Company Town

by Madeline Ashby

Quiet and white and thick. It covered everything. She buried her face in it. Drank. Licked. Nibbled until her teeth sang with pain.

  How had she gotten out of the elevator? Maybe she’d blacked out.

  She swung her legs through the snow as best she could. Pulled herself along by one snowy railing that remained unbent by the blast. It felt cold and hard and good under her bare hand. She hugged it as she pulled along. Felt it wedge up under her ribs. Let it hold her up. The rail ran up the incline of the jetty and alongside the stairs as they wound up to the low-speed level of the Demasduwit Causeway. Multiple flights of them, all switching back against each other, each surface hung with a long white beard of icicles.

  So many.

  No boats on this side of the tower. Probably they were all on the other side, the ruined side, putting out fires. (Were there still fires?) Or rescuing people. (Were people still alive? She was still alive. But she did not feel like a person.) This far out the water had a skin of ice on it, and it was accumulating snow. Without the railing, she might have stepped onto it at any time.

  “It’s good there’s this railing,” Hwa heard herself say. “Otherwise I’d just walk out on the ice and drown.”

  Drowning didn’t seem so bad. She’d heard it was the good way to go. You asphyxiated, and then there was nothing. Layne had asphyxiated. Drowned in her own lungs. That didn’t look like a good death—the bloody pink foam oozing up out of her throat and onto the electric pink of her hair.

  He’ll cut you in places you don’t know about, yet. The witch had said that. Under the causeway. In what Hwa had thought was the lowest place she could go.

  Hwa had to physically lift her bad knee with her good hand in order to get up the stairs. Eventually she just sat down on the stairs gingerly—the ice—and started pushing backward on her good knee. It was probably for the best. She was already seeing stars. Probably being completely upright was a bad idea anyway.

  “I could probably just go to sleep, right here,” she said, after the second flight of stairs. “That’d be a thing to do.”

  When her eyes opened, she was further up the stairs.

  “Ping RoFo.” She pushed up another slick stair. “Prefect, get RoFo on this shit.”

  Prefect said nothing. Probably the system was trying to reach her in its own way. Hwa looked around for cameras. There was an ancient-looking dome, black and smooth like a shark’s eye, and she waved at it. She doubted it would help. Half those things were dummies anyway. She twisted around—pain searing up her sciatic nerve from her ankle to her shoulder like someone had replaced her tendons with twisted wire hangers—to look at the rest of the stairs. Far up above was a rectangle of white light. What time was it? How long had she been in the shaft? What if everyone had evacuated?

  What if she was the last one in town?

  She started crab-walking as fast as she could. Her breath left little clouds of steam as it hissed between her teeth. Her knee felt fuzzy. Like someone had replaced the joints with steel wool. She started reciting “My Bonny Lies over the Ocean” to herself. Not singing it so much as breathing it, using it to keep pace.

  “Bring back,” she muttered, pushing herself up stair by stair, “bring back, oh bring back my bonny to me, to me…”

  Her knee throbbed. Her tailbone ached. Her hands froze into claws. Sweat trickled down her back and pooled at the base of her spine. Then it cooled on her body and she shivered. Her teeth chattered. Without her earbud and her watch she was alone. No augments. Just meat. Just flesh and bone and blood and breath. A solitary figure crawling up the leg of the city, like a bedbug or a flea.

  She pushed.

  At the top of the stairwell, she rested. The gate to the stairwell formed a natural break from the wind, and she sat there for a while watching the snow whisper down. She could just barely make out Tower Three, and if she turned—oh, Christ, that hurt—she could see Tower Two only a little bit better. That was good—if it got too cold to snow, then she really could die of exposure.

  Up ahead, there stood a set of blinking roadway blocks. They were yellow and black where they weren’t covered in snow. And beyond them stood two columns of tents, also that special shade of caution yellow, with a snowy aisle in the middle. In the special quiet made by the snow, Hwa heard radios coughing to each other.

  She was almost there before someone in a bubble coat came jogging out to meet her. He wore massive mirrorshade goggles. Both were flecked with snow.

