Shatter City

by Scott Westerfeld

  The fab ignores her.

  I clamber backward on the stones, but my retreat is blocked by the looming pile of a collapsed wall. My ankle isn’t working right, agony jolting with every step.

  I gesture for the pulse knife, calling it to my hand—but it’s stuck there in the fabricator’s brain case, lifeless.

  The machine starts toward me, crushingly huge, moving faster with every step.

  A shadow passes overhead. Great—some lucky RFS warden can watch me be trampled into paste.

  But then a roar like a hundred pulse knives fills the square. The shadow swoops down, dark and buzzing. A man on a hoverboard …

  Not a man. A wolf.

  Boss X skims the cobblestones, his pulse lance thrust out like a trip wire. The charging metal beast runs straight across the blade—all six legs cleave away in a spray of fragments.

  The fab’s body crashes into the ground, skidding toward me on flailing stumps. Its massive weight digs a trench into the cobblestones. For a dreadful moment, it’s like watching the fin of some giant shark coming at me through the water.

  But it scrapes to a halt, momentum expended a meter short of crushing me. The forge is still working inside, rumbling the cobblestones. The heat of it envelops me.

  The maw opens again, and a fresh horde of butterflies swarms out. But they scatter, witless and purposeless, up into the air.

  The fab’s brain is dead at last.

  Boss X lands beside me, his force lance cycling down. A handful of other boards descend—rebels in leather and fur, tools and weapons strapped to their backs.

  “Nice haircut,” X says. “You’ve found your look.”

  I test my ankle, managing to stand. Painless has finally taken hold.

  “Glad you like it.”

  A rebel in a sneak suit jumps from their board, gathering me into a hug.

  “Always punching above your weight,” Yandre says, pulling off their mask.

  I should be more surprised to see them, or elated and relieved. I’m not sure. The Painless, combined with my still bubbling battle frenzy, washes everything else out.

  X glances over at Essa. “You’re recruiting locals? Very sound.”

  “Meet Boss X,” I say to her. “He’s a rebel. But maybe you guessed that.”

  “Yeah.” Essa pulls off her mask, her eyes wide as she takes in his surged, barely clothed body. “Welcome to Shatter City.”

  “Thank you.” He turns to me. “After what you told me on the train, my crew voted to stick close and keep an eye on things. A few days ago, we decided we’d seen enough.”

  A smile crosses my face. “You believed me.”

  “Boss,” one of the other rebels says. “Company.”

  We all look up.

  It’s two wardens on hoverboards. Their uniforms are a bright, pulsing green, the color of the Diego Relief Force. It takes them a few seconds to take in Boss X, his rebels, the destroyed Shreve fab, and decide that they want no part of this.

  They shake their heads, wheel around, and fly away.

  “I like this town,” X says.

  “Yeah, but RFS will be here soon.” I gesture at the fabricator. “Help me strip the batteries. We could use them.”

  “We have solar to spare. We’re here for the brain—what’s left of it.” X walks over and pulls my knife from the fab. “Nice to see someone using a gift.”

  He tosses the spent knife to me.

  “Come on, Boss,” Yandre says. “We should fade before the RFS gets here. Or are we in the mood for a firefight?”

  X gives this a slow beat of thought, then shrugs. With a swift stroke of his lance, he cuts the fab’s brain case free.

  “Another time. Let’s go.”

  The rebels’ hideout is in the battered center of Paz.

  As the skeletons of fallen buildings rise around us, Essa’s fingers reach for her feels. There are makeshift memorials everywhere, best guesses as to where a loved one’s remains lie crushed beneath a hundred tons of metal.

  We descend into an excavation crater filled with construction drones from Seatac. Boss X has either made a deal or hacked the machines—they don’t bother us. A massive sewage pipe thrusts from the wreckage into the crater, big enough for us to fly inside without crouching.

  The pipe is empty and echoing, and smells like old socks. Riding behind X on his board, I can’t see much in the darkness ahead. But the running lights show rats and shiny-backed beetles scurrying along the walls. Half-hidden by clumps of lichen are small exhaust fans, stirring the air to keep it breathable.

