The Heist of Hollow London, page 16
“Y’know, with your…” Arlo tapped the side of his head.
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Great. Feeling very, very stable.” She smiled and shut her case.
Arlo didn’t think Drienne could tell when an episode was coming on. She’d never done anything to mitigate those episodes—for example, by taking herself out of a social situation, or suspending access to her own money for a few hours. But stress was often a trigger for her, and right now she did seem remarkably calm.
Arlo nodded. “Then we’ve got a job to do.”
They picked up their cases and left the room.
* * *
Drienne and Arlo took the overline, passing through Acton on their way up to Kentish Cyc. It struck Drienne that her character—Annie, she reminded herself, Annie Clarke, repeating it under her breath—would be even more aghast at the state of London than she was, and she should lean into that. She felt like she ought to have some talent for this sort of deep roleplay, due to her tendency to slip into an alternate persona, but she’d never done it consciously. Her ambassadorial persona was a construct, but there was no authentic self she reverted to when she wasn’t working; the construct had long since supplanted it. She was looking forward to finding out if she was good at pretending. It might be a skill she could use in the new life she was going to build after all this.
“Do you think,” she said to Arlo, “that if we do this and our debts are canned…”
Arlo turned and looked around, in case someone might hear them, but the carriage was empty and even if it hadn’t been, they could barely hear each other over the grind of poorly maintained wheels against dusty rails, so anyone not sitting right next to Drienne would have no chance of hearing her.
“Do you think my problems might stop?” she finished. She’d been wanting to say this ever since Mia told her of the reward for success, but she was afraid it sounded foolish.
“I’ve no idea,” said Arlo.
“Neither have I, but what do you think?”
“I suppose it depends whether it’s caused by circumstances, or by something, you know…”
“In my brain.”
“Yeah.”
“I just think … if the problem is a disconnect between my being a made, and some part of my brain that refuses to accept that’s what I am…”
“Is that how it works?”
“I don’t know.” Drienne felt irritated: he should know by now she didn’t know how it worked. “But if it is that—if my circumstances change, and the fact I’m a made isn’t important anymore, will that fix it?”
“Do you think what we are won’t be important anymore?”
“It won’t, will it? If we’re no longer retained … it won’t matter that we’re mades, will it?”
“I don’t know. Won’t we always be different?”
Drienne didn’t know the answer. She looked out the window, and watched some kids taking turns to throw rocks at a rusting double-decker bus.
* * *
A man was waiting for them at the platform when they arrived, wearing a shiny dark gray polo and matching baggy trousers—both items Arlo had been pushing a couple of months ago, which spoke volumes. Drienne and Arlo had read the man’s personnel file, so they already knew he was very low-status in xec terms. But even if Drienne hadn’t known that, she could immediately tell by his clothes. He’d given up.
“Hello, I’m Henrik Paul,” he told them. “You must be Roland and Annie.”
Drienne and Arlo both remembered to smile in the way you do when someone says your name. Drienne shook Henrik’s hand and he asked if they’d had a good journey.
“Very smooth,” Drienne said.
“Yes,” Arlo agreed. “Much better than I expected.”
“Oh god,” said Henrik, “have you heard horror stories?”
“Well…”
“Nothing specific,” said Drienne.
“It’s really not that bad,” Henrik stressed. “If you’re using business routes, the system still basically works. But I don’t blame you for the quick turnaround.”
Drienne felt sorry for Henrik. His file had not been a long read. He’d been working here eleven years, and there was little of note in that time except a couple of minor disciplinaries. When Mia had been working here, Kentish Cyc was seen as a good, challenging proving ground for young, hungry talent. But its prestige had faded, worn down by the diseased city that housed it, and Henrik was not young, hungry talent. The fact the plant had xecs at all was a relic of a time when it had been an exciting project. Henrik had been sent here in his early thirties, which meant they didn’t want him anywhere else. Possibly there’d been an incident that had been kept off his file—maybe he’d fucked up, pissed off someone important, or knew too much and had been pushed to the margins. Or maybe he was just bad at his job. Xecs very rarely got fired for being useless: they could be ruthless with each other if they had something to gain, but it took something major to turn their backs on one of their own. Instead, they just let them fail sideways. Out of the public eye, buried here and in the other Londons of the world no one wanted to acknowledge.
The trio headed down to the street. Before they crossed, Henrik turned to Arlo and Drienne and said, “Crazy, isn’t it?”
