The Naked World

by Eli K. P. William

  Jammed immobile into an off-balance, panicking crush, everyone lurching forward for their lives, Amon saw a half-dozen SampleQuitos swarming in and smacked one away, knowing that they were strong enough to survive swatting and would blacklist his genome if he let them close. Several TazerWasps rocketed towards him from his right side to disable this violent offender, and he hurled another baton into their midst, sending them on a sudden vertical U-turn, plunging out of sight. Amon climbed over another small heap, totally oblivious in his half-conscious rush to what body parts he was stepping on—a head there, a thigh here, a buttock there—and got his feet back on the ground. He saw the end of the bridge approaching, the slumscape rearing beyond it, when suddenly a screech filled his ears. Or not ears per se. Rather, the noise seemed to originate in his head, though somehow he instinctively knew which direction it came from and involuntarily looked that way, diagonally up to his left where he found a BansheeBird about five meters away. Its glass hummingbird body hovered elegantly, its see-through pin-beak aimed right at his forehead, the beat of its fast-blurring translucent wings adding a sharp thrum to the sound wave that seemed to scrape along the pleats of his brain as though ten thousand tiny chainsaws were grinding on rusted lumps of metal in his skull. There’s no point going on, called a voice from his depths in metallic-shriek syllables that were just barely intelligible. End it! A razor-whirling headache seemed to scream down his body as he fumbled for another baton in the right pocket of his jacket. He got the cylinder in his hand but the pain was so bad he wasn’t sure if he should throw the baton or just leap over the side of the bridge to stop all sensation forever. Not death. Dream Mayuko! Forest jubilee! Summoning every fragment of his splintered will with this incoherent mental battle cry, Amon quelled the suicidal impulse and withdrew the baton … but when he looked towards the BansheeBird to take aim, something just to the right of it pulled in his gaze. A fireworks display of multicolored lights pulsed at varied frequencies on the clear wings of a DazzleMoth fanned out towards him and his headache crescendoed, his visual field melting into a searing blaze of white as the bone of his cranium felt ready to implode. Convulsing and dry retching with rib-cracking strength, Amon put his hand on the ledge, followed by his right foot, and prepared to jump off towards the drone.

  Gatah. Gatah-kroonch. The chainsaw squeal suddenly stopped, and Amon collapsed backwards in shock onto a warm, lumpy, twitching bed. Gatah-gatah-blamkreesssshhh. With fluorescent afterglow spots still blinking in his vision and elbows in his back, Amon saw Rick standing over him holding the gun he’d taken from the OpScis, its smoking twin barrels pointed out to where the two drones had been, a sparkling glass cloud expanding in the air from that direction. Lowering the barrel, Rick reached out to grip Amon’s right bicep, hauled him to his feet, and smacked him hard in the face. A sharp buzz in his right cheek, Amon allowed Rick to pull him along, punching, kicking, and pistol-whipping at anything in their way. Something tiny alighted on Amon’s forehead and he went to brush it off with the back of his hand, but his reflexes were too slow in his lingering daze and it took off before he reached it. Only as the red blur of blood-filled wings receded into the sky did Amon realize it was a SampleQuito off to label him a hungry ghost or worse. Then he looked down and found the spiral off-ramp right in front of them. After seconds that felt like hours, they had reached the end of the bridge at last!

  But before they could get to the barrier at the end, reinforcements arrived—a swarm of fluttering, humming, glittering things headed straight for them, far too many for Rick’s one machinepistol to handle. Fuck.

  THWAP. Three balls flew down from the looming disposcrapers ahead and exploded near the drones into nets that wrapped around them. With their multifarious wings all tangled together, they began to plummet into the moat or onto the heads of the crowd on other bridges below. Retracing the parabolic course of the net to the ledge where it seemed to have originated, Amon could see no one there, but he knew Hippo had positioned Ty and his crew on the rooftops just across the gap at the end of the bridge to cover the sabotage crew in case CareBots were roused—and were they ever roused. Amon could hear machine gun fire and saw a few butterflies burst like smashed candy before the rotating barrel of a Gatling gun poking from the doorway of a room several stories up.

