Free Nicola Griffith by Slow River Page B

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 dinner with Oster and Katerine, and Greta and Stella; Willem and Marley would be staying for the week . . .
    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