by Alex White
First published 2016 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-84997-931-3
Copyright © 2016 Alex White
Cover art by Jeffrey Alan Love
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
To Connor, who gave me a chance.
To Mom and Dad, who gave me a fighter’s spirit.
To Renee, who gave me humanity, humility and a perfect son.
Chapter One
Good Morning
“LOXA-LOX...”
Her eyes opened to the one room apartment, a yellow streetlight projecting her only window onto the carpet. She sighed and rolled over, pulling her blanket tighter about her body.
“Lox, Lox, Loxley... Get up, up, up,” she sang hoarsely to herself. She sat up on her mattress and looked back at the indentation where her mother used to lay.
“I’m awake.”
Her mother was two years dead, but the young woman announced her awakening, anyway. Loxley had been told how to wake up when she was a little girl, on account of her walks on the building’s roof in the middle of the night. You wake me up, too, baby. You always wake me up, too. Maybe I want to go with you, her mother would say.
Several times since her mother’s passing, Loxley had tried to leave the apartment in silence, but she felt her mother’s invisible tug on her heart when she awoke. She’d get scared on the way to the garden and have to come back. The first days after her mother passed, Loxley never left the apartment. Eventually, hunger won out, and she learned to talk to the mattress.
She stretched, cat-like, and scrubbed the crunchy sleep from her eyes. Loxley walked to the window and opened it, looking out onto the Hole. Much of the city lay hidden behind dingy buildings, but she preferred it that way. When she was little, her mother had taken her to the top ring – to Edgewood – with its alabaster buildings. “Isn’t it pretty?” her mother had asked, but Loxley didn’t like looking down into the basin at all the lights. There were too many to count, and it made her anxious to think of all the ones she was missing. Then, she started thinking about how almost everyone in the city could see her if she was standing at the top edge, and she had to leave.
Loxley lived close to the bottom of the Hole, nestled into the seventh ring in the base of the terraced, crater-shaped city. The buildings in the rings above were like baffles, shielding her from the view up in Edgewood. Some folks couldn’t be happy unless they were on top. She liked the bottom just fine. She didn’t need much space – just a little electricity and running water.
She reeled in some clothes off the line and pulled on some skivvies before shutting the window. They were cool and damp from where she’d left them out overnight, and she shuddered at their touch. Her jeans were full of wintery dew, and she wouldn’t put them on. She placed the rest of her outfit over the radiator and padded into the kitchen. She cooked an egg, and by the time she’d eaten it, her other clothes were completely dry. She went to pull on her hot garments and burned her belly on the pants button. She held her breath and shook the crackles out of her fingertips until the heat went away, then bent down to lace up her boots.
Without a sound, she slipped out her door and into the hallway. The corridors of Magic City Heights were empty, beige walls awash with clicking, fluorescent light the color of chicken fat. Loxley didn’t like the halls – their lights were too random and difficult to watch. She locked her deadbolt and made for the stairs.
Birdie Hoggatt had left her trash outside her apartment for her nephew to carry down in the morning. Loxley spied some coffee grounds and a banana peel through the milky plastic. She crept to the pile and tried to undo the knot in the top of the bag, but it wouldn’t budge. Frustrated, she knelt and tore a fist-sized hole into the belly of the trash bag, the cans inside complaining at her disturbance. It was a tiny sound, but infinitely louder than she’d been.
Footsteps pounded closer and Birdie’s door flew open, revealing the neighbor in a fluffy, white bathrobe, her wiry legs protruding from the bottom. She sneered, her lips curled in such a rage that Loxley thought the woman might bite her.
“Well hey there, sugar. Looks like I found my little coon thief,” she said softly, regarding Loxley sidelong. She looked down the hall to see if anyone else had been disturbed by the racket. “Leaving holes in the bags, throwing it all over the goddamned floor. Every day – every single day it’s like this.”
It wasn’t every day, though. Birdie only left her trash out on Tuesday, and Loxley hadn’t gone through it for three weeks. She’d only forgotten to put it back in the bag once, and that had been more than a year ago. Birdie shouldn’t have been angry; It was trash, so she wasn’t using it.
The older woman puffed up her chest. “You want to say something for yourself?”
“It’s just trash.”
“It’s not your trash.”
Loxley’s heart thundered, and she couldn’t keep looking Birdie in the eye. She pushed a hand inside the bag, feeling for the banana peel. Her fingers brushed against its skin, and she made to grasp it. “I just need some –”
The neighbor’s slap stung Loxley’s forearm, and she yanked her hand back to her side with a yelp. She let out a little hum as she swallowed tears. Everything in her body was telling her to panic and run away. She tried to stop humming, but every exhalation brought a fresh note.
“Get your filthy mongoloid paws out of there. I’m going to call Rick, you know. He’s going to throw you out.”
Rick wouldn’t throw her out. Rick gave her the key to the roof, so he must have liked her. Loxley stood and rubbed the spreading welt on her arm. Birdie wasn’t being reasonable. There had to be a cause.
