by Alex Wells
“I said this is our town. We live here.” Mag raised her voice. “This is our town. These are our streets. This is our home. This–”
His fist cracked across her jaw. She reeled back to be caught by Anabi. She tasted salt and metal and lightning. But Mag wasn’t going to stop. And she felt rather than saw people drifting toward them, windows opening a bit wider. She had their attention.
“Get back to your house,” the guard said.
Mag straightened, stepping up again. She felt Anabi’s hands clutch at her shirt. “This is my house. All these are my houses. You go back to yours.”
The guard raised his hand again as his partner watched. Mag saw the female guard’s eyes widen a moment before a large, rough hand snatched around her partner’s wrist and yanked his fist back.
“The fuck you doin’?” the miner growled. “She ain’t done nothin’ wrong.”
The guard jerked his hand free and stepped back. They were going to shoot, Mag thought with sudden horror. And like her thought put it into their heads, both guards raised their rifles.
Another hand rested on Mag’s shoulder, and she felt more come in, miners running out of their houses to join the rapidly expanding crowd. “You don’t want to do that,” she said to the guards. And finally, she leaned on them with her will, making them move their fingers away from the triggers of their rifles. Little things. She would protect her people. “This is our town. These are our streets. You don’t get to come in here and tell us where we can and can’t walk.”
Around her, miners murmured in agreement. A few took up the ragged chant of “Our town” and “Our streets.” The words multiplied as she continued to lean on those guards. It would have been a damn fool thing for her to do, if she hadn’t had her witchiness to rely on – and in a crazy moment, she realized that she would have done it anyway. They had drawn their line. They would hold it.
Frustrated by something she couldn’t put a finger on, the first guard hauled back her rifle and hit one of the miners with the butt.
The crowd roared around Mag. They piled onto the two guards, though Mag shouted, “Don’t hurt ’em! Don’t kill ’em!” The guards’ rifles were passed back through the crowd to disappear. More miners grabbed the greenbellies’ arms, lifting the screaming and yelling guards off their feet.
“Get out of our town!” a woman shouted. More people took up the cry.
“Take ’em back to the company office,” Mag said. “That’s theirs. We don’t want that.” And somehow, they still heard her over the shouting, and took that up as well. “Company men for the company office!”
More people were coming from their houses, the street filling. Mag saw Clarence and Odalia move by – the look Odalia shot her could have curdled stabilized milk. But they were doing what they always did, finding their crews, and moving them out – up and down the street. The sound of shouting filled the town, and the sharp retort of isolated gunshots. Mag felt each of those like a blow, but there wasn’t time to wonder now if someone was hurt or dead.
Because if they pushed one set of guards back, they had to push them all back. She was bound to be in trouble, later. She hadn’t talked this out with anyone, and it hadn’t been a plan. Then again, she hadn’t planned to get bullied either.
Mag let the crowd carry her along, though she felt Anabi’s hands still tight in the back of her shirt. She’d have to go look at the warehouse later. They carried the guards back through the streets, toward the company office. The entire town filled with the roar of voices, covering up the absence of the drive chain. She saw the pale, doughy shape of Bill Weld’s face in the windows of the office for a second before he ducked out of sight.
A line of guards surrounded the office. They leveled their rifles at the miners, though didn’t fire. It probably had something to do with the multiple guards now held at the front of the crowd like shields.
“Disperse! You will disperse!” one of the guards in front of the office shouted.
The big miner that had saved Mag from getting hit again yelled back: “You stay here, and there won’t be no trouble! Ain’t no one been hurt yet but ours!”
Mag wondered if she’d done the wrong thing, then, waiting for the rifles to spit fire. The tension of it made her teeth ache. The crowd shoved around her as she saw more people come into the street. More guards got dragged up to the front by the office, put in front of the rifles.
Finally, the door of the office opened, and Bill Weld poked his head out, to jeers and shouts from the crowd. “The guards are here for your safety…” he started to say, as more jeering drowned him out.
