“But of course!” Honeybul said, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a tablet, almost falling over himself at the thought of gaining a new customer. “You can look through the list of Candidates right here.”
Knile took the tablet with smile of gratitude, then began to flick through the profiles of the children contained therein. With each motion of his hand, a feeling of dread began to creep into his bones. Every single one of these children was condemned. He was looking at boys and girls who would never reach life as an adult. They would suffer and die horrible deaths, and their names would be forgotten, their passing unlamented.
Knile knew what was coming. As each smiling, innocent face went by, he was steadily approaching the inevitable.
And then he found it. The dark-haired boy with a certain sadness in his eyes and in his smile that Knile knew only too well.
Roman. Goddammit, no.
“This one,” Knile said, keeping his voice even as he handed the tablet back to the old man. “Can I have him?”
Honeybul scrutinised the screen, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Remington. This one has already been selected by another benefactor. One of my regular clients, in fact.”
“I’ll pay you,” Knile said. “More than your other benefactor.”
Honeybul shook his head. “It’s just not possible. This client is very, very particular–”
“Has the boy been delivered to the benefactor yet?” Knile said sharply. The 9mm was sitting in his inside jacket pocket, and now the weight of it was beginning to feel like a great ball of lead. It needed to be removed. It needed to be pointed at the face of this grinning fucking monster, this wolf in sheep’s clothing. It needed to talk in its own savage, uncompromising language, unleashing its fury at the man on the sofa.
Knile needed to put a bullet through Hoyer Honeybul’s wrinkled head. He needed to spray the old man’s brains all over that spotless fucking sofa.
In a moment of clarity, Knile realised he was prepared to do just that.
“He has not been delivered yet, no,” Honeybul went on, oblivious to the thoughts that were bouncing around in Knile’s skull. “This one has had some trouble with the Enforcers in the past. It’s taking a little longer than usual to have his records expunged, but I’m confident he’ll be delivered in the next few days.” Honeybul winked up at him. “What can’t be fixed with a few extra creds, I ask you?”
Knile’s fingers crept inside his jacket, touched the butt of the gun.
A bullet through the head, that’s what. Creds won’t fix that, you fuck.
There was a scream over by the stairwell, and Knile spun, expecting to see Enforcers coming at him. Instead he saw something worse.
One of Alton Wilt’s men was there, levelling a gun in his direction as the woman beside him bleated in fear and fell to the floor.
Knile dropped to one knee, the 9mm in his hand in an instant. Wilt’s man fired first, but the shot smacked harmlessly into the wall above Knile’s shoulder. Knile returned fire, squeezing off two shots and hitting the man in the chest and shoulder and sending him tumbling back down the staircase.
As the partygoers screamed and began to run in all directions, Knile turned back to the sofa, but Honeybul had already bounded off, his blue suit barely visible amid the throng of people. Knile pointed the gun in the old man’s direction, but knew he could never make the shot. Reluctantly he shoved the 9mm back in his jacket, then scooped up the suitcase in one hand and grasped Ursie’s wrist with the other.
“Up the stairs, go!” he shouted.
Behind them there were more gunshots, and Knile heard shouts from the Enforcers. He wasn’t sure if they were after him, or if they were engaged in an altercation with more of Wilt’s men, and he didn’t stop to find out. He and Ursie had a lead on the others, and he wasn’t about to give that up for the sake of curiosity.
They made it up another two flights of stairs, and people on this level were just as panicked as those below had been. Knile collided with a man running the opposite way and almost fell over. He somehow kept his balance, then looked back to see the man cowering on the floor. He was young and handsome, his skin tanned, and he wore a powder blue suit and a grey necktie. He held one arm protectively over his face, as if he were expecting Knile to put a bullet between his eyes.
Then Knile heard something that made the very world tilt under his feet. A sound that made his heart pound in his chest and which stole the wind from his lungs, caused a chill that rippled down his spine.
No, he thought desperately. That’s impossible.
Ursie stood waiting for him up ahead, her mouth moving as she tried to shout something, but Knile couldn’t hear her voice over the deafening hammer of his own manic heart.
Knile heard the sound again, and this time he turned toward it.
On the other side of the room, a woman was being dragged away by a man in a white suit. She wore a dress as blue as the azure skies of old, and her chestnut hair fell about her shoulders as she struggled to free herself from the man’s grip.
She reached out for Knile.
He saw her mouth forming the words, and her voice sounded distant but utterly clear.
I love you! Don’t leave me!
Knile’s world fell apart at the sight of her.
“Mianda,” he breathed, stricken.
It couldn’t be her. He strained his eyes wide as if that might dispel the illusion he saw before him, but the vision of the woman remained unchanged. She was just as perfect as the day he’d last seen her.
Then she was gone, the man in the white suit dragging her through a doorway and out of sight.
Gunshots permeated Knile’s stupor like cannons going off in his head. He heard the sound of footsteps on the staircase. Men coming.
“Knile!” Ursie was screaming.
Knile got moving again, taking two sluggish steps before his instincts kicked in. He moved into full stride, catching up to Ursie and leading the girl upward and away from their pursuers.
He dared not look back again.