  Still disoriented and nauseous, Amon let Rick pull him to the end of the bridge and watched him fire at a bunch of DusterFlies glide-creeping up below a protruding room. His shots missed but drew the attention of Ty, who leaned out into view from behind the room and swung his three wheels out one after the other in three great arcs—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—so that each skipped from head to head of drones at three different altitudes, sending their short-circuited forms plummeting onto the end of the Road to Delivery. Yet the bots Ty missed amassed with further reinforcements into another murmuration above him, whirling and looping in a complex formation that looked like a crystal-river gift-ribbon, and Ty shouted an alarm call before his crew leapt from their cover and scattered into the shadows of the slumscape, tailed by vitreous insectile blurs.

  Looking down, Amon saw that the spiral ramp was packed, with many hang-dropping off the side onto the heaving headscape below. Rick glanced over his shoulder and whipped out his gun-arm—gatah-kroonch, gatah-kreesch, gatahkreeshahh—shooting down a BansheeBird, DazzleMoth, and DusterFly trio that approached from behind as the people around them dropped to the floor to take cover. Seizing this opening, Rick dashed ahead, stepped onto the barrier at the end, and leapt forward—all in fluid succession. He launched out across the gap, wedged his upper body into a cranny left by two poorly aligned shelters, and pulled himself in before waving Amon over and sliding forward into a dark cavity out of sight. Terrified he might lose his friend, Amon gave his head a swift shake and followed after Rick with a dash, a step, a leap, and a thwachk, crawling into the slumscape.

  20

  THE GIFTED TRIANGLE, AN ELEVATOR

  At the end of the cranny was a hole that dropped into darkness, the bottom out of sight. Amon hesitated at the edge for a split second, but it was either take the leap or return to the madness, so he twisted around between the tight walls to get his legs in front of him, dangled them into the hole, and dropped in. His soles took the ground hard and he fell, rolling to absorb the impact until his left hip slammed into a wall and he came to a stop.

  When he got up, he found himself in a narrow cleft between walls of bamboo-board shelters that leaned over top in gappy rows like a closed mouth with missing teeth viewed from the inside. Beside him, Rick was lying on his side in a low alcove.

  “’ts go!” barked Amon, and started to run down the alley, but noticed Rick wasn’t following and stopped, turning to find him cringing and gripping his right ankle. “What’s happened?”

  “I fucked my ankle on that drop.”

  “You okay to go on?”

  “Not much choice, is there? We’ve got to get away from those drones.”

  Rick rose slowly to his feet and took a few tentative steps. He managed to limp along several meters, but winced every time he put down his right foot. After about twenty steps, he stopped to stand on one foot, keeping his right heel up and toes floating above the ground, clenching his jaw in pain.

  “Here,” said Amon, stepping beside Rick and wrapping his left arm around his waist. “Put your weight on my shoulder.” And they began to proceed, with Rick hopping along using Amon like a crutch.

