Neon Sands Trilogy Boxset: The Neon Series Season One

by Adam J. Smith

  Caia Warner. A complete person. She looked at her reflection in the panelled mirror of the elevator. Looking back at her time out on the sands, she had been a half-person, completely reliant on her mission – and focused. Resentment had not paid its entrance fee to any of her rides. There had been no time for it. Kirillion had plucked her from obscurity and thrust her knee-deep into the sand, where she’d had to learn quickly. And adapt. After the shock of learning that everything she had been told about life outside the dome was a lie, her momentary anger vanished, and instead of hating Kirillion, she thanked him. Not to his face. Never to his face, the bastard. However, there was a privilege in peeking beneath the surface of things, and smugness – sitting around campfires listening to the rambling stories about a world torn apart and destroyed. Nothing but the sand dwellers remaining. Perhaps she shouldn’t have received such a kick from it – and on more than one occasion she’d wanted to tell them what she knew; that the sand mountain they spoke of did in fact hide a whole other world from them: one they would risk their lives climbing for.

  But if she had said anything, she’d be dead right now. Not Caia Warner, undercover operative. She smiled at her reflection.

  Some things never change.

  She ran fingers through her cropped hair, bleached to near white. The hood of her leather jacket had kept her head dry from the rain. Nearing the mirror, she pulled her bottom eyelid down and checked the whites of her eye. She pulled at her skin, testing the tautness, still amazed by the surgery she’d had just a couple weeks after returning from Sanctum. She looked ten years younger.

  Kirillion too.

  You’ve done a great service to the city. Keep on serving, and you will live forever.

  Quite how that worked, she didn’t know. Didn’t even know if it was literal. Didn’t even know if it was something she wanted – but if the surgery could make her look this young again, no older than twenty, then eternity might not be so bad after all.

  Were there others like me? she’d asked.

  Of course.

  But they’re still out there, looking for something they can never find.

  So?

  So, shouldn’t we recall them?

  Getting soft now, Caia? Kirillion had smiled. Without forward momentum, everything stops. Desire falters. Purpose lapses. What do you think is happening at Sanctum, right now? Now that they know the truth?

  Trying to figure a way to get here?

  They’ll implode. Our other agents will find out and they’ll spill the beans. The forward momentum, the resource gathering, the essential living activities, will cease. Without leadership – my leadership – they’ll be headless. Kirillion’s beard was darker now, all flecks of grey gone. You were always my favourite.

  Maybe it was because she looked ten, fifteen years younger than she did, and hence regenerated of vitality and youth, that she had felt a little flutter in her belly, fingers strumming her diaphragm. She couldn’t help but need his acceptance. The sands had hardened her, but all this rain, especially down here near the pits, was beginning to soften her.

  She felt for the pressure point in her bottom eyelid and pressed it, activating the recording contact lens. The elevator doors opened onto floor twelve and she stepped out into the dimly lit hallway. She’d taken the apartment next to Rylan because it was vacant and convenient, and she unlocked it now, walking into the open plan space. It smelled empty, unlived in –inside, only what the previous inhabitants had left behind. So a table and chairs, a couch, a bed, and not a lot else. The cupboards were empty of food, but she spied a few glasses and plates and other kitchenware. She tested the water, turning it from freezing to boiling point with a turn of the temperature gauge. Working: good.

  She placed her holdall on the kitchen table and began pulling out her life: dirty cutlery and plates, clothes in need of a wash, a few towels that stank like wet dog, her linking port, her favourite pair of running shoes (now that she didn’t have to lug a blower about on her back and struggle with the strain of sinking in sand, she had to keep her fitness up somehow) and a few toiletries. She genuinely did need a few more things: pillow, sheets, bedclothes, those kinds of things, all of which she’d be able to find up on market level in the morning. That all paled in comparison to her very vital need for coffee.

  Since returning to the city she’d become hooked – how she’d lived without it, she couldn’t fathom. Her old friends didn’t know what they were missing. They knew of coffee, from the carefully selected films they could watch, but a coffee bean just wasn’t an essential plant when fruit, vegetables and clothing needs were considered.