35
They didn’t stop to catch their breath until they had made it to the next tier. Knile’s knowledge of the layout of Lux undoubtedly helped them to give their pursuers the slip. The old maintenance shaft he’d located lay forgotten in the back of an Auto workshop, whose workers had spilled out onto the avenue as they attempted to determine the cause of the commotion over at the mansion. Both he and Ursie had been able to slip inside the workshop while the workers’ attention was elsewhere, and from there they’d ascended through the shaft, where cobwebs and dust lay thick as soup.
Now they trudged through gloomy and dank industrial corridors, the mayhem of Lux safely behind them. There were no Autos here, no avenues or marble statues. No people. There was only the relentless hum of giant pistons and fans, and other half-seen apparatus that whirred away under thin shafts of white light from the spotlights above.
“What is this place?” Ursie said, looking around uneasily. There was a thick chemical miasma about the place that made her wrinkle her nose.
Knile, who hadn’t said anything since leaving Lux, didn’t answer for a long time. When he spoke, his voice lacked its usual vigour.
“These are called the Plant Rooms.”
“So what does this stuff do?”
Knile looked around. “These levels are like the nerve centre of the upper part of the Reach. Those fans are the air intakes for Lux.” Showing no modesty, he slipped out of his dress pants, which were stained with blood, and put his old trousers on again. “There’s also water filtration units, air purifiers, and basically anything else that doesn’t fit the aesthetic of all of that gold and marble below. Further up is the field generator for the Stormgates, among other things.”
“Where are all of the people?”
“This gear is automated. You might see someone from maintenance in here now and again, but that’s about it.”
Knile suddenly stopped
dead still and looked behind them. Ursie froze, alarmed.
“What is it? Are they coming?”
Knile did not turn back to her.
“I don’t think I can take you the rest of the way, kid,” he said in that voice that was bereft of conviction. Bereft of hope.
“What?” Ursie said, walking in an arc so that she could face him. “What are you talking about, Knile?”
“I’m not sure I want this anymore.”
“This what?” She tried to move into a position that would catch his eye, but Knile kept his face down, avoiding the directness of her gaze.
“This whole fucking journey.”
Ursie shook her head, disbelieving. “What happened down there, Knile? Who was that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“There was a woman. A woman dressed in blue who was calling out for you.”
“No. She was calling out for the man I ran into, the man on the floor.”
“Bullshit.” She stepped closer to him. “You know her.”
“No,” Knile said quietly.
“It was Mianda, wasn’t it?” she persisted, her voice raised. “She’s alive. She’s living in Lux.”
“No, she’s not. That’s not possible.” His voice was hoarse.
“She called out to you. She said she loved you. It was her!” Ursie said, practically shouting at him.
“It’s not possible,” Knile said again, raising his own voice and choking back a sob.
“Why not?”
“Because Mianda never loved me!” Knile roared, finally meeting her glare, his eyes glistening with tears. Ursie stumbled back, reeling from his ferocity. “Is that what you wanted to hear?” he yelled, taking a step toward her. “That couldn’t be Mianda, because Mianda hated my fucking guts!”
Ursie shrank away from him. “I… I don’t understand.”
Knile sank to the floor, shoving his backpack away from him and lifting a trembling hand to his face. He brushed the tears angrily from his cheeks and then violently yanked the tie around his neck, loosening the knot and then slipping it over his head, tossing it away.
“Mianda never looked at me the way I looked at her,” he began, struggling to bring his voice under control. “I tried to make her see that I was the one for her for so long. For years. I said and did all the right things, lavished attention on her. I did everything I could, and yet she never came round to me.” He smiled distantly. “All my life I found a way to get things done, things that other people couldn’t do. I found a way through every part of the Reach, but I never found a way to make the person I cared about most love me for who I was.”
“Why haven’t you told me this before?”
“You think it’s easy to talk about this? To admit the only person you loved despised you in return?”
“No, of course not.” Ursie shifted uncomfortably, not really knowing how to respond to this side of Knile that was so different to what she had seen before. He didn’t say anything more, so she added, “If you want to talk about it, I’ll listen.”
He mulled over that offer for a few moments, then shrugged despondently.
“Yeah, sure. Why not? It’s about time someone knew the truth.” He settled back against the railing and smiled bitterly. “Clever Knile, the guy who can always find a way out of every situation. The guy who always comes up with a new angle when all hope seems lost. Guess what I did, Ursie? I came up with the plan to win her over, a trick that couldn’t fail. I would get us both off-world together at the same time, arrange for us to make a life on one of the outer colonies. Perfect, right?”
“Sounds nice,” Ursie said.
“She agreed to it. I mean, who wouldn’t? The chance to escape this earthbound existence? How could she say no?” Knile’s mouth twisted bitterly again. “Everything was going according to plan. I opened all the right doors and made all the right moves, kept one step ahead of the Enforcers. I knew they had their eye on me, but they couldn’t stop me. They never even got close.
