by A. R. Knight
The usual headlines about the war dominated. Wins, losses, speeches by generals and politicians about how this was either the greatest time, or the end of time. I hunted for the numbers. They were buried, hidden in small boxes at the bottoms of the articles. A thousand here, another five thousand there. Each and every one of those would be going to Riven. Most would be angry. Everyone worried about the cost of war for the living, nobody seemed to care what it meant for the ones who watched the dead.
The oven dinged, a noise more seen than heard as the thing stopped its shower of sparks and the front door popped open. A pair of tongs hung on the wall next to the oven. Using its hook, a spindly metal grabber, I fished my breakfast out. I picked out my utensil from the container on the table, a tall cylinder with my name, Carver, embossed into it. A welcome gift from the other guides when I came here.
The utensil was a thick tool with a slider built into the stem. I slid it back a notch, hiding the spoon and revealing the fork. Stabbed it into the mix of bacon and eggs and stuck the salty goodness in my mouth. They’d done a real nice job with the taste on this one. A glance at the label on the package, Breakfast Number Three and, beneath, flavored with cheddar. That’d be why. Every once in a while the processors got a deal on something tasty and stuck it in. I took an extra minute to savor every bite of this one, as I probably wouldn’t get another for a month or more.
Then a brief visit to the shared showers on my floor, always a crowded squeeze given the hot water for our building only lasted for an hour in the morning. 5:00 to 6:00. That’s what you had if you needed a hot shower. Most days I didn’t care, but today there were standards. Today I’d be going outside.
I put on an undershirt and the only sweater I owned. A faded green with the letters C.R. sewn into the back. My initials. Another gift, this one from a girl I’d known a long time ago. She would’ve laughed if she knew I still wore this thing.
Thick work pants, loaded with pockets, and then the coup de grace, my coat. A marker of status, this thing. Thick and long, originally black but now a dusty gray, with twin lapels stretching off the collar and down part of the front. A hood that tucked behind my neck and could be pulled out as needed. Only guides wore these, and they opened doors. Shut a few too.
As I left my place, I grabbed one more thing. My mask. The metal was cool on my face, but it settled under my chin and around my ears perfectly. Every year or so I had to take it in, get it adjusted. It had to fit tight. I rode the elevator down and as it opened I press the button on the side of the mask. A switch woven into the curling black metal with bits of topaz sprinkled in. I’d wanted it to look like embers in the night, and the guides had delivered.
I pulled over the hood, and stepped onto the sidewalk. The mask started filtering out dust and dirt from the air. The lenses dulling the sunlight’s bright edges from my eyes.
The streets were crowded, the masses generally going in my direction. Making their way to the trains going either into or out of the city. The streets themselves busy with ranging carts. Treaded steel beasts hauling cargo or passengers arrayed on lines of benches. Wheels crunched into gravel, sprinkling the sidewalk with pebbles.
The train station was a block away. Its looping entrance arch watched over by a three-story tall mech. The machine stood on four legs that bled into a squat sphere of a body. Lights coated the bottom, directed wherever the driver chose. Twin smokestacks on top sat still, they’d only belch when the mech was moving. On the sides of its body were a pair of thick guns, their bullet belts streaming down and wrapping around the machine so that it seemed to be literally cloaked in golden death. These days, most people looked up at the mech and smiled. Waved.
I did too.
Chapter 4
I nodded to the conductor as I stepped on the train. Behind me, the next passenger pulled out her chit and the conductor punched it. Another perk of being a guide? Free rides. The train car was crowded this morning, but a pair shuffled away from a bench and let me sit down.
I took them up on the offer and settled in against the window. It was as cool on the train as it was outside, a temp I was comfortable with. In the summer, wearing this coat wasn’t always a pleasant experience, but without it I didn’t get the perks. So even if I was liable to become a pool of sweat, I wore the damn thing.
Across from me, a man and his son stared open-mouthed at my face. Their masks were of the ordinary variety, a plastic covering that did its job but nothing more. That lack of personality was echoed by the man’s uniform, the plain white shirt and trousers. An average briefcase, one that probably didn’t even expand when opened. Didn’t even have a shock lock.
The kid, though, made up for the boring outfit with a healthy helping of personality. His eyes seem to get wider and wider the more he stared at me. I smiled back at him, but he couldn’t see it from beneath the mask.
“Got a question?” I asked the kid.
“No, he’s fine,” the dad said.
“Let him talk,” I replied and nodded at the boy. The dad gulped, but kept quiet. “Come on kid. Not every day you see a guide.”
“What’s it like?” the kid blurted. “Over there?”
They always asked the same question. The same one that can be found answered in any magazine in any given month. None of these people ever read anything.
“Riven. Not ‘over there’,” I said. “You want to know what it’s like? It’s like walking into a nightmare. The scariest thing you’ve ever seen and it only gets scarier every step you take. Eventually, if you live long enough, you realize you can’t be scared anymore. That the things you were scared of, well, now they’re scared of you.”
I thought the kid’s eyes were to pop right out of his head. But he got himself pulled together enough for follow-up.
“What were you scared of?” the kid asked.
