Hex

by Rhiannon Lassiter

  “She couldn’t come anyway,” Caitlin informed her, shaking out her luxuriant chestnut curls. “Didn’t Mira call you last night?”

  “Carol’s dad got dumped by his company,” Zircarda interrupted. “They’re moving out of Belgravia. So she won’t be in the clique anymore.”

  “And you can’t invite anyone who’s not one of us,” Caitlin chimed in automatically.

  “God, no.” Ali shuddered and it was not entirely fake. The conversation served to remind her that she could not afford to fall out of favor. It hardly took any effort for her to laugh. “So Carol’s out of it, is she? Thank heaven for that.” As the skimmer sped across the bridges, Ali was careful not to look out of the windows, unwilling to catch even a glimpse of the darkness far down below.

  • • •

  Kez sat awkwardly beside Raven, his hair still damp from his shower. She was hacking into the network, her fingers flying over the keypad faster than he would have thought possible as information scrolled up the screen. She was in a good mood, willing to explain some of what she was doing and to let Kez watch her. But his enjoyment was frustrated by the presence of Wraith behind him. He had said nothing for the last hour, and was only a disapproving presence as he checked and rechecked his laser pistol as if preparing for battle. It was a comment on Raven’s decision to move higher up in the city and Kez was not entirely sure that Wraith was wrong.

  He might have ambitions to live in the heights but the reality of such a move scared him. At best all he could hope for was embarrassing himself, at worst the Seccies would be completely sanguine about arresting him if he didn’t fit in. The fact that Raven was a Hex made him estimate his chances of being allowed to go free if he were caught worse than those of a snowflake in hell. He also secretly admitted that in allowing him to discover that she was a Hex, Raven had hardly been playing it safe. Whatever he might think of Wraith’s opinion of him, letting a streetkid know something that could get them flatlined was a disastrous move by anyone’s standards. But Kez was swiftly realizing that caution wasn’t one of Raven’s priorities. She had a kind of reckless confidence in her own abilities that led her to openly ignore Wraith’s warnings. But Kez had no idea of the true extent of those abilities and he suspected Wraith didn’t either, which was why he sat uncomfortably on the edge of his chair, wondering if at any moment he would hear the sirens of Seccies coming to get them.

  Raven was creating a new ID for Kez. It was in fact the first real ID he had ever had, never having made it onto any official census records. He was amazed at the ease with which Raven hacked into the government files. Despite the fact that he had never known a hacker before, the street price for fake IDs was high enough for him to gather that this kind of operation could only be attempted by the most electric of experts. But Raven wasn’t even concentrating properly, turning her head to talk to him as her fingers lightly touched the keypad.

  “How would you like to be my cousin, Kez?” she asked.

  “A what?” he wrinkled his nose in puzzlement.

  “My ID claims I’m a researcher for a US vidchannel named AdAstra. It would be convenient for you to be related to me.” She grinned. “I would tell the computer you’re my brother but we don’t look enough alike.”

  “You don’t look much like Wraith,” Kez pointed out.

  “That’s because he looks like a freak,” she replied, raising her voice a little so her brother would be certain to hear her. “Rachel and I were perfect little asylum orphans but everyone looked askance at Wraith. It’s ironic that he’s never shown the slightest sign of being a Hex, despite the fact that he looks about as freaky as you can get.”

  “Wraith looks like a ganger,” Kez said, trying to smooth things over. “It’s not really freaky, just scary.” He bit his lip, thinking of the gangers he had been unfortunate enough to know, but Raven just laughed.

  “That’s ironic as well. I’m much more frightening than Wraith,” she told him, then glanced back at the computer before he could attempt a reply. “OK, I’m done here. Would you like to know your new name?”

  “It’s not anything weird, is it?” Kez asked, mistrusting Raven’s sense of humor.

  “Would I do that?” Raven asked facetiously. “No, it’s as close to your real name as I could make it. You are now Kester Chirac, a Canadian national. You flew over from San Francisco last week, traveling executive class, seat 14C. Your cousin, Elizabeth Black, had seat 14B. AdAstra’s research department paid for both fares—media people are expected to scam their company for their family’s benefit.”