  Whoever had planned that had not been a coffee drinker.

  She could look back at that time in a generic sense, but tried to avoid specifics. Or specific people. If she did…

  … old friends…

  … it usually brought back Barrick’s face; his glinting eyes and thick beard that had brushed her lips and cheeks in quick, red hot blasts of passion in the crawler.

  It was nothing, she told herself. Then, and now. Nothing at all, just a quick fuck to ease the tension and pass the time. Sometimes she’d see a child though, and imagine all the love and effort poured into bringing it up; imagine all the effort put into raising Barrick (love too – back when he still lived with his parents), only to have those hands, that smile, that dry wit, drained of its life-force and nudged with a kick into swirling waters. That childhood rescue from a starving dome reduced to a lungful of water.

  She remembered clamping her hand over her mouth as the shot rang out and Barrick fell like a sack of hemp, clutching his stomach. He’d knocked Kirillion over, but Kirillion was unhurt and backed away. Then there was a splash as Kirillion toed Barrick into the water.

  It had been so long since they’d first arrived at Sanctum, when he’d killed anyone who stood in his way to cover his tracks, she’d forgotten how ruthless he could be.

  Barrick and Calix had backed them into a corner.

  He’d had no choice.

  Barrick was down. He was in no shape to stop their departure.

  She flung the empty holdall towards the sofa where it landed in a shaft of advertising light from outside the window, and turned for the front door. She checked her reflection in a mirror on the wall and then left, leaving her door wide open. In the murk of the hallway there were the faintest smells; mostly good – various spices from home cooked food (there must be families on this floor) but there was also that slightly damp, sweaty undercurrent that came with being so near the pits and the heat.

  At her neighbour’s door, she knocked. It was late, she knew, but what better way to introduce herself then to make an entrance, so he would wake up to a beautiful woman on his doorstep, and return to sleep with her in his dreams.

  When there was no answer she knocked again. She could be patient.

  The door opened and Rylan’s face peered around. She could almost catch the moment his eyes transitioned from unfocused and sleepy to focused and awake.

  “Hi,” she said. “Fuck, I’m sorry, were you asleep? I heard some movement not long ago and thought you were awake.”

  Rylan pulled the door inwards, and he stood there scratching his face in shorts and vest. “Sound has a way of travelling – it’s the damn ventilation in this place. Same everywhere, I guess.” He stopped talking and looked at her, waiting for her next move.

  She flashed him her biggest smile and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’ll try and remember that.” She looked past him: the room was darker than her own. Despite this, she could see only single sets of things, nothing that gave away the presence of other guests. She shook her head as though shaking free her thoughts, and continued; “I’ve just moved in next door, like, literally, and I have so much sorting to do, but no coffee! I can’t function without it, seriously.” She laughed. “I just didn’t feel like going all the way back down to Market…”

  “Say no more,” said Rylan. “Bit late for a moving in party?” He turned and headed for
his cupboards.

  “I just had to get out of where I was.”

  “Oh? Trouble?” He opened a cupboard and retrieved a cup.

  “Umm…”

  “None of my business,” the cupboard door shut with a slam. “Fucking doors,” he muttered. “Whatever you’re running from, it’s probably a good thing you have, in my experience.”

  From another cupboard he grabbed a bag of beans and poured them into the cup. “You bring a grinder with you?”

  “Oh, yeah, you bet.”

  “Press?”

  “Got it!”

  “Then you’re all set!” He held out the cup of beans. “Except you haven’t told me your name.”

  She took the beans, put them to her nose, and breathed deeply. “Caia – and you?”

  “Rylan.”

  “Well, thank you again. I’ll let you get back to sleep, neighbour!” She turned and walked away, calling “I owe you one,” over her shoulder.

