The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  At least, she thought it was the lighting.

  “Is this really an elevator?” Lissa said. “We’re going to feel like awful idiots if—”

  Alania touched the panel hiding the elevator controls, and it sank into the wall and slid aside. Lissa’s voice trailed off to a slightly breathless, “Oh!”

  “Seventh Tier, here we come,” Alania said, but her own heart raced a little as she pushed the key into the control port and a touchscreen lit up. She blinked at it. It only showed three numerals: twelve, where they were, five, and, astonishingly, one.

  “It only goes to Fifth and First?” Sandi said.

  “The Lieutenant’s robot factory is on Fifth,” Alania said slowly.

  “But why does it go to First?” Lissa said. “Nobody goes to First.”

  “I don’t know,” Alania admitted.

  “Please don’t press that one!” Sandi said.

  “I won’t,” Alania said. But just for a moment, she was sorely tempted.

  “Even Fifth . . .” Lissa was usually braver than Sandi, or at least she pretended to be, but she didn’t sound it now. “That’s . . .”

  “Seven Tiers down,” Alania said. “Talk about an adventure!” Refusing to give in to her own sudden fluttering attack of internal butterflies, she pressed five.

  The room sank so suddenly and quickly that she gulped as her stomach, butterflies and all, tried to jump out of her throat. She looked at her friends, their eyes wide and white in the stark lighting, and grinned at them. “Having fun?”

  “Uh-huh,” Sandi said, but she sounded uncertain.

  Alania felt more than a little uncertain, too, now that they’d actually done what she’d been planning for weeks, but she tried to push the feeling aside. Lieutenant Beruthi had no right to keep her locked up in his Quarters, not when her friends were allowed to travel. She wasn’t a little girl anymore; she was twelve years old, and however angry he might be after today, he’d have to admit that much, at least.

  The descent was shorter than she would have thought, the elevator clearly a fast one. It stopped after only half a minute or so, as abruptly as it had begun to sink, and Alania staggered a little as her weight momentarily seemed to double. Sandi grabbed Lissa’s hand. Lissa let her.

  The door opened, revealing an utterly ordinary corridor paneled in the City’s default white plastic wall covering. The three girls stepped out. The door closed behind them, and they heard the car ascend. “Will it come back?” Lissa said anxiously, Sandi still hanging on to her.

  “Once I put in the key,” Alania said, hoping she was telling the truth.

  She looked left. The corridor stretched unimpeded about twenty meters before ending in a closed door.

  She looked right. Different direction, same view.

  “Some adventure,” Lissa said. “Sandi, let go, you’re hurting me.”

  “Sorry,” Sandi said, and she released Lissa’s hand. Lissa rubbed it.

  “We’re inside the factory,” Alania said. I hope. “We have to get out if we’re going to see the Tier.” She looked left and right again, shrugged, and turned right. “One way looks as good as the other.”

  “What if the door’s locked?” Sandi said.

  For an answer, Alania held up her key. But the door wasn’t locked, and when they passed through it, they found themselves in long, narrow room with a door to their left, another to their right, and a glass wall across from them. Alania went to it and looked down.

  “Wow,” said Lissa, which is what Alania would have said if she weren’t so busy staring at the mesmerizing scene: Beruthi’s primary robot manufactory, she supposed. The space below them, easily twice the size of Quarters Beruthi itself, was filled with robots in the process of building other robots. But every one of them was frozen in place, unfinished robots waiting on motionless conveyors for other robots to continue assembling them. The factory was manufacturing nothing at the moment. It might have stopped a minute ago or ten years ago; there was no way to tell.

  “That’s . . . weird,” Sandi said.

  “Maybe it’s break time,” Alania said, because she felt like she ought to say something, and “wow” and “weird” were already taken. Although she felt silly the moment she said it, because why would robots need to take a break? She looked at the two doors out of the otherwise empty room and decided to go left, since they’d gone right the last time.

