Even the orientation procedures were disorganized and sloppy. Magyar had surprised me on my second day by digging up a copy of the orientation disk. “Watch it in the breakroom,” she said. “It runs forty minutes. I want you back on station in forty-five.”
The carpets and walls of the breakroom were done in white and teal, and there were about twenty uncomfortable chairs and two screens, one tuned to the net—usually the news—the other to a video loop of swimming fish. There was a PIDA reader under each screen, but I didn’t have to V-hand it to run the disk.
The video was terrible. It wasn’t just the production values that were bad; there were several major errors in the procedures described, errors that would continue to echo down the line, like Magyar’s insistence that the bugs could not tolerate even the slightest deviation in temperature. The information was simplistic at best: “In the primary section, specially tailored bacteria break down some of the more toxic compounds. Think of them eating ammonia and excreting other, less toxic chemicals, like nitrite. . .” Worse, there were half a dozen blatant edits where worker safety information had been taken out, probably by Hepple. No details about warning signs of the deadly chlorine gases that could build up, or methane explosions like the one that had killed four hundred workers in Raleigh, North Carolina, six or seven years ago, even though I had seen the red methane-release handles at the emergency station. The simple evacuation drill was clear—use this exit, not that; turn this off, not that—but unexplained. More worryingly, there was no mention of the stakes, the regional impact of polluted water if someone really screwed up their job: nothing about spontaneous abortion and convulsions, or violent dehydrating dysentery, spinal meningitis or central-nervous-system collapse.
“I hope you got something out of it,” Magyar had said when I gave it back. “You need to look out for yourself in a place like this. Pay attention to the machines. They can be dangerous.”
I had not known what to say. The machines in and of themselves were not dangerous—if you followed safety procedures. But you could not follow safety procedures that you were not told about. I wondered how much Magyar herself knew, how much she pretended not to know in order to keep her job. I had contented myself with a nod and a thank-you.
I circled the rake, which was still madly trying to dig its way to Australia. The month before I started this job, another worker had his left leg torn up by a mobile rake that had got stuck. Statutory regulations stated that a machine should never be approached while in operation; that it should be deactivated by remote, then towed out of the water and examined by a qualified technician. At Hedon Road, there was never time: turning the machine off and then on again in less than thirty minutes damaged it. The rakes were temperamental enough without adding to their unreliability, and we were so shorthanded that the unwritten rule was: Shove it out of the hole and keep it going. Once in the clear, whatever was clogging its tines usually got whirled off. If you couldn’t find and retrieve what it was that fouled the blades in the first place, you just hoped that the next time the machine encountered it, it wasn’t your shift.
It looked as though the right front tines were jammed. I stepped carefully in front of the stilled metal, hoping it wouldn’t restart on its own, and leaned in and pushed. The rake chugged, sputtered, then moved sluggishly on its way. A two-foot length of bulrush floated to the surface.
Until I had started work at Hedon Road, I had not cared one way or another about bulrushes. After ten days on the job, I hated them. They were good at what they were intended for—facilitating the anaerobic and aerobic cycles of denitrification and nitrification, and buffering the rest of the system against toxic shock—but they were incredibly difficult to manage. Their tough, fibrous stalks fouled all the maintenance equipment and their fluffy cotton seed heads clogged air intakes. The rakes, of course, were designed to cut the rushes before the heads ripened, but because they had about thirty percent downtime—most of it, of course, during the night shift—we were always behind schedule.
When Magyar had walked by three days ago and seen me pruning the rush heads by hand, she had said nothing, but the next night the other workers had been issued with shears, and instructions to work out their own system for keeping the rushes trimmed. She may have been poorly trained but she was not stupid. She had nodded at me afterward, but said nothing. I found myself liking her.
I pulled down the record slate and started to check the readouts. Smart or not, good instincts or not, Magyar wouldn’t take kindly to being shown too many times how to improve things by a new worker. I could not blame her for that. I wondered how my father would have handled the situation in my place . . .
And then I was standing staring at the slate without seeing it, tears rolling down my face. What was I doing here? I didn’t belong. I could run this place in my sleep. I shouldn’t be waist-deep in other people’s shit. I could be back on Ratnapida, lying on my back in the sun-warmed grass watching the clouds, making up stories with Tok about industrial counterespionage . . . And we would eat dinner with Oster and Katerine, and Greta and Stella; Willem and Marley would be staying for the week . . .
But Stella was dead, Oster was not who he had pretended to be for all those years, and my family had refused to pay my ransom. There was no going back because what I wanted to return to had never existed, except in my Oster-woven version of reality.
