by Neil Clarke
He poured wine, and she wished she could have added a trip to the beauty parlor as part of the last meal. She had always wanted to be a blonde or maybe a redhead.
About the Author
Don Webb has won both the Fiction Collective and Death Equinox Awards, been nominated for both the Rhysling and International Horror Critics Awards. He dwells in Austin, Texas with his wife the video artist Guiniviere Webb. He has several dozen short stories in anthologies, and as a Texan, a secret recipe for chili. He is a staple at Armadillocons in Austin, and despite having three mystery novels, loves the short story form the best.
Placa del Fuego
Tobias S. Buckell
Tiago would normally have taken his cut of the picked pockets and stopped right here at the Seaside Plaza. On the very edge, past the vendors on the cobblestone sea walk, Tiago would sit with his legs over the rocky sea wall and look out over the harbor.
Today he only detoured through the plaza to throw the crowd in between him and the woman chasing him.
He’d gotten a brief glimpse of her before the running started: tall, dark eyes, dark skin, dark leather jacket and microfibre pants, careful dreadlocks pulled back into a pony tail.
She was fast in the crowd. She wasn’t dodging around legs, using the ebb and flow of the masses to see open routes like Tiago. No, people who got in her way were just . . . thrown out of the way.
Too strong. She was some sort of soldier, Tiago thought, refocusing ahead.
He might have gotten himself into a bit of a situation.
Slipping onto the seawall path, he sprinted harder, deciding that she was covering the gap in the crowd. To his right the harbor was filled with ships and their cargo, anchored and waiting for a spot to clear on the docks. One of them was throwing out a parasail, the windfoil bucking in the inconsistent harbor wind, but then filling out, rising up into the air hundreds of feet overhead, and then some.
The ship began to pick its way out of the harbor, headed between the tall forest of wind turbines at the harbor’s edge: a dangerous move to unleash a windfoil in the harbor, but suddenly Tiago noticed other ships unfurling sails in haste. A cloud of brightly colored parafoils leapt to the harbor sky like butterflies swarming from a shaken limb.
This was worrying enough that Tiago slowed, somewhat, and looked to his left. The warehouses, three and four stories tall, dominated the first row of buildings. But behind them, climbing tenaciously up the side of the mountain, homes and houses colorfully dotted the slopes.
A large, dark mass of gray haze topped the rocky crest and slowly fell down toward the harbor like a heavy cloud.
“Oh shit.” Tiago stopped. People in the Plaza were turning too, and murmuring started to spread. They stood up from picnics or meals and the edges of the crowd were already leaving.
The woman smacked into Tiago and grabbed his upper arm.
“Take your damn money,” Tiago shouted. I don’t want it. I’m sorry. Just let me go.”
She looked puzzled as he shoved the paper money into the pockets of her jacket. He may have even given her more than he’d stolen, he wasn’t sure.
“What’s . . . ”
Tiago pointed up the mountain. “It’s going to rain.”
She looked over the buildings and let him go. “I forgot.”
Forgot? There were two things on the island to remember: stay out of the rain, and avoid the Doacq’s attention by staying inside at night.
He bolted. The last thing he saw was the armada of harbor ships, parafoils all full overhead, pulling their hulls up onto their hydrofoil skids as they all scattered to get well clear of the island.
Then the sirens began to wail all throughout Placa del Fuego, alerting its citizens to the descending danger.
From the open sweep of the docks and seawall of the harbor, Tiago headed into the heart of Harbortown. He could breathe easier seeing overhangs above him, and walls he could put his back to.
People hurried about with carbon-fiber or steel umbrellas. Some had already gotten into their hazmat gear.
The klaxons wailed in the background, constantly blearing out their call for all to find shelter. Shops slammed thick windows shut and bolted them, while people yanked tables and chairs and billboards inside. Customers packed in, shoulder to shoulder.
