Step one: unload and stack the slabs: Step two: clear everything out of Gramps’s house that could be salvaged and load it into the big 16-wheeler to be driven to the Glendale recycling center. That took the rest of the morning. After a lunch break in the hollow shell of the house, the wrecking crew started wrecking, working from the side of the house that didn’t face the road, to hide the work. I’d seen houses go down to the foundation slab before, but this was still different. One second, it was a house, the next, it was rubble. I regretted that we hadn’t been able to salvage the windows or the copper, but fuck it. This omelet was going to take a lot of broken eggs.
A fence crew put up hoardings around the jobsite, unrolling chain-link and lashing tarps to it. Working in the smoke was hard, but we heeded Bruce’s warnings to keep safe, and Arina showed us a protocol for setting up emergency shelter in a sandstorm, adapted from gun-range safety, where the “downrange” had to be fully clear of people before any machine could be activated. It made things slow, but it was a good slow, knowing we were all safe. And anyway, my time sense got all weird, like I’d feel as though no progress was being made and the next thing I knew we’d be sinking these monster pilings for the new structure, and I’d be like, whoa, when did that happen? The last thing we did before the sun set was load up the second truckload of building waste, using the backhoe and the forklifts, and a couple of comrades drove it off to the dump. There was still a huge pile of debris, but the dozers got it off to one side and left us room to work.
We had night lights, and I was pumped to keep going, but Phuong talked me out of it. “You have been up since five in the morning, Brooks. Call it a day. Otherwise you’re going to hurt yourself—and that’s if you’re lucky. You’ll probably hurt someone else, too. Let’s go. Dinner and bed.”
The folks around us nodded. It was full dark now, and smoky. Neighbors had passed by during the day, but in our environmental suits, we could have been anyone. There was nothing on the main socials about it, and nothing on the Maga socials that the public could see. So we’d be able to build tomorrow. I was suddenly ravenous and exhausted.
“Shit, I’m inside-out with hunger,” I said.
“Stressful times,” Phuong said. “Let’s go eat our feelings.” Much of the crew had already drifted away. We hugged the ones that were still there and walked to her place.
* * *
We took a shower together, making jokes about saving water, but really because we just wanted to be in the shower together. We soaped each other and it was only partly sexual. Mostly what it was, was tender.
“It has been a big day,” I said, as I toweled her off.
“Crazy,” she said. “But good crazy.”
We wrapped the towels around ourselves and I picked our discarded clothes up off the floor. “Oof,” I said. “Jesus, they smell like a trash fire.”
Phuong sniffed. “You’re not kidding. Straight into the washing machine, please. Don’t want those in my hamper all night stinking up my room.”
Her housemates had already eaten, but Arina had saved us some jerk tofu and spiralized butternut squash noodles in puttanesca sauce. The tofu was lethally spicy, as was nearly everything Arina cooked, but yogurt made it delicious again. My scalp sweated. I chased it with Don and Miguel’s best whiskey, an “impossible” wheated bourbon that was “aged” in a Chablis cask (Chablis is aged in steel, but Miguel and his whiskey-nerd pals had made a guess at what a hypothetical Chablis cask would do to whiskey if it existed and you aged whiskey in it). I drank way too much of it, way too fast, and the next thing I knew I was half asleep on the sofa, nodding off to the buzz of Phuong and her housemates talking among themselves. Everything I owned was in a short stack of mover’s boxes in their corner: a box of photos for the city archive, a box of clothes, a box of knickknacks; on top of them, my backpack with a couple of chargers and batteries.
I dropped off with my head on the headrest, then woke myself up with my own snores. Everyone laughed at me, but in a kind way, and Phuong put her arm around my neck and put me into a friendly headlock. “Come on, fella, time to put you to bed.”
Just as I was dropping off again, I had a waking thought: “Set the alarm,” I said. “Four a.m. We’ll get there early and get a start.”
“City doesn’t allow construction to start before seven a.m. You do that and someone will call noise enforcement and we’ll get busted on the spot.”
