Company Town

by Madeline Ashby

  “The wine. Red or white?”

  “Oh. Sorry. I don’t drink wine. Too much sugar.” She gestured at the stain he couldn’t see, then dropped her hand quickly. “Abrupt changes in blood sugar are bad for … me.”

  “That’s a shame. Is there anything else I can offer you?”

  “Vodka, if you have it.” It was the safest. But it sounded demanding, to be so specific. “Or gin. Or bourbon. Or—” She heard the sound of ice on steel. She turned, and he was shaking a martini. “Or martinis. Sure.”

  As he poured, he asked: “Do you eat lamb?”

  Hwa shrugged. “Don’t know. Never had it.”

  He paused. “Never? Not even once?”

  Hwa gestured at the other towers. “I don’t think you reckon how spendy meat is in this town.”

  “Do you enjoy meat?”

  “Well, yeah, it’s good for me, and it tastes good, and—”

  He opened the door to the freezer and cut off the conversation. Out came a packet that he tossed in the sink. “We’ll eat the other things first, and this for dessert. Is tartare all right with you?”

  “What?”

  “Raw. Would you like to try it raw?”

  The moment stretched on for longer than it should have. “Sure,” Hwa said, finally. “If that’s how you like it. I mean, you know more about it than me, right?”

  He smirked. “Indeed.” He put the drinks and the shaker on a tray and carried them out to her. When she picked up hers, he held his out. “To your return.”

  It was a perfect martini. Literally. She’d had one once before, at the Aviation bar in Tower Four. Half sweet vermouth, half dry. Just the barest hint of sugar, the tiniest possible taste of what she wasn’t supposed to have. She leaned into the moment the way she leaned into pain. Breathed through it. Inhaled deeply: leather and garlic and mint, the olive brine beading on her glass.

  “I need you to tell me something,” she said, opening her eyes.

  Síofra was watching her closely. “Yes?”

  “Can you just level with me, and tell me you had somebody following me, the day of the shooting? Somebody wearing next-gen prototype camouflage, or something? Because if that’s the truth, then now’s the time.”

  Síofra put his drink down and stared at her. “You saw it, too.”

  Relief flooded her. She drained her martini. “I thought I was having a seizure.”

  Síofra gestured at the windows, and suddenly surveillance footage was on the screen. There was the skullcap, staring at his guns. Checking and rechecking the clips. Sighting down the scopes. He bent down to tighten the laces of his boot, and there it was: a blip of pixellated white, a glitch. A glitch that looked vaguely human in shape. An invisible man, with his hands on the ammo.

  Hwa pointed. “I saw this guy. In the sprinklers. The shape of him. Did you include this in the final report?”

  “I did. But the live rounds left behind a trail. They were in a smart box. It looks like simple human error. And Silas wasn’t interested in an alternative explanation.”

  A shiver ran through her. She pointed at the martini shaker. “You got any more there, b’y?”

  He poured her another. “When you start back, I’ll thank you to stop calling me boy at the end of sentences.”

  “It’s just an expression. It’s how we talk, out here. Besides, you’re only ten. I can call you whatever I want.”

  He laughed. Hwa reminded herself stop staring at him, and pulled her focus to the footage on the screen. She was here for more than just this job. She spoke the part she’d rehearsed. “Once I get my Prefect access back, I’ll start looking for who’s selling camouflage in town. But I want expanded access. The premium plan, like you have.”

  “You mean to hunt down this phantom?”

  Hwa drank. “Fucker got me shot. If he didn’t want me hunting him, he should’ve finished the job.”

  PART TWO

  OCTOBER

  9

  Acoutsina/Nakatomi/Girders/Bentham

  Hwa’s days began to follow a certain pattern.

