House of Gold, page 11
“There’s a spaceport in the outskirts of the city,” Hondo puts in. “Yesterday we saw a huge ship descend toward it.”
“It was probably just a cargo ferry coming down from orbit,” Adaolisa says. “The actual interstellar ships are too large to land on planets. And in fact, the starship currently in orbit is a recent arrival from New KwaNdebele. I did some digging and used one of Counselor’s aliases to reach out to the first mate; she’ll be in ZimbaTech tomorrow and has agreed to edit us into her manifest and vouch for us as her passengers—for a fee. She’ll also need to grease a few palms at the Citizen Affairs Office, which means I’m going to need those money tokens from the safe, Jamal.”
Jamal stares, a heavy crease forming above the bridge of his nose. “How much?”
“Sixty thousand shillings for the identities, and an extra ten thousand each to start us off with a decent amount of Scree.”
“That’s almost all the money we have!”
“There’s more in Counselor’s Nzuko wallets,” Adaolisa calmly says. “We won’t want for food or other essentials for a while.”
Unmasked petulance oozes from Jamal. “Counselor could still come back, you know.”
I roll my eyes. “I thought you agreed he probably wasn’t coming back.”
“Well,” Jamal says, “that was before I knew your Prime wanted to piss off almost every shilling we have.”
I expect we’re about to have an argument, but Hondo steps in, coolheaded and reasonable. “Don’t you want to see the rest of the city, Jamal?” he asks. “With Scree we could finally walk past some of those checkpoints and see what’s on the other side.”
When Jamal sighs in defeat, it dawns on me that Hondo may actually be the more levelheaded of the pair, which, knowing Hondo’s wild temper, says a lot more to me about Jamal’s true nature, and none of it good.
“Checkpoints?” I ask, and Hondo nods.
“Certain zones of the city are sectioned off. We’ve gathered there’s a minimum Scree threshold required to cross over. The other day we saw a man denied entrance to the zone where he works because his Scree had dipped below the minimum. The police had to haul him away kicking and screaming.”
A current of envy runs through me at seeing how much they already know about the city. “Scree is a social currency, right?” I say. “The holo streams are filled with ads for how you can earn or spend it. It’s really annoying.”
“Repulsive, more like,” Jamal grumbles. “You can’t even visit a barbershop without them asking to verify your Scree.”
“They turned obedience and conformity into a currency more valuable than money,” remarks Adaolisa. “It’s ingenious when you think about it.”
“You almost sound impressed,” Jamal says in an accusing tone.
I bristle, but Adaolisa remains unflustered. “You can be impressed by something without admiring it, Jamal.”
He watches her for a moment, then grunts, the prickliness fading from him. “I’m grateful for the hard work you’ve done, Adaolisa. You have my blessing to use the tokens. And just so you know, I haven’t been running around aimlessly. I’ve been getting to know the people of this city, how they think, how their colors move and swirl around them without them even knowing it. I never thought anyone could be so oblivious to their own enslavement.”
Adaolisa and I exchange confused looks. “Colors?” she asks.
With a smirk, Jamal rises from his chair. His eyes flash at us with hidden significance when he says, “You’ll know exactly what I mean the second you step outside. Now, if you’ll excuse us, the city awaits.”
The boys go down to the city, and once again I’m left to haunt the apartment while Adaolisa returns to her terminal in the library.
I try to find something to watch on the holo screen, but surface entertainment is plagued with ZimbaTech commercials and Scree promotions, so I give up in disgust, silently bemoaning the loss of the Habitat’s archive of Old World content. A lot of it was dated, filmed before the advent of holographic technology, but at least the actors never burst into regular paroxysms of groveling praise for ZimbaTech or some other corporate government.
Since we’ve concluded that Counselor is probably not coming back, I decide to disobey his command and go out through the glass doors to watch the city from the landing pad. The safe house is the highest apartment in our building, so I have a great view of the lanes of aerial traffic weaving through the towers. From here I can also see the skyline’s crown jewel, a distant spiraling skyscraper of pearlescent glass with a holographic ribbon of the word ZIMBATECH revolving around its spire.
The static is also much clearer here. It’s been with me since I arrived in this city, coming from the people living below us or caressing my mind from those passing through in aerial cars. I still don’t know what it is, and I haven’t told Adaolisa because I don’t want her to worry, but I’ve grown used to it and can almost forget it’s there. If I concentrate, though, I can single out particularly agitated sources of static all the way down on the ground. At least three such sources are just out of sight, hidden behind another building. They sound hostile and impatient to me, like the slightest annoyance could set them off. A Scree checkpoint manned by impatient police officers, maybe?
“You’re going stir crazy,” Adaolisa says behind me.
“I’ll manage,” I reply automatically.
She joins me by the rails on the landing pad, looking out into the city. “I’d have told you to go with the boys if I didn’t know you better.”
“I can’t risk leaving you here alone. I know too little about this place. I don’t even know what’s on the other side of the door.”
She smiles. “Like I said. If I didn’t know you better.”