“Why are you so smart?”
“Blue Helmet school. They teach us how to do the job without pissing off the locals. It’s literally like the first week of training. Most important lesson of the Canadian Miracle. Your parents’ legacy.”
She kissed my forehead.
“Okay, six a.m. alarm.”
“Brooks, it’s a ten-minute walk and you don’t own enough clothes to dither over what you’re going to wear. How long, exactly, do you think your shower and breakfast are gonna take, fella?”
“Six thirty, then.”
“See you at six thirty.” She turned out the lights and then my body turned out mine.
* * *
My body spent the next seven hours getting ready to punish me. When the alarm went off, I sprang out of bed and promptly fell over.
“Jesus, are you okay?” Phuong scrambled around the bed.
“Ow,” I managed.
“What is it?”
“I overdid it.” My ribs hurt. My arms hurt. My legs hurt. My neck? My neck hurt so much. My hips hurt. “I’m nineteen years old. My hips aren’t supposed to start hurting for years and years.”
“I’ll fill the tub,” she said. “We’ve got tons of rainwater in the cistern, so it won’t cost anything.”
“Ohhhhh,” I said.
“Hang in there, Grampa,” she said. “I’ll get you some painkillers, too.”
We barely made it out at 6:50 a.m. I had soaked about 30 percent of the ache out of my joints and muscles, the painkillers had done for another 20 percent, and the Tiger Balm that Phuong slathered over every part of my body had accounted for 10 percent more, getting me into an upright and ambulatory state.
“I’ll feel better once I warm everything up,” I said, as we walked quickly toward Gramps’s house. I was limping a little, but I was limbering up.
“Remember,” Phuong said, muffled by her mask, “it’s only a learning experience if you learn from it. Go easy today, okay?”
* * *
Blue Helmet prefab buildings are fast, but word gets around faster.
We were able to recycle the foundation slab, which meant that once the pilings were in, one crew could go to work fitting and locking panels while a second crew added structural members for the next stage. Wilmar was in charge of double-checking the building against the plans, making sure that panels with inset plumbing and electrical components were seated correctly and had good interconnects with their adjacent panels.
I was on a panel crew, which was easy when we were doing the first layer, but when that was done we had to work on ladders and it got awkward. Working in the smoke gear was idiotic, something no one should do. It started off difficult and quickly became unbearable as my clothes got saturated with my sweat and started to chafe. I sweated under my goggles and the sweat got in my eyes. When I reached inside my goggles to scratch, they filled up with smoke, and the grit on my filthy fingers added to the sting that made my eyes water.
With all that, it was inevitable that I’d fuck up, and I did. I was passing a panel up the ladder and I zigged when I should have zagged and the people above me whom I’d been handing it to lost their grip, then I lost mine, then Milena, who had the other corner, lost hers, and the panel tumbled, clanging off my helmet and knocking me on my ass as it shattered on the foundation slab next to me, showering me in sharp, hard fragments.
“Ow, fuck,” I said, as I rolled around, holding my helmet.
“Idiot, stop moving,” Phuong said, clamping me still. “You could have a spinal.” I stopped struggling. She was right. Every Blue Helmet on-site was fully up to date on basic, advanced, and wilderness first aid, and within seconds there was a whole goddamned committee probing me, asking me to count their fingers and tell them who was President (“She who must not be named,” I said, and they laughed. Bennett was the worst), working my joints from the bottom to the top.
“How do you feel?” Phuong said after the exam was over.
“Okay. Stupid. Clumsy.”
“But it’s an adorable clumsiness,” she said. “Your pupils are the same size. Headache?”
“No. My ears were ringing at first, but that went away quick. I think I’m okay.”
“I think you’re engaging in wishful thinking. You should be strapped to a spine board and taken for X-rays.”
“Come on,” I said. “That looked worse than it was. It just clipped me and then made a giant mess. Let me walk it off.”