  “Is that really all in the records?” Kez asked in astonishment.

  “And a lot more.” Raven leaned back in her chair with a self-satisfied expression. “Do you want to know about the flitter that took you from the airport to London, or the hotel you stayed in last week?” She leaned forward again, sweeping her hands across the keypad. “There’s your hotel bill at the Regent.”

  Kez stared at the screen in fascination and was aware that Wraith had come up behind them and was looking as well.

  “It’s a large bill for just a week,” he commented.

  “Kez charged a lot to room service,” Raven said dryly and Kez realized with relief that they were reconciled again.

  “When did I check out?” he asked, studying the lines of type.

  “Tomorrow,” Raven told him. “When we move into our apartment.”

  “And where is this apartment?” Wraith asked, his voice impassive.

  “The Belgravia Complex.” Raven shrugged. “It’s full of media people, null-brainers, and phoneys. But I guess we can stand it for a while.”

  “Electric!” Kez said under his breath. He had decided that, whatever the risk, he wasn’t about to get separated from his newfound companions just yet.

  3

  STRANGE MATTERS

  Raven and Kez moved into the Belgravia Complex the next afternoon in style. Wraith had gone to find the Countess, unwilling to participate in arranging for an apartment, an action he hadn’t condoned, so they went ahead without him. The apartment Raven had rented at an astronomical price was luxurious in the extreme, and the furnishings that arrived in a huge transit a few minutes after their flitter pulled up outside the complex were equally so. According to Raven, the apartment had originally been fitted out in pale pastels but, unbeknownst to Wraith, she had ordered decorators to refit it according to her specifications.

  As the people from the furnishing company moved their new possessions into the apartment, Kez began to get quite a comprehensive idea of what Raven’s preferences were. Apparently she favored dark colors, particularly deep crimson and russet-brown. She also liked loud music. Technicians were rewiring the apartment’s music system to accommodate the industrial-strength megawatt speakers Raven had requested, and the first thing she did when the furnishings were moved in was to call up a music company and order what sounded like half their listings. Kez hadn’t heard of any of it, but when the lasdisks began to stack up in the lounge, he privately decided it was ganger-style music. Some was relatively recent, jetrock and acidtechno, but there were reissues from way back in the late twentieth century with the most dismal and depressing lyrics he had ever heard.

  “It’s fin de siècle music,” Raven told him, when he protested. “It’s got realism. Those musicians saw the deluge coming and they weren’t afraid to say so, when the politicians were too scared to admit it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kez asked, straining to be heard over the crashing backbeats of the sound system.

  “The technological age,” Raven replied, turning the music down a fraction in consideration for his ringing ears. “The loss of history in the march of progress. How do you think the genetics experiments came about? Throughout the whole of the twenty-first century, scientists tried to improve people to bring them into line with the new technology. Science took over the world—that’s how come London shot three kilometers into the sky.” She laughed, as she flipped through the asso
rtment of disks. “The only reason it isn’t even higher was that the cities slowed down a bit after the crash of New York; and they’d reached five kilometers before the supports gave way.”

  “Could that happen here?” Kez asked, alarmed for the first time in his life about the city’s stability.

  “No chance.” Raven grinned at his expression. “New alloys, new building techniques. Terrorists tried to blow up LA in 2314 and couldn’t do any more than smash a few bridges. The skyrises are here to stay.”

  Raven wasn’t really in a mood for conversation and Kez could only stand so much of the thumping music. Leaving her to play with the system, he went out to explore the complex, armed with the fake IDs that had arrived by registered courier as they moved in. With an account balance of 800 credits Kez was ready to sample some of Belgravia’s much vaunted facilities.

