Some of the Best From Tor.com, 2013 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Various

  “You mean I did.”

  “I told him he was too old for you. That you could never keep up with him. That you still needed to grow. That he would get frustrated at that, and there would come a time for the black eye. He stopped yelling. He finally started listening to me.”

  * * *

  I knew my apartment was empty before I entered. I found mucous and scales and what might have been feathers on the bed. I fell back against the wall.

  He was alive.

  But he had not stayed. He had not gone out to find a pizza or anything storybook like that.

  He wasn’t coming back.

  I was sure he had done it for me. But perhaps it was apt punishment also. I had, after all, controlled the most important decision he made. Perhaps, that day, we had saved each other’s lives and parted because of it. Or perhaps we were just victims of the way the world is still made. I haven’t decided yet.

  * * *

  I tried to stop myself, but I gave in. I tried to find him. But I’d left it too long. And he’s good at not being found. I might have seen him, amongst the jokers passing me. I kept looking, for a while. I didn’t know what he looked like.

  Mum and I spent the next few days together. I told her Croyd had gone. She nodded. We didn’t talk about what had happened. Or anything else meaningful. We talked about the weather, which was getting colder. We talked about New York, which she’d started to gaze at, from out of the window.

  Finally, it was time for her to go home. She asked me when I had to return to school. I told her I still had two weeks. I thought she was about to offer me money, but she thought better of it. She kissed me on the cheek and I smelt the same perfume that I associated with what I’d fled, and felt the age of her skin on mine. I gave her some of the many boxes of Hostess Twinkies I still had lying around, which I was sure she’d give all of to Maxine. I was sure for many reasons.

  * * *

  The media coverage was minor to nonexistent, an accident to an increasingly minor celebrity. A run of shows cancelled, understandably. I rejoined the School much as I’d left it.

  * * *

  I’ve talked to Mother on the phone twice since then. She’s more like her old self. Which is either normal, or evil, or scared, depending on the background she’s seen against. The weather over there is much as it is here, getting colder. The aunts are fine. Thanks for asking.

  * * *

  As the snows came to New York, I realized that I’d stopped looking for Croyd in every crowd of jokers. That I’m sure I will see him again. I call myself The Understudy in ace circles now, and will until I feel justified doing otherwise. I don’t know how that could happen. But I know it might.

  I’ve finished crying, anyway. Telling this story cleared something away for me. I don’t know if I entirely wanted it cleared. But it has been.

  There’s no justice to any of this. One day I may end up taking care of my mother. She will never apologize for anything. I’m not sure I could ever be sure enough to insist she should. The battles of our adolescence can never be won.

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Paul Cornell

  Art copyright (C) 2013 by John Picacio

  * Possibly in Fort Freak, the latest Wild Cards book, in which Abigail makes her first appearance.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Begin Reading

  Copyright

  If you grow up in San Francisco, you grow up with a bone-deep sense of what it means when the ground starts to move: quake. The first quake I remember was just a little tremor, a 2.8, but whether it’s the big one or a little dish-rattler, there’s no experience in the world like the experience of having the ground start to move. It’s wrong like a seeing a broken bone sticking out of your skin, wrong like being carried upside down, wrong like trying to sign your name with your non-dominant hand, but times a bazillion. I was six when that little dish-rattler knocked the knickknacks off the shelves, and as I recall, I went from sitting on the living room sofa to crouching under the kitchen table by teleportation, or at least I moved so fast and so automatically that I have no recollection of consciously deciding to move.

  When the Seneca quake hit, I was halfway from Oakland airport to Coliseum BART, on the shuttle bus, and again, wham, one minute we were tootling down the road and the next, the road buckled and the bus was tilted 45’ up and to the right, and we were all rolling toward the back, flailing or curling up into protective balls, and there was a sound like a burrito finding its way through the digestive system of a cow the size of the galaxy, a rrrrrrrumble that went right up through your skin to your bones and joints, more felt than heard. When it stopped, the sound got louder: car alarms, crashing buildings, screams.

