The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

I thought Martisela would at least step back. Even as Zuniga strained at my grasp, she pushed up right under his nose. “You and your nasty friends,” she whispered. “I shall have to bear them in mind, won’t I?” Suddenly it was Martisela I had by the shoulders. Zuniga was rearing back. “My friends don’t fare so well lately. One of them is burned to death. The other is living under a bridge. Maybe your nasty friends will let you live long enough to find a bridge of your own. If you haven’t invested too much of their money. That would work well for you, yes? A nice little bankruptcy and you will escape their friendship with your life.”

“Don’t speak of my friends,” Zuniga said. “I’ll set them after you. I’ll have them use you.”

“With no money or access to deflect their more predatory instincts? I think you’re about to discover just how useful you can be.” Have I mentioned Martisela’s height? In shoes, she could barely see over my shoulder. The entire time I had hold of her, Martisela’s voice never rose above a whisper. The room should have rolled over her voice like a wave over a sand castle.

I glanced back to see a hundred faces turned up from their market projections and catastrophe grids, all staring from Zuniga to me to Martisela and back to Zuniga.

Zuniga noticed as well. He turned on them. “Que me ves?”- What are you looking at?

This seemed as good a moment as I would get. I handed him my currency marker.

“What is this?”

“It’s 500 megatramos. For your salvage.”

“You’re not serious. I consolidated these salvage holdings, not you. Why should I play this game?”

“You’ve got lizard shit on your coat. You want a coat, smells like lizard shit?” And the unspoken question- when will you get another one?

He looked at the platten in my hand like it had been scraped off his coat, but he knew better than to refuse my offer. His lips tightened into a sarcastic smile. The joke, whatever it was, must have been on me. He might have explained except for the floor daemon who appeared at his elbow with a phone call for Seсor Zuniga.

“Now we’ll see!” Zuniga whipped the phone from the kid’s hand. I would have walked away, but Zuniga would have none of that. He nodded at me as his gangster came on the line. He glared in vindication. “ Seсor Dryden.” He was laughing. їQue ondas, Carnal? The smile hung on his face a moment, suspended like a cliff diver at the top of his arc.

This would be one of those conversations of silences, stuttering objections, pale eyes, sentences that trail off into nothing. At some point, Martisela nodded toward Zuniga’s hands. What I had taken for knots of anxiety were actually mathematical catastrophes.

“He shouldn’t do that.” She made this little snick-sound with her tongue. Somewhere between pity and reproach. “He’s calculating the moment of his own death,” she said. “If he’s not careful, he’ll get an answer.”

I don’t know how she knew that, only that I had watched him re-run this calculation a half-dozen times. He ran it again even as Martisela pushed me ahead of her through the curtain.

Sooner or later, it had to come out right.

It was evening on the Galle de Campana. One of those evenings the city is most generous with its charms. A chill settles in with the fog. The pumice tiles that line the street swell and chafe and the air fills with the most delicate harmonics. A gang down at the paraffin depot was boiling moderator for some space-bound transport.

Esteban’s family lived in one of those heritage neighborhoods that creep down the sides of every bridge in the Paraffin District. Their house had been built by a ship owner when the Puente de Hierro was new. The vestiges of wealth remained even though the wealthy ship owner was gone: Here’s a formal VR portal, throw rugs rucked up around it. A genuine captain’s command chair from the wreck of the Four of Pentacles, its cushions shiny with wear. And everywhere, the reek of old cooking, the racket of kids slamming up the narrow stairs two and three flights without stopping. The shiver and groan of the bridge itself, as river traffic passed between the spans.

Someone had put out a card table in the old decontamination chamber that fronted the street. Esteban himself peered over the mezcбl flasks and ornaments of pressed tin. I remembered the picture from a bridge party we had been to across the canal in El Ciudad de Cenizas. Esteban had that look he always had, that sort of half-smile, as if he were listening to a punch line just beyond his understanding.

“Orlando, who’s with you?” Cynthia Contreras called to us from the kitchen. “Martisela Coria? Ay Dios mнo. I can’t believe they let you out.” She was wedged in between relatives at the back of this giant mahogany heirloom table. She waved us over for hugs. Her eyes were pink, but, for the moment, dry.