She and I locked eyes through our goggles. I was not current on even basic first aid, but I knew she was right. Technically. Also, she was just right. I didn’t think I’d hurt my neck, but history is filled with people who “walked it off” and then never walked another step after the precarious arrangement of bones and nerves running through their fool necks reached a (literal) breaking point.
“If I go to the hospital, they’ll want to know how it happened. That’ll be the end of it.”
“We’ll lie.”
“I’m needed here.”
“Brooks, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re probably the least skilled person on this jobsite.”
“Ouch.”
“Sorry, dude, but facts don’t care about your feelings.”
“It’s my house.”
“Not anymore.”
I closed my eyes. My neck really didn’t hurt. “Please,” I said. “Please. I need this. I’m fine, Phuong.”
“You’re an idiot.”
I looked into her eyes. Darkest chocolate, only a shade or two off the black of her pupils, made a little milky by her goggles. Normally she’d call me an idiot and I say something silly and we’d shake it off. I just held her gaze. “Please, Phuong.”
She looked away, then looked back at me. We had an audience. Someone said, “I saw it hit him. Just caromed off his head. Didn’t see any compression or stress on his neck.”
“Slowly,” she said. “Move slowly. Snail-pace. Anything hurts, anything feels funny, you stop. I need you to promise me.”
“I promise.”
“You paralyze yourself, I’ll kick your ass.”
“You’d kick a paralyzed guy’s ass?”
“Sweetie, that’d just make it easier.”
They gave me a round of applause when I got to my feet and slowly rolled my head to one side and the other.
That’s when my neighbor Brad came through the gate in the work fence. “Brooks?”
I froze. He was hard to read behind the mask and goggles, but his body language was pretty astonished. I looked over my shoulder at the jobsite, and for the first time, it all sank in: a day before, this had been Gramps’s house, which had been his father’s house, and had stood on this site since 1939. Now it was a completely new building, the backyard piled high on one side with prefab slabs, and on the other side with rubble from the house that had stood for more than a century.
“Yo,” I said. Someone on the jobsite groaned audibly.
“What’s, uh, what’s going on?”
“Emergency housing,” I said.
He stood for a long moment. Almost everyone on the site had gathered around to check in on my accident, but now the others who’d kept working stopped.
“Right,” he said. “Only, I thought they’d stopped all that?”
“Not this one,” I said.
“You got an exemption?”
“It’s an emergency,” I said. I liked Brad and I didn’t want to lie to him. At least not overtly.
He put his hands on his hips. “What’re you building here?”
“Four stories, eight apartments. Mix of three- and two-bedroom places. Fully solarized, weatherized, with vertical farming, a roof garden, and a courtyard.”
He looked around again. “That sounds nice, Brooks. Thought there was something about a parking requirement? One spot per bedroom? You’re not excavating a garage?” He said it like a joke, but I could hear that he sounded concerned.
“Emergency housing doesn’t have the same parking requirements. These are transit-oriented homes.”
“Ah.”
More silence. So much silence, even the small noises of the city were absorbed by the drifting smoke.
“Someone told me this was a city crew. Didn’t realize you were out here.”
“Well, it’s a municipal project,” I said. “Easy to get confused.”
He straightened up and locked eyes with me, in a way that reminded me of how I’d locked eyes with Phuong. He was old enough to be my dad, eyes a little tired behind his goggles. I had known him most of my life. He’d come to my house when he’d heard gunfire. He wasn’t a member of the Maga Club, but there were plenty of people who admired them and didn’t make a big show of it. They tended to be middle-aged guys. Like him.
“I guess it’s easy to get confused,” he said. All the tension went out of my body.
He looked around. “Looks like I’m gonna have some new neighbors,” he said, and waved goodbye to us all. He turned and disappeared into the smoke. I watched him go, relieved … until I asked myself how long it would be until my next neighbor came by.
We locked the gate.
