ARC: Peacemaker (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

Moonee was a tiny pocket of the city’s coastal mass that hadn’t been affected by the shift away from terraced hi-rise, hi-density living.

Other than some office clusters in what had been the old Central Business Districts of individual cities, Moonee was one of the few hi-rise residential builds left on the East Coast.

Of course the old CBDs didn’t exist anymore. Or at least, the buildings were still there but not as markers for individual downtown hearts. But Moonee had been built as a detention facility for illegal immigrants. When the city had subsumed the entire eastern landscape, the refugees had stayed on here, but the money for services had evaporated. Utilities were still extended to the area, but maintenance and policing were hit and miss.

It became a cauldron of cultural and spiritual splinter groups. Once you entered one of the terraced hi-rise buildings, there was no clear exit. Entire floors were taken over by factions, which meant that homemade stairs had been attached to the sides – none of them built to safety standards. Sometimes they were little more than a rope and some chinks in the wall.

More people died falling to their death in Moonee than from any kind of crime.

You had to know where you were going here; it was too easy to stumble onto the wrong level of a building and wind up assaulted and pushed out a window.

I didn’t know where Kadee Matari resided but I knew someone who could probably get word to her. Though I imagined that the moment we stepped over the crates in the alley, she’d known there were strangers in Moonee.

Sixkiller’s hyper-awareness had me on edge as we walked the almost empty street that ran between the dozen tenements. Up on the balls of his feet, fingers flicking at his sides, I sensed he was itching to pull his guns. Maybe he could feel the thousand eyes on us as well.

“Easy,” I said quietly.

“Where are we going?”

“Across the road. Tenement #4.”

The guy I wanted to see resided in the bottom floor in what had once been a foyer with reception desk and lift wells. Now it provided living and storage for a man who ran Moonee’s communication hub, selling access to the local CC network, and wireless Internet.

Which meant he already knew we were coming.

I crossed the empty street and stopped in front of a rectangular advertising sign covered by scratched plastic. The girl in her underwear had long brown hair and a coy look. I stared straight in her eyes. “It’s Ranger Jackson from Park South. I want a meeting with Kadee Matari.”

For a long, long moment there was no answer. Maybe he was out, maybe he’d died. Maybe someone else had taken over as gatekeeper and feed provider in Moonee.

I slipped my hand slipped inside my jacket and rested it on the butt of my pistol. Some movement in the undercroft of the opposite tenement caught my eye. A door opening perhaps.

“Welcome back, Virgin. I missed you,” said a deep, mellifluous voice emanating from around about the poster girl’s mouth.

“Can you help me Rombo?”

“I already have,” he said.

I heard Sixkiller’s quick intake of breath then felt the prickle of something sharp at my neck.

“Keep still,” said a clipped, foreign voice in my ear. I complied, hoping Sixkiller would do the same.

A hand fished inside my jacket and removed my gun. Then it propelled me sideways past Rombo’s foyer to the narrow conduit between building #4 and #5.

I found myself looking up at a gate and stairs made from steel rods of varying lengths. A rough spiral of wire circled around them like a cage.

“Climb,” said the voice again.

I angled my head and just enough to see that the man who had possession of my gun and held a long blade knife to my throat, had long hair, knotted at the base of his neck and a face pierced with gold chains.

Behind him, two men with similarly styled hair held guns at Sixkiller’s head. His holsters were empty and so was his expression. Something told me it was a look that might be dangerous.

“What about my colleague?” I asked.

“He stays. Insurance,” said my chaperon.

“Let me speak to him.”

The man nodded once and let me turn to look at Sixkiller. “Please just wait. I will be fine, but I need the bone feather.”

The Marshall moved his hand very slowly to his jacket. He withdrew the talisman and handed it to me.

I slipped it into my pocket and turned back, placing my foot on the first rung. “How far?”

“Until I say.”

I hated heights really. That is, I loved to stand on a mesa and watched the sunset and to climb the rock fingers of Los Tribos. But this kind of situation flat out turned my insides to shitty water
–
slippery foot pegs, barbed wire to catch me, and a weapon at my back.

Coward! I chided myself. This might lead you to Dad’s killer.

That thought alone got my legs working.

I concentrated on each step without looking down. My arms and legs burned with the effort and sweat blurred my vision. Slow, slow progress took me up past the fourth floor until the pegs literally ran out. The building ran ten or fifteen stories high at least but this particular stair case had run its course.

I looked straight ahead along the length of the wall and saw other stairs dotted across the width of the building. Not all of them reached the bottom or the top.

What kind of crazy system was this?

“What now?” I called back.

“Wait,” said my escort from below me. “Hold.”

I clung to the top peg and hunkered against the wall not sure what to expect.

A rope and hook flew past my face, lodging in the corner of an open window above us. The face-chain guy climbed over me, using my body for purchase and swung lightly through. A few seconds later a rope flew down and lassoed my shoulders.

He poked his head out. “Tighten at the waist.”

I did as I was bid.

“Now get your hands on the ledge and pull yourself in.”

I was neither agile nor imbued with killer arm strength but the threat of falling to my death proved a powerful motivator. I latched onto the ledge and heaved arse.

Between my desire to get off the ladder and the face-chain guy hauling the rope around my waist, I catapulted through the window in ugly but effective style.

It was hard to hide how hard I was trembling when I righted myself. I badly wanted a toilet.