Captain Longbridge, the yellow stripes on his shoulders vivid next to his rage-purpled face, moved up to Bill’s side. They seemed to be having an argument, an ugly one. Then his lips moved in something that had to be like a curse and he stepped back.
“The guards will stay here,” Bill said. “But the first rule-breaking we hear of, I’ll send them back into the town.”
“We can police ourselves fine,” the big miner growled. “Your’n picking the fights, not us.” The crowd released the guards.
Mag waited to see if the greenbellies would fire then, as the frightened guards scrambled back. She felt them wanting to, felt fingers starting to tense on triggers, a massacre in potential. Well, she was angry too. Everyone around her was angry. She drew off that anger, and cast it over the greenbellies like a blanket of stone – let them know what it was like to be afraid. She felt Longbridge fight her, saw his lips curl in a snarl – but he didn’t shout the orders he wanted.
And the crowd slowly moved back. Somehow, Clarence found her as they filtered through the streets. He grabbed her elbow, bruising tight. He had blood on his knuckles. “The hell were you thinkin’?”
Mag felt strange, floaty. For once, her witchiness hadn’t made her head hurt. She felt strong, capable, ready. “Was thinkin’ they don’t got a right to bully us in our town.”
He looked like he wanted to shake her – because he was scared, Mag thought. Maybe she’d feel scared later. “We’re gonna have to get us some guards of our own.” But even scared, he was thinking of the best way to organize things. “If there’s an ‘our side of town’ now, we gotta keep it that way.”
Mag couldn’t help but laugh, still floating, maybe hysterical as she thought about the blood, the gunshots, what this really all meant. “Figured we needed somethin’ to do, since we ain’t got the mine to take up our time.”
“God help me that I sometimes forget who your uncle was,” Clarence muttered. “And this is my punishment.”
Chapter Thirty-One
22 Days
Shige prowled around the exile of his small apartment, wondering if he’d finally taken one gamble too many. Ms Meetchim had been angry enough to send him home once he’d delivered all of the news, including Dr Kiyoder’s assurance that Mr Yellow would be just fine once he’d had a day to “reset.” The chill ultimatum Meetchim had given him was that he might return tomorrow to see Mr Yellow wake up, and then he’d better have something good to go with her morning coffee.
It could have been worse, really. As upper management went, Ms Meetchim had a cold rather than hot temper. But he had little doubt that she’d hang him out to dry if things went poorly. This was what he got for taking the sort of mad risk that had made Kazu an infamous embarrassment for the family – he recalled multiple times he’d watched around a corner, as the security services had brought Kazu home in handcuffs and had tense conversations with their father about favors. He was supposed to be so much better at calculating the odds than that. But it seemed particularly unfair, since apparently Kazu still hadn’t run through his luck, even as he’d turned his back on the family.
Shige fixed himself a drink – it had been a very stressful day – and decided to use this downtime as an opportunity to finally comb through the massive dump of files he’d stolen from Dr Ekwensi’s office.
With his feet comfortably up, he started reading. Mercifully, even unco
nscious, Mr Yellow still controlled all of the local fields. The lights were steady and there were no problems with his data card reader. He hadn’t wanted to risk printing all of the files onto flimsies.
He began with the specifications for the recent generations of Weathermen. Most of it was supremely technical, data about particular genetic alterations. Some bits here and there he recognized as being similar to his own alterations. He’d made it his business to educate himself thoroughly once he’d come to terms with what he was. The information about the neural implants was less useful, in that he couldn’t make head nor tail of it.
