Slow River

Chapter 27

I set the Hammex 20 up on its tripod and sat opposite, in the chair beneath the window. The camera lens was like a cold fish eye, unblinking. I stared at it, forgetting what I was supposed to say. The reflection of a bird flying past my window flashed in the glass eye and made me jump.

I cleared my throat. “When I was seven, someone tried to sexually abuse me. I think it was my mother…”

I talked for hours, occasionally sipping water from the glass next to me. I told the camera about Greta helping with the lock, about Stella killing herself, about Tok calling me in Uruguay. I told the camera everything I could remember about my kidnap; about Fishface and Crablegs and the tent; how they had known I was allergic to spray-injector drugs; what they had said and how they had said it. I talked about the nail.

When I found I was talking at great length about the qualities of the nail—how it smelled, how it felt in my hand, how big it was—I turned the camera off, used the bathroom, made myself some tea.

When I resumed, I was much more terse. “So when they took me outside, I thought they were going to kill me. I tried to escape. In the course of that escape attempt, one—the one I called Fishface—was seriously hurt. Then I was bundled up into a van.” I described the van as well as I could. “Crablegs threatened to kill me. He tried, with some kind of nasal spray. I got away. I was hurt, naked, alone. I was helped by a stranger.”

That’s what Spanner still was: a stranger. One with a dangerous smile and skillful hands. I wondered what she was doing, right now. I wondered if someone was hurting her for money. It was getting dark outside. The sun went down early on winter afternoons.

“I illegally took the PIDA from the corpse of a woman called Sal Bird, who had died, I was told, in a swimming accident in Immingham. I worked at Hedon Road Waste-water Treatment Plant.” I gave my address and phone number. I explained about the sabotage; about Meisener; about Montex and the van de Oest corporation and Greta. “I think Lucas Chen has been abducted by the same persons as myself three years ago.”

I thought about saying more, but there wasn’t any point. This was only to give them enough to start with while I was. dealing with my family and dodging the glare of publicity. No doubt I would spend hours closeted in some grim-looking police station while being politely interviewed by the officer or officers in charge. For all that I had done, I had never seen the inside of a police station. The idea frightened me.

On the other side of the window, neon in shopwindows and the sodium of streetlights were blinking on. The flat was gray and shadowy beyond the camera flood. I should really stand up and make some calls: tell Ruth and Ellen the truth before the net caught the story; let Tom know that the building would be swarming by this time tomorrow. Maybe he had a relative he could stay with for a day or two.

I just sat there, hands and feet getting cold, watching the camera light grow more sharp-edged as the shadows in the flat turned from gray to black.

It was spring again. Lore had been prostituting her body for more than a year. All that money. She lay there for a long time, stroking the quilt, dunking, finally admitting to herself what she had known, on some level, all along. That evening, as they were preparing to go out to meet more customers, Lore sat down on the rim of the bathtub.

“How much does it cost?”

“Hmm?” Spanner was facing the mirror. She continued to brush her hair, but Lore knew Spanner was watching her.

“The drug. How much does it cost?” Spanner paused in midstroke, then shrugged. “What does it matter? We have enough money.”

“We’ve been earning an average of six thousand a week for more than a year. That’s more than three hundred thousand—”

“I can count.”

“—and where has it gone?” Lore stood up, took the hairbrush from Spanner’s hand, and shook it in her face. “I want your attention, and I want the truth. Why, exactly, have we been selling our bodies for the last year?”

“To earn—”

“The truth!”

“That is the—”

“But not the whole truth, is it? Yes, we’ve been letting old ladies watch while you sodomize me; you’ve tied me up while some executive jerks off because it’s his birthday; I’ve had to watch while you piss on some jaded couple. For what?” Lore was pacing up and down now, hairbrush still in her hand. “And don’t tell me money. It’s the drug. I thought the drug was to make our lives bearable while we made money the only way we knew how. But that’s not it at all, is it? I got it all backward. That was never the point. The whole point was the drug. The whole point was what you and I did while we took the drug. Because you like it. Deep down inside, you like it.”

“You do, too. Otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it.”

That wasn’t true. Was it? Lore shook her head. “Just tell me how much we’ve been spending on that drug.”

“A lot. Everything.” And Spanner smiled.

Lore hit her. An open-handed slap that sent her spinning across the sink.

“Why?” She was panting. But Spanner said nothing. “I should have figured it out sooner. Why hadn’t I heard about this drug? Why didn’t anyone else know about it? Because it’s new. Who steals it for you? You make me so angry! We could have earned more selling it than using it. Couldn’t we? Couldn’t we!”

