The wind left me like I’d been sucker punched in the gut.
I blinked. “What?”
“Where I know you from. You’re friends with Rajani.”
And then it hit me who he was. His given name was something old-millennium, like Jason or Michael or Robert. On the Hill he’d gone by Dusty, and to have a nickname like that in a community where four out of five people were a slinger or a rat says something. He was gray-brown like dust: his hair a light brown, his skin tanned a light brown. Only his eyes stood out, bright blue against all that dust. But Rajani and the other slingers hadn’t dubbed him Dusty because of his coloring. Rather, he was a dustrat who threw himself into the life with gusto. He wasn’t that old, but he’d chased the neural gray zone so long and hard part of his brain stayed there. He spent half his days on the Hill spouting nonsense, seeing vapor.
Many rats were older outsiders, close to going silent and trying to escape their final years. Others were throwaway kids, tossed to the streets after they’d aged out, hooked on the Axon pills they could not afford. Dusty could have been one of those, except for the ready paper he was always eager to spend. Either he was a grade A street hustler, unlikely considering how stoned he usually was, or he was some insider’s kid who’d gone slumming on the Hill once and liked what he’d found.
But if he was an insider’s kid, what was he doing in Coulee?
“It’s Dusty, right?”
“Yeah. What’s your name again?”
“Lazlo.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Lazlo Khosravi. That’s my name. Always has been.”
“No. It’s um...” He screwed up his face comically. “Um... no, don’t tell me.”
“Lazlo.”
“Shhh. Quiet. I almost had it. Um—” His blue eyes shot open, and he grinned hugely, revealing a wide gap between his front teeth. “Harry! That’s it!”
“No.”
“Sure it is. Rajani calls you Harry. Too bad what happened to her.” He waggled his head from side to side, a ridiculous caricature of Rajani, and sang out in a high-pitched voice. “Harree. Come here Harree, my lovely.”
Faisal turned and looked at me and Dusty, snorted, then turned back.
“Harish,” I muttered.
“Say again?”
“Harish. She calls me Harish.”
He hooted and beamed. “See! I knew it!”
“That’s not my name.”
“Whatever Harry.”
“Hundan, the name’s Lazlo.”
“Lazlo, Harry—difference does it make?”
“Harry gets you bloodied the second these cuffs are off.”
“Okay, okay. Chill, dude. Just messing.”
Dude? Who even said that? He was an insider for sure. Done with him, I looked out my window. The heliovan was exiting the tunnel to a pink sky. I hadn’t seen a sunrise in three months and I wanted to enjoy it, but the annoying con beside me started talking again.
“So what’d you think of prison?”
“What?”
“Was it all you had hoped for?”
Ahead of me, Faisal barked out a laugh.
Dusty watched me eagerly like we were at a party or something, making small talk.
“You serious?”
“Long ride dude. Passing the time.”
I stared out at the flat, brown expanse spreading in all directions. Rocks and dirt, that’s all I could see. How far was the drive to the Line? I didn’t even know what the Line was, yet I’d volunteered. Five years off my sentence, and I grabbed at it like a chump. Thought I was so smart, but that hundan warden—
“So, in case it’s not obvious, I’m in for hezui.” The con was still talking. “Yeah, I’m a duster. Pretty easy collar.” He said it like an insider bragging about his career at some insider meet and greet. “Got me a year. A little boring in the clink, though. Thought I’d try something different for the second half.”
Sook said to Faisal, “You believe this guy?”
Faisal shook his head and chuckled.
“Lazlo. Yoo hoo.”
I turned my back to the chatty prisoner, but he wasn’t taking the hint.
“What you in for? Hey. Lazlo.”
I stared harder out the window. Didn’t he know he was making himself a target? These men were serious thugs, not some stupid dusters on the Hill. I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes, pretended to be asleep.
“Harree—come here, Harree!”
