Windswept (17 page)

“Some of them are going to become
your
people.”

“And I’ll look out for them,” I said, holding out my right hand. “You willing to do this on the Public?”

He sighed, then shook his head. “What about my busted crane? My tornup lattice?”

“You throw that into the proposals, and it’ll get covered. You might even be able to upgrade.”

“You’re just gonna break my heart again, aren’t you?”

“Maybe, but I’ll never break a promise.”

He nodded, then shook my hand. I filled in the requisite forms quickly, but when it came time to blink the money into the escrow account, my eyes wouldn’t move. I just looked at my balance and saw how much had been eaten out of it over the past day. I would be under a hundred thousand yuan. That was way below my comfort level. Even with the payout for fulfilling my obligation, I would have a tough first year.

But then I remembered the blue-green bottle sitting at home, and I blinked up twenty thousand yuan into escrow. Within three minutes, the Brushhead-Steelcase Joint Purification Infrastructure Venture was ready to roll. “Done,” I said. “Your turn.”

Wash blinked up his info on the agreement, dumped ten thousand into the escrow account, then looked me square in the eye so his pai could talk with mine and said, “I, Washington Lee, do hereby grant seventeen Contract positions to Brushhead’s Contract headcount.” He blinked a few times, and the transfer codes, all in a precise ISO-20K font, rolled past my eyes.

“I accept,” I said, then got up.

“Is that it?” said Wash.

“What more do you want?” I said. “You want me to ask you to the Golden Days Dance?”

Wash blinked. “You hate dancing.”

“Just like I hate farting around,” I said. “What else is there?”

Wash smiled and said, “There was a time when people would seal a contract over a drink.”

I held up my cup. “I’m on the clock.”

“And you’re also Estella Tonggow’s buddy.”

“Which means, what? I can make rum appear out of thin air? I have magical distilling powers?”

He shook his head. “You have a flask-shaped object in your pocket. You do the math.”

I glared at him but took the flask out. I unscrewed the cap; Jesus, it smelled good. I wanted to down the whole thing, but made a show of taking a pull. I pushed my tongue against the spout to keep anything from getting into my mouth. The rum burned a tiny, perfect dot on my tongue, and I handed Wash the flask. He took a drink and smiled. “I hope you’ll sell that to me at a discount once you’ve closed your deal.”

I rolled my eyes and tucked the flask into my pants. “And I hope you’re OK with getting your hands dirty,” I said to Banks. “You’re about to start working for once in your life.”

Banks smiled at Wash and said, “I can ignore her, right?”

“Won’t do you much good,” said Wash. “She’ll still get her way.” He got up as a crane sailed overhead with Jilly’s tuk-tuk clutched against its belly. The crane gently set the little green beast on the ground. “Sorry I didn’t get this taken care of earlier.”

I looked at the tuk-tuk; it was stained with rotten breadfruit and reeked of crab juice. Wash snapped his fingers, and the waiters all rushed over to wipe the tuk-tuk down. “Solidarity,” said Wash, once they’d finished. “And now if you’ll excuse me, I have repairs to order, traffic to direct, countersuits to file, and about a million liters of rum to drink in order to get through it all.” He nodded to Banks and Jilly, gave me a heavy glance, then walked toward the upright where our crane was parked. As he mounted the stair, he turned and called, “What made you think you could jump a crane off the rail and not die?”

“I saw it in a movie!” I yelled back.

Wash shook his head and climbed out of sight. The crane hummed back to life, then cruised away to make its delivery. I blinked up a call to Jordan to tell her the good news, but just got her voicemail. I sent her a text, and we piled into the tuk-tuk.

I eased down into the tuk-tuk’s back seat, now completely knackered. A nap, followed by a hot shower and signing in all these Breaches, seemed like just the thing. Overhead, the cranes kept cruising along like giant flying turtles. They hauled tanks of molasses bound for all parts of Occupied Space, ready to get dropped down a line and turned into fuel or plastic or, God forbid, food. I closed my eyes as Banks and Jilly chatted about action movies. I tried to text some people back at the Union Hall about our success but got nothing but network errors. Maybe the fall had done more damage to my pai. One more thing to deal with when we got back. I shut my brain off for the rest of the drive.