But if they had merely been selling it, Spanner would not have had the same power; she would not have known something Lore didn’t.

Lore wanted to hit Spanner again, hit her over and over, blame her for everything. But something held her back. She was already the kind of person who sold herself, who humiliated herself on a regular basis. She did not want to become the kind of person who enjoyed hurting others.

Spanner had turned her back on Lore and was examining her face in the mirror. “It’s swelling already. I’ll have to use a lot of makeup to cover it before we go out.”

Lore felt cold and sick. She had hit Spanner. She could not understand why Spanner wasn’t reacting to that. “We can’t go out. Not now. We—”

But Spanner whirled, teeth bared and tendons standing out in her neck and shoulders. “We have no choice! You think the drug’s expensive? You have no idea!” She barked with laughter. “We owe money, you fool. And they know where we live. They’re not forgiving types, either. So you get your body into that dress and come with me, because if we don’t earn some cash tonight, tomorrow you won’t be in any position to worry about what kind of damage this stuff will be doing to your health.”

Lore’s mind went terrifyingly blank. She was beginning to feel that the whole world was out of control. She closed her eyes. Think fast. “They know you. Not me. You need the money more than I do.”

“They won’t take long to figure—”

“But for now, you’re the one.” Lore made her voice hard and flat. “So you need my help, for a change. So I’ll make you a deal. We’ll go out tonight, and tomorrow, and the next day. For as long as it takes. But we won’t use that drug anymore. And we’ll save the money.”

Without the drug, it would be unbearable. At least, she hoped Spanner would find it so. And then maybe she could be persuaded to look at the possibility of a net-commercial scam.

“Is there any left?”

Spanner held up a vial, still half-full.

“Then you can use it.” She no longer trusted Spanner to look after her while she was in throes of hormonally induced ecstasy. And maybe the effects of the drug would not be lasting if she stopped taking it now.

Without the drug it was terrible. Lore felt like a receptacle, one of those plastic vaginas she and Spanner had both laughed at in the sex shop. But she stayed with it grimly. And she stuck to Spanner’s side like a burr.

“I won’t let you run up any more debt,” she told her. So they earned their money, and they saved, and after six weeks Lore decided it was enough.

Lore prepared the garden for a long absence. That’s how she thought of it, a long absence, not a permanent one; she did not want to examine why. She just pruned and aerated and clipped. She had hoped to see the cat one last time, but it stayed away. It would always be wild, coming and going unbidden. Like hope. She hoped Spanner would feed it. Probably not.

Afterward, she cleaned her spade and shears and clippers carefully and wrapped them in oilcloth. Then she waited patiently for Spanner to wake.

When she did, Lore called her into the living room. She gestured at the two piles of debit cards on the table. “Choose one,” she said. “They’re roughly equal. You can check them if you like.”

Spanner looked at them, and at the two suitcases against the wall. “Does this mean what I think it means?”

“Yes.” Lore sat on the couch. She had meant to be businesslike, but the lost look on Spanner’s face brought back memories of all the good times they had had: the exhilaration of riding the freighters; packs full of stolen slates; champagne at four in the morning. “Yes,” she said again.

Spanner squatted on her heels by the table, examined the pile thoughtfully. “You know, there’s enough here to bankroll that scam you were talking about earlier.”

And Lore couldn’t leave without one more try. “We could both start afresh,” she said. “You’ve got skills. It wouldn’t be hard. We could move, find another flat. Somewhere where Billy and the others couldn’t find you.” Spanner said nothing. “We could take new names. Get real jobs. You have skills. It’s never too late to start again.”

“Isn’t it?” She looked up, and Lore was reminded of the ancient look, the soft pain she had seen that first night on Spanner’s face when she had seen how badly injured Lore had been.

“No,” she said, but even to herself she did not sound convinced.

Spanner laughed, but it was a sad laugh this time. She scooped up the nearest pile of cards. “Well, it lasted longer than I expected that October night, and it was more fun.”

“Please, Spanner…”

“No. We’re different. This may not be what you feel you deserve from life, but it’s the level I’ve found, the place I call home. It’s where I belong.”

“No. It’s where you think you belong, because you believe you don’t deserve any better. But you do. We all do. There’s a chance here, with this.” Lore nodded at her own pile, “Don’t dismiss it.”

