by Anna North
“There are fifty thousand people on this island,” he said. “About five hundred are first-boaters. Another five thousand or so are second-boat, or they came in the influx, but they’ve managed through crime or connections or, very occasionally, intelligence to acquire wealth. The rest are people like us. We don’t have money, so we don’t have power. My organization is going to change that.”
“How?”
“Rich people have friends everywhere. The guards, the big companies, the Board. Tyson most of all. We’re making friends of our own.”
He spoke like he didn’t have to think, like he had a grand plan in his head and he was just breaking off chips of it to show her. She liked his certainty, and she liked the anger crackling in his voice. She hoped he was dangerous—she needed some danger on her side.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked.
“It depends on where your skills lie,” said Ansel. “But in general—talk to people. I have a lot of contacts, but I’m not always able to get the best out of them. In some situations, you might be better.”
She had talked to so many people in the past few days, it didn’t seem like much to promise. But she thought of the guard and his minty tongue, and she was wary.
“If you want me to talk to someone, and I don’t want to, what happens?”
“What are you suggesting?” Ansel asked.
“I mean, I don’t know how many guys you have. I don’t know whether you have guns or what.”
“I’m not going to divulge any information about our weaponry—yet. But I’m not trying to indenture you. We want enthusiastic allies or none at all. You won’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
Darcy hoped the girl in pink was right. And she hoped Ansel did have weapons. She was so small now, and she wanted to step into the middle of something big.
“Okay,” she said, “I’m in.”
“Very well,” he said. “Kneel, and I will knight you.”
“I’m not going to kneel. Tell me how you got the names.”
He spoke into the monkey hand.
“Let the record show that the subject refused knighthood.” He dropped the monkey hand to his side. “I know someone who knows someone in the guards. Thus, I obtained a list of all the missing persons from the week your mother disappeared. Usually only one or two people are reported missing per year. We live on an island, if you haven’t noticed. But ten people were reported in that week alone. I thought that was interesting. Don’t you?”
“I know someone who lived with my mom, back on the mainland. She said everyone on the list was a child on the first boat.”
“Who was that? Did she say anything else?”
“Yuka McKenzie. She lives at the nursing home where I work. She didn’t know why, but she said there was another kid, someone who wasn’t on the list. Ruth Rosen. Does that sound familiar at all?”
He shook his head.
“Did she say anything else about her?” he asked.
“She’s Esther Rosen’s twin sister. And Yuka seemed to think that she’d know what happened to the others. You think your friend in the guards could find her?”
“My friend’s friend. Perhaps. But he’ll need some convincing.”
“Can you convince him?”
“Oh, he doesn’t like me. He prefers women. Maybe you could convince him.”
She thought again of the young guard at the Avenida station.
“I’m not going to sleep with this guy,” she said.
“I don’t think it will come to that.”
“You don’t think?”
“It never has, with my friend.”
“So why doesn’t your friend talk to him then?”
“They’ve had a bit of a falling-out. And anyway, you’d be good at it. You seem like someone who gets what she wants.”
Darcy thought of listing all the things she’d wanted and never gotten, from the chicken sandwich in some rich kid’s hand at a bus stop when she was eight to the freedom to look forward to the next day without a dollar-by-dollar plan for getting through it, but she was too exhausted to begin. The black sky was turning yellow at its corners like an old comics flyer. She had the slightly unreal feeling that comes at the end of a sleepless night, the feeling of burrowing under time. The days and nights could pass, and she could crawl beneath them, like a mole or an insect in the earth, hidden from whatever parsimonious eye kept track of the minutes and hours. She shook herself. She had to be at work soon.
“Where do I find this guy?” she asked.
“He’s at the Boat in Hell City every night. He’ll be by the bar. Do you have any clothes besides that?”
She looked down at her jumpsuit, then at the small stack in the corner.
“Just some T-shirts and shorts. And my old school uniform, but it doesn’t really fit anymore.”
“That’s perfect,” he said. “Wear that.”