  At 04:30, she woke up, drank a bottle of water with vinegar, and ran for an hour. Some of the time, Síofra came with. Otherwise, she ran the Demasduwit Causeway, circled Tower Two, then ran up the Sinclair and back down again toward the school. He ran the Fitzgerald to the Sinclair, and at the end of the run they met up. They had eggs in avocado and he asked her about what was going on in the city—whether he should tweak the register of the train’s announcement voice, or if the streetlights should change temperature from warm gold to cold white as the night wore on, or whether they needed more sniffers in public places. After what had happened to Calliope, he was supposed to be getting more suicide prevention measures installed. She showed him how to skip stones through the gaps in the existing motion detection. He did not ask how she knew where they were.

  At 06:15, she arrived at school and visited the weight room. Weights didn’t take long.

  By 07:00, she was showered and changed into her uniform and scoping the school. She did a full perimeter check, and she and Prefect ran over whatever the NASS system told them was important: assemblies, games, deliveries, other changes to everyday routine.

  From 08:00 to 16:00 she had classes with Joel. On Mondays, Joel had science club with Mr. Branch until 17:30. On Fridays, his father sent a special jitney to pick him up, and they did father-and-son stuff for the evening.

  Weekends the family had other security in the form of skullcaps, but there was a standing invitation to Sunday dinner. It was useful for copying Joel’s homework. And for reading the room. Anyway, it wasn’t like she had anywhere else to go. Usually Síofra was there, too.

  From 16:00 to 18:00 weekday afternoons, Hwa had Joel to train. She wanted him in the morning, originally, but it was a no-go. Joel’s implants had a persnickety update schedule—they had to talk to servers all over the world, and he was simply not good to go until later.

  After 18:00, she could go home. At home, she still had Prefect. And in between its other tasks, while running at very, very low background usage levels, the kind that wouldn’t trigger any kind of suspicion, Prefect had put together everything she needed to know. First, she’d run facial identification.

  “This woman appears a great deal,” Prefect had said, the first time she showed it a picture of Calliope. “She’s also deceased.”

  “I want to put together a timeline of her death.”

  Prefect had paused for a moment. For a moment she thought it didn’t understand her command. Then it said: “No one in your position has ever asked me to perform that task.”

  “No one who’s not a cop, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “That mean you can’t do it?”

  “Not at all. But it will force me to engage in some adaptive learning. Please be patient with me.”

  “Sure.”

  “And, I will need you to sign a waiver clarifying your understanding that my powers of observation can in certain circumstances extend to the extrajudicial, and that your use of my interface does not indemnify Lynch Ltd. or make them liable to any and all resulting legal actions pursuant to your investigation.”

  Hwa frowned. “Eh?”

  “If you use me to look at information that should in theory be covered by a warrant, and you are caught doing so, you will not hold the company responsible.”

  “Oh.” Hwa looked at Calliope’s face smiling at her from the display unit. “Where’s the dotted line?”

  And so they began.

  This was how Calliope spent her last day:

  Calliope found a recipe for dark chocolate pudding.

  Calliope watched almost an entire series of This Old Temple.

  Calliope read up on all the cast members of This Old Temple.

  Calliope checked the dates on all the items in her fridge that might allow her to make dark chocolate pudding.

  Calliope read up on food poisoning.

  Calliope went down a rabbit hole of intestinal
distress.

  Calliope did nothing for over an hour. Probably, she slept.

  Calliope received a message.

  Calliope looked up some coordinates.

  Calliope left the apartment.

  Calliope started walking on the causeway.

  Calliope disappeared.

  Calliope’s body surfaced on the water a day later.

  “Show me those coordinates,” Hwa said.

  * * *

  The coordinates matched a location on the Acoutsina Causeway, between the joints. Calliope had gone there sometime between 22:00 Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon of that week, when the flies found her body. Her fob logged her out of the tower at 21:48, and ambient surveillance found her at:50 and:55 looking before she crossed onto the causeway, and then again when she paused to look at a man cooking syrup sculptures. The fire under his wok picked out her features enough for the cameras to recognize her in the dimness. She smiled at him as he drizzled a butterfly shape onto a plate, carefully lifted it free, and handed it to a little girl. After that, Calliope drifted away from the crowd. And then she disappeared.

