Like a Boss (21 page)

“I want a refund,” I said. “Right now. All of it.”

Hawa pointed at the door. “Then you’re welcome to step outside and talk to my banker. She’s probably ransacking the neighboring stalls.”

I stood up. I clenched my hands so tightly that the tea cup bent. “Where is it?”

Hawa made a big show of sifting through the piles of knitwear. In the middle of a stack of onesies was a canvas sack. She smiled as she reached in, her bracelets rattling. “Seriously?” I said. “Five hundred for a
bag
?”

She waved me off. “You know what the secret is to maintaining a good holding company? Misdirection.” She pulled a battered pad from the bag and tapped its screen. The lamps winked out, then blacklight LEDs embedded in the ceiling winked on. The pourform walls came alive with star charts and circuitry diagrams. Hawa hummed as she ran her fingers over the constellations and tapped at a scrawled keypad on the wall. She nodded to Onanefe. “Can you scoot ten centimeters to your left, dear? I don’t want you to get a concussion.”

Onanefe slid to the side. Hawa put her palm flat against an outline of a hand (decorated, I noticed, with feathers, eyes, and a beak), and the portion of the wall where Onanefe’s head had been
chunk
ed open. Hawa tugged at the panel of pourform, and two wire racks on rails slid up from the ground. In the racks were bundles of blue boys, three foil bags covered in biohazard stamps, a khanjar in a silver sheath, what looked like the components of an automatic pistol, boxes of ammunition, and, tucked behind a skein of purple yarn, a crate holding my candles and my bottles of Old Windswept.

Hawa pulled a candle and a bottle out of the rack. “Is this worth your five hundred?”

I plucked the bottle out of her hands and grabbed a candle out of the crate. “Thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” I walked to the door and started throwing bolts.

“What do you think you’re doing?” said Hawa.

“Going out. I need some privacy.”

Hawa gawped. “To drink? Are you nuts?”

“I’ll be right back.”

“I think not,” said Hawa. “You step out of here, Padma, I’m locking the door behind you. It’s insane outside, and I’m not going to let it get in here.”

“But you let us in!”

“That was before I knew you were going to go right back out,” she said. “As of a few minutes ago, you’ve reclaimed your stuff. That means our deal is done. You want to have a nightcap in the middle of all that madness, you go on ahead. But you can’t come back in.”

“You got any matches?”

Hawa crossed her arms over her chest. “What, it’s not enough to wade into a riot? You want to start a fire, too?”

“No questions asked,” I said. “You got a light, or what?”

Hawa’s beads clacked as she tilted her head to the side. “Maybe. You can’t tell me why you’re going to commit suicide first?”

“Good Lord, Hawa, could you knock off the theatrics? There is no angry mob. There is no riot.”

Onanefe groaned.

“Okay, not anymore,” I said.

“You got some kind of problem? Let me help you.” Hawa put her hands on my arms and tugged. “Whatever it is–”

“Christ Almighty, I am not an alcoholic, okay? I’m not some rummy who needs to get liquored up to deal with stress! I just have to step out for all of sixty seconds, and then I’m done.” I clicked the bolts.

Hawa moved to block the door. “Padma, please. Don’t do this. Whatever you need to do out there can wait until it’s safe.”

The Fear hissed. I blinked up the time. Five forty-seven. “No, it can’t,” I said. I gave her a kiss on the cheek, kicked open the bolt in the floor, and went outside.

I shivered even though it wasn’t cold. The sun had started its dip toward the horizon, and everything looked angry and red: the sky, the Market, the people. I clutched the crate as a pack of women holding cricket bats sifted through the wreckage next to Hawa’s stall. They all wore gray t-shirts with SECURITY printed on the front and back. They couldn’t have been younger than thirty, but they all looked old and hard as they squinted into the failing light.

“Oy!”

I turned. Onanefe held onto a strut, gasping as he took an unsure step toward me. “We had a deal!”

“No, we had a bet. Which you lost.”

“Semantics.” He screwed his face and winced as he walked toward us. “Ladies, good evening. You mind if I talk with my colleague?”

The women looked at each other, their wariness transferring from me to Onanefe. I held up a hand. “It’s okay. He’s okay.” They shrugged, then moved on to another pile of wreckage.

