“Got food,” I said, lapsing into dialect. I set one of my meat rolls on a nearby rock stump and went about eating the other roll.
A small figure crept out of shadows. I couldn’t see her clearly in my side vision, but it looked like she had tousled black hair and wore clothes that had turned gray. She could have been me at eight or nine. She inched forward, grabbed the meat roll, and scuttled back into the shadows.
I kept eating.
After a moment, I said, “Got water.” I took two snap-bottles out of my pack, broke the seal on one, and put the other on the stump. Then I took a long swig of the cool water in my bottle.
The girl came out again, a little bolder this time. She walked over, put her hand on the snap-bottle, and stood looking at me, defiant.
I regarded her. “Clean water,” I added. It was a valuable commodity here.
She glanced at my holster. “Got gun.”
Now that I could see her better, I realized she was older than I’d first thought, eleven maybe. Her clothes were clean, and someone had repaired the worst tears. Wild hair tumbled over her shoulders, ragged but well-washed and brushed. Her dark eyes seemed too large for her face.
“Not shoot you,” I said.
“Killed Scorch.” She was clenching the neck of the snap-bottle.
“Scorch screwed up,” I said. To put it mildly.
“You screwed up.” She swept up the bottle and ran back into the shadows like wind whistling past the outcroppings. The sound of her retreat faded within seconds.
That went well, Max thought dryly.
At least she showed herself.
Did you come here to find dust rats?
I shook my head, on odd response given that I was conversing with an EI via a node in my spine. His question bothered me. It didn’t seem right for an EI to call our children rats.
Not really, I thought. But duster kids go everywhere here. They could probably tell me a lot.
Good luck with that, Max thought. You’ll need it.
Yeah, I know. I wouldn’t have told me squat either, when I had lived here.
In any case, right now, I had someone else to find.
* * *
Gourd took his name from the gourdex vines that grew in the Vanished seas, one of the few plants that thrived in that wasteland. They were muscular reeds, big and low the ground. Their gourds held moisture, and their tendrils dug deep into the desert, mining fresh water. The human Gourd filtered water. In our youth, he had been part of my dust gang, along with Jak and Dig, the girl who freed me from the orphanage. The four of us grew up together, inseparable, as tight as a fist holding gold swag. But now? I had no idea if Gourd would even talk to me.
The Grotto wasn’t the only body of water in the aqueducts, but it ranked as the largest, a lake fifty meters across, far underground. The brackish water was undrinkable, poisonous to those foolish or desperate enough to swallow too much. Gourd built equipment to make the water drinkable. He bartered for parts with the cyber-riders who mined the garbage lines under Cries or stole tech-mech from shops on the Concourse. Every generation here produced wizards who drew miracles out of dilapidated, mismatched tech-mech. Gourd put together low-pressure distillation machines, reverse-osmosis devices, or super-filters. He had a knack. That was what we had said. Gourd has a knack. I knew now it was far more than “a knack.” He was a brilliant engineer, better than even most professional technologists in Cries.
The Grotto lay deep, four levels below the city, in complete darkness. I wore my stylus around my neck, creating a sphere of light. Crusted minerals on the nearby rocks glittered like a million spark-flies, red and blue, with accents in white, green, and purple. Lacy rock formations surrounded the water, stone columns riddled with holes, small and large. Max was right, they did resemble fractals repeating their patterns at ever finer detail.
I sat on a rock stump by the lake and fooled with my stylus, shining it across the dark water. The grotto was eerily silent, just my breathing and the drip of water somewhere. Memories poured through me. One of my closest friends had drunk from this lake when we were both six. She nearly died. Back then, our circle had included a dust gang in their twenties, and they took care of her. She recovered, but I never forgot the terror of seeing her lying in the dark, shaking with illness.
Another memory came, this from the only time the Cries police had actually ventured all the way down here on one of their raids. They scooped up duster kids and hauled them off to Cries. The children trickled back to the aqueducts over the next year, bringing tales of holding cells and work farms. We celebrated their return to freedom. The irony didn’t escape me, that we rejoiced in having a tougher life here than what they had left behind. The farms were hard labor, yes, cheaper to use children rather the bots to bring in water mined from the beneath the desert. Even so. They fed you regularly and didn’t ask for more than a person could give. I had probably worked harder in my army training than I would have on a farm. But who cared? It wasn’t freedom, and that lack destroyed us, parching our spirit like the dry air of the desert.
In the undercity, we came of age with our bitterly won freedom and the emotional scars it bequeathed us. Yes, we lived in caves and the ancient ruins of a dead civilization, and we used canals as throughways instead of roads, but it was a community, our community, not a slum, as they called us in Cries. The undercity was unique. In all my travels, I had never seen another culture like this one. Our world had its own beauty, one as haunting as the reed music that often drifted through the canals, those ancient melodies played by some unseen piper.
Rattles came from my right. A pair of eyes gleamed in the light over there, behind a pillar of stone. As soon as I looked at them, they disappeared with a scraping noise.
I set one of my snap-bottles on a nearby shelf of rock crusted with minerals salts. “Got water,” I said. “Three bottles.”
