Blackfish City(46)
“This one’s a classic,” Soq said, flashing a file to Fill’s screen. “The Book of Jeremy. Do you know it? This gay guy, after his best friend, Jeremy, died—Jeremy was straight—he got into his email—Jeremy had given him the password—and deleted all the boring bits to condense this guy’s whole adult life—from fifteen to thirty-seven, when Jeremy died working a shale oil rig in one of the hydraulic fracturing earthquakes in upstate New York—and he interjected his own commentary between emails. It’s super hot, and super sad.”
“Amazing,” Fill said, and read out loud: “‘Jeremy’s profanity is preserved here precisely as it was in life; a bawdy, inappropriate, usually humorous but sometimes profoundly moving knack for saying the earthiest things with such innocence that you feel like a bad person for finding it smutty. Nowhere is this more evident than in his emails to girlfriends, where he says things like, “Kath I miss you like crazy lately, never saw a bitch so keen to get her hair pulled,” and you somehow know that Kath took no offense at this, can in fact picture her reading it, flushing red, remembering Jeremy.’”
“Great stuff to jerk off to, and then cry.”
Fill put Soq on his account for the most expensive app on the market, beamed it directly to their slate. “This is how I found City Without a Map,” he said. “Do you listen to it?”
“Tried to. Didn’t do much for me. I don’t need a guide to this city. And I don’t need all that poetry.”
Fill nodded, smiling. His eyes full of wanting.
The noodles arrived. Soq conceded that they were still perfect. They ate them in great gulping bites, both of them hungrier than they’d realized, looking up only when they were finished.
“You’re really hot, you know that?”
“So they tell me,” Soq said, furiously computing how to respond, what to do—the kid was hot, sweet, sad, they’d had a good time, but rich, unspeakably so, and probably not fond of being turned down, denied something he wanted, and what if after all this lovely quality friendship time he turned around and called Safety on Soq? So Soq stood, butched up as much as possible, and growled, “What are you going to do about it?”
Hours later, after several bouts of switching back and forth between fucking and sleeping, Soq was getting dressed in thin winter daylight when they heard Fill say:
“What the fuck even was that? Was that . . . you?”
“’Course it was,” Soq said, pushing up the black leather armband and adjusting the spikes on their hooded coat.
“Like . . . biologically you? Like, you were born with it, or . . .” He craned his neck, trying to get a glimpse. “I’ve heard that there are some pretty crazy surgeries you can get these days—”
Soq kicked him, hard, a swift blow to the shoulder that made him yelp. “Don’t be rude.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I give you my handle?”
Soq shrugged. The kid was out of bed, heading for the coffee maker, practically preening. Full-on courtship behavior, but Soq was already strapping on their slide boots, washing their face, moving on.
Fifteen minutes later they were halfway down the Arm One slide when their jaw bug buzzed.
“This is the last one,” Soq said.
“You’ll still owe me,” Jeong said fondly, sending the details. A briefcase from a floating lab off Arm Two, which as far as Soq knew dealt in genome-customized party-booster drug regimens, to a semi-famous musician on Arm Five. “Till the day you die you’ll owe me.”
“Maybe,” Soq said, leaping off the slide and dancing through the Hub. “But I’ll have to find another way to pay that off. Because this? This is the last one.”
They had dreamed of leaving the slide messenger life behind entirely, immediately, but they didn’t feel strong enough to turn Jeong down. Soq would never have survived long enough to land a role in Go’s army if Jeong hadn’t helped them a million times, in a thousand ways, over the past several years.
There was no nostalgia to it, no sadness at the life Soq was leaving behind. Messengering had been fun, exciting, the best possible way to make money within the limitations of being unregistered. But the pay was shit unless you worked twelve hours a day or more; the people were assholes; the risk of death was constant. And Dao had already wired Soq’s first week’s salary. And it was astonishing.
Technically all Soq needed to do was hold down the empty apartment. But Go had explicitly said that Soq didn’t need to stay there all the time, and like a good ambitious underling Soq wanted to find ways to impress the boss. Besides, Soq didn’t want to risk a repeat of last night’s random hookup.
It had been stupid. Dangerous. Fun, but dangerous. Soq told themself they had mostly only slept with him to keep him from calling Safety.
And what had been up with that collapse? Was he sick? He’d sworn he was just dehydrated, a three-day disruptor bender, but wasn’t that precisely the lie Soq would have used if they had the breaks or neosyph or a contagious botched gut flora hack?
More important: Soq knew the signs, when someone fell hard. Those macho gay hypocrites were the worst—fetishizing masculinity, sneering at trans boys and femmes and anybody else insufficiently butch, but let them get a taste of something like Soq and all their biases got blown out of the water. The boy was smitten, and Soq wanted no part of it. Love, relationships, even friendships—and they would have been good friends, Soq knew it, even if Soq would have spent most of the time hating Fill intensely for his money—Soq couldn’t have any of that right now. They were finally poised to leave it all behind, the pain and the hunger and the wondering.