the needle pattered and scratched, pattered and scratched. The long Poplar Street barge undulated under the tread of feet moving past the scarrist's, but his fingers were steady as a gin-soaked frontier doctor's.
The prick and shift of the needle stopped and the pock-faced scarrist sat back on his heels. He set his tools aside and made a practiced job of applying the quickseal. Patience looked down at her hands, at the palm fretted indigo to mark her caste. At the filigree of emerald and crimson across the back of her right hand, and underneath the transparent sealant swathing the last two fingers of her left.
A peculiar tightness blossomed under her breastbone. She started to raise her left hand and press it to her chest to ease the tension, stopped herself just in time, and laid the hand back on the chair. She pushed herself up with her right hand only and said, 'Thank you.'
She gave the scarrist a handful of cash chits, once he'd stripped his gloves and her blood away. His hands were the silt color he'd been born with, marking him a tradesman; the holographic slips of poly she paid with glittered like fish scales against his skin.
'Won't be long before you'll have the whole hand done.' He rubbed a palm across his sweat-slick scalp. He had tattoos of his own, starting at the wrists-dragons and mermaids and manatees, arms and chest tesseraed in oceanic beasts. 'You've earned two fingers in six months. You must be studying all the time.'
'I want my kid to go to trade school so we can get berths outbound,' Patience said, meeting the scarrist's eyes so squarely that he looked down and pocketed his hands behind the coins, like pelicans after fish. 'I don't want him to have to sell his indenture to survive, like I did.' She smiled. 'I tell him he should study engineering, be a professional, get the green and red. Or maintenance tech, keep his hands clean. Like yours. He wants to be an artist, though. Not much call for painters up there. '
The scarrist grunted, putting his tools away. 'There's more to life than lighters and cargo haulers, you know.'
Her sweeping gesture took in the little room and the rainy window. The pressure in her chest tightened, a trap squeezing her heart, holding her in place, pinned. 'Like this?'
He shrugged, looked up, considered. 'Sure. Like this. I'm a free man, I do what I like.' He paused. 'Your kid any good?'
'As an artist?' A frown pulled the corner of her lip down. Consciously, she smoothed her hand open so she wouldn't squeeze and blur her new tattoos. 'Real good. No reason he can't do it as a hobby, right?'
'Good? Or good?'
Blood scorched her cheeks. ' Real good.'
The scarrist paused. She'd known him for years: six fingers and a thumb, seven examinations passed. Three more left. 'If he keeps his hands clean. When you finish the caste'-gesture at her hands-'if he still doesn't want to go. Send him to me.'
'It's not that he doesn't want to go. He just-doesn't want to work, to sacrifice.' She paused, helpless. 'Got any kids?'
He laughed, shaking his head, as good as a yes, and they shared a lingering look. He glanced down first, when it got uncomfortable, and Patience nodded and brushed past on the way out the door. Rain beaded on her nanoskin as it shifted to repel the precipitation, and she paused on decking. Patchy-coated rats scurried around her as she watched a lighter and train lay itself into the lake, gently as an autumn leaf. She leaned out over the Poplar Street Canal as the lights taxied into their berth. The train's wake lapped gently at the segmented kilometers-long barge, lifting and dropping Poplar Street under Patience's feet. Cloying rain and sweat adhered her hair to the nape of her neck. Browning roux and sharp pepper cut the reek of filthy water. She squeezed the railing with her uninjured hand and watched another train ascend, the blossom of fear in her chest finally easing. 'Javier Alexander,' she muttered, crossing a swaying bridge. 'You had best be home safe in bed, my boy. You'd best be home in bed.'
A city like drowned New Orleans, you don't just walk away from. A city like drowned New Orleans, you fly away from. If you can. And if you can't…
You make something that can.
