“I can’t go away. Where do you think I am coming from?”
There was silence for a long while. She guessed he was contemplating, perhaps recalling the legends of the canyons and the madness that can creep into riders as they delve deeper into the crevices, bringing up horrid pasts and ghosts of people long dead. Maybe he didn’t want to give in to the madness of speaking to a disembodied voice.
On his tail, together they weaved left and right. She had him: damaged sails, agitated mind. She even had to reduce power to keep her position because of his slipstream. She could zip out, forge ahead. Now she saw her chance to really hurt him, she was determined to act.
“Matriarch got your tongue?”
“Who are you?”
“Georg,” she said. Was that a wobble up ahead? She touched Phoenix’s nose to the rear of Rohen’s hoverbike.
“That’s not possible. Georg is dead,” he said, glancing back.
“I’m dead, alright. You might wanna keep your eyes on the path, my boy.”
Rohen ducked to the left to miss Tweezer’s monument – a mid-cartwheel pose wrapped in barbed wire – and Elissa followed suit. “Georg was a layabout. A layabout in life, and a layabout in death. He’d haunt no-one.”
“Rohen, you may as well give up now. It’s all over for you. You think winning entry to Neon City will absolve you? You killed me. You’ll have to live with that forever, and ever, and ever. The bright lights won’t change a thing.”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Your death,” he said. Elissa eased off slightly. Now that she had him, she wanted to give him enough rope to hang himself by.
“Was it by your hand?”
Silence in her ear. She could still hear his wind-battered momentum, and was that heavy breathing?
“Was it by your hand?” she repeated.
“You asked me to.”
“Was it by your hand?”
“You wanted it to end.”
“Was it by your hand?”
“I was absolved. Death by willing suicide. And not my fault.”
“Then why stage it?” Elissa recalled the day; it had been a particularly pelting afternoon, the sun burning bright and yellow until the top of the dome swallowed it up. She’d done her usual shift at The Crank, bussing drinks to drunks and friends all day, venturing out to those sat beneath the awning in the bastard heat for reasons unknown to her, before rushing back inside to the fan-cooled interior. In and out, on her feet, all day. Bloodshot eyes beneath tattooed brows watching her movements, her swaying hips. Let them have it, that momentary rise, she thought, the brightest highlight of their sad afterlife. She felt sorry for them. Drinking into oblivion. And if they had currency: fucking into oblivion. The sea of sad, purposeless, clones.
It wasn’t just a fuck they wanted. Looking into their eyes, it wasn’t fucking at all, just for someone to acknowledge them. And so that’s what she did. She didn’t really understand what was going on behind those eyes, but she looked, and she listened, and she made them all feel as though they had a friend. She wasn’t the only one, of course, but not many of the other girls cared half as much; they had either fallen from the bottom rung and landed, spread-eagled, on four-poster beds, and without wit to keep them going, they used their bodies. Elissa saw herself as something more.
So when she left The Crank, she checked her schedule to see whose turn it was for a visit, thankful for the cooling night. Georg lived in a nearby shack in a self-imposed exile of sorts, cut off from the regular interactions of the town. He hadn’t visited The Crank for weeks and she was afraid he’d do something stupid. With the sky turning violet, she pushed through the hemp-rags of his makeshift door and bumped into Rohen, on his way out, a look of surprise flashing across his face. He pushed past, and ran. She watched him go; he did stop at one point, as though to turn around and say something, and it gave her enough time to register his brow-tattoo from which she would later name him.
Justice – true justice – was a problem in the town: she had trouble accepting the way of things. It was a problem of will: from the matriarchs down to the brothers on the street, they understood that there was no free will, that everything was determined by desires or compulsions that went towards creating their motivations. It was a common practice in class, for those who bothered turning up, when those who taught could be bothered, to experiment on the brains of cats they kept cooped up within the animal rearing sector; putting them under and injecting them with proteins that targeted a specific area of the brain to grow a tumour that pushed on the central nervous system, making cats that were, in turn, more docile, or more aggressive. See here, they would say; see how this physical manipulation affects the nature of this animal. Now imagine this on both the grander scale, and the smaller scale, to an almost infinite regression. All it takes is one small push on one receptor to determine what we like, why we like something, and how we act upon that like.