But Spanner was already getting up, flipping the switch on her screen, pulling up a swirling graphic in vibrant colors. Lore picked up a suitcase in each hand, paused. “I’ve entered my new address in your files.”

Spanner said, without looking up from the screen: “I’ll see you again. You’ll always need me.”

I stood and stretched, turned off the camera light, looked at the clock. Eight-thirty. Morning in Ratnapida.

A bath first.

The tub took a while to fill. I don’t remember thinking anything in particular.

I climbed in but felt no urge to use the soap. Gradually, the water stilled. My face came into focus on the surface, between my bent knees. I looked at the reflection curiously: brown hair, gray eyes, good bones. The gray eyes watched me back. This was me. I didn’t need Sal Bird anymore.

This is what my father would see when I met him tomorrow. What would I say? How would I explain how I had lived the last three years? I wouldn’t, not right away. It would be enough that I was here. At last.

And then I was filled with a sudden energy, the need to call, to meet Oster and show him my real face, to wait for Magyar outside the plant afterward. I reached for the soap.

I was toweling myself dry when the screen chimed. I wrapped the towel around myself and took the call.

“Magyar!”

“You haven’t called yet, right”

“No, but as soon as my hair’s dry—”

“Too late. Your father’s here, demanding to know where you are.”

That couldn’t be right. I hadn’t called him yet.

“Look, if… if you need more time, I can foul up your employment records to hide your address.”

“No.” It came out crisp and decisive. “I mean, yes, hide my address. I’m coming in to see him.”

“Now?”

“Right now.” My hair could dry on its own.

I don’t remember getting dressed, or whether I took the slide or walked, but I do remember the sheen of Magyar’s hair in the street light outside the plant, and I remember walking through the gates next to her, carefully, as though my body were built upon bird bones, hollow and light. And I remember the door.

It was pale woodash, something like that. Very pale. There was a nameplate: P. Rawlin, Superintendent. I stood in front of it, my face about four inches from the grain, long enough to worry the assistant. He shifted slightly behind me, and Magyar gave him a look. I closed my eyes. My father was behind that door. Whom I had loved, then hated, and did not know at all. I took one last look at Magyar, who nodded.

The handle was one of those old-fashioned knobs. Brass. Slippery under my sweating hands. It turned easily.

Dark red carpet. A desk, a big slab of some dark wood. A man climbing to his feet as the door shut behind me—the plant superintendent. To the right, a woman in a brown suit. A quick glance from her pale eyes to me and then from me to the man sitting on the left side of the desk. A strange, eerie silence. Then the superintendent, Rawlin, saying something at the same time that the door swung shut with a click and my father jumped to his feet, face eager, hands open: “Lore! Oh, thank god, Lore!”

His words were like solvent on cheap varnish, stripping away my comforting glaze of unreality.

“God. Lore. When I heard, I came as fast as I could. We’ve just land—”

The world was painfully bright and real. I held up my hand, making him stop. “Who told you? Was it Meisener?” Oster dropped his hands. “Who?”

“Meisener. Or that’s what he calls himself. He works here.”

“Wait a minute,” the superintendent said, coming out from behind the desk. “One of our workers knew you were here?”

“Oh, he’s not yours.”

Rawlin frowned at that, then ignored it. “But if he knew you were here, why didn’t he claim the reward?”

“It wasn’t Meisener?” I asked Oster. But of course it wasn’t. And then all my adrenaline had boiled away and I felt old and sad and tired. They were all staring at me. I sighed. “Let’s start again.” I nodded to Rawlins. “Superintendent,” I said, then held out my hand to the woman. “I’m Lore van de Oest.”

She responded automatically, as people do. “Claire Singh. Director of City Sewage.”

I smiled the polite smile I had not had to use for a long time. “My father and I haven’t seen each other in a while. We would like some privacy.” It took her a moment to understand; then she flushed. Perhaps it was the smile, perhaps she remembered that Oster could buy her and her city from his daily operating budget. “Rawlin,” she snapped. “We’ll leave father and daughter to themselves for a few minutes.”

I watched them leave, refusing to meet my father’s eyes until the door was closing behind them. I tried to imagine what Magyar would make of their exit. I felt better knowing she was there.

Then there was no way to put it off any longer. I turned to my father.

He held out his arms again, but more cautiously this time, and that caution, almost timorousness, undid me. He was my father.

“Oh, Papa…”

I threw myself into his arms. But I wasn’t six anymore, and he couldn’t keep out the world. And he seemed smaller than he had been. We moved apart a little to look at each other, hands still wrapped around biceps and triceps.

