The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction

The Hand Is Quicker… ELIZABETH BEAR

Elizabeth Bear was born in Connecticut, and now lives in Brookfield, Massachusetts, with her husband, writer Scott Lynch. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and in 2008 took home a Hugo Award for her short story “Tideline,” which also won her the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (shared with David Moles). In 2009, she won another Hugo Award for her novelette Shoggoths in Bloom. Her short work has appeared in Asimov’s, Subterranean, SCI FICTION, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Strange Horizons, On Spec, and elsewhere, and has been collected in The Chains That You Refuse and Shoggoths in Bloom. She is the author of the five-volume New Amsterdam fantasy series, the three-volume Jenny Casey SF series, the five-volume Promethean Age series, the three-volume Jacob’s Ladder series, the three-volume Edda of Burdens series, and the three-volume Eternal Sky series, as well as three novels in collaboration with Sarah Monette. Her other books include the novels Carnival and Undertow. Among her recent books is an acclaimed new novel, Karen Memory.

Society has always been divided between the Haves and the Have-Nots, but here’s a look at a disquieting future, one where the Have-Nots are, conveniently, kept literally out of sight and out of mind.

Rose and I used to come down to the river together last summer. It was over semester break, and my time was my own—between obligatory work on the paper I hoped would serve as the core of my first book and occasional consultations with my grad students.

Rose wore long dark hair and green-hazel eyes for me. I wore what I always did—a slightly idealized version of the meat I was born with. I wanted to be myself for her. I wondered if she was herself for me, but the one time I gathered up the courage to ask, she laughed and swept me aside. “I thought historians understood that narratives are subjective and imposed!”

I loved her because she challenged me. I thought she loved me too, until one day she disappeared. No answer to my pings, no trace of her in our usual haunts. She’d blocked me.

I didn’t handle it well. I was in trouble at the university. I was drinking. I wasn’t maintaining my citizenship status. With Rose gone, I realized slowly how much my life had come to revolve around her.

No matter how she felt about me, I knew she loved the river-edge promenade, bordered by weeping willows and her namesake flowers. Those willows were yellow as I walked the path now, long leaves clinging to their trailing branches. The last few roses hadn’t yet fallen to the frost, but the flowers looked sparse, dwarfed by the memory of summer’s blossoms.

The scent was even different now than it had been at the height of summer. Crisper, thin. The change was probably volunteer work; I didn’t think the city budget would stretch to skinning unique seasonal scents for the rose gardens. I knew Rose was older than I, no matter how her skin looked, because she used to say that when she was a girl, individual cultivars of roses had different odors, so walking around a rose garden was a tapestry of scents. Real roses probably still did that.

I didn’t know if I’d ever smelled them.

Other people walked the path—all skins. The city charged your palm chip just to get through the gate. I didn’t begrudge the debit. It wasn’t as if I was ever going to get to pay it off. Or as if I was ever going to get to come back here. This was a last hurrah.

I edited out the others. I wanted to be alone, and if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. That was good, because I knew I didn’t look happy, and the last thing I wanted was some random stranger reading my emotional signature and coming over to offer well-meaning advice.

Since this was my last time, I thought about jumping skins—running up the charges, seeing some of the other ways the river promenade could look—fantasyland, or Rio, or a moon colony. Rose and I had done that when we first started coming here, but it turned out we both preferred the naturalist view. With seasons.

We’d met in winter. I supposed it was fitting that I lost her—and everything else that mattered—in the fall.

Everything changed at midnight.

Not my midnight, as if honoring the mystical claptrap in some dead fairy tale. But about the dinner hour, which would be midnight Greenwich Standard Time—honoring the mystical claptrap of a dead empire, instead. I suppose you have to draw the line somewhere. The world is full of the markers of abandoned empires, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Great Wall of China, from the remnants of the one in Arizona to the remnants of the one in Berlin.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.

I was thinking about that poem as I crossed Henderson—with the light: I knew somebody who jaywalked and got hit by an unskinned vehicle. The driver got jail time for manslaughter, but that doesn’t bring back the dead. It was a gorgeous October evening, the sun just setting and the trees still full of leaves in all shades of gold and orange. I barely noticed them, or the cool breeze as I waited, rocking nervously from foot to foot on the cobblestones.

I was meeting my friend Numair at Gary’s Olympic Pizza and I was running a little late, so he was already waiting for me in our usual corner booth. He’d ordered beers and garlic bread. They waited on the tabletop, the beers shedding rings of moisture into paper napkins.

I slid onto the hard bench opposite him, trying to hide the apprehension souring my gut. The vinyl was artistically cracked and the rough edges caught on my jeans. It wasn’t Numair making me so anxious. It was finances. I shouldn’t be here, by rights—I knew I couldn’t afford even pizza and beer—but I needed to see him. If anything could clear my head, it was Numair.

