The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  She ignored it.

  “Are you crazy?” Danyl echoed her inner critic. Unfortunately, she couldn’t ignore him.

  “They know you have a beamer,” Alania said. “They’ve turned off their lights. They won’t present a target until the last minute. There are two of them left. Even if you get one of them, the other one gets you, and I just get . . . gotten.”

  Danyl stared up the shaft a moment longer, then shouldered the beamer and turned back to Alania. “All right,” he said. “You go first. If they get here before we find a way to the bottom, I might get a shot.”

  “I think you’re going to need both hands,” Alania said, already wishing she hadn’t thought of doing what she was about to do. But there was no time for second thoughts, and so she stepped down onto the first torn support, no more than half a meter in length and bent downward. She expected it to flex, but then again, she weighed far less than the stairs it used to support. It didn’t move.

  Much.

  Leaning against the wall as if her life depended on it, which of course it did, she took another step. And then another. After half a dozen, Danyl started down behind her.

  Step by step, they descended. About twenty steps down, a bracket had torn out of the wall, leaving a gap. Alania took a deep breath and an extra-long step. For a frightening moment she felt herself overbalancing, but she lurched toward the wall and slammed her already bruised shoulder against it. Wincing, she pressed on.

  One and a half turns around the shaft, and she reached the tangled metal of the fallen stairs. She stopped for a moment. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness as she descended, and the single eternal burning below provided just enough light for her to see the general shape of things. It looked like she should be able to climb down through the maze of metal bars and twisted steps to the ground . . . if it was ground. It glistened. What if the bottom of the shaft is full of water? she thought. It could be meters deep.

  Shouts from above. She looked up.

  The Provosts, barely visible silhouettes in the gloom, had reached the end of the steps. They’d have to descend the same way she and Danyl had, and they wouldn’t be able to use their weapons as they did so any more than Danyl could use his beamer now—not that the Provosts presented very good targets, with both the poor lighting and the metal stairs protecting them.

  Or did those thin slabs of metal matter to a beamer? She knew nothing about weapons. Until today, she’d never expected to need to.

  She took a deep breath and stepped tentatively down onto the jumbled, jagged mass of metal that had once been stairs. It gave under her weight, but not much. Carefully, she felt her way lower and lower. Danyl followed close behind.

  Something dropped from above, hitting the metal with a clang and then bouncing its way down to the bottom of the pile. She barely had time to wonder what it was before it exploded.

  Light blinded her wide-pupiled eyes, stabbing into her head like diamond daggers, and the blast stunned and deafened her. Her fingers slipped from the bit of railing she clung to, and she dropped the rest of the way to the bottom of the shaft.

  She hit the icy water with a splash, floundered, found her feet, and stood up, gasping, still waist-deep. Something thudded onto a bit of staircase over her head and hung there: Danyl’s beamer, stopped from falling into the water by its strap. She couldn’t see Danyl—she could hardly see anything after that flash except the lights of the two Provosts, who must have switched them on again to check the results of their explosive device. One had moved off the final hanging step and was slowly descending the broken supports that Alania and Danyl had just negotiated. The other remained where the stairs ended, presumably with his rifle pointed into the shaft, his target Danyl . . .

  . . . who was either unconscious or dead.

  Alania didn’t know where the impulse came from. All she knew was that suddenly she felt enraged: furious at the Provosts pursuing them, at her erstwhile guardian Lieutenant Beruthi, at First Officer Kranz. She ripped Danyl’s beamer rifle from where it hung and raised it.

  The Provost who had remained on the steps was still almost directly above her; she couldn’t get a clean shot at him. But the other one was on the other side of the shaft from her, halfway down the failed supports.

  The beamer, she discovered, painted a red dot on its target. She aimed above the headlamp, slid the dot down the Provost’s helmet, his chest . . .

  “Beamer!” the man above screamed, but Alania had found the Provost’s leg with the bright red dot and pressed the firing stud.

