Pacifica Page 4

  The words came out harder than she’d intended. She had better skills than making tar, but it would fetch a good price, and that made it more valuable than pride.

  She glanced back to the unmarked boxes on the shelves, knowing inside them were things like toothpaste, clothing, and blankets. Cigarettes, contraband within the city limits because of the Clean Air Act, and empty gas cans for days when the kanshu loosened their grip on gas rations. Pots and pans and bowls, water purifiers and cooking grease. At least those things had been here. Most of the supplies were running dangerously low.

  On the other side of the room were crates marked by the black bird, the symbol of the Oil Nation. Formal trade between the two countries had been stopped during the last war, but that didn’t mean Gloria wasn’t getting her hardware under the table from someone on the other side.

  Most days Gloria could be counted on for a trade. All days she could be counted on to cause trouble.

  “Finally, they’re asleep.” Sylvie entered the room, hands resting on her hips, back hunched like an old lady. Her brows quirked at the jar in Gloria’s hand.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Marin calls it tar,” said Gloria. “Last time she cooked it we got a hundred credits a dip.”

  She would have rather earned her keep fixing things, but times were thin. She would do what she’d always done: survive.

  “A hundred…” Sylvie stepped closer, then pinched her nose. Even unopened, it reeked like cleaner and burnt sugar.

  If only the things inside it were that nice.

  “This’ll get more,” said Marin. “The kanshu will pay double when they get a taste of this.”

  “One in particular,” said Gloria.

  A line formed between Sylvie’s delicate brows. “Who?”

  “Teller,” said Gloria with a smirk.

  “The one from the ads?” Sylvie gave a shocked laugh. “This is drogue, yes? I suppose you never can tell about people.”

  Gloria’s mouth turned up in the smallest inkling of amusement. “She sends a guy to make her deals, but Marin found out her name for a bonus dip last time.”

  “What’s so great about it?” asked Sylvie.

  “Open it.” Marin took a step back, and held her breath.

  Gloria unscrewed the lid of the jar as Sylvie’s eyes widened.

  The second the tar hit the air, Marin felt the world go sideways. She held her breath, shoving Gloria’s hand back down. Sylvie had been closer, though, and Marin caught her arm as she stumbled sideways. Gloria’s cackle filled the warm room.

  “Told you it was better,” said Marin. “Kept it on the fire two whole days this time.” She yawned. It had been a while since she’d slept more than an hour or two straight.

  “How did…” Sylvie blinked, still trying to shake the effects of the tar. “How did you learn to make that?”

  A knot formed in Marin’s throat as she pictured a tiny shack at the edge of her hometown, and her small hand turning the handle of a great copper vat.

  “Family business,” she said.

  “My mother taught me to flirt,” said Sylvie, making a face. “This would have been more useful.”

  Gloria put an arm around Marin’s shoulders. “What would I do without you?”

  Marin grinned, but the truth was, she didn’t know what she’d do without Gloria. When she’d come here, five years ago, she’d had little more than those kids in the other room did now. If she hadn’t ended up at the library, or if Gloria hadn’t taken her in, she’d be out on the streets.

  Or back on open water, which meant she was as good as dead.

  “How soon can you move it?” asked Gloria. There was a pressure in her voice Marin was unaccustomed to hearing, and she turned to face the other woman.

  “How soon you need me to?” she asked.

  Gloria sighed, then crossed her arms over her flat chest.

  “We’re down to the six rations, split between us all,” she said. “We keep taking in these kids, we’ll starve within the week.”

  A tense silence settled between them. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe Gloria, but she had to see it for herself. Striding to the crates marked “Food,” she tipped them open, finding box after box empty.

  “Thought you were farming the kids back out,” said Marin to Sylvie. She didn’t mean to be blunt about it, but that was the truth. This was a black-market trading post; most of what they dealt with was contraband. It wasn’t meant to be a daycare.