One of the things I liked about Numair is how unpretentious he was. I didn’t skin heavily—not like some people, who wandered through underwater seascapes full of sentient octopuses or dressed up as dragons and pretended they live in Elfland—but he was so down to earth I’d have bet his default skin looked just like him. He was a big guy, strapping and barrel-bodied, with curly dark brown hair that was going gray at the temples. And he liked his garlic bread.

So it was extra-nice that there were still two pieces left when I pulled the plate over.

“Hey, Charlie,” he said.

“Hey, Numair.” Garlic bread crunched between my teeth, butter and olive oil dripping down my chin. I swiped at it with a napkin. I didn’t recognize the beer, dark and malty, although I drank off a third of it making sure. “What’s the brew?”

“Trois Draggonnes.” He shrugged. “Microbrew license out of… Shreveport.com, I think? Cheers.”

“Here’s mud in your eye,” I answered, and drained the glass.

He sipped his more moderately and put it back on the napkin. “You sounded upset.”

I nodded. Gary’s was an old-style place, and a real-looking waitress came by about thirty seconds later and replaced my beer. I didn’t know if she was an employee or a sim, but she was good at her job. The pizza showed up almost instantly after that, balanced on a metal tripod with a plastic spatula for serving. Greek-style, with flecks of green oregano visible in the sweet, oozing sauce. I always got the same thing: meatball, spinach, garlic, mushrooms. Delicious. I’d never asked Numair what he was eating.

The smell turned my stomach.

“I may not be around much for a while.” I stuffed the rest of the garlic bread into my mouth to make room. And buy time. “This is embarrassing—”

“Hey.” He paused with a slice in midair, perfect strings of mozzarella stretching twelve inches from pie to spatula. They glistened. The booth creaked when he shifted. “This is me.”

“Right. I’ve got financial trouble. Big-time.”

He put the slice down on his plate and offered me the spatula. I waved it away. The smell was bad enough. Belatedly, I turned it off. Might as well use the filters as long as I had them. The beer still looked appealing, though, and I drank a little more.

“Okay,” he said. “How big-time?”

The beer tasted like humiliation and soap suds. “Tax trouble. I’m going to lose everything,” I said. “All assets, all the virtuals. I thought I could pay it down, you know—but then I got dropped by the U., and there wasn’t a replacement income stream. As soon as they catch up with me—” I thought of Rose, to whom Numair had introduced me. They’d been Friday-night gaming buddies, until she’d vanished without a word. I’d kept meaning to look her up offline and check in, but… It was easier to let her go than know for certain she’d dumped me. Amazing how easy it was to lose track of people when they didn’t show up at the usual places and times. “I got registered mail this morning. They’re pulling my taxpayer I.D. I’ll be as gone as Rose. Except I came to say goodbye before I ditched you.”

He blinked. Now it was his turn to set the pizza down and push the plate away with his fingertips. “Rose died,” he said.

I rubbed the back of my neck. It didn’t ease the sudden nauseating tightness in my gut as all that bitterness converted to something sharp and horrible. “Died? Died died?”

“Died and was cremated. Her family’s not linked, so I only heard because she and Bill went to school together, and he caught a link for her memorial service on some network site. You didn’t know?”

I blinked at him.

He shook his head. “Stupid question. If you knew— Anyway. I guess you’ve tried everything, so I’ll save the stupid advice.”

“Thank you.” I hope he picked up from my tone how fervently glad I was. Nothing like netfriends to pile on with the incredibly obvious—or incredibly crackpot—advice when you’re in a pickle. “So anyway—”

“Give me your offline contact info.” He held up his phone and I sent it over. It was a pleasantry. I knew what the odds were that I’d ever hear from him. And it wasn’t like I could keep my apartment without a tax identification number.

However good his intentions.

Right then, a quarter of the way around the planet, midnight tolled. And I fell out of the skin.

It was sharp and sudden, as somewhere a line of code went into effect and the last few online chits in my account were levied. I blinked twice, trying to shake the dizziness that accompanied the abrupt transition, eyes now scratchy and dry.

Numair was still there in the booth across from me. It was weird seeing him there, unskinned. I’d been right about his unpretentiousness: he looked pretty much as he’d always done—maybe a little more unkempt—though his clothes were different.

Since he was skinned, I knew I’d dropped right out of his filters. I might as well not exist anymore. And Gary’s Olympic, unlike Numair, had really suffered in the transition.

The pizza that congealed on the table before me was fake cheese, lumpy and dry looking. Healthier than the gooey pie my filters had been providing a moment before, but gray and depressing. I was suddenly glad I hadn’t been chewing on it when the transition hit.

The grimy floor was scattered with napkins. The waitress was real, go figure, but a shadow of her buxom virtual self—no, she was a guy, I realized. Maybe working in drag brought in better tips? Or maybe the skin was a uniform. I’d never know.