And so, and this was what Elissa hated – what she couldn’t bring herself to believe – there was no free will. No-one was ultimately responsible for their actions.
The town had laws which needed to be adhered to, otherwise true chaos would ensue. There may not be free will, according to the nature they were taught, but there was still room for punishment to influence a person’s decision making, but only as a hindrance. There was no justice. No need for justice.
When she walked in to Georg’s shack and saw him hunched over with his thumbs pressed into his eye sockets, blood oozing slowly, slowly, down to his hands and over his wrists, her first compulsion was regret that she hadn’t been here for him. Perhaps she could have stopped this. But then she saw the blood dribbling down the cracks of the bare tundra in front of him and realised there was no way that blood could have gotten there if he had simply committed suicide.
She ran back out into the darkening night and chased the shadows down the accidental streets, ramshackle sheds one-to-three stories high – and no higher, it was generally accepted, for fear of collapse – but the brother who had just left was nowhere to be seen. Others waved and smiled at her as she frantically searched, because she was well-known, and popular. Back in the present, hurtling along on Phoenix, she imagined there would be many watching the feed and urging her on. It would likely be high-news; the woman who caught the murderer, who had subsequently ‘got off lightly’ with just three months in solitary, chasing him down for her revenge. But not hers. For Georg. A guilty plea and the insistence that it was Georg’s desire that he die, had preyed upon the matriarch’s good will as they sentenced Rohen. It wasn’t his fault; a victim of circumstance, and after all, it was just another instance of brother-on-brother violence.
What determination had needled its way into Georg, so that he had pleaded to die, had manifested and needled its way into Rohen. He was blameless.
But...
He hadn’t looked like a victim.
He’d looked like a murderer, pleased to get off so lightly.
“I was scared. I had to stage it,” said Rohen, catching one of the last bits of sunlight as it cascaded in a waterfall of orange flames from the top of the canyon. Elissa could see his yellow scalp through his thinning hair.
“You had to stage it. Because you murdered me.”
“NO!” he shouted. “Why are you doing this? What is this place? How is your ghost here, of all places?”
“I’m everywhere you go, my boy.” She wondered how she sounded to him. This device changed her voice and made it more masculine, but with that metallic side-effect. No doubt it was creepy as shit.
“No,” he repeated. “No, no, no...” on and on, like a mantra. Elissa had him now, she knew. He was withdrawing, as she had seen other brothers do in The Crank during arguments and disagreements. It was usually she who had to pull them back from the abyss. See, she’d seen enough brothers come and go at the The Crank to know the different looks; the plain and simple, to the downright dangerous. It was all in the w
ay they looked at her. Fine margins in their genetics she had learned to read.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, yes, yes...” She nudged his rear. Up ahead, a series of hairpin boulders formulated. “Feel that? She’s coming for you.”
He looked around, and as he did, she nudged him again, this time pushing right ever so slightly to push him off course. Lynk sped past on the left, followed closely by Rassler, and shortly after by a loud, grunting, scream as Rohen realised what was going on. Too late, he re-applied the throttle but his back-end was spinning out, so he ended up spiralling left as Elissa pushed more firmly right. Just for good measure, she managed to drag Phoenix’s nose across the remaining sail arms on Rohen’s right-side, tearing them up, before he span completely out of control and slammed sideways into a boulder, crushing his leg.
