Chapter 3: Out of the Frying Pan
"Stop moonin' over that fool boy and focus on your work!"
Carlita whirls around and glares at her aunt, her cheeks burning. "I am not mooning!" she hisses.
Maya hucks her washcloth into the sink with a snort. "You been standin' there starin' at the wall half the damn afternoon!"
"There is no boy, Tia Maya! I'm just worried about something," Carlita protests, but her aunt only grunts and jabs her finger at the sink. Carlita returns to her washing with a frustrated sigh.
Lon and Burger—the only other two kitchen workers, both almost as old and impossible to deal with as Maya—snigger from a table where they sit peeling potatoes. Carlita ignores them. They’re sometimes mean when she’s alone with them, but they usually let her be when her aunt’s in the room.
Carlita wishes for the umpteenth time that there was another job she could do. She hates working here in the kitchens, hates spending her days with her insufferable aunt and her lackeys, and hates them butting their noses into her personal business. But she knows the community elders make no exceptions to their rules: you want to live topside, you work the job you're assigned. Those who can't hack it or refuse to follow the rules—like Carlita's mother and Del Rey—live down in the Crypts with the rest of the "rougher members of society," as the elders often put it.
She turns the tap and waits patiently for water to trickle from one of the rain barrels sitting on the rooftop above, filling her washbasin inch by creeping inch. She wonders if the barrel's almost empty. She hopes she won't have to go upstairs to swap the hose over to a new barrel. Her foot's already aching.
Del's right, she knows. It's important to find Jamar and rescue him if he needs rescuing. The fewer runners they have, the worse off they all are—and the higher the danger to Del himself, as the community relies on him more and more to risk his neck for the greater good. To go out there again and again, scavenge for this, trade for that. There's no end to it.
But he's never afraid. Carlita envies the guts it must have taken for him to refuse mucking out the toilets two years ago. She wishes she could have seen the look on Elder Black's face when Del threw his shovel at her feet and told her he quit. Imagine that!
Carlita would love to do the same to Maya, Lon and Burger. Just leave. It would be so easy! But then where would she go? She knows she isn't so poorly off living topside. She's guaranteed two regular meals a day in exchange for relatively easy work. She's safe and she's always fed. But down there in the Crypts, most people work far harder, in more dangerous conditions and for much less. Like Carlita's mother, slaving away as a rat-catcher in the old sewer tunnels. Carlita shudders.
The water's barely trickling out of the tap now. What's more, it's freezing cold, almost as if the pipes are frozen. Odd—it's warm and sunny above the fog today, Carlita thinks.
"I've got to go upstairs to change the water barrel," she announces to the room with a sigh as she picks up her stick and makes for the door.
"Oh no you don't," Lon interjects. "You take over dinner prep. I'll go." She hefts her bulk off her chair and half-walks, half-waddles to the door. "You take ages with that bum foot of yours. Every damn time."
Carlita's face grows hot again, but she bites her tongue because she knows it's true. She constantly worries that one of her colleagues might file a complaint about her slowness. It could cost her job.
Her eyes burn holes in Lon's back as she disappears into the stairwell. Carlita wishes she could formally complain about the other kitchen ladies. They almost seem to take delight in making Carlita feel miserable, but she knows they aren't breaking any laws. Seniority's everything topside, and that's that. The old give the orders and the young comply without objection.
Maya notices her niece's insolent glare, of course. "Mind your place, girl, or you'll be joining your mother and boyfriend in the Crypts," she snaps, and then snorts again. "Or maybe that's what you want."
Carlita shrinks against the counter, choking back a sudden well of bitter tears. "No, Tia Maya, I'm just trying to do my job," Carlita pleads. She adds, against her better judgment, "And Del is not my boyfriend. You know that he—"
"I don't care what he is!" Maya growls. "Dead Boy is a runner now, and you know what that means."
Carlita shakes her head in angry protest, which Maya mistakes for ignorance.
"It means that boy will be dead before long, so you'd best get him out of your fool head!" Maya snaps.
Carlita swells with rage and rushes forward. "He will not!" she screams directly in her aunt's face before giving her a mighty shove to the floor. As Maya rocks back on the cracked tiles gasping in fury and disbelief, Carlita grabs her walking stick, darts out the door and staggers down the hall toward the stairs, making her second dramatic exit of the day.
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Garden has just started the long trek downstairs when she meets Raz. He's on his way down too, and when she says she's just going for a walk on her afternoon break he immediately asks if he can come with.
"I guess," Garden shrugs. "But you won't find it too exciting." This is the truth, at least for him.
Raz is an older boy a year younger than Carlita with a light brown complexion and short black hair. He lives topside one floor below Garden, and works as a courier between the scraper residents and the Embarcadero Crypts shops. He's also one of the very few people that Garden trusts.
Like many who live in the community, Raz is another mixed-race kid—Pakistani and Jewish, in his case—who knows very little about either ethnic background. Culture mostly disappeared after the Fall, all blending into a single culture of survival. The oldest residents still remembered what it was like pre-Fall, but most of the people who are now mothers and fathers were still young when the whole world fell apart, and retained very few traditions of their people.
