“They censor all the juicy bits anyway. What are you doing here on the ground? Come to Boston for a vacation or something? Space not dangerous enough?”
The other cops laugh. They’re all in a weird mood—most of them haven’t stopped fingering the handles of their crowd-control zappers since I spotted their group, and I decide to be jovial.
“No, just visiting my mom. Got two weeks of leave, but I don’t think I’m going to spend it all down here.”
“I don’t blame ya. Well, take care, and stay off the street at night. Nothing good ever happens out there after sunset.”
“Will do. You guys be safe.”
I adjust the strap of my furlough bag, give the group a friendly nod, and walk on.
“Sergeant,” the first cop calls after me, and I turn around again.
“Yes, sir?”
He motions for me to come back, and I return to the group. When I’m standing in front of him again, he lowers his voice.
“How’s it going up there? How are we doing?”
I look at the anxious expressions on the faces of the cops gathered around me. I want to say something upbeat, give them some inside scoop that will cheer them up a bit, but I know how badly we are getting mauled, and I can’t bring myself to make up a cheery pep talk.
“Well,” I say, and shrug. “We’re trying to hold the line, you know? Just digging in, and holding the line.”
I can sense their disappointment, but I can tell that they’re happier with honesty than obvious rah-rah bullshit.
“Yeah, I hear you,” the first cop says. “It’s the same down here.”
The streets outside are littered with garbage. In front of the transit station, I see the scorched husk of a hydrobus, pushed against the curb and stripped of everything usable. Near the station, there’s a little concrete booth where they used to hold the monthly commissary voucher lottery, but the polyplast windows are shattered, and there are long streak marks of soot on the concrete above them. It looks like nobody has bothered to pick up garbage or issue vouchers here in a good while. The sun has already started to set, and the shadows of the gray and worn-down buildings are turning the street in front of me into a maze of dark and dangerous spots. I walk the two blocks to Mom’s new tenement building as quickly as I can without breaking into a run. Soon, darkness will fall, and then the rats will come out in packs.
Mom has moved up a little in the world since I moved out. Her new apartment is on the second floor of a tenement building that looks roughly half as old and twice as clean as the one where we both lived for over ten years. I don’t have an ID card to scan at the front door’s access panel, so I ring the buzzer labeled with her name: GRAYSON P.
The access panel has a little vid screen, for the mutual verification of identities. The one in our old building was broken or coated with crap most of the time, but this one is working fine. When Mom answers the buzzer, her face shows up on the little armored display, and even on the low-resolution screen, I can tell that she has aged ten years in the last five. She squints at the camera mounted above her own little screen, and her eyes widen in surprise.
“Andrew!”
“Hi, Mom. I got in early. Let me in before they mug me out here.”
Mom presses the button for the door opener in lieu of a reply, and I step into the building, mindful to check over my shoulder for anyone trying to follow me in to rob me in privacy.
I take the stairs instead of the elevator. Our old staircase smelled like stale vomit and fresh piss most of the time, but this one only smells like floor cleaner.
When I reach the second floor, Mom is waiting in front of the elevator door. She turns around when she hears the staircase door, and I give her a little wave.
“You know I always take the stairs, Mom.”
“Andrew!” she says again. Then she rushes to meet me and gives me a fierce hug. “What are you doing here already? You said you were going to be here on Monday. I haven’t even cleaned the place up yet.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mom. I had something on my schedule that fell through.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have walked here. It’s too dangerous. I would have met you over at the civil center.”
She stops her attempt to crush my rib cage and holds me at arm’s length to examine my uniform.
“That looks pretty good on you. My, you’ve filled out, haven’t you?”
“Lots of running and lifting. We don’t exactly sit around all day.”
My mother seems smaller than I remember her, more slight and insubstantial. She has lost the extra few pounds she had been carrying around for years, but instead of looking fit and lean, she just looks thin and used up. Her mousy brown hair has many gray streaks, and there are deep wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth that weren’t there before.