* * *
The second set of visitors came by at noon, a group of about five or ten who crowded the crack between the gate and the fence to get a look. We ran our noisiest machines and pretended we didn’t hear them calling “Excuse me!” and “Hello!” They left, and moments later, there were drones flying over us. We pretended we didn’t see them.
We got a respite from the smoke as the sun began to set, just enough to make the sky turn an astonishing, bloody red, but thin enough that we could pull down our masks and air out our moist, chafed faces.
Over the course of that day, progress had been amazing, then agonizing, then amazing again. The first two rows of slabs clicked into place quickly, accelerating as the work crews got into the rhythm of the job. There’d been a moment when I stepped back from sealing a slab into place and looked around and realized that there was a brand-new structure there, just like that, a magic trick in three dimensions.
Then there’d been a long period of agonizing slowness as all the services were checked and rechecked—electrics, plumbing, data. It all had interconnect and integrity sensors built in, but we had to activate them and get them initialized and chained before they could start working. Time crawled as we troubleshot persnickety problems, sometimes using Blue Helmet socials to conference in experts who could suggest fixes to thorny problems.
Then everything lit green and crews went to work snapping on the joists and locking them in, laying down the floor slabs, and putting in scaffolding for the second story and we were off to the races again, half of the next story racing around the building’s edge even as a crew added exterior and interior doors and other fittings to the first floor. We even got the plumbing working, and the jobsite got a sink and a toilet. With the door closed, the windows fitted, and the first-floor ceiling in place, we got filters running and then we had an indoor space with breathable air, just like that.
Now it was sundown and I was so fucking proud and tired that I wanted to do a jig and then collapse. Phuong was huddled with some of the other senior Blue Helmets on the site, the ones who’d taken on foreman roles, goggles on her forehead, mask under her chin, a sooty line between them on her glowing, sweaty, beautiful face. I ambled over to her, grinning and groaning and feeling that good ache of a good day’s work done good.
As I got closer, I realized they weren’t just relaxing after a long day. There was something … intense going on.
“Guys?”
Phuong motioned me to sit down with them and get my head into the close circle.
“It’s not gonna work, Brooks,” she said.
I started to answer, but she kept going.
“The neighbors, the drone. It’s a miracle we lasted until sunset. We’re gonna have code enforcement out here first thing tomorrow, soon as the office opens at eight. Then it’ll be cops.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah, well.” She squeezed my hand. “It was always a long shot. And at least we got this much done, one and a half stories out of four. At this rate, the simplest thing will be to finish it. It’d be crazy to knock it down. We made a point. Maybe we get everyone down here tomorrow, just throw caution to the wind and go wide-public with messaging on socials instead of DMs and group chat, make it a spectacle. That’ll up the odds that it’ll get finished.”
I felt slammed. All that good tired was now bad tired. I’d knocked down Gramps’s house. The house my dad grew up in. The house I’d been raised in. The house I’d been sheltering half a dozen unhoused refus in. That house was gone, and what would replace it? A half-built shell. Not even half-built. Maybe it would sit that way for months. Years. Maybe they’d knock it down.
I must have made a sound, because Phuong said, “Shh, now, we’re gonna tell everyone before they go home for the day, give them a say in how we handle it tomorrow.”
I closed my eyes, imagined the scene, the people, the cops, the building. In my imagination, the building was a lot more … built.
“What if we don’t go home?”
Phuong started to say something, then saw I wasn’t done, and waited. The other Blue Helmet elders took her lead. They all radiated intimidating levels of competence, so I chose my words carefully.
“Building inspectors aren’t going to come out overnight. They work regular work hours. We have outdoor lights. Cops aren’t going to arrest us for unverified building-code violations. No one is going to get a judge to order an injunction after six p.m. for unlicensed construction. What if we stay and keep working until they make us stop? Finish the second story. Finish the interior services. Start on the third floor. Maybe finish the third floor?”
Phuong unsuccessfully hid a smile. “That’s a lot of work, and we’re all exhausted. You’re amazing, Brooks, but tired people and jobsites don’t mix. Remember your little near-spinal-injury?”