“You ever see a body?” I said and the kid shook his head. The dad next to him kept getting paler and paler. That’s the thing that happens when the stuff you only hear about in stories turns out to be real after all and closer than you think. “Well you’ve got these chopped up, mangled people wandering the streets and they’re getting angry every second that they’re there. Their frustrated that they have to live in this terrible place where there’s no sunlight, no real food or drink, nothing to do but think about what you’ve lost, and eventually they forget who they were. Then they find someone to take it out on. Someone to tear apart because that’s the only thing they can think of to do. Those people are what I was scared of.”
The kid was into it, nodding like he wanted me to go on. The dad looked like he was going to be sick. He grabbed his son’s hand and stood up as the train started to move. Pulled the kid off of the bench.
“We’ve got to move up for next stop,” the dad stammered, leading the kid away.
I barely had a moment to myself before another body slid into the bench across from me. A woman, going by the cream dress, one already showing stains at the edges from the air. Her mask, though, that caught my attention. Not the cheap stuff, but a silver plate with weaving white ceramic around the eyes. The usual filters over the nose and mouth bordered with gold. Flashy.
“So you’re a guide,” the woman said. I spread my hands, palms up. Didn’t the coat make it obvious? “That likes to scare children.”
“Riven should scare children,” I said.
“But it doesn’t scare you.”
“Not anymore. You go anywhere enough times, even the strangest of places start to feel ordinary.”
“Have you been far over there?”
Far? A word like far didn’t really apply to Riven. Where you were over here, affected where you came out over there. I’d never seen a map of the place, but all of the guides crossed over in different parts of the city. Maybe just outside. That’s where the spirits were, and that’s where we stayed. No reason to explore a world of horrors.
“I’ve seen enough,” I said. Outside the window the train was drawing closer to the city center.
The wide apartment structures like the one I lived in were gradually being replaced by taller offices, wide warehouses for factories, and the occasional metallic buildings that housed laboratories. The places that experimented and invented the things that would go to the factories and then to our homes. Most of the laboratories were thick and windowless, owing to their tendency to explode. Or catch on fire.
“Then you know what’s happening?” the woman tilted her head as she asked the question. I got the impression that she didn’t think I had a clue. Her voice, coming through that mask, had the same sort of tone I got from Chicago’s finest when they asked if I could find a murder victim in Riven. That I was a problem that had to be endured.
“The same thing that’s always happening. More spirits to wrangle.”
Now her eyes lit up. Apparently I’d found the right word.
“More spirits. So you’ve noticed?” she asked.
“We’ve all noticed. When you’ve got a war this big going on, Riven’s going to get a little crowded.”
“And when it gets too crowded?”
“Don’t think that’s going to happen,” I said. “We’ve got enough guides, and Riven is a bigger place than people think.”
The train whistled to a stop, one before mine. The woman glanced outside the window, then turned back to me, digging into a pocket in her dress. She pulled out a card and a pen, scribbled something on it, and then handed it to me.
“I think your world is about to get a lot more dangerous than you expect,” the woman said standing up. “I can help you.”
I turn the card over in my hand. On one side was a floral design, a simple slogan reading “find your peace” and a number to call. On the back, in her handwriting, was a street address. Not far from where we were now. I looked back up, but the woman was already gone.
Chapter 5
I took a deep breath as the train stopped at Union Station. You want a real taste of Chicago, you came here. Preferably in the morning, when Union Station was a pit of chaos. Everyone going somewhere, and everyone else trying to sell them something for the trip. I followed the crowd out of the train car and onto the platform where my ears were blasted with shouts for a thousand things I didn’t need.
It was a weekday, so most of the goods for sale were targeted at workers going to their places. Newspapers, food packages for lunch, shoeshines or lint rolls. One guy, wearing a halter over his neck that connected to long portable shelves, sold tubes of whitener. Guaranteed to remove pollution stains from your clothes. Whenever the sellers caught me in their eyes, though, they fell quiet. Guides weren’t anyone’s target market.
Another benefit to being a guide? Even though I was in a crowd, everyone kept their space. It was like moving in my own private bubble. Plenty of room to breathe, to look around, to walk without tripping over someone else’s shoes. So long as you don’t mind the stares, it was a good deal. At least, it was until the reporter showed up.
“Carver!” Opperman said, appearing as if by magic on my left side. He held a scribe tablet in front of him, a nifty little gadget that recorded everything we said as punches on a thick paper. By running those punches through a player later, the paper would re-create the sounds we made and, thus, the words we spoke. “Care to comment on the war this morning?”
“War is bad,” I said, not stopping.
The main plaza of Union Station was miraculous place to see. I still remember my first time, when my train arrived from the east coast. The station’s ceiling covered in tubes sending packages and letters to the various platforms where they would be loaded in mail cars and shot across the country. Each of those tubes colored so that, plastered up against each other, they formed a painting. A great circle with three colors; green, black, and blue that represented Chicago’s main industries. Food, mechs, and research. The Spire of Humanity graced the center. The tall tower at the heart of the city. The seat of government for the middle third of the country.
