by Watson Davis
“Well.” He slid the chair back up against the wall with his foot, adjusting the buttons of his shirt. “Let’s see what charges the police come back with. I just don’t know what I’m going to do after this. Getting you that job was a difficult task.”
“Hey, look at it this way.” I smiled up at him, at his craggy old face, the drugs starting to kick in, a comfortable exhaustion spreading through me. “It can’t go any worse than this one, right?”
Progress
“Look.” I pointed at the clock on the wall of the Sharing Room, which was a room painted in some sort of irritatingly neutral pastel color with a bunch of chairs in a circle where we-the halfway house inhabitants-were supposed to get together in group sessions and talk about how we felt and crap that happened in our pasts that still haunts us even though we’ve buried it beneath layers of denial. I’m not talking to anyone about that stuff especially to a bunch of people even more messed up than I am. Thanks, but no. “Time for today’s session to end. I’m hungry.” I looked around at Greta, the prostitute sitting beside me gnawing on the cuticle of her little finger and said, “Who’s with me?”
Edward Craft, sitting in his chair, the first among unequals, sighed. “Dorothea, you’ve got to make an effort. At least go and talk to your family if you won’t talk to us.”
“Right. Sure. I will.” I stood, patting my tummy. “But now, I’m going to get something to eat.” I looked around at the other people fidgeting in their chairs in the circle, nodding to Dion the forger, to Greta, to Sena, Harris, and Joaquin. “Right, gang? Time to eat?”
“OK. You’re right.” Craft stood and that released the rest of the group. “We’ll meet again tomorrow, but I expect to hear something about your childhood, Dorothea.”
A carefully edited version, maybe.
The first to stand, I reached the door before anyone else; I was glad that the torture session was over. The facility’s receptionist was waiting outside. I turned toward the cafeteria, trying to remember what was on the menu tonight, thinking about pulling up the menu on my onboard.
The receptionist, slight of build, hunched at the shoulder, a touch of gray in her curly black hair, reached out, delicately touching my forearm. “Dorothea? You’ve got a visitor, dear.”
I stopped, looking down at her, mind racing, a cold foreboding in my guts. “A visitor?”
“This way, hun.” The woman hobbled toward the front desk and the door to the receiving room. I followed.
“Dorothea’s got a visitor? Woohoo.” Dion laughed, making whooping noises, trailing along behind me.
“Shut up,” I said.
“He? She? Rich? Good-looking?” Greta slid in beside Dion, peeking at herself in one of the mirrors, futzing with her bleach-blond hair.
“Well, this is propitious.” Edward Craft hurried up alongside, straightening his clothes, smoothing the cuffs of his sleeves. “Maybe it’s an old friend and we can finally learn something about who Dorothea was before she’d ever killed anyone.”
I ignored them, leaving them at the door to the reception area.
An offworld woman, very well dressed, gemstones sparkling on her ears, fingers, and around her lean neck, was waiting in the reception room. She stood, clutching her purse against her chest, feet close together, heel to heel, as though trying not to touch any of the chairs or couches, probably not a bad idea, all things considered.
Her face lit up when she saw me, relieved. She stepped toward me, extending her hand. “Dorothea. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.”
I backed away, recognizing her. “You’re that woman from the car.”
“Yes. Krishna Wiatrek from FountainCorp.” She lowered her hand, hesitantly, her smile fading. “I’ve been sending you messages. We really need to talk.”
“No, we don’t.” I waved her off, backing up toward the door into the halfway house’s inner sanctum. “What we need is for you to stop sending me messages that I’m deleting as soon as I get, and you definitely need to stop stalking me or whatever the hell this is you’re doing here.”
“Dorothea, wait, listen...”
I turned and stormed back through the door, passing Craft, Greta, and Dion, not waiting for the door to shut behind me, the three of them following me, looking back at the doorway. On the way past, I pointed at the receptionist. “I never want to see that woman again.”
“Righty.” The receptionist nodded, touching her temple, making the note. “She’s on your banned list.”
