James Corey: The Churn

She shrugged out of her robe and pulled on simple, functional clothes. Running shoes. Her go-bag was a nondescript blue backpack with a three-month supply of her medications, two changes of clothes, four protein bars, a pistol, two boxes of ammunition, a bottle of water, and three thousand dollars spread across half a dozen credit chips. She pulled it down from the top of her closet, and without opening it to check its contents, went to the chair by her front window. The curtains were pale gauze that scattered and softened the afternoon light, graying everything. She pulled a sheer yellow scarf over her hair, swathed her neck, and tied it at her sternum, the ironic echo of her old hijab. Then sat very still, feet side by side, ankles and knees touching. Primly, she thought. She waited in silence to see who would open her door, a security team or Timmy. The darkness, or else the light.

The better part of an hour passed. Her spine hurt, and she savored the pain, keeping her face placid. Smiles or grimaces, either one would disturb her makeup. Then footsteps in the hall, like someone clearing their throat. The door opened, and Timmy stepped in. His gaze flicked down to her back, up to her face. He shrugged and nodded to the hall in a gesture that said, Can we go? as clearly as words. Lydia stood, pulled on her pack as she walked to the door, and left her room for the last time. She had lived there for the better part of a decade. The necklace that Liev had given her the night he’d told her he was moving on, but that she would be cared for, hung from a peg in the bathroom. The cheap earthenware cup that Timmy had painted with glaze when he was eight years old and given her for what he’d mistakenly thought was her birthday remained in the cupboard. The half-finished knitting that an old roommate had left when she disappeared twenty years before sat hunched in a plastic bag under the bed, stinking of dust.

Lydia didn’t look back.

“My spirit animal is the snake,” she said as they walked south together They went side by side, but not touching. “I shed my skin. I just let it slough away.”

“Okay,” Timmy said. “Come on this way. I got a thing waiting.”

The waterline was cleanest near the new port. There, the ships and houseboats rested in clean slips made of flexible ceramic and the bones of the drowned buildings had been cut free and hauled away. With every mile farther from the port, the debris grew less picturesque, the charm of the reclaimed city giving way to the debris of its authentic past. Little beaches formed over asphalt, gray sand swirling around old blocky concrete pillars standing in the waves green with algae and white with bird shit. The stink of rot came from the soupy water and the corpses of jellyfish melting where the tide had left them.

Timmy’s boat was small. White paint flaked off the metal where it hadn’t been scraped well enough before being repainted. Lydia sat in the bow, her legs folded under her, her chin high and proud. The motor was an under-the-waterline pulse drive, quiet as a hum. The water in their wake was louder. The sun was near to setting, the city casting its shadow on the waves. A handful of other boats were on the water, manned by children for the most part. The citizens of basic with nothing better to do with their time than spend the twilight on the water, then go home.

Timmy ran them along the coast for a time, and then turned east, out toward the vast ocean. The moon had set, but the lights of the city were bright enough to travel by. The islands had once been part of the city itself, and now were ruins. Timmy aimed for one of the smaller, a stretch not more than two city blocks long by three wide humped up out of the water. A few ancient walls still stood. The boat ran up onto the hard shore, and Timmy jumped out, soaking his pants to the thighs, to pull it the rest of the way up. The metal screeched against the rotting concrete sidewalk.

The ruin he led her to was little more than a camp site. A bright yellow emergency-preparedness sleeping bag lay unrolled on a foam mattress. An LED lamp squatted beside it with a cord snaking up the grimy wall to a solar collector in the window. A small chemical camping stove stood on a driftwood board placed over two cinderblocks, a little unpowered refrigerator beside it to store food. Two more rooms stood empty through the doorway. If the house had ever had a kitchen or a bathroom, it was lost in the tumble of rubble beyond that. Outside, the city glowed, the violence and bustle made calm and beautiful by even such a small distance. The wail of the sirens and angry blat of the security alerts became a kind of music there, transformed by the mystical act of passing above waves.

Timmy pulled off his water-soaked pants and dug a fresh pair out from under the sleeping bag.

“This is where you go?” Lydia said, putting her hand on the time-pocked window glass. “When you aren’t with me, you come to this?”

“Nobody bugs you here,” Timmy said. “Or, you know. Not twice.”

She nodded, as much to herself as for his benefit. Timmy looked around the room and rubbed his hand across his high forehead.

“It’s not as nice as your place,” he said. “But it’s safe. Temporary.”

“Yes,” she said. “Temporary.”

“Even if Liev does tell ’em about you, it’s not like it’s over. You can get a new name. New paper.”

Lydia turned her gaze back from the city, her right hand going to her left arm as if she were protecting herself. Her gaze darted to the empty doorway, and then back. “Where’s Erich?”

“Yeah, the meet didn’t happen,” Timmy said, leaning against the wall. She never ceased to be amazed by his physicality. The innocence and vulnerability that his body managed to project while still being an instrument of violence.

“Tell me,” she said, and he did. All of it, slowly and carefully, as if worried he might leave something out that she wanted to know. That she found interesting. The low rumble of a launch shuddered like an endless peal of thunder, and the exhaust plume rose into the night sky as he spoke. It had not yet broken into orbit when he stopped.

“And where is he now?” she asked.

“There’s a coffee bar. The one at Franklin and St. Paul? On top of the old high-rises there. I got him there when it was done. They’ve got a deck there you can rent by the minute, and since his got taken, I figured he’d like that. Gotta say, he was pretty freaked out. That DNA thing? I don’t see how that’s gonna end well. If he’s right about how Burton’s gonna react…”

Lydia shook her head once, a tiny gesture, almost invisible by the light of the single LED lamp. “I thought you were his bodyguard. You were assigned to protect him.”

“I did,” Timmy said. “But then the job was done. Burton didn’t tell me I was supposed to go to the bathroom with him for the rest of his life, right? Job was done, so the job was done.”

“I thought you were his friend.”

“I am,” Timmy said. “But, y’know. You .”

“Don’t worry about me. Whatever comes to me, I have earned it a thousand times over. Don’t disagree with me! Don’t interrupt. Burton asked you to protect Erich because Erich is precious to him. The particular job he assigned you may be over, but worse has come to the city, and Erich is still precious.”

“And I get that,” Timmy said. “Only when they got Liev—”

“I have lived through the churn before, darling boy. I know how this goes.” She turned to the window, gesturing at the golden lights of the city. “Liev was only one. There will be others. Perhaps many, perhaps few, but Burton will lose some part of his structure to the security forces or to death. And the ones who remain afterward will become more important to him. He is a man who values survivors. Who values loyalty. What will he think, dear, when he hears that you left Erich to come spirit me away?”