  We round a bend, and the passage widens—

  The rebel hideout. Lights, batteries, heaters along the walls, sleeping bunks wedged between support columns. The lifting machines that hollowed the place out and packed the hard-dirt floors. A cookstove with a gleaming coffee grinder sitting on it. Their own water main, tapped and ready.

  My heart lifts with a feeling like Hope.

  “Looks like you plan on staying here a while,” I say.

  “Not just us,” Yandre says. “Boss Charles’s crew is flying in for night raids. But they don’t like sleeping in sewers. Me either, for the record.”

  “A chance to live in chaos,” X says. “And you complain about the smell?”

  Essa gives him a dark look. “Some of us liked it better before the chaos.”

  X bows his head in apology. “We hope to deliver Paz back to you in working order—a free city.”

  Essa deflates a little, and reaches for her feels. “I’ll settle for that.”

  “X?” I ask. “Have you heard anything about my sister?”

  “She’s still missing?”

  “Completely.” I let out a sigh. “A friend said she ran off to join the rebels—pretending to be me. Somewhere far away, probably.”

  I expect X to laugh at the idea of Rafi in leather and furs, and realize that I can’t bear it if he does. But he only narrows his eyes.

  “A daughter of Shreve, deciding to become a rebel? That sounds like a hard thing to hide.” He places a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “Thanks, X.” My flash of gratitude is followed by a rush of exhaustion—the frenzy of battle fading at last, my twisted ankle starting to buzz at the edge of my awareness. Emotions start to cascade in me.

  My friends are here. I don’t have to be alone. There are ruins over our heads, but buried here in the earth is something worth fighting for.

  I reach for my wrist, giving myself a touch of Home.

  “What do you need, Frey?” X asks softly.

  “Other than finding my sister, I don’t know. Maybe a shower?”

  Yandre takes my hand with a smile. “I was just about to suggest that, chica. Follow me.”

  The showers are in a corner of the cavern. Here, instead of packed dirt, loose wet stones cover the earthen floor. There’s a smell like pine soap and damp earth. A water pipe juts from the wall, covered with smart plastic.

  A glowlight hangs from the pipe, and a brick of soap, but no curtains.

  Rebels don’t really do privacy. Not that I’ve had much at Rafi’s place … and I think of Srin, waiting for me. A destroyed fabricator is big enough news that it’ll make the feeds.

  She’ll wonder if it was me, and where I am.

  She might have Col waiting on the line, expecting me any minute.

  “Yandre, can you get a message out? Something secure from the RFS.”

  “Not really,” they say. “Courier drones use the city interface.”

  “Right. I’ll have to go myself, then.” But the thought of leaving the rebels right away makes my stomach twist a little.

  Boss X’s crew trusts me. And they know how to fight this kind of war. When the other cities let Shreve stay, they didn’t abandon Paz.

  There, scratched into the dirt wall, is the old slogan.

  She’s not coming to save us.

  We have to do this ourselves.

  “Not till you have a shower.”
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br />   Yandre whistles a few notes, and the smart plastic shivers to life overhead. It crawls away to reveal holes in the pipe, unleashing a bracing spray of water onto us.

  A shudder goes through me. “Whoa, that’s cold. You didn’t even let me undress!”

  Yandre laughs, stripping off their sneak suit. “Couldn’t help but notice your clothes could use a wash.”

  “Yeah, fair.”

  I peel off my shirt and singlet, drop them beside me on the wet stones. But when I balance on one foot to get a shoe off, my twisted ankle wobbles, sending me sprawling backward onto the rocks.

  Yandre kneels in the spray and takes my arm.

  “You okay, chica? You’ve been walking funny.”

  They gently pull my right shoe off, sending a deep, distant note of pain up my spine.

  “Whoa.” Yandre looks at me. “Did you not feel this?”

  A band of skin around my ankle is bruised—the shades of burned toast, with patches of purple. Released from my running shoe, my whole foot looks swollen.

  “Not really,” I say. “Heat of battle.”