My voice echoed in the dark spaces of the Grotto. I pulled the half empty bottle out of my pack and took a swig of water. Then I sat holding it, my boots braced against a cavern floor thick with minerals. The snap-bottle I had left on the ledge caught glints from my stylus and gleamed in the darkness.
“Got trade,” I said to the empty air. “Water. Gourd.”
Silence.
After a while, Max thought, This is getting you nowhere.
Be patient, I thought.
It’s been twenty minutes.
This can’t be rushed.
Someone is going to attack you for those bottles.
They’re kids, Max.
That makes no difference.
I can defend myself. But they won’t attack.
Why not?
It’s not how these things work. I hoped I was still right about that.
Rustles came from the rocks all around me. I continued to sit.
A deep voice abruptly spoke behind me. “You got light.”
I glanced around. “Heya, Gourd.”
He walked into the light, a huge, muscular man with graying temples, and leaned his bulk against a nearby column with his brawny arms crossed. He wasn’t dressed as a “tourist” anymore, but in his natural clothes, a black muscle shirt and heavy trousers with a knife sheathed on his belt.
A boy ran forward and grabbed the bottle I had left on the ledge, then retreated back into the shadows. I took out two more snap bottles and set them on the ledge. I had promised them three.
Gourd watched me. “Good snap,” he said.
I nodded. Two girls ran out and grabbed the bottles. They glanced at me, then darted away.
I smiled slightly at Gourd. “You got fast dusters.”
“They don’t trust gifts.”
“Not gifts. Bargain. Water for you.”
“So you got me.”
I indicated a nearby ledge. “Come sit.”
He considered me, his dark gaze impossible to read. Then he pushed away from the column and went to sit on the ledge.
“So,” he said. “You want to talk?”
> “About Majda.”
His expression became even more shuttered, if that was possible. “Majda got nothing here.”
“They got trouble,” I said. “Scorch committed treason.”
He gave a sharp wave of his hand. “We’re not the military, Bhaaj. Not our concern.”
I heard the suppressed anger in his voice. He had always thought I betrayed the dust gang when I enlisted. I didn’t know if he would ever forgive me.
“It is our concern,” I said. “Scorch has no honor.”
“Scorch has no life. You killed her.”
That sounded like Gourd, as blunt as always. His face showed no emotion, but I could still read him even after all these years. He didn’t regret Scorch’s death. She had been bad enough in our youth, and time had only deepened her psychotic view of the universe.
“She was selling weapons to slavers,” I said.
He stiffened. “To the Traders?”
“Traders, yah. Maybe sell people, too.” She had broken our unspoken code to protect one another, and she upset our uneasy balance with Cries, drawing their attention to the undercity.
Gourd’s voice darkened. “So Majda is coming here.”
“Not yet,” I said. “They sent me.”
“You got to warn Jak.”
“He already knows.”
“What did he say?”
“Close up the Black Mark for a while.”
Gourd pushed his hand through his shaggy hair. “Why are you telling me?”
“You know the dusters.” He kept the children supplied with water.
He frowned at me. “Dust rats won’t help Majda.”
A sudden anger surged in me. “Not rats,” I said. “Rats are vermin. Dust gangs are children. Human children.”
He spoke quietly. “Yah.”
I was a dust rat. That identity would be forever ingrained in my psyche, my heart, my soul. Nothing would heal the scars, no matter how many high-end clients I served, no matter how many credits I accumulated.
Except I did have money now. “We got to do something for the kids.”
He regarded me warily. “Do what?”
“Make their lives better.”
Anger crackled in his voice. “Don’t want charity.”
“Oh, fuck that.” I was tired of putting pride before sanity. “We’ll find a way.”
For a long time he was silent, and I was sure I had pushed too far.
Then he said, “What way?”
Good question. The Cries authorities would say we needed schools for our children and jobs for the adults. They refused to see we already had both. We learned from doing, from knowledge passed down generation to generation. The cyber-riders were engineers and neural-mech surgeons who passed their knowledge orally and in their circuits. Older gangs taught younger ones how to fight. We learned architecture, history, and anthropology from living in these ruins and manipulating them to fit our lives, and biochemistry so we could grow edible plants in dust and mineral-heavy water. The list of subjects went on an on. I had never realized how much natural knowledge I had accumulated until I left the undercity.
Adults found the work they chose, not what Cries told us that we should want, cyber-riders with their tech-mech, dust farmers growing food, crafters designing goods, caregivers looking after children, and yeah, even Jak with his casino, which employed a substantial number of people. We traded services and goods rather than buying or selling. Even if my people wanted above-city jobs, no one in Cries would hire a “slum rat,” and trying to remake us into the above-city’s idea of proper citizens would destroy the heart of this place. Life here could be harsh, but our heart beat like drum, strong and firm.
So what would improve life here? What worked for me wasn’t for everyone, indeed probably not for many. I had succeeded in the army because I wanted it so much, the desire to do well burned within me. I doubted most of my people would share my passion for a job that imposed so many constraints on their lives, and without that fire, they weren’t likely to survive in ISC.
Maybe the best idea was to start simple. So I said, “Water.”
