CHAPTER TWELVE - STP-44 THE OASIS

“Water is necessary for life.

It goes without saying that good water is necessary for good living, then.

At the lower levels, and lower costs, you have water services that will provide cheaper water. This water is poorly filtered, usually tainted and brackish, with microplastics and bacterial colonies giving it a pungent odour and colour.

In better neighbourhoods, where the community has agreed to pay for a better quality of water, you’ll find near-distilled water. It may have some traces of industrial decontaminants within it, but it is entirely possible to drink this water without getting sick (in the short or medium term).

Many buildings have their own filtration system as well, but these are expensive, and usually reserved for industrial applications.

The best water, the water found only in the penthouses and the places where the ultra-rich live, is carried over to local cisterns from outside of any mega-city. It is tailored to have a good taste, a clear colouration, and no plastics, oils, or any other chemical contaminants.”

--On Watering, S. Cing

***

The non-maintenance elevator was probably safer, but holy fuck it was slow. The entire thing hummed as it rose up, and its LEDs flickered every so often. It made some of the ads plastered to the walls look cool for the split second they were in the dark. The glow-in-the-dark ink was probably worth it.

“So,” I asked as I debated leaning against one of the walls. Would it hold? I didn’t normally have to consider whether things could handle my weight. “How did you two meet?”

Franny turned my way. “I assume you’re talking about Delilah and I?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was there when Gom—Delilah met Rac here, so that only leaves you two, right?”

Franny crossed her arms, her bat left next to her, the lump at the end of the handle pushing against her side. “I joined the convent when I was... nine? Ten years old? I met Gomorrah the year after that. She wouldn’t stop crying until I became her friend, and then she followed me around non-stop.”

“I was terrified,” Gomorrah said. She looked my way, and probably guessed that I was missing some context. “The convent has a few programs in it; some of them basically act as a sort of... babysitting slash summer-camp. It’s not too expensive, and it means your daughter gets to go to a decent private school afterwards.”

“Like a scholarship?” I asked.

“Something like that,” Gomorrah said. “They train girls to be well-behaved and on how to carry out basic duties, and we get to attend one of the city’s better schools for a lot less. It’s also one of the stricter schools, but the results are usually pretty good.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Half of my schooling was online, and when I did go to a class, it wasn’t exactly ritzy.”

“Oh, my family couldn’t afford anything too nice,” Gomorrah said. “Hence the convent. But it... well, I’m not close to my parents, let’s say. A lot of the girls there aren’t.”

“What, like abandonment issues?”

Gomorrah shrugged, and I decided not to poke at it any more than that.

“The place isn’t so bad,” Franny said. She picked up her bat and twirled it around. “They’re strict, but that’s better than being tossed out on the street, and they’re big on morals and such.”

“Never could afford morals,” I said.

Raccoon nodded. “Those are rich people things.”

I raised my hand her way, and she slapped it in a quick high-five. “Yeah, moral-less gang rise up.”

“You’re terrible,” Gomorrah said.

The elevator ground to a halt, and the doors slid open. Raccoon slipped past the rest of us and took the lead, doing what I think she thought of as her job in leading us through the underground. Either her sense of direction was really keen, or she just knew her way around--either way, we soon exited into the parking space where Gomorrah’s Fury was waiting.

“Dibs on the front,” I said.

“You want to sit up front?” Franny asked. “I’ve been friends with Delilah longer.”

“Oh, this is a competition?” I asked. “Well, I’ve fought by Gomorrah’s side before.”

“You don’t even call her by her real name,” she said.

“We have cute nicknames for each other. She calls me Stray Cat, as if I’m some mangy mutt off the street, and I call her Gomorrah, after a city that was burned down or whatever.”

“I don’t think that fits the usual definition of cute,” Franny said.

Grinning, I leaned down so that I was closer to Franny. “If you want to sit next to your girl, you just have to ask. I’m sure she’s appreciating you fighting for the right already.”

She sputtered, then with a huff, moved over to the rear of the Fury and jumped into the backseat. Raccoon followed her in without any fuss.

“What did you tell her?” Gomorrah asked over a secured line.

“Just poked fun at her obvious romantic feelings for you.”

