“There she is,” he said, pointing to the left, where I saw Nix standing with her hands in her pockets, staring at something on the wall I couldn’t make out.
“Thanks,” I said, and then I went to join her.
She was looking at a tiny photo of a man and a woman — one African, one Asian — taken by what appeared to be an automated photo booth camera. There was one on the corner of Mulberry and Canal in Chinatown; I’d scrunched inside with my school friends once, making faces at the camera as it clicked and flashed. In this photo, the man and the woman were smiling at each other, not at the camera. They seemed happy.
“Nix,” I said.
She didn’t look at me. “Did your mother kick you out?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“What is this place?” I asked instead of answering her question.
“It’s the Wall,” she said as if I should know.
“Why are there so many photos here?”
“They’re photos of people who have disappeared.” She finally glanced at me. “What are you doing here?”
“I—I had a fight with my mom.” My face burned.
She cocked her head. “So you ran down to me? I can’t do anything for you, Kyle.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” I insisted.
Her eyebrows rose. “You don’t?”
My blush deepened.
“There’s nothing for you down here. You’re better off up above.”
“My mother won’t tell me the truth,” I blurted out. “I need to know the truth.”
“About what?”
“About . . . everything.” I gestured to the photos on the walls. “Who are all these people?”
“I don’t know who they all are. But these are my parents.” She pointed to the couple in the photo.
“Who put the photo there?”
“I did. When someone disappears, one of us who remains puts up a memorial to them.”
I looked around at the photos; there were thousands of them. Some of the people in the photos were mixed, but others were pure. One photo, of an Asian girl with shoulder-length hair in a school uniform, reminded me of myself. I shivered.
“Why does the Patrol allow these photos to stay up?” I asked.
“The Patrol never makes it this deep into the Tunnels.” She glanced one last time at the photo and touched my elbow. I jumped in surprise. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Nix took me through the maze of tunnels, passing other people bearing the same tattoos she did. They nodded to each other, their gazes sweeping over me briefly, dismissing me. I wasn’t one of them.
She led me to a little square room with plywood walls built in a row of rooms along an abandoned train track. Inside, she pulled a string to turn on a hanging overhead bulb. The place was small but clean, with a mattress elevated on concrete blocks and stacked crates that contained neatly folded clothes and a few other items: a leather-bound book, a carved wooden box. This must be her home, not that dark nest beside the stairs. There was one ancient spindle-legged chair in the corner next to an overturned crate that served as a table. On the crate was a can of jasmine tea.
I would have recognized that can anywhere. It had come from my mother’s kitchen. I looked at Nix, my pulse speeding up. “Did you steal that from us?”
She didn’t seem perturbed. “It’ll bring in a good price.”
My mouth fell open. She was a thief. I had paid her fifty credits to take my brother’s name to her boss, and I had gotten nothing out of it. And then she had robbed me. When had she had the opportunity? When we were clearing off the table? Before she — before we—
My insides went hot, remembering how distracted I had been. I never would have noticed.
“Hey, you don’t need that tea,” she said easily.
“But it’s not yours!” My voice screeched like a schoolgirl’s.
She shrugged. “It’s not yours, either. It’s your mother’s.”
I sat down on the chair beside the can of tea in shock. “What’s my mother’s is mine.” A lump rose in my throat as I said the words. Guilt welled up again, bitter and coarse.
“I thought you two had a fight.” Nix sat on her bed, and the wooden board supporting it creaked.
My mother had scrimped and saved for months to buy that can of tea. We only drank it on special occasions, like my birthday or when the government issued us special rations for Chinese New Year. And I had taken it out tonight just to impress this girl, who had promptly stolen it.
“I’ll tell you something,” she said, grinning briefly. “You’ve got some balls for a good girl.”
My stomach fell. I had trusted her. I had trusted her, and I had invited her into my home.
“Most girls come wandering down here in the middle of the night, and they’d never be seen again. I’m impressed you made it out to the Wall. It’s a good thing you ran into Rio.”
“Rio?”
“The guy who brought you.”
“Oh.” Why hadn’t I asked his name? I was too focused on Nix. On getting here, to this place that was obviously her home, where she was sitting on her bed and watching me with glinting dark eyes, a foot away from the tea she had just stolen from my house.
“So, Kyle, you want the truth?”
Hearing her speak my name made my whole body tremble. I nodded.
“The truth is, I don’t believe a thing the government says. All those campaigns for maintaining racial diversity, all those warnings about MID. What a bunch of shit. Nobody’s died of genuine MID for generations. Maybe once it was real — I don’t know. I never had the benefit of a scientific education. But what I do know is that I’m alive. I’m alive, and so are thousands of people who live in these tunnels, and none of us fits, the definition of pure.”
