For the Win

by Cory Doctorow

  Chaos.

  The street was a little wider than most of the lanes near the handshake buildings, a main road that was just big enough to admit a car. A car idled at one end of it, two policemen outside it. Three more police were just entering the building he’d come out of, using a glass door a few yards away. The blue police-car bubble-lights painted the walls around them with repeating patterns of blue and black. Somewhere nearby, shouting. Lots of shouting. Boyish yells of terror and agony, the thud of clubs, screaming from the balconies, no words, just the wordless slaughter house soundtrack of dozens of Webblies being beaten. Beaten, while Lu lay dead or dying in the crawlspace.

  He turned left, the direction that Jie had gone, just in time to see her disappearing down a narrow laneway, turning sideways to pass into it. He wasn’t sure how he could follow her injunction to stay to one side of her in a space that narrow, but he decided he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to try to make his own way out of the labyrinth of Cantonese-town.

  As soon as he entered the alley, though, he regretted it. A policeman who happened to look down the alley would see him instantly and he’d be a sitting target, impossible to miss. He looked over his shoulder so much as he inched along that he tripped and nearly went over, only stopping himself from falling to the wet, stinking concrete between the buildings by digging his hands into the walls on either side of him. Ahead of him, Jie cleared the other end of the alley and cut right. He hurried to catch her.

  Just as he cleared the alley-mouth himself, he heard three more gunshots, then a barrage of shots, so many he couldn’t count them. He froze, but the sounds had been further away, back where the Webblies had emerged from their safe house. It could only mean one thing. He bit his cheek and swallowed the sick feeling rising in his throat and scrambled to keep up with Jie.

  Jie walked quickly—too quickly; he almost lost her more than once. But eventually she turned into a metro station and he followed her down. He’d used the ticket-buying machines before—they were labeled in Chinese and English—and he bought a fare to take him to the end of the line, feeding in some RMB notes from his wallet. The machine dropped a plastic coin like a poker chip into its hopper and he took it and rubbed it on the turnstile’s contact-point and clattered down the stairs with the sparse crowd of workers headed for early shifts.

  He positioned himself by one of the doors and reached into his pocket for a worn tourist guide to Shenzhen, taken from the free stack at the info-booth at the train-station. It was perfect camouflage, a kind of invisibility. There was always a gweilo or two puzzling over a tourist map on the metro, being studiously ignored by the flocks of perfectly turned-out factory girls who avoided them as probable perverts and definite sources of embarrassment.

  Jie got off four stops later, and he jumped off at the last minute. As he did, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass of the car-doors and saw that one side of his hair was matted with dried blood which had also run down his neck and dried there. He cursed himself for his smugness. Invisible! He was probably the most memorable thing the metro riders saw all that day, a grimy, bloody gweilo on the train.

  He followed Jie up the escalator and saw her pointedly nod toward a toilet door. He went and jiggled the handle, but it was locked. He turned to go, and the door opened. Behind it was an ancient grandmother, with a terribly hump that bent her nearly double.

  She gave him a milky stare, pursed her lips and began to close the door.

  “Wait!” he said in urgent, low Chinese.

  “You speak Chinese?”

  He nodded. “Some,” he said. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “Ten RMB,” she said. He was pretty sure that she wasn’t the official bathroom-minder, but he wasn’t going to argue with her. He dug in his pocket and found two crumpled fives and passed them to her. It came to $1.25 and he knew it was an insane amount of money to pay for the use of the bathroom, but he didn’t care at this point.

  The bathroom was tiny and cramped with the old woman’s possessions bundled into huge vinyl shopping bags. He positioned himself by the sink and stared at his reflection in the scratched mirror. He looked like he’d been through a blender, head-first. He ran the water and used his cupped hands to splash it ineffectually on his hair and neck, soaking his t-shirt in the process.

  “That’s no way to do it,” the old woman shouted from behind him. She twisted off the faucet with her arthritic hand. He looked silently at her. He didn’t want to get into an argument with this weird old crone.