Affection wells within me, and I snake an arm around her back. “Then you should also know that I’ll wait for as long as you need. You’re cautious and diligent, and you’re doing important work. Don’t worry about me.”
Her smile slowly weakens as she looks toward the distant ZimbaTech spire. “I’m more worried about myself, actually.”
I search her face. “Why?”
She doesn’t mask her anxiety. “I know I can’t sit in front of a terminal collecting information forever. I know it’s impossible I’ll ever control everything around me. But I feel like I’m drowning, Nandipa. Flailing against a tide of all the things I don’t know, and that I’m not learning them fast enough. Whenever I step away from the terminal, I begin to fear I’m missing something, some vital detail or piece of information, and if I don’t discover it, I’m going to make a mistake and get us both killed.”
Concern thickens within me, and I hug her closer to my side. “That’s not going to happen, Ada. You won’t get us killed. I know because you have good instincts and good judgment. You don’t need to know or control everything for you to make wonderful decisions. All you need is to trust yourself a little more, because you’re spectacular.”
She gives a tired laugh. “Easier said than done.”
“Trusting you is easy, believe me,” I say. “You should try it.”
Her smile is genuine, but again it doesn’t last for long. We watch the aerial traffic flow past us for a time, and then she says, “Why us?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Who sent us those messages, Nandipa? Who put those programs on our PCUs? Why did they target me and Jamal, and why does it feel like they saved our lives?”
I have asked myself these questions, too, and the more I think about them, the less our survival feels like luck.
The mech bay would have been one of the last places to collapse, since it was built into the seabed and had no structures of glass. The bay was also one of the few places in the Habitat with an emergency submersible; most other sectors had pressurized escape bunkers. So whoever sent that last message put us in the bay just moments before the attack, with one of the handful of people in the Habitat authorized to use the submersible.
It’s hard to believe our escape wasn’t engineered.
“So it had to be a Custodian, right?” I think aloud. “Someone with high-level access. For all we know, it was Counselor himself and he’s just a really good actor. Or maybe it was Administrator.”
Adaolisa exhales loudly, shaking her head. “The one person who might have helped us get some answers is possibly gone forever.”
“You think he’s dead?” I ask.
“I think someone—or something—got to him. He’d have come back otherwise. But enough of that. I didn’t come outside to worry you with questions neither of us can answer. There’s a gymnasium a few floors below. It’s close enough you won’t have to feel like you’re leaving me, but at least it’s out of the apartment. You should go down and give it a look.”
“I . . . don’t know,” I say. “We’re going out tomorrow, aren’t we? I can wait until then.”
She squeezes my arm, her voice firm. “Go, Nandipa. I may be a control freak, but I won’t let that keep you prisoner. Besides, you’ve never needed to spend every waking hour in my presence. There’s no need to start now.”
“This isn’t the Habitat,” I remind her.
“Believe me, I know. But I’m safe here, and I have a lot of work to do, and you’re inches away from pulling out your hair.”
I gasp, tousling my curls by reflex. “I would never!”
Her eyes glitter with silent laughter. “I know. You love your hair too much, and I don’t want that to change by driving you to madness. Now go. That’s an order.”
With a water bottle in one hand, I take my first step out of the apartment dressed in the gray compression bra and gym shorts I came wearing beneath my jumpsuit. I make it to the elevator and descend to the gymnasium floor without event.
The gymnasium itself is a rectangular room of mirrors and steel, one side with a head-on view of the advertisement holo screen on the building across the street. I’m almost as disappointed as I am relieved when I find no one there.
The treadmills take me a moment to figure out, but soon I’m lost in the percussion of my sneaker boots hitting the moving rubber. After I’ve warmed up sufficiently, I move on to chest presses, push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups, working myself to the satisfying burn of fatigue. Adaolisa’s calm presence in the apartment above keeps my anxiety in check, and my restlessness eventually fades away.
I’m cooling down with stretches by the mats near the mirrors when I sense a cloud of static approaching the gymnasium. A young woman in a gray bodysuit and golden box braids tied up in a bun joins me seconds later, and she does a double take when she spots me, her static ramping up with curiosity.
She tries to be casual about it, but I sense her eyes on me as she steps onto an exercise bike, and they follow me as I move to fill my bottle at a water fountain. She finally gets off her bike to accost me on my way toward the exit.
“Sorry, sis,” she says, “but you’re new here, right?”
Never say more than you have to, is what Adaolisa would tell me. And always lie with the truth if you can. “Yes, I’m new.”
The woman looks me over with a mixture of envy and admiration that makes me uneasy. “You’ve gotta tell me what skin mod you’re using.”
Um. What? “Excuse me?”
“Your bodymod,” she says, still looking me over. “I like it. It’s so subtle. I’m using Adore by Cerise. What about you?”
“. . . I don’t use mods?”
She snorts in derision, folding her arms. “Okay. Keep your secrets. But I bet you’re some Oloye’s sidepiece, huh. He pay for your privacy filter too?”
I think she’s implying I’m some sort of prostitute or kept woman, but I decide it’s not worth challenging whatever assumptions she’s made about me. “. . . Maybe,” I say.