I had never heard anyone say these things out loud, and it shocked me. “You think the government is lying to us?” I asked. “Why would they do that?”
“People like power,” she said simply. “And once they have it, they don’t want to give it up. They’ll do just about anything to keep it. There are plenty of us down here in the Tunnels, but compared to the population of the whole city, we’re a drop in the bucket. And we serve a purpose. We take in your outcasts. We give the Patrol work to do. We eat your garbage and we do your dirty work. You have no idea how much money there is to be made making the government happy.”
I was horrified. Part of me wanted to believe her, and part of me didn’t. “But the government is trying to keep us — humanity — alive for the future. They’re trying to keep us safe.”
She snorted. “You know how the government says we can’t ever leave this place? All those posters everywhere saying you’ll die of radiation poisoning if you even try to get out of here.”
“Yes.” Of course I knew; they drilled it into us every day at school. After decades of war and human misuse had destroyed most of the world, a few safe havens had been built. We were the last enclave on the eastern coast of North America.
The government had built a safe zone around our city — an atmospheric shield that would protect us while the planet healed. There were other enclaves across the continent, but since we couldn’t risk traveling outside the dome, we might as well be alone. It would take twenty generations before we could walk on the earth again instead of on the concrete of this city. I was generation eleven. I would never see the real sky.
And then Nix said: “There’s a tunnel that leads out of here. All you need is a thousand credits. You pay the toll, you get out.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “But what’s on the other side? It could be a wasteland. It probably is.”
“I don’t know what’s on the other side, but my parents went through the tunnel, and so did most of the people on that wall. And I’m getting out of here, too.” She paused, glanced at the jasmine tea. “All I need is another fifty credits. That tea will buy it for me.”
My stomach churned. I was goin
g to be sick. I was such an idiot. “You just said you’d help me because you wanted the money. For the toll.”
She shrugged. “Don’t take it personally.”
I ground the palms of my hands against my eyes to push back tears. “I thought you liked me,” I said, my voice breaking, and then the hot nausea of shame flooded through me.
I felt her hands tugging at mine, pulling them away from my eyes. When I blinked through the tears, I saw her kneeling on the floor in front of me. If she had looked at me with pity, I think I would have fled. But I didn’t see pity in her face. I saw sadness, and the slightest trace of regret.
“I do like you, Kyle,” she said, her voice barely louder than a whisper.
So I kissed her. I kissed her so hard that I bit her lip, making her cry out in surprise, and she backed away, raising a hand to her mouth.
“Fuck,” she said.
We stared at each other. I wanted her so badly. It scared me how much. There, deep underground, beneath the streets of the only world I had known, I wanted this girl who had just robbed me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure if I was apologizing to her or to myself.
Her face softened, and she said, “Come here,” and pulled me over to the bed.
This time she took off her coat.
When I woke up, she was gone.
I sat up in the dark and felt for the string attached to the bare bulb and pulled, and the room sprang into harsh yellow light. The can of tea was gone. The crates were empty. But there was something lying on the chair.
I got up. It was a photo of Nix scowling at the camera, the flash reflected in her eyes and making her skin look washed-out and pale.
I sat down on the chair, my legs shaking.
Outside Nix’s room, Rio was waiting on the edge of the abandoned train tracks, sitting on an overturned crate. When he saw me, he said, “She asked me to take you back out.”
“Did she really leave?” I was hollow inside.
“Yeah, she left.” He gave me a sympathetic look as he got up. “Let’s go.”
By the time I crawled out of the stairwell, it was late afternoon. I walked back home to find my mother and the Emerald Garden chef preparing for the dinner rush. She gave me one short look and barked, “Get changed for work.”
I went upstairs and buried the photo of Nix in my top dresser drawer, between folded uniform blouses, and then I put on my work clothes.
My mother told me to focus on my studies, that my assignment was coming soon. “You’ve always been a good girl,” she said. “Just forget about what happened.”
But I couldn’t. I thought about what Nix had told me every time I saw one of the Patrol. I wondered if that tunnel to the outside was real. I wondered if Kit had paid the toll, too.
One weekend morning when my mother was out at the market, I went into her room and pulled down the box she kept hidden on the top shelf in her closet. It contained my birth certificate, her deed to the restaurant, and various other government-issued papers, but I knew it also contained a slim photo album. I had caught her looking at it a few times surreptitiously, but she had never let me see it. I hoped it had photos of my father in it.
