It was Dim, the scarlet time just after the brightest lights went out, just before dark. All the thirsty spectators had gone home long before. Mischa moved, and that was a mistake. She almost fainted again. On one side of her, the older man was a storm of guilt and remorse; on the other, the companion was a quiet pool of desperation.
Without thinking about it, Mischa worked her wrists against the thongs that bound her. Nothing intelligent and nothing human drove her, only the need to be free. The thongs began to rub her skin raw. When her wrists bled, the dry leather around them grew damp and started to stretch.
The companion looked over at her, slowly, painfully. “Don’t, girl,” he said. “They’ll let us down in the morning. If they catch you—” Mischa made an animal sound. Her hands came free and she slid down the stone and fell to her hands and knees. She felt completely empty, of emotion and of strength. The pain was a part of her; it ate into her, like a malignancy. Her back was crusted with blood. She got to her feet, stumbled forward, and almost fell off the edge of the plaza. Raw flesh scraped a corner and she crouched shivering until she could move again. Her throat burned, and her eyes. Blood began to ooze from newly opened welts.
She crawled and stumbled toward the alpha-helix. She neither saw nor felt the few people still out, who watched and avoided her. She knew only a feral and desperate need to escape. The alpha-ramp rose under her feet, and she climbed.
Someone touched her arm. She reacted violently, reflexively, pulling away, reaching for her lost knife, stumbling again, into sand. She froze with the pain of it. Her breath came out rough, almost silent.
“Mischa, it’s all right, it’s me.”
She heard the words, but they meant nothing. She pushed herself up, leaving blood in droplets in the sand. Her arm was touched again. She tried to push the hand away.
“Let me help you, dammit.”
Mischa did not ignore the voice, she simply did not understand what it was saying. A few more meters above and ahead was the radial tunnel leading to her niche. A thought wandered into her mind: she might not make it. One more step, another. The muscles of her calves hurt so badly they trembled.
The person following her touched her again. Startled, Mischa pushed out. After that the footsteps stayed farther back. At the edge of the radius she held herself up against the wall for a moment. The follower took a hesitant step toward her. Mischa plunged away into the blood-red darkness.
The tunnel floor was a quagmire, the dimness a filmy curtain across her eyes. She stumbled on.
More by feel than by sight she knew she had reached her home. The tunnel walls were rough and natural instead of smooth and finished. Her fingers scraped over stone to the fissure.
She fell inside, like a toy with all the joints bent backwards.
o0o
Mischa began to come to, fighting to reach the surface of consciousness. Her struggle became an actual physical effort of grasping and twisting and climbing upward from a deep abyss. Survival drove her; not knowing what surrounded her, she had to make herself safe.
“It’s all right, everything’s all right, Misch. Go back to sleep.”
She finally heard the voice and felt gentle hands on her shoulders, holding her down. She fought for a minute before she identified the voice as friend-not-foe, no more, and the words hardly far enough to grasp their meaning. She almost continued the long impossible journey but the voice soothed and reassured her, and she slipped back into the crevasse of unconsciousness.
She lived an endless sequence of fever dreams. Later, the details were never clear. Time stretched out, and every dream drew her deeper, farther from light and air and iridescent sand and sun and ships and stars.
Then she was trapped in true darkness. Like a wounded cat, she slept. A barrier stood before her, but when she tried to pass, it was too slick and high to climb. When she tried to go around it, she traveled in an unchanging straight line that returned her to her starting point, which was unmarked but which, somehow, she recognized. The anger of frustration welled up inside her. She used it to beat at the barrier. It exploded, silently, leaving dense fog and smoke. She walked through the debris for a long, long time.
o0o
The fog dispersed slowly. Mischa lay on her stomach in her bed. She was alone in her niche, and she could not remember when the aura of friend-not-foe had dimmed and disappeared. She sat up. On her side, heavy scabs were beginning to flake away over shiny scar tissue. The wounds had been washed and carefully tended. Her time-sense was thoroughly skewed. She thought she had been unconscious for a couple of days at least, but she was not hungry.
She stood up. She was stiff, weak, a little shaky. Her pants and torn shirt lay on the floor in a corner, filthy and ruined, so she put on a clean pair of pants from the big wooden chest, and laid aside a jacket of the same smooth-worn material. Then, feeling foolish, she had to sit down and rest.
Mischa heard a noise and scraping outside her cave. She slipped aside, next to the entrance, but did not have time to cover the bright and well-fed lightcells. Someone pushed the curtain away and dropped a bag inside. Kiri slipped in and slid to the floor. She stood up awkwardly, saw that Mischa was not in her bed, looked around with alarm, and found her with relief.
“You’re losing business,” Mischa said.