“Wait.” The Blue Helmet elder was a woman whose name I didn’t know. She had an Italian accent, or maybe Greek, and I’d gathered that she was romantically involved with a Burbank Blue Helmet she met on an overseas project and came home with. She gave off scary competence-vibes and always seemed to know the answer to thorny technical questions that came up in the build. She got a faraway look in her eyes, then stood and walked away from us, entering the half-built first floor and taking a walk around inside. We looked at each other, shrugged, and waited until she came back.
“Okay guys,” she said. “I think we could split into five or six crews, each working separately: three utilities crews, one more doing fit and finish on the ground floor, one more completing the structures on the second floor. Sixty, seventy people. Now we’ve got a second floor, there’s much more space for people to work without getting in each other’s way.” She sucked her teeth and looked the structure up and down. “Between now and eight a.m. tomorrow, with meal breaks, two shifts, I think we’ll have the third story done and be working on the fourth.”
We looked at her, at each other, at the building. Everyone’s faces were naked and glowing in the sunset.
“Fani,” Phuong said, “where do we get seventy people from without blowing our cover?”
Fani rolled her eyes. “We already said our cover’s blown, yes? Building inspectors at eight, cops at eight fifteen. Not before.”
Josh, another elder Blue Helmet who I remembered from Burroughs, said, “Unless there’s a noise complaint. Cops come out for noise.”
Fani shrugged again. “Do they write tickets or do they arrest you? If they write tickets, we crowdfund them in the morning.”
“It’s tickets,” Josh said. He giggled. “Definitely tickets. Maybe twice, three times, then they tell you arrests are next if you don’t keep it down.” He giggled again. “Don’t ask me how I know.”
Phuong gave him a friendly shoulder-sock. “I remember that party too. Dumbass.”
I bounced on my hunkers, looking at all of them but mostly at Phuong. They glowed. She radiated. Holy shit I was in love with her. “Are we doing this?”
The Blue Helmet elders played eyeball hockey, doing some kind of mind-meld. “Fuck yeah,” Phuong said. “Someone get the coffee going.”
* * *
We got a noise ticket at 10 p.m. Then some drone flyovers, then more. Another noise ticket at midnight. The cops marveled at the building and complimented us on our workmanship but told us to stop pissing off the neighbors. “People got kids,” they said. We gave them coffee. Half the DSA kitchen was set up under an easy-up outside the new structure, including its excellent bulk-coffee apparatus and its emergency batteries.
The drones got thicker and more aggressive. Someone got one inside of the house and flew it around until someone swatted it out of the air with a fifteen-ounce claw hammer, rousing a cheer all around.
I took a catnap at 2 a.m. and swore I’d taken another at four, but the next thing I knew, the sky was getting lighter and there was another pair of cops at the door—and one of them was my old friend Officer Velasquez.
We showed them in and offered them coffee. They weren’t interested. Velasquez gave me a long look and then said, “Brooks Palazzo, right?”
“Nice to see you again,” I said.
They shook their head. “This is the third or fourth time I’ve been here, but I see you’ve done some renovations.”
I shrugged and tried a grin. It felt pasted on. My shoulders and sphincter were tight. Officer Velasquez might have been the good cop in the Burbank PD’s good cop / bad cop pairings, but right now, they were looking at me in a way that freaked me out a little. Or maybe it was just the lack of sleep. “Just making some space to move in some friends from out of town.”
Their partner, an older, no-nonsense white woman with gray in her red hair and a good five inches on me, gave me a hard stare. “I’m not in the planning department, but I had the really strong impression that a federal judge in Sacramento ordered that all refugee construction had to be shut down.”
I shrugged again. Don’t talk to cops was an easy thing to say, a harder thing to do. If I said, “I’d like this interview to stop while I call my lawyer,” would they just haul me in? Their bodycams’ activity lights winked at me.
Some of the elder Blue Helmets drifted over my way and both cops tensed up. They just sipped their coffee and kept it neutral. It was a standoff.
