She went through that feeling, came out the other side: numb acceptance that this was life. Living as Missioncreep, speaking to no one, making as little mark on the world as possible. Nadie was her role model; the merc and her bizarre vigilance that demanded you be both attentive and absent. The more she practiced, the more natural it felt, except for panicky flashes when she wondered if she was losing herself in this persona. Those were so unpleasant that she was glad when they receded and were walled away behind the sentry’s wooden façade.
Now, sitting there, rarely seen morning sun on her skin, looking at Nadie’s shit-eating grin. She struggled to come to grips with this new reality.
She guzzled her champagne, a flavor she’d never liked, liked even less with the taste of walkaway country on her tongue: public toothpaste formula and gummy, scummy of morning breath. But as bubbles and sweet, cold tartness washed her tongue and a burp forced its way out her nose with a burning, CO2 tingle, reality sharpened. She recalled, in fast shuffle, the times she’d drunk ostentatiously proffered champagne at family events, then the taste of corn-mash white lightning she and Seth and Hubert, Etcetera sipped as they slipped away from her father’s house, the beers and vodkas they’d made at the B&B, and then—
“I’m free?”
“Darling, you are free as anyone can be in this world.”
Missioncreep—no, Iceweasel—realized Nadie was drunk, had been drinking something else while she went to whatever hidey-hole she’d kept the champagne in. She had never seen Nadie in this state. She was almost … sloppy. Not to say she didn’t exude the air of sudden death, but it was a jovial, even sexy kind of sudden death.
“Congratulations.” She set down her champagne and scrubbed her eyes, the scratchy contacts’ familiar itch suddenly vivid. She impulsively plucked them out and rolled them like boogers and flicked them away, blinking tears from her eyes until her vision cleared. The contacts were supposed to be optically neutral, but there was an unmistakable difference. She looked at her funny, dark brown skin, the blotches in the creases of her palms and the crook of her elbow. She, too, was smiling.
“So, does this mean I can use the net again? I can call my friends?”
“You can join your friends, chickie—I even know where you can find them.”
“I don’t know what to say, I mean—”
“Fucking wonderful! Birthday and Christmas and your Bat-Mitzvah, rolled into one!” She slugged another long draught of champagne, passed the bottle.
Iceweasel looked around her cell-like room, her meager things, the normcore clothing Nadie brought, generic interface surfaces that she’d avoided personalizing lest she inadvertently create a fingerprintable element. Their local storage held the books she’d read, but she could replace those easily enough. She wanted to walk away from all of it. Even when she realized their encrypted storage contained the notes she’d made during the long solitude, she didn’t give a shit. Those were Missioncreep’s notes, made by a stranger receding in her rearview.
She drank from the bottle. Champagne didn’t taste sweet and sickly this time. It tasted wonderful. This must be what other people felt when they drank champagne—power and freedom, the sense of being beholden to none save those of your choosing. That was why it tasted bad before—it symbolized her captivity to Redwaterness. Now it was the opposite. She’d probably never taste it again, she hoped she’d never taste it again. She guzzled more, let it run sticky over her chin and down her throat.
Nadie sat on the end of her bed, small white teeth, square face, ice-blue eyes, the cords of her neck and the sinews of her muscled arms standing out, cheeks flushed, wildness in her eyes. On impulse, Iceweasel reached out and Nadie took her hand. Her palm was hard with callous, strong as teak. Iceweasel felt her pulse throb. She thought of Gretyl. Thinking of Gretyl should make her want to go, to resist the impulse that had hold of her, but thinking of Gretyl made her want to—
She leaned in. Nadie leaned in, too, her hand tightening on Iceweasel’s almost to the point of pain. Iceweasel knew Nadie chose to take her to the point between pain and pleasure. She was the mistress of that point and could land on it like a commando pilot setting down a bird on an aircraft carrier, kissing it with control that made it look easy.
When they kissed, those small, square teeth nipped at her lips. She groaned before realizing she was making any sound. A dam inside her broke, pent-up emotion of the months in one kind of captivity or another, times she’d missed Gretyl with a longing that blotted out rational thought. She squeezed Nadie’s hand, heedless of how hard, feeling Nadie was indestructible.
Nadie’s free arm went around her. She was crushed to the woman. She realized that for all of Nadie’s strength, there wasn’t much to her—she was tiny. The body pressing to hers couldn’t have been more different from Gretyl’s. Her feelings for Nadie and Gretyl were polar opposites. No matter that Nadie had terrorized her, hurt her, kidnapped her—she had rescued her. She was there, so alive, in the way that no person had been for her for a long time.
She wrestled her hand free and reached for Nadie’s ass, compact as a tennis ball, slid her hand down the waistband of her leggings, feeling skin/skin contact whose feeling she’d worked so hard to forget. Her mouth flooded with saliva. Her fingers curled, found the matted, wet hair, slippery folds, her fingertips slipping inside. Nadie’s teeth nipped harder at her lip, making her pull back. Nadie followed, not letting her go. It hurt. It felt good. She panted.