And there was me.

I was not as comfortable with myself as Numair. I didn’t skin heavily, as I said—just tuning. But my skins did make me a hair taller, a hair younger. My hair… a hair brighter. And so on. With them gone, I was skinny and undersized in a track suit that bagged at the shoulders and ass.

Falling into myself stung.

I reached out left-handed for my beer, since Numair was going to get stuck for the tab anyway. It was pale yellow and tasted of dish soap. So maybe the off flavor in the second glass had been something other than my misery. Whatever.

I chugged it and got out.

The glass door was dirty, one broken pane repaired with duct tape. On the way in, it had been spotless and decorated with blue and white decal maps of Greece. I pushed it open with the tips of my fingers and moved on.

Outside, the street lay dark and dank. Uncollected garbage humped against the curb. Some of it smelled organic, rotten. A real violation of the composting laws. Maybe they didn’t get enforced as much against businesses. I picked my way across broken cement to the corner and waited there.

There were more people on the street than there had been. Or maybe they’d been there all along, just skinned out. You could tell who was wearing filters by the way they moved—backs straight, enjoying the evening. The rest of us shuffled, heads bowed. Trying not to see too much. The evening I walked through was full of bad smells and crumbling buildings that looked to be mostly held together by graffiti.

“Aw, crap.”

The light changed. I crossed. Of course, I couldn’t get a taxi home, or even a bus. Skinned-in drivers would never see me, and my chips were cancelled. I wouldn’t get through a chip-locked door to take the tube.

I wondered how the poor got around. I guessed I’d be finding out.

I didn’t know my way home.

I was used to the guidance my skins gave me, the subtle recognition cues. All I was getting now was the cold wind cutting through a windbreaker that wasn’t warm enough for the job I expected it to do, and a pair of sore feet. Everything stank. Everything was dirty. There were steel bars on every window and chip locks on every door.

I’d known that intellectually, but it had never really sunk in before what a bleak urban landscape that made for. Straggling trees lined unmaintained streets, and at every corner I picked my way through drifts of rubbish. I knew there wasn’t a lot of money for upkeep of infrastructure, and what there was had to be assigned to critical projects. But it didn’t matter; you could always drop a skin over anything that needed a little cosmetic help.

Sure, I’d seen news stories. But it was one thing to vid it and another to wade through it.

About fifteen minutes after I’d realized how lost I was, I also realized somebody was following me. Nobody bothers the skinned: an instantaneous, direct voice and vid line to police services meant Patrol guardian-bots could be at our sides in seconds. It was a desperate criminal who’d tackle one of us. One of them. But that was another service I couldn’t pay for, along with a pleasanter reality and access to mass transit.

I wasn’t skinned anymore, and I bet anybody following me could tell. Of course, I didn’t have any credit, either—or any cash. I guessed unskinned folks still used cash, palm-sized magnetic cards with swipe strips. A lot of places wouldn’t take it anymore. But if you didn’t have accounts or a working palm chip, what else were you going to do?

Well, if you were the guy behind me, apparently the answer was, take it from somebody else.

I was short and I was skinny, but living skinned kept me in pretty good shape. There were all kinds of built-in workout programs, after all, so clever that you hardly even noticed they were healthy. And skinning food kept the blood pressure down no matter how many greasy pizzas you enjoyed.

My pursuer was two-thirds of a block back. I waited until I’d put a corner between me and him. As soon as I lost sight of him, I broke into a run.

It was a pretty good run, too. I was wearing my Toesers, because I liked them, and if they were skinned nobody could tell how dumb they looked. Also, they were comfortable. And supposedly scientifically designed for natural running posture, so you landed on the ball of your foot and didn’t make a thump with every stride. Breath coming fast, feet scissoring—I turned at the first corner I came to, then quickly turned again.

Unskinned folks looked up in surprise as I pelted past. One made a grab for me, and another one shouted something after, but I was already gone. And then I was on a side street all by myself, running down a narrow path kicked through the piles of trash.

Maybe this was an even more desolate street, and maybe most of the lights were burned out, but I kept on running. It felt good, all of a sudden, like positive action. Like something I could do other than wallowing. Like progress.

It kept on feeling like progress all the way down to the river’s edge. And then, as I stopped beside a hole snipped-and-bent in the chain link, it felt like a very bad idea instead.

The river was a sewer. When I’d been here before—okay, not down here under the bridge, but on the bank above—it had been all sunshine and rolling blue water. What I saw now was floating milk jugs and what I smelled was a sour, fecal carrion stench.

