All the Different Shades of Blue

by W. R. Gingell

  All the Different Shades of Blue

  (A City Between Novellette)

  There’s a sharpness to the human world. An edge to the wind that bites, a piercing sensation to the jagged pieces of sound that litter the perilously light air, a poniard point to the sound of human voices duelling inside the confinement of a café or a restaurant.

  It’s not like that beneath the waves. Beneath the waves there’s softness and peace and all the different shades of blue you ever saw or heard or smelled. A comfortable feeling of weight pressing against every part of you that keeps you exactly where you’re meant to be. Beneath the waves—ah, if I could, that’s where I’d live out all my days.

  If I could—and there’s the rub.

  There’s not much of a life Below for a half-breed merman; particularly one born without gills, or the lung strength necessary to stay below the waves for more than a couple of minutes at a time. I can thank my human mother for that—just like I can thank my merman father for the disjointed and utterly useless bones in my lower half. Neither human nor mer, those bones don’t join enough to be used for walking, though in my mer-form they make a serviceable tail. Enough to get by, if I could but breathe beneath the waves. Above the waves, I can breathe, and perhaps that would be enough to get by, too; if only I could walk.

  To the rest of the Other Kind, there’s Behind, Between, and the human world. To us merfolk, there’s Above and Below—the airy side, and the real world. The only laws that really matter to us are the laws Below, even when we’re above. Perhaps that’s why I became a hacker when my parents abandoned me in the Above world; a combination of orphanly angst and an ingrained disregard for human laws.

  Besides all that, my job means I don’t have to go out if I don’t wish to do so. It’s not a simple matter to navigate my wheelchair around the bends in the outdated and rusty ramp that runs around the outside of my building. Perhaps I could move to another flat, but there aren’t many places around North Hobart where you can have a beautiful view and space for a water tank the size I need—not within my budget, at any rate.

  So I put up with the difficulty and go out every day for my coffee. Coffee and a smile, that’s the way I think of it.

  It was a Thursday that day. Busy, as usual, and I had to be careful crossing the road because there are no zebra crossings there. The traffic is inclined to be savage and suicidal in North Hobart, and although there are small ramps for wheelchair access to the road, there’s a good chance the drivers won’t see you above the guard rails. If they do, there’s more than a chance they’ll attempt to drive over you regardless.

  In spite of that, I made it safely to the other side, the momentum from my dash carrying me up the small ramp and halfway across the footpath. I was earlier than usual, as I had been for the past week at least. I usually take my coffee-and-a-smile at eleven o’clock, but when I accept a job I like to start as early in the day as possible. I should have known better than to take a job across the road from my house, but the money was more than usually good, and it wasn’t a difficult job.

  Potentially illegal and most definitely Other, but not difficult. Perhaps you could call it delicate.

  The café sat above a Behind club that didn’t quite exist in the human world—normal, warm, and reasonably popular. It had human owners, naturally, but whether or not they knew it, they paid a tax to the Behindkind beneath them. Lately they hadn’t been drawing as many customers as the Behindkind thought convenient for a cover, and I had been hired to alter the ancient protective spells around the cafe to allow something a little…extra…into the magics.

  If it was only a matter of hacking the magic it would still have been illegal, at least by Behind laws—in law, if not in practise, Behindkind doesn’t approve of meddling with humans. But by human laws it was illegal, too; to run the program I would be hacking directly into the café’s internal network and accessing their music tracks. The club below and the café above might be linked Behind, but they certainly weren’t linked on paper or legally.

  It could also, technically, be called fraud. Even if it wasn’t music, the track I would be threading through the café’s music was specially designed to make its patrons more open-fisted, not to mention more inclined to return. The club below would benefit not only from a larger revenue, but from the innocent front created by a bustling coffee house.

  Goblins, it would seem, didn’t understand the correlation between selling good coffee and a bustling customer base. Not that I should be talking myself out of a job, but the coffee had always been good enough to bring repeat customers before the human management changed.

  In any case, they gave me the ambient track, laced with magic, and it was my job to make sure it took. For a very good fee, naturally.

  As a program, it needed to infect the system and all the computerised bits, of course; but my real hacking is the kind that isn’t limited to computerised systems. In fact, most of the hacking I do for Behindkind clients is the kind of hacking that involves infiltrating magical systems with malicious magic or hijacking them with load-bearing magic. Routine, human hacking jobs aren’t exactly rare, but when my client is Behindkind, the odds are my job will be one that involves magic.

  I’d been working on this particular job for nearly a week now. And yet, it shouldn’t have been a difficult job. All I should have had to do was hack into the network and then into the threaded filaments of protection that hung around the coffee shop so that it would allow me to make potentially dangerous alterations in the magic of the cafe. The protection must have been from some long gone owner or patron, because the previous owners had run the café as long as I’d been patronising it, and they were no Behindkind. It was nearly impossible to detect; thin and delicate, and it should have been weak, too, but for some reason it clung to everything I tried to do, sticking like spider web to my attempts to break through it and fouling every magical hack I tried besides. It left me curious to know who had once loved this coffee shop enough to ward it against the kind of magic that needed such protections, and more than slightly irritated at the failure of every test run I’d tried so far.

