she would ask, eventually. “Fine, you do that, but I need the preliminary work completed now, within the next couple of days.”
Spanner glanced in the mirror again, then at her wrist. She was getting nervous.
“I have an interview today,” I pressed. “I should be starting work tomorrow, or the day after.”
“Fine, fine. Come by the flat tomorrow.” Her attention was beginning to drift.
I sighed and stood. “Your flat, then, tomorrow.” But she wasn’t listening anymore.
When I reached the street door, a couple were just coming in. They were laughing, wore expensive clothes, good jewelry. I glanced back. Spanner was rising to meet them.
Outside, adjusting to the bright afternoon after the dim warmth of the bar, I hesitated. Those two were trouble. Maybe Spanner was too desperate for what they were offering to notice the casual hardness of their faces, the way their eyes had flickered automatically over the room looking for exits, checking for weapons.
I waited outside for nearly ten minutes before I realized I could do nothing to help. I left reluctantly, wondering why—after all she had done—I still cared.
TWO
Lore is five. Tok and Stella, the twins, are nine. They have been playing in the fountain in an Amsterdam neighbor’s gardens. Lore has tried to catch the up-spouting water in her mouth.
Tok is shouting at her. “Don’t you want to know what it is that you’re drinking?”
“It’s water,” she says, puzzled.
“How do you know it’s clean?”
“But it’s always clean.”
“This is clean,” he says, “but it isn’t everywhere.” Lore hardly listens at first. His eyes are bright and fierce, an almost turquoise blue, like the sky first thing in the morning when the day will be burning hot. Like the eyes of their father, Oster, when he is excited. But then Tok pulls up facts and figures on water contamination incidents over the last thirty years and Lore listens in horror. “All it takes is one sip of some of this stuff, Lore, and then when you’re grown up, or as old as me, it’s leukemia, which means your blood goes yucky, or renal failure, that’s when your kidneys rot and don’t work anymore. . .”
She is frightened, but refuses to cry. Stella would mock her for weeks. “Does it hurt?”
“Of course it hurts!”
Lore does not go back to play in the fountain and that night she has nightmares of drinking swamp water full of dead rats, and she never forgets to test the water again. Even in the waterand air-filtered surrounds of the family holdings. Even on trips to luxury resorts in Belize and Australia. Even bottled water, because all it takes is one chemical spill in the groundwater table and the eau de source can be full of benzene—there and gone again in the blink of an eye, missed by the random testing. Never take anything for granted, her mother often says, and Lore never does. None of the family ever do. It is the company motto when Lore’s great-uncle patents the hundreds of genetically engineered microorganisms that now are indispensable in the world’s attempt to clean up its own mess. It is what prompts the ever-careful van de Oests to guarantee future monopoly and profit by making sure their patented, proprietary bugs need their patented, proprietary bug nutrients. And Never take anything for granted prompts them to use the first gouts of cash to corner a piece of the nanomechanical remediation technology market, a corner that grows steadily for the next fifteen years.
THREE
The Hedon Road wastewater-treatment plant was on the east side of the river, the part of the city that grew during the Victorian era. The buildings were big and ugly: limestone, and sandstone partially eaten away by the corrosives in industrial soot.
I turned up at seven in the evening, and after a few perfunctory questions about name, age, and experience, the flunky showed me into a tiled locker room. He handed me a skinnysuit. “Get changed while I pull your record for Hepple.”
“But I’ve only come here for an interview.”
“You want the job, you talk to Hepple. You want to talk to Hepple, you wear this.” He left with a shrug that indicated he did not care, one way or the other. At least I didn’t have to worry about the records. Sal Bird’s employment history was good enough for this job.
It was an hour after the change of shift and the room was empty, though from somewhere down a corridor I heard the beating slush of a shower. I wondered if they used water