Ziegler’s car drops me off after every session and takes me right back to where he met me, but not today. Today I ask the car to take me to the Smithsonian.
“I am contracted for one single ride,” Gaia informs me. “Further trips will have to be approved by Mr. Ziegler.”
“Just drop me off there,” I say, “then you can go back to him.” Ziegler mentioned Alala, and she’s definitely an option, but there was a time I used to do these things for myself, by myself. Maybe I should start doing that again.
“Thank you,” Gaia says. It took some adjusting, talking to the voices of people that aren’t actually real—in cars and stores and pretty much everywhere else. It’s easier in so many ways because Gaia—disembodied and run by software, not even close to human—isn’t going to judge me the way that people sometimes do.
I lean back and shut my eyes for a second, rub my eyelids. I don’t know what I’m hoping to get out of going to the Smithsonian. I can’t get into the Archives and I won’t try. Ziegler’s right about that part. There will be guards, because everything is guarded. There’s every chance they’ll identify me as it is, as soon as I set foot in there, into the eyes of their security cameras. I would risk everything on an impulse and I’d lose.
It’s so tiring being here.
It’s not how I dreamed it would be.
Every other car on the road is just like this one. I can see into their seats if their windows aren’t dimmed: the smiling families, the people in business suits on their way to conferences or lunches, the kids being ferried around and taken where they need to go. There’s nobody like me. Nobody is looking around with the same awe at this place, feeling uncomfortable surrounded by so much comfort. They’re used to it. I’m not sure that I’ll ever get used to being here.
As we drive, the buildings get taller and taller. I crane my neck to look at them, to try and see where they peak, where they touch the sky. Soon the streets are too dense, and I shade my eyes against the glare of the glass. And then we’re in the part where the towers give way to the very center of the city.
When they rebuilt Washington, they concentrated on the infrastructure. That’s how they describe everything—the layout, the areas, the people who live here. The city is structured like a wheel, with the oldest part—the bit that’s meant to be protected, with all the buildings full of important people, important information—in the middle. And there’s grass and parks as well, green and luscious and nurtured. You’ll be driving along the road, hemmed in by buildings, then suddenly everything drops away and you’re surrounded by white stone and polished marble and iron statues. The streets are three times as wide as anywhere else in the city and there are gardens and fountains and a general sense of luxury.
Now the car pulls up outside one of the buildings. “This is as close as I can get,” it tells me. I’ve never been able to tell if it’s meant to be male or female. Probably that’s the point.
The buildings here are hundreds of years old. My favorites are the oldest-looking ones: big, whitewashed walls, spired roofs, windows that stretch almost from the awning to the ground, stone chipped away at the edges. They’re even older than Australia was. There are weapon scanners when you go inside the buildings—the city officials are worried about terror attacks just like everybody is—but they’re still welcoming. Everybody is allowed to learn the history of where we came from and what we went through.
No. Not we. They. I went through something very different.
When I was first finding my feet in the city, I came here a lot. Some of the museums here have art, some have furniture, some deal exclusively with war. But I like the one that’s a tribute to what the world was like before anyone who’s now alive saw it: a history of everything that went before.
I go through the enormous, polished-wood doors and let the realization hit me like it always does: I’m looking at something that doesn’t exist anymore. This is a dinosaur. Tyrannosaurus Rex, the holo in front of it says; it’s all jaws and teeth sticking from exposed bone, a snarl on its skull. The world’s most fearsome predator. Its name is from the ancient Greek words for Tyrant and Lizard; and then Rex, which means King. Nearby, other smaller skeletons rear up and prowl, animals throughout history posed as if they’re encircling the biggest dinosaur, as if they worship it—or maybe as if they’re getting ready to attack. It’s hard to tell. The smallest, a Velociraptor according to the holo, is the scariest. Its teeth are sharpened to terrifying points, its claws like thick, curved knives. And velociraptors are fast, the holo says. Fast is sometimes much scarier than big.
I stop now and look at it. I picture my head in its mouth, the vision coming from nowhere. The big one might share Rex’s name, but this little one is what reminds me of her most—smaller, vicious, more dangerous.
Corridors lead off from the central lobby and people mill through them. Words hang in the air directing you to the various sections of the museum: A WORLD BEFORE US, THE GROUND BENEATH OUR FEET, LIFE UNDER A MICROSCOPE, THE BEASTS AND THE BURDEN, WHEN WE FELL. It’s this last one that I walk toward. This passageway is the quietest by far. Most people don’t want to be reminded of their mistakes, or the mistakes of their parents, or their grandparents. They want to go further back—to a time when stories weren’t even written down, when they were passed along, verbally, generation to generation. And that’s how it was for me, and how the lies of what happened to us—why we were on that ship, where we came from—were set. But now? The closest history I can learn is more interesting than the furthest.
