The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  “Starved,” Alania said.

  “Then let’s see what we have.” He knelt on the floor and began rummaging through the cabinets beneath the beds.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  KRANZ SAT in his darkened office, his heart laboring in his chest, his breath coming in ragged gasps. He had never felt so helpless, so panicked. The flames of the inferno that had engulfed Retreat Beruthi still flickered on one of the screens on his desk. More helicopters were screaming that way, but he knew they would find no survivors.

  Estate Beruthi had been empty. Retreat Beruthi had not. But some fool of a Provost had overreacted, and Beruthi had clearly programmed his damnable robots to attack if anything happened to him . . . and to destroy any evidence in the bargain. Kranz had a horrible feeling that destroying the evidence had also meant destroying Alania and Danyl on the theory that it was better for the Captain and all her heirs to die, better for chaos to descend on the City than for Kranz to install Alania and carry out his plans . . . plans of which Beruthi had known every detail.

  Selfish bastard, Kranz thought savagely. Does he know what will happen when the Captain dies?

  No, he thought then. Because you don’t either. Not really. All you know is it will be very, very bad.

  His eyes flicked to the monitor on the wall. The nanobots in the Captain’s body could no longer stay ahead of the cascading cellular damage, some of it at the molecular level where even nanobots could not function. No one had ever lived as long as the Captain. When she had been . . . installed in her current position, the thinking had been that the nanobots would make her functionally immortal.

  But functionally immortal was a long way from actually immortal.

  The nanobots Alania and Danyl carried, had they been fully activated, might have protected them from the destruction of Retreat Beruthi. But they were not fully activated.

  Kranz’s only hope—and it was a slim one—was that the two had been sheltered from the explosion, perhaps in the basement, perhaps in the surrounding woods. If they were in the basement, they might be horribly injured and probably trapped but possibly—just possibly—still alive. If they were in the woods, the nanobots could keep them from dying of exposure, but they could do nothing about the effects of thirst and hunger. Alania and Danyl would find no food in the foothills of the Iron Ring, where no edible vegetation grew; in all of the Heartland, only the plants grown and tended on the Estates could be eaten. Alania and Danyl wouldn’t be edible to the wildlife in the Iron Ring, either, but that wouldn’t stop the wildlife from trying to kill them. The nanobots couldn’t save them if they stumbled on something really dangerous, like a dragonbear or spidercat, and were disemboweled or torn limb from limb.

  The original First Officer Kranz had not been a religious man. He had believed only in himself, in his own power of reason, and in the righteousness of his actions. Kranz had inherited those attitudes along with his nanobots, and thus he had no god he could pray to. The ordinary citizens of the lower Tiers had been known to pray to the Captain, but Kranz knew better than anyone else just how futile that would be.

  All the same, he offered a silent appeal to the uncaring universe. Let them be alive, he thought. Let them be alive, for all our sakes.

  His eyes flicked back to the Captain’s medical monitor. Another of the few green lights on it had just turned to blinking yellow.

  Danyl had no idea if the strange craft they had boarded was traveling underwater or above the water. Probably, he thought, a bit of both—while underwater travel would reduce the chance of detection, he doubted the River was always deep enough to enable it.

  Nor did he have any idea how fast they might be moving or how long it would take to reach the City. If they had simply been drifting with the current, it would surely have taken at least a couple of days, but from the thrum of the boat and the way it resisted being swirled around, it was clearly powered and under computer control.

  Despite that, it had lurched or bucked hard enough to toss them around several times, which was why both Alania and Danyl now kept their rears firmly planted on the cots as they ate the self-heating, prepackaged stew—though “slop” might have been more accurate—they had found in the storage lockers. To drink, there was bottled water.

  Danyl touched the left pocket of his pants, where the precious access key rested. Just . . . what, three days ago? . . . he’d hoped to trade Alania at the Last Chance Market for a mere City Pass. Now he had the means to ascend all the way to Thirteenth . . .