  Together, they moved with as much stealth as they could, peeking around corners before turning into new alleys, creeping up stairs to scope the path ahead and climbing down again if the route looked too open, aiming their guns forward when crawling through tunnels and squeezeways, gradually losing themselves in the maze of this unfamiliar territory in the hopes of losing their pursuers, of putting as much distance between themselves and the battle as they could. It was difficult for Rick to climb and they would be easier to spot on the more open upper levels, so they stayed as close to ground level as they could. E
verywhere they went, the paths were almost deserted, with only the occasional furtive figure appearing and then vanishing into the interstices of the slum, the local gifted surely taking cover from the violence in their disposcrapers. But eventually Amon and Rick heard the blather of many voices ahead, which told them they were approaching one of the branches of the Road to Delivery, and they steered their course away from it, knowing that the air above would be filled with CareBots. By now the drones might have been taught what they looked like using images culled from the Delivery sensors—or just to search for suspicious armed men dressed like OpScis. All the men and women on the sabotage crew, including Vertical, had volunteered to do their parts knowing that there was a strong chance they could be labeled as hungry ghosts or dangerous targets. Plastic surgery could be provided to throw off facial detection, as a few bankdead doctors recruited at the founding of Xenocyst had passed on this archaic art (which had been rendered obsolete by the ubiquity of digimake). And Rashana had offered, without anyone requesting it, to do everything in her power to remove anyone whose DNA got sampled from blacklists, either by bargaining, bribery, hacking, or, if that failed, by giving them amnesty in her Er facility until anonymous relocation could be arranged. Yet for the time being, the crewmembers had to hide and Amon and Rick did their best to stay clear of more heavily populated areas. Despite their distance from the main foot traffic arteries, they occasionally spied a DusterFly or TazerWasp ripping past in some crack overhead and had to cower at the base of the nearest wall or inside the nearest nook until they were sure the threat had passed. The translucent bodies of the CareBots were as difficult to spot in the gloom as flitting shadows, and Amon now understood why they were constructed of such a vitreous material. The only other motion was the flakes drifting about them, colorless and gray, as they crept further into the cold depths of the labyrinth where sunlight never touched.

  After some time, the bamboo-board transitioned into copper and then to limestone before the shelters turned motley, and the air began to fill with the reek of sewage and rot, telling them they had left the Gifted Triangle and reached a giftless area.

  “We need to get off the streets and find shelter before the drones secure the Triangle and move in to lock down the surrounding enclaves,” said Amon as they walked along a narrow strip of tarmac between precarious crumbling towers of misaligned blocks.

  Rick nodded. “If only we could ditch these uniforms. With no one else outside, we’re the easiest targets on Earth.”

  Though the original plan had been to give the saboteurs a change of clothes so they could remove their disguises after the mission, the OpSci uniforms had turned out to be too tight to wear over the more baggy standard supplies and they would have looked strange carrying bags to Delivery. Instead, the council had decided to have Xenocysters waiting on their return route to hand them changes, but Amon and Rick had missed the rendezvous, leaving them stuck with what they were wearing. OpScis had been passing ever more frequently through the Gifted Triangle of late, so while it wouldn’t be obvious that they were the saboteurs, they didn’t blend in either as the residents were all gifted.

  Amon looked around at the disposcrapers. “Should we try to commandeer one of the rooms?”

  “How about there?” said Rick, pointing to a stub of alley that ended at a narrow dead end wall. It was made of concrete—not shelters of Fleet concrete but a solid slab—with an empty doorframe cut into it on the ground floor. “That looks like the entrance to a condo, doesn’t it? If we hole up in an elevator the drone sensors won’t have a chance.”

  Amon nodded. Then both men drew their guns and Amon helped Rick to the end of the alley. Through the doorframe, Amon could see shadowed figures huddled everywhere—on the floor, along the walls—the milky half-circles of their low-hung eyes tracking them from the darkness.

  “I hate to disturb these people in their homes,” whispered Amon.

  “I know, me too,” Rick replied. “But can I leave this one to you? With my leg like this, you’ll be more persuasive.”

  Without replying, Amon held out his gun and stepped confidently through the frame. The figures all melted away from him as though his duster were a torch dispelling shadows, clearing a path for them across the dim, dilapidated lobby. The ceiling over their bowed heads bent down in the middle as though some heavy weight were on the floor above, the walls dark in blotchy patches with what appeared to be holes, the de-tiled floor bumpy and warped, as Rick clung to Amon’s arm and hobbled along just behind him.

  “There,” said Rick, pointing to the battered metal door of an elevator open just a crack, a faint vertical line of light slashing out. The opening was too narrow for them to fit, so they both stuck their hands between the doors and, with a surge of muscle, managed to pry them a notch wider. Beneath the glow of a fresh firefLyte, a group of six scrawny, pugnacious-looking boys sat against the walls surrounded by an assortment of anadeto and bits of plastic that cluttered the chamber. Startled, they leapt to their feet and snatched up mismatched weapons: a chipped scalpel, a razor on a string, spiky pieces of metal and plastic.