The corridor opens into a hall, a diorama at the far end showing the city as it once was, before they set the infrastructure. It was smaller, more squat. There was more green. Most importantly, there was no wall to cordon it off from the rest of the world, keeping the temperatures down and those in the wilderness out. It used to be so much messier than it is now, more organic. You can see the freeway as it roared into the city and the aquarium—a towering building that swelled to bursting in the heat—one of the first major casualties (the brief plaque in front of it says) the metal that held it together splitting and spilling its innards across the road it sat upon. There’s the palatial house where the president used to live, one of the oldest buildings in the city, with tunnels and secret places below it. When the heat kicked in—when the riots started as the evacuations left people here to die—the building was torn apart. When they rebuilt the city and let the people back in, they put up a statue in tribute.
I walk around the diorama and on the other side there’s a model of the city as it is now: surrounded by the sweltering wasteland where once there were suburbs, the borders between city and wasteland extreme and enforced, the Wall—the Bastion—so large and encompassing. An explanation of how it works: chilled air generated in turbines along its length is pumped into the city. And finally, the semi-permeable roof (A SCIENTIFIC MARVEL! the plaque says) mounted atop the Wall, which blocks UV rays to stop burned skin and cancers, things I never worried about on Australia. Things I never even knew about.
Around me, holos of people walk and interact with the exhibits, leaning in and speaking, giving me more information. They’re so close that I could touch them, but they’re silent until I’m in front of them, until I’m in their eyeline—then they speak. It’s scary, like ghosts that only I can hear. I listen as they talk.
“We were selfish,” a woman says, leaning in to peer at the city as it was, “and we didn’t think about what was really important. We didn’t protect ourselves. That’s a hard lesson to have to learn.”
“We were complacent and we assumed we were safe,” a man says, pointing at the outside of the city, sweeping his hand to show what he’s talking about, indicating the countryside and greenery and the water. “We built and built and we never worried about the future. It was easier to ignore it. Then the land started falling into the sea.” The holo sweeps his hand across the diorama and a projection of water spills out from the aquarium, reenacting the history—water pouring across the green, flooding it, swallowing it. The waves overwhelm the city, and when they’re gone, Washington is left bordering a new coastline of cliffs and scree, a beach of land that never used to line the sea, that used to be towns and farms.
It isn’t what I imagined this world would be like. But then, I don’t remember what exactly it was I thought we would find down here beyond a fantasy about grass, about the sky. All I really remember is that we found the button that brought us home, discovered that we had been lied to, and then landed. Somewhere in the middle of that I killed Rex. Somewhere in the middle of that Jonah died. Agatha died. Mae was taken.
And at the end of it all, I was alone.
I move to the next exhibit. It was here that I first met Ziegler when we were both watching this holo diorama play out: him for the hundredth time, me—slack-jawed with awe—for the very first. I stand in front of it now: THE PRISON SHIPS AUSTRALIA AND SOUTH AFRICA—the first two countries who volunteered to build ships and send people into orbit around the planet, because the heat was overwhelming and the portion of their landmass that was actually habitable was growing smaller and smaller. When the program began, every country had plans for ships. They were built in shipyards and the first that went up—the only ones that went up—took prisoners initially, as a test. The irony: Then they needed the newly empty prisons, places that had housed the people who weren’t deemed fit for living with the rest of the population. The prisons were sheltered, often cold. Many were underground, by that point.
If the ships were successful, maybe others could live off-planet. Maybe that could be our real future. But only those two ever launched. After that, the program was aborted. So many people died, overpopulation stopped being an issue. So they found a new way. Walls were built up around key cities, and the people who had survived it all lived on as before.
But the story they told about the prison ships, after all was said and done, was a lie. The governments and scientists said that the original prisoners died up there. A brave, noble accident—volunteer convicts who had been willing to pioneer our escape from the tyranny of Earth, from the climate that wanted to swamp them, the ground that insisted on tearing itself apart, the water that constantly tried to rise up against them. When Ziegler saw me watching the lie being told, when he saw the tears running down my face, he introduced himself. I didn’t hear him at first, so he tapped my arm. It made me flinch, pull myself into a defensive posture, ready to tear his eyes out. I was more scared of this new world back then. He said four words to me—I distinctly remember them: Don’t worry, you’re safe. Then he went straight into his spiel about the prison ships. He told me that he didn’t know how they could get away with it, lying to people the way that they did.
