On his way back out he helped himself to a rain cape and a hat from the rack of secondhand clothes near the door. The cape was too small for him and came down barely past his waist, but the hat fit. He pulled the wide brim down to shade his face as he walked quickly back to busier streets, trying to hide in the crowds. He reasoned that the girl and her drone would be following him, told himself he was leading her away from Bridge Street, drawing the danger away from Ma and Myka.
Truth was, he just wanted to be safely out of Cleave. He would hop on an outbound train, change at Chiba to the Spiral Line, change again onto the O Link at Kishinchand, be half-way across the galaxy before his pursuers knew he’d left town…
But how was he going to do that? The girl might have friends. That drone she had sent after him in Ambersai might be buzzing the streets. She would be watching the station.
He needed a plan. He stopped for a while in a damp, fern-grown cleft in the canyon wall where holo-images of the Guardians billowed like tethered ghosts above a row of data shrines. People kept stepping out of the crowds on the street to stand in front of this shrine or that, uploading electronic prayers. Human beings had always dreamed up gods to guide and guard them, and the Guardians were the last, best gods they had ever invented. Artificial intelligences, created on Old Earth, as immortal and all-knowing as the gods in old stories. It was the Guardians who had opened the K-gates, and helped the cor-porate families lay out the rails and stations of the Great Network. In olden days they had downloaded themselves into cloned bodies and walked among humans. Now they mostly kept themselves to themselves; beings of pure information, spread across the data rafts of every world, busy with thoughts too huge and strange for human brains to hold. Zen was pretty sure they wouldn’t be interested in his troubles.
He decided to call on human help instead. He stole a disposable headset from a vendor’s cart and found a quiet spot among the shrines. The headset was just a cheap plastic one, but it did the job. One terminal fitted snugly behind his ear, transmitting sound through the bones of his skull. The other pressed against his temple, streaming images straight to the visual centers of his brain. As he opened a connection into Cleave’s data raft, a storm of gaudy ads was superimposed over his view of the wet street. He blinked them away and found a messaging site.
He wanted to call Myka, but it was too risky; the girl in red was certain to be watching for messages. So who else could he turn to?
Zen didn’t have friends. He’d left a few behind when he moved from Santheraki, and never bothered making new ones. The trouble with friends was, sooner or later he’d have to tell them about Ma’s troubles and his life on Bridge Street, and those were sadnesses that he preferred to hold close and secret. It fitted the image he had of himself, too—the lone thief, all stray-cat-cool, walking solitary down some midnight street. Oh, he’d talk and joke sometimes with the kids who met up at the Spatterpattern Club, but he couldn’t trust any of them to help him out of trouble this deep.
That just left Flex. Flex was Myka’s friend, really, but maybe she would help him for Myka’s sake. Flex had just the skills he needed.
With quick movements of his eyes he typed her contact details on a virtual keyboard, which folded away into the corner of his field of vision when he was finished. He blinked on the “Audio Only” tag. The “connecting” icon flashed for ages.
At last Flex’s voice said, “Hey?”
“It’s Myka’s brother,” said Zen, afraid to say his name in case anyone was watching for him on Cleave’s communication nets. “I need help.”
“What sort of help?”
“I need to get on a train, but I can’t go through the station.”
“Okay.” Flex didn’t seem to need any explanation. “Meet me here.”
Coordinates pinged into Zen’s headset. Battery Bridge. He thanked her, took off the headset, dropped it down a storm drain as he hurried on.
*
All the way to the bridge he kept wondering if the drone had intercepted his messages, but Flex was the only person waiting for him when he got there. A short, stocky figure, rain hat shining like a wet toadstool. Under the hat was another, with trailing earflaps, and under that a kludged-together headset with a big viewing lens that hid Flex’s right eye.
Zen had never really been sure if Flex was a boy or a girl, but he mostly chose to think of her as “her.” Her plain brown face and shapeless clothes gave no clues, but there was a gruff gentleness about her that reminded him of Myka. She lived rough somewhere in the Stacks, but sometimes the factories called her in to paint their vehicles and the murals over their gates. That was how Myka had met her.
The rest of the time, Flex was a tagger, one of those feral artists who liked sneaking into the rail yards to paint their designs on waiting freight containers, passenger carriages, even on the locos themselves. The trains’ maintenance spiders would usually clean the graffiti off before the paint was dry, but if the work was good enough, some locos let it stay, and wore it with pride as they went on their way through the K-gates. Flex’s stuff was more than good enough. Zen didn’t know much about art, but when he looked at the things Flex painted he could tell that she loved the trains. She never rode the K-bahn herself, but her quick, bright paintings did. Her leaping animals and strange dancing figures were seen by people in all the stations of the Network, mobile murals traveling the galaxy on the flanks of the grateful trains.
More importantly for Zen, the long game of cat and mouse she’d played with the trackside security systems meant that she knew of ways to get to the trains that didn’t involve passing through the station.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Anywhere,” Zen said. “Away.”