Velasquez sized up the situation and made a call. “We’re going to wake up someone from planning,” they said. “In the meantime, your neighbors are trying to get some sleep, and it would be a kindness of you after what seems to have been a full night of construction to give it a rest until we’ve had planning on the site and cleared up any confusion. Does that sound like something you all can live with?”
“Absolutely,” Phuong said, speaking for the elder Blue Helmets. “Sure you won’t have a cup of coffee?”
Velasquez smiled and their partner scowled. “No thank you,” Velasquez said. “We’ve got to figure out who’s on deck at planning.”
“Good luck,” Phuong said, and sprinkled a wave at their departing backs.
* * *
The inspector goggled. Or maybe she boggled. I’ve seen both those words used before and never had an idea of what they might actually refer to but then this thirty-something Chinese-American woman with bedhead and a giant oxygen backpack showed up on the doorstep of Gramps’s lot and just stopped dead, eyes wide, looking up, then down, then up, then down, then straight ahead, hands out at her sides, palms out, like she was a telekinetic trying to use her powers to levitate our brand-new, three-story building.
Finally, she spoke. “What. The. Fuck.” She put her hand over her mouth, smashing herself in the mask, then shaking her head like a cartoon character and saying, “Ow,” loudly.
“One of you want to come and talk to me about this? Like, maybe the property owner if that person happens to be present at this time?”
Everyone looked at me. I took a big step forward and stuck out my elbow. “Hi, I’m Brooks Palazzo. I’m the owner.”
She bumped elbows with me. “Mr. Palazzo, I’m Olivia Chin, with Burbank Code Enforcement. I think you probably can guess why I’m here.”
I thought about playing dumb—No idea, why don’t you tell me?—but it would have been a dick move. “I guess I can.”
“Mr. Palazzo, you appear to have built a multifamily unit on your lot, which is zoned for a single-family dwelling. Do you have a permit to carry out this construction?”
“I do not.”
“We were relying on the Internet Displaced Persons Act waiver,” Phuong said. I looked around. She and her elder Blue Helmet posse had formed up behind me, literally getting my back. That got my heart to stop thundering. “We are in the midst of a declared refugee emergency.”
“Ms.—”
“Petrakis. Phuong Petrakis. Hi, Olivia.” She pulled her mask down.
The city inspector took a closer look. “Shit,” she said. “Phuong? From the Slammin’ Coyotes?”
“Not since high school, but yeah. You’re looking good, girl.” To the rest of us: “I know Olivia from roller derby.”
“Phuong, it’s, uh, good to see you, but—” She flapped her arm at our apartment block, which appeared and disappeared in the blowing smoke. I was so sweaty in my gear, and my face and scalp itched like they were covered with fire ants. “I mean, come on.”
“Olivia, it’s done. I mean, by sunset we’ll have the roof on. You know as well as I do that the Magas’ injunction is bullshit, and you know as well as I do that a building like this, put together by a crew of Blue Helmets from regular slabs, it’s gonna pass all the inspections. We just need a couple more hours to finish the exterior, then you can padlock the site.”
“And what, you’ll jump the fence and do all the interior work? I know how you play, Petrakis. I mean—” She flung her arms out again. “Come on.”
“Okay, I get it. You’ve got a job to do. So what comes next?”
Olivia paced the perimeter, got to the front door. “Can I?” Phuong made a go-ahead gesture. She made little noises as she moved through the building, going from room to room, then up the scaffolding to the second and then third floor. Finally, she leaned down out of an unglazed third-story window. “Jesus fucking Christ you guys. Seriously?”
A few minutes later she was back with us on what was left of the lawn. “How did you keep this all under wraps while you built it?”
“We didn’t,” I said. “I mean, we did, a little, but it only took forty-eight hours.”
“Forty-eight hours for what?”
“For you to show up.”
I watched that land on her. “Wait … You built this over the last two days?”