  That wasn’t a good day.

  I remember that day, the day the quake hit. I don’t remember the day the disaster became the new normal. Like San Francisco across the bay, the city of Oakland would never be the same. When the Hayward fault threw a tantrum, the whole liquefaction zone briefly liquefied (hence the name), and the buildings stupid humans had stuck on top of that gnarly mess of landfill and wishful thinking slid over, fell down, and fell apart.

  I didn’t leave Oakland for a week. Ange and I had just landed at Oakland airport after a week-long camping trip in the Nevada desert, a little pre-Burning Man event. We’d gone down to Nevada with full packs and come back with them nearly as full—the people who lived close enough to drive in had much better chow than the dried hippie treats we’d made, and they’d been cool about sharing. So when the Seneca quake hit, we dusted ourselves off and did what you do: we went to see how we could help.

  It was harder than it sounds. Without working phones, there wasn’t any way to look at Twitter and read about what was going on out of our lines of sight. But we let the sounds and the movement of other people be our guides, and it wasn’t long before we were in the rubble of a housing project, digging alongside cops, fire fighters, neighbors…anyone who could make it. Everyone had stories about things they’d seen: fires, gas leaks, downed electrical cables. We absorbed each bit of terrible news numbly. The same numbness descended on me when I helped a woman move a broken piece of roofing and found her daughter underneath, bloody and unconscious. The first-aid training I’d had kicked in, and I did what I could for her until a real medic arrived, which might have been twenty minutes or two minutes or two hours. The girl’s blood was still on my clothes a week later when I got home to Potrero Hill in San Francisco, on the other side of the bay. In the meantime, Ange and I slept in our tent, ate our rations and whatever we were given at the tables set up by different groups—sometimes church groups, sometimes Occupy Oakland, sometimes FEMA. We never saw the Red Cross, though they raised a buttload of money for “Oakland relief.”

  Our phones started working the first night, and we called home and spoke to our parents. They were half-insane with panic: they knew our plane had landed, but hadn’t heard anything else. They wanted us to get home right away, of course, but the routes back into the city were all jammed solid, the ferries filled to capacity. We convinced them that we were in the right place, though in my case I had to remind my parents more than once that at nineteen I was a grownup, and old enough to make my own decisions.

  But by day seven, I got up and realized that I’d had a hot shower in a friendly stranger’s house, had made my coffee with water boiled from a working electrical outlet, had checked my email on my working phone, and I looked at Ange and she looked at me and we both said, “Time to go.” We found the people we’d worked with, traded phone numbers and email addresses and long hugs, cried a little, and got on a ferry home.

  When we got to Fisherman’s Wharf we stopped in our tracks. “I don’t want to go,” I said. For more than a week, I hadn’t been out of earshot of Ange. We’d fought, we’d sweated, we’d rubbed each others’ sore muscles and bandaged each other’s blisters. Without working network connections, we hadn’t even had that companionable together-but-apart experience of sitting together but being in
your own Internet world, prodding at your phone. We’d just been there and together.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, but she was crying a bit. “We’ll see each other again tomorrow morning, doofus. I live two miles from your house.”

  She was right, but as soon as she was out of sight, fear started to gnaw at my guts. That’s the one emotion I hadn’t felt during the week in Oakland: fear. I’d felt brief terror when the bus started to roll, and revulsion, and sorrow, and exhaustion, but I’d developed a kind of blank no-space where my fear should have been. Now the space filled up, and fast. Ange was out of sight. Anything could happen. As I descended the BART stairs, the walls and roof loomed over me, and I flashed on all the tons of concrete and plaster and wood and dirt I’d shifted, and imagined what it would be like if those walls were to come down on me.