No self-respecting shop would let Tiago inside: he was an urchin. His clothes were ripped and melted, his face dirty, and he ran on bare feet.
They’d toss him out on his ass faster than he could get inside.
A faint stinging mist started to fill the air. Tiago squinted and slowed down. The unfamiliar would run faster, but then they’d inhale more. He cupped his hands over his mouth, a piece of flannel in between his fingers to filter the air. He looked down at the cobblestoned street to protect his eyes.
His calloused, flattened feet knew the street. Knew how many steps it would take to reach the alley, knew how many times he’d have to pull himself up on the old pipe running outside to get up onto the roof, and how many more steps across the concrete to get to his niche.
It was a spot between two old storage buildings a few streets back from the waterfront, almost near the Xeno-town enclave. One of them had a large, reinforced concrete gutter along its edge, and when the second building had been built right alongside, wall to wall, had left a sheltered ledge the length of the building.
You wouldn’t know it to look at it. Twenty street kids had taken bricks and concrete and built a wall along the overhang, blending it into the architecture. It was behind this that Tiago had his very own room.
To get to it, he stepped out over the edge of the building, and behind the wall.
Safe.
His skin stung from contact with the mist, but he could sit in the entryway along the corridor leading down to the seven foot by four foot concrete cubicles they called home, and watch the rain.
It was a floating, frothy jelly, spit out from the trees on the island into the air, that slowly floated down. In most cases it just slowly burned at whatever it landed on, like some sort of an acid.
But after that, all it took was a spark for it to ignite.
In the distance the harbor pumps thrummed to life. All over the city the engineers were fighting back the rain with a mist of their own, taken from the harbor water to coat and rinse the harbor.
Usually being on this side of the mountain protected them. But sometimes the wind changed. Sometimes the fire forests were unusually active.
Either way, you didn’t want to be outside. The burns and scars on the children huddled around the openings of their sanctuary testified to that.
The steady rain continued, sizzling as it hit the ground outside.
Tiago relaxed in the quiet among his neighbors as the city fought the rain. He could worry about explaining to Kay why he was coming back with no money from the morning’s work later, as much as that scared him. For now, he was just happy to be out of the rain.
He just about leapt out of skin as the wall next to him crumpled and the woman who’d been chasing him shoved her way through and crouched in front of him.
“Hello,” she said. “We still have business to finish.”
Tiago jumped up to run and the other kids moved back away from him.
But where could he go with the rain coming down so hard?
He looked back at his pursuer. The rain had eaten away at the skin on her forearms, exposing silvery metal underneath. Metal pistons snicked as she flexed her fingers.
A cyborg. Here on Placa del Fuego.
Impossible.
There was no advanced machinery on Placa del Fuego. It all failed on the island, until one reached three miles offshore. In Harbortown the sailors said scientists from other worlds clustered aboard large ships near the wormholes, monitoring what islanders called the deadzone and they called ‘an unexplained continuous EMP event.’ They claimed the epicenter was somewhere deep under the crust of the planet, right under Placa del Fuego.
The wormholes that lead f
rom the ocean around Placa del Fuego to the oceans of other worlds light years away were anchored in the water just on the edge of the deadzone, and the scientists were there to order the wormholes moved as the deadzone expanded slightly each month.
One street rumor said that one of the alien races had buried a device under the island, intending to use it as a cover for a last stand during the human war for independence. Some said it was the Doacq that bought the deadzone with it.
It didn’t matter what or who caused it. The end effect was that the town used pneumatic tubes to send messages. Ox-men from Okur pulled rickshaws around, or people used the compressed air powered trolley cars. Everything ran on compressed air: the town’s reservoirs were filled by the myriad wind turbines that festooned the harbor entrance and the exposed ridges of the mountain.
But because of the deadzone, this woman shouldn’t have been here, Tiago thought. She shouldn’t even work. But in the cramped darkness of his room the cyborg woman squatted on Tiago’s hand-carved wooden stool.
