alt.human (20 page)

“!¡
authority
¡! That way’s out,” I said to Hope, pointing to the right. “Go! Follow that person ahead – see?”

Then I turned the other way. I had to find out what was happening to my sibs.

I ran round a corner and up a few steps and emerged onto an open, low-ceilinged area.

I stopped. From here I could see up another flight of steps to the terrace. The doorway was packed solid with bodies, so dense that only a little light seeped in from outside. Some of the bodies had tumbled forward, down the steps. Some even still moved.

All were coated in seething, crawling black.

I backed away, and realised then that Hope had come with me.

I turned, and she just stood there staring.

She had a blemish on her left cheek. A mark. A small black patch, like a blob of tar.

“!¡
alarm | fear
¡!” I clicked.

I stepped towards her, hooked my fist into an open claw and scraped it down her cheek, feeling my nails raking through flesh, my fingers slick with blood.

The black lump burned like hot fat. It seethed in my grip, that small knot of bugs.

I hurled it away from me but some stuck and I felt them going to work on my hand, skin and flesh dissolving.

I dropped to my knees and ground my hand into the rock floor.

The bugs were tiny fleshy things. They squashed easily, bursting red with our blood inside them.

I looked up and now Hope was clawing at her cheek.

I ripped my shirt off, balled it over my fist and scrubbed at Hope’s face, squashing the bugs into her flesh, rubbing them away. The shirt began to disintegrate as the bugs started to digest it, but it was enough to get rid of most of them, and Hope’s clawing, rubbing hands removed the rest.

For the second time, we collapsed into each other’s arms. Her face was a mess of blood, hers and mine, the flesh on one cheek shredded. As I held her, she wriggled a hand free and raked at her face again.

I clung on tight, trying to stop her from tearing herself to pieces, and suddenly she slumped and I thought she had fainted but her eyes were still wide, staring, lost. I didn’t know at that time about the voices in her head, but they were a screaming cacophony just then, bellowing and shrill, and while she knew moving would calm them, she had no strength, and her legs were like drinking straws, and it was all she could do to hold herself upright against me, and all I could do to hold myself upright against the cold marble wall behind me.

We were snapped out of our shock by a sudden surge from the roof terrace steps as bodies shifted, settled, and a collection of bones that had once been a body, or bodies, fell clattering to the ground. As I watched, the mass of what had once been human shifted and fell, tumbling down into the open area where we stood. The bones shattered on impact with the hard ground, and a cloud of white dust rose into the air; a twisting, swirling mass, swarming with black flies, hungry for more.

Suddenly alive again, I pushed away from the wall, took Hope’s hand in my wounded one and headed deep into the nest.

We passed through passageways worn smooth with use, through rough-walled caves, deep into the heart of the crags that ran through Cragside Ipp.

All the time, Hope clung to my hand, until finally I had to stop and prise it free and swap sides so that she could hold my undamaged one.

Later, we emerged in Villa Virtue, the clan’s main nest. In the main communal area, people sat around in clusters. Sol sat with Divine and Ruth, staring into space while the two of them talked in a low mutter. A couple of black-laced members of Frankhay’s militia sat at a bench, a teenaged boy tending to the girl’s wounded arm, which was swollen and purple, with a big red welt on the forearm. I learned later that she had been accidentally stung by one of the joeys as it went down under a mass of bugs. Hope caught the wounded girl’s eye and nodded, and now I finally had time to wonder what Hope’s role had been in all of this. Was she with Frankhay? She was dressed like them, and I’d seen her with them when I’d gone on my mission to the Loop; she’d come here to Cragside with their attack. She didn’t act like she was with them, though.

In all, there were sixteen of us, all survivors from Villa Mart Three.

I slumped down at a bench, just as Jemerie came over with a bowl of something. “!¡
control | authority
¡! Sit tight while I see to that injury,” he told me. He swabbed at my hand with a cloth dipped into what turned out to be icy cold water infused with healing herbs.

