Nicola Griffith by Slow River Page B

seem to notice. Lore nibbles at her own food and watches her sister surreptitiously over the rim of her juice glass.
Where does she go all the time?
she wonders. Wherever it is, it does not seem very pleasant.
    The locksmith arrives only forty minutes later, and the three of them troop upstairs, again in silence. Greta simply points at the door and the locksmith nods.
    It takes five minutes. Lore watches, fascinated, as the old lock is removed with something that looks like a cooking spatula, and a creamy ceramic square with a glossy black face replaces it. Lore thinks he has finished until he fishes a second from his pocket and fits it over the door and jamb on the hinge side. He doesn’t look Venezuelan. When the locksmith is finished, he pulls out a white key remote the size of a rabbit’s foot. He presses a button, and the black face turns to deep blue. “All yours.” He starts to hand the key to Greta but she nods in Lore’s direction and he gives it to her instead. He leaves.
    “It’s a special lock system,” Greta says. “No one, and I mean no one, will ever be able to get through that lock. And because there are two, they can’t just take the door off its hinges, or knock it down. They’d have to cut a hole through the middle. And the monster can’t do that.”
    Lore looks down at the fat white key in her hand and wonders about monsters in the Netherlands.
    “You can remove the locks and take them with you, wherever you go. I’ll download all the operating instructions to your slate later. You’d better choose the code when I’m gone. Anything you like. You can even make them different for each side. And you can use algorithms to make sure it’s never the same twice.” She taps the key in Lore’s hand. “Don’t lose that.”
    After she goes, Lore sits on her bed, turning the locks on and off, listening to them thunk competently open and closed.
    Greta leaves again the next day, and Lore develops a habit of reaching into her pocket to check she has her key whenever she is nervous.

SEVEN
    I was surprised when Magyar somehow managed to get hold of a combination of handheld and portable PDs. She piled them up on the gangway and called the section, some twenty-odd men and women, together.
    “You already know that the computer’s down. It’s going to stay down for at least a day. Systems want to dump the whole program, plus backups, to make sure there aren’t any other viruses. Meanwhile, these are handheld detectors. I’ll want readings every half hour—”
    “There won’t be time!” a red-haired man called. He worked two troughs down from me. He was flexing his right arm, over and over, testing his new neoprene and webbing elbow support, making it creak. His name was Kinnis.
    “Shut up and let me finish. And try to keep still while I’m talking to you.” The creaking noise stopped. “I’m not asking you to read every single trough every half hour—I only want readings from one trough per person. But make sure it’s the same trough, and make sure it’s from the middle. We want an idea of changes, got that? Good. Questions?”
    “How long are we going to be doing this?”
    “As long as it takes. Systems say they can’t guarantee they’ll have everything clean and back up in less than three days, but you know how much they overcompensate. It might only take a day. There again, it might not.”
    “But how do these things work?” Kinnis asked, looking dubiously at the pile of equipment.
    “Ask Bird. She seems to be an expert.” They all turned to look at me. I felt my blanket of anonymity evaporating, but it was my own fault. I managed to nod. What did Magyar suspect? Next time I would keep my mouth shut.
    A big, rawboned woman called Cel looked at her waterproof watch, and said in a Jamaican accent, “We’ve another six hours of the shift to go tonight.”
    “Yes,” agreed Magyar, “and those holding tanks have to be pumped out as well, so let’s not waste any more of it,