Sometimes Garden envies kids like Carlita, who can speak a bit of Spanish with her aunt and mother, but Raz's parents failed to retain anything of either culture, despite being one of the few families in the building who are still alive and together. That somehow made Raz very relatable to Garden; he's often even easier to understand than her own brother, as Raz isn't constantly running off and acting mysterious like Del does.
"So, where we going?" Raz asks as they descend the stairs. Dim electric lights light the stairwell, flickering from the overburdened antique solar panels. Not many places in the building are freely allowed electricity, but with the elevators long since abandoned and the windows boarded up to keep the fog out, the mid-level stairs are deemed important enough to remain lit, at least during peak hours.
"Just to the third floor." Garden smiles at the curious look Raz gives her. "And no, I'm not meeting anyone."
"Really? Well you're right, then. That does sound boring." Raz laughs. "But I'll hang with you for a bit anyway."
Garden appreciates having a companion for her short walk, although she's soon too out of breath to say much. Walking down more than forty flights of stairs is tiring, especially when you have to take it slow to avoid slipping on ice patches—they're below the fog level now, and not all of the windows are sealed up properly. It's cold.
Raz, on the other hand, who makes the trip several times a day, seems fazed neither by temp nor toil. "You heard Carlita's in trouble for skipping duty?" he gossips in a hushed voice.
Garden only nods and shrugs with what she hopes looks like frustration, her heavy breathing making up for her lack of small talk. She isn't sure how else to respond. Carlita's her friend, but she's been so distant and cold for a long time now—the last few months, at least. It confuses her.
"I hope she's all right," Raz adds. He peppers the rest of the descent with idle chit-chat, but doesn't ask anything else that requires an actual response.
The third-floor landing has a single door that swings half-open on broken hinges, thick white fog spilling through the doorway to float in the stairwell half a flight above and below. The door was previously padlocked a number of times, but to no avail—it's too popular a hangout spot to be denied. Still, one has to enter quietly to avoid being heard by the lobby guards who always hang around three floors down and are usually hell-bent on coming up to put a stop to anyone's fun.
Raz slips through the open door first, and Garden follows close behind. Inside, the fog is dense—a large section of the east wall was destroyed in an explosion long ago and all the exterior windows have since been busted out, leaving the entire floor open to the elements. A number of half-attempted renovations were repeatedly ripped down over the years. The third-floor fog landing at 101 Cali is one of the few landmark oddities that the locals somehow came to a unanimous unvoiced agreement about keeping.
It's a relatively safe place to hang out in the fog, for one. There are no Frozen, and the wraiths won't come up if you don't make a whole lot of noise. It's high enough that there's no line of sight to or from the street, even on days when the fog flows the thinnest. There are tons of rooms that used to be offices in which people can hang out without fear of bothering anyone (or anything). And, best of all, it's completely abandoned, as nobody can stay in this ice-cold environment for more than a few hours at a time.
Still, Garden and Raz keep quiet. It wouldn’t be a good look to be seen together in such a place, which is largely famous as a spot for young lovers looking for some privacy or boozers who want to party without sharing their stash. Garden certainly don't want anyone to get the wrong impression—she and Raz are strictly just friends.
They stalk through the hallways, with Raz checking every door they pass, but they don't meet a single person. Other than the cold, wet fog buoying about them, filling each room and corridor with dense cloud-stuff, they're completely alone.
Garden leads the way back to the largest room with the half-destroyed wall. A few wooden crates are arranged in front of the gaping hole. Smashed glass litters the floor, evidence of parties long past.
Garden plants herself on one of the crates. The room has an incredibly musty smell that leaves an acrid tinge on her tongue—it's almost too strong to bear, but Garden sinks her nose down into her scarf and ignores it. She sits and stares, gazing out at the fog roiling before her over the lip of blasted concrete and metal rebar of the destroyed wall.
Raz squats down next to her and pulls a protein bar from his messenger bag. "This all you came for?" he whispers.
"Yep." Garden doesn't turn to look at him—her attention is fully on the fog. "It's a kind of fog meditation."
"Did you just make that up?" Raz takes a bite of the bar and offers it to Garden, who ignores it.
"Maybe."
Raz stands there for a few minutes, watching the fog silently together with Garden. It's peaceful. In the late afternoon, the fog is taking on a luminous quality that makes it seem less ominous, even friendly.
“Nice. I might have to come back and try this on my own sometime.” Raz stoops and drops the half-eaten protein bar into Garden’s jacket pocket. "In case you fall asleep and miss dinner. I’m outta here."
Garden doesn't respond. Her eyes are fixated on the fog, her face blank, completely absorbed. Lacking anything else of interest to see or do, Raz turns and walks for the door.
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Behind Raz, out in the fog beyond the blasted wall, a shape suddenly moves: a long snakelike ice-form undulating in a current of coalescing cloud. It slides past the opening and is gone, seemingly unaware of the room’s two occupants.
Raz is likewise oblivious to what just transpired. He's already exiting the door, glad to move on from this liminal space toward more familiar faces downstairs who don’t act so strangely like the topside girls he knows.
Garden, who sits staring directly at the snakelike shape that crosses before her outside the hole in the wall, also doesn’t see what had happened—for her eyes are now seeing something completely different.
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