The Man Who Crossed Worlds (Miles Franco #1)

by Chris Strange

  Part of me was tempted to lie here. I could barely think, I could barely move. Hell, the smart thing to do was sit tight and wait until the pain went away. If that meant the big sleep, then so be it.

  But I couldn’t. I wasn’t finished yet. I couldn’t wait here for John Andrews and his gangsters to come out and finish me off. I’d tempted fate enough tonight.

  I said before that a Pin Hole needed Kemia to operate. That’s not entirely true. Kemia is a powerful catalyst, but it is possible to open a Pin Hole without any. Trouble is, it’ll be weak, and it won’t last long before collapsing again. If I was much further from the Bore, it would be totally impossible, but I was close enough to see the blue light peeking between the buildings alongside the river, and I thought I could just manage something.

  Making a Pin Hole isn’t hard once you’ve got the hang of it, at least not the physical construction of it. The coins in my pocket—the ones I’d had to hassle the cops to get back—all had premade Pin Holes scratched into their surface, but nothing that would help me now. Scratching the circle into stone or metal works best, but you can draw the circle using chalk or viscous fluid in a pinch.

  I used my blood. It seemed poetic. And there was certainly an abundance of it trickling down my fingers, ready to use.

  Just as each Tunnel has to be specially constructed for the people using it, each Pin Hole is designed to serve a certain purpose. It’s not really about memorizing the right design to use, it’s about crafting each component of the circle with a specific intention. Like the old cliché goes, it’s an art.

  I may be broke and prone to getting the shit kicked out of me, but I’m a damn good Tunneler. I applied for a job at Immigration when I first left university, with my brand-new Tunneler’s license ready to be framed and nailed to the wall. I got through every interview, every shortlist.

  Sure, I got turned down by Human Resources at the last minute, but it was probably just because all my competitors were so well dressed it looked like they’d even ironed their hair, while I showed up smelling of whiskey and wearing a trench coat that was outdated the day I was born.

  I didn’t want the job anyway. Immigration were a bunch of assholes.

  The point is this: I was a damn good Tunneler. Even so, Tunneling without Kemia was damn hard. Tunneling without Kemia when your arms were tied behind your back and you were aching all over was an absolute bitch. It took three tries before I finally got a complete circle with all the symbols in the right place. Then came the hard part.

  I closed my eyes to help with my concentration. Laypeople seemed to think Tunneling was about clearing your mind, and focusing. That’d be exactly the wrong thing to do. Clearing your mind was about order, about structure. Tunneling was about chaos. It was about carving open an impossible hole in reality, to connect this world to a world where nothing is fixed and reality is fluid. Trying to bring order to that would drive anyone crazy.

  Instead, I let my mind wander free. The closest thing I could compare it to is that moment when you’re half-awake and half-dreaming, and your mind flits from thought to thought, unbound by logic or rules or constraints.

  As my mind drifted, I became aware of a pressure, a crackling of energy coming from the Pin Hole. I didn’t have to draw the instability into reality. It wanted to be there, it wanted chaos instead of order. Thermodynamics and entropy and all that, I guess. All it took was an investment of energy on my part to tear open the Pin Hole. Then it was just a matter of letting chaos trickle into the real world.

  I hummed as I worked, a nonsense tune, more out of habit than any necessary part of the procedure. I gathered what strength I had left after the beating while pressure grew behind my eyes, and fired it into the circle with a slash of released energy.

  Without Kemia, it was only barely enough to prick open the Pin Hole, but it did the job. A sense of confusion—madness, almost—came over me, before I cleared my head again. It had worked.

  I couldn’t completely untie my bonds. With Kemia, I could have turned the rope into handcuffs or snakes or a hundred other things, but right then all I could do was change the knot slightly.

  It was enough. I twisted my hands around, catching the loose loop that had appeared in the knot, and tugged on it. With a few agonizing contortions of my wrists, the rope came loose and dropped to the concrete.

  Blood rushed back into my hands, giving me the world’s worst pins and needles. I shook my hands in the air, trying to get them working properly again, then massaged the bruises on my wrists.

  With an exhalation and a refocusing of my mind, the Pin Hole closed. It would draw energy from me to keep the Pin Hole open, and in my current condition I didn’t know if I could keep the necessary state of mind anyway. The rope seemed to shimmer for a moment, then it was back in a loop the size of my wrists, tied up just as tightly as it had been when it was holding my wrists behind my back. That was the problem with transmuting stuff. It just didn’t last.