It would be nice, he thought grumpily, if there was some sort of primer for non-technicians on how the Weathermen worked. He found hints here and there, like the theory that the Weathermen could predict the future, at least in the short term, and that was what allowed them to safely bridge the vast distances. Through whatever means, they were able to place ships spatially so that they wouldn’t collide with debris. He found out also that half of the neural network design – the earliest half of it – was to allow the Weathermen to interface properly with the ship engines, to use the power plants to do whatever mysterious twisting of space occurred entirely within them. On that point, no one seemed to know quite how it worked, other than it didn’t make sense with any established science. There was a lot of that in the reports – this or that feature being counter to all current, established knowledge of physics, with no sign of any reconciliation.
What a comforting thought. No one knew how it worked, just that it did, and their entire commerce system and most of the government was now based on it. Shige got up to fix himself another drink.
After floundering in detail, he decided to go back to the earliest files, the first experimental Weathermen. Understanding the root could mean finding understanding of the current state of things.
Only he found a strange gap. The earliest of the genetic experiments were there to be seen, and no problems at all. But the neural network research was far in advance, at that point. The genetic alterations had, in fact, been made to suit that generation of the neural networks, and then the two had evolved side by side from then on.
What, then, had come before?
And there, he found files hidden in the gap, code-locked on a different level than what he’d deciphered before. Shige downed the last of his drink, long since watered by melted ice. Whatever was in there must be interesting indeed, he thought, if it was so well hidden.
He set up a new codebreaker with the most current Corporate security keys he’d liberated from Meetchim’s office, only a few days before. To his dismay, that wasn’t the immediate solution. It would take time, and brute force.
What the hell had he found?
21 Days
A strange sound filled the air, almost like the shriek of a hunting bird, but it was a scream, and it came from Mr Yellow’s lips. Shige wondered idly what the sound would be like if he was actually in the room with the Weatherman, rather than watching him from the other side of presumably soundproofed glass. He felt the scream like pressure against his eyes and the skin of his cheeks, a wordless, endless want that he needed to silence. “How long has this been going on?” he asked Dr Kiyoder, who stood beside him.
Her mouth was a grim line in her round, sallow face. “Since he woke up, about ten minutes before I called you.”
He ought to be more worried than this, but Mr Yellow wasn’t really hurt, was he? He merely… needed something. “Has this sort of thing happened before?”
She shook her head. “Not at this scale. It’s normally caused by insufficient acclimation. If we were anywhere else, I’d just keep him in a dimly lit room, turn on the white noise generator, and give him a bit of time. They normally calm themselves after a few hours. But the conditions here are… more difficult.” She rubbed her eyes, which were bloodshot and surrounded by dark circles. “More native material to consume would be our best bet, but he processed all of the subjects we had in holding. That should have been enough.”
Shige grimaced at the phrasing of “processing,” though he trusted she interpreted that as annoyance at the situation. “There’s serious unrest occurring in most of the towns. They ought to be cleaning up the problem workers soon, and I imagine there will be no small number of them contaminated.”
“Likely,” Kiyoder said, though she didn’t sound all that cheered. “I really don’t understand what they have to complain about. But I’d rather not have Mr Yellow in this state for however long that will take to sort out.” She frowned. “I might have to put him in stasis.”
He didn’t like the sound of that at all, Mr Yellow going away until they could get replacement parts of some sort on the next rift ship. The thought sparked an odd quiver of panic in his chest, one that would be unproductive if he allowed it to flourish. “If that’s the best you can do…”
But it wasn’t right, he found himself thinking. This wasn’t a situation that meant poor attunement. Mr Yellow had been well settled for some weeks. This was a different problem, a different kind of imbalance, though it became harder and harder to think the longer the sound went on, the longer he stood in this room and felt the simple, elemental nature of Mr Yellow’s need pressing against the backs of his eyes. Thirsty. The words drifted through his mind, We are always thirsty.
He could almost feel that thirst, thick on his tongue, and the haunting trace of the hot mouthful that would give relief. “Dr Kiyoder… do you still have those blood samples I recovered from the attack?” Part of him found the thought revolting. Kazu was still his brother, even if he’d become something monstrous. But that blood, it would be full of the so-called “witchiness.” Mr Yellow needed it, and that sudden conviction could not be shaken.
