Jon Grimwood - Effendi

“Netting,” Sarah demanded, her voice urgent.

Ka looked puzzled.

“Netting,” she repeated and pointed to an unused roll of thermoflage that still lay where they’d dumped it five days earlier. “Hurry.” Sarah grabbed his hand and pulled Ka to his feet.

Ka knew better than to refuse. “What are we hiding?” Ka asked. “And what are we hiding it from?” Hiding themselves from the planes was the usual answer but the truck was already netted and the sky was free from silver specks.

“We’re going to catch food,” she told Ka and the boy stopped fussing.

“Do what I do,” said Sarah. So Ka did.

Together they unrolled the net and laid it flat in the road. Then Sarah cut two long lengths of electrical flex from a cardboard roll in the back of the truck and gave one to Ka.

“The net goes there,” Sarah said, indicating a dark slit of alley between two broken houses. “You take the one on this side and I’ll take the other.”

Reaching the roof on his side of the alley was easier than Ka expected, mainly because the stairs were in place and neither floor had fallen in. Sarah’s climb took longer and when she finally appeared on the roof opposite, sweat had fastened her shirt tight against her back.

“Broken stairs.”

Ka nodded, silently threading one end of his wire through a gap in the parapet when he saw Sarah do the same. When she tied one end tight, he did that too and obediently tossed the rest of his flex over the edge, watching as it fell into the street below.

“Okay,” said Sarah. “Now we do the netting.” She disappeared from view and it took Ka a moment to realize she’d started the return climb. Although he still made it down before she did.

“You’ve got stairs,” Sarah said.

Ka nodded guiltily.

“Some people . . .” Crouched back on her heels, mouth slightly open and face fierce with concentration, Sarah carefully tied her wire to a corner of the net and waited for Ka do the same. After that, all they had to do was climb back to the top and haul on their wires until the net was in position.

She smelt of kif, as always, but beneath the smoke Ka could smell sweat as it dried into her shirt and a feral stink that he also carried, but mostly forgot to notice. All of the other girls he’d met had washed with sand, disappearing behind a wall or bush to scrub it into their skin. Sarah was different. If the river was nearby she used that; otherwise she used nothing.

“Why are you sniffing?”

“I’m not.”

Sarah looked at him.

“The pipe,” said Ka. “I like it.”

Sarah nodded, like she understood. But a few minutes later she got up to make a hard-to-see adjustment to one corner of the trap and when she came back, she sat somewhere else.

Later on, the blue sky turned pink along its edge. Pink turned to purple and purple to a blue so deep it was almost black. And stars hung silent as Sarah lay back and wondered at their unimaginable distances.

Sitting on the other side of the fire, Ka held a spit-roasted bird, one of a dozen that he’d eaten as the evening wore on and the flames burned low. Two more tiny birds cooled on a length of aerial near his feet. The wings he’d taken to discarding as hardly worth the bother, throwing them back to sizzle in the fire while he concentrated instead on pinching strips of hot meat from the tiny carcass.

When the fire was done and the night turned colder, they retreated to the back of the truck, Sarah to clean her pipe and Ka to talk to the Colonel. He was still talking when Sarah fell asleep. Though she woke once, later on, to remove his hand from inside her shirt.

It was a job and someone had to do it. Shutting his eyes briefly against a flickering beam of red laser, the man calling himself Mike Estelle opened them again, then smiled through the yellow afterglow at a young American dancing opposite.

Wide face, fair hair, a turned-up nose that looked natural; sweat darkening the valley between her breasts and beading her throat like glitter dust. Trousers slung low enough at the back to expose the black waistband of a thong.

Her name was Dawn, apparently.

“Okay?”

She grinned back and danced closer.

And closer.

When Mike jerked his head at an exit, she nodded. And when he put one arm round her shoulder to steer her towards the door, she smiled and let his hand slip forward until it hovered above her shiny bra. With a sideways glance, he grabbed a handful, ready to make a joke of it if she protested but Dawn just giggled and turned her head, mouth opening as she raised her face for a kiss.

A crowd of students pushed past on both sides, jeering at the thirtysomething man with his arms locked round a teenager, though no one actually seemed to mind that he blocked the door between the main dance floor and the loos at Neutropic. The last of the students, a kid with a magenta dread wig, silver contacts and a vest that readDEEP AND TRIBAL, glanced back, noticed that the girl now had one breast completely out of her bra and grinned. So Mike twisted his lips into a smile and nodded to the student, a ubiquitous knowing nod that the Thiergarten agent hoped said sorted .

From the floor came the gut-crunching, ear-bleeding thud of bass bins overlaid with a wasplike electronic loop that wound itself up and up but went nowhere, endlessly . . .

Mike hated the noise but then, he hated nightclubs, which was why he’d been so happy to firebomb the last one. To really like the music, he’d decided, you had to be out of your head and Mike was teetotal everything. Unlike the Friday night crowd around him.

That any clubs opened on a holy day upset the mullahs; so those which did made sure their licences were up-to-date, closing times were met and the local uniforms paid off. The morales themselves were mostly beyond bribery, though blackmail could work.

The other thing Neutropic did was weed out locals at the door. Anyone who didn’t do a convincing impression of a well-dressed foreigner got bounced by the fashion police. Letting in Iskandryia’s own just wasn’t worth the grief.

Which was fine with Mike Estelle. The last thing he needed was to hook up with some local kid who had an angry elder brother and five uncles.

“You know what I like about this place?”

He didn’t.

“Everyone’s always off their heads.”

Yeah, he liked that too. Mind you . . . “You know, it’s a bit noisy . . .”

“What?”

He started to repeat himself and then realized she was grinning, so he grinned back and gently steered her through the door and towards some fire doors.

“Wait.”

He looked at her.

“Rehydration,” she said, pulling three tiny pink hearts from the pocket of her white jeans. “Need a bottle for these.” Actually they weren’t jeans, they were some kind of paper-thin trouser, bias-cut from acetate, belted with a silver sheriff’s star on a leather thong threaded through loops. And she didn’t need water . . .

“You ever tried a kite?” He dipped his own hand inside his shirt, reaching for a small pouch that hung on a silver chain round his neck. Shaking out a tiny purple lozenge, he dropped it into her open hand.

“No need for water with these,” he said. “They just melt in your mouth.”

“What’s in them?”

He smiled and named a cat valium analogue mentioned earlier at the bar by some girl he’d bought a drink. She had been older than this one, not yet close to being drunk and there was a hardness to her, a neurotic edge that made him nod politely, knock back his Diet Coke and disengage. Places like Neutropic didn’t exist for people like her to waste his time. Besides, she’d been Swiss and he needed a Yank . . . Or at the very least some Yank wannabe from the American university.