The software was good, and it spun track after track, seamlessly matching beats, but speeding up, daring us to keep up with it on the floor, humans and machines locked together in a musical battle. Shirelle and I busted out our best moves, and then she spun away to dance with an older guy—a steelworker, not a walkaway, you could easily tell ’em apart—who danced like he was a nineteen-year-old at a club in New York City, not a middle-aged guy in a stolen factory in the San Fernando Valley. Then I was whirled off by a pair of walkaways, and one of them was white, and she and her friend, a Mexican-looking guy, did these freaked-out moves that would have looked corny if anyone else had tried ’em, something like a war dance from an old cowboys and Indians movie, and something like a lindy hop, but with them, it worked. I tried out some of their steps, and they smiled and encouraged me and soon we were all grinning like fools.
Meanwhile, in the background—piped in and mixed down with the music by our earbuds—I was aware of the sounds of machines, first faint and tentative, but then more intense and regular, and the software doing the music matched it with paradiddles that put it into a jazz time, so the lindy hop parts of the walkaway dance really worked, and more people were doing it, but more and more of the dancers were drifting over to the machines. First the steelworkers, then the walkaways, then the rest of us, grabbing more beers, forming semicircles around the lines where the machines were doing their things.
The sheet-metal workers moved smoothly, passing parts from one machine to the next—transferring wire gridworks to huge beds where they were stamped and folded, then to a bed where a writhing nest of robot arms made a series of precise, high-speed welds. The shopping carts took shape before our eyes, moving to finishing steps where water-jets cleared off snags of metal and then polished the steel, then into a coating bath tended by workers in masks.
One of the walkaways was unstacking plastic tubs from a pile that was leaning on a column and hauling them over to the area where the upside-down carts were being muscled into place in long, precise rows. The walkaway—a woman the same color as me, and not much older, I realized with a surprise—pulled something out of her crate and snapped it onto a cart. It was a wheel. She went back for more. The walkaways had brought wheels! I hadn’t even thought about how a steel factory would produce rubber wheels. Someone else had, though. Someone who’d thrown more than one Communist party. It wasn’t a game for amateurs.
I joined her. She gave me a pretty smile, one crooked tooth and a lopsided dimple. Her hair was in short braids, streaked with silver. It looked amazing. “Nice hair,” I said as we met at the wheel-tub. It was nearly empty: we had help now, three more people clicking the wheels into place.
“Thank you. I like your shoes.”
I’d worn my coolest kicks: covered in tiny relief sculptures of hundreds of famous athletes twined around each other, every pair unique and printed by Goldman-Nike, designed so that the rubber deformed to make them dance and move when I walked, ribbed with high-contrast piping that glowed bright enough to show every feature, even in the factory light. They were the most expensive thing I owned and I’d nearly died when Mama gave ’em to me for my birthday, so I was proud that she noticed.
“Thank you!”
“Mind if I scan ’em so I can print some later?” She was already moving around them, holding out a bead that she passed over them for several passes. For a second I felt like she was taking something from me, picturing her and all her friends wearing identical shoes by lunchtime the next day, then I told myself that I was like the assholes who insisted that this factory and all its feedstock just rot until the roof caved in.
“Be my guest.” Because what else could I say, seeing as she was already nearly done, except, whoops, she needed me to lift up each sole, so I did that, holding onto her shoulder—muscley!—while she finished up.
“I think I can re-do ’em with the faces of all my friends.” She pocketed the bead. “Be fun to try. My name’s Merseinne, call me Mer, you want?”
“Lenae.” Her handshake was rough, strong, calloused. She was hella strong. No wonder she could throw around those tubs like they were full of cotton balls instead of heavy-duty wheels.
“Looks like there’s more needs doing.” She shoved a tub my way and I staggered under it, got it balanced and crouch-walked it to an empty spot.
