Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  Word on the street says there was once this guy—a Make, maybe Medical, maybe Secretarial—who worked for a guy—definitely human—who ran most of the city’s organized crime. He patched up gunshots and sewed together stab wounds. He ran the books and kept tabs on who owed the big man what. Whatever job he had done for the mobster, it had been important; on that the Word never wavered. He was useful and he was smart and he was a great favorite of this man who sat above the Law and because of that he also found himself boosted out of the Law’s reach. A Make who had made good; the street kids who told the tale shook their heads in wonder at the idea. It was as if he had told gravity to go fuck itself.

  At some point the mobster had finally died and left the Make most if not all of a healthy inheritance. He had used his connections and his newfound shitloads of money to once again vault merrily over the Laws and buy a penthouse suite somewhere in the city, where he lurked to this very day raising racing pigeons. Nice, plump, tame pigeons, sitting on nests of eggs.

  It becomes a thing, this legend and his mythological pigeon coop. There are easier foods to steal than some ex-mobster’s prized pets, but at some point it becomes less about hunger (not really, not quite, it’s always about hunger if you dig down far enough) and more about the challenge. The street rats of the City unite beneath this purpose, trading information when and where they come across it. A kid from the dockside Halfway says he knows a girl who says she’s seen weird-looking pigeons flying to and from an old apartment tower near the City center. Someone bums a doorman a loosie and gets gossip in return: the mysterious tenant on the penthouse floor is a Make, the doorman can’t be sure of it, but he’s almost certain although he’s never met them face-to-face. Word on the street buzzes like a power line on a hot day. It arcs through the City—through the markets and food stalls and slick little no-name alleys, down into the sewers, up over the hypodermic racks of skyscrapers punching trackmarks into flabby fogbanks and down down down again to the docks and the piers and the filthy tideline of the sea—and then goes clattering back the way it came, a magnet on a fishing line that draws every bit of loose crap along with it.

  “Why did the doorman think he was a Make again?” Rhye asks, craning her head back to take in the tower’s bulk. It’s not colossally tall as apartment blocks go, maybe six stories at the outmost. It’s also not in the best shape. It is, to put it mildly, a shithole. Rhye has been in Halfway housing for most of her life at this point and she knows a shithole when she sees one. The brick is pitted and crumbling, the street-level walls bloating out like an old man’s stomach. Ivy digs its little claws in where it can, climbing like it thinks maybe it can achieve orbit if it gets high enough and hooks a tendril into a passing satellite or shuttle. The skeleton of a rusting, partially collapsed fire escape clings desperately to the building’s side; whether it’s still anchored there by its own failing supports or whether the ivy is holding it up is a question for a fire marshal who has presumably gone blind from staring too long into the glare of a big pile of gold dumped onto his doorstep. It seems like a pretty sorry spot for a legend to be hiding, Rhye finds herself thinking. From the looks on the faces of the other Make kids gathered there, they mostly tend to agree. “Did he see his eyes or something?”

  “He didn’t say,” says Jinx, who wasn’t there but knows the older kid who was. Jinx is not Rhye’s friend. Rhye doesn’t have friends. She is twelve years out of the factory and she’s learned a lot since the day she tugged on that ward’s hems. Friends are a sloppy thing to keep. The same people who designed her to feel the dishrag twist of an empty stomach or the sweat of an unbearably hot City afternoon also gave her empathy and the whole range of human emotions, presumably for the same reasons as all the other built-in human weaknesses: As a failsafe, a collar around her neck to be yanked if she ever stepped out of line. She can’t make herself not hungry, and she definitely can’t stop feeling the special sticky hell of a Colony summer day, but the friend thing is more easily remedied. It only requires being an absolute dick to anybody who gets too close. Rhye has become exceptionally good at being an absolute dick to anybody who gets too close. The kids she runs with keep a wary, respectful distance, Jinx included. All she knows about him is that he’s originally from an uptown Halfway and that he’s probably also a Manual ’cause he’s strong as hell. That’s all she wants to know. They’ve covered each other’s backs a time or two and that’s as far as the relationship stretches. “He just said he knew, y’know?”