I put a hand out to the fence, the wire gritty, greasy where my fingers touched. It dented when I leaned on it, but I needed it to bear my weight up. A stitch burned in my side, and every breath of air scoured my lungs. I didn’t know if that was from running, or because the air was bad. But it was the same air I’d been breathing all along. The filters didn’t change the outside world. Just our perceptions of it. So how could the air choke me now when before, I breathed it perfectly well?

Shouts behind me suggested that maybe my earlier pursuer had friends. Or that my flight had drawn attention. I was in shadow—but the yellow tracksuit wasn’t anyone’s idea of good camouflage.

Gravel crunched and turned under my feet. I pushed the top of the bent chain triangle up and ducked through, into the moist darkness under the bridge.

Things moved in the night. Rats, I imagined, but some sounded bigger than rats. What else could live in this filth? I imagined feral dogs, stray cats—companion animals abandoned to make their own fate. Would they attack something as large as a man?

If they did, how would I fight them?

I groped along the bridge abutment, feeling with my toes for a stick. The old stones swept down low, the arch broad and flat. I kept my hand up to keep from hitting my head on an invisible buttress. The masonry was slick with paint and damp, mortar crumbling to the touch. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, but light concentrated by the oily river reflected up, and I could see the stones of the bridge’s underside clearly.

I crept into that dank, ruinous beauty until the flicker of lights against the chain fence told me that my pursuers had found me, and they had come in force. My chest squeezed, stomach flipping in apprehension. I crouched down, tucked myself into the lowest part of the arch, and fumbled out my phone.

“Police,” I said. Even if my contract had been cancelled, that should work. I’d heard somewhere that any phone can always dial emergency. And there it was, a distant buzz, and then a calm voice answering.

“Emergency services. Your taxpayer identification number, please?”

My voice stuck in my throat. I’d never been asked that before. But then, I’d never been calling from an unskinned phone before. Without thinking, I rattled off the fourteen digits of my old number, the one that had been revoked. I held my breath afterward. Maybe the change hadn’t propagated yet. Maybe—

“That number is not valid,” the operator said.

“Look,” I whispered, “I’m in a dispute with Revenue Services. It’s all going to be sorted out, I’m sure, but right now I’m about to be mugged—”

“I’m sorry,” said the consummate professional on the other end of the line. “Emergency services are for taxpayers only.”

Before I could protest, the line went dead. Leaving me crouched alone in the dark, with a glowing phone pressed to my ear. Not for long, however: in less than a second, the dazzle of flashlight beams found me. Instinctively, I ducked my head and covered my eyes—with the hand holding the phone.

“Well hey. What’s this?” The voice was deceptively pleasant, that seductive mildness employed by schoolyard bullies since first Romulus beat up Remus. The flashlight didn’t waver from my eyes.

I flinched. I didn’t answer. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t have a voice.

I tried to find the part of myself that managed unruly students and lecture-hall hecklers, but it had vanished along with my credit accounts and the protection of the police. I ducked further, squinting around my hand, but he was just a shadow through the glare of his light. At least three other lights surrounded him.

He plucked the phone from my hand with a sharp twist that stabbed pain through my wrist. I snatched the hand back.

“Huh,” he said. “Guess you didn’t pay your taxes, huh? What else have you got?”

“Nothing,” I said. The RFID chip embedded in my palm was useless. Would they cut it out anyway? I had no cash, no anything. Just the phone, which had my whole life on it—all my research, all my photos. Three mostly finished articles. There were backups, of course, but they were on the wire, and I couldn’t get there without being skinned.

I wasn’t a skin anymore. Objects, I realized, had utility. Had value. They were more than ways to get at your data.

“Your jacket,” the baseline said. “And your shoes.”

My toes gripped the gravel. “I need my shoes—”

The dazzle of lights shifted. I knew I should duck, but the knowledge didn’t translate into action.

At first there wasn’t any pain. Just the shock of impact, and an exhale that seemed to start in my toes and never stop. Then the pain, radiating stars out of my solar plexus, with waves of nausea for dessert.

“Jacket,” he said.

I would have given it to him. But I couldn’t talk. Couldn’t even inhale. I raised my hand. I think I shook my head.

I think he would have hit me anyway. I think he wanted to hit me. Because when I fell down, he kept hitting me. Hitting and kicking. And not just him, some of his friends.

It’s a blur, mostly. I remember some particulars. The stomp that crushed my left hand. The kick that broke my tailbone. I got my knees up and tucked my head, so they kicked me in the kidneys instead. Gravel gouged the side where kicks didn’t land. If I could burrow into it, I’d be safe. If I could just fall through it, I might survive. I thought about being small and hard and sharp, like those stones.

After a while, I didn’t have the breath to scream anymore.

At first the cold hurt too, but after a while it became a friend. I noticed that they had stopped hitting me. I noticed that the cuts and bruises stung, the broken bones ached with a deep, sick throb. My hand felt fragile, gelatinous. Like a balloon full of water, I imagined that a single pinprick could make the stretched skin explode back from the contents. I prodded a loosened tooth with my tongue.

