‘Did you bring down a dome?’ Jem asked. There was an edge of something in her voice, Lari thought, but he couldn’t work out what. Awe? Fear? Excitement?
‘Yes and no,’ Gregor answered her. ‘We took down a utility dome. Not huge, but certainly significant.’
‘How many people lived there?’ Lari’s voice was cold.
‘Relax, Larinan. It was unpopulated, but it housed the main maglift re-route junction for Port North Central, and also one of the largest recyc-to-energy plants in the north-east quarter. No doubt a few workers got caught up in it, but we timed it for change of shift, so the numbers of dead should be minimised.’
‘So we’ve cut Central off from the mag system?’ Jem’s eyes gleamed in the sparse light. ‘I wish I could have seen it. You should have gotten us, Dad.’
‘They’ll be able to reroute around the junction, given time, but it’ll certainly slow things down up there. And they’ll be having huge power problems.’
Lari looked at the burning remains and shook his head.
‘You don’t approve?’ asked Gregor.
‘No.’
‘It’s for your benefit, Larinan. Do you see any more flyers up there? No. The Prelature’s going to be dealing with this for months. And we haven’t finished yet, not by a long shot. There’s a lot more of this going to happen in the very near future. In fact …’
Lari turned his back on the scene and walked away, following the causeway for a few hundred metres until Gregor and Jem and the hell they’d created were well behind. After a few moments footsteps crunched towards him.
‘Get lost,’ he muttered without turning around.
‘Already am.’ Saria came up beside him. She didn’t say anything more, but her arm snaked around his waist and she leaned her tiny weight into his hip, and the two of them stood there, looking out over the underworld and listening to the sound of destruction.
There’s nothing to him, this one.
Saria feels the boy next to her and tries to reach for him, but there’s not enough earthwarmth here and he’s still too filled with skyfire for her to find him.
But there’s a spark of the Earthmother in there, too. She knows that. It’s just buried, real deep, and he keeps it there. They all do. That’s what she’s realising about these Nightpeople. They’ve all got it, just like she does, but they’ve gotten good at keeping it hidden, ignored. Dead, like their city.
She’ll dig it out of him eventually.
She leans on him. He’s solid, like rock. She likes that.
The first thing she had to do, Kes decided, was find a hub.
On the other side of the embankment, just after she’d left Lari, she stopped and looked around. The underworld surrounded her in every direction, a maze of blackened ruins and empty alleyways. The skycity rose out of it, thousands of domestems reaching into the night like a perfect, impossibly huge forest, its canopy hidden in the darkness above.
At least some of those stems, Kes knew, had hubs built into them. She just had to find one. And then somehow call a lift. And then reallocate it. And avoid security.
A part of her considered returning and waiting with Lari, but then she thought of her mother, who she knew would be half mad with worry by this time.
No, she had to get home.
The nearest domestem was only a couple of hundred metres away on the other side of a decaying building. She took a couple of steps towards it, then hesitated. Perhaps it would be a better idea to get some distance between her and Gregor before she started searching.
But what if in doing that she missed a hub? It might be hours before she found another.
‘Shi!’ She cursed softly, then headed for the nearest stem.
From a distance, seen from the sky, domestems looked slender, almost elegant, as they rose from the underworld. From close up, though, each was massive. As she clambered over an unstable litter of rubble, the round base loomed larger and larger, until she was standing beside it.
The stem was probably thirty or forty metres in diameter and completely smooth. She’d expected to find it bolted to the earth, but it simply rose out of the ground, looking for all the world like it had grown there.
She reached out and rested her palm lightly against it. The plascrete was cold and slippery. It felt as though her hand might slide right off it.
Trailing her fingertips against the icy smoothness, Kes made her way around the bottom of the stalk, walking the full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees until she found herself back at the point where she’d first started.
No maglift.
She wasn’t surprised. She wondered how many hubs there were down here. There had to be some, she knew, because Jem had talked about them. It was just a case of finding one.
The next stem loomed a little south of the first. Kes turned towards it.
For hours she continued like that, picking her way from stem to stem. Most of the time, moving from one to the other was as simple as crossing an empty street, but on a couple of occasions it took twenty minutes of detouring around unstable ruins just to reach the bottom of yet another hubless stem. At one point, somewhere in the small hours, Kes spotted a puddle of water off to the side, its surface reflecting the glow of the skycity. The water tasted foul, but Kes, crouched on her hands and knees, sucked it in as if it had come from the best recyc plant in the city.
Slowly, she continued from one stem to the next, meandering her way across the city.
She’d been walking half-asleep for some time, when she realised she was staring into a sky as red as blood. The murky layer between the underworld and the skycity was glowing with a fierce, almost iridescent illumination.
Warmth washed over her and Kes understood what was happening.
Sunrise.
She was walking into the dawn.
As if to confirm it, her wristband emitted a low warning chime.
‘Shi!’
A couple of hundred metres away a large, ancient rectangle of a building crouched in the middle of a vast, paved area pierced only by domestems. The building had no windows and just a few doors, and though the ground around it was littered with broken glass and ash, it was the nearest possible shelter.