“Mm,” said Drienne, but the question had been directed toward Arlo.
“The company just collapsing out of nowhere, I mean,” Henrik went on.
“Yes,” said Arlo. “Strange times.”
“No one saw it coming, did they? I don’t know, maybe you did. Did you?”
“No, we—”
“We had been on alert for it,” said Drienne.
“But really only the few weeks before it happened,” added Arlo. “It’s like they say, you go bankrupt gradually, then very suddenly.”
“Who says that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ernest Hemingway,” said Drienne.
“It’s very odd,” Henrik said to Arlo without acknowledging Drienne had spoken. “I’ve no idea what I’m going to do. Most of the workforce will stay when the plant is sold—I mean, half of them are mades anyway, so they’ll be sold as part of the package, of course.”
“Of course,” said Drienne, unable to stop herself adding an edge to it that thankfully seemed to go unnoticed.
“But the new owners will want their own top-floor people in, so I’ll be out of a job. I’m sure someone’s ready to swoop in and buy it the moment you’re done and it goes on sale. But that’s really why I wanted to meet you off the carriage.”
“Because you wanted to ask if there are any jobs going at RookDivest?” said Drienne.
Henrik laughed. “Ha! No. I mean, if there are—”
“We wouldn’t know, sorry,” said Arlo, and Drienne could hear him keeping the annoyance out of his voice. He was right, to be fair: the last thing she should do was invite contact between this guy and RookDivest. She would bite her tongue next time.
“Of course. No, it’s…” Henrik glanced at the plant and lowered his voice slightly. “Er … you should know the workforce—everyone below the upper floor, I mean—they don’t know the company has collapsed.”
“Ah,” said Arlo, reacting as if this was new, but not surprising, information.
Taking her cue from this, Drienne added: “We thought that might be the case.”
“Is that normal practice in situations like this, then?” Henrik looked from Drienne to Arlo.
“It’s not unusual.”
“It wasn’t my idea. Last instruction I got, so I couldn’t query it. It’s been hard work keeping it from them, but worth it, I suppose, because productivity has been great. But maybe we can avoid tipping them off?”
“Won’t your staff notice when we start removing all the branding?” said Arlo.
“They might notice something. But they’re not a terribly curious bunch, so just be unobtrusive and they’ll figure it’s not their business, I think.”
So much for Kline’s insistence that management would have a plan for this.
“If they do ask,” said Drienne, “we could claim to be doing a branding update, rather than a debranding.”
“If you like,” said Henrik, nodding. “Yes, that makes sense.” He raised a hand and gestured for them to cross the street. As Arlo and Drienne walked ahead of him, they exchanged a glance they made sure he didn’t catch. They always knew when both of them were thinking the same thing, and they both thought this guy was a fucking clown.
* * *
The security arch at the main entrance accepted Arlo and Drienne, or rather Roland and Annie, without a hitch. Then they stood in the reception area for several minutes nodding as Henrik droned on about keeping morale high and quotas and his hands-off approach to management. Eventually, Arlo gently suggested they needed to start work.
“I’ll accompany you on your way round, of course,” Henrik said.
“That isn’t necessary,” Drienne said in a tone suggesting they didn’t want to inconvenience him by making him do something as tedious as that.
“Oh yes,” said Arlo, “we know our way round, we’ve got a detailed plan of where to go and what to look for.”
“I’m sure you do,” said Henrik, “but you know what these old places are like—things get moved and modified over the years. I know every inch of this building.” He gently punched a support strut, as if joshing with a younger sibling.
“Right.” They hadn’t prepared for this. Kline had profiled the guy and declared he was much too laissez-faire to have any interest in being involved in a mundane operation in a workplace he would shortly be dismissed from. “That isn’t—I mean, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do.”
Henrik smiled and shrugged. “Not really! We’re not supposed to change anything until the place is sold, so there’s very little for me to do.”
“We want to get through it as quickly as possible,” said Drienne, “so we were going to split up and—”
“That makes sense,” said Henrik, and turned to Arlo. “I’ll come with you.”
Fuck. Drienne had left the door wide open for that one. And it was dawning on her why Henrik had been giving Arlo more attention—the xec was attracted to him. Kline hadn’t allowed for that. There wasn’t much they could do if he was keen to hang around; well, they could tell him to fuck off, but it was all-important to keep this businesslike and neither of them could think of any good reason why Henrik shouldn’t help with this process.
