Metatropolis

Elizabeth Bear had a heck of a year last year: Her short story “Tideline” has racked up all sorts of awards, including a Hugo Award, and she’s also released a number of novels. She’s the Energizer Bunny of science fiction: She just keeps writing and writing and writing. Fortunately, we all benefit from her output.

Bear’s story here is excellent in its own right, but one thing I’d like to point out is how it, with Tobias Buckell’s “Stochasti-City,” is an excellent example of how the working relationship among the writers of METATROPOLIS came into play. One of the things we did as writers was to show each other our works in progress, so we could see how others were solving the problems of fleshing out this world we created, and to make sure that our own stories connected with the others.

In the case of Bear and Buckell, their two stories, both set in Detroit, are an interesting and complementary set, and you can hear how the two share story elements and themes, even as their stories stand on their own. It’s proof to me that the idea of communal world-building and individual story writing can pay off in ways both expected and unexpected.

Handlebars stung Cadie’s palms as her front tire popped off the curb and slammed cracked asphalt. Flexed elbows absorbed the jolt, but she still felt the sting across her shoulders. She skittered sideways between an autorickshaw and two pedestrians, and entered the traffic flow. Detroit had never had much in the way of public transportation, and decayed infrastructure made the public streets practically impassable.

Cadie knew that. Knowing it didn’t manage to lessen her irritation much when she had to stop on Randolph Street and dismount so she could lift her bike over a pothole that stretched the width of the road. Another day, she might have ridden over and popped the bike up the other side, but today she couldn’t afford to risk a tire. She was already late and didn’t have the spare cash for a new tube.

Heads turned as Cadie swung a leg over her machine again and rocked up onto the pedal, balancing on the scarred ball of her sneaker. She shook her dreads down over her shoulders, tossing back the one that always wanted to spring forward and sway like a pendulum in front of her right eye. Some yoob in a business suit turned around to stare at the stretch of her cargo pants as she kicked off and leaned forward. She could have flipped him off, but it was more fun to pump toward him, pedaling furiously, and tip his hat into the filthy street.

“Bitch!” he shouted after her as she vanished into the stream of rattling trucks and electric squirts. Then she did flip him off, without turning, the finger pointing down stiff and rigid beside her pumping haunches. Somebody else whooped laughter, a steel bracelet bright with rubber-edged jingling tags rattling on his wrist as he waved, but Cadie’s antagonist shouted something she lost in a roar of giant wheels and the blare of her headphones as she slid in behind a truck. She was pretty sure it wasn’t his phone number.

And if it was—she grinned as she pedaled down the echoing soot-blackened channel, anonymized by traffic—she had all the men in her life she needed.

THOSE wrist tags bugged her as she slid along through traffic, finally making better time now. Every counterculture has its recognition signals. Hanky codes and earrings. Slave rings and crossed wrists. Cryptic magnetic decals on the bumper of a car. Peace signs, band badges, piercings, dyed hair, long hair, cropped hair. Ankhs, safari vests, and Leathermans. Gang signs and team insignia. The colors of the tribe.

Every counterculture has its ways of keeping the gate. Some are secret for purposes of exclusion and control. Some are secret by force of necessity. Some flamboyantly broadcast their existence, but adopt impenetrable habits of speech. Some are driven underground at first, for centuries or decades, only to emerge when the conventions of society change.

But then they cease to be the counterculture; they lose their passcodes and secret handshakes; the recognition symbols that once served to discreetly identify them to friendly eyes become an open badge of membership. A Christian fish. A rainbow flag. Nuances of nonverbal communication are lost when it becomes safe to speak aloud.

Lately, Cadie had been noticing the tags. Rattling silvery metal, worn on a steel ball chain looped around throats under tailored sport coats, through the worn buttonholes of frayed denim jackets, hooked on a keychain carabiner. Sets of three or five or seven, once nine, always odd numbers, the thin sheets of metal rolled in colored rubber at the edges for safety and perforated like lacy antique punch cards. She hadn’t gotten a good look at a set, but she thought there was some transparent, refractive material sandwiched between layers of metal, visible where the cutouts fell.

They weren’t customary—she’d catch somebody with a set every couple of days, a few times a week. Once, she’d seen two in a day.

She wondered, sure. Googled around a little, checked a couple of trendy stores that sold fashion accessories. Found nothing. The thing that struck Cadie odd was that the tags—which looked more than anything else like miniature fine-jewelry replicas of dog tags—were the only thing the people wearing them seemed to have in common. She hadn’t realized they were a recognition signal until she’d seen a bum in two pairs of too-short trousers, seven tags rattling against his filthy collarbones, nod in passing to a businesswoman walking between her bodyguards. A leather strap supporting a pilot electronics tote crossed the shoulder of her designer suit. Five tags swung freely from the strap loop.

BY the concrete footing of a converted warehouse, Cadie locked her bike and set the zapper. Somebody had stenciled an outline of a grinning man smoking an upside-down pipe on the wall; whatever the encoded message was, Cadie didn’t get it. She hustled up steps to a rusted steel door that had once been painted orange. Somebody had told her there was no word for the color “orange” in Hindi; there was only yellow and red, and whatever lay between them had to be assigned to one category or another. It seemed strange to think about at first, but then she realized that all the colors between blue and green didn’t have their own names either. Just names by association, teal and turquoise and aquamarine. But weren’t those colors just as real as blue or green? Didn’t they have as much unique identity? Who was it that decided that they had to be one or the other?

So if you spoke another language and orange stopped being orange and became yellow, what then? Did the color itself change? Or was it just your perception of it?

Cadie nerved herself and tapped her code on the pad beside the door. Whoever was inside could see her on the cams. Facial recognition software had already identified her when the print-reader on the keypad slid a bar of blue light along her fingertip. From its intensity, it seemed as if Cadie should be able to sense a chill.

The battered door sagged against its hinges as remote locks slid back. Cadie squared her shoulders under her battered denim jacket, setting the fine swags of chain across the breast pockets swinging, and stepped inside.

IT was a long walk, past the guard’s office with the door propped open by a chipped wooden wedge. The guard—a big warm man burdened with the parentally reprehensible name of Celsius Washington—waved at her as she passed, his Marine Corps ring and his shaved head catching bands of light. She waved back. With meaty lips and chipped white teeth, he grinned. “Your little girl is growing up fine, just like her mom.”

Cadie rolled her eyes and flipped him off like the guy on the street, but when she gave Cel the bird it was a different gesture, with more English in it and framed with a smile.

More coded signals. Sometimes a fuck you was just a fuck you. And sometimes it was a whole bunch of other messages, and the fuck you was only the carrier wave.

Consider how Cel pressed both hands over his heart and leaned back in his chair, head tipped winningly to one side. Fatigued metal groaned under his shift of weight. She walked on past, leaving the finger behind, framed in the door until her arm dragged it after.

Here, the character of the building changed. From reclaimed property and scarred tile to soft carpet in bright tertiary colors complementary to walls and furniture. The receptionist, James, had hung up his suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his immaculately pressed shirt, but his tie still snugged crisply below his Adam’s apple and a semiautomatic pistol was clipped into a magnetic rig on his right hip. The reflected light from security monitors under the console wall gilded him blue.

