The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  “So what did she say?”

  “Well, last week during the council, I heard the electric whooping that Rashana’s PhantoCopter makes when she’s signaling that she wants to land on our helipad, and rushed to the roof to have our lookouts ring the landing bells. She requested a meeting, to which I promptly obliged and cut the council short. We sat in the center of the library, and after we’d caught each other up on the situation in our respective organizations, she asked if I had come across anyone by the name of Amon Kenzaki. I said I hadn’t because I wasn’t sure what her goal was in seeking you and whether you wanted to be found. She went on to describe you in astounding detail—probably using some criminal profiling app—and asked if I had come across anyone who looked like you. I explained that the Xenocyst council personally screens all new members and that I would have definitely remembered your face whether we had rejected you or not, especially if you were wearing a Liquidator uniform. She gave me a penetrating stare as though she suspected I was lying—you must be familiar with that terrifying thing the Birlas all do with their eyelashes—and she asked me if I was absolutely certain. She happened to know that Rick was here and as the saying goes, ‘friends of a kind call each other.’ When she saw Rick at Delivery and asked him about you, he claimed ignorance to your whereabouts but displayed nervous hesitation that made her doubt his veracity. Now I was evincing just the same hesitation. I assured her that she was misreading me—that I had not seen you—and told her that if there was nothing more to discuss we should call our meeting concluded. Still sending me those fierce, suspicious blinks, she requested that I have your description sent out to all our patrols and to contact her immediately if there was any sign of you. When I agreed and explained that your description had already been carefully noted by Little Book like everything else, she promptly boarded her PhantoCopter with her guards and left.

  “Did I make the right choice here, Amon? I realized after you told us your story at the council that the Birla you were seeking was Rashana, and I could have offered to introduce her, but I wanted you to understand your position here before being confronted with that difficult choice. This time, I wanted to make sure to get your consent, given your complicated situation with respect to the two sisters. Now I wonder if I should have just told her and put you two together at once.”

  “Hmmm …” Amon thought about this, feeling the same uncertainty as when Rick had asked him a similar question. “I’m not sure. I did my best to hold back in line at Delivery so she wouldn’t spot me because I wasn’t sure if she was Rashana or Anisha, and just barely managed to stay out of sight. Then I heard from Rick that she’d introduced herself as Rashana, and since she seemed to have received the message I left before I cash crashed, I began to believe she was the activist. But then I remembered the way her guards surrounded her in a precise formation and it reminded me of the tengu around the emoticon man who hurt Mayuko. So I started to think that maybe I couldn’t trust her after all. Now after hearing everything you said about how she funded Xenocyst and all the good work her organization does, that fits with what the activist Makesh said about wanting to help the bankdead, and the activist warned me I was in danger, so maybe … I don’t know … I …”

  Amon closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled the words, “I appreciate your trying to protect me. I just hope you haven’t alienated Xenocyst from an ally on my behalf.”

  “Not to worry. Though I certainly wouldn’t want to sour our relationship with Rashana, ever since the lawsuits she’s become unable to support us in any material way, so we can get on well enough without her.

  “As much as I’d hate to see you go now that you’re finally members, I think you and Shaké would be best to seize the opportunity to speak with Rashana while it’s still available and at least find out what she wants from you. It’s not often that the Birlas pay so much attention to just one person—they’re an incessantly busy family with connections to nearly everyone on Earth—so her interest in you may not last, and I don’t think it’s a chance to pass up lightly.”

  “What gives you such confidence I’d be safe to meet her?”

  “Well, for one thing, I can tell you for certain that the woman searching for you is Rashana.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve known the sisters since they were babies. You think I can’t tell them apart? No twins are that similar. Maybe with digimake, but not in the naked world.”

  “Even if you’re right, can I really trust her?”

