by Neil Clarke
Tiago nodded. Don’t get noticed. Don’t cross dangerous people like Kay unless you could run. Melt into the background. These were core life principles of his. It was why he made a good pickpocket. There was even a mid-sized bounty available for his capture.
“More importantly, you’ve been in the Dekkan Holding Center,” Nashara said. In the distant background the sound of rain alarms drifted through the streets. A night storm. The worst kind.
A cold chill gripped Tiago. “You want me to go back to The Center?” Images of the dark warrens flitted back to the front of his mind.
“Not as such.” Kay pointed a Kevlar poncho and gas mask hanging by the door. “Suit up.”
They walked through the slowly darkening streets, the rain hissing against their protective gear. Nashara wore goggles and a long leather fisherman’s coat that seemed impervious to the rain, Kay the same outfit as Tiago.
Their footsteps clicked against cobblestone as Kay led them through sidealleys and tiny backstreets so cramped they had to move through them single file.
No one else was out.
Tiago stopped a tremble in his hands at the thought of being out at night.
Several times they came to dead ends, where small locked doors stopped Kay’s progress. But a few knocks in a pattern and they would open, and the trio would tromp through someone’s front room, leaving sizzling drops of rain behind.
There was no hurry, and Tiago gauged that they’d moved across the entire city over the last two hours.
Kay finally stopped and removed her gas mask in the quiet foyer of a restaurant, eerie in its empty state, though the tables were all set and ready: waiting for the morning crowd. She looked right at Tiago as he removed his mask. He burned his fingers on the wet straps as she said, “I’m turning you over to the warden of the DHC for the bounty. The driver of the prison wagon has been paid to suggest stopping to pick you up.”
He felt numb. Outside, Tiago saw through the windows, the rain had fallen to a drizzle. The gaslight streetlamps flickered shadows as the wind flicked their flames this way and that.
“So you do want me back in the hellhole,” he said, the misery leaking out into his voice.
Kay pulled out a packet of photos and spread them with a flourish across a nearby table like a card dealer. “No. You’ll get picked up, but there’s someone inside the wagon that Nashara wants.”
Tiago frowned. Kay was helping Nashara why? He couldn’t quite put together what was happening here.
Kay leaned close. She was doing it, creating that little bubble of space that seemed to exist just between the two of them. It was some sort of talent, almost magical. “Don’t try to figure it out, Tiago. Just take a look at the pictures of the crew of the Zephyr III. One of them will be in the wagon. We need your help.”
He looked up and out of the bay windows. He wondered how far he could get if just ran. He had some money, maybe he could stowaway on a boat.
How long could he evade Kay?
Not very long.
She gently grabbed his jaw to point his gaze back down at the table. She’d read his thoughts via his body language. “There’s no running, Tiago. Not now.”
He swallowed and committed the faces before him to memory, something other than fear building as she put a hand on his back to steady him.
“I’ll be there as well,” Nashara said from by the door. She’d opened her coat up, and underneath Tiago saw more guns lining the inside than he’d even known a single person could carry. She was a walking arsenal. You rarely saw any guns on the island, too expensive, even for criminals.
“So why don’t you just break into the wagon and get the person you want?” Tiago asked.
“Don’t want to tip my hand until we know we have the person we want. Otherwise, if we go in too early guns blazing on the wrong wagon, our guy could get hidden further, or put under tougher security. So you’re our scout, Tiago. When you give us the go ahead, we move in to recover both of you.”
“And if the person isn’t there, I get beaten, interrogated, and locked up.”
“We will get you out quickly if that happens, we can bribe a few judges, and Nashara is ready to pay you well,” Kay said. She was pulling on her poncho. Before she snapped on the bug-like gasmask, she continued. “I have to go meet the wagon. I’ll be back shortly.”
This was his moment to bolt.
Nashara picked up the pictures of the crew. “Three weeks ago. You remember anything strange happening?”
