by Alex Oliver
Lali thought about the Innocent, and the guards he commanded, and her total lack of a plan for getting away with a baby in tow. "Thank you," she said, "I would like to be made ready for death. Just in case."
~
After Morwen had thrown herself from the balcony there was a long moment where it felt as though she wasn’t falling at all. She lay on her back and the whole world was streaming past her at a pace her mind could not keep up with. Wind hit her in the face and stole her breath, and it seemed to take forever for her thoughts to catch up with her body and gibber at her that she was going to die.
A blow shocked her out of even that small amount of lucidity, as something hit her in the side, tumbling her. Coughing out pain and shock, she opened eyes that had squinched shut against the blast of air and tried to think. She should think, damn it. Thinking was what she was good at - not this action woman stuff. She was made to sit behind a desk and carefully follow data pathways not--
Stop it! Stop it! Do something!
Another blow, coming out of nowhere, slapped her out of her panic. What was hitting her? Here in freefall, mid air, what was she crashing into?
She managed to twist in the air enough to see the green and silver blur of the side of her tower, and a brown tangle almost directly below her. It was a wood and wicker balcony, she realized, just before she hit it, grazing a beam turned to soft punk wood in the acid rain. The impact of the pulp was softer than the others, only sending a bolt of achy, bruising pain up through her knee and hip as she bounced off. She flailed to get a grip on it but couldn't move her arm in time. Her fingertips brushed the underside, but she was already past.
Still, now she knew what to do. The hand that was already up, she reached out until she could almost touch the green-slicked windows. About twenty feet down, a second wicker balcony stood out, festooned with washing lines and flapping brightly colored children's dresses. If she could... She writhed in the air as though she was in zero gravity, wriggling closer to the building, took a lunge with a foot and managed to push herself off a walkway wall. No way to slow the fall, but she was now above the tiny platform.
Breathing hard she focused like a hawk on the square. She would land there, in the left hand corner. There would be milliseconds to reach out and twist the washing lines around her arms. She would have to hope they were not thin enough to sever her wrists, but if they did, it would probably be an easier death than falling onto the streets beneath.
She couldn't take a deep breath, couldn't... couldn't. No she couldn't do this. And then her feet hit the woven platform. It exploded beneath her in a storm of dry splinters that drove into her lower legs like hundreds of daggers. The pain and the shock almost paralyzed her but her arms flew out as she'd rehearsed in her head, and with a quick twist, she had the nylon line wrapped around both arms.
It was like plunging them both into boiling oil. "Aaaah!" she screamed as the slippery cord tightened and bit into her flesh, cutting through her jacket, sliding through her skin, and then she jerked to a sudden, bone shuddering halt, swinging on the metal pin from which the balcony had been suspended, with a flounced pink skirt bunched up in her face and her feet kicking in the air half a mile above the ground.
She took a moment to weep into the skirt's extravagant frills, to weep for sheer pain and fear and shock and the impossibility of doing anything more to save herself. For a little while that was enough.
But then the sharp, cutting pains in her arms and the stabbing pains in her legs and the deep, aching wrenching pains of her shoulders died down just enough to allow her to notice the tiny head that peeked over the wall a score of floors above her. Someone up there had just realized she was still alive. They would be coming for her.
This wasn't fair! She had never asked for this. All she had ever wanted to do was to tinker with engines and live a peaceful, productive life. Was that so wrong?
Catching herself before she could get started on a self-pitying rant, she took stock of where she was - dangling beneath the walkway of one level, about head height for anyone inside the apartment below. But the windows of this apartment were a lake of green algae, and the doors stood open on fire-blackened emptiness. If she just pulled herself up enough to loosen the ropes, then swung out, when she swung back in she could put out her booted feet, break through the glass of the window and roll to safety on the dirty concrete floor.
Tears threatened again. Easy, right? She had enough pain already, she didn't want to--
But Priya. For Priya she could do it.
She bounced off the window the first time. Too tentative. Had to haul herself back up the blood slick ropes and really go for it, feet first like a child on a swing.
