MICHAEL PA
As Doberman and I hauled our sled into the city, the street globes seemed to brighten with each step we took, and the shadows between the buildings shrank back, becoming smaller and more insubstantial. We were following an established route, which had been mapped out and used by previous expeditions. Nevertheless, the going had been frustratingly slow. The sled was awkward, and the wheels kept getting caught in cracks and ruts, which meant we had to make frequent stops in order to free them.
During one such break, while I jostled the front wheels loose from a wedge-shaped fissure between two halves of a fallen stone, Doberman unclipped his harness.
“Let’s take five.” His bald head glittered with perspiration. He pulled a metal canteen from his belt and glugged some water.
The wheel freed, I straightened up with my hands pressed to my aching lower spine and looked back the way we’d come. Behind us, the streets were empty. We had stopped in a wide avenue, with two thoroughfares separated by a low, narrow barrier. Patches of soil had been sunk into the top of the barrier at intervals, and might have once housed decorative plants—although now all that remained were weeds.
I didn’t bother unhitching my straps. Instead, I stood where I was and considered the wide fronts of the buildings on either side. None of the walls looked entirely straight. The angles were all wrong. They had strange kinks in them. Some of the buildings leant forward, over the street; others tilted backwards or to the side. They had wide front windows and tall open doorways. If this had been a human city, you could almost imagine they were shopfronts, but what they might have sold was anybody’s guess.
“You know what I don’t get?” I stamped my boots on the floor. “How my feet can be cold and sweat at the same time.”
Doberman sniffed. He quite obviously didn’t care what I thought about anything, least of all my feet. His pale, suspicious eyes were on the street ahead.
“If I’m right, that building over there—” He pointed to a tower emerging from behind the buildings on our right. “—is the one we’re after. If we can find a way through these houses here, it’ll lead us straight into the tower and save us having to walk a couple of kilometres to the intersection at the end of this street before doubling back.”
I cracked my knuckles. The street globes in this part of town worked as well as anywhere else, but the air seemed colder than usual. My breath came in wisps.
“That’ll slow us up. We might try a dozen doors before we find the right one.”
“And we might find the right one first time.” The other man’s lip curled. “Unless you’re scared?”
I narrowed my eyes at his bantering tone. “Shut up, Doberman.”
“Really? Are you feeling brave all of a sudden?” Doberman was enjoying this. “Because I heard you bottled it at the spaceport and sold those slavers your sister.”
“Slavers?”
“Yeah.” A leer. “They paid you for Cordelia. Took her off with them. Probably sold her at the first world they came to.”
I bunched my fists. “You shut your face.”
Doberman chuckled. “Hey, it’s no business of mine how you make your money. The only reason you’re here now is that you know the city, and you know when to keep your mouth shut.”
I turned back to the sled. With rough jerks, I tightened the payload straps. “You always were a cocksucker, Doberman. Even when we were kids.”
“Fuck you, Pa.” Doberman’s smile dropped. He became serious. “Think about this, though. How many kids did we know when we were growing up? We all wanted to be scavengers, all of us. Fuck knows, there weren’t a lot of other options. But how many of us are still here, still doing it? Stinky Ben lost a leg over in the Green Zone. Mel and Zack disappeared. Jon got shot…”
Straps fastened, I looked up. “What are you saying?”
Doberman gave a sneaky, sideways look. “That you and me, we got the smarts those guys never had. And this scheme, this scheme is going to make us rich.”
“If Brandt doesn’t kill us.”
Doberman waved me off. “Brandt won’t even know about it. He’ll think we came back empty-handed. We’ll even act all disappointed and shit. And then, when things have cooled off, we’ll come back and ‘strike it rich’.”
“If there’s even anything to find.”
“Of course there will be. You know that as well as I do, or you wouldn’t be here.” He tapped a finger to his temple. “Smart, see. Same as me.”
A rising whine echoed between the buildings. Doberman’s brow bunched into an indignant Neanderthal frown.
“A flyer?”
Stupidly, my brain refused to believe the evidence of my own ears. Intellectually, I knew there weren’t any flyers on City Plate Two. Security didn’t have any; all they had were those clunky APCs.
I saw Doberman flee for the nearest shopfront, heavy bulk moving with surprising grace, feet slapping the road.
“Run, Pa!”
Still tethered to the sled, I wasted a few precious seconds fumbling for the harness release. The crossbows were on the other side of the sled—on Doberman’s side—and I didn’t have time to go around to get them. Instead, as soon as I’d unclipped, I turned and ran in the opposite direction, my boots stomping and slithering on the cracked surface of the street.
Behind me, the flyer rose above the rooftops. Glancing back, I could clearly see two figures strapped into the cockpit’s transparent bubble. The one on the left was the pilot; the one on the right held a long-barrelled rifle with a telescopic sight. As I watched, the man leant sideways out of the flyer’s open hatch and took a shot. The bullet whined past and smacked off the road surface a couple of metres from my feet. I didn’t stop to wait for another one. Instead, I flung myself full-length into the nearest building.
I rolled across the floor and lay gasping in the darkness as the flyer passed overhead, its downward jets kicking dust and grit through the empty doorway. The walls of the room were bare, with no other doors or windows, and therefore no back way out. Shards of ancient, broken pottery covered the floor. A five-legged stool lay overturned in one corner. Tapering black spikes dangled from the ceiling, all different lengths. When I had my breath back, I rolled onto my front and elbow-crawled to the door. Bits of shattered ceramics dug into my arms and chest. If the flyer landed, I would be trapped. They had me cornered.
