by Oisin McGann
“Looked like they were moving with a purpose, didn’t they?” Sol muttered. “Wonder what they found out.”
Cleo and Ana emerged from the hospital at the head of the angry crowd. Cleo’s teeth were grinding as she walked, her thoughts a mass of indignation and frustration—a burning rage bursting to be expressed. They had spent hours in the library untangling the web of corporate entities that hid those responsible for the fire.
There were thousands of companies in Ash Harbor, but most of the major business ones were parts of the different commercial empires run by the Big Four: Ragnarsson, Takashi, McGovern, and Schaeffer. Their interests overlapped, and there was a constant struggle between them for domination of the city, but for the most part, Ragnarsson controlled food production, Takashi the water supply, McGovern managed the waste, and Schaeffer controlled the air. Between them, they owned seventy-five percent of the city’s property. It was disturbing how little of the city was owned by ordinary people. Much of the rest of Ash Harbor’s interests were divided between lesser industrialists like the mayor, Haddad, and backstreet businessmen like Cortez. But it was the Big Four who really ran the show.
Racine Developments, which owned Cleo’s apartment block, was itself owned by Lodestone Housing, which was owned by Carter & Chen Properties….
Behind Cleo, people flooded out of the hospital entrance; exclamations of rage, of disgust and disbelief bubbled like a simmering volcano on the verge of erupting. Word spread to those who had already left the hospital to find places to stay, to sleep, now that their homes were gone. The crowd swelled with those who rushed to join them.
Carter & Chen Properties was owned by Ash Harbor Bank, which was a subsidiary of the Renaissance Banking Corporation….
Forty-six people had died in the apartment-block fire—mercifully few in a block that housed over a thousand people—and there were still victims who would not make it through the night; there were many more who would be maimed or scarred for life. Pain and grief had driven people to look for someone to blame, a focus for their need to make sense of their tragedy. And Cleo and Ana had provided one.
The Renaissance Banking Corporation was owned by Occidental Financial Holdings, which was owned by the Schaeffer Corporation. And the previous year, the Schaeffer Corporation had put forward a plan to build a state-of-the-art leisure center on the site of the apartment block. A petition from all the people in the area had stopped them, the inhabitants of the block stating their firm objection to having their homes bulldozed to make room for a gymnasium, a weather center, and some tanning salons. Today, the very day after the fire, the Schaeffer Corporation had made its application again.
Cleo and Ana had been unsure of what to do when they had discovered this. They had looked for other instances where the Schaeffer Corporation had benefited from accidents. And once they really started searching, there seemed to be no end to what they found. It seemed impossible that nobody could have noticed this before.
But then they had begun calling the news agencies. As soon as they mentioned Schaeffer, the journalists made their excuses and hung up. Not a single reporter expressed an interest in their story; some even sounded scared. One woman, who had actually lowered her voice to talk to them, told them that her webnews organization was owned by Schaeffer. Most of them were, and those that weren’t wouldn’t go up against him. Cleo and Ana had started to feel afraid. They called the police and were put through to the Industrial Security Section, which informed them that the fire was being treated as an accident. Did they have any material proof of arson? Cleo could not say for sure that the pipe on the roof that she’d seen the worker tampering with was a gas pipe or that it wasn’t a routine maintenance check. Ana had asked if gathering proof wasn’t the job of the police. The officer had said they should be careful about making accusations they couldn’t back up.
Feeling frightened and powerless, Cleo and Ana had returned to the hospital and told anyone who would listen about what they had found. And this time, people paid attention. The crowd marching down Bessemer Street toward the headquarters of the Schaeffer Corporation was now six hundred strong…and growing.
Sol and Maslow followed the crowd, trailing through the understreets and over rooftops. They watched as more and more people joined the march, and what it lacked in organization, it made up for with momentum. And it was not passing unnoticed by the authorities. As the crowd grew, so did the number of police cars and vans shadowing it in the surrounding streets. It was illegal to travel in such large groups; massing in crowds such as this was only permitted in certain static areas of the city, where the concentrated weight would not interfere with the motion of the Machine.