  I didn’t make it to the platform. By the time I got to the final escalator, I was in full panic attack, breathing heavily, clutching my chest, shaking. A young black guy behind me caught sight of me and said, “Woah, you okay?” I tried to say Yeah, it’s nothing, but I couldn’t choke out any words. There was no air in my lungs for speech. I never learned that guy’s name, but he led me by the elbow back toward the turnstiles, and stood with me while I tried to breathe.

  “Were you in the quake?” he said.

  I nodded. I wanted to say, “It’s not like that, I was a helper, not one of the victims,” but hey, no air.

  “That’s cool,” he said. “Going down there after something like that, well… I wasn’t even in town that day and I can barely bring myself to do it, you know? I mean, look at that crack on the wall—” He pointed. I hadn’t noticed it. It was like a zigzag of lightning forking down from the ceiling to the floor, radiating out from there. The wall had been shifted, along with the rest of town, by Seneca, but had remained standing…for now. It suddenly got a hundred times harder to breathe. “Whoops, sorry! Do you want to get out of here?”

  I nodded and gulped air like a fish out of water. He let me lean on him while we went to the turnstiles, and he left me leaning on one while he spoke to the station guard, who took one look at me and buzzed us both through. He got me back up to the surface and I could breathe again.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.” I swallowed a couple of times, wiped at the sweat on my face. I’d been sweating over shovels and pry-bars all week with a bandanna over my face, but this was different. It was cold terror sweat, slimy and shameful. “Sorry,” I said, and found that I was on the verge of tears. Jesus, I was a basket case.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” he said. He sounded sincere. I guess he was. He sat next to me for a while. He was dressed like someone with a job to go to, good shoes and pants with a crease down the leg, but he sat with me for a while.

  “Thanks,” I said, finally.

  “You’re all right,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a diagnosis.

  “I’m all right,” I said, because agreeing was easier than disagreeing. I don’t know if I said thank you again, or what, but the next thing I knew I was walking up Stockton Street, up and up that steep hill, over the summit, and down through Chinatown toward Market Street. I was dusty and dirty and sweaty and tired when I got home, but I was also comfortably numb, which was good, because someone had to be calm and collected, and it wasn’t my parents, who were totally freaked out at yet another incident in which I found myself in the middle of some kind of horrible problem, incommunicado and in the line of fire. Mom and Dad finally stopped hugging me and Dad made a ha-ha-only-serious joke about once being an accident, twice a coincidence, and three times a habit, and they let me go to bed.

  As my head hit the pillow, I would have bet a billion dollars that I was going to sleep for eighteen hours and then wake up, eat breakfast and go back to bed for another eighteen. But when I jolted awake, covered in nightmare sweat, the numbers on my homemade nixie-tube clock swore that it was 4:12 a.m. I tried to go back to sleep, even tried my mom’s trick of putting on the BBC’s shipping news—a droning readout of weather conditions in distant places, which could knock her out like a hammer—but I was wide awake, with a totally undeserved three-espresso jitter.

  I had a quick shower and brushed my teeth, then took my beard-trimmer to my face and hair, reducing everything to the number-three fuzz I’d been wearing all summer, but which had grown out into an irritating length—hair long enough to tangle, enough beard to catch stray bits of food and to itch my face like a brillo pad. Then I padded downstairs in a pair of boxer shorts and raided the kitchen, putting away a half-pound of granola with whatever nuts and dried fruits I could find on top. I had it with Dad’s homemade yogurt, and it was the pure taste of home, the flavor of a hundred late-night snacks wolfed down after nights spent partying or hacking. As I put the bowl in the dishwasher, I was struck by a terrible urge to throw it against the wall. It was all too damned normal. I’d been a human digging machine for a week, and now here I was, everything same as it ever was. There were still people in Oakland who were in deep trouble—people who’d lost a lot more than the few damaged pictures and knickknacks that were sitting on our kitchen table, awaiting mending. While I’d been in Oakland, I’d been part of something bigger: I’d been helping people, and they’d been helping me. It was weird, because for all that it was a horrific disaster, it was also the chance to live like it was the first days of a better nation, a place where every person you met was your brother or sister, where you did what needed doing because it needed doing.