  “I understand your caution—getting involved with the powerful is as risky as it can be rewarding—but I think your worry about the guards is misplaced. They are all part of the Birla Guard, a carefully reared mercenary pool from which all members of the family draw. Since all recruits are trained in the same way, I imagine their deployment patterns are identical, whether it’s one of the units serving Anisha or Rashana. So I don’t think the similarity you witnessed is any reason to distrust her. But think it over. Ultimately it’s your decision, and if you choose never to speak to a Birla again we are of course more than happy to have you here.”

  “Thank you. I’ll consider it a bit more as you advise. But if I do decide I want to reach her, how would I go about it?”

  “Just tell me when you want to reach her and I’ll have someone ring the bells. We have arranged a signal that Xenocyst can use to request a visit. She’ll be alerted as soon as the local sensors pick it up and should then fly over on her PhantoCopter at her leisure. Or you can go to Delivery and get in touch with one of the representatives of her charity yourself. It’s up to you.”

  “What’s her charity called?”

  “Atupio.”

  “Atupio?!” Amon jolted back and frowned in surprise and fear. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. Many of Rashana’s donations to my foundation were channeled through that corporation, and we’ve been partnered for decades. Why?”

  “That’s the name of the company that paid for Barrow’s identity assassination and probably the attempt to identity assassinate me as well.”

  PART 6

  EXPOSED?

  15

  XENOCYST, AMON’S ROOM

  Gwong-ng-ng-ng-ng went the sound of the bells, gwong-ng-ng-ng-ng, approaching incrementally as they went off in succession from the lookouts on the Xenocyst border inwards. Following close in their wake, warning calls leapt from mouth to mouth across the area.

  “Typhoon. All residents to their shelters!”

  “Typhoon. All residents to their shelters!”

  “Typhoon. All residents to their shelters!”

  “Typhoon. All residents to their shelters!”

  “Typhoon. All residents to their shelters!”

  Drenched in cool sweat after hours of lifting and carrying, Amon’s skin stung as a fierce wind began to hiss and whistle through the narrow crannies of the District of Dreams, and he watched as Rick covered his face with his forearms and cringed at each gust. The tatters of his friend’s jacket rippled against him as Amon felt the thwap of his own on his skin, the expired fabric releasing streams of flakes at the same moment as the buildings around them, all of it swirling up into a great confluence that shrouded the slumscape around them. With aching muscles, Amon plodded behind him along a ledge that wrapped the upper bulge of a massive disposcraper dome. Like Rick and everyone else in the line of people stretching around the bend ahead, he leaned on the curving wall as he went and shifted from foot to foot whenever the traffic stopped to rest his weary legs. They were doing their best to heed the warnings and return to their shelter as quickly as they could before the storm began, but so was everyone else and the paths were crammed with slow, grinding crowds as Amon’s recollection turned with numb exhaustion to the harrowing events of the day.

  For the previous few weeks, as the autumn air reached its chill tentacles into every alcove and corner of the slums, Amon and Rick had been helping with an ever-increasing variety of jobs, just as Hippo had told th
em they would. Instead of their construction, demolition, escort, and patrol duties, hospital managers had enlisted them for reproductive waste disposal. Wearing work shoes and overalls on loan, they would head to the birthrooms, where doctors and nurses huddled over pregnant women on cots squeezed into tight rows. From the base of some of the cots they took buckets of what looked like blood and hauled them outside to dump them into a steaming crevice. Wiped the floors with dissolving Fleet-cloth rags. Cleaned the postpartum latrines. Removed ragged bedding that had passed its expiration date. It was grueling, sometimes nauseating labor, but it quickly became part of their routine. And while Amon was absorbed in it, he could almost forget that he’d ever known another way to live.