“It’s going to look pretty stupid with this splint sticking out.”
He looked her up and down, again paying her more attention than she was accustomed to receiving.
“No,” he said, “you’ll look great. I promise. Just go to the Boat tomorrow night, around eleven o’clock. He’ll be there. You can’t miss him—he wears this dumb visor all the time. And make sure you compliment him. My friend says he likes to be flattered.”
Then he stood, took the crown off and returned it to its place on the floor.
“If you need to find me,” he added, “I live in Hell City, near the market. There’s a green bucket outside the door.”
He used his monkey hand to wave good-bye.
5
At 10 p.m., Darcy turned off the Avenida and walked up Eighteenth until she got to the gray blocks where the Seafiber factory dribbled out its workers. Then she joined the jumpsuited crowd—grimly rowdy, smelling of salt and ash—as they all waited for the Hell City bus. Three women in front of Darcy shared a low, shapeless laugh. Darcy saw them pass a stained Seafiber bag from hand to grubby hand, saw each in turn lower her face into its mouth and breathe slowly in. When the last one had huffed her fill she lifted her face to the sky and let the rain pound her in the cheeks. A fat teenage boy to Darcy’s left began to lead his buddies in a song.
“I wish all the ladies,” he called.
“I wish all the ladies,” they answered.
“Were just like Aunt Jemima.”
“Were just like Aunt Jemima.”
“ ’Cause then they’d taste like syrup.”
“ ’Cause then they’d taste like syrup.”
“When I ate out their vaginas.”
A dark square opened out of the silver rain and the bus thundered forth into it. The fat boy peeled away from Darcy into the crowd crushing against the curb. The bus wheels sent up wings of black water and the people jumped and slapped at their plastered pant legs. Then the bus made a terrible metal ripping sound and stopped in a cloud of oil-stinking exhaust. Darcy wiped the rain from her face and struggled forward across the melting sidewalk to the scrum of men and women crowding the bus doors.
She had never ridden the Hell City bus before. It looked like a junkyard. Its headlights were bashed in and covered over with clear tape. A long stripe of tape also bisected the windshield. The side of the bus was patched in two places with Seaboard and in one place with what looked like a blue jumpsuit. Scrawled across these patches was an epic swath of graffiti: the image of a naked girl with head-sized breasts and a fat-lipped, gaping mouth, above a firing gun and the words “First Street Girls = RAT BITCH SLUTS.” A ladder made of old metal pipes hung down over the girl’s legs; the three women with the solvent bag handed a coin each through the driver’s window and hoisted themselves up the rickety rungs. The roof of the bus was already covered with a thick layer of wet and fractious humans who squatted hip to hip with one another and clutched the rusty, gum-spattered guardrails. When Darcy’s turn came she dragged herself up with both hands, pulling her bad leg up the wet rungs behind her.
> Two hollow-eyed teenagers made room for her in the back left-hand corner of the roof. She lowered herself onto the little damp square of metal they uncovered, slung her bad leg to the side, grabbed the handrail as the bus shuddered and screamed and began to move. The roof pitched and yawed so fast and hard that Darcy felt her gut rise to meet her throat. All around her the young and old were laughing or sleeping or smoking hand-rolled seaweed cigarettes; a group of girls were tossing around a ball made of what looked like old underwear.
They passed through Lower Chicagoland, down Wabash Avenue, where the GreenValley Vegetarium squatted, gray-green and humming. Darcy had heard it had twenty different climate-controlled rooms for growing luxury produce, like strawberries and apples. The air above the building was bruised with solvent exhaust; the air-conditioning drums groaned like old men. Darcy realized she hadn’t seen one safe-house sign on the whole ride—she wondered if Trish was right that there weren’t nearly enough to protect all the islanders.