“Where are they going?” Sol wondered aloud as he and Maslow scaled a ladder that would take them over the pigeon-painted roof of a food-processing plant.
“Ragnarsson’s headquarters are the other way.”
“It’s not Ragnarsson they’re after,” Maslow replied, pointing overhead. “We’re heading right into the center of the Third Quadrant.”
Sol glanced up, and there, high above them, was the giant tower crane. The Schaeffer Corporation’s tower crane. Where two men had died when one of its carriages had fallen from its arm. Vincent Schaeffer’s carriage.
“They’re fools.” Maslow grunted as he pulled himself up onto the roof. “No organization. The police will break them up in no time. And now your friends down there are going to be marked. You start something like this, you’re messing with the Machine.”
Sol followed him over the ledge and hurried through the rows of huge, tilted solar panels that made the roof look like the deck of an ancient sailing ship, to the far side, where he could look out on the street below. He wanted to be down there with them; there was a visceral anger in that crowd that touched something in him. All the fear and pain and frustration he had felt over the last two weeks boiled up inside him, wanting to be shared with others like him.
The crowd marched on into the heart of the Third Quadrant, coming to the majestic, monolithic headquarters of the Schaeffer Corporation. And waiting there in orderly rows in front of its steps were two squadrons of a hundred and twenty red-clad ISS troopers in full riot gear. From a crane carriage suspended overhead, senior officers were observing the scene.
The building was a minimalist, sloping slab of ferro-concrete twenty stories high, filling the end of the street. Its dark-tinted windows bulged like a hundred insects’ eyes, and on either side of the street, matching buildings rose like canyon walls. As the crowd shuffled to a halt in front of the riot troops, a silence descended on the street. A menacing sense of impending violence hung in the air, the police officers’ transparent shields raised in a barricade, their gas masks hiding any show of emotion. For just a moment, there was perfect calm in which all that could be heard was the perpetual rumble of the city’s works in motion.
Then Ana spoke up.
“Bring out Schaeffer!” she cried. “This company burned down these people’s homes! We want some answers! Bring out Schaeffer!”
Other voices took up the call. “Bring out Schaeffer!” they demanded in increasingly louder roars. There was no plan, no idea of what they would do if he emerged. This crowd of individuals had become a single entity, a massive animal in pain, crying out in its anguish for comfort and for revenge.
“Disperse and return to your homes!” a voice ordered over a bullhorn from the crane carriage overhead. “You are in contravention of Section Eight of the Illegal Gatherings Act. Disperse immediately! Disperse and return to your homes!”
The police officer’s choice of words could not have been worse.
“What homes?” a voice screamed out. “They’ve burned our homes to the ground!”
Shouts echoed the cry, and the massive creature surged forward, the people on its leading edge stumbling ahead of the crowd to be pressed hard against the first row of shields, the nervous police officers roughly shoving them back. Ana and Cleo found themselves being shunted backward
by the glasstic shield of the trooper in front of them. They were being crushed, and the crowd was becoming dangerously aggressive; Ana called out for calm. Other voices joined in, and the crush eased. Word started to filter through that there were more troops behind them. They were surrounded. Fear welled up; people began to grow uneasy…defensive. The enormous conglomerate behind Ana flexed with emotion, and she suddenly realized how close they were to calamity.
“This is your final warning!” the bullhorn declared.
“We will not allow you to endanger the city. Disperse immediately!”
Nobody budged. It wasn’t clear if what happened next was a deliberate act, or a panicked move by some frightened riot trooper, but there came a popping sound, and something arced lazily overhead, trailing a tail of smoke. The tear-gas canister landed right in the center of the crowd, and suddenly there was mayhem. For the second time in as many days, people found themselves coughing and choking, unable to breathe in poisonous fumes. Blinded by the chemical smoke, those in the center pushed outward, and the creature that was the crowd swelled, its edges crashing against the shields that barricaded both ends of the street. The police staggered backward against the weight of the people, only to find themselves pushed forward again by their comrades behind them. More tear gas was fired into the crowd, and the cloud of eye-stinging smoke spread quickly over the street.