I recognized him because he looked like Kit, except older. He had short, curly hair and medium-brown skin. He didn’t have any gang tattoos — at least none that were visible — but he was obviously mixed. He never would have blended into the crowd. Kit and I were lucky that we hadn’t inherited his hair. I pulled out a picture of him standing beside a brick wall, a faint look of surprise on his face.
On the next page was a collection of small photos of Kit and me as babies. Seeing us together made my heart sink, and I had to turn the page. There was Kit in the ceremonial photo taken a week before his assignment day, wearing his school uniform and a fixed, fake smile. I missed him so much.
I didn’t think I would ever see him again.
I took a few deep breaths. I peeled Kit’s photo off the page and pocketed it along with the picture of our father. Then I went back down to the Tunnels.
Rio had taken over Nix’s post, and he recognized me. “What are you doing back down here?” he asked.
“I need to go to the Wall.”
His face didn’t change expression, and I remembered how Nix had been at first: so cold and blank and hard. “You’ll have to wait. I don’t get off duty till lights out upstairs.”
“I’ll wait.” I ducked into the dark room behind the tunnel wall and sat on the edge of the mattress, and I remembered the last time I had been there.
I could tell that Rio thought I was insane, but he didn’t ask any questions. When his shift ended, he took me through the maze of tunnels again until we ended up in the vast ruin of a train station, the bits of paper layered onto the walls like feathers on a bird.
“You gonna need someone to take you back?” he asked.
I could stay down here. I could find a way to live in the Tunnels, just like Nix.
But I couldn’t abandon my mother.
I was a good girl.
“Please,” I said. “Will you wait for a little while?”
He shrugged. “It’ll cost you twenty credits.”
“Okay.” I didn’t have twenty credits, but he didn’t know that — did he? He gave me a look that suggested he knew I was lying.
He snorted. “Five minutes.”
I walked around the perimeter of the hall until I found the photo that Nix had been looking at. There wasn’t much room around it, but there was enough. I pulled three tacks from my pocket and stuck the photos onto the wall. My father, whose name I didn’t even know. My brother, with that fake smile on his face. I wondered if he had known, when that photo was taken, that he would be leaving soon afterward.
And Nix. Her photo was the smallest. I pushed the pin through the left side margin so that it didn’t cut off any of her face. “I hope you made it out,” I said. She seemed to glare at me through the photo, all hard edges and metal, just like the smell of her skin.
A Pocket Full of Dharma
by Paolo Bacigalupi
Wang Jun stood on the rain-slicked streets of old Chengdu and stared up into the drizzle at Huojianzhu. It rose into the evening darkness, a massive city core, dwarfing even Chengdu’s skyscrapers. Construction workers dangled from its rising skeleton, swinging from one section of growth to the next on long rappelling belts. Others clambered unsecured, digging their fingers into the honeycomb structure, climbing the struts with careless dangerous ease. Soon the growing core would overwhelm the wet-tiled roofs of the old city. Then Huojianzhu, the Living Architecture, would become Chengdu entirely.
It grew on lattices of minerals, laying its own skeleton and following with cellulose skin. Infrastructure strong and broad, growing and branching, it settled roots deep into the green fertile soil of the Sichuan basin. It drew nutrients and minerals from the soil and sun, and the water of the rancid Bing Jiang; sucking at pollutants as willingly as it ate the sunlight which filtered through twining sooty mist.
Within, its veins and arteries grew pipelines to service the waste and food and data needs of its coming occupants. It was an animal vertical city built first in the fertile minds of the Biotects and now growing into reality. Energy pulsed from the growing creature. It would stand a kilometer high and five wide when fully mature. A vast biologic city, which other than its life support would then lie dormant as humanity walked its hollowed arteries, clambered through its veins and nailed memories to its skin in the rituals of habitation.
Wang Jun watched Huojianzhu and dreamed in his small beggar-boy mind of ways and means that might lead him out of the wet streets and hunger and into its comforts. Already sections of it glowed with habitation. People, living high and far above him, roamed the organism’s corridors. Only the powerful and wealthy would live so high above.
Those with guanxi. Connections. Influence.
His eyes sought the top of the core, through the darkness and rain and mist, but it disappeared long before his
eyes could find it. He wondered if the people up high saw the stars while he saw only drizzle. He had heard that if one cut Huojianzhu, its walls would bleed. Some said it cried. He shivered at the rising creature and turned his eyes back to earth to continue pushing with his stick-thin limbs and bent posture through the Chengdu crowds.
Diverse Energies Page 15