“No judgment here, sis. We all do what we gotta do to survive. And whatever you’re doing looks like it’s working.” Her curiosity satisfied, she turns away from me and returns to her workout.
I feel a laugh bubbling inside my chest as I leave the gymnasium. My first conversation with a surfacer, and I get accused of being someone’s “sidepiece.” I think I’d be horrified if it weren’t all so absurdly different from what I dreaded as I lay in my bed in the Habitat.
Later that night we reheat the last four meals in the freezer and eat them silently in the dining area.
I know hunger exists. I have felt it myself as I trained under instructors who forced me to subsist for weeks on just enough rations to keep me alive. I know hunger is a motive that has driven my species ever since we took our first steps on the Old World and that wars have been fought because people were hungry and had no viable means of feeding themselves or their children. I understand scarcity.
But it’s only now that I’m properly glimpsing what it might feel like to actually live with scarcity and hunger, and not because my trainer took my food away but because I literally have no more access to food.
It feels almost surreal as we clean up afterward, burdened by the knowledge that there’ll be nothing for us to eat come morning tomorrow. We can no longer expect our needs to be met simply because we exist. No food will magically reappear in the freezer. No masked Custodian will be there to dish us a healthy serving of kelp-based eggs and ham. We are truly alone and on our own.
I can’t decide how I feel about this.
It’s become a habit for Hondo and me to spend an hour every evening after dinner occupying ourselves with cooking holo streams or hate-watching overly dramatic celebrities as they go about their vapid lives, where the only thing that seems to ever matter is what they’re wearing and who they’re sleeping with.
These “lifestyle” holo streams are invariably asinine and ridiculous, but I derive a perverse sort of pleasure from mocking and criticizing the people on-screen.
“Ancestors, can you believe her?” I say halfway through an episode following a rather attractive but scatterbrained socialite. “If she were any more stupid, her head would be buoyant.”
Hondo coughs, covering his mouth to hide a smile, and I feel myself flushing with minor embarrassment.
I guess I do get too engrossed in these kinds of shows. I know he watches them only because I want to.
Sometimes Adaolisa and Jamal join us. Tonight they slink away to their respective terminals, leaving us to our own devices. We don’t talk about our Primes or how we spent the day—a Proxy never shares anything that might compromise their Prime’s activities. We don’t talk much at all, but our silences feel combustible, me being aware of Hondo being aware of me.
I’m not new to sexual desire. Benjamin and I had our fun when the fancy took us. And before Benjamin there was Haroun. But either boy felt to me like a shallow pool I could take a dip in and then wade out unscathed. We all knew the boundaries and expected nothing more from each other beyond the barest bones of what might be generously called friendship.
The intensity I sense from Hondo feels like quicksand. A dangerous thing that might ensnare me if I let it. He has a physical pull that has surprised me, a fascinating thrill that keeps drawing me into the depths of his dark eyes. But I can’t help the feeling that if I let things ever go that far, we’d destroy each other.
I excuse myself at the end of the hour, not lingering too long in the silence after I turn off the holo screen. If Adaolisa has sensed anything, she says nothing about it when she eventually joins me in our room. I almost ask for her input but ultimately decide against it; I don’t want her thinking I’m considering the idea. Because I’m not.
Sunrise the next morning finds us all dressed in our jumpsuits and ready for Adaolisa’s contact to arrive. There is no breakfast beyond mugs of coffee, but I’m so excited to finally leave this building that food is the last thing on my mind.
At the appointed hour a boxy old vehicle with a rusted sky-blue coat rises out of a traffic lane to descend onto the landing pad outside.
“She’s here,” Adaolisa says with a nervous hitch in her voice. “Let’s go.”
“This better work, or we’ll starve to death,” mutters Jamal as we file out the glass doors.
The individual who proceeds to emerge from the vehicle almost literally takes my breath away. She is long and thin, like a mantis, and as colorful as a butterfly. I cannot tell if she’s wearing eyepieces or if those shining red lenses were grafted onto her face. A fluffy pink Afro covers one side of her scalp, while coils of chrome thread out of the other.
As we approach each other, my eyes are drawn to the many holographic patches sewn onto her red, grease-stained jumpsuit and the dark leather jacket she’s wearing over it. Many of them are written in the Second Dialect, which I’ve gathered isn’t spoken much on this world. Her noise is different as well, fuzzier, though the sensation of static is much stronger in my ears. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were actual electrical components inside her head.
She stares at us for a beat, her noise inquisitive. “So who’s the one I spoke to?”
Adaolisa is so surprised by the woman she takes a whole second to respond. “Are you Zandi?”
“That I am.”
“Then we’re the ones you’re expecting. These are my siblings, as we discussed.”
The stranger considers us again, the strength of her noise kicking up a notch. “Where did you say you were from?”
The boys and I remain silent and let Adaolisa do the talking. “You said your services came with no questions asked.”
“They do. It’s just that you don’t look like the sort of people who typically need my services.”
“We have our own reasons.”
The woman grins, showing us two rows of chrome teeth. “Hey, this isn’t an interrogation. It’s your money, and I appreciate the business. Speaking of which.”