  She heard him say “Goodnight” and then close the door. Back in her own apartment, she poured the beans into her grinder and turned the handle, and then proceeded to make a coffee. The slightly acrid smell of the brewing beans filled the air; a happy by-product of her newly acquired addiction would be the eradication of that mixed smell of old occupants and the pits.

  While it brewed, she stood by the window and looked out, beyond her reflection. Odd, to be so near the bottom she could see it from her apartment window. She was used to the higher levels in the dome; the impressive scope of that height and the views down the avenues if she leaned out over her balcony. There were no balconies this low down. Beneath street level she had stayed up near Negative One in the Welcome Hotel; the ceiling visible above her head, and the pits below lost in the criss-cross metalwork of the gangways and periodic streets connecting the towers. Even without the gangways, there was a shrouding mist; one that now appeared above her instead of below.

  She raised her finger to her bottom eyelid and ceased recording.

  She tapped the window twice and it turned into a sheet of darkness. She’d missed this. When lying in bed with Barrick, she’d missed this. The one time they did actually lie in bed together. She’d wished she could tell him about it – wished they could lie together and replay the moment, maybe prompting the creation of a new one.

  She grabbed her coffee and sat on the sofa and brought up a holographic display in the armrest. She placed her hand within the holographic dial and above the chip reader, and turned on the screen. The window lit slowly and showed a range of options from television and music, to game shows and sports, while in the corner was the personal ID reader. She navigated towards it, selected it, and brought up the folders saved to her drive.

  The storage bar glowed red.

  “Yes, yes,” she muttered. “I’ll get round to deleting some soon.” She skipped over various folders – most from her childhood which she had watched almost as soon as she’d returned, catching glimpses of herself as a seven-, eight-, nine-year-old girl; right up to just before she was recruited, her spotty face all puffy in the mirror. Remnants of puppy fat in her cheeks. The bottom of her stomach had fallen out at those pictures, imagining what she would have done in the city with all that time she’d wasted on the sands. The powder staining that nubile face, no longer quite so fresh.

  She couldn’t agree to Kirillion’s youth treatment quick enough.

  A single folder named OUTSIDE seemed to jump from the screen, and she hovered momentarily over this, knowing how cluttered and disorganised it would be. Knowing how many recordings would feature Barrick. Remembering how she had recorded so much of the early days in Sanctum when there had been all the killing, and not particularly wanting to relive it.

  She found the folder marked with today’s date and opened it, and played the single file. She blinked at herself in the lift. Rediscovered her new apartment. Relived her first encounter with Rylan.

  “Is that love at first sight I see?”

  She laughed. Dream on.

  He looked good, even with sleep in his eyes. Or maybe because of it; the child-like charm of it, and the ruffle of his hair. The thing with reviewing recordings, you get to notice things you missed the first time round, like his eyes scanning her from head to toe, or the thickness of his forearms from turning bolts all day. But somehow, his eye whites were redder, and the blood in his veins across his face was more noticeable, and blackheads seemed headier. He’d gone straight to that bar from work, then home, eaten, then bed; the day’s grime was evident. Teeth flashed and seemed whiter. When he turned into his kitchen area revealing the room, she paused it.

  She consumed the scent of coffee as she brought it to her lips, and sipped, scanning the room as she did so. She zoomed and focused on countertops, the back of chairs and the sofa, a pile of shoes. Even the amount and variety of dirty cups and plates. “Home alone,” she said – no doubling of male garments, and certainly nothing a female would want to wear.

  Still worth keeping an eye on.

  It was people like Rylan – especially people like Rylan – who needed extra attention. His life did not revolve around the link; his genes exhibited minor abnormalities that made him less suggestible, coercive. Of course, this independent streak rarely caused a problem as a whole – those who leaned towards solitude weren’t necessarily bent on revolution, and if they were, finding others like them was like finding the correct backdoor to someone’s personal files. Ironically, the Link could be just the tool revolutionaries like him needed. If he was one.

  If he could overcome the futility.

  If he had a cause.

  If he knew who Calix was, and where.