But then the cold got into the hurts and they numbed. Little by little, starting from the extremities. Working in. It mattered less that the hard points of gravel stabbed my ribs. I couldn’t feel that floppy, useless hand. The throb in my head slowly became less demanding than the throb of thirst in my throat.

In the fullness of time, I sat up. It was natural, like sitting up after a full night’s sleep, when you’ve lain in bed so long your body just naturally rises without consulting you. I thought about water. There was the river, but it smelled like poison. I’d probably get thirsty enough to drink it sooner or later. I wondered what diseases I’d contract. Hepatitis. Probably not cholera.

My cheekbones were numb, along with my nose, but I could still breathe normally. So the nose probably wasn’t broken. The moving air brought me a tapestry of cold odors: sour garbage, rancid meat, urine. That oil-tang from the river. Frost rimed the gravel around me, and in noticing that I noticed that the morning was graying, the heavy arch of the bridge a silhouette against the sky. There was pink and silver along the horizon, and I knew which direction was east because the sun’s light glossed a contrail that must have sat high enough to reach out of the Earth’s moving shadow.

Footsteps crunched toward me. I was too dreamy and snug to move. I’m in shock, I thought, but it didn’t seem important.

“What’s this?” somebody said.

I flinched but didn’t look up. His shadow couldn’t fall across me. We were both under the shadow of the bridge.

“Oh, dear,” he said. The crunch of shifting gravel told me he crouched down beside me. When he turned my chin with his fingers and I saw his face, I was surprised he was limber enough to crouch. He looked like the bad end of a lot of winters. “And you lost your shoes too. What a pity.”

He didn’t seem surprised when I cringed, but it didn’t light his eyes up, either. So that wasn’t a bully’s mocking.

“Can you walk?” He took my arm gently. He inspected my broken hand. When he unzipped my jacket, I would have pulled away, but the pain was bad enough that I couldn’t move against him. When he slid the hand inside the jacket and the buttons of my shirt, I realized he was improvising a sling.

As if his touch were the opposite of an analgesic, all my hurts reawakened. I meant to shake my head, but just thinking about moving unscrolled ribbons of pain through my muscles.

“I don’t think so.” My words were creaky and blood-flavored.

“If you can,” he said, “I’ve got a fire. And tea. And food.”

I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, his hand was extended. The left one, as my right hand was clawed up against my chest like a surgical glove stuffed overfull with twigs and raspberry jam.

Food. Warmth. I might have given up, but somewhere in the back of my mind was an animal that did not want to die. I watched as it made a determined, raspy sound and reached out with its unbroken hand.

Letting him pull me to my feet was a special kind of agony. I swayed, vision blacking at the edges. His steadying hand kept me upright. It hurt worse than anything. “Come on,” he said.

I remember walking, but I don’t remember where or for how long. It felt like forever. I had always been walking. I would be walking forever. There was no end. No surcease.

Pain is an eternity.

His fire was trash and sticks ringed with broken bricks and chunks of asphalt. It smoldered fitfully, and pinprick by pinprick, the heat reawakened my pains. The soles of my feet seeped blood from walking across the gravel. I couldn’t sit, because of the tailbone, but I figured out how to lie on my side. It hurt, but so did anything else.

There was tea, as promised, Lipton in bags stewed in a rusty can. I hoped he hadn’t used river water. It had sugar in it, though, and I drank cautiously.

The food was dumpster-sourced chicken and biscuits, cold and lumpy with congealed grease. I ate it with my good hand, small bites. The inside of my mouth was cut from being slammed against my teeth. If I chewed carefully, on one side, the loose tooth only throbbed. I hoped it might reseat itself eventually.

Why was I thinking about the future?

The sun had beaten back the gloom enough for even my swollen eyes to make out the old man across from me. He had draped stiff, stinking blankets around my shoulders, but as the sun warmed the riverbank, he seemed comfortable in several layers of shirts and pants. A yellowed beard surrounded his sunken mouth. His hands were spare claws in ragged gloves. He drank the tea fearlessly and warmed his share of the chicken on the rocks beside the trash fire. I thought about plastic fumes and kept gnawing mine cold.

After a while, he said, “You’ll get used to it.”

I looked up. He was looking right at me, his greasy silver ponytail dull in the sunlight. “Get used to being beaten up?” My voice sounded better than I’d feared. My nose really wasn’t broken. One small miracle.

“Get used to being a baseline.” He bit into a biscuit, grimacing in appreciation.

I winced, wondering how long it would take me to start savoring day-old fast food fat and carbohydrates. Then I winced in pain from the wincing.

The old man chewed and swallowed. “It’s honest, at least. Not like putting frosting all over the cake so nobody with any economic power can tell it’s rotten. What’s your name?”

