Still amber. “All clear.”
“Four seconds. Three. Two. One.”
The screen cut to a brilliant green. “This is-” and Spanner swore. The screen suddenly dulled to brown and red: the ruined floor of what had once been rain forest.
“What’s happening, what’s happening?
“Minimercial,” Spanner said briefly. “They’ll take the whole commercial spot.”
We had less than three minutes to decide what to do. “Board’s amber.”
“And the signal’s very sweet,” Spanner said. “I’m going to do it.” Her voice was sharp, decisive. “I’ll cut in when it’s done. Steal program time.”
“You know this commercial.”
“No, but a windup’s a windup.”
She was right. You could always tell the last few seconds of an ad. “Do it,” I said.
It was dangerous, much more dangerous than we had planned. Viewers never timed adverts, but after years of always getting the same number of seconds their bodies would be tuned to it. Inside, they would think, Hey, there are a lot of ads today… And maybe one of those viewers would be the security snoop. Maybe he or she would be fast, would flip the trace before we cut.
“Here’s the windup.”
“All clear.” No going back now. If the drugs had affected Spanner in the slightest, if she made one millisecond’s mistake, the cut would be obvious. Adrenaline tightened the muscles around my eyes; my breathing got shallow.
She was perfect. The white lettering faded out and then in to the bright red and yellow that was the first frame close-up of Tom’s tie.
I looked at the board. “Ten-percent red. Twenty.” The security program had started to trace our signal. It wouldn’t find us until the whole board lit.
“Come on, you babies, come on,” Spanner muttered. I wondered what the account program was telling her.
“Twenty-five percent. Fifty!” The sudden flicker of red across the board made my heart leap sideways. “Seventy!”
“Taking us off.” My board went blank. She started stripping down the screen, unhooking the box.
I found I was kneeling on the floor, stowing things in the backpack without knowing how I got there.
“Nearly twelve seconds,” she was saying.
“Cut the account,” I said.
“Money’s still coming in-”
“Cut it!” I didn’t care how much or how little we had. We needed to cut and run. A nanosecond could make a difference to a security program.
She touched a key, pulled a lead free. “All closed down.”
And then we were standing outside in the rain, pulling the door closed, leaning against the wall, laughing. The rain ran in my ears, my mouth, down my neck, but I didn’t care. We should be running, but I didn’t care. Adrenaline exhilaration could do that. I laughed and laughed: we were free, safe. I had forgotten how sweet it felt to operate outside the law, how good, how big it made me feel…
Reluctantly, I pushed myself away from the wall. “We have to hurry.”
“They didn’t trace us.” But she was already sobering, looking from left to right. Information technology and its finer points did not matter much to the crocodile brain. It wanted some physical distance. We hurried.
I started to feel safe when we were about a quarter of a mile away. I slowed, stopped, started stripping off the plasthene protection. Spanner followed suit. “How much did we make?”
She grinned. “Guess.”
“A lot.” I started to fizz again. A lot of money. For a few minutes’ work. “Tell me.”
“A hundred and four, maybe a hundred and five thousand.”
I laughed out loud, incredulous.
“Shut your mouth,” Spanner said, “you might drown in this rain.”
I was suddenly glad of the rain, glad to be getting wet. It was real. All that money. I felt dizzy. It made a mockery of what I earned at Hedon Road.
The Polar Bear was quiet, only half a dozen people in the place. Spanner had ordered us whiskey. I rolled the glass around in my hands, content to sniff at the fumes. Spanner was on her third drink in thirty minutes. She probably should not be drinking at all with the painkillers she was on. Now that the adrenaline high was fading, I was too tired to care.
“So, what will you do with your share?”
“I don’t know.” I sipped, enjoying the hot, smoky taste. After taking out start-up expenses and paying Tom his share, I’d have more than thirty thousand, tax free. I could drink this stuff every day. Live in a bigger apartment. For a while. “Maybe I’ll give it to someone.” Magyar might be willing to get Paolo’s address from the records. I tried to imagine his expression when he found he was thirty thousand richer. I stared into my glass. Such a warm, welcoming color.
Spanner reached over and covered the glass with her hand. “Who?”
“What?”
“Who are you giving it to?”
Giving the money to Paolo was a stupid fantasy. It wouldn’t help him or me. But I needed to talk—and who was there but Spanner? So I told her about Paolo. About him coming to Hedon Road, about his youth, his strangeness. About his eyes, the way they seemed to open when he realized I wasn’t mocking him, that I would teach him. How young he was, and vulnerable. How he had tried to kill himself. How I felt guilty.
She sipped at her drink. “You didn’t exactly cut off his arms and legs with an axe.”
“No. But I should have done something when I could. So should my father, my mother. Willem. Everybody.” I wanted her to see, to understand. I told her about the hotel room, the judgment in the Caracas case. How, when I had heard, I had shrugged in my air-conditioned hotel room and climbed back in the shower. “But how could I have known then, when I was only sixteen?” They had just been pictures on the screen. Somewhere inside I had thought the dirt on their faces to be makeup, their anguish an act.
But Spanner wasn’t listening. “Money means so little to you that you can afford to just give it away?”
“It’s not the money.”
“Of course it’s the money!” What else is there? She was scared, I realized suddenly. Money was all she had. If I didn’t think much of that, what would I think of her?
“Spanner…”
But she was almost hissing. “You make me sick, you know that? You’re an arrogant bastard. You think the world cares what you feel. You think you can make a difference, but you can’t.”
I had never seen her scared before. It made me uneasy. Something had changed. It had always been the other way around. But I wasn’t afraid anymore. She could not make me do anything I didn’t want to do, ever again. She had rescued me, and taught me to stay alive, but I had paid and paid and paid. I had paid enough.
I think she saw that, and I think it frightened her even more. I wanted to explain to her that I wouldn’t hurt her, that I wasn’t like everyone else she knew, but I didn’t know what to say—and I wasn’t sure if it was true.
She saw my indecision. “Poor little rich girl!”
“No.” I was too tired for this. I finished my drink and stood up.
“Not anymore. I work for my living. I work hard. I do a good job. It means something.”
“Shoveling shit means something?”
“What does your job mean?” I was suddenly blazingly angry: with her, with the world that had shaped her, at myself and all the things I had done or neglected to do.
“What does it mean to you that people pay to use you like a disposable tissue? Does the money make you feel good, worthwhile, even when you can’t move because of the pain and you’re all alone because you don’t have any friends? Does it make you feel good that you might have died if this poor little rich girl hadn’t decided to take pity on you? Does it make you feel good when you wake up in the morning hating yourself because of the things you did to make a quick hundred? Does it?”
I have never seen a snake in the second before it strikes, but I think I know how it would look. It would move its head back a fraction of an inch, it would close its nictitating membranes partway, and the sunlight would slide across hard gray fangs, dry as ancient bone. And then its expression would go blank as all the muscles but those it would use to strike, to drive the venom home into soft mammalian tissue, relaxed.