CORDELIA PA
“Look, a ship!”
Wrapped in the warmth of his stained and patched parka, Michael Pa paused in the wan light of a street globe, his long ponytail thrown back as he watched the incoming space trader furl its black lace wings. Beside him, I pulled nervously at his sleeve. We were in one of the city’s narrow alleys and it was late.
“Mikey, come on,” I urged, but his eyes filled with yearning, Michael refused to move. He remained transfixed by the ship, which looked to me to be a fairly standard example of its class, the solid, industrial lines of its hull seemingly at odds with the apparent fragility of its sweeping, electrically charged wings. Long ago, somebody had painted black and yellow stripes over its stern, and its flat, rust-streaked belly reflected the glow of the port’s arc lamps. The stripes made it look like a fat bee; otherwise, it was unremarkable. Ships just like it came and went every day.
“Where do you think it’s come from?” Michael asked, cheeks pink and breath steaming in the cold night air. “Where do you think it’s going?”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t have cared less. The air froze the back of my neck like a compress, and this wasn’t the kind of place I wanted to linger, especially at night. Growing up around the edges of this vast, echoing metropolis, I’d heard the same stories as everybody else: of ghosts and booby traps, and prospectors who simply wandered off into the night, never to be seen again.
The buildings in the city had been deserted for a thousand years, and existed in perpetual night. No sun had ever warmed them, no rain ever fallen over them. The skies above their roofs and spires were, and always had been, perpetually scattered with stars, against which the lights of the nearer Plates glimmered.
Although I’d only ever lived on two of the twenty Plates in the swarm, I knew all their names by heart: Night Town, Admin, Favela Two… On a clear night, I could recognise them by their positions in the sky relative to one another, and by the soft murmurs they made when I looked at them—murmurs that apparently only I could hear. Currently, in the sky above the descending ship, I could see Ghost Castle, Shipyard One, and the bright sunlamps of Farm Plate Three—the latter close enough for me to make out its rectangular shape against the stars. It looked as wide as my thumbnail held at arm’s length, and I smiled at it, comforted by its familiarity. At night, the Plates whispered incomprehensible secrets to me, their voices a constant, comforting sigh, like wind through high tree branches or waves sliding up a darkened beach.
Not that I’d ever actually seen a real beach, of course.
“Come on.” I walked a few paces, and then turned. His eyes were still on the ship. Only when the uppermost tips of its up-curled wings finally dropped from sight behind the low buildings ringing the spaceport on the Plate’s edge did he lower his face and start to walk again.
“You are so impatient.”
“Me?” I fell into step beside him, gloved hands thrust deep into my coat pockets. The coat had been old when I’d bought it, and the gloves had once belonged to the inner lining of an obsolete pressure suit. “You’re the one who’s desperate to leave.”
I shrugged, looking around at the darkened, alien buildings. Some were blocky, others thin and tapering, but the proportions were all wrong. Whoever, or whatever, built them had been around three metres in height, and had scaled the size of the doorways and stairs accordingly.
“We grew up here,” I said.
“Not through choice.”
Huddled in our coats, we walked to the end of the street and turned right. We had come into the antique city on a scavenging expedition, hoping to find among its abandoned turrets and tunnels a scrap of saleable alien technology. Now, we were trailing back, empty-handed, to the edge of the Plate. Only the very fringes of the city were occupied. The vast majority of it remained unexplored, due to the dangers and unpredictability of its alien architecture. When our mother died, Michael and I had to move from Alpha Plate to share our uncle’s draughty fourth-floor walk-up here on City Plate Two.
As we walked, street globes greeted us at each intersection, hovering like anaemic suns, casting a pale light. Having been aligned by their alien builders to the rotational period of some long-forgotten foreign planet, the globes took thirty hours to cycle from bright noon to gloomy dusk, and then back again. Right now, they were almost at their dimmest. We’d been out longer than we’d planned, and now only a few minutes remained until midnight, and the start of curfew.
The streets were empty. Few people ventured this deep into the abandoned city, especially at night. As the street globes faded and the shadows deepened, the archways and spires took on a more threatening aspect.
“Don’t you ever think about it, though?” Michael asked.
“About what?”
He slowed. “About life on the other Plates?”