“Lore…” Long and drawn out, as though it was new in his mouth. “Lore, I thought you were dead.”

“I was, in a way.”

He reached up, seemed about to ruffle my hair, then touched the ends gently. “Brown suits you.”

We held each other at arm’s length in silence, measuring. Still daughter and father, but changed. “Come for a walk with me. By the canal.”

“In the city?”

His surprise and distaste amused me. “I’ve lived here three years. I’m one of the people I used to be scared of. We’ll walk by the canal and no one will bother us. Assuming the media doesn’t have this already.”

“It’s tight as a drum. That won’t last past tomorrow morning, of course.”

“Unless your informer takes it to the net for extra money.”

“No. That was one of the conditions of receiving the reward.”

It made sense. “Will you come for that walk? You can have a bodyguard follow us, if you like.”

I opened the door. Magyar was there, trying to look bored, succeeding only in looking fierce and alien in her green skinny with its red and black strapping. I stood aside, gestured from one to the other. “Magyar, this is my father, Oster. Dad, this is Cherry Magyar.” I put my arm around her waist briefly, so he would understand, and said to her, “My father and I are going for a walk. I’ll be back. After the shift, outside.”

I hadn’t meant it to be a question, but of course it was. My father was here in the flesh. Everything was real. This was her chance to back away from Lore van de Oest. All she said was, “Don’t be late,” and gave my father a piercing look.

It was wet and cold and windy. The towpath was surprisingly light: the water reflected the city’s glow. We walked in silence for a while.

“Did you fly straight from Ratnapida?”

“Yes. Private plane from Auckland to Bangkok, then on to Rotterdam. Then here.”

“I imagine you feel cold.” It was summer in Ratnapida. Mid-eighties on a cool day.

“The carp are bigger,” he said. “Even in just three years.”

More silence.

“Lore, will you come home?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“She’s gone,” he said softly. “Your mother.”

“What happened?”

“It was terrible.”

I took his arm as we walked, and he told me: Tok arriving in the middle of the night, shouting, “—making all these accusations. He was wild. Shouting, almost screaming.” He wouldn’t wait until morning. He had waited too long already, he said. Stella was dead, Greta was a twisted shadow of what she should be, because ever since they were very small Katerine had been going into their rooms and… using them

“Did you believe him?”

“I didn’t want to.”

“But you did, didn’t you?” Accusatory. “Because you already knew.”

The arm in mine tensed. I thought he would pull away, but then he sagged. “I didn’t know. I mean, I was never sure. But I think I’ve suspected… That night when you screamed and wouldn’t be left alone without a lock… But she was my wife! Your mother. Mothers don’t… they don’t do that sort of thing.”

“Stella is dead. I nearly died. Tok ran away.” I had a sudden vision of myself as a mechanical bird, parroting: Stella is dead, I nearly died, Tok ran away. Stella is dead, I nearly died, Tok…

“It’s so easy, Lore, to ignore things. To pretend that what’s there is your imagination.”

“Do you know, do you have any idea, what your… your pretense cost me? Do you?”

“Tok said…” His voice was low and brown with grief.

Maybe I should have felt sorry for him, and I did, in a way, but I was too angry. “Stella died. I didn’t even get to go to her funeral. I don’t even know where you had the funeral. Katerine was there, and not me. Katerine and Greta. And why? Because you didn’t pay my ransom! Because—”

“What do you mean, we didn’t pay your ransom? Of course we did. Greta handled it. She told me so personally.”

“Greta,” I said. “Greta. Good old gray Greta. Greta will get the job done. Give it to Greta.” I hardly recognized my own voice, it was so twisted up. Oster looked sick. “Don’t you like who I’ve become, Papa? I’ve been through some hard times, staying alive. But I’m not a bad person. I don’t hide from the truth.” You’re doing it again, hiding from things, Magyar had said. Well, not anymore. “Let me tell you some things about Greta, Papa. Are you listening? Because I will follow you and speak until you do hear. Gray Greta, efficient Greta, is running a group like Jerome’s Boys.”

“But—”

I was implacable. “One of them, who goes by the name of Nathan Meisener, was almost responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of people. I could have been one of them. And she’s risking the deaths of thousands every day. She had me kidnapped. Yes, my own sister. She probably kidnapped Lucas Chen.”

Oster looked bewildered.