  Cal

  In his dream, Calix felt sweat turn cold as the water rose up his sides and then his elbows and his shoulders and the bottom of his chin. He lifted his chin, mouth gaping and gasping, the top of his head pushing against the submarine hatch. Nowhere to go but up, but up wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard he turned the valve. The first taste of the freezing water licked his lower lip. Mustn’t swallow. To swallow would be death. He arched his neck further until the back of his head dipped into the water, and he didn’t know which was worse; dehydrating and burning to a crisp in the blistering heat at the base of the sand mountain, or drowning far below land where no man had any right to be, body frozen but lungs hyperventilating into the already narrow gap of air floating above the water.

  Hands on the wheel, he turned again; succeeding in turning his body around in the swill, but not a lot else.

  And then he was bodiless – his entire self numb from the cold. His hands no longer held that firm grip. The tips of his fingers no longer felt the smooth metallic ice of the valve. The back of his head was no longer cold – it was simply not there. Just his mouth, and water that tasted like blood seeping in at the corners, causing him to gulp. Face pressed to the ceiling so tightly his nose squashed. He could stick his tongue out and lick it – and he laughed. It was a ridiculous thought to have at a time like this. Annora would have found it funny too, laughing with him at how silly the idea was. How daft. And how did you end up down there anyway?

  As the water covered his nose and mouth, he sank into a shaft of light. Above, the light source glimmered, round and accessible where the hatch had been. A hand broke the surface, reaching down, and he grabbed it, felt the owner pull him to safety. The corrugated light rippled until he broke free of the surface and saw that Annora was the one pulling: of course she was – she wouldn’t let him drown without finding her first.

  After heaving him across the metal bow bobbing on the surface of the water, she vanished without a word. Darkness returned in a blink. Water dripped from the ceiling of rock that glistened as though pockmarked with embedded gems. Too near for his liking. Where have you gone?

  I miss you.

  Were they his words or hers? He thinks hers – echoing back to him from the darkest parts of the cavern.

  Cavern.

  Where did the pipe go?


  “I’m coming,” he called out across the blank sheet of water, almost plaintive, he knew; but this was how he felt, in the dead of night where anything of life and emotion became amplified against the void. Embers glowered by an inspired bellow. It was a dream, this much was obvious. The platform would be next, appearing on his left as they – for it was he and Elissa – bobbed on the current.

  But he wished to be drowning again, so that he could be rescued again, and see her again.

  This was it – the end. Time to wake. Time to wake.

  Cal.

  “Annora.”

  No, Cal. Cal! Time to get a move on.

  Wardle

  “For too long, ladies and gentlemen, we have remained immobile. Fishes not only hooked on barbs but trapped in nets of our own devising.” Corbin Wardle scanned the room, meeting eyes, and smiled. “Pun intended.” A low, chuckling murmur spread among the guests before quieting.

  “Philosophers say we must learn from history, or risk repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Well, where does our history begin, and where does it end? What is our history?” As he spoke, he felt that rising heat in the pit of his dislocated stomach, the stimulus in the brain convincing his body. This was how it always began: the anger. He allowed it to simmer like the pit-pools in the shallows above the furnaces. Always there. Always steaming. Put it to boil and he could explode, righteous with rage.

  He’d learned to vent that steam in ways that could not be seen easily by those who should not see it.

  “Our history is one long, straight path. How did we get here? Where did we come from? Have we always been here?” He pointed out into the standing crowd, their faceless heads lit softly from above. “You. You are the few who ask these questions too, no? Or at least, the few who care enough about the answers to risk showing up here tonight. Our past is like putty in the hands of the elite; thick, black putty. They shape it however they want, and when we shine a light in its direction, we might get a glimpse – a long-ago war destroyed everything outside the dome, Neon City–” he said the city’s name as though capitalised, clutching at the air as though twisting a lightbulb. “Neon City: the final refuge on a poisoned planet. We assume planet. Why not moon, or asteroid? Who here has seen the stars in the sky? No-one has – because we can’t go outside. We can’t leave! We’re told it’s too dangerous, and that’s that.”