Chapter Nineteen

Thirteen Days To Launch

Mal ate her breakfast from the backseat of an armoured vehicle as they drove away from the MEC, watching the aerial drones swarm in the high beige sky as she mechanically spooned mush into her mouth. Render was chatting with the chauffeur in the front seat, their snorkels swinging from their designated hooks in the cab, the same plexiglass masks she saw on every passerby — it seemed that the manufactured atmosphere had not saved Midtowners from persistent respiratory sensitivities, if they had to wear rebreathing equipment just to walk between buildings.

When they came to the edge of Midtown's atmosphere, the smog on the outbound bridge was so thick that Mal was shocked when the car didn’t immediately careen off the road and into the channel. Her body curled and her hands tightened around her bowl as the car continued on its way, only relaxing once the smog looked less like soup and more like the air she was accustomed to the city. She didn’t recognize the area, somewhere north of Crown Heights, but it was undoubtedly still Midtown territory, with plexiglass snorkels on every face that walked by, and no Untouchables to be seen: if she had to guess, this was where the less well-off of the Midtowners lived, unprotected by a manufactured atmosphere but still guaranteed the right to dominate the landscape. A variant of the Bayonne project, only without the pesky Untouchables constantly agitating for equal treatment.

The car came to a stop along a nondescript street. She bent down to hide her half-empty bowl beneath the seat in front of her, nodding absently as Render explained that the streets were too narrow for the car, that they would have to get out and walk the rest of the way. She incorrectly affixed the loaned plexiglass snorkel to her face, and the chauffeur let her out of the car.

He and Render tightly flanked her as they walked down a street lined with aged double- and triple-story walk-ups, the odd crumbling house or storefront, sidewalks and roads cracked around saplings and weeds that had withered into rattling brown husks. Her eyes roved over every detail of her surroundings as she endlessly adjusted the fit of her mask — if an opportunity for escape presented itself, she couldn’t afford to lose it.

The further they walked, the more she was certain that she had been to this place before, that she somehow knew this cracked pavement and these weathered buildings. Her neck craned left and right as she tried to pull the familiarities to the surface and examine them more closely, but they always seemed to float just out of reach, lost in the haze of before-Gwenh and without an anchor to tell her when she had been here. The feeling nagged for the entirety of their ten-minute walk, every new sight piling on the frustration until she was gnashing her teeth, trying to decode why an old billboard was so important or why her thoughts were snagging on the distinctive curve of an old tree-stump. She was ready to brush it off as the neighbourhood aesthetic, distinctly Untouchable while Midtowners favoured sleek buildings and grit-free streets, but when they turned a corner and she caught sight of a long line of buildings charred black with old smoke, facades heavily stained but otherwise still standing, that ceased to be an option.

She stopped short, heart in her throat as she traced the edges of the smoke-stain in two realities: one in the present, one twenty years gone. Her lungs tickled with acrid smoke in the house as the child version of herself struggled to peek over the windowsill, watching the flames climb higher and higher up the side of the big house across the street, the people fleeing in droves on the pavement below — some of those people were burning too, frantically beating out the flames as they ran for safety. One had collapsed on their stoop, body warped in agony as the flames consumed them; someone that this person had loved was standing barely three feet away, wailing in anguish and begging passerby for help, help no one was able to give.

Render was saying something about how well this neighbourhood had been rebuilt after a devastating fire, how besides a few blocks and other circumstances that couldn't be helped that it was almost exactly as it had looked in the city's heyday, but she wasn’t listening. She was breathind hard, smoke filling her nose and lungs as though the fire was all around them, and she could hear the frantic voice of her auntie as she called for everyone to wake up, to get out of the house, to head for water. She turned on her heel with her heart in her throat, hoping to take in the brownstone she had been born in, the home her father's family had lived in since coming down from Kahnawake, but it wasn’t there: it and the rest of its block had been bulldozed into flat, dry dust. Her stuck heart lurched as she remembered the key sitting on the mantle in her parents’ home, and something in her was desperate to know exactly when it had ceased to be an object of utility.

“Are you feeling alright, Mal?”

She blinked with burning eyes, and turned to Render. She hoped that her sorrow wasn’t so plain on her face as it was in her croaking voice: “I used to live here.”

He shook his head with a laugh. “This area was reclaimed before you were born,” he reminded her, and her jaw clamped shut as she recalled that she had a cover to maintain. “You must be thinking of somewhere else. I find that all your neighbourhoods look the same, you know.”