  “I try,” said Sylvie. “But few families have the means to take in an extra child.”

  “Few? Try none.” Gloria made a small sound of disgust. “I’ve turned away eight customers today alone looking for rations.”

  “What happened?” asked Marin. “I thought we were supposed to get more this week.”

  “La limpieza’s cutting down on my business,” said Gloria. “They’re tightening security on the supply trains. My source wouldn’t give up a single sack of flour unless I doubled his rate.”

  Marin felt the knife at her hip, thinking he might not have been so bold had she been negotiating.

  “Want me to talk to him?” she asked.

  Gloria snorted. “We can’t burn him—he’s the only in I have on that line.”

  “Let him hope he never finds his own plate empty,” said Sylvie tightly. “He would find no generosity at my table.”

  Another sigh slipped between Gloria’s teeth. “We don’t get some income, we’ll have to shut down.”

  Gloria had fed half the people of the docks at one point or another. If she couldn’t get the money to pay off her source—an Armament guard on Noram’s supply routes—the food she traded would stop. It wasn’t as if Marin could contribute with government-issued rations vouchers, either. As far as Noram was concerned, she didn’t even exist.

  Sylvie chewed her lip, anxious. “We can’t turn the children out.”

  “No,” said Gloria. She paced between the shelves, blending with the shadows the farther back she went. “This is our home,” she finally said, an edge to her already hard voice. “These are our people. They can’t send us away and they sure as hell are not going to starve us out.”

  Marin’s dreams of a cot and a warm meal went up in smoke. Her own people back home on the island never would have stuck their necks out for others the way Gloria had. It made her homesick, in a twisted kind of way. Like missing something you never had.

  “I’ll go tonight,” she said. “Sneak across the line while you’re rioting.”

  She didn’t have to ask if Gloria would be at the relocation center. She had been nearly every night since the paperwork had first come out to ship five hundred people to Pacifica, since she’d sent her errand runners out to rally the people and protest. Her husband had lived and died on this land, she said when anyone asked, and she wasn’t moving. Now the masses gathered long before she showed, and fought long after she left.

  “Be careful,” Sylvie warned. “La limpieza will be out in force.”

  “Looking at her,” Marin said, motioning to Gloria. But she felt a tension spread through her tired muscles. No one knew where the Shorelings charged with conspiring to riot were going—rumor was the mainland prisons were all full. Some said they were being taken to a jail out to sea or set to swim.

  She’d seen that kind of justice. That was corsario justice.

  After a moment, Gloria nodded.

  “Be fast,” she said. “Be safe.”

  Even if Marin didn’t want to go, she didn’t have a choice. Living here, hiding here from her own people, didn’t come free. She would not starve, or let this crew starve, while she could still do something.

  Marin took the jar and placed it gently back into her pack. She settled it on her shoulders. Without another word, she went down the stairs, ignoring the errand boys and security guards who joked about her just getting back. Ignoring that voice that whispered to her from the water to come home.

  She couldn’t go home. This was wher
e she belonged now.

  This was who she was now.

  Into the black night she went, heading through the streets now vacant with the coming curfew. It was imposed each day at dusk by la limpieza on account of the riots, and when she heard the far-off wail of a siren, she ducked into an alley and waited until the sound had cleared.

  Then she was off, nerves churning in her belly, eyes roaming, one hand in her pocket on her father’s old knife. Another turn led her deeper into the city, and soon she saw it. A crowd bigger than all the corsarios on the island she’d once called home. A sea in which to lose a fish.

  The riots.

  Without wasting another second, she headed toward them, ready to make a deal.

  CHAPTER 6

  TWO BLOCKS down from the Natural History Museum was the Plaza Centro, marked by a burst of old-fashioned Spanish tile and a fountain filled with stone trees, something that Ross had only seen live in nature preserves. There, beneath the sparkling gray limbs, he and Adam waited for the bus that would take them below the cliffline.

