Archon's Queen (2 page)

“Only got one left, but I’ll give it to ya on the cheap. Hundred creds.”

“Giro was light this fort.” Annabelle sighed. “I got sixty five.”

A hand on her ass, a voice in her ear from the left mimicked that of an old woman. “Your last sixty five on a Zoomer, ya poor dearie, what’ll ya eat?”

Quaking, she kept her gaze on ripples spawned from the walls of her boots. “I can beg for food… I can’t beg for zoom.”

She fumbled through a battered handbag, rifling around trash and empty wrappers until she found a three-inch plastic fob: the credstick. The man on the right tugged her shirt up to expose her breasts, and the air washed over her, crisp and cool, speckled with freezing dots of rain. The part of her that used to blush had broken years ago.

“Well then, this lil’ scrubber’s got quite the pair.” Knux helped himself to a feel with his living hand. “Size o’ peaches.”

The man to her left shook his head. “Gotta be fake. Too round.”

Knux smirked, patting the underside of her right boob, making it bounce. “Now where’d a slag like this git the creds fer ‘at? They feels awrite.”

“Yeah, Spid. This one blows her whole allowance on candy, ain’t gonna afford any work.”

“Tim’s got a point there, mate.” Knux’s throaty chuckle became a phlegmatic projectile, which vanished into a nearby puddle.

She stared at the ground. Numb, she ignored the grimy paws smudging her pale skin. “They’re real. Sixty-five and a show then? Will that do?”

“I’m thinkin’ ya keep your creds and do us a favor instead, lass.” The guy on the right winked.

Annabelle covered her mouth, the urgent lack of drugs in her blood added to the nausea of what they suggested. She was not so desperate she’d shag three men in the middle of The Ruin where anyone could see. The shudders could not hide the presence of the thing in the back of her mind. With the drugs so thin, it swam to the surface. Coarse hands teased at her exposure, circling her nipples; she looked to the right and bit her lip, shoving her right arm behind her back so they couldn’t see the tiny, warm spark crawling through her fingers.

“I’ll get the rest of the creds in a couple o’ days. If it pleases you lot, I don’t fancy a feck in the mud.”

Tim pulled her by the hips against his body. Hot breath flushed around her neck and filled her nose with the fragrance of synthbeer as he licked at her ear. Scared, she pushed at him to get away. The presence stirred in her mind, riding the wave of fear. Knux’s metal arm flew into a spasmodic fit of twitching while Spid grabbed his head and screamed; a faint wisp of silicon smoke drifted on his breath and rose from the M3 plug behind his ear.

“Oi, what the hell.” Tim let her go, rushing to his friend’s side.

Annabelle scurried to the right a few paces, almost falling from her effort not to allow the thick mud to pull her boots off. Gulping, she pulled her shirt down and tried to calm herself. “Must be bum ‘ware, shortin’ out inna rain.”

Knux swiped the credstick from her and offered a thin sheet of white plastic with two flesh-toned derms. “Take ‘em, ya look a mess. Kin pay me the balance nex’ time.”

With that, he retreated to tend to his misbehaving arm and screaming friend. Anna trudged away, stepping with urgency between areas of old paving that peeked through the mud on her way back to the tower. She peeled one of the dermal patches from its backing and pressed it into the tender skin of her right forearm, two inches south of her wrist. Within seconds, the uncomfortable sharpness of sobriety faded away to the reassuring calm of a zoom high. The thing in the back of her mind roared, vanishing like a demon drawn down to the abyss through a rent in the Earth.

She squatted, unable to walk through the woozy onrush of the chem coursing through her veins. Once more, faces swelled out of the clouds and laughed at her. Raindrops screamed as they fell past, the sound of millions of tiny men falling to their deaths. Blue sparks arced between her bare legs, snapping at the water for an instant before vanishing. She curled tighter into herself as the taste of ozone filled the air and the sound of the wind mutated into a howling roar. Rain fell on her in a hail of ice needles.

Springing to her feet, she ran ahead, slipping and falling several times in her haste to avoid the sharp things streaking out of the sky. A goblin darted out from behind an overturned car; yellow eyes filled with greed gleamed out of the darkness. She drew up short, and took a step back, ready to scream. Its clawed hand raked at the air as it edged closer.

Mottled green and brown gave way to grime-covered skin. The form changed, standing straighter. The claw became a hand upturned, begging. Glimmering greed melted away to curiosity. A young boy no older than ten stared up at her. His look of hope fell to one of resignation. She was every bit as poor as he. The boy gave her a sad look before he ran off to the tower.