“You shouldn’t be up.”
“When is it?”
Kiri told her. Her estimate of two days was a day too short. Mischa sat on the wooden chest and started to pull her knees up under her chin, but stopped when she found how much it hurt to bend her shoulders forward. “Listen,” she said. “Thanks.”
Kiri shrugged, and turned away. “Old debt.” Her voice was soft. Mischa let the subject drop. Kiri owed her nothing. If she owed Chris, then she must know he could never be repaid.
“How do you feel?”
“Pretty good.”
Kiri pulled a hot bottle out of her bag and opened it. The odor it released was pleasant, and while Mischa could not remember a particular time of having smelled it before, it was familiar. Hungrier than she had realized, she accepted the steaming broth and sipped it. “Did you get in trouble?”
Kiri shook her head. “But I didn’t find out until too late to get a bondsperson.” She brought Mischa’s knife out of her pocket and handed it to her. “Nobody’d stolen it when I got there.” Mischa valued the knife, and had not expected to get it back. “Hey, Kiri…” She could not think of anything to say that did not sound silly.
“Eat your soup,” Kiri said.
o0o
After Kiri left, Mischa slept for a few hours, but when she awoke she was too restless to stay in bed. She eased into the jacket and walked slowly down the radius. When she reached the helix she sat on the edge of the path and looked out over Center. Stone Palace was like a slash in the wall, bare and uglier than the shanty-hut units and crowded people and everything else that made Center what it was. She knew she could do nothing, right now, but she swore to herself that someday she would bring the extravagant appointments of the Palace down around the elegant Lady Clarissa’s head.
In that instant, an explosion crumbled a section of the Palace wall. The cavern shuddered. In the moment before shock wave and sound and bits of debris reached her, Mischa threw herself around and down. Dust and rubble fell on her back. She winced and turned on her side, shielding her face. The blast echoed back and forth, slowly, like ripples in a long pond.
All the lights went out.
People began to scream. Mischa had realized several years before that she could see better in the dark than most people, that she could see in some places where other people could not see at all, but she had not realized that the ability had protected her from a primeval fear. From every direction, fifteen seconds of terror washed over her: few in Center had ever experienced total darkness. Mischa compared the deprivation cell to what the people around her must be going through, and understood their panic.
The lights flickered on, dimmed, brightened. The feeling of terror faded much more slowly than its sounds.
The results of the blast seemed hardly to justify its force. There was a new opening in the Palace facade, at ground level. Workers swarmed around it as soon as the dust had cleared. Mischa sat up, brushed herself off, and watched. As she scrambled to a better vantage point, the change in the cavern wall kept catching on the corner of her vision.
The workers began to smooth the blasted edges, forming a new doorway to the lower level of the Palace. People on First Hill, which faced the Palace, stood on their balconies pitching stones and gravel out into the Circle. Mischa saw no bodies or blood, which was on the order of a miracle.
She began to notice other, more subtle changes: an undercurrent of excitement, more people along the arc where the bars were clustered. It was like early spring, when several of Blaisse’s ships came in at once. Mischa was beginning to tire, but her curiosity kept her going. She started down the helix and met Kiri coming up.
“You do get around.”
“What’s going on?”
“I guess the new people decided they needed a private entrance in Stone Palace.”
“What new people?”
“A ship landed while you were healing.”
“In the storms—? And you didn’t tell me—”
“I thought I could keep you resting,” Kiri said. “I yield.”
“Who are they? How—?”
“Come back home and I’ll tell you what I know. Which isn’t much.”
They returned to Mischa’s niche.
o0o
Jan Hikaru’s Journal:
Earth: clouds, a walk through a sandstorm that would kill an unprotected person, a maze of caverns, trapped human beings. I believe that the city we are in grew up inside one of the huge bomb shelters built here before the Last War. We are in gaudily appointed rooms that I find irritating, but they seem to suit the other people from the ship.
I haven’t buried my friend’s body yet; I can’t until I know the customs. I’m acquainted with no one. Whom should I ask? Beggars? Slaves? (There are slaves in this society. How can I do nothing, knowing that?)
I can’t stay in the Palace, I can’t stay with the pseudosibs and their people. I have no place here, I want none. But I haven’t any other place either.
Am I just afraid? When something happens that I can’t accept, that I as an individual could protest, will I rationalize inaction?
I went outside Stone Palace today. I had to get out. I walked along a street of bars and pleasure houses, where people sell services, their bodies, drugs in any form or effect. And beggars—I have never been approached by beggars before. People used to try to press coins into my hands when I helped my poet through the streets. I regretted not having money or anything else to give the crippled children in the city, until I realized that their deformities are induced, not congenital. They have mutilated themselves, or they have been mutilated.