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“Franny isn’t like that,” Gomorrah said. “And if she was, it wouldn’t be for me... You don’t actually think she’s... you know?”

I stared at Gomorrah over the roof of the car, and noticed she was gazing at the ground. “I mean, call me a hopeless romantic, but she used to protect you, right? Your redheaded knight? And now the balance of power is all twisted around and she’s not sure what’s going on anymore, and you’re both upset at each other because you both care a lot, but things aren’t the way they used to be?”

“You’re taking a lot of this out of context.”

“Lucy would be sighing right now at how romantic everything is,” I said.

Gomorrah groaned. “Lucy is dating you. Her romantic abilities are very much up for debate, and her taste is unquestionably poor.”

I laughed as I slid into the passenger seat. She wasn’t wrong; Lucy could do better. I was just lucky, and clever enough not to tell Lucy as much. “Come on, let’s go see about killing some dragons,” I said as I flicked out of the private channel.

“I thought nuns didn’t like killing things,” Raccoon said.

“We don’t,” Franny said.

“Aren’t there dragons in the Bible?” I asked.

“No, not the way you’re thinking,” Franny said.

“The fuck would you read it, then?”

Gomorrah spun up the Fury and we pivoted before taking off out of the alley at a speed I think Franny wasn’t comfortable with.

“When did you learn how to drive, Del?”

“This week,” Gomorrah said as she shot out into oncoming traffic, weaved over a truck, then flipped us over into the right lane. There was a speedometer sign against one wall, large green digits telling drivers how fast they were going over or under the limit. It flashed red when we roared past.

“So, what’s the plan once we get to the Sewer Dragons?” I asked. “Because I have a plan, but I’m not sure it’s a good one.”

“Does your plan involve copious amounts of explosives?” Gomorrah asked.

“You know me so well,” I said.

“I... actually haven’t considered it that far,” Franny said. “If I caught a few of them in the act, I could beat them up, make them regret taking people the way they have. But I’m not equipped to assault their front door. There’ll be dozens of them, at least.”

“So, we try the diplomatic method,” I said. “Gomorrah, you talk to them, maybe ask that they... I don’t know, give up on their evil ways and such.”

“And what will you do?”

I flicked on the invisibility on my coat and my new armour, and in the time it took for someone to blink, I was gone. “I’ll be sneaky!” I said.

”That’s so cool,” Raccoon said.

“I know, right?”

“No one would be able to see me stealing their trash with something like that,” she said.

“Not... exactly what I had in mind, but hey, good for you.”

I held onto one of the handles above the door as Gomorrah took a turn at a speed that was pretty far from advisable, and then I refocused on what was going on outside as we slowed down before a large gate with the words SEWAGE TREATMENT 44 stenciled across them in fading paint.

“Give me a minute,” Gomorrah said. She did something that locked the car in place, hovering before the doorway while she wiggled her fingers in the air. The strange gestures of someone fingering their way through complex menus on their augs. “Yeah, this is the one. The section beyond this technically belongs to the city, but it’s all being rented out by a few companies that are in charge of the water filtration and sewage treatment. They have things divided up, based on where in the city the waste is coming from and where it’s going.”

The gate thumped, dust peeling off of it in a rain of rusty flakes before the entire thing slid aside. When the path was finally clear, Gomorrah drove us in slowly, the headlights on the Fury doing more than the lights on the ceiling to illuminate the tunnels.

The walls here weren’t walls at all, but huge pipes and tubes, all of them wide enough that I was sure the Fury could fit into them, if tightly.

We moved down a long, narrow passage that opened up at the end on a large balcony that circled halfway around a lower level. It was like walking out of one of those entrances in a stadium, only instead of benches all around there were stations with pipes and little buildings with flickering lights, as well as other passages heading off every which way.

The lower level had a cement arch over a much wider tunnel. There were smaller buildings all around the entrance, made of steel plates and scrapped cars. Stalls and shops and little areas where people were sitting around drums with fires burning merrily within. The entire area was lit up in the familiar blues and pinks and greens of stolen neon ads, most of them strung onto towers covered in wires to brighten the place up a little, like psychedelic trees.

“I guess this is where the Sewer Dragons come from,“ Gomorrah said. “Let’s find a place to park before we go say hello.”

***