“Hello, Ms. Grange,” he said. He touched the control for his headset and announced her, indicating a chair by the next set of security doors. James held up a plastic envelope while she retrieved a butterfly knife with a pierced steel handle and a can of tear gas from her inside pocket. She dropped her weapons in and he bent the flap over, tucked it inside, and placed the resulting package in his top desk drawer, which he locked.

James tucked a coil of light brown hair behind his ear, a transparently flirtatious gesture. He had great big hazel eyes with heavy eyelashes, and was at least ten years too young for her.

And so what? “You’re not staying long enough for that to be effective security.”

She laughed and took the indicated chair, listening to the whisper of her metal fringe as she leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. Too much work, not enough sleep. But there was no easy solution for that in her life, either.

After a suitable pause, James cleared his throat to draw her attention. She straightened, blinked, and was already rising when he said, “The staff will see you now, Ms. Grange.”

The inner door swung open as she turned toward it. She passed within, was wanded, and walked through the imaging portal. The security staff were used to her jacket now, but they still gave it a thorough hand-examination. It was heavy in part because there were layers of body armor behind the swinging chains.

Nothing extravagant. Nothing she’d want to rely on to protect her from a gunshot. But a little extra edge, the sort sensible people acquired.

Cadie smiled when they gave her back her jacket. “How bad is the coffee today, Angelina?”

The woman with the wand, a broad-shouldered veteran whose straight black hair fell in a clipped line across her forehead, shrugged. “It’s been on for a couple of hours. I’d see if it melts the spoon before I trusted it.”

She winked and waved Cadie past. Cadie fluffed her dreadlocks back and decided she needed the coffee, for something to do with her hands if nothing else. And even burned, it was real coffee—a luxury not to be spurned. She filled a ceramic mug, added milk—organic, local farm, no BGH, from genetically random free-range cows—and decided it wasn’t burned enough to really need the sugar.

It was a stalling tactic, she knew. Every time. She anticipated the visit all day, rushed to get here, and then it was all she could force herself to do, not to scramble back out the door without going in to spend her carefully allotted, scientifically calculated time with Firuza.

She turned and made herself face the one-way glass. Firuza, age five and a half, bent over a child-height table, her fingers and smock smeared with bright primary colors. A dab of yellow stood out against Firuza’s cheek.

Cadie took a long drink of complex, slightly acrid coffee to brace herself, touched the biometric pad by the connecting door, and went in to her daughter. Firuza looked up as Cadie paused just inside, a sunny grin warming her expression. “Mom!”

“Hey, kiddo,” Cadie said. She dropped her jacket on the chair beside the door, crossed the room to Firuza, and buried her nose in the little girl’s hair. She breathed deep, the clean tang of Ivory soap and the thick scent of gouache.

Cadie dropped down beside her, bony knees pressing hard on the linoleum floor, and angled the paper a little so she could see better. Clouds, behind a tree, and the yellow sun. The tree was intact, regular, growing smoothly into the contours of a green finger-smudged hill. There was another one a little further away, a blurry brown animal which might have been a bear or a dog or a pony. “Who’s this?” Cadie asked.

Firuza gave her the sort of look one normally reserved for mental midgets and random incompetents. “It’s my dog Archie.”

Cadie, wise to the ways of children, did not inform Firuza that she did not have a dog. There was a crèche dog, but his name was Rudolf, and he was a golden retriever, not a giant brown blurr of hair such as this appeared to be. “Your dog?”

Firuza nodded, solemnly. “The one we’re gonna get when I can come live with you again,” she said, and smeared blue paint all over Cadie’s most rogue dreadlock.

CADIE stopped at James’ desk on the way out to collect her effects and pay the bill. By the time she made it back down the corridor, the sky was periwinkle.

She leaned against the crèche’s misleading facade and took a moment to reconstruct her own. The pause was more than a breather—it was her opportunity to observe her surroundings before descending to her bike.

She unlocked her wheels and slung her leg over without incident. But as she was rolling down the sour-smelling alley to a cross street where evening traffic drifted past, a silhouette detached itself from the left wall and stepped gingerly towards her, both hands upraised beside its head.

Cadie hesitated, hip-shot, one leg stiff on the pedal as she coasted forward. Stay or go? She had the speed to jolt past him, knock him aside and go spinning out of the alley. Detroit had some little up and down, but nothing like when she’d lived in San Diego. He’d never catch her on foot—

Something jingled on the figure’s wrist, casting rainbow sparks of light against the grubby walls. “Cadence Grange?” he said, and though his voice wasn’t quite the same as when he’d been shouting after her, she recognized it.

Cadie stood on the foot brake, the bike wobbling slightly as she balanced it to a halt. “Who wants to know?”

HE said his name was Homer, which—once they were ensconced in a booth in a greasy spoon—prompted Cadie to ask, “Who names their kid Homer anymore?”

“My parents were Simpsons fans.” He took a bite of what passed for hamburger these days and wiped mayonnaise off his chin while Cadie studied him. He looked about mid-twenties, lightly freckled across the tops of his cheeks, his hair sticking out this way and that in tiny random twists about two inches long. His T-shirt bore a sweat stain around the collar, his forearms were tendon-cabled below the rolled-up cuffs of his cargo jacket, and a Marine Corps ring like a smaller cousin of the one Cel wore glinted heavily on his hand. Before he sat down, she’d noticed his boots were scarred across the toes, deep enough to show the steel caps in one or two places, and the laces were knotted together where they’d worn thin. Now she spotted the calluses on his hands, the chipped fingernails.

“Not, ‘How do you know my name?’ Or, ‘What do you want from me?’” Another bite of hamburger. He was buying time. He pushed the paper basket of fries toward her while he chewed.

Hands folded around the water-dewed cup of iced tea he’d bought her, she frowned at the fries. Her stomach grumbled, but there was brown rice and beans at home, and if she was lucky the market she passed on the way would have the cheap bruised oranges from Florida she could almost afford. Beans and brown rice and oranges: not the best diet, but it wasn’t missing anything you couldn’t live without for a while. Sometimes, she scored greens as well, or a lemon or lime. She got by. Better than some people did.

“Huh.” It seemed like he expected more, so she pressed her palms against the table and said, “You make a living at that?”

He set the burger down—the smell wouldn’t have been all that appetizing, even if she hadn’t been able to see the gray interior, but it still made her swallow saliva—and wiped his hands before fiddling significantly with the frayed cuff of his cargo jacket. “I get by. Since we’re playing first date, what do you do?”

The coincidence of phrasing made Cadie raise her eyebrows. Screw it, she thought. “Don’t you already know?”

That could have been a wink, a flinch, or a nervous tic. Whatever it was, he eyed her steadily afterward, his impression sliding incrementally into a frown. He wanted her to break, she thought, to look down or glance aside. Instead, she tilted her chin up slightly and stared down her nose, matching him frown for frown.

Finally, he snorted laughter, rolled his eyes, and shook his head. “All right.” He reached inside the jacket and palmed something from an inside pocket. Cadie’s hand had already closed around her butterfly knife when he rotated his wrist and revealed a personal omnicommunications device. State of the art, metallic purple matte finish, with a strokable texture. He drew his thumb across it and it popped open, revealing a screen. Her own image slid into focus, digitally sharp, a flash of her downturned finger beside her butt cheek and below that, the registration plate on her bike. “See?” he said. “No mystery about it.”

