The Forgotten City (5 page)

She stood, ripped up her face mask and said, “Don’t fight Caesar.”

“It’s the gangster way,” Copernicus said.

“I don’t care. I have a bad feeling. There must be some other way – something I can do.”

Copernicus shook his head. They’d already been over every other option and found them all lacking. Silho wasn’t sure if she could, using light-form, mass immobilize the gangsters guarding the prison camps without taking it one step too far and slaughtering them all, and either way the effort would most certainly end up with her burning again. She could regenerate, but with extensive damage – it would take time, and then there’d be the backlash from Caesar to worry about. The fight-in was the only legitimate way to take control of the machine-breeds’ fate.

“I understand how you’re feeling,” he said, “but the situation is what it is, and we have to continue. We have to free the machine-breeds. No one else can.”

“I know but … I just feel …” She struggled to express her deep foreboding.

“Fear …” He stepped forward and took her hand in his.

“It’s more. Something is wrong …”

“Silho,” he said softly, “I understand, but you have to trust me.”

He drew her close and she pressed against him, hugging him with all her strength as though someone were trying to drag them apart. He touched her face and lifted it to his. The words she wanted to say were lost to her, and a moment passed where she didn’t know what to do, and she couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t move. Then he leaned down to her. Her first reaction was to try to pull away, but Copernicus held her firm and pressed his lips against hers. Heat rushed through her body and she felt him respond, the embrace fast turning from consoling into something else. They kissed deeply, everything around them fading into insignificance until they were all that was left. She felt no more fear, just his lips, his touch and his body against hers. He guided her down to the floor, undoing his weapon belt and discarding it. The look in his eyes left no room for misunderstanding. Silho felt her heartbeats pounding too fast, so loud she barely heard her com beeping – insistently and persistently – until Copernicus pulled back and she had to answer.

“Eli?”

“Um … Silho. It’s not Eli – I mean it
is
Eli – as you know – you just said my name … Can you – if you wouldn’t mind – tell the Boss that I think the front-core coms are malfunctioning again and my menu has frozen.” He sounded monumentally embarrassed. “I am so,
so
sorry, but I thought I should tell you. I can hear everything the boss is thinking and I assumed he didn’t actually want me hearing … what he’s thinking … at the present moment … Not that there’s anything wrong with what he’s thinking – it’s just – slightly explicit and – and there’s nothing wrong with that – and – and I’m just going to stop talking right here.”

Silho really didn’t know how to respond. She actually felt like laughing, but Copernicus spoke into the com, his voice tight. “Thank you, Eli.”

He blinked to access the prototype implant and gave it a verbal command. “End transmission.”

He waited for a moment, then moved in close to Silho again, but before they could kiss, Eli’s voice came through Silho’s com.

“Ah … Still here …”

Copernicus clenched his jaw. He blinked open his menu again and disengaged manually.

“Eli?” he checked.

“Yes – just working on disconnecting. My menu is still frozen.”

Silho could hear him working frantically on the other end of the com.

Copernicus disengaged again.

“Are you —”

“Still here,” Eli confirmed.

“Now?”

“Yes …”

“Now?”

“Sorry – yes.”

Copernicus cursed. He grabbed the blade from his belt, and Silho flinched as he pushed the tip into his forehead, digging out the implant. He crushed it in one fist and dropped it to the ground. With blood streaming down his face, he looked so savage that Silho had to laugh. She realized it was a completely inappropriate reaction, but couldn’t stop once she’d started. Fortunately, Copernicus didn’t take offense. His fury melted into a smile and he dragged her back to him.

A rumble trembled the ground. The search was coming back around; the gangsters possibly picking up on their presence. Copernicus’ eyes told Silho he was thinking the same thing. It was time to move. He helped Silho up, then grabbed his weapon belt and re-fastened it. Their eyes met and she could see the frustration in his expression.

“After the fight-in,” he said, a promise in the words. He kissed her and she held onto him, not wanting to let go.

“Everything will be alright,” he whispered to her. “Trust me.”

He kissed her again and she nodded, wanting to believe him.