To Annabelle, the building beckoned, despite the lime green fire raging through the closed windows. The weather fell on it like gasoline, turning the ebon spire into a torch shining a sickly glow over the devastation around it.

She buried her face in her hands, struggling to rein in the hallucinations, the unpleasant side effect of her necessary evil. Years ago, they were wild and terrifying. Now, for the most part, she could recognize them for what they were―illusions. The loss of reality used to last much longer. Tolerance let her will away the sights after a short time.

Annabelle clutched her head, chanting, “It’s all in my head,” over and over for several minutes. Wild, nightmarish changes in The Ruin lessened. She remained motionless in the rain for a time with her eyes clamped shut. The Zoom filtered through her brain, caging the writhing beast within. When she looked, the world had returned to bleak rainy normality with only a hint of faces above; as long as she concentrated hard, she was in control. The reassuring fog in her head remained, forming a gate the Devil could not breach. She wobbled to her feet and slogged through mud toward the monolith of gloom.

Coventry Tower sat at the center of The Ruin, an area once known as Tower Hamlets before the war bombed it to oblivion and back. From Bishopsgate in the west to Hackney Road in the north, the crushed and flattened remnants of buildings came to an approximate end by Grove and Burdett streets. Beyond that, abandonment left intact structures empty east to Gillender Street, but no Proper wanted to live in them, being it was so close to the refuse that collected here.

Created long before her birth, The Ruin existed as a tangled mess of collapsed buildings, old cars, and crashed military craft. This place adopted those whom society no longer wanted, a refuge for people with nowhere else to go.

It was her home.

yes closed, Annabelle rubbed her thumb over the derm. The sensation of her smooth skin interrupted by a tiny square of rubberized plastic felt like an old friend holding her hand. The cold wind stopped bothering her, and a thousand whispering voices in the dark came and went. A light hit her like a tangible diaphanous object; her eyes snapped open.

A quarter mile away, where the police had a blockade around The Ruin, someone on an armored truck had spotted her out in the field. By the time she got her arm up to shield her eyes, the light had moved on. She had no weapons and nothing of value, merely another throwaway. The spotlight circle panned over the debris field. Shiny corners of the police van gleamed, a polished onyx brick. She stared at it, that they ignored her obvious distress stirred both relief and anger.

Anna turned away, facing the tower, and cringed away from imps and scuttling fiends that cavorted around the shattered landscape. A grey creature two feet tall, with an oblong head and floppy ears, ran up and clung to her leg. She looked down at the black banded tail as it coiled around her boot. The little thing stared at her with pleading yellow eyes. She pressed a hand to the side of her head. With a grunt of concentration, the creature melted into a loose piece of windblown plasfilm fluttering against her. She kicked and it glided off into the scrap.

Anna ignored the various sights and sounds she knew to be false, and stumbled toward the only building here. The voices continued, their source circling about and changing at random. No longer screaming, the raindrops hit her like a hail of freezing pinpricks, putting a spring in her step. A patch of paving offered refuge from the mud, and she wobbled her way onto it between two slabs of wall that used to be the façades of shops. She ventured a glance at the shattered window frame and a thin figure drawn of shadow staring back at her.

A prolonged blink chased it away. Her world swayed, making it difficult to stay on her feet; Knux had given her a potent zoomer this time, not to mention at almost two in the morning, fatigue made the ride more intense. The voices got louder. She staggered ahead, trying to get to Coventry tower, ignoring phantom creatures that prodded and picked at her arms.

Solid hands seized her and wrenched her about. Another demon stared down at her from a towering height, glowing eyes of fire widening in amusement. Two others, wreathed in the flame of hellspawn’s wings, held her by the arms as the massive one leaned back and laughed a scorching breath into the sky. He spoke at her in a tongue she could not understand, and his clawed hand reached for her. Anna struggled to get away, but the demons held her in place. Oddly enough, she had a feeling this mythological creature of a forgotten religion wanted money. She had none; they’d take the zoom.

“Oi, that’s plenty enough you lot. Sod off!”

An amorphous humanoid shape drawn of dark smoke emerged from behind the deep baritone. She knew the voice. The mass of shadow split down the center, revealing a man. The smoke rolled behind him as he advanced, murkiness sent to oblivion by her recognition of Ol’ Jack.

He installed himself as the doorman of Coventry Tower, a protector of sorts, and had been there since before she arrived. Six and a half feet tall, he moved with the grace of a prowling tiger. Hands poised, his body language gave a warning absent from his calm face. Anna grinned at the sight of the rain trailing over his coffee-colored skin. She forgot the demons holding her, oblivious to everything aside from the trickles of water merging and parting down his leather coat.