For the Win by Cory Doctorow (cheapest way to read ebooks TXT) 📖

arcs to the mat by the door. "Our building's answer to the bound-foot grannies' detective squad," she said, and he laughed again at the slang. Back in Nanjing, they'd used this term to talk about the little old ladies who were always snooping around, gossiping about who was doing something evil or wicked. They didn't really have bound feet -- the practice of binding little girls' feet to the point where they grew up unable to walk properly was dead, and he'd never seen a real bound foot outside of a museum, though the grannies would always exclaim over the girls' feet, passing evil remarks if a girl had large feet, cooing if she had small ones -- but they acted all pinched anyway.

"And she'll believe that I'm a repairman? I don't have any tools!"

"Oh, no," Jie laughed again. It was a pretty sound. Lu could see how she'd be a very popular netshow host. That laugh was infectious. "No, she'll think we're having sex!"

He felt himself turning red and stammering. "Oh -- Uh --"

Now she was howling with laughter, head flung back, hair fanned out over the sofa-cushions. "You should see your face! Look, so long as Grandma Mao out there thinks I'm just a garden-variety slut, she won't suspect that I'm really Jiandi, Scourge of the Politburo and Voice of the Pearl River Delta, all right? Now, get your shoes off and let's have a look at that head-wound."

He did as he was bade, neatly lining his shoes up by the doorway and stepping gingerly onto the dusty wooden floor. Jia stood and led him by the shoulders to one of the rolling chairs by the desk and pushed him down on it, then leaned over him and stared intently at his scalp. "OK," she said. "First of all, you need to switch shampoo, you have very greasy hair, it's shameful. Second of all, you appear to have a pigeon's egg growing out of your head, which has got to sting a little. I'll tell you what, I'll get you something cold to hold on it for a few moments, then I want you to go have a shower and clean it out well. It looks like it bled a little, but not much, which is lucky for you, since scalp wounds usually bleed like crazy. Then, once we've got you into a more civilized state, I'll put you on the Internet and make you even more famous. Sound good?"

He opened his mouth to object, but she was already spinning away and digging through the small fridge, crouching, hair falling over her shoulders in a way that Lu couldn't stop staring it. Now she had a bag of frozen Hahaomai chicken dumplings -- he recognized the packaging, it was what they ate for dinner most nights in Boss Wing's dormitory -- and was wrapping it in a tea-towel, and pressing it to his head. It felt like it weighed 500 kilos and had been cooled to absolute zero, but it also made his head stop throbbing almost immediately. He slumped in the chair and closed his eyes and held the dumplings to the spot where the zengfu -- the slang was infectious -- had given him a love-tap. He tracked Jia's movements around him by the sounds she made and the puffs of perfume and hair stuff whenever she passed close. This was not bad, he thought -- a lot better than things had been an hour ago when he'd been crouching in front of the station talking to the gweilo.

"Right," she said, "take these." He opened his eyes and saw that she was holding out two chalky pills and a glass of water for him.

"What are they?" he said, narrowing his eyes at the glare of the sunset light streaming in the window. He'd been nearly asleep.

"Poison," she said. "I've decided to put you out of your misery. Take them."

He took them.

"The shower's through there," she said, pointing toward the bedroom. "There's a towel on the toilet-seat, and I found some pajamas that should fit you. We'll rinse out your clothes and put them on the heater to dry while we talk. No offense, Mr Labor Hero, but you smell like something long dead."

He was blushing again, he could tell, and there was nothing for it but to duck and scurry through the bedroom -- he had a jumbled impression of a narrow bed with a thin blanket crumbled at the bottom, a litter of stuffed animals, and mounds of fake handbags overflowing with clothing and toiletries. Then he was in the bathroom, the sink-lip covered in mysterious pots and potions, all the oddments of a girl which a million billboards hinted at, but which he'd never seen in place, lids askew, powder spilling out. It was all so much less glamorous than it appeared on the billboards, where everything looked like it was slightly wet and glistening, but it was much more exciting.

Every horizontal space in the shower seemed to support some kind of bottle. Lu bought big two liter jugs of shower gel that he could use as shampoo, too, but after squinting at the labels, he found one that appeared to be for bodies and another for hair, and made use of both. The water on his head felt like little sharp stones beating against it, and his shoulder began to throb as he rubbed the shampoo in. After the shower, he cleared the steam off the mirror and craned around to get a look at it, and could just make out the huge, raised bruise there, a club-shaped purple bruised line surrounded by a halo of greeny-yellow swelling.