“Do you have a bathroom I can use?” Drienne asked.
22
MORE THAN SHE’S SAYING
Kline was at the window of his apartment, trying to see if Frankie James was home (she wasn’t there this morning, which suggested she’d been on the early shift today, and her window was now open). He’d worn his favorite burgundy suit for the operation—he’d be sitting in here the entire time, and the weather was too warm for it really, but this suit always made him feel sharp, professional, on his game. Drienne messaged him to confirm she and Arlo had got into Kentish Cyc and their cover was proving watertight thus far (of course it was, the credentials he’d created were impeccable, if anything went wrong Arlo and Drienne’s performance would be to blame). However, there was a badly worded addendum to this that took Kline a few moments to decipher: xec insisting on accompanying us, tried to shake him off no luck, you said he wouldnt join! need to distract, help.
Kline replied: what do you expect me to do about it?
dont know think of something?? wrote Drienne. thought you could give him something to investigate.
Kline moved away from the window and sat on the apartment’s uncomfortable sofa. It wasn’t his fault Paul wanted to be involved in the operation: nothing on his record suggested that. He opened up his model of the HR structure of the plant and looked for weak points.
* * *
After getting back to Kentish Cyc, Nadi had found her four carts of salvage waiting in the collection bay and then lingered there, pretending there was a problem with the couplings. Then she checked no one was looking, delved into the cart that contained the cut-up bed frame pieces, and retrieved the Lost Weekend, relieved to have it in her hands again. The front of Nadi’s overalls had a stash pouch on the inside to accommodate the device. This had been Loren’s idea. It was uncomfortable, but the overalls were baggy and hung shapelessly over her breasts in such a way that the device, when stashed flat against her stomach, added no noticeable bulk. The securits paid little attention to what you did with salvage while you were still on shift. Their concern was whether you took any of it away with you, and they trusted the exit scanners to take care of that.
Nadi then proceeded to take her carts up to the workfloor, where she dumped all her scrap metal in the appropriate bay. While doing this she received the alert telling her Drienne and Arlo had entered the plant, which meant soon she’d get the word to meet Drienne and pass her the device. They’d agreed to meet in a bathroom near the plastics bay, and to this end Nadi had deliberately sought out more strips of plastic with the same glue that had vexed her yesterday. This meant she would be able to lurk near the plastics bay for several minutes. She stationed herself there and patiently started to scrape away the glue.
While Nadi was doing this, someone tapped her on the shoulder. Probably they were going to give her glue-removal advice like that old woman yesterday. Nadi turned to find a middle-aged woman with sun-weathered skin and very dry hair peering suspiciously at her.
“You came here from one of the other Oakseed sites, yeah?” the woman said.
“Yes,” said Nadi, glancing up from the plastic and then returning her attention to it.
“Where was it?”
“Helsinki,” Nadi said, this time without looking up. She’d memorized a whole bunch of stuff about Helsinki in case anyone asked her about it and no one had, until the exact moment she really didn’t want to talk.
“Listen to me,” said the woman.
“I am listening.”
“This is important. Don’t ignore me.”
Nadi guessed the woman was a nat, and had clocked Nadi for a made. Despite them having exactly equivalent status at the plant, the woman had that air of entitlement, like she was a class above. Nadi put the plastic strip down on the ledge and sized the woman up. She was at least twenty centimeters shorter than Nadi and certainly weighed a good deal less. Her hands were slender. She didn’t look like she could best Nadi in hand-to-hand combat, so it was interesting she was being so aggressive. Perhaps she didn’t expect a confrontation with a made would provoke a violent response. Or maybe she was a skilled fighter, or armed, and fancied her chances if a confrontation kicked off. The arch would have picked up any weapons she’d brought to the plant today but harvesting brought many opportunities to find makeshift weapons: shards of glass, twisted metal, et cetera.
“What was happening in Helsinki when you left?” the woman said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Is the Helsinki operation still there?”
“Of course it is.”
“I think that’s bullshit,” the woman said with a mirthless smile. “I heard the company’s collapsed. Gone. And we’re the only bit still running.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Nadi started to say, but she was interrupted by a middle-aged man with deep scars across the left side of his face, including a diagonal one across his eyebrow that would have given him an angry appearance if he hadn’t been angry anyway. It wasn’t Nadi he was angry with.
“Sharon,” the scarred man said. “Stop this.”