Nadie sprang away and tore off her clothes in a series of economical motions. She was an anatomical drawing—the body Iceweasel had glimpsed in the taxi, with its strange rivers and arroyos of scar tissue stretched over lean muscle. Panting, reaching for her, some part of Iceweasel’s brain noticed she had a slightly crooked left forearm, an old break that hadn’t healed right.
Nadie dodged her grasp, settled on her haunches, staring frankly with cool, glittering eyes. She reached for the champagne and took another slug. She cocked her head expectantly. Iceweasel understood, skinned out of her clothes. Gooseflesh as she bared herself to that gaze. She reached again, and Nadie shook her head minutely and dodged back, continuing to stare.
Nadie’s eyes roamed over her body. Iceweasel’s breath came in short pants. She could feel the gaze. Nadie could tear her to pieces, force her to submit. Every nerve and hair follicle came to electric, tingling life. Nadie’s eyes narrowed. She smiled lazily, traced one of her own nipples, large and pale pink, with a calloused fingertip. The sound of skin on skin was loud, the only other sound Iceweasel’s breath. She reached for her own breast, touched it as Nadie was touching hers.
It didn’t feel like her own finger. It felt like Nadie’s. Matching her movement for movement, it was as though her nervous system lost track of its own boundaries.
Nadie nodded and licked a fingertip, brought it back to her nipple. Mesmerized, Iceweasel did the same. The feeling of being touched by a stranger wasn’t so strong, but as she fell into Nadie’s cool eyes, it grew. When, in her peripheral vision, she saw Nadie’s finger slide lower and followed suit, she gasped. She hadn’t masturbated in months, not since she’d been taken, not for some time before. That part of her switched off when she was kidnapped, but it had waited and it saw its chance. Their hands moved faster, blurring, soft wet sounds and breathing growing in pitch. When she arched her back and gasped, Nadie dived across the bed and bore her to her back, burying her face between her legs, tongue flickering quickly and remorselessly, hands on her hips refusing to give as she bucked. She buried her fingers in Nadie’s short hair, shouted words without meaning, rode it, not caring who heard, not caring what Nadie felt, burning away self-consciousness in a moment that went on and on.
When she was done, she gingerly released Nadie, felt her tongue on the inside of her thighs, felt the juices and saliva cooling under her ass. Nadie ascended like a serpent, all muscle and sinew. She smelled and tasted herself on Nadie’s face as her thigh slid between Nadie’s legs and Nadie pressed it, all that
strength coiled atop her. Iceweasel was light-headed from hyperventilation, champagne and bone-shattering orgasm, but she was still full of animal horniness. She rolled Nadie, aware that Nadie allowed herself to be rolled, but knowing this was what Nadie wanted, as she grabbed the woman’s wrists and pressed them over her head, burying her face in the tuft in her armpit before nipping at her breast, biting harder, listening carefully to the answering gasps, straining to hold the wrists. Nadie pushed against her and she reared up and pushed back and looked into Nadie’s eyes. They were unfocused, her breath in sharp pants.
“Do you want this?” she whispered. Her hand drifted lower. Continuous consent was a walkaway thing. She was used to asking this question and having it asked of her, but it was exotic for Nadie. Nadie’s eyes focused on hers for a moment, and she bit her lip and whimpered. “Yes.”
On impulse, Iceweasel said, “What’s that?”
“Yes,” Nadie said. “Yes, please. Please?”
The submission from this woman, who could kill a hundred ways with her bare hands, electrified the room.
Slowly, teasingly, she moved her hand and went to work. Nadie’s hips worked and bucked, and she stopped, pulled away, looked in her eyes. “Do you want this?”
“Please,” Nadie said. “Please, please.”
More kissing movement. Nadie’s hips writhed. She stopped again.
“Do you want this?”
“I want it. Please. Yes. Please, Iceweasel, please. Please don’t stop.”
They locked eyes again. Iceweasel held her gaze, fingers dug into those incredible ass-muscles, and she waited. Nadie chewed her lip and her eyes shone. Her skin shone, sheened with sweat.
“Please, oh please, don’t stop. Please?”
Slowly, she lowered her face. This time, she didn’t stop, rode the bucking of Nadie’s hips, used her whole body to follow as Nadie reared up shuddered, screaming and tearing at the sheets with clawed hands.
When she was done, Iceweasel daintily licked her fingers and flopped beside Nadie, whose chest heaved like a bellows. Her skin was clammy with drying sweat, and Iceweasel flung a leg and an arm across her and nipped at a scar on her collarbone, at the base of her throat.
“Mmmm,” Nadie purred. “Very nice. Quite a going-away present. I didn’t get you anything.”
“You said something about directions to my friends?”
“That’s hardly a favor. They’re not in good shape, even if they think they are. Your ‘default’ world gets less stable every day. The existence of walkaways is seen as a prime cause, destabilizing influence beyond all others. Don’t imagine just because you can run away once or twice they won’t decide to take you all again, someday.”
“We can rebuild. Look at Akron.”
The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multistory housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human waste for fertilizer and wastewater for irrigation, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.
Akron wasn’t the first city like this—there was Łódź, Capetown, Monrovia. It was the first American city, the first explicitly borne of the crackdown on walkaways. It put the State Department in the awkward position of condemning a settlement that was functionally equivalent to many it had praised elsewhere.