I listened to him as he spoke. He told me that something had crash-landed in the city recently, a pod. That almost nobody saw it land, and those who did were brushed off: told that it was a helicopter, something secret they should just ignore. They were told, so of course they followed instructions. But not Ziegler. He saw it come down and he understood. Or at least he suspected.
He asked me where I came from. I didn’t look like I lived in the city, he said. Was I from New York?
I told him that I wasn’t, and he nodded and smiled. I wonder if he knew, even then. When I came back, a week later, he was there again. The third time I came back was when I told him who I was. I told him about Mae.
He didn’t really seem surprised.
We parted, Ziegler writing down his contact details on the skin of my hand because we couldn’t find any real paper (he seemed so bemused that I didn’t have a contact chip, his face scrunching into a quizzical parcel when I told him). I spent the rest of the day there, trying again to catch up on a history that never meant anything to me. It wasn’t my past. Even the stuff from before Australia had left wasn’t mine because everything I knew had become twisted and gnarled with time and storytelling. Some facts stayed, between the lies from Australia and the presented truths from the museum: that the Earth was in trouble, that ships were sent into space, that those ships were a failure. But beneath that was the great lie: Earth didn’t tear itself apart. It stabilized—broken and hurting—but was still here, still working.
On Australia, we told ourselves that it was gone, a blackened shell of a planet cindering in the void. I’ll never know if that lie came from the people who sent my ancestors away—telling them falsehoods to placate them for what they were doing, where they were going—or from my ancestors themselves—ashamed of who they were, wanting some other narrative to tell, something that might have allowed them to sleep easier at night. I think deep down I know the truth. My ancestors were not good people. It’s hardly a stretch to think that they’d lie about their pasts.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe they were ashamed of who they used to be and of what they had done, so they lied—not only to themselves but to their children and their children’s children. They lied and their lies became my truths, until they were exposed.
And the world here is so different from what I knew. The streets are clean. The buildings are new, bigger and better, space efficient; and there are always shops, cafés, restaurants. Everybody’s happy here. The happiest they’ve ever been—that’s what the statistics say. Contentment levels are at an all-time historical high. The new infrastructure is perfect, unified. But then, as Ziegler told me, the poverty divide is so extreme. You’re rich or you’re homeless; you’re inside the walls of one of the existing cities or you’re in the wilderness. There’s very little in-between.
“So why don’t the powerful help the people who need help?” I asked. It seemed obvious to me—that they would give them money, help them get food, houses, whatever.
“Just because you’ve got power doesn’t mean you know what to do with it,” he told me. “They’re scared of losing it, or of the people who want it. Everybody’s scared.” He shrugged. Such an ineffectual little shrug. But you look at them now and you can see that. Everybody acts comfortable, but they’re not inside. What if this is all there is? they wonder. And it is. I know, because I’ve seen what’s outside of here, and it’s so much worse.
I watch the holo of Australia’s launch. I recognize that it’s an old video—before the technology was as impressive as it is now, but still it’s jaw-dropping to me, to see these people from hundreds of years ago, in their clothes that I don’t recognize. People that are long dead, watching Australia get assembled before being sent up to space. After that, the uniformed men and women being led up gantries toward the smaller loading ships that look just the same as the one that I came down to Earth in. I can see their faces turning to the cameras. Sad faces, worried faces, not sure if this is a punishment or an opportunity. Matching uniforms in a violent shade of orange; fragments of a fabric that I recognize from the ship as I knew it, somehow outlasting the people who wore it. These are the ship’s ancestors—my ancestors—and they are both criminals and victims at the same time. There’s no mention of the cruelty of their abandonment in the display. The holo woman who stands next to me tells me that all contact was one day lost with both ships and the program was abandoned. She shrugs as if that’s the end of the story, a punctuation mark.
“What are you doing?” I hear a voice ask, and I turn, ready to run because that’s my instinct. But it’s Ziegler. He puts his hands up in the air as I turn toward him and steps back. “You think I don’t have a tracker in the car?” He doesn’t look disappointed though. He expected this. “I don’t have to ask why you’re here.”
“I wanted to see the museum again,” I say.
“You wanted the Archives.” He shakes his head, like he’s disappointed. “You can’t get in, I told you. It’s too dangerous.”
“You shouldn’t have followed me,” I say, and I go past him, down toward the section signposted HOW WE USED TO LIVE. He follows me, walking quickly to catch up.
“You took my car. I have a right to know where it was going. Besides, somebody needs to stop you getting yourself into trouble.”
