“I can’t say.”
“Really?” She knows he’s going to.
He pauses again. Scratches the base of a dreadlock. Looks around. “Jesus Christ. Okay. But not here.”
10. AFTER
“You okay?”
Mary rests against the doorframe. Grids hadn’t come back from the kitchen, even after she’d heard Tyrone leaving, so she’d come to check on him. She’d found him sitting on the edge of his bed, an open shoebox at his feet, a crumpled photograph in his hand.
“Yeah. I’m good.” He looks up and smiles, that certain warmth he reserves for her. “Tired.”
“Yeah, I know the feeling.”
“You was okay today? With them peoples?”
“Yeah.” She shrugs. “It was fine. Just like anyone else coming in, really.”
He nods, smiles again. His eyes fall back down to the photo in his hands. Mary wonders how many people have seen him like this in the last five years. Vulnerable, human. She feels honored, special—but also a sense of responsibility that troubles her. The same burden she feels for everyone that comes into the shop, demanding she gives them closure, wanting her to stitch up the wounds of their loss. But this is worse, because it’s Grids, and so far she’s not been able to deliver.
She crosses from the doorway to the bed, gently sits down next to him. She knows exactly the photo that he’s looking at before she sees it. The high cheeks, gold hoop earrings, the tightly curled hair in bunches.
“You miss her?”
“Yeah.” He looks up at her, and for a second she thinks he might cry. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s seen him like this, but still it surprises her. “Yeah, I do, Mary. I miss her every day.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stupid, really.”
“No. It’s not.” She puts a hand on his shoulder.
“You’ve—you’d tell me, right? Tell me if you’d seen her? Tell me if you’d heard her, even?”
“Of course I would.” That twinge of guilt, that burden of failed responsibility, the fear that she’ll never find anything, the sense of being a fraud, a con artist, that she feels every day in the shop. But worse again, because it’s Grids. Because if it wasn’t for him taking her in she’d still be out in the street, or back at the camp digging around in other people’s trash. She silently fights back panic, wondering how long he’ll tolerate her turning up empty-handed.
“I know you won’t find her… but, y’know. Maybe another photo. Maybe some of her music, yeah?”
“I know. I’m always looking, Grids, every day I’m out there. I promise.”
“I know, I know.” He laughs at himself, shakes his head. “Get me. Pathetic. Like those people that come in the shop every day, always looking for someone that ain’t there.”
“Nothing pathetic about it. Everybody is looking for someone.”
“I guess.”
They sit there in awkward silence for a moment, her hand still on his shoulder, unsure what to say.
“I told you about her, yeah?”
“Yeah. Yeah, you did.” Maybe half a dozen times. She knows the story by heart. “Tell me again if you like. It might help.”
“Nah—”
“It might help.”
“Help?” He looks almost offended, as though he’s about to shutter away his vulnerability again.
“Help me, I mean,” she lies, thinking fast. “It might help me, y’know, find her.”
“I guess.”
“I’d like to hear it. Really.”
The last time Grids talked to her it was here, downstairs, in the shadows of the towers.
It had been nearly a year since he’d last seen her. Their crew was over. They’d drifted apart, College was deep in his studies and computers, the others had all got jobs or kids or prison time, or some combo of the three.
But she was running with her own crew now. A bunch of teenagers hanging around in the playground that cowered between the half-century-old towers, leaning against the climbing frames, legs dangling from swings. Unpixelated eyes watched him from under hoods and hijabs, caps and shemaghs. It seemed a pretty even mix of races and genders, and the air was thick with the smell of high-grade GM skunk and cheap, sickly sweet supermarket cider.
But there, in the middle of them all, her head totally uncovered, the breeze gently nudging her oversized gold hoop earrings against her black skin and rippling stray hairs across her forehead, sat Melody. She smiled at him.
It should have been intimidating—it was at first—standing there as her crew circled him, silently watching. Listening, recording. Two of their cheap, toylike microdrones circled above them. Children that had lived their whole, brief lives under surveillance, that had always struggled to find privacy and space of their own, turning that feeling into power, significance.
It should have been intimidating, but when Melody spoke, everything else faded away. She made him welcome, made him feel safe. She was older now—they both were—but she seemed grown-up, more formed. Reasoned. Considered. Like the old knee-jerk anger she’d had when they ran together had faded away. She was polite, articulate, poetic—her words peppered with Bristolian and Jamaican slang, tech jargon, and favela speak—but always clear, measured. She spoke purposefully.
They talked for nearly two hours. Awkwardly at first. Mostly catch-up. At some point she blinked him some tunes—he’d heard her stuff already, secretly he’d never stopped following what she was doing, but this was new material—almost painfully slow synthetic beats, decades-old dub sirens soaked in reverb, her vocals turned into disjointed, contextless consonants echoing through simulations of antique tape-delay machines, pristine numbers being crunched to birth virtual crackle and dust. Sparse, minimal, stripped down. It wasn’t the beats that mattered, she told him, but the spaces in between. His spex’s bone-conduction speakers filled his skull with her bass.
No more looting, she explained. No more pranks. The only hustle now was the music, and protecting the towers the city wanted to rip down. Protecting their home.
Grids was confused, at first. Asked her why. Why was she fighting for this place? Why protect this shithole that had been their childhood prison for so long? Hadn’t it always been their dream to escape from here? Hadn’t they fantasized, high and laughing, about watching it burn?
She paused and looked up at the towers that filled the sky around them, their matrices of windows almost vanishing as they climbed into the perma-drizzle. Her eyes widened as one of the drones dropped in low, hovering and twitching its camera ball to catch her close-up, and Grids wondered if they were streaming all of this, as if even at that point her life was already a global performance.
When she spoke it was more slang poetry, both nuanced and brutal, reasoned and freestyled.
She reminded him about the corridors, the stairwells, the entry halls. About how there were no cameras in there. About how it was their space, where they could move, talk, fight, love, play. Unseen. Unmonitored. Unrecorded. Of the many hours—of the many days—of first/third/drone-person footage they streamed and posted of her, none of it was inside those towers. It was a statement: she only ever recorded herself in places where she knew she was being watched anyway, where the CCTV cameras and the ever-circling high-altitude drones could track her. She wouldn’t give away any more than that, and when she entered those towers she disappeared. She was invisible.
The place they wanted to move her to, her and him and all the other residents after they’d ripped down the towers, was some new-build estate out by the airport, an edge-land construct ten miles out of the city. A sparkling new ghetto of identical buildings, as if they’d all been popped out of the same mold in some giant’s candy factory, topped with solar-panel frosting and pumped full of generic IKEA filling. The council had made this huge deal, she told him, out of keeping all the residents together, of “preserving the community.” Of learning from past mistakes. But that wasn’t the point; every inch of this new estate was under watchful digital eye and ear, dome cameras on every street corner, keyword-triggered microphones embedded in the walls. For their own safety, naturally. But their community wasn’t as obvious as that. It wasn’t the people that mattered, she told him, but the spaces in between. The hidden spaces, the communal secrecy, the unwatched places. The spaces that belonged to them.