***
Leora lay on her back at the end of a skid-trail which began where Feather lay prone on its side. There was an indentation in the soft stone somewhere near the edge where she had made contact, smashing forcefully into the surface before bouncing back up again. As Leora felt Feather losing trajectory control, and herself losing grip on the handlebars, she switched off the main thrust and the anti-grav, mid-air, and came crashing down. The feeling of heaviness that followed hoverbike use was magnified, accelerated, when Feather didn’t regain height, and when momentum sent her tumbling. She was like the rocks she had sent tumbling as debris; human debris, a sack of ground-locked flesh and bone. For a moment, she recalled Avi, who had taken the scraps of three hoverbikes and fashioned them together with added steel-sheeted wings, and flown. She had been a child, watching him fly in ever-increasing circles around the town and up, higher and higher. It got so he spent more time up in the air than on the ground. Finally he sallied for the sand mountain, never to be seen again.
The back of her right thigh was grazed and her elbows bruised from rolling away, but she was alive. The question was, how was Feather? It always felt so wrong, she thought, seeing the hoverbikes upended and making real contact with the ground. She always got the urge to right them, like upside-down beetles kicking the air.
She stood, and echoing from the canyon beyond she heard the thrum of passing riders, disturbed sand and dust floating up in clouds. She lifted her goggles to clean them thoroughly, and squinted into the sunlight. The crevice through which she had raced, and from which many had fallen, seemed distant. Surely further away than it actually was. But as she ran towards Feather, it didn’t get much closer. As the full extent of her madness revealed itself, she forced herself to look away.
I did not just jump that, she thought, forcing Feather upright.
Have you completely lost your mind? asked her father.
I’m getting there, she laughed. She had to laugh. Poor Deo and the girls, having to watch her jump that crazy gap, and crash. “Please, please, please,” she whispered, straddling the seat and pressing the ignition. “Go!” she cried as it lurched from the ground. She twisted the throttle and set off down the incline to the plains.
***
“Take Joe, for example,” said Matron Augustine. “He’s the same as all you, right?”
Heads turned to look at him and he felt like one of those paper targets the older brothers competed to throw discs through to score the most points. He’d tried once, but the disc kept spinning off course and threatening to hit someone standing in the aisle. He couldn’t be trusted, was the upshot of that. And now, Matron was pointing at him, setting eyes and sneers on him.
“Wrong,” she said. “He should be, but somewhere along the line, maybe in his mother’s womb, or what resembles a womb – as far back as that – something triggered, or perhaps that should be, didn’t trigger, and it made him soft in the head. By Grace, maybe his head was just too soft to come out and his brain got all bent out of shape. Point is, we don’t know, but we don’t need to know. You just need to know it’s not his fault–”
One of the brothers sniggered and another landed a hard punch on Joe’s arm.
“–Mikkel, not too hard on the brother, eh? Just like you need to know that it’s not your fault if you feel like you are superior to him, because you are.” Joe’s head burned with shame.
“Your superiority is not your fault. Be thankful for your genes. Let your compulsions lead you, that’s what they are for. In this true desire is the heart of our nature.”
“But what if what I feel is not superiority, but sorrow?” asked a voice from the back. “I feel sorry for Joe.”
“Well, that’s not your fault either. There’s always a few among you who develop a more sympathetic tendency.” She paced back and forth with her black, bulb-tipped rod swinging down into her palm, down into her palm, before a bank of monitors that were, at this time, turned off. On the walls, pages of old books had been lacquered to the surface; torn and ripped and brittle from time, but here and there old lines could be formed, lines from forgotten stories. Joe had sometimes tried to make them out, catching little snippets, but feeling ultimately sorry that snippets were all he could get.
Matron Augustine stopped her pacing and faced them. “Now for the really important bit,” she smiled. “Don’t think for one minute that you’re not responsible for your actions. You step out of line in here, and what do you get?”
“The rod.”
“Starved.”
“A bed with the pigs.”