  Then, the previous morning, a whole twenty-five-story-tall, fifty-room-square swathe of Xenocyst buildings had suddenly caved in, and Amon and Rick were called in to assist with the rescue efforts. The cause had been premature lower floor decay due to room replacement delays, and the sudden influx of hundreds of injured patients into the hospital only made the supply shortages worse. Not only were the bed-ridden unable to pick up their own supplies, but the already scarce medical equipment became overstretched with the wards filled beyond capacity, until doctors and nurses could do little more than offer their kindness and attention as many perished. While OpSci skirmishes and malnutrition, as well as increasing numbers of suicides, were already taking their toll on the Xenocyst ranks, this new crisis created a backlog for the undertakers. And since all survivors had been liberated from the rubble the night before, Amon and Rick were asked to assist them at dawn.

  Subsumed in damp chill beneath fragments of gray morning sky, they had found themselves with two other men holding the corners of a large, opaque plastic envelope that served as a hearse and hid its contents from the onlookers they passed. The two of them were worn out already from rescue efforts that had stretched well past midnight (groping and shoveling under the glow of the now precious firefLytes), and their arms and legs strained under the load as they climbed dark stair-strips. With each step the rakhaw of crows grew louder and a foul smell stronger, until a direct waft of air thick with putrescence struck Amon’s nostrils and he gagged despite himself. Moments later, he learned the source of the stench as they reached a platform overlooking a large square rooftop about ten meters below, tucked out of sight by the backs of disposcrapers built encircling it. A man with a shaved head at the brink of the platform chanted over a body around which a family leaned, as four other men loaded another body onto a huge basket attached to a pulley and began to lower it over the side. Finally, Amon saw the crows he had so often heard, a glistening black mass perched on the edge of every rooftop around them, wheeling and swooping over the mound below that swarmed with their greedily pecking brethren.

  Neither Amon nor Rick had ever attended a funeral before, as they had no family and few friends. And so the two harbingers of bankdeath finally became familiar with death of the body—the fact that a person could be wiped out with naught a trace but their bones, not merely economically and socially but straight from existence. To be sure, Amon had once thought Rick was murdered, but he had never confirmed it with his own eyes, and his friend had turned out to be alive all along. They had also occasionally glimpsed fallen bodies as they rushed through the slums on their different errands, and had dug up the rubble too late for some during the rescue the night before. Yet nothing had prepared either of them for the horror they now saw, all words that might have described it abandoning them to the raw presence of the scene.

  They remained silent even after their duties were complete, walking along winding causeways and roofcourses beneath the ever-darkening sky-slivers, and it was then, before the signal bells were rung, that Amon decided he would seek out Rashana. Whatever happened, he was going to find her. By whatever means possible, whether the chances were slim or not, he and Rick were getting out.

  Now, reaching a roomslope partway along the curving ledge, they slid down it onto a small raised landing that fed the pouring crowd into a packed elevated trenchway. As Amon slowly jostled his way ahead behind Rick, he could discover no chain of reasoning that had led him to this resolution in that moment—after the experiences of the day, his head was empty of definite thoughts altogether. But he felt a kind of certainty when he considered the decision and knew it had been motivated at least in part by a mysterious incident Vertical had related to him a few days earlier and a story she had told him soon after.

  According to Vertical, a Xenocyst border sentinel had said that a woman had come looking for Amon. Escorted by a group of private mercenaries serving as her bodyguards, the woman had approached the sentinel’s lookout block in the buffer canyon near the northwest tunnel. The sentinel had refused them entry as armed visitors were not permitted. Apparently the woman, who he had described as “young and beautiful,” had asked if a man called Amon Kenzaki was there. The sentinel had told her he hadn’t heard of anyone by that name and sent her away, but had later related the incident to his squad and the story soon spread to a man who served on Vertical’s scouting crew. Vertical had overheard him mention Amon’s name on their lunch break and, after prying for details, had sought out Amon at the first opportunity.

  Though Amon’s initial idea was that this woman might be Rashana, his confidence in this weakened the more he thought about it. Although she could be considered “beautiful” in a refined sort of way, and might plausibly be called “young,” as she was likely still around forty, Amon doubted these were the first adjectives that would come to mind when describing this strong-willed, commanding corporate demigod of a woman, with her fearsome eyelashes. And it made no sense for her to be escorted by regular mercenaries rather than the Birla Guard, nor to be on foot outside the gate when she could fly right into the Cyst more safely on her specially designed stealth rotorcraft, the PhantoCopter. But if it wasn’t her, then who could it be?