“Charlie,” I said.

He nodded and didn’t ask for a surname. “Jean-Khalil.” I wondered if first-names only was part of the social customs of the baseline community.

The shock was wearing off. Maybe the sugar in the tea was working its neurochemical magic. My broken hand lay against my belly, warmed by my skin, and the sweat running across my midsection felt as syrupy as blood.

I kind of wanted the shock back. I looked at the chicken, and the chicken looked back at me. My gorge rose. Bitterness filled my mouth, but I swallowed it. I knew how badly I needed the food inside me.

I balanced the meat on the fire ring next to Jean-Khalil’s. “You eat that.”

He wiped the back of his hand across his beard. “I will. And you need to get to a clinic.”

I put my head down on the unbroken arm. If I didn’t get the hand seen too, even if I survived—even if I didn’t have internal injuries—what were the chances it would be usuable when it healed? “I don’t have a tax number.”

“There’s a free clinic at St. Francis,” he said. “But it’s Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

I managed to work out that if I normally met Numair on Tuesdays, it would be just after dawn on Wednesday. Which meant, depending on when the clinic opened, something over 24 hours to wait. I could wait 24 hours. Could I sleep 24 hours? Maybe I’d die of blood poisoning before then. That might be a relief.

I had heard of St. Francis, but I didn’t know where it was. Somewhere in this neighborhood? If it offered a clinic for baselines, it would have to be. They couldn’t get through the chip gates uptown.

Despite the blankets heaped over me, I thought I could feel the ground sucking the heat out of my body. The old man nudged me. I opened my eyes. “Edge over onto this,” he said.

He’d made a pallet of more filthy blankets, just beside where I lay. With his help, I was able to kind of wriggle and flop onto it. I couldn’t lie on my back, because of the tailbone, and I couldn’t use the hand to pillow my head or turn myself.

He rearranged the blankets over me. Something touched my lips: his gaunt fingers, protruding from those filthy gloves. I turned my head.

“Take it. It’s methadone. It’s also a pain killer.”

“You lost your tax number for drug addiction?” I had to cover my mouth with my unbroken hand.

“I’m a dropout,” he said. “Take the wafer.”

“I don’t want to get hooked.”

He sighed like somebody’s mother. “I’m a medical doctor. It’s methadone, it’s 60 milligrams. It won’t do much more than take the edge off, but it might help you sleep.”

I didn’t believe him about being a dropout. Who’d pick this? But I did believe him about being a doctor. Maybe it was the way he specified medical. “I was a history teacher,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to say professor. “Why do you have methadone if you’re not an addict?”

“I told you,” he said. “I’m a doctor.”

“And you dropped out.”

“Of a corrupt system.” His voice throbbed with disdain, and maybe conviction. “How many people were invisible to you, before? How much of this was invisible?”

If I could have had my way, I would have made it all invisible again. This time, when he pressed his hand to my mouth, I took the papery wafer into my mouth and chewed it. It tasted like fake fruit. I closed my eyes again and tried to breathe deeply. It hurt, but more an ache than the deep stabbing I associated with broken ribs. So that was something else to consider myself fortunate for.

I knew it was just the placebo effect and exhaustion making me sleepy so fast, but I wasn’t about to argue with it.

I said, “What made you decide to come live on the street?”

“There was a girl—” His voice choked off through the constriction of his throat. “My daughter. Cancer. She was twenty. Maybe if she hadn’t been skinning so much, in so much denial—”

I put my good hand on his shoulder and felt it rise and fall. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged.

It was a minute and a half before I had the courage to ask the thing I was suddenly thinking. “If you’re a dropout, then you have a tax number. And you don’t use it.”

“That’s right,” the old man said. “It’s a filthy system. Eventually, you’ll see what I mean.”

“If you don’t want it, give it to me.”

He laughed. “If I were willing to do that, I’d just sell it on the black market. The clinic could use the money. Now rest, and we’ll get your hand looked at tomorrow.”

I don’t know how I got to the clinic. I didn’t walk—not on those bare, cut-up feet—and I don’t remember being carried. I do remember the waiting room full of men and women I never would have seen before I lost my tax number. Jean-Khalil had given me another methadone wafer, and that kept me just this side of coherent. But I couldn’t sit, couldn’t walk, couldn’t lean against the wall. He got somebody to bring me a gurney, and I lay on my side and tried to doze, blissfully happy there weren’t any rocks or dog feces on the surface I was lying on.

It doesn’t take long to lower your standards.

I realized later that I was one of the lucky ones, and because of the broken bones I got triaged higher than a lot of others. But it was still four hours before I was wheeled into one of the curtained alcoves that served as an examining room and a woman in mismatched scrubs and a white lab coat came in to check on me. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Dr. Tankovitch. Dr. Samure said you had a bad night. Charlie, is it?”

