The Refugee Sentinel (14 page)

Li-Mei kept sinking. The liquid frost had swallowed her whole and she couldn’t feel her legs. Not much of a loss, considering one of them was turned and the other one broken. What a relief that Taxi was the only witness to her embarrassing fall, she thought. The two of them would laugh about it later. It served her right for forgetting her boots.

Then an inside voice questioned if concepts like “later” and “serve right” would exist in her future. She had to see to it that they did. Li-Mei’s brain S.O.S.-ed a paddling command to her legs but she couldn’t tell if they had picked up the transmission. Her logic tried to convince her panicking thoughts that at least it felt like she had stopped sinking, but she wasn’t surfacing, either. Was it possible to surface in a river this cold? Of course, it was; she just had to keep churning her legs even if she couldn’t tell if she did.

In what felt like a year of paddling, she broke through the surface for the first time. Water gushed out of her face then she sucked air into lungs shrunken to the size of thimbles. Here’s to baby-steps, she thought. First, to no longer sinking and second, to surfacing. Now she had to focus on breathing, and last, on getting out of her beloved river. She floated for a moment to collect some strength, inhaling a cocktail of oxygen and water with hoarse breaths. The problem was she couldn’t afford to float. The river was taking its toll, a million microscopic knives slicing at her skin from all angles. How long until she fell into a hypothermic shock? Another minute? Another three, at best? Li-Mei wished she hadn’t studied about hypothermia. What you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you.

The watery frost tightened its embrace by the second, refusing to let her lungs unfold and the currents accelerated, a sign that the river was shrinking. There went knowledge again, she thought, ever the mathematician, even when drowning. A boulder the size of a small horse floated past her. Time to add a new baby step: stay clear of rocks. Getting to either bank in this current was wishful thinking. Her best bet would be to stay clear of rocks and reach for tree branches close to the water. The river had a different plan.

A vortex caught Li-Mei and threw her toward a submerged granite rock. Her face hit the stone and her nose shattered, along with four of her teeth. Again the frost pulled her mouth apart and rushed inside, like a snake. This time, her jaws felt like rubber, too weak to bite off the snake’s entry. Instead, she swallowed, again and again, to get rid of the searing cold. Her legs, blue from toe to thigh, stopped paddling and shivered in defeat. Her eyelids flung open. The frost burrowed inside her body, pushing out the last remaining ounces of warmth. The six-year-old went limp. It was only her ears that still worked and Li-Mei thanked them. The ears were her warriors who hadn’t quit unlike the feet or throat or lungs, or worst, the white sneakers, that had started it all.

Then, when she couldn’t imagine how the frost could get any more crippling, it relinquished for a moment. Blood gushed from her broken nose and her undefeated ears heard sloppy barking. Li-Mei didn’t know that Shibas could bark. A switch turned her pupils on and they registered trees and a dark sky jotted with stars. She lay in a net, above the roaring waters, that dragged her away from the current and toward the barking. Spasms tore up her throat and she retched the frost out of her body, again and again, unable to stop. Then her skin hit against something solid: gravel and dirt. The barks swallowed her whole and his tongue did too. Li-Mei lay on her stomach and coughed harsh and wet for what felt like forever. Then she breathed in and looked at them. The two Servants with their fishing net, and him.

As loud as a typewriter, her teeth took over her body. Despite their scary clutter, Taxi didn’t run when she leaned over to hug him. He nuzzled his nose against her cheek, his version of a kiss - the only one she didn’t mind. Li-Mei turned, attempting to kiss him back. Her lips touched the rubbery nose then her forehead bumped on it, as she shook too hard to hold steady. “Thank you for saving my life,” she squeezed past her lips despite the clattering teeth, the shaking, and the rising frostbite pain.

The Shiba didn’t seem to hear, but he seemed to understand.

Victor’s memory with names was as precise as an elephant with a fiddle. The sender’s name on his home terminal looked hopeless and unfamiliar. He read the email again:

“Dear Victor Saretto,

You committed a sign-in curfew infraction at 10:32 pm on June 3, 2052. This infraction pushes your cumulative violation balance into a penile status. Therefore, you must appear in-person at 1332 Fourth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98109, within 24 hours of receipt of this notice. The City of Seattle reserves the right to commence criminal proceedings against you, including arrest and incarceration, should you fail to act in compliance with these instructions.