The assembly line was really tearing now, so much rolling stock on the factory floor that we were in danger of running out of space. Someone realized that the shopping carts were shopping carts, so you could push one into the back of another and it would nest inside it, making long, segmented rolling snakes out of them. Even with that measure, we were soon filled to the doors. But it was OK: the feedstock was done, and the dancers were starting to look a little glazed with the heat of their bodies and the machines. It was 2 AM.
Antoine came over and high-fived me. “Where’s Shirelle?”
I looked around. She’d helped out in spells, but had been more of a dancer than a maker. I had stayed with cart construction and logistics straight through, pausing only for beer and water. There’d been three of us who took the lead on the carts: me, Mer the walkaway, and a guy I figured out was a Wobbly. Being part of their trio made me feel fucking badass, I have to admit.
“There she is.” She was with a group of the kids that we’d brought along with us. I’d known those kids for most of my life, and it struck me that in a month, I’d stop seeing them every day, and I’d probably never see a lot of them again. That was a weird feeling, but not an entirely bad one. More … enormous.
Shirelle spotted us and toasted us with her red cup. She was grinning like a fool, looking for all the world like Antoine.
Antoine put his hands on his hips and looked at the tight-packed shopping carts.
“Now what?” I was exhausted, exhilarated, and exactly, exceedingly exalted. I had an all-over tingle of danger (the cops could still show up) and accomplishment (we did all this!).
“Everyone with a truck brought it. We load ’em up, tarp ’em over, dump ’em downtown near the market where the homeless are. They do the rest.”
That made sense. I mean, we weren’t going to push ’em through the streets all night, were we? But it was such an anti-climax.
“I got a better idea.”
* * *
Some of the steelworkers used sheets of metal to make ramps that helped us roll the carts into the collection of pickup trucks in the factory’s sheltered loading-area. Once they were loaded, the walkaways spread out and visited each truck’s cab, doing something to them to keep them from knowing where they’d been that night, giving them plausible new geography in case someone ever pulled their logfiles. Most of the steelworkers were going to walk home, and the walkaways were going to head into the night and ghost, of course. With lap-sitting and squashing, all the kids we’d brought would fit into the cabs of the trucks.
They were just sorting that out, led by Shirelle, when Mer found me and stuck her hand out. “Just wanted to say goodbye before we all went back to our corners.”
I shook her hand, then, on impulse, gave her a hug, which was all muscles and bones. Damn, walkaway life must be for real.
“Take care of yourself.” Which was a funny thing for her to say to me, since I lived in civilization and she was a criminal who lived in the badlands.
“Uh, you too.”
She held me out at arm’s length. “I mean it. It’s scary here. Lots scarier than we have it out there.” She jerked her head toward the hills. “We stay out of their way and they stay out of ours. You staying here in default, you’re a problem they have to solve. We’re self-deporting to nowhere, poof. Out of sight, out of mind.”
That word “default” leapt out at me. I knew it was what they called us here in the real world, the people who just did what they were supposed to do. School was default, family was default. Even parties like Ale’s were default. This shit we’d just done: not default. The sort of thing that the cops would pull a fake lockdown to ge
t inside of. Not being default felt good.
“Thank you. I hope I see you again.”
“You want to make that happen, just message me.” She passed me a slip of paper. “That trickles into walkaway-net. You send it a message, it’ll bounce, and that bounce message will get logged and I’ll see the log, eventually.”
“Cool.” I meant it. Walkaways were super-spy ninjas, of course, but getting a glimpse into how they were able to operate without getting hammered was cool and impressive.
* * *
We rode back to Burbank with Shirelle on my lap and one of my butt-cheeks squeezed between the edge of the passenger seat and the door. The truck squeaked on its suspension as we went over the potholes, riding low with a huge load of shopping carts under tarps in its bed. The carts were pretty amazing: strong as hell but light enough for me to lift one over my head, using crazy math to create a tensegrity structure that would hold up to serious abuse. They were rustproof, super-steerable and could be reconfigured into different compartment-sizes or shelves with grills that clipped to the sides. And light as they were, you put enough of them into a truck and they’d weigh a ton. A literal ton, and Jose—our driver’s—truck was only rated for a half-ton. It was a rough ride.
