“Good enough,” Chuy interrupted him. “You’re hired!”
” What? You…” Jeff shut his mouth before he could blurt out can’t hire anybody, you’re not old enough!
“Me and Chaco, that’s m’brother, we’ve got a little game and gear shop. We’re getting flooded with merch from all the new Harmonica refugees, and we never heard of most of the titles and don’t have time to evaluate them all. Congratulations, you’re our official consultant on imported merch.”
Jef felt dizzy. And excited. And thrilled.
But mostly dizzy.
He really, really needed to sit down somewhere quiet and think.
“Can you start now?”
“My, um, my folks are expecting me back right now.” He was not going to say I have to get back to my mother.
“Tomorrow, then. If you show up at the shop, the job’s yours.”
“Wait! Where’s the shop?”
Chuy was already in motion. He turned around and jogged backward for a minute. “Chac and Chuy’s Chop Shop. E street, just off Gabrel Moresco Plaza. Don’t worry, everybody knows where we are!”
***
By all her old standards, the apartment block where Ruven was squatting was a dreadful comedown from Jillian’s Vista View place. The rooms were small and cramped, with narrow windows that let in very little light, and metal grilles over those windows that made Jillian feel as if she were in jail. The open stairway in the center of the block reeked of cat piss. The neighborhood… was not quite a slum, but looked as if the only thing that had arrested its descent was the flight of more than half the residents. And the remaining neighbors were not quite of the class Jillian was used to.
On the day they moved in, Trisha and their baggage piled on a ramshackle, much-patched float whose appearance Ruven never explained, Trisha sat down in their long dark room on the second floor and burst into tears. “I can’t have Tomas’ baby in a place like this!”
“You won’t have to,” Jillian reminded her, “we’re only three blocks from a hospital.” That had been the feature that sold her on the move. “Anyway, it’ll look brighter after we put out our pictures and things.”
“Where? There’s hardly room to move in here. I don’t know why you had to bring all your stage junk along.”
Jillian gave Trisha a soft flimsy to blow her nose with and made a quick journey of exploration, returning with good news.
“The room next to this is vacant too, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t use it as well.”
Trisha shrugged wearily. “If it’s as gloomy as this one, what’s the point?”
“Space,” Jilli said. “It’s not a corner room, so it doesn’t get quite as much light in the living area as this one, but we can use it to store our things and we can fix up the kitchen area as a hair styling salon for you.”
Trisha damply conceded that a separate salon might be useful – “not that I ever hope to have any more customers,” but said she was much too tired to look at the room right now, and why couldn’t Ruven have found them a place on the ground floor like his so she wouldn’t have to use that revolting staircase?
Since Trisha had been right there when Ruven had explained that for security reasons only single men lived on the ground floor, Jillian didn’t waste her breath repeating his explanation. She bit her lip and set about heaving the boxes and bags of things they didn’t need immediately into the darkest part of the room next door. It took her a little time to arrange their baggage so that they could reach any box or bag they needed without digging through a pile, but she was pleased when she finished to find that she’d been able to leave the front door and the kitchen free. A chair abandoned by the previous occupants took pride of place in the kitchen – now, the salon – and if she could get a tall stool to put behind it, and something to cover the stove top, it should actually work out rather well. The kitchen – salon – windows looked out onto the interior balcony, so Trisha would get the benefit of as much natural light as possible. And the kitchen cabinets, once Jillian had cleared them of the debris left behind and given them a good scrub-down, would serve to store Trisha’s working tools and Jillian’s cosmetics.
“Mirror,” she was murmuring to herself as she returned to their “living” room, “I need a mirror.” The one in their old apartment had been fixed to the wall and Jillian had been afraid she’d break it if she tried to pry it loose; maybe that had been a mistake. A salon really had to have a mirror, didn’t it, even part of a mirror would be better than nothing.
She was pleasantly surprised to find Trisha ensconced on their old couch and a pile of pillows, holding a cup and chatting happily to a woman Jillian liked on sight. Pushing down the thought that she would probably have liked the Spirit of Discord himself if he’d managed to cheer Trisha up, she welcomed the visitor and found a stool for herself.
“Oh, Jilli, this is Merdis Abadi from the other side of the stairwell, she has an apartment big enough for her and her husband and their two nearly grown sons!”
“Concord! With that many big clumping men about, I expect she needs the space!” Jillian put out a hand to the visitor. “Thank you for coming to see us. I’m Jillian, Trisha’s sister-in-law.” She registered short, crisply curling black hair with a spatter of grey and a plain, but friendly, face.
“I heard your little sister crying,” Merdis explained, “and just thought I’d pop in and see what was the matter. And then I made her a cup of tea and started telling her about all the advantages of living in the Donteven.”
“In where?”
“I guess you were too preoccupied with carrying your things and helping Trisha upstairs to notice the sign.” Merdis glanced at Trisha with a look of expertise that Jillian recognized. “Five months?”
“We thought, four.”
Merdis pursed her lips. “Hmm, well, no harm in being prepared early.”
“I’m not having the baby here,” Trisha interrupted petulantly. “I want to go to the hospital!”