The handcuffs cut into my wrists painfully when I spun around and made to punch the idiot. I bit my lip hard to stop from crying out and the bleeding started again.
“Yo, Lazlo. You’re leaking.”
“Shut up.”
“What, too good to talk to me? Hezui not tough enough for you?”
I was innocent. But these cons sitting around us, listening to Dusty’s foolishness and watching me doing nothing to shut it down? The target had been on my back since I stepped into the heliovan and this stupid insider—he was only serving a year, fewer months now, since he volunteered, plus crypto he didn’t need—was painting that target bright red for these hundans.
Faisal was listening. Sook too. I wondered if the two men in the front could hear. Mostly, I worried about Acne Scar. I knew cons liked to gossip. Not much else to do. And I knew that Dusty with his insider ways and frequent dustouts would be entertainment for bored cons. I didn’t intend to join him as the prison punching bag. I suspected slingers and collectors would be easy pickings on the Line, just a step above a rat, a hezui.
I took another look at the four cons sitting ahead of us. How many more would be on the Line? They were all far larger and stronger than me. If any of them took a swing at me, I didn’t stand a chance. The only way I would establish some cred, buy myself some time until I could run, was to admit to the one thing I hadn’t done.
“Shashu.”
Dusty whistled. “Dude, for real? Who’d you kill?”
He shouted it; of course he did. And what had I expected? He announced it to the entire heliovan. No amount of bumping along the road or engine noise had muffled his voice. I imagined Dusty’s voice bouncing around the inside of the van and piercing through the bulletproof window to the driver’s pod. If he hadn’t needed his full attention on the road, the driver would have turned around and taken back every nice thing he’d done and kind word he’d said to me.
None of the cons turned or looked, and that’s how I knew they’d all heard.
Of course, if I told Dusty I was a killer, the next question would be who my victim was. But while it had been easy to lie about killing someone, I couldn’t bring myself to say her name. It wasn’t true, of course it wasn’t, but claiming to have caused her death would abuse her memory.
“Shut it.”
But Dusty kept at it, wheedling and cajoling like one of the little kids at Miz Hazel’s. I tried to change the subject.
“How long you been at Coulee?”
“About three months. You?”
“Same.” I figured they had arrested Dusty around the same time as me. The Hill had been quiet that night, as though the cops had swept for dusters before I’d arrived.
“So who was it? What’d he do to you? How’d you kill him?”
I shook my head, glared at him. Shut up already.
“Dude, come on. Is he from the Hill? Do I know him?”
“How should I know?”
“So he is from the Hill—” I could almost look through those light eyes into his brain and watch the blue-tinted cogs and wheels spin. “He’s a slinger. No reason to kill a rat.”
I tried to stare him down, but my eyes flickered.
“Someone didn’t pay up. You muscled him.” I imagined smoke coming out of his ears as his little-used brain gears spun and spun. “You’re a collector. You killed one of your slingers.”
This freaking hundan. The closer he stumbled to the truth, the less able I was to bluff my way out.
“I’m telling you nothing. Give it up Sharabi.” A mistake, cursing him in Rajani’s language, but it tumbled out somehow.
His wide eyes glowed. “Rajani calls me that.”
Not trusting my face and what it might reveal about me, I turned toward my window again.
“Wait, you collected from Rajani. I heard that, no—”
I pressed my forehead against the window frame. The metal casing burrowed into my skin and I welcomed the pressure, wished I could force it deeper into my skull. Anything to take my mind off this other harsher, sharper sensation piercing through me. I saw Rajani again, lying motionless on the floor. My despair became real along with anger at whoever did that to her, anger at the cops who’d pinned it on me, bone-crushing sadness that Rajani no longer breathed this world’s heavy air. And then I was angry at Dusty, this stranger I barely knew who dared to think I could have harmed a hair on Rajani’s beautiful braided head.
I wasn’t aware that I’d pulsed him, not until he said, his voice lowered, “Wow, dude. I see it clearly.”