This time the window shattered all around her. She let go as she passed through, feeling shards of glass pass like lines of fire over her face, and then basic training kicked in like instinct and she tucked her head and shoulders in as she rolled and smacked into the far wall.
"Oh God," she sobbed as she uncurled, blood on her hands, all of her limbs feeling severed at every joint. "Oh God!" I can't do this! I can't!” But she still had to get out of here before the police caught up with her. She still had to find Priya. She--
She didn't seem to be able to stop crying. Lurching to the laundry chute in the apartment's bathroom, she pulled up the mechanical dumbwaiter and crouched inside, lowering herself laboriously, painfully, hand over hand until she could climb out on a level that communicated with the other buildings in the sector. By that time she knew she was fading fast. Time for a new plan. She would still find Priya, but first she badly needed help.
~
The ever-present acid rainfall seeped through the stones even of the roofed, linked levels, made long yellow streaks on the painted walls, and ate crumbling holes in the unoccupied apartments, but Siobhan's place still sparkled as white as cocaine. It seemed that she still repainted every four months. Morwen wrapped the ends of her sleeves over her bloody hands before she knocked, so that she would not stain the scoured silver front door.
It took so long for an answer. So long that her wobbly knees finally gave out under her and she slid to a huddle against the stainless steel, leaning her head carefully against it in defeat.
When the door opened, she fell through sideways, sprawling like the contents of an upended garbage can over the stainless steel floor of Siobhan's mud-hall. Siobhan herself, in a voluminous fluffy white bath robe and kitten slippers put both hands over her mouth at the sight and squeaked, backing away in a powdered flurry.
Morwen managed to kick the door shut behind her, blew out a long breath of relief and allowed herself to appreciate the floor, cool, metallic and soothing under her cheek. By the time she had opened her eyes again, Siobhan had dropped her hands and was easing cautiously forward, drawn perhaps by curiosity and the beginnings of recognition.
Morwen pushed the hood off the tight red spirals of her hair, and Siobhan squeaked again, this time in concern.
"Morwen?"
"Yeah." She tried to push herself up, leaving a long red smear on the floor. That was fine - the mud room was designed as a kind of air-lock for dirt, a transitional place between the filth of out and the cleanliness within. Siobhan's outside boots and macintosh hung from pegs on the wall, and at her command jets close to the floor would hose it down and drain the contaminants into the gulley that ran around the room's walls. "Can you help me?"
There was no reason why Siobhan should. Morwen was a criminal on the run, and Siobhan was an upright, upstanding citizen. But she was as soft and fluffy of heart as her gown. "Of course!" she exclaimed, without taking time to think about it. "Oh my goodness! What happened to you? No, don't say. Let me go and get the med kit first."
Morwen closed her eyes again and drifted on her weariness, concentrating on pain and injury and the slow pulse of her blood rather than the question of where Priya might be now. Perhaps Siobhan might know something. They had all three of them been friends at tech college, before Siobhan married a deep-space min
er and did what was expected of her in giving up the thought of her own job. She seemed - now Morwen had the energy and sense of safety to look - happy enough; she was red-cheeked and plump and smiling in her swathing of softness.
"We'll have you fixed up in no time," she said, shrugging the macintosh over her bath-robe to keep it unsullied. "Now let me see."
Together they managed to get Morwen out of her torn up clothes, and then Siobhan went over her with tweezers, pulling out small wood and glass splinters. "Did you fall through a window?"
"I fell off our walkway," Morwen admitted, wondering how much she could tell.
"Oh my goodness!" Siobhan had the fairytale coloring of Snow White. When she blanched she was as pale as paper, all the starker because of her jet black hair. "So these spiral cuts are--"
"Where I wrapped a washing line around my arms to catch me."
"You poor thing! Can you stand up?"
With Siobhan's help, Morwen staggered to her feet and over to the far corner of the mud-room, where the partition of a shower stood. "If you wash off, I'll put down some coverings over the carpet, and we can finish this in the day-room."