Ahead of us, at the port on the edge of the Plate, the ship’s engines gave a final shrieking roar, and then tapered to silence. I hugged myself against the cold. My hand strayed to the necklace at my throat: a platinum chain, which had once belonged to our mother.
“No,” I said.
“Only, I talked to Trudy earlier tonight—”
“That airhead?”
“—and she reckons she’s getting off this Plate.”
“She says that to all the boys.”
Michael stopped walking. “I think she means it.” He lowered his voice. “She says she’s got a contact on one of the ships, a trader called the Electrical Resistance. Next time it docks, she’s off. And she says I can go with her.”
I gave a snort. “She’s a waitress. The only resistance she’s got is to reality.”
Michael put his hands on his hips. “I’m serious.”
“So am I. Now please, let’s move. We don’t have much time.” I stalked off. After a few seconds, Michael ran to catch up.
“Why are you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“So cynical.”
I huffed. “Listen, if you want to believe everything a girl tells you when she’s trying to get you into bed, that’s fine with me. Good luck to you, it’s none of my business. Right now, I’m more worried about getting home.”
Michael chuckled.
“You’re jealous.”
“Of what?”
“Of the attention I get.”
I flinched. I knew all about attention: over the course of my sixteen years, my chopped white hair and mismatched eyes had attracted their fair share of remarks from the other scavengers—and not all of them had been complimentary.
“She’s just trying to get into your pants,” I said with a sniff. “That sort of attention I can live without.”
Self-consciously, Michael pulled his coat closed and scowled. “All I’m saying is that it wouldn’t hurt you to lighten up a bit once in a while. You used to want to travel. Don’t you remember how we used to lie in the dark and make lists of all the places we wanted to see?”
I glanced up at the stars. “I’m sixteen now, Michael.”
“So?”
I tugged my fur-lined hood up around my ears. “I’m older now, and things have changed.”
“Because of Uncle Caleb?”
Inside my gloves, my fists bunched. “He needs us to take care of him.”
Michael rubbed his mouth with the back of his glove. “I know. But that doesn’t mean we have to spend the rest of our lives stuck here. He wouldn’t want that.”
“We can’t just abandon him.”
“I’m not saying we should.” Michael’s arms flopped despairingly. “But if we don’t go soon, we never will. We’ll get bogged down. We’ll never make the break.”
I sniffed. “You’ve always been like this. Even when we were little kids, you couldn’t wait to get away.”
“And you’ve always been too cautious! We should get some money together and send Uncle Caleb to Hospital Plate.”
I shook my head. “That’s horrible. He looked after us.”
“And now he’s ill. He doesn’t know where he is half the time. The best way we can look after him is to see he gets professional care.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“We can if we sell the apartment and all his stuff.”
“But if we sell that, where will we live?”
“We’ll be gone.” Michael glanced ahead, in the direction of the port.
“Where?”
“Back to Alpha Plate, maybe even Command.” He threw his hands wide. “And then, who knows? Maybe all the way to Earth.”
I hunched my shoulders against the cold. I was only five years old, and Michael four, when our mother died and we were forced to abandon Alpha Plate for a life scavenging around the edges of this vast alien city. Alpha Plate had been a childhood paradise filled with miracles: warm bio-domes and access to endless information; programmable matter that allowed almost any machine or object to be printed from apparently inert garbage; and access to healthcare far above and beyond anything I could now hope to afford.
“We can’t, it’s impossible.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, yes, it is.” I sighed. “Even if we could find a buyer for the apartment, by the time we’d paid for Caleb’s care, we wouldn’t have enough left over to buy a ticket to Night Town, let alone Alpha.”
“We’d find a way.”
“By flirting with losers like Trudy Hyde?”
“Perhaps.”
“Forget it.”
We cut down a connecting street and crossed the Old Yard: a bare expanse of the Plate’s surface untouched by paving. The material was a semi-translucent blue, and smooth, so that walking on it felt much like walking on glass. Out in the open, away from the buildings of City Plate Two, we could see more of the sky. On the horizon, the system’s solitary gas giant hung like a dusky basketball while, all around, the tiny rectangles of the other Plates swarmed against the stars. Agricultural Plates shone with the golden warmth of powerful sun lamps; the other city Plates with the pinprick glitter of a million spire windows. And there, high above all the rest, the bright twins: Command and Alpha.
