Driftmetal (16 page)

Blaylocke looked at me, betrayed. Chaz looked to
Vilaris for direction. Vilaris just scratched his dark beard, then
tugged at the knot in his tieback to let his hair fall down around
his face.

“Pyras is our home—not Muller’s,” said Vilaris.
“We’d only known Muller for a few weeks before we came aboard the
Galeskimmer
. He’s not here because he wants to be. We
threatened to turn him over to the Civvies if he didn’t come with
us. We think Muller’s crimes are responsible for scaring Gilfoyle
away.”

“I think it’s a conspiracy between Gilfoyle and
Councilor Yingler,” I chimed in.

“All I want to know is whether we’re justified in
confronting this Gilfoyle fellow,” said Sable. “There’s a reason
you’ve been keeping Pyras a secret. Until I know what it is, why
should I believe the rest of your story?”

“Pyras is a grav city,” I said.

Mr. Scofield was dubious. “I’ve mapped every corner
of the stream, and I’ve never come across such a place.”

“Pyras isn’t in the stream. It’s in the
nearflow.”

Dennel McMurtry gave a loud, callous laugh. Mr.
Scofield tittered. Nerimund echoed Scofield.

“That’s not possible,” Sable said. “Nothing survives
the nearflow for long, least of all a town or a city. Any floater
down there would get torn to shreds in a few days.”

“Turns out surviving the nearflow is easy when you
have technology from before the world shattered,” I said, “not to
mention gadgeteer gurus like Chester, here.”

Vilaris continued, saying, “We have the ability to
shield the city from inorganic matter, and a circuit of locking
rods that can be disabled when we want to move. Pyras has remained
a secret place for many generations, through a minimal amount of
interaction with people in the stream.”

Sable was beginning to understand. “You’ve been
isolated down there since before the shattering?”

“Just after it, actually. It was only a village back
then; a few families seeking refuge from the techsouls who had
vowed to cleanse the world of primitives. They stayed, and now
there are thousands of us.”

“You’re all… primitives…”

Vilaris nodded.

“How can you possibly keep that a secret?”

“It’s gotten out from time to time. But of course,
everyone who hears it dismisses it as a legend. Of those who do
believe it, not many are willing to venture into the nearflow to
look for us. And of the ones who do come looking, no one’s ever
developed the technology to break through our cloaking systems.
We’ve never been found.”

Sable flopped into her chair. “I don’t believe
it.”

I smirked. “That’s what I said.”

“All this time, this has been about saving a city
full of primitives?”

“We can survive without the money from the
gravstone. But we can’t survive forever without trade. There’s only
so much gravstone in the substrata of our floater, and we can only
sell it until the surplus runs out. We lose a lot of good years if
we let a delivery this big go unpaid-for.”

“Well, I can’t blame you for wanting your privacy,”
said Sable. “The few primitives I know who live in the stream have
hard lives. Most of them are poor, and they deal with prejudice on
a daily basis. Please realize that I don’t hate you just because
you’re primitives. I’m not morally opposed to helping your kind;
it’s just dangerous keeping company with you.”

“So you’re still in?” asked Vilaris.

Sable glanced at her boatswain and her
quartermaster. They each gave her their approval in turn. “Our
arrangement stands. We help you retrieve what belongs to you, and
you help us get Uncle Angus back.”

“Uncle Angus-back,” said Nerimund.

“That’s right, Neri,” said Sable.

“Tonight, then,” I said. “It happens tonight.”

We spent the rest of the day finishing the last of
our preparations. By mid-afternoon, the sun was hidden behind
lifeless gray clouds, and a light drizzle had started. The crew was
stricken with an incurable restlessness. They kept coming to me
with questions about what they were supposed to do. I was losing
hope that this was going to go down without something very bad
happening. The fog that had cleared up by noon was returning—not as
thick this time, but still a nuisance, given what my three
primitive companions and I were about to do.

“I think it’s time, fellas,” I said, when the sun
had set to a dim yellow speck, blurry behind a field of low-lying
clouds. “Chaz, let’s see what you’ve got for us.”

