Like a Boss (7 page)

I thought about Sunny and Ly Huang. Both of them were serious about their studies and their work. They were bright, happy kids who were charting their futures. If they had pitched their plans to walk into whatever Saarien had cooked up, then they were in danger. He could talk about atonement all he wanted; deep in my guts I knew he was a con artist and a liar. However he had gotten out of prison, I would make sure he went straight back in.

I cleared my throat. “This is very difficult for me, as I’m sure you can tell.”

He nodded. “I can only imagine. I was terrible to you. I tried to
kill
you. I can never expect you to forgive me for that, but I’m thankful I didn’t succeed. You’re a good person, Padma. You’ve given so much to this city, to the Union, and I don’t think you’ve ever been properly rewarded.”

I shrugged. “I never expected a reward.”

“But you
deserve
one,” he said. “Everyone here does for living our lives. Every day when we’re not living under the Big Three’s control is a victory. Every day we help each other is a good one.”

Still sounds like a con
, hissed The Fear. For once, I agreed with it.

Saarien pushed open the doors. “Come inside, and maybe we can start righting those wrongs. Come and see what the Temple of New Holy Light is all about.” He walked into the building, the goons holding the doors for us. I took a step, then froze. I didn’t want to go in there. I didn’t want to do anything but get back to my flat for Six O’Clock.

But I had made promises to Marolo and Keiko and Vikram, though, hell, I could have blown off Vikram and not felt bad about it. But Keiko, she was a friend, and Marolo had always been good to me. Their families were in trouble, and I said I would help. If the kids weren’t inside right now, they would be eventually. I had to make sure they were okay. I gave Sirikit a nod, and we entered the building.

It was boring.

There was a single room, twenty meters square, with dingy beige walls and sputtering LEDs overhead. Six benches made from castoff crates and ship parts faced a battered podium. At the far wall was a makeshift altar with a picture of the Working Christ, a carved Buddha, and an icon of Ganesha. Cheap incense smoldered in the offering bowls. It looked like Saarien was pandenominational; I wondered what kinds of theological hoops he jumped through to make this all work.

On either side of the door were two long tables. Two women sorted clothes on one table, and two men sorted jars of jam and preserved fish on another. Someone had written TAKE WHAT YOU NEED, GIVE WHAT YOU CAN on the wall above the tables. Two electric hot plates sat on the floor, and giant kettles of green soup simmered inside.

And the people. They all looked ragged and hungry and
tired
. The last time I had seen a room full of people so exhausted was ten years ago during Contract Time. WalWa’s initial offer to the Union was an insult, and they answered our counter by having their ships empty their sewage systems into Santee’s atmosphere. Whether they were coming from a position of perceived strength or they just wanted to be dicks, I have no idea. What I do know is the entire planet went on strike for half a year, and it damn near wiped us out.

With no cane going up the lifter, we had no hard currency or Big Three items coming down, which meant that stuff started falling apart fast. Every machine more advanced than a bicycle was shut down to save on wear and tear, and a lot of people walked just to save their bicycle chains from strain. WalWa threw kites into the air above Thronehill, and they became giant screens that broadcast images from the Life Corporate every hour of every day. They’d turn on fans and waft the scents of machine oil and hand sanitizer over their wall to break our resolve. We answered back with slingshots and fresh bread (though the bread started to run low toward the end; people were too tired to work the ricewheat harvest). When WalWa finally caved and the strike ended, everyone slept for a month.

All the people in this room looked like they wanted to sleep for a year. “Where did they all come from?” I asked Saarien.

He sighed, his skinny shoulders rising and falling beneath his massive suit. “From the kampong, and from the alleys of the city. They’re the people who’ve fallen through the cracks.”

“There are no cracks,” I said. “Everyone on this planet gets food, shelter, medical care.”

“But some
don’t
,” said Saarien. He pointed at a couple in their fifties cradling bowls on their laps. “Maurice there, he’s a Shareholder who used to have his own welding shop. His pai malfunctioned after the last firmware update, and he kept losing texts from clients. They got so frustrated they stopped going to him for work, and his reputation took a hit. He lost the shop, and then his husband Diem got meningitis, which screwed up
his
pai. They got booted from their flat ’cause their landlord wanted an excuse to tear it down and rebuild, and they can’t keep their appointments with lawyers or doctors. They’d given up when I found them.”

