Like a Boss (38 page)

Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one

For the Union makes us strong

– it was such an old song, such a
cheesy
song, one that not even the hardest of the hardcore believers in The Struggle could sing without rolling their eyes. It was so bright-eyed and earnest, but I knew it was backed with centuries of
real
struggle, of people who got their heads caved in by crooked cops for the crime of demanding an honest wage for honest work. That’s what we all wanted. That’s what we all had earned. That’s what we were going to get. Not just bread, but our goddamned roses, too. I swallowed the spit out of my mouth, took a great breath and belted out the chorus –

Solidarity forever, solidarity forever

Solidarity forever

For the Union makes us strong

I needed this. I needed to hear these words coming out of my mouth, because words were all I had left. I wasn’t a fighter or a hero. I was just a woman who’d stupidly signed her life away to a juggernaut that wanted me only as grist for its mill. I was someone who’d walked away from a life that had promised everything even though it valued me for nothing. I was someone who looked at a hundred people with machetes and murder in their eyes and sang the next verse, the cheesiest of the whole song:

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite

Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?

Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?

For the union makes us strong

And Soni and a few others joined in with the first
Solidarity forever
, and then another dozen for the next, and then the whole crowd blasted out the words
For the union makes us strong
.

We sang the whole song, all of us, those words from Dead Earth echoing throughout my neighborhood. We got all the way to the last verse, the one written by those first Breaches, the one that started –

On these shores we built our city, made ourselves a brand new life;

Indentured slaves no more, free from crushing corporate strife

– when the machetes clanged again. Metal clashed, and sparks flew, and those people
howled
, that terrifying sound that had haunted our nights for the past week. I looked the women right in their faces, and I raised my voice as loud as I could to belt out the chorus. So did everyone else. We sang the chorus again and again until we drowned out the sound of the machetes and the howls. My throat burned. My eyes were wet. If I stopped singing, I would die. Our song was the only protection we had, and it couldn’t do a damn thing against a coral steel machete.

The blades stopped. They walked up the steps. I didn’t move. I could hear the people behind me begin to cheer, begin to surge. I held up a hand:
wait
. I didn’t stop singing, though. I wanted to make sure our voices followed those fuckers all the way to Letty’s office. If she couldn’t hear us through our pais, she could hear us with her own ears. And what better way to drive her out of our heads by singing the song she couldn’t?

I didn’t expect her to come out of the great coral steel doors, not alone. But she did, her head high and her smile haughty, the look of a queen, not an elected official. I stood up and walked to the first landing. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of standing over me, never again.

Her clothes were clean, her green hair in a perfect ponytail, but dark bags dragged her eyes toward the ground. “I fucking hate that song,” she said. “Can you ask them to stop?”

“Why don’t you order them to?”
Solidarity forever
rolled around and around behind us.

She shook her head. “You know it doesn’t work like that.”

“I have no idea how things work anymore,” I said. “I do know that they’ll start with you stepping down and turning yourself over to Chief Baghram.”

She laughed. “And then what? You think that’s going to keep everything together? You’ve only put a plaster over a gunshot wound. There’s no money. There’s no income. We’re–”

“We’re going to figure that out, and we’re going to do it without you,” I said. “You’ll step down, you’ll relinquish all control over every operational aspect of this planet, and you’ll get a fair trial for your many, many crimes.”

“And how are you going to find an impartial jury? Hell, how will you find a
judge
who isn’t connected to me? I’m the President of a Local with three million people. I pay
everyone
. There’s no such thing as impartial here.”

“Then we get a judge from another planet,” I said. “I think everyone can wait four years for that, after what you’ve done.”

Letty crossed the short distance between us. “You can’t prove a thing, and you know it,” she said, her teeth gritted. “You can talk all you want, but in the end it’s just words. Words don’t get people fed.”

“No, but they get them working.”