“No,” he says, “you wouldn’t.” He grabs my arm and stops me right in front of a map of the world as it once was. I spent an hour here once: I pressed a button and it showed me holo overlays for every conceivable variant between the world of the year 2000 and the world today. Population growth, urban sprawl, deforestation, animal extinctions, rising sea levels. The country at the bottom right of the map is where I focused before. AUSTRALIA, just as the ship was called. That’s where I once came from, where I was condemned. I press the button to bring up the census hologram, to show me the bright shining light that signifies how dense the population was. The country used to be bright pinpricks of settlements, of light shining through. Then the holo updates and one by one, those lights go out. The country collapses. Come the end of the holo, there are barely any lights left.
Ziegler pushes his hand out and through the hologram, scattering the image. It tries to reassemble around his wrist, the pixels not quite working, not quite lining up. “If you tried anything, you would get caught and you’d be thrown in prison. Where would I be then?”
“You don’t need me,” I tell him.
“Of course I need you. You’re my evidence. You know the truth. Do you know the hardest thing to find in the world? Actual proof of atrocities we’ve committed. You get taken and I lose the chance to make things right.” He starts to walk away from me, back toward the entrance, and I follow him. Then, quiet as anything, so quiet I barely hear him saying it: “Besides, I’ve grown fond of you.” I remind him of her, of his daughter. I’m a surrogate, that’s what it is.
“You told me that you’d help me find Mae,” I reply. That’s all I can manage. I don’t say, Also, thanks for all the help you’ve given me, the food and clothes and bed when I needed it. I don’t thank him. I’m not sure I have ever. But then, I’m not sure that he’d ever expect me to.
And I don’t say that I’m fond of him, too.
“And I’m doing my best. But these things take time.” He sounds exasperated, which is fair enough, really. I’ve asked for nothing but Mae, over and over. I’m nothing if not stubborn.
“So help me now. We’re here.” I grab his arm, stop him from walking. We’re in the lobby. There are people everywhere. A security guard at the front stares at us over the heads of the group of kids in front of him, each of them with a parent for protection. “We go outside, we walk to the Archives, we walk around while I look at it. That’s all. I’m not going to ask you to help me break in or anything.”
“Jesus, Chan,” he hisses. I don’t want the security guard to scan us. He hasn’t yet: His headset is around his neck, red sores on his temples from wearing it as much as he does, from the cheap tech that they give them. No way the company’s paying for augments, because why would they? Soon enough, the guards’ll be swapped for bots or terminals, that’s what everybody says. This guard looks tired. Barely awake. But still, his eyes track us. We do anything interesting and he’ll scan us—scan me—and that’ll be it. Backup will swarm in here in seconds. I look down and away from him, try and move out of his line of sight.
“Chan, listen to me. You can’t get in there,” Zeigler spits.
“I just want you to help me look.” I pull Ziegler toward the exit. I keep my voice soft. “Or I go by myself. Whatever happens, happens.”
He sighs. Resigned to it. “Fine,” he says, “let’s go.” And he walks off through the doors and down the steps, away from the museum and toward the manicured grass and white concrete of the sidewalk. I tread next to him, out of step. Anybody sees us, they’ll just think I’m his daughter, that I’m following him somewhere. He looks like he fits in. Because of him, it doesn’t matter what I look like.
The Archives are on a computer, but not one like all of the others. Everything else is networked, plugged into each other. Data moves around wirelessly and you can access pretty much anything from anywhere provided you know the logins—provided you’re the right person. Not the Archives. There’s a logic that anything on a network is hackable, and everything is fallible. When the chaos happened before and the cities all collapsed, they lost a lot. Data was stored in the ether, and then suddenly that ether didn’t exist anymore and they had to start again. Now you would never know it to look at the cities, but there was a Dark Age that Ziegler has told me about—and I’ve seen it written about, in Ziegler’s articles, capital D, capital A. A time without information, without computers or networking—and it lasted decades. They had to rebuild, had to put things in place to keep everybody safe and stop another collapse from happening. People died, Ziegler said, billions of people. Lucky that my ancestors missed it or I might not have been born. He said that like some joke almost. I wanted to tell him that there was nothing lucky about being born on Australia. I’m not sure he gets even now just how bad it actually was. I could show him my scars, I suppose. But not yet.
So they built the new infrastructure and now all information is protected, worried about. The Archives are on a computer that isn’t on a network, isn’t accessible unless you’re next to it, unless you’re actually there. It’s underground. The whole place is quakeproof, waterproof, fireproof—and hackproof, like it’s the most precious thing in the world.
Maybe it is. Maybe the knowledge of who people are, where people come from, what people do—maybe that stuff is what we should hold above everything else.