“I’m sorry men don’t want to sleep with you anymore,” said Loxley. “I could maybe bring you some food sometime.”
“Excuse me?”
“My mother told me you were a whore, but I never see men coming to your apartment. It must be very hard to get by.”
“Why did your momma tell you I was a whore?” Birdie’s eyes bored into her.
“Because I heard you two yelling one time. I asked why you were yelling, and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Loxie. She’s just a whore.’”
Birdie shook her head. She was laughing, but her face was mad – not as mad as before, though, so maybe the conversation was going well. “Maybe the world is a better place without your momma, then. What do you think of that?”
“I think it would be hard to say one way or the other, Miss Hoggatt. I liked mother a lot, but it could be she wasn’t good for everyone.”
Birdie looked even less mad after that. “Do retards like you even have feelings?”
“I felt it when you hit me.”
“You’ll feel that again if I catch you going through my trash.” Again, Birdie glanced down the hallway. “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing on that roof, but you leave us the hell alone.” She punctuated this with a little twitch of her hooked nose.
Birdie slammed the door in her face. Loxley regarded the plain, red panel for a long moment, then she reached down and yanked out t
he banana peel and coffee grounds. She strode down the hall, leaving a trail of black specks in her wake. Her confidence faltered as she drew closer to the stairwell, and she scampered the rest of the way.
She finally reached the rooftop door, happy to see its battered steel knob. She shifted her rotting gains to one hand and checked to make sure it was locked before she fished out her precious key. Rick, the building’s superintendent, had given it to her a long time ago, and she guarded it jealously. She turned the lock, savoring the sound of the tumblers clicking into place, and opened the door to the dim light of the rising sun.
Row upon row of planters stretched before her, holding her life’s work – crops of berry bushes, vegetables and herbs. She grew marijuana, too, because it was easy and it sold well at the Bazaar, but she didn’t like the smell. Folks complained about the way people acted when they were smoking the stuff, but Loxley rarely understood the way anyone behaved, so it scarcely bothered her.
The walls here were made from thousands of plastic bags stretched and taped over wooden framing. Her makeshift structure diffused the sunlight and kept the humidity high. Even in these winter months, it would salvage heat from the leaky rooftop weather seal and keep the plants inside nice and cozy.
Her pride and joy was her water collection system, which ran along the rim and base of nearly every planter. She’d salvaged the pipes from a nearby building’s walls, though the ruined structure had been full of frightening men at the time. With the exception of the morning’s compost heist, she could be sneaky when she had to be. A small electronic pump sat idle, ready to siphon her water drainage barrel back into the collection system. That pump had set her back a small fortune, but her crops had returned on the investment tenfold.
Best of all, no one could see her in her greenhouse. Some mornings, when the Foundry was operating in full tilt, she could hear the rhythmic pounding like a heartbeat all around. She took long, slow sniffs of the warm, wet plant life, and her pulse slowed. No one could come here – just her.
She locked the door behind herself and set to work.
A rhythm possessed her as she labored on her morning’s tasks. She dropped the banana peel and grounds into the top of her composter, then cleaned the filter on her water collector. She started up the pump and set about pruning her plants like a gorilla searching for insects. She began to hum as she worked, an aimless, tuneless noise. She wasn’t tone deaf, but she couldn’t sing. She knew that fact well, though happily, there was no one around to judge.
Her makeshift wonder gave her delightful yields year round, and made her something of a celebrity in the Bazaar. The cucumbers were ready to pick, ripe and plump, their emerald skins waxy and unmarred by insects. She gathered them, along with her other staple crops, into wicker baskets and took them inside to the stairwell door. She wished Rick would have the elevator fixed, but sometimes he looked the other way on her rent, so she couldn’t complain.
Rick had also given her access to the fenced in area outside, which contained breaker boxes, plumbing connections, and Loxley’s beaten up farm cart. As long as she stayed out of Rick’s way and kept the planters from leaking, he said she could do whatever she wanted. The aging superintendent rarely showed his face, but Loxley knew he liked her. She said so once, and he’d told her, “No. I just can’t stand all the other goddamned whiners in this place. You’re the least annoying.”
She hauled her yield down twelve flights, two baskets at a time, over a grueling thirty minutes. She knew she looked small, but her morning chores had made her pretty strong. Once her load filled the cart, she unchained the door and set off for Vulcan’s Bazaar.
The Boatman
FROM THE SKY, Loxley imagined the Bazaar looked like a giant, rusty snake. It ran down Fifth Avenue on the seventh ring, a covered aluminum breezeway filled with jabbering merchants, blaring music, burning neon and a host of strange, stinging smells. Loxley didn’t like to go inside, and when she did, she had to keep her eyes on the ground or she’d feel ants marching up her legs and the crackles in her fingertips. Sometimes, people would try to talk to her, but she couldn’t always tell who was talking, and she didn’t know who she should listen to. She could make it quieter if she sang to herself, or covered her ears. She would often do both, and feel the vibrating hum in her chest as she tried to navigate the raging sea of lights with eyes watering.