  . . . where he was expected to become the new Captain.

  The idea was mind-boggling, yet he felt a fierce excitement at the same time. He had no idea what it would mean to “plug” himself into the City in place of the dying shell of the previous Captain. But clearly Beruthi expected that he would retain free will and could seize control of the City from Kranz and the Officers. Whatever happened after that would have to be better than the stultified hierarchical tyranny that now ruled the City and Heartland.

  Wouldn’t it?

  It wasn’t like he had any better options. He could no longer doubt the outlandish truth of his origins, not with people dying in droves as Kranz desperately sought to capture him and Alania. That being the case, they literally had nowhere else to go. The Heartland stretched two to three hundred kilometers in every direction from the City, but there was nowhere to hide in all that space. They might evade capture for a while, but not for long, and if they were taken prisoner by Kranz, all hope of achieving the goals of the Free Citizens would be lost. Kranz would install Alania as Captain, and her nanobots were programmed to override her own will and memories and personality, turning her into yet another copy of the first First Officer, Thomas Kranz.

  Their only hope, slim though it was, was to reach the Thirteenth Tier undetected and for Danyl to take over as Captain . . . without the late Beruthi’s help or guidance.

  There could be no planning beyond that.

  One step at a time, he thought, not for the first time. First, get to the City.

  He took another bite of the “stew,” the need for sustenance overcoming his distaste. No, he amended his previous thought. First, we have to get through the Middens.

  His old stomping grounds, of course, but not this side—this side belonged to the Greenskulls. Unless the Provosts had finally destroyed them, as they had certainly destroyed the Rustbloods by now, in which case this side belonged to the Provosts.

  The boat lurched again, and this time it kept on lurching and bucking. Danyl gripped the edge of the cot with one hand. “Hope you’re not prone to motion sickness,” he said to Alania.

  “How would I know?” Alania said, holding on to her own cot. “Not a lot of movement on Twelfth Tier.” She grinned at him. “Besides, if I am, you probably are, too . . . brother.”

  Does it run in families? he wondered, and realized he didn’t know. But he couldn’t deny that his insides did feel a little . . . not exactly nauseated, but certainly unsettled. Although that might have been just a reaction to the stew. “You’d think someone with Beruthi’s resources could have stocked this thing with better food,” he muttered.

  “He probably stocked it with whatever he could get that could go missing without anyone noticing,” Alania said. The boat lurched again, and her hands tightened on the cot. Danyl thought she looked a little green. “He must have built this thing recently. He couldn’t have known when all this started that he’d be bringing us up here.”

  “He said this was for his own use in an emergency,” Danyl said. “A way to get back to the City without being seen.” A particularly violent lurch threw him back against the wall, and he decided he’d just lie down. Alania clearly thought that was a good idea; she stretched out on her own cot. “It could have been built years ago.”

  “Maybe,” Alania said a little weakly as the turbulence intensified, “he built it for fun.”

  Danyl closed his ey
es and swallowed hard. “If he did,” he groaned, “he had a very twisted idea of fun.”

  After that, he was too busy trying not to throw up to talk.

  An interminable time later, the bucking and bouncing eased. Danyl hadn’t quite thrown up, and he hadn’t heard Alania throw up, either, which was a good thing, since he was pretty sure the sound and smell in the small cabin would have pushed him over the edge of regurgitation himself. As his insides settled, his eyelids closed, and he slept.

  He woke to a grating noise beneath him, a sudden slowing. There was a crunch, a thud, a tearing screech . . . and then the storage lockers beneath Alania’s bed burst open. Water gushed into the interior of the boat, carrying with it more packages of stew, bottles of water, and other supplies. Danyl jerked upward, meeting Alania’s wide eyes across the way. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he shouted. He swung his feet over the edge of the cot and stood up in the cold, swirling water, already up to his calves and rising fast. He waded to the hatch and pounded on it. It remained stubbornly closed.