  It was the first time in as long as he could remember that he was in the city without a bodyguard. He felt like jumping in the fountain. Yelling at the top of his lungs. He felt like doing something crazy.

  Which was already in the works.

  He bounced on his heels, then punched Adam in the ribs.

  “Ouch,” said Adam.

  “What time is it?” Ross asked, looking for a clock on the shelter at the bus stop. The relocation event ended with a silent auction at midnight, but these things never really closed up before one in the morning. They had plenty of time to get to the riots and back without anyone noticing they were gone.

  Adam retrieved his comm from his pocket.

  “Seven fifty-two.”

  “What are you doing?” Ross hissed, slapping a hand over it. “You were supposed to leave that back at the museum.” He looked around for a trash incinerator, ready to bake it. Their comms were a direct link to the security team, and bringing them with was a sure way to cut these festivities short.

  “Relax,” said Adam. “I turned off the tracking device.”

  Ross pulled back. “You can do that?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s in the operating manual.”

  “You read the operating manual?” Ross shook his head. “Never mind. Of course you did.”

  How could he forget? This was the guy who turned in homework early and asked their teachers for supplemental reading when something was interesting.

  He wasn’t exactly sure how they were friends.

  “Lose the coat,” Ross told him, annoyed by how perfectly Adam had folded his suit jacket over one arm. Ross’s was back in the museum, where Adam should have left his.

  “Where would you like me to put it?”

  “Toss it,” said Ross. “Throw it in the fountain, I don’t care.”

  Adam gave him a pointed look that said this wasn’t going to happen. It didn’t really matter what he did with it. Even without the accessories, every inch of Adam was clean and pressed. His dark hair was short and neat. Even his tan face was freshly shaven, though Ross doubted he’d had much to shave. He looked nothing like the kid who had moved up the cliffs with his family three years ago. No ragged edges. No sunburnt skin. No pants that sagged low on his hips just so the ends would cover his ankles.

  It was difficult to remember sometimes that Adam was not like him in one of the most fundamental ways.

  Adam was a Shoreling.

  It wasn’t that he looked so physically different; the same two seeds dropped in different countries would sprout the same sapling. But one would be watered, and pruned, and sheltered from the wind, while the other would face drought, and infestation, be broken down and cut up. Even if they both grew leaves in the spring, what existed beneath would be a different tree.

  There were other Shoreling kids at the public schools above the cliffline—one of the schools, Ross had heard, had a busload sent up from the slums every morning—but Adam was the only one at Center. He was brought from the wrong side of town for a purpose, a fact Ross knew Adam was acutely aware of. It was why his shirt was perfectly pressed every morning, and why he consistently made the highest marks in every class.

  He was their poster boy for integration.

  As was his father, the vice president.

  Cars whipped past—some white government vehicles like the one he was used to riding in, others privately owned. It would have been easier to flag down one of the blue taxis, but it seemed wiser to blend in with a crowd. Anyway, asking a driver to take them near the riots this time of night was sure to raise suspicions.

  A bus came, a red line down its side, and they climbed aboard. It was the first time Ross had ever been on a city lift, and it surprised him that the seats were decently clean and the cabin air-conditioned.

  “Ahem,” said the driver, a woman with a short patch of yellow hair. She tapped the metal box beside the wheel.

  When Ross hesitated, Adam stepped past him.

  “I got it.” He removed his comm from his pocket again, turned the dial on the side to the credit setting, and held it above the black scanning device. Ross moved quickly to a window seat, keeping his head down.

  “You have to pay for public transportation?” It wasn’t as if they were rolling around in a mansion on wheels. He felt like an idiot for not knowing this.

  Adam glanced around the cabin. “We’re in a fuel crisis. Welcome to the real world.”

  Shaking off the minor setback, Ross grinned. “Feeling nostalgic? This remind you of the good old days?”