I’d been lucky. When the blood and loose skin was cleaned away, my hand was just raw and sore. The bugs hadn’t eaten me to the bone; my hand would recover. “!¡
shock
¡! What
were
those things?” I said softly.

“!¡
restrained
anger
¡! Living weapons,” said Divine, coming to stand by me. “Simple to breed, programmable so they can be set on specific targets. Note they didn’t follow us through from the Mart: they must have had some kind of boundary programmed in so that they don’t destroy everything. It’s like Callo told us: exactly what happened in Angiere.”

“They did worse in Angiere,” said Hope, her voice small. “I... I was there. I saw it all.”

Jemerie went to her then. She seemed to be in shock. And her face... The bugs had eaten away her left cheek, through to the jaw. No wonder her voice had sounded so weak! She could barely open her mouth to speak.

I looked around again.

It appeared that Hope and I had been the last to escape through the caves.

“!¡
shock
¡! Is this it?” I asked. “Is this all of us?”

That was when the Loop girl with the wounded arm spoke up. “!¡
cautious
¡! Some as got out on the pads,” she said.

I recalled seeing the joeys trying to escape on the float-pads, most of them shot down by the troopship. “Did any get clear?” I asked.

The girl nodded. “!¡
reporting
¡! Frankhay did. I sees ’im out well clear. ’Im an’ Buller was clear. Couple a joeys, too. Dunnat know as any else.”

N
O ONE WANTED
to remain in the nest that night. Villa Mart Three was too fresh in our memories.

When it was suggested that we sleep in the strip of parkland by the river known as the Hangings, mine was the one voice of dissent. I remembered our search for Skids on Riverside, the grunts rounding up the homeless, trooping them into those trucks... While it made sense to get away from the nest, the streets of Laverne were unlikely to be any safer. I turned to Sol for support during the debate, but she was still in shock, staring and muttering and no use to anyone. Everyone else was for it, so I stopped arguing.

We sat around for a time before anyone made a move to leave. I think we were all in a state of shock. We had heard the stories of what had happened elsewhere, but Hope was the only one among us who had actually seen this kind of attack before. I think that up until that day, we had still believed that Angiere was a distant place and this could not possibly happen in Laverne.

I sat with Hope, while Jemerie applied a dressing to her ruined face.

“!¡
probing
¡! So what’s your part in all this?” I asked her. “You turn up in Precept Square with no pids, you’re there with Frankhay’s mob at the Loop, you’re part of their raid... What’s going on? !¡
pressing
¡! Who
are
you?”

She looked at me, and after a time said, “You saved me. You made me Reed Trader. But... that’s who Frankhay is: his real name is Reed Trader. He made me tell him what you did. You saved me, but I betrayed you. I had to come. I had to do something.”

It all fell into place: the things Frankhay had said up on the roof terrace, his anger; suddenly there was a reason for his raid. I cursed my own sloppiness, then. I should have checked the background of the stolen pids before using them. Hope blamed herself, but it was my fault, not hers.

I squeezed her hand and said, “!¡
sympathy
¡! It’s okay.” Then I nodded towards the dressing on her face. “Does that hurt?”

She nodded. Her eyes were loaded with tears.

I closed my eyes briefly, and instantly flashed back to Villa Mart Three, the wall of bug-tarred, disintegrating bodies surging down the steps from the terrace. I felt sick, just thinking of what we had so narrowly escaped, and of what had happened to so many people I knew and loved.

As I say, I think we were all in shock then, each in our own particular mix of pain and fear and flashback and numbness.

W
E WENT TO
the Hangings as evening descended, and saw that someone had lit a fire. A small group huddled around it, fending off the chill of the late summer evening.

It took me a while to recognise one of them as Skids.

At first he was just another one of the dossers, a blanket pulled around his shoulders, his face buried in his knees. He could have been anybody.

We settled among the trees nearby, and none of the clanless around the fire looked up. I kept glancing across at them, partly curious, partly wary – we might seem like easy pickings to them, in our shocked, broken state.

After a time Skids raised his head. Maybe he recognised a voice; maybe he’d been lost in some reverie and had only just come back to awareness.