She relaxed, incrementally, but didn’t take her hand off the knife. “And this is how you get a date?”

“No,” he said. “This is how I make an offer. See, I know your name isn’t Cadence Grange.”

She thought she kept the reaction off her face. She’d practiced in the mirror. But the pierced handle of her knife left raised bumps in her palm as her fist clenched.

That was fine. Homer couldn’t see her hand in her pocket, and the edge of the table would hide it if her forearm had bulged. “Really? That’s news to me.”

His grin broadened a little at her denial. “Now how did I know you were going to pull that bluff?”

He shook his head without taking his gaze off her, a cat intent at a crevice. Cadie wondered if he could hear the knocking of her heart, if he somehow knew about the cold sweat on her palms and the way her stomach twisted in nausea.

“All right, fine.” He lowered his voice. “Cadence Grange wasn’t always your name.”

He reached for a fry while Cadie—despite herself—froze like a scared rabbit. He dipped the fry in ketchup, ate it, and made a face that made her wonder if he was mugging for his audience of one like a bad movie villain, or if he honestly thought he was funny. What kind of narcissism did it take, to try to entertain someone while you were leading her to the gallows?

He washed the mouthful down, rattling ice as he slurped, and said, “I know that people are looking for you and her. And it would be very bad for you both if they found you. Your real first name is Scarlet, like the color. You are technically still married to a foreign national, and not only is Firuza Grange also an assumed name—I assume because of her kidnapping risk—but she’s also not your daughter.”

“Stop.” She said it softly, but her voice brought him up short. She is my daughter, asshole.

The voice in her head that said it was answered by others, though, as always. The one that said, Stepdaugher. And the one that answered, And if she is, why can’t you stand to look at her?

They sat in silence for a moment, staring at each other across the worn Formica tabletop, through air that stank of rapidly cooling grease and overcooked hamburger.

“What do you want?” Cadie asked, when she could gather herself to say anything.

Homer shook the ice against the sides of the paper cup. The gesture made the tags on his steel bracelet rattle. “I want to help.”

HOMER’S ride was racked up outside the burger joint, where he must have left it when he came around the corner to fetch her. Cadie had inadvertently locked her own bike a few slots down and she rehearsed her options while she released it. She could make a break for it—no telling how good Homer was on his wheels, but almost nobody could keep up with Cadie through downtown if she really didn’t want to be kept. But if she tried to ditch him, he had her registration, which meant he knew her address of record, and he would have no problem finding out who she ran packages for.

Cadie had plans for vanishing, like any good fugitive. But before she could use them, she’d have to shake Homer and get a message to the crèche—which had its own more than adequate security and evacuation policies, the reason Cadie had chosen it over any number of legitimate residential co-rearing facilities.

That, and Taras wouldn’t get cooperation from the Detroit families, if he came looking. There weren’t any favors there for him to collect, and enough bad blood—Cadie hoped—to make a smoke screen thick enough to conceal her and Firuza.

Homer might be decoying her someplace private to do her harm, but he hadn’t made an aggressive move when they were alone in the alley outside the crèche, and she certainly hadn’t grown less wary of him since. And if he was working for Taras, then Taras already knew where she was, and by the time she got back to the crèche, Firuza would be gone.

The possibility made her miskey the release. She dried her palms on her trousers before she tried a second time.

Taras, though. It would be like him to bring her back so he could make her regret the error of her ways specifically and in detail. But games of cat and mouse, wasting time distracting her, that would be out of character. He’d take her out and get what he had come for without unfortunate sentiment. He was efficient. Focused.

She’d found it attractive as hell once, before she’d learned what he was efficient and focused about. Before she’d had it demonstrated by way of Erzabet, Firuza’s biological mother, that efficient and focused were only manifestations of ruthlessness.

When she’d confronted him on his affair, she hadn’t expected his response to be her rival’s corpse. He would have killed Firuza too, if she’d asked: she was sure of it.

Instead she’d asked for the little girl as a gift, and Taras—magnanimous as always, as long as you kept him pleased—had had his daughter delivered in a basket.

No. If Homer were working for Taras, Cadie would already be as dead as Erzabet. Cadie wondered if there were a woman for whom her own murder would now serve as a gift. She wondered whether Taras’ father had wooed his mother with similar offerings.

She couldn’t trust Homer. She couldn’t trust anyone—Taras had taught her that. But she could grit her teeth and pretend to trust Homer at least as far as she could throw him, at least as long as it took to learn what his game was.

Pretending to trust didn’t mean being stupid, though. She triggered an emergency code on her omni as she slung one leg over her frame in unison with Homer’s mount-up, and she felt the better for doing it. If it wasn’t already too late, somebody would be getting Firuza out of harm’s way even now. If the staff at the crèche hadn’t been bought out. If—

When Homer pushed off, Cadie followed. They glided into moderate traffic like two fish entering the school. Homer’s ride was as scarred as his shoes, gray-painted and dull looking, but Cadie knew a little about bikes, and the frame under that sloppy coat of primer was titanium alloy. She thought she could name the brand from the silhouette, if there were a sudden quiz.

Walking with a bike would have been awkward, but so was trying to talk while pedaling through city traffic. Conversation would have to wait for their destination. She still did pull up next to him in a lull in traffic and called, “Where are we going?”

Maybe that grin was intended to be encouraging, to make this all feel like an adventure. Maybe if she hadn’t been shaking with adrenaline and doubt, she could have grinned back.

As it was, if she’d been carrying a stick, she would have spoked the motherfucker.

HE only made her chase him for about ten kilometers by the odometer on her handlebars. Traffic, growing lighter in the dark, had all but dried up by the time they pulled in to the driveway of an unassuming, treeless ranch house with the interstate running through its back yard. A bike rack stood by the door, screened from the road by a piece of weathered stockade that looked like it had been assembled from salvaged fencing materials. Four bikes—none of them quite as battered or nondescript as Homer’s ride—were already racked. Homer dropped his into the fifth slot and engaged the lock.

Cadie followed suit, but rather than locking in she just touched the key and let her hand slide off again. Sometimes, the option of a quick getaway was worth a little risk.

She took two deep breaths to slow her heart and put herself at Homer’s shoulder as he centered before the door. The tags on his left wrist rattled when he reached for the handle. A biometric scanner concealed in the knob glowed blue through his palm for a moment before the lock clicked.

How many women are injured or die because they’re not willing to seem impolite?

She waited while Homer considered, nodded, and stepped in front of her. Sending him in first wasn’t a lot of protection, but at least it meant he wouldn’t be between her and the door if there were an ambush. She thought about trying to jam the lock as she passed through, but the attempt would be obvious and the chances of it working were small. She settled for leaving the door ajar, and was momentarily surprised that he didn’t reach behind her to latch it.

The only person waiting inside the cozily-lit living room was a woman of average height, her gray hair pulled back in a bun and secured with chopsticks—a hairstyle Cadie wasn’t sure she’d seen in over a decade. Not in America, anyway. Cadie knew her bias against men was unreasonable. She knew she shouldn’t have felt a tickle of relief, but logic didn’t enter into it. Women were comforting. They meant safety and allies.

