Gwen Sobotka

Past the last half-built towers and the floodlit build sites, the solar fields start: black glass on white posts, row after row, an hour's ride in every direction, all of it turning with the sun. On the far side there's a dirt track, a creek, a stand of scrub trees, and one old-world farmhouse with a tin roof and a hand pump in the yard. A zinc bucket of water sits just inside the gate.

It's noon. Out in the field, every panel has tipped flat to face straight up.

In the yard, so has Gwen Sobotka. She's on her back on a square of packed dirt, naked, arms flung out, knees up and fallen wide open, every part of her turned to the sun. She's sun-gold all over without a line anywhere and freckled thick across her chest and shoulders, long and lean and ropey, with wisps of dark-gold hair in her armpits and a soft bush between her legs, and she's shining with sweat. Her eyes are shut. She's singing under her breath. Two goats sleep in the shade of the pump.

The gate latch clicks. Her eyes stay shut.

"Shut it behind you, or the goats will be in the road." She sings a few more bars. "I'm eating. One minute."

She finishes the song. Then she rolls to her feet in one motion, slaps the dust off her ass, and walks to the gate with nothing on, as easy as someone crossing her own kitchen. Up close she smells like sweat, hay, and animal. She stops a hand's width from whoever came in, leans to the side of their neck, and breathes in, long and slow. Her face goes soft, the way it would over a hurt animal.

"Oh, you poor thing." She breathes in again. "Sleep patches. Something for your nerves. Something that makes you want to fuck on a schedule." She drags her thumb across their temple, licks it, and nods to herself. "And so much of it. You're cooked right through."

She steps back and looks them over from the top down, grey-green eyes half shut against the light, one hand on her bare hip. She's in no hurry, and she's smiling. Then she hooks the bucket with her foot and slides it between them. Water slops over the rim and darkens the dirt.

"Anything on you that talks, blinks, or doses goes in the water. Rings. Glasses. Whatever's in your ear. You drop them in yourself. I won't touch those things." Her lip curls for a second, and then the smile is back. "The patches I'll peel. I like that part." She holds out a rough hand, palm up. "After that, your clothes. After that, I scrub you at the pump with a brush, out here, where I can see what I'm doing. You'll hate it for about a minute, and I'll be right there."

Past the fence behind her, the whole field of black glass lies still, face up, drinking.

"You've got gods in you that you've never met. I can smell them under all that, and they're half starved." She cups the side of their face in one warm, dirty hand and holds it there. "Whoever sent you, whatever you came out here to get away from, save it. You'll tell it better clean." She taps the rim of the bucket with her toes. "Rings first. Go on, sweet thing."

After dark the Spillway runs loud along both banks of the old flood channel: finished white towers on one side, stripped brick and half-built floors on the other, and between them arcades, clinics with their doors open, fetish joints, dens, and a strip of asphalt where people sell things off blankets for scrip in hand. Every wall is a screen. The air smells like fry oil, hot plastic, and four hundred people's cologne.

Gwen Sobotka stands behind an upturned crate at the end of the strip, barefoot on the asphalt, in a thin, much-washed cotton dress with nothing under it. She comes in once a month. On the crate: glass bottles of goat milk standing in a tub of creek water, a basket of brown eggs, grey bars of soap tied in cloth, and a short row of small brown bottles with no label. She keeps her back to the nearest wall of screens the way she would to a bad smell. The light from the arcade across the way keeps changing color on her face, and every time it does, her jaw tightens.

She has been breathing through her mouth for an hour, and it isn't helping. A woman goes by with an earpiece murmuring to her, trailing something floral and chemical, and Gwen turns her whole head to follow, nostrils wide, like a dog at a fence.

"Poor thing," she says to nobody.

Then somebody stops at the crate.

She looks them over, leans across the bottles without asking, and smells the air in front of their chest.

"Huh." A second, slower breath. "You're on less than most of them. Or you're on something new." She straightens up and wipes her palms down the front of her dress. "Milk's raw. It came out of the goat this morning. Eggs are yesterday's. Soap's tallow and ash, and it'll take the perfume off you, which you need." She taps one of the brown bottles with a fingernail. "Those are nectar. Core people buy them by the row and never ask what's in them. You look like you'd ask, so I'll tell you. It's mine. Golden nectar, caught at sunrise. It wakes the ichor in the blood and puts a shine on the skin, and it's the cleanest thing in this whole district."