He glanced across at our group and I saw a scattering of stars tattooed across his gaunt face.

I gasped, finally recognising my old nest-sib. I’d been convinced he must have been rounded up and loaded into one of those trucks, long before now. I’d been convinced I’d never see him again.

He caught my eye, nodded. That was all.

Wary, I moved to sit by him. “!¡
tentative
¡! Skids,” I said. Life hadn’t treated him well. He was skinny and pale and lost-looking; his hair was long, but thin; his eyes were sunken into their sockets. But he was
Skids
.

“!¡
cautious
¡! I came looking for you,” I said. “Before. I saw them rounding everyone up.” I flashed back to the watcher holding my head by a fistful of hair, making me watch the homeless being trooped into the trucks. Laughing at me. “They were killing them all. I thought you–”

“I saw,” said Skids simply. “I watched. I saw you there. I knew you would be back. The Singer of the Ways showed me your path.”

I wondered then if the sickness apparent in his body was also a sickness in his head. There was something missing from the Skids I had once known. I did not consider the possibility that there was something
more
.

“!¡
patient | concerned
¡! We’ve been attacked,” I told him. “Jersy and Madder were killed. Jacandra and Carille too. And Vechko, Meliss and Fairhead, before this. They raided the nest: watchers and their grunts.”

Skids nodded as if he already knew, although maybe he was just agreeing, encouraging me to go on.

“This is it now.” I spread my hands to indicate the small group of us. “We are what remains. They’ll be back. The watchers. They did this in Angiere, and now they’re doing it here.”

“What will you do?” asked Skids.

I shrugged. “!¡
uncertain
¡! If we stay, they’ll wipe us out,” I said. “All we can do is leave.” I remembered what Callo had once told me. “Maybe we’ll go east. There’s a place... Harmony. A place where we can be safe.”

“You know how to get there?” asked Skids. “You think you can do it?”

I shrugged again. I didn’t really see what alternative we had.

Then Skids surprised me. “I’m coming with you,” he said. “Our paths align. This is how our way has been sung.”

Chapter Seventeen

W
E SPENT THE
night underground, in the living, breathing guts of the city.

We’d been in the Hangings, the stretch of parkland by the river. I’d been reluctant to go there, but the others had argued we would be safer among the homeless. My fears were confirmed that night, when with a sudden, throbbing groan a troopship swung low over the trees.

We all looked around, not sure where to turn, and then Skids caught my eye, nodded towards the river and said, “!¡
reassuring
¡! Come. This way. Follow me.”

I nodded and he moved away. I went after him. The others in my small group hesitated, then one by one followed.

Skids clambered over the low wall by the river, onto the rocks. With one more glance back at me, he nodded and then ducked into the rocks and vanished.

I climbed carefully over to where he had been. There was a gap between the rocks, an opening. Some kind of drainage pipe.

“Bring a torch,” I called back to Jemerie; soon, the two of us squatted by that opening with a flaming torch lighting the way.

I ducked down and squeezed through the opening, the pipe’s walls slick against me, their surface ribbed. My feet were submerged in water and the air smelled of stagnant ditches and old latrines.

I took the torch from Jemerie and ventured further into the tunnel.

After its mouth, the drain opened out and soon I could stand upright. I looked more closely at the walls, then, and saw that its ribbed surface pulsed to an irregular beat.

I saw Skids, a dark shadow just ahead of me.

“!¡
hesitant | taken aback
¡! What
is
this?” I asked him.

“!¡
matter-of-fact
¡! The city’s drainage system,” he said.

“!¡
incredulous
¡! But... it’s alive.”

He nodded. “It is part of the All,” he said. “!¡
gentle
¡! We can be safe down here for the night. We have the protection of the All here.”

“!¡
URGENT
¡! W
E HAVE
to get out of Laverne,” I said to the small group gathered around the fire. “We can’t stay here, hiding in the guts of the city like this.”

Skids had helped us build the fire in a chamber deep in the city’s drains. The burning dispelled the bad air and the smoke was carried away through the network of tiny channels that branched off from our hiding place.