The Smithsonian used to be nothing but museums: a row of them with hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, apparently. At one end, there’s the building that once housed the government of the entire country. Ziegler had to explain that to me: that it was the most important building in the country way back when, and that the people who passed laws—who kept the people under control—they worked here. This was where they did everything. It was the most secure building, Ziegler said, with underground space that was basically impenetrable. That’s why they picked it when they needed somewhere safe for the Archives. It isn’t as fancy as some of the others—it’s cleaner, more straight lines, less in the way of extravagant architecture. Pretty, though . . . but that’s ruined a bit by the perimeter wall that’s all around it.
Ziegler stands back when he reaches the perimeter, proud somehow that I can see as little as he said I would. The darkened plexi-walls all around it, unscalable. Electric mesh at the top. One gate with one panel next to it, for access, next to a raised vehicle ramp. It’s a small gate. Through the dark transparency of the wall I can see the building itself. Stone, white concrete, insets. Windows. Clean.
“Used to be the home of democracy,” he says. I don’t ask him what that is because he’s told me before. When I told him about Rex, that she was the Lows’ ruler, he told me the meaning of her name. “Rex means king,” he said, “a word from some ancient language that refuses to die, clinging onto the remnants of the world like a louse. Your ship was an aristocracy, which is when royalty rule. Here, now, on Earth? It used to be a democracy, where we vote for everything we want to happen. Now it’s a bureaucracy.” He seemed proud of that, like it was a joke. So I asked him who rules in a bureaucracy and he said, “Red tape.” I didn’t know what that meant either, so I didn’t ask.
Now Ziegler looks almost smug. “They chose it because of how secure it was before there was anything really important kept in there.”
“Okay,” I say.
“They hollowed it out after the riots and fires. They lost pretty much everything inside. Amazing to think of what was gone—so much of our history.” He turns and puts his hand on the glass, leaning forward, peering in. “You used to be able to take tours, apparently. It won’t look like this on the inside. It’ll be servers, I’d imagine. Miles and miles of them.” He smiles at me, and a guard comes rushing toward us. One of the usual police: black outfit, white re-breather, red eyepiece. No striker, but he’s got his hands held out. He runs right up to the wall and just as Ziegler’s turning back to look at him, he slams his hand onto it, palm open. He’s probably talking, but we can’t hear him through the wall.
Suddenly I do—like it’s inside my head. I know what it is and I hate it: targeted sound. “Move away from the wall.”
“I told you,” Ziegler says. He shrugs then raises his hands and steps back. “This is what they do, Chan. They keep information from us. They say they’re protecting it from disaster, but they’re really just hiding it from the people.” He looks at the guard. “We’re going,” he says, and he makes a gesture with his hands that I know isn’t exactly kind. He puts his arm around me and turns us away from the guard. “You want to get in there, we’re going to need help. I can’t do that.”
A siren rings out in the distance, in the yard in front of the building. “That means it’s the end of their shift. Watch him,” Ziegler says. “I’ll get the car.” He turns me back around so that I can see the guard. He’s standing with other guards now at the foot of the building’s steps. He takes off his helmet, laughs with his friends. “Car,” Ziegler says, and he waits at the curb for it to come from wherever he parked it.
The guard pulls his gloves off and goes to the gate. He scans his arm on a pad to allow him to leave, a molecular read of his DNA, then leans forward and stares into a device for an eye scan. The gate itself fizzes and pops out of existence for a second and he steps through. It rematerializes behind him. He waves good-bye to his colleagues, doesn’t turn to look at them—he eyes me, though. I’ve seen that look before, where he’s trying to act like he isn’t staring, like he isn’t looking at the bits of me that politeness might have taught him to pretend to ignore a little more. Here on Earth, they’re more subtle about it than they were on the ship, but the intent—the look—is the same. Then he glances away, as if he’s ashamed of being caught. I imagine a partner, children, a life outside of his job.
I imagine him going home to them, having whatever counts as the rest of his day—relaxing or chores or seeing his friends. And then tomorrow he’ll come back here and do this all over again: scanning himself to get inside, having all the access he likes to all the information in the world, information like where Mae’s being kept.
I watch him wander into the distance until a voice behind me breaks my attention. “Get what we need?” Ziegler asks. His car has pulled up, the door hanging open, waiting for me. It shuts automatically and the safety belt snakes across my waist.
“We?”
“You. I meant you.” He leans forward and points out of the window at the front of the car. “Birds,” he says, and I follow his gaze. A flock of them, soaring in the distance. “Take us to Andrews Docks,” he says, and the car starts and pulls away from the curb. We drive through the city streets again and this time, instead of getting cleaner, taller, more impressive, the buildings go the other way. Everything starts to fade, the city becoming worse as we travel toward the place where I live now.