In my head, I heard Alpha’s familiar whisper. It was a lonely, mournful sound. I shivered and hugged myself. As a child, I’d dreamt of flying among them, arms outstretched as I wove through their loose formation, free and happy. Now, I kept my eyes on the ground until we reached the street on the far side of the Yard, and the first signs of human habitation.
We weren’t even halfway home but the globes lighting the corners had already dwindled to their bare, brown minimum, signifying midnight. My heart quickened. “It’s curfew time. We have to get indoors.”
Beside me, Michael frowned. He knew as well as I did that it was a serious matter to be caught on the streets between midnight and dawn. “We shouldn’t have spent so much time checking out that old tower.”
“That was your idea.”
He ignored me, and crossed to a narrow alley between two of the large, blocky warehouses on the opposite side of the street. “If we cut through the Burrow, it’ll bring us out on Eighth Street and save us five minutes.”
I peered dubiously at the graffiti carved into the walls on either side of the alley’s entrance. The Burrow was where the down-and-out slept: the destitute, burned-out, and unemployable. It had a reputation for gang violence and drug use, and occupied an entire city block: a shanty town of packing crates and plastic sheeting crammed into the shells of two old alien accommodation blocks.
“I think I’d rather stick to the roads.”
“And risk getting picked up by one of the patrols?” Michael stepped over the threshold, into the shadows. “Trust me, this will be a lot quicker.”
He moved off, deeper into the gloom, and I cursed. The alley stank of garbage fires and stale urine. Laundry lines stretched between the windows and fire escapes, and jury-rigged power cables hung in loops from the eaves.
“I don’t know about this.” I leaned back on my heels to look up and down the deserted street, but there was no one there to see what I was about to do. “If we step into this slum and disappear, nobody will ever know what happened to us. There’ll be no witnesses, and, even if the security troops bother to search for us, they won’t think of looking in here. No one in their right mind cuts through the Burrow at night; at least, not by choice. Even the people who live in it try to keep their heads down once the street globes begin to dim.”
“We can try.”
“Mikey, wait—”
“What?”
“I—”
I heard a burst of engine noise at the far end of the street. An armoured personnel carrier ground around the corner on six fat mesh tires. A searchlight blazed from the gun turret above its cab, pinning me in its glare. Squinting, I raised a hand to shade my eyes.
“Halt!” The amplified voice rattled my bones. For a seemingly endless moment, unable to think, heart hammering in my chest, I dithered. I couldn’t let myself be caught. If I went to jail, who would care for Uncle Caleb? Michael wouldn’t hang around, and he couldn’t afford to bail me out. I had to get away, but how? The security patrols carried guns and weren’t exactly shy about using them.
The vehicle groaned to a halt before me. Against the glare of its searchlight, I caught the red twinkle of a retina scan. Without meaning to, I blinked, and screwed my eyes into slits.
“Stand still!”
An armoured door opened with a metallic squeak, and a heavy boot crunched down onto the road’s surface.
“Why are you out so late, girlie, all by yourself?” A male voice, half-stifled by the thick gas mask covering his face. “Don’t you know it’s after curfew?”
He took a step towards me: a silhouette against the light, his torso puffed out by a padded flak jacket, head appearing over-large and misshapen by the flaring dome of a high-threat combat helmet. I saw the nightstick dangling from his belt, heard the plastic creak of his uniform and the rasp of his breathing.
The security troops were little better than mercenaries. The real cops were safe and warm on Alpha Plate. Here, on City Plate Two, the troopers were recruited from the ranks of the deadbeats they patrolled and paid by results. Shakedowns and extortions happened all the time. If you had money, you could bribe your way out of any trumped-up charge they threw your way; if not, if you were a penniless young scavenger caught out on the streets after midnight, then you were going to become another tick on some trooper’s score sheet…
In a flash, I saw the next ten years of my life stretched before me: being moved in and out of cramped cells; coming out of jail with nothing but a drug habit; reoffending simply to get a warm bed for the night; falling deeper into addiction and desperation; and then most likely ending my days beaten down and half-starved in a filthy warren like the one behind me, with no one left to mourn, and only the other down-and-outs to squabble over my few meagre possessions.
No, I thought. I will not live like that. I refuse to. I would rather die.
And with that, I turned and made a lunge for the alley.
“Hey!”