  A flash, a pop, a sizzle, and the man screamed and dropped from the wall, slamming into the metal tangle below so hard that all the wreckage trembled . . . and Danyl also dropped from somewhere up above, drenching Alania anew as he splashed into the water. Alania, suddenly shaking—I shot a man!—slung the beamer over her shoulder and knelt, feeling for Danyl, afraid he might be unconscious and drowning. But when her fingers touched his shoulder, he grabbed them suddenly and tightly and then exploded upright, coughing and sputtering. “What . . .”

  “Flash. Bang. I don’t know.”

  “Flashbang.”

  “That’s what I said,” Alania said, confused.

  “No, that’s what it’s called. A flashbang. A stun grenade.” Danyl sounded shaky. “Are you all right?”

  “Blinded me. Deafened me. For a minute.”

  “Knocked me right out.”

  “Captain Marril!” shouted the remaining Provost directly over their heads. “Sir! Talk to me!”

  Danyl’s head jerked up, then back to Alania. “What happened?”

  “Got the beamer. Shot the other one as he came down.” Alania tried to say it matter-of-factly, but it didn’t sound matter-of-fact. “He fell. Over there.” Now that she looked, she could see the fallen man’s headlamp glimmering through the tangle of metal. It wasn’t moving.

  “Good,” Danyl said. He turned toward the wall. “There has to be an exit . . . oh. Of course.”

  Alania saw what he’d just spotted: a metal door at the end of a short tunnel a few feet higher than the floor of the shaft, which began beneath the lone eternal still burning down here. But that short tunnel was on the opposite side of the shaft from them . . . where they would provide an excellent target for the Provost still lurking above them, rifle in hand, calling for his fallen officer.

  THIRTEEN

  DANYL STILL FELT a little fuzzy-headed from the effects of the flashbang, but it didn’t dampen his newfound respect for Alania. Who’d have thought a sheltered Officer girl from Twelfth Tier would have it in her to beam down a Provost?

  He just hoped he’d live long enough to tell her how impressed he was. “We’re going to need to distract him, get him looking the wrong way,” he whispered. “I’ll do that. You make for the door.”

  Alania peered at the exit. “Looks like there’s just enough room to duck under the wreckage,” she said. “All right. Do you want the beamer?”

  Danyl started to say yes, of course he wanted the beamer . . . but then he realized that made no sense. If anyone was going to have a shot at the Provost still above them, it would be Alania. “No,” he said. “Keep it. If this doesn’t work, it may be your only chance.”

  Alania didn’t argue, just nodded. Even allowing for the dim light, she looked pale. Well, she just shot someone. She’s got a right to.

  “All right,” he said. “Here we go.” Keeping as close to the wall as he could—which, thanks to the wreckage, wasn’t very close—he crept slowly through the water. He could see the Provost up above, and he knew all the man had to do was flick his light toward Danyl and he’d be seen (and likely shot). But the Provost was peering in the direction of his fallen commander, whose own light had started to move as though he were turning his head from side to side.

  “Captain Marril!” shouted the man up above, and Danyl took advantage of the noise. He plung
ed under the water, surfaced close to the wreckage, raised his arms, and brought them splashing down as he let out a horrendous moan. Overacting much? he thought as he submerged again and moved. And not a moment too soon—a tremendous flash lit the shaft, and bullets zipped into the water where he had been two seconds before.

  In that same instant, Alania splashed under the wreckage, scrambled up the steps leading to the tunnel, and dashed into it. In her wake, bullets chipped the stone at the tunnel’s mouth. Danyl dove under the black water, swam blindly for several strokes, emerged with another moan, and plunged to the side again as the rifle blasted in his direction. The light from the Provost’s lamp flashed wildly across the water where he had been while he lunged for the tunnel in the shadows. Alania waited there, just out of the line of fire. Danyl scrambled up the steps and in beside her just as the Provost got his bearings again. Bullets shattered stone and struck sparks off metal, but none found their targets.