Jayve lay back in a puddle of blood-warm rain and seawater in the 'borrowed' dinghy and watched the belly lights of another big train drift overhead, hulls silhouetted against the citylit salmon-colored clouds like a string of pearls. He almost reached up a pale-skinned hand: it seemed close enough to touch. The rain parted to either side like curtains, leaving him dry for the instant when the wind from the train's fans tossed him, and came together again behind as unmarked as the sea. 'Beautiful,' he whispered. 'Fucking beautiful, Mad.'
'You in there, Jayve?' A whisper in his ear, stutter and crack of static. They couldn't afford good equipment, or anything not stolen or jerry-built. But who gave a damn? Who gave a damn, when you could get that close to a starship?
'That last one went over my fucking head, Mad. Are you in?'
'Over the buoys. Shit. Brace! '
Jayve slammed hands and feet against the hull of the rowboat as Mad spluttered and coughed. The train's wake hit him, picked the dinghy up and shook it like a dog shaking a dishrag. Slimed old wood scraped his palms; the cross brace gouged an oozing slice across his scalp and salt water stung the blood from the wound. The contents of the net bag laced to his belt slammed him in the gut. He groaned and clung; strain burned his thighs and triceps.
He was still in the dinghy when it came back down.
He clutched his net bag, half-panicked touch racing over the surface of the insulated tins within until he was certain the wetness he felt was rain and not the gooey ooze of etchant: sure mostly because the skin on his hands stayed cool instead of sloughing to hang in shreds.
'Mad, can you hear me?'
A long, gut-tightening silence. Then Mad retched like he'd swallowed seawater. 'Alive,' he said. 'Shit, that boy put his boat down a bit harder than he had to, didn't he?'
'Just a tad.' Jayve pushed his bag aside and unshipped the oars, putting his back into the motion as they bit water. 'Maybe it's his first run. Come on, Mad. Let's go brand this bitch.'
Patience dawdled along her way, stalling in open-fronted shops while she caught up her marketing, hoping to outwait the rain and the worry gnawing her belly. Fish-scale chits dripped from her multicolored fingers, and from those of other indentured laborers-some, like her, buying off their contracts and passing exams, and others with indigo-stained paws and no ambition-and the clean hands of the tradesmen who crowded the bazaar; the coins fell into the hennaed palms of shopkeepers and merchants who walked with the rolling gait of sailors. The streets underfoot echoed the hollow sound of their footsteps between the planking and the water.
Dikes and levees had failed; there's just too much water in that part of the world to wall away. And there's nothing under the Big Easy to sink a piling into that would be big enough to hang a building from. But you don't just walk away from a place that holds the grip on the human imagination New Orleans does.
So they'd simply floated the city in pieces and let the Gulf of Mexico roll in underneath.
Simply.
The lighters and their trains came and went into Lake Pontchartrain, vessels too huge to land on dry earth. They sucked brackish fluid through hungry bellymouths between their running lights and fractioned it into hydrogen and oxygen, salt and trace elements and clean potable water; they dropped one train of containers and picked up another; they taxied to sea, took to the sky, and did it all over again.
Sometimes they hired technicians and tradesmen. They didn't hire laborer-caste, dole-caste, palms stained indigo as those of old-time denim textile workers, or criminals with their hands stained black. They didn't take artists.
Patience stood under an awning, watching the clever moth-eaten rats ply their trade through the market, her nanoskin wicking sweat off her flesh. The lamps of another lighter came over. She was cradling her painful hand close to her chest, the straps of her weighted net bag biting livid channels in her right wrist. She'd stalled as long as possible.
'That boy had better be in bed,' she said to no one in particular. She turned and headed home.
Javier's bed lay empty, his sheets wet with the rain drifting in the open window. She grasped the sash in her right hand and tugged it down awkwardly: the apartment building she lived in was hundreds of years old. She'd just straightened the curtains when her telescreen buzzed.
Jayve crouched under the incredible curve of the lighter's hull, both palms flat against its centimeters-thick layer of crystalline sealant. It hummed against his palms, the deep surge of pumps like a heartbeat filling its