"You don't have to help me," Morwen stepped into the spray of water and hissed at the scalding pain of clean water over her cuts. "You know I'm a criminal."
Even while she was saying it, a voice in her head was insisting, shrill and scared, Don't tell her that! You need this! Don't give her an excuse to throw you out or give you up! Even the thought of another ambush felt like more than she could bear.
"Well, they said that," Siobhan conceded, the roses back in her dimpled cheeks, "but they also said you were dead. And if you're dead, I don't see how you could be using my shower. You be sure to get all the dirt out now. That stuff suppurates."
So Morwen washed until the water ran clean, switched the shower to air-blast to dry her, and then limped on a trail of plastic bags up the stairs to the clean rooms. There Siobhan sprayed her arms with antiseptic gel and bandaged them, pronounced the other cuts superficial, and helped her into drawstring trousers that looked like a pleated skirt when she cinched them around her starved waist, and a rusty brown flannel top that hung off one shoulder but felt like a hug.
Once she was bandaged, dressed and no longer bleeding, Siobhan let her sit in the pile of pillows that served her for a couch and brought her buttered soda bread farls and a dish of beef stew.
"I don't know what you can have done to make everyone lie about you the way they do," Siobhan sighed, settling into the cushions beside her after lighting the coal-gas fire.
"What do you mean?" Morwen was slipping towards sleep as painkillers, overexertion and a full stomach lulled her in this place of safety. How good it was to be able to stop for a while. She might not want to live full time in this domestic idyll, but to stay a moment was--
"I know you're not dead," Siobhan scoffed. "And I'm sure you'd never be a traitor. I knew they were lies just like those lies they told about you and Priya. I knew you were just friends. What nonsense that was. Two friends sharing a flat, and they said... Well! When Priya was married, I went round to all of them, and I said--"
Morwen's ease fell out from beneath her like a worm-eaten floor, as denial hit her in the chest, and her dinner tried to surge back up. "When she was what?"
"Oh," Siobhan swayed back, clueless and concerned. "I thought she would have told you, but perhaps she couldn't get through. You're so often a long way away. Yes. She was married last year, to Jai Kumara of Probashi Industries - the defense people, you know. They have a mansion up on the Petersfield cliffs...”
Her stream of talk trickled to a stop as she peered at Morwen's stricken expression, visibly trying to work out why she was upset. “He's very rich!” she said, as if this was a reassurance. “Priya's mother was so proud! I think her family had been worrying she was getting past it, but she got there in the end, right? Aren't you happy for her?"
We're waiting until we can have a double wedding. That's what they had said, laughingly to turn away the pressure of the outside world, while inside they had exchanged their own rings and vows. Morwen wanted to howl, “No! What did they do to her? How did they break her?” That fucking family of hers – fathers and brothers and uncles and cousins, married sisters and their husbands, who would have thought they were doing the right thing for her. Who would have thought they were rescuing her from dishonor.
Priya hated to say no to anyone, hated conflict, hated standing up for herself. Morwen's disbelief slid into certainty like an injection of lead in the veins. She felt her insides would pull through her skin and slump on the white carpeted floor in a bloody slurry.
“Morwen? Are you all right?”
“We said 'together or not at all,'” she managed, that pale excuse for what they had really promised.
Siobhan chuckled knowingly. “That was a little girl promise,” she said, smiling a smile of complete incomprehension. “You can't have expected her to keep it. Not really.”
She had to get out. She had to get out of this place where she wouldn't even be given the luxury of being able to cry. “I'm sorry,” she hauled herself to her feet, already stronger for food and painkillers, her wounds sealed and numbed. “I've got to go and see her. Where did you say she lived now?”
Siobhan gave her a long look, a pretty little frown twisting the dark brows above her dark blue eyes, and Morwen was buried alive under the need to hide from her, the knowledge that this welcoming friendship would be lost the moment she let her friend see who she really was. She had once thought she had a reasonably happy life here, but that was before she tasted what it was like on Cygnus 5, where she could stop pretending.