When we stop, he turns to me before I get out of the car. “Don’t do this alone and don’t do it now. Like I said, maybe talk to Alala. If you get taken, if something happens to you, there’s nothing I can do to help you, you know.”
“I know,” I say. And then I’m out onto the sidewalk, the car is gone; I can hear the docks, smell the docks, before I’m even at the fence that divides them from the rest of the city.
As I’m walking home, I think about Ziegler’s promise to help me find Mae and how it feels like it’s slipping away from me, from him. We’ve been working on this for far too long. He’s been looking, and I’ve been waiting. It’s getting hard to be patient.
There was a time when I would just act: see, think, do. Done, and then it can’t be undone. You just have to deal with the aftermath. That’s how I ended up here.
I think about the guard. The security measures are meant to prevent anyone from breaking in, but the guard could probably circumvent them if I forced him to. At night, that’s probably safest—I’ll bet their security is quieter when there aren’t other people around, and the darkness could play to my advantage. I’d have to run. I’d have to have an exit route. I’ll have to know what I’m looking for because the guard would raise the alarm as soon as he had the chance. I’d have to knock him unconscious and that would only buy me so much time. The alarms would go off sooner or later. I don’t know how to shut them down.
Fine. There must be another way.
I persuade him. I find something that he wants, and I try and get him to help me. Getting what you want is the same here as it was on the ship: Everybody’s after something. Everybody wants more than they’ve got, doesn’t matter how or what that is. He can’t earn much. I’m not asking for the world, just access to the building. Or even just get me inside, through the gate, and I’ll make it worth his while. But what will that be? No guard is going to risk their job for the cost of a good meal. They’ll want education for their kids or the cost of an extravagant augment. No way I can afford that. And then even when I’m inside, there’s the computer. It’ll be hackable, but only from there, so I’ll need to either have somebody with me or know what I’m doing. And I don’t. It takes me minutes to type anything, even though Zeigler’s been teaching me. I don’t even understand how computers work.
Every plan collapses as I run it around, as I try to pick holes. I’m good at that—weighing up the consequences and seeing them as they are. I think I’ve developed a pretty good sense of what’s realistic and what’s not. Maybe Ziegler’s right. I should ask Alala, see what she says, if she’s got any suggestions.
And then, as I’m walking home, I see her. She’s rushing along, carrying something—a small black case that shines in the blue lights that litter the Wall. She smiles at me and calls to me to follow her. She knows that I was going to find her.
Of course she knows.
“Wait here, just a few minutes,” she says when we reach her house. It’s not fair to call hers a shanty, not really. It’s a step up. She’s got a repurposed cabin, fixed up on cinder blocks. The entrance to it has rotted away, but she’s fixed up an old wooden door. Salvage—but if you had to live here, her home is the one you would want. An electricity junction with a running-water source, the security of the fence at her back, and the cluster of other houses protecting the front. Because of the deals she does, she needs the protection, it seems. She makes people angry, and when people get angry you need security. When I’ve spoken to Ziegler about her, he’s called her “a big fish in a small pond,” which I suppose makes sense. Not that I’ve seen a fish outside the museum, of course. But still I understand the concept, the idea.
The inside of her place is divided into two parts: one where she lives, the other where she conducts business. There’s another transaction already taking place: A worried man, barely older than I am, waits just outside the cabin. He’s got an augment in his throat, a voice box, and there’s a soft mint-smelling vapor coming from his mouth, which lolls open: teeth missing, tongue limp and softened to the point of uselessness. No sense in not doing something with your mouth when you can’t really speak anymore. He has no shoes, toes poking through the holes of his socks. Scars and needle track marks run up his arms, but they’re not fresh. Scars from another life, he’d probably say if I asked him. From what I’ve heard, that life is always there though—waiting, pulling at you until you crumble. The marks on his skin are going to be a constant itch—scars always are.
He doesn’t make eye contact with me, but I recognize him from around. There are only so many people living here. I wonder why he’s here, what he wants. There’s clearly no money on him and he’s nervous. But he’s not here for drugs. It’s something else.
Alala does a lot of trade. I’ve wondered why she doesn’t move to the main part of the city. She’s probably got enough money, given how good business seems to be, and it’s got to be a better life than here. Though she lives here like she already lives somewhere fancier: There are fake furs all over the chairs, a small makeshift kitchen (the units salvaged, I’m sure), with a sink that miraculously has running water, and a direct line down into the city’s electric supply. She’s doing well for herself compared to most in the docks.