A giant display of train times, standing on a copper tube, sat beneath the painting. Each departure and arrival tracked and entered by a team of people working switchboards around the base of the column. All in plain view because, so I’d heard, the operators wanted people to know how much work it was keeping their trips on time.
“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?” Opperman continued.
“What did you want me to say?” I replied. “Save yourself some time and tell me what you’re fishing for.”
Opperman nodded, his head bobbing violently. Sometimes I wondered if the man subsisted only on coffee. His movements were so jerky and his voice went so fast that it sounded like one of those children’s toys wound up too tight.
“Have you seen it?” Opperman said. “The spirit that’s causing all the problems?”
Now I turned my head, looked at him through my mask.
“Causing all the problems? What spirit?”
“My sources tell me—”
“What sources?”
Opperman shrank back a step. “You know I can’t tell you.”
My hand moved to my waist but there was nothing there. I wasn’t in Riven, I didn’t have my lash. Even for a guide, traveling around the city armed was a good way to get in trouble. Chicago was weapons-free, like most of the country. If you weren’t in the military or enforcing the law, you’d find yourself in a cell before they even bothered asking questions.
“Then I can’t trust your information,” I said.
“Come on, Carver. You how this works. You give me the story, and I drum up support for the guides. Make sure you have the funds you need.”
“I haven’t seen it,” I said. “Don’t know what you’re talking about. If you want, I can tell you about the spirit I wrapped up this morning.”
“Anything interesting? An angry widow claiming she was wrongly murdered? Maybe a kid?”
“How about a man driven to despair by this rotten city?”
Opperman rolled his eyes, but kept pace with me as we neared the exit.
“Carver, I can’t get that above the fold. Maybe page three. How about an opinion piece?”
“What kind of opinion do you want?”
“Do you think the guides are able to handle an uprising? A mass of angry spirits led and directed by one even worse?”
An uprising? That was a new term. Angry spirits weren’t exactly disposed to cooperation. They tended to, you know, tear each other apart. Opperman leaned forward, staring at my mask. Holding the tablet up. The guy thought this was an important question. So I bit back my sarcasm. There were benefits to having the biggest paper in town on your side.
“Look, Chicago has three guides alone, and there are hundreds across the world. More than enough to deal with a bunch of angry spirits,” I said. “Remember, we’re still sane. They’re not. Even if they have numbers, we’ve got the brains. The equipment. Riven will be fine.”
“If it’s not?”
“You’ll know, because all of your dead friends will come back to find you. And you won’t be happy to see them.”
Opperman switched off the tablet, slipped it in his pocket as we went through the door and out into the street. He held out his hand and I shook it.
“Now that’s the quote I was looking for,” Opperman said. “I’ll try to get the story in for the afternoon. Evening edition at the latest.”
“Can’t wait.”
Opperman turned to walk down the street, opposite of where I was going. I let him get four steps away.
“Opperman. Your sources have any more useful info, you be sure to get it to me,” I said. “If there’s really something dangerous out there, there’s more to worry about than selling papers.”
The reporter held up his hand and kept walking. The man stuck to his principles, had to give him that. As I turned towards Ezra’s, I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d said. One spirit ruling a bunch of others? I’d never seen that before. Never heard of it. Even when Riven was crowded, Bryce said, there still wasn’t any organ
ization. Just one big angry mob of ghosts waiting to be sent on their way.
This time wouldn’t be any different.
Chapter 6
Ezra’s looked over the river, stuck between a pair of bridges at the base of a bank. From the outside, all you saw were the thick gold letters hanging above the door. Nothing more than the name flanked on either end with the guide insignia. A circle in the middle and four lines spaced around the outside. They didn’t quite form a square, leaving the corners blank, but the impression was clear. Those lines kept the circle from expanding, kept Riven from breaking out.
Ezra’s door, unlike Union Station’s, was a purifier. Most stores were these days. I opened the first metal and glass entrance and stepped into a small room. Big enough to hold two or three people. The door shut behind me and I pulled a small lever on the wall to my right. The movement opened a seal, leveraging air pressure to force the dirty haze back out into the city. The lever crawled back up and by the time it clicked back into position the air inside the room was clean. A snap announced the inner door unlocking, and I pushed my way into the best bar in Chicago.
The first thing anyone notices about the inside of Ezra’s, and the first thing my eyes went to even after all this time, was the automatic orchestra hanging above the bar. It was massive, covering the length of the back wall. Instruments carved out of wood, brass, and canvas made a collage that appeared to go deep into the wall behind. As though you were actually looking into an orchestra pit.
Beneath the carvings, an intricate set of speakers piped music in from the player behind the bar. Like Opperman’s tablet, the thing ran on reams of punched-in paper. I’d watch them load it a time or two, the bartender slotting in a scroll that weighed twenty pounds and letting it play.
If you weren’t sitting right at the counter, a crimson stained bar, Ezra’s had more than its share of tables and cushioned chairs. Fake candles hung from the ceiling on wires, their flickering light pointing down as though they might drip wax right on your face. It created the illusion that it was always late at night, always classy, always mysterious.