Gourd motioned at the lake. “We got water.”
I snorted. “We got lethal shit.”
He shrugged. “I fix it.”
An idea was forming in my mind. “You need good equipment. Good tech.”
He met my words with silence, but at least he didn’t refute them.
“Dunno,” I said. “Scorch had a big operation. Maybe she left some tech behind.” In truth, whoever stole Scorch’s crates had taken everything. But if some high-end desalination equipment happened to appear in one of her caverns, top-notch machinery that wouldn’t easily degrade, fail, or corrode, who was to say where it came from?
Gourd considered me. “Might send some rats to look.” He stopped, then said, “Might send some gangers to look.”
I nodded. “Gangers” at least acknowledged the children’s humanity. “Tomorrow,” I said. I needed time to find good desalination equipment.
He stood up. “Maybe.”
I rose to my feet. Maybe. That meant we had no bargain unless he later decided to accept the equipment. I had hoped he would tell me more about Scorch’s operation, but he left no openings for me to ask. I wanted to say so much to him. Don’t be angry, Gourd. I miss you all. Of course I couldn’t speak those words. It was weakness.
“Gourd—” I hesitated.
He watched me warily. “Yah?”
“What do you hear from Dig?”
“She has her own circle now.”
“Alive, then?”
He nodded. “Alive.”
The tension in my shoulders eased. Alive. All four of us had survived, which wasn’t always the case with dust gangs. When all this was over, maybe I could find her.
Gourd took off, but just before he disappeared into the inky shadows, he turned around.
“Bhaaj,” he said.
I tried to make out his face in the darkness. “Yah?”
“Scorch also used the Alcove. I don’t know why.” He paused. Information was never truly free. After a moment, he added, “Maybe my gangers will find some tech-mech there tomorrow, heh? A good bargain.”
With that, he was gone.
XII
Lavinda
Colonel Lavinda Majda resembled a younger version of her sister the Matriarch, but with a different quality that was hard to define. She wasn’t more willowy than Vaj and not quite as tall, but still with that familiar upright carriage. She exuded the confidence of someone who didn’t even realize she was self-assured. I knew I was in the presence of a damn good officer when I spoke with her, but she lacked some indefinable edge that Vaj possessed. Lavinda seemed more human.
We stood in a sun-drenched chamber on an upper floor of the palace. Light poured through the many arched windows and pooled on a floor of interlocking tiles designed from blue stone that people mined out of the dead seas. I had grown up breathing the dust of those rocks, but no trace of grit showed in these polished tiles that paved the floor in graceful mosaics.
Lavinda was doing the Majda thing, standing at the window, looking out at the view with her hands clasped behind her back. I wondered if she realized what a luxury she owned, that she could stay here as long as she pleased, flooded with sunlight, staring at the mountains.
I spoke. “Colonel Majda, my greeting.”
Lavinda turned to me. “Ah. Major.” She inclined her head. “Thank you for coming.”
I hadn’t thought I had a choice. A summons from Majda, no matter how politely phrased, was still a summons. “Did you want an update on my investigation?”
“If you have anything to report.”
It had only been two days, but it seemed a good idea to give her something. “Scorch may have had another base of operations in the aqueducts, one we didn’t know about.”
“May?” She came over with her easy, long-legged stride. “You haven’t checked?”
“That’s where I was heade
d.” I would already be there if she hadn’t called me to the palace.
She considered me. “Chief Takkar says you continue to shroud your movements.”
“That’s right.”
The colonel waited. I had nothing more to say.
After an awkward silence, Lavinda said, “Major, I understand why you feel the need.” Dryly she added, “I would be an idiot if I didn’t.”
“Idiot” was the last word I expected to hear from a Majda in a sentence about herself. Lavinda was definitely different from Vaj. I said only, “I’m better able to do my job that way.”
“I know.” With a tired exhale, she pushed her hand through her hair, leaving the short locks tousled. “I cannot, however, speak for the task force commanders at HQ.”
Undoubtedly she meant her sister, who was offworld, heading up the main investigation at ISC headquarters. “Is there a problem?”
Lavinda began pacing. “From what we’ve learned, Scorch’s operation was a minor part of a much more substantial smuggling operation centered elsewhere than Raylicon. It looks like she simply offered a way station they could use to pass through with their goods.”
On the surface, that made sense. Something felt wrong, but I didn’t see what, not yet. “I’ll let you know if I discover anything.”
Lavinda nodded, preoccupied. She stopped at the window and resumed her Majda stare at the mountains. This was getting us exactly nowhere. I went over and joined her at the window. “It sounds like the major work of the investigation is taking place offworld.”
“Most.”
I waited with her, all agaze at the mountains. Sure, they were nice to look at, those majestic peaks of blue and red stone. But still. Why stare at them so much?
“It’s meditative,” Lavinda said. “It calms my mind so I can think more clearly.”
Ho! I stepped back, staring at her. “Why did you say that?”
She turned to me. “You wondered why I liked to look at the mountains.”
My pulse stuttered. “How could you know that?”
“You practically shouted it.”
No, I had not practically shouted it. I had not practically whispered it. I had not spoken one freaking word.
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