"There's something you can wear on the bed," Jia yelled from the other side of the door. He cautiously turned the knob and found that she'd drawn a curtain across the door to the bedroom, leaving him alone in naked semi-darkness. On the bed, neatly folded, a pair of track pants and a t-shirt for an employment bureau, the kind of thing they gave out to the people who stood in front of them all day long, paid for every person they brought in to apply for a job. It was a tight fit, but he got it on, and balled up his clothes, which really did stink, and peeked around the curtain.

"Hello?"

"Come on out here, beautiful!" she said, as he stepped out, his bare feet on the dusty tile. She leaned in and sniffed at him with a delicate little sniffle. "Mmmm, you chose the dang-gui shampoo. Very good. Very good for ladies' reproductive issues." She patted his stomach. "You'll have a little baby there in no time!"

He now felt like he would faint from embarrassment, literally, the room spinning around him.

She must have seen it in his face, for she stopped laughing and gave his hand a squeeze. "Don't worry," she said. "It's only teasing. Dang-gui is good for everything. Your mother must have given it to you." And yes, he realized now, that was where he knew that smell from -- he remembered wishing that his mother was there to give him some herbs, and that wish must have guided his hand among the many bottles in her shower.

"Do you live here?" he said.

"In this pit?" She made a face. "No, no! This is just one of my studios. It helps to have a lot of places where I can work. Makes life harder for the zengfu."

"But the clothes, the bed?"

"Just a few things I leave for the nights when I work late. My show can go all night, sometimes, depending on how many callers I have." She smiled again. She had dimples. He hadn't ever noticed a girl's dimples before. The head injury was making him feel woozy. Or maybe it was love.

"And now?"

"And now we talk to you about what you've seen," she said. "My show starts in --" she looked at the face of her phone -- "12 minutes. Just enough time for you to have a drink and get comfortable." She fished in her fridge and brought out a water filter jug and filled a glass from a small rack next to the tiny sink. He took it and drank it greedily and she fetched him the filter, setting it down on one side of the desk before settling into the chair on the other side.

She began to click and type and furrow her brow in an adorable way, slipping on a set of huge headphones, positioning a mic. She waved to him and he settled into the opposite chair, refilling his glass.

"What kind of show is this again?"

"You are such a boy!" she said, looking up from her screen, fingers still punishing her keyboard with insectile clicks from her manicured fingernails.

He looked down at himself. "I suppose I am," he said.

"What I mean is, if you were a girl, you'd know all about this. Every factory girl listens to me, believe it. I start broadcasting after dinner, and they all log in and call in and chat and phone and tell me all their troubles and I tell them what they need to hear. Mostly, it comes down to this: if your boss wants to screw you, find another job, or be prepared to be screwed in more ways than one. If your boyfriend is a deadbeat who won't work and borrows money from you, get a new boyfriend, even if he is the 'love of your life.' If your girlfriends are talking trash about you, confront them, have a good cry, and start over. If your girlfriend is screwing your boyfriend, get rid of both of them. If you are screwing your girlfriend's boyfriend, stop -- dump him, confess to her, and don't do it again." She was ticking these off on her fingers like a shopping list.

"It sounds a little repetitive," he said. He wondered if she was making it up, or possibly delusional. Could there really be a show that every factory girl listened to that he'd never heard of? He thought of how little the factory girls in Shilong New Town had talked to him when he worked as a security guard and decided that yes, it was totally possible.

"It's very repetitive, but we all like it that way, my girls and me. Some problems are universal. Some things you just can't say too often. Anyway, that's not all there is to it. We have variety! We have you!"

"Me," he said. "You're going to put me on a show with all these girls on it? Why? Won't that make the police want to get me even more?"

"Darling, the police already want you. Remember the video. Your face is everywhere. The more famous you are, the harder it will be for them to arrest you. Trust me."

"How can you be sure? Have you ever done this before?"

"Every day," she said, eyes wide. "I'm my own case study. The police have been after me for two years now, and I've stayed out of their clutches. I do it by being too popular to catch!"

"I don't think I understand how that works," he said.

She looked at the face of her phone. "We've only got a minute. Here, quickly, I'll explain: if you're a fugitive, being poor is hard. Even harder than for non-fugitives. It's expensive being on the run. You need lots of places to live. Lots of different phones that you can abandon. You need to be able to pay li --" bribes -- "and you need to be able to move fast. Being famous means that you have access to money and favors from a lot of different people. My listeners keep me going, either through direct donations or through my advertisers."

"You have ads?