He nodded at a young woman unwrapping a coil of wire. “Su Yin came from the kampong to go to the Open School. She got her tablet stolen her first day in the city, before she could even get herself on the Public. It’s a four-month wait to get on the rolls through paper channels because no one in the Union wants to deal with finding the forms. She’s ashamed to go home because she thinks it would mean admitting defeat. She slept in our doorway.”

Saarien led us around the room, talking about the people who sat on the benches and made the soup and mended the clothes for giveaway. The more he talked, the more I remembered all the Ward Chair meetings where he would wheedle and cajole and outright lie to get more and more money for the greasy spit of a neighborhood that he was supposed to look out for. He had turned it into the base for upending the entire galactic economy, all while letting the refinery he was supposed to manage slip into ruin. Every time someone talked about the casualty numbers out of Sou’s Reach, Saarien would just smile and say they would be remembered as valued martyrs to The Struggle. Then he would move on to bilking more cash out of the Union.

But this man here, if he didn’t genuinely care about the people under this roof, then he was putting on the greatest dramatic performance in human history. People smiled at him. His eye got moist as he hugged them and fed them and helped change a diaper.

My brain did a backflip at that:
Evanrute Saarien just changed a diaper
.

His suit remained spotless.

“How did this all happen?” I said. We sat at the front of the building, bowls of stuff resembling lentil soup on our laps.

He smiled, a bit of tomato wedged in the gap between his teeth. “It was in prison. Have you ever been to Maersk?”

“I’ve tried to avoid it.”

He shook his head. “That’s how I felt when the airship dropped me off. The criminals who get sent there are the worst of the worst, the ones who had no business being a part of society. I was sure I would get murdered within two minutes of landing.”

Saarien put down his bowl of soup. “But it wasn’t like that. If anything, it’s harder. The guards and the prisoners have to work together to grow crops, to keep the water flowing, to make the place thrive. Three hundred people on a patch of land that’s only five hundred hectares, and if you don’t get with the program, you don’t eat. There’s no black market, no underground trading, because everyone’s busy repairing fishing nets or manning fishing nets or gutting fish.” He shook his head. “I’m not a fan of fish anymore.”

I ground my jaw to keep me from yelling,
Why aren’t you still there?

He put his hands in his lap. “Everyone talks, too. We talk while we work, we talk at meals, we talk during sessions. We have plenty of time to reflect and think about what we did. I thought it was all bullshit until my second year.”

I shifted in my seat. “What happened?”

He gave me a small smile. “I realized that
I
was all bullshit. Everything I’d done, it was all for my own purposes, starting with me becoming a recruiter for WalWa. I just saw people as units to process and take advantage of. I was so disconnected from humanity, even after I Breached, and I couldn’t let go of that. It took going to prison and losing all my power to remind me that I was a person, and I had to rely on other people, and to do that I had to
earn
their respect.”

This all sounded like a great line. I nodded, waiting for him to show me a sign that it was all nothing but a line. “Is that how you got out so early?”

His eyes grew sad. “I didn’t want to go.”

“What?”

He nodded. “There was a structure and a peace that came from living and working there. And the fact that all of us had to talk and
listen
, that made it clear that I’d lived my life the wrong way. I did all the talking, but I never listened. I never thought about what
I
had to do to make others’ lives better. I was elected to leave early and bring that attitude back here.” He held out his hands. “I’m starting at the bottom with this.”

“With a church?”

“Faith without works is dead,” said Saarien. “I still have faith in The Struggle, but I know it has to start in here.” He pounded the center of his chest like he was hammering nails. “I found something I can’t put into words, but I can put it into action.” He blinked, like he’d just been poked in the ribs. “Speaking of action, it’s time for the five-thirty service. Can you stay?”

NO
, I wanted to scream at the tops of my lungs, not with Six O’Clock looming. No way in hell. But I hadn’t seen Sammy yet, and I had to get something to bring back to Keiko. I looked at Sirikit. “Can you get me to Samarkand Road before six?”

She furrowed her brows. “We can stay ten minutes.”

I turned to Saarien. “I have an appointment, but I can stick around.”