My feet slapped the raw Plate material of the alley floor. I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I still had a life to lead, and I wouldn’t let them take it from me without a fight—because even death would be preferable to jail.
Ahead, in the reflected glare of the searchlight, Michael stood with his eyes wide. I grabbed his hand and pulled him along. “Run, you idiot!”
Blinking aside afterimages, we crashed headlong through flapping sheets and broken sticks of furniture. Our feet splashed through puddles of foul-smelling liquid. From the street, the police searchlight lit up the alley, throwing our shadows ahead of us.
“Halt, or we fire!”
Michael slowed, but I yanked him onwards. “Keep running!”
Holding on to each other, we flailed through another clothesline, and pushed our way past an unplugged chest freezer.
“Come back, you little feral bastards!”
Shots came from behind, deafeningly loud in the enclosed space. I heard the pap pap pap of bullets punching through the laundry around us. Chips flew from the walls to either side, and sparks pinged from the overhead fire escapes. The muscles of my back cringed in anticipation, expecting the spine-shattering punch of a bullet. Then Michael hauled me sideways, into an open doorway, which led deeper into the Burrow.
Once inside, out of the line of fire, we stopped with our backs against the wall, heaving in great lungfuls of stinking air. I couldn’t hear anything over the roaring in my ears. Were we still being shot at? Would the security troops venture this far into the Burrow without backup?
After a minute, the searchlight snapped off, leaving me blind. Angry curses echoed down the alley from the street. Apparently, the gap was too narrow for the APC, and the patrol was unwilling to enter on foot.
In the darkness, Michael squeezed my hand. “You all right?”
I swallowed. My eyes were slowly becoming used to the gloom. I looked down. My feet and legs were soaked and filthy, my trousers ripped. “I’ll survive.”
Michael gave a brittle laugh. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe we just did that.” He gave me a brotherly punch on the arm. I rubbed my shoulder and tried to slow my breathing.
“Well, you said you wanted me to be more adventurous.”
I heard the APC’s engine start up, the sound amplified by the narrow confines and concrete walls of the Burrow. The security troops were leaving.
“What now?”
The sleeve of Michael’s parka had caught on something during our mad dash, and had ripped almost from shoulder to wrist. Grey tufts of man-made insulation fibre fluffed from the wound. He picked at it. “We get out of here as quickly as we can. All that gunfire’s bound to have woken half the block.”
“Do we go back the way we came?”
“No, the patrol might still be waiting for us. We’ll have to go on through and find an exit on the other side.”
Gaunt figures moved in the darkness. The inhabitants were stirring, aware of our presence.
I made a face. “Is that such a good idea?”
“It’s better than getting shot. Now, come on.”
* * *
“Hey, Mikey, wait up!” I stumbled forward in my brother’s wake. Right now, home seemed further away than ever. Beneath my parka, the shiny man-made fabric shirt scratched at my armpits and collarbone. The passage was leading us deeper and deeper into the bowels of the Burrow. The walls were coarse and damp. Sometimes, we glimpsed pale faces and glittering eyes. We heard footsteps stalking us, and heard whispers from above and to the sides. Water dripped. My wet boots crunched over broken splinters of glass and sloshed through dank pools. In places, I had to duck under scaffolding poles and ragged curtains of plastic tarpaulin. At one point, we passed an open stairwell, which brought echoing voices from the floors above, its walls dancing with the flickering shadows cast by rag fires lit for warmth.
“Wait.” I needed to catch my breath. Ahead, Michael slowed. We came to a standstill at a place where the corridor widened into the base of a hexagonal shaft. The shaft seemed to be some sort of air well. Its smooth sides led upwards, through seven storeys, to a grating on the roof, allowing frigid night air to filter down through the fetid, stale fug of dampness and smoke. An inch of dirty water covered the floor. Steam hissed from heating ducts. I bent forward with my hands on my knees. My chest heaved.
Michael came back and touched my shoulder. “How are you doing? Are you okay?”
The water at our feet stank. I wrinkled my nose and bit back the first reply that came to mind. Shaking away his hand, I straightened up.
“Of course I’m not okay. Look at me. Do I look okay to you?” My boots were ruined and would cost every penny I had saved to replace. I couldn’t go scavenging barefoot. “Why does it have to be so wet in here, anyway?” Angrily, I kicked at the fusty water. “Why can’t it all just fuc—”
I broke off. In the time it took me to close my mouth, the water had completely drained from sight, soaking into the floor as if sucked down into a sponge. The drops raised by my kick spattered down onto suddenly dry ground.