E
very time was the last time, until the next time. One too many drinks, a poisonous word, a feeling without a name and here she was, a liar again – proving right every wrong they said about her. She wasn’t deluded. She knew it was sick. No shades of maybe to save her soul. This was all bad from every angle. Diega more than knew it – she felt it. It gave her the guilts. She couldn’t face herself in the mirror for days afterward. And every time was the last time.
I promise
. Everyone knew not to trust a liar. When was she going to learn?

Diega’s head hung low to her chest, sweat snaking cold rivers down her face. She could see her feet dangling above the ground. And below them, her blood, blue-black as the night sky, trickled down a drain. She dragged her head upright and it flopped back with little control. Her hands were bound above her with chains fasted to a beam. Beyond that, a tower tunnel stretched up to a sphere of light.
Too far to reach
. Somewhere up there was a club with music booming full-blast, but the only beat down here was her heart, slow and echoing in her ears.

Down here
…

In this dungeon reeking of pain and piss, bloody handprints on the wall keeping tally of the beatings. Diega’s head dropped down again and she saw the man in front of her. One of her own kind – an Ohini Fen, with the swollen bulk and protuberant veins of artificially enhanced muscles. A black mask concealed his face. He raised the club in his hand, and as he did, he morphed it into a whip. He tensed. Diega braced, the colors of her rainbow skin flaring. She felt the rush of air and then it struck. Pain radiated through her body. She couldn’t breathe around it. Agony … and release.

She gazed back up to the light, barely feeling the other blows raining down on her, only returning to herself once her feet hit the ground and she toppled face-first into a pool of her own blood. Her punisher grabbed her. He ripped his mask halfway up and forced her mouth against his. The kiss tasted of metal. His hands were too rough and she did nothing to stop it – just closed her eyes, and she was back on the cliff watching the demon witch fall, only now she was falling with her – down to the Envirious Realm – where all the broken people go.

*****

Diega pushed open the door from the stairwell to the main floor and staggered out into the club. The music pounded, vibrating the floorboards, as laser lights sliced the smoky darkness, over strobing figures, lost in the rhythm.

Before the war, the Helliox had been a borderline-illegal hole in the wall, kept in business by the Fen soldiers who frequented it, but never spoke of it. The sum of her people in one line –
what we know we never speak of
. But now … Diega climbed a short flight of stairs and passed through a set of doors, finding herself standing on an open elevator platform, looking out over what the Helliox had become. From one basement room it had blown out to almost a full city block, a multi-leveled hive of entertainment. Somehow this place had survived and thrived when so much of Scorpia had crumbled.

The elevator lowered her past the neon flashing lights and sound-storm of an arcade city, past restaurants and bars, beauty parlors and pamper halls; past a barter mall packed out with hagglers. Below that was a gambling den, with a gigantic holo-screen projecting over the crowds. In the main fight arena, the tournament to decide who would stand up as boss of the fairy-breeds in the fight-in was well underway – only males allowed. Everywhere inanimate objects morphed and resettled, then changed again. Everything that could be shifted appeared blurred around the edges to Diega’s eyes and those of her kind, though it wasn’t just Fens crowding the Helliox – there were fairy-breeds of all types here – Sleagh Maith, Myrea Nene and Danan, as well as other less common types like the Grimshaws and Rhymers who had come out of hiding since the fall of the Ar Antarian king, who’d hunted them almost to extinction. Everywhere the whistles of the old language sang through the air. A sense of the forgotten was coming back. In some ways it felt like a victory and in others ways a backslide. Amongst the thronging crowds, there was not one non-fairy-breed face. The call for gangster law to reign had inflamed the just-below-the-surface racial prejudice of her kind. Diega looked up through the open top of the building to the stars above – with half the city lights knocked out, they’d never blazed so brightly and felt so close.