I shook my head. “I’m not going to run off and leave you stranded, okay? I just have something to do.”

“That you can’t do inside? Where it’s safe? And there’s tea?”

“I need privacy.”

Onanefe narrowed his eyes, then shook his head. “Look, I understand about habits, okay? I’ve had plenty of friends who get hooked, and–”

“Oh, fuck you,” I said. “You can take your concern and sanctimony and shove ’em up your ass, okay? I am not an addict off to get a fix. I have something I need to do at six o’clock, and if I don’t, things will get unpleasant for both of us.”

He cocked his head. “What, are you some kind of werewolf?”

“None of your business.”

“You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t
know
you!” I turned and got in his face. “You miraculously showed up at my flat when it was on fire, then you miraculously said I owe you a boatload of money. You know what that sounds like to me? A setup. A great big setup to relieve me of something, and I don’t have the time, the energy, or the network connection to figure it out. What I
do
have” – I jabbed a finger in his shoulder; his cheek twitched at my touch – “is a pain in my ass and an appointment at six. Guess which one is more important to me now?”

I took a step back. “Besides, if there’s anyone who shouldn’t have to prove trust, it’s me. I saved your ass from getting crushed.
You
don’t get to lecture
me
about trust.”

He gritted his teeth, and his eyes unfocused for a moment. When he looked back at me, he nodded. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. You got something to take care of, okay. I just –” He bit his lip and looked away. “I know your reputation, that you’re this badass, that you don’t take any crap. But I saw something else in you today. You worry. You care. You give a shit. And right now? Santee needs more people like that. And it fucking kills me to think that you’re going to take that bottle and wander out here and–”

“– and all that can wait for five minutes. I promise.” I patted him on the arm and walked away as quickly as I could without making it look like I was running.

I passed an abandoned food stall, the coals under the grill smoldering. A corner of the stall’s dark blue awning flapped loose. I set the bottle and candle down next to the grill and set myself up. The awning came down with a few sharp tugs. The stall’s owner had left all her tools out, including a bundle of rags for cleaning the grill. I wrapped a rag around a spatula, dipped it in a bowl of cooking oil, then set it on the grill. It
whoosh
ed into flame, and I lit the candle. I plopped on the ground in front of the candle and threw the awning over me.

I blinked up the time: five fifty-nine.

There I sat, underneath a canvass tent in the ruins of one of the biggest markets in Santee City. There I was, me and my candle and my bottle and my wrecked brain as my city and probably my whole planet spun out of control. I saw my place in the middle of all that mess, one lone woman who had people hounding her for money or favors or blood. This was not where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in my flat, listening to the Six O’Clock sounds of Brushhead, the beeping of the tuk-tuk horns, the ringing of the bells at Our Lady of the Big Shoulders, and the glorious sounds of the muezzin at the Emerald Masjid. I wanted to hear people working and living and loving, not the hostile silence that surrounded me.

I took a breath and cracked the seal on the bottle. The smell of Old Windswept, that smell of pear and cinnamon wafted upward, overpowering the must and smoke. For a moment, I knew right where I was: in a makeshift tent in Bakaara Market in Howlwadaag, on the northeast edge of Santee City. I let my mind’s eye fly upwards, above the haze and the crowded streets, above the network-dark buildings and cafés, up and up past the orbital anchor and out into Occupied Space, higher and farther than the ripples of today’s madness could travel. I was a speck, an invisible dot on an invisible dot in an ocean of stars I could never comprehend, but I knew where I was. I drank, took a breath, then took a second drink. Why not?

I threw aside the tent. Where I wanted to be was a long way from where I was. I would get there. I would get Onanefe and his crew squared, I would get Letty squared, I would get this entire goddamn planet squared… it would just have to wait until I was done here.

Onanefe was right where I’d left him. I handed him the bottle. “Done.”

He held the bottle up to the failing light and sloshed the rum. “Looks like you barely started.” He unscrewed the cap and sniffed. His face mellowed. “You mind?”

I shrugged. “Help yourself.”

He took a long pull, then coughed. “Ho,” he breathed. “Strong, but smooth.”

“That was from the first batch I made after I took over. I was terrified I’d get it wrong, send the whole place under.”