“What are you doing?!” Ana shrieked at the officer who was jamming his shield against her. She stood protectively in front of Cleo, holding her back. “We just want some goddamn justice!”
The air was thick with fumes, and she squeezed her eyes shut as they started to burn; it was as if somebody were squirting boiling water in them. She screamed until her chest was so constricted by the crush of bodies against her that she had no breath. Her nose and throat felt full of thorns and she gagged, her empty stomach pushing bile into her mouth. She spat on the shield pressing against her face, opening her swollen, tear-filled eyes to look into the gas-masked face of the trooper in front of her. The edge of his shield was pulled down, and he raised his heavy baton over his head. Her arms were pinned against her chest; she couldn’t even raise them to defend herself.
“You’re supposed to protect us!” she screamed.
“You’re supposed to protect us!”
The baton came down hard on her skull, crashing into her consciousness in an explosion of pain. Light burst in front of her eyes. Her head felt as if it would shatter. Through blurring vision, she saw the man raise his baton again, and then there was only the shock of impact, fading into nothingness.
Section 18/24: UNITY
EITHER IT WAS A hallucination or a feverish dream, or it was real; Ana wasn’t sure which. She was lying stretched out on a grassy slope under an empty blue sky. Soft bundles of cloud drifted over a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of farmland below, but not up here. If she could have smelled the clouds, she knew she would have got a definite hint of onion, or perhaps pepper, off them.
Sol and Cleo sat a short distance away, wearing flesh-colored gas masks and wide-brimmed straw hats. Ana tried to get up and move closer to them, but she found she couldn’t. That was all right; she was happy right where she was. God, it was so good to finally get out of the city for a while! From somewhere nearby, she could hear a dull ringing that was quite irritating, but it wasn’t so loud that she couldn’t hear what her two students were saying.
“So how did you get her out?” Sol was asking.
“When the cops waded in and started bludgeoning everybody, they left gaps,” Cleo replied, her voice rubbery behind her mask, and quite hoarse. “I could barely see, and I was choking so badly…but somebody helped me drag her clear. The doctor said she’s got something called a compression. The skull, or the blood, or something’s pressing in on the brain. They have to operate, but there’s so many people hurt. That asshole hit her really hard…three times. Doc says she’s lucky to be alive. They don’t know if she’s going to have brain damage or what. Jesus, it was horrible….”
I’m fine, Ana called to them, when she realized they were talking about her. Hunky-dory, really. There’s no need to worry. They didn’t seem to hear her.
“You should have waited to talk to me,” Sol said sullenly. “We could have done something more productive. Maslow said it was a waste of time the moment he saw you come out. He said even if you guys didn’t start it off, they’d plant agitators….”
Who’s Maslow? Ana inquired, but they didn’t reply.
“They had a right to know!” Cleo snapped. “Those were their homes that burned down, not yours. And anyway, you were off playing Spanish Inquisition with Ragnarsson. And what did you find out? Zilch. What would you have done if I’d gone to you? Paid a ‘visit’ to Schaeffer too?”
What does she mean, Sol? Ana frowned.
“I wouldn’t have got hundreds of people teargassed, that’s for sure,” Sol snarled back, the valves of his gas mask fluttering. “If Schaeffer’s running the Clockworkers, then he’s the one I want.”
Birds appeared in the sky overhead; peacocks with impossibly long tails, arcing over like slow, languid missiles. Ana felt as if she were pressed against a pane of glass, as if she were watching Sol and Cleo through a window; she felt short of breath, her chest constricted.
“So you going to set your hit man on Schaeffer now? The two of you going to knock him around a bit? Kill him, maybe? That’ll solve a lot, won’t it?”