As Tiago turned on a bright white LED lamp she counted off a lot more money than he’d stolen, or given back to her. Bill after bill after bill. A massive fistful. A month’s takings.
It hovered between them.
“Before you tagged me and made the pick,” she said, “you seemed to know your way around the harbor. I need someone like you.”
Tiago took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure if he needed someone like her.
She was trouble.
The hesitation must have been obvious to her. She smiled. “I’ll double what you want.”
What was the alternative? Tiago took the money. He’d be a fool not to.
“What are you looking to do?” he asked.
“I need to find the person at the top of the underground. Who sees all and knows all.” The cyborg shifted, and the stool creaked. Tiago grimaced. It was made of imported wood, and it was his most precious possession. “I’m looking for Kay.”
“Kay?” Tiago feigned confusion.
“You know who I’m talking about,” the woman smiled.
He did. He wasn’t very good at lying straight-faced. He swallowed nervously. “What do you need from her?”
“I need Kay’s help.” Tiago waited for more, and the cyborg continued. “To find my grandfather. How do I find this person?”
“You don’t find Kay,” Tiago said. He folded the money away into the depths of his ragged clothes. “She finds you. Go find yourself a nice room along the waterfront somewhere. Kay will show up now that someone knows you’re trying to find her. That’s how it works.”
“Word on the street.” The woman leaned forward and held out her hand. A card rested in her palm. “I’ll pay you the other half when I meet Kay. Come find me tomorrow at noon.”
Tiago took the card. An address had been scribbled onto it. “What is your name, then?”
“Nashara.”
Nashara. A cyborg called Nashara. The Nashara? Was he really talking to a living, breathing legend?
Tiago’s hands shook.
She was a lot more than just trouble.
He’d gotten himself in way, way deep into something.
Nashara, left, walking out in to the sizzling rain like it was no more than an inconvenience.
It was only a moment before Tiago’s neighbors parted and the tiny figure of Kay walked out. Her grey eyes took in the broken brick with a flick before she turned to face him. Her hair was cut just short of her ears, almost boyish. She was shorter than Tiago, something that always surprised him. In his own mind she stood much taller. “I’ll have it repaired,” she said calmly, flicking her head at the destruction.
Kay’s fixing the damage would obligate them to her.
But no one said anything. Refusing it would be an even bigger problem.
They might come to beat him up tonight, Tiago thought. If they weren’t too scared.
“You were here the whole time?” Tiago asked, his voice cracking slightly with fear.
Kay ignored his surprise. “That was a Nashara. Here on the island. I wonder how she’s able to work here?” Ox-men: two large slabs of hairy muscle, large eyes and flat noses, squeezed into the passageway behind her, stooping over to fit. They regarded Tiago with dull, incurious eyes.
“I don’t know . . . ” Tiago muttered.
Kay unpacked a Kevlar poncho and pulled it carefully on. She buckled on a gas mask. Behind her, the two Ox-men did the same.
In a muffled voice she told Tiago, “Do you know how expensive it would be to shield someone like her, a cyborg, to be able to function in the deadzone? That must be what she’s done. It means she has access to . . . incredible resources.” She paused thoughtfully, thinking about that. Then she continued. “I have preparations to make before I’ll meet her. Keep your appointment. I’ll send someone for you both.”
She stepped out into the rain, and the Ox-men followed her. The three of them disappeared over the side of the building in the haze, and Tiago turned around to face the boys trying to hide in the shadows.
He could tell by the fear on their faces that they would not be bothering him.
They were far, far too scared of Kay.
So was he.
Nashara sat at a table outside a seawall restaurant, surveying the Plaza over a cup of tea. A few small fires had broken out the night before where jellied rain had landed on canopies or abandoned stalls. But considering the strength of last night’s storm, it wasn’t too bad, Tiago thought. He’d certainly seen worse.
His new benefactor motioned Tiago to sit with her.