I shoved the slate back on the shelf, angry for letting self-pity distort everything. Reality at Ratnapida would more likely be the family sitting at the table, pretending not to see me, pretending that the kidnap and abuse had never happened, that they had not received, not watched—over and over—the tapes my abductors had made for the net. My reality and theirs were different. Looking back, they always had been. The family had refused to hand over the money quickly enough for my abductors, but I doubted they would see it that way. Some might say it was their fault I had been subjected to such public humiliation, their fault I had ended up killing. But if I went back now they would just sip pinot grigio from crystal glasses, eat salad from Noritake china, and pretend that I had not been treated as a thing, had not had to scrabble to survive, that nothing had changed. And I would have to look at Oster and wonder if the decision not to pay had been deliberate, because I knew too much.
No. There was no going back. I had known that when I lifted the rusty nail and stabbed it into Fishface’s neck. That part of my life was over.
I breathed hard, and clenched and relaxed my face muscles. Self-pity could creep up on anyone, but I would not let it happen again.
A flickering readout caught my eye. Readouts were not supposed to flicker. Another flashed from 20.7 to 5 to 87 and back again. That made no sense at all. Then all the readouts went berserk.
I lifted the phone, tapped in Magyar’s call code. “This is station four, primary sector.” I had to shout over the trilling station alarms.
“What is it, Bird?”
“I have readout anomalies.”
“Which ones?”
“The whole bank. Going wild. Nothing makes any sense.” Magyar did not reply immediately. She probably did not know what to do. “I need your authorization to cut the flow to the secondary sector.”
“But we don’t know that there’s anything wrong with our stream. . .” She sounded scared.
“We don’t know that there isn’t, either, and they don’t have the sensors we do.”
“It’s probably computer failure. Or maybe the monitors have gone down because of backflow. Flooding.”
“The flood warning didn’t go off. We have to—” I broke off. Judging from the entire bank of instruments going crazy, it probably
was
simple computer failure. There was another way. “Look, I think there’s a way I can cut the stream temporarily and divert it to the holding tanks. Fifteen minutes won’t do anyone any harm. Secondary sector might not even notice. And I can take some readings manually, if you have a handheld photoionization detector around.”
There was a moment of silence. “There’s one in the locker that’s about knee height. In front of you. Get me your results ASAP.”
The PD turned out to be an old-fashioned portable of a kind I had not seen since I was a child. It was calibrated in parts per trillion. I lugged the case out of the influent bunker and along to my trough. It took me a while to remember how to assemble it. Thigh-deep in water, I hoped I would not stumble into one of the irregular gouges the rake had torn in the gravel. With the weight of the PD I would overbalance and I had no barrier protection for my face. The machine bleeped softly in my hand. Everything looked good so far.
It was full dark outside now, and the water, under its surface of reflected bright white, looked black, like ink. If the lights here went out, I wondered, would I be able to see the stars reflected in the troughs? Only if someone went onto the roof and cleaned off years’ worth of grime.
Ten minutes later, when I waded out, Magyar was waiting, thumbs hooked in her belt.
“The readings are fine. Dead on normal.”
“Good.” I waited for her to say
I told you so
. The holding tanks would now have to be pumped out and cleaned. A lot of extra work for a shorthanded shift. She just nodded at the PD. “That’s not a handheld.”
“It’s all there was.”
“Looks heavy.”
“It’s not so bad when you’re in the water. And, anyway, it feels a lot lighter than they used to when I was thirteen.”
She gave me a strange look. “I’ll have to take your word for that.”
I pretended not to notice her surprise, but I was disgusted with myself. First self-pity, now nostalgia. It led to slips I could not afford.
SIX
Lore is nearly seven and a half. The family is staying with friends in Venezuela for month or so over Christmas. Greta is there, too.
The only image Lore really has of her half sister, Greta, is grayness: gray hair, gray eyes, and a gray kind of attitude to life. She is almost always away somewhere looking after the family interests. She is much older, of course—twenty-five now—and Lore tends to treat her more like an aunt than a sister, partly because Greta, even when she’s around, seems so distant, withdrawn. Not unkind, just preoccupied with whatever it is that always makes her look stooped and check around corners before turning them. Lore has never seen her laugh, though sometimes she does smile. At those times Lore thinks she looks beautiful: her face stretches sideways a little, shortening it, taking away the grooves and hollows and shadows, changing it from gray to gold.
Lore’s most vivid memory of Greta has to do with the Dream Monster.
Lore is asleep on her stomach with the covers thrown off the bed—how she always sleeps in a hot climate—when suddenly she is woken up by the monster. It has her pinned down and is breathing hot fire on her neck and groaning like a beast. She shrieks, and pushes, and doors bang open down the corridor, lights come on, and she must have blanked out for a minute or two, or maybe she really was dreaming, because then Katerine is sitting next to her on the bed, still dressed, and Greta is in the doorway, with Oster pulling on pajama trousers.
“A dream,” Katerine is saying to Lore. She turns to Greta and Oster. “Just a dream.”