  Hwa went for a night run at 22:00 the next Tuesday to see what she had seen.

  At night, the pavement of the Acoutsina lit up speckled and blue, like a scattering of diamond dust had been mixed in with the asphalt. It was a pale imitation of the stars overhead. This far out to sea, the sky was still dark. It was different, on the mainland. Even St. John’s had an orange sky at night. But in New Arcadia the stars were clear, so clear you could imagine how sailors had navigated by them.

  The year after Tae-kyung died, Hwa had taken an off-book job guarding equipment on an observatory vessel. The biologists took their boat out at night, and during the day they wanted someone keeping an eye on all their stuff while they slept. The final night, they took her with them to watch the Perseids. The meteors kept streaking by, so many and so fast that they all lost count as the cups kept filling. Everyone was talking about how lucky they were to see it so clearly. All Hwa could think about was how even the oldest things died and became nothing, and what a comfort that was, that nothing lasted forever.

  Now she slowed to a stop, near the candy drizzler and his wok. He was still there. He gave her a hopeful look, but she shook her head. He directed his shtick somewhere else.

  “All right, Calliope? What did you see?”

  It would be Halloween, soon, so the kiosks were selling masks and props and costumes. One guy was hawking maps to the best candy and parties in Tower Five. And there were a bunch of haunted accessory realities—you could see the whole rig populated by zombies, or vampires, or whatever. Each day the vision would change a little, until you were in full alternate-universe horror.

  “Do Calliope’s purchases over the past month match any of the businesses here?”

  It took Prefect a minute. “No.”

  Hwa crossed to avoid a cyclist and looked out over the water. She sighed. “She was right here. I’m standing where she was standing, right before her fob started to drift. Even if she jumped, everyone would have seen her.”

  “Posit: she entered the water somewhere closer to the water, immediately below.”

  Hwa looked down. Below the low-speed pedestrian level was the high-speed level for vehicles. Lights rushed by, infrequent but blazingly fast. This late there was no speed limit. Only at peak hours did the vehicles have to watch how fast they went. If Calliope had gone down there, it was possible she’d been hit and fallen. But there was a suicide barrier at that level. She knew. She had seen Síofra’s maps of the area.

  Which meant she’d entered the water from somewhere below the causeway itself. Where the trolls lived.

  “You have got to be shitting me.”

  Hwa searched for the nearest set of service stairs. The relevant logo floated up above a parkette fringed with twisted long-needle pine and a few artful boulders that suggested human shapes huddled against the wind. Set in among the trees was a set of rusting steel doors. The rust had all but eroded the New Arcadia logo that burned high above in Hwa’s vision.

  “Here goes. Open her up.”

  It took a moment, but Hwa heard the bolt squeal to one side. She pushed down on the doors, but they wouldn’t budge. They’d rusted together. Hwa looked around at the people crowding the causeway. No one was really paying attention to the woman in the trees. The trees themselves reeked of piss—probably everyone had gotten used to ignoring whoever stood there.

  Hwa gave the door a nudge. Then a shove. Then a full body check. The doors fell open and Hwa stumbled down into cold, stale darkness. She found herself in a tight tunnel that reverberated with the roar of passing vehicles. The stairs went almost straight down. Their edges glowed, dimly. She felt around for a switch, but there was none.

  “Lights,” she said, but none came. She waved her hands. Nothing. Even if there were lights, their circuits might have burned out years ago. “Who used to manage this part of the causeway?” Hwa asked.

  “The last manager on file is listed as Nakatomi & Sons,” Prefect said.

  “Aye? How long ago did that contract wrap up?”

  “Five years ago.”

  “Great. Lovely. Beautiful.” Hwa gripped the rail tighter. “Well, give it to RoFo, okay?”

  RoFo was a sub-persona deployed by the Urban Tactics office to create an evolving portfolio of tasks based on residents’ complaints. You just pinged RoFo, and complained about any damn thing you could think of. A crack in the wall. A clogged drain. The way your doors kept opening and shutting, opening and shutting, all night long, because the motion detector was tuned so fucking high the food moths set it off. It didn’t mean the problem would get fixed right away, but it did mean you’d been listened to. It was an easy way to feel like someone cared. Even if no one really did.