Tiago stopped thinking about other lives and worlds. “There was a fight. At night. All over the town. Whoever it was burst through walls, fell through roofs. Ripped up road. No one saw much of it. We just saw the damage . . . ”
“It was my grandfather: Pepper was on his way back with information about a new threat to the Xenowealth worlds. He disappeared here, last seen getting aboard the Zephyr III. But the Zephyr was destroyed in a limited yield nuclear blast event nowhere near any of the wormholes out, but a hundred miles north of here in the polar ocean.
“Word is that one survivor from the Zephyr III came back. You’re going to help me acquire him. I came with a ship, it’s pretty heavily armed up: the Streuner. Pepper didn’t have backup, I’m not making the same mistake. Once we’re on the ship, it’s a run for the wormhole, back into the heart of the Xenowealth, for debriefing.”
Acquire him. There was a strange turn of a word, Tiago thought. She was a kindred soul to Kay. Someone who wove the fate of everyone around them.
He was just a pickpocket. It was all he ever really aspired to. His own quiet moments on the seawall, a safe, dry place to sleep. Good food.
Now he was caught up in something that involved the fates of the connected worlds.
“What does Kay get out of it?” Tiago asked, treading into areas which he knew he shouldn’t be poking his nose.
Nashara tapped the inside of her coat, and the guns jiggled. “Force multipliers.”
“You know what she’ll do with all that?”
Nashara nodded, her dreadlocks shaking as she did so. “She plans to run the island.”
“She will.”
“Maybe. But only if she stops depending brazenly on those modifications the Nesaru bred into her.” She smiled at Tiago’s shock that she knew about that rumor. “You’re an open book to her. And she holds your strings. But only when she’s standing in front of you. She has to learn other ways to get people to do her bidding, and her teachers have been the underbelly of Harbortown. To be a great leader requires more, it requires people to trust you just as much when you’re not standing right in front of them. That takes something else. Besides, what she has: it’s not that special a talent.”
“Do you have it?”
“Yes. Different technology, not biological, but same result. But Tiago, free will’s a bitch. Kay can only manipulate. Underneath, we still move our own lives forward. You understand? We fought the entire war over that, back when the Satrapy ruled everything. Before human independence.”
Only someone as powerful as she was, Tiago thought, could believe that about free will.
He chose not to say that.
But then, she could probably see him thinking that anyway.
“Here.” Nashara pressed a small sliver of metal into his palm. “Jam that under the target’s skin, it’ll tag him for me and let us know to come get you both.”
“Okay.” He’d have to keep this out of the cops’ hands. Easy enough. He’d snuck small items around the heavy security of The Center.
Outside the loud hiss of a compressed air powered wagon drew closer, and then it stopped. Nashara pulled a large pistol out and aimed it cheerfully at Tiago’s head. “Time to turn you in, Tiago.”
Tiago had sworn many oaths to never end back up in one of these wagons. Yet here he was again. It was near midnight as they jerked into motion with a belch. Tiago looked around. Unfamiliar, bruised, battered faces regarded him.
For a moment he panicked, not seeing any of the faces
from the pictures Kay had shown him. He imagined getting locked away in the sweaty man-made caverns underneath Harbor Town.
Then he saw the youngest face in the wagon and recognized it from the photos he’d been shown of the crew of the Zephyr III. It was just a boy. A boy who was younger than Tiago.
Could he drag him into the net Kay and Nashara had cast?
Yes. The boy was already caught up in the mess from being on the same boat as Nashara’s grandfather.
Tiago stood up, tripped, caught himself, and then sat down near the locked rear door.
The boy hadn’t even felt the pinprick of Nashara’s tiny device.
Tiago waited, tensed, for something, anything, to happen.
The wagon rolled on, turning a corner, headlights revealing ten Ox-men blocking the road with spike strips. The wheels of the wagon exploded as they were shredded, and it rattled to a halt on the rims as prisoners in back were thrown against each other.
Nashara landed on the ground outside. She must have leapt off the top of a building nearby, Tiago realized, as pulverized cobblestone leapt into the air from her impact.
