Like a Boss (33 page)

I went through their pockets and found my multi-tool in one of their pockets, along with their tiny rebreathers. They also had four packets of CauterIce. My fingers were useless, so I tore at the first with my teeth. My lips went numb as some of the gel spattered out, but I didn’t care. I squirted it on my hands and sighed from the orgasmic relief of not hurting. I used up the other packets on my neck and face, even rubbing a little on my scalp.

Now all I had to do was not get roasted alive.

The fire had swollen in the afternoon winds, and the smoke sank lower to the ground. My thin layer of clear air was vanishing fast as it fed the fire from the roots up. I remembered what Marolo had said about slash-and-burn drills:
Dig, cover, hold
. Digging wouldn’t be a problem; the soil was loose. But cover? The Jennifers had nothing I could use. Their clothes were just as flammable as mine.

But their skin wasn’t.

I worked as fast as I could, kicking dirt with my boots until I had a space big enough for me to curl up. I dragged the Jennifers over, leaving a trail of bloody mud behind. The cane crackled, all those hydrocarbons burning bright and hot, even in their undistilled, unprocessed form. There was a reason cane burns were controlled on Santee; this stuff was meant to power cities and starships. This wasn’t going to burn out quick and clean.

I lay down and pulled the Jennifers over me. I bit down on the rebreather and did my best to follow my old EVA training: nice, relaxed breathing was the way to go. I had put the Jennifers on their backs, which made my shelter only slightly less creepy. I closed my eyes and thought about how cool the air was… until I remembered why the air was so cool. Then I just screwed my eyes shut even harder.

The shelter got hot for a moment, and the stench of burning clothing filled my nose. There was no point in blocking out what was happening to me, but that didn’t mean I had to embrace the situation. Fuck that. This was a horror show, and even The Fear had the decency to shut up. Some of this was my fault, sure, but I wasn’t the one who’d shot these two women. I wasn’t the one in charge of a bombing campaign. And I definitely wasn’t the one who’d shut off the money spigots. Everyone back in town, hungry, angry, just wanting to get
paid
. Hell, I’d wanted to get paid, too, if only so I could throw my salary into the gaping maw that was my debt. Even if I sold my distillery, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. What would I get? A few million yuan, maybe? What could I do with that?

I could pay everyone for a week with that.

I stopped breathing for a moment. What was the number Letty had thrown at me? I tried blinking my pai back to life, but my eye was still screwed up. I thought about squirting the last of the CauterIce in there, then realized, no, that was an incredibly stupid idea. I’d have to rely on my good ol’ inboard memory.

I pictured the scene in my head: there was Letty, there was one of the Jennifers, there was me. Letty was waving the bottle around, saying the Union was broke, that it took… dammit, what was the number? Two million? No, it was
two point eight million yuan to keep everyone paid for a week, bennies and all
.

And how much had Vikram said I was worth?
Two and a half, easily, just from the cane alone. Throw in the actual product, and three is a fair offer.

I had a way to beat Letty. Holy shit, I could sell the distillery, pay everyone on the planet for a week, and end the strike. Everything that had come screeching to a halt would move again: the inspectors would certify the cane, the cutters would harvest it, everyone would process the cane and send it up the cable, because the cable would be working. I could jump-start Santee’s economy, and all I had to do was sell the one thing that kept me sane.

Excellent idea
, said The Fear.

Except I had my stashes. I had enough Old Windswept hidden all over for the next thirty years. Forty, if I pushed it. “Ha!” I said. The rebreather fell out of my mouth. I scrambled to shove it back between my teeth. I didn’t care that it tasted like dirt; I had a
plan
, and it was
good
, and I was going to
kick Letty’s ass
.

I waited until the rebreather beeped, letting me know its air filter was done. How long had that been? Thirty minutes? I popped in the second one, but it started beeping after a few minutes. That must have belonged to the Jennifer who’d helped burn my building.

