Somebody lived this. A Mnemonic took it off her, and nobody has bought it yet. For the next few minutes the frame is hers.
Third shift, Sputnik, and the rain has been going since the trams stopped.
Vey comes out of the stairwell at Nine Vents with her collar up and somebody else’s afternoon still sitting behind her eyes. That’s the job. You hold a stranger’s memory for an hour, you deliver it, and afterward your own hands feel borrowed for a while. The client paid in Cal, which means he was honest. The client cried at the handoff, which means the memory was worth what he paid.
The street is doing what it does. Signage in six languages nobody reads, all of it selling the same four things. Steam off the Last Bowl’s counter at the corner, and Soup behind it, who has never once asked her name because she has never once offered it, and whose broth is the best on the street for reasons nobody orders twice without suspecting. A Waz-armed dock crew coming off shift, arguing about a woman. Two Civil Authority officers standing out of the wet in a doorway, and their visors turn to follow her, and keep following, and she doesn’t change her pace, because in this city pace is a confession.
She buys a bowl. She eats it under the awning, because walking and eating is how you get your bowl taken.
There’s a man at the end of the counter who isn’t eating.
He has ordered. The bowl sits in front of him untouched, and he is so still that the steam goes straight up. Dark coat with no wear on it. Gloves. He has been at that counter as long as she has been on this street and his shoulders haven’t moved once. When he finally lifts a hand it’s to straighten one glove, slowly, and then the other, and then he looks at her the way an accountant looks at a column.
Vey pays. Vey leaves half the bowl, and it was a good bowl. Her Wisp drifts up out of her hood where it rides in the cold, a scuffed little orb the size of a fist, and says, in its dry way, that the man ordered the same bowl yesterday and didn’t eat that one either. She doesn’t answer it in public. It knows that. It said it anyway.
Four blocks up, the rain changes.
It comes down gold. It does that maybe once a month this side of the wall, and everyone on the street knows the drill and performs it badly, masks up, collars up, get inside, and every single one of them looks up first. It falls slow. It takes the neon on the way down and the whole street goes the color of an old lamp, and for about nine seconds nobody in Sputnik is doing anything at all except standing in it with their faces uncovered.
She has read enough dying people to know the arithmetic. She stands in it anyway. Everyone does. That part isn’t in the clinic pamphlet.
At Fourteenth there’s a public terminal under the awning, and as she passes it the ticker stutters the way they do, and resolves.
It says her name.
Not her street name. The other one. The one she sold to a colleague eleven years ago for four hundred Cal and a sealed record, the one she hasn’t heard aloud since, the one that’s supposed to be in a drawer in an office in Chrome.
Then it says, closer.
Then it goes back to grain prices.
Her Wisp has gone silent beside her ear. It doesn’t do that.
Vey stands in the amber rain in front of a machine that shouldn’t know her and doesn’t run, because running is also a confession, and because a part of her she doesn’t discuss with clients wants to stay and find out whether it will say anything else.
It doesn’t. Not tonight.
She walks home the long way. Past the bathhouse where two crews at war are both checked in and neither will touch the other while the water is hot. Past a wall where a century of dead names are cut into the heat main at hand height, and she puts her palm flat on the pipe as she goes by, the way everyone does, without deciding to.
Rent is due Monday. Her arm needs a ripperdoc she can’t afford. She is going to take the job past the gate, the one she has been turning down for a week, because the money is stupid and the client is worse and out there past the last lamp is where they say the amber comes from.
She is thirty-one and she has never in her life seen a blue sky.
She wouldn’t trade a night of this for one.
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