Cadie stayed beside the door, making no effort to conceal her assessment of the living room and its contents. A little box of a space, furnished in thrift-shop chic. The green velvet sofa was at least a hundred years old, and probably had not been reupholstered in half that. The wallpaper was peeling, and as Cadie’s eyes adjusted, she realized that the lamps on the end tables generated their shimmering light from kerosene, not electricity.

“No, thank you.” She wanted to fold her arms, but it was smarter to keep her hands free in case she needed them. “Who are you?”

The woman smiled, but did not rise. “Stephanie Shearer. Yes, before you ask, it’s my real name.”

Whatever that means. It sounded like the sort of name an unimaginative writing team would assign to a superhero’s girlfriend.

Cadie said, “That’s a precise but useless answer. What do you want from me?”

She felt Homer shift his balance slightly away. So he respected Shearer, and was possibly a little afraid of her response to Cadie’s defiance. Either that, or he disapproved of the defiance itself, in isolation from Shearer’s potential response.

Shearer said, “So how did a nice California girl wind up married to the Russian mob?”

“It’s a long story.” Cadie could picture the conversation like intersecting fingers, locked at the base but pointing in incompatible directions, pushing against one another. They could fence forever, and get nowhere. “Look. Stephanie. You already have me at a disadvantage. You know who I am, what I’m worried about. You have to have a pretty good idea of what I can do for you, or you wouldn’t have had Homer here contact me. You can’t imagine that I’m going to hand you any additional advantages until you give me a corner to stand on, here. What do you want from me?”

Cadie shook her head as if to clear her ears, but her understanding of the word still hanging almost visibly in the air between them didn’t change. She had to restrain herself from glancing sideways at Homer, as if to share an eyeroll with him. Not that he was a likely source of solidarity, but—any port in a storm. “You’re nuts.”

“Not at all.” Now Shearer stood, revealing herself to be of average height and build, and—by her movement—younger than she looked. Or perhaps she merely kept herself in excellent shape. She did limp heavily on one side, however, and Cadie wondered if it were a transitory or a permanent hurt. “Let me tell you about brand name loyalty.”

This time, Cadie glanced at Homer before she could stop herself. He was regarding her with amusement, and she didn’t think it was directed at Shearer. “You are deliberately wasting my time, Stephanie.”

The irritation was a pose. The more of her time they wasted, the longer Cadie could stall, the more time the crèche had to spirit Firuza to safety. A first-class evacuation protocol was one of the reasons Cadie paid such a premium for Firuza’s registration there.

“Brand names,” Shearer said as if she had not heard Cadie’s challenge, “represent a particularly successful exploit of basic human psychology. They work because of the metrics humans use to assign trust.”

“You distrust me now because you don’t know me. But in general, when you do begin to trust a person, it is because you know them, or you know people who know them, and can vouch for them. And you trust the word of certain people more than others, because you know them to be ethical, or well-informed. It’s a reputation economy.”

“So a brand name is in essence a fake person you can feel like you know. The psychology is pretty simple.”

Homer cleared his throat and added, “And totally cynical, in application, because there is no person back there. No reputation to rely on. No sense of ethics. A corporate board, which has the same sense of morals as a stiff dick.”

Cadie leaned against the doorframe, careful not to nudge the door itself shut. This time, she let herself fold her arms, needing the sense of support. “I’m really not following why you are telling me this.” At length, but she kept that part to herself. She didn’t need to antagonize these people.

“It’s a philosophy,” Shearer said. “We want you to understand why we’ve approached you and why it is that you should help us. We’ve approached you because of reputation. Your personal reputation. Because you were willing to go up against Taras Boyko to protect the life of a child to whom you have no biological connection, and against whom you have reason to harbor a good deal of resentment.”

She shrugged, a fatalistic gesture that Cadie took as confirmation of her—Cadie’s—grasp of the obvious. Nearer by, however, Cadie saw the corner of Homer’s mouth twitch. “We want you to do something for us. Something dangerous.”

Good guys. Sorry. Right. But Cadie didn’t say that either. “Then stop yanking my chain, please. Or my leg. Or whatever it is you’re pulling until it’s about to come off with a pop. What do you want, and why should I help you?”

Shearer wasn’t done with Cadie that easily, though. She smiled and glanced at Homer, who shook his head. “I always forget what it’s like, dealing with people who’ve been living outside for too long. Cadence, who do you think your crèche turns to in order to evacuate threatened children? Who do you think is most interested in raising children away from government programming? We know you can barely afford the residential program Firuza is registered for.”

She couldn’t stop the nervous scrape of tongue and teeth across her lips, and cursed herself for how much it gave away. “What do you want with my daughter?”

“Interesting philosophical question,” Homer said. “Is your spouse’s bastard child still technically your stepchild? Or is it some other kind of nonbiological relationship?”

The sharp chill along Cadie’s spine intensified. She was good at keeping her expression impassive—a skill she’d perfected while living in Taras’s house—but apparently her poker face wasn’t good enough this time, because Homer and Shearer shared a significant glance, and Shearer said, “We’re not going to hold her hostage. We’ll help you take care of her whether you assist us or not.”

Rather than easing the tension across her shoulders and neck, the nonchalance in his statement brought it into sharp focus. “You’re giving me my child back. Just like that. What if I tell you I don’t want your help?”

“We’ll try to convince you otherwise.” Homer shrugged. “We don’t operate that way.”

Shearer smiled. “We’re the good guys.” She limped a few steps away, as if giving Cadie room to think clearly. But once she got there she turned back and twisted her hands together earnestly. “And we want you to be one of the good guys too. Human neural hardwiring is deeply tribal, at the bottom of it. One builds trust by mutual cooperation. It’s like branding, only there are real people standing behind it.” She jingled her tags, a shimmer of sound like a glass wind chime. “To want to help us, you have to trust us. To build that trust, we offer you help, first. I realize we have some work to do with you—”

Cadie grimaced. “I mistakenly married a Ukrainian mobster,” she said. “He killed his mistress while we were married, and claimed he’d done it as a gift to me. It’s not the sort of mistake you want to make twice in a lifetime.”

Homer shifted his feet. “You know, when Bluebeard tells you not to look in that little room under the stairs…”

It shocked Cadie into laughing. When she finished, she reached for the chair beside the door, the one she had been standing next to. She turned it slightly so it faced Shearer—the scrape of its legs on the gritty floor set her teeth on edge—and dropped into it, decisively. “—It’s time to ask for a divorce, yes. Are you going to tell me what you want from me?”

They looked at each other again. Homer shrugged. “You have a route out of eastern Europe,” Shearer said. “One Taras Boyko obviously does not know about, or knows how to monitor. And if he doesn’t, it’s a safe bet that nobody in government does either. We need it. There are people there who want to join us. You’re our hope of getting them out.”

“Oh,” Cadie said, when the silence had gone on long enough to make her shift from buttock to buttock with discomfort. “I see what you mean about dangerous, now.”

SCARLET. In Russian, the word for “red” was the same as the word for “beautiful,” as Taras has more than once reminded her. Another reason Cadie had been only too eager to leave her name behind. Not just because it was also his name, but because he had managed to ruin the part that wasn’t.