Kiyoder’s expression shifted to something more thoughtful. “They are… quite remarkable. Highly contaminated, more than anything else I’ve seen – though with similarities to subject 64539.”
It took Shige a minute to recall why that number sounded so significant – that was the designation given to Magdala Kushtrim during her brief stint in the Corporate lab. He’d committed her records to memory before he went looking for her after her escape. And she was somehow similar to what his brother had become? Tone carefully uncomprehending, the desire for information warring with a sudden urge to scream at Dr Kiyoder to get on with it because Mr Yellow was dying of thirst, couldn’t she feel it, he said, “Oh?”
She nodded, not really paying attention to him now as anything but a source of affirmative noises. “I revisited that data set with the new, if inadequate information you brought me about the amritite. And I think there might be a connection. Which makes Mr Green’s interaction with that subject even more interesting. So perhaps…”
“Perhaps?” he prompted.
Kiyoder waved vaguely at him, then disappeared down the hall. He considered following, if for no other reason than to escape the unearthly noise Mr Yellow still made. It was more in character to wait. Dr Kiyoder had been prodded into motion, and that was what mattered most.
He wasn’t kept waiting long. Kiyoder returned with one hand covered in a translucent safety glove, and a vial of blood held in her fingers. She let herself into the room with Mr Yellow; the moment the door was opened, the inhuman screaming became startlingly loud. Shige watched as she unscrewed the cap on the vial and waved it under Mr Yellow’s nose, like one might do with old-style smelling salts on someone who had fainted. When that elicited no reaction, she tipped the vial to let a dark, viscous drop fall into the Weatherman’s mouth.
The screaming stopped instantly. Mr Yellow blinked his eyes, then a pale, thin hand lashed out to yank the vial from Kiyoder’s fingers and bring it to his lips. He slurped the blood down – Shige felt a shiver of relief that he couldn’t hear the sound – and then looked at Kiyoder. His lips moved into a word that Shige felt like it had been written directly on his nerves: “More.”
Shige turned and ran down the hall to where he recalled specimen storage bein
g. He recognized the vials he had brought and took the entire cold case to bring back to Kiyoder. She relieved him of it instantly, and this time he followed her into Mr Yellow’s room to watch the Weatherman drink them all down, one after another, so like a university student downing shots that Shige had to choke back a near-hysterical laugh. The Weatherman dropped the empty vials on the floor, heedless of their shattering.
When he’d had the last and licked every red trace from his lips with his tongue, Mr Yellow smiled. Shige’s knees went weak with a relief he did not want to question, and a strange thread of pleasure.
And then Mr Yellow said: “We hear it clearly now.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
19 Days
“Mag, you got a second?” A small, white-haired man, his back hunched, caught Mag’s sleeve with his hand as she passed by. His fingernails were clean – it took her a moment to remember he was one of the town’s tailors, and hadn’t been in the mine for years.
“Of course.” If she had a second to herself right now, she’d be using it to sleep.
He stared down at the cracked leather slippers he wore. “Can I trouble you for a few days’ worth of water? I saved much as I could, but somethin’… a rat, maybe, it chewed through one of the bags.”
“You all out?”
His shoulders jerked. “Didn’t have much to begin with.”
There wasn’t anything to be done about that, even if the thought of already breaking into their supplies filled her with dread. This moment had been coming, and she should feel positive it’d taken this long; the store had been refusing to sell since the strike had started, out of sheer spite. “I’ll bring you a day ration. But put it in somethin’ sturdier.”
“Thank you. Feel like a damn fool, I do.”
She ought to comfort him. Maybe it was fatigue that made the words stick in her throat.
Mag walked to the furthest warehouse through quiet streets to find the building empty – too empty. Mag went through all of the crates that remained, ones they’d cribbed from supplies that had been shipped in years ago and never touched. They were empty now: the supply cache was gone.