“Who was that?” Craft scurried up beside me. “Someone from your past?”
“She looked lonely. And rich. Maybe I should…” Greta stopped and headed back to the door.
“She’s just some headhunter trying to hire me.” I pulled up the menu for the cafeteria. “Mmm. Spaghetti night.”
“Oh? She thinks you’re employable?” Craft looked back to the door, walking sideways. “Maybe I should be working with her to find you a job.”
“No,” I said. “She wants me to be a vile, money-grubbing mercenary and I’m not doing that. I’ve got standards.”
“There’s nothing wrong with profiting from your skills,” Edward said, his breathing becoming labored. “It’s better than being homeless.”
I stopped before the door of the cafeteria, the clattering of plates, of people talking coming from within. “You don’t understand what that kind of job entails. I prefer being able to sleep peacefully at night.”
“Oh.” Edward’s eyebrows rose. “Since when do you sleep peacefully at night?”
“Mmm,” I said, turning back to the cafeteria. “Spaghetti!”
Homecoming
I pulled up to a nondescript, military row house in the military dome outside of Massif and parked my beat-up, low-rent scooter. I checked the number stenciled above the door to make sure it was the right place. All these places look the same and I’d lived in several over the years, mostly with the sergeant major when I was a girl.
I stood in front of this one, staring at the curtained front windows, the curtains pulled shut, staring at it like an opponent in a sparring match. A sick unease wound its way through my guts, threatening to push my lunch out from one orifice or another as messily as possible, a niggling thought that I should walk away, that I wasn’t ready to face this.
Problems never go away if you don’t face them. The sergeant major said that. I believed him.
I sucked in a chest full of air, tasting the oil and grease and smoke and sweat and tears of a military base, the smell of home, a horrible stink to miss. I missed it.
I marched to the door and knocked, pressed the buzzer a couple of times, knocked some more. The door swung open. A woman in rumpled fatigues stopped, frozen, her mouth open, dark eyes wide, brown skin almost as dark as mine, her curly hair gray as a ship’s guts.
I nodded to her, just a flick of my chin, my eyes locked on hers, my most ancient adversary. “Mom.”
Her mouth snapped shut. She eased forward, placing her shoulder against the door facing, closing the door on her other shoulder, pinching off whatever view I could have into her apartment. She pitched her voice low, almost inaudible. “What are you doing here?”
Suddenly, I was that stupid, gawky fifteen-year-old sulking again, running away from home, pissed off over being grounded. The muscles in my jaws spasmed, grinding my teeth together, clenching my jaw. Somehow, I spat out, “I came to tell you that I’m out of prison.”
“Well, wooty hoo. You were expecting a party?” She sniffed, her eyes narrowing, lips curling back. “I said goodbye and good riddance to you at the sentencing. I told you then I was done with you. I meant it.”
For the first time, I noticed the decorations on her shoulder. “Two stars? Wow. You’re moving up in the world. Looks like having a traitor for a daughter didn’t hurt your career much. What should I call you now, Vice Admiral?”
“Don’t call me at all.” She stepped back, glaring, shutting the door.
I stuck my boot in the way, blocking th
e door, leaning in and taking the brunt of it with my shoulder. “I didn’t come to talk to you, anyway. I want to talk to the sergeant major, let him know I’m out, that I’m all right, that I’ve got a civ job now.”
“He can’t talk to you.” She pushed against the door, putting her weight against it.
“All you have to do is let me in and he’ll talk to me. I know he will.”
“He can’t talk to you. He’s ill. He couldn’t stand the excitement of seeing you.” Her eyes, mirror images of mine, bored into my soul, her bottom lip shaking, tears building up. “Haven’t you done enough damage? Aren’t you satisfied with all the souls you’ve taken, all the people you’ve killed? Do you want to kill him now?”
I staggered back, my insides shattered and broken. The door slammed, sealing shut, clicking and snapping as the locks engaged.
I turned and walked back to my scooter, shoulders hunched forward, staring at the white and yellow lines painted in the pavement.
