Second Shift - Order s-2 Page 2

  Frankie bit his lip and narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, but wasn’t Roker the one who started growin’ his own beans down in Dispatch?”

  Mission wiggled his shoulders. His arms were going numb. He wasn’t used to standing still with a load—he was used to moving. “That’s different,” he argued. He tried to remember why it was different. “That’s for climbing food.”

  Frankie shook his head. “Yeah, but ain’t that hypercritical of him?”

  “You mean hypocritical?”

  “Whatever, man. All I’m saying is everyone has an excuse. We’re doing it because they’re doing it and someone else started it. So what if we’re doing it a little more than they are? That’s the attitude, man. But then we get in a twist when the next group does it a little more. It’s like a ratchet, the way these things work.”

  Mission glanced down the hall toward the glow of distant lights. “I dunno,” he said. “The mayor seems to be letting things slide lately.”

  Frankie laughed. “You really think the mayor’s in charge? The mayor’s scared, man. Scared and old.” Frankie glanced back down the hall to make sure nobody was coming. The nervousness and paranoia had been in him since his youth. It’d been amusing when he was younger; now it was sad and a little worrisome. “You remember when we talked about being in charge one day?” Frankie asked. “How things would be different?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Mission said. “By the time we’re in charge, we’ll be old like them and won’t care anymore. And then our kids can hate us for pulling the same crap.”

  Frankie laughed, and the tension in his wiry frame seemed to subside. “I bet you’re right.”

  “Yeah, well, I need to go before my arms fall off.” He shrugged the pump higher up his back.

  Frankie slapped his shoulder. “Yeah. Good seeing you, man.”

  “Same.” Mission nodded and turned to go.

  “Oh, hey, Mish.”

  He stopped and looked back.

  “You gonna see the Crow anytime soon?”

  “I’ll pass that way tomorrow,” he said, assuming he’d live through the night.

  Frankie smiled. “Tell her I said hey, wouldja?”

  “I will,” Mission promised.

  One more name to add to the list. If only he could charge his friends for all the messages he ran for them, he’d have way more than the three-hundred eighty-four chits already saved up. Half a chit for every hello he passed to the Crow, and he’d have his own apartment by now. He wouldn’t need to stay in the waystations. He could ask Jenine to marry him. But messages from friends weighed far less than dark thoughts, so Mission didn’t mind them taking up space. They crowded out the other. And Lord knew, Mission hauled his fair share of the heavier kind.

  •3•

  It would’ve made more sense and been kinder on Mission’s back to drop off the pump before visiting his father, but the whole point of hauling it up was so his old man would see him with the load. And so he headed into the planting halls and toward the same growing station his grandfather had worked and supposedly his great-grandfather, too. Past the beans and the blueberry vines, beyond the squash and the lurking potatoes. In a spot of corn that looked ready for harvest, he found his old man on his hands and knees looking how Mission would always remember him. With a small spade working the soil, his hands picked at weeds like a habit, the way a girl might curl her fingers in her hair over and over without even knowing she was doing it.

  “Father.”

  His old man turned his head to the side, sweat glistening on his brow under the heat of the grow lights. There was a flash of a smile before it melted. Mission’s half-brother Riley appeared behind a back row of corn, a little twelve-year-old mimic of his dad, hands covered in dirt. He was quicker to call out a greeting, shouting “Mission!” as he hurried to his feet.

  “The corn looks good,” Mission said. He rested a hand on the railing, the weight of the pump settling against his back, and reached out to bend a leaf with his thumb. Moist. The ears were a few weeks from harvest, and the smell took him right back. He saw a midge running up the stalk and killed the parasite with a deft pinch.

  “Wadja bring me?” his little brother squealed.

  Mission laughed and tussled his brother’s dark hair, a gift from the boy’s mother. “Sorry, bro. They loaded me down this time.” He turned slightly so Riley could see, but also for his father. His brother stepped onto the lowest rail and leaned over for a better look.