  As her feet found another step, she heard a creak and then a clang. Then complete darkness. The doors had closed.

  “Are they supposed to do that?” Hwa asked.

  “All the service doors leading to high-speed causeways have an automatic locking protocol.”

  Hwa slowly let the breath out of her body. She closed her eyes. Her own personal darkness was warmer and safer than the howling blackness of the tunnel around her.

  “Prefect, are you able to open the door? Down here, on the high-speed level?”

  Silence.

  Hwa swallowed. Master control room, she reminded herself. Just picture the master control room. Picture all the buttons and screens. Picture all your problems on those screens. They’re far away. Remote.

  “Prefect?”

  A blip in her ears. A pop. Bad audio. A voice that sounded like it was underwater.

  “Prefect!”

  “—Apologies. Another process briefly borrowed my cycles.”

  Down below, another bolt screeched to one side. A door yawned slowly open. Violet light and noise from the high-speed causeway followed. The light exposed the little landing three steps below where Hwa stood.

  Blood.

  Everywhere.

  Old. Rusty. Like the doors.

  Handprints. A puddle. A dark blossom on one wall.

  Calliope had died here.

  * * *

  For about five seconds, she thought about calling the police. Then she thought better of it. She could send an anonymous tip, later. For now, there were the trolls.

  They lived under the causeways. Hence the name. Hwa had only visited them once before. Someone stole her backpack and put it there. Probably Missy Thompson, the grade five class bitch, though Hwa never found out exactly who it was. Which was probably for the best.

  Then as now, she’d found the secret entrance that took her below the vehicle level and into the girders. It was a runoff channel, meant for slurping down melted ice and snow and whatever else the pavement didn’t want, and dumping it out to sea. She was still just small enough to fit through, once she found a square of grate that was rusted enough to pry up. Back in grade five, she’d had to bring her own
crowbar. Stealing the crowbar was half the job.

  In October, the runoff was low. Not too much had washed down there. But if someone had killed Calliope—and someone had fucking butchered her—they had to drop her from somewhere. Somewhere close to the water. Somewhere under the causeway itself. In the girders. In the lowest place you could go.

  She walked on in darkness. Ahead of her, something skittered. She paused. “I’m friendly,” she said, although it sounded stupid. “I’m not police.”

  Nothing. Silence. Just the occasional rush of a ride overhead, and the dry whine of the wind in the channel.

  “My friend died,” she said. “She was killed. Here. Close to here. And I want to know who dumped her body.”

  A grunt. A rustling. Multiple trolls were in the channel with her. She heard something crunch behind her, softly, and she held up her hands. Who knew what edits they’d done to their eyes. Her own specs told her nothing. There were no maps for this place. No one had bothered to make them.

  “I swear I won’t tell anyone how I got down here,” she added. “I won’t bring anybody else into it. I just want to know, for me own self.”

  Clicking. A wet clicking, like many tongues striking many roofs of many mouths. Some of the trolls were all networked together, brain to brain, via early skullcap prototypes. Or so she’d heard. That was part of why they were down in the girders. The bleedthrough was too intense. Addictive. It was the only real social network.

  Something poked her in the back. It pushed her forward. Together they advanced through the channel. Hwa kept her hands up. Eventually the quiet lessened, and she heard a steely shrieking, and they pushed her out into the light.

  In the sudden bright glare of light was another city altogether. Unlike the city topside, it had not changed much. It was still paved with particle board and threading plastic. Its buildings were old disaster pop-ups, some of them still silver. Others were grown, mushroom-like, riven with green veins of mould, bigger now than when she remembered them. She had expected tarps, the first time, but didn’t know why. They wouldn’t hold through the winter. And these people had been here longer than most. Wind whistled through the other city. Hwa heard a cat. She smelled cooking.