“But she knows,” said the woman, whose name was apparently Sharon, as she jabbed a finger in the direction of Nadi’s face. “She was on a different site less than a week ago. Helsinki. And now they sent her here.”
“Okay, so she must know,” said the scarred man. He turned to Nadi. “Hi—my name’s Mitch, glad to have you on the team.”
Mitch put out a hand and Nadi shook it, feeling conscious of the device stashed inside her overalls. She used the handshake as a pretext to lean forward a little just in case the bulge was showing. “Good to meet you,” she said.
“Cool. So could you put these rumors to bed for us, at all?” He looked at Nadi hopefully and jerked a thumb in Sharon’s direction. “Because she won’t shut up about it all of a sudden.”
“Everything was normal when I left,” Nadi said.
“But did you hear anything?” Sharon glared urgently at her.
“No. I mean, no one ever tells us anything.”
Mitch nodded, apparently satisfied, and turned to Sharon. “There. Now, can you please stop upsetting people with all this talk.”
“You’re not in charge of anyone, Mitch.”
“No, but I speak for many of the people here—”
“No, you fucking don’t.”
“I don’t want to have to report you—”
“That’s a lie, you shitty little copper, you’re gagging to report me—”
“Come on—”
Sharon turned and jabbed her finger toward Nadi’s face again. “She knows more than she’s saying.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nadi, “I really can’t tell you any more.”
“Hell of a coincidence you got redeployed here now.”
“Not really. You needed someone else here and I was available.”
“Oh right,” Sharon said, taking a step toward Nadi, “you were available.”
“Please move away from me and calm down.”
Sharon reached out and grabbed Nadi’s overalls just below her neck.
What followed was automatic and Nadi would have done it in any situation, but it gained urgency because she didn’t want anyone putting a hand on the part of her overalls where the device was stashed, and Sharon’s hand was already too close for comfort. Nadi’s right hand shot up and grabbed Sharon’s wrist, her thumb closing around the heel of Sharon’s hand, then she squeezed hard to force Sharon’s fingers to lose their grip on the overalls. Before Sharon could react, Nadi turned on the spot, kept her grip on Sharon’s wrist, and brought the other woman’s arm over her head, twisting it. Sharon yelped in pain and dropped to the ground.
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Great. Feeling very, very stable.” She smiled and shut her case.
Arlo didn’t think Drienne could tell when an episode was coming on. She’d never done anything to mitigate those episodes—for example, by taking herself out of a social situation, or suspending access to her own money for a few hours. But stress was often a trigger for her, and right now she did seem remarkably calm.
Arlo nodded. “Then we’ve got a job to do.”
They picked up their cases and left the room.
* * *
Drienne and Arlo took the overline, passing through Acton on their way up to Kentish Cyc. It struck Drienne that her character—Annie, she reminded herself, Annie Clarke, repeating it under her breath—would be even more aghast at the state of London than she was, and she should lean into that. She felt like she ought to have some talent for this sort of deep roleplay, due to her tendency to slip into an alternate persona, but she’d never done it consciously. Her ambassadorial persona was a construct, but there was no authentic self she reverted to when she wasn’t working; the construct had long since supplanted it. She was looking forward to finding out if she was good at pretending. It might be a skill she could use in the new life she was going to build after all this.
“Do you think,” she said to Arlo, “that if we do this and our debts are canned…”
Arlo turned and looked around, in case someone might hear them, but the carriage was empty and even if it hadn’t been, they could barely hear each other over the grind of poorly maintained wheels against dusty rails, so anyone not sitting right next to Drienne would have no chance of hearing her.
“Do you think my problems might stop?” she finished. She’d been wanting to say this ever since Mia told her of the reward for success, but she was afraid it sounded foolish.
“I’ve no idea,” said Arlo.
“Neither have I, but what do you think?”
“I suppose it depends whether it’s caused by circumstances, or by something, you know…”
“In my brain.”
“Yeah.”
“I just think … if the problem is a disconnect between my being a made, and some part of my brain that refuses to accept that’s what I am…”
“Is that how it works?”
“I don’t know.” Drienne felt irritated: he should know by now she didn’t know how it worked. “But if it is that—if my circumstances change, and the fact I’m a made isn’t important anymore, will that fix it?”
“Do you think what we are won’t be important anymore?”
“It won’t, will it? If we’re no longer retained … it won’t matter that we’re mades, will it?”