  Alania joined him, ran her fingers around the edge, and found the hidden panel he’d missed. It popped open at her touch, revealing two buttons, helpfully labeled CLOSE and OPEN. Alania punched the OPEN button. It flashed red, and a woman’s voice said, “Main hatch is underwater. OPEN command denied.”

  Alania shot Danyl a horror-filled glance. He turned back into the interior as the water reached his thighs. There was no way out through the head. But surely there was more than one exit . . .

  There! A square in the ceiling, offset from the central band of illumination. He scrambled up onto Alania’s cot, already underwater and squishy underfoot, ran his fingers around the edges as Alania had done with the main hatch, and found another small panel that also concealed two buttons. He punched OPEN. The small hatch slid aside, letting in cool air—and more water, though this was in the form of drenching, ice-cold rain.

  “Hurry up!” Alania cried.

  Danyl fumbled around on the outside of the boat and found what felt like a ladder rung: he pulled on it, and a chain ladder promptly fell onto his head and then down, splashing into the water at his feet. He scrambled up it and onto the hull of the boat, then turned and helped Alania out. The boat listed alarmingly beneath them, and Danyl looked frantically around. The heavy rain and thick mist obscured their surroundings, but he could make out a rocky beach off to their right, and behind it a wall of familiar reddish stone.

  The boat tilted again . . . and kept on tilting, beginning a roll toward that red cliff. “Jump!” Danyl yelled and leaped into the water. He hit it awkwardly with an almighty belly flop and struggled to get his feet under him, terrified he wouldn’t find bottom . . . but there it was. He turned, expecting to see Alania floundering in the water, only to see her swim a few strokes past him before standing in much shallower water and wading ashore. He waded after her, and in a moment they both stood shivering on the beach. The lightless boat, now just a black lump in the water, had rolled hatch-down. If they hadn’t gotten out when they had . . .

  “Shit! My backpack was in there.” At least he still had the slugthrower; he’d fallen asleep with it holstered at his side. He looked at Alania, her face a pale blotch in the dim rainy twilight. “You know how to swim!” he said almost accusingly.

  “Quarters Beruthi has a pool,” she said, sounding a little embarrassed. “Sala—my servant—taught me as a child.”

  “Well, that explains it,” Danyl said. “Somehow my servant never got around to it. It’s so hard to get good help in the Middens.”

  Alania laughed a little shakily. She stared at the capsized boat. “Now what? Where are we?”

  Danyl looked downstream. “I don’t . . .” He paused. “Do you see a light?”

  Alania stepped up beside him and followed his gaze. “Barely,” she said. “Down low.”

  “Come on.” Danyl led the way downstream, picking his way carefully through the loose rocks. As they approached the dim yellow glow, he realized that the river was making a new sound, a deep grumbling, and that the gray mist ahead of them was darkening, not growing lighter, even though the light all around them was slowly waxing. They’d traveled all night, and dawn was coming.

  Then, suddenly, he realized what he was seeing, and he stopped, holding out his arm to halt Alania. “We’re here,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “The north side of the Middens. Wait.”

  The light continued to grow, and the vague dark bulk in front of them slowly became clear: a wall of rubbish rising up and up until it vanished into the fog. Danyl didn’t need to see all the way to the top of that pile of refuse to know what squatted above it: the City.

  He’d never been to this side of the Middens, but he’d known it rose more steeply from the Canyon floor than the other side and was not as deep. He’d learned from his studies that the City perched above a place where the Canyon depth abruptly plunged from “only” three hundred meters deep to the full half a kilometer their aching legs had climbed to the Rim Guardians’ nest. At one time there must have been a spectacular cascade here. The Middens had swallowed it long ago, of course.

  “Shouldn’t we be climbing it?” Alania said, staring up into the rain at the mountain of trash.

  “Wait,” Danyl said again. He kept his own gaze on the yellow glow. If he was right . . .