“Exactly,” she continued. “Chaos!” She slammed the rod into her palm. “Anarchy!” She slammed it again, accentuating each point. “Disorder! Lawlessness! Mayhem! The Matriarchs will not stand for any of this. They are forgiving, and lenient, as we are products often of outside forces, but one such outside force should be fear of punishment. We know, for example, that a man may get angry and kill his partner. But this is not a psychosis for murder. He is not a serial killer. He can – and must – be punished! But he can – and must – remain a useful member of society. So he is punished accordingly, six months in confinement perhaps. And when he is released he is branded a killer of loved ones, and should he take up another partner, so it be on her head. But you see why this man can be released back to society? It is not in him to kill coldly, without an emotional rage. This we understand. We have the death penalty for the coldest of murders, but we have not used it in my lifetime, for there is so often an outside motive.”
“What about if we’re putting something out of its misery?” came a voice from the corner.
The brothers nearest to Joe jostled him, and started laughing. “It would be humane,” one of them said. “Just to kill him,” said another. Joe felt hands on his shoulders and fingers that dug into his back and pinched the back of his neck. He felt heat surging from his guts and his face burning and his eyes stinging, pushed left and right, bringing his legs and arms into his body as closely as possible.
“You can’t,” said Matron Augustine. “He has experiences. They may not be like yours, and they certainly won’t be like mine, but they are his, and his alone, and he may be happy in his own way. The same case can be said against the killing and eating of animals, but need often outweighs moral obligation.” It was this line that stuck in Gentle Joe’s mind as he powered Rosie through canyon. At the time, he’d been grateful, for the brothers’ needling began to peter at that point, and he thought here was someone who cared about him.
But he understood now, racing into the deepening gloom, that Matron Augustine was making fun of him. That she’d been worse than even the brothers, that day. A fresh flame of anger flickered within him, below the mantle of natural kindness that was the equilibrium of his being; for his ‘soft brain’ and whatever had happened to make him different; for the brothers that had bullied him until his teens when he realised he wasn’t any smaller than them; for all the Matrons that had belittled him, put him inside the Locker, or worse, made him come out of it; and most of all, for himself. The Matron had been right about will: he had felt compelled to take part in the race, for he knew, deep down, that he didn’t stand a chance,
and maybe something bad would happen. Something real bad.
That real bad thing was happening right now. He could be stuck, and it would be all his fault. Was that what he had wanted? Head down into the wind, he shook it slightly, an acknowledgement that maybe it had been, but it wasn’t what he wanted now.
He rounded the corner and saw something ahead that melted his mantle of kindness and extinguished the nascent flames. Someone had crashed.
Go, said a voice from somewhere. Just go. Was that a woman’s voice? He felt this conscience taking hold of his arms, his hands, locking his wrists in place. But it was a bad conscience. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t him!
His real ego took control and unlocked his wrists, slackened his taut muscles, and brought the hoverbike to a slow roll until Rosie hovered beside… and he double-checked, for it couldn’t be true. Rohen was the favourite. He was a brother, and had a distinguishing jacket which right now was covered with a film of fine red sand. In his hair too. He could have been any brother. But it was definitely his hoverbike – dull and grey and undecorated – and with broken spines where the sails should have been.
“Are you okay?” Joe shouted.
Rohen looked up, startled – he had been passed out. A sudden grimace plastered his face and he cried out in pain. Joe noticed his leg was trapped against the boulder, pinned by the hoverbike.
“I’ll help!” Joe called, flicking the kickstand down and turning Rosie’s power level down to minimum. She eased closer to the ground until she was resting on her struts, and Joe jumped off. “Don’t move!”
His boots kicked up puffs of dirt and left prints as he ran over to Rohen, who now moaned in a way the feral cats sometimes did when it was too hot and there was too little food for them. Joe held on to this mental image a moment; all those cats huddling in the shade of the water well, not unlike Rohen here, slumped in the shade of the boulder.
He removed his mask and immediately the dust tickled his nostrils. “Are you okay?”
Rohen turned his head. His brow frowned, and below the mask and goggles, Joe guessed that it was anger that flashed in the eyes, not gratitude. “Do I fucking look okay?” Rohen snarled.
Neon Sands Trilogy Boxset: The Neon Series Season One Page 23