Shearer paused to pull a cane out of the stand beside the door, and then gestured Cadie and Homer after her as she led them down the short hall toward the back of the ratty little house. As she followed past the rear rooms of the house, Cadie made herself breathe evenly and calmly, and keep her hand from knotting around the butterfly knife in her pocket. She didn’t need any more dents in her hand.

Cadie asked, “So, do you live here? In this house? It’s a sort of safe house?”

Homer shrugged. “Who lives anywhere, anymore? We’re digital nomads.” When he patted the omni on his belt, his tags jingled. “Where my data is, that’s my home. Stuff is just stuff. Almost anything can be replaced, or rented.”

A lesson Cadie had learned hard and well. When it’s time to run, you run, and don’t worry about your suitcase. Still she said, “You’ve given me a lot of ammunition. It makes me wonder how you’re lying to me.”

She wasn’t sure why she gave them that. Frustration. The urge to provoke. The hope that if she made Shearer and Homer angry, one of them would let something slip past the facade.

Whatever response she anticipated, it wasn’t that Shearer would snicker behind her hand. “Honestly,” Shearer said, as if speaking to a ridiculous ten year old, “What do you expect anyone could do to us? Confiscate our goods? We don’t own any. Send us to jail? We’re not doing anything illegal, short of a little trespassing, although I suppose they could legislate against us. But if that happens, we just move on. We’re pioneers, Miss Grange. We’re leaving your stratified society behind and building something new.”

Shearer shifted her weight entirely to her crutch on the left side, and with her other hand threw open the door at the end of the hall. Wet, warm air and green light enveloped Cadie, as if that door led into a jungle. She half-expected birdsong.

Shearer ushered her forward. Framed in the door, Cadie stopped short, one foot still raised. Slowly, she put it down. The walls of what must have once been the master bedroom had been torn off, the spaces between the framing replaced with heavy billows of translucent plastic and glass walls constructed of a mosaic of car windows fixed together with lathing and caulk. Just within those stood tall racks, reaching from floor to ceiling, that looked as if they had been assembled from old car bumpers.

The racks were full of tanks, and the tanks were full of plants. Tomatoes, cucumbers, gourds, melons. Things Cadie didn’t at first glance recognize. The air smelled green and sharp, fecund. She breathed deeply by reflex, and had to remind herself not to enjoy it. “A garden?”

When she looked over, Homer was grinning. “Distributed resources,” he said. “There are a lot of abandoned homes in Detroit. Some of them are petroleum farms, some are food farms. All salvaged materials. We have our own network. All salvaged materials.”

“Salvaged?” The planters were old-fashioned, plastic gallon milk jugs. Cadie reached out and touched the nearest, setting if swinging slightly. Moisture dewed her fingertip. She rubbed the pads together, thinking she would like to taste it.

“All you need to live,” said Shearer. “Food, water, a place to sleep, protection from the elements, connectivity. Exploitation of natural resources, manufacturing—stuff—is a dead technology, Miss Grange. The world needs to invent something new. New ways to live. We’ve proven that upsizing and globalization really don’t work as well as we’d hoped. Economies of scale make stuff cheaper, but they also demand that we move stuff from place to place, and create demand for stuff that’s really not needed. And so rapid growth may lead to rapid collapse. With modern communications, you don’t need to be big anymore to be diversified.”

“More than the first steps,” she said. “The federal government has been manufacturing petroleum in landfills for years, by seeding them with bacteria that consume organic material—but manufacturing synthetic oil doesn’t help address issues of carbon load and climate change. And burning those hydrocarbons returns carbon load to the atmosphere that was previously trapped in discarded consumer goods. Growing carbon-negative crops and processing those into synthetic petroleum may be more helpful, but surely it’s even more helpful to stop shipping your food from Costa Rica?”

Cadie thought of the oranges at the market, trucked from Florida at perfectly daunting prices. She touched a broad-leafed plant by the greenhouse door. “This is a banana.”

“We know you very well.” Shearer folded both hands together on the handle of her prop. “Besides, what are you going to do to us? Tell your ex-husband that we plan to smuggle a few random Ukrainians out of Kiev? I don’t think so. Inform the authorities? You’re no more a threat to us than a knife is to water, Miss Grange.”

It was just like Kiev. When order crumbled, something rose to fill the vacuum. Something like Taras.

Cadie thought of people trapped where she had been trapped, without the resources she’d had. At least she’d had money. Taras had never minded if she spent money. Giving her things was a way to keep her dependent, to ensure loyalty. She touched the shiny leaves of the banana again. “So you want to use me as a tool.”

“No,” Homer said. “We want you to be an ally. Come on, we’ve got something else to show you. We need to take a little drive.”

“Your bike will still be here when you get back, if you decide you need it.”

THE other presumed bicyclists had never materialized, though their rigs were still by the back door. However, out of deference to Shearer’s infirmity, when Cadie and the others left the little house with a freeway in its yard, they took a tiny hybrid car with Homer driving and Cadie scrunched into the backseat, pondering.

Perhaps it indicated a lack of imagination on her part, but she was having a hell of a time figuring out the catch. And like the feral animal she’d become, that in itself made her wary. If you couldn’t see the trap, it still stood to reason that there might be one.

She had ceased to worry about simple abduction or a hit, at least. If they wanted her, they’d had her the second she walked into that weird gutted house that grew like a leaf off the dying stem of 1-75. There was no reason to string her along like this, except for a con, and a con would have been appealing to her greed or vanity by now. Of course, there was always the possibility that they were exactly as they seemed…

Cadie folded her hands in her lap and resigned herself to wait. Wait, and ask questions, as Detroit purred past outside the hybrid’s windows. The little car only made louder sounds when it struck rutted pavement. Cadie wondered how it stood up to the mess of Detroit’s alleged streets.

Homer didn’t glance away from the windshield. “We found her.” A flat informative answer, and a very good point.

Cadie settled against the back of the chair, folding her arms over the safety belt. Her butterfly knife gouged her hip.

“You haven’t explained yet how you live without…stuff,” she said. “Everybody needs stuff. Clothes, cooking utensils. Sheets and blankets. Vacuum cleaners. Lawn mowers.”

“Your lawn.” She craned her neck so she could look at Cadie over her shoulder, frowning. “How often do you mow it?”

Cadie paused, thinking back to Taras, his house, the staff and the manicured lawns. Just picturing the place—a dacha, by which he meant palace—had her swallowing nausea. He’s on the other side of the world, she lectured herself. He can’t get to you here.

Except if she did what these weird people wanted her to do, she might be leading him right to her.

Anyway, regular people probably didn’t mow as often as Taras’ gardeners did. “Once a week,” she said, trying to sound like she wasn’t guessing.