  “Shirt off,” she said, in a stern voice. When he hesitated, she gave his wrist an impatient slap. “Off!” she said. “Shirt off, lean forward, hair under the tap. Honestly!”

  He did as he was bade, bending deeply at the waist to get his hair under the faucet in the small, dirty sink. She cranked the tap full open and used her trembling hands to wash out his hair and scrub at his bloody neck. When he made to stand up, she slapped his back and said, “Stay!”

  He stayed. Eventually, she let him up, and dug through her bags until she found a tattered old men’s shirt that she handed to him. “Dry,” she said.

  The shirt smelled of must and city, but was cleaner than anything he was wearing. He toweled at his hair, careful of the tender cut on his scalp.

  “It’s not deep,” she said. “I was a nurse, you’ll be okay. A stitch or two, if you don’t want the scar.”

  “Thank you,” Wei-Dong managed. “Thank you very, very much.”

  “Ten RMB,” she said, and smiled at him, practically toothless. He gave her two more fives and put his t-shirt on. It smelled terrible, a thick reek of BO and blood, but it was a black tee with a picture of a charging orc and it didn’t show the blood.

  “Go,” she said. “No more fighting.”

  He left, dazed, and found his way into the station, looking for Jie. She was waiting by the escalator to the surface, fixing her makeup in a small mirror that just happened to give her a view of the bathroom door. She snapped the compact shut and ascended to the surface. He followed.

  “Forty-two dead,” Big Sister Nor said to Justbob and The Mighty Krang. “Forty-two dead in Shenzhen. A bloodbath.”

  “War,” Justbob said.

  “War,” The Mighty Krang said, with a viciousness that neither of them had ever heard from him before. He saw their looks, balled his fists, glared. “War,” he said, again.

  “Not a war,” Big Sister Nor said. “A strike.”

  “A strike,” General Robotwallah announced to her troops. “No more gold gets in or out of any of our games.”

  “Forty-two dead,” Yasmin said, in a voice leaden with sorrow.

  Forty-three, Ashok thought, remembering the boy, and sure enough, Yasmin mouthed Forty-three as she sat down.

  “We’ll need defense here,” General Robotwallah said. “Banerjee will find more badmashes to try to take us out of this place.”

  Sushant stood up and held up a machete that the boys had left behind. “We took this place. We’ll hold it,” he said, all teen bravado. Ashok felt like he would be sick.

  Yasmin and the General looked intensely at one another, a silent conversation taking place.

  “No more violence,” the General said, in the voice of command.

  Sushant deflated, looked humiliated. “But what if they come for us with knives and clubs and guns?” he said, defiant.

  Yasmin stood up and walked to stand next to her general. “We make sure they don’t,” she said.

  Ashok stood and went to his little back room and began to place phone calls.

  “Sisters!” Jie said, throwing her head back and clenching her fists. She’d been calm enough as she sat down in the basement of the internet cafe, a private room the owner rented out discreetly to porno freelancers who needed a network connection away from the public eye. But now it seemed as if all the sorrow and pain she had shoved down into herself when Lu was shot was pouring out.

  “SISTERS!” she said again, and it was a howl, as horrible as the
noise Lu had made, as horrible as the noise that half-dead cat had made in the street in front of Wei-Dong’s house.

  The cafe was in the shuttered Intercontinental hotel, in the theme-restaurant that sported a full-size pirate ship sticking out of the roof, its sails in tatters. The man behind the desk had negotiated briskly with Jie for the space, studiously ignoring Wei-Dong lurking a few steps behind her. She’d motioned him along with a jerk of her head and led him to the private room, which had once been a restaurant store-room.

  Once the door clicked shut behind them, she produced a bootable USB stick and restarted the computer from it, fitted an elegant, slender earwig to her ear and passed one to Wei-Dong, which he screwed into his own ear. After some futzing with the computer she signaled to him that they were live and commenced to howl like a wounded thing.

