Demolition Love

4. TRESPASS

  Lawson drags me back with an arm around my waist.

  “Do you ever think before you act?” he asks, still in that carefully pitched whisper. “That’s not an A. The guard’s not going to beat on you for a while and then just go away!”

  I stumble into the shadows and bump against Kylie. Her eyes are wide, whites showing all around in the darkness. She wraps her arms around me.

  “I don’t want to leave Sam,” she confides into my neck.

  Something expands, a big feeling, filling my chest. Maybe this is what bravery feels like.

  “You don’t have to,” I whisper. “You stay here.”

  “Here?” She looks around.

  “No, I mean, go back to the Ashram. We can take it from here.”

  Lawson and Lin are talking in the shadows, not paying us any attention. They probably don’t expect our help with stuff like this anyway. After a couple minutes, Lin waves us over. When we don’t move, they come to us.

  “What’s going on?” Lin asks, glancing between Kylie and me.

  “Kylie needs to stay. She hit her head and she can’t see straight.” I shoot my friend a look, urging her to play along.

  Kylie nods. “Aidan’s right. I’ll slow the mission down.”

  “You can’t go back alone.” Lawson frowns as he glances between Lin, Kylie, and me, obviously feeling it’s his job to protect us all. If he offers to take Kylie home, he leaves Lin and me to face the GeeGee guard and the world beyond.

  Lin sighs. “I’ll take her.” She wraps a hand around Lawson’s bicep and taps her fingers on his skin. “You just make sure you get those weapons!”

  The two Real Dealers embrace, and Lin and Kylie start off. A few steps out Kylie stops. She turns, scurries back, and throws her arms around me again.

  “I’m sorry, Aidan! Be careful, okay?”

  “Go back to Sam,” I say. “I’ll be back.” I’m not really sure of that last, but I manage to sound pretty convincing.

  Kylie nods, wiping at the corner of her eye, and resolutely turns away to rejoin Lin. They’ve made it only a few more steps when Lin looks over her shoulder.

  “And don’t interfere!” she whisper-shouts.

  It takes me a second to realize she’s reminding Lawson not to interfere with the A, when they beat on me, when we get back. I hadn’t realized Lawson’s noninvolvement was up for contention.

  “It’s okay,” I assure him, when the two femmes have gone. “You have to keep the agreement.”

  D-town only works because inter-tribe agreements are always honored. Without that, The Dance would cease to be a safe zone, and there would be nothing to bind us together. We might all kill each other. The Bees would be the first to go.

  “I know,” Lawson snaps.

  A single train track runs through Urban Center 63, dividing the Three Street financial district from, well, us. It wasn’t planned that way—the track was laid long before D-town sprung up—but that’s how it turned out.

  Sometime after the tracks were laid—decades later, I think—seven teens were run over in half as many months. Accidents or suicides, no one knew. Fearing litigation, the railroad corporation walled in the tracks. Each wall is almost four meters high, brick topped by chain-link and barbwire. On both sides of the tracks, there are NO TRESPASSING signs every few feet.

  D-towners call the whole affair—wall, track, wall—the Boundary, and I think it’s why D-town ended up here, instead of any of a dozen other quadrants of the city. It lends a feeling of security second only to prison walls. That goes both ways; they feel safe from us, we feel safe from them. At least, that was how it worked before the DEMOLITION sign.

  In the five-block stretch where D-town borders uptown, there is only one crossing. When I was a child it had flashing red and white lights, an electronic bell, and arms that lowered when trains passed, but all the trappings are long gone. Now there’s just cracked concrete and bare metal rails.

  And, as of today, the GeeGee guard pacing in front of the crossing. On our side. With a sonic blaster.

  “How are we going to get across?” I whisper to Lawson.

  He looks at me for a long moment, then slips a hand behind his back. His shirt hitches, flashing a triangle of pale skin, taut over firm stomach, and for a second I don’t see the object in his hand. Then my scalp goes cold, and I lose my breath. I grab his arm, the arm not attached to the hand holding the handgun.

  Bloody shit. He has a gun. How did he get a gun?

  Even before, guns were nearly impossible to get. My parents didn’t even have one at home. My godfather did; he taught me to shoot it. One of the many things about the man I try to forget.

  “You can’t,” I say, voice rising in desperation.