  The experience left him bewildered. He had flagged down a skimmer to take him to the rec complex and it blew his mind. He had never seen so much space devoted to recreation. Arkade had areas he hadn’t even heard of. He had no idea how to ice skate and he stared at the glittering expanse of frozen water in incomprehension. And he was even puzzled by the museum. Kez couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to look at carved rocks and pictures of dead people they didn’t even know. But it was full of old people, looking at the stuff with evident fascination. In the end he followed a group of kids, a couple of years older than him, who had just got out of school. He tailed them around for about half an hour as they checked out music and clothes stores; eventually buying some viddisks he thought Raven might like because he couldn’t think what else to get and was worried about being stopped by a store cop. He was looking at a synthleather jacket, wondering if he should get rid of his old denim one, when he noticed one of the girls in the group he had been following standing next to him.

  She flashed him a brilliant smile as he turned to look at her and held out a smooth hand. He took it, more out of surprise than anything else, as she introduced herself.

  “I’m Zircarda Anthony—my parents run the Anthony Corporation,” she told him. “You must be new to Belgravia, right?”

  “I’m Kez, Kester Chirac,” he added. “I just moved in today.”

  “Are you going to go to Gateshall?” Zircarda asked. “We all do.” She waved airily at the rest of her group of friends.

  “That’s a school, isn’t it?” Kez said, alarmed at the possibility and wondering why this girl was asking him so many questions. “No, I don’t think so.” The girl looked surprised and he lied quickly, his instincts taking over. “I go to school back in the States. I’ve come over with my cousin—she’s a researcher for a vidchannel.”

  “What channel?” a girl with ash-blonde hair asked authoritatively.

  “AdAstra,” Kez replied, desperately trying to remember the cover story Raven had primed him with.

  “I haven’t heard of it,” the second girl said superciliously and a third, this one with curly brown hair, informed him:

  “Ali’s father owns seven vidchannels.”

  “Really?” Kez’s heart sank and he wondered how he was going to get out of this one. The answer came to him just as he was getting desperate. “AdAstra’s kind of alternative. It’s into twentieth-century music, kind of fin de siècle.” He was pretty sure that he had pronounced the last phrase wrong, but it looked as if the girls had accepted it.

  “I knew you would be into alternative music as soon as I saw you,” Zircarda pronounced triumphantly. “You know your jacket makes you look just like a ganger.”

  “Yeah,” Kez replied, too astonished to think what else to say. But the group of kids talked enough for it not to matter. Zircarda introduced them all, with brief explanations attached.

  “This is Ali, Bob Terrell’s daughter, and Caitlin, her father’s an MP, and Mira, her mother is Martia West the actress . . .” The list went on and on as Kez was presented to each and every member of a group of kids who apparently thought of themselves as a kind of exclusive gang for the children of the very rich.

  Within minutes Zircarda had extracted from him the location of the apartment Raven had rented and his “cousin’s” name, and had quizzed him in detail about fin de siècle rock. He was completely terrified at what Wraith might say when he found out about this and worried that any minute he would get tangled up in his own lies. Eventually he got away, claiming his cousin was expecting him back, and flagged down a fast flitter outside Arkade to take him back to the apartment.

  • • •

  As it happened, Kez had no chance to explain what had gone on at the rec complex. He arrived back at the apartment only seconds after Wraith, who was as excited as the boy had ever seen him. Raven had actually turned off the screeching music in order to listen to what he was saying.

  “The Countess has found Rachel’s adoptive parents,” he announced as Kez walked in the door. “One of her contacts recognized their pictures, some ganger who works the area. They’ve changed their names, which was why we couldn’t find them.”

  “What about Rachel?” Raven asked.

  “Nothing.” Wraith’s face clouded over a little. “The person who recognized them didn’t remember having seen her. But he said they had two kids.”

  “That’s great!” Kez said enthusiastically, inwardly wondering if Raven and Wraith would dump him as soon as they found their sister. “Are you going to find them now?”

  “Let me check them out in the nets instead,” Raven suggested. Kez was surprised at this uncharacteristic display of caution but Wraith’s reaction was one he couldn’t have anticipated.