  Breathing hard, Danyl nodded to Alania. “Good work,” he said. “You sure you haven’t done this before?”

  She smiled, though her face looked as pale as ever in the dim light. “I think I’d remember.”

  “He’ll be heading down after us, or at least to help the other guy. Let’s get out of here.”

  He splashed down the tunnel through water just a few centimeters deep. The metal door looked forbidding, but when he pushed down on the latch, there was a solid, satisfying click, and the door swung smoothly and silently outward. Someone had clearly been maintaining it, although he wondered if they’d bothered to open it, since they hadn’t done anything about the twenty meters of metal staircase that lay in ruins on this side of it.

  With water foaming around his feet and pouring down three steps to spread out on a stone floor, Danyl, blinking in what seemed painfully bright light after their long descent in the dark, found himself looking into another stone chamber. Although the floor had been smoothed, this one was clearly natural, the reddish rock above them rough and green with slime. Past the mouth of the cave flowed a river, the water slick and oily, covered with an iridescent sheen.

  A wooden pier thrust into that black water, and tied up to it was a boat, if you could call it that. Flat-bottomed and graceless, it looked to have been cobbled together from stray pieces of wood and plastic, as it almost certainly had been. What other raw materials could these “River People” have except for rubbish they salvaged from the lowest reaches of the Middens?

  “That’s our ride,” he said to Alania. She mutely held out the beamer rifle, and this time he took it. Then he took hold of her arm and helped her limp toward the boat.

  They emerged from the cavern, and for a moment Danyl forgot everything else.

  The Black River flowed to their left, south along the Canyon, disappearing around a bend. Sheer walls of red stone towered above them, boulders the size of aircars scattered at their bases. The River slithered around the half-submerged rocks like an oily snake, leaving behind a greasy gray residue.

  To their right rose the Middens.

  Centuries’ worth of rubbish hundreds of meters deep had compressed here at the base into a black, greasy conglomerate. A steep slope covered with a sickly green sheen of weeds stretched up and up to the City, though all Danyl could see of the vast structure was its rounded top—the opalescent dome of the Thirteenth Tier, home to the mythical Captain.

  Alania followed his gaze, and he wondered what she was thinking as she looked up at her old home.

  Probably hating you for not letting her turn herself in when she had the chance. But he couldn’t betray Erl that way. He had no idea why his guardian wanted them down here, wanted them to find Yvelle and the River People, but Erl had been willing to risk his life to make it possible, and Danyl was damn well going to try to carry out what might’ve been his final wishes.

  Tunnels had been driven into the bottom of that massive heap of refuse, the openings shored up with beams of wood, metal, and plastic. Eternals glimmered in the depths of those tunnels.

  Mines, he realized. These “River People” are mining the Middens.

  He thought he heard a sound in the cavern behind them. Enough sightseeing. He turned away from the Middens and stepped down into the boat. It rocked under his weight, the movement sending long, slow ripples across the oily water. In the boat’s flat bottom he found two paddles. He held out his hand to help Alania down into the ungainly craft, then handed her a paddle. She took it gingerly. “What do I do with this?”

  “Paddle,” Danyl said.

  She gave him a withering look. “I know that. But . . . how?”

  “Do I look like someone who’s done a lot of boating?” Danyl said. “Do the best you can.” He used the paddle to push the boat away from the pier, and it drifted out into the River, moving farther away from the shore as the current took it.

  From the center of the Canyon, the Middens looked even taller, and he could see that in the very middle of the slope was a long, wide gouge, a scar where no weeds grew and the rubbish looked fresher, as though it had arrived recently or been flipped over. Danyl recognized the signs—sometime recently, a trashalanche had roared down that slope, plunging down into the River . . .

  . . . right where they currently drifted.

