Dispatch from a Colored Room

King among financiers

I know you're all just itching to hear how I, a little errand-girl at a bank, managed a drug-addled mother and her hyperactive three-year-old through five hours on or in between little bus, big bus, and rail, and I would love to tell you, but for the sake of getting to the point I'll skip it, except to note that the main branch of Dawnroad Bank is in the opposite fucking octant from the Ironweed Line, which doesn't sound like much unless you're the little errand-girl, the three-year-old is asleep, and the mother's lungs and muscles are too wrecked to carry the guy for any distance. What I didn't realize about someone who'd lived on the sixth all her life is that she's got two problems on the higher terraces -- first, she's too warm, and second, the air's too thin. Not too thin for her to live, but too thin for her to be comfortable. She gets distractible, fatigued. Third problem: The viascutes. The sixth is wide open, and the ways are only managed where there are a lot of people, the Old Port and Ashview and near Mauleneault. So I've got Sim on my shoulder, which would have been like lugging a sack of nails if a sack of nails kicked in its sleep, and meanwhile Aimee is fading in and out of consciousness and periodically decides that she knows where she's going and it's not where I'm going, and I can't count the number of times I nearly lose her down some new alleyway or maze because I can't chase her and she doesn't listen.

We all stink by this point, bear in mind. It's well past business hours and we've spent all our time in stations or communal seats; there is no cleanliness possible in this scenario, even if your favorite three-year-old hasn't gotten sweet and sour sauce all over everybody after a massacre of a dinner that years of drink has still failed to redact from my nightmares. 

Sorry, I think I just lost my place. Give me a second --

Right, so this is the condition in which we tromp into the main branch of Dawnroad Bank, which I'm sure I need not tell you is a luminous edifice, just a forest of columns, drawn up from the ground as though the earth itself had condescended to move its most beautiful cavern up where everyone could see. It's pre-Disjunction architecture, the lintel over the main door says "GALDRES LEAGUE," G-A-L-D-R-E-S whatever that means, as if, again, the stone itself had decided that this was what all passersby needed to read when they entered -- and who argues with stone? At any rate, here we tromp, into the main vestibule that's clearly been kept half-lit just for us, and a trim little gentleman in an impeccable grey suit, I almost murdered him for his suit then and there, is waiting there with a shit-eating little smile, like a genie who knows you're on your last wish and you really need a favor.

"Mlle Leblanc," he says to Aimee, who would look less like she were drooling if she were actually drooling. "And your son Sim, I presume." I apparently don't rate a greeting in this scenario, and I'm not sure if that should worry me. "President Salmant is most anxious to see you."

I wasn't drinking anything, of course, but I was so thirsty that I was thinking about drinking, and so in my head I spat it out.

I, bear in mind, had never laid eyes on anyone high-ranked enough to inhale in the presence of President Salmant. And -- look, here we all are, I'm obviously not invested in whatever cults of personality do or don't govern the brotherhood of financiers -- but, vagabonds and vavasours, you and I all know that this is not the sort of person who would get in trouble, should someone like me happen to disappear quietly in the middle of the night. 

And the genie in his beautiful suit gives me a smile that says he knows it. And Aimee nods agreeably and says "Me too." And the genie goes, and we follow.

There are stairs. We'll leave it at that. I learn that Sim's a bedwetter. Luckily I'm in back, so at least I'm the only one who almost breaks her neck when her bootheel slips in Sim's bedwet. Aimee has the genie's arm, or vice versa, and he supports her reeling form effortlessly, probably because she doesn't weigh anydamnthing.