The Water Thief (16 page)

“Now back in the
days of the republic, there were regulations that said when you had revolving
doors you also had to have emergency doors that opened out. There were millions
of little regulations like that, and the republic could shut down places that
didn’t comply.
Of course
those rules
made life harder on business, installing extra doors, inspections, higher
heating bills. But this hotel went bankrupt, six hundred people died, who does
that help? And nobody going into that building knew it was a death trap. You
can’t inspect every building you walk into yourself.

“Sure, in the
days of a horse and buggy, you didn’t need specialized knowledge to make sure
that you were getting a good product. But in modern times how are you going to
make sure there’s no cadmium in your paint, or that there isn’t lead in your
water, or that the building you’re walking into is safe? Regulation isn’t
pretty, but….”

“She’s that way
because a hotel burned down?”

“No. She was in
that fire. Her whole family was. She made it out. They didn’t.

“I think she
misses her sister the most. Talks about her all the time. Anyway, that’s it.
She’s a bit of a fanatic when it comes to the republic. And not that I don’t
agree with her, but going to jail for the rest of your life doesn’t help the
cause. Nobody on earth will ever know that she stood up to that judge.”

I know.

“What do you
think they’ll do to her?”

“Whatever will
make them the most money.”

“Why don’t we
try to get her records? If we all chip in—”

“Oh, Charlie,
you’re so sweet. But how are we going to do that? We start poking into those
records, someone’s going to ask why. They’ll start investigating, and then
we’ll be next. Besides, I’m not sure you have that kind of money.”

“If she’s gone
for too long, what does that mean?” I asked.

“Reclamation,”
said Kate, gravely. “Of course. But you need to do a lot more than steal a
little water or tick-off a judge for something like that.”

“But she’s gone
missing, right? You should have heard something by now?”

“Yeah. I mean
we’re worried, sure. Why are you so bothered by this?”

I almost fell
out of my chair with nausea. She put her arm around me, but I threw it off and
held my head in my hands.

The man who had
escalated Sarah’s report was long since dead. I didn’t know him anymore; I was
ashamed that I ever had. It was another lifetime, a distant memory. But it
dragged on me like an anchor tearing through my life. It wasn’t Charlie who had
filed that report, it was Thatcher, a man I’m not sure I ever understood, and
someone I didn’t like.

If I could have
undone it, I would have. I’d go back to my old life, back to that dark cubicle,
writing reports and listening to Corbett and Bernard bicker. I’d even go back
to my marriage, if it meant that I had never written that report.

Certainly Kate
and her friends—all of them—would’ve been better off.

I want to be reclamated. Leave me to rot at
Ackerman.

She looked at
me, worried. But she loved me only because she didn’t know what I had done.

“I turned her
in,” I said finally.

“What? What do
you mean you? You didn’t even know her.”

“No… Not for
stealing the water. Her case. It came into Perception. It was a small matter,
nobody cared. I thought if I wrote it up, told people she was a citizen, that I
could make...” a fortune. That was the word I was looking for, a fortune.

“How did you
know she was?”

“I didn’t! I
thought I was making it up.”

I could see in
her mind the tumblers falling into place. I hadn’t picked her agency by chance.

That blasted clipping. How could such a thin
piece of tissue paper cause so much destruction to so many people? I’ve as good
as reclamated Sarah myself.

I wanted to
leave, but it was too dignified. I couldn’t deny her throwing me out.

“I’m sorry,” I
said. Apologizing seemed so useless. But what else could I do?

You’re a failed colleague, and an even worse
friend.

She fell to her
knees and began to sob. I found myself hoping that her friends would show
up—maybe Spag—and see what I had done. They’d make me suffer proper. But I
couldn’t bear her crying. Overcome by cowardice, I ran out of the apartment. I
didn’t even stop to close the door, just fled down the hallway, over the stoop,
and out into the darkness.

Acid. Maybe the acid is bad tonight and I
can let it eat me away.