“You match the carpet, you're so pale,” said Siobhan in teasing concern. “Give me a moment to put on some clothes, and I'll take you.”
~
'Mansion' was accurate. Priya's new home took up a whole mile on top of the cliffs, far above the city, where the air was clear and the rain could be drunk unfiltered. The tops of trees showed above the high boundary wall that made the place look like a prison, though the leaves were curled and brown at the edges, dismal. Many roofs and ornamental chimneys showed among them, as though the place was less a house than a tiny village. The only access on the city side was a pier with a checkpoint in mid air, where a small stone guard-house contained a man in peacock green silk with a rifle over his shoulder.
By the time Siobhan's small flitter had drawn up at the mid-air landing point, Morwen had schooled herself into a more fitting appearance. An appearance of nerves appropriate for meeting with a best friend who had done well for themselves while forgetting to invite one to their wedding. She even managed not to shoot the messenger, but to turn on the quay and hug Siobhan hard.
"Thank you for all your help, and for believing the best of me. I hope you don't get into trouble for it."
Siobhan dimpled again. "Oh, I can handle them," she said, soft as a marshmallow and equally sweet. "Good luck."
"I need it," Morwen whispered, looking at the guard as Siobhan sailed back into the smog. Then she squared her shoulders, as if to march into battle, and approached.
The guard was already out of his hut, gorgeous in sherwani and dhoti, but moving like one who is more ornamental than functional. If it hadn't been for the rifle, he would have posed little problem. But the rifle made things difficult.
"Stand where you are!" he shouted, raising it to his shoulder, canting his turbaned head to look down the barrel at her.
She stopped, wishing she was not so conscious of the drop all around her, of the winds plucking at her hair and her oversized clothes. One fall in a day had been enough. "Can you tell me that Priya is all right?" she asked, misgivings sliding up her back with the cold touch of the air. What if Priya was fine? If she was content in her new life? What would Morwen do then? Who would she be? How could she survive it?
The guard didn't answer her, just raised his radio to his ear and said "Control? She's here."
God!
How stupid of her to come! Of course the Kingdom forces had known she would turn up on Priya's doorstep. They would have been waiting for her. Had they taken Priya away and interrogated her and broken her? Turned her house into a trap? That's what Morwen would have done if their positions had been reversed. Shit!
She took stock of her surroundings again, but it wasn't good. The landing platform was barely six feet across, and the solid ground was a good hundred feet beyond that. Low, grimy clouds scudded by beneath her - there was nothing to cling to or break her fall this time. With a sudden overwhelming pang of nostalgia for Lali, who would probably have seen this as a challenge, she pressed the back of her knuckles into her eye to try to stop herself from shattering apart.
And then the far door in the mansion's encircling wall burst open, and Priya came sprinting up the quay in a whirlwind of dizzying multicolored sparkles from the spangles on her clothes and in her hair, and threw herself into Morwen's lacerated arms like all her dreams come true.
"I knew you would come!" she laughed as the long tail of her plait caught up with her and lashed forward, curling around Morwen's hip, "I knew you would come!"
There was a moment, with Priya's solid weight in her arms, pressed against her breasts, with Priya's head tucked under her chin, warm, confiding and saffron scented, that Morwen felt almost safe enough to break apart, almost cradled enough to howl and be comforted, but then Priya pulled away. "But we can't stand out here. Come on, quickly, indoors."
She was so beautiful! A short, slight, petite little thing who made all other women look oversized. This Jai Kumara, whom Morwen loathed in every other respect, at least had the sense to lavish her with jewels - emeralds on her forehead and a string of pearls winding through her long plait right down to the tip where it finished in a spray of diamonds. Emeralds in her ears and nose and at her throat, their sparkle not managing to distract from the shadow that had fallen over her eyes.
"Madam," said the guard, low, warning behind her, and they both stiffened. No, this was not safe. Morwen reapplied the pressure to her scattered pieces and did not cry.