Flex grunted. “Myka always said you’d end up in bad trouble.”
“I live for trouble,” said Zen. “Anyway, you paint trains. Does Myka ever lecture you about that?”
“That’s different. And I’m not her little brother.”
“Will you help me?” Zen asked.
Flex nodded. “ ’Course. Myka saved my life once. I owe her.”
They climbed a stepped alleyway that led up beside the plummeting foam of a waterfall. The rumble of passing freight trains came down at them from above. Zen wondered what his sister had done to save Flex’s life, and why she’d never men-tioned it. But the industrial districts were dangerous, everyone knew that. People were probably saving each other’s lives down there all the time…
Halfway up the staircase, Flex stopped. She must have sent a signal from her headset, because a rusty hatch cover slid open in the alley wall. She ushered Zen through it and came after him, switching on a flashlight as the hatch slid shut behind them.
“Used to be a power station round here,” she said. “It served some old rail line that got closed down. This is one of the access passages. It comes out in the freight yards behind Cleave Station.”
It was only a short way, but the passage was narrow and airless. Dark side-passages opened off it, full of the fury of the cascade being squeezed through the sluiceways under the K-bahn. At its end, rungs stuck out of the wall of a vertical shaft, and at the top of the shaft another hatch opened. Zen popped up like a gopher in a dead, weed-grown space between two gleaming K-bahn tracks. The brightly lit platforms were about a half mile away, tucked under the overhang of the canyon wall. The part of the line where Zen had emerged was in darkness, except for a fading Station Angel, hovering like an outsized will-o’-the-wisp in the wake of some train, which had just come through the gate.
“What are you waiting for?” asked Flex, down in the shaft behind him.
“There’s a Station Angel…”
“Angels won’t hurt you.”
“I know that,” said Zen. They were still eerie, though, and he was glad to see that this one was fading—Angels did not last for long this far from a gate. He scrambled out of the hatch and stood for a moment, staring toward the platforms, because he had never seen a K-bahn station from that vantage point before. Then Flex climbed out behind him and they set off across the tracks toward a line of parked freight cars in a siding. Zen was almost starting to enjoy himself now. Somewhere down the line he’d tell this tale in bars or coffee shops to lesser thieves. “They had drones out after me, but I just snuck onto the K-bahn and jumped on an outbound train…”
The waiting cars were ore hoppers, blazoned with the crossed keys logo of the Prell family and a lot of graffiti by artists who weren’t as good as Flex. Zen saw her give the tags a quick look and wrinkle her nose at the poor workmanship.
“Do I climb in to one of these?” he asked.
Flex shook her head. “Wait here till a passenger train comes in, jump it, ride into the station, then slip inside when the doors open.”
“Won’t the train notice?”
“It will, but it probably won’t care. I know the locos that come through here. Most of them are all right. The worst that will happen is it’ll send a maintenance spider to look you over. Tell it you’re a friend of mine.”
“Train coming,” Zen said. He could hear a flutter of engine sound, growing louder.
Flex looked up. The light from the station fell across her hard little face. “That’s not a train,” she said.
She was right. The rails weren’t thrumming the way they did when a train approached. Whatever was coming was coming through the air.
“Drone!” Zen said, and at the same moment its searchlights came sweeping across the tracks. Flex vanished, giving him one warning look, then darting into a nook of darkness behind the freight cars. Zen turned to follow, but the light caught him. He saw his shadow pasted over the tags and logos on the side of the nearest car, as crisp as if Flex had sprayed it there in black paint.
He looked back. The drone hung in the air a few feet away. It must have seen him follow Flex into the passage, worked out where they’d emerge, flown up here to wait. Its battery of cameras and instruments was trained on Zen, relaying his image back to the girl in red or whoever else was controlling it.
“All right!” he shouted. “What do you want?”
Sparks flew from the drone’s carapace. It spun in the air. Zen heard cracking noises, sharp dings. He looked left and right. People were running and shouting. Spurts of light flashed on gray raincoats. He thought at first these were the drone’s handlers coming to pick him up, then realized that they were shooting at it. The drone tried to steady itself, but something heavy hit it and it flipped over and crashed down on the tracks. There was a blue flash; shards of debris zipping past like bats. Hands caught hold of Zen; flashlights shone in his face. The gray-coats were shouting at him, but the crack of the exploding drone had deafened him. They started to shove him toward the station along a ceramic footpath that ran between the tracks.
The train that had just arrived in Cleave was no ordinary passenger train. It had, for a start, no carriages, only a long, double-ended locomotive, black, still steaming from its passage through the K-gate. The gaggle of trainspotters on the platform end were going wild, and well they might, thought Zen. On any other night he would have been there with them, fighting for a proper look. Because it was like something from the threedies, this train. A massive, brutal machine, horned and armored like a dinosaur, its hull barnacled with gun turrets and missile pods and stenciled with the logo of the Network Empire.
What was a wartrain doing in Cleave?