The rain was
clean. I cursed my luck. The one time I wanted rain strong enough to eat flesh,
and I was denied by nature herself.

I ran down the
street, into an alleyway, down another street, and around the nearest corner. I
didn’t watch out for glass or nails in the road, pedestrians or the occasional
car, I just ran. I caught a broken lamppost, and felt a gash open on my arm. It
didn’t hurt enough, so I looked for another injury I could inflict on myself.

In my blindness
I fell down a small gully into a drainage ditch. I knew immediately where I
was—the abandoned school a few blocks from her apartment; the five
hundred-year-old ditch. I wanted to get lost where I could never be found, and
I had failed at that too.

Mud and refuse
washed over me.

This will infect my cuts for sure.

I felt a shoe
come off and wash away. I lay a minute before slowly climbing up the bank and
back onto the main road. I was shivering, and I realized I’d freeze to death
long before any infection spread.

Lightning
struck, and I saw a person across the intersection from me. Nobody but lunatics
and madmen had any business being out there in that weather.

Kate came up to
me, and in one fell swoop drew her arm back and slapped me hard, very hard,
across the face. I had no resolve left.

Good. Again. Harder.

I prayed she had
a knife, something she could stick into my belly, twist and pull up—let me die
in a garbage pile in LowSec. It was still a better death than most people out
there got, starving to death, though not nearly as bad as I deserved. She
wouldn’t do it. I don’t know how I knew that—she certainly could kill me if she
wanted—she had the nerve, had the skill. But she wouldn’t. So I eagerly awaited
the next slap.

It didn’t come.

“Why?” she
shouted.

What the hell? That’s what she wants to
know? How could she not know? She knew what it was to be a colleague.

The truth?
People always tell you that hard work leads to success. But it’s hardly ever
true. Prestige, power, and influence are the only real currencies. People use
those to buy the
favors
they need to
make money. The people who make the most money come from money, have the most
to leverage and can sit back and let their money do the work. You want to know
who’s going to make the most money? Just look at who was born into it. The
single best indicator of where you end up in life is where you start, no matter
what the capitalists tell you.

I did it because
I wanted into that club.

Sarah had been
nothing more than a name on a piece of paper. I hadn’t seen her curly blond
hair, her bouncy demeanor or fanatical dedication to a cause she was willing to
die for. She had no parents, children, friends or even colleagues—she wasn’t
somebody’s child. She was just a name.

“Why?”

“I… I thought
that if I could—”

“Why did you
tell me?”

I stammered.
From the moment I met her, I knew that I’d have to face this sooner or later.
How could she not know that?

I want to be punished. That’s why.

“I… you had to
know.”

“You didn’t have
to. You could have just gone on pretending… pretending that you didn’t know
her. Why didn’t you?” she said angrily.

Because I want to know what it feels like to
have the only person you love in this world hate you. Then I might feel better.

I shook my head.
It would have been the only sensible thing to do—pretend like it never
happened. We were happy together. It’s not as if anybody would ever have found
out, and telling her wouldn’t bring Sarah back. If I had possessed even an
ounce of self-preservation I’d have buried the secret, even from myself.

“Let me go,” I
begged.

I had stopped
wiping my eyes. The rain had matted my hair to my face, and I couldn’t see her
any more,

But I heard a
soft voice. It simply said “no.”

“Just let me go.
Go home, I won’t come back, I promise,” I pleaded.

“No.”

“End it all
right here. I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t have anything left.”

“No,” she said.

She came up to
me, threw an arm around me, and led me back home.

We sat there
quietly. I was disinfecting my wounds, and she was toweling off.

“I could buy her
out,” I said, “at the very least pay her fine.”

“You don’t have
that kind of money. None of us do. Besides, you’re already leveraged to the
hilt.”

“I’ll find a way
to raise it.”

“How? I mean, if
anyone could just raise that kind of money, they’d already be doing it.”

“Maybe if we
pool our funds, we can buy her out?”

