“There was once a forester who went into the forest . . .”
Fundovogel, Grimm’s Fairy Tales
The stretch limo body that served as the family apartment was blocked up just under the I-40 overpass, giving the pale girl a commanding view of the dusty, junk-covered concrete riverbed. Thousands of wrecks and abandoned vehicles had been pushed off the overpass after the Death to clear the roads above for traffic. . . traffic that never returned. Ranga strode toward the distant Corporate Domes in armor and bio-protective gear.
"Hey! Where ya goin, Daddy-san?" Her strident voice echoed along the underpass.
"Sorry baby, gotta burn," Ranga yelled without looking back. "When the Mara calls, I lissen or it's my ass. Watch your brother and stay outta the plaguewinds. Forty-eight ya." He broke into a lope, disappeared into the jumbled maze of Death scrap.
"Hwoon dahn gang-banger punk," Linya muttered under her breath. "Splice you!" she yelled, knowing he could still hear her. "I'd rather have Bird watchin' my back, anyway!" She needed to go to market at Crossroads Village, but now that would have to wait two whole days. He was always off doing something for those Mara Salvatrucha gangsters.
She felt like another piece of junk; unwanted but too valuable to burn. Sometimes she wondered why Ranga had bothered to father a daughter, much less adopt Birdboy. It wasn't like he was ever at home. As she often did at times like this, Linya wished her mother had survived. Fuming, she slid back into the rear seat and turned around. There sat Old Sanna across the cabin of the limo, studying Linya's near-nudity.
Linya throttled her first fearful impulse to cover up, also her second angry impulse to get her sawed-off twelve gauge and splatter the old switch-hitting witch. Instead she ignored Sanna and swung up into her sleeping rack, welded to the limo's roof to avoid the plaguewinds that might penetrate even the limo’s door seals. Despite limited space, with practiced effort she squirmed into cami and shift. When she dropped back into the cabin to put on her boots, Sanna was gone.
Old Sanna was Ranga's head servant and cook, though Linya knew the fat woman thought herself a free agent. Linya also knew Sanna harbored twisted feelings for her. Ranga would recycle the woman in a heartbeat if he knew about those lusts, knowledge Linya used mercilessly to enforce their uneasy truce.
Linya poked Birdboy’s rack until his face peeked down out of the nested bedding. He was a dark boy; dark hair, dark eyes, and a swarthy complexion, contrasting Linya's petite paleness. In this broken world he meant everything to her.
"C'mon, Bird, rise 'n shine." He wouldn't make eye contact, as usual, but she could see the smile playing around his mouth. Autistic, her friend Okie Nate at Crossroads Village called it. Whatever it was, it didn't make Birdboy stupid, just hard to reach. A little more fussing got the boy cleaned up and dressed, then Linya synthed them some breakfast.
Chores were the next order of the morning. The three other servants had duties salvaging stuff for the MS13 gang to sell at the Domes, which left a list of menial chores for Linya. Water had to be hauled up from the river basin to the purification tank, solar pods dusted and rewound, and bedding hung in the antiseptic burn of high ultraviolet sunlight unfiltered by ozone layers.
And the sweeping. It was the chore she hated most. Each morning she put on the stinking, chafing bio-isolation suit and tediously swept everywhere the overpass kept shade. She had to make sure every bit of dust got into the deadly, ultraviolet-rich sunshine. When the breezes of night plumed anthraxes, plagues, and fungal spores from the unburied dead, the living could not afford to let dust settle.
Linya soon found that Birdboy wasn't having a good day despite his early cheer. After he wandered from the protective shade of the overpass for the third time, she gave up and led him back to the limo.
"Okay, Bird." Linya powered the vid system. "Chill here and I'll finish the chores. What'll it be?" She was tickled when he crossed his arms, ducked his head, and glared at her, mimicking a rapper pose. "Classic MTV, then."
While she fiddled with the satlink, Birdboy powered up his PlayStation Holo-Virtual deck. For a few happy minutes she sat with him, clapping encouragement as he rezzed holo-virtual constructs on the tiny holographic stage. He controlled the tiny performers with amazing realism, sometimes copying the vid performers, sometimes improvising complex stomps.
Poor Bird, she thought. The machine was so easy for him, but the rest of the world was so damn hard. She left him bobbing his head and working his fingers to the beat.
The girl finished her regular chores by noon, decided to fetch Birdboy and join the rest of the household for lunch. Linya worried that Bird got little enough social contact as it was. She hoped dealing with group meals would help, not that Sanna or the three menservants truly cared about either of the kids. Old Sanna was already passing out fry bread and synth protein wieners when Linya and Birdboy got there.
"Missy Linya, Master Bird, nice of ya to join us," said Brock from the head of the battered pre-Death picnic table, sliding them a plate with a generous portion. Linya knew his respect was for Ranga, not her. Beaner muttered a greeting through a mouthful of fry-bread. Skinny Sal just leered and winked, bug-eyes rolling.
Brock and Sal were prize slaves, Skinhead gangers captured by the Mara Salvatrucha Estados in Dome turf wars and never ransomed. Beaner wasn't a slave; he'd come up from Mexico a free man, choosing to work for Ranga rather than join a gang or enter a Dome. Linya suspected the scar-faced Mexican was running from either the law or Mexican crime cartels. Linya trusted none of them.
"Appreciate it," Linya said, elbowed Birdboy until he gave halting thanks as well. "You boys want some hot sauce with that?" The men eagerly tore off chunks of bread and passed them to Linya. She gathered up the bits, dumped them into the processing hopper of the household organic synthesizer, along with her own and Birdboy’s portions.
"What," Sanna said to the men with sarcastic cheer, "my cooking not good enough for you all?"