Our plan was to pull up on skid row and start handing out carts to anyone around, giving people two or three to share with their friends. Each truck had a different stretch we were going to hit, but as we got close to our spot, two things became very apparent: one, there were no homeless people around, because two, the place was crawling with five-oh. The Burbank cops had their dumb old tanks out, big armored MRAPs they used for riot control and whenever they wanted to put on a show of force, and there was a lot of crime-scene tape and blinking lights on hobby-horses.
The thicker it got, the more scared we got. This kind of thing wasn’t unusual for downtown Burbank—a couple times a month, you could expect to see BPD flexing, shutting down some street. There was no reason to suspect they were out there for us. But it was asshole-tighteningly scary to be coming from a crime-scene with a truck full of evidence and too many people in the front seat of the truck and looking at all this law.
“Turn it around.” The whites of Shirelle’s eyes were showing, but her voice was steady. Jose the driver didn’t need to be told twice. With robotic motions, he signaled a turn, pulled into an empty parking spot, put the truck into reverse, backed it out and headed back the way we came. He wasn’t the only one—while some of the drivers were pulling up to the roadblock and asking the cop which way to detour, others were turning around and finding their own way.
“Shit shit shit.” His voice was a low monotone.
“I got an idea.” Shirelle’s smile was funny and tight and not exactly good-natured.
“Uh-oh.”
She punched me in the shoulder. “Shut up. I got an idea.”
* * *
We pulled up two blocks from Ale’s house, a dead-end street that backed onto the railroad fence. Jose got the ramp in place without clanging it and the casters on the carts rolled with the silence of elegant walkaway engineering, until we had them all arranged into two long snakes of shopping carts on the sidewalk.
Jose looked uncomfortable as he stood by the driver’s door. “You sure about this?”
“We got this.” Shirelle was a lot more confident than me, and there’s no point arguing with Shirelle when she’s feeling confident.
Still, Jose looked at me. I gave him a thumbs-up and a smile and Shirelle made the same gesture in a way that made sure I knew she was making fun of me. I know for a fact that one of the secret superpowers we get as teen girls is that grown-ass men can’t stand it when we might be making fun of them, and Jose was no exception. He gave us a shake of his head and drove off.
“Now what?” But I knew.
Shirelle grabbed the handle at the back of one snake. “Now we push.” She set off and left me to follow her.
Look, it was three in the morning at this point and if anyone saw us, they must have been left scratching their heads. But I don’t think anyone saw us. Residential Burbank streets, 3 AM? Nah.
The lights were all off at Ale’s house when we pushed our carts onto his lawn, but we could still hear corny candybilly music coming through the door, which wasn’t locked. Shirelle let herself in without knocking. The living room was dimly lit by a few candles, and it smelled like unwashed people getting it on, which they had been doing until pretty recently. There were candy necklaces and cowboy hats everywhere, along with the bodies.
One of the bodies rolled over and squinted at us.
“Hola, Ale,” Shirelle said. He was pretty, if you liked ’em pretty. And when he wasn’t being stupid, he was pretty smart, which was more than you could say for most of the boys I’d known. It wasn’t crazy for Shirelle to like him, even if he was one hundred percent destined to crash-land in the land of the lost losers, forever.
“Shirelle?” He scrambled to his feet, using a pillow to cover himself. “Jesus. Gimme a sec.” He gave us a view of his ass as he made his way to his bedroom and then came back out, wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else. “You guys are a little late. Party ended a couple hours ago.”
Shirelle sucked her teeth. “We didn’t come here for your party, Alejandro. We’re on a mission.”
He shook his head. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“You’re going to love it, fool. Shut up and listen.”