Her wristband chimed again and Kes hurried towards the massive ruin.
A low pile of rubble blocked the entrance, but there was a tiny gap near the top and it took only a couple of minutes to scramble through. Inside, the building was cavernous. An enormous hallway, three storeys high, stretched away from her, with wide balconies running the whole length. The roof was open to the sky in a number of places, and red light poured through these gaps, illuminating the interior, but the place was so large that there had to be a corner somewhere that the light didn’t reach. She slithered to ground level and found herself in a long gallery of empty alcoves.
The first three she rejected as unsuitable; two were filled with rubble where ceilings and walls had fallen in and the third had enormous cracks in every wall, lending it a dangerously unstable feel. The fourth, though, was ideal. Deep and empty, and cast into heavy shadow.
The moment she lay down Kes slept.
Hours later, she was startled into consciousness.
‘Hello?’
Nobody answered.
A low rumble, like distant thunder, trembled through the ground and the old building moaned around her. Kes tensed. If it started to fall, there was no way she’d get out.
She’d slept all day. Climbing back outside, she was surprised to see an enormous column of smoke pouring up from the underworld a few kilometres east of where she stood. Its base was lit by a massive fire and the plume surged high into the skycity before dispersing south in a long tail.
‘Hoi! You, there!’
On the other side of the plaza a couple of figures emerged from the shadows and came hurrying towards her. Her first instinct was to flee, but after a moment’s examination, she decided they looked harmless.
The one who’d called out was a woman, her age hard to guess,
but she looked old. She was crusted with dirt and mapped with scar tissue. Out of this shone a pair of green eyes.
Beside her slouched a teenage boy. A couple of times, when he slowed down too much, the old woman would deliver a glancing slap on the back of his head. As they drew closer, the woman pointed a finger towards the column of smoke.
‘Wha’ was thet, eh? You got any idea, lass?’
She stopped, suspicious, and looked properly at Kesra for the first time.
‘What clan are you?’
‘No clan.’
‘Then where you from? Topside?’ The old woman nodded upwards, a sharp, hard jerk of her chin.
‘She’s …’ began the boy, suddenly agitated, but the woman whacked him into silence.
Kes said nothing.
‘What’re you doin’ down here, eh?’
‘I got lost…’ Kes started, but the boy interrupted.
‘She’s Underground. Look!’
He pointed a grubby finger at the pendant which had fallen out from Kes’s top and now hung outside her clothing. The old woman’s eyes narrowed.
‘That true?’
‘I guess. Not really, though. I just—’
‘You know Ratz?’
Reluctantly, Kes nodded. ‘I’ve met him.’
The woman spat. ‘You ’ent any friend of ours, then.’ She pointed again at the smoke column. ‘So what’s that? Don’t expect me to believe it’s nothin’ to do wi’ your lot.’
‘I really don’t know. I’m … I ran off.’
‘Ran off?’ The woman snorted. ‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know. From Gre … Ratz. I’m trying to find a maghub.’
‘What? You wanna go back topside, eh?’
Kes nodded and the woman laughed again.
‘Better you than me, lass.’ She looked at the smoke again. ‘It looks to me like your Underground is fixin’ to bring the sky down on all our heads. You wanna be up there when they do?’
‘My parents …’ Kes began, but the old woman held up a hand to cut her off, regarded her steadily for a moment and then, deceptively fast, she reached out, grabbed the pendant and jerked it savagely. The chain parted with a snap and before Kes could react the old woman had flung it away.
‘They catch you wearin’ that now an’ you’ll be in a world o’ trouble.’
‘They? Who?’
The old woman laughed mirthlessly, showing a mouthful of broken teeth.
‘Take your pick. If Ratz has jus’ done what I think he has, then the clans down here’ll be none too happy with him. An’ that mob up top …’
She left the rest unsaid and turned to the boy.
‘Orpral, take ’er to the nearest door. An’ you …’ She turned to Kes. ‘Watch out for yourself, lass.’
‘Thank you.’
Kes followed the boy into the twilight.
He led them past three domestems before veering down a long alleyway, making straight for a slightly more distant stem.
‘There.’
On the other side of a wide road, a single stem rose from the ground. At its base, lit by a glowing red bulb, a maglift door was set into the curved wall, an allocation place fixed beside it.
‘Better call one now, ’cause it takes ages for ’em to come down here.’
Without another word, the boy vanished back into the alleyway, leaving Kes alone again.
At the allocation plate, she hesitated. The moment she waved her wrist across it, she knew alarm bells would start going off somewhere up in the city. She’d been gone for so long now. If nothing else, her parents would have reported her missing. And when she summoned a lift from down here …
Still, there was no other way. Not that she could think of, anyway. She didn’t have Jem’s knowledge, couldn’t use a dead I.D., and was pretty certain that Jenx would have locked her out of the user interface after the whole thing with Lari.
She waved her wrist over the plate and spoke clearly: ‘Dome 750 South.’
Nothing happened for several seconds. She was about to try again, when the reader chimed, a confirmation chime, then nothing more.
That was it, then. A lift was on its way. The only question now was whether it would be filled with security agents. Still, there was nothing she could do about it now.
