit without him? If she didn’t fit him, then he didn’t fit her, that was only common sense. Like inflatable puzzle pieces, pushed out to their capacity when one piece was removed.

Yes. When something didn’t fit and had to be removed, then the remaining pieces had to be exaggerated to let themselves fit better in this new definition of the puzzle. Someone could live like that. Exaggerated into normalcy.

If she were to look up—and she spent most of her time not looking at anything besides the streets and alleys all around her, trying to keep her bearings and her wits about her—she would see the Gateway Tower. “The Tower,” as they called it. All broken and spiraling upward, like the finger of some gaunt, decrepit giant. Air ducts and piping spread like vines all along its outer-edges. Probably just the cost of building one floor of that place could have paid for her entire education. Built more than twenty years ago, it had never been finished, and so never used as a haven for business like the industry leaders had intended.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder from behind. Immediately, all her adrenaline spiked—mugging! Rape! Death!

Gary?

“Hi, Ana.” He smiled, reassuring. “You look upset. Can I help you? Where are your bodyguards?”

She slipped her hand out of her pocket, where it had been resting on the long knife that her mother made her promise to carry with her when she was in the city—armed guard with her or no.

Gary didn’t know it, but Ana had been ready to slice him from pelvis to shoulder. Well...sort of. She had never done that sort of thing before, but her whole life her parents had been telling her how pretty she was and how she would have to fight for her life one day when someone tried to rape her. It was not a question of “if” for them, but “when.” And Ana, even though she tried to fight their neurosis, often couldn't find the holes in their logic. She was pretty. She probably was going to get raped someday. Sometimes she even wished it would hurry up and happen so that she could view it as something in the past. And why wouldn't she? The alternative to being raped was owning up to the fact that she wasn't pretty enough to be raped—and that was unfathomable for Ana. It would mean every opportunity she held would be gone.

She knew Gary as a sort of stare-heavy creep from some class a year or two before. There had been a study group he organized that she stopped attending when it had just been him and a trio of other such stare-heavy types staring down her shirt.

The problem was that he—and the rest of his study group—weren’t rich or anywhere near it. No connections to Citizens. Otherwise, Ana would have been much more forthcoming. Her first mistake was going to an
actual
study group. The good study groups, the ones she was now a part of, were more about socializing. They paid others to do their homework, to take their tests. Anyone that actually needed to study for success was too blue-collar for Ana’s needs.

To keep up appearances, she had hired her own small team of homeworkers and testers. They had graduated from college already—in fact, working as a homeworker and tester was the number one job opportunity for a degree in Liberal Arts. As such, Ana didn’t have the budget for a regular guard to follow her around—and anyway less than twenty minutes ago she had been with Raj anyway, who lived his whole life under guard.

Everything was unexpected. Gary was unexpected.

“I—I don't know. I'm just walking. Going home. It’s not all that far.”

He looked surprised. “You don't have a ride?”

“I did. I just—no, no ride. Not anymore. He offered one, but I didn't take it.”

Had she imagined it, or did Gary’s eyes light up just then?

“He?”

“Don't worry about it.” She looked around at the broken, shelled-out buildings nearby, the masses of spurious overgrowth brought on by the Mississippi's constant swell through the Dam. Behind her, an oak had lifted a house up off its foundation. The top of the tree was a bare stump, chopped short for firewood.

He was tall, paunchy, and with a horrible curled hairstyle that he took from singers back in the twentieth. A jazzkid, though not with the sort of original flair that sometimes made them cute. He was doing it because he wanted to be noticed, because he wanted to get laid. He took it on because it was a personality to have that didn't ruffle over his own basic template, not because he felt it.

He was a poser. Ana tried not to hold it against him. She was one as well—or so Raj had informed her. Her thoughts regressed again. Was her poverty, her lack of status, really that transparent?

If only she had gotten those height-restricting implants when she was seven. Then, none of this mess would have happened. Short girls had everything they wanted. That was what a man wanted, a shorter girl to own. Now Raj had three of them. Ana should have insisted. She should have started biting her mother’s wrists until she got them. It had been cowardice to stop at just standard tantrums and starting fires with their furniture.

It was well-known that the only real way to gain some elevation in the world was either through talent or beauty, and even then you had to be noticed. And Ana had been noticed...and found wanting. Shorter girls got her job.

Change the subject.

“What are you doing down here?” she asked. “This doesn't seem like your place. Don't you live near the university?”

