Company Town (32 page)

“The people from the Benevolent Irish Society are going to be here in two hours to collect stuff,” Hwa reminded her. “Why can't I help you?”

“You don't know where anything is,” Sunny said. “I can't ask you to find anything, because you don't know where I put things. I have a system.”

An avalanche of mesh and velour and feathers poured out of the closet. “Some system.”

Sunny stood up straight. She pointed at Hwa. “Don't fucking start. Don't even fucking start. If the Lynches were actually able to
catch
this crazy motherfucker, I wouldn't even be in this position.”

Hwa looked at the piles of clothes. The boxes of dishes. Why was Sunny even packing dishes? She barely ate anything, anymore.

“If you'd voted for the Lysistrata strategy—”

“I didn't join a union so I could strike. I joined for the fucking pension.” Sunny wadded up a pile of pink lace and threw it on the
maybe
pile. “I work like everybody else in this town. As hard as I can for as long as I can.”

“I know.”

Sunny turned up the drama as she pawed through more piles of stuff. There appeared to be no organization whatsoever. Storage devices on top of clothes on top of old tax records on top of rolls of towels. Over twenty years of total chaos strewn across the floor of the living room. Hwa couldn't even see the coffee table, anymore. She wasn't sure that what she was perched on was even a chair, under all the clothes.

“I hate moving,” Sunny said.

“Yeah.” Hwa spotted a Christmas card she'd made in pre-kindergarten sandwiched between the pages of an artisanal blown glass dildo catalogue. She decided not to mention it. “Moving sucks.”

“Is that why you're staying? Or is it your
boss
?” Sunny arched an eyebrow. “Is he making it worth your while to stay?”

“Mom!” Hwa buried her face in her hands. “We haven't … We don't … He's my boss.”

“Never stopped me and Tae-kyung's father,” Sunny said. “He was my manager. It's the same thing.”

Time to change the subject. “Will your place in Calgary even have enough room for all this stuff?”

“Of course it will. It's Alberta. Big sky country.”

“That's Montana.”

“Whatever. It's the mainland.” Sunny stood up and stretched. She bent at the waist and Hwa heard all the pops in her spine as the muscles finally relaxed and the vertebrae found alignment. Sunny's hands traced through the wreckage, pushing aside old cookbooks until her hands lit on a box. Before she even opened her mouth, Hwa knew Sunny was about to switch tongues.

<>

“What are they?”

<>

“Of me?” Hwa asked. “And Tae-kyung?”

Sunny shook her head. It was a tiny movement, like the jerk of a fish on a line. “No. They're of me. Do you want them?”

“What, they're like your publicity shots? Because I can go online and see those. And besides, I thought you sold all of them already.” She gestured at the clothes. “You should be selling all this shit, too. You've still got fans. I'm sure someone, somewhere, wants your old underwear.”

Sunny sucked her teeth. <>

Hwa shrugged.

<>

Hwa stared at the box. “Before you started working? Before you signed your first contract?”

Sunny nodded. <> She held the box tight to her sternum, like if she let it go for one second it might run away from her. <>

Hwa nodded. “Fine.”

Slowly, Sunny handed over the box. It was a movement of her whole body. Like something in the box would die if she ever let it leave human hands. When Hwa opened it, Sunny hissed. But inside there was just an envelope secured with an elastic. The years were written on the envelope in script Hwa didn't recognize. Her grandmother's, maybe. Hwa had never met her. Hwa tucked the envelope down into her vest.

Sunny let out a deep sigh. She looked at the piles. “Take that one down,” she said, pointing to the
leave
pile.

So Hwa packed up two giant garbage bags full of clothes and started down the hall. The garbage chutes were all full. Who thought it was a good idea to stuff a whole diaper bag down one of those things? Or a whole dressmaker's dummy? Everyone really was leaving town, after all. Though the end of the month was always such a disaster in Tower One. She'd have to go down a floor or two. She found the nearest set of elevators and wiped her eyes. Everyone dragging their castoffs out must have stirred up extra dust. Her eyes burned. Her sinuses burned. Something smelled awful. The clogged garbage? No. Too acrid. Not sweet enough. Almost like … fertilizer.

There aren't even any sniffers
. Daniel had said that, about Tower One. It was why he was happy she'd moved.

A song came over the emergency intercom. An old jazz standard. Sweet. Slow. She'd heard it before. On the water. In the taxi. “Where or When”? That was the title. It autoplayed every time you passed the protest signs about the experimental reactor.

Oh, Jesus.

<> Maybe she would hear her. Through the doors. Over the drama. Over the song. <>

The contents of the garbage chute exploded. Heat washed over Hwa's face. She fell to her knees. No alarm sounded. No sprinklers came. They'd hacked the building. Must have. Fire everywhere. Tae-kyung had died this way. Just like this. Flame licked the ceiling.

Beside her, the elevators chimed open. She bolted. Too late, she saw the darkness below. The empty shaft.

She fell.

*   *   *

Her mouth was full of blood.

Her ears rang.

Her leg throbbed.

Her head ached.

All in all, it was like the outcome of most of her early matches.

The elevator beneath her had major cracks in it. It looked … crumpled. She felt like the egg in one of Mr. Branch's physics experiments. From what height did Hwa need to fall before she broke?

How much of her was broken?

She couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Not comfortably, anyway. Was that smoke inhalation, or a collapsed lung? Did it matter?

“Prefect?”

Nothing.

“Daniel?”

Nothing.

“Joel?”

Nothing.

She was in a giant Faraday cage. Communication with the outside world was impossible. She had two options. The first was to crawl up out of the shaft, somehow. The second was to open the trapdoor on the elevator she'd landed on, and hope that something inside still worked.

It took hours. Her fingers were bloody by the time it was done.

Weakly, she pressed the emergency intercom button. Static. “Worth a try,” she muttered.

Even her watch was broken. Sometimes light flitted across its spider-cracked surface, but nothing coherent or intelligible. Just blurs. And her specs hadn't lasted two minutes. All she had to her name were the clothes that had helped break her fall, and the photos Sunny had given her.

She was going to die here, probably. She had one working hand and one working leg. Every time she tried to sit up, she puked. She searched her vomit for blood, but it was hard to focus. And there wasn't much light. Just one single fluorescent coil.

This was the way she would have always gone out, she decided. She used to climb those elevator shafts like they were playground equipment. It was a dumb thing to do. Arrogant. She'd thought that just because she'd never had a bad fall that she never would. But now it was her turn. Her number had come up. She'd rolled snake eyes. Aces and eights. There was really no end to the list of appropriate metaphors, except there was no metaphor for falling down an elevator shaft during a terrorist attack and dying alone surrounded by your mom's old clothes.

She made a nest for herself.

She slept.

Sleeping was good.

It preserved oxygen.

*   *   *

She kept pressing the emergency call button. Nothing.

She kicked with her good leg at the walls of the elevator. Miners did that, when they were trapped in a cave-in. They had to read passages from a book on the subject in French class.
Germinal.
That was the name. At one point the men started eating pieces of leather belt and shoe to feel full. Hwa wondered if it would get that far, with her. She hoped not.

She kept kicking.

*   *   *

The light started to die. Whatever source it had been attached to, it was no longer attached. So she had to do the thing she'd been avoiding. Because doing it meant that things were well and truly over. That her days were numbered.

She pulled out the envelope Sunny had given her.

It was hard with one hand. But she pulled down the elastic and out spilled all the old pictures. None of them were very good. The person taking the pictures didn't really know how to take pictures. Most were blurry. Ill-composed. Taken at things like parties, without much context.

The little girl in them was profoundly plain.

Not cute.

Not magnetic.

Not remarkable.

Not in any way noteworthy.

<> read one of them.

She'd looked just like Hwa. Like Jung-hwa, Just Hwa, Miss Go, Squirt, the miserable little bitch with the big fucking mouth. The girl without a future. Sunny had looked just like her. Before all the surgeries. Unstained, yes. But still plain. Plain and basic and not very special at all. Certainly not like a girl who would sing in a girl group. Not like a woman anyone would pay attention to, much less pay for.

No wonder Sunny hated her. She'd spent thousands of dollars doing everything she could to avoid seeing that face in the mirror every day, and then it came out of her body anyway. Only worse. Defective. Of course Sunny couldn't love her.

It wasn't an apology. But it was an explanation. And that was a damn sight more than she'd offered in the past twenty-three years.

Hwa tucked the pictures back under her collar, against her chest, and closed her eyes.

*   *   *

Light.

Cold.

Air.

A crack in the room.

 

17

Lover

Snow.

Quiet and white and thick. It covered everything. She buried her face in it. Drank. Licked. Nibbled until her teeth sang with pain.

How had she gotten out of the elevator? Maybe she'd blacked out.

She swung her legs through the snow as best she could. Pulled herself along by one snowy railing that remained unbent by the blast. It felt cold and hard and good under her bare hand. She hugged it as she pulled along. Felt it wedge up under her ribs. Let it hold her up. The rail ran up the incline of the jetty and alongside the stairs as they wound up to the low-speed level of the Demasduwit Causeway. Multiple flights of them, all switching back against each other, each surface hung with a long white beard of icicles.

So many.

No boats on this side of the tower. Probably they were all on the other side, the ruined side, putting out fires. (Were there still fires?) Or rescuing people. (Were people still alive? She was still alive. But she did not feel like a person.) This far out the water had a skin of ice on it, and it was accumulating snow. Without the railing, she might have stepped onto it at any time.

“It's good there's this railing,” Hwa heard herself say. “Otherwise I'd just walk out on the ice and drown.”

Drowning didn't seem so bad. She'd heard it was the good way to go. You asphyxiated, and then there was nothing. Layne had asphyxiated. Drowned in her own lungs. That didn't look like a good death—the bloody pink foam oozing up out of her throat and onto the electric pink of her hair.

He'll cut you in places you don't know about, yet.
The witch had said that. Under the causeway. In what Hwa had thought was the lowest place she could go.

Hwa had to physically lift her bad knee with her good hand in order to get up the stairs. Eventually she just sat down on the stairs gingerly—the ice—and started pushing backward on her good knee. It was probably for the best. She was already seeing stars. Probably being completely upright was a bad idea anyway.

“I could probably just go to sleep, right here,” she said, after the second flight of stairs. “That'd be a thing to do.”

When her eyes opened, she was further up the stairs.

“Ping RoFo.” She pushed up another slick stair. “Prefect, get RoFo on this shit.”

Prefect said nothing. Probably the system was trying to reach her in its own way. Hwa looked around for cameras. There was an ancient-looking dome, black and smooth like a shark's eye, and she waved at it. She doubted it would help. Half those things were dummies anyway. She twisted around—pain searing up her sciatic nerve from her ankle to her shoulder like someone had replaced her tendons with twisted wire hangers—to look at the rest of the stairs. Far up above was a rectangle of white light. What time was it? How long had she been in the shaft? What if everyone had evacuated?

What if she was the last one in town?

She started crab-walking as fast as she could. Her breath left little clouds of steam as it hissed between her teeth. Her knee felt fuzzy. Like someone had replaced the joints with steel wool. She started reciting “My Bonny Lies over the Ocean” to herself. Not singing it so much as breathing it, using it to keep pace.

“Bring
back,
” she muttered, pushing herself up stair by stair, “bring
back,
oh bring back my bonny to
me,
to
me
…”

Her knee throbbed. Her tailbone ached. Her hands froze into claws. Sweat trickled down her back and pooled at the base of her spine. Then it cooled on her body and she shivered. Her teeth chattered. Without her earbud and her watch she was alone. No augments. Just meat. Just flesh and bone and blood and breath. A solitary figure crawling up the leg of the city, like a bedbug or a flea.