She had a cozy alcove on the other side of the Bazaar – in a side street off the main drag – nestled between a café and a man selling old cameras. It would take her exactly twenty seconds to cross the bustling thoroughfare, and then she could wend her way back through alleyways to get to her spot. It wasn’t technically legal to sell in the street outside the Bazaar, but Officer Crutchfield made an exception for her.
Loxley was early, and she wanted to get to her stall before trading bells rang – but a dead man stood in her way.
Her mother could see the recently dead. Her mother said all the women of Loxley’s family could see them, but that had never been demonstrated because she’d had never met any of her other kin. Her mother always said there was nothing to fear from the deceased, but Loxley knew better. The lightest touch from a spirit would strike her like a hammer and bruise her terribly. When they could, the dead would cling to her like drowning victims. Ghosts might kill her if they were angry, and they were always angry at her for some reason.
She first spied the spirit about a block away as she neared the Bazaar. A man’s silhouette, still in the open air, stood like a paper cutout in the bright winter sun. She felt his unmistakable presence the second she laid eyes on him. As she drew nearer, she could make out a pale, older face, robbed of color by death. He looked at her with scratched, dusty eyes, his jaw slack, his fingers curling and uncurling, expectantly. She edged closer, and he took extra special notice of her, raising his pleading hands for her to come to him. The dead would only range so far from the only thing they knew – their own corpses.
She didn’t see his physical body, but he was blocking the way all the same. The other traders heading to the Bazaar took no notice of anything strange, so perhaps the corpse was hidden. It could have been in a building nearby, or even in the Bazaar, itself. Loxley spotted a shiny black Consortium car on the corner. She’d seen plenty of them in the past; the Consortium was everywhere. Did it have something to do with the ghost? Silhouettes of men filled the car’s windows, but she couldn’t tell if any of them were dead.
She couldn’t go another way; this was the easiest place to cross the Bazaar. What if she got turned around? What if she got trapped in the throng as they labored to open their stalls for the day? She felt the crackles start to form in her fingers, and she shook them out. Maybe she could just run past the ghost. That would be foolish, though. He didn’t have to run to catch her, and she knew it. She gritted her teeth. He wouldn’t stop staring at her, longing to touch her with those furious hands of his. His palms trembled, and he began to pace back and forth, not with the gait of a man, but the awkward steps of a puppet.
“Get out of here, stupid!” she called. Several heads turned, and she felt shame in the pit of her stomach as a few people chuckled.
He leaned in her direction like a lover leaning into a kiss, but came no closer. He seemed unfazed by her words, which did not surprise Loxley. She’d met several ghosts, but none of them ever listened to her. She didn’t believe they would listen to anyone. They lingered only for violence, unless they were old or died of a sickness.
She let her pullcart down onto its rests and shuffled back and forth between the handles. She couldn’t bear the thought of missing a morning’s sales, and what if the spirit was there tomorrow? She came to market every day. She shouldn’t miss today, because she was supposed to be there. The crackles wouldn’t leave her fingers, no matter how hard she shook them, and the ants started marching in her legs. She kneaded her knuckles against the sides of her hips, trying not to whimper.
“Hey, is everything okay over there?” came a familiar voi
ce.
She couldn’t run past. If she ran past, he would catch her and hurt her. The ghost cocked his head, but it didn’t look like he moved his neck; it looked like one of the strings holding him had been cut. His lips locked into a silent plea. She needed to be sitting in her spot. Trading bells would ring soon and she wasn’t there. If she wasn’t there, she couldn’t trade. Her voice began to rush between her clenched teeth without her permission.
“Loxley,” came the voice again.
She wrapped her hands around the cart’s handle and began to rock, feeling it grind against her hip bones. She pushed harder until it hurt. Stupid ghost. He had to move. This was the way the day was supposed to go, and if it didn’t go that way she didn’t know what would happen. She felt as though she were being pushed toward a cliff, unable to turn her head away from what she knew was coming.
A heavy palm came to rest on her shoulder, and she instantly batted it away with a yelp. She wheeled, wide-eyed, to see Officer Crutchfield. He smiled and took a step back, his hands up in the air.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked. “There’s something bad happening.”
“Just wanted you to see a friendly face, Loxie,” he said. “I could tell you was upset.”
She looked him over. When he smiled, crow’s feet emerged, as though his face was trying to hold up his shiny eyes. She stopped on his ginger whiskers, sprinkled through with white hairs.
“I like your mustache. It reminds me of a cat.”
He stroked it. “Suppose I am a bit calico.”
She imagined an old burly cop with a cat’s head. Then she imagined it putting mice in jail at gunpoint and laughed aloud. After the tension of the ghost it felt good to laugh, and she drank deeply of her relief.
