His response gives her nothing. “What I would do is not the issue. But I suspect we are soon to find out what you did.”
The cat leans close and sniffs at Aiah’s ear. Aiah’s stomach turns at the moist touch of his breath, at the stench of a thousand dead animals. Aiah fights the sick feeling in her belly, the cry of despair and futility that rises in her heart.
Stick to the program, she thinks, and lightning illuminates the conservatory in pale corpse-light.
“Were I given such a thing,” Aiah says, “I would know I couldn’t use it myself. So I would offer it to someone . ..”
Sorya laughs again. “For a million.”
Aiah clenches her teeth. “For a sum considerably less than its value.” The cat’s rumble is loud in her ear; maybe even the cat is laughing at her.
Constantine leans back in his chair. Leather creaks, pneumatics sigh. “Ah. I knew — we knew —” with a nod at Sorya, “— from your peculiar insistence over the phone, that you wanted to see me for some reason other than some little metering problem. At least it isn’t some,” he lets weariness show in his eyes, “feeble attempt at romance. You are not as tedious as that.”
“Thank you.” Aiah speaks as coldly as she can.
“You want to sell me power,” Constantine says. “But what use would I have for it? I reside in the Scope of Jaspeer on sufferance. Your sad little republic is stable and old and possesses neither imagination nor conviction, and it considers me an adventurer. It is cautious; it spends a certain amount of effort monitoring my activities. I make this government uneasy, and it would as soon see the last of me.”
His tone is perfectly level, as opaque as his manner, and betrays neither interest nor passion. Maybe, Aiah thinks wildly, I am boring these people.
The cat, at least, is bored with her. It sits and begins to lick its paw.
“What better way,” Constantine continues, “to dispose of its unease, than for this government, or one of its agencies operating on its own, to send a provocateur to my home to tempt me with some grand illegality?” He steeples his fingertips. “How much easier it is to believe this story than to believe that some young woman has discovered a vast source of power, and wishes to sell it.”
“I have it,” Aiah says, “I can show it.”
“This proves nothing.” He sits in his chair unmoving. “If you are who I think you are, tell your government I am uninterested in these games. I have no ambitions, and no spare millions in any case. If you are who you say you are, I wish you success in finding a buyer. The Operation, I know, is always interested.”
Aiah’s nails drive through wool into her thighs. Pain leaps through nerves, tautens her voice. “I won’t do that,” she grates. “Never to them.”
Constantine’s somber pupils grow wider. “Why not?” he asks. “The Operation is at least as respectable as I am. Probably more so.”
“They,” Aiah lets out a breath. “They hurt my sister. I won’t deal with them.”
Constantine just looks at her. Waiting, as always, for her to reveal herself.
“They control all the clubs here,” she says. “And entertainment. And . . .” She waves her hands. “You know that.”
He says nothing. Aiah hates him for making her tell this story — for bringing up the memories, the rage, and all of it for nothing, because he’s not going to take the offer, he’s just bored and looking for entertainment, and Aiah will provide it because she’s too desperate to simply turn and leave.
“She — my sister Henley — she worked for them. Just as a waitress, in a club. She was expected to dress a bit provocatively, but she wasn’t required to — there was nothing more than flirtation involved, and flirtation pays well — she was going through college, getting a degree in graphic arts. And when she’d saved enough, she tried to leave, and when she came to pick up her checktube...” Fingernails bite into thighs again. “The manager had her hands broken. Not just her hands, but wrists and elbows. You don’t do graphic arts with broken hands, do you? And now she got arthritis, and ...” Aiah finds herself snarling, her voice shaking with anger. “Henley wasn’t under contract to him or anything, she didn’t owe him anything, and she was just a waitress, the manager just did it because he could, because he was having a bad day and she made him angry. So —
She shrugs. Hate lies bitter on her tongue, and she can’t tell who she hates, herself for groveling this way or Constantine for making her do it. “So I won’t sell to the Operation. And I guess I won’t sell to you.” She makes a gesture that encompasses the room, the conservatory, all of Mage Towers. “You’ve retired, or taken up gardening. Maybe you only saw me because you were bored. The New City Movement is dead. Pardon me for still believing—”
He holds up a hand. Lightning etches his features. Thunder rocks the tower. “You don’t know what it is you’re asking,” he says.
“Apparently not.” The sarcasm comes easy enough.
“This is not,” he says, “a little business you wish to engage in. You do not deal with little people.” There’s anger in his voice, and Aiah takes a mean satisfaction in having put it there. “And you,” he says, “you have put yourself in our hands. We could take this source of yours, and you could disappear.”