  “Instead?” He stared piercingly at Raven. “Don’t you want to see Rachel?”

  “I came to London with you, didn’t I?” Raven bristled, taking umbrage at her brother’s tone. “I’m just not as obsessed with this thing as you are, OK?”

  “This isn’t obsession.” Wraith shook his head. “You just have no idea, do you, Raven? You can’t relate to other people at all, just machinery.” His gray eyes were as hard as ice and Raven stared back at him, white with rage. She was too angry even to speak. Swinging around, she headed for one of the bedrooms, slamming the door behind her with a crash.

  Kez stared after her in alarm, then turned to look at Wraith, utterly astonished.

  “It sounded like you hate her,” he said in amazement.

  “I don’t know Raven very well anymore,” Wraith said stiffly. “When she stops sulking, tell her I’ve gone to find Rachel.” Kez only hesitated for a moment.

  “I’m coming with you,” he told Wraith.

  “I don’t recall inviting you,” Wraith said coldly.

  “Oh no.” Kez shook his head. “You’re not leaving me behind now. You got her into this mood—I don’t want to be here until she gets out of it.”

  “Come on then,” Wraith said shortly and headed for the door. Kez followed him as quickly as he could. But they had barely reached the flitter when they heard the music starting up behind them, even louder than before.

  As he strapped himself into the passenger seat of the flitter Kez wondered if he should have told Raven about his encounter with the Gateshall clique in the mall. But the thudding noise he could hear even with the flitter’s doors shut warned him against returning to the apartment. As Wraith took off, Kez settled himself more comfortably in his seat, hoping that in subjecting herself to that atonal din Raven would work herself back into a reasonable mood.

  • • •

  When the group left Arkade, Zircarda and Caitlin went back with Ali to her apartment. By the time they had stretched out in the lounge in front of the vidscreen, Ali and Caitlin were bored by the thought of Elizabeth Black and Kester Chirac. However, Zircarda had decided Kez was an original: dressing like a ganger but too young to be a genuine threat. A new addition to Belgravia was always an event since the complex attracted some of the richest and most influential people in the city. Knowing the new arrivals before anyone else would add to Zircarda’s social standing and
, through Kez, she would be bound to be one of the first to meet Elizabeth. If anyone else had gone on in this way Ali and Caitlin would have absented themselves. After all, Zircarda had only met a weird kid at least three years younger than them. But Zircarda was the undisputed leader of their clique and they listened patiently, agreeing whenever Zircarda paused for breath.

  She had finally wound to a standstill in the middle of UltraX’s chart show, which Ali and Caitlin had been watching with half an eye as they listened to her, when Bob Tarrell came in the front door of the apartment.

  “Dad, what are you doing home?” Ali asked in surprise.

  “I need to work on the arrangements for the party, honey,” he replied, already heading for his study. “Try and keep it down in here, kids, OK?”

  “Sure, Dad,” Ali said and turned back to see Zircarda regarding her with an expression she had come to recognize. The brilliant smile, coupled with the calculating look in her eyes, could only mean that her friend wanted something.

  “Hey, Ali,” Zircarda began, with a casual air. “What do you think of inviting Kez and his cousin to your party?”

  “I don’t know if my Dad would be keen on me inviting any more of my friends,” Ali replied uneasily. “He keeps saying that it’s supposed to be for work.” Zircarda’s expression began to change and Caitlin leaped in quickly before things could get uncomfortable:

  “Ali, didn’t you tell us yesterday that your Dad wants to change the format of one of his channels, and that he needs ideas?”

  “Yes, I did,” Ali replied slowly.

  “Well, Kez’s cousin works for an alternative rock channel—maybe she would have some ideas,” Caitlin suggested, glancing at Zircarda for approval. She got it.

  “And if your father invites Kez’s cousin, we can introduce her to everybody!” she proclaimed triumphantly. Ali knew when she was beaten.

  “I’ll ask him when he next stops for a break,” she said. “He’ll just be mad if I disturb him now.”