Twice the going rate in makecamp, Li thought.
People were looking at her sideways, hostile. A bearded man said, Hey. No jumping.
Yeah, yeah, everyone knows the drill. The operator glanced at Li again and jerked her head towards the queue.
Li stepped back and watched her taking payment in advance. Most people offered trade. Waterpure tabs or readies, half a dozen eggs, a wrinkled bag of apples, a good length of copper wiring, a torch. One woman had high-thermal wear, still in the plastic.
Li needed to use a phone but she resented being suckered like this. Didn’t have enough trade to be suckered anyway. She itemised her supplies. Less than two days’ water. Enough dried fish for three more days, her camping gear, the plastic, the high-thermals, her tools. Nothing she could spare. But she had to call Agency. Just because the Port Howell branch had lost Matti didn’t mean her claim wasn’t being run through some other branch’s database right now. You never knew with government. That’s what kept people hoping.
She wasn’t queuing anyway, fuck that. Went to wait in the dead phone box.
Someone got up off a crate and the queue shuffled forward, dust clouding and settling again. There was none of the sociability of the road camps. These people were barely making eye contact with each other. Everyone looked hungry and beaten and older than they probably were. A woman with a young child halfway down the line had a bony, dust-coloured nanny goat on a lead. There was a man somewhere in his twenties with a missing arm and purple scars all over his face.
Li turned her attention to the phone box, not expecting much. The handset had been broken apart and stripped of receiver, carbon transmitter, steel conduit. But the phone itself looked more promising. The outer armour had been comprehensively removed but the housing was basically intact. The lightning-bolt icons gave fair warning: try to pick the lock and you’d hit a breaker switch connected to the grounding terminal. That would trigger an electrical current upward of a hundred milliamps, shutting down the whole system. Shutting down whoever was messing with it, too.
From the scorch marks, it looked like someone had triggered the kill switch on this unit. That’s what happened when amateurs tried salvage. Li had bypassed the kill switch on this exact model in Nerredin and a dozen other towns in West. Val had probably done hundreds, but pickings were a lot thinner now – most people didn’t even bother checking boxes anymore. Especially the young ones, like this woman, busy sharking her customers and missing what was under her nose. Because if the kill switch had already been triggered then this phone was easy tech.
The four-pin angle was rusty. It took Li nearly a minute to pick with a tension wrench and a short hook, but the housing came off cleanly. Underneath it was the security layer – the trigger mechanism a burnt-out mess of wiring. Whoever died in this box had taken the risk for her but she was still slow and careful unscrewing this layer.
Hey Stokes, the operator yelled. We taking goat?
Li glanced over. The goat woman’s child was trying to pull the animal away.
No, the guy on the porch called back. We are not takin fucken goat. Jesus.
She’s a good milker, the woman insisted. I’d get two thousand for her easy at market.
Then find a market, the operator said. We’re not running a farm.
If you can’t carry livestock, butcher her.
Mum, no! The boy was trying to wrestle the lead away. She slapped him and he crouched down with his arms around the goat.
Please, she said to the operator. I need to call my husband – he went ahead.
Can’t do it. You got a complaint, take it to Stokes over there.
Li got back to work. She was through to the circuit board now. It was intact. The circuitry was fried but there was plenty here she could use – the terminal block alone should buy her two phone slots, minimum. Couldn’t believe her luck. She glanced at the operator again, who was talking to an older man on one of the crates. No one was looking Li’s way. She worked fast with the screwdriver and needle-nose pliers. Nearly there.
You’re done, the operator told the man. You want more time, you pay again.
He fended her off, the phone still to his ear. No, please. I am second in the queue.
Not my problem.
They tussled over the phone and the queue stood watching, weirdly compliant but on edge. A wiry, middle-aged man near the front caught Li’s attention – the way his eyes were moving between the scene in front of him and the porch. He would be the first one to blow. The feral, Stokes, eased himself off the porch and lifted a sawn-off shotgun but he didn’t look worried enough. If he didn’t shut this down now there was going to be a free-for-all and then Li could forget about making her call.
The operator got hold of the phone and pushed the man hard in the chest, knocking him off the crate. Stood over him as she cut the connection.
No! He got up, shaking. You cannot! I paid good dollars.
Back the fuck off. The operator had something in her free hand now, it looked like a water pistol.
You know Agency is not a ten-minute call, the man said. You know this. But you take my money for nothing. For hold music and Company ads. He spat. Bloodsucker.
The operator lowered her safety glasses, stepped back and sprayed him full in the face. He jerked as the liquid hit him and she stepped in close and sprayed again. This time he went down, clawing at his eyes.
The people watching swayed, a mutter coming off them. Stokes fired a single shot straight up into the air. There were screams and