Michael gave a small, surprised grunt. “That was weird.”
I frowned. “Yeah.” My gloved palms tingled. I squeezed my hands into fists and shoved them back into the pockets of my coat. My feet were still squelchingly wet, but now they were standing on the bare, dry Plate. Michael looked at me, eyes wide.
“Where did it go?”
I gave the floor an experimental tap with my toe. “I’ve no idea. Maybe there’s a drain?” I straightened up and looked around at the dripping walls of the hexagonal chamber. “I wish we’d never come here.”
Michael put his hands on his hips. “So, it’s all my fault, is it?”
I looked up at the tiny patch of sky, high above. “That’s not what I meant.”
“But it’s what you were thinking, right?”
I raised my eyebrows in exasperation. “No.”
“Liar. You always blame me.”
“I do not.”
“Yeah?” Michael crossed his arms. “What about that party over in Reed Block last year? And the Leicester twins, remember them?”
I tried to push past him. “We haven’t got time for this now. We need to find a way out.”
Michael scowled. “Okay, but don’t forget, it was you who ran from that patrol. It’s your fault they were shooting at us. If I hadn’t pulled you in here you’d be under arrest right now, or dead. Just for once, I got us out of trouble, and I think you could at least say thank you.”
Movement caught my eye: beyond my half-brother’s shoulder, in the corridor beyond the air well, armoured figures were approaching.
“Trust me,” I said, “this time you’ve really dumped us in it.”
Instinctively, I reached up to cover the chain at my throat. Frowning, Michael turned to follow my gaze, and stiffened as three armed and padded security troopers stepped into the air well. Without a word, they fanned out, spreading around the walls to surround us.
“There you are,” the leader said in a thick accent. With his armour and equipment, he seemed to fill the space. He pulled his gas mask down so it hung around his neck, and looked us up and down with slow insolence.
“Now we have you.” He gave a low, phlegm-rattling chuckle. “Nowhere for you to run, eh?”
I clung to Michael’s arm.
“No, please,” I said. The Burrow had been frightening, but I’d been willing to risk its damp floors and desperate inhabitants in order to avoid arrest. To go through all of that and still get caught seemed grossly unfair.
The security trooper’s dry, peeling lips split apart in an incomplete leer.
“Don’t start begging yet, girlie. You don’t know what we want.”
Michael stepped in front of me. “And what do you want?”
A thick moustache crouched like an animal on the man’s upper lip, and sharp black bristles darkened his chin. “First, you give us all your money.”
“And then we’re free to go?”
The man shook his head. Behind him, one of the other troopers snickered. “Then you give us coats, any jewellery.” The man reached up to smooth his unshaven jaw. “As sign of good faith.”
My mouth went dry. Michael said, “And if we refuse?”
From the pocket of his jacket, the man drew an old, rusty screwdriver. The tip had been sharpened to a wicked point. “Then I kill you both. Take your stuff. Make it look like street gang.”
I tightened my grip on my brother’s sleeve. My palms itched, and I couldn’t tear my eyes from the makeshift weapon. To either side, the other cops giggled childishly.
“What do we do?” I hissed.
“What do you think?” Michael used his teeth to pull off a glove. He unzipped his parka and reached into the inside pocket. Slowly, he took out his credit disk and dropped it at the man’s feet. The trooper snatched it up with a grunt of satisfaction, and then thrust his chin at me.
“Now you, too.”
Hands shaking, I removed my gloves. As I did so, the trooper let out a cry. He waved the screwdriver at my throat. “Give me chain.”
I shook my head. “No, please. Not that.”
“Give it to me!” His hand reached for me. I flinched backwards and collided with one of the troopers behind me. Rough faux-leather gloves clamped my upper arms. I caught a whiff of old sweat, gun oil, and onion breath.
Michael cried, “No, leave her alone!”
Without taking his eyes from my necklace, the leader let fly with a vicious backhanded swipe that caught Michael across the lips and knocked him to his knees. “Shut up, boy.”
The man stepped closer, and pressed the screwdriver to the side of my cheek. The improvised blade felt cold and smelled of rust. The handle was dark and flaky with dried blood.