I pushed the bodies off me and got up. The world around me was ash and cinders, all smoldering in the afternoon sun. The wind had blown the fire northeast. To my southwest was singed cane. I looked back at the dead Jennifers, their clothes burned away and their skin blacked with soot. I pulled them side-by-side and cleaned their faces as best I could before snapping a picture. More evidence. I’d send someone back to collect the bodies.

I started walking into the wind. The scorched cane was still hot as I slipped through the stalks. When I got to a stand of clean, unburnt cane, I spat out the beeping rebreather and started jogging.

By the time the sun had dipped toward the horizon, I had spotted a lone comms tower in the distance. That tower meant a transfer station or a loading depot. I hoped it also meant someone who didn’t want to kill me. I pushed through the cane as quietly as I could until I heard people talking. I crawled, the edges of a pourform building looming past the stalks.

It was a small farm house. A cycle tractor sat in the front yard, kids climbing up its three-meter-high wheels. A five year-old girl, her face lit up in the twilight, perched on the saddle, barely reaching the handlebars. “I’ll stop you, you corporate parasite!” she yelled. “No one can stop the Sky Queen of Justice!”

I sighed with relief. I had found fans.

I stepped out of the cane, my hands in front of me. One of the kids spotted me and froze. Then they all looked up, their mouths agape. “Hi,” I said. “I’m Padma Mehta. Are your parents home?”

“They’re working,” said the girl in the saddle, her voice blank. Then she started and kicked the kids below her. “See! I
told
you the radio was wrong! She wasn’t dead!” She jumped down and ran to me, though she stopped half a meter short. I could only imagine how I looked with my toasted hair and sooty skin and God knew how much blood on my clothes.

“Are you really her?” she asked. Her hair was a mess of curls and braids, and her overalls were covered in anime character patches.

“I am. Am I really supposed to be dead?”

She nodded. “The Prez was on the radio just before dinner. Said you were a…” She screwed up her face to remember.

“A traitor!” yelled one of the boys.

“She is not!” the girl yelled back.

“What’s your name?” I said.

She looked at her feet. “Laural,” she said, her voice just above a whisper.

I took a knee in front of her. “Well, Laural, I promise you I’m not a traitor. As sure as I’m alive. Do you believe me?”

She looked at me, her ocean-blue eyes as big as stars, and gave me a nod. “But I don’t know if anyone else will.”

“If you help me, I can show I’m not.”

Her mouth bunched up into a barely suppressed smile. “How can I help?”

“First, I need you and your friends to run and tell every adult that you saw me, and that I’m going into the city.”

She nodded.

“Second, I’m going to need to borrow
that
.” I pointed at the tractor.

Laural hopped down and swatted at one of the older boys who held on to the wheel. “She needs this ride! Back off!”

I climbed up into the saddle. The tractor was just a tricycle with ridiculously big wheels and a whole lot of gears. I gave the pedals a gentle push, and the tractor crunched forward on the gravel.

“One more thing,” I said as I aimed the tractor toward Santee City.

“What?” said Laural.

I grinned. “You gotta give me a head start.”

Two hours later, the sun had gone down, and the lights of Santee City came into view. I just kept pedaling.

I had kept the tractor off the road, pushing through the cane at a snail’s pace. The tractor was meant for hauling bundles of cut cane, not as personal transport. It was a ridiculous machine, the kind of thing that popped up all over Santee through ingenuity, stolen parts, and sheer pig-headedness. It would have worked just fine on the gravel paths back to the city, but I needed the time to think and plan. A plan might keep me from getting killed for real.

A plan might help you get to Six O’Clock
, said The Fear. I just kept pedaling.

The only thing on my side was the fact that Laural and her friends had fast feet and big mouths. Rumors obeyed their own special laws of physics, and those laws got torqued when kids were involved. All the adults in the kampong would certainly know of the unscheduled and unauthorized burn, and having the kids tell them that I had emerged from the embers would get other people talking. Eventually, those people would talk to whomever Letty had told that I was a two-timing, back-stabbing, double-murdering villain, and then the debates would start as both stories started wrestling with each other. Letty may have had access to the Public and all of our pais, but even she couldn’t stop the residents of Santee from bullshitting with each other.

