By mid-morning, I was growing anxious. “Who’s this guy again?” I asked Sinda, for what had to be the third time in less than ten minutes.
“He’ll be here soon enough. Just calm down already.” She was calling herself Shalla today, which stuck in my mind for some strange reason. If I thought it would get us in to the guy she knew who might be able to remove our tags any sooner, I would’ve used the name every time I asked about him.
Finally, when I thought I would crawl out of my skin with nervous dread, a strange squeaking sound echoed from farther down the open subway tunnel. Sinda stacked up the cards she’d been shuffling and tucked them away in one of her pockets. “That’s him,” she said. “Tin.”
“The water man?” Kyer asked.
Though she’d told us bottled water was delivered weekly, we ha