  “Why dontcha set that down for a while?” his father asked. He slapped his hands together to keep the precious dirt on the proper side of the fence, then reached out and shook Mission’s hand. “You’re looking good.”

  “You too, Dad.” Mission would’ve thrust his chest out and stood taller if it didn’t mean toppling back on his rear from the pump. “So what’s this I hear about the cafe starting in their own sprouts?”

  His father grumbled and shook his head. “Corn, too, from what I hear. More goddamn up-sourcing.” He jabbed a finger at Mission’s chest. “This affects you lads, you know.”

  His father meant the porters, and there was a tone of having told him so. There was always that tone. Riley tugged on Mission’s coveralls and asked to hold his porter knife. Mission slid the blade from its sheath and handed it over while he studied his father, a heavy silence brewing. His dad looked older. His skin was the color of oiled wood, an unhealthy darkness from working too long under the grow lights. It was called a “tan,” and you could spot a farmer two landings away because of it, could pick them out by their skin like burnt toast.

  Mission could feel the intense heat radiating from the bulbs overhead, and the anger he felt when he was away from home melted into a hollow sadness. The spot of air his mother had left empty could be felt. It was a reminder to Mission of what his being born had cost. More was the pity that he felt for his old man with his damaged skin and dark spots on his nose from years of abuse. These were the signs of all those in green who toiled among the dead. And this was where his father would have Mission work as well, if it were up to him.

  While his father studied him and Riley played with the knife, Mission flashed back to his first solid memory as a boy. Wielding a small spade that had in those days seemed to him a giant shovel, he had been playing between the rows of corn, turning over scoops of soil, mimicking his father, when without warning his old man had grabbed his wrist.

  “Don’t dig there,” his father had said with an edge to his voice. This was back before Mission had witnessed his first funeral, before he had seen for himself what went beneath the seeds. After that day, he learned to spot the mounds where the soil was dark from being disturbed. He learned to study the way those same mounds gradually sank and leveled out as the worms carried off what lay beneath.

  “They’ve got you doing the heavy lifting, I see,” his father said, breaking the quiet. He assumed the load Mission had begged for was instead assigned by Dispatch. Mission didn’t correct him.

  “They let us carry what we can handle,” he said. “The older porters get mail delivery. We each haul what we can.”

  “I remember when I first stepped out of the shadows,” his dad said. He squinted and wiped his brow, nodded down the line. “Got stuck with potatoes while my caster went back to plucking blueberries. Two for the basket and one for him.”

  Not this again. Mission watched as Riley tested the tip of the knife with the pad of his finger. He reached to take back the blade, but his brother twisted away from him.

  “The older porters get mail duty because they can get mail duty,” his father explained.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mission said. The sadness was gone, the anger back. “The old ports have bad knees is why we get the loads. Besides, my bonus pay is judged by the pound and the time I make, so I don’t mind.”

  “Oh, yes.” His father waved at Mission’s feet. “They pay you in bonuses and you pay them with your knees.”

  Mission could fe
el his cheeks tighten, could sense the burn of the whelp around his neck.

  “All I’m saying, son, is that the older you get and the more seniority, you’ll earn your own choice of rows to hoe. That’s all. I want you to watch out for yourself.”

  “I’m watching out for myself, Dad.” He nearly added: It isn’t like I have anyone else.

  Riley climbed up, sat on the top rail, and flashed his teeth at his own reflection in the knife. The kid already had that band of spots across his nose, those freckles, the start of a tan. Damaged flesh from damaged flesh, father like son. And Mission could easily picture Riley years hence on the other side of that rail, could see his half-brother all grown up with a kid of his own, and it made Mission thankful that he’d wormed his way out of the farms and into a job he didn’t take home every night beneath his fingernails.

  “Are you joining us for lunch?” his father asked, sensing perhaps that he was pushing Mission away. A change in subjects was as near to an apology as the old man dared.