  “Where you to?” he asked. She thought she recognized his voice. “Holy shit, Hwa!”

  He ripped the mirrorshades off. Underneath, Wade still had the face she’d almost broken. He hadn’t left the city after all. Her vision tilted. Went sideways. At first she thought she’d fallen down. But Wade was carrying her. And running. “FATHER!”

  Her vision bounced along as they cleared the roadblock. Then they were in a tent city. It smelled of instant food: oatmeal and coffee and freeze-dried orange juice. Someone cut through the crowd. Father Herlihy. The priest ushered them through the tents. The white sky turned to yellow tarp, orange cable, and dolly tracks. Someone brushed past her foot and her knee twinged and she yelped.

  “Is your ankle broken?” Wade asked.

  “I think my everything is broken.”

  He lay her down on something. It felt like a dentist’s chair. Then he put a blanket on her that looked like foil. It was immediately, stunningly, blissfully warm.

  “I rode an elevator in free fall,” she said. “Twenty floors. Twenty floors? I don’t know. Do you know in France, they don’t even count the first floor?”

  “DR. MANTIS! DR. MANTIS, WE NEED YOU OVER HERE RIGHT NOW!”

  Dr. Mantis swooped down from the dollies. His thorax clung to the network of steel tracking rods above, but his many eyes and claws swung low to look at her.

  “Miss Go!” he chirped. “Hello. What seems to be the trouble?”

  “I think I have a concussion. And my knee hurts.”

  “She’s hypothermic,” Wade said.

  “Oh, dear. That’s not very nice, is it?”

  “My mom died,” Hwa said. “I think.”

  Dr. Mantis strobed its vision into her eyes. “You are concussed. Your knee has also sustained some damage. I am going to inject your leg with freezing to bring down the swelling. There’s also a joint filler to help the cap start to seal.”

  A sharp pain in her knee that dulled as she breathed. She imagined the needle as the hardest thing in the wad of jelly that was her joint. Would she ever kick again? She used that leg to pivot.

  “And you need to rehydrate. This is saline.”

  Something in her arm. A pinprick. Angel’s eyes seemed so big. Father Herlihy’s, too. Father Herlihy was crying. No, not crying. More like weeping. Tears streaming down his face, silently. He’d probably seen so much already. Maybe this was it for him. Maybe he was hitting the wall.

  “Does she need blood?” Father Herlihy asked. “Because I could … I’m … I…” His hands opened and closed, as though he were already pumping his blood into her. What a strange thing to offer. How would he even know they matched?

  “It’s really not that bad.” Hwa tried hard to focus on the father’s face. Make sure he heard her. Maybe then he’d feel less bad. “I’ve had concussions before.”

  “Too many, according to your records,” Dr. Mantis said. “From tae kwon do?”

  “And me mum,” Hwa added.

  Father Herlihy ran from the tent.

  She looked at Wade. “Did I say something bad?”

  Dr. Mantis turned her head gently in its claws. “Look at me, please.”

  Outside, someone was raising his voice. Wade’s huge shape rose and blocked the tent flap. The standard bouncer pose. Then a burst of illumination. A flash-pass. Credentials. Wade stood aside.

  Daniel stood in the door.

  “Hello, Mr. Síofra.” Hwa wondered how Dr. Mantis knew. Then again, he was a robot doctor. He probably really did have eyes in the back of his head. �
�How are your hands?”

  Daniel had his hands behind his back. “They’re healing nicely. Thank you.”

  He came to stand beside the bed. Ducked around the sack of saline hanging from the ceiling. Took one of Hwa’s hands in both of his. He said nothing. Just pressed her hand between his and blew on it, slowly, putting the warmth back in.

  “You’re like a bad penny,” he said, after drawing another breath.

  “What’s a penny?”

  His face cracked into a smile. He wiped one eye with the heel of his hand. “Do you want to stay here after this is done, or come back with me?”

  The fireplace. That bathtub. All that vodka. The things that made it nice to have a body that bled and burnt and died. Compensation for being meat.

  “That second one.”