She blinked harder, eyes stinging from the memory of smoke as much as the grief, and didn't protest as he wrapped a tight hand around her elbow and pulled her toward one of the charred apartment buildings, all the while expounding on the area’s booming artist population and how erecting the 9th Street Wall had done wonders to draw more migration to the area. Inside, the building was deceptively well-maintained, every inch of the halls clean and perfectly-lit, every window showing the outside in perfect detail, only without the cloying orange smog. If she jumped through one of these windows on the ground-floor, she'd probably only suffer from scratches and maybe a turned ankle; as though hearing her thoughts, Render and the chauffeur closed in on both sides and shepherded her to the elevator, moving as though it might leave without them.

The car shuttled them to the fifth storey, where she was guided to a door that was propped open with a salvaged car motor, slick with oily bay-water and smelling of tar. Inside the apartment, half-finished projects cluttered every surface and most of the floor, with narrow walking paths between the waist-high piles. It would have reminded her of Goose’s warehouse, but the familiarity was tempered with something deeply unsettling: it looked and felt like home, but home didn't smell faintly of bleach or strongly of something acidic. From behind one of the taller piles a scruffy young man emerged, dressed in a shirt made thin from years of use, pants that had been patched and patched again with different shades of denim, and steel-toe shoes with the metal caps erupting through the rubber tips. He greeted Render with an eager-to-please smile and a flick of his shaggy brown hair, and again the uncanny valley reared its unsettling head — she could hardly stand to look at a Midtowner choosing to dress like an Untouchable, not when his teeth stood like pieces of ivory and pearl, not when a small rock of serpentinite dangled from his right earlobe.

"Good morning, Alex." Render offered his hand for the young man to shake. “I see you’re ready for visitors.”

“Ah.” Alex turned to look at the mess with a grimace, cheeks reddening as though he had committed some embarrassing faux-pas. “It seemed clean enough to me — I hope that won’t hurt our agreement?”

“No, not at all. I bring good news, in fact: I have a motivated buyer in London, and after my broker's fee, the sale will cover you and your family’s seats twice-over. All that’s left is to take care of the abstracts and deliver the product.” Render gestured to Mal. “This is my photographer. Ready to get started?”

Alex peered at her, friendly smile spoiled by his narrowed and calculating eyes. He was coming to his own quick conclusions about her socioeconomic status: no amount of expensive equipment could make her Midtown, any more than old clothes could make him Untouchable. “Don’t touch anything,” he finally said, giving Render another small smile and gesturing for them to follow. He led the way through the narrow channels to a small table that had been set up with a softened light, a white backdrop, and a staged art-piece.

She drifted closer to get a better look — metal sculptures were a rarity to her, with Untouchables preferring to sculpt with clay or stone, and many Kawehno:ke artists preferring to weave. The metal brought its own personality, strong but flexible, and she liked how the bronze and blue and purple bloomed from the grey like a fungal growth. She liked that this piece was meant to be a tree stump like the one she used to climb as a toddler, with intricately laid metal rods bent and swirling together to mimic the bark and knots, the rings cut out of the top with some sort of precision tool; she almost lost herself in tracing the swirling lines, counting the rings and watching how the light skimmed over the textured surfaces.

Alex and Render were happy enough to leave her to her work, turning away to concern themselves with other matters. She stepped into the shooting space before the table, barely three by three feet, surrounded on all sides by detritus, and shifted the lamp back slightly to soften the highlights — she was hoping to make it look more like the diffused sunlight up north, cast by a faint circle she could sometimes track through the layer of clouds. The light caught on the handles on either side of the sculpture's base, and suddenly her enthusiasm plummeted: a good soup pot was such a rare find, and here this one had been rendered useless.

She snarled inwardly at herself for finding it beautiful, for coming close to appreciating something so malignantly Midtown, but that was all the protest she could afford herself. Her teeth gritted as she continued her work, not bothering to mess with the placement any further: even glimpsing it through a camera filled her with the kind of guilt that thrived in the overlap between wealth and waste.

The roster of shots she was expected to take were easily checked off: front, left-side, right-side, and top-down. She leaned back as far as she was able to as Alex swapped out the pieces, nose tickling at the strong artificial fragrance he was using to scent himself. Replacing the soup pot was another engine that smelled of bay-water, the outside polished to its former gleaming glory and etched with more of the swirling organic designs Alex seemed to favour. The inside was packed with alabaster cement, the openings filled to the brim and smoothly leveled off.

