Slow River

While her back healed, Lore’s days passed in a haze of drugs and conversations at odd times of the day or night. Spa

There was always the tree, of course. Even when she could not see it, she could hear it. The leaves hung down like dead things now, and when people walked past, she heard their feet crunching on those that had already fallen. She spent hours watching the sun travel across the warm sandstone of the building opposite. When she got well enough, she sat up against the window. When the sun was at just the right angle, she could see where layers of sandstone had been blasted away to cleanse it of the soot: acid, black effluvium from generations of factories, coal-burning fires and, later, combustion engines. The sandstone shone a deep, buttery yellow early in the morning, bleaching to lemon and then bone as the light increased. She guessed at the shape of the building she lived in by the shadow it cast, on the one opposite.

She listened to the morning chorus of sparrows and the evening calls of thrushes as people came and went in algal tides. She liked to drowse while the pigeons on the window sill cooed and whirred their wings. The sill was white with their excrement. She wondered what they found to eat in the city. Once, waking from a thick, Technicolor afternoon dream, she found a squirrel on the cable outside, watching her. She could see the muscles and tendons of its haunches as it gripped the thick cable with tiny claws. It had eyes like apple pips, hard and opaque. Then it ran off, tail twitching.

But the window could not keep her occupied all the time, and then Lore would wonder if the man, the kidnapper she knew only as Fishface, had really died, if the police were still looking for her. Perhaps the other one, Crablegs, had confessed, or been found. Maybe Tok had already denounced Oster.

Once she tried to access the net, to check back on the news, see if any bodies had been discovered, what the police were doing about finding her, but she was locked out. The keyboard was dead, and voice commands resulted in nothing but a flat, still screen. She did not mention her attempt to Spa

But then Spa

Lore never asked where Spa

After a wreck, when Lore could get around the flat a little, Spa

“It’s me,” Spa

Spa

Lore kept her face still, but she remembered a tent, drugs, being naked. Was this any different?

“I’ll allow any passive use. That means you can listen to my messages. Or some of them. You can access news. But you can’t interact: no talking, no sending messages, no shopping. I’ll bring you anything you need. At least for now.”

“I’m not a child.”

“No,” Spa

The first time the screen bleeped when she was alone, it was a man’s face that appeared: black spiky hair, blue eyes, thin eyebrows, smile like a cherub. “Remember those chicken hawks we came across last month? If you’re still interested, get in touch.”

That was it. Even with all Spa

When Spa

Lore waited for an explanation.

“Billy,” Spa

“I thought you said your business was victimless.”

“Yes.”

“Where there are chicken hawks, there are chickens getting hurt.”

“You know more than I thought you might.” Lore just nodded, and waited. Spa

“Daisy chains?:

“A ring of fresh young faces. Younger than chickens. This one and his friends like them younger than four.”

Lore felt her cheeks pulling away from her teeth in disgust.

“It’s not much to my taste, either. So what Billy and I do is put a tap on him. Blackmail,” she amplified. “A certain rough justice to it, don’t you think? Those who hurt others get a taste of how it feels to be powerless, and we make money. All very neat.”

Lore stared at her. Spa

“Often they stop molesting them, once they’ve been burned.”

“Often isn’t always.”

Spa

“You don’t care, do you?”

“It’s business. We can’t go to the police because they’ll want to know where we got our information. Besides, it could get dangerous if we meddled too far.”

Lore remembered Spa

“No one who doesn’t deserve it.”

No one who can’t pay. Lore thought about chicken hawks and daisy chains. “You could send an anonymous tip to the, police.”

“We’ve done that. Now and then. When we think the situation warrants. But without solid evidence, they don’t usually take any action.”

Lore saw that the lack of police action suited Spa

Lore dreamed that night of being rolled, dead-eyed, into a plasthene sheet and tipped into a grave. On the lip of the grave, throwing shovelfuls of wet mud, were cherubs called Billy, laughing, and Spa

She woke up gasping and clutching her throat, remembering her lungs fighting the plasthene for air, a cupful, a spoonful, a thimbleful. It was morning. Spa

Spa