Kate shook her
head. “At what cost? There’s always someone we need to bail out, someone in
trouble—there’s more trouble out here than we can afford. People are starving
to death.”

“Maybe just
enough to buy her records then. I can get you some money,” I said desperately.
“Then at least we’ll know where she is.”

“Knowing where
she is might make us feel better, but it won’t help her at all. And if I buy
the records, they’ll want to know where I got the money. That’ll draw attention
we’d rather not have.”

“I’ll ask for
her records then, as a follow-up to my report!”

“How many times
have you ever followed up on a report in your career? Five or six? You have to
have some kind of reason to follow up—they’re going to ask.”

“I’ll say it’s
because I am so concerned for the company, because she’s so dangerous.”

“You’re going to
help her by reminding Ackerman how dangerous she is?”

“My god,” I
said, “how can you be so blasé about this?”

“Oh, my poor
Charlie,” she said. “I’m not. But what do you think life is like out here?
People vanish all the time. Ackerman can come for anyone for any reason, and
sometimes people come back, sometimes they don’t. All we can do is keep our
heads down, hope they don’t decide we’re all worth more rendered into machining
lubricant.”

“I have to do
something.”

“I don’t know
about you, but I want to live. And we’re not going to live if we can’t overcome
our mistakes, move forward, and worry about keeping the people we have alive.
I’ve got some experience with this, and I can tell you that you can spend years
blaming yourself; it’s cathartic, it’s easy, and it’s a great excuse to not go
about the business of living your life. Wallowing in self-pity is as futile as
working for that huge payoff at Ackerman. But you’re not the only one suffering;
neither is Sarah. People out here, citizens, are struggling to stay alive. If
you can’t forgive yourself, where will you be?”

“What would she
think, you bedding the man who had her killed?”

“We don’t know
she’s dead. We don’t know that it was your report that escalated her case. We
don’t know who reported her in the first place or why. Heck, we don’t know for
sure why she was arrested—stealing water might have just been an excuse.

“We need to
focus on what we have, and not what we don’t. But if she knew the man you are
today, what you’re risking by coming here, I think she’d forgive you. I hope
she would.

“And I haven’t
given up on the idea that maybe someday you’ll be able to ask her for
forgiveness yourself,” she said.

“I want to do
something. I want to bring down Ackerman, the whole system—corruption and
greed—I want to end it.”

“I know.”

“There must be
something we can do, some way to bring it down. I mean, if we don’t do
something, they’ll keep picking all of you—all of us—off. This is no way to
live, waiting for them to come grab us.”

“I’d rather be
me than them any day of the week. Every day I thank God for putting me on this
side of the wall and not the other.”

 
“I want to do
something
,” I said. “I want to start being part of the solution, not
part of the problem.”

She nodded. “I
understand. Do you trust me, Charlie?”

I looked at her.
“Of course.”

“Good. Then go
to sleep.”

I was sitting at
the café, quietly stirring my coffee, lost in thought while Linus rambled on about
lagging indicators of unemployment in the current economic climate.

He noticed, and
asked if I had been listening.

“No. I’m sorry,
you were talking about... What?”

“Is it
Beatrice?”

“Oh no, god no,”
I chortled.

“Then what?
There are plenty of other people who are willing to pay for my time if you’re
not interested.”

Of course Kate’s friends don’t trust me. I
haven’t done anything. I haven’t risked anything for these beliefs—stood by
them, fought for them.
So long as I
say and do nothing, citizenship is just a belief.

“I was just…
Well I’m tired, that’s all.”

“You gave me
that excuse last week,” he said.

“Well, I’ve been
busy….”

“Do you remember
the story of the boy who cried wolf? It’s about a boy whose job it was to guard
the village’s sheep. One night he got bored, so he cried wolf, and laughed as
all the villages came running. The next night he did it again, and again on the
third night. On the fourth night, however, a real wolf came. He cried for help,
but the villagers thought it was a trick, so none of them came, and the wolf
ate him. Do you know what the moral is?”