She removes the mask, the air largely free of spice dust here. The smell of rubber is replaced by humidity, fertilizer, that tinge of damp vegetation.
For long seconds, nothing happens. Grids doesn’t turn to face them. Tyrone says nothing. She glances at College, who just shrugs back. The silence is claustrophobic. Eventually she speaks, just to put an end to it.
“All right, Grids.”
He turns to face them. She’s startled by both how old and yet familiar he seems.
“Fucking hell,” he says, his head tilted slightly to one side. A look she genuinely can’t decode. “I don’t believe it. It’s actually you.”
“You remember me, then?” Instantly she’s no idea why she would say that.
“Yeah. Yeah.” He laughs. “Hardly going to forget you, am I? You know who this is, Ty? This is Anika. Threw herself in front of a tank with a—what was that thing you had strapped to you called again?”
“An EMP bomb.” She feels a damp chill sweep over her skin.
“An EMP bomb. E-M-P. You know what that is, Ty?”
Ty shrugs back at him, confusion muted by nonchalance.
“It stands for ‘electromagnetic pulse.’” Typical Grids, Anika thinks. He knew damn well what it was called. “Kinda bomb doesn’t blow you up, but fries all the electronics nearby. Kills them dead. Anika jumped out in front of that fucking tank in the middle of a firefight with one strapped to her and stopped it dead in its tracks. Literally. Craziest shit I’ve ever seen. She’s a fucking hero, Ty.”
“I wouldn’t say tha—”
“Then she left.” His tone snaps from nostalgic reverence to sarcastic annoyance. “Then she disappeared. Just like that. Why’d you leave so quickly, Anika?”
Ghosts flood the room, walls fold away. She’s out in the Croft again, a second after the recording stopped. Crowds climbing onto the tank, the crew being ripped from forced-open hatches. Limp, scared bodies, faces of children, being pulled to the ground, disappearing into the mob. She hears herself screaming for them to stop, her voice lost in the chaos.
“I didn’t like the way things were going.”
College speaks up, seeing where this is headed, wanting to break the tension. “Grids, I got the network running again.”
“What?”
He steps forward, grabs a school desk at the side of the room, and drags it in front of Grids. Pulls his backpack off and empties it on the desk, dozens of spex spilling out, dull LEDs on their arms blinking. He steps back, looks up at Grids, pride on his face, arms extended out at his sides.
“All these, bruv, I got them working again.”
“Really?” Grids looks at them, with what Anika reads as disgust. Like he might catch something from them.
“Really. I got ’em all working just off of Mary’s pair. The way the network works, it just needs one working pair and it’ll start reseeding the network again, reinstalling itself… I just needed a pair that had the client still installed, that hadn’t been wiped. A pair belonging to someone that left the Croft before the EMP went off. Mary’s pair—”
“He knows all this already,” Anika says.
Grids looks at her, across to College. He laughs. “Of course I do, I ain’t fucking stupid. What? You thought I really believed she had fucking magic powers? C’mon, man.”
“Yeah—but, y’know.” College shakes his head. “Every time I brought it up—”
“Every time you brought it up I wouldn’t talk to you. I told you to shut up.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, well. Because I couldn’t be fucking bothered. I didn’t want any of this.” He waves his hand dismissively at the pile of no-longer-dead technology on the table. “Look at this shit. Look at you two. I should have you both strung up.”
“Like that tank crew,” Anika says. Anger she can’t swallow back down. Things unsaid for too long.
“Oh.” He looks at her, eyes wide. Nodding. “Oh, okay. So you still pissed about that, then? That wasn’t just me, y’know.”
“You didn’t stop it.”
The mob suddenly breaking apart, falling back from the body on the ground, one of Grids’s men, scarf covering his face, standing above him with that pistol. Two hands on the grip, pointed at his head. Pleading and apologies and sobbing. Anika turning to Grids, yelling at him, telling him not like this, but him just standing there, watching.
The gunshot jarring, echoing through her head. The red mist, shattered eggshell skull. Blood and brains running into the drain like paint.
Silence.
Then a dull thud from the other side of Bristol, jarring everyone awake, sound rushing back like air into a vacuum. Everyone moving again. Another distant thud. A sense of scale, realization that this must be happening all over the city.
“I didn’t—” Grids seems lost for words for once. He shakes his head, as if trying to shake the traces of guilt and regret, replace them with anger. “Fucking hell. I heard you’d been in Wales the last ten years.”
She can remember leaving now, trying to get away from the crowds, heading for the M32, bag on her back and eyes down so she couldn’t see the limp bodies hanging from the lampposts, seagulls tugging at gray flesh.
“Yeah?” Grids snorts, and Anika realizes her face must betray her surprise. “Yeah, I hear things, girl. Heard you been in Wales. I’m sure you seen a lot worse than what happened that day in Wales, yeah? Because I know I fucking have. And I just stayed right fucking here.”
He looks at them both, her and College. Glances around to look at Ty. Shakes his head again.
“What—what do you see when you look at me? Huh?” He pauses, waiting for an answer he knows won’t come. Silence except for the sound of running nutrients.
“What? Some savage? Some despotic fucking warlord? A gangster? I keep this place together, man. I keep this shit working.” He slams his chest with his fist. “I look after these people. Make sure there’s water and cow shit to keep these farms running. Make sure people eat. Make sure College here gets what he needs to keep the solar running. Make sure people got lights at night, don’t freeze to death in the winter. You know how I do that? Do you? It’s not by killing people. It’s not by being a fucking barbarian. It’s by hustling, by business. I do all that by fucking politicking. By bribes. The cops. The LA. The fucking city council. It takes money, all made by selling rich white people herbs. Spices. Fucking ganja. I’m not Scarface, I’m—” He pauses again, searching for words. “I’m like the fucking mayor.”
“This’ll help you with all that, G!” College points at the spex, the emptied bag. Anika is surprised to hear him this impassioned, to see it on his face. More memories, ghosts. “This’ll change everything. The network, it’ll give you an advantage, some leverage—”
“This? This is all bullshit.” Grids shakes his head at both of them, sucks teeth. “Nah. Fuck this. This is more hassle than it’s worth. It’s always been more hassle than it’s worth. Don’t you get that? Serious? Out of all this bullshit, the last ten years… have you really not worked out that this is always going to be more hassle than it’s worth?”
“But—”
“Nah. Nah, College.” Anika turns to him, face resigned. “He’s right. Probably. He’s probably spot-on. It’s more hassle than it’s worth. Plus we’ve all got things we’d rather stay buried.”
“…”
She looks Grids straight in the eyes, glimpses the sympathy she knows is there, the warmth that sheltered her body in that crumbling, bullet-shredded alley. “It’s just right now I ain’t got much choice, Grids. I got people to look after too. People that are dying. People that are being worked to death. Literally. And this, this is the only thing I can take back to them that might give them a chance, an advantage.”