“I don’t know. Won’t we always be different?”
Drienne didn’t know the answer. She looked out the window, and watched some kids taking turns to throw rocks at a rusting double-decker bus.
* * *
A man was waiting for them at the platform when they arrived, wearing a shiny dark gray polo and matching baggy trousers—both items Arlo had been pushing a couple of months ago, which spoke volumes. Drienne and Arlo had read the man’s personnel file, so they already knew he was very low-status in xec terms. But even if Drienne hadn’t known that, she could immediately tell by his clothes. He’d given up.
“Hello, I’m Henrik Paul,” he told them. “You must be Roland and Annie.”
Drienne and Arlo both remembered to smile in the way you do when someone says your name. Drienne shook Henrik’s hand and he asked if they’d had a good journey.
“Very smooth,” Drienne said.
“Yes,” Arlo agreed. “Much better than I expected.”
“Oh god,” said Henrik, “have you heard horror stories?”
“Well…”
“Nothing specific,” said Drienne.
“It’s really not that bad,” Henrik stressed. “If you’re using business routes, the system still basically works. But I don’t blame you for the quick turnaround.”
Drienne felt sorry for Henrik. His file had not been a long read. He’d been working here eleven years, and there was little of note in that time except a couple of minor disciplinaries. When Mia had been working here, Kentish Cyc was seen as a good, challenging proving ground for young, hungry talent. But its prestige had faded, worn down by the diseased city that housed it, and Henrik was not young, hungry talent. The fact the plant had xecs at all was a relic of a time when it had been an exciting project. Henrik had been sent here in his early thirties, which meant they didn’t want him anywhere else. Possibly there’d been an incident that had been kept off his file—maybe he’d fucked up, pissed off someone important, or knew too much and had been pushed to the margins. Or maybe he was just bad at his job. Xecs very rarely got fired for being useless: they could be ruthless with each other if they had something to gain, but it took something major to turn their backs on one of their own. Instead, they just let them fail sideways. Out of the public eye, buried here and in the other Londons of the world no one wanted to acknowledge.
The trio headed down to the street. Before they crossed, Henrik turned to Arlo and Drienne and said, “Crazy, isn’t it?”
“Mm,” said Drienne, but the question had been directed toward Arlo.
“The company just collapsing out of nowhere, I mean,” Henrik went on.
“Yes,” said Arlo. “Strange times.”
“No one saw it coming, did they? I don’t know, maybe you did. Did you?”
“No, we—”
“We had been on alert for it,” said Drienne.
“But really only the few weeks before it happened,” added Arlo. “It’s like they say, you go bankrupt gradually, then very suddenly.”
“Who says that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ernest Hemingway,” said Drienne.
“It’s very odd,” Henrik said to Arlo without acknowledging Drienne had spoken. “I’ve no idea what I’m going to do. Most of the workforce will stay when the plant is sold—I mean, half of them are mades anyway, so they’ll be sold as part of the package, of course.”
“Of course,” said Drienne, unable to stop herself adding an edge to it that thankfully seemed to go unnoticed.
“But the new owners will want their own top-floor people in, so I’ll be out of a job. I’m sure someone’s ready to swoop in and buy it the moment you’re done and it goes on sale. But that’s really why I wanted to meet you off the carriage.”
“Because you wanted to ask if there are any jobs going at RookDivest?” said Drienne.
Henrik laughed. “Ha! No. I mean, if there are—”
“We wouldn’t know, sorry,” said Arlo, and Drienne could hear him keeping the annoyance out of his voice. He was right, to be fair: the last thing she should do was invite contact between this guy and RookDivest. She would bite her tongue next time.
“Of course. No, it’s…” Henrik glanced at the plant and lowered his voice slightly. “Er … you should know the workforce—everyone below the upper floor, I mean—they don’t know the company has collapsed.”
“Ah,” said Arlo, reacting as if this was new, but not surprising, information.
Taking her cue from this, Drienne added: “We thought that might be the case.”
“Is that normal practice in situations like this, then?” Henrik looked from Drienne to Arlo.
“It’s not unusual.”
“It wasn’t my idea. Last instruction I got, so I couldn’t query it. It’s been hard work keeping it from them, but worth it, I suppose, because productivity has been great. But maybe we can avoid tipping them off?”
“Won’t your staff notice when we start removing all the branding?” said Arlo.