“And so you shall,” Merdis reassured her. And then to Jillian, in an undertone, “if we have time to get her there. Don’t worry, first babies usually give plenty of warning. Still – no harm in being prepared, like I said.”
“You sound like an expert,” Jillian said. “Next to me, anyway.”
Merdis pursed her lips again. “Mmm. No expert, but I grew up on a farming collective. You get to see all sorts of variations on giving birth, there. And there were no hospitals nearby, so I’ve helped bring more than one new person into the world. We can talk about preparations later; no need to bother your sister-in-law. A bit high-strung, is she? Well, the first one makes many a woman nervous. I was lucky, had both of mine as easy as falling off a log. But not many – well. Later?”
“Later,” Jillian affirmed, shaking Merdis’ hand again and thinking how lucky they were to have fallen in with this very competent woman. Jillian hadn’t even thought beyond the necessity of getting Trisha to a hospital before the baby came; Merdis seemed to have thought of all the possibilities with a glance, and to be fazed by none of them.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The next day Jillian found out why Merdis had called their building the Donteven. On the front of the building large, uneven hand-painted capital letters spelled out, “DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.” Smaller letters under that added, “We’re tired of moving the bodies.” She must have been just about out on her feet yesterday to have missed that.
The walk from here to Romuela’s was longer than the walk from her old apartment, and not noticeably safer. The difference was that now one of the men from the apartment block walked her to work and someone showed up at the end of the day to walk her home. Jillian was grateful; the streets were so bad now that she would have been afraid to go out alone. It surprised her that one man was enough to dissuade the gangsters who collected at improvised roadblocks along the way, demanding payment for the privilege of crossing their “territory,” but she understood better after the day when someone waved a bla
ster at Lorens Danko and he simply said, “Hey, stupid, I’m from the Donteven.” Apparently the men of the building had made quite an impression on the neighborhood already. Ruven was noncommittal about the blaster scorch marks on the outer walls and the syncrete slabs shielding most of the ground-floor windows. Andru Abadi’s teenage sons, Kris and Danyel, treated her to explosive and exaggerated tales of the first battle for the Donteven. At least she hoped they were exaggerated.
When Jillian tried to express her gratitude for the escort service, Andru waved her off. “Every bit of cooked food you bring home saves Merdis that much work.”
Apart from Jillian’s already cooked contributions from Romuela’s kitchen, the apartment block had gradually gone to a communal system: whatever food anybody had was handed over to Merdis, who daily made “casserole” or “soup” from it, with a side dish of bitterleaf if the scavengers had had any luck that day. As the streets nearest the building were picked clean, it was necessary to go farther and farther afield to find the weeds. Another bit of routine fell into place: whoever escorted Jillian to work would take a roundabout way home and pick greens on the way. This meant possible contact with strange gangs; her escorts took to going out armed. They didn’t mention how they came to have a motley collection of sidearms ranging from a practically-new peace officer’s weapon to an antiquated blaster made of actual sheet metal instead of printed and sintered steel, and Jillian didn’t ask.
Apart from the gangs bunched up at major intersections, the streets were virtually empty. There were always a few gaunt people desperately foraging through dumpsters for edible scraps; they and the gang members ignored each other by some sort of mutual agreement. The dumpster outside Romuela’s had been overturned daily until she gave up and simply put all edible scraps on the syncrete of the back alley. That included things like soured milk and meat that was beginning to smell off. When Jillian questioned that, Romuela looked at her with tired eyes. “If I put that stuff in the dumpster, you know somebody will spill everything out of it to get the food. Anybody’s desperate enough to take a chance on food that’s going bad, that’s their decision, not mine.”
All these improvised systems worked fine until the day when Jillian waved good-bye to her escort and entered Romuela’s to find most of the furnishings gone and Romuela herself emptying the supply shelves.
“I can’t do it any more,” she told Jillian. “Do you know how many times I’ve paid protection money in the last month? Three separate sets of bloodsuckers came down on me and threatened to break the place up if I didn’t pay them. I needed that money to pay my contacts. Now I don’t have enough to buy supplies from them. Who goes to a café that doesn’t have food?” She blinked away tears. “Not that I care. My feet have hurt every single day since I opened the café. My voice is ruined from cooking over a smoky oil stove. It’ll be a real nice change to sit down and do nothing.”
Jillian wondered how her boss was going to survive. “Doing nothing” was hardly an option for anybody in the city who wanted to scrounge enough food to survive on, now that the last nanosludge units had stopped producing. Romuela answered that question before she could voice it. “I’m going to my nephew in the country. He’s on a farm collective. They always have enough to eat, count on it, even when they plead poverty and refuse to load the food barges.”
Jillian hoped Romuela was right about that, and hoped she would get to the collective safely. From the bits of gossip floating around the Donteven, neither was a sure proposition. Ruven hadn’t received a food parcel from his collective in weeks. Communications up-river were more often broken than working; he didn’t know whether the collective had stopped sending, or whether the parcels were being looted off barges, or simply kept by a hungry delivery worker. All were possibilities.