Diega stepped off the elevator onto ground level. Immediately she recognized a group of Fens from her neighborhood, La Crox, in Estabana. They were playing a game of Briscopa, traditional cards, around a table. She moved closer, but they saw her coming and closed their ranks, boxing her out. She was the bad daughter, the one who had abandoned her parents. She was a disgrace. Even here in this place. It was the hypocrisy of her people – sons could go, do and be whatever they pleased, whereas daughters only did as their parents allowed. A wild boy was a wild boy; a wild girl was a curse and a scar on the family’s integrity. With all her being, she wanted to say she honestly didn’t care what they or any others thought about her, but that would be another lie – albeit one she told very well. Everywhere she went, she always noticed who was looking and who was not, and she never passed a mirror without looking into it and hating what she saw.

Diega moved away into one of the bars, one with blue lighting and a crystal ceiling. The bartender took her order, holding her gaze for a few moments too long, a smile lingering on his lips. Someone pushed in beside her and put an arm around her waist. She whipped around to shove them off, but saw her friend, an ex-United Regiment soldier named Castana. He gave her an intoxicated grin. She still pushed him away, but only lightly.

“Dee!” He raised his voice over the pounding music. “It’s been too long. I’ve missed you.” His words slurred into each other, and he slipped an arm back around her. The bartender placed Diega’s drink down in front of them, his smile gone.

“Allow me.” Castana paid for the drink with a handful of pills – Moonshimmer and Intensity – barter and drugs were fast becoming the fairy-breed currency since the annulment of the sovereign. Diega reached for her drink.

“Wait,” Castana said. He winked at her and hovered a pill above her glass. Her hesitation was a mere flicker. He dropped it in and she watched it fizz, then drained the glass in one go. Castana laughed.

“Never change,” he murmured into her ear. He kissed her face, as the pain of her body and mind numbed. This was something that Jude had never understood, despite how close and intimate their relationship had become – she didn’t take drugs to feel high, she took them to feel nothing. He’d never understood her at all.

Diega let Castana lead her out onto the dance floor where they joined the masses. His body pressed against hers from the front, another stranger from behind. She blinked and they were in the alley outside the club, both of them still pressed against her. Panic filtered through the drug haze. Where was she? Where were her clothes? Where was her mind?

Both men were laughing – not at her, but it felt like it. She shoved Castana away and landed a kick to the other’s chest, knocking him sprawling. She staggered sideways onto the pavement, her hands closing over her clothes and weapon belt. She drew her electrifier and stood, aiming it first at Castana and then the stranger. Both men put up their hands.

“Easy, Dee,” Castana said. “You know me. It’s just a bad trip.”

“
Fsx
,” she cursed at him in Fenlen. “Don’t trutting move.”

She snatched up her clothes and kept the gun pointed on them as she retreated down the alley.

“
Sirca
,” she heard the stranger say – it meant “crazy”.

Diega paused just before the end of the alleyway and dragged on her clothes and belt. There was still enough Intensity in her system for her not to feel the welts and bruises darkening all over her skin. Keeping to the shadows, she stepped out into Alamada Square, the center of Estabana. Outside the Helliox everything was far more subdued – an empty street, one small restaurant, with one small family eating inside by candlelight.

To the left and seven blocks down stood her parents’ house. She hadn’t been there for so long, since finishing her court-ordered military sentence and deciding that she wanted to continue her training as a soldier. She’d gone home that day looking for a new beginning, maybe even reconciliation. Even as she’d climbed the front steps, she’d realized it was bad idea. She’d opened the door, but knocked lightly as well. There were no locks or knocking between family, but she wasn’t sure if she was still that. Inside the house was clean, but colorless – lived in, but abandoned. She found the two of them, her parents, sitting in the glass room, watching the stars. At her greeting, both glanced sideways with gray eyes. They looked like ghosts of themselves. Neither spoke, which wasn’t surprising, but it still hurt.

She left them and went upstairs to the bedrooms. She pressed open the door to her sister Ariana’s room. Everything was as it had been the day Ariana was taken – from the washed clothes folded on her bed to the homework on her desk. In this room, time had frozen. She wanted to go inside, but couldn’t bring herself to do it – so she went instead to her own room and found it completely bare. They’d thrown away everything. Tears seared her eyes, but she forced herself to walk in, military boots thudding on the boards.

