In the sudden bright glare of light was another city altogether. Unlike the city topside, it had not changed much. It was still paved with particle board and threading plastic. Its buildings were old disaster pop-ups, some of them still silver. Others were grown, mushroom-like, riven with green veins of mould, bigger now than when she remembered them. She had expected tarps, the first time, but didn’t know why. They wouldn’t hold through the winter. And these people had been here longer than most. Wind whistled through the other city. Hwa heard a cat. She smelled cooking.
“I’m down here,” a gravelly voice said, a few balloons away.
Hwa walked. She kept her hands out, her wrists loose. She tried to avoid looking at any one particular tent or balloon.
“Warmer,” the voice said.
Hwa paused in front of one balloon that was actually two of them stitched together. Someone had painted an evil eye sigil across it. Outside stood a huge mask of bone and antler, so large it needed stilts to stand on. It loomed over Hwa. The wind rose up and she heard something inside it rattle.
“Hot,” said the voice inside.
Hwa went inside. The woman waiting for her sat in a wheelchair. She was Inuit. Her hair hung lank and gleaming with grease. The balloon smelled of her unwashed scalp. She was blind. Or rather, her eyes no longer saw. Hwa didn’t know if they were out of warranty, or what. But the machines where the old woman’s eyes were had gone pearly. Nonetheless, she motioned for Hwa to sit down on an old can of cooking oil. The whole place was cans. Corn. Peas. Tomatoes. Hwa only knew them from the pictures on the labels. The languages, she couldn’t read.
“I’m sorry,” Hwa said.
“For what?”
“Not bringing anything. I didn’t know I’d be coming here. I was looking for my friend—”
“Your friend isn’t here. She’s dead.”
Hwa nodded. “I know. What I don’t know is what happened.”
“She died.”
Again, Hwa nodded. She listened to the ocean below. “I want to know how she died.”
“She was murdered.”
Hwa sat forward. “Did you see it?”
A huge, rotten laugh exploded wetly from the old woman’s throat. Hwa wiped her face with the back of her hand. Now the tent smelled of tobacco and teeth and sickness, all at once.
“Blood, first,” the woman said. “Yours is clean.”
Hwa swallowed. “Organic.” She wasn’t sure if she should mention the anticonvulsants. Knowing whether to mention it would mean having some inkling of what the woman wanted with her blood, and she very much didn’t want to have that. “No machines,” she added, just in case. How had this woman known?
“I see things,” the old woman said, as though she’d heard Hwa’s thoughts. “Through other eyes.”
Outside, Hwa heard the synchronized clicking of tongues.
“You control them?” Hwa licked her lips. “You hacked them? Through the skullcap?”
“Did you know that the root of the word cybernetics comes from the ancient Greek for pilot? Of course they can be piloted. Give me your hand.” The woman reached into the folds of her flesh and tugged. An oyster knife appeared, the shiniest thing in the place, bright and hard as the edge of a fresh moon. She reached for Hwa’s hand.
“No, my arm,” Hwa said. “I’m already wounded, there. Take that.”
The woman shrugged elaborately. Smell rolled off her as her shoulders shifted. Hwa peeled up her sleeve and exposed the pink flesh of her bullet wound. The woman leaned forward and Hwa’s eyes burned and the knife rode up, up, up, gently, until it hit scar tissue.
The old woman inhaled deeply. “That’s the stuff.”
“What will you work with it?”
Again, the woman laughed. It was a thick, awful sound. “Work? Nothing. People here need transfusions. They got bad implants. Hep C.”
The knife slid in under the scar. Hwa expected it to hurt more than it did. But the knife was extremely sharp, and barely tugged the skin.
“He’ll cut you places you don’t know about, yet.” Phlegm gurgled in the old woman’s throat. “He’s been coming for you for a while. Him and all his brothers. He has a lot of souls. You just have the one. Be careful you don’t lose it.”
Hwa thought about asking where her other souls had run off to, but she wasn’t sure she’d like the answer. “Did he dump her from here? My friend? She was in pieces.”
The old woman nodded. “He was here. But he’s everywhere. Behind you. In front of you. Almost touching but not quite.”
Hwa frowned. “A shadowboxer?”
“Aye.”
“How do you know?”
The woman tapped the ruined lenses of her machine eyes with one brown, mouldy fingernail. Then she pointed out of the hut. Again the mouths outside clicked. “My eyes see things most can’t.”
“Ghosts?”
The woman’s hand left her face and stroked Hwa’s. She pushed the hair back from Hwa’s face. The skin of her hand was surprisingly soft and warm. It occurred to her that Sunny had never touched her this way. This gently. This carefully.
“Oh, my little one,” the witch murmured. “Wish t’were that simple.”
*
“This had better be good,” Kripke said, when she found him. “I was just about to lock up.”
Hwa rolled her eyes. She nodded at the people still in the gym. They looked tired, and most of them clustered around two women leaning into each other and learning the finer points of a kidney punch, but they were still around. “Aye. I can see that, b’y.”
He sighed. “Fine. What is it?”