  It proved to be an auspicious choice; the door led to a flight of stairs that took them down to the level of the factory floor. A featureless door to their right presumably led onto that floor. A light above the door burned red.

  But a few meters farther, at the end of the corridor, was a second door, and above it was the single word Alania most wanted to see: EXIT.

  “At last,” she said, and she pushed at the panic bar. The door swung open, and she hurried out into Fifth Tier proper.

  She found herself in a narrow alley between the factory and an apparently identical building, both clad in the same City-standard plastic sheets as the corridor they’d first entered, although these were dark gray rather than white. The floor was bare metal—no sign of the white tiles of Twelfth—but what shocked Alania the most was that it was dirty: blackened and smudged and greasy-looking. She raised her head and sniffed, and her nose wrinkled. “What’s—”

  “—that smell?” Sandi finished for her.

  It was sour and kind of salty: definitely organic.

  “People,” Lissa said. “Dirty people.” Her nose was wrinkled too, giving her heart-shaped face a look of comical disgust. “My brother plays grifterball when we go to Ice Canyon Resort. It smells like the arena locker rooms.”

  “Maybe we’ve gone far enough?” Sandi said meekly.

  “We haven’t seen anything yet,” Alania retorted firmly—at least, as firmly as she could with her heart racing. To their left, the alley ended in a wall, in the middle of which a single narrow window glared blankly down at them, nothing visible beyond its dirty panes. She turned right again and headed resolutely to the other end of the alley.

  It opened into a square courtyard. To their right was the blank front of the robot factory, broken only by two large doors, one marked DELIVERIES, one that simply said STAND CLEAR WHEN LIGHT IS FLASHING. The Beruthi name did not appear; there was nothing at all to reveal who the building belonged to.

  To their left was a very similar factory, though the exits were smaller and completely unlabeled. There was no way to tell what it manufactured.

  Two-story windowed structures surrounded the rest of the courtyard. The only path leaving it was a broad thoroughfare that ran in the direction of the Core, its familiar curved, silvery wall rising about two hundred meters from where they now stood. Though the courtyard itself was empty, beyond the buildings surrounding it, the thoroughfare thronged with people crossing the street or moving along it. It was no wonder the whole Tier smelled of them. The air was far warmer than on Twelfth and far more humid, which probably accounted for the streaks of rust on the—

  Alania’s aimless thoughts suddenly stilled as she realized there were also people in the square now, people who had just emerged from one of the windowed buildings, and that those people were looking at them . . . and coming their way.

  Not just people, but young men. There were six of them, shabbily dressed in shades of gray and black, and they moved en masse.

  “Alania?” Sandi whispered.

  “A gang of some kind,” Alania said, “Maybe we should—”

  “What?” said a voice behind them, and all three of them yipped and spun to see another young man behind them. A boy, really, Alania thought, taking in his smooth face and piercing gray eyes. He was maybe four or five years older than they were, but that didn’t make her feel any better, because there was something in that face that terrified her—something hard and predatory, something she had never seen befor
e.

  Not that she’d seen a lot of boys before, since no boy had ever been invited to one of her birthday parties, obviously. She’d met some of the other girls’ brothers, though, including Lissa’s grifterball-playing one, at the occasional function the Lieutenant had hosted, and none of them had had the . . . edge this boy did.

  The boy stepped forward. “Welcome to Fifth Tier,” he said. His eyes flicked past them, and Alania glanced back to see that the other boys had stopped and were staring at them, arms folded, faces impassive. “Don’t worry about them,” the boy in front of them said. “They’re mine.”

  “Your what?” Alania whispered.

  “Followers. Henchmen. Soldiers. Take your pick.” The boy leaned against the factory wall and looked all three of them up and down with an appraising glance that made Alania uncomfortable, though she didn’t know why. “How old?”

  “Twelve,” Sandi said, while Alania was still trying to decide if it was a good idea to answer that question or not.

  “Twelve,” the boy said. “Perfect.”

