The thing about contamination plumes is that they move.
Not fast, not dramatically, but they move. Underground, in the dark, following the path of least resistance through soil and clay and the accumulated bad decisions of a city that has been paving over its own problems since before I was born. Three centimeters a day sometimes. Sometimes less. I find this fascinating even when it's also terrible, and it's usually both at once, which I've come to think of as the essential condition of environmental science in Gotham.
I'm explaining the Bellhaven plume to Anya when I notice she still has her coat on.
It's a small thing. She came in twenty minutes ago and sat down and I started talking because I was mid-thought and she let me, and I'm only now registering it: the coat, both hands around her coffee, the particular quality of someone who has been somewhere they'd rather not name and hasn't quite left yet.
I keep talking. If she wanted to say something about it she would.
"The plume started at the drainage failure, which they filed as contained this spring." I turn the laptop toward her and trace the line on the map. "It wasn't contained. It's been moving northeast at roughly two centimeters a day for three years, which puts it here." I tap the screen. "Under a residential building. Thirty-four units."
She leans forward to look. She actually looks, follows the line with her eyes, takes in the scale, doesn't just nod at me. I've had this conversation with four different people at the city assessor's office. None of them looked at the map.
"Water table?" she says.
"Compromised. Seventeen contaminants, four above threshold." I pull the laptop back. "I've been trying to reach the building manager for two weeks. He keeps referring me to the property management company."
"Which refers you back to him."
"Which refers me back to him." I sit back. "It's a very efficient system for not talking to me."
The corner of her mouth moves. It's not quite a smile. She seems to decide against smiles mid-process, like she starts one and then changes her mind. but it's something, and I have gotten unreasonably good at catching it.
"I can make a call," she says. "Noise complaint history, official pretext. Get you a door in."
"I'd really like that," I say, and mean it.
She nods and looks back at the map. Outside, Sycamore Street is being extremely quiet about being a Tuesday. The streetlight two doors down is still out. I've filed three complaints about it since July. I've started to feel it's become a matter of principle between me and the city's infrastructure complaint system, which is not a fight I was looking for but here we are.
"How many sites now?" she asks.
"Active monitoring? Six." I turn a page. "The grant review comes back in five weeks. If the soil data holds we can compel remediation on at least two sites."
"Mooney Street."
"Mooney Street is one of them." I circle something. "I've been there four times this month taking baseline readings. The playground." I stop for a second. I always stop for a second here. There are children on that playground every afternoon, which is the whole point, which doesn't get easier. "The iron content has been four times acceptable levels for at least eight years. Eight years."
She's quiet. She does this well. Goes quiet in a way that doesn't feel like absence, more like she's somewhere specific inside herself, working something out. I like it. Most people fill silence because they're uncomfortable with it. She uses it.
"I pulled a file last week," she says. "An inspector. Keeps signing off on projects that don't match the inspection reports." She looks at the table. "I can't share it. But if you had a list of project addresses, and I had a list of project addresses—"
"They might overlap."
"Coincidences happen."
I look at her. She's still looking at the table, which is what she does when she's offered something that cost her something: looks slightly away, like the transaction is easier if neither of us looks directly at it. I know what it costs to pull a file like that. I've looked it up. I want to tell her she doesn't have to, and I'm not going to, because she knows that, and she's doing it anyway, and the right response to someone choosing to do something for you is to let them.
"Send me the list," I say. "I'll cross-reference the inspector signatures tonight."
She looks up. Something registers in her face, the way it does when she's decided what to do with a piece of information, and she nods.
"Also," I say, because I keep forgetting to mention this and I'm going to do it now before I forget again, "I've been collecting something. Incidents in the Narrows, someone breaking up muggings and gone before anyone looks. Four of them now, different nights, different streets. I don't know what the pattern means yet but it's there." I pull the sheet from under the laptop. "I keep writing them down."
Something shifts in her expression. Small, contained, but I'm watching and I catch it.
"Can I see that?" she says.
I hand it over. She reads it carefully, all the way to the end, her right hand in her coat pocket where it's been most of the evening. I've noticed that too: the right hand, the pocket, the care she takes about where her hands are. I don't have an explanation for it and I've decided not to ask because some things aren't mine to ask about.
"I'll keep collecting them," I say. "If something connects."
"Yeah," she says, and gives the sheet back. The flat register, the one that means she's decided something she's not saying. I've gotten good at that one too.
I take the sheet. I look at her for a moment. The coat still on, the hand still in the pocket, Gotham doing its orange overcast thing through the window behind her. There's something in her face tonight I don't have a name for. Not tired, exactly. Tired is simpler. More like she's carrying a question she hasn't answered and isn't sure she wants to.
I want to ask what it is.
I don't. I go back to the inspector column, because this is what we do here and it's enough. Sit at this table and work in parallel while the city does what it does outside the window. I look forward to it, actually, which surprised me when I noticed it a few months ago. I look forward to Tuesday nights. I look forward to the counter guy putting the cup down without asking and to the particular quality of someone sitting across from me who actually reads the map when I show it to her and doesn't make me explain why it matters.
I'm aware that's a lot to put on a Tuesday. I don't think about it directly.
At nine-thirty she closes her notepad.
"I'll send the list tonight," she says, standing. She puts on her other glove. She'd taken the right one off at some point without me noticing. She looks at me for a moment. Just a moment. The length of something being decided.
"The streetlight," she says. "The one that's been out."
"Three complaints. Nothing."
"I know someone in maintenance. Not through channels. I'll make a call."
She says it quickly, without looking at me, the way she says the things that cost something. Then she goes. The door lets in a draft of rain-smell and closes.
I look at the empty chair.
I look at it for longer than I need to, given the inspector column and the cross-reference and the grant review in five weeks. Then I turn back to the laptop.
Outside the window, the streetlight is still out.
I write a note at the bottom of the page, below the inspector signatures. Not about the inspector.
Three complaints. She'll make a call.
I look at it. Then I turn the page.
Three weeks later I'm walking home from the lab, late, grant application due Friday, and I turn onto Sycamore and the streetlight is on.
Just on. Like it's always been on. Clean circle on the wet pavement, the orange Gotham overcast above it doing its usual thing.
I stop.
I stand under it for a moment. I don't know why, it's just a streetlight. I think about three complaints that went nowhere and one phone call that apparently went somewhere, and I feel something I don't immediately have a word for. Warm is the closest I get. A small specific warm, the kind that comes from something working when you'd stopped expecting it to.
I take out my phone. Type: the streetlight is on.
Three dots. Then: I know.
Then: get home safe.
I stand there a moment longer than makes sense. Then I put my phone away and walk home through working streetlights, thinking about contamination plumes and the grant application and the way she says things that cost her something quickly, without looking at you, like it's easier if you don't notice. And about the specific small warm of a light coming on in a city that mostly doesn't.
I notice I'm smiling.
I don't do anything about it.