Like a Boss (22 page)

He uncapped the bottle and took a long, long drink.

Another thought plinked into my brain. “Were you in Brushhead to meet with Letty?”

He coughed, and a little of the rum splashed onto his lips. “I really can’t talk about that.”

That was enough for me. I stood up, wobbly as I was. “You and I are going to end this shit. Right now.”

“We are?”

“Yep.” I grabbed his arm and yanked him to his feet. “Whatever secret business you and Letty were going to hammer out, we’re going to make it happen.”

He winced. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Come off it, Onanefe. You and Letty were going to meet, but Letty set fire to my place. She got to whisk herself away from whatever it was you were going to discuss, and now the strike has turned to chaos. There’s no organization. There’s no discipline. There’s just a whole lot of angry people breaking stuff, and once that blows over, we’ll go right back to status quo. Whatever it was you wanted to change won’t happen unless
we
make it happen. So come on.”

“Where?”

I sniffed the air and caught a whiff of shawarma. “Over there. It’s never a good idea to talk treason on an empty stomach. And you’re buying.”

Onanefe protested for a few meters, but the sudden smell of roasting eggplant and baking bread perked him right up. One of the food stalls had reopened, and a few dozen people huddled over their plates of kumara cakes and pita. Even the tough-looking security women ate there, their bats tucked under their arms. The man running the stand wouldn’t take our money. “No point in letting this spoil, and the banks are closed, and what the hell,” he said, handing over two plates. “Solidarity, wha’?” I handed him the bottle of Old Windswept. He winked, and the smiley-face tattoo on his cheek crinkled as he took a drink.

We shoveled food into our mouths. I didn’t bother to slow myself down. This wasn’t a time to savor. It was a time to plan and get angry. “We won’t be able to find her, so we’ll have to draw her out,” I said, wiping the last of the thoom off the plate with my thumb. Oh, a thousand blessings on thoom, that most delicious and anti-social of condiments.

He munched on his shawarama. “How should we start?”

“The old-fashioned way would be to just complain to a few people and wait for word to get out on the Public. You get enough complaining and some minion would scurry over to take reports and assure everyone that things would get done.”

Onanefe rubbed his mustache. “Except the whole city is complaining right now. And the Public’s down.”

“Right. Which means we have to boost our signal above the noise.” I gave him a nod. “What would you do?”

Now he gave his mustache such a twirling that the ends began to stay in tight curls. “It’s not enough to complain. We have to get her angry. We have to call her integrity into question.”

I nodded. “We need focus.” I looked at people around us until I saw what I needed. “And there it is.”

I grabbed one of the security guards and said, “Hey, you know who I am?”

She stopped chewing long enough to size me up. She finished and swallowed. “Should I?”

I pointed at the ink on her cheek, a megaphone. “You used to do Big Three PR.”

She bristled. “I’m a security consultant now.”

“And what I have to tell you concerns not only the security of this market, but of the entire Union. The entire planet, even. What’s your name?”

“Who wants to know?”

I moved my plate to my left hand and held out my right. “Padma Mehta. I’m with the Stipend and Benefits Reinstatment Committee.”

She took a moment before shaking my hand. “Thoj KajSiab. What committee is that?”

“The one I’m starting right now, and I’d like you to join me. What are you getting paid to work here?”

“Fifteen yuan an hour.”

“And no hazard pay?”

KajSiab made a face. “For what?”

“Are you kidding? For the riot!”

The women looked at each other, their faces bunched up in worry. KajSiab cleared her throat and leaned in. “We’re, uh, not supposed to call it that.”

I looked at the smashed produce on the ground and the tattered tents flipping in the evening breeze. “What was it then?”

KajSiab swallowed. “A spontaneous human outburst incident.”

I laughed. “Where did
that
come from?”

KajSiab swallowed. “Look, this is a really weird time, okay? We get discounts on food for our families by working here. If we upset our boss, we’re out of a gig. And this is the best gig I can get right now.”

I nodded. “I’ve been hearing that a lot. Which is all the more reason for you all to be pissed off. This isn’t how things are supposed to work here. It’s bad enough when the Big Three are messing with us. This is a Union job, isn’t it?”