  Amon’s heart began to flutter when he allowed himself to entertain the only other likely possibility: that it had been Mayuko! This seemed too exciting to be true, and he wanted to speak to the sentinel to confirm that the guards had indeed been run-of-the-mill mercs and to ask him about this young, beautiful woman’s hair, whether it had a certain sheen, like a comet laced with mercury.

  He asked Vertical to bring him to the scout from whom she’d heard the rumor, but as the man had been shifted to reconstruction, it took several days to locate him. Then, when the scout finally took them to the northwestern lookout just three days ago, the sentinel could not be found. According to his fellows on shift, he had gone on a supply run a couple of days earlier and never returned, a mishap that was becoming more and more common as the OpScis turned increasingly aggressive. To make matters worse, the sentinel had apparently been at his post alone when the woman had approached, meaning there were no further leads.

  Hearing this, disappointment fell heavy upon Amon like a great avalanche of sand, and he sat on a ledge overlooking the buffer canyon, too laden with thoughts and feelings to remain on his feet. From his perch, he watched the hordes of residents pour up and down the stairpaths on the outer wall of Xenocyst, cross the broken canyon floor in both directions, and stream in and out of the cracks in the petal-flurried, crumbling roomcrags on the far side, a splash of amber-cream released by the sunken sun glowing with incongruous beauty along the serrated tumbling skyline above. Yearning to see Mayuko more intensely than ever, Amon wondered whether the story had been true; whether she was indeed safe and, if so, why she might have come to find him.

  To his surprise, his sad ruminations were interrupted by a warm hand on his shoulder. He traced from its fingertips up the arm with his gaze to find Vertical, who had sat beside him on the ledge without his realizing. She looked into his eyes with an expression of tender sympathy Amon wouldn’t have thought possible on her usually grim face. For a moment he was uncomfortable at having her burst his bubble of solitude, but realized quickly that her touch was reassuring, that he was glad to have compa
ny.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” mumbled Amon. “I guess so.”

  “I heard your stories. She was important to you and Rick.”

  He hadn’t said who he thought the visitor was. Somehow Vertical had put it together on her own.

  “Yes …” he half-whispered as he blinked back the tears that came to his eyes, “she was—is …”

  “I know how you feel. Something similar happened to me once.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Amon, looking at her somewhat hopefully as if she might have answers to his sorrows.

  “Yes. You remember when I talked at the festival about my husband?”

  Amon nodded, recalling how Ty had called her out for cutting her story short and not properly explaining her name. “I guess he came here at some point?”

  Vertical sighed and looked off at the bloom of milky-dapples-on-peach wavering along the slumscape horizon. “If you think it’ll help, I can tell you about it.”

  Amon turned to her, catching the glint of sadness in the corner of her sunset-filled eyes, and nodded, “please,” curious to hear the rest of her tale as much as he was hoping for a distraction from his own.

  “I had been living in the Gifted Triangle for five years when my husband found me. Searching for someone out here is no easy task. There are so many people in this tight labyrinth it’s just too expensive and time consuming. But he was persistent and lucky. I was so shocked when I saw him. I’d already gone through all the grief, thinking we’d never meet again. But he’d held out hope the whole time and wanted me to come back with him to the Free World. He told me that he’d graduated law school and found a position at a decent firm. He could afford to let me stay in his home now, provide me with food, everything I needed. Though I was reluctant to leave the new life I had made here, I was happy to see him and amazed that he’d put all that effort into finding me on the time off from his new job. The decider for me was when he told me there was a track in the shared gym at his apartment. I was sick of sprinting back and forth on whatever short patches of rooftop I could find. The idea of really letting go on an open track seemed like a godsend.