“Don't you?”

“Yeah.” She shook her head.

Home. That would be a dream right now. There was nothing better she would like than to be back in her apartment. A spacious four hundred feet, loaded with amenities. If there was anything the university provided, it was nice, ample living space.

At times, she suspected it was only so good to keep her in a lull about the price, about the lack of choice in the classes available. Why would she ever need particle physics for an Arts degree? Pointless. So long as she was comfortable, so long as she could just escape from this ragged chunk of hell she walked through and glide into her bed, turn up the nozzle on her good dream gas and buzz out with a tab or two of vodka, this could end up being a reasonable day.

Gary was staring at her, waiting for an answer. Who knew? Maybe he was just staring to stare. He was the type.

“Sorry,” she said. “My boyfriend, my...I was here with a guy. He's buying out a building down here for his choice consultant firm. The property is so cheap, you know.”

“Choice consultant?”

“Yeah. You know these people, they've got so much going on that they get choice paralysis? A friend of mine, Alijah? She told me was doing a paper on all that. The paralysis, I mean. Anyway, my boyf—my ex, he's setting up a firm that offers choices to people. There's bulk packages, and they split them up between types of decisions—entertainment, food—though they even go up to marrying and which corp to choose.”

His eyes widened. “Wild.”

Buildings leaned into each other, groaning under their own weight. In the past, some had fallen on top of one another, and the Junktowners simply strung down the sagging stony carcasses with ropes and cables, building on top and over and around. A kind of urban pueblo town, all around them.

She nodded. “So, what are you doing here?”

To be nice, to obey society’s rules of conversation, was the only reason she asked. She did not actually care. He was, she was fairly certain, crushing rather hard on her—and this was why running into him “by chance” in the middle of Junktown, where no one in their right mind would go, was more than a bit unsettling.

Gary flustered for a moment, shoving his hands in his pockets.

“Well, it's a bit of a story. I'm sort of embarrassed, actually. I was on my way to see my mother—she's sick—”

“Hold up,” said Ana. Anything to stop him from talking. “Do you see that?”

A small, compact black woman in tight dark criss-crossing rags rushed at them from across the street. There was something dangerous and intense about the way she moved. She had a teched-up hand and the ragged mess of her hair hung to one side of her head, partly covering her eye patch.

The woman moved at them like a wrecking ball, like a thundercloud, like an unhinged cannon. All movement, all loaded with horrible potential. Ana's stomach straightened out and twisted, all of a sudden a wet rag.

“Move,”  she said.

Gary and Ana moved. The woman walked past them to the building beyond. A squat thing with kind of an arched overhang above the door, patched together from metal and branches. It had chains on the doors. Tech hand whining, whirring, the woman tore the chains off.

“She can’t do that,” said Gary. “Hey!”

He had a baton in his hands. Why in the hell did he have a baton in his hands?

“Hey, you can’t do that! That’s not your property.”

For some reason, he tapped the woman on her shoulder with the baton. The way you might take a stick to a snake. She turned at him, slow. She was shorter than him; in that moment, to Gary, there was no doubt she was a giant.

“The hell did you say to me?”

Roaring, Gary rushed at the woman, baton held high, and she shoved him hard to the ground, using his momentum. He sprang up swinging, the baton rat-tatting off her mechanical hand, and then they were grappling. Grunting. Shouting. Push and tug. Hands locked around one another, they stumbled through the rot of the doorway and into the abandoned building behind them.

Ana moaned in surprise. What the hell was happening?

* * * * *

S
amson and the copbot were on the sixteenth floor. He stopped on one step to take a rest, looking at the copbot. Expectant-like, it looked back at him, coconut-half-jaw agape.

“So you called us partners, down there.”

“
Yes
. You did it first. I
agree
with it.”

"That's swell. So, P-L-Eight-Four-Five—"

"That is
my name
."

"Right. It's sort of a mouthful. Since we're partners and all, can I just call you Partner?"

The copbot gave a little hop.

"That is so great. Yes. Do that.”

“Good. I have a question for you, Partner.”

“Shoot!” The copbot laughed. It was a bouncing, eerie sound. “Don’t actually shoot, though. I would have to shoot you back.”

“Okay. Well. You haven’t exploded.”

“Not yet! It could happen whenever, though. Explosions abound! They are in the fabric of my understanding.”

“...Okay. I just meant, well. Can you still self-destruct?”

“Ah. Let me check.”