KajSiab and her co-workers gave me small nods. “The manager didn’t want to pay police rates.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re getting hosed.” I felt that warm glow of righteous indignation I used to get from my old organizing days. Some WalWa middle manager would try to cut back on hours or say they had to freeze wages, and I would get to march into Thronehill and whale on the Corporate drones until money fell out of their ears. It was a glorious feeling to have that rage back, all made just a little nauseating by the fact that I was defending Union people from a Union screwing.

KajSiab’s face got a little harder. “Then what do we do?”

I smiled. “The first thing you do is talk with everyone who works with you and get names and times of meetings. We can’t pull up anything from the Public to back up your testimony, but we can sure as hell start preparing things.”

She snorted. “More talking?”

“No,
focused
talking. Because after we’re done here, we’re going to find out who else is in the same boat as you. Who else isn’t getting their fair wages? Who else is having their livelihoods stolen through paperwork? I’ve seen a lot of angry people all day, and, believe you me, we got allies out there. But if we want the Prez’s ear, we need to be prepared. Are you in? Or do you want to go back to scrounging for leftover tabbouli?”

The security women made faces as they weighed their options. “The tabblouli’s not
that
bad,” said one.

“The quality of the food isn’t the point,” said KajSiab, flexing her arms. “This woman’s right. What happened today was a full-on riot, and we got sent out here with no armor, no instructions, no police backup.” She nodded and put a meaty hand on my shoulder. “I’m with you, Padma.”

The other women all piped in with a chorus of, “Me, too”s. I sighed and flushed away a little more of my buffer to make room for whatever they were about to tell me. I made sure to keep everything Vikram had said. One of these days, I’d have to get a memory upgrade, even if it meant letting some tech jab needles in my eye. I hadn’t needed to remember much before, but now? Now meant having to remember everything.

By the time the shawarma stand was out of food, the security women had brought over other merchants, and they told us about how they’d had to pay extra rent for security measures that never arrived. “We’re ruined!” said one, a middle-aged guy with welding spot scars up and down his arms. “I put everything into my business, and it all got washed away by those looters! And now I can’t find the Market manager or my Union rep or anyone!”

I nodded and blinked in his testimony. “I’m going to make sure you get restitution. Can you find anyone else who’s gotten nailed by this… what did you call it?”

He snorted, and his tattoo – an old clipper ship – moved like it was rolling over a massive wave. “It was an ’enhanced logistical fee.’ Never heard such garbage before, but Luc, y’know, the Market manager, he said I couldn’t keep my stall if I didn’t kick in.”

“You know anyone in your Ward who had to pay it?”

“Only everyone,” he said. “Didn’t matter what their trade was. Hell, even my wife, she runs a kindergarten,
she
had to pay. What, the kids are gonna riot? Please.”

I nodded. “That is indeed some serious bullshit. And we’re going to take this right to your manager, and then to whoever told
him
to put the squeeze on you, all the way up to Letty Arbusto Smythe. ’Cause you
know
this is because she’s falling down on the job.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, but you think it’ll really change anything?”

“We won’t know unless we do it.” I patted him on the shoulder.

Onanefe was talking with a few Freeborn men who also had market stalls. Their conversation slowed as I approached, but Onanefe prodded one of them on the arm. “What’s your problem?”

The man rubbed his arm, then fiddled with his rolled-up shirtsleeve. “I don’t know her.”

“You don’t know me, either,” said Onanefe.

“But I know
about
you.” The man nodded at me. “Her? She’s just another Ink.”

“Not just any Ink,” I said, giving him my winningest smile. “I’m the one who’s going to help you get back what you lost.”

“And what’s that?”

I let the smile fade. “Nothing less than your pride.”

The men exploded into laughter. “Wow, she’s
good
,” said one of them, clapping Onanefe on the back. “I might actually buy her bullshit.”

“It’s not,” said Onanefe. “We’re going straight to the Prez’s office, and Padma here is going to kick in the door.”

The men stopped laughing. “You serious?”

“As a heart attack,” I said. “Whatever you’ve told Onanefe, we need it to build our case. We’re going to take her down. Tell everyone you know.”

After a few more mutterings and handshakes, the Freeborn left the Market. So had everyone else. By now, night had fallen, and none of the streetlamps had come on. The purple moon was a quarter full, strong enough to help me see faces but too weak to see in the shadows. “You think your friend will let us back in?” asked Onanefe. “It feels a little bleak out here.”