  * * *

  “I think I need a shower,” Hwa said, when he offered to draw her a bath. “It sounds like heaven, but I don’t think I can manage the tub right now. Getting in and out, I mean. I’m a little dizzy.”

  “Of course.” Daniel reached into the shower and played with the knobs, testing the heat on his own arm. When it satisfied him, he turned back to her and looked carefully at her torn clothes. “Do you need help with those?” he asked quietly.

  Hwa moved her shoulder experimentally. Pain shivered down her spine and along her sciatic nerve. “Yeah,” she admitted.

  Daniel knelt. He started with her socks, lifting her foot by the ankle and placing it on his knee as he unrolled them. First one, then the other. He looked up at her from the floor.

  “Turn your filters up,” Hwa said.

  He frowned. “What filters?”

  “In your eyes. The filters. So you won’t see … me.”

  He stood. “Why would I not want to see you?”

  She swallowed. “People edit me out,” she said. “I’m ugly to look at. And I’m twice as ugly to look at, naked. I’m doing you a favour, here.”

  “Do you not want me to see you?”

  Her mouth worked. She had been invisible—or blurred, or filtered, or hidden—for so long that whether or not she wanted to be seen rarely came up. “I don’t know. But you’ve gone this long without seeing it—me—and you’re probably better off.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Daniel looked genuinely confused. “The augments in my eyes are to help me see more, Hwa. Not less. I don’t know what you think I see, but I have never edited you out.”

  Hwa crossed her arms across her chest. She wanted to hide. Desperately. Her hands climbed up to cover her face.

  “No, don’t.” Daniel sounded alarmed. “Please don’t do that. Don’t hide. Not from me.”

  She started to curl in on herself. It would be better, now, to be smaller. To disappear. Daniel’s hands took gentle command of her shoulders. He kept her from falling.

  “I saw you the moment you collapsed, that first day,” he said. “After the pain ray hit you, I cut off the camera feeds in my eyes. And I took your pulse, and I picked you up and carried you down all those stupid gangplanks. And I watched your face, and your halo, and I read everything I could about you, and I wanted them to get a doctor for you, but they wouldn’t, and so I waited, for hours, and, Christ, I’m so sorry I offered you this job, Hwa. Look what it’s done to you. What I’ve done to you.”

  His voice was thick and wet. She splayed her fingers and looked up. Tears had slipped down his face. For once, he looked exhausted. No, not exhausted. Human.

  “It was selfish of me,” he continued. “Selfish and arrogant and stupid. You’d have been better off if we’d never spoken to each other, after that day. If I had just left you alone. You were happy. And your friends were alive. And…”

  Hwa let her hands fall. “You sound like you’ve been thinking about this a lot.”

  He wiped his eyes with the heel of one hand. She could just barely see the faint red tracery of wounds across the knuckles. “Yes. A lot. Over the past few days.”

  Hwa looked at the broken mirror hanging above the sinks. “Oh.”

  “I’ll close my eyes,” he said, and shut them. He helped her step the rest of the way out of her clothes. She stepped into the shower and hissed at the hot water on the open wounds. She twisted it down to a softer, trickling volume, and turned around. Daniel stood with his back against the cube, idly twisting a towel in his hands. Now she could ask. Now that the water was quieter and he couldn’t see her.

  “You … wanted to see me?”

  “Yes,” he said, a little too quickly.

  “All of me?”

  After a long pause, he nodded, as though to himself. “Yes,” he whispered.

  Maybe she just had no adrenaline left. Maybe that was how she could be so calm. Maybe shock had its benefits. “People don’t really look at me that way.”

  The laughter pushed out of him in a rush. He aimed it at the ceiling. She watched him shake his head through the glass. “That is completely false. You may not have glaucoma, but you have an enormous blind spot.”

  A blind spot. Layne had said something about that, in the dream. Was this what she’d meant? Was this what one stray fragment of her subconscious had been trying to tell her?

  “It’s just hard to believe, is all. Name one other person.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know their names. I just see them looking at you. And then they see me looking at them, and they stop looking at you.” He cracked his knuckles.