Shirelle didn’t bother him with the little incriminating details, just hit the high points: there were fifty shopping carts parked on his lawn, the greatest shopping carts ever made. They were a gift to Burbank’s homeless people. Don’t need to know where they came from, but we got to give them out, on the downlow.
“And that’s where you and your no-good friends come into the picture. We need a street-crew. I count ten of you, that’s five shopping carts each. Call it an hour’s work. You all have incurred quite a debt to society tonight with your debauchery and illegal dope fiending, and I’m here to offer you a way to make it up.”
One of the cuddle-puddlers groaned and told us to keep it down and Ale shook his head. “Sorry.” I couldn’t tell if he was apologizing to her or Shirelle or all of us.
Shirelle switched from her stern glare to her million-dollar smile. “Come on, Ale. These parties are getting old, bet you can’t even tell them apart anymore. How long before you get so tired you give up on it. On the other hand, you throw in with us and have the experience of a lifetime.” I heard her put something extra into that and I looked back and forth between them without making it obvious. Had she already hooked up with him? I didn’t think so, but watching the two of them, I could see that it was a close thing.
“Ale, what the fuck?” That was another of the sleepers. I looked more closely. I knew him, Dewayne Marshall, graduated the year before. What the actual? Was everyone except me spending their weekends at orgies?
“D, get up, OK? I want to ask you something.” Ale was grinning now too, reflecting back Shirelle’s million-dollar, million-watt smile. That girl is unstoppable, and that’s why we all love her.
* * *
Sleeping on the streets in Burbank is against the law, and if you can’t pay the fine, you go to jail. The city’s homeless aren’t easy to find after dark, but there are a few places that are reliable: the food bank, the soup kitchen, the library parking lot. It’s been years since the library opened its doors, but they kept the free internet.
We split into four groups of two. I figured that Shirelle would go with Ale, but she surprised me by linking arms with me. “Library?”
I covered my surprise and shrugged. “I guess.” I looked at her. “How come you’re not with Ale?”
“He’s with Sarina.” That was the girl we’d woken up at the start when we got Ale.
“They a thing?”
She shook her head. “Not a thing, but you know, a thing tonight. Not my place to get between them.”
“Shirelle, what is going o
n with you and that fool?”
She pinched my arm. “Nothing you need to worry about.” She shook her head. “Look, he’s pretty, and when he’s not high he’s pretty smart, too. But Ale Martinez isn’t any kind of boyfriend material. He’s OK for relieving tension, you know, having a little fun. But I’m not about to tie myself up to him. Look at him.”
“Those clothes!” I stifled a laugh. He’d even put on the miniature cowboy hat.
“That’s why I only ever see him at his house. He’s not much good on the outside, but in private…”
I shook my head. Shirelle and I told each other everything, except it seemed like we didn’t. Not always. Graduation was weeks away, days really, and I’d assumed that whatever happened with the rest of the fools I’d been locked up with since I was five, I was going to be tight with Shirelle forever. But she knew I thought Ale was a half-wit and so she hadn’t told me about him. And Ale was a half-wit. Plus he was hooking up with other girls, right in front of her. She deserved better than that. A day before, I’d have had the impulse to tell Shirelle that she was being more stupid than she had any excuse to be. Today, I felt like I’d just noticed a huge gap between us, but maybe it had been there all along. We were besties, but we were also about to be graduates. Did grads have besties?
We pushed our snake of carts to the library, the Buena Vista branch where there were a handful of permanent-ish homeless tents and a larger population of rotating homeless leeching off the wifi and the power-outlets set into the concrete benches. Someone had used cold-chisels to smash out the dividers that were supposed to stop you from sleeping on them. There were lots of places in B-bank where you could get busted for sleeping out, but everyone knew that the homeless ruled the Buena Vista branch and its park. The wheels whispered as we steered them carefully up the driveway, past the old night-deposit box for books, dented and fire-blackened in the harsh yellow streetlights.