  “If you don’t mind,” Mission said. He felt a twinge of guilt that his father expected to feed him, but he appreciated not having to ask. “I’ll have to run afterward, though. I’ve got a… delivery tonight.”

  His father frowned. “You’ll have time to see Allie though, right? She’s forever asking about you. The boys here are lined up to marry that girl if you keep her waiting.”

  Mission wiped his face to hide his expression. Allie was a great friend—his first and briefest romance—but to marry her would be to marry the farms, to return home, to live among the dead. “Probably not this time,” he said. And he felt bad for admitting it.

  “Okay. Well, go drop that off. Don’t squander your bonus sitting here jawing with us.” The disappointment in the old man’s voice was hotter than the lights and not so easy to shade. “We’ll see you in the feeding hall in half an hour?” He reached out, took his son’s hand one more time, and gave it a squeeze. “It’s good to see you, Son.”

  “Same.” Mission shook his father’s hand, then clapped his palms together over the grow pit to knock loose any dirt. Riley reluctantly gave the knife back, and Mission slipped it into its sheath. He fastened the clasp around the handle, thinking on how he might need it that night. He pondered for a moment if he should warn his father, thought of telling him and Riley both to stay inside until morning, to not dare go out.

  But he held his tongue, patted his brother on the shoulder, and made his way to the pump room. As he walked through rows of planters and pickers, he thought about farmers selling their own vegetables in makeshift stalls. He thought about the cafe growing its own sprouts. He thought of the plans recently discovered to move something heavy from one landing to another without involving the porters.

  Everyone was trying to do it all in case the violence returned. Mission could feel it brewing, the suspicion and the distrust, the walls being built. Everyone was trying to get a little less reliant on the others, preparing for the inevitable, hunkering down.

  He loosened the straps on his pack as he approached the pump room, and a dangerous thought occurred to him, a revelation: Everyone was trying to get to where they didn’t need one another. And how exactly was that supposed to help them all get along?

  •4•

  After the best meal he’d had in ages—as fresh as it was free—Mission hurried down four flights toward Sanitation to see Jenine. He felt light as a feather downbound and with the load off. With just his empty porter’s pack on his back, his canteen jouncing on one hip, his knife on the other, he skipped down the steps side-style with one hand on the rail. At times like these, descending after a long slog up, it felt as though he could leap over the rail and float unharmed to Mechanical like a mote of dust. He apologized to those he overtook, saying “porter, ma’am” and “porter, sir” by the book, even though he wasn’t carrying anything official.

  Weightless as a bird, with his heart thrumming like one was trapped in his ribcage, it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t the descent that had him feeling giddy. Everyone expected him to grow up a farmer, to settle down with the girl who loved him, but Mission wanted the opposite of what was easily attainable. He wondered if this was a punishment of sorts, a slow strangulation, his thirst for distant things. Did he love the chase? Or was it that staying on the move made it more difficult for the past to catch up to him?

  He arrived at Sanitation, a rumble of footfalls on steel treads, and pushed through doors in need of oil. Sanitation was one of the levels laid out in a spiral; a single hallway coiled its way from the landing and did three circuits before dead ending into the waste plant. Fresh water emerged near the landing and was piped out to the rest of the Up Top, while gray water and black water—euphemisms both—were pumped into the waste room. The gray came from showers, sinks, and drains, the black from toilets.

  Such were the romantic and decidedly un-sexy conversations Mission had with the girl of his dreams that he could name the plant’s every phase of operation as he wound his way toward the waste room. If needed, he could also bore a porter to tears with rumors of who had said what about whom throughout the plant. This was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.

  The noise along the curving hallway grew louder the deeper he went. It started out as a background hum near the control rooms and offices, and just when he’d gotten used to this residual noise, another layer piled on top, more machines macerating, filtering, straining, and pumping. Mission never appreciated how loud the combined buzzing was until he left the plant with his hearing rattled and his throat sore from yelling over it all.