Respectfully,

Natt Gurloskey

Chief of Police, City of Seattle”

Victor couldn’t imagine how he had broken curfew. Like religion, he signed-in at his home station an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, before the five-pm cutoff. Scanning early was his bulletproof method to beating a system known to chug every night, as billions hustled to scan the Digital Passports in their right palms. June had happened more than six months ago and a sign-in violation made no sense. Could he have been a few minutes late that day? Conceivable... But five hours late meant the system had crashed. The darn mildew must have seeped inside the city’s mainframe.

Victor read the mail for the third time. He had no dispute option available, but to show in person – in stinky, rotten downtown Seattle. He shut the terminal off and cracked his neck to relieve the stress piling on his joints. Few other lunacies could poison the mood as well as government bureaucracy did. Victor ironed his favorite striped suit and hung it on a chair by his bed. He set the alarm for five-am the following morning, the police headquarters opened at eight, but it was always better to show early. As he lay in bed, struggling to fall asleep, the name of Natt Gurloskey flew inside his head. He couldn’t place the name and couldn’t help not being able to place it…

Victor suffered from memory lapses since Robert’s death. And his performances at the Benaroya had taken a tumble. Each time the cello nestled between Victor’s thighs and the conductor’s baton tapped the podium to start the evening’s performance, Robert’s image would flood his mind. Victor survived on a few occasions by the mercy of other instruments drowning out his mistakes. However, Maestro Ludovic Geoff begged to differ. Victor semi-expected a trashing when the conductor scheduled him for a one-on-one weekend meeting.

Lack of focus, sloppy hands, graceless apathy – all accusations Geoff hurled at him, like darts at a dartboard. Victor’s smartest move was to stifle a chuckle, “Sloppy-hands” would have been a fitting nickname for Robert. The thought ushered memories, then grief, then Victor’s tears, but not enough to burlap Geoff’s guillotine. Victor was terminated on the spot and walked out of the conductor’s office in reverse, bowing once and again.

When he went back, a week later, to collect his final paycheck, he found out it had taken Geoff a day to update the “Who We Are” symphony portraits in the Benaroya lobby with the face of a new cellist.

If Natt were a hundred pounds lighter, he would have killed it in Hollywood. “Too damn easy,” the caption under his beaming face would have read if he were on a movie set. He leaned back, hands clasped over his head, with fingers drumming Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” on the top of his skull. It wasn’t even eight in the morning and the day had started like a whopper. A hunched-over Victor Saretto, who looked like a man who made his own bed when he stayed at hotels, sat across from Natt’s desk.

“Mr. Saretto,” Natt’s balding head shook, “I’m concerned with how long you’ve waited to ameliorate your situation.”

Saretto squirmed in his chair and exhaled a response. “This is the first time I –“

“You failed to get back home on time, did you?” Natt cut him off. “Was it car trouble? What do you drive?”

“I don’t have a car.”

The cop picked at a set of matches while his gaze jumped between Saretto and Saretto’s reflection in the polished top of the office desk. His index finger held the matches straight and his thumb spun it around with a whirring sound.

“So you don’t have a car yet. But one day… when you get your own set of wheels.” Natt smiled showing two rows of uneven teeth. “You should turn off the radio and the AC. Tell the girlfriend in the passenger seat to shut it. And drive. Listen to the engine. Close your eyes for a few and feel the kinetic push inside your gut. Sense how soft the brake pedal feels under your foot. Push on the gas. Get closer to the car in front. So close he’s thinking you’re that goddamn bastard who’s pushing the slow drivers out of the carpool lane. Sense the hum of the pistons. Open your eyes. If you don’t have a huge-ass grin on your face, I don’t want to know you. To me, you might as well be dead meat.”

“Excuse me, but how is my car ownership relevant to the case?”

Natt pushed back in his swivel chair. “If you had a car, you wouldn’t be in this mess. But let’s get on topic. I was saying I hate to think how long you’d have waited without our notice.”

“The notice was issued in error.”