“Give to me.”
I swallowed. The itch flared in my palms. “Get away from me.” My voice shook. My hands burned as if cradling dry ice, and a hurricane roared through my head.
The trooper laughed over the top of his dangling gas mask. “Too late, girlie. First, I take your chain, and then I take your money. Then we leave you here.” He gave a leer. “Teach you not to break curfew. Now, give me chain, yes?”
My head felt ready to explode. I moaned to relieve the pressure, and the trooper stepped back, momentarily startled by the sound.
“Be quiet. Nobody will help you.”
I ignored him. Something seemed to be welling up inside me, bubbling up through my feet and crackling into every nerve ending and cell. Talons of pain raked the insides of my skull. The ground shook and the building started to split open. Chunks of masonry fell like rain; pipes burst; electrical cables were yanked from their mountings, showering sparks. The troopers started to shout—
A gunshot rang out.
I blinked. The fury inside me calmed. In the sudden echoing silence, nobody moved.
A woman stepped into the clearing. Her features were sharp, as if hacked out of flint, and she wore a set of faded grey ship fatigues. Behind her, a tall young man with dreadlocks covered us all with a menacing Hooper gun.
“All right, that’s enough.” The woman’s voice was hard, used to obedience. “The next person to move will be mopping their guts from the wall.”
She walked around the edge of the air well until she came to a halt beside me, hands clasped behind her back.
“Cordelia Pa?”
“Yes?”
“Good.” She gave a curt nod, as if in acknowledgement of a box being ticked. “We’ve been tracking you for the last couple of hours. My name’s Lomax. You need to come with me. But first…” She turned to the troopers. “Have you fucks ever seen what a Hooper gun can do to a human body? No? Well, if you’re not out of here in ten seconds, I’ll ask Spider here to give you a demonstration. Right, Spider?”
Gold teeth flashed as the young man raised the weapon in both hands. “Hell yeah.”
For a moment, the troopers stood frowning. They weren’t used to being ordered around by civilians. Spider flicked a switch on the side of the gun and it started to emit a rising whine. The two at the back wavered. Then, as the whine approached a deafening crescendo, their leader’s nerve broke, and all three tried to flee. They crashed against each other in the narrow doorway, hampered by their armour, their victims forgotten.
The woman watched them go with a smile of cold satisfaction.
Crouching beside me, Michael shook me by the shoulder. We were both covered in grit and plaster dust.
“Oh, Cordelia. Thank God. I thought—” Unable to speak, he rocked back on his heels. “I thought—”
I coughed. I felt drained and empty. “What happened?”
“You tell me!” We were still in the hexagonal air well, at the centre of the slum. “What was that, Cordelia? That shaking. What happened?”
I put a hand to my forehead; my skin was clammy. My breath came like mist in the night air, and my insides felt hollow and cold. Above us, the building had split open all the way to the top. Steam hissed from broken pipes. Cold water sprayed from a severed tap, pattering down like rain onto the rubble.
“I don’t know.” I had impressions, blurred fragments of pain and anger, but when I tried to focus on them they skittered away. My head ached. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“Just—” Michael broke off, eyes wide. “Cordelia, your hands!”
Looking down, I saw my fingertips glowing softly, like the last charred embers of a dying fire—as if the bones smouldered beneath the skin. I turned my hands over and over, frowning.
Police sirens wailed on the far side of the ruined Burrow. The frightened troopers had summoned reinforcements. I curled my hands into fists and pushed them into my pockets, and met Michael’s wide-eyed gawp with a glare. Before I could tell him to keep his mouth shut, Lomax bent down and hauled at my arm.
“Come on, we have to move.” She helped me upright and we set off as quickly as we could, Michael following, the gangly young man called Spider bringing up the rear. My hands wouldn’t stop trembling, and I kept stumbling over my own feet. I tried to look back over my shoulder. “Did something explode?”
Lomax pulled me forwards, not breaking step. “Damned if I know. Felt like an earthquake to me. But I’m just here to take you to the port. We can talk more when we get there.”
“The port?”
We emerged onto the street. The sirens were louder out here.
“Come with me.” With her hand on my elbow, the woman led me back down the block, to a delivery van parked by the kerb.
“Get in.”
I shook her off. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere safe. Now, please, both of you get in.” She opened the passenger side door and pushed me into the cab. Michael climbed into the back with Spider.