  Inside the waste room, he spotted familiar faces all around the processing vats. Knowing who he was looking for, one of the workers pointed down the long row of low steel cylinders that held the gray and black water. Jenine was on top of one of the cylinders, which was almost as big around as his dad’s apartment and crisscrossed with pipes and valves. Crouched down, she worked a series of large valves while an older woman filled a glass vial with murky fluid and held it up to the light. Mission waited patiently. This was where the water eventually came from that his father was always cursing. He remembered his old man sitting around the dinner table, shaking his fist at the floor, grumbling about the supply of water, how it was more than he needed for his crops one day, never enough the next.

  Jenine eventually felt his presence. She turned, smiled, and lifted a finger, asking him to wait a moment, then finished opening and closing the valves. The woman testing the waste water glanced up at the two of them, frowned at Mission, and carefully dispensed a dark dye into the tube before shaking it, a thumb unhygienically used to cork the end. These were dark arts, Mission thought, whatever they did to make shower water and urine safe to drink. Dark and noisy arts. But at least he had grown used to the smell, which wasn’t the foulness one would expect but rather something chemical, something caustic.

  Jenine yelled to her supervisor that she was taking her break, wiped her palms on the seat of her pants, and hopped down. She led Mission away from the rows and rows of containers before digging the foam inserts out of her ears.

  “Hey, Mish!” she yelled, as she pulled him into the hallway. She clasped his neck and kissed him on the cheek. By the time he thought to hug her back or return the gesture, it was already over, leaving him scrambling awkwardly at the air and feeling a fool.

  She led him down two doors to the break room, which stank of microwaved soup and sweaty coveralls. It smelled almost exactly like the break room in Dispatch, fifty levels down, in fact. Mission wondered if every break room smelled just like this.

  Jenine grabbed a dented metal cup from a pile of them by the sink and filled it with water. “Whadja bring me?” she asked, glancing at his shoulder.

  Mission shook his head and turned to show her his empty pack. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling like an ass.

  She waved her hand and took a long pull on the tin cup. “It�
��s fine.” She refilled the cup from the sink, and Mission noticed that she waited for the faucet to stop dripping into the vessel, even tapped it twice with her fist to get the last drop, before pulling it away. Every profession had its quirks and habits, he supposed. Like how a porter never passed a landing without checking for a signal ’chief, nor missed a rumor whispered on the stairs.

  “Sorry if I made it sound like it’s your duty to shower me with gifts.” She winked at him, and Mission laughed.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I like bringing you stuff. I was just weighed down with a tandem haul this time.” He swung his arms and twisted at the waist to stretch his spine. “They’ve been pouring it on us. But this is what I’ve been told to expect our first year.”

  “Tell me about it.” Jenine leaned back against the counter and waved Mission toward the jumbled pile of cups. “I thought shadowing was bad, but first year is even worse.”

  He accepted her offer and filled a cup with water. He reminded himself to top up his thermos before he left as well.

  “It’s almost enough to make you miss school, isn’t it?” she asked.

  Mission laughed. “Oh, hell yeah it is.”

  “Here’s to better days.” She held her cup up.

  Mission tinked his against hers, careful not to splash any water. “To better days.”

  They watched each other over the lips of their cups while they drank. And in that breathless pause, in the time it took to swallow once, twice, three times, Mission felt an incredible rush of happiness that just as quickly plummeted away. It was like a memory of something that had not yet happened, a vivid image of him and Jenine sitting at a small table in a small apartment, and then a sense of the space between them brought on by their occupations. In this imaginary future, he would find himself leaving for another week of runs before he got his next day off. And so the same dread he felt right then in that break room, the desire to maximize their time together, to sip rather than gulp, would surely haunt him in a future he could only dream about. He swallowed and peered into his cup, searching for the courage to tell her how he felt.