Metropolitan Read Online Free Page B

remembers, when she’d really wanted to be alone. Wanted to be away from her huge, anarchic family, from their oppressive high spirits and noisy poverty and hopeless irresponsibility. In a place just like this, high and remote and sealed from the world by black glass.
    She and Gil had been together for a year when they’d bought the apartment on Loeno Towers, pooling their savings and still having to borrow half the down payment from his parents. They were both successful for a while, working hard, saving, allowing themselves one shift out every week, a few carefree hours when talk of finances was carefully banned.
    And then Gil got his transfer, a lateral movement across department lines that led to a job two thousand radii from the Scope of Jaspeer, far out in Gerad territory. The job was supposed to be temporary, lasting no more than two months, but now it had gone eight months with no real end in sight. Gil had been home only three times. His travel bonus wasn’t enough to cover his expenses: things were expensive in Gerad and his income was garnished twice to pay two different sets of taxes — a bookkeeping problem that was supposed to have been solved by now, but somehow wasn’t.
    Gil had been sending what he could, but Aiah couldn’t make up the difference on her own. Payments were falling behind, each by another day or two. Late payment penalties were piling up.
    She considered acquiring a roommate, but Gil was against it. It would be, he explained, like admitting defeat. He still expected his new job to end any week now, and he didn’t want to have to evict someone who’d just settled in.
    Roommates were against the Loeno protocols in any case, and she’d have to smuggle the person in.
    Not but that she couldn’t. She was one of the Cunning People, after all.
    And she couldn’t sell the place either. Loeno Towers had been built in expectation of a rise in demand for upper-middle-class housing and the demand hadn’t come. A third of the apartments were still vacant, and the rest were going for bargain prices. If she sold, she’d have to sell at well below what they’d paid.
    Gil wouldn’t consider selling in any case. He’d say it admitted defeat.
    Defeat was a stranger to Gil’s mindset, but not to Aiah’s: her whole culture, the entire nation of Cunning People, had all outsmarted themselves spectacularly three generations ago, and after that self-destruction no amount of cunning could piece together the wreckage. Even the Metropolis of Barkazi was gone, the once-sovereign commonwealth now carved into districts governed by former neighbors. Defeat and fragmentation was in the air Aiah breathed as a child. When she’d won her scholarship to the Rathene School, and then to the university, every single relative told her nothing good would come of it. They’re teaching you to betray your people , her mother insisted.
    Well, maybe they were. She had been awed by the Jaspeeris, by the utter simplicity of their optimism. Infected by their certainty, she’d signed up for geomancy classes, even though her scholarship didn’t cover the plasm fees required.
    The two years of theory went well, but after theory came practice, and she’d run into a stone wall: she simply couldn’t afford her own discipline. So she shifted to administration and after graduation applied to the Plasm Authority. At least the civil service hired Barkazils, and in the back of her mind she’d thought that in working for the Authority she’d at least be learning something about plasm.
    When she’d met Gil, she found him the most certain man she’d ever met; for a while Aiah thought Gil and his people had somehow found the magic her own ancestors had inexplicably missed. He was pale-skinned and Jaspeeri and practiced optimism as if it were a religion.
    “All Barkazil heroes are losers,” he pointed out once, after she told him a few stories from her people’s tradition. “Have you noticed that?”
    No, not till he mentioned