How could we leave earth to this?
o0o
During the following days, Mischa watched the pseudosibs from a distance and found out all she could about them from the people with whom they dealt. She saw that their section of Stone Palace was much less guarded than Blaisse’s, and that they seemed not to have such a pathological fear of the city. This encouraged her. Yet time had passed; she was forced to take note of it: her immediate need was to replenish her store of tribute before her uncle and Gemmi called her again. She spied on Stone Palace from the alpha-helix all one day, but did not approach it, and when the lights above began to dim, she left her own shabby section and climbed down to the Circle.
She had been watching one of the bright little import shops facing the Palace. A recess one level above the shop gave her a place to sit where she was not obviously spying on it. The climb had tired her; she kept dozing off as she waited. When the ceiling lights faded to their lowest intensity for the night, the merchant pulled heavy curtains across the multicolored sparkles in the windows and locked his door. Mischa already knew that he lived behind the shop. That was not in itself a hindrance; she was by training and preference a sneakthief, and quiet. It only remained for her to watch his place throughout one night, to discover whether he had a companion contract or a security subscription.
The patrol did stop once, early on. Mischa inspected the Family people hopefully, but neither of the pair was the ice-eyed administrator. She must be long since promoted from foot patrol, but Mischa would have liked to rob a place whose protection was that one’s responsibility.
Mischa waited until the night was half over. Finally, doubting her ability to stay awake another four hours, another one hour, she walked slowly home.
o0o
The next night, the hours passed slowly. Mischa watched from a higher vantage point. The security patrol stopped only once, at the same time as the night before. Mischa knew it was good: she knew she could walk in and take what she wanted whenever she decided to.
Perspiration broke out on her forehead. She held out her hand and found it trembling. She clenched her fist and the new scars on her wrists turned white. Her body tried to tell her that she had been too badly hurt too recently, that she was still weak, that she was tired from her vigil. She climbed down across the roofs until she was over the shop. Her knees and her stomach felt the same, frightened. When she drove the shaking out with anger, it was anger at herself and at her fear: tomorrow when the time came to return, would she find some excuse against it? She might fool herself into being too tired, too weak, any of a hundred things. The possibility of that much self-deception scared her as much as the possibility that she was losing her nerve.
There was no motion nearby, little sound, an aura of life, but sleeping life. Lying flat on the roof, she listened, and received a reward of silence. Looking over the edge, she found the windows dark and curtained and the door firmly closed.
Chris had taught her to pick locks so early that she could not remember the lessons. He had been a good thief; she was better. She swung down to the next level. The shop door was recessed, putting her in deep shadow. With her lockpicks she gently probed the double locks. Opening them took longer than she liked, but the door finally clicked open, with neither the shrill scream of a scare-alarm nor the low reverberation of a warning device in the merchant’s sleeping quarters.
Mischa eased through the doorway. Inside the shop, semiprecious stones glowed deep black or glinted brightly. As Mischa shut the door, the outside lights flickered. For half a second the shop was a shattered rainbow. It would soon be light in Center.
The single doorway at the back of the shop was closed only by a curtain. Mischa crept quietly about, checking for silent-alarm wires, finding none.
The glass cases were locked and uninteresting. Everything on display was semiprecious or artificial, and set. Unset stones were less trouble, harder to trace.
Beneath the cases, shallow drawers in tiers of four each opened toward the back. Narrow panels separated them. The drawers were locked, but no more securely than the front door. They held boxes of pendants and rings and anklets of no higher quality than the jewelry already displayed. Unperturbed, Mischa stopped actively searching, sat back against the wall, and simply looked, as she did for the moon on the nights she was outside. The sky-glow behind the clouds would catch on the edge of her vision, not where her sight was sharpest. This search was similar, but she made her mind act, rather than her eyes.
She knelt again before the drawers and slid her fingers beneath their lower edges. She tapped the panels between them, listening for any hollowness, and tugged at them gently. One opened, swinging upward and outward smoothly and quickly. The hinge clicked faintly; the panel remained open.
A flexible coil of thin insulated wire, badly balanced on a narrow shelf, slipped out. Mischa caught it before its attachments clattered on the floor. She sat back on her heels, holding the lock leads. Outside, the lights flickered again, casting a quick streak of gold past the shop’s window curtains. The radiance caught on the tips of the paired electrodes. The light faded, and the shop was scarlet and ebony once more.
Mischa placed the cold electrodes against her temples. They attached themselves, pushing fibers into her skin; they drew her out, and sent her along the thin silver wires. She could feel the resonances of the man sleeping in the room behind the shop. His recorded essences formed a barrier; the lock should open only to him.