Chaz stretched, cracked his back and neck, took off
his goggles. Sweat stains darkened the chest of his shirt and the
insides of his shoulders, his tied-back hair damp and oily.
“They’re done,” he said. “Without further ado, may I present to
you… the apex ingots.”

He whipped a dirty rag away from the molds beside
the ship’s furnace. Eight round beads shone brightly within; four
the size of flattened tennis balls, the other four no larger than
lemons. He handed us each a set, one large and one small, and took
the last pair for himself. They were smooth to the touch, their
depths shot through with gleaming red-orange veins. They were
perfect. Just what I’d asked him for, and just the right size—I
hoped.

They were ingots of pure driftmetal.

9

I opened the
Galeskimmer
’s gate and stepped
to the edge of the deck, my toes hanging out over empty sky. The
boat was slowing, Mr. Scofield guiding her to a halt and checking
his coordinates to be sure we were in the right place. The crew was
gathered on the deck, sails battened down and guns in place. I
clutched the center of my chest with both hands and felt the
driftmetal ingots, heavy as any normal rocks in the pouch Eliza
Kinally had sewn.

“Head to Platform 22 and wait for our signal,” I
said.

Mr. Scofield frowned at the prospect of taking
orders from me, but nodded his understanding.

I flicked him an apathetic salute.

“Still sure you want to do it this way?” Vilaris
asked me.

“We have to. I don’t know whether Gilfoyle keeps
bodyguards at his personal residence, but they’d spot the
Galeskimmer
before we got close enough to surprise them.
This is the only way. We’re getting your contract fulfilled, or
we’re taking the gravstone. There’s no third scenario.”

“Be careful,” Vilaris said.

“It’s not me you should be worried about. It’s you
and those weak primitive bones of yours. Better hope Chaz did the
math right when he made these things.”

When I looked at Chaz, the pouch strapped to his
chest, and the two oddly-shaped lumps bulging out below his
clavicle, I had a startling epiphany. I trusted him. That was the
reason I cared about Pyras. The reason I was going to go through
with this even though I could’ve walked away. When you trust
someone—not just know them, but trust them—the idea of tying your
fate to theirs becomes less daunting, somehow. Maybe I was in it
for the money, too, but even selfish jerks like me like to think we
do things for the right reasons every once in a while.

Chaz smiled at me, the kind of smile a person gives
you when he’s scared out of his mind and doesn’t care that you
know. I guess he trusted me too, a little.

There was worry in Sable’s eyes, but hers was
masked; an attempt to be brave and uncaring, even though there was
more at stake than she was ready to admit. She didn’t want me to
know she was worried about me, but that was okay. I didn’t want her
to know how I really felt either.

“See you down there,” I said.

I stepped overboard. I was falling, a bullet through
the fog, toes pointed, arms clutching the pouch to my chest, my
stomach grabbing me by the throat.
Dangit Chaz, I hope you got
this right
. The pouch tried to get away from me, slipping up
under my chin. I fumbled for it and held on. There was a moment
when my whole body seized up like a dry engine, my mind driven wild
with the thought of slamming into some unseen obstacle in the
fog.

As I plunged, the larger of the two driftmetal
ingots began to lighten, pulling back against the weight of my
body. I had the distinct sensation of slowing, but I had no idea
how fast I was going or how close I was to my destination until I
saw the border lights below me, blinking through the fog.

I slowed to a halt like an elevator coming to rest
in its guides, my toes scraping the roof of the building. When I
started to rebound upward again I ripped open the velcro panel,
releasing the larger of the two ingots. I hit the roof with as soft
a clatter as I could manage, coming to rest on one knee. The ingot
shot up into the clouds. A second later it came back down, bobbed
up, and settled about twenty feet above me. The breeze caught it,
and before I knew it the fog had wrapped it in its delicate arms
and swept it away.

Chaz came next, his legs flailing to reach the roof
but getting no closer to it than I had. He didn’t release the ingot
in time, bobbing up and down with it until he came to rest two
stories up. Once he’d settled, he found himself with no choice but
to let it go. He fell sideways onto the roof, landing in an
unathletic heap. I caught him before he started rolling.