  Adam had been raised in the banks, a mixed section on the southern side of Lower Noram that was mostly residential. It was run-down, there was no question, but it wasn’t nearly as poor as the docks or some of the other areas below the cliffline.

  His father had been a store owner who’d gotten involved in local politics, and made a name for himself as a Progressive Party minority voice on the city council. When it was time for Ross’s father’s reelection, tension between those on either side of the cliffline had been high, so Ross’s father picked a running mate that his advisors thought might buy the Shoreling vote: one of their own. He was the first elected officer since before the Melt not from an established political family, the first in over a hundred years from a different party. There had never been such a high voter turnout.

  He couldn’t stop the Shorelings from rioting, though.

  “They weren’t good old days,” said Adam quietly.

  “Of course not,” said Ross. “I wasn’t there.”

  Adam snorted.

  The rest of the ride went slower than Ross had hoped. Each stop they took on people, and let a few more off. Both he and Adam kept their heads down and their gazes roaming. By the time they finally reached their stop, Diamond Peak, they were the last two on the bus.

  The street outside was darker than the Plaza Centro, with only a few traffic lights to guide their steps. Around them, storefronts were empty, the glass cracked on half, boarded up on the rest. Apartment buildings, seemingly abandoned, stretched up into the night. This looked nothing like the brightly lit streets of the political district where he and Adam lived. This was a forgotten place. Nobody wanted to live this close to the cliffline.

  “You sure about this?” asked Adam.

  In truth, Ross wasn’t. There was a flicker of doubt inside him, an awareness that he’d already gone too far. If they got in trouble, Tersley wasn’t here to watch their backs.

  “Of course,” said Ross. He’d dragged Adam this far, he wasn’t going back now. “But if you’re scared, you can hold my hand.”

  Adam groaned.

  Because the roads were blocked due to the riots, Adam suggested they take the pedestrian bridge off Sierra Street to the docks. As the streetlights spread farther apart, they walked quicker, the abandoned road drenched in long stretches of shadow. Ross’s palms began to sweat. The darkness fueled his adrenaline.

  �
�There’s the visitor center,” said Adam.

  Ahead was a square, white building with a flat roof. An empty car lot waited to the right. The windows were dark. It felt like some sort of warning.

  “The bridge should be behind it.” Adam motioned to the left of the visitor center. They crossed through a parking lot, around the wreckage of a building that had been knocked down so long ago the rain had rusted away the metal beams. As they neared the bridge, a chain-link fence came into view. Large caution signs were attached at frequent intervals.

  Despite the heat, a shiver worked through him as they reached the gate—an arching iron trellis that rose twenty feet in the air. At one time it might have been inspiring, but now it was eaten away by the weather and half covered by weeds.

  “Not many people come this way, I guess,” said Ross. He could see the bridge just beyond, though it looked more like a staircase, descending into the fog.

  “Let this be a reminder of all those lost in the ’07 post-Melt quake,” read Adam from a tilted sign beside the gate. “And a tribute to those who followed in the landslide. We will never forget. We will rise again.”

  Oh-seven was nearly eighty years ago. He knew from school that prior to that, Noram had been on even ground, but once the ice melted, the quakes became more severe. There had been no way to predict this one. It had killed thousands of people, and become a permanent line drawn across the city.

  “They say the next one is supposed to be twice as bad,” said Adam. “All the erosion is happening because the tectonic plates under the city are shifting.”

  “This sounds suspiciously like paranoia,” said Ross, pushing through the creaking gate. Before him stretched a thick, greenish haze, lit from beneath. “Maybe you should be on the other side of the riot line.”

  “Maybe you should be,” Adam said under his breath.

  Ross smirked.

  Swallowing, he stepped onto the metal grate, gripping the rough, corroded bannister as he made his descent. At a rickety landing, the staircase flipped back the other way. The haze grew thicker, and with it came the pungent smell of garbage, too long baked in the heat. Soon he couldn’t see more than a few steps in front of him.