“It’s when they leave home and spend a lot of money and eat a lot of food and maybe fuck new people.”
And then Arcadio walks up some plank stairs, and Javier has to follow him. Stairs are hard. Arcadio warned him about them. His feet want to snag under the lip of each step. Arcadio waits at the top, rolling his eyes, and Javier tries to catch up and slips. His chin hits wood. Arcadio makes a big sigh with his shoulders and plucks Javier up by his collar and hauls him the rest of the way. When he looks at Javier’s face, he laughs.
“You got a pussy on your face, mijo.” He puts Javier’s hand on the wound and pinches the fingers shut around it. “Hold it like that until it quits bleeding. It’ll seal up soon.”
Javier follows him along a swinging bridge. Everything here is ropes and pulleys and buckets. No birds are singing. Instead there’s soft, airy music coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.
“Fucking flutes,” Arcadio mutters. He pauses at a piece of dead wood bristling with signage. The letters look familiar, but Javier can’t read the words. Arcadio points. “Come on. We need clothes.”
“I thought we were getting food.”
“We are. But first we need to get clothes. You don’t look right, and neither do I.”
Javier follows. They march across more swinging bridges until they find a place to hop down. The staff doesn’t live in the little village in the trees, Arcadio says. They live in plastic flat-pack houses that you set up by following a set of instructions with no words on it, just pictures. Arcadio used to set them up for human workers, he says. The vN they just used to bundle up in parachuting and hang from somewhere, all tied together so none could escape.
They pluck clothes from the line. Dark green P-O-L-O shirts (not pollo shirts, Arcadio says, and shut the fuck up and stop making so much noise) and chinos.
“These are what the workers wear,” Arcadio says. “Luckily, one of them just iterated.”
“What are those things?”
“Shoes. Well, sandals. Printed sandals.”
“What are they for?”
“They’re for your feet. Put them on.”
Javier gives his father a deeply skeptical frown. Nothing goes on his feet. Nothing. He can’t jump with those big rubbery things flopping around on his feet. Not jumping means not escaping. It’s a stupid idea.
“It’s a stupid idea.”
“When I want your opinion, I’ll ask you for it. Now do you want to eat, or not?”
So they go to the C-O-M-M-I-S-S-A-R-Y next, where the workers spend their pay on food. It’s special vN food that comes out of massive printers somewhere at the edge of the big city somewhere, all hot and smoky and ferrous, and the amount necessary to keep a non-photosynthetic clade running always costs just a little bit more than they would all make in a week.
“This place does clade-based employment,” Arcadio says. “That’s why we have to have a big clade. So we’ll get hired somewhere good.”
Brothers. Until this moment, Javier has never considered that he might one day have brothers. What would they be called? Would they be better jumpers? Would Arcadio like them better? If they were easier iterations, ones he didn’t have to take care of alone, he might like them better.
Javier is considering this when Arcadio asks him to steal his first bars of food.
“Wipe your chin,” Arcadio says, and then bends and does it for him with a roll of his thumb. The wound is still sticky, and Arcadio wipes the glittering black smear on the inside of his new shirt. “Good. Now you look normal.”
It occurs to Javier that he has never seen himself. There were mirrors in the car they camped in, but they were spotted with mould and angled strangely, so Javier only ever saw himself in bits and pieces. Never his whole face or body. But it probably doesn’t matter. He’s going to look just like Arcadio. He looks just like the way Arcadio used to look. There’s no need for a real mirror.
“Follow that woman,” Arcadio says. “She’s pretty. She’ll distract them.”
The girl is pretty. She’s human. She’s huge and round and has hair frizzing every which way, with a grey streak running through it like spilled sugar. Her blouse sticks to her back. Thus exposed, her shoulders fold forward like the curves of a big paper book, like the map book in the back of the car with the pages ripped out. They read that book together, he and Arcadio. They read about Mexico City and Los Angeles and even Dejima, the place that’s going to be Mecha, soon. Arcadio says they’re going to go there, someday. When the clade is big enough.