  “For what?” Lissa asked, saving Alania the trouble. She was having difficulty forming any words, to tell the truth. Breathing was a lot harder than it should have been, too.

  The boy ignored the question. “Came slumming, did you? Looking for adventure?”

  “My guardian is—” Alania began, finding her voice at last, but the boy cut her off.

  “Not here,” he said. “Not here, and there’s no surveillance either. We own this courtyard. Nobody will know what happened to you.” He straightened and looked past her at the rest of his gang. “You want adventure? You’re about to get more than you—ungh!”

  His eyes rolled up in his head, and he crumpled to the ground, twitching, a puddle of urine forming beneath him. Alania gaped at him, then jerked her head up to see the watchbot she’d thought she’d disabled in Quarters Beruthi standing just outside the door through which they’d exited the factory, its right hand raised, palm out. “Please step aside, ladies,” its mechanical voice said, and then it strode past her as she, Lissa, and Sandi pressed themselves against the wall. Alania saw the rest of the gang turning to run, but of course that was useless against a robot. Four flashes of light, and they’d all joined their leader, stunned on the metal ground. The watchbot’s head rotated a full 180 degrees; its sensors were clearly no longer disabled. If anyone else was watching from the surrounding windows, they wisely chose to remain hidden.

  The watchbot strode in its strangely smooth manner back to Alania and her friends. “And now, miss,” it said, “we will return to Quarters Beruthi.”

  A small part of Alania wanted to say, “You can’t make me,” which might have been technically true—the watchbot could not stun her as it had the unfortunate Fifth Tier boy, nor could it manhandle her and haul her to the elevator. But it was a distinction without a difference, since the watchbot could call for Provosts. And in any event, after what she had just witnessed, she wanted nothing so much as to return to the security of the home she no longer saw as quite the prison she had thought it.

  They rode the elevator up in silence. The watchbot had nothing to say, Lissa and Sandi were subdued, and Alania’s mind kept circling around one thing: what would Lieutenant Beruthi say . . . and do?

  She didn’t have to wait long to find out. A tall, thin, deeply tanned man with short black hair and a stylus-thin mustache awaited them at the door of the utility closet. “Sandi, Lissa,” Lieutenant Beruthi said, “I think you should go home.”

  “Will you . . . tell our parents?” Sandi asked in a small voice.

  “Tell them what?” the Lieutenant said evenly. Lissa and Sandi’s eyes widened, they glanced at each other, and then they dashed away like the tiny street-cleaning bots that kept Twelfth Tier sparkling and which Fifth Tier had so obviously lacked. The Lieutenant watched them disappear around the corner of the upstairs hallway, heading for the same stairs the watchbot had tumbled down earlier, and then turned back to Alania.

  She met his gaze defiantly. “I’m not sorry,” she said. “You’ve kept me a prisoner my whole life. I’m glad I escaped, even if it was scary.”

  The Lieutenant just looked at her, his dark eyes steady, his thin brown face unreadable. “What did you learn?” he asked.

  She blinked. “What?”

  “From your adventure on Fifth Tier,” he said. “What did you learn?”

  She stared at him. That was the last question she’d expected. “Well,” she said slowly. “I guess . . . that the lower Tiers really are very different from Twelfth Tier. That the people on them aren’t like the Officers and their families. That there are people who will do bad things to other people . . . even people from Officers’ families.”

  The Lieutenant nodded. “Good lessons all,” he said. “The City contains some fifty thousand people. Far more live in the lower Tiers than the upper. Life is indeed very different there: more diverse, more crowded, more difficult. The people who live there must struggle to survive, and it is very difficult to move beyond the niche into which you are born. And you were only on Fifth; the lower Tiers are even more difficult and dangerous for their denizens, and below us all lie the Middens. Even there, in the most difficult and dangerous place of all, people live . . . though at least they are not subject in the same way to the City’s laws.”

  Alania stared at him. “What?”

