Slow River

“-with Oster van de Oest, live from Auckland.” The fountain was buttery with summer sunshine. Oster, used to cameras, had made sure the sun was behind him so he wouldn’t squint.

“We empathize with the family of Lucas Chen. We know how we felt uhen Frances Lorien was taken. We know that somewhere, someone knows where she is. Even after three years. We’re prepared to offer two hundred and fifty thousand for information leading to the discovery of the whereabouts of our daughter.”

He looked different. Older. And so formal. He thought I was dead.

I turned the sound off. “It’s not Auckland, you know.”

Magyar looked at me blankly. “The house, Ratnapida. The family has an agreement with the news services not to reveal where we live.” They were showing more pictures of me. Magyar was looking back and forth from me to the screen. “Not that easy to see at first, is it? But you’d have spotted it eventually. It’s there, if you think to look.”

She was turned away from me now, studying the bright pictures, but she watched me from the corner of her eye.

“That’s me. Frances Lorien van de Oest. The real me. Or it was.” I didn’t know who I was now. I had an eerie sense of multiplicity, of staring down at my reflection in the water and seeing three faces instead of one.

Magyar was very still, and her eyes looked odd. Slitty. Sunk back into their epicanthic folds. I knew I should be wary of her strange expression, but I felt oddly dispassionate. Unreal. The pictures on the screen kept moving, mute. The three reflections in my head rippled. Who am I? Magyar still didn’t say anything. She was clenching and unclenching her plasthene-gloved fists. Her mouth was a straight line.

“You aren’t supposed to be angry,” I said calmly, from a great distance.

“No? Tell me, Bird, how am I supposed to react?”

Like everyone else reacted to the van de Oest name: shock, awe, then a closing off as the person they were dealing with changed from human to van de Oest.

“I don’t understand. Why are you angry?”

“Because I feel like a fool.” Her nostrils were white. She was breathing hard. In, out. In. Out. Abruptly, she jerked her arm around, looked at her watch. “We’ve already lost shift time. Time is money. Unless you’ve decided you’ve had enough of playing at poor little miss worker bee, I want you on-station in three minutes. And I’ll expect you to make up the time you’ve lost.”

Just like that. Dismissed. “But…”

“But what?” Hand on hip.

But I’m Frances Lorien van de Oest! Didn’t she know what that meant? She couldn’t just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else… But she had. Which is what I wanted, wasn’t it—to be treated as a real person?

“We’re not done with this, Bird. Not nearly done. We’ll talk after the shift. After you’ve made up your time.”

She waited. I waited back, then realized she had the upper hand: I was the worker, she the supervisor. The fact that I had told her who I really was didn’t change that. I left the break-room. As though my movement had disturbed the surface of a river, the three faces shivered and blurred together, indistinct.

I don’t remember walking to the troughs, but found myself there, trembling, looking at my face in the slick black water.

Who am I? What would I say if I opened my mouth?

We ordered loc, the hot chocolate liqueur. Magyar took a big gulp of steaming liquid and burned herself. She swore, called to the man behind the counter for some ice, then scowled at him when he shoved an ice bucket her way. Her eyebrows were very dark against her pale skin.

She put a cube in her mouth, crunched, sucked.

I said nothing, I did not even want to breathe too hard, in case the single blurred reflection in my head separated out again.

“So. We’re here to talk about the way you lied to me.”

I spoke carefully, uncertain of my voice. Of my accent. Of the language. Of my own tongue. “It’s hard.”

“Do it anyway.” Utterly unsympathetic.

“Tell me about your family.”

“Why? We’re here to talk about you, not me.”

“Do you have brothers? Or sisters?”

“Both.” She swallowed her ice and took another experimental sip of loc.

“I have—had—two sisters and a brother. But one is a half sister, Greta, my mother’s daughter, and she’s so much older than me she’s more like an aunt-”

“Is this relevant?”

“-and the other brother and sister are twins. Were twins. Stella killed herself.” Now she was listening. “In some ways I was like an only child. And my parents should have divorced fifteen years ago. I am used to hiding things that matter to me, keeping them close. It’s what I do. Who I am.”

“Tell me why the fuck I should care about that! You think that just because you can buy me and Hedon Road, probably the whole city, a hundred times over I’ll nod and say, Fine? Just like that? Without even an explanation of why you’ve been hiding, lying to me? Lying to everyone.”

There was no way to deal with her anger. I ignored it. “This job, Hedon Road isn’t a game to me. I need it. I have less money than you do.” Not true, not true. What about the thirty thousand? The faces shimmered, each with their own secrets.

The muscles in her jaw had relaxed a little, and her pupils were returning to normal.

“I was kidnapped. You know that. When they, when I escaped, I couldn’t go back.” The rest stuck in my throat like small polished pebbles.

“Why? And why did you lie?”

I sat there, mute.

“I feel like such a fool. Do you have any idea how used I feel? All that time I was ordering you around, telling you to bring me this readout or that, treating you like an apprentice. Making you work like that. All that time, you knew, you knew…” She swirled the remains of her loc around the glass. “You know something? You’ve made me feel ashamed of myself. Of how I bullied you. I don’t like that.”

“You didn’t bully me.”

She wasn’t listening. “But why? That’s what I don’t understand. You say you need the money, but why? Why aren’t you back with Mummy and Daddy-”

“Don’t.” Sharper than I intended. “Please, don’t call them that.”

“Fine. Your family, then. Why aren’t you with them, in your fancy house, or estate, or whatever?”

“Ratnapida.”

“What?”

“The house. It’s called Ratnapida.” Stella in the fountain. Oster. Then, later, Oster and Tok, standing side by side. Tok looking beaten.

“Whatever. You could be in the sunshine, doing nothing. So why are you hiding? And what happened to the real Sal Bird?”

I think I killed someone, I had told her. “I never met her. She died in an accident.” I waited for her to decide whether or not to believe me. I knew I looked calmer than I felt. Years of training at the di

She absorbed that, nodding. Still expressionless. “Go on.”

“The man I killed…” I swallowed. The man I killed. “It was one of the men who kidnapped me.” I told her about the tent, the drugs. About Crablegs and the camera. About finding the nail.

“This is hard. I haven’t thought about it. It was… So when they took me outside, after they’d told me my family hadn’t paid… I thought… it just…” Another swallow. I looked down at my hand on the bar. This was not something I wanted to think about. I stared at my fingertips, the way the skin curled pinkly around the nails. She put her hands on mine, warm and dry. I still couldn’t look up. Try, that hand said. “I had the nail hidden in my fist. When we got outside I hit him in the neck.”

She lifted her hand from mine and picked up her drink. “Was he dead?”

“The other one, Crablegs, he said I’d killed him. “But…” But of course Crablegs would want me to think that. Keep me confused, docile. “I don’t know. I just assumed.”

“Then that’s the first thing we do tomorrow.”