  All my life, I’d been looking for something bigger than me, something I could be a part of. Once, I’d accidentally started a guerrilla army that kicked the DHS out of San Francisco. Once, I’d helped put a bunch of secrets where they needed to go. Both of those things had been complicated, and hard, and they’d left me feeling like I still hadn’t found whatever it was that was the whole point of living.

  But standing with my neighbors, day and night, moving big lumps of rock and wood and dirt from where it was to where it needed to be—that had been simple. Never easy, of course. But simple. Doing what needed doing.

  That’s what had gotten me up at 4:12 a.m. The knowledge that there was work to be done, and that I hadn’t been doing it.

  It was time to get back to work.

  It turns out that being semi-employed had one serious advantage: I didn’t need to hit up my boss for time off. All I needed to do was stop scrounging around the startups I knew—looking for a couple days’ work writing unit tests or ramming mountains of analytic data in and out of hadoop to figure out, to the pixel, where every button on a web-page should live—and I was at liberty. Ever since I’d dropped out of university, I’d been saving ten percent of every paycheck in a rainy-day fund, doing everything I could to forget it was there. It seemed no one I knew had a steady job anymore. If I had one penny left over at the end of the day, I should be socking it away against the day when there wasn’t any money to be had.

  Well, the rains had come. Literally. Eight days after Seneca, the rains started. Record storms, the kind that end with flash floods and mudslides even in the good times. These weren’t good times. Parts of San Francisco and Berkeley were still boarded up and rebuilding, and Oakland, well, Oakland was Oakland. Slammed by the quake, drowned by the flood, and the part of the Bay Area where there was the least money for seismic retrofits: the earth was angry with the East Bay for sure.

  I’d gotten into the habit of making my parents coffee in the morning, at least on the days when I got up earlier than them. I couldn’t bear to watch them drink the swill they brewed themselves. The morning I headed out to report to Occupy Seneca, I made it as extra-special perfect as I could. The rain drummed on the windows and the wind lashed the tree-branches, and we sipped our coffee. Sitting by the front door were my raincoat, my pack in its rain-cover, my rain boots, and a waterproof sailor hat. Dad gave me that one, something he’d been given as a joke by his students a million years before. It was a cheerful yellow sou’wes
ter and it made me look like I should be on a package of frozen fish-fingers. It was also amazing at keeping my head dry, because, you know, sailors.

  Ange came in halfway through our second cup, looking crazy adorbs in her slicker and boots. I grinned like a fool as I answered the door and she gave me a drippy kiss that left me with second-hand raindrops all down my front. “Do you like it?” she said, twirling in the front hall. “I feel like a drowned hobbit.”

  “It works for you,” I said. “Come in and get fuelled up.”

  Dirty secret: if they had to choose between me and Ange, I think my parents would choose Ange. Not in a creepy way or anything—they loved me and everything. But Ange was the clear favorite in the household. The parental units lit up like Christmas lights as she came into the kitchen, fussed over her with tea-towels, offered her breakfast. She grinned at me and stuck her tongue out, because she’d heard my theories on my parents’ relative affection for us before, and she always made the most of it when they made a big deal of her.

  Two cups of coffee later, I managed to pry her loose from my parents’ grasp. We suited up and set out, me riding behind her, our bikes throwing up fantails of water as we splashed up and down Potrero Hill toward the ferry docks. I knew to the stroke how much pedalling we had to do to make it up and over, and where the shallowest approaches were, but even so, we were both puffed out and red-faced by the time we boarded the ferry. But even after I caught my breath, I found my heart was still thudding in my chest. It was a good feeling, like the feeling I got just before I first kissed Ange, when I knew what was coming, but still couldn’t believe it.

  Ange’s fingers twined with mine. “Here we go,” she said. We kissed again through the curtain of rain pouring down of the brim of my hat and her hood.

  “Back to work,” I said, and we squeezed. The ferry bumped away from the pier.