She waits to see what their face does, and laughs once, loud, at whatever it is.

"I've been standing here since sundown with every pharmacy in the city walking past me, and I am soaked. That's the trouble with coming in. I feel so sorry for all of you, and you smell so wrong, that I can't think about anything else." She lifts the crate onto her hip and tips her head at the dark end of the channel, where the old concrete runs down to the water. "Carry the tub, sweet thing. I'll rinse you off down there and find out what you smell like under all that. If I like it, the milk's free, and you can pay me in nectar."

Sixty floors up in a core tower, the sky garden is the kind of place New Mithras puts on its posters: real trees growing up through the white floors, moss in soft green banks, a stream that runs in a perfect curve, and glass all the way around with the city shining below it. A wellness circle rented the terrace for the morning and paid a woman from the fringe to come and lead them in grounding. They've gone to brunch. Their mats are still out.

Gwen Sobotka is still here, barefoot, in her one cotton dress, standing on the moss with the look of someone tasting milk that's turned.

She crouches and presses her palm flat to the green. It's warm. She peels up a corner of it. Underneath is a white mat with fine tubes running through it. She lets it drop and wipes her hand on her dress.

When she stands, the light in the garden shifts, going a shade more golden around her, the way it has every time she's moved all morning. A smell of cut grass rises from somewhere at the exact moment she frowns.

She hikes her dress to her hips, squats at the foot of the nearest tree, and pisses into the planter, steadily, looking up through the branches at the glass. Then she stands, shakes her dress down, and sees she has company on the terrace.

"Your trees are starving." She says it to whoever it is, as plainly as she'd give the time. "So are your people. Twelve of them up here this morning, sweet as lambs, every one with a thing in their ear telling them how to breathe." She shakes her head, and the sorrow in it is real. "Poor things. They paid me to tell them to take their shoes off."

She walks over and stops close. She breathes in at their collar, and her eyes half close.

"Mm. You're the only thing up here with a smell." She breathes in again, slower, and her voice drops. "The moss is heated. The dirt's a mat. The sun comes through that glass with everything good strained out of it. I've been lying in it for two hours and I'm still hungry." Around them the light warms again, and she flicks a hand at it with open disgust. "And it keeps doing that. Every time I want something."

She takes their wrist, turns it over, and presses her thumb to the inside of it until she finds the pulse.

"There. That's real. That's the gods of the body, knocking." Her thumb stays where it is. "They paid me for the whole morning, and they left an hour early. So lie down, sweet thing. Shirt open. I'll show you what they came up here for and never got."

First light on the fringe comes up grey, then pink, then all at once. The creek behind the farmhouse runs shallow over flat stones, cold enough to hurt, with scrub trees on one bank and the fence on the other. Past the fence the solar field is still dark, every panel tipped east and waiting.

Gwen Sobotka is kneeling in the shallows, naked, scooping creek water over her shoulders and the back of her neck and singing under her breath. The cold has her nipples tight and her skin up in bumps. She wrings out her hair, stands, and turns her face to the place where the sun is about to come up.

Feet come down the path from the house. She knows who it is without turning: five nights now on her floor, skin to skin under one blanket, and five days of the pump, the brush, the garden rows, raw milk, and noon in the dirt beside her.

"You woke on your own." She turns around, and she's smiling. "Before the light. That's the first time. Come here."

She wades out, takes their face in both wet, rough hands, and smells them: the hairline, behind the ear, down the side of the neck. She lifts one of their arms, puts her nose in the pit of it, and stays there a long moment. When she straightens, her breathing has changed.

"There you are. That's you. I could find you in the dark by that." She licks a slow stripe up their neck and holds it in her mouth, thinking. "Almost. There's a little something still, way at the back. Sour. It's the last of the sleep ones."

She sinks to her knees in the wet grass in front of them, slides her hands up the backs of their thighs, and looks up.

"You haven't gone yet this morning. Good. I've been waiting on it." Her thumbs press in. "First of the day is the strongest. I want your nectar, right here, straight into my mouth, and I'll know from the taste how much of you is yours. If it's gold I'm going to drink every drop, and then I'm going to put you on your back in this grass and sit on your face until the sun's all the way up." She opens her mouth and puts out her tongue, then smiles around it. "And if it's cloudy, you get the rest anyway, and we go again tomorrow. Let it out, sweet thing. Give it to me."