  “Sisters! My sisters!” she said, and tears coursed down her face. “They killed him tonight. Poor Tank, my Tank. His name, his real name was Zha Yue Lu, and I loved him and he never harmed another human being and the only thing he was guilty of was demanding decent pay, decent working conditions, vacation time, job security—the things we all want from our jobs. The things our bosses take for granted.

  “They raided us last night, the vicious jingcha, working for the bosses as they always have and always will. They beat down the door and the boys ran like the wind, but they caught them and they caught them and they caught them. Lu and I tried to escape through the back way and they—” She broke then, tears coursing down her face, a sob bigger than the room itself escaping her chest. The mixer-readouts on the computer screen spiked red from the burst of sound. “They shot him like a dog, shot him dead.”

  She sobbed again, and the sobs didn’t stop coming. She beat her fists on the table, tore at her hair, screamed like she was being cut with knives, screamed until Wei-Dong was sure that someone would burst the door down expecting to find a murder in progress.

  Tentatively, he uncrossed his legs and got to his feet and crossed to her and caught her beating fists in his hands. She looked at him, unseeing, and stuck her face into his chest, the hot tears soaking through his t-shirt, the cries coming and coming. She pulled away for a moment, gasped, “I’m sorry, I’ll be back in a few minutes,” and clicked something, and the mixer levels on the screen flatlined.

  On and on she cried, and soon Wei-Dong was crying too—crying for his father, crying for Lu, crying for all the gunshots he’d heard on the way out of the handshake buildings. They rocked and cried together like that for what seemed like an eternity, and then Jie gently disengaged herself and turned back to her computer and clicked some more.

  “Sisters,” she said, “for years now I’ve sat at this mic, talking to you about love and family and dreams and work. So many of us came here looking to get away from poverty, looking to find a decent wage for a decent day’s work, and instead found ourselves beating off perverted bosses, being robbed by marketing schemes, losing our wages and being tossed out into the street when the market shifts.

  “No more,” she said, breathing it so low that Wei-Dong had to strain to hear it. “No more,” she said, louder. “NO MORE!” she shouted and stood up and began to pace, gesturing as she did.

  “No more asking permission to go to the bathroom! No more losing our pay because we get sick! No more lock-ins when the big orders come in. No more overtime without pay. No more burns on our arms and hands from working the rubber-molding machinery—how many of you have the idiotic logo of some stupid company branded into your flesh from an accident that could have been prevented with decent safety clothes?

  “No more missing eyes. No more lost fingers. No more scalps torn away from a screaming girl’s head as her hair is sucked into some giant machine with the strength of an ox and the brains of an ant. NO MORE!

  “Tomorrow, no one works. No one. Sisters, it’s time. If one of you refuses to work, they just fire you and the machines grind on. If you all refuse to work, the machines stop.

  “If one factory shuts down, they send the police to open it again, soldiers with guns and clubs and gas. If all the factories shut down, there aren’t enough police in the world to open them again.”

  She looked at her screen. It was going crazy. She clicked in a call. Wei-Dong heard it in his earpiece.

  “Jiandi,” a breathy, girly voice said. “Is this Jiandi?”

  “Yes, sister, it is,” she said. “Who else?” She smiled a thin smile.

  “Have you heard about the other deaths, in the Cantonese quarter in Shenzhen? The boys they shot?”

  Wei-Dong felt like he was falling. The girl was still speaking.

  “—forty-two of them, is what we heard. There were pictures, sent from phone to phone. Google for ‘the fallen 42’ and you’ll find them. The police said it was lies, and just now, they said that they were a criminal gang, but I recognized some of those boys from the strike before, the one you told us about—”

  Wei-Dong dug out his phone and began to google, typing so quickly he mashed the keys and had to retype the query three times, a process made all the more cumbersome by the need to use proxies to get around the blocks on his phone’s network connections. But then he got it, and the photos dribbled into his phone’s browser as slow as glaciers, and soon he was looking at shot after shot of fallen boys, lying in the narrow lanes, arms thrown out or held up around their faces, legs limp. The cam-phone photos were a little out of focus, and the phone’s small screen made them even less distinct, but the sight still hit him like a hammerblow.