  “Shut up,” Lawson hisses, face close to mine. “Are you trying to get us killed? Or worse? Don’t worry. I’ll do it.” His lip curls. “You can keep your lily-white soul clean.”

  “Are you insane? You can’t kill one of them—”

  “I’ll just wound it, then.”

  “—shoot one of them at all, you idiot!” I duck around his shoulder, size up the guard, and duck back. “It’d take, what, five of its friends with those blasters to come here and kill us all!”

  “I’d think there’d be some people in D-town you wouldn’t be too sad to lose.” Lawson crosses his arms.

  “That’s not my call to make. And besides…” I trail off, not really knowing what I meant to say, if I had anything in mind at all.

  “If you had to choose between that”—he points at the guard—“and me, who would you choose?” There’s color in his cheeks, and his eyes are wide.

  “That’s not my call to make,” I repeat weakly.

  “You’re such a bloody—never mind!” He throws up his hands and paces away. He whirls and strides back, until he’s right up in my face again.

  I cower back.

  “Tell anyone I have this—” He sticks the gun in my face. Not the barrel, but still my stomach drops out of me like I might lose control of my bowels. “—and I’ll…” He runs a hand through his hair, leaving it sticking up in sweaty spikes.

  “You’ll what?” My voice quavers. “Beat me until I wish I’d never been born? Like I haven’t heard that one before.”

  He lowers the gun and opens his mouth. I think he wants to say that he’d never do that, but his teeth click closed with a snap.

  “I have a sister,” he says. “This gun is our life.” He waves it again and I step back. “If anyone knew we had it… Promise me, you won’t tell anyone, Aidan, no matter what.”

  “I promise I won’t tell anyone, no matter what.”

  He swallows and nods. “Thank you.” He tucks the weapon back where he had it hidden before, then looks me over. “Hey, I wasn’t, I didn’t mean…”

  A gust of wind drives dust at us, and he holds up a hand to shelter his face. I nod, even though he can’t see me, and walk a few steps on, hoping he’ll think I’m rubbing my eyes because of wind and dust.

  “So, what’s the plan?” he asks, catching up.

  “I’ll climb over this wall and make noise from the tracks. When the guard’s distracted, you slip through the crossing.” Simple. Like I’ve climbed the walls before, haven’t broken most of the major bones in my body at least once, and I don’t hurt all over from the recent beating.

  “That’s just dumb,” he says. “First, there’s not only one wall. Even if I boost you over the first one, and you manage to get down the other side without bleeding or breaking anything, how are you going to get over the second one? Can you even climb? What if you can’t get out before the next train comes? The space is too narrow. You’ll die on the tracks. I can climb. I’ll go over the walls. You go through the crossing.”

  I shake my head. “I have to be the one to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I won’t let you use the gun.”

  “You won’t let me? What are you going to do? Step in front of the—no, never mind, d
on’t answer that. Look, I should be the one to go. I’m the one with a gun.”

  “That makes no sense. You can’t shoot a train.”

  He grimaces. “Okay, fine, race you to the top.” We’ve been walking back and forth along the Boundary for most of this conversation, and he must have been looking over the path in front of him, because a second later, he has a handhold, and a toe hold, and—

  “That’s not fair!” I hiss.

  He keeps going, his whisper echoing down to me. “Why not?”

  “Because you know you’ll win.”

  He lands on flexed knees back on the ground in front of me. “True. But I’m not sending you over. You’ll get stuck, Aidan.”

  Without thinking, I grab his hand. The skin on top is warm and soft. “Together,” I say.

  He gives my hand a squeeze and doesn’t let go. My whole body goes hot.

  “Together,” he agrees.

  It takes the better part of…a very long time to get over the first wall. My clothes and skin are torn from the barbwire, and I’m surprised the sky isn’t warming with dawn by the time Lawson catches me at the bottom. He misses a little, and I go to one knee in the gravel beside the tracks, gouging myself.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he whispers.

  I’ve had so much worse, I just shrug. “Do you think the guard heard me?”

  He cocks his head. “Naw. We’re too far on. I don’t hear it walking, do you?”

  “Maybe…” I lower my voice to ghost story pitch. “…it’s because it’s not walking anymore.”

  Lawson gives me a look. Then shoves me back against the wall and pulls out the gun.