“There are ways to handle people like Raleigh.”
“You can free me from him?”
“I doubt I have the funds to buy you out.”
Emiko’s heart crashes as Anderson-sama continues, “With tension so high, I can’t provoke him by just taking you away. Not when he could just send the white shirts hunting here. It would be too risky. But I think I can arrange for you to sleep here at least. Raleigh might even appreciate the lessened exposure.”
“But would this not create problems for you? The white shirts do not like farang, either. You are very precarious now.” Help me fly from this place. Help me find the New People villages. Help me, please. “If I were to pay Raleigh-san’s fines… I could go north.”
Anderson-sama tugs her shoulder gently. Emiko lets herself be pulled back to him. “You hope for too little,” he says. His hand traces across her stomach. Idle. Thoughtful. “A lot of things may be changing soon. Maybe even for windups.” He favors her with a small secretive smile. “The white shirts and their rules won’t be here forever.”
She is begging for survival, and he speaks of fantasy.
Emiko tries to keep her disappointment hidden. You should be content, greedy girl. Grateful for what you have. But she can’t keep the bitterness from her voice. “I am a windup. Nothing will change. We will always be despised.”
He laughs at that, pulls her close. “Don’t be so sure.” His lips brush her ear, whispering. Conspiratorial. “If you pray to that bakeneko cheshire god of yours, I might be able to give you something better than a village in the jungle. With a little luck, you might end up with a whole city.”
Emiko pushes away, looks at him sadly. “I understand if you cannot change my lot. But you should not tease me.”
Anderson-sama only laughs again.
26
Hock Seng crouches in an alley just outside the farang manufacturing district. It’s night, but still there are white shirts everywhere. Everywhere he goes, he finds cordons of uniforms. On the quays, clipper ships sit isolated, waiting for permission to unload cargo. In the factory district, Ministry officers stand on every corner, preventing access for workers and owners and shopkeepers alike. Only a few people are allowed in and out, ones who show residence cards. Locals.
With only a yellow card for identification, it took Hock Seng half the evening to traverse the city, avoiding checkpoints. He misses Mai. Those young eyes and ears made him feel safe. Now he crouches with cheshires and the stink of urine, watching white shirts check another man’s identification and cursing that he is cut off from the SpringLife factory. He should have been brave. Should have simply robbed the safe when he had the chance. Should have risked everything. And now it’s too late. Now the white shirts own every inch of the city, and their favorite target is yellow cards. They like to test their batons on yellow card skulls, like to teach them lessons. If the Dung Lord didn’t have so much influence, Hock Seng is sure that the ones in the towers would already be slaughtered. The Environment Ministry sees yellow cards the same way it sees the other invasive species and plagues it manages. Given a choice, the white shirts would slaughter every yellow card Chinese and then make a khrab of apology for their over-enthusiasm to the Child Queen. But only after the fact.
A young woman shows her pass and clears the cordon. She disappears down the street, deeper into the manufacturing district. Everything is so tantalizingly close, and yet so impossibly out of reach.
Looked at objectively, it is probably best that the factory is closed. Safer for everyone. If he weren’t so dependent on the contents of the safe, he would just report the line’s infections and be done with the tamade thing entirely. And yet, in the midst of all that illness, ensconced above the miasma of the algae baths, the blueprints and specifications still beckon.
Hock Seng wants to tear out the last of his hair with frustration.
He glares at the checkpoint, willing the white shirts to go away, to look somewhere else. Wishing, praying to the goddess Kuan Yin, begging to fat gold Budai for a little luck. With those manufacturing plans and the support of the Dung Lord, so much would be possible. So much future. So much life. Offerings for his ancestors again. Perhaps a wife. Perhaps a son to carry on his name. Perhaps…
A patrol stalks past. Hock Seng eases deeper into shadow. The enforcers remind him of when the Green Headbands began patrolling at night. They started out looking for couples holding hands in the evening, displaying immorality.
At the time, he told his children to watch themselves, to understand that the tides of conservatism came and went and if they could not live as freely and openly as their parents had, well then, what of it? Didn’t they have food in their bellies and family and friends whose company they enjoyed? And within their high-walled compounds, it was irrelevant what the Green Headbands thought.
Another patrol. Hock Seng turns and slips back down the alley. There is no way to sneak into the manufacturing district. The white shirts are determined to shut down Trade and hurt the farang. He grimaces and begins the long circuitous route back through the sois toward his hovel.
Others in the Ministry were corrupt, but not Jaidee. Not if anyone is honest about the man. Even Sawatdee Krung Thep!, the whisper sheet which loved him most, and then denigrated him so completely during his disgrace, has printed pages and pages in praise of the hero of the country. Captain Jaidee was too well-loved to be cut into pieces, to be treated like offal that is dumped in methane composters. Someone must be punished.
And if Trade is to blame, then trade must be punished. So the factories are closed along with anchor pads and roads and docks, and Hock Seng cannot squeeze out. He cannot book passage on a clipper, cannot ride upriver to the ruined Ayutthaya, cannot flee on a dirigible to Kolkata or Japan.
He makes his way past the docks and, sure enough, the white shirts are still there, along with small knots of workers, squatting on the ground, idled by the blockade. A beautiful clipper ship lies anchored a hundred meters offshore, rocking gently in the water. As beautiful a clipper as he ever owned. Latest generation, switch hulls and hydrofoils, palm oil polymer, wind wings. Fast. Capable of hauling plenty of cargo. It sits out there, gleaming. And he stands on the dock, staring at it. It might as well be docked in India.
He spies a food cart, a vendor frying generipped tilapia in a deep wok. Hock Seng steels himself. He has to ask, even if he reveals himself as a yellow card. He is blind without information. With the white shirts at the other end of the dock, if the man calls out, he should still have time to flee.
Hock Seng eases close. “Is there any way of passengers crossing?” he murmurs. He tilts his head toward the clipper. “Over there?”
“No transit for anyone,” the vendor mutters.
“Not even a single man?”
The man scowls, nods at the others in the shadows, squatting and smoking cigarettes, playing at cards. Huddled around the hand-crank radio of a shop keeper. “Those ones have been there for the last week. You’ll have to wait, yellow card. Just like everyone else.”
Hock Seng fights the urge to flinch at being identified. Forces himself to pretend as if they are all equals in this, to create a hopeful fiction that the man will see him as a person, and not as some unwelcome cheshire. “You haven’t heard of small boats, further down the coast? Away from the city? For money?”
The fish vendor shakes his head. “No one’s going either way. They’ve caught two different groups of passengers trying to make their way ashore from the ships, too. The white shirts won’t even allow a resupply boat to go out. We’re betting on whether the captain will weigh anchor or the white shirts will open up first.”