  “Let me shut the water off,” Yandre says, standing.

  “No. It’s great.” I pull off my other shoe. “Can you hand me that soap?”

  They stare at me a moment, then pass the soap down.

  Still sitting, I struggle out of my sweatpants and soap up. As I wipe the grime from my swollen foot, suppressed agony rings. But the pain is distant from the Painless and the Calm, and this clean water is right here on my skin.

  Yandre is staring at my feels. “When did you get those?”

  “First night I was here—a misunderstanding. They come in handy, though.”

  “How often do you use them? Every day?”

  A laugh sputters out of me. “Are you kidding? We’re fighting a war here. We need all the help we can get.”

  “You mean, you use them all the time.”

  “Of course, but …” Suddenly I feel my nakedness. I wave a hand at the rest of the cavern. “You’ve got your whole crew. I’ve only got Essa and Srin—three of us against the RFS, and Srin’s leaving. You think there’s coffee in Paz? Or power for heaters? We don’t even have running water. Or enough to eat!”

  I don’t say that Essa lost her family—that every Pazx lost someone. That you can hear weeping across the city on still nights, all of it bleeding into one sound.

  Or that in that first week, you could smell the bodies when it rained.

  “Feels are the one thing that isn’t rationed.” I point at my arm. “All these emotions, they’re all made by my body; the feels just give it a nudge. I can’t run out of Sadness, or Joy.”

  “Sure.” Yandre sighs. “Morale must be tricky.”

  I shake my head. Morale is the wrong word.

  “This isn’t about singing campfire songs—it’s about survival.” Something Essa told me comes back. “It’s like Rusty days up there, when they used to die from sadness.”

  Yandre leans back out of the spray, flicks wet hair aside. “That’s called depression, Frey. My brother’s had it his whole life. Without his feels, he might not be alive.”

  “What? He’s a Vic. You don’t have feels.”

  “People who need them do.” They gesture at my arm. “But my brother’s only got a few faces. Not a whole orchestra like that.”

  “Then you know what I mean.”

  “I know you were walking on a broken ankle. Making it worse with every step.”

  “There was a battle to fight.”

  “The battle was done when you hoverboarded all the way here. When you walked to this shower. You could’ve been grinding a clean fracture into splinters!”

  I give them a shrug. “You’ve got an autodoc, right?”

  “Sure—we can fix your ankle.” Yandre leans closer. “But, Frey, what if you’re carrying something like that in your head?”

  I hold their gaze, defiant at first. But the argument is as distant as my pain, and as annoying, so I close my eyes and lean back into the spray.

  Lying there on the stones, all that matters is this cold shower. It’s making my heart beat hard, and my skin feel bright and raw. The rebels’ handmade soap smells like pine and fresh tallow, like Forgetting.

  I almost give myself a long touch of the real thing, but my eyes open just in time to catch Yandre watching me.

  “Okay, my head hurts too,” I admit. “And my heart—it’s been a long war. Also, I had a troubled childhood.”

  That gets me a fleeting smile.

  “There are human doctors for that, you know,” Yandre says. “All you do is talk to them, but it helps.”

  “Not here in Shatter City, there aren’t—not nearly enough, anyway. Essa thinks I should listen to sad songs. Got any suggestions?”

  They shrug. “My dad writes sad novels. People always cry when they read them.”

  “Sounds fun. But I’ve been meaning to ask—what are novels, anyway?”

  “They’re text files,” Yandre says tiredly, like this is something they’ve explained a thousand times. “Imagine a really carefully written ping, except it’s addressed to everyone, not just you. And they’re about a hundred thousand words long.”

  “A hundred thou—” I stare at Yandre a moment. “That’s the most brain-missing thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “The Rusties loved them. Of course, they also thought tigers in cages were fun.” Another shrug. “I’ve got a fab’s brain to take apart. Let’s dry you off and get an ice sleeve on that swelling.”

  I look at my sweats in a pile next to me, soaked and soapy. Even hung by a heater, they’ll take hours to dry.

  “You got any clothes that fit me?”

