He kept saying it, over and over again: We can go anywhere.
Papa had a job again. He had a plan again. They had a chance, again. And for the first time in months, he sounded like himself. Not the scared and sorrowful man who kept apologizing that they didn’t have enough food for the night or the medicine that Mom needed, or who kept insisting that it was possible to go north when it clearly wasn’t. Not that man who seemed to crumple in on himself as he realized that the way the world had been was no longer the way the world was.
It had all happened so fast. One minute Maria had been worrying about what her mother would say about her B on a biology test and the dress she’d have for her quinceañera, and the next, America was falling apart all around them, like God had swiped his hand across the map and left a different country in its place.
You weren’t supposed to get turned back by militias at the border of Oklahoma or see people strung in the margins of the interstates. But she’d seen both. Her father kept saying that this was America, and America didn’t do these things, but the America in her father’s mind wasn’t the same as the America that they drove across.
America wasn’t supposed to be a place where you huddled for safety under the shield of an Iowa National Guard convoy and woke up without them – waking with a start to desert silence and the hot flapping of a FEMA tent, realizing that you were all alone, and that somewhere out in the darkness, New Mexicans were planning to make a lesson of you. In Papa’s mind, that shit didn’t happen. On the ground, it did. There was America before Cat 6 hurricanes and megadroughts, and there was after – with everyone on the move.
That was all past now, though. Papa finally had a plan that would work, and a job that paid, and they were getting out.
Maria settled back on her mattress and dug out a language tablet. The Chinese gave them away free to anyone who asked, and people hacked them to get access to the public network. To make up for her greed with the water, she decided to study instead of watching pirated movies.
The screen lit up, and a familiar Chinese lady started the lesson. Maria followed her prompts. The lady moved on from numbers to other words, tricky games that highlighted the tonal differences between “ma” and “ma,” “mai” and “mai.”
Different language. Different rules. Tones. Tiny differences to Maria’s ear that turned out to make all the difference in the world. If you weren’t trained to listen for them, you didn’t know what was going on. You were lost.
The lady in the tablet nodded and smiled as Maria said “buy” and “sell” correctly.
Maria was so engrossed in her study that it took a while to notice that time had passed, and Papa wasn’t home.
She got to her feet and went out into the choking furnace of 120-degree heat. The smoke had thickened. It seemed like all of California was on fire, and all of it was blowing in to Phoenix.
Maria peered toward the Taiyang, but even the construction cutter flickers were invisible now. Papa was never late coming off shift. He always did his shift, got his pay, filled his jugs from the Red Cross pump, and came straight home.
She started walking toward the construction site, making her way down the long dust-rutted boulevards, where Texas bang bang girls stood on the street corners and tried to pick up rich Californians who were over the border to go slumming. Walking past the Red Cross pump, where the lines for water stretched around the block and the price always seemed to go up. Past the shanty towns of suburban refugees that filled Fry’s and Target parking lots, all of them scavenging and building plywood slums around the relief pump, grateful to be close to any place where they could get water. Past the Merry Perry revival tent, where people lashed themselves with thorn bushes and begged God to send them rain.
Maria trudged through the choking smoke and dust, wishing she’d saved some of her water jug for the brutal heat of the walk. The arcology loomed out of the smoke, a jumbled collection of boxy interconnected towers, as isolated from Phoenix as if it were a castle fortress.
On the Taiyang’s construction side, the gate guard wouldn’t let her in. He didn’t seem to understand English, Spanish, or her broken Chinese. But he did make a call, though.
A Chinese man came out to her. A polished man, he wore a hardhat, nice clothes, and filter mask around his neck – a good one from REI that would keep California and Phoenix out of his lungs. Maria eyed it jealously.
“You’re here about the accident?” he asked.
“What accident?”
“There was a fall.”
He spoke with an accent, but his English was clear enough. It had been a long fall, he said. She wouldn’t want to see his body. He was very sorry. Taiyang International had made arrangements for the respectful disposal of his body. She could pick up his remains in the evening. There was some leftover pay, and Taiyang would cover the costs of the cremation.
Maria found herself staring at the man’s fancy dust mask as he droned on. The rubberized seals and replaceable filters...
Her father would be smoke. More smoke, adding to the burn that people tried to keep out of their lungs. Maybe she was breathing him in, right now – him and the Sierras and all of California.
His ash, flying free.
JAMAICA GINGER
Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl
NALO HOPKINSON (www.nalohopkinson.com), born in Jamaica, has lived in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and Canada. She now teaches creative writing at the University of California Riverside in the United States. She is the author of six novels – Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, The Chaos, and Sister Mine – two short story collections, and a chapbook. She edited anthologies Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, and Mojo: Conjure Stories. She is a recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Locus Award for Best New Writer, the World Fantasy Award, the Sunburst Award (twice), the Aurora Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, and the Norton Award. Her most recent book is the short story collection, Falling in Love With Hominids.
NISI SHAWL (www.nisishawl.com) is the author of collections Filter House and Something More and More. Her short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy, Carl Brandon and Gaylactic Spectrum Awards. Filter House won the James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. She is co-author of Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and co-editor of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. She writes reviews for The Seattle Times, and writes and edits reviews for the feminist literary quarterly Cascadia Subduction Zone. Her Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair is due out from Tor in September 2016.
“DAMN AND BLAST it!”
Plaquette let herself in through the showroom door of the watchmaker’s that morning to hear Msieur blistering the air of his shop with his swearing. The hulking clockwork man he’d been working on was high-stepping around the workroom floor in a clumsy lurch. It lifted its knees comically high, its body listing to one side and its feet coming down in the wrong order; toe, then heel. Billy Sumach, who delivered supplies to Msieur, was in the workroom. Through the open doorway he threw her a merry glance with his pretty brown eyes, but he had better sense than to laugh at Msieur’s handiwork with Msieur in the room.