That went better than expected.
Flipping Burgers
I parked my scooter in a spot by a garbage dumpster, wedged in between a couple of other nondescript scooters just as nicked up, in a dark alley, faintly red in the afternoon sun, the sun blocked by the six and seven story buildings on either side of the alley, factories and machine shops, steam shooting out from rusting pipes climbing the walls like vines on a rich-person’s wall, leaving the black asphalt of the street shiny from the condensation, slippery. Bits of trash: cloth, paper, and plastic took flight in the stiff breeze rushing down the alley.
Randomly placed doors broke up the cruddy brick walls, some almost hidden beneath the illegible graffiti, lights and cameras above them, the lights and cameras caged for their own safety behind thick steel bars and tinted glass, the doors thick slabs of metal with either a street number stenciled above them or a company’s emblem emblazoned into them.
Two homeless bums snuggled up between a dumpster and an enviro vent farther down the street, almost invisible clothed in trash bags stuffed with cushions and I don’t want to know what, a cardboard fort behind them. I’d have to remember that camouflage trick in the future, better than a ghillie suit in a city.
I set my helmet on my scooter’s seat, locking everything up. Touching my temple, I checked my location, making sure this was the place. The whole situation felt wrong, smelled wrong, and not just the bums’ excrement or the stink of rotting fish from the dumpster. I crossed the alley to the door my directions insisted was where I wanted to be, a door with “The Royal Chickeneer” painted on it, a grinning chicken with a golden crown, and, not seeing a buzzer, I knocked on the door, rapping against it with my knuckle.
I stepped back, raising my hands, looking up at the camera hidden above the door, smiling, letting the smile fade when I thought about how stupid I must look like that.
About ninety seconds later, thunk, thunk, thunk, the door unlocked and opened. A boy stood there in a blue and orange uniform, a cap with that stupid chicken’s head embroidered into it, a boy with ice-white skin, hair like distilled sunlight, eyes as blue as his uniform, a Meridani boy from the look of him. He shut his mouth so I shut mine.
He pointed, gulping, and in heavily accented Hellene, he said, “You’re here for the job? You Dorothea?”
“Yeah.” I nodded, my stomach flipping in my abdomen, a burning, sour taste in the back of my throat. I shifted to the Meridani language, a collection of vowels and consonants like a bitter liquor I’d hoped would never touch my lips again. “Would you prefer Meridani?”
His face twisted, several emotions flashing: surprise, relief, then switching, changing to something else, revulsion. “You speak our language?”
“I speak some. Not well.” I shrugged, stuffing my hands into my back pockets, glancing back at my scooter, wondering if I should just go. “Haven’t spoken it in a few years. Might be some rust.”
“Your Meridani accent’s better than my Hellene.” He smiled, the wide smile of an innocent, his upper lip perfectly straight, his lower lip bending like a recurved bow. He bobbed his head, holding the door with his right hand, gesturing for me to enter with his left. “Please forgive my rudeness. I am Darwin. I take food orders.”
Taking a deep breath, I nodded and slipped in past him, into a crowded kitchen, hot pots boiling on open flames, orders being yelled in from a heavyset man in the front of the kitchen, a pale-skinned Meridani with a bulbous red nose and rosy cheeks, with responses yelled back in a chorus from cooks with their heads down, more cooks asking for this or that, handing things across, all the cooks, male and female, Meridani. Knives pop-pop-popped against cutting boards, slicing and dicing vegetables. The whole thing looked like insane chaos, incomprehensible to me, but it smelled wonderful, all the different foods, spices, breads.
And one by one, bit by bit, the chaos faded away, the knives stopped chopping, the big man in the front yelled and no one responded, the cooks all looking at me, their eyes wide, and their mouths open.
“In the name of the prophet, what is going on?” The big man turned around, sputtering, glaring, seeing his cooks staring, shifting his gaze in the same direction, my direction. He raised his hands, screaming, “Darwin, don’t bring damned unclean delivery cunts into my kitchen and don’t let her touch anything or we’ll have to have the whole damned kitchen fumigated.”