“I hear a lot about Akron. Once is a fluke. It’s only months old. It could fall down tomorrow. I was in Łódź when it happened there. Łódź wasn’t the first city where it was tried. It failed in Kraków, badly. There were deaths, many. A terrible sickness, fevers in the water, no one could make the dispensaries print the right medicine. You have heard about the successes of these cities, but there are so many failures.”
“People walk away because the world doesn’t want them. We’re a liability. I’ve heard my father talk about it: the people who want to come to Canada, people who want to have children, people who dream of having their children learn all they need to get by in the world, dream of health care and old age without misery. As far as he’s concerned, those people are redundant, except when they represent a chance to win a government contract to feed them as cheaply as possible, or house them in prison camps. Do you know how much money my father makes from his share of the Redwater private prisons? He calls it his gulag wealth fund.”
Nadie chuckled and smacked her thigh. “I forgot how funny your old man was. You don’t have to worry, little girl, you don’t have that blood on your hands.”
“It’s on yours now.”
“I’ve had real blood on my hands. I can live with metaphorical blood.”
“But why? Can’t you see it’s insane? Why should the world go on when its system doesn’t need people anymore? Our system should serve us, not the other way around. Look at walkaways: if you show up in walkaway, there will be things you can do to make room for yourself. Walkaway is based on the idea anyone should be able to pitch in with her work and provide everything she needs to live well, bed and roof and food, and extra for people who can’t do so much. In stable walkaway places, the problem is there aren’t enough humans.”
“Congratulations, you’ve made virtue of inefficiency. Taking more hours to do the same work isn’t an ideological triumph.”
This was familiar turf for Iceweasel, a discussion that often roiled dinner tables in walkaway.
“You’re right, that’s fucking ridiculous. If that were the case, we’d be idiots. But it’s not. In default, unwanted humans work their asses off, scrounging money, scrounging shitty-ass jobs, getting their kids using interface surfaces for whatever learnware they can find and trust. The one thing they’re not allowed to do is put all those labor hours into growing food for themselves, or building themselves a permanent home, or building community centers. Because the system that organizes the land where the homes and the food and the community center would go has decided that these are better used for other purposes.”
“If you tell me about the uselessness of nice restaurants, I may giggle. You should know I have reservations at six of the seven best restaurants in the world next week, and the S.S.T. tickets to get me to them.”
“Restaurants are nice. We have places where you can eat nice meals in walkaway. Sometimes, they might ask you to help cook. At B&B, that was a hot job, people fought for it. It would be an honor to let a stranger at the kitchen. Default is organized so that only some people can eat at restaurants, so only some people must work at restaurants. In walkaway, everyone can eat whenever they want, and there’s plenty to do as a result—cooking and growing things and clearing things away. New walkaways always struggle to find enough to do, worrying they’re not keeping busy enough to make up for all the stuff they’re consuming. We do more automation than default, not less, and the number of labor-hours needed to keep you fat and happy for a day is a lot less than the inefficient system over in default where you have to scramble just to scrape by.”
“That won’t be my problem. I’m going to lie around and have grape-peelers feed me. Give me a year, I’ll be wearing a toga and a laurel.”
“The only zottas I know who live like that are either addicts or broken. Real zottas like my dad work as many hours as any beggar. Being a zotta means worrying you’re not zotta enough, grafting away to make your pile of gold bigger than those other assholes’ piles. I bet my old man hasn’t had
eight hours of sleep in a row in ten years. If it wasn’t for medical technology, that fucker’d be dead of ten heart attacks and twenty strokes.”
“No one forces him.”
“You know it’s true. You worked for zottas. Have you ever met a lazy zotta?”
“Of course.”
“Was she a drunk? Or a pill-popper?”
“Well—”
“No one forces you. It’s a fucking amazing non-coincidence that everyone with more money than they could spend spends every hour trying to get more. Walkaways, who have nothing, play like no one in default. They play like kids, before anyone knows about schedules, lie around like teenagers who fuck off from school and lie on a roof and bullshit for hours. They do things people always think, If only I was rich.… The irony is, rich people don’t get to do that stuff.”
“I understand irony. You don’t need to hammer me.”
“With zottas, it’s a good idea to explain thoroughly. They’re not good at thinking critically about money.”
Nadie propped herself on one elbow, their bodies briefly adhering from dried sweat. “What you’re saying, it’s not news, Ms. Ex-Zotta. I am older. I’ve spent as many years living with zottas as you. You don’t understand: this isn’t stable. There isn’t going to be default world and walkaway world trading people forever. When you have big rich people, and everyone else poor as poor, the result is … unstable.
“If there are rich and poor, you need a story to explain why some have so much and so many have little. You need a story that explains this is fair. Last century, the rich made things stable by giving some money back, tax and education and so on. Welfare state. People could become rich. Invent something, you could become rich, even if you weren’t born rich.
“But those zottas—not zottas yet, actually, just gigas or megas—only let their money be taxed because it was cheaper than paying for private security and official surveillance they needed to keep hold of wealth if the system grew unstable because of the gap between them and everyone.”