“You’re not asking why, Papa, but I’ll tell you. She took me because I was an easy target. And she saw me as being the favorite, of you and Katerine. Maybe you would both pay the ransom. And she needed the money, because she needs to control things, have secrets, secret power. Only she didn’t know what to do when Tok started making the accusations.

Everything got confused. Maybe she thought Tok knew about her. Maybe she panicked and tried to get rid of me: I stopped being a person and became a liability. People aren’t real to her. Why? Because my mother made her crazy.” I was trembling with rage, only now it was not only at Oster but at Katerine. Katerine, who had ruined the lives of untold people. Who had nearly ruined mine. Katerine.

“Where is she?”

“What?”

“Katerine. Where is she” Where did you send her? She’s not in jail. It would have been on the net.”

“Tok said we should get the police. But I couldn’t. She’s your mother.”

She’s a monster. “She should be in jail.”

“I couldn’t…” He seemed unwilling to continue. I just waited. I was scared, I realized. What if she was somewhere nearby?

“Don’t you see? Not having control, not knowing what was going on hurt her.” Not enough. Not nearly enough to make up for Stella, and Tok, and me, and Lucas Chen. “I made her leave. Divorced her. Divested her of her holdings.” It all sounded impossibly military, like a court-martial. “She’s watched. We get reports…”

He trailed off. I had a sudden, sickening feeling in my stomach. “Who sees to the reports?”

“Greta.”

Greta. She was everywhere.

Oster was still talking to me. “… don’t understand why she would want to hurt you. She’s your sister. Are you… are you sure?”

He was hunched up, like a dog expecting a kick, I felt sorry for him. “I’m sure. And I don’t think she does want to hurt people. She doesn’t think about that. What she’s thinking about is the family. The business. Control. The patents, the intellectual property, the profits. It’s her life. The way she’s found to not think about being small and held down by her sweating, crying mother…” I was the one who was crying. Greta, who had got me a lock. My mother, lost…

He stared at me. His eyes were bright with city lights. “How do you know all this?”

“Oh, Papa, you are the one who should have known!”

He reached out and touched my tears, found a handkerchief. “We can’t be everywhere, and know everything at once,” he said sadly.

But you didn’t even try! He had removed himself from the responsibilities of ownership, He had been happy to leave it all to his wife and her family. He had delegated himself right out of the command chain, and gone off in his boat to count endangered fish.

“The business carries your name. You’re responsible.”

I didn’t know how to make him understand. I met a man called Paolo, I wanted to say, whose life is ruined because you didn’t care enough to oversee the business. The money comes in, and you take it, you don’t care how it’s made, you don’t care that we still rake in tithes on every patent use, that we preside over a monopoly that we don’t need anymore. We already have so much money we don’t know what to do with it.

But even when I was seven years old I had known he preferred to leave the real work to others. He wasn’t a termite on the forest floor, organizing the building; he was a brightly colored bird soaring up, up above the canopy, unconcerned with what went on below, as long as the sun still shone and there was nectar in the orchids.

There was too much for me to explain, and I didn’t have time.

“I have something to do tonight,” I said. “Something that won’t wait. I’ve made a tape. I’ll give it to you. You must make Greta give back Lucas Chen.” I hesitated, then decided not to threaten him with taking it to the police, making the whole sordid business public. “And I want your help. I want you to speed up the formal reclaiming of my identity. I want a copy of my PIDA.”

He knew there were things I wasn’t saying, but he merely nodded. “I have it.” They had probably sent it to the family as proof that they had me. “I’ll get it messengered over first thing tomorrow. Will I see you then?”

He looked old and frail. “Oh, Papa, yes.”

We walked farther. We had been walking awhile.

“I have to go.”

We held each other again. Longer this time, and harder. I had my father back. “Tomorrow,” he whispered. I hurried down the towpath.

Spanner was in the Polar Rear, drinking alone. She saw me in the mirror and watched me thread my way to the bar, the way a well-fed snake will watch a young pig: trying to decide whether it should kill now, or wait for its prey to grow a little and make the attraction, the mesmerizing gaze, the final strike worthwhile.

I didn’t bother to sit down. “Why did you do it?”

She shrugged, looking down at her drink. “Why not? You always said I would do anything for money.”

“And will a quarter of a million make you feel good about yourself?”

“Money always helps.”

“That’s what you’ve been waiting for all along, isn’t it? A reward. For your prey to finally get big enough, worth the risk. Worth lunging for, pumping full of poison.”

Her eyes seemed dry and blank. No reflections there. No clues about how she felt, or if she did feel anything anymore. I doubted she understood a word I was saying.