  “Gee, that sure sounds like a sure thing. I heard they were giving out free lunches at the cop shop, you’d better run over and check.” A couple of the other kids snicker. Jinx flinches back, scowling. Another victory for Rhye’s reputation. She’s hungry, which makes her cranky, but then she pretty much stays hungry, so cranky has become her default setting. Definitely helps with the no friends rule. “You want me to climb up and see just how full of crap he was or are we just gonna stand here all day until someone notices and chases us off?”

  Now it’s Jinx’s turn to snort skeptically. “You? Climb that? Rats couldn’t climb that wall, it’s too unstable. Also, you ain’t got enough muscle. You’ll total yourself. You’ll fall off and split open like a bag of garbage.” The snickers from the other kids are louder this time. Nobody ever manages to get one off at Rhye most of the time. Enjoy it, assholes, she thinks, committing the bitter feeling of being laughed at to memory for the next time she feels sorry for any of them. “We should just find some way of sneaking in instead. I think I saw a maintenance door over—”

  “Boost me up, asshole.”

  Jinx pauses.

  “Say what?”

  “Did I stutter, or did the Factory make your eardrums defective? I said, boost me to that ivy over there. I can make it to the top.”

  Jinx stares at her a few seconds longer, gauging how serious she is, making sure this isn’t some kind of prank that ends with her riding around on his shoulders like a pony. Eventually, he shrugs: Your funeral.

  “Fine,” he says. “But I’m not sticking around to help when you fall off. That’s your problem.”

  “Not asking you to stick around. Just get me up on the wall and get the hell outta the way.”

  Jinx isn’t much older than her, but he’s a lot broader, made for a future of serious heavy lifting on docks or trucks. Rhye’s strong too, but it’s in a leaner, less obvious kind of way. Nobody had ever specified what type of Manual duty she was built for, and she had never gotten far along enough in her early training to find out. At this point in her life she could give a shit. All Rhye knows for certain is that she’s confident she can make it up that wall, all the way to the distant roof.

  Jinx crouches to let her scramble aboard. The small crowd of street kids is shifting and muttering restlessly, caught between wanting to see a spectacle—whether that’s Rhye actually making it or Rhye smashing to earth hard enough to turn herself into pink confetti doesn’t make much of a difference—and wanting to clear out before someone notices what’s going on and calls the cops.

  “Ready?” Jinx asks, still huddled in a crouch.

  “Ready,” says Rhye. She balances easily, a bare heel planted on each of his upturned palms.

  He pushes off the ground like a boulder with ambitions of becoming an asteroid, every muscle in his broad body dunking gravity’s head facedown in the toilet. The momentum of him flows into Rhye. He’s a lit fuse beneath her, a sizzling bomb, the shockwave of his explosion boosting her own jump higher. Her heels part ways with his shoulders and just like that she’s on her own, a hurled brick tumbling through the air to crash against the wall and a length of conveniently dangling ivy, feet scrabbling and hands clutching and green leaves flying and an involuntary cry from the group below rising like an alley cat’s chorus. Told you so, assholes, she dearly wants to turn and shout, but there’s no time for that now; if she stops moving she’s doomed. Her fate over the next several seconds rests squarely on how fast she can hoof it.

  Slith
er-strain along the vines, slipping from stalk to failing stalk, hand over hand over hand over foot over scraped knee over someone’s bedroom window and a pink teddy bear perched sentry duty still over a sill full of dying plants, over the rattlebones of the fire escape’s buckled spine flaking crumbling clattering away to spit red hail over the upturned faces of her gang, shivering sighing giving up the ghost with every springloaded footstep that dares touch down and spider-splayed over brick again, clinging springing lunging with fingernails and fingertips and her goddamned teeth when more ivy comes within reach and Rhye doesn’t care about dying but she does care about proving she can do this, she can do this, her arms scream her toes are raw her shins are raw she can taste blood but she can do this, she’s four stories and climbing, four down two to go, more rotten fire escape tumbling from her weight, more sensing air beneath her bruised heels where half a second ago there was a memory of metal, another window with no curtains where an unmade bed lurks the smeared depth of a glass pane’s fathom away, and there’s a sound like beating wings above and a hush like a held-in cheer below and also distant sirens and she thinks she’s made it, she can’t look up or down and the mortar itself has started to give but she thinks she might be close, she might be close, she might be closing in, and she’s only light enough to have made it because she’s always so hungry she can motherfuckin’ float. She’s climbing her own rib cage to victory.