“Keep your heads down,” Lomax warned, “in case we run into a patrol.”
* * *
She took us to the spaceport, and out onto the apron.
“Hey.” Michael leaned forward between the front seats. “I know that ship. We saw it land.”
I followed his outstretched hand. A ship sat on the concrete a few dozen metres to our right, and I recognised the yellow and black stripes around its stern.
Hauling on the control column, Lomax brought us to a halt beside it, in the shadow of its furled wing.
“Welcome to the Gigolo Aunt,” she said. She killed the engine and climbed out, hurrying around the van’s chrome grille to open my door. “Come on, we have to leave.”
She helped me down, and I stood squinting in the harsh glare of the overhead arc lamps. I’d never seen a ship this big up close before, and its sheer scale was almost overwhelming. I’d been expecting it to be around the same size as the passenger shuttle that had ferried Michael and me to City Plate Two all those years ago, but this beast was easily four times the height and length of those little inter-Plate hoppers. Resting on its belly, the ship looked like a building tipped over on its side. Aside from the stripes, the hull plates were an industrial grey. At the front, the bow tapered to a blunt snout, where someone had stencilled its name. Warning decals surrounded its engines and airlocks. Sensor pods stuck out like oddly spaced whiskers.
“Leave. Come on, it’s all arranged.”
I pulled back. “You mean—?”
“I need to keep you safe, Cordelia. And right now, the only safe place is away from here, around another star.”
“You are joking. There’s no way—”
“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice. After tonight, the police will be looking for you and your brother, and there are only so many places on this Plate you can hide.”
I looked up at the ship’s black mesh wings, which swept high into the air, glinting dully in the orange wash of the arc lamps.
“What do you even want with me?”
“We’ll tell you more once you’re aboard—come on.”
“But I can’t leave. My uncle—”
“I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
Ahead the ship’s airlock gaped: a welcoming circle of yellow light set into the hull’s dull exterior. Lomax hurried me towards it.
“I can’t go.”
“We’re all going. Now, get on board.” She chivvied me into the confined space. Spider still had the Hooper gun cradled in his rangy arms. He looked me up and down, and raised an eyebrow.
“She looks younger than I thought.” He had an unfamiliar, off-Plate accent, and his short, thin dreadlocks spiked from his head like a spider’s legs. He turned his gaze to Michael. “And I thought there was only supposed to be one of them?”
They both looked at Michael, who paled visibly and drew back, as if afraid of the light spilling from the lock. Lomax scowled. “Get in, kid.” She reached for him, but he took a couple of steps backwards.
“No, I can’t. I won’t.” He held up his hands to ward her off.
I tried to reach him, but Spider’s long fingers closed around my upper arm.
“Sorry, love,” he rumbled. “You’re staying here. We need you with us.”
“But he’s my brother!”
Beside me, Lomax swore under her breath. “We don’t want you,” she said to Michael. “We just want her. If you want to come, that’s fine. But you need to decide, right now.”
I caught my half-brother’s eye. His face shone pale in the overhead lights.
“I can’t do it.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “I’m sorry, Cord.”
I couldn’t believe it. Mikey was the one who wanted to get away. He’d always been the dreamer. Now here he was, about to be handed everything he’d ever wanted, and he was chickening out? Suddenly, all his big talk meant nothing, and I finally saw the scared little boy that had always been hiding behind all his bluster.
Lomax took a deep breath, and seemed to come to a decision of her own. “Catch.” She flipped a credit disk at him. He caught it by reflex.
“There’s five hundred on there,” she said. “It should keep you going for a while. And you can keep the van.”
Michael’s eyes widened. They kept darting from the disk to me.
“I’m sorry, Cordelia.”
“Mikey?” The port lights blurred and swam as tears filled my eyes.
“I can’t do it.”
I just wanted to grab hold of him. “But this is all you’ve ever talked about.”
“I know.” He sniffed, and wiped his nose on the cuff of his torn parka. “And I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.” He climbed into the van. I called after him, but he didn’t look back. He grabbed the steering column and the engine whined into life. Then, tears streaming down his cheeks, he pulled away. Struggling to breathe, I watched his tail lights racing for the gate.