The bus hung a harrowing right—the roof pitched into the turn, and everyone slid sideways in a crush against the railing. A general yell faded into grumbling as they righted themselves. They were on Chickadee Court now. Darcy could see the remnants of the old Founders’ Village—the stucco single-family homes with their circle driveways, now encrusted with lean-tos and rusted-out metal sheds. The few floss silk and frangipani trees that still rose out of the wet black earth held tree houses slapped together out of car doors and cheese-food crates and old Seafiber shower curtains. As they rumbled eastward, the world seemed to get smaller. Precarious extra floors were piled on top of the houses; tall teetering shanties squeezed between. Seaboard and scrap metal crowded out the air. Then the street began to narrow—shacks and sheds were built on the shoulder, jutting out into the path of the bus. Children ran out from sagging doorways as the bus approached, jumping and trying to grab on to its sides. A little girl wearing only a pair of pink polka-dot shorts leapt and caught the ladder. She held her open palm out for money. Someone gave her a high-five. Someone else handed her a green beer bottle with a finger’s worth left in it. The bus slowed on its way up to the intersection—there were no stoplights in Hell City, only clots of honking, rusty cars. The little girl jumped off and ran whooping between the drivers, waving her green bottle in the rain.
The bus slowed as the road got worse. They were on landfill now for sure. Darcy could almost feel the heaped-up trash and sand and sea muck giving under the wheels. This was where Tyson and the Board had first tried to expand the island, before they knew that landfill had to be reinforced, and there were so many cave-ins here that the flyers didn’t even bother to report them. Of course the last-boaters lived here—nowhere else would take them.
Darcy smelled something gamy cooking, and then the unmistakable sweet stink of solvent boiling down. Supposedly the hardest junkies ended up in Hell City because there were no guards to bust them. Some of the shacks had iron-red troughs in the doorways where solvent-heads had poured pot after pot of cook water. Darcy passed by one Seaboard shed now roofless and whorled with char marks from a cook gone bad; someone had spray painted the front wall with the words “FOR ReNT, TeN DolLARs A Yr.”
The other shacks and tree houses were dun and rust and gunmetal, occasionally plastered with wet ads cut from magazines. One low-lying thin-walled hut was plastered with naked women from pornoflyers—inside, Darcy could hear techno music beeping and hammering. Another shack was spread with doll parts: legs on the roof, blind breasts over the windows, heads above the door. All the objects in Hell City seemed broken off or torn out of something: a movie poster was a baby’s swaddling, a hubcap was a frying pan, a shower curtain was a roof.
A hundred feet ahead the road ended. A long low building made of rusted metal squatted in the bus’s path. As they drew closer, Darcy could see portholes in the sides and peeling silver paint. A keel pointed outward toward the bus, dinged and salt-scarred, its sharp edge dulled by its long-ago push through the waves. Beyond the boat was a great soupy no-man’s-land, a sucking swamp of orange mud and rusted cans and pools of standing water. The remnants of old shacks, built in the days when the land looked sturdy, sank into the mire, their walls warped and swollen, their roofs caving in. A few were still inhabited by people so desperate or marginal that even Hell City proper had no place for them—Darcy saw a skinny naked form, its long stringy hair obscuring its face, dart from a doorway and crawl, with a terrible, broken-hipped gait, across the sand. Fifty yards east of the last busted shack was the seawall, its barbed wire now a mockery. Once it had kept people off the restricted beach—now there was nothing beyond or before it worth restricting.
All the other boats—the first two cruise ships, and the numerous large and small craft of the influx—had been broken down and made into cars or pipes or factory parts or expensive jewelry for ironic rich people, but this one had hobbled in two years before Darcy was born, with passengers so scabbed and sored and rickety that no one wanted anything they lived in. The Boat itself was patched and rotting too, no square foot of metal without some scratch or flaw, so that looters had given up on it and scrap men let it be. All around it the pitted road was so full of men, women, and children hustling, dancing, tripping, and yelling that the bus driver didn’t even come to a full stop outside, just slowed down long enough for Darcy to jump off. With the new splint and the cream, she could walk as long as she kept most of her weight on her left leg. She kneed and elbowed her way through the sweat-and-solvent-scented crowd to where a bouncer stood with a lightning-bolt tattoo bisecting his forehead. He looked her up and down—she saw that his lightning bolt had been clumsily inscribed and was furred and faded at the edges like a bruise. His eyes lingered on her eyes for a count of five before he jerked his head over his shoulder to let her know she could go in.
