Against Gravity

Kendrick stared at the child and thought of his daughter.

He looked back up, suddenly catching the woman's eye. "Jesus won't help you," she said with a cheery smile, her accent a soft drawl from somewhere south of Virginia. "But I can give you a ride into town if you like."

"Thanks, but I've got to make my way somewhere…"

The beggars were trailing off as fresh meat from some other flight began exiting the terminal. The relief worker had the door of her cab half open. She left it and stepped over to him.

"Don't get in that cab," she murmured. "You'll never see tomorrow."

"What are you talking about?"

She leant a little closer, so he could smell her perfume. "It's the licence plate. I can tell."

He stared at her, then stepped back from his cab, closing the door. The driver glared at him from inside, shook his head, and went back to reading his eepsheet. She drew him back with a gentle pressure on his elbow and nodded towards the registration plate on the rear.

"It's fake. There's ways to tell. They lock you in, gas you, and steal anything valuable. As often as not they put a bullet through your head and dump your body in the river. Corpses get dredged up all the time, and nobody ever checks on them."

Kendrick saw the driver glance around at them and mutter some inaudible profanity. A moment later the cab shot away from the kerb with a screech of tyres.

Kendrick watched it roar away, dumbfounded. "All I'm saying is you look like this is your first time over here," she said. "Yet you're obviously American, so…" She shrugged.

"Weren't you together with all those other relief workers on that flight?"

"Nah, they're headed for the West Coast." She gave an impish smile. "I deal with European fund-raising for the regional administration that takes care of food relief for New York." The woman studied Kendrick for a moment, her smile growing just wide enough to show a glint of small, perfect teeth. "Listen, I usually always stay at the same place. It's safe and has the advantage that nobody tries to kill you in your sleep."

"What's it called, this place?"

"The Chelsea. Used to be quite well known."

Kendrick saw the woman with the baby moving towards them again, having presumably found slim pickings elsewhere. Tears still streamed down her face and her voice was a constant wail. The baby's mouth hung slackly and he realized to his horror that the child was dead.

That was the worst thing he could possibly have seen. He got into the taxi: anything to avoid the sight.

The relief worker slid into the seat beside him.

"My name's Kendrick," he said. "Thanks for the lift."

"No problem at all. I'm Helen," she said, smiling. "Chelsea Hotel, please, driver."

Helen swayed against Kendrick's shoulder as the cab pulled sharply around a corner, between looming and run-down brownstones. Something had been niggling at Kendrick's memory. "The Chelsea Hotel – I feel like I should know that name."

Helen nodded. "You used to get a lot of artists and musicians staying there. They've been going there for a long time, well over a century. I suppose it used to possess what you'd call bohemian charm."

The cab pulled to a stop right outside a twelve-storey brownstone. "Look, I'll pay for this," Kendrick offered, finding his wand.

She squinted at the device. "Isn't that thing something of an antique?"

He smiled quickly. "I don't like the, ah…" He shrugged amiably.

Helen raised an eyebrow a millimetre or so. "I didn't take you for the type to get upset about subderms. Makes my life easier, though, if I want to pay for something in most parts of the world."

"Maybe so, but it bothers me. And I don't mind if people think I'm old-fashioned." Which was bullshit, of course: Kendrick's augs would fritz the subdermal implants that everyone else used to pay for their goods and services – or even to make phone calls.

She sighed. "Well, that wouldn't do you much good round here anyway." She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out some crumpled notes. "Stick with cash here, long as you're in town. Foreign currency only -yen, if possible."

As old and shabby as the hotel looked from the outside, it was a different story on the inside. At some point the building's original i

"Listen, I want to thank you," Kendrick told Helen after he'd checked in. He found it hard to take his eyes away from her shape under the T-shirt. She had luminous wide eyes, and she smiled prettily.

"Then you can buy me a drink in the bar."

First, Kendrick went up to his room and dumped his stuff. All he had really was his jacket – and his wand, which he didn't intend to let out of his sight. He thought again about getting rid of it but reminded himself how much harder it would be for Todd, or anyone else, to help him if he did so.

He checked the instrument for the hundredth time since he'd glanced out of the plane window and first seen New York on the horizon. Todd's GPS tracker told him that Hardenbrooke was already somewhere in the city. That meant there was a chance that Caroline was somewhere nearby.

Kendrick resisted the urge to run out and start looking for her immediately. He had to be careful if he didn't want to end up in the same boat as her. Rest up, he told himself; he was feeling jet-lagged, run-down. He wasn't sure that he could handle the pressure of so much happening.

Kendrick showered, then studied himself in the mirror for several seconds. As he got dressed and headed for the bar, he wondered about the guilt he was feeling.

Later.

Kendrick leant over to smooth one hand along Helen's jeans-clad thigh, feeling her small hands slide up around his head, then reach down to tug at his shirt. She pulled him down towards her and they kissed deeply. He let his fingers slide under her own shirt, feeling the firm curvature of her breasts.

Caroline – did he still love her, he wondered? Maybe he hadn't really accepted that it was over between them. She'd been right, after all: he had deceived her.

Helen slid down, still lying under him on the bed, and started to wriggle out of her jeans.

Every muscle in Kendrick's body ached; for months – no, years – he'd been wound up like a steel spring, wondering if he was going to live, wondering if he was going to be allowed to live. And he noted with a certain detachment how easy it was to put everything that had been happening out of his mind – just for a little while.

Helen pulled her T-shirt off, her jeans already on the floor. Then Kendrick was inside her, feeling her hips rise to meet him – not Caroline, whose face was still hovering, unwelcome, in his mind's eye, but this woman Helen.

How long had it been? A long time – there'd been nothing like this since the break-up with Caroline. Alcohol buzzed in his brain.

Just then, as Helen shifted under him, her body moving with a languid animal rhythm, it was easier to think of Caroline not at all.

24 October 2096 The Chelsea Hotel, New York

When Kendrick woke a few hours later he knew that he had made a terrible mistake.

Helen coughed, a soft sound verging on the inaudible, but enough to cause him to wake up to near-darkness, the only light a thin yellow luminescence seeping in from the street lamps beyond the drapes.

He did not even need to move to know that Helen was no longer lying in the bed beside him. Perhaps, he thought, she had picked this as an opportune moment to dress and leave for her own room.