  “Tell them to leave,” Rick muttered to Amon.

  “Out!” Amon shouted, standing outside the doorway with his barrel trained on the inside of the chamber. “You’ll get it back tomorrow when we leave.”

  The boys froze, holding their weapons ready to fight, but five of them flicked their eyes to the eldest boy as if wanting his instruction. Not more than thirteen, their young leader was unusually pudgy for bankdead in these days of scarcity, clearly having secured more than his share. He nodded to the others and they all began to gather up tools, knick-knacks, and scrap from the mess on the floor, bundling them in their own pieces of tarp. A boy who looked about nine sent a venomous glare at another boy of about the same age when he picked up a hole-puncher. He looked ready to call him out for stealing until he glanced at Amon furtively and seemed to think better of it.

  In the order that they finished bundling their meager treasures, the boys crept timidly for the doors and Amon stepped back to let them out through the slit. Their pudgy leader was the last to leave and went to take the firefLyte on his way out, but when Rick gave him a piercing glare and a firm shake of his head, he abandoned it, slipping past them into the lobby in the wake of his friends and stepping around the huddled shadows out into the alley. When Amon looked back through the crack, the floor of the elevator was completely bare, as though no one had ever lived there.

  Amon didn’t feel good about kicking people out of their shelter, even this gang of young thugs that was probably terrorizing the local denizens—otherwise there was no explaining their possession of this prize elevator and their many weapons—but in the circumstances he and Rick had little choice. In the frenzied struggle to escape Delivery with their lives they had already fought and stepped on however many innocents, and there was no restraining their beastly wills to survive now, though Amon, and surely Rick as well, hoped to mitigate the harm they might do as best he could.

  Rick turned his body sideways and Amon stuffed him through the slit from behind before squeezing into the elevator himself. Amon sat against the wall left of the door below where the firefLyte hung from a hole in the ceiling and Rick took the wall opposite him. They then laid their guns on the floor and Rick breathed a sigh, drawing Amon to let out one of his own. He almost felt a hint of relief.

  But it was then, beneath the glow of the lantern, that Amon noticed Rick was crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Amon asked, staring at his friend as tears dribbled slowly and steadily from his eyes.

  “What?”

  “You’re crying!”

  “Yeah, and you’d think it’s because of my ankle and everything else that went wrong today,” said Rick almost casually as he continued to cry, his voice not audibly perturbed by sadness or any other strong emotion, his expression almost flat if displaying signs of tiredness. “It started when we were about halfway across the bridge. I’m guessing it was one
of the DusterFlies.”

  “Tear dust?!” said Amon in alarm.

  “I think they got me when I fired warning shots for Ty and them.”

  “We’d better go find you something to drink.”

  They had received extra food and beverages that morning, provided by the council to fortify them for the mission, and Amon had felt more contented than he had in weeks. Now, after the extreme exertion of the sabotage, he was parched, and saw that Rick was losing water even faster.

  “Oh yeah. I’d love something to wet my lips. But I don’t think I can walk.” Rick pulled off his right shoe and rolled up his pant leg to reveal his ankle, bright red and swollen to the size of a Fuji apple. “I guess I twisted it worse than I thought. It just keeps throbbing harder and harder and now that I’m sitting down it feels all stiff, like it’s locking up.”

  “Shit. What are we going to do? We need to rehydrate you fast.”

  “Don’t worry. The trickle has been so small since they got me on the bridge you didn’t even notice. Right now must be the peak.”

  “I hope so … but I’d better go find you something anyway. You never know,” said Amon, getting to his feet. “Just wait here.”

  Picking up his duster, Amon slipped between the doors. Strangely, he found the lobby completely empty, the huddled figures gone, and realized why when he saw a faintly glinting blur hovering outside the open doorway. Several DusterFlies fluttered in the alley, wantonly flicking about the dust on their wings, and a BansheeBird thwapped the air as it blurred by an intersecting path above. Without turning around, Amon slunk back into the elevator, resisting the panic thumping in his chest to retreat as quietly as he could.