  The girl was still speaking. “We’ve all seen them and the girls in my dorm are scared, and now you’re telling us to walk out of our jobs. How do you know we won’t be shot, too?”

  Jie’s mouth was opening and closing like a fish. She held her hand out and snapped her fingers at Wei-Dong, who passed her his phone. Her face was terrible, her lips pulled away from her teeth, which clicked rhythmically as she looked at the photos.

  “Oh,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard the girl’s question. “Oh,” she said, as if she’d just realized some deep truth that had evaded her all her life.

  “Jiandi?” the girl said.

  “You might be shot,” Jie said, slowly, as if explaining something to a child. “I might be shot. But they can’t shoot us all.”

  She paused, considering. Tears rolled off her chin, stained the collar of her shirt.

  “Can they?”

  She clicked something and a commercial started.

  “I can’t finish this,” she said in a dead voice. “I can’t finish this at all. I should go home.”

  Wei-Dong looked down at his hands. “I don’t think that would be safe.”

  She shook her head. “Home,” she said. “The village. Go back. There’s a little money left. I could go home and my parents could find some boy for me to marry and I could be just another girl in the village, growing old. Have my one baby and pray it’s a boy. Swallow pesticide when it gets to be too much.” She looked into his eyes and he had to steel himself to keep from flinching away.

  Wei-Dong spoke, his voice trembling. “I can’t pretend that I know what your life is like, Jie, but I can’t believe that you want to do that. There are forty-two dead. I don’t think we can stop here.” Thinking I am so far from home and don’t know how I’ll get back. Thinking, If she goes, I’ll be all alone. And then thinking, Coward and wanting to hit his head against something until the thoughts stopped.

  She reached for the keyboard and he knew enough about her work environment to see that she was getting ready to shut down.

  “Wait!” he said. “Come on, stop.” He fished for the words. In the weeks since he’d arrived in China, he’d begun to think in Chinese, even dream in it sometimes, but now it failed him. “I—” He beat his fists on his thighs in frustration. “It won’t stop now,” he said. “If you go home to the village, it will keep going, but it won’t have you. It won’t have Jiandi, the big sister to all the factory girls. When Lu told me about you, I thought h
e was crazy, thought there was no way you could possibly have that many listeners. He thought you were some kind of god, or a queen, a leader of an army of millions. He told me he thought you didn’t understand how important you are. How you—” He paused, gathered the words. “You’re shiny. That’s what he said. You shine, you’re like this bright, shiny thing that people just want to chase after, to follow. Everyone who meets you, everyone who hears you, they trust you, they want you to be their friend.

  “If you go, the Webblies will still fight, but without you, I think they’ll lose.”

  She glared at him. “They’ll probably lose with me, too. Do you have any idea what a terrible burden you put on me? You all put on me? It’s absolutely unfair. I’m not your god, I’m not your queen. I’m a broadcaster!”

  The heat rose in Wei-Dong. “That’s right! You’re a broadcaster. You don’t work for some government channel like CCTV, though, do you? You’re underground, criminal. You spent years telling factory girls to stand up for their rights, years living in safe-houses and carrying fake IDs. You set yourself up to be where you are now. I can’t believe that you didn’t dream about this. Look me in the eye and tell me that you didn’t dream about being a leader of millions, about having them all follow you and look up to you! Tell me!”

  She did something absolutely unexpected. She laughed. A little laugh, a broken laugh, a laugh with jagged shards of glass in it, but it was a laugh anyway. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course. With a hairbrush for a microphone, in front of my parents’ mirror, pretending to be the DJ that they all listened to. Of course. What else?”

  Her smile was so sad and radiant it made Wei-Dong weak in the knees. “I never thought I’d end up here, though. I thought I’d be a pretty girl on television, recognized in the street. Not a fugitive.”