  I checked my watch as I worked. Nearly eleven: so that was why my magic had begun to feel sluggish. Eleven o’clock was coffee-and-a-smile time.

  My fingers slowed until they were no longer typing. I would have to check the last few lines of script I’d input; there were bound to be mistakes, and though my typing wasn’t producing actual lines of code, it was producing something far more volatile—lines of magic. Far less dangerous to make mistakes with my computerised code than my magic code.

  I sat back against the soft fabric curve of my wheelchair as the hour hand of my watch ticked over to eleven. If I cupped my hands around the coffee mug like so, it would look as though I was taking a natural break, cool and unconcerned. As though I wasn’t waiting for a flicker of dark blue jeans and black boots along the lower part of the window that would mean—

  There was a flicker of blue, and I looked away immediately. I didn’t like to be seen looking when she walked up to the door. It was enough that at the tinkling of the bell, I couldn’t ever help looking up…

  The bell on the door tinkled lightly.

  I looked up, my fingers tightening around the coffee mug, and there she was at the door. Long-legged and thin, she had a kind of faun-like look about her. I wasn’t sure if that was because of her thinness, or if it was the hopeful, almost wide-eyed way she seemed to look at the world around her. Her mouth was thin, too, and just a bit crooked, which is probably why I didn’t seem to be able to help smiling at her when she came in for her coffee every day.

  To a Behinder’s eyes, she could have been called ugly—to the co
nstantly glamorous Behindkind, every other creature is ugly, and even among Behindkind there’s none so beautiful as the merpeople. Even for a human, she wasn’t pretty; her nose was too big, her mouth too thin, and her long, dark hair was perpetually untidy. But I couldn’t help smiling whenever I saw her face, just the same. Perhaps I’ve been in the human world for too long.

  I smiled by reflex today, too, and she smiled back at me. I don’t know who she is, but she comes for coffee every day, just like me. She must have a tab set up with the human owner, because I’ve never seen her pay.

  I probably should have tried to warn her away when the ownership changed and the profits shrank enough for those below to notice—goblins with a Behindkind clientele aren’t the safest combination for a human to be around. I didn’t warn her, because at heart I’m as selfish as the next Behindkind; and if I was telling the truth, I liked her smile.

  Now she would continue walking, the smile still sitting lopsidedly on her face, and buy her coffee; three large, with lids. It happened the same way every day.

  Except, perhaps, today.

  Today, she didn’t keep walking, and I saw the smile fade from her face by degrees, replaced by a thoughtful, interested kind of look. It was an odd expression for such a young face to wear.

  She glanced back at the door for the briefest moment, then around at the café; a quick, flickering look all around. As I watched, she blinked and began walking again. They say a human’s feet point in the direction they’re most wanting to go, but her feet never shifted, despite that glance at the door. She passed by my chair as she always did, and went to the counter for her coffee. She would have three coffees to take away, just as I always had my one in a mug, and I would smile at her once again when she turned to close the glass door. That was what had happened since she had started coming to the café.

  To say that I was surprised, therefore, when she slid into the booth at right angles from me a moment later, would be to greatly understate the situation.

  “Hi,” she said. Her hands were wrapped around a coffee mug; slender, capable hands, they were, but it was her eyes that were really arresting. I hadn’t seen her close enough before to know that they were such a light, luminous grey. “I’m Pet.”

  I was surprised at the warmth that blossomed in my chest. She didn’t look shy, this girl; but she gave the impression of self-sufficiency that I would have said was at odds with the kind of personality required to make the first move on a stranger. Or was she making a move?

  “Hi,” I said back, and started to close my laptop. It wouldn’t matter if I took a break. “I’m Marazul.”

  “No, no,” she said. “No need to stop. You work here now? The last few days, you’ve been over here typing.”

  I pushed the screen open again, and edged it just a little further Between the human world and Behind, so that it looked like the simple laptop it ought to look like. I do use the laptop bit of it for human-type hacking, but it’s really mostly an interface for the more tricky job of magical hacking.

  “I don’t, in general. I’m freelancing for them this week.”

  “Ah.” Pet nodded solemnly. “I thought you had a bit more stuff than you usually have. Where do you fit it all?”

  She glanced over at my wheelchair, and I felt a touch of unease. My workbox usually stayed Between until I needed it: in the human world, it looked like a small laptop sleeve that I could slip into the seat of my wheelchair, between my outer thigh and the side of my chair. When I needed it, all I needed to do was bring it from Between into the human world. Unfortunately, I had just brought it properly into the human side to rummage for a particular piece of something that I was trying in an effort to help along my magical efforts. There was certainly nothing on my chair that could have been used to harness a workbox of that size, nor a compartment big enough to house it.

  “Someone carried it over for me,” I said, with barely a pause, nodding at the building across the road that supported my apartment. “I only live across the road.”

  “Ah,” Pet said again. The thoughtful look was back on her face, and if it had sat oddly on her face before, now it was something else again. Thoughtful, interested—and perhaps a touch wary?