The face-chain guy had other ideas though, pulling me up by the lasso and tugging the rope in a way that meant I had to follow him. I stumbled after him, looking around. Most of the internal walls had been gutted leaving a large open space, partitioned by clusters of wooden and brass statues and curtains of dream catchers.

I smelled hashish and sandalwood and meat cooking; each scent fighting for dominance and yet mingling to create something organic and holistic as well. On one side of me, over near the front of the building where the windows were, three large ovens squatted next to each other. Pots bubbled on the cook tops and the oven lights flickered. Without getting any closer, I could tell that it was curry in the pots and hash cookies on the cooling oven trays.

A busy kitchen’s a happy kitchen.

The face-chain guy brushed through drapes of chimes and feather charms, and stepped around large Buddha and Shiva statues and rearing brass serpents. The serpents creeped me out the most with their bright green eyes and tarnished skin.

When we were almost, I guessed, at the other side of the building, we reached oneof the few internal walls painted with indigenous artwork. In front of it, sat a young womanon a worn but one-time-quality armchair. The right side of her face was quite beautiful; the left, a mess of scars. On one knee she balanced a tablet; on the other, a jeweled pipe. She tapped slowly at the tablet between sucks on the stem.

The face-chain guy slung me down on the floor in front of her.

She didn’t lift her eyes for several more puffs but when she did I was mesmerized by them. Glassy green like a sea creature and the force of her personality radiated through, striking me hard.

“You’ve had little rest of late, Virgin Jackson.”

“You know me?”

“In the way that a person knows about history,” she said.

I had no idea what that meant. “I’ve been told that you are the one who could help me with the answer to a question.”

“And were you also told about the dangers of coming to me?”

“I’ve been here before. I know the dangers.”

She sucked thoughtfully on the pipe again. “Aaah, yes… about your father.”

I did a bad job of hiding my surprise but she went on anyway.

“You expected I would just give you what you want? Why is that?” she asked.

“Because I think that my question affects you. And that I am connected to the answer. It maybe that you have things you can learn from me as well.”

Her laugh went off like a crack of lightning in the room. “A sense of conviction is a gift like no other, Ranger. You have my attention, so ask me.”

Strange as it was to be treated as child by a woman younger than me, I reached slowly into my jacket pocket and brought out the bone feather. “Can you tell me the significance of this?”

“Where did you find it?”

“Taken from a man following me in the Western Quarter.”

She frowned, shifted both the tablet and the pipe to a side table and took the object from me, rolling it in her hands, sending the feather into twirling flurry. The bleached white bone stood out starkly against her olive skin.

“Tell me how you see yourself to be part of this?”

“First a man tried to kill me in my home. He wore the tattoo of a group who call themselves Korax, after the raven. Then a creature attacked me in the park. I came close to bleeding to death from my wounds.”

“What creature?”

“It looked like a crow but much larger; I’ve been told it is called a Mythos.”

She closed her eyes, appearing to drift off to sleep then she blinked them open. “Do you believe, Virgin?”

“How is what I believe relevant to any of this? I just want to deal with what’s happening. People are trying to kill me.”

“That’s where you are wrong,” she said. “Belief is everything. Belief is the foundation of our reality.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “I
believe
that my father was murdered though it was made to look like an accident. I
believe
somehow his death is connected with the recent attempts on my life, and a man I found murdered in my park. And I
believe
that you know something that can help me with these problems.”

She rested the bone feather on her lap and retrieved the pipe.

I waited while she sucked at it and her eyes grew even glassier. It took all my self-control to not tear the stem from her lips and toss it across the room. The face-chain guy stood close by though, ready to tug the rope around me tighter, and I sensed others in the shadows.

“What you’ve brought me is a
varna,
an object of warning. But this one is different… special, I suppose you could say.”

“How so?”

She lifted it high in the air. “The bone is a native animal. The kind that our local vodun might use. The feather is from the coastal Romany but the nano-lumes are Druze. These nicks that appear as straight lines are inscriptions by the Indigenous tribes.”She brought the feather to her nose and sniffed. “The feather has been soaked into cannabis favoured by the Rastafarians and the beads are Yoruba and Akan – African.”

“You’re sure?” I was impressed.

Her green glass eyes sparked. “I’m always sure.”

“What would one of the Korax be doing with this kind of a collective warning?”

“Are you sure he was part of this Korax group you speak about?” she asked.

My eyes widened when it dawned on me that I’d
assumed
he was but I’d seen no actual tattoo. “If he wasn’t Korax then who was he?
”

She blinked. “You seem clever, Virgin, but maybe I am wrong.”

“And you seem to practise being obtuse, but maybe I’m wrong,” I snapped back.

The face-chain guy lifted his knife but she waved him down and
passed me the talisman. “Take this, go home, Ranger, and don’t return here. Find out what it is that you believe in. That will serve you better than anything I can tell you.”

“I’m facing a murder sentence for a crime I didn’t commit. How can what I believe in affect that?”

“
Talk to your companion. Perhaps he can help you understand.”

“Which companion?”

“The tall one guided by the bison.”

“Nate? But how do you know...”

She shrugged, put the pipe back to her lips and closed her eyes. Clearly, I was dismissed.

Face-chain guy pulled me to my feet by the rope and along in a different direction to the way we’d come. I brushed past rows of bead curtains, glimpsing weapon racks behind some of them and ultraviolet enclosures behind others. When we finally stopped in front of as double door, my inner compass told me I was on the other side of the building from where I’d climbed the stairs.