She ripped the door open, shattering the lock, and reached in to pull the boy out. Tiago jumped out next to them.
Three Ox-men ran into the alleyway, eyes wide with fear. “Doacq,” one shouted in a low rumble.
Nashara looked down the road. “Tiago, what the hell is that?”
Tiago didn’t need to glance a second time. “Oh shit. Shit! The Doacq. We need to get out of here. Now!”
The seven foot tall, hooded figure moved with unnatural quickness down the street. Tiago caught a glimpse, in the flicker of gaslamp, of two large, catlike eyes under the cowl and a slit-like nose.
But it was the mouth that he noticed most. It yawned, the jaw dislocating and stretching like a snake’s: a two foot gaping chase of darkness.
The Doacq whipped across the street, slamming into an Ox-man. The jaw dropped even lower, and the Doacq rose taller, somehow, and then the gaping maw descended on the Ox-man.
Hundreds of pounds of rippling, engineered, brute strength disappeared, and the Doacq turned to face the wagon.
“That’s a damn wormhole in its mouth,” Nashara said, awe in her voice. Then she grabbed the side of the wagon and grunted. “And it’s generating an EMP field . . . ”
The Doacq flowed forward, the robe rippling in the slight wind. The massive jaw gaped wider and wider as it got closer. It seemed all maw to Tiago, mesmerized by the black nothingness opening up, propelled by the creature’s feet.
Nashara pulled out a large shotgun, and the deafening discharge filled the tiny stone canyon of street and houses. The Doacq twitched to face the incoming shot . . . and swallowed it all without any change in its approach.
“Son of a bitch,” she said, and then leapt forward. The Doacq, ducked and grabbed her, redirecting the energy of the jump to throw her in the side of a house.
Nashara staggered back to her feet in the middle a mess of rubble.
Tiago grabbed the boy and looked around for a place to hide. One of the nearest doors opened, and whip-lean shape of a Runner beckoned at him to get inside.
He needed no encouraging. He ran for the door.
Three explosions shook the street, and Tiago saw with a glance back that Nashara had flicked grenades at the Doacq. It swallowed several, but couldn’t be in more than one place at the same time.
Another grenade exploded to its side, and the Doacq faltered. Shreds of its cloak and flesh splattered on the ground and an animal-like shriek of pain filled the streets.
The Doacq was not supernatural, Tiago thought, dazed. It could be harmed. He paused at the doorway. Maybe Nashara could face it down.
But then the Doacq spotted him, and turned for the building, completely ignoring Nashara.
An Ox-man yanked Tiago into the house and barred the door shut. “This way,” the Ox-man grumbled, and shoved the two boys forward through the house.
A trapdoor underneath a table led them under the house, into a hidden basement lit by a single bulb.
“Through here,” said a Runner, appearing out of the dark. The shadows made his ribs, visible under a thin shirt, look even more pronounced than normal.
There was heavy, thick steel door a pair of Ox-men had opened. As they passed through that, they groaned shut, and then dropped to the ground as something was kicked out from underneath them. The smell or rank sewage took the breath away from Tiago, and he switched to breathing only out of his mouth.
In the distance, and explosion of brick and screaming startled Tiago. The Doacq must have gotten into the house. With Nashara in pursuit.
They were standing inside a tunnel, lit glancingly by the Runner’s flashlight. The center of the tunnel had a wide trench in it, currently dry.
It revealed Kay waiting with a pair of Ox-men armed with RPGs. They aimed the weapons at the thick door behind Tiago.
“So this is our quarry,” Kay said, turning on a small penlight to check the boy. “Your name is June, right?”
The shellshocked, beaten boy nodded.
“Can you speak, June?”
“Yes.” It was a faint whisper, unsure of itself. But it was the most June had done since this had all started, other than let Tiago drag him around to safety.
“Well June, this is Tiago, and we have to move quickly before the Doacq comes after us. It likes characters like us. It finds us interesting.”
Kay led them down the gentle slope of the tunnel at a brisk pace to a junction, where the sound of running water filled the air, and the stench increased.