She went to her hiding place in the cupboard and drew out the box. She opened the lid. Inside was the special bracelet with Ariana’s name inscribed on it – a gift from their father for doing so well at school. Ariana had been effortlessly talented in everything she did, unlike Diega, who had tried with everything she had, but never did as well. That day, the day Ariana had been taken, Diega had felt overwhelming jealousy of the gift, and even more so of her parents’ praise. She’d stolen the bracelet out of her sister’s room before they went out, liking the way it sparkled on her wrist.

She went down a dark set of stairs and never came back up … The feelings flowed – impatience to anger, from anger to disquiet, from disquiet to fear, from fear to terror … She was gone. The fun sister, the happy-go-lucky sister, the adventurous sister, the smart sister, the beautiful sister … Gone. Forever.

The story she’d told from then till now was that Ariana had vanished in a crowd, but the truth, which she’d never told a soul, was that in the overcrowded Alamada Square she’d seen her sister walk away with a stranger – and she’d felt uneasy about it. She’d even started to run after her, but then she’d stopped, thinking for once Ariana would be the one in trouble for wandering off, for once she’d be the one their parents yelled at, the one being told she was an embarrassment … And then she was gone, and all the regret in the world added up to exactly nothing. There was no way to bring her back. Because of jealousy, she’d let her sister die.

Diega had put the lid back on the box and taken it with her, leaving the house without saying goodbye. Her sister had been murdered year-cycles ago, but Diega was deader to their parents than Ariana would ever be.

Diega turned right and shuffled down the street, passing an overflowing dumpster. All rubbish collection had ceased since war broke over the city. A smashed-up speeder lay among the garbage. Diega went over and wrenched it upright. The engine was completely shot, but that had never presented a problem for her. She harnessed her electrosmith skills and sailed the speeder into the air. She zoomed, flying way too fast, the Intensity making time and space skip around her. Rooftops zipped past, gunfire sounded too loud, and then she saw the AOX building, the meet-up point, flash before her face. She collided with a ledge and crashed onto the rooftop, skidding along the rocks, only her military fatigues saving her skin from being shredded. She smashed into the other side, with the speeder on top of her. Hands wrenched her free from the wreckage and she looked up at Jude, staring at her through his night-vision glasses. His spider robot, SevenM, sat balanced on one broad shoulder.

“Diega!” He shook her. “What have you done to yourself?”

She shoved away from him and stood up, limping on a twisted ankle.

“Are you high again?” he demanded.

She snorted, sick to trutting death of Jude’s holier-than-thou attitude. He was looking at her like a sickness that needed curing. She started to tell him to mind his own business, but he grabbed the narc-gone spray off his belt and squeezed it full into her face. It was absorbed straight into her bloodstream and sobered her immediately. A mountain of pain smashed down on top of her. She staggered to the edge of the rooftop and leaned against it, swallowing, feeling as though she was about to throw up. She grasped her anti-nausea serum and downed it, followed by a pain-cancel to kill the ache of her bruises.

“I don’t understand.” Jude spoke behind her. “You killed the Skreaf. You avenged your sister. Why are you acting even crazier than before? What’s wrong with you women?”

Diega shook her head. He didn’t understand. Everything was worse now – because of him, because of Copernicus and Silho and because she felt even more lost for purpose than ever, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing through her. She just gave a rough laugh and said, “King Jude.”

He knew how to press all her buttons, but she knew all his as well.

Jude moved in closer and said with pity that cut straight to her heart, “Diega – I still care about you.”

Her eyes flickered closed. That was the worst thing to hear –
I still care about you. But I don’t love you …

He kept talking, but she didn’t hear another word, just stared up to the stars, finding among the infinitude of glowing forms the star her parents had made for Ariana and sent into the sky to shine forever. She’d always wanted to make her own star from her sister – but never had. It would mean accepting she was gone. Beyond the stars, the immense forms of other planets filled the night sky, the most visible of them, Bandos, Eumaios and Praterius, said to have once been part of Aquais, struck free by a rogue meteor.