Cleo’s voice was starting to break with emotion. Ana sympathized—it had been a hard day for all of them. She couldn’t quite remember why.
“If I have to,” Sol replied. “What choice have I got? I can’t…I can’t think of what else to do. They’ve wrecked everything. There are people who want me dead. I don’t know what they look like, or how many of them there are…. They can go anywhere. They could be anyone. It’s like having ghosts after you.”
That’s why you need all the help you can get, Sol! Ana exclaimed wheezily.
“That’s why we need all the help we can get,” Cleo argued. “The police can’t all be in on it. Most of them are normal slobs like us. We just need as many people involved as possible, if we could somehow let everybody know what’s going on—”
Exactly, Ana affirmed. Listen to her, Sol.
“The riot didn’t even make the news,” Sol hissed. “It’s this city—it’s—It just uses you up and spits you out. You can’t change the whole system, and they’ll kill you for trying. We’re cogs; we don’t count for squat—all you can do is look out for yourself.”
“Then you might as well just kill yourself now, if that’s what you think.” Cleo grunted hoarsely when her voice wavered. “’Cos what hope have you got? You’re as bad as those goddamned DDF. As long as we let the Clockworkers run this city, they’ll get you eventually. But they can’t stop all of us. ’Cos yes, we’re cogs in a machine, but it’s our machine. It won’t work without us. All those grits sneaking around wrecking things, all the small-minded giants in their swanky offices…they need us—more than we need them.”
Damn straight! Ana shouted, punching the air. Don’t fight with each other! Get out there! Raise some hell!
“Did you just see her fingers move?” Sol said, looking over.
“I think so…. Do you think she can hear us?” Cleo’s face was unreadable under the gas mask.
“My coach always told us that hearing’s the last sense you lose when you’re knocked out.”
“Did he get knocked out a lot?”
“He’s a better coach than he was a boxer.”
“We should tell somebody she’s here,” Cleo mused.
“Doesn’t she have a boyfriend?”
“Yeah, Jude or something,” Sol muttered.
Julio. Ana laughed. Julio. You’ll love him, Cleo; he’s a sweetie. I wish he were here. Would you call him for me?
Another man suddenly appeared on the hillside. “Sol? We need to go.”
Who’s this? Ana asked.
He looked l
ike that detective, Mercier. Except he was more rugged, less like a paper shuffler.
“I’ll walk up to the roof with you,” Cleo said. “I need some air; my throat’s still killing me.”
And then they were gone. The hillside was very empty without them, and Ana felt herself sliding down the hill, as if the grass were steep and wet, sliding down into the onion-smelling clouds, and she was terribly lonely….
Leaving their comatose teacher with the four other patients in the cramped hospital room, Sol and Cleo walked out into the corridor. Maslow was already striding toward the stairwell. Cleo cast a lingering glance back at Ana lying motionless in the bed. An Asian woman dressed in doctor’s scrubs crossed the hallway from one of the other rooms, intent on the medical palmtop in her hand. She gave them a perfunctory smile and brushed past into the room.
Cleo watched her check Ana’s chart and then gauge her pupil response with a penlight. The doctor shook her head gently and took out a syringe. Cleo saw the set expression on the woman’s pale face and found little hope there. Turning away, she hurried to catch up with Sol and Maslow. She had a nagging feeling that she knew the doctor from somewhere, but she couldn’t place where.
Sol and Cleo followed Maslow toward the stairwell. He opened the door and froze. Carefully closing the door, he motioned them toward the elevators.
“Someone’s coming up the stairs. Three people, in a hurry.”
He had his hand in his jacket pocket, and Cleo glanced at Sol to see he had done the same. Did they spend their whole day expecting a gunfight? How could anybody live like this? As if they could be shot dead at any moment.
And then Cleo remembered where she had seen the doctor’s face before. It was on the day she had gone to the Filipino District to buy some guitar strings from Cortez, when she had seen the three people disposing of a body in the sewage-treatment works. The pale-faced Asian woman had been the one in charge.