“The worst,” I said. She was cute—Asian, plump, with bright eyes behind her glasses—and I caught myself flirting before a flood of shame washed me back into into myself. She was a contributing member of society, here to do charity work. And I was a bum.

“Honestly, there’s not much you can do for a broken tailbone except”—she laughed in commiseration—“stay off it. So let’s start with the hand.”

I held it out, and she took it gently by the wrist. Even that made me gasp.

She made a sympathetic face. “I’m guessing by the bruises on your face you didn’t get this punching a brick wall.”

“The cops don’t come if you’re not in the system.”

She touched my shoulder. “I know.”

I got lucky. For the first time in weeks, I got lucky. The hand didn’t need surgery, which meant I didn’t have to wait until the clinic’s surgical hours, which were something like midnight to four A.M. at the city hospital. Instead, Dr. Tankovitch shot me full of Novocaine and wrapped my hand up with primitive plaster of Paris, a technology so obsolete I had never actually seen it. Or if I had seen it, I’d skinned it out. She gave me some pain pills that didn’t work as well as the methadone and didn’t have a street value, and told me to come back in a week and have it all checked out. The cast was so white it sparkled. Guess how long that was going to last, if I was sleeping under bridges?

She didn’t offer me the clinic’s contact information, and I didn’t ask for it. How was I supposed to call them without a phone? But I was feeling less sorry for myself when I staggered out of the alcove. I planned to find Jean-Khalil again, and ask him if he’d show me where he looked for food and safe drinking water. I was clearheaded enough now to know it was an imposition, but I didn’t have anywhere else to turn. And he’d sort of volunteered, hadn’t he, by picking me out of the gutter?

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

It was Mark Twain. But then, so were a lot of true things. And I was determined to prove myself more like the dog than the man. Jean-Khalil was an old man. Surely he could use my help. And I knew I needed his. I didn’t see Jean-Khalil. But just as the waves of panic and abandonment—again, just like after Rose—were cresting in me, I spotted someone. Leaning against the wall by the door was Numair.

Numair had seen me first—I’d been moving, and he’d been looking for me—so he saw me stop dead and stare. He raised his hand hesitantly.

“Buy you dinner?” he asked. He didn’t flinch when he looked at me.

From the angle of the light outside, I realized it was nearly sunset. “As long as we can get it someplace standing up.”

That meant street meat, and three hotdogs with everything were the best food I’d ever tasted. Numair drank beer but he didn’t eat pork, so he ate potato chips and watched me lean forward so the chili and onions didn’t drip down my filthy shirt. I knew it was ridiculous, but I did it anyway. It felt like preserving my dignity to care. What dignity? I wasn’t sure. But it still mattered.

“I’m sorry,” Numair said. “I’m really sorry. If I’d realized you didn’t know about Rose—I just never imagined. You two were so close. And you never mentioned her—I figured you didn’t want to talk about her.”

“I didn’t.” We’d had a fight, I wanted to say. Something to absolve myself of not checking. But when she stopped logging in, I figured she’d just decided to cut me off. She wouldn’t be the first, and I knew she had another life. A wife. We’d talked about telling her she was having an affair.

And then she’d just… stopped messaging. People fall out of social groups all the time. It happens. I guess somebody more secure wouldn’t have assumed they were the problem. But I was used to being the problem. Numair’s the only friend I have left from the gang I hung around with all the time in grad school.

I swallowed hot dog, half-chewed. It hurt. He handed me an open can of soda, and I washed the lump down. “How’d she die?”

She hadn’t been old. I mean, she hadn’t skinned old. But who knew what the hell that meant, in the real world.

“She killed herself,” Numair said, bluff and forthright. Which was just like him.

I staggered. Literally, sideways two steps. I couldn’t catch myself because the last hotdog was balanced against my chest on the pristine cast. I already had the instinct to protect that food. I guess you don’t have to get too hungry to learn fast.

“Jesus,” I said, and felt bad.

He made a comforting face. And that was when I realized that if he could see me, he wasn’t skinning. “Numair. You came all the way down here for me?”

“Charlie. Like I’d let an old friend go down without some help.” He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled it back, frowning. He looked around, disgusted. “You know, you hear on the news how bad it is out here. But you never really get it until you see it. Poisoned environment, whatever. But this is astounding. Look, we can get you a hearing. Appeal your status. Maybe get you a new number. You can stay with Ilona and me until it’s settled.”

There were horror vids about this sort of thing. The baselines lived outside of social controls, after all. There was nothing to keep them from committing horrible crimes. “You’re going to take in a baseline? That’s a lot of trust. I’m a desperate woman.”

He smiled. “I know you.”