Of course, Letty had a whole lot of bombs on her side. I just kept pedaling.

Any other night, and I would have probably loved to ride like this. The evening breeze was cool and strong, straight from the depths of the kampong. All that green from the leaves, all that funk from composting bagasse, all that sweet tang from the cane itself. All those billions of hectares of industrial and heirloom, enough energy to power starships, cities, one-night stands. I’d come out here so many times, but tonight felt different. And not just because I was in peril.

I pulled the brakes. The tractor came to a gentle stop. I stood up in the pedals and looked around.

Behind me, the last of the orange faded from the sky. Above me was a canopy of deep purple, lit by a billion stars. When I was a kid, sitting on my parents’ veranda after dinner, I’d look up at those stars and think about visiting all the planets orbiting them. I knew most of them were uninhabitable rocks, but I wanted to go anyway, just to see the sky from a different world. I would hop from one world to the next, spending my days collecting views of constellations that no one else would see or care about.

No one bothered to name the constellations when they landed on Santee. Not even the first Breaches did, and their souls were lit up by the poetry that comes with liberating themselves. There were songs and paintings and shadow puppet plays about everything that happened to the first people to get themselves windswept, but none of them had looked at the stars and made pictures out of the points. I had never understood that. They were so busy creating their own mythology, why wouldn’t they keep going all the way past the sky?

I took in a breath, letting the smell of cane fill my head. The sky spun, all those stars upon stars, all those billions upon billions who called Occupied Space their home. Somewhere there were other versions of me: the Indenture fighting her way up the Corporate ladder, the Union stalwart punching that Indenture in the face, the little girl looking up at the night sky. If we could talk, what would I tell them about my life? What would I ask them about the choices I had to make? What would I say to them?

I turned my eyes to the eastern horizon, the city lights flickering in the heat haze. There was none of the blue glow from the streetlamps; all of the light must be coming from people’s houses. A few streaks of orange reached for the sky – fires, probably. Whether they were from more tuk-tuk bombs or from people torching each other’s neighborhoods, I’d have to find out when I got to the city.

My city. My beautiful, messed-up city. I loved this place when it was in a good mood, hated it when it became sulky and selfish. People didn’t always work together. The weeks after signing the Contract always saw an increase in bar fights and street knifings. Some idiots would try to make guns, saying the Ban was a relic of another time; that people had to protect themselves. It took a few arrests and angry block meetings to remind everyone that we had to protect each other from the Big Three, not from ourselves. God, no wonder the Freeborn always scorned joining the Union. A week without pay and the idea of solidarity dissipated like a fart in a hurricane.

I looked back at the kampong. I knew the way to Tanque, but I wouldn’t go there. I
couldn’t
go there, not when Letty was tearing Santee down just because she couldn’t think of another way out. People had been pissed at me for making the hard choice. They could sure as hell do the same for Letty, seeing how making hard choices was her job. Messing with our pais, letting the city slide into chaos – that was the kind of crap we’d expect from the Big Three, not our own. I was going to make her answer for everything she had done to me, to the Jennifers, to all of us. And I was going to do it by showing her how wrong she was.

I turned toward the city, stood up in the pedals, and got cranking. I was exhausted, hurt, and hungry, but spite would get me to Xochimilco Grove. That, and the satisfaction that would come with kicking Letty’s ass.

Two hours later, I left the tractor at the edge of the kampong. The Co-Op Building loomed over the cane as I pushed my way through the field. Light streamed from the windows, but it was harsh and green, the kind that came from chemical lamps. Shadows paced the top floor, and I heard bottles smashing inside. What better time to put my distillery up for sale?

Someone had tried to build a barricade at the end of Chung Kuong Street, they but seemed to have quit halfway. Chairs and tables and compost bins were stacked together, but they only came to my shoulders. I climbed up, only to have the whole thing collapse in a heap. Behind it stood Todd, the kid who sat behind the lobby desk at the Co-Op. He brandished a crowbar in front of him, straight end out. “Stop! You can’t come in! I’m not afraid to use this!”

I put my hands on my hips. “Really? And what are you going to do with that, Todd?”