56

I first spotted Amanda as a shadow on the videoscreen. She came into the Snakepit carefully, hugging the wall: the lights were still on, so she wasn’t groping in the dark. The music was still blaring and thumping, and once she’d looked around to make sure the place was empty she went over behind the stage and switched it off.

“Ren?” I heard her say.

Then she went offscreen. After a pause the videocam mike in the hallway picked up her soft footsteps, and then I could see her. And she could see me. I was crying so much with relief I couldn’t speak.

“Hi,” she said. “There’s a dead guy right outside the door. He’s gross. I’ll be back.” Mordis was who she meant — he’d never been taken away. She told me later that she got him onto a shower curtain and dragged him down the hall and bundled him into an elevator, what was left of him. The rats had been having a party, she said, not just at Scales but anywhere even close to urban. She’d put on the gloves of someone’s Biofilm Bodysuit before touching him — even though she was daring, Amanda didn’t take stupid risks.

After a while she was back on my screen. “So,” she said. “Here I am. Stop crying, Ren.”

“I thought you’d never get here,” I managed to say.

“That’s what I thought too,” she said. “Now. How does the door open?”

“I don’t have the code,” I said. I explained about Mordis — how he was the only one who’d known the Sticky Zone numbers.

“He never told you?”

“He said why would we need to know the codes? He changed them every day — he didn’t want them leaking out because crazies might get in. He just wanted to protect us.” I was trying hard not to panic: there was Amanda, outside the door, but what if she couldn’t do anything?

“Any clue?” she said.

“He did say something about my name,” I said. “Just before he — before they — Maybe that’s what he meant.”

Amanda tried. “Nope,” she said. “Well then. Maybe it’s your birthday. Month and day? Year?”

I could hear her punching in numbers, swearing gently to herself. After what seemed a long time, I heard the clunk of the lock. The door swung open, and there she was, right in front of me.

“Oh, Amanda,” I said. She was sunburned, tattered, and grimy, but she was real. I reached out my arms to her, but she stepped back and away.

“It was a simple A equals One code,” she said. “It was your name, after all. Brenda, only backwards. Don’t touch me, I might have germs. I need to shower.”

While Amanda was taking her shower in my Sticky Zone bathroom I propped the door open with a chair because I didn’t want it to swing shut and lock both of us inside. The air outside my room smelled awful compared with the filtered air I’d been breathing: rotting meat, and also smoke and burnt chemicals, because there’d been fires and nobody to put them out. It was lucky that Scales hadn’t caught fire and burned down with me inside it.

After Amanda had taken a shower I took one too, so I’d be as clean as her. Then we put on the green Scales dressing gowns Mordis kept for his best girls and sat around eating Joltbars from the minifridge and microwaving ChickieNobs, and drinking some beers we’d found downstairs, and telling each other the stories of why it was that we were still alive.