Five Ox-men stood in a trench full of dirty water holding onto a small metal boat with an electric engine on the back.
Something boomed in the distance, echoing through the sewer tunnels, as they clambered in.
Kay smiled. “That should slow the Doacq down.” She waved her hand at the Ox-men and they let go. She gunned the engine up to a brisk whine as the boat shot clear, bouncing off the sides of the trench.
Tiago had a moment to absorb everything now. He turned to Kay. “All this preparation. You knew the Doacq was coming? How?”
“He always comes when there’s this much activity,” Kay said. “And he’s difficult to stop. I thought maybe he was allergic to the sun, but he shrugged off the ultraviolet and full spectrum lamps I installed on his favorite haunts. Since then, it’s gotten harder and harder to hunt. I can’t even get a good picture of it, cameras fail around it.”
Tiago felt like he was looking at a different person. “How can you know so much about the Doacq?” Most of the town didn’t even talk about it, they whispered about it and avoided the night. When people disappeared, you didn’t dwell on it. You knocked on wood that you would never be the one to turn a corner, and see the Doacq standing there.
“You hunt the Doacq?” Tiago asked.
She heard the stunned disbelief in his voice and turned on him. “It’s an alien. It’s not some supernatural creature, Tiago. It’s like the Nesaru, just more powerful. We don’t know where it comes from, but just like the other aliens, it plays on human land as if it owns it. It thinks it rules us, but it doesn’t!”
There was a hatred in her face, naked for the two boys to see. She’d let her control slip. “I will destroy it. And then I will take the island. And after that, I will make the Nesaru leave, and the Gahe, and the other stinking aliens that have kept us under their thumb flock through here. Pepper may have failed to kill the Doacq for me, Nashara may fail yet, but I won’t.”
She turned down another tunnel as Tiago bent over and grabbed his knees. This was insane. They were up against the Doacq?
“You did good, Tiago,” Kay said, her face under control again. “You got her to chase you, despite the rain incident. You got her to invest in you, to want to protect you, just enough that instead of grabbing June and running back to her ship, she decided to tackle the Doacq. It was perfect. You have a place among my lieutenants, a place on this island, Tiago. You
did well.”
He didn’t feel like it.
Things had gotten complicated quickly. He hadn’t intended the mark to be a living legend.
He certainly hadn’t expected to be involved in the betrayal of a living legend.
Tiago shivered.
Kay had a safe house set up for them. It took getting out of the sewers and back onto the streets, through the alleys and people’s homes again. By the time they got inside, Tiago couldn’t tell where in Harbor Town he was. They’d doubled back, and around, and it was so late it was now probably officially early. His eyes were scratchy, his movements felt like they were delayed by a half second.
“Don’t worry,” Kay told him as she took their protective gear. “You’ll be safe here. There are people for the Doacq to catch. He’ll eventually slow down, turn his attention elsewhere. It’s all planned.”
It didn’t make Tiago feel any better. He caught the eyes of June, and the other boy certainly didn’t look reassured either.
But Kay caught that. And she spent time with them until they were mollified, and relaxed. There were Ox-men guarding the house, equipped with heavy machine guns, and escape routes everywhere.
A tall man came in with cold water and sandwiches. Somehow getting something in his stomach took the edge of Tiago’s fears.
Maybe it was just having something to do.
“There is more I have to do,” Kay said. “The caches of arms Nashara promised me need swept up and stored in secure locations. And eventually, I need to see who won.”
She left the room, five foot figure flanked by a pair Ox-men.
June stopped eating. “Do you trust her?” He asked.
Tiago looked up and wanted to say he did, but the words caught in his mouth. “I don’t know. She’s dangerous to cross.”
June gestured at his face. “As dangerous as this?”
“Yes.”
“Then I don’t want to have anything to do with her,” he said. “I’ve had enough.”
The boy looked exhausted.
“I’m sorry,” Tiago muttered. “I’m very sorry. I thought you would be going with Nashara.”