  The brick crumbles completely beneath her left foot just as her right hand reaches up to grasp at empty space. Up and over the edge of the roof, one last moment of abuse for her kneecaps and shins as she drags them across that jagged granite lip, rolling and gasping across bird crap and good solid tar paper and six vertical stories of dubious architecture. There is no part of Rhye not on screaming brainless fire, but she made it. Sirens are definitely blaring on the street below. A flock of pigeons bursts into irritated flight around and above her and for a confused second she thinks the flutter is her heart escaping the shoddily constructed papier-mâché cage of her chest.

  THERE’S NOTHING SPECIAL about the roof. Tar paper, air ducts. An uninterrupted view of a thousand roofs exactly like it, stretching away in every direction until distance or the sea cut them short. It’s mostly unremarkable. Mostly it’s not worth the climb Rhye just made. Her fingers and toes are numb; the muscles in her forearms and thighs and back are, unfortunately, not. Not for the first time this month or week or day or hour she curses the thousand unknown names of the humans who designed her, wincing, and hobbling her way across the roof’s width in half-hearted exploration because she’s up here now and why not? Whether the cops come after her or not depends on how bored they are today.

  She makes her way around the jutting finger of another bank of air ducts. Stops, blinking stupidly.

  Huddled in the lee of the duct bank is an enormous pigeon coop.

  There’s no way the rumors were true. There’s no way that doorman knew his ass from a hole in the ground. There’s no way Jinx had had the right of it, but here she is, and here is a carefully constructed, carefully painted bird hotel, and no matter how many times she warily hobbles around it, the damn thing refuses to vanish in a puff of smoke. Pigeons burble and coo, flapping and roosting and going about their pigeony business. Small openings in the wire let them come and go as they please. The human door to the interior sits slightly ajar.

  Her stomach makes a noise like a subway car. Eggs. There have to be eggs in there, right? First thing’s first: Suck down as many eggs as possible, then figure out where to go from there. She is not thinking about how the hell she’s going to get back down; that’s a problem for future her with a bellyful of unborn birds. One thing at a time. Eat. Rest. Let the cops clear out below. She staggers towards the coop door.

  The nesting pigeons barely look up as Rhye’s shadow lurches over them, so chill it’s almost insulting. Every pigeon she’s ever come across on the street got out of the way if not in a hurry then at a reasonably fast stroll. The way these round, beady-eyed earmuffs react, she might as well be one of those plastic owls people put out on their rooflines. In her head the eggs had been lined up like bodega goods, ready for the picking. Digging them out from under a bunch of bird’s asses had never figured into her plans.

  “Shoo,” she says in a half-whisper.

  Blank oildrop stares.

  “G’wan, shoo,” she says again, and makes a ridiculous little flapping motion with her hands. “Go away.”

  Nope. Nothing doing. One of them actually settles in and makes itself more comfortable.

  “Okay, you know what, fuck you.”

  Crrrrrrlooo.

  As a final resort: “...Please? C’mon, I’m hungry.”

  “Pigeons aren’t very smart, kid. They speak terrible English and their Europan is only passable.”