  He almost smiled—had she really seen that or imagined it? Imagined it, surely. “And your final understanding, that there are people who will do bad things to other people, even members of Officers’ families, is the most valuable lesson of all, for it applies as much to Twelfth Tier as to the Middens and everything in between.”

  Alania felt lost, but there was one question she wanted answered above all else, so she asked it. “How will you punish me?”

  “In the most severe fashion possible,” the Lieutenant said. “I am going to ensure that you learn those same three lessons over and over again.”

  Alania opened her mouth to say, “What?” again, then closed it.

  “Tomorrow you begin a new school regimen,” the Lieutenant said. “You will learn, in as much detail as is permissible for you to learn, everything there is to know about the City and its operation. It will serve you well when you are grown.”

  “When I’m . . . ?”

  “Give me back my spare key,” the Lieutenant said. “You have had your adventure. I will not allow it again.” Alania drew the golden rod from her pocket and held it out. The Lieutenant slipped it into his own pocket. “Now,” he said briskly, “I believe you will find food waiting for you below.” And then he turned and walked away, leaving Alania staring after him.

  She descended to the main floor and sat in the relatively small kitchen, rather than the cavernous dining room, for a meal which, to her surprise, consisted of some of her favorite foods: mashed redroots, candied vatham, even a hollowed-out frozen bluemelon. She felt like she was being rewarded more than punished, but that made no sense.

  No less sense than the robot she had been so certain she had disabled suddenly appearing in the alley on Fifth Tier to rescue them. She scooped up a spoonful of melon, then stopped it halfway to her mouth, suddenly realizing the truth.

  I will not allow it again, he said. Again. That means he did allow it this time.

  I didn’t disable the watchbot at all, she thought. It probably plugged those wires back in itself the second I was out of sight. Lieutenant Beruthi programmed it to let us go. He made sure I knew about the elevator and the spare key. He wanted me to get out of Twelfth Tier.

  But why?

  She had no answer.

  She wouldn’t have one, it turned out, for many years.

  TWO

  THE TRASHSLIDE STRUCK without warning.

  They didn’t always. Sometimes there was a preliminary tremor, a sign you should look for something more stable
to stand on, if you could find anything suitable; “stable” and “The Middens” were words that didn’t have much to do with each other. Until today, Danyl had only ever been in the Middens in the company of his guardian, Erl, but he’d learned that much. Erl seemed to have a sixth sense for how the trash would move, and half a dozen times he had hurried them to some safer spot just before a sinkhole had opened or a slide had come roaring down one of the valleys that provided more-or-less reliable paths through the mounds of trash.

  But today Danyl was on his own, having rebelliously sneaked out to follow Erl to the forbidden Last Chance Market, just to get a glimpse of it, and though Erl was in sight, he wasn’t listening for trashslides; he was engaged in intense, secretive conversation with someone wearing a black synthileather coat and dark glasses. Hearing the rumble above him as the trash began to move, Danyl scrambled up and dashed through the scraggly stand of tangleweed he’d been hiding behind, hoping to reach the Last Chance Market’s platform, secure on its massive iron beams anchored to the Canyon wall. But the slide caught him before he’d covered a quarter of the distance, sucking him down from behind.

  He did as Erl had taught him, rolling up into a tight ball to protect his most vulnerable organs, eyes squeezed shut behind his goggles, but he felt an agonizing burning pain as something slashed his left leg open and another as something stabbed him in the side while he tumbled helplessly in the welter of plastic and paper and wood and metal and nameless gunk.

  Then everything was still and dark. Danyl couldn’t tell how deeply he was buried, couldn’t see any light even when he dared to open his eyes, couldn’t move, could hardly breathe, the pressure was so great . . . and he knew he was bleeding.

  He pushed as hard as he could against the confining trash, but it didn’t budge, and the cold realization crashed in on him that he could die here, suffocate or bleed to death; that no one would ever find him; that no one even knew he was here. He’d just turned twelve years old, and he was going to die . . .