When we came around Fernandes onto Solidarnoœæ, I could see the Union Hall clock tower poking above the shophouses. The clock’s massive face, almost three meters across, showed a huge thunderhead looming over the old microfiber plant up on Beggar’s Hill. The plant had been Brushhead’s main employer for forty years, a place that churned out the scrubbers used to clean spent fuel cans. It kept a lot of people working until WalWa figured the fuel savings from cleaning the cans wasn’t worth the expense of the plant, so they shuttered everything and booted us all out. I was shop steward, doing my first organizing gig, and I’d led all of Brushhead into that plant to steal everything, including the stuff that was bolted down. We hollowed that place in sixteen hours, and when the WalWa comptrollers came to do inventory, they found not a factory but brand new housing units for the now-displaced workforce.

The plant depicted on the clock face was the old one, before we’d punched holes in the pourform walls and installed caneplas windows and verandas. The figures of WalWa people in their stiff-collared company coats stood at the doorway, about to be overwhelmed by a thunderhead made of Brushhead residents. Everyone who’d marched on the plant had donated a little memento to Jens Odoyai, the artist who’d made the clock face. The images of the plant and the WalWa figures were all fashioned from bits and bobs from the plant, but the thunderhead was made from stuff that mattered to us. I’d given up my shop steward badge, a little fist made from recycled glass. It had been a long, brutal day, but I still smiled when I looked up at that clock and remembered how satisfying it had been to take that plant apart.

The clock said it was five-fifteen, and my entire body suddenly ached at once. I’d been running around all day and wanted to crawl under a desk and sleep for a week, but I knew first I had to get home for six o’clock. “OK,” I said, “we’re just gonna stop off here quickly, then get dinner. No, a
massive
dinner.”

We rounded the corner, and there was the Hall. It was a simple square building made of recycled concrete and ironpalm, but it had a dignity and quiet power I’d always liked. If every structure in Thronehill looked like a marker, some way for WalWa to say to the world they had come, saw and conquered the living shit out of the place, then the Hall looked and felt like a home. It was a refuge during hurricanes, a place for the neighborhood to celebrate weddings, and the site of more debates than I cared to remember. It was solid, it was safe, and, as we walked toward Koothrapalli, it was surrounded by a wall of cops. They all wore their patrol uniforms, forming a neat yellow-and-black line that blocked the way out.

“Stay here,” I said to Banks, and approached the police. The cops were all familiar faces, women and men from the local precincts. I pinged Soni. “What’s going on?” I said when she picked up. “My money’s no good?”

“It is,” said Soni, both in my head and in front of me. She stepped out of the row, wearing that I’m-really-not-happy smile that cops wore when they were about to arrest someone. “Can we talk?”

I looked at Banks, then nodded. We stepped down the sidewalk.

“What can you tell me about the body in the freezer?” she said, her voice low.

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” I said.

“Padma, this is not the time to joke around,” said Soni. “I had patrol over at the office on Handel and Reigert this morning to answer a call about a chemical spill, and they came back with pictures of a corpse on ice. What do you know about it?”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” I said. “I’m going to take care of it later.”

Soni straightened up. “Then you
do
know about it.”

“Sure. I helped put him there.”

Soni grabbed my shoulder and spun me around, pinning me against the hood of a parked lorry. “Padma Mehta, you’re under arrest.”

“Oh, come on!” I said as she cuffed me. “What the hell for?”

“Murder.”

“Soni, he was dead when we found him!”

“Really?” said Soni, spinning me around and waving to the cops. “Because you were seen with him last evening, threatening to kill him.”

“What? Who are we talking about?” I said.

“Who do you think?” she said, blinking me a picture. “Evanrute Saarien.”

It was the walk-in freezer at the Union office, and there was a body in the corner, but it wasn’t Mimi’s late husband. It was a bigger man, his hands bound and his face beaten beyond recognition. His tongue lolled out of his purpled mouth, like a dog that had choked on its owner’s lipstick. Under the blood and gore, the corpse’s suit was white.

“I have no idea how he came to be there,” I said. “Lots of people use that office.”

“Yes, and you were seen leaving it last night around ten,” said Soni, “about thirty minutes before Evanrute Saarien’s pai pinged a Public terminal on Reigert.”