  I got on my hands and knees, tried to ignore the pain shooting through my ribs and stomach, and pushed myself up. My head spun like a merry-go-round cranked to high gear, but I didn’t fall. It felt good to be on my feet, aside from the nausea that threatened to send me heaving my guts into the gutter.

  I risked one glance back at the strip club. I could have sworn I saw a blind move in an upper floor window, but hell, everything seemed to be moving right now. I threw a contemptuous sneer at the window just in case, then started stumbling away down the street.

  My legs screamed in pain, but they did what I asked of them. The rain had become a light drizzle, just enough to wash some of the blood that graced my face down my neck, staining my white shirt. I was too out of it to care. I didn’t have a clear idea where I was, but the central city’s skyline was to the south, so that’s the direction I went.

  Cars drove past me, headlights scattering off the mist of raindrops like a million tiny fairies. None of them stopped to help when I stumbled to my knees and retched the pitiful contents of my stomach into a storm-water drain.

  I didn’t blame them. I wouldn’t have stopped either.

  Luckily, I’d barely eaten in the last day or so, so it didn’t take me long before I could continue on my merry way.

  The journey passed in snatches of memory and darkness. I might have been sleeping part of the way. I blacked out again, embraced by the wonderful painless arms of unconsciousness, and when I came to there was a blue sedan pulling up beside me.

  I made a move to run, but I already knew it was hopeless. If it was Andrews having second thoughts, I was dead anyway. I was too tired, too sore. I just stood at the side of the road, eyes half-closed, and prayed for a miracle.

  The car’s electric window lowered, but no gun appeared to put me down. Instead, there was a woman’s face.

  I wondered again if I was seeing things. I stared blankly at the woman, swaying slightly on the spot, her face slipping in and out of focus.

  The woman’s red hair was what triggered my memory. Caterina Andrews stared at me silently, eyes aged beyond her years.

  I stumbled to the car, my legs moving on automatic, pulled open the door, and slid inside. It was so warm in the car, so warm and dry I didn’t even care who it was picking me up. It could have been Satan himself offering me a ride and I would have accepted.

  “Jesus,” the gangster’s wife said. She reached a hand toward my face, then froze and let her arm drop. A whiff of lavender hung in the air. “What did they do to you?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for recounting the beating. I wasn’t in the mood for anything. “Can you take me home?” I could hear the desperation in my voice, but I didn’t care anymore.

  She bit her lip in a way that I thought was incredibly cute, despite my injuries, the pale pink flesh becoming tinged with white. It made me think of the flowers in one of my foster mothers’ window box. Strange. I hadn’t thought of her in years. Dimly, I was aware I was slipping back into unconsciousness.

  “Where do you liv
e?” she finally asked, snapping me awake long enough to tell her my address.

  She nodded, started the car, and pulled out into a gap in the traffic. The rumble of the car engine relaxed me like a massage.

  More comfortable than I ever thought I’d be again, I fell asleep.

  When I woke, Caterina had parked outside my apartment building and was unbuckling her seatbelt. I fumbled for my own seatbelt, realized I’d never buckled it in the first place, and grunted.

  “Thank you,” I said, my voice croaking and painful. “I can manage from here.”

  She smiled at the steering wheel, a soft smile, and shook her head. “What floor do you live on?”

  “The ninth.”

  She opened her door. “I’ll help you. Come on.”

  Now that I was slightly more rested and feeling less like I wanted to throw up, having the gangster’s wife help me was a bit of a blow to my ego. Not enough of a blow to refuse her help altogether, though.

  She came around to my side of the car and helped me out. It had finally stopped raining, but I was soaked to the core.

  “Aw hell,” I said as I went to push the door closed. “I’ve got blood all over your seat.”

  She shrugged and slipped a soft shoulder under my arm. Her hair smelled of floral shampoo. “It’ll come out. John has chemical cleaners that’ll get blood out of anything.”

  I shivered and blamed my wet clothes for it, then let Caterina help me to the door of my apartment. I was putting more weight on her than I intended, but she didn’t complain. My shaking fingers tried and failed to put the keys in the door, then Caterina took them from me and opened the door herself, without the problems I usually have.

  It took us twenty minutes to get up the stairs. I had to rest after every flight, while Caterina waited in silence. Tania didn’t appear on the stairway this time, thank God, and neither did her mother. I think a barreling about late rent payments might be the thing to cause me to keel over and die.

  “What’s your name?” she asked while I wheezed and tried to catch my breath after the sixth flight of stairs.

  “Miles,” I said between breaths. “Miles Franco.”

  She didn’t offer to tell me her name. I think she knew I was well aware who she was.

  When we eventually reached my apartment, Caterina again unlocked the door and got me inside. She sat me down on my couch and started rummaging through my kitchen cupboards.