  Yandre looks me up and down with a smirk. “Nothing presentable. You’ll have to dress like a rebel.”

  “Great. Leather should go with my new hair.”

  “The boss’ll love it. Get that soap off you. War council meets in an hour.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t have time for that. I’ve got to get back home and talk to—”

  “Nonsense, Frey. You’re not going anywhere till that ankle’s fixed.”

  The rebel war council meets in the center of the artificial cavern.

  The hideout doesn’t have much furniture, so we sit in the dirt, in a rough circle around an airscreen projector.

  Everyone in X’s crew is here—plus me, Essa, a rep from Smith’s rebels, and Boss Charles herself, just arrived. It’s the three crews who joined me and Col in our attack on Shreve, but there are no Vics here.

  No one even mentions them.

  I get it—Dr. Leyva lied to the rebels, took them for granted. But I wish they’d realize that Col is different. He doesn’t just fight for himself and House Palafox.

  He fights for me.

  I remember him saying those words on the outskirts of Paz, but I can’t recall what it felt like. My feelings are too tangled up.

  I’m twitchy with the need to get home to Srin and her comm gear, but I also want to lie down and sleep here, protected by my old allies. The ice sleeve on my ankle is making me shivery—the rebel medic has prescribed another hour of bringing the swelling down before the autodoc can even start. My new outfit is ill-fitting and clumsy, made of leather and the fur of dead rabbits. Intentionally crude, like nothing I’ve ever worn before.

  After Yandre’s lecture, I haven’t touched my feels.

  It’s not fair—a whole life controlling my emotions, hiding them from everyone, and finally my feels have set them free. And Yandre wants me to feel bad about it?

  Boss X brings the meeting to order with three simple words.

  “The Smoke lives.”

  The other rebels repeat them.

  I remember this ritual from the first days the rebels joined us against Shreve. The Smoke was the first rebel camp, back before the mind-rain, when Tally Youngblood was just another clueless ugly. A reminder that no matter what the cities do to us, there’s always the wild to disappear into.

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nbsp; Boss X stands.

  “We got a fabricator’s brain today.” He smiles at me. “Alas, it was damaged by our old friend here.”

  “Sorry,” I mutter.

  “The memory was intact, at least. And we found what we were looking for.”

  “So it makes dust?” asks Boss Charles.

  X sits down, nodding at Yandre. They gesture, and the airscreen lights up—schematics of the fabricator’s memory.

  “No dust,” Yandre says. “And its code for making water purifiers and other survival gear was all standard shareware.”

  Charles grumbles a little, adjusting the furs she’s sitting on. “You wouldn’t invite me to X’s lovely sewer for nothing, ’Dre. And you look more smug than usual. So what did you find?”

  Yandre smiles, flicking aside the schematics. Objects appear in the air.

  “A set of instructions for making these, Boss.”

  I recognize a few things—drill bits, heat sinks, magnetics—but the rest is beyond me.

  “Imagine you’re a construction drone from Diego or Seatac, and you blow an alloy gun.” Yandre points two fingers at a mechanism on the screen, enlarging it to fill the space. “You look for a replacement, and you find one of these lying around. It looks like a standard spare part … you can’t tell it was made by Shreve.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” Boss Charles asks.

  “Nothing that a drone would notice. The specs and tolerances are the same—you can still mix metals with it. But it’s got a virus inside.”

  Of course—my father always starts with the small things.

  “So he’s infecting the other cities’ relief forces,” Charles says. “One day all those construction drones will join the army of Shreve?”

  The rep from Smith’s crew speaks up. “No way, Boss. A brain on a big lifter, carrying twenty tons of wreckage around? That code gets checked all the time. A virus would get spotted.”

  “And my father’s already got an army,” I say. “The whole point of the quake was to conquer Paz without anyone knowing.”

  A few unconvinced looks come my way. X must’ve told them about the warning I gave him, but no one believes my father can make earthquakes.

  “You’re both right,” Yandre says. “These spare parts don’t infect their hosts. But they can infect the stuff they’re working on—the building materials.”