At the threat Aiah feels the hair on her arms prickle. “You couldn’t get to it without me,” she says. “Nor could you use it.”
“Are you that certain?” Sharp teeth gleaming in his black face.
“I’ve taken precautions,” Aiah continues. “Left documents in places where they’d be found.” True enough, in its way.
His lip curls. “Where I couldn’t find them?”
“Metropolitan,” Sorya says. There is a warning in her voice.
“Whatever little dreams you have, put them aside,” Constantine says. His eyes, alive now, burn into hers, though his body is still relaxed in his leather chair. “Can you run with giants?” he demands. “Or at any rate such giants as this sad and barricaded world can engender?”
Hatred still burns in Aiah’s words. “I haven’t seen a giant yet,” she snarls.
“Constantine.” Sorya’s alarm is clear.
Constantine rises from his chair, and Aiah involuntarily shrinks from him — she’s forgotten how huge he is, how powerful, and she sees now that he’s got a copper t-grip in his hand, and that there’s a wire leading from it to some plasm source — Constantine is armed, and active, plasm-light glowing in his eyes, and with a fast, ferocious gesture he thrusts one massive hand toward Aiah. And that is the last she knows, for quite some while.
*
When Aiah comes to herself she’s standing on a wet street-corner busy with end-of-shift traffic. She looks up wildly, sees black glass reflecting receding storm clouds, the black pinnacles of Mage Towers cutting the horizon above a red-brick apartment building. They must be a full radius away. Someone runs into her from behind.
“Oh. Sorry.” She turns to see a businessman with a furled umbrella already hurrying away. Automobiles, silent except for the splash of tires in the wet gutters, glide past on efficient battery power.
Words imprint themselves across the sky.
600 DIE IN APARTMENT BLAZE.
DETAILS ON THE WIRE.
Beneath the burning plasm floats a figure: humanoid, with long wings, its body sheathed in bright metal. One of the twisted, an avian soaring in its element. She looks up in awe. She’s never seen an avian before. She swallows the sudden lump in her throat. Perhaps it’s an omen.
The avian flies out of sight. Aiah looks down at her palm and sees writing there. Alveg Park, 1000, tomorrow. Hardhat. The printed characters, written on flesh, are badly formed, but they’re clearly her own.
She seems to have made an appointment with herself.
But how, she wonders, did she know to look at her palm just then? It was not a natural gesture under the circumstances.
Her eyes leap to the horizon again, the jagged teeth of Mage Towers. He’s been in my head, she thinks.
Apparently not.
She looks around, sees a trackline station of the New Central Line that will take her home. She walks toward it, reaches into her pocket for her Transit Authority pass...
And to her astonishment, she lifts from her pocket a drawstring bag that clinks, full of money.
CHAPTER 9
A cold wind shoulders its brusque way through Alveg Park, its breath moist with impending rain. The park sits atop District Hospital Seventeen, a cavernous medical complex roofed by a recreation center almost a full square radius in area. The surface beneath Aiah’s heavy work boots is crumbling orange brick interlaced with exposed silvery bits of worn rebar. Trees sit in concrete tubs, bark scarred with pocket-knife carvings despite sharp-tipped circles of wrought-iron bars meant to protect each trunk. Some of the carvings are decades old. The shade provided by the trees is erratic, and a makeshift arrangement of faded canvas awnings, once brightly colored, is strung on steel poles above the old benches. No one sits on the benches today, not beneath the heavy canvas flogging louder than thunder in the hard wind.
Aiah doesn’t have to go through the hospital to get to the park: there are big exterior elevators, graffiti-scarred steel cages, that lift the public to the park. Most of the park’s inhabitants are pigeons, though there are also a lot of children at this hour of a Saturday; and there are a few adults in the ball courts, braving the weather, practicing or playing pick-up games.
Aiah can’t picture Constantine in a place like this, though it otherwise seems like a reasonable place for a clandestine meet, without taller buildings nearby and with interrupted sight lines that would make observation difficult or obvious. Still, she feels conspicuous in her hardhat, boots and yellow jumpsuit. She doesn’t know who’s going to be meeting her. And, as the place is huge, she doesn’t know where she’s supposed to be met, so she wanders, chilled even in her jumpsuit, and feels lost. Fried-food smells from a vendor make her mouth water. She was too nervous to eat breakfast. She stops, buys a fish patty on a seed bun, and is pleased the vendor has Barkazil mustard. She adds the mustard, bites down . . .
“You are Miss Aiah?”
The speaker is one of the twisted, a huge slab of a man with a face like a piece of black armor, small eