Like a Boss (16 page)

Regulator Neck went
pfft
. “You can’t blame everything on the Big Three
or
on the Union
or
on us.”

“Who said I’m blaming it on us?” said a Freeborn man behind us. He clutched a tool bag to his chest.

“
I
did,” said Regulator Neck, jabbing himself with his thumb. “Every time the Contract comes up, we get an offer to join with the Union. We always say no.”

“That’s because we’re
not
Union,” said Flour Coat.

“Yeah, but we’re also not Big Three,” said Regulator Neck. “We all get screwed by them. Shouldn’t we wise up and work together?”

“What, like those terrorists from the FOC?” said Tool Bag.

“They weren’t terrorists!” said Flour Coat.

“Really? Then what do you call the people who blew up that post office?”

“Assholes,” said Flour Coat. Everyone grumbled assent.

“I didn’t like the violence,” said Regulator Neck, “but the people in the FOC were right. We had to get a seat at the table.”

“And lose our independence?” Tool Bag snorted. “No way.”

“What independence is that?” said Two Anchors. “You’re just as dependent on the Big Three as
we
are. Or are you gonna tell me you don’t work in the city supporting some Contract gig?”

“Why, you got a problem with that?” said Tool Bag. “I gotta make a living.”

“We all do,” said Two Anchors. “But you Freeborn talking about independence is like a piglet complaining it has to go to some other sow’s teat.”

There was silence. “That makes no sense,” said Regulator Neck.

“I know,” said Two Anchors, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I haven’t had any coffee this morning.”

“If we wanted to, we Freeborn could completely cut ourselves off from you Inks,” said Flour Coat. “
We
can always grow our own food, make our own goods, live our own lives.”

“That why do you make pastries ten hours a day in a Shareholder bakery?” said Regulator Neck.

Flour Coat smacked him again. “I swear, if I could afford a lawyer, I would divorce your ass in a heartbeat.”

“Thirty years you been saying that, and yet you keep coming back.” Regulator Neck made a kissy face. “You know I’m the only one who’s got what you need.”

“I can always find another plumber.”

The whole bus howled. Regulator Neck threw his hands in the air and slid out of his seat. The only empty seat he could find was at the back of the bus.

Two Anchors chuckled. “Still, he’s got a point. All of us work for the Big Three one way or the other.”

Flour Coat made a face. “How you figure?”

“Who buys your pastries?”

She shrugged. “Just people. Anyone.”

“And where do they get the money to buy their pastries?”

“From their jobs.”

“And every job here centers around cane. You’re growing it, you’re cutting it, you’re turning it into molasses, and all of it goes up the lifter.”

“Not
all
of it,” said Tool Bag.

“Okay,” said Two Anchors. “We keep some to power things. But my point is that almost everyone is supporting or supported by cane. Occupied Space runs on burning cane. Freeborn people grow it, Union people process it, Big Three people consume it. We get Big Three money, and it comes trickling down into our pockets so people can buy your pastries.”

My stomach rumbled. As good as the bao had been, I would have loved an almond bialy and a coffee.

Flour Coat sniffed. “Well, I can always quit. Start my own shop. I don’t have to depend on someone filling a Slot for me.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“’Cause the money’s too
good
.”

“Or it was,” said Tool Bag.

“Yeah,” said Two Anchors. “No doubt there.”

The Red Bus slowed as it approached North Terminal. The traffic was thick: Blues from San Monique, Greens from Hawthorne, Yellows from way the hell on the other side of the island. There were no police to direct traffic, just a lot of honking and jostling for position at the loading bays. Our bus hissed to a stop and the driver said, “You got five minutes to unload.”

“Or what?” I asked.

She looked up at the mirror and caught my eye. “Or you’ll be stuck in a bus. I’m taking this to the depot, and then I’m marching with everyone else.”

As we disembarked, people handed out signs saying STRIKE and NEW DEAL NOW. Some of them had steel Temple pins, and a few had added the supernova to their Union ink on their cheeks. I caught sight of Meiumi and her son before they were swept into the mass of bodies. Meiumi Greene. With an ‘e’. I hoped she would be okay.

I grabbed the first bike I could and rode straight to Brushhead, taking every side street and back alley that wasn’t filled with people. By the time I got to Budvar, I had to ditch the bike and walk. People jammed the streets, all of them bright and bubbly. Every café, bar, and strip club was open and full. I took off my coat and tied it around my waist, the heat of the morning and the crowd baking through my clothes. I saw strikers walk off the street and hand their signs to people blinking their way out of coffee shops. The slogans were all generic: SOLIDARITY and UNFAIR and STRIKE. None of the signs had demands. None of the people talked about demands. What the hell kind of strike was this?

Two hours and a twenty-yuan egg sandwich later, I arrived at the remains of my home. The building was now a charred shell. The roof and top two floors had collapsed. Blackened beams and studs leaned against each other. It looked like the skeleton of a whale that had fallen from the sky and auto-ignited on impact. Long tracks of dirt snaked up to the foundations.

Onanefe and his crew sat around their Hanuman, all of them sooty and bleary-eyed. They held bowls of noodles, but none of them ate. They just stared into the distance. I picked my way over the burnt remains of the building’s rose garden. “You guys okay?”

Onanefe groaned as he slid off the hood of the truck. “You missed a hell of a good time.”

“I was detained.”

“For a week?”

I shrugged. “Entropy happens. I see you saved the day here.”

Onanefe stretched, his neck popping as he twisted it from side to side. “I don’t think we ever worked like that. Cutting cane’s going to be a vacation.”

“Anyone else get hurt?”

He shook his head and brushed his mustache. Parts of it had singed away. “There were fires all over the neighborhood. Been busy for days.” He pointed at the building next to mine. “We had to work like hell making sure the fire didn’t spread. It just got hotter after you left, so we started a bucket brigade and brought dirt up top to tamp things down. It’s gonna take a while for the neighborhood garden to bounce back.”

“I think everyone will forgive you.” I held out a hand. “I never had a chance to introduce myself. Padma Mehta.”

His eyebrows shot up. For a moment, I thought he was going to start singing my theme song. Then his eyebrows came down, along with his expression. “You owe me fifty thousand yuan.”

“You’re kidding.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. The rest of the crew rose to their feet and huddled around him. “We never kid about wages. You own the Old Windswept distillery, yes?”

“Yes.”

He nodded. “We own a plot out in Erendiz Flats. We raised heirloom cane, supplied a lot of distillers. I grew good stuff.”

I nodded to myself. “Okay. Where do I come into the picture?”

“About a year and a half ago, I got a massive order from Estella Tonggow. My entire stock for a year, exclusive. It was COD, which I
never
do, but Madame Tonggow’s reputation was impeccable. I signed, I delivered, and I never got the money.”

“Why?”

“Because she was dead.”

“Wait.” I tried to blink up all of my contracts from the distillery, but the Public just gave me the finger. “Dammit, I can’t connect right now. Look, I hope you can understand why this is a bit of a shock to me, right?”

He shrugged. “Whether it’s a shock or not makes no nevermind. What matters is that we get paid.”

“Then why didn’t you bring this to me?”

“I did,” said Onanefe. “Every month, I’d send letters by courier to your office. You want to tell me you’ve never seen them? I got the receipts in my kit bag.”

“Yes, because I
haven’t
,” I said. “My manager deals with all that.”

“And she wouldn’t think to say, ‘Hey, boss, you owe this guy fifty large’?”

“No,
he
sure as hell would. But since
he
hasn’t, that means I either have to fire him or–”

“You need to pay up!” yelled one of the cutters.

“We
counted
on that money!” yelled another.

“I need to pay for my husband’s meds!”

“I need to pay for fixing our compost digester!”

“I need to pay for my daughter’s gamelon lessons!”

The others looked at the last guy. “What?” he said. “Flora loves playing, and
I
don’t know how to teach her!”

Onanefe put his hands on his hips and squared off toward me. “That money was going to make a big difference in all our lives, Ms Mehta. But when we didn’t get paid, we had to hustle and start working other fields to cover our collective nut.”

“What do you want me to do about it, then?” I turned out my pockets, and held up the contents: fluff, a ticket stub from the Red Bus, and three two-yuan coins. “This is all I’ve got.”

Onanefe glanced at the detritus and sniffed. “What about the distillery?”

A chill raced up my neck. “What
about
it?”

He shrugged, and the edges of his mustache lifted up as he smiled. “Maybe we should look into garnishing your profits until we’re paid. I’m pretty sure the Strike Committee would be happy to add that to their list of demands.”

“Is there an actual list?” I said. “I’d love to see it.”

“You come with us, we’ll show it to you,” said Onanefe.

“Maybe you should bring a copy here,” I said, letting my weight sink into my shoes. I had no idea if these guys were going to try and take me, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared.

Onanefe held up his hands. “Hey, hey. Don’t get the wrong idea. We’re pissed, but we’re not like that.”

“Good to know.”

He laughed and slapped one of his crew on the shoulder. “You believe this? Lady, we just busted our picks to
save
this neighborhood, and we don’t even live here. You know, this is just like you Inks, thinking all us Freeborn are a bunch of savages.”

“I think you’re a bunch of people who are tired, angry, and outnumber me,” I said, not relaxing. “You’ll pardon me for being cautious.”

Onanefe’s face became a grim mask as he shook his head. “And people wonder why Freeborn don’t join up around Contract time. Okay, Ms Mehta, you win. I’ll get someone to find a printer and show you the invoices–”

And that’s when someone stabbed me in the shoulder.

Later, I would rewind my pai’s internal buffer and study the moment: Onanefe turning away, his crew looking at me in disgust, and that one guy stepping out of the crowd with a steak knife in his raised hand. I had never seen him before, a clean-cut Freeborn man in a yellow linen shirt and cargo pants. There was nothing about him that said I should have worried. Nothing except the knife, of course. He pushed aside one of the cutters and brought it down into my left shoulder.

In the moment itself, though, all I got was his scream, followed by blinding pain up and down my arm and back and, really, my entire body. I went down, and he came with me, his beet-red face in mine. “PARASITE! TRAITOR!” he roared, and then he disappeared as the cutters lifted him up and away.

I didn’t scream. It hurt too much to scream. I gave the knife one look – blood gushing out a hole in my shirt, the knife blade shining in the mid-morning sun – then turned away. I focused on breathing and not going into shock. Going into shock meant losing control, and that meant someone else could take another stab at me.

Someone put a kerchief on the wound. Calls went out for a doctor. I wondered who would show up. We had a fire and got cane cutters. Maybe this time I’d get a butcher. I felt the sudden craving for a tri-tip sandwich, then my head spun at the thought of doing anything other than not bleeding to death.

One of the cutters came back with two people holding kit bags and t-shirts from Santee General Hospital. They assessed my arm for a moment before one of them, a woman with a caduceus tattoo, said, “Seriously? You brought us here for this?”

That stopped the nausea. “What? Knife!”

“
Pfft
.” Medical Lady took a multi-tool from her pocket and opened the scissors. Three quick cuts, and she pulled my shirt off my shoulder. I looked at the wound just as she pulled a can from her bag and sprayed pink gel all over my shoulder.

“What’s thaAAAAAAAAA–!”

She slid the knife out of my shoulder. I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything, really. That still didn’t stop my brain from screaming
Holy shit, she just pulled a knife out of your body!

“It’ll hurt like hell once the gel wears off, but you’ll be okay,” she said, dropping the knife into a caneplas bag.

“Thank you for not going on strike,” I said.

She made a face. “I’m marching like everyone else.”

“Yeah, but you still patched me up.”

“And you can expect one hell of a bill once the Public starts working again.” She blinked in my face.

“So it’s not just me? I haven’t been able to get on the Public all day.”

“The word is that everyone in IT is striking,” said Medical Man. “They shut down the servers because no one would be around to babysit them.”

Medical Lady snorted. “Just as well. My pai hasn’t been able to upload any patient data for months. Incompatible model with the latest patches. How the hell does anyone expect to get continued care?”

“Well, I’m good for it,” I said as they packed their bags. “Paying you, I mean.”

Medical Man shrugged. “That’s what the Medical Committee told us before they started holding up our reimbursements. You know how much CauterIce costs? That’s, like, sixty yuan alone on your shoulder.”

I looked at the pink goo. It had hardened and begun to flake away. The cut now looked like I’d just scraped my shoulder on a nail, not had a knife plunged into it.