Ilona only knew me as a skin, but when I showed up at her house in the unadorned flesh, she couldn’t have been nicer. She, too, had turned off her skinning so she could see me and interact. I could tell she was uncomfortable with it, though—her eyes kept flicking off my face to look for the hypertext or chase a link pursuant to the conversation, and of course there was nothing there. So after a bit she just showed me the bathroom, brought me clean clothes and a towel, and went back to her phone, where (she said) she was working on a deadline. She was an advertising copywriter, and she and Numair had converted one corner of their old house’s parlor into an office space. I could hear her clicking away as I stripped off my filthy clothing and dropped it piece by piece into the bathroom waste pail. It was hard, one-handed, and it was even harder to tape the plastic bag around my cast.

It had never bothered me to discard ruined clothing before, but now I found it anxiety-inducing. That’s still good. Somebody could wear that. I set the shower for hot and climbed in. The water I got fell in a lukewarm trickle; barely wetting me.

They probably skinned it hotter when they showered.

I tried to linger, to savor the cleanliness, but the chill of the water in a chilly room drove me out to stand dripping on the rug. As I was dressing in Ilona’s jeans and sweatshirt, the sound of a child crying filtered through.

I came out to find Numair up from his desk, changing a diaper in the nook beside the kitchen. His daughter’s name was Mercedes; she’d always been something of a little pink blob to me. I came up to hand him the grease for her diaper rash and saw the spotted blood on the diaper he had pushed aside.

“Christ,” I said. “Is she all right?”

“She’s nine months old, and she’s starting her menses,” he said, lower lip thrust out in worry. I noticed because I was looking up at the underside of his chin. “It’s getting more common in very young girls.”

“Common?”

With practiced hands, he attached the diaper tabs and sealed up Mercedes’ onesie. He folded the soiled diaper and stuck it closed. “The doctor says it’s environmental hormones. It can be skinned for—they’ll make her look normal to herself and everyone else until she’s old enough to start developing.” He shrugged and picked up his child. “He says he treats a couple of toddlers with developing breasts, and the cosmetic option works for them.”

He looked at me, brown eyes warm with worry.

I looked down. “You think that’s a good enough answer?”

He shook his head. I didn’t push it any further.

They put me to sleep in their guest room, and fed me—unskinned, the food was slop, but it was food, and I got used to them not being able to see or talk to me at mealtimes. After a week, I felt much stronger. And as it was obvious that Numair and Ilona’s intervention was not going to win me any favors from Revenue, I slowly came up with another plan.

I couldn’t find Jean-Khalil under the bridge. His fire circle was abandoned, his blankets packed up. He’d moved on, and I didn’t know where. Good deed delivered.

You’d think, right? Until it clicked what I was missing.

I showed up at the free clinic first thing next Tuesday morning, just as Dr. Tankovitch had suggested. And I waited there until Dr. Tankovitch walked in and with her, his gaunt hand curved around a cup of coffee, Dr. Jean-Khalil Samure.

He didn’t look surprised to see me. My clothes were clean, and the cast was only a little dingy. I’d shaved, and I was surprised he recognized me without the split lip and the swelling.

“Jean-Khalil,” I said.

I guessed accosting the clinic doctors wasn’t what you did, because Dr. Tankovitch looked as if she might intercept me or call for security. But Jean-Khalil held out a hand to pause her.

He smiled. “Charlie. You look like you’re finding your feet.”

“I got help from a friend.” I frowned and looked down at my borrowed tennis shoes. Ilona’s, and too big for me. “I can’t do this, Jean-Khalil. You’ve got to help me.”

I’m sure the clinic had all sorts of problems with drug addicts. Because now Dr. Tankovitch was actively backing away, and I saw her summoning hand gestures. I leaned in and talked faster. “I need your tax number,” I said. “You’re not using it. Look, all I need is to get back on my feet, and I can help you in all sorts of ways. Money. Publicity. I’ll come volunteer at your clinic—”

“Charlie,” he said. “You know that’s not enough. The way you live—the way you have been living. That’s a lie. It’s not sustainable. It’s addictive behavior. If everybody could see the damage they’re doing, they’d behave differently.”

I pressed my lips together. I looked away. Down at the floor. At anything but Jean-Khalil. “There’s a girl. Her name is Rose.”

He looked at me. I wondered if he knew I was lying. Maybe I wasn’t lying. I could find somebody else, skin her into Rose. Maybe she’d have a different name. But I could fix this. Do better. If he would only give me the chance.

“You’re not using it,” I said.

“A girl,” he said. “Your daughter?”

“My lover,” I said.

I said, “Please.”

He shook his head, eyes rolled up and away. Then he yanked his hand out of his pocket brusquely. “On your head be it.”

I was not prepared for the naked relief that filled me. I looked down, abjectly, and folded my hands. “Thank you so much.”

“You can’t save people from themselves,” he said.