Maré Verde

Chapter One: The Ferry at Boa Viagem

The tide clock above Celina Rocha's bunk clicked over to 05:40, and the drowned city began to breathe.

She heard it before she saw it: the long groan of hulls shifting on their moorings, the slap of water against the seventh-floor windows of the Marivaldo Tower, the first pontoon vendors banging their tin scoops to say they were open. Then the smell, which was always the same smell. Salt, diesel that had been cut with something cheaper, and underneath it all the green breath of the reactors two kilometers south—that thick, faintly sweet stink of algae paste that meant Recife had eaten yesterday and might eat today.

Celina got up, pulled on her boots, and went out onto the deck of the *Santa Rita das Águas* to count money.

The ferry had carried commuters across the Capibaribe forty years ago, back when the Capibaribe had banks. Now it sat rust-welded to the seventh and eighth floors of the tower, its bow lashed with cable to a balcony that had belonged to a dentist, its stern held by four chains bolted into a stairwell. Below the waterline the tower's lower floors were a dark aquarium full of furniture and fish. Above, twelve floors of families hung their washing from window frames and lowered baskets to the water on ropes. The ferry's old ticket booth was Celina's office. The ferry's engine room, which no longer held an engine, was something else.

She sat on an upturned crate with her ledger tablet on her knees and worked through the night's transfers by the gray light coming off the water.

Calorie credits. That was all money was, now, and had been since the Phosphorus Crash took the federal government and the fertilizer supply and the whole idea of a country with it. A credit was one kilocalorie of guaranteed reactor output, redeemable at any Municipal Nutrition Authority depot, and the MNA printed them on laminated chits with holographic strips and logged them in a ledger that was supposed to be incorruptible. It was not incorruptible. It was administered by depot managers who earned eleven thousand credits a month and had children.

Celina's business was simple enough to explain to a child, and she had, once, to a child. A depot manager writes down that a hundred families collected their full ration. Ninety-eight actually did. The manager holds two rations' worth of credits that officially do not exist. He cannot spend them at a depot—the strips are tracked—so he sells them to Celina at forty percent of face. Celina laundered them through her own float, her own chits, her own paper, and sold them on at a hundred and forty percent to people who could not wait in the queue: workshop bosses who needed their welders fed, clinics that needed protein for post-surgical patients, families whose ration cards had been suspended for a bureaucratic reason nobody could ever quite discover.

A hundred percent margin on human hunger. She had stopped flinching at that number around her fourth year. She had not stopped noticing it.

"Dona Celina."

Eliseu was eleven, all elbows, and had the fastest legs on the cable bridges. He had come up the outside ladder without her hearing him, which he did on purpose, because he thought it was funny.

"You're early."

"Dorival says the Depot Four count is late again. He says maybe tomorrow." Eliseu held out a folded scrap of ration paper. "And Dona Nilda's outside on the walkway. She's been there an hour. She wouldn't let me wake you."

Celina took the scrap, read Dorival's cramped handwriting, and felt the small cold click in her stomach that meant something in the machine had shifted. *Count late* meant an audit. Audits meant MNA security had started looking at depots again, and when MNA security looked at depots, they eventually looked at ferries.

"Send her in. And eat something."

"I ate."

"Eliseu."

He grinned and took the paste bar she flicked at him, and vanished down the ladder.

Dona Nilda came aboard the way old people came aboard everything now, sideways, one hand on the rail, testing each plank as if the city had taught her not to trust flat surfaces. She was seventy at least. Her dress had been washed so many times the pattern had gone to suggestion.

"Sit," Celina said.

"I'll stand."

"Sit, Dona Nilda. You're making my deck nervous."

The old woman sat on the crate opposite and put a cloth bundle on her lap and did not open it. "My granddaughter has the wasting fever. Sofia. Six years old. The clinic at Pina says she needs four hundred grams of protein a week for a month or she won't come back from it. Four hundred grams." She said the number carefully, the way people said numbers that had been read to them from a chart. "The ration gives us ninety."

"Four hundred a week for four weeks. That's about twenty-two thousand credits at depot rate." Celina did the arithmetic without looking down. She never looked down; it was part of what people paid for. "What do you have?"

Nilda opened the bundle. A wedding ring. Two ceramic knives, good pre-Crash steel-composite. A photograph in a frame, which meant the frame, not the photograph. And a coil of copper wire that had been stripped out of a wall somewhere, which was the only item in the bundle Celina actually wanted.

"Nine thousand," Celina said. "For the wire and the knives. Keep the ring, nobody's buying gold."

"Nine." Nilda's mouth tightened. "I need twenty-two."

"You need twenty-two thousand credits' worth of protein. That isn't the same thing." Celina turned the tablet around. "Look. The clinic buys from me. It buys at a rate I set, and it marks up to you because it has to pay its nurses. If you go through me directly, you cut the clinic's margin out. Nine thousand of your credits, plus I'll carry the rest as debt at four percent a month, and I'll write the delivery as clinic-allocated so nobody asks your granddaughter's name."

Nilda stared at her. "Four percent."

"That's my rate for people who pay. You'll pay."

"How do you know?"

"Because you came here with your knives instead of your excuses." Celina wrote the line into the ledger. Under the table, out of the old woman's sight, she adjusted a second figure—her own float—and shaved eight hundred credits off the total, which she would eat herself and never mention. She did that maybe twice a month. She had a private theory that a person needed a small secret decency the way a boat needed a bilge pump. Not to make it clean. To keep it from filling up.

When Nilda had gone, Celina sat for a while with the tablet dark on her knees, watching the sun come up over the flood.

From the ferry's rail you could see most of what was left of Boa Viagem: forty towers standing in eleven meters of Atlantic, joined at the fourth and ninth floors by cable bridges made of scaffold plank and fishing net, laundry hanging in the gaps like signal flags. Between them, on the water, the pontoon market was assembling itself for the day—rafts of lashed drums and shipping-crate lids, roofed with tarps, selling fried paste, rewound motors, filtered water, dental work. Further out, where the old avenue had been, four channel markers blinked in a line, and past them the sea went on flat and brown to the horizon.

Three million people. Five working reactors. The MNA published yield figures every quarter and the figures had gone down every quarter for nine years, and everyone knew it, and everyone had agreed by some unspoken vote not to say the word famine out loud until they had to.

Her earpiece chirped. Josiah, on the boat channel, and his voice was wrong.

"Celina."

"You're late. Where are you?"

"Coming up the avenue. Four minutes." A pause with engine noise in it. Josiah Ramos was a boat mechanic who had learned to be a smuggler and had never learned to be a liar; you could hear everything in him. "I need the cache open when I get there. And I need you to not shout at me for about ten minutes."

Celina stood. "What did you take on?"

"There was a skiff turned over off the old Second Church. MNA transport, the gray-and-white ones. Sank fast. I could see the hole from thirty meters, Celina, somebody put it there."

"Josiah. What did you take on."

The silence lasted long enough that she heard water dripping somewhere in it.

"Not cargo," he said. "A person."