“Don’t blame us for enforcing curfew. I can arrest you right here in the office.”

“I’d like to see the official records proving my curfew infraction.”

“Look, son.” Natt leaned over, hands planted on the desk like arched pillars. “If you rubbed the legs of a grasshopper for four hours, it will trigger its brain to swarm and become locust. Don’t do it. Don’t force me to swarm.”

“You must be doing this on purpose for some reason…” Saretto trailed off.

“Are you accusing the Seattle PD? I’d step careful in your flippers, son. It’s either…” Natt thumbed through a stack of papers with a licked finger, “six hours of jail to get your violation balance in line, or nine months in ULE prison for libeling a police officer. You understand the difference between Seattle jail and ULE prison, right?”

Natt had taken the cellist for the type who’d capitulate at that point, but Saretto pressed on, “In this case, I’d like to request access to a state-appointed –”

The cop walked around the desk and pulled the front two legs of Saretto’s chair. The cellist fell backward, hitting his head against the floor. Standing above the crumpled body, the cop’s foot crashed into Saretto’s ribs. “How about I give you access to my boot? Convincing enough? Time to get you to our Capitol Hill detention center, son.”

Unannounced, Saretto’s tears gushed. “What you’re doing to me belongs at a prison,” he said, “not the Seattle Police Headquarters.”

Natt lifted the man by the collar and spun him. Cold handcuff steel clawed into Saretto’s wrists.

“Victor Saretto, I charge you with breaking the curfew provisions of Seattle City proper and with besmirching a police officer.” Natt pushed the cellist out of the office and past a row of cop cubicles, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say –”

The two men walked through the building. Another cop arresting another curfew dodger on another day in the Pacific Northwest. Natt stuffed Saretto in the back of a police prowler and sped into the gray morning, heading toward a Capitol Hill detention center that didn’t exist.

Sarah’s tone left no room for negotiations. “One hundred percent unacceptable.”

“What do you want me to say?” Colton coughed like he was suffering from an asthma attack. Something fell and broke on his side of the line.

“The ULE would rather mummify me than let me out of their sight.”

“I only took her spot, Sarah.”

“Unless you’ve discovered teleportation, getting us to Seattle is not going to happen.” Then she laughed in the receiver. “It would be a stretch even with teleportation.”

“Soon you’ll be the only one left, Sarah. But now, I have as much right to be her parent as you do.”

“Do you really think your melodramatic lines are helping the situation?”

“I may have been the drunk who scarred Yana for life, but I’m still her father.”

“Then you should act like one and stop being selfish.”

“And you should, for once, put her before your work. The next nine days won’t obliterate the world any more than it already is.”

Sarah knew he was right. On any given day, her schedule spanned from four-am to midnight. She had to give him that, even if being wrong was not Dr. Sarah Perkins’s forte. She was the world’s foremost molecular biophysicist, and humanity’s last hope of squeezing more energy out of the dog-tired Earth. The team of forty-five under her, and the management above, had gotten used to doing as she asked. Not because they were yes-men but because Sarah was always right. The ULE Ministry of Science had endorsed her inclusion in the High-Potential program and the US Territory Governor had filed the motion with the ULE Congress. Whether her Hi-Po candidacy was approved would always remain classified information, but everyone knew that Earth would be screwed if Sarah weren’t on the list.

She knew Colton was right – only a small person would deny a father the right to see his daughter for the first time in seven years… and maybe the last time. Sarah rummaged through the dependencies on how to get this done. It was an outrageous decision tree and it also wouldn’t be her call. A committee of ULE politicians and military strategists had full control over the Hi-Pos’ itineraries and whereabouts. She paced around her desk, eyes jogging back and forth between the speakerphone and a coffee stain on the wall.

“Shake those lab rats off your tail.” Colton interrupted her thoughts. “Move to the ULE embassy in Seattle, if you have to. When a father’s dying wish is to see his daughter, the world, and I mean the whole damn world, makes way. Least of all, this Bunsen-burner project you’re working on.” He hung up in the middle of another coughing fit.

Sarah had to guess he was fighting a cold or perhaps coughing because of the fear that even sacrificing his life wouldn’t be enough to see Yana again.