  “Those people are staring at my face. That happens all the time. All they see is—”

  “Your mouth.” The back of his head thudded against the glass. Like he was trying to knock the thoughts clear of his mind. “Your mouth and your hands and your legs and your neck and how you move. How you walk. How you talk. How you fight. How you dance.”

  Hwa picked at the smallest point. It was easier than taking him at his word. “I don’t really dance.”

  “You danced with me.” His voice was small. “Wearing that … I don’t know what to call it. All those buttons. I wanted to take you home with me. I should have taken you home with me. I should have kept you here all night.”

  Hwa leaned against the glass, behind him, her hands on the foggy place where his shoulders were. “And done what?”

  His head turned fractionally. “Anything you wanted.” She watched his throat working. “Even if it was nothing at all.”

  “I wouldn’t…” She looked down at her stained leg and her scarred arm, her bland body that was only good for causing pain. “I wouldn’t really be any good for that, though,” she said. “It’s not exactly my area of expertise.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” He sank to the floor. “You think I didn’t think about that? About how wrong this is? I wanted to wait. I wasn’t going to tell you until after you left the company. You could make your own choice, then.”

  That explained some things. And it was good of him. He was right: anything further would have been wrong, even if they had been riding a razor’s edge from day one. Lynch had so few boundaries, but Daniel had tried to keep this one, to hold the one line he most wanted to fall.

  “So you’re just a company man through and through, eh?”

  “Not lately,” he muttered. “I thought I owed these people something. I thought they had saved me. And all this time I was just their backup plan.”

  “So…” Hwa let her fingers make clear streaks in the steamed glass. “You don’t really owe them anything, do you? You don’t have to play by their rules, anymore. Not if you don’t want.”

  His hands stilled. The towel was tight between them. Taut and white and trembling. “Let me look at you. Please.”

  Hwa stepped back under the water. She opened the shower door all the way. He scrambled to his feet, all elegance gone, and pushed in, eyes red, clothes on.

  “God, Hwa,” he muttered, and his mouth was on hers, on the stain, on her closed eyes, her neck, the palms of her hands when they came up, tentatively, to hold on to his shoulders. The two of them fell back against the
wall of the shower and she yelped. He pulled back instantly.

  “Am I hurting you?” He held her face in his hands. He looked scared. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been afraid of hurting her. Of her actually being hurt.

  “I don’t know how much longer I can stand up.”

  His smile was so open and genuine she didn’t quite recognize it. “Should we lie down?”

  Hwa nodded. “I can’t fall asleep, though. The doctor said.”

  He reached around her and shut the water off. This close, through soaking wet cotton, she could feel every inch of him. Solid but springy, like a good mat. And warmer than her own skin, warmer than the water dripping from it, almost unbearably warm. A solid wall of heat that made all of her aches but one seem very distant and unimportant. He smoothed wet hair away from her face.

  “I will not let that become a problem.”

  * * *

  She did well, for someone on the injured roster.

  He went slow. Torturously slow. Drying her off, laying her down, oiling her skin, inspecting all the hurts and scars and rough patches with gentle fingers and a gentler mouth. The time she fell through a glass coffee table. The time a chain cut open her hand. The time Sunny pressed her arm to a hot oven. Belts and medals and trophies. The bullet wound, still pink and glossy. He looked so reverent, so transported, she had to shut her eyes. He let her lie still and quiet and then asked, quietly, if things would feel fairer if he were naked too. She nodded into the pillows and heard him kicking things away. When he was done she felt his weight dip the mattress behind her. He reached for her tentatively and waited until she said it was okay for him to come closer. And even then he just held her, skin to skin, speaking softly into her neck only when he thought she might be falling asleep.

  “I’m sorry,” Hwa said. “I’m sorry I’m not … doing more.”

  “I don’t need to be seduced, Hwa. I just need you to be here, and alive, and safe, with me.” He paused, and nestled a little closer. He stroked down the length of her spine, his touch reminding her of the way his voice would shiver down her nerves when he spoke to her from across town. This was better. Much better. “Although if there’s anything in particular you feel that you need, please tell me.”