Risking a peek outside, I saw Doberman’s face peering back from the shadow of a glassless window on the opposite side of the street. I couldn’t see the flyer, but I could hear it wheeling around overhead, trying to find an angle of attack.
Across the street, Doberman pointed upwards and mouthed something, but I couldn’t make it out.
“I can’t hear you,” I yelled. The air around me smelled vaguely spicy, like the ghost of a long-vanished curry house.
The other man flinched and put his finger to his lips. I laughed at him. “They can’t hear anything over the sound of that engine.”
Doberman scowled.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“How would I know?”
A shadow passed over the road between us and I recoiled back into the gloom, away from the light of the street globes. The people in the flyer must have seen which doorway I’d leapt through; but maybe they didn’t know that it led nowhere. If I stayed out of sight, they might start to widen the parameters of their search, in the assumption I’d be trying to get away through the rear of the building.
It was a slim hope, but I clung to it.
A flyer could cover a lot of ground quickly—in fact, it could probably fly from one edge of the Plate to the other in a few minutes—but it couldn’t get down into the nooks and crannies, the guts of the city. While you couldn’t hope to outrun one on foot, you might still hope to evade it by losing yourself in the narrow alleys and crawl spaces of the alien buildings.
If only I could get out of this room…
I rubbed my face with my hands. What would Cordelia do? She’d always been the cleverer one. I’d been good at ploughing ahead, regardless of risk; but she’d been the voice of reason, the one at the back with the calm analysis of any situation. What she’d said to me in the Burrow had been true: I had a knack for trouble. I always had. But as fast as I could land us in it, she’d always been able to find a way out again. All those years, we’d been a team. Her caution had been the perfect foil for my recklessness. And it was recklessness, not courage. Lying here in the dust and smashed crockery of a darkened storeroom, I knew that now. The two were very different qualities. A courageous man wouldn’t have let his sister go off with strangers. When it had really mattered, when she’d really needed me, I’d let her down and run away.
On the other side of the street, Doberman’s face skulked at his window. The door of the building next to his looked to contain a stairwell that led up to the building’s higher floors, and maybe even into the tower that had been our objective. If Cordelia were here, she’d be telling me to stay hidden, to keep low and wait for the danger to pass. It was good advice, I knew—but this was a lousy hiding place. If I wanted to go to ground, I needed to find a better bolthole, preferably one with a back door, and those stairs were the best option I had right now. But could I reach them without getting shot? I’d have to cross this carriageway and vault the barrier in the middle. It would help if I knew where the flyer was. I could hear its fans whining but just couldn’t see it.
“Hey, Doberman!”
“What?”
“I’m going to run for it.” I pulled myself up into a crouch, feet ready to propel me out into the light and dust.
“Don’t be an idiot. That’s just what they’re waiting for.”
“Can you distract them?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“I’m not sticking my head out.” Doberman’s voice had lost some of its usual bluster. “Not for you, not for anyone.”
I bit back the curses that sprang to my lips. Instead, I flexed my fists and thought of my sister. “Okay, fine. Can you just tell me where they are?”
The face at the window bobbed around, trying to squint upwards. “Yeah, I got them.”
“Where are they?”
“Three buildings down, on your side. Level with the third floor.”
“What are they doing?”
“Oh shit, I think they’re getting ready to land.”
I cursed under my breath. It was now or never. If they caught me in this room, I’d have nowhere to hide. I’d be a fish in a barrel.
The noise of the flyer’s engines changed in pitch. I shifted position, bracing my feet against the floor like a sprinter waiting for the off. I couldn’t afford to slip; I’d only get one chance at this.
“They’re coming down,” Doberman called.
My tongue felt drier than the dust in the street. “Tell me when they’re about to touch.” If I timed it just right, the pilot and the gunman would be preoccupied with landing, and that might give me half a second’s grace. The dust thrown up by the flyer’s engines might buy me half a second more.
“Touching down now.” Doberman started counting off. “Three. Two—”
I threw myself forward, willing my legs to push harder than ever before, and burst out into the bright light of the street globes, feet pounding the road surface, arms pumping, cold air wheezing in my lungs. I didn’t look towards the flyer. I kept everything focused on the stairs ahead. If there were shots, I didn’t hear them. My ears were filled with the roar of my breath and the thump of my pulse.
I crossed the first carriageway in four strides, leapt the central divide, and landed on one foot. For an instant, I thought I was going to fall on my face. Then the other leg hit, and I was running again. I passed the sled, trying to keep as low to the ground as possible, and tumbled headlong through the open doorway, onto the stairs.
Each stair was half a metre in height, making them impossible to run up, but I did my best and collapsed onto the landing at the top, wheezing breathlessly, the cold air having scoured my lungs.
For almost a minute I lay gasping, trying to catch my breath. I felt sick with adrenalin, but it was a giddy and elated kind of sickness. I laughed. I’d outpaced death. There was no high older or purer than that.
But I wasn’t safe yet.
With the flyer on the ground, the crew would be coming after me, and both would be armed. I reached into my coat pocket and squeezed my fist around the penknife that had given so much comfort at the outset of this stupid expedition. Now, against automatic weapons, it seemed worse than useless. I thought longingly of the crossbows on the sled but, as I had no way to reach them, they might as well have been sitting on another Plate altogether.
Having no weapons, I would have to rely on my ability to run and hide. Beyond the landing where I lay, the high stairs continued upwards, spiralling from floor to floor. Limbs shaking from the run, I dragged myself upright, and continued to climb.