Mischa did not like being forced so close to anyone; with the lock recording on one side and the merchant on the other, she could perceive him better than she had ever been able to perceive any ordinary person, anyone but Chris or Gemmi. The usual faint aura took shape, clarified, solidified. Wanting to fling the contacts away and leave, Mischa touched the wall of a simulated consciousness, and reached out for the true being. She became a channel for thoughts; she could not shield herself. They washed in, unaltered, amplified, but she took them and molded her own patterns to fit, and ran up against the barrier. It resisted, yielded, but did not open. She shifted and tried again, racing through the spaces of several independent variables. Mischa struggled to stay afloat and aware in an inundation of hidden, half-controlled fears and desires.
The barrier shuddered and dissolved; the lock on the hidden compartment fell open. Mischa pulled away the sticky contacts and threw them down. She was dripping with sweat, but steady.
The secret drawer slid open to gentle pressure. Mischa lifted out one of the fist-sized leather sacks that filled it.
The stones, poured into her palm, glowed as though ready to erupt with light and heat. Each was all colors, one at a time. They shifted and moved in her hands like living things.
Mischa put the first bag under her jacket. The others were filled with set stones, but set stones worth stealing. She took as many as she could comfortably and unobtrusively carry in her inner pockets. At the bottom of the drawer lay a flat black box with a pebbled leather surface. She opened it slowly.
Even in the darkness the eyes glittered out at her. The size of a fingernail, or a thumbnail, or the entire exposed area of an eye, they were small multicolored multifaceted concavoconvex discs that fractured light through the planes of precious stones or reflected it from polished metal. The opaque iris enhancers had openings for the pupil, but many of the even minimally transparent ones were a single expanse of decoration. In a person’s eyes they turned the world different colors or broke it into pieces or turned it upside down. They were hand-made, hand-designed; no two pair were alike. One pair was pink roses with an effect of three dimensions. Another held spirals that could drink a soul. Mischa shut the box and kept it.
Since the eyes were not displayed, they must be contraband, smuggled in past the Family of the gate without duties or taxes. And that meant, in turn, that Mischa was almost safe in taking them; the theft could not be reported to security, and the merchant had little other recourse. She was almost sorry to steal from a man who cheated the Lady Clarissa’s people.
The drawer stuck when she tried to close it. She eased it out and pushed again. It squeaked against its runners. She froze, but behind her the merchant came groggily awake, broadcasting the desire to pretend he had heard nothing. He was indecisive and afraid, and without being aware of the cause, upset by the remnants of Mischa’s intrusion into his mind.
Mischa heard him get up; his attempted silence was marred by his weight. Even on tiptoe he sent vibrations through the floor. Mischa moved back and waited beside the curtained doorway. In a moment the naked shopkeeper peered out, his blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Only the needler in his hand made him dangerous. When he reached for the light switch Mischa grabbed his wrist. For all his slothful appearance, he was strong, but he had no training and no practice. Mischa got the needler away from him and kicked it across the room.
“Lie down.”
He made a sound of protest. Mischa flicked out the blade of her knife. The sound silenced him, and he lay down quickly, still clutching his blanket. Mischa took it away and cut strips from the woven synthetic.
“You can’t do this.” His voice squeaked in the middle of a word.
“Okay,” Mischa said.
As she twisted the slices of blanket he gathered himself. “Come on,” Mischa said. The sarcasm in her voice seemed to keep him still more than any real warning might have. She tied his wrists behind him, made him bend his knees, and tied his feet to his hands.
“My arms—”
She ignored him, but he took a quick breath. Mischa grabbed his chin and pulled his mouth shut. The clack of his teeth was louder than his single croak.
“I lose my temper so easy it makes me mad sometimes.” Mischa did not like to frighten people more than absolutely necessary to keep them from forcing her to hurt them. She was a thief, not a terrorist.
The jeweler blinked, trying to see her, trying to find any way to identify her in the dark. Mischa opened the hidden drawer again and used one of the small suede sacks to gag him. He struggled when he realized what it was. Mischa grinned, but waited until she was sure he would not choke on the leather, vomit, and suffocate himself.
The shadow in the doorway was paler now. The lights flickered more often, almost regularly. Mischa waited, holding the door ajar, and slid outside between two washes of light. She left the shop closed but unlocked. Eventually a customer would come in, or the jeweler would work the gag free.
Mischa was drenched with sweat, but the residual weakness had disappeared and she felt good for the first time in much too long. She headed home, laughing quietly. The exhaustion she felt was a satisfying kind, the result of long vigilance and a good job, and knowing, not just hoping, that nothing her uncle or Stone Palace or the Families could do to her could destroy her.