For ten minutes Kes stood by the doors waiting, but no lift arrived. She wondered if she should try again, but she knew the rule: once the allocator had chimed, you were in the queue and trying again would simply drop you back to the bottom of it. She sat cross legged beside the hub and settled down to wait. An hour and a half after she’d first summoned the lift, Kes stood up and took a few steps on legs which had gone half numb. Something had to be wrong with the system, she thought. It couldn’t take this long for a maglift to arrive.
Then, abruptly, the doors opened and soft light spilled onto the road around her.
Kes almost threw herself inside.
The moment she’d grabbed the nearest handgrip the doors slid shut again, sealing her in. Her last glimpse of the underworld was of the sky filled with that giant plume of smoke. It hovered, hanging ominously above the ancient city, and the sight sent a shiver through her. Then the floor pressed below her feet as the maglift flew up into the sky.
She had no idea where she was, so she had no clue as to how long it would take to arrive at her destination. Sighing, she breathed the clean, filtered air, and leaned into the padded wall-rest. The lift transited into a horizontal shaft, accelerating rapidly along it, the resonators in the roof and floor humming quietly.
She had the feeling that something was out of place, something missing, but it took her a while to realise what.
The newspanel was silent.
Above her, the lift’s display showed a blank screen, unaccompanied by any sound. There was no babble of webnews, no webcasts, just mute nothingness.
Kes’s grip tightened on the handhold. The lift jolted slightly as it transferred into another shaft and accelerated again, and it might have been Kes’s imagination, but the movement seemed somehow rough and the acceleration sluggish. Finally, it slowed for a final time and the controller announced: Dome 7S0 South.
Very strange. It had brought her home. She’d been expecting to find herself at the security hub in Port North Central, but as the lift shuddered into the hub and the doors opened Kes found herself looking out into the familiar common of her own mixed-use dome.
Before she’d even had time to step out of the lift, people were crowding into it around her, jostling and shoving.
‘Hey!’
A heavyset man bumped against her and she dug her elbow hard into his ribs as she shoved past.
‘Watch it, girly,’ he growled, but he was too intent on grabbing a handhold to do anything else.
Forcing her way past the crowd of people, she made it out to the allocation area. The common was in chaos. All around her people pushed and shoved one another, the air ripe with curses. Nobody was smiling; nobody was laughing. Every face she saw was set in an attitude of grim determination. A thin man in a suit hurried past, headed towards the melee at the hub, and she grabbed his arm.
‘What’s happened?’
He stared at her, confused, as though having to work out that she was really speaking to him.
‘There was an explosion. A dome went down under Port North Central. The maglifts are stopping all over the city.’ The man stopped and looked at her, seeing her for the first time, taking in her dirt-stained face, her messed hair and her filthy clothing. ‘Shiftie Shi!’ He wrenched his arm free and barged away into the crowd.
‘An explosion …’
It had to be the Underground. Gregor. She had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She turned and ran for home.
The lobby was almost completely deserted, an internal lift waiting. It took only a couple of moments to get upstairs to the front door of her apartment.
‘Mum? Dad?’
‘KESRA!’ Her mother flung herself through the doorway of the be
droom, grabbing Kes in a tight hug. ‘I thought I’d lost you. I thought I’d lost you both …’
‘Mum, calm down, you’re choking me. MUM!’
Eventually her mother disentangled herself. ‘Where’ve you been?’ Then she noticed her daughter’s appearance. ‘Kesra! What happened to you? Are you hurt?’
‘I…’ Kes looked at her mother, whose eyes were red with crying, her face blotchy. ‘Mum, it’s okay. I’m back. I got … caught up in something, that’s all.’ Kes took her mother’s hand and led her over to the threadbare couch. ‘Where’s Dad? He’s not home yet?’
To Kes’s surprise, her mother burst into tears again. ‘Oh, Sky!’
‘Mum! What’s wrong?’
‘I thought you must have heard. I thought you knew.’
‘Knew what? Mum, talk to me.’
‘Your father … there was an explosion … the recyc dome …’
Kes could feel the room swaying around her and her mother’s voice coming from a long way off.
‘What happened to Dad? Is he all right? Mum?’
‘He’s gone, Kes. It’s all gone.’
‘Dad?’
‘The whole dome. They destroyed the whole dome. Those shifties blew out the whole dome …’
‘No, they can’t have … It’s impossible …’
But when she looked at her mother’s distraught face, Kes realised with a sickening lurch that it was completely possible. Numb, she crossed to the apartment window. Their dome wasn’t high enough to have a view of the city, only of other domes and domestems, but she knew. She knew that somewhere out there, kilometres to the north, an enormous plume of smoke was rising up from the underworld below Port North Central, belching smoke and flames into the lower levels of the city, and that somewhere in the midst of all that was her father.
‘Kesra?’ From the couch, her mother watched, but before she could say another word, the front door burst open and four armoured security agents stormed into the room.
‘Remain still! Do not move!’ barked one, then when he was satisfied that all was clear, he shouted back into the hallway. ‘Secure!’
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