Chapter 3 continued: Terrah and Eden
More character encounters
Hey folks, and welcome back to the book. This week I’m back to Terrah, and we’ll be with her for a while as she tells the story of how she and Eden got to know each other, with Cid in tow.
Intro is brief this week. The section is also only around 1700 words, so here is the first nearly-half, with the rest after the jump. Enjoy, and see you next week!
TWO
Terrah
I ran into Eden the first time probably a year ago. Count in my head: is that right? Seems so much longer. I’d been rolling with Cid for just a few weeks, crazy robot-cabbie that he was before all this. I’d gotten in his car one day and seen immediately that he wasn’t normal stock. A survivor, a real hard case, which yeah, yeah, good joke, he’d probably knock on his own tin can head if he was here. And funny. He was a goof sometimes and so wasn’t always as quick and decisive as I wanted. But he was a great driver, and it was good to have some muscle, or metal I guess, behind me when I went into some of the rougher jobs.
It was you hooked me up with her, you know? Which means you were indirectly responsible for me meeting both Cid and Eden. You ever wonder what your place in this world was?
That night you called me up, said you had a weird contact, friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend type thing, high level client. Nobody you’d dealt with before, said you didn’t trust nobody but me to go in and deal with it. I took the shit she wanted, strapped up as much as I could discreetly, and went in.
Her apartment was in the old Back Bay, where the Charles had spilled over and made the Common back into the Bay it had been before a bunch of Puritans backfilled it. I liked that, found it kinda poetic. This was one of those bog-proof buildings that went up after the catastrophe, where the ‘fugees of Back Bay lived. Stiltscrapers, some of the city-rats call them. Raised up on sunken concrete posts with steel reinforcements. People live starting the second story up.
I cased it for a few minutes, making sure there weren’t too many eyes. (You could never be sure nobody was watching these days; somebody was always watching.)
The elevator, which sealed like a goddamn submarine, went up into the building’s heights and let me out on the sixth floor. I tapped the screen on the door with the right number. I heard something inside that sounded more like a moan than words. Then a face appeared on the screen.
That face. I knew that face, I was sure of it. Somebody famous? Or sort-of famous? Maybe she’d just been modded that way. White women always doing that shit.
“You here from T?” asked the beautiful face in the screen.
“Yeah,” I said. “You wanna let me in or just pay me through the door?”
I vastly prefer being let in to places. Screens and taps make everything easier, of course, but with contraband you really want to be let in. I know I could have done the entire transaction without leaving my capsule bed, except fuck capsule beds, I don’t live like that.
I like going inside places. Getting to know the clients, just a little. Seeing the edges of things. There’s a magic in that, a taste of glamour without letting it infect you. I like the nearness of it. I liked knowing that in some small way people like that still needed people like me, and that, if it came down to it, I could kill them with my bare hands and they probably wouldn’t have the first idea how to fight.
What, you thought that part of me wouldn’t still be there?
“I’ll uh…come in,” said the face in the door, and she backed away to open it.
The apartment was luxe, but in a quiet way. Outdated, too. It had a lot of space, was the main thing. The floors were covered in this deep blue carpeting, which I found spooky for some reason. I glanced down the hallway and saw that the carpet continued, and I wondered whether the kitchen, the bathroom, were carpeted too.
She was young — ageless, I guess, was how I thought of it at first. Her skin looked almost artificial, it was so smooth and even. She was jonesing but her face didn’t show strain. Her eyes didn’t look capable of getting bags under them. But they were a little glassy, like she was at the start of withdrawal. I knew that look. I tried to be gentle when I saw that look.
I held out the baggie. “You looking for this?” I said, with a little smile.
“Yeah,” she said, hardly looking at me. She held out her hand for it, but I pulled it back.
“I’ll be needing my payment.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes, of course.”