  Danyl remembered being trapped in the trashslide when he was twelve, the day he’d followed Erl to the Last Chance Market. He’d been lucky he’d only been injured, even luckier that Erl had scavenged the docbot that had fixed him up and managed to keep it stocked over the years with—

  Scavenged?

  Danyl suddenly felt like an idiot. Whatever Erl had been doing for the last twenty years, it clearly had involved far more than scavenging. He must have been getting supplies directly from his contact in the City, Danyl thought. He probably just had to make a call to get whatever he needed. It hadn’t just been Erl protecting him his whole life; it had been a whole network of people, people he didn’t even know, all trying to keep him safe.

  It had to be the same people who had tried to kidnap Alania from the First Officer. But why?

  What’s going on?

  The River gave no answer, slithering unhurriedly along between the towering Canyon walls. Danyl looked at the gray scum covering his paddle each time he drew it from the water and hoped like hell neither of them fell in.

  The boat, with its shallow draft and flat bottom, seemed designed for someone to stand up and drive it along with an oar or pole from the rear. Danyl kept his bottom firmly planted on its bottom instead and paddled away, trying really, really hard not to splash any of the foul liquid on his skin or Alania’s. They both had multiple scrapes, and though Alania seemed to heal as quickly as he did and might even be as resistant to infection, they still needed clean water, antiseptic, antibiotics, and bandages as soon as possible.

  He snorted. Why not hope for a Twelfth-Tier hospital while he was at it? It seemed about as likely.

  They reached a bend in the River and slipped silently around it, the Middens and the City vanishing from sight. They floated down another long stretch and rounded another bend, then another and another. Danyl had never before been out of sight of the City. It was a strange feeling. He supposed it should have been liberating, but it was hard to feel liberated while trapped in this strange boat with no place to land beneath the sheer walls, accompanied by the certain knowledge that sooner or later Provosts would follow them down the ugly River.

  His watch still worked. It was approaching 1300—midday. They’d been on the River for a bit more than an hour when they rounded another bend . . . and everything changed.

  The walls of the Canyon closed in. The current sped up. Worse, the water began to heap up into oily black hummocks, which could only mean there were rocks beneath the surface. There was no white water—Danyl doubted this river could form white water—but a greasy gray foam began to collect on the surface.

  “Stop paddling
!” Danyl called to Alania. He pulled his paddle from the water as Alania shipped hers, then stuck it over the stern of the boat, hoping to use it as a rudder. His mouth had gone dry. If they hit one of those rocks and tipped into the River, neither of them would come up again.

  Fortunately, for all the turmoil in the water, there seemed to be a deep channel right down the center of the stream. Danyl suspected it was man-made—it acted almost like a rail along which the boat sped, the water pouring around the boulders to either side forming a kind of cushion, keeping them right where they needed to be.

  They raced downstream now rather than crawled. As they neared yet another bend, Danyl began to hear a roaring, rushing rumble.

  He looked desperately around, but there was no escape. The walls rose as steeply as ever. Far overhead, blue sky mocked them. Bright sunlight lit more than half of the western wall. Soon the sun would shine directly down onto the River, however briefly.

  Danyl doubted either of them would see it. That noise could only mean one thing:

  A waterfall. Their deaths.

  Gripping his paddle so hard his knuckles whitened, he cried, “Hold on!” to Alania and waited helplessly to see what the River had in store.

  FOURTEEN

  “HOLD ON!” DANYL CRIED to Alania, but of course there was nothing to hold on to but the thin walls—transoms? ransoms?—of the boat, and they felt like they might snap off in her white-knuckled hands at any moment.

  She could hear the thunder of falling water and knew Danyl had come to the same conclusion as she: that just out of sight around the next bend, the River plunged into a waterfall. If they went over the edge and fell into this dark water, that would be the end. Even if the fall didn’t kill them, as it almost certainly would if there were rocks at the bottom, the water was foul, and the backpack Erl had provided would drag her down. She felt as helpless as she had in the elevator that had dumped her into the Middens.