Parts of the city were just like the Ambersai Bazar. Zen and Nova moved through streets of jangling pachinko parlors and stir-fry mollusk bars, streets glowing with neon, filled with the rumble of K-trains crossing the viaducts, whose supporting pillars flickered with advertising slogans and luminous graffiti. It was not somewhere they could hide for long, but they would last longer there than anywhere else.
They had abandoned the car after a few minutes. Zen had never stolen a whole car before, but he knew the best rule was not to keep hold of it for long. They had jumped out under a railway bridge and let the car keep going while they doubled back through streets of sleepy bio-bungalows, through light industrial zones where 3-D printers whirred and hummed behind the paper walls of factory units.
He wanted to contact Flex and the Damask Rose. He had been gone far longer than he’d promised, and it was going to be hours yet before he could get back to where the old train waited. He needed to message it,but he knew he mustn’t. The local data raft would be full of watchbots, all waiting to home in on him and pinpoint his position for the Bluebodies’ drones. So he did not contact Flex, but he did let Nova link her mind to the city’s information feed for just long enough to download a map.
The news was bad. His way into the Dog Star Line tunnels was on the northern side of the city; the shuttle had crashed on the south.
So they pushed through the crowds in the neon streets, hoping to get clear across before the Bluebodies sighted them. On the screens they passed, the newsfeeds were streaming video of the wrecked shuttle.
Zen became a thief again, as if the Ambersai ambience had triggered his old skills. It felt comforting to be doing something he was good at, slipping things from the stalls he passed as if he were invisible. He stole Nova a coat with a hood to cover her holed tunic and shadow her face. He stole steamed ginger dumplings for them both. At a novelty gene-tech booth called Pogonometry he stole himself a mustache-symbiont, a hairy critter designed to cling to his upper lip, where it would live on sweat and dead skin. It turned out to be a cheap knock-off, though, and after half an hour it turned ginger and wandered off up his cheek like a lost sideburn. He gave that to Nova too, but it didn’t suit her either.
He kept looking at her as they walked. He kept asking her, “Are you all right?”
“I think so. I am now. Thank you for coming back for me.”
“I would have come sooner. Raven wouldn’t let me. He wanted to leave you up there.”
“I am only a Motorik,” said Nova.
“It’s not that. It’s just how Raven is.”
They went on in silence for a while, down a lonely street that ran beside a freight line. After a while Zen said again, “You are sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, Zen.”
“That hole it made in you—that did no harm?”
“It did. I was shut down for a long time, I think. But there was plenty of sunlight up there to power me, and my whole body is made from self-repairing compounds.”
“I wish mine was,” said Zen. He was covered in bruises from the shuttle crash, shaky with stress and adrenalin.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“What for?”
“For bringing you into danger.” She looked earnestly at him, her face flickering in the light from a passing train. Like the heroine of one of her old movies. “When I was up there, and I thought I’d never see you again, I felt as if my heart would break. My heart is not made from self-repairing compounds, Zen Starling.”
The train was gone, but he could still see her, striding along beside him in the sodium glow from the trackside lamps. The smell of space clung to her, rich and smoky. What was this that he was feeling? It frightened him, whatever it was. He was almost relieved when she suddenly said, “We’re being followed.”
Zen looked back. He couldn’t see anyone, but he knew that Nova had sharper ears and better eyes than him.
“There are three of them,” Nova said. “I don’t think they’re human.”
He pulled her into the doorway of a warehouse and took out his gun. “Motorik?”
Nova shook her head. “Hive Monks.”
Zen laughed with relief, and stepped out of the doorway. He couldn’t be sure that these were his Hive Monks, but it seemed likely; Hive Monks didn’t usually go about in threes.
“We have found you!” whispered the Monks, hurrying along the street so quickly that they seemed in danger of disintegrating altogether. Zen laughed again. He had never been so glad to see a few million mutant insects.