He took a sniff, then capped the bottle. “You got it right. Madame Tonggow would always send us off with a bottle after we delivered. Everyone else on the crew cracked theirs right away, but I never opened mine. Figured I’d save them for special occasions.”

I laughed. “You know there’s a market for the stuff she made? You could probably sell those bottles and get a better chunk than what you think I owe you.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Fifty thousand yuan worth of rum?”

“Try a hundred K.” I shook my head. “Collectors are weird. They came sniffing around after I took over, offering me cash for used barrels. They all wanted a piece of her.”

He nodded. “Madame Tonggow would talk about stuff like that. People always coming from the Co-Op, pestering her about selling bits of equipment or buying into weird schemes. She’d give ’em that smile, the one that says, ‘Yes, dear, that’s nice. Now shove off.’”

“I wish I’d spent more time with her. I was so focused on buying the distillery that we didn’t do much more than talk business.” I looked at the bottle and contemplated another pull. I contemplated a lot of pulls. Bad things were happening out there in the growing dark, not just in the Market, but in the rest of the city. I really had to keep myself sharp.

I took another pull and handed him the bottle. “She probably could have helped me deal with those assholes from the Co-Op. Did you know they wanted my cane?”

Onanefe coughed as he finished his swig. “Maybe I should send
them
the bill.”

I snorted. “You’d have even less chance of getting it, then. The Co-Op Board got caught up in some stupid speculation scheme, and with the labor stoppage…”

Somewhere in the back of my brain, a thought came loose and bumped into a whole lot of other thoughts, like a pachinko ball plinking its way down the pegs. “The Co-Op doesn’t have cane. The cane isn’t coming because you guys have stopped working. You’ve stopped working because you haven’t gotten paid.”

“What’s that?”

I focused on Onanefe, fighting through the buzz. “Who else hasn’t been getting paid?”

He opened his mouth, then clamped it shut as he sat back. “Well,
everyone
. All the crews.”

“Heirloom and industrial?”

He laughed. “We don’t discriminate. We get a call to cut, we go.”

“But it wasn’t like you were getting paid for one and not the other, right?”

“Right. Why?”

“Because…” I put my head in my hands and squeezed. This was too much to think about with those three shots of rum and a long day in the sun. I was so tired. My skull hurt. I didn’t want to piece this all together. I wanted someone else to do the work and let me go back to my distillery and my horrible job in the bowels of the water works.

The horrible job that paid off my crushing debt. The debt that would go away if I did what Letty asked, but I couldn’t do that anymore because the strike had taken on a life of its own. I couldn’t stop it, Saarien couldn’t stop it, Letty sure couldn’t stop it. The only way to stop a strike was to give the people what they wanted or wait until they broke. And since there had been no list of demands…

“She wants this to happen,” I breathed. The high from the rum evaporated, leaving me sick to my stomach. “She wants the strike to happen, and to burn itself out. Why?”

“Who is ‘she’?”

“The Prez.”

“Letty?”

I nodded. “She burnt my building down on purpose.”

“She was
there
?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Do you know her? And I mean know her as a person, not as the Prez?”

Onanefe fiddled with his mustache. “It’s complicated.”

“Don’t you dare tell me you were an item, ’cause that’s the last bit of weirdness I need right now.”

“Worse. We were political partners. Back in the day.”

I cocked my head and smiled. “Holy crap. You’re with the FOC, aren’t you?”

He straightened up. “And proud of it. Hell, I helped found our local chapter with Letty.” He shook his head. “Then she took off for the city and joined the Union.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Two Contracts. Ah.” He sighed and looked out into the distance. “We’d spent two years going from one farm to the next, talking with every Freeborn about working together. The old-timers wanted to defer to the Union, but Letty and me, we wanted Freeborn seats at the table. We’d seen our parents and
their
parents work their tails off, taking
pride
in how they’d remained free and independent when they were working for jiao on the yuan.”

He sucked his teeth. “My folks were good people, but they were scared. They didn’t want to risk the little they had asking for what they were worth. Letty and I weren’t scared. We were going to make things better.”

I looked at the ruins of the Market. “I don’t suppose this is the ‘better’ you had in mind?”