For that matter, communications within the city weren’t that great. Occasionally electricity would light up the buildings and a public service holocast would assure them that the Central Committee was working day and night on their behalf; the rest of the time the city was dark and silent. Jillian hadn’t been able to charge her CodeX the last time there was an electricity hour, so she had no way to ask her neighbors in the Donteven for someone to come to the café and escort her back to the apartment.
Romuela loaded her down with more food than she could easily carry, mostly uncooked supplies this time rather than cooked leftovers. “What if I just take one bag and come back for the other?” She could draft her escort from the Donteven to carry food, too.
But Romuela nodded towards the front windows with a meaningful look. Half-starved people were already gathering in the street. “The news is getting around. The money I had to give to the bloodsuckers won’t make them fight off looters, now that I won’t have any more for them. I’m leaving now, by the back way, and you’d better do that too. Anything we abandon here will be gone within the hour.”
They said hasty goodbyes at the back door; then Jillian put her coat on, grasped the handles of her two heavy food bags and started the long walk home.
She’d been coming and going on this route so long that the gangs recognized her as being from the Donteven. Most of them grudgingly allowed her to pass free; at two of the biggest intersections she had to pay them off in food. She picked the heaviest items, a bag of flour and a huge tin of cooking oil, so as to lighten her load a bit. Both were literally priceless now, and she bitterly grudged parting with them, but it could have been worse.
There were the usual people picking through garbage, even on this bitterly cold winter day. Jillian felt mean and guilty, walking past them with more food than any of them would have seen in weeks. But she’d earned this food, and any she gave up would lessen Trisha’s chance of survival even more.
Still, she looked away from the trash pickers, unwilling to meet their eyes. That was her undoing.
She was actually within sight of the apartment building when a body crashed against hers and forced her to the sidewalk. She heard something breaking in the bag she’d fallen on. The man who knocked her down was prying at the fingers she’d clenched around the handle of the other bag. He didn’t weigh a lot, but he had the strength of desperation.
And extremely bad breath. Jillian looked up at rotting, broken teeth and gagged. She felt his hand over hers on the handle of the food bag. “Let go, or I’ll break your fingers. I will,” he insisted, as if she’d tried to argue with him. It flashed through her mind that this man was not used to violence; he had to wrestle with his own better instincts before he could hurt her.
Unfortunately, the better instincts were losing badly. “Let – ” he panted even while he was prying her fingers loose. And then there was a hollow thump; he stopped and collapsed on top of her.
“Don’t even think about it!” Kris Abadi hollered, giving Jillian’s assailant another whack with his stick.
“We’re tired of moving the bodies!” Another blow, from Danyel.
“Jilli! Are you all right?”
Jillian pushed away the dead weight of her assailant – not very much weight, not for a man that tall – and stood up carefully. A sharp pain shot through her right knee, but nothing was broken. She thought.
“What a fool, attacking you within sight of the Donteven,” Kris said, picking up the bag she had crushed in falling.
“We better get back to patrol duty now.” Danyel took the other bag in one hand and slipped his free hand under Jillian’s elbow. The support was welcome; her knee hurt and for some reason she was shaking all over. Still, she stopped after a few uneven steps.
“Wait!”
“What’s wrong? Did the bastard hurt you?”
“He’s starving,” Jillian said. “I want to give him some food.” She felt a queer sympathy with the man who’d failed to rob her because he couldn’t make himself break her fingers. They were all falling back to beasts, herself included. Giving a little food freely might make her feel human again.
“Jilli.” Kris’ voice was low. “Jilli, he’s not going to hav
e any use for it. Not now.”
She made herself look back. The man’s head was horribly broken; she could see the brains oozing out. The other trash pickers had scattered. The near-freezing air had almost coagulated the blood already; when that was done, there would be no movement at all upon the street.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Esilian National Assembly’s debates on ‘the matter of Harmony’ were broadcast on the holonews channels in their entirety.
When Jef Elmasri learned that there was a news channel devoted to nothing but the business of the National Assembly, he was fascinated. The Central Committee in Harmony City made nothing public but decisions and decrees. How could a news broadcaster get away with making everything the Assembly did public?
“In the first place, it’s not ‘everything.’” Chuy Manalang had assumed the responsibility of bringing his new friend and protégé up to speed on the Esilian way of life. “You can be sure there are plenty of deals being made off camera, in unofficial meetings. This is just everything they say in Assembly, and why not broadcast it? Any citizen can sit in the galleries at Assembly Hall and watch the speeches live. Heck, it’s not even restricted to citizens – you could get in, if you wanted to subject yourself to a day of excruciating boredom.”
“Second place,” chimed in petite Krisi Andriotis, who kept the books for the Chop Shop, “they’re not ‘getting away’ with anything. Don’t we have a right to know what our representatives are doing?”
Jef, who’d never contemplated such a right, nodded like one mesmerized. He had already developed a crush on the elfin girl with her spiky black hair and delicate features. The high point of his day was bringing her a cup of her favorite iced kahve concoction when he came to work each morning. She always smiled and thanked him, and on one glorious day her fingers had brushed his as she took the cup from him.
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