“Well, no,” Shearer said. “Because sometimes people want to mow their lawn at the same time—everybody on Sunday afternoon, right? And sometimes it’s dark out. But you can have one lawn mower for ten houses. Or fifteen. Or you can all chip in for a lawnmower and then take turns mowing all the lawns. Say you have one lawnmower and ten yards. You mow five lawns Saturday, your neighbor mows five lawns Sunday, and then both of you are off the hook for a month. And collectively, you have saved the price—and the resource drain—of nine lawnmowers. I mean, it would be more sensible not to mow the lawn at all, but people like short cropped grass. You have to work within the sacrifices people are willing to make, and take it slow. Once they realize how much cheaper it is to share equipment, living space, and so on—a lot of them come around. We’re really a quite communal species, the last couple of hundred years excepted. We’ve built bridges and mills and fences and barns as a team for centuries. When we’ve become conscious of the advertising messages that surround us constantly, exhorting us to own things—the shinier and more expensive the better—we adapt remarkably well to sharing. Collective child-rearing is already making a comeback; it’s just too hard to bring a baby up alone. Here.”

She thrust her hand into the back seat. A metal circle like a medieval seneschal’s key ring dangled from her fingers, a single pierced silvery tag swinging from it. “Take this.”

“It entitles you to access our resources—as an apprentice, in a limited way. More tags are awarded for contributions. It’s a means of keeping the unscrupulous from gaming the system. And of rewarding labor, which is one of the problems Utopian communities have traditionally had. Well, that and attempting to move urban people into a rural lifestyle without the proper training or technology, so they more or less had nothing to do but starve and quarrel…but then, we’re a practical community rather than a Utopian one.”

Shearer paused, as if she was considering saying more. And then she shook her head and turned her face back to the road ahead, which now wound pockmarked and undermaintained through the sort of suburban war zones that had become unsupportable in the oil crunch. As they ventured deep into the Wilds, Cadie found herself watching carefully, as if spotting a potential threat along the side of the road would help them avoid it. There were gangs out here, packs of the disenfranchised, squatters and petty warlords. Nobody went out of the city if they could help it.

Cadie slid a little lower in her seat, half-expecting a roadblock or a group of armed men to materialize in front of them. She’d heard stories of cars stripped, of office buildings and grocery stores and homes sacked and occupied. Very small city-states, she thought, swallowing a nervous giggle.

Dubiously, Cadie fastened the ring around her wrist and shook it so the lone tag made a shimmering sound against the band. It sounded pretty. “And are you taking me to your community?”

Homer took a hand off the wheel to gesture. “Our community is everywhere. A core is easy to uproot. A distributed model—”

“Like water to a knife, right.” Cadie meant to sound ironic and arch, but it didn’t quite come out that way. These people were so obviously true believers, fanatics. Adrenaline chilled her as a sickening suspicion took hold. “You guys aren’t the ones who commandeered that skyscraper, are you?”

But Shearer snorted with such obvious dismissal that Cadie instantly felt like an idiot for asking. And then felt like an idiot for feeling like an idiot, because what was to stop Shearer from lying to her until she gave them what they wanted?

Homer caught Cadie’s eye in the mirror. “We come or go, more or less as we please. Some of us hold down outside jobs, like Stephanie.” He shrugged. “Some of us do not.”

Cadie scrunched her legs around behind his seat, trying to encourage blood flow. The bracelet was a weight on her wrist; it seemed like she could hear the tag shimmer every time she so much as took a breath. The sound made her as conscious of every tiny motion as if a predator watched her. “How much longer?”

Homer pulled the car onto a narrow road that wound through a heavy copse of trees. An ivy-covered sign, unreadable, made Cadie think this’ must be the remains of an abandoned office park. Somebody had laid truckloads of gravel over the ruined asphalt, so the driveway was smoother than the municipal road that led to it.

“LIKE industrialization and the black satanic mills, globalization is a failed model that nevertheless we have to pass through to invent the next modality.” Even holding the car door for Cadie, Shearer was still lecturing. And Cadie was still listening, though she was starting to find some intelligent questions.

“So who makes the stuff you can’t salvage?” she asked. “The stuff you hold in common? Does your society work without an industrial society to…to parasitize?”

Shearer grinned. “Maybe not. But industrial society has it coming. Allez-oop,” Propped on the open door, she offered Cadie a hand, and Cadie—despite her better judgment regarding Shearer’s frailty—accepted it. She tried to use the frame of the auto as her primary source of lift for standing, but the older woman’s strength surprised her. In reflected light, Cadie could see where parking lots had once been. Now, the rustle of tall corn filled the night.

Here, there were people. Men and women moved along pathways lit by solar-powered LED lamps stuck on spikes into the grass, so Cadie had very little sense of their faces, forms, or how they were dressed. But she heard the click of high heels and the rubbery thud of heavy boots, the scuff of sneakers. And the light high Tinker-Bell shimmer of tags ringing on each other as their wearers moved.

Everyone seemed casually busy and a few were far more intent—obviously in a hurry. But some passersby still glanced at Cadie and her escorts, and several greeted Shearer and Homer with a word or a wave. Cadie found herself hiding half-behind Homer, sticking close to his heels like an uncertain dog or a child.

“I’m going to let Homer take you around,” Shearer said. “My hip has had enough.”

Homer studied her with a concerned expression, but his only response was a nod. “I’ll meet you in the lounge.”

Shearer winked before she turned away. “Make sure you take her up to the roof.”

Inside, they paused in a glass-roofed atrium full of potted chest-tall fruit trees. The heavy scent of oranges filled the air, sharp enough to wrinkle Cadie’s nose. The space was not brightly lit; instead, strands of fairy-light LEDs strung overhead gave illumination enough to walk by. And as with outside, there were people walking. A woman in blue jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up tended the orange and lime trees, dropping fruit into a basket that curved around her hip. A man surrounded by six or seven school-age children climbed the wide stair to the mezzanine level, and a security guard or receptionist or both looked up from behind the desk beside the doors. Her entire head and body except her face was enveloped in a hijab and chador, but based on her gimlet-eyed appraisal of them as they entered, Cadie did not think the concealing garments would slow her down at all. After her inspection, she nodded, though Cadie caught her rechecking Cadie’s wrist for the bracelet before she looked down.

When Cadie stuffed her hand into her pocket the tag caught on the fabric, keeping her from reaching easily to the bottom. She was still following Homer like a duckling, head down so her dreads hid her expression, but she had to steal glances at the flock of children climbing the stairs and Homer caught her.

She imagined Firuza laughing with these children, flocking with them like so many noisy starlings. Her own childhood had been play groups and educational trips and team sports in the summertime, and she wondered what it was like to grow up surrounded by foster siblings. Did their caretakers watch them? Make sure nobody got bullied, that the little ones got their fair share?

Everybody in San Diego must think she was dead by now. She wondered what they had done, when the emails and phone calls had stopped coming. Had they worried?

“You have your own crèche?” she asked, as they reached the bottom of the flight themselves. The kids and their minder vanished through a door at the top of the stairs.

“School,” he said. “Not crèche. They stay with their guardians at night. Guardians or parents,” he amended. “They’re probably on their way home now. Distributed model also makes child rearing that much easier.”

She watched his shoulders rise and fall, and suffered a realization. “You have kids.”

“Had,” He paused at the top of the stair and waited, looking down at her until she caught him. “You’ll discover that a lot of people find us out of some kind of life trauma.”

This time, the shrug came with wide-spread hands. He looked at her, really looked at her, and she looked back just as hard. What she saw was a skinny sallow-skinned person with acne scars across the tops of his cheeks, one who didn’t look down when she stared right at him. It’s about people, too, she realized. You can’t do what they want to do without people.

