“I stepped on her.” Bella looked sick. “I didn’t even stop.”
“She’d been dead a long time by then,” Li lied. “There was nothing you could have done for her.”
Bella started to speak, but as she opened her mouth Haas’s voice rang out in the front office.
“I should go,” Li said.
“No! Wait.”
Li had stood up to leave, but now she crouched in front of the woman, looking up into those impossible eyes, searching the perfect oval of her face for a clue, an answer, anything.
“They got away with it, didn’t they?” Bella said, still speaking in a harsh whisper. “They killed her. And no one’s going to punish them.”
Li was close enough to smell her now. Close enough to see the bitter lines around her lovely mouth, the bruised pallor of the flesh stretched across her cheekbones. Bella looked like a fighter who had taken a knockout punch and was waiting for gravity to catch up with her. And in the violet depths of her eyes Li saw the same black emptiness she’d seen down at the cutting face.
Only this time she could put a name to it.
It was hate. Hate that had been tended and fed and watered until it was big enough to burst through her skin and swallow universes.
Shantytown: 19.10.48.
Compson’s sun shed a smeary bottle green light on Shantytown and played halfheartedly over the awkward sprawl of mold-fuzzed rooftops. The miscalibrated atmospheric processors produced a sooty drizzle that made all of Shantytown look like it was underwater, and the mud that sucked at Li’s boots gave off a faint whiff of sewage.
She followed McCuen past pawnshops, tattoo parlors, storefronts advertising bail bonds and cash loans on paychecks. They were off the grid here; the signs flashed with neon and halogen, not spinfeed. THE PIT, she read, and PAYDAY PAWN and MINER’S EASE, and GIRLSGIRLSGIRLS.
First shift was on; it showed in the waiting silence of the bars, the absence of able-bodied men on the streets. Still, as they left the commercial strip and dove into the back streets, they drew increasing notice. A clot of pale, ragged children stopped their stickball game and stared. A woman on her way home from picking pea coal off the tailings piles turned clear around to watch them pass. When Li looked back, she saw that the woman’s body was bent into a sharp letter L under her load.
McCuen picked his way through the unmarked intersections as surely as if he had a map. Each turn took them farther from daylight and deeper into Shantytown’s poorest quarter. Modular housing units began to be replaced by the virusteel and decaying ceramic tiles of settlement-era habitat pods. Occasionally they passed a still-functional airlock, status lights blinking to indicate the operational status of long-idle life-support systems. More often, the remnants of the original colony were mere deadware, the bottom layer in a sedimentary accretion of obsolete technology and home-brewed or scavenged building materials.
Just as Li was beginning to wonder how many blind corners and unlit side streets McCuen could lead her down, he ducked into a gap between two boarded storefronts, dropped down three steps, and slipped into an alley so narrow that the dank walls nearly met overhead.
Doors opened off the alley on either side, but they were all closed. The few windows were boarded up or covered with plastic sheeting. The rank smell of vegetein flowed out of the houses like smoke and soaked into the packed hardpan. And underneath it, deep and musky, Li caught smells that had the power to throw her back twenty years into the dim memories of childhood. Sweat. Bad plumbing. Last night’s empty beer bottles. Poverty.
McCuen walked fast, eyeing the shadows like a man who is only mostly sure he isn’t about to be rolled for his palm implant. He ran his hand along the right wall, counting doors like a miner counting drift turnings. At the eighth door he stopped and tried the latch.
It swung open, and he ducked in without pausing on the threshold. Li followed.
They hurried down a dark corridor toward a faint blur of daylight. The corridor dumped them into an interior court with a rough, sloping floor. One side of the court was dark and quiet, stairs leading up toward darkened apartments. The other side opened onto the flying sparks and whining machinery of a welder’s shop. They mounted the single step into the shop just as the welder finished sawing through a sheet-metal panel and straightened up, pushing back his safety goggles.
McCuen stepped up to the man and pulled a bent door hinge out of his pocket. “My mother asked me to bring this by,” he said, his voice echoing under the shop’s high ceiling. “Can you fix it?”
“When does she need it by?”
“Good Friday, she said.”
Instead of answering, the welder put his torch down and walked off toward the front of the shop. As Li and McCuen watched, he put up a closed sign and cranked heavy storm shutters down over the shop window, shutting them into darkness.
“Sit down,” he said, and flicked the switch that lit the shop’s single dim bulb.
McCuen sat. Li didn’t.
“So,” the welder said. “This is her.”
“Yeah,” McCuen said.
“Time to put your mouth where your money is,” the welder said.
Li held out her left arm, sleeve rolled above the elbow. He snapped a tourniquet around it, produced a needle from his apron pocket, and pulled more blood than Li thought could possibly be necessary, even for the most incompetent doctor. “They want a tooth, too,” he said.
“Oh, Christ,” Li muttered. “For God’s sake.”
“You didn’t say that before,” McCuen said.
“Well, I’m saying it now. You can fake blood. Teeth tell the whole story.” He turned back to Li. “You want to talk to the man or not?”
Li shrugged and opened her mouth.
She spent the next half hour sitting on a work counter nursing a bloody gap where her bottom right premolar had been, while McCuen paced back and forth impatiently. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as she’d hoped it would; a little worse and her internals would have thrown enough endorphins at it to have her feeling comfortable. As it was, they ignored it and left her to handle it.
Finally the welder came back, accompanied by a second man who waved them back into the slanting courtyard and toward the stairs.
“Here?” Li asked.
But he opened a narrow door tucked beneath the stairs, ducked into another corridor, and led them into an alley even darker and narrower than the one she and McCuen had come in by. Five right turns, two left turns, and three interior courtyards later he turned into a broader alley, this one roofed with grimy, rain-streaked greenhouse sheeting. It ran level, but its walls curved like a snail’s shell, as if responding to some structural logic Li couldn’t fathom.
A few dozen meters down the spiraling alley, their guide stopped at a nondescript door, knocked, and entered.
The room inside smelled of old newspapers and boiled cabbage. A pea-coal fire smoldered in the grate, filling the room with greasy smoke. A woman sat at a chipped laminate table holding a child in her lap, reading to him in a low murmur. The woman and child both looked up momentarily, then dropped their heads to the book again, uninterested.
“Where is he?” their guide asked.
The woman jerked her chin toward an inner room. As Li passed by the table, she saw there was something wrong with the boy’s upper lip and his legs were withered.
McCuen started toward the door, but the guide barred his way. He looked hard at her, then shrugged and went over to sit at the table. Li stepped through alone and heard the door swing to behind her.
She stood in near darkness, cut by a single dusty beam of sunlight stabbing through a storm shutter. As she looked around Li understood the odd curvature of the alley outside. The house was built onto the outside skin of one of the old life-support pods; this room’s three newer walls were native mud brick, but the back wall, the only original one, was a curved gleaming expanse of ceramic compound. An airlock yawned in the center of the old wall, but its control panel had been ripped open and hot-wired long ago. The irising virusteel door panels were permanently stuck at a two-thirds-open position, and someone had hung a blanket over the gap, blocking off Li’s view of the geodesic dome that must lie behind.