“We look for you; we find you!” rustled Uncle Bugs, reaching out to pat and stroke Zen’s clothes while Zen fought down the urge to flinch away. “The train scanned the newsfeeds, told us the Empire was hunting for you. We were worried for you, Flex and the train and we. So we set out to search. No one sees Hive Monks. No one stops us or questions us. We are only Hive Monks.”
“Thank you,” said Zen. Feeling ashamed that a pile of beetles would go to such trouble to help him. Wishing the Hive Monks did not disgust him so.
“There are police-bodies everywhere!” said one of the other Monks. “Railforce, eugh! At the station, on the streets.”
“There are many, many that way,” said Uncle Bugs, pointing along the street in the direction that Zen and Nova had been going. Zen could see the searchlight beams there, where drones cruised to and fro above the city center.
“You must hide,” urged the other Monks.
Zen shook his head. “We must keep going. Sooner or later they’ll start wondering how I got here, and that will lead them to the Dog Star Line and the Damask Rose. We haven’t got time to hide. We have to keep moving.”
“You keep moving and hide,” said Uncle Bugs. “We hide you. You hide in us.”
Zen didn’t know what he meant at first. Then he understood, and wished he hadn’t. “Oh no!” he said. “No, no, no, I’m not doing that …”
But what other choice was there?
*
Nova broke the locks on the doors behind them, and let them into an arch-roofed vault much like Flex’s place in Cleave, except that this one was piled with drums of chemicals. A burglar alarm asked tetchily who they thought they were and told them it was going to inform the police, but it was a cheap model and Nova got her mind inside it and calmed it down. The Hive Monks were already losing their human shapes, dissolving into boiling, glittering mounds of insects, empty robes crumpling like the clothes of melted snowmen. Zen’s mouth felt dry. This was going to be awful.
But the insects held no terrors for Nova. She stepped close to the edge of one of those seething heaps. Bugs poured up her legs in dark shining streams, twining around her thighs, her torso, spiraling down her arms and out along her outstretched hands until her fingers were mittened with them. And still they kept coming, scrambling over one another, the winged females fluttering. They covered every part of her body and limbs, then piled themselves up to cover her head too. When she was entirely clothed in insects, she went carefully to where the fallen robe lay, picked it up, and pulled it over herself. The armature she folded up and stuffed inside the robe. She held the wasps’ nest mask against the front of her head and the bugs pulled it into place. When she turned to face Zen she was a Hive Monk—slightly larger than average, but who bothered to look at Hive Monks? Hive Monks went where they pleased.
“But not out of the city,” said the mound that had been Uncle Bugs. “If police bodies see us leaving the city they shall say, ‘Oho, Monks stay in the stations, usually,’ and there will be questions and maybe pokings with sticks, and they find you hidden in us. So we must go down through the stations to the old platforms. The train will meet us there. We have discussed this all with the train and Flex. The train will be there in one hour. We must find our way by then.”
“I can take us there,” said Nova, slightly muffled, from behind her Hive Monk’s paper face. “I have maps of the station in my head.” She tried moving about. The burlap robe was too short on her: her bug-covered feet showed under the hem.
“Crouch down a bit,” Zen told her. “Bend your knees. And don’t walk so smoothly. Walk like a drunk person balancing a glass of wine on their head and trying not to spill any.”
He eyed the nearest mound of insects, trying to will himself to step into it.
“The covering of insects is not solid,” said Nova cheerfully. “Plenty of air gets in.”
“What do you know? You don’t need to breathe! They’ll get into my mouth.”
“No they w—” she said, and broke off spluttering. “Pleugh, eugh!”
“I hate bugs!” said Zen. The thought of all those little feet creeping over him was making him sweat and tremble. But he looked at Nova, lurching and lumbering around the warehouse in her version of a drunkard’s walk, and knew it was the best disguise he had ever seen.
So he shut his eyes, clamped his mouth tight, clenched his teeth, made bitter-lemon faces as he tried to squeeze his nostrils closed. And the rustling tide of bugs flowed up his body and engulfed him.
It was not how he had imagined it would feel at all.
It was worse.