Vilaris followed, his timing better than either of
ours. He released the ingot just as he was reaching his lowest
altitude and landed on his feet, graceful as a cat. Blaylocke
released too early, realized it, and grabbed the ingot with a bare
fist before it got away. He tiptoed down before he let the ingot
slip from his fingers and float upward into the fog. Everything
happened in a matter of seconds, each of us arriving right after
the last like the first snowflakes in a winter storm. They were the
ugliest snowflakes I’d ever seen.

Gilfoyle’s home was a glass-and-stone monstrosity of
high arches and thin spires, set atop his largest grav platform
like a haunted castle. The fog was clearer from the roof down, just
a light mist swirling over the platform below. I couldn’t see
another soul from where I was. Anyone inside this wing of the house
would’ve had to be fast asleep not to have heard us. I motioned for
the others to follow as I slid down a gable and dropped onto one of
the second-floor balconies, expecting to find some thug with heavy
augments waiting for me.

Instead I found myself facing a glass door and a set
of tall windows, peering into the bedroom on the other side. A low
flame burned within an oil lamp on the dresser, casting flickering
shadows over the toys strewn about the floor. A small form lay
still beneath the thick yellow comforter of an overlarge bed. I
checked the door. Locked.

Vilaris and the others dropped down beside me,
looking about warily. Chaz knelt, produced a set of lock picks, and
began to fiddle with the door. I lifted a foot to the glass and
triggered my solenoid, reached through the empty space, and
unlocked the door from within.

The ground crunched beneath my boots as I strode
into the room and plucked the child out of bed by the pajamas. In
the hallway, I saw light from downstairs. I clunked down the steps,
the child tucked beneath my arm like a sack of flour. I felt her
beginning to squirm as she woke up and found herself dangling above
the floor. My companions’ footsteps were tentative and careful
behind me. They may have been whispering at me to get my attention,
but I wasn’t listening.

I heard voices from the kitchen as I came through
the living room, its walls lined with mahogany wainscoting and
built-in bookshelves. I passed the tufted oxblood sofa and its
matching armchair while the cracked painting of some gray-bearded
ancestor brooded over a black marble fireplace. The scent of an
earlier meal grew sharper when I rounded the corner and set the
child down on the tiled kitchen floor. Gilfoyle and the woman I
assumed to be his wife were leaned against the counter, she in a
blue silk nightgown and he in green plaid pajamas, glasses of dark
red wine in their hands and an empty bottle behind them. Chaz,
Vilaris, and Blaylocke waited in the living room. I could see them
from where I was standing, but Gilfoyle and the woman didn’t know
they were there.

Gilfoyle looked at his wife. “Run. Hide.” He turned
his body toward me, putting himself between me and the woman. He
put a hand on the counter to steady himself.

When the woman saw the child standing in front of
me, tears welled in her eyes. She bent down and held out her arms,
flicking her fingers inward. The little girl began to move toward
her, but I grabbed her and pulled her back.

“You should ignore your husband’s advice,” I told
the woman. “You don’t want your little girl to get hurt. I don’t
either. You’d better stick around.”

Gilfoyle was almost as brave drunk as he had been
surrounded by his thugs. He held up an arm to block the woman from
coming any closer to me and repeated the two words to her again.
She shook her head and stood her ground, eyes darting between me
and the child. The little girl was whimpering now, starting to
cry.

“Everybody stays right where they are and things are
gonna be fine,” I said.

Gilfoyle squinted at me. “You. It’s you. You’re that
thief. The one who tried to steal my truck.”

“Wasn’t the truck I was trying to steal,” I said.
“But never mind that. We’re here to collect the money you owe the
city of Pyras.”

Gilfoyle looked at me like I’d just said something
in another language.

“To the tune of three million chips,” I continued.
“Pyras has yet to see a single chip for that whole truckful of
gravstone. You severed your contract with the city and took off
without paying for it.”

“Oh yes… it was the gravstone you wanted,” Gilfoyle
said. “And then my medallion.”

He was wearing it. I saw the medallion’s chain
glinting in the light of the oil lamps, gold links against the pale
skin alongside his collar.