A bank of elevators waited silent immediately before them, but two had the buttons taped over, and the third bore a hand-lettered sign that read ARE YOU SURE? Cadie found the implied faith in personal judgment refreshing, and was about to say so to Homer, but he was already vanishing up a stair. He paused just inside to hold the door for her, and she ran a couple of steps to catch up.

“Farther up and further in,” she said, but Homer looked at her blankly. “Nevermind,” she finished with a wince.

He didn’t seem concerned about it anyway. He led her up three flights at a trot that made her glad of the time she spent in a bicycle saddle, and then out into a corridor that connected on either end to a broad open space broken up by partial-height walls. “A cube farm?” Cadie asked.

“Former cube farm,” he said, and led her out into the walkways between the once-beige fabric walls.

Somebody with little concern for corporate image had been at them with fabric paints and glitter glue, illuminating the cubes with vivid primitive paintings of macaws and monkeys, sea turtles and sloths. Even in the LED fairylight, the colors were stunning enough that Cadie wished she were seeing them by daylight. Curtains—repurposed blankets, draperies, and shower curtains—hung across the doorway of each cube, and from inside some of them Cadie could hear the click of keypads or the rustle of cloth. One or two stood open, empty, revealing futon mattresses with neatly folded bedclothes, plastic crates set beside them to serve as storage and tables.

Homer cocked his finger like a gun and made an approving click. “Yours if you want to use them. First-come, first-served, though it becomes possible to make reservations with enough history of service. But as you can see, we’re rarely full.”

There were plants here too, racked in front of the floor to ceiling windows where they would break up the glare of the light. Cadie recognized potted strawberries, thyme, basil, rosemary, and sage.

Homer followed her line. “Wood sorrel,” he said, “It grows like a weed, and it’s tasty and full of vitamin C. We toss it in soup. Might as well. Here, follow me.”

He led her to another stair, this one in the corner of the building and boasting an old FIRE EXIT sign. Again, she climbed behind him, this time hearing the giggles of children echoing down the glass and cement stairwell. She was not sure if she wanted to catch them, or if what she really wanted was to clap her hands over her ears and block the sound away.

Whatever her conscious mind thought, her subconscious was sure. She only caught herself walking faster when she almost trod on Homer’s heels. “The person who painted the murals,” she said, when Homer turned back to see what the rush was. “Did she—he?—earn more tags for doing that?”

“Not just for that,” Homer said. “She’s kind of a polymath. But yes, that’s one of her contributions.”

“Okay,” Cadie said. “So really, it’s not all that different from anything else. Except instead of money, you get tags.…”

“Except, instead of contributing to an exploitative economy designed to line the pockets of the top capital holders, we’re contributing to a collective economy in which people know one another by reputation.”

“Then we split up,” Homer said. “Subdivide until we reach a sustainable level. Growth—getting as big as possible as fast as possible—is not the only way to survive. Think about dinosaurs and mammals.”

His grin was infectious. He pushed open the roof door and she followed him, surprised by the springiness of turf under her feet, and the sweetness of cool night air. She had, perhaps subconsciously, been expecting gravel and the reek of rubber roofing after a long day baking in the sun.

“Green roof,” she said, an exclamation of surprise, and felt Homer’s smug pleasure beside her.

“This is all ancient technology,” he said. “From turf roofs to cooperative agriculture. It’s just that for a while we got confused about progress, and hooked on the idea that it also means giving up what works.”

As they moved out into the darkness and Cadie’s eyes adjusted, she could make out the silhouettes of other people. First, the children she’d glimpsed earlier, not giggling and shoving now but standing in a close and cheerful huddle, gathered around something illuminated by the LED flashlight in their crouching instructor’s hand. Beyond them, a couple pulled each other close, watching the crescent moon rise over trees, the taller man’s head leaned on top of his lover’s.

Cadie stepped away from Homer, towards the huddle of children gathered around the puddle of bright green light. The instructor glanced up as she came close, registering her approach, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge her. Since he also made no move to exclude her, she rose up on tiptoe to see over the heads of the kids. They were gathered around an unprepossessing black beetle the size of a kidney bean, and as Cadie was wondering what, exactly, the point of the exercise was, the instructor took his thumb off the button on the LED flash and the light went out.

Her eyes took a moment to adjust to blackness and moonlight, the silver-limned figures of the hunched-over children and the high block wall of the roof edge beyond. Moonlight, she remembered from somewhere, is comprised of parallel rays, because it is reflected as if by a giant mirror. It’s cold—reflected light is cold—and it casts perfect sharp-edged shadows, because it does not scatter the way sunlight does. It turned each blade of grass into a slender knife of frost, and the pools of shadow under the children into bottomless wells. Twinkling green fairy lights flickered on and off overhead, casting no appreciable illumination, unlike the LED chains in the lobby.

That’s what Cadie thought, at least, until at the center of their gathering, a sharp signal flickered, a cold chemical light as green as the doused LED answering the flashes overhead. “Firefly,” she breathed, understanding, and bit her lip just in time to keep from embarrassing herself by saying it out loud.

“The female stays on the ground,” the instructor said. “Until she finds a male that flashes fast and bright enough to interest her. When that happens, she flashes back, to show him where to find her. Until she does that, the male doesn’t even know she’s there.”

“But then why don’t all the bad flashers get bred out?” It was a girl who asked the question, Cadie thought, though it was hard to tell from the voices in the dark. She wondered if Firuza had ever seen a firefly.

“That’s a really good question, Sabrina. See, there are other males, who aren’t such good flashers, and sometimes they wait until a female flashes at a male who is bright, and then try to get to her first and fool her. So they can pass on their genes by being tricky. Salazar, here, pick out a male, one of the flying ones. Take the LED and see if you can imitate the flashes well enough to get him to come down to you—”

In the intermittent backglow of the LED, Cadie could make out Salazar’s face. He might have been eight or nine years old, and as he looked up his expression was as perfectly intent as any scientist’s as he tried to pick one male firefly’s flash pattern out of the holding pattern overhead.

Cadie only realized she was holding her breath when Salazar’s silent concentration imploded around the sudden, unmistakable hail-pelting rattle of gunfire.

She hit the ground—or the roof—intuitively, sweeping Salazar and one of the other children into her arms and covering them with her body. Homer hit the turf beside her as the instructor began snapping orders to his charges, quick commands that spoke of faithful drill. As they all dropped to a crouch and began moving quickly and in good order towards the roof door, Cadie rolled to let the children she’d shielded scramble alongside their classmates. At the edge, the two men who had been watching the moonrise both went to their knees, peering over the wall like archers over a battlement. One—the shorter one—touched his headset. Cadie saw the blue light flicker live as he began to speak into it.

“Miss Grange,” he said. “Not everything is about you. Go with the nice man.”

Cadie thought about arguing, but Homer was already moving away from her while Ernie—Ernie must be the instructor—shooed eight-year-olds down the stairs single file, counting each child with a tap on the head as he or she passed. Cadie, bent double with her knees against her chest, ran to meet him.

“Homer says you’ll take care of me,” she said, when Ernie looked at her with elevated eyebrows. He’d doused the light inside the stairwell, but she could see his expression plainly by moonlight. She bit her lip and said, “Sorry. I’m new.”