The scarred man fumbles with the curtain that divides the two parts of Alala’s place, pulling it aside to let her by. She pushes through fast, a little box held out in front of her. I see behind the curtain and there’s so much going on I can barely take it all in. There’s a woman on a bed, her legs up, screaming but with something between her teeth—what looks like one of the police’s truncheons. There’s a man who I know from here who used to be a doctor but now will patch up wounds or crudely fit black-market augments for the right fee (whatever alcohol or pills you’ve managed to get ahold of), and he’s pulling a baby from between the woman’s legs, his hands clamped around the head. Then Alala reaches out, face devoid of all emotion, to clamp her palm right down onto the baby’s mouth. With the other hand she opens the box, and there’s an injection in there. She takes it out, holds it up, and the man here now—he must be the baby’s father—holds the curtain open.
“Iona,” he says, his voice digitized like the car’s, and it takes me a second to figure out that’s the baby’s new name.
The doctor cuts the cord. Alala keeps her hand clamped on the baby’s face. The doctor slaps the infant and the baby bucks, trying to scream through Alala’s grip. They ignore the mother: She needs attending to, but she’ll wait. The baby is more urgent if they don’t want any alarms to be raised.
The doctor takes the syringe from Alala, his hands still dripping with the mother’s blood, and he places the needle right up next to the baby’s neck.
“Firm,” he says, “hold her firm.” Alala keeps her hand over Iona’s mouth, even as she struggles. She’s just been born and doesn’t know what’s going on, nothing but panic. The doctor slides the needle into her soft flesh, his hands remarkably steady—I’ve seen him when he’s not working and he shakes as though his body has a constant shiver running through it—and there’s absolutely no resistance to the needle, the injection is delivered straight into the throat. The baby struggles more. You wouldn’t think something so small could be so much trouble, but she’s wet, sopping with whatever she was born in, fluid and blood and mess. So easy to drop. The needle comes out, the point of it wet with new blood.
“Try,” the doctor says. Alala—who still hasn’t said a word—pulls her hand away slowly and the baby’s mouth arcs open, suddenly free to breathe and scream in equal measure.
Only no noise comes out. I can’t even hear the desperate sounds of her inhaling air, trying to heave it into her new throat, trying to understand what’s happening. But then, why would she know any different? If she’s never made a sound, she won’t know what she’s missing—not until she’s older, frustrated at her own inability, at the choice that somebody else made for her yet likely kept her with her parents and stopped the Services from taking her somewhere else, to another life.
“Good,” the doctor says. “Good.” He wipes his hands on his tunic then looks at the mother. She’s lying back, eyes lolling, craning her neck in order to see her baby. “That was good work,” he says, but it isn’t clear who he’s talking to. He takes the baby and places it in its mother’s hands. “It’s for the best,” he says, and he sounds weary as he says it because he knows that maybe that’s not true. She won’t speak again. She was born here in the docks, after all, and this is the only way of making sure she’s quiet, that the Services won’t find her. They’d take her away if they found her. And nobody gets them back after they’ve been taken.
I wonder if Mae would have been quiet. I wonder if she would have known how to keep her head down, stay silent. I wonder if I would have had to force her to, to take measures to make sure that she did.
But I let her get caught, get taken away to wherever they end up being taken.
I shut my eyes for a second. I think about my punishment; how I failed her and everybody else.
“Sensible, isn’t it?” I hear the words and it takes a second for me to realize they’re aimed at me. It’s Alala’s voice and she’s right in front of me. I look at her, then through the curtain as it closes. I see the family reunited: the nervous man cradling his new and silent daughter, his wife exhausted but almost happy that this has gone as well as it could possibly go given the circumstances. Alala clicks her fingers in front of my face to get my attention. “You look worried. You in the same way as her?” She means the mother. She puts her hands in front of her belly, puffs out her cheeks, waddles, then collapses in laughter. “Sit down, sit down. Stop looking so worried, silly girl. Tsk.” She kicks one stool out from underneath the table and another for herself. She lowers herself down to it, this long moan coming as she breathes out, hand pressed against the small of her back.
“I need something. Or, if I can get something . . .”
“You can always get something,” she says, “depends on how much you want it, that’s all.” She’s hard to give an age to. She’s older than Agatha was I think, but they obviously grew up in such different places, such different ways. Alala’s skin is weathered in some places, smooth in others. She’s lived here in the docks for a while—not her whole life, but that’s a story I haven’t yet managed to be told. But then there are augments, treatments that people buy to make themselves look younger. Possibly she spent some of her money on her face. Maybe she’s even older than she lets on. Her body creaks in a way that isn’t like Agatha’s did or how mine has done—not because it’s been pushed, but because it’s just degrading. Everybody has a story and hers is one that I’m desperate to know. Did she start here or out there? Her accent is different from everybody else’s, that’s for certain. She didn’t come from this city, not originally, just as I didn’t. She’s had longer to adapt, though. “So,” she says, “what is this thing?”
