Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [12]
All the security teams at the checkpoint saw was one more coloured woman in a bus full of them, headed out to keep the blood off the airport floor. The real cleaners knew exactly what Maria was doing but they kept their mouths shut. A clan of women with varicose ankles, hands and lungs shot from the industrial‐strength poisons they used for cleaning.
Maria paid for her airline seat with cash. As the jet taxied for takeoff she let herself cry a little. For Jerome and the baby growing inside. She flew out of LAX, heading east, as far as she could go. Heading into the future. As she reclined in her economy‐class seat, spinning her earphone dial, trying to find some music with a little bottom to it, a little strength, she swore one thing. Whatever happened to her she would never clean floors for a living.
New York was a gamble, a chance to find work and a better way of life. Maria thought anything had to better than home with the police helicopters slicing through the sky every night and the understreets being built and the endless drug wars where the worst gang you could imagine was always being displaced by ones that were worse still.
So she arrived in the east, landing at Kennedy, riding the subway in and stepping out of the station to be swallowed in the endless winter. With the climate going to hell all over the world they’d begun to get snow in LA on a regular basis. Maria thought she’d be ready for the cold weather. But nothing could have prepared her for that first city winter, sitting beside a searing hot radiator in a room with the windows painted shut. Icicles hanging down on the red neon sign outside the bar where she drank in the evenings. Sometimes getting drunk enough in there to dance, on her own, by the candy‐coloured light of the karaoke unit. Cars outside chewed the dirty snow into rivers of slush. Maria slipped all the time when she walked home drunk, keeping her eyes on the shadows. It took her months to get the knack of walking on ice.
But it didn’t take Maria long to learn that they had understreets in New York, too. You couldn’t see them but they were there. Her money ran out quickly and when it did the heat in her room was cut off. Maria alone in her room, at three in the morning, New York wintertime, dancing to keep warm.
When a job finally came up, she grabbed it and held tight. She’d held on to it all these years.
The door shut behind her, cutting off the wind howl. Maria wiped her feet with care on the corrugated rubber matting then took off the plastic shoe protectors she wore; she knew what it was like having to clean up muddy footprints. On the far side of the lobby above the elevators an entire wall of black marble was devoted to the directory for the King Building. Corporate names and logos, followed by floor numbers, glowing in whatever colours were deemed to convey quiet power and wealth this year. Most of the logos were holograms but Maria knew a few of the cheaper ones were neon.
Maria walked through the warm lobby of the building and put her ID card into the elevator control console. The information on the card, along with the thin film of body oils that composed a fresh thumbprint, were sucked into the slot and passed into the building’s nervous system. The computer that handled the alarm, evacuation and security procedures considered the information it had received, searched its memory, and came to a conclusion. It sent an elevator down for Maria and carried her up to the seventy‐third floor. Maria didn’t even need to push a button. And if she