“Work. What the hell do you know about
work
? You don’t understand the first fucking thing about work until you’ve grown up out
there
.” She sneered as she pointed west toward the kampong. “Get up before dawn to cut cane. Spend your childhood watching out for vipers or breaking up cane rat nests. Watch your parents starve because there isn’t enough food for everyone, so they give up their dinners so they can grind their lives away growing cane for some parasites a billion light-years away.
Work
? You think because you’re down in the muck at that plant you know about work? You and every other Ink on this planet don’t know the first thing about
work
.”

“So you’re going to teach us all, huh? You’re going to burn this city down and let people starve?”

“I’m going to balance out this city because no one can say
no
,” she said, her face growing dark. “All this bullshit about Slots and seniority just keep us from moving
forward
. I’m going to make that happen, and if people die, well, revolution is messy.”

“Are you kidding me? You’ll just blow everything up and sift through the wreckage and call it a society?”

“Like you’ve never wanted to level this city and start over.”

“I want it to change on its own, not jab it with a sharp stick. You ever stop to think about what the people right here want?”

“They want to get drunk and screw and forget what a great big mistake they made coming here,” said Letty. “They want to pretend they’re still living the Life Corporate. They want to fight over the Big Three’s scraps instead of
making
their own future.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “All that time you spent with the FOC and on the Executive Committee, and you
know
that’s bullshit. People came here because they didn’t want to get screwed by the Big Three. They didn’t want to sit back and become consumers. Everyone came to Santee because they knew it was an actual
life
. That’s why we have a Union: to work together to make everyone’s lives better.”

Letty clapped. “That’s
adorable
. You sound like you mean it.”

“I do,” I said. “Every goddamn word.”

“Too bad your words can’t do anything to fix this. They sure as hell can’t make me step down.” She crossed her arms and shrugged. “What are you gonna do about it, Padma?”

I looked at her, at that self-righteous smirk, and all I could do was laugh. “All that power you earned, all that you’ve squandered, and the best you can do is taunt me like some boardroom bully. So, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna show you how to get shit done.”

I walked halfway down the steps and held up my hands. A minute later, the entire crowd was silent. “Pass the word, everyone,” I said. “Letty thinks she has all the power. She thinks that we can’t do anything without her. We’re going to show her otherwise.”

The front row turned and spoke to the people behind them, and they did the same, all the way to the ends of the streets. It was like watching a wave breaking and rolling back. When eyes were back on me, I thought, How
do we show her?

Of course.
We do the work.

“I’d like you all to go home, eat up, and rest. If you’ve got food to spare, share it with someone who’s hungry. Then, go back to work. Whatever your shift is, go to it. I want this whole planet working, just for twenty-four hours. If you don’t have a job, you can help clean up or check on the injured or the shut-in.”

This time, the murmuring wave was louder, the faces confused and angry. I could hear
Really?
and
Is she kidding?
“We’re going to show Letty and her thugs that we don’t need them. This planet works without them. But it can’t work without us.”

I pointed at the clock, its hands telling me it was half past eight. I froze at the sight and felt The Fear give a solitary hiss in the back of my brain. I would be sure to make tomorrow’s Six O’Clock. “Work for twenty-four hours, then come back here at six o’clock. Get home safe.”

I walked down the steps. Soni had put on her Cop Face. “Really?” she said. “That’s it?”

“That’s enough for now,” I said. “How many police have you got in the crowd?”

Soni glanced at the worried faces surrounding us and whispered, “Maybe two hundred. You don’t want us to try and take the Hall, do you?”

“Hell, no,” I whispered back. “We don’t know what’s inside there. I just want you to make sure everyone gets home safely.”

“Define ‘safely.’”

“‘Not getting hacked to pieces.’

She nodded. “I can do that. But you’ve got a plan for tomorrow, right?”

“Of course.”

She paused. “Are you going to share it with us?”

I tapped my temple, and she rolled her eyes. “I can’t wait to get this shit fixed.” She wandered into the crowd toward a knot of cops and shooed them to work.

Onanefe had found his crew. Their funeral whites were now a dingy gray. “We’d ask to crash with you,” said Onanefe, “but it looks like you’re in the same boat as us.”