  “Why the hell did you stop and pick me up?” I asked, massaging my forehead where the pain was worst. “More importantly, what’s your husband going to think?

  She came back carrying a big glass of water, a packet of painkillers, and an open pack of chocolate biscuits that I’d stashed in my cupboard before the last job. This woman was an angel. “He won’t even notice I’m gone. He’s got his own troubles.”

  I thanked Caterina, swallowed five paracetamol and a chocolate biscuit, and followed it up by draining the glass of water. “Okay, that answers one of my questions.” I shuffled over to make room for her on the couch, but she didn’t sit down.

  “I don’t throw lives away as easily as my husband. You don’t seem like a bad man.”

  “You must be a poor judge of character.”

  She didn’t look at my face while we talked. I could understand. Hell, I probably looked like something out of Night Of The Living Dead. She held out her hand to me, and I stared at her, puzzled.

  “Take your jacket off,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You’re shivering, and you’re soaked. Where do you keep your towels?”

  “Try the floor. Or maybe you’ll find one hanging from the corner of my dresser, if you’re lucky.”

  To her credit, she didn’t screw up her face. She just disappeared into my room and started rummaging. She came back a few minutes later, somehow managing to find two towels that looked relatively dry and clean.

  “Stand up so I can help you with your jacket,” she said.

  “I think I can manage to undress myself.”

  She raised her eyebrows skeptically, so I set out to prove myself right. It didn’t go well. I tried to remove my arm from my sleeve and sent lightning bolts shooting through my shoulder. I grunted, attempting to maintain an air of manliness in the face of overwhelming opposition, before Caterina finally took pity on me and took hold of my soaking jacket.

  It occurred to me, as she slid the jacket from my shoulders and went to work on my tie, that I wasn’t as nervous as I should be. I mean, she was undressing me, for Christ’s sake.

  I studied her as she dug her fingers into the tie’s knot, a frown of concentration on her face. She was pretty enough, though not what I’d call beautiful. Just kind of plain, I guess, but not in a bad way. She had a scattering of orange freckles across her nose, and her lips were small and narrow.

  Even if she was plain, her looks would normally have been enough to set my hands to sweating and my tongue working to insult her as much as humanly possible. Instead, there was only peace. Maybe I was just tired.

  She made a tsking noise when she unbuttoned my bloodied shirt, uncovering the scrapes and bruises that had turned my chest purple and red. For a brief, stupid minute, I was self-conscious about being half-naked in front of her, but I forced the thought away before it could make me blush. She wasn’t there to be my goddamn lover.

  She retreated to the kitchen again, filled a large bucket with warm water and a dash of antiseptic that I didn’t even know I had, and started washing away the blood from my body.

  I’ve got to say, this was a first. I couldn’t say I’ve ever stood shirtless in my apartment while a woman I barely knew—a woman married to a gangster, no less—cleaned me. Awkward didn’t even begin to describe it.

  Why the hell was she doing this? Did she feel guilty for what her husband did to me? I watched her eyes, but there was no hint she was thinking about anything except the practical matter of scraping congealed blood from my chest hair.

  I cleared my throat, regretted it immediately when it made my chest spasm with pain, and said the first thing to come into my head. “So, your husband’s kind of an asshole.”

  Great conversation starter, Miles. You’re a real charmer. She glanced up at my face for a second, not quite meeting my eyes, then returned to her work. “I wouldn’t tell him that, if I were you. You might not be so lucky next time.”

  “Lucky?” I pointed to the bruises that stretched across my ribs. “I don’t call this lucky.”

  “When I saw you at the strip club, I thought for sure he’d have you killed. The way he looked at you…I’ve never seen anyone walk away from him after that.”

  “Then why’d he let me go? The cops can’t be that much of a threat to him.”

  She used another towel to dry my skin. It hurt when she pressed it against my bruises, but I kept myself from wincing this time. “I don’t know. He was raging when he was done with you. He wouldn’t even speak to me.”

  I considered about asking her how she’d managed to wind up with such a violent Vei, but thought better of it. As nice as she was being, I still couldn’t work her out. Whose side was she on?

  I decided to see if she had information I could use. I’m a nice guy like that. “Chroma. That mean anything to you?”

  She stopped drying me. Her gaze travelled slowly up to my face, and she met my eyes for the first time. They were green, and pretty. “I’ve heard John talking about it to his men. It’s the drug, isn’t it? The new drug I heard you talking about.”

  I nodded.

