She listened to the morning chorus of sparrows and the evening calls of thrushes as people came and went in algal tides. She liked to drowse while the pigeons on the window sill cooed and whirred their wings. The sill was white with their excrement. She wondered what they found to eat in the city. Once, waking from a thick, Technicolor afternoon dream, she found a squirrel on the cable outside, watching her. She could see the muscles and tendons of its haunches as it gripped the thick cable with tiny claws. It had eyes like apple pips, hard and opaque. Then it ran off, tail twitching.
But the window could not keep her occupied all the time, and then Lore would wonder if the man, the kidnapper she knew only as Fishface, had really died, if the police were still looking for her. Perhaps the other one, Crablegs, had confessed, or been found. Maybe Tok had already denounced Oster.
Once she tried to access the net, to check back on the news, see if any bodies had been discovered, what the police were doing about finding her, but she was locked out. The keyboard was dead, and voice commands resulted in nothing but a flat, still screen. She did not mention her attempt to Spanner. She wasn’t ready. Not yet. She began to wonder if this whole episode was a drug-induced nightmare, some scheme of her supposedly loving father.
But then Spanner would return from her jaunts crackling with manic energy and a restlessness that did not disguise her fatigue, and Lore would understand that it was all too real.
Lore never asked where Spanner had been, but she wondered what she did in those hours that made her so tense. Business, she supposed, though she wondered why Spanner had to get so wired to transact a supposed victimless, low priority crime. Sometimes it would be two or three hours before Spanner’s deep blue eyes stopped their constant roving around the room, alighting on windows, doors: checking, always checking, as if for reassurance, the exits.
After a wreck, when Lore could get around the flat a little, Spanner called her over to the screen. “Sit,” she said. Lore sat on the couch.
“It’s me,” Spanner told the terminal. The screen lit to light gray. “It’s voice-coded. Won’t even display the message-waiting light unless I tell it to. I’m going to set it up to accept certain commands from you.” Lore felt herself being studied but she refused to give Spanner any idea of how it made her feel to be controlled like this. She said nothing.
Spanner sighed. “This is just a precaution on my part. I want you to understand why I’m doing this. I don’t want you calling Mummy and Daddy when those painkillers start to wear off and you realize what a mess you’re in. I can’t afford any kind of notice, never mind the kind of wrong conclusion the authorities might jump to if they find you here, injured, and half out of your mind on drugs.”
Lore kept her face still, but she remembered a tent, drugs, being naked. Was this any different?
“I’ll allow any passive use. That means you can listen to my messages. Or some of them. You can access news. But you can’t interact: no talking, no sending messages, no shopping. I’ll bring you anything you need. At least for now.”
“I’m not a child.”
“No,” Spanner agreed. “But this is the way it has to be.”
The first time the screen bleeped when she was alone, it was a man’s face that appeared: black spiky hair, blue eyes, thin eyebrows, smile like a cherub. “Remember those chicken hawks we came across last month? If you’re still interested, get in touch.”
That was it. Even with all Spanner’s precautions the message had not said much. But Lore knew about chicken hawks. That was not victimless crime.
When Spanner got home, she went straight to the screen, took the message, called back. “Me. Yeah, I’m still interested. Usual place? Fine.”
Lore waited for an explanation.
“Billy,” Spanner said. “Business.”
“I thought you said your business was victimless.”
“Yes.”
“Where there are chicken hawks, there are chickens getting hurt.”
“You know more than I thought you might.” Lore just nodded, and waited. Spanner sighed. “We got the information from some straight-looking punter’s slate: he runs a daisy chain.”
“Daisy chains?:
“A ring of fresh young faces. Younger than chickens. This one and his friends like them younger than four.”
Lore felt her cheeks pulling away from her teeth in disgust.
“It’s not much to my taste, either. So what Billy and I do is put a tap on him. Blackmail,” she amplified. “A certain rough justice to it, don’t you think? Those who hurt others get a taste of how it feels to be powerless, and we make money. All very neat.”
Lore stared at her. Spanner thought she was some kind of Robin Hood. “But the kids still get hurt.”
“Often they stop molesting them, once they’ve been burned.”
“Often isn’t always.”
Spanner shrugged.
“You don’t care, do you?”
“It’s business. We can’t go to the police because they’ll want to know where we got our information. Besides, it could get dangerous if we meddled too far.”
Lore remembered Spanner coming home with flushed cheeks; the hectic eyes, the sharp jaw where her teeth were clenched together and could not or would not let go, not for hours. Blackmail. “And who else do you blackmail?”
“No one who doesn’t deserve it.”
No one who can’t pay. Lore thought about chicken hawks and daisy chains. “You could send an anonymous tip to the, police.”
“We’ve done that. Now and then. When we think the situation warrants. But without solid evidence, they don’t usually take any action.”
Lore saw that the lack of police action suited Spanner just fine. If the men who ran the chains weren’t making money, they couldn’t pay quiet fees to insure silence.
Lore dreamed that night of being rolled, dead-eyed, into a plasthene sheet and tipped into a grave. On the lip of the grave, throwing shovelfuls of wet mud, were cherubs called Billy, laughing, and Spanner holding something out of reach, saying, When you’re all grown up, and Lore, who could not close her eyes because she was dead, saw that what Spanner held were manacles.
She woke up gasping and clutching her throat, remembering her lungs fighting the plasthene for air, a cupful, a spoonful, a thimbleful. It was morning. Spanner was gone, but the screen was lit to a sunburst of color and a cartoon of a rabbit with a thought balloon saying, Call who you want. It’s open to your voice. Lore stared at the screen a long, long time. She would not call the police. She wondered how Spanner had known that. She did not feel too good about it.
Spanner was still out when the medic returned in the early evening. He pronounced Lore’s back to be healing well and left her a tape-on plaskin sheath to wear when she was in the bath or shower. “The rest of the time, let the wound breathe. You won’t need any more injectable painkillers. These distalgesics should do,” He handed her a bottle of brightly colored caplets. “You need anything else?”
He seemed in a hurry, and Lore wondered what mayhem or despair he was rushing to.
“Do you ever wonder where your patients get their injuries?”
She thought of a three-year-old, and what injury an adult might do her or him in the name of need.