The Apocalypse Ocean (3 page)

It didn’t make sense to try to hide the money or risk going outside. Tiago folded himself up on his mat in the corner of the room for a nap.

Tiago’s neighbors must have drifted away, because when someone parted his curtain after waking up he didn’t see anyone outside behind their silhouette.

Then he realized they saw who had come and all found good reasons to vanish. Kay stood there at the entrance to his room, wearing a kevlar poncho and holding a gas mask in her hands. Fire rain dripped onto Tiago’s floor from her outerwear. 

She glanced around his room. Cataloging it, no doubt. Studying Tiago in his natural habitat. Her hair was cut just short of her ears and she was shorter than Tiago. Though in his mind she was always taller.

“Your corridor has a hole in it,” she said.

Tiago nodded. He pulled all the money out from under his shirt and put it on the stool in front of her, and then backed away to his mat respectfully.

“There was a visitor.” His voice cracked slightly with fear. He looked down at the floor. “A woman. She had, metal implants. Technology. She was looking for you.”

“A Nashara, yes. Here on Placa del Fuego. Now, that is something very interesting. And looking for me?”

One of her bodyguards and chiefs, Bakeem, squeezed into the room and started counting the money. It was very crowded in here now, Tiago thought. If Bakeem sneezed, he’d break the walls down into the next room over.

Wouldn’t that surprise Heliodor?

Tiago risked looking around Kay to the corridor, and saw two Ox-men outside. Seven feet tall with slabs of hairy muscle, overly large eyes, and flat noses, they had to stoop to fit. They regarded Tiago with dull, incurious eyes.

“She’s been asking around,” Kay said. “Using my name a lot. She has my attention.”

Bakeem left a quarter of the money on the stool. Tiago looked at the rest of it disappearing into his pockets wistfully.

“Do you know how expensive it would be to shield someone like her, a cyborg, to be able to function in the dead zone?” Kay asked thoughtfully. “That must be what she’s done. It means she has access to

… incredible resources." She paused thoughtfully, thinking about that. Then she continued. "I will meet her.”

Tiago nodded, and he handed her the card that Nashara had given him.

Kay looked it over, then handed it back. “Go there when the rain stops. Tell her to follow the Ox-men.”

“Which Ox-men?” Tiago asked.

“Just tell her to follow the Ox-men,” Kay said. She shook the gas mask. “Tiago?”

“You know my name?” Tiago blurted, despite himself. Then froze.

“It would not be in my nature to forget it,” Kay said, her voice level. “Did you really try to pick that Nashara’s pocket?”

“Why do you keep calling her ‘a Nashara, or that Nashara, is there more than one?” Tiago asked.

“I don’t remember you asking this many questions before.”

Appropriately chastened Tiago swallowed, and remained quiet.

Everyone stood in the room, waiting for something.

“Tiago? My question?”

“Oh. Yes. I did lift money from her,” he said earnestly. Then. “I didn’t realize.”

“Who she was? No, no you didn’t.” Kay smiled softly. “But you’ve been targeting offworlders, haven’t you? Don’t bother to answer, I see it’s true. Very smart of you. I may just have been wasting your boldness. I will remember that.”

Tiago kept silent as he waited for her to leave the room, Bakeem following, and then the Ox-men after that.

The whole group stepped out of the gaping hole in the corridor and into the rain. When they all disappeared into the haze Tiago turned around to look at the faces daring to peek out of the doors.

He saw Nusdilla. He could tell by the fear on her face that she would not be talking to him for a while.

They were all far, far too scared of Kay.

So was he.

As a young child he’d never dreamed he would be stealing cheese and trinkets from market stalls, climbing buildings to live in a hand-built hut, or picking pockets. He’d wanted to be a streetcar conductor.

But after mom died and his father wandered out into a full fire rainstorm with a jug of bad smelling rum, Tiago had been alone on Placa del Fuego. Both his parents had been immigrants to the island. They’d been a tight, private family, not interested in making friends. Just keeping their heads down and surviving.

There was nothing and no one for Tiago after they were both gone.

Kay discovered him on the Seawall. She’d spotted him stealthily snag a loaf of bread in the market.

He’d leapt to his feet when she sat next to him, trying to decide whether to bolt. She’d made no sudden moves, just pulled out an apple and a very large knife.