“I call it ‘Sugar in the Gas Tank’,” he said to Render, voice warping around the tremendous effort it took to get it off the dolly and onto the table. He stepped back and patted the sweat off of his forehead, and breathlessly continued, “I had to race someone to get to it first, and I had to pay out the nose to get the cement mixture the way I wanted it—”

“What does it do?” she heard herself ask, voice scratchy as as she snapped the next photo.

He looked over at her with a raised eyebrow, as though he’d never heard such a silly question — or maybe he was waiting for her to apologize for interrupting. She stared back at him until he finally answered, slowly, as though explaining to a child, “It’s art.”

“It’s wasteful. My cousin could have had this same engine up and running within the hour — this does nothing, permanently.”

“Is art supposed to be useful? Does it not fulfill its purpose by simply being?”

It was her turn to talk slowly: “Art provokes thought and feeling. This makes me think that an engine’s purpose is to operate in some capacity, not to be made useless, and it makes me feel sad that it didn't go to someone who needed it.”

He shrugged. “Early bird gets the worm. I’m glad to have made you think, at least.”

“Mm." She cycled through her roster of photos in record-time, not wanting to look at the piece for any longer than necessary, and leaned back again as he took it away. "Next time you should stuff some baguettes into your shoes, call it ‘Bread and Circuses’ — that’ll really make people think.”

"Miss Y, that's enough," Render said sharply. At her mild flinch he put on a strained smile and clapped Alex on the shoulder, trying to diffuse the tension. “You’ll have to forgive her outbursts, Alex — valuable assets are worth the trouble they cause.”

“I suppose,” he replied testily, rolling the dolly away. Render fixed her with a warning look, but she wasn’t paying attention: Alex had set a new piece on the table, explaining its origins and influences to Render as he took care to position it just-so. Mal stared at it with her heart in her throat, eyes tracing over the rich umber hue of the glazed funeral urn, the etched lines swirling in and around each other to form the words of a burial poem, the light and shadow placing across the perfect likeness of a dragonfly. She stepped closer, ignoring Alex’s protests as her hand raised of its own volition, reaching out to touch the soft, moist earth and the tiny sapling cradled within; up close, she could see that the inner threading had been forced open, and that her fingers had picked out a piece of charred bone.

She lurched back from the urn, abandoning her equipment and chaperones as she darted through the maze of junk and out into the hall. She ignored Render’s call for her to wait, feeling shaky on her feet and unable to steady her racing heart as the floor stretched out endlessly before her, the elevator impossibly far away, the windows she passed too high up off the ground. She had to escape while she had the chance — she would scale the 9th Street Wall and flee into Untouchable territory, she would use the semi-collapsed train tunnels to travel further south, and she'd swim across the bay to get home, if she had to. She could be back with her child before nightfall, and that would have to be consolation enough for never getting to beat Alex to death with her bare hands.

Ten feet from the elevator, a hand clamped down on her shoulder and spun her around. Render’s face was grim and stern, his voice low and measured, “What do you have to say for yourself, Miss Y?"

She didn’t hear the undercurrent of danger in his voice as she pulled herself free, thought it was as present as a gun in her face. “He stole from us,” she snarled, caring not about what her loss of temper could mean down the line, too angry and too certain that he would weather her outbursts just like always. “That urn was made from Delany clay, harvested from the kaolin ponds for the sole use of burying our dead. That urn had one of my people inside of it, he dug up one of our dead and stole them from us—“

The sound of the slap almost preceded the sensation, loud and bright in her ears before her face rocked to the side. His rings left deep, painful marks on her cheekbone as she stumbled and lost her balance, crumpling to the floor out of surprise and tweaking her sore wrist on the way down. The left side of her face burned as she cradled it in her hand, gaze fixed on the carpeting as tears pricked in her eyes.

Render’s shining loafers stepped into her wavering periphery as she blinked back the tears. “I see that Gwenh has been something of a bad influence on you," he said coolly. "If you want to keep her within reach, I suggest you reel in those impulses. Now, what do you have to say for yourself?”

She ran her tongue along the inside of her cheek, half in shock and half to assess the new boundary — her teeth had cut into the flesh, not enough to draw blood but enough for the tenderness to linger. When she finally spoke, her voice came out soft and apologetic: “I apologize for losing my temper, and for speaking out of turn.”

“Consider this your second strike.” His shoes turned and walked away, a second pair of polished loafers walking up to take his place. “Take her back to the Centre, Otto. I have to clean up her mess.”