“Did you hate me right from the beginning?” She said nothing. “Why did you hate me? Because I had what you didn’t, self-respect?”

She stirred. “You didn’t have any self-respect when I found you naked and bleeding and nameless. No, what I hated was that you had choices. You chose to not go back to your family. I had no choices. I’ve never had choices.”

“That’s not true. There is always a choice.”

“Easy to say when you’re a van de Oest.”

Perhaps she was right. I would never know. I was not her, and I was glad. “What do you want me to say? That I hate you? I don’t.” And I didn’t. I didn’t feel much of anything except sorrow that she could not and would not see the chances and choices and possibilities of change I felt everywhere about me. And it wasn’t just because I was a van de Oest. Stella had been a van de Oest, and she had killed herself. Greta had been brought up as one, and she had twisted and stayed twisted. You had to allow change, you had to want it. You had to believe you deserved it. Spanner did not hate me; she hated herself.

I left her sitting there alone, looking at her reflection in her beer. I wondered what she saw.

The medic had a clinic in the center of town. I had to offer him a triple fee to open up for me for a nonemergency.

There was no nurse. He cleaned my left hand himself, worked on it quickly and efficiently, and closed up the incision with a plastic staple. He sprayed it with plaskin. Put a small sticking plaster on the top. “That’s to remind you it’s stapled. Otherwise, you might forget and try to use it.”

I wondered how many times he had saved people’s lives, or how many times he had tried and failed, without notifying the authorities. His eyes were very tired, down-drooping, like a bloodhound’s. He was exhausted. What would happen if there was a gunshot wound, or a serious stabbing to attend to, and he was too tired?

“Doctor,” I said on impulse as he collected his instruments in a tray, “if I made a donation, would you give me some information about one of your past clients?”

“No”.

“For thirty thousand?” He hesitated. “For thirty thousand now, and a yearly stipend—enough to hire an assistant for the night shift? I’ll put it in writing if you like.”

He put the tray down and looked at me steadily, his eyes more like a dog’s than ever. “What’s the question?”

“Did you treat a man, just over three years ago, with a wound to his neck? A man about six feet tall. The wound would have been about here.” I pointed to the left side of my neck, at the carotid.

“What kind of wound?”

“Puncture. Tear. Made with a long, rusty nail. And if you did treat him, did he die?”

He said nothing for a long time. “Let me ask you a question instead. You know I need the money—the clinic needs it. If I refuse to give you confidential information, would you withhold it?”

The man had saved my life. He knew it, I knew it. I sighed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” That wasn’t enough. The thirty thousand was stolen, anyway. “You can have the thirty thousand. No strings attached.”

He went to his terminal and for a moment I thought he was going to pull the information I needed, all the case notes, because I had made the selfless choice—like the child in a fairy tale being rewarded by the old witch in disguise. But life isn’t a fairy tale. He was making up my bill.

He held it out.

“Thank you,” I managed, and headed for the door.

At the wharf, the lights were still out from my last visit. The surface of the river was choppy in the wind. I watched it awhile. The riverbank is the one place in the jungle where an animal is visible from the air and the ground.

The grate in the pavement was hard to lift one-handed, and I got a bruise on my wrist when it fell the first time I tried. It seemed appropriate. This should not be too easy and painless.

Turning on the lights was like stepping out into the open. “My name,” I said to the wind, to the river rolling to the sea, “is Frances Lorien van de Oest. I live here.”

I would spend the rest of my life by the river, being visible.

I got to the plant just as the shift was leaving. Magyar was the last out. Maybe she had been waiting as long as she could, giving me extra time, or putting off the possibility that I might not be there. Her shoulders were hunched against the wind, her face pinched and worried. Her head turned this way and that, searching.

I stepped into the light. “Magyar.”

When she saw me she smiled. It was like opening the door of a furnace: a blast of light, fire, warmth. For me. This woman’s eyes were bright and lively, full of herself and her vision of me. I could see myself there, if I looked.

I held out my hands. She took them, then lifted my left hand to the light. “What happened?”

“I had the false PIDA removed.” For a while, I would be nobody but the Lore I had made. We stood in the street, wind howling around us, Magyar’s hair streaming behind her. I imagined her in my kitchen in the morning, skin warm and smelling of sleep, that beautiful hair tucked behind her ears, making coffee, talking of this and that. “Come home with me.”

“Yes.”

We walked hand in hand down the street. When I met my family again, I would introduce them to both of us.