“We need to find more people,” I said, walking toward Shahjahan Road. “I figure we’ll spend another couple of hours talking with marchers, and that should boost the signal enough to get Letty’s attention.”

He shivered and rubbed his arms. “It’s just that, you know, it’s dark.”

I stopped at the edge of the Market. “You’re from the kampong!”

“Where we use
lights
.” He shook his head and looked up at the darkened buildings that surrounded the Market. “You ever march through a cane field in the middle of the night? It’s not fun. You got cane vipers, cane toads, cane
rats
… You ever seen a cane rat?”

A bottle smashed on the ground nearby, followed by a high-pitched howl. Onanefe tensed, his fists up. I pulled him with me into the shadows of a shuttered konbini. “What was that?” he whispered, his voice hoarse.

“Probably nothing,” I lied. Down the street, there was another tinkling of shattered glass and another howl, like a drunken wolf declaring it was on the hunt. Other howls joined in, a chorus of anger. It gave way to a harsh clanging, a thousand kids bashing rebar on molasses barrels, all out of rhythm. Down Shahjahan, an orange light appeared. It grew brighter as the noise got louder, and I pulled Onanefe past the konbini until we got to an alley. I took a quick glance: it wasn’t a dead end, so we still had an escape route. We hid behind a rubbish bin as the sound bounced off the buildings and echoed through the empty Market.

The marchers that we saw today were calm and buoyant. The mass of people that worked its way down Shahjahan was anything but. They carried crowbars and hammers and whatever implements of destruction they could find. Torches made of rags dipped in cane diesel lit their way, the greasy flames casting harsh faces into relief. There were no signs, no chants, just a susurus filled with frustration and barely contained rage.

Onanefe breathed out. “There’s an angry mob if ever I’ve seen one.”

“Yeah, but whose?”

“What do you mean? It’s a mob. It’s angry. They have
torches
, for God’s sake.”

“Yeah, but are they Union? Freeborn? Are they with Letty? Rank-and-file? I can’t make out any faces.”

“You’ll pardon me if I don’t walk out and ask. Hey!”

I left Onanefe behind the bin and tip-toed to the edge of the alley’s darkness. It was a mixed bag: Union and Freeborn, men and women, old and young. They all had the glass fist pin of the Temple of the New Holy Light on their shirts.

Then one of them looked at me.

I was hidden in the shadows. One of them turned for a brief moment, and the torch light reflected in her cold, hardened face.

It was Saraphina Moss, the woman with the shark eyes.

I made myself as small as I could. I recognized a few more faces in the crowd, people I’d seen milling around the Temples I’d visited. I crept back to Onanefe. “They’re with Saarien. Maybe all of them.”

His eyes grew wide. “What the hell is he
doing
?”

“Immanitizing the Labor Eschaton. Let’s get out of here.” I pulled him away from the mob to the other end of the alley. Onanefe winced as I grabbed his arm, and he doubled over, knocking aside a crate full of empty bottles. They crashed to the ground, loud enough for anyone to hear over the steady drumbeat of feet on Shahjahan.

The feet came to a quick stop. Flashlights blinded us, and a dozen people yelled “Stop!”

We didn’t.

We also didn’t get very far, what with Onanefe’s busted ribs. I managed to swing him out of the alley onto Proctor Avenue. Everyone on Proctor painted their houses bright colors and let their kids play in the streets. Now, as the torches flickered and the flashlights danced, the street turned into scenes out of a nightmare: slashes of orange wall, doorways glowing red, and the purple moon turning the darkened streetlights into looming sentries.

Onanefe groaned as his legs gave out. I lowered him in a doorway as the mob crowded around us. I didn’t flinch from the lights. “Good. You’re here. This man needs help.”

The few angry faces I could see looked at each other. “Why did you run from us?” asked a woman.

“That’s entirely beside the point,” I said, stepping up to the woman. She stood in front of a few hundred people. Her hair was tied into a precise bun on the top of her head. A Temple pin glinted on her coveralls, and a pair of welding goggles hung from her neck. Her tattoo, a flame, made this woman a rare sight: someone who’d kept the same job even after Breaching. “My friend got crushed during the riot in the Market. He needs to see a doctor.”