  “He’s always agitated,” she said, “always angry whenever it comes up. I get scared when he comes to me after those conversations.” She licked her lips, a nervous gesture, and she suddenly looked like a frightened rabbit, ready to bound away.

  I laid a hand on her upper arm as gently as I could, and she didn’t flinch. I felt sorry for her, for whatever she’d had to go through. I’d spent less than half an hour with John Andrews, and it had scared the hell out of me.
What would it be like to be married to him? “You don’t have to stick with him, you know. There are people who can—”

  She shook her head, cutting me off. “No. Thank you, but no.”

  I thought about arguing with her, but I could see it wouldn’t help. Not tonight. Maybe I’d get another chance to talk her into it, but pushing it too hard right now might scare her away. I still needed more from her. Feeling like the piece of shit I was, I released her arm. “Okay. But I got a feeling this is a dangerous time to be around him.” I paused while she chewed on that, and then I spoke again. “I’ve got to know. Is John involved with Chroma?”

  She bit her lip and shook her head again. “I don’t think so. He’s much too afraid. If I had to guess, I’d have to say whoever’s doing it has been leaning pretty hard on him to stay out of the way.”

  “They must be tough to go toe-to-toe with him like that.” I sat down on the couch and rested my elbows on my thighs. I was too wrapped up in questions now to be self-conscious about being shirtless in front of Caterina.

  Now that I was feeling more alive, I realized the incident with John Andrews had left me pissed. Somehow I’d wound up stuck in the middle of all this shit, and I wasn’t pleased. Getting my ass kicked was never part of the deal.

  I wanted to get to the bottom of this Chroma business, but not because the cops wanted my help. I’d had gangsters beat me up before, but I’d never been truly scared for my life, not until tonight. John Andrews, Doctor Dee, it didn’t matter, they were all the same. They were goddamn bullies trying to gain control of this town, and they didn’t give a flying fuck how many people they crushed in the process.

  To my surprise, Caterina sat down next to me. She opened her mouth a couple of times, conflicting emotions playing in her eyes. Finally, she spoke. “John can’t know I told you this. But after he sent me out of his office, I heard him on the phone. He was making calls, a lot of them.”

  I frowned. “So? Maybe he just had a heap of gangster business to attend to.”

  “He called one of the people by name. It was Paul Guzman.”

  “Captain of the Gravediggers? I didn’t pick them as friends.”

  She shook her head. “Their street battles have been worse than ever. They don’t speak. They never have.”

  “And yet your husband was calling him,” I said. “All right, I’m starting to see your point. You know who else he was calling?”

  “No. But the way he spoke to them…I don’t think they were friends. I think he was calling the other gangs.”

  That didn’t make a lick of sense. I couldn’t see a lie in Caterina’s eyes, but maybe she’d misheard. Maybe Andrews was just in a bad mood from dealing with me.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “I didn’t catch much, but I could have sworn he mentioned a meeting.”

  “Yeah? Where?”

  “Suron, I think he said. I haven’t heard of it. Is it a club? A street?”

  “No,” I said slowly. “Not quite.”

  I put my head in my hands and sat like that for a few moments. My head pounded. Maybe I was misreading the information. I had to be. Surely I couldn’t have spooked Andrews that much. Surely.

  Aw hell. I really had a knack for picking my battles.

  After a while, Caterina stood up. She picked up my shirt from the floor where she’d discarded it, and handed it to me. “You’ll want to soak that in some hydrogen peroxide and get a stain remover to wash it. Or just throw it away.”

  I barely registered what she said, but I accepted the shirt anyway.

  “I think you should stay out of this, Mr. Franco.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “My husband isn’t the worst man out there. Stay home. Get some rest. Maybe leave town, if you’re worried. Bluegate is broken already.”

  I didn’t reply. There was nothing else to say. Maybe I’d do that, pack my bags and go, if only for a while. I wouldn’t be able to Tunnel, but I’d be alive. I was just a nobody, after all.

  Christ, who was I kidding?

  Caterina leaned down and kissed my forehead. The touch of her lips sent a little spark of excitement through my skull, and I came back to life a little.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Franco.”

  “See you, Cat. Tell John I said hi.”

  She smiled, but her eyes were sad. She put a hand on the door handle, then paused and turned back to me. “Why are you doing this?”

  I leaned back and tried to think of an answer. “Not sure,” I said after a moment. “It’s just…this is my city, you know?”

  She nodded and turned away. The door creaked shut behind her, and I was alone in my apartment again. I realized I was cold, and exhaustion once again crept over me.

  I barely gave myself enough time to strip off my blood-stained socks and trousers before I slipped my aching body into bed and fell into a dreamless sleep.