“Oh, you are kidding me,” I said.

“His teeth were bashed out, his fingerprints burned off, but his DNA and pai ID match,” said Soni.

“And you can tell from everyone else’s buffers that I had nothing to do with this.”

“Except I don’t,” she said.

“What?”

“You were with a bunch of people who haven’t gotten their pais reburned. Whatever they saw can’t be used in court. I have to follow procedure and put you under arrest.

“This is bullshit.”

“Maybe, but it’s how it’s going to be. You want to sing along as I read you your rights?”

“No, I already know the words,” I said, then closed my mouth. She hustled me toward a waiting bumblecar, and I blinked a text to Banks:
Get out of here NOW.

Banks gave me a small wave, just before Soni slammed the door shut.

The cells at Santee City Jail were quite pleasant: bright colors, soft surfaces, not much crowding. It was a nice contrast from the WalWa facilities with their harsh lights, sharp corners and hidden truncheon practice. You could have turned the place into a cheap hotel if you swapped the bars for walls.

It was still a horrible place to spend the night.

Not that I slept much. By the time I’d gone through booking, six o’clock had come and gone, and there was no way I could convince the cops to get me a shot of Old Windswept and a candle. Well, the rum, maybe, but open flames in a jail cell? Even I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

Soni had been professional about the whole thing: marching me to the front desk, making me spit into the register, then turning off my pai with a wave of a red lightstick. That was the killer: I could’ve gotten through a long night if I’d been in contact with the outside world. Without my pai, I could do nothing but listen to the drunks trying to one up each other with their tales: about the work they’d done, about the work they planned to do, about how they Breached, about how bad they were, about how bad things were. I started drifting in and out, my head filled with horror stories about people seeing bodies getting torn open, about masked figures flitting in and out of bar fights. People were disappearing all over the city, even from the kampong, they said. Ghosts had landed on Santee, they said. The Big Three were going to abandon the planet, let us die, they said. I let it all wash over me, all the babbling and whining and whimpering, and I kept to myself on my bench.

Though I wasn’t completely on my own.

The Fear hissed and whispered and chuckled as I lay down, keeping my eyes shut so tight my face hurt. The Fear mocked me, called me a fool, then started to monkey with my fingers and toes, taking away the sensation in some while making the others feel like they were hooked up to tuk-tuk batteries. The Fear talked and talked as I did my best to stay calm and in control and failed. I could feel the paralysis creeping up my spine, feel the icy fingers reaching out to shut off my body and turn me into a catatonic statue. At one point, I must have curled up in a ball, because, when I clawed my way out to consciousness, I found my knees tucked under my chin and a Freeborn woman sitting at my feet.

I looked down at her as a cloud of something awful washed over me. At first, I thought a rat had died in the cell’s air vents, but then I saw a snoring Union woman thrash around on her cot before settling down. Then the Freeborn woman coughed and shifted in her seat. The smell got worse.

At first sniff, I thought it was the classic combination of body odor and booze, but there was an ugly sharpness to their smell, like they’d been splashed with chemical runoff. Their clothes were also spattered with bleach spots, and, as I watched, the spots spread. A thought clicked in the back of my head, and I wished I could pull up my pai’s buffer. I’d just seen something that stained like that. What was it?

“What?” said the Freeborn woman.

“Your clothes,” I said, clearing my throat, trying to cover up from my staring.

“What about them?” she said, huddling up on the bench. “They not good enough?”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, shaking the cotton out of my head. “You really want to pull that class warfare crap now? When I’m in the same cell as you? What made the spots on your clothes?”

“She did,” said the Freeborn woman, jerking a thumb at our sleeping cellie. “I was just trying to get a drink last night, and she started squawking about how my type shouldn’t have been in the bar, telling me my kind was killing her business, and how dare I try to reap what she sowed or something crazy like that.” She snorted. “Then some other Ink tries to calm her down, some skinny thing, looked like she would blow away on a breeze.”

I cocked my head. “What then?”

The woman nodded. “She starts talking, this real high voice, about how she’s just lost her man, and how she’s lost, and can I help her. Real pitiful, right? I was going to tell her to go away, but then these two old ladies show up, one on either side of me, right? They look even weaker than this first lady, but they grab my arms and it
hurts
.”