For a moment, I thought about telling them to hop into their Hanuman and bring us to Tanque, but ugly reality smashed that idea to pieces. I didn’t own the distillery any more. The new owners had probably already changed the locks.

“I was going to Big Lily’s,” I said. “She can probably put us all up.”

“She got food?” asked one of the crew.

“Jesus, I hope so.” I looked around the emptying streets. A few people still stood around, singing, but the rest walked away, looking at the ground or off in the distance. I pushed my way up Koothrapalli, hoping I hadn’t played into Letty’s hands again.

“Padma.” A shake.

“Fuggoff.”

“Not this morning,” said Big Lily. “Come on, you got work, and I gotta open up for the breakfast crowd.”

I groaned and opened my eyes. Weak morning light crept through the windows. Big Lily stood above me, offering me a steaming cup and a not-steaming bowl. “Your friends, the cane cutters, they left half an hour ago. Almost cleaned me out, but I saved you some tea and suafa’i.”

I sat up, the foil emergency blanket crinkling around me. The floor of her place was made of ironpalm slats, and they had sucked all the heat out of my body. Even with the blanket, I shivered. My back was knotted, my neck was stiff, and I was not a fan of Big Lily’s suafa’i. She always used too much sago so the porridge became a gummy mass. I set the bowl next to me and wrapped myself around the cup. I willed all the heat in the tea to enter my body. It would be cold in the mains when I went to work.

I froze. Holy crap.
Work
.

I slurped the tea and inhaled the suafa’i. “Gotta get to the plant,” I muttered as I pulled on my boots. I stopped. “My God, who’s been at the plant all week?
Has
anyone been there?”

Big Lily took the bowl. “I think they had a skeleton crew running the place. Service has been spotty, but the water’s been clean. Ish.”

“Ish?”

Big Lily made a face. “It’s been smelling a bit like, um, lard.”

I groaned. “Fatbergs. My favorite.”

She handed me a cold bacon roll. “Do I want to know?”

“Just imagine all the cooking oil and rendered fat in the city coming together into one great, quivering mass.”

She made a face.

“Exactly,” I said. “Usually, someone upstream from me monitors filters to keep most of it out, but with everyone gone…” I put the roll in my pocket. “Well, if they show up, we’ll fix it. If they don’t, then I apologize for this week’s water quality.”

“They’ll show,” she said.

I caught myself from saying
I sure hope so
and gave her a wink. “Then make sure you break out the good stuff for tonight. People are going to want to celebrate.”

She nodded. “Wish you’d have told me you were going to unload the distillery, though. I’d have put in one last order.”

“Good thing I left those two cases here for emergencies.”

Big Lily gave me a cock-eyed grin. “What do you think the last week has been?”

A chill crept up my back. “Lily… you
do
have those cases, right? The ones I said not to touch unless the world was ending?”

She put her hands on her hips. “Well, shit, Padma, I’d think this has qualified.”

I got to my feet. “Where’s the rum?”

“I traded it for food.”

“Did you trade
all
of the rum?”

She nodded, a sad look in her eye. “The prices have been
obscene
. You have any idea how much sago was going for?”

I looked at the empty bowl in her hand. One bottle of Old Windswept could last me a year if I were careful, and I was
always
… well, I was usually careful. I was certainly careful with where I’d put my other stashes. I had cases hidden everywhere in the city. Big Lily and Hawa weren’t the only ones I’d trusted with my secrets. And I’d always made those deals when we had shut off our pais. I had paid
extra
to make sure that hadn’t happened. My rum stashes were safe, right?

Right?

Big Lily kept an ancient wind-up clock above the bar, and it chimed half-past seven. I had to be at work in thirty minutes. It was a five minute walk to the water works. That gave me twenty-five minutes to run like hell over to Mooj Markson’s konbini on Handel. I always sold Mooj Old Windswept at a good rate, and he always kept a case in reserve for me.
Just in case
, I’d said. I threw a good-bye over my shoulder as I charged out the door.