“It’s odd,” she muttered as he sat. “All this stone, brick, slate. Leather for clothes. No wood, no fabrics. Hardly any trees, not even scrub. Grim.”
Tiago looked down at his patched clothes. She was surprisingly ignorant about the island if she was the real Nashara. The real Nashara had cloned her own mind to infect alien starships in the fight for human independence. The real Nashara was a founder of the Xenowealth. The real Nashara was a force of nature. That Nashara, it seemed to Tiago, would, at least know about stuff here on the island. “Rich people have them,” he said. “In those glass houses.”
“Greenhouses?”
Tiago shrugged. “Sure.”
Sometimes, in the quieter moments, looking out over the harbor, he’d wondered what the places were like out over the horizon, and through the wormhole the ships sailed through to get to the oceans of other worlds, and through wormholes in those oceans to even more. Other worlds where things were made, and then transported here. Where people like Nashara came from.
But it was useless to daydream too much about where the ships went. Because they weren’t taking Tiago along with them. No matter how much he wished for it whenever he sat on the sea wall.
Nashara set her tiny wooden cup down and stood up. “I think Kay will be receiving us now.”
Tiago turned around, and the two Ox-men he’d seen last night had silently, amazingly for their bulk, walked up right behind him.
They didn’t have to say anything, they turned around and began to walk away. Nashara followed.
And that, he thought, was the end of that.
Only it wasn’t.
Up at the end of Onyx street, down the stairs cut into the side of the road and in the basement of an old house tunneled into a rock outcropping at the very edge of town, was one of Kay’s many lairs.
He’d been summoned there, two days later.
Amber late-afternoon light pierced the dusty windows, and a menagerie of Placa del Fuego’s shadowy denizens milled about. There were more Ox-men, some Runners, and even a few simple-minded Servants. Lots of grubby kids like Tiago, many of them faces he recognized from Elizan’s crew crowded in, as well as others from all over the rest of the city. They were Kay’s crew, now, all of them. She owned the Waterfront and the Back Ring, and was almost done finishing up controlling the Harbor.
If it was criminal, and happened in Placa del Fuego, Kay wanted to run it.
/> It had been different, last year. Last year Tiago worked for Elizan; a high strung old man who would leap at a chance to whip anyone who’d held back the take.
A tough life: Tiago still had misshapen broken bones to prove it, but it beat trying to live outside alone. Something he’d learned quickly enough.
Placa del Fuego had no heart for the homeless.
When Kay appeared on the streets in the Back Ring, rain-burned and tired, she’d been ignored. For the first week. The second week she’d figured out the command structure of one of the drug cartels and executed the commander with a sliver of knapped flint.
Within days the cartel danced to her tune.
Rumors said she came from Okur, where the birdlike alien Nesaru had established a colony. Under the Bacigalupi Doctrine, anticipating the lack of fuel and the collapse of the interstellar travel after the war for independence, the Nesaru had bred humans into a variety of forms to serve them. Nesaru engineered, bred, and reshaped human Ox-men and Runners had fled Okur to Placa del Fuego. So had Kay.
She was something else, Okur refugees said. Something designed to control the modified human slaves under the Nesaru’s thumb. She could read your thoughts by the slightest change in your posture, a twitch in a facial muscle. She emitted pheromones to calm you, convince you, and used her body to control your personal space.
You were a computer, waiting to be programmed. She was your taskmaster. A perfect, bred, engineered, manipulator of humankind.
“Tiago,” Kay said, beckoning him closer. “Nashara and I have quite a job for you.”
Nashara stepped out from behind a thick stone pillar. “There will be considerably more money in it for you.”
Kay put a protective arm around Tiago. “I really need your help with this, Tiago.”
He stiffened slightly as she moved in closer, creating a tiny world between just the three of them. “What do you need?” he asked, hesitant.
“You keep a low profile, Tiago. Back of the crowd. You don’t try to cheat me of my cut. You wouldn’t even dare think of it.”