“I saw you. I can show you how to do that better, without having to run for it afterwards,” she told him. “You won’t starve anymore.”

She offered him half the apple on the tip of the knife, extending it into the neutral space between them.

Tiago had snapped it up. Then looked down at it. “What do you want?” he asked, suspicious.

“Most of the take as a cut,” she said reasonably.

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I’ll teach you how to steal money, which you can hide better than bread. Then walk back into that market and buy whatever you need to not starve. You’ll get more from the quarter take I’ll let you keep than you will alone.”

“And if I say no?”

Kay slowly sliced her piece of the apple into thirds. “See that Ox-man over there?”

Tiago looked. Sure enough, one of the hairy alien-bred Okur immigrants stood further on down the Seawall. “I see him.”

“He will break all of your fingers, and you will be a beggar in a gutter. The market – this whole section of the waterfront – it’s mine now. I’ve taken it. If you want to play here, you work for me.”

And that had been the way things had gone one for almost a year now, Tiago thought, watching the rain fall outside. As soon as this stopped, it was time to go find Nashara and do Kay’s bidding.

After all, he still valued his fingers.

#

Nashara sat at a table outside a seawall restaurant, surveying the Plaza over a cup of tea. A few small fires had broken out the night before, but considering the strength of last night’s storm, it wasn’t too bad. Tiago had certainly seen worse.

Nashara motioned Tiago to sit with her.

“It’s odd,” she muttered as he sat. “To see all this stone, brick, slate. Leather for clothes. No wood, no fabrics. Hardly any trees, not even scrub. Grim.”

Tiago looked down at his patched clothes. She was surprisingly ignorant about the island. She was an offworlder. A famous one. And yet … Tiago had to guess that out of all the Forty- Eight worlds, all of them connected by wormholes, she didn’t know everything about every one.

There were many things Tiago didn’t know about just Placa del Fuego, let alone the off-island towns, and the cities around the two wormholes. 

“Rich people have those,” he said. “In the glass houses.”

“Those greenhouses?”

Tiago shrugged. “Sure. Gardens, fancy clothing, fresh fruit.”

In the quieter moments, looking out over the harbor, he always wondered what the places were like out over the horizon and through the wormholes the ships sailed through to get to the oceans of other worlds. 

Other worlds where things were made before they were transported here. Where people like Nashara came from.

Lately he chided himself for daydreaming. It was useless to think too much about where the ships went. Because they weren’t taking Tiago along with them. No matter how much he wished for it.

Nashara set her tiny wooden cup down and stood up. “I think Kay will be talking to me now.” She pointed.

Tiago turned around, and saw two Ox-men standing behind him.

He was supposed to tell Nashara to look for them. He opened his mouth, but Nashara was already walking their way.

When they saw that, they just turned around and began to walk away. Nashara followed.

And that, Tiago thought, was hopefully the end of that.

The Nashara seemed content to wander into Kay’s basement trap. The entire house had been carefully restructured by Kay for meetings just like this.

The kind she wasn’t so sure about.

Here she didn’t have the balance of power she preferred. Here she had to expose her face. Here she was clearly a target now, and not the puppet master.

But the possible payoff was too high, Kay thought, watching the whip-lean woman walk in through the door after the Ox-men. Kay had heard her coming, her weight, that combination of machinery and flesh, had stressed the wooden planks almost to breaking point.

Nashara walked through a beam of light sparkled with dust, and stopped and looked right at Kay.

There was another shift in the balance of power. Kay couldn’t read this person. She was a blank slate.

Her primary talent, and curse, didn’t work on this one.

Contrary to whispered rumors, Kay couldn’t actually read minds. But she’d been bred from generations of humans that could intuit what others were thinking, and manipulate them. The ultimate in managerial stock. It was a sense as integrated and apparent to her as sound, and it felt discomfiting to suddenly realize it didn’t work on this person.

Just like it didn’t work on aliens.

Kay didn’t like the feeling. It made her feel vulnerable. A little bit of the old fear crept into her. The uncertainty. The lack of control. She fought it back with a fiery explosion of willpower and anger.