  The spark of illumination vanished for an instant, reappeared . . . and then brightened and grew larger: a door had opened. A dark figure half obscured the opening—

  —and then a bright white light speared through the rain, pinning Danyl and Alania where they stood. “Move a muscle and die,” a woman shouted. And then, to someone else, “Spika here. We’ve got strangers at the River. Send reinforcements.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  ALANIA TURNED HER HEAD away from the painfully bright glare of the light and looked at Danyl instead.

  “Call her over,” he whispered, and then, with a groan, he fell to his knees and onto his side.

  Alania gaped for only an instant, then understood. “My brother is injured!” she cried. “Please, come help!”

  The woman—Spika—hesitated, then approached, lowering the light to illuminate Danyl’s apparently senseless body. In the process, she revealed that the light was attached to a battered-looking but undoubtedly still deadly automatic rifle and that she was a dark-skinned woman in her thirties or early forties with short, curly black hair, wearing a too-large black synthileather jacket over greasy green overalls. Alania dropped to her knees beside Danyl, both to continue the charade and to avoid doing anything Spika might interpret as threatening. She didn’t know exactly what Danyl had in mind, but she assumed he planned to try to disarm the woman once she got close enough.

  But Spika didn’t get close enough. She stopped well out of reach. “I don’t see any injuries,” she snarled.

  Danyl opened his eyes. “There aren’t any,” he said in a low voice. “But I figure out here I can talk to you without anyone else listening in, like I assume they could do back there at your post.”

  The woman stiffened. “What are you up to? There’ll be two more Greenskulls here in ten minutes.”

  “Call them off.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because they’ll take this away from me . . . and then you won’t get into the City.” Very slowly, Danyl moved his hand to the breast pocket of his jacket, unbuttoned it, and showed just the top of the golden key Beruthi had given him.

  The effect was instantaneous—Spika gasped. “Is that . . .”

  “It’s exactly what it looks like. A high-level City access key. It’ll get us into the Bowels and from the Bowels to the First Tier.”

  The rifle came up. “Then I’ll kill you and take it.”

  “No, you won’t,” Danyl said. “It’s biolocked to me. I’m the only one who can use it. The key alone can’t get you
into the City, but with it, I can. And I will . . . if you’ll call off the others.”

  “The only way I know into the City is through the main gate,” Spika said. “That thing is useless there. You need a City Pass.”

  “I know an entrance,” Danyl said. “But we need your help to get there.”

  Spika hesitated.

  “You’ll never have a chance like this again. And you know it.”

  An agonizingly long pause. Alania stayed where she was, knees pressed painfully to the stones, and stared at the Greenskull woman. Then, almost spasmodically, Spika lowered her weapon and the blinding light and raised her arm, speaking into her wrist. “False alarm,” she said. “Just shadows. Cancel backup.”

  “You sure?” a voice crackled back.

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Damn rain is playing tricks.”

  “All right.”

  “Spika clear and out.” The woman lowered her wrist and raised the rifle again. “Talk fast. I could still shoot you.”

  Danyl carefully got to his feet in a nonthreatening fashion, and Alania just as carefully got up to stand beside him. “I grew up in the Middens,” he said. “South side.”

  “Rustblood?” Spika snapped.

  “No,” Danyl said. “Independent. You ever heard of Erl?”

  “’Course I’ve heard of Erl. Everyone in the Middens has heard of Erl.” Spika squinted at him. “Wait a minute. You’re that kid of his?”

  Danyl nodded.

  “Then who the hell is she?” She jerked her head in Alania’s direction. “She called you her brother.”

  “I had to call him something,” Alania said.

  “Just someone else who fell out of the City,” Danyl said. “Like I did as a baby. Like you did once upon a time.”

  Spika barked a laugh. “Once upon a time? Don’t make it sound like some Earthmyth tale. I ended up down here because I thought nothing could be worse than up there.”