  The voice comes from behind, in the doorway, where Rhye wasn’t keeping watch because Rhye was hungry and sloppy and tired. The voice is too close to get away from, the voice is attached to a figure who blots out the light, the voice is as rough and honeyed as the whiskey Rhye will develop a taste for a few summers from now and every time she takes a drink a little part of her will think about that moment in the pigeon coop, caught red-handed with no way out and the dusty smell of birds so strong she’s never quite blown it out of her nose since. It’s a woman’s voice, and a woman’s calloused hand that falls on Rhye’s shoulder, strong enough to make her yelp. She writhes and twists and now the pigeons are getting upset, the stupid bastards.

  “Come downstairs and I’ll cook you some eggs,” the woman says. “Fight me, and I’ll crack your head so wide open incoming shuttle traffic will be able to read your serial numbers from the air.”

  NOURISHMENT[ nur-ish-muh nt, nuhr- ]

  noun

  1. something that nourishes; food, nutriment, or sustenance.

  2. the act of nourishing.

  RHYE’S CAPTOR FROG-MARCHES her out of the coop—farewell pigeons, you were so not worth the trouble—and back more or less the way she originally came. An access door leads to a dimly lit flight of stairs. The stairs lead to a dingy hallway; the inside of the building doesn’t look to be in much better shape than the outside. The hallway leads to another door, a row of shoes and a welcome mat that simply says NO standing guard on the threshold. She gets a few glances over her shoulder at the woman as she’s pushed along: Old, maybe late twenties, face lined and darkened by the sun like a dock worker’s. She wears paint-splattered blue coveralls. Her eyes are hidden by a ridiculous pair of sunglasses with oversized orange plastic frames.

  “Stand against that wall,” the woman commands. “Try anything funny and I’ll tear your head off and use it as a doorstop.”

  Rhye does as she’s told for once. The woman carefully unlaces her boots, pulls them off, and places them at the end of the shoe line-up.

  “Don’t wanna track any more pigeon shit in than I can avoid,” she says by way of explanation. “Okay. You first. Wipe those nasty feet on the mat, for all the good it’ll do. Know what’ll happen if you act up?”

  “...Something bad to do with my head?”

  “Bingo. You catch on quick. Let’s go.”

  Rhye expects an apartment as dingy and cramped as the rest of the building. Every place she’s ever lived in her entire life has rated on an extremely short scale from ‘dingy and cramped’ (the Factory) to ‘in an advanced state of falling down’ (the Halfway). The space the old woman steers her into is so far removed from everything Rhye knows she immediately has to invent a new category for it. It vaults. It echoes. It glows with light from a bank of windows that start at the floor before casually bonking their heads on unseen rafters. The furniture is worn but not worn out; the floors are scuffed but clean. It looks like someone takes care of it. It looks like someone has had time to care.

  And money. That doesn’t even bear mentioning.

  “Here’s what’s next,” the woman behind her says. “We’re gonna walk into the kitchen over there. You’re gonna sit
quietly on one of those barstools, and you’re gonna tell me what you were doing up there. It’s gonna be the unvarnished truth, too. While you do that, I’m gonna do what I promised and make us both some eggs. All right?”

  It’s the nicest interrogation Rhye’s ever been invited to. She’s got no choice, but at least there’s free food at the end. She shrugs. Her stomach gurgles.

  “…All right.”

  “Wise choice.”

  The woman moves with unsettling liquid quickness. The production chain of pan to stovetop to oil-in-pan to the chkk-chkk-chkk-WHOOSH of gas catching flows so swiftly Rhye can barely track where one movement ends and the other begins. She sweeps three eggs from the windowsill into her outstretched hand—chicken’s, not pigeon’s—and cracks each one expertly into a mixing bowl produced from somewhere in the time it takes Rhye to blink.

  “First of all,” she begins, “how the hell did you get up there? Did you sneak into the building or something?”

  Rhye’s too hungry to be sassy. Lady wants the unvarnished truth? Fine.

  “I ran,” she says, simply.

  “You ran... in?”

  “Up. I ran up the building. And climbed.”

  The whisking slows for a second. The woman turns to look at Rhye more closely. She’s still got her sunglasses on inside, which is a little weird but whatever.

  “Damn,” she says. “God damn. Up the west side?”

  “Yup.”