It was the first real notion she’d had that Homer and Shearer’s hard sell was working. Ernie studied her for a second, dark thick hair falling in a wing across his forehead until he shook it back irritably. “Right,” he said. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be an asshole. Come with me.”

DOWN the stairs in the dark, without even the light of the LED flashlights to guide them. Only one floor, because this stairwell was at the corner of the building, and they would have been visible and vulnerable through the glass if anyone had cared to look up. The children stayed close to the center of the staircase, heads ducked, shoulders hunched as they crabbed down the flight. Cadie mimicked them, protecting the ones closest to her with her body as much as she could. The descent gave her a strobe-image series of glimpses of the firefight below, muzzle-flash and then a shuddering roar of water as defenders within and atop the besieged office building opened up with firehoses. Searchlights flooded the lawn and crop fields with light. Rows of corn shook with the passage of running bodies, like something out of a horror movie.

A child at the front of the file pressed her tags to a control panel by the door on the landing, and it slid open with a whisper of complaint. The kids ducked through, Ernie paused to usher Cadie through, and then he sealed the door behind.

Once the solid door was shut, the kids straightened up. Cadie tried to emulate them, fighting a contraction of her abdominal muscles as if someone had fastened her lower ribs to her pelvis with giant hog-nosed staples. By placing one hand on the wall and pushing against it, she managed to stand up tall, though she thought Ernie and all the kids could see her shoulders and knees shaking.

“It’s better than being shot at for real,” Ernie said, with a wink, and slapped her on the shoulder. “Come on, the panic room’s not far. Come on, kids, look sharp!”

Doors had closed across the corridors like airlocks, breaking each one into defensible segments, and Ernie opened each one with his tag and cleared the other side like a pro before he let them pass each one. He urged them into a trot, using his voice like a border collie’s bark to keep them both moving and close. Cadie was pretty sure herding children wasn’t supposed to be that easy.

Given the circumstances, she was happy to be herded as well. It’s easy to give up authority in crisis. Easy to do what you’re told. Easy to follow orders and let somebody else take responsibility. Easy to pretend you didn’t know what was going on.

She reached into her pocket and palmed her butterfly knife right-handed, slipped the pepper spray into the left. Caught the glance across the children’s heads that told her Ernie had seen her do it, and nodded agreement when the quick jerk of his head sent her up to the front of the line. She flipped the knife open, hiding it from the kids with her body. The motion made her tag ring on her bracelet with a clear sharp chime.

“Open the door,” Ernie said when they came to the next lock. Cadie brushed her tag against it and pushed it open with her shoulder, telling herself to be ready for whatever was on the other side.

Nothing, and the sharp beat of her heart left the taste of rotting metal in her mouth as she turned left, then right, and made doubly sure. Her pulse ratcheted down a half notch, and she was just about to slink forward and clear the offices opening off both sides when the door to the nearer one flipped back and she found herself face to face with a man with a gun.

She reacted almost without knowing it, taking in so many details in an instant—the stubble on his cheek, the way his gun shook in his hand. It was just adrenaline. She didn’t think for a moment that he would hesitate to shoot her.

Her left hand came up and she maced him in the face. His gun went off; the head-spinning boom almost blinded her. But he’d flinched, and the first bullet must have missed her, because she didn’t feel it hit. She stepped forward, the knife rising from her fist like a scorpion’s sting, and punched him under the ribs. Hard, something shoving her hand down. Thunder against the side of her head, a blow as if somebody had struck her on the ear with a cymbal. Hot air kicked against her cheek as the gun fired again and he staggered into her. The knife driving down her fist because he leaned against it, and how was she on her knees? How had that happened? He slumped on top of her, everything slippy and wet, his shirt tearing away from the knife blade so she could see the dark ink of the tattoos across his chest. Should his skin be that white under the red? Maybe all the blood was on the outside now. She fell under his weight, hard thump as her head hit the floor.

Her strength all swirled out of her like somebody had pulled a cork on a string.

SHE woke briefly at the bounce of the gurney as paramedics lifted her into place, woke again as they slid the trolley into the elevator—Are you sure? Cadie thought, unironically—and felt herself going under, swept along a tumble of semiconsciousness and battered on its rocks. “I need my daughter sent them,” she said, or tried to say, but there was something over her nose and mouth and the paramedics looked at her as uncomprehendingly as farm animals.

She would have panicked—she tried to panic—but even the adrenaline could not keep her above water when the tide of exhaustion swept over her again.

THE next awakening was gentler. Gray, soft, in cool sheets. Someone beside her, because Cadie could hear the breathing. She turned her head and opened her eyes, and found herself face to face with Stephanie Shearer.

The rustle of sheets must have alerted Shearer, because she looked up from her omni—opened flat in reader mode—and smiled. “Awake pretty fast,” she said, and folded the omni away.

Cadie made a noise that she meant to be a word, but it came out as more of a wheeze.

“Sorry,” said Shearer. “I can’t give you a drink. The bullet perforated your intestine. But it’s all fixed now, and you can have a swab. Will that help?”

Helplessly, Cadie nodded. She managed to raise a hand to take the soaked sponge on a stick that Shearer handed her. There wasn’t enough water in it, but it did ease the stickiness on her tongue and palate. A few moments later, she managed to croak, “What happened?”

Shearer took the swab away. “You got shot. And then managed to knife the shooter fatally. Don’t worry, we have very good lawyers, and you’re unlikely to be charged.”

“Firuza,” Cadie said. She tried to make it sound like a question, but she couldn’t get her voice to lift at the end.

“Safe in the Cascades. We have a place there.” Shearer smiled, dunking the swab in the water glass again. “Distributed living. You can go see her as soon as you’re well enough. I mean, assuming you want to stay with us.”

Cadie wasn’t ready to think about that yet. So she said, “You were the artist.”

“On the cubicles.” Her voice was coming back. “You painted the cubicles in the dormitory.”

“Busted,” Shearer said, smiling. “You saw me coming. I thought they needed something to make them feel like home.” She rummaged in her pocket, came up with something, and laid it on the bedside table with a soft chime.

Cadie lifted her head to look, aware now of the tug of needles in her left hand. It was the circular bracelet, and now—she saw—there were three tags on it. “Is that mine?”

“Can’t keep you on probation when you’ve gotten shot defending us,” Shearer said. “What do you say?”

So did Cadie, though it made her head spin. “All right.” Then she pressed her head back into the pillow and closed her eyes against the dizziness. “I’ll do it. You know the thing about your Utopia—”

She didn’t open her eyes to look at Shearer, but she felt the tension, heard the creak of her chair as she leaned forward. Shearer said, “It’s not a Utopia. It’s just maybe something that sucks a little less. And it’s not mine.”

“Yeah,” Cadie said. “Whatever.” It took a minute for her to gather her strength. “This will never work.”

A longer silence this time, until Shearer said, “It’s hope. Even if it fails. It’s hope. We need hope. We need to learn to trust the people we ought to trust again.”

“Yeah.” Cadie swallowed. Her throat still ached with dryness. She wondered if she had enough strength to ask for the swab again. “I can’t argue with that.”

THE RED IN THE SKY IS OUR BLOOD

ELIZABETH BEAR