The door of the Boat was a jagged hole cut in the metal. Darcy passed through it and into a darkness the color of tobacco juice. The high metal ceiling scrambled the music into a tinny tattoo, and in several places the rain was falling freely through it. The walls had their own smell, rust and brine and rot and something older, some foreign mainland chemical that had since fallen out of the world. Darcy ran her hand along one and felt the rivets holding it in place. Someone had screwed these in twenty years ago or more, with the last of the mainland metal, so that a last few, lucky or unlucky, could creep across the ocean and collapse in a heap in Hell City, where they were now writhing together like snakes.
Darcy pushed through the crowd. The inside of the Boat was one enormous room, bigger than the Manhattanville High School gym her class had been allowed to visit on alternate Wednesdays, bigger than the dining room at World Experiences. In the middle, a solve-core band was playing—a man plucked out a loud, slow, aimless riff on his cheese-box guitar while a singer wailed in a voice like air blown across a bottle neck.
“My home is a worn-out shoe,” she sang. “My home is a pizza box. My home is a solvent vial. My home is the open sea.”
A short woman grabbed the air in front of her and turned it like a knob. A man was licking space in a conical shape. As Darcy looked for Ansel’s contact, she felt hands climb up her. A finger made its way into her pocket, and when she wheeled around, its owner disappeared into the crowd.
The bar was at the back of the Boat, next to a rusted-out boiler. Girls with solvent-glazed eyes and skirts made of cut-off jumpsuits crowded around it, singing along to the music in sludgy voices. A bartender with fever-ravaged skin handed out jars of yellow-green palm beer. Around the bar were a handful of tables. At one sat a crew of young men in the red bandannas of the Kings, their toughness belied by the anxiety at the corners of their eyes and the still-soft down on their upper lips. At another were three refinery workers, one of them badly burned across the forehead, all of them grimly filling themselves with beer before the bus ride back to their dark Lower Chicagoland efficiencies. And at a third were a skinny, pointy-faced woman smoking a cigarette and a man in a Seaboard sun visor. H
e looked about thirty-five and was light-skinned, black-haired, and strong-jawed, like an advertisement for the guards.
He turned, and she felt his eyes on her. She tried to compose her face to meet him. She wanted to look invulnerable, like she belonged in this place and was never intimidated or afraid. But she also wanted to look like someone worthy of help. The skinny girl put out her cigarette on the Seaboard table and looked at her with a skeptical eye. She had a tattoo of a mouth next to her mouth. Darcy drew her shoulders back, made her face hard, resisted the urge to tug on her shorts.
“I’m Darcy Pern,” she said. “I’m a friend of Ansel’s.”
She wondered if she should have given them a false name. She wished she had asked Ansel more about the guard. He was looking at her the way job interviewers once looked at her—smug and bored and lazily confident that they had something she wanted.
“And?” he said.
And what? She searched the air around the table for something complimentary to say. She thought he was handsome, but she didn’t want to tell him that. She looked at the cigarette-burned tabletop, the smeary portholes, the jar of cloudy beer in his hand.
“I like your hat,” she said.
The skinny girl laughed. Her front teeth were gray and jumbled together. Her tattoo was an amateur job, like the bouncer’s; the mouth opened much wider on one side than the other. It looked like it was burping.
“Is that so funny, Pine? Just because you don’t find my hat attractive doesn’t mean nobody does. What do you like about it, Darcy?”
She remembered the GreenValley interviewer asking about her experience, remembered the sucking feeling inside her chest as she realized there was no right answer she could give. She pushed the feeling away. The guard leaned back. He was wearing a fifty-cent Seaboard visor, the kind boys on the Avenida made themselves, and he was drinking palm beer in the Boat with a girl even more last-boat than a last-boat hooker. Darcy took a breath.