"Oh, no ma'am," Brock blurted. Fear twisted his face when he realized what he’d said. "I mean, yes ma'am, it's just we know you don't have the time all the time."
"The miracle is," spoke up Beaner, "that such a handsome woman can cook at all." The other two men chimed in agreement.
Linya rolled her eyes as she listened to men fawn and flirt with the fat, old cook. She and Birdboy never ate anything Old Sanna synthed and that was why. What Linya knew, and none of the rest, was that Sanna was a splicer. Linya knew this because she was a splicer, too. She queued up the synth programs; a bit of hot sauce for the men, pitas with peanut butter and jelly for her and Birdboy.
Long ago splicers promised a paradise of food and good health, but genetic sequence splicing had instead spawned the Death on the old world. An accusation of splicecraft today usually led to a drowning, guilty or not. It made her queasy sometimes, knowing that the cook had likely made the men that way with splicecraft.
Old Sanna had taught the girl splicecraft for years, ever since Linya 'accidentally' discovered the woman's splicer kit and forced the issue. The cook never admitted to splicecraft on the other servants, but Linya knew a couple of ways she herself might try to craft such loyalty.
Linya didn't really know the science behind gene splicing, but she didn't have to. With a good synthesizer and a splicer unit all anyone had to do was search the databases for sequences and synth up a virus to carry the splice into the body. The art was in using as few sequence changes as possible to achieve a stable splice. Linya just knew she could be such an artist someday, maybe splice for a corp, or fix Birdboy's autism, or even cure the plaguewinds.
After lunch the men returned to their salvaging. Linya put her brother to sorting old drill bits in front of the vid and went to find the cook for their daily splicecraft lesson. She found Sanna in the positive-pressure greenhouse bubble, pouring more water into the purification tank.
Linya was cat-kill curious about what might actually get the flabby splicer to do manual labor. Puffing, Sanna dropped an empty jerry-can, turned and saw Linya.
"No lessons today," said Sanna flatly, "Go play or something." Grunting, she hefted up another container. Waves splashed some water out of the tank as she poured.
"You got the tank too full, Old Sanna,"
Sanna laughed. "Don't you worry. Now, scat." The woman rubbed the sweat from her face, dropped the empty jerry-can. Linya edged closer than she liked to get to the old pervert these days, especially after this morning.
"What's all the water for, anyway, Sanna?"
"That's a secret, little Linya." She spun and snatched hold of the girl’s shoulders. "A dangerous secret. You sure you wanna know?"
"Yeah, I want to know," Linya said defiantly, trembling with disgust and fear. Ranga being gone was suddenly much more than inconvenience. She hated feeling scared, though, and anger helped her take back some control. “Tell me.”
"Good. Best you know, anyways." Sanna knelt, still holding the girl's upper arms. "I need the extra water because tomorrow morning I'm gonna grind Birdboy up and run him through the big synth."
Linya smiled at the joke, then wondered if the old bitch was serious. "But. . ."
"Ranga found the kid in the wilds, but that ain't all. He was in his dead mother's arms, his whole family dead from a plaguewind."
"What? Couldn't be, he'd be dead, too." Linya suddenly wondered if this wasn’t all a bad dream.
"Immunity!” A smile split Sanna's face. “That little retard was born immune to the plaguewinds! I finally got the sequences mapped, RNAi encoded. You know what that means?" Linya shook her head, dumbstruck. The woman pulled her into a sweaty hug.
"It means we're rich," she whispered. "I'll buy into a pharmacorp, we'll live in the domes like Vested Execs." Sanna gently stroked the girl's back. "I need to break the kid down to extract enough sequences fast enough for the first batch, but he'll be better off." Sanna stood, smiled again. "Don't worry, I'll come back for you soon."
The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur of confusion and disbelief. Sunset was close when the plan sprang whole and complete into Linya's mind. She had to run away, right now, and take Birdboy with her.
A short time later she banged on the cargo container that served as the men’s bunkhouse. Noise inside stopped with her knock. After a few tense seconds Sal yanked the door open, releasing a mushroom of skunky smoke into the dusk. His mouth hung agape as he ogled Linya. She’d put on a cherished Dome fashion outfit, which she knew made her look more mature. Smiling, and hating it, she held out a jug of Ranga's whiskey.
"Here," she said in a little girl voice, "Old Sanna said you should have this."
With effort Sal tore his eyes from her body and focused on the liquor bottle.
"Yeehaw!" He snatched the bottle. "Party time!" Sal smiled, gap-toothed and ugly. "Come party, babe."
Linya turned and ran for the limo, chased by raucous laughter. For a moment she wished she'd used something deadlier than opiates to spike the juice. With Old Sanna already unconscious from her nightly synthed endorphin binge, the coast was clear.
Back in the limo she broke into Ranga's locked stash and stuffed her pack with black market trade goods. ROM cards with illegal bots, ‘Executive Restricted’ Direct Neural Net Interface implants, and rolls of knock-off designer bioware patches were all common currency in the domes. Shotgun lanyard around her neck, protective poncho over everything, and she was ready. Next, she went to Birdboy's rack, found him awake and watching her. She smiled, and wonders, he smiled back.
"Bird, you know I love you?" He nodded. "I need you to trust me. If you never leave me, I will never leave you." In response, Birdboy pushed his Batman rucksack out of his rack. The ancient, plastic-and-canvas pack thudded to the floor at Linya's feet, inexpertly stuffed with clothes, toys, and everything else the boy valued.
"Never, never, not now, not ever." He whispered this over and as Linya raced sunset in the stolen electric utility cart, whispered all the way to Crossroads Village.
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