“Now that you are here, Nashara let me explain your position,” Kay said. “You stand on a large trap door. Underneath is a hundred-foot drop. The side of the pit is lined with explosives to cave it in after you. Each of those window slits has a sniper with a high-powered rifle, and each of the columns around you has a shaped charge buried inside. You are standing in the blast zone. I am not. Over you is a brick floor designed to fall in afterwards. Those are the things I’m prepared to tell you. I don’t know if those would kill you, but they would slow you down enough so that I could leave.”

Nashara didn’t look down, or at the columns. She didn’t seem surprised. “Okay,” Nashara said. “You’re a little bit nervous about meeting me. I understand.”

And Kay couldn’t tell if that was a dig, an attempt to undermine her with the Ox-men standing about, or Nashara’s honest assessment.

Kay gritted her teeth. “You are, I believe, a Nashara?”

“As far as I know,
the original
Nashara,” the cyborg lady said. 

“The first one in the Xenowealth?” Kay had spent time reading about history, trying to learn about the Forty-Eight worlds. Things she’d been denied as a child. “You’re the one that assassinated Gahe on Astragalai? You fought the Satrapy and unleashed copies of yourself all throughout their computer networks and ships?”

“Among other things.” Nashara stood still.

“So you’ve worked for the Xenowealth for nearly a century and are still alive and very dangerous. You’ve blunted the League for so long you are on their most wanted list. And now you’re on Placa del Fuego.”

“And now I’m on Placa del Fuego,” Nashara said. Her black eyes regarded Kay, expressionless, calm, and alien.

Even though Kay had a good feeling she already knew the answer, she asked, “Why?”

“You know why,” Nashara said, cocking her head. Those long dreadlocks around the shoulders shifted slightly with the movement.

“You’re looking for the man who fought the Doaq,” Kay said.

“His name is Pepper.”

Kay blinked. Telegraphing her shock, yes. But it was genuine. “The old-father of New Anegada.” And, as she’d suspected, a very dangerous man. The man she’d led into a trap with the Doaq. Shame that he’d died. Kay leaned forward. “Why was
he
here on my island, then?”

“That would be giving up information for free,” Nashara said. “Why would I do that just yet?”

Kay waved that aside. “You can read me, much like I can read most humans. You saw my mild shock; you would have seen my momentary worry and guilt as well. I cannot play games with you, I don’t have the leverage. All I really have is the fact that you think I may know where Pepper is, as you don’t trust hearsay, and you don’t trust what a handful of confused people in Palentar have to say before it almost burned to the waterline. Am I right?”

Nashara nodded. “Yes.”

“He’s dead,” Kay said. Sharply enough she’d hoped to have gotten a reaction.

Maybe. Maybe there was a slight stirring.

That gave Kay hope. “It makes no sense to lie to you. I tried to get him to fight the Doaq, just like I would like to try and get
you
to fight it. They would have done it, anyway; I just set it up in a controlled environment where I could watch. I was hoping Pepper would kill it.”

“And he failed?”

“He jumped off a Palentar dock into the water rather than lose to the Doaq,” Kay told her.

Nashara frowned. She wanted Kay to see that, Kay thought.

“What direction?” she finally asked.

Now
that
was an interesting response. “Why should I help you?” Kay asked. “What do I get? Because I could just bury you in the pit, here, and call in someone from the League. They have their agents here. And I like the League. They were the first revolutionaries; they fought against the aliens, to free us. And according to them, you’re a traitor. So why should I help a traitor?”

“Because I’ll give you what you’re going to ask for,” Nashara said. She smiled a long, wicked smile. “You know something more, and if it helps me get Pepper, I’m willing to give you the weapons they won’t let onto the island. Not the League, not anyone else.”

Kay swallowed. Nashara was right. There was something else. Her single bargaining chip. “I want whatever you’re thinking of and one thing more.”

“What’s that?” Nashara asked. No doubt she would be thinking that maybe Kay wanted the chance to leave the island. Go out where the dead zone didn’t make life so hard.

But that wasn’t that Kay wanted at all.

“I want a shielded and dead-zone operable, limited-yield nuclear weapon,” Kay said, holding her hands a foot apart. “Just a small one.”

Because after Pepper, and after Nashara fought the Doaq, Kay would still be here.

She wanted to take this whole thing up a notch.

And that expression of surprise on Nashara’s face that slipped through, that was just extra cream on the pastry, Kay thought.