“I need to get into the Archives,” I say. The best thing about Alala? She knows secrets and she keeps them. She and Ziegler are both good at that, but for totally different reasons. “I need to get access to the Archives.”
There’s a pause where it seems like she’s mulling it over and then she laughs, slapping her knees, tears leaking from her left eye. The other eye stays dry. I wonder in that moment if it’s even real.
“It’s very hard to get in there, little girl,” she says. “Very hard. Harder than anything you have done before this.”
I stay calm. I explain about the guard I watched, the security there. “I thought we could persuade him to get them, to get the files for us,” I say.
And for some reason that sets her off laughing again. It’s a good minute before she stops, composes herself, tries to speak, and then goes right back to her laughing.
I explain the entry process: watching the guard leave the same way that he must have gone in, the DNA scan on the arm, then something with the eyes. As I talk, Alala pulls the fake, ratty furs from the back of the chair over her shoulders. She’s got heat in here, small radiators that look like they’re decades old, maybe even older, but she barely uses them. She reaches underneath her chair and pulls up a metal bottle, a cork stuffed into the mouth. “You ever drink poitín?”
“No,” I say.
“I make it myself. Bit like vodka.”
“I’ve never drunk that either,” I tell her, and she uncorks the bottle and lifts it to her mouth and swigs, holds, and glugs. I can see the muscles in her throat as she swallows. She gasps when she’s done.
“You aren’t even old enough to drink here. Pah. Start small,” she tells me, her voice sounding breathier. She hands me the bottle. “Don’t want you getting sick in my home.” I lift the bottle to my mouth. I can see something floating in the liquid, not alive and not dirt. More like fibers. I wonder what she uses to make this stuff. It doesn’t seem to smell of much of anything. Actually, no, that’s not true. If there’s a smell, it’s of something far cleaner than it looks; like the smell of the middle of the city, of the whitewashed buildings and the stripped-clean streets.
I mimic her, open my lips, pour it in. It burns; reminds me of some of the worst drinks on Australia. Back there, it was a thing with some people who worked in the arboretum to brew alcohol. To use whatever we grew, let it ferment, turn it into something that could—for even a few minutes—dull the pain, take you away from where you were and what your life was. And the Pale Women used to make their own grape wine, claiming it was the blood of the savior, channeling their faith by getting drunk. I never tasted it, though. And I’ve never tasted anything as harsh as what Alala’s waving in my face now.
“Good, eh? Good.” She stands up, walks over to me, holds the bottom of the bottle as I hold the rim against my lips, and she tilts it. “You have to drink it faster. Doesn’t work if you dawdle.” And while I sip, while I try to stop it just rushing down my throat, stripping it clean (or so it feels), she tells me what I wanted to hear. “I will help you get into there. But no, no. You cannot persuade him.”
“I can,” I say.
She shakes her head and tuts. “We pick a different guard, not the one you found. Who cares about him? I don’t know. I get you a name, somebody who owes me, so they do you a favor, give you what you need. Use his ID, get in when it’s dark, when the patrols aren’t watching. Lots of access points. Won’t raise an alarm. No, that’s good. Better. Sneak around, wearing a uniform. But you are so short! And you are a little bit funny looking, you know? You don’t look like you’re from here. Only people from Washington get to work in the Archives, because they don’t trust the rest of us.” She pronounces Washington with the t dropped, Washingun, like the people here do. Strange, how different their words sound to mine. “Grow more inches. Taller, taller. Get a leg augment.” That’s a joke, and I know that I’m not the tallest of people, but her words actually sting a little.
“No, you stand on the toes of your feet, like a dancer.” She does a little tippy-toes jig, tottering left to right, and then collapses into her laughter again. Her throat sounds like she lived in the Lows’ part of Australia, that same ragged, wheezing laugh that constantly threatens to tear itself up into a cough. She swigs from the bottle again, to dampen the sound. “Go at a strange time. You be clever about wearing a mask, cameras won’t get a fix on you.” She offers me the bottle again, and I raise my hand. I’ve had barely any and already there’s a softness to the edge of my vision, a dampening in my head. “But yes, I can get you in. You get what you want. You get out.” She smiles. “You get what you want—maybe you get what I want as well, maybe?”
It’s not a question. It’s a deal.
“What do I have to do first?” I ask.
She smiles. “That’s the hardest part,” she says.