“After we made it through Lux, Mianda started asking questions. She wanted to know how I got the passkeys.” He shrugged. “So I told her. I told her that I’d taken them from a married couple who were leaving together. She was horrified, aghast that I was capable of doing that to someone, that I would steal their dreams away from them like that. The higher we went, the less she talked to me, and then by the time we reached the Atrium, she’d lost it. She wouldn’t go any further. She stopped inside the Stormgates and wouldn’t move. She couldn’t go through with it.” He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “We were right there. Right fucking there, so close to the end.” When he opened his eyes they were once again glistening. “I’ll remember her words forever. She said, ‘I can’t keep going, Knile. Not with you. I can’t be with you.’ I told her that I loved her, that I’d done all of this for her, but she only replied, ‘No, you don’t love me. You only love yourself. Look at what you’ve done to other people. You could never care about anyone but yourself.’”
Knile’s head dropped, and it seemed that he would say no more. Ursie moved over and sat down beside him.
“I’m sorry, Knile. I didn’t know.”
“We would have made it,” he said softly, his eyes focussed on some far-distant point. “We would have left this world behind if only she’d kept walking.”
Ursie reached out a hand and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“So you see,” Knile said caustically, “that wasn’t Mianda down in Lux. She would never have said those words to me. Or, if it was her…” He tilted up one of his shoulders in a shrug. “If it was her, she could only have been talking to someone else.”
He reached out and snagged his backpack and pulled it back to his side, then gathered up the holophone. He paused for a moment as he considered what to do.
“I have to call someone,” he said, and Ursie nodded without question. He scrolled through the call history and found the first number in the sequence, a call that had been made to the phone the morning before.
The number began to ring.
“Hello?” Talia’s face appeared on the screen, and she peered at her own display as she struggled to make out the caller. “Knile, is that you?”
“Hey, Talia,” Knile said, his voice still restrained as he struggled with his emotions.
“What’s going on?” Talia said warily. “Did you make it off-world?”
“Not yet.”
Talia stared at him through the display, aware that he was teetering on some emotional precipice even through the image coming through was hazy and stuttering. Her voice softened.
“Look, Knile, I’m sorry about what I said to you yesterday when I left–”
“It’s okay, Talia. Everything you said was true, and I needed to hear it.”
“I was taking my frustrations out on you, and you didn’t deserve that.” She paused. “You didn’t really need my help to get back into Grove, did you?”
“No.”
“So why did you come to me?”
Knile exhaled shakily. “I guess I just wanted to see a friendly face again after all these years. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that.”
Talia smiled, relieved, as if a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
“It was good to see you, too, Knile.” Her smile weakened. “How did things go with Roman?”
The heat in the Plant Rooms was making him sweat, he realised. He shrugged out of his jacket and dumped it on the floor, then began to roll up the sleeves of his shirt.
“That’s what I’m calling you about,” Knile said, and his voice became firm once again as he brushed away his melancholy, embracing the task at hand. “Roman’s gotten himself in some trouble, although he doesn’t know it yet.”
“What’s happened?”
“Roman told me that he’s been accepted into a scheme inside the Reach that he believes is a stepping stone to getting off-wo
rld. It’s called the Candidate program and it’s run by this old guy called Honeybul. I just met the guy in Lux, and the whole thing is a sham. It’s a front for a child slavery racket.”
“Oh, god,” Talia moaned in dismay.
“The kids get sold off to the rich in Lux, to be raped or beaten or whatever. I doubt any survive in the long run, and if they do, I’d hate to be one of them.”
Knile experienced a sharp pang of guilt at the thought of the girl he’d sent into the arms of the Enforcers. Would they really help her, or simply return her to Honeybul? He knew which option was more likely.
More collateral damage. More wreckage left in your wake. Well done, Knile, he thought bitterly.
“What are you going to do?” Talia said, and Knile pushed thoughts of the girl aside.
Knile glanced around helplessly. “Talia, I’m in a bit of a bind. I have Enforcers after me, I have some maniac with his own private army who’s trying to kill me and take my ticket, and I only have a few hours left before my ride leaves on the Wire. There’s nothing I can do.”
“So what am I supposed to do, Knile? I don’t have access to the Reach. How do I stop this from happening?”
“You have to stop Roman from joining the Candidates. Go and see him at Grove. Talk to him.”
“Talk to him?” Talia exclaimed. “Do you remember what happened yesterday morning? Do you think he’s really going to listen to anything that comes out of my mouth?”
“You have to try, Talia. You have to get through to him.”
Talia sighed and pressed her hand into her face. “Okay. I’ll go and see him. I’ll try.”
“Thank you, Talia. Just don’t waste any time about it. He could be inducted into the program any day.”
There was a noise somewhere within the depths of the level, a metallic clang that sounded like a tool being dropped, and Knile quickly got to his feet.
“I have to go, Talia.” He swung the backpack onto his shoulder. “I’m sorry to do this to you.”
“Knile, you–”
Knile killed the call, and in the moment before Talia’s face disappeared he saw something shimmering on his forearm, a reflection from the light of the phone. Curious, he waved the glowing display over the tag the kid had given him down in Gaslight, the tattoo of the word Skybreach, and now he could see dozens of tiny, glittering points responding to the light of the phone like fluorescent algae.
Earthbound (The Reach, Book 1) Page 29
