Slow River

The video was terrible. It wasn’t just the production values that were bad; there were several major errors in the procedures described, errors that would continue to echo down the line like Magyar’s insistence that the bugs could not tolerate even the slightest deviation in temperature. The information was simplistic at best: “In the primary section, specially tailored bacteria break down some of the more toxic compounds. Think of them eating ammonia and excreting other, less toxic chemicals, like nitrite…”

Worse, there were half a dozen blatant edits where worker safety information had been taken out, probably by Hepple. No details about warning signs of the deadly chlorine gases that could build up, or methane explosions like the one that had killed four hundred workers in Raleigh, North Carolina, six or seven years ago, even though I had seen the red methane-release handles at the emergency station. The simple evacuation drill was clear—use this exit, not that; turn this off, not that—but unexplained. More worryingly, there was no mention of the stakes, the regional impact of polluted water if someone really screwed up their job: nothing about spontaneous abortion and convulsions, or violent dehydrating dysentery, spinal meningitis or central nervous system collapse.

“I hope you got something out of it,” Magyar had said when I gave it back. “You need to look out for yourself in a place like this. Pay attention to the machines. They can be dangerous.”

I had not known what to say. The machines in and of themselves were not dangerous—if you followed safety procedures. But you could not follow safety procedures that you were not told about. I wondered how much Magyar herself knew, how much she pretended not to know in order to keep her job. I had contented myself with a nod and a thank-you.

I circled the rake, which was still madly trying to dig its way to Australia. The month before I started this job, another worker had his left leg torn up by a mobile rake that had got stuck. Statutory regulations stated that a machine should never be approached while in operation, that it should be deactivated by remote, then towed out of the water and examined by a qualified technician.

At Hedon Road, there was never time: turning the machine off and then on again in less than thirty minutes damaged it. The rakes were temperamental enough without adding to their unreliability, and we were so shorthanded that the unwritten rule was: Shove it out of the hole and keep it going. Once in the clear, whatever was clogging its lines usually got whirled off. If you couldn’t find and retrieve what it was that fouled the blades in the first place, you just hoped that the next time the machine encountered it, it wasn’t your shift.

It looked as though the right front lines were jammed. I stepped carefully in front of the stilled metal, hoping it wouldn’t restart on its own, and leaned in and pushed. The rake chugged, sputtered, then moved sluggishly on its way. A two-foot length of bulrush floated to the surface.

Until I had started work at Hedon Road, I had not cared one way or another about bulrushes. After ten days on the job, I hated them. They were good at what they were intended for—facilitating the anaerobic and aerobic cycles of denitrification and nitrification, and buffering the rest of the system against toxic shock—but they were incredibly difficult to manage. Their tough, fibrous stalks fouled all the maintenance equipment and their fluffy cotton seed heads clogged air intakes. The rakes, of course, were designed to cut the rushes before the heads ripened, but because they had about thirty percent downtime—most of it, of course, during the night shift—we were always behind schedule.

When Magyar had walked by three days ago and seen me pruning the rush heads by hand, she had said nothing, but the next night the other workers had been issued with shears, and instructions to work out their own system for keeping the rushes trimmed. She may have been poorly trained but she was not stupid. She had nodded at me afterward, but said nothing. I found myself liking her.

I pulled down the record slate and started to check the readouts. Smart or not, good instincts or not, Magyar wouldn’t take kindly to being shown too many times how to improve things by a new worker. I could not blame her for that. I wondered how my father would have handled the situation in my place…

And then I was standing staring at the slate without seeing it, tears rolling down my face. What was I doing here? I didn’t belong. I could run this place in my sleep. I shouldn’t be waist-deep in other people’s shit. I could be back on Ratnapida, lying on my back in the sun-warmed grass watching the clouds, making up stories with Tok about industrial counterespionage… And we would eat di

But Stella was dead, Oster was not who he had pretended to be for all those years, and my family had refused to pay my ransom. There was no going back because what I wanted to return to had never existed, except in my Oster-woven version of reality.

I shoved the slate back on the shelf, angry for letting self-pity distort everything. Reality at Ratnapida would more likely be the family sitting at the table, pretending not to see me, pretending that the kidnap and abuse had never happened, that they had not received, not watched—over and over—the tapes my abductors had made for the net. My reality and theirs were different. Looking back, they always had been. The family had refused to hand over the money quickly enough for my abductors, but I doubted they would see it that way. Some might say it was their fault I had been subjected to such public humiliation, their fault I had ended up killing. But if I went back now they would just sip pinot grigio from crystal glasses, eat salad from Noritake china, and pretend that I had not been treated as a thing, had not had to scrabble to survive, that nothing had changed. And I would have to look at Oster and wonder if the decision not to pay had been deliberate, because I knew too much.

No. There was no going back. I had known that when I lifted the rusty nail and stabbed it into Fishface’s neck. That part of my life was over.

I breathed hard, and clenched and relaxed my face muscles. Self-pity could creep up on anyone, but I would not let it happen again.

A flickering readout caught my eye. Readouts were not supposed to flicker. Another flashed from 20.7 to 5 to 87 and back again. That made no sense at all. Then all the readouts went berserk.

I lifted the phone, tapped in Magyar’s call code. “This is station four, primary sector.” I had to shout over the trilling station alarms.

“What is it, Bird?”

“I have readout anomalies.”

“Which ones?”

“The whole bank. Going wild. Nothing makes any sense.” Magyar did not reply immediately. She probably did not know what to do. “I need your authorization to cut the flow to the secondary sector.”

“But we don’t know that there’s anything wrong with our stream…” She sounded scared.

“We don’t know that there isn’t, either, and they don’t have the sensors we do.”

“It’s probably computer failure. Or maybe the monitors have gone down because of backflow. Flooding.”

“The flood warning didn’t go off We have to-” I broke off. Judging from the entire bank of instruments going crazy, it probably was simple computer failure. There was another way. “Look, I think there’s a way I can cut the stream temporarily and divert it to the holding tanks. Fifteen minutes won’t do anyone any harm. Secondary sector might not even notice. And I can take some readings manually, if you have a handheld photoionization detector around.”

There was a moment of silence. “There’s one in the locker that’s about knee height. In front of you. Get me your results ASAP.”