“No, that’s not right.” I struggled against Spider’s grip. “He can’t. He wouldn’t—” My fingers prickled. Little pins seemed to be stabbing the pads. I wanted to reach out and haul him back, but it was too late. The van disappeared into the dockside tangle of containers and cranes, and I lost sight of it.
All the air seemed to drain out of me. Spider gave my arm a tug, and, too stunned to resist, I let him lead me into the waiting hatchway.
“We’ve got a full hold and we’re good to go. Welcome aboard, kid. Make yourself at home.”
Lomax looked down at me. “Are you okay?”
I shook my head, and turned to look back across the landing apron, towards the perimeter fence and the city beyond.
“I can’t leave him, not like this.” Something seemed to be tearing within me. A million tiny hooks were slowly, agonisingly ripping my heart and stomach.
“You don’t have any choice,” Lomax said.
“But why?”
“I told you. You’re important.”
I turned on her. “But, Mikey—”
“We’ll do what we can. Once you’re safe, we’ll see about sending some more money.”
Beside us, the gold-toothed man scratched his ear. “Do we have a problem here?”
Lomax held up a hand. “Everything’s fine, Spider. Could you just give us a minute?”
The man made a show of contemplating the Hooper gun in his arms. Then he smiled, letting the overhead light play across his gleaming dentures. “Sure thing, compañero.” He opened the inner lock and slouched through into the ship’s echoing interior. “But don’t take too long. Gant says wheels up in two, whether we’re ready or not.”
After he had gone, Lomax touched me on the sleeve. “I promise we’ll do everything we can.”
I shook her off. “But I don’t understand why you’re doing any of this. I’m nobody special. What do you want from me?”
“I’m taking you to see an old friend of mine,” Lomax said. A red warning light began to flash on the ceiling. With a metallic groan, the outer airlock door started to hinge shut. “An old and dear friend.”
I took a last despairing look through the narrowing gap at the city I’d called home for the vast majority of my life.
“What ‘old friend’?”
Lomax lowered her eyes. “Your father.”
With a final, heavy ker-thunk the airlock sealed itself, cutting me off from City Plate Two and everything I’d ever known. Engine noise came from astern, vibrations shaking the deck beneath my feet. In a glass panel on the wall behind Lomax’s shoulder, I caught the reflection of my own face: spiky white hair, odd eyes, cheeks streaked with plaster dust and dried blood. I put out a hand to steady myself, quite sure I’d misheard.
“My father?”
Before Lomax could elaborate, a warning klaxon blared through the ship’s corridors.
“Come on,” she said. She took my hand and guided me to a cramped passenger compartment with half a dozen rows of seats. She helped me strap into the scuffed padding of a chair in the second row, fastening the harness with a metallic snap. As she took her own seat the deck trembled, and I gripped the armrests.
“I can’t go.” Suddenly, my heart tripped like a hammer. Butterflies swirled in my chest. The room smelled of cheap plastic seat covers.
“We don’t have a choice, either of us.”
A small screen lit in the headrest of the chair in front, displaying a view of the landing field. The hull rang with audible clangs as fuel lines and air hoses disengaged and withdrew, slithering back into recesses in the apron’s tarmac. Hydrazine vapour caught the light, streaming from thrusters on the ship’s belly.
“Lift in ten,” a croaky voice intoned. I looked in vain for a glimpse of Michael, but he and the truck were long gone.
“Please—”
The older woman shook her head. “Too late now.”
The deck trembled again, and the cabin walls groaned. The view on the screen in front shuddered. The noise of the engines increased until it was a gut-shaking roar, and the old ship wobbled into the air.
* * *
The Gigolo Aunt went up like an elevator. It ascended until it was a hundred metres above the spaceport, and then paused. I saw the oversized alien buildings of the city laid out in their concentric squares; and beyond them, at the point where the streets simply petered out, the rim of the Plate itself; the edge of my world, with nothing to stop the unwary literally falling out of the world, into the stars beyond and below. The sight opened a hollow pit in my stomach. I’d been kind of lost my whole life; poor, orphaned, alienated from the other kids by odd looks, having to scrabble an existence on the edge of the city. Now even that was being taken away.
Beside me, Lomax said, “This is for the best, you know.”
“How can you say that?”
“Just trust me.”
“But you mentioned my father—?”
“This is his ship.”
The Gigolo Aunt tipped back on its stern, aiming its nose at the stars, and I frowned.