  I found myself, ridiculously, ashamed of myself for lying to her. Who ever heard of Behindkind being apologetic for lying to humans? It’s not only good policy, it’s almost tradition.

  Oblivious, Pet sipped her coffee, sighing her contentment in rainbow-spangled steam. She let me work for a few minutes in silence before she asked, “Are you hurt?”

  I looked instinctively at my hands. Sometimes I don’t feel it when I cut myself on the Airy side. “What? Am I bleeding?”

  She stared a bit, and then grinned. “Oh! Right! Sorry. I meant the wheelchair. Did you have an accident?”

  “No,” I said, and went back to my work. The spell hack hadn’t taken in any of my earlier tests, and I didn’t like that. That’s the most absurd thing about working magic through electronics—sometimes it takes up without so much as a pull, and other times it refuses utterly to work. “I was born like this.”

  “Oh.” She nodded. “I thought it might be a cover.”

  “A cover?” I couldn’t help smiling. Her tone was just the right mix of gusto and speculation to make me think she was the kind of human girl who snuck around the town hoping for dark deeds and nefarious characters.

  “Yeah!” She nodded again, this time more enthusiastically. “A few of the merpeople I know don’t like to walk, so they go around in wheelchairs when they’re above.”

  I kept smiling, but I had the distinct sensation that I couldn’t breathe. “Did you say merpeople?”

  She actually shushed me. “What if someone hears you?”

  “What are—What are you?”

  “Me? I’m just a human.”

  “That’s what I mean,” I said, frowning. My fingers hovered over the keyboard as I tried to decide where the greater part of my attention should be fixed; Pet, or my merger program. “You’re just a human. What do you know about merpeople?”

  “Not a lot. I can’t breathe underwater, so I don’t meet many.”

  “That’s not what I really meant.” I sat back in my chair, genuinely curious and just a little bit amused. “You’re very good at not answering questions, for a human.”

  “Aren’t I!” she agreed, looking pleased and pink. “I’m getting a bit of practise, these days. I suppose your mother was human.”

  I nodded, unobtrusively twitching something within the program right with a touch of magic and a tap at the keyboard. The merger program turned the electronic pulse into a magical one that faded seamlessly into the threads of protection around the café.

  Wonderful! I would be able to run another test soon.

  “She was. How did you know?”

  “Athelas says that if the mother is human, problems always come out on the human side, and if the father is human, they come out on the Other side.”

  My fingers curled away from the keyboard completely as a warmth of amusement sprang up in me. For a human, she really was adorable. How did she know these things—and why these things in particular?

  My test, I thought, could wait a few minutes more. I asked, “Does he? What else does he say?”

  “Mostly don’t do that, Pet, and must you, Pet?” she said. She leaned forward, edging her elbows onto the table, and asked, “What are you doing, anyway? Your computer is halfway Between, did you know? I’m not even sure it’s a real computer.”

  If I had been looking down at my keyboard, my head would have snapped up. As it was, the café felt like it shook a little. I said in some shock, “I’m aware.”

  It wasn’t what I had meant to say, but it didn’t seem to strike Pet as odd. She said, “Oh well, as long as you know. I suppose that’s how you got everything here.”

  “It is,” I agreed, aware once again that I still hadn’t said what I intended to say.

  “You lied to me.”

  Wa
s that a current of disappointment in her voice?

  “Behindkind usually do lie to humans,” I pointed out; and this time, it was what I meant to say. I didn’t like the reproach in her eyes. Because of that reproach, I added, “If you knew, why did you ask me?”

  “Wanted to see if you’d lie to me,” Pet said laconically. “Is it because you’re trying to push a spell through the protection around the café?”

  “Do you really think it’s wise for a human who knows a little too much to be asking questions of strangers?” I asked her; and if it was a little sharp, well, I was still taken aback. A girl who smiled at someone so friendlily as Pet did had no business being so sharp—or so knowledgeable.

  “That’s another thing Athelas says,” said Pet.

  She really was very good at not answering questions. I would need all my attention if I was to find out exactly who and what she was. I set the latest test hack running with a few clicks of my mouse and a very small amount of magic to push it Between, where it would pull Behind and the human world a little closer than usual.

  It wouldn’t work, of course—not when it still had that annoyingly sticky protection spell to contend with, not to mention the mistakes in the script that I had probably made due to Pet’s arrival and proximity. But it would give me some idea of what I needed to do next, and at least it would look as though I were still doing my job if the goblins thought to check on me.

  I pushed the laptop slightly to the side, leaning back in my chair with an assumption of ease that I didn’t quite feel, and asked her, “Who is Athelas?”

  “Flaming heck!” said Pet, stiffening. “What was that?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “That’s not even a deflection!” I said. “You can do better than that!”

  “No,” she said, covering one ear with a grimace and opening and closing her mouth as if she was trying to pop that ear. “I’m not kidding. What did you do?”

  “What do you mean?” She couldn’t be talking about my test hack, but I looked down at the laptop screen instinctively, anyway.