But Lore is still shaking and realizes she is crying.
“What is it?” Oster says, and kneels by the bed. He takes her hand. “If you tell me what you’re afraid of, we’ll fix it.”
“Wasn’t a dream,” she hiccoughs. She has to make them understand. “It was a monster.”
“Of course it was a dream, love,” Katerine says with a smile. “How could it have got in?”
“Through the door.”
Oster makes a shushing gesture at his wife. “A monster? Well, I don’t much like the idea of a monster being loose when we’re all trying to sleep, so you tell me all about him, and then we can keep a look out.” He ruffles her hair, which she carefully smooths down.
She knows he is humoring her, but it doesn’t matter, because at least he will listen. “It was big and heavy, only not heavy like a rock, heavy like. . .” She doesn’t know how to describe it.
Heavy like the end of everything.
“Very heavy, anyway. It made monster noises. And breathed hot air.” She shudders. That air had felt so bad, like the breath of something dead.
“Well, the solution seems easy enough. If it came through the door, we’ll give you a lock. A special lock that monsters can’t open. Only people. Will that do?”
She considers it, then nods. By this time, Katerine is looking at the time display on the ceiling. “It can wait until tomorrow. It’s past three already and I have that net conference at nine.”
Lore is not sure whether her mother is talking to Oster, or to Greta who is still and silent by the door, or to her. She turns a mute look of appeal to her father.
He sighs. “I’ll deal with it, Kat. You and Greta get to bed.” They do. “I think we’ll be lucky to find a lock at this hour. But there might be a place . . . Will you be all right on your own for half an hour?”
In answer Lore climbs down from the bed, puts on her slippers, and tucks her hand into his. He looks at her, then smiles. “Together it is, then.”
In the end, they take the lock from the pantry door. It is an old-fashioned thing, attached by magnet to jamb and door, the mechanism a crude combination lock. But when they get it onto her bedroom door, and Lore wraps the combination cylinder with her hand so that even Oster can’t see what number she chooses, she feels better. Oster tucks her up, kisses her forehead, and when the door closes behind him, she hears the satisfying
click
that means no one can ever come in here again until she rolls each of the white counters to its proper number.
She is getting dressed the next morning when Greta knocks at the door. She opens it proudly. Greta seems awkward. “Did you sleep better, later?”
Lore nods, then shows Greta her lock. Greta frowns. “This isn’t good enough.”
“But—”
“No, it’s not good enough. Lock the door behind me and watch.”
Lore, mystified as usual by Greta and her ways, does so. Twenty seconds later, the lock clicks back and the door swings open. Lore is suddenly terrified. She doesn’t care that it is Greta who went out of the door, she is sure it is the monster coming back in. She runs to the bed intending to climb under it, forgetting that it is a futon and not her own, high bed in Amsterdam. The door closes again and Lore opens her mouth to scream.
“It’s just me,” Greta says. But she seems distracted. “We’re going to do something about that lock.” And she sits down on the futon right there and starts contacting people on her slate. “There. Now let’s go eat breakfast.”
They are the only ones at breakfast and though the maid drops Greta’s croissant, Greta does not seem to notice. Lore nibbles at her own food and watches her sister surreptitiously over the rim of her juice glass.
Where does she go all the time?
she wonders. Wherever it is, it does not seem very pleasant.
The locksmith arrives only forty minutes later, and the three of them troop upstairs, again in silence. Greta simply points at the door and the locksmith nods.
It takes five minutes. Lore watches, fascinated, as the old lock is removed with something that looks like a cooking spatula, and a creamy ceramic square with a glossy black face replaces it. Lore thinks he has finished until he fishes a second from his pocket and fits it over the door and jamb on the hinge side. He doesn’t look Venezuelan. When the locksmith is finished, he pulls out a white key remote the size of a rabbit’s foot. He presses a button, and the black face turns to deep blue. “All yours.” He starts to hand the key to Greta but she nods in Lore’s direction and he gives it to her instead. He leaves.
“It’s a special lock system,” Greta says. “No one, and I mean no one, will ever be able to get through that lock. And because there are two, they can’t just take the door off its hinges, or knock it down. They’d have to cut a hole through the middle. And the monster can’t do that.”
Lore looks down at the fat white key in her hand and wonders about monsters in the Netherlands.
“You can remove the locks and take them with you, wherever you go. I’ll download all the operating instructions to your slate later. You’d better choose the code when I’m gone. Anything you like. You can even make them different for each side. And you can use algorithms to make sure it’s never the same twice.” She taps the key in Lore’s hand. “Don’t lose that.”
After she goes, Lore sits on her bed, turning the locks on and off, listening to them thunk competently open and closed.
Greta leaves again the next day, and Lore develops a habit of reaching into her pocket to check she has her key whenever she is nervous.