Darwin pointed at me, his face growing an even paler shade of white. “This is her, the girl from the employment service, Dorothea.”
One of the cooks snickered.
“What?” The big man left his spot from the long metal table at the front of the kitchen. Women stared in from the front of the restaurant, their white faces gathering in the window above that table. He stomped toward us. “This black-skinned bitch?”
“Yes.” I curtsied. “They apparently made a huge mistake.”
“She speaks the Holy Tongue,” Darwin whispered toward the big man up front, cupping his hand against the side of his mouth like I wouldn’t be able to hear him that way.
“I apologize for the error. I will leave now.” I curtsied once more, bobbing my head the way the Meridani do, and marched to the back door, paying special attention to the sliding sound and gasps behind me, the hair on the back of my neck rising.
“Wait.”
I turned, slowly, carefully, fists tight at my sides.
The big man stood beside Darwin, a long butcher knife in his hand pointing toward me. “You’re not that black-skinned bitch named Dorothea? The butcher?”
“Why, yes. Yes, I am.” I smiled, suddenly finding myself in my element. “Unless you want to join your brethren in the afterlife I sent them to, you’ll think better of waving that knife around.”
“Little bitch, I outweigh you by seventy kilos.” A stupid smile spread across his face. He stepped toward me, leering. “Do you realize the ministers have placed a one million credit bounty on your head? Just your head, the rest of your body, they don’t want so much.”
“Your brethren outweighed me, too.” I spread my hands. “And yet, I am here and they are looking down at us with their thumbs up their asses.” I wriggled my fingers, gesturing him to come toward me, to try it, daring him. “One million credits are worth nothing to the dead.”
His blue eyes studied me, looking me up and down. He gnawed on his lip and set the knife aside.
I sniffed. “At least your dead brethren had balls.”
My Handler -- Part III
The door read “Craft: Chief Mental Hygienist” and it was locked. I’d tried to open it, pacing back and forth in the hall, wanting to hit something, my insides jittering, wearing a hole in the faded geometric shapes in the carpet, past the patched-up, vinyl-covered sectional by the drug dispensary, past the sad, sickly bush, turning and walking back, trying the door, palming the buzzer, doing it all again, and again, and again.
The door swished open. Laughing, Craft stood in the doorway next to Dion the forger, mid-sentence, hands in motion, explaining some something
or other piece of crapola that I didn’t give a single rat’s ass about.
I stomped up, jabbing my finger into Craft’s shoulder, almost knocking him over. “We need to talk.”
Craft turned to me, eyes blinking, mouth gaping open. “Huh?”
Dion’s head eased back, his eyes wide, darting from me to Craft, and back again, raising his hands in surrender. “OK, then. I’ll just be-”
“Do you have any damned idea what you sent me into?”
Craft raised his hands, imitating Dion’s stance, retreating back into his office, skirting the chrome and brown leather chairs in front of his desk. “So your interview didn’t go well?”
“Didn’t go well?” I followed him in, stalking him, sweeping past Dion who had pressed himself up against the wall. I clenched my fists. “You really don’t have the faintest idea where you sent me, do you?”
“It was just a job as a damned server at a restaurant.” He dropped into the plump office chair behind his desk, gesturing for me to choose between those two crappy chrome chairs. “I figured that was easy enough that even you couldn’t screw it up. And they had some special requirements that you were uniquely suited for.”
“Uniquely, huh?” Refusing to sit down, I rested my knuckles on his desk, leaning into them, glaring down at him. “What was that special requirement?”
“Um. I don’t remember offhand.” He placed his palm on his desk, bringing it to life. He selected my file, pulled up the paperwork. “They had a language requirement and it shows in your dossier that you’re fluent in that language.”
“Meri-fucking-dani.” I tried to spit out the word with as much gravitas as I could, trying to get it to register, trying to get some sort of a clue to insert itself in between his synapses.
“Yeah?” He shrugged. “So?”
