Nicola Griffith Read Online Free PDF Page A

gardens. Lore has tried to catch the up-spouting water in her mouth.
    Tok is shouting at her. “Don’t you want to know what it is that you’re drinking?”
    “It’s water,” she says, puzzled.
    “How do you know it’s clean?”
    “But it’s always clean.”
    “This is clean,” he says, “but it isn’t everywhere.” Lore hardly listens at first. His eyes are bright and fierce, an almost turquoise blue, like the sky first thing in the morning when the day will be burning hot. Like the eyes of their father, Oster, when he is excited. But then Tok pulls up facts and figures on water contamination incidents over the last thirty years and Lore listens in horror. “All it takes is one sip of some of this stuff, Lore, and then when you’re grown up, or as old as me, it’s leukemia, which means your blood goes yucky, or renal failure, that’s when your kidneys rot and don’t work anymore. . .”
    She is frightened, but refuses to cry. Stella would mock her for weeks. “Does it hurt?”
    “Of course it hurts!”
    Lore does not go back to play in the fountain and that night she has nightmares of drinking swamp water full of dead rats, and she never forgets to test the water again. Even in the waterand air-filtered surrounds of the family holdings. Even on trips to luxury resorts in Belize and Australia. Even bottled water, because all it takes is one chemical spill in the groundwater table and the eau de source can be full of benzene—there and gone again in the blink of an eye, missed by the random testing.
Never take anything for granted,
her mother often says, and Lore never does. None of the family ever do. It is the company motto when Lore’s great-uncle patents the hundreds of genetically engineered microorganisms that now are indispensable in the world’s attempt to clean up its own mess. It is what prompts the ever-careful van de Oests to guarantee future monopoly and profit by making sure their patented, proprietary bugs need their patented, proprietary bug nutrients. And
Never take anything for granted
prompts them to use the first gouts of cash to corner a piece of the nanomechanical remediation technology market, a corner that grows steadily for the next fifteen years.

THREE
    The Hedon Road wastewater-treatment plant was on the east side of the river, the part of the city that grew during the Victorian era. The buildings were big and ugly: limestone, and sandstone partially eaten away by the corrosives in industrial soot.
    I turned up at seven in the evening, and after a few perfunctory questions about name, age, and experience, the flunky showed me into a tiled locker room. He handed me a skinnysuit. “Get changed while I pull your record for Hepple.”
    “But I’ve only come here for an interview.”
    “You want the job, you talk to Hepple. You want to talk to Hepple, you wear this.” He left with a shrug that indicated he did not care, one way or the other. At least I didn’t have to worry about the records. Sal Bird’s employment history was good enough for this job.
    It was an hour after the change of shift and the room was empty, though from somewhere down a corridor I heard the beating slush of a shower. I wondered if they used water from the mains, or siphoned off their own effluent. I smelled chlorine. The mains, then.
    I stripped to my underwear, then sat on the wooden bench and pulled the skinny from its package. I was expecting cheap government issue and was pleasantly surprised by the slick gray plasthene. It was about a millimeter and a half thick—well within the necessary tolerances—and the seams were well made. I stepped into it, spent a couple of minutes wriggling my toes to get them in the right place, then hauled it over my hips and up to my shoulders. The smell of new plasthene on my skin reminded me of the sheet in the van, of dreams of blood and suffocation.
    There was no easy way to skinny into these suits. You just had to squirm until everything was in the right