“Well, the first day was mostly demolition and hauling. Most of this is day two. Phuong tells me it’ll take forever to finish the interiors, but like she said, we figure we can do all the structural work including the roof by tonight.”
Olivia opened her mouth. Closed it. Repeated the procedure. “Bullshit.”
Phuong laughed. “Girl, it’s only because you went into planning instead of going overseas with a Blue Helmet brigade. This is how we do it, when we’re working fast after a flood or a famine—the time it used to take to put up a bunch of tents and build some shithole refugee camp, now we can build a whole fucking city. We could do it here, if we had the same rules of engagement as we do in the field.”
Olivia slumped and I felt kind of bad for her. She was only trying to do her job, and clearly she cared about it. Listening to Phuong deride California’s safety and planning rules reminded me of Gramps and his pals and their crazy, knee-jerk opposition to any kind of regulation, how they’d call all the exceptions to those rules in the Internal Displaced Persons Act “Green Shock Doctrine” and say it was a plot to exclude their concerns from the fate of their community. Gramps and his Maga buddies were evil psychos, but maybe they were right about that.
“Look, you know I can’t let you keep working on this. I mean, seriously. I’ve got to write you a citation, immobilize all your equipment, and shut the site down. You haven’t done an environmental impact assessment, you don’t have a first aid plan, you have no workplace monitors, and, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a gigantic fire about ten miles that way and near-zero visibility and extremely poor air quality that make doing any work of this kind totally unsafe. Oh, and illegal.”
Phuong shrugged. One of the elder Blue Helmets said, “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
Olivia looked hard at him. “And you do what you gotta do?”
“Something like that.”
Up until then, there’d been some camaraderie in their discussion, but now it evaporated. Wrong thing to say, bro, I thought. “Look, people. Word of advice: there’s a world of difference between wildcatting your own construction project and violating a workplace shutdown order. That difference starts with criminal penalties, and goes up from there. You are clearly doing this because you believe in a good cause and I want to help you get it built and opened. So, take my advice: go get some breakfast, then get some sleep, then get some lawyers. Don’t push this one.”
“We hear you,” Phuong said. Every single person on the jobsite, including Olivia, noticed that this was not the same thing as “We agree with you.” Olivia flapped her arms helplessly.
“I tried,” she said. “We’ll have the immobilizers on-site in fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour. Don’t give that crew any trouble, please and thanks. They’re just doing a job.”
“Take some coffee for the road?” Phuong suggested. Olivia turned on her heel and walked back to her car, back stiff.
“I feel bad for her,” I said.
“Me too,” Phuong said. Other people nodded and made agreeing sounds. There were seventy of us on the site, all gathered around the building, all looking at Phuong to say something. I had a moment where I thought it was weird that no one was looking at me, because it was my property. Then I realized how stupid that thought was, given that I had gone to such great lengths to get rid of it, and these people, my friends and comrades, were only honoring my stated wishes.
And then I felt proud because everyone was looking at Phuong, and Phuong was standing with me, and she thought I was great. She loved me.
“Okay, people, finish what you’re doing, especially anything that needs the heavy gear. Immobilizers in thirty minutes tops. Hop to!”
And they did, but Phuong and the elders didn’t. They huddled up and called over a few other people. I hesitated, not sure if I should join their huddle or get to work with the crew that was craning more slabs and roof joists up to the third floor. Phuong settled it for me by waving me over.
“You still got the list of names you contacted for the alternative street fair, the city-planning thing?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Somewhere in my screen. Shit, do you think I should delete it? Is it evidence?”
Phuong giggled a little. “Oh, I’m sure it’s evidence, but no, don’t delete it. We’re going to get in touch with everyone we seeded the street fair call-to-action to and ask them to get over here and provide support.”
That surprised me into silence. Finally, I managed, “Why? Support for what? Everything’s gonna be immobilized in minutes.”
“Immobilizers can be removed,” Fani said. She rocked her head from side to side. “It’s been known to happen.”
* * *