He smiled, showing me that gap. I wondered: had someone knocked his tooth out? Had he just let himself go until he found whatever it was he was about to preach? I could figure that out later, right after I found out about the missing kids.

Saarien walked to the front of the room and clapped his hands. “Has everyone gotten enough to eat?” There were calls of varying enthusiasm. Maurice and Diem, the couple he’d pointed out, took extra helpings of soup and sat down in front. People appeared from back rooms and from the front doors. Within a few minutes, thirty people had filled the benches. A third of them had ink. None of them were Sammy or Ly Huang.

He stood in front of the altar, took a breath, and, for a moment, I saw the same Evanrute Saarien who had tried to kill me: the rolled-back shoulders, the slick smile, the
suit
. Then he exhaled, and all that confidence drained out of his body. He deflated into the smaller, sadder version that had ushered me in here.

“Friends,” he said, his voice just strong enough to still the crowd. “It’s been a tremendous week for our flock. We’ve gotten new donations of jellied eel from Beckton’s, and I understand our PV Committee will be installing some new cells this week on the Wisniewski’s house.” A young couple with a baby waved at everyone.

“Yes, a good week.” He nodded to himself, let his eyes drift toward the back walls. “And there’s always more we can do. There’s more we
must
do, and not just here in the city, but for our brothers and sisters in the kampong. They’re the ones whose toil lets everyone live. The more cane they cut, the more money flows back to us.” He focused his gaze on a Freeborn woman in the front row. “Though we know that’s not quite true, right?”

Everyone nodded. The murmuring took on a hotter tone. I could feel it right away: these hungry people were
angry
. I made a mental note to feed all this footage to every Ward chair and remind them they were falling down on the job.

“No, it’s not true. If it were, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be in our flats, at our jobs, maybe knocking back a few fingers of the Co-Op’s finest.” The anger grew sharper, not only on Saarien’s face, but on everyone else’s.

Saarien held out his hands to still the crowd. “But what can we do? What
should
we do?”

“Protest!” yelled the mother.

“March!” yelled Maurice the welder.

“Fight back!” yelled a man with a beard down to his navel.

More words floated around, until a girl from the back called out “STRIKE!” Saarien pointed at her, his face lit up like a Diwali firework display. He nodded, and then that smile returned, the one that said everything Saarien had told me was, indeed, bullshit. He was back in the game.

Sirikit leaned over. “We have to go if you want to make your six o’clock.”

I looked at Saarien, getting ramped up about The Struggle, about how the cane workers did the most important work but got the least in cash. He was rebuilding, and he would try and kill me again. I could feel it.

But I could also feel The Fear scrabbling around my brain. I got up and hustled to Sirikit’s tuk-tuk.

“You want me to stick around?” Sirikit asked as we pulled up to Number 42 Samarkand Road. “I have the feeling you’ll have more places to go.”

“Not tonight.” I hopped out, and shadows from the koa tree in front of my building wrapped around me. Three of the Patil kids stuck their torsos out of their window, right next to mine. They waved and sang until their father, Swaroop, called them to stay away from the fire escape and come to the dinner table. I smelled roasted kumara and fishcakes and heard arguments and prayers. I walked to the empty front stoop and patted the spot where the late Mrs Karpinski used to sit and smoke. God, I missed bullshitting with her. I blinked up the time: five fifty-five. “But tomorrow, probably, yeah. Around four-ish. And tell Jilly she needs to get out of the office.”

Sirikit honked the horn. “I’ll send the boss your regards.” She zipped off into traffic, and I ran five flights up to my flat.

Once inside, I didn’t waste any time. I locked the door and went to the kitchen. The bottle of Old Windswept sat in the back of the cupboard, hiding behind the spices. I could have left a case of it lying around, but, you know, old habits. I walked around the flat, closing all the blackout curtains but for the one covering the window facing the ocean. I set the bottle on my dining table and pulled a hurricane candle and a matchbook from underneath. I blinked up the time: five fifty-nine. I closed the last curtain, giving a nod to the mourners filing out of Longxia Cemetery a block away and cursing my landlady for saying the flat had a “territorial view” instead of “a living room overlooking a bloody graveyard.” I lit the candle.