“They might notice something. But they’re not a terribly curious bunch, so just be unobtrusive and they’ll figure it’s not their business, I think.”
So much for Kline’s insistence that management would have a plan for this.
“If they do ask,” said Drienne, “we could claim to be doing a branding update, rather than a debranding.”
“If you like,” said Henrik, nodding. “Yes, that makes sense.” He raised a hand and gestured for them to cross the street. As Arlo and Drienne walked ahead of him, they exchanged a glance they made sure he didn’t catch. They always knew when both of them were thinking the same thing, and they both thought this guy was a fucking clown.
* * *
The security arch at the main entrance accepted Arlo and Drienne, or rather Roland and Annie, without a hitch. Then they stood in the reception area for several minutes nodding as Henrik droned on about keeping morale high and quotas and his hands-off approach to management. Eventually, Arlo gently suggested they needed to start work.
“I’ll accompany you on your way round, of course,” Henrik said.
“That isn’t necessary,” Drienne said in a tone suggesting they didn’t want to inconvenience him by making him do something as tedious as that.
“Oh yes,” said Arlo, “we know our way round, we’ve got a detailed plan of where to go and what to look for.”
“I’m sure you do,” said Henrik, “but you know what these old places are like—things get moved and modified over the years. I know every inch of this building.” He gently punched a support strut, as if joshing with a younger sibling.
“Right.” They hadn’t prepared for this. Kline had profiled the guy and declared he was much too laissez-faire to have any interest in being involved in a mundane operation in a workplace he would shortly be dismissed from. “That isn’t—I mean, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do.”
Henrik smiled and shrugged. “Not really! We’re not supposed to change anything until the place is sold, so there’s very little for me to do.”
“We want to get through it as quickly as possible,” said Drienne, “so we were going to split up and—”
“That makes sense,” said Henrik, and turned to Arlo. “I’ll come with you.”
Fuck. Drienne had left the door wide open for that one. And it was dawning on her why Henrik had been giving Arlo more attention—the xec was attracted to him. Kline hadn’t allowed for that. There wasn’t much they could do if he was keen to hang around; well, they could tell him to fuck off, but it was all-important to keep this businesslike and neither of them could think of any good reason why Henrik shouldn’t help with this process.
“Do you have a bathroom I can use?” Drienne asked.
22
MORE THAN SHE’S SAYING
Kline was at the window of his apartment, trying to see if Frankie James was home (she wasn’t there this morning, which suggested she’d been on the early shift today, and her window was now open). He’d worn his favorite burgundy suit for the operation—he’d be sitting in here the entire time, and the weather was too warm for it really, but this suit always made him feel sharp, professional, on his game. Drienne messaged him to confirm she and Arlo had got into Kentish Cyc and their cover was proving watertight thus far (of course it was, the credentials he’d created were impeccable, if anything went wrong Arlo and Drienne’s performance would be to blame). However, there was a badly worded addendum to this that took Kline a few moments to decipher: xec insisting on accompanying us, tried to shake him off no luck, you said he wouldnt join! need to distract, help.
Kline replied: what do you expect me to do about it?
dont know think of something?? wrote Drienne. thought you could give him something to investigate.
Kline moved away from the window and sat on the apartment’s uncomfortable sofa. It wasn’t his fault Paul wanted to be involved in the operation: nothing on his record suggested that. He opened up his model of the HR structure of the plant and looked for weak points.
* * *
After getting back to Kentish Cyc, Nadi had found her four carts of salvage waiting in the collection bay and then lingered there, pretending there was a problem with the couplings. Then she checked no one was looking, delved into the cart that contained the cut-up bed frame pieces, and retrieved the Lost Weekend, relieved to have it in her hands again. The front of Nadi’s overalls had a stash pouch on the inside to accommodate the device. This had been Loren’s idea. It was uncomfortable, but the overalls were baggy and hung shapelessly over her breasts in such a way that the device, when stashed flat against her stomach, added no noticeable bulk. The securits paid little attention to what you did with salvage while you were still on shift. Their concern was whether you took any of it away with you, and they trusted the exit scanners to take care of that.
Nadi then proceeded to take her carts up to the workfloor, where she dumped all her scrap metal in the appropriate bay. While doing this she received the alert telling her Drienne and Arlo had entered the plant, which meant soon she’d get the word to meet Drienne and pass her the device. They’d agreed to meet in a bathroom near the plastics bay, and to this end Nadi had deliberately sought out more strips of plastic with the same glue that had vexed her yesterday. This meant she would be able to lurk near the plastics bay for several minutes. She stationed herself there and patiently started to scrape away the glue.
While Nadi was doing this, someone tapped her on the shoulder. Probably they were going to give her glue-removal advice like that old woman yesterday. Nadi turned to find a middle-aged woman with sun-weathered skin and very dry hair peering suspiciously at her.
“You came here from one of the other Oakseed sites, yeah?” the woman said.
“Yes,” said Nadi, glancing up from the plastic and then returning her attention to it.
“Where was it?”
“Helsinki,” Nadi said, this time without looking up. She’d memorized a whole bunch of stuff about Helsinki in case anyone asked her about it and no one had, until the exact moment she really didn’t want to talk.
“Listen to me,” said the woman.
“I am listening.”
“This is important. Don’t ignore me.”
Nadi guessed the woman was a nat, and had clocked Nadi for a made. Despite them having exactly equivalent status at the plant, the woman had that air of entitlement, like she was a class above. Nadi put the plastic strip down on the ledge and sized the woman up. She was at least twenty centimeters shorter than Nadi and certainly weighed a good deal less. Her hands were slender. She didn’t look like she could best Nadi in hand-to-hand combat, so it was interesting she was being so aggressive. Perhaps she didn’t expect a confrontation with a made would provoke a violent response. Or maybe she was a skilled fighter, or armed, and fancied her chances if a confrontation kicked off. The arch would have picked up any weapons she’d brought to the plant today but harvesting brought many opportunities to find makeshift weapons: shards of glass, twisted metal, et cetera.
“What was happening in Helsinki when you left?” the woman said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Is the Helsinki operation still there?”
“Of course it is.”
“I think that’s bullshit,” the woman said with a mirthless smile. “I heard the company’s collapsed. Gone. And we’re the only bit still running.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Nadi started to say, but she was interrupted by a middle-aged man with deep scars across the left side of his face, including a diagonal one across his eyebrow that would have given him an angry appearance if he hadn’t been angry anyway. It wasn’t Nadi he was angry with.
“Sharon,” the scarred man said. “Stop this.”
“But she knows,” said the woman, whose name was apparently Sharon, as she jabbed a finger in the direction of Nadi’s face. “She was on a different site less than a week ago. Helsinki. And now they sent her here.”
“Okay, so she must know,” said the scarred man. He turned to Nadi. “Hi—my name’s Mitch, glad to have you on the team.”
Mitch put out a hand and Nadi shook it, feeling conscious of the device stashed inside her overalls. She used the handshake as a pretext to lean forward a little just in case the bulge was showing. “Good to meet you,” she said.
“Cool. So could you put these rumors to bed for us, at all?” He looked at Nadi hopefully and jerked a thumb in Sharon’s direction. “Because she won’t shut up about it all of a sudden.”
“Everything was normal when I left,” Nadi said.
“But did you hear anything?” Sharon glared urgently at her.
“No. I mean, no one ever tells us anything.”
Mitch nodded, apparently satisfied, and turned to Sharon. “There. Now, can you please stop upsetting people with all this talk.”
“You’re not in charge of anyone, Mitch.”
“No, but I speak for many of the people here—”
“No, you fucking don’t.”
“I don’t want to have to report you—”
“That’s a lie, you shitty little copper, you’re gagging to report me—”
“Come on—”
Sharon turned and jabbed her finger toward Nadi’s face again. “She knows more than she’s saying.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nadi, “I really can’t tell you any more.”
“Hell of a coincidence you got redeployed here now.”
“Not really. You needed someone else here and I was available.”
“Oh right,” Sharon said, taking a step toward Nadi, “you were available.”
“Please move away from me and calm down.”
Sharon reached out and grabbed Nadi’s overalls just below her neck.
What followed was automatic and Nadi would have done it in any situation, but it gained urgency because she didn’t want anyone putting a hand on the part of her overalls where the device was stashed, and Sharon’s hand was already too close for comfort. Nadi’s right hand shot up and grabbed Sharon’s wrist, her thumb closing around the heel of Sharon’s hand, then she squeezed hard to force Sharon’s fingers to lose their grip on the overalls. Before Sharon could react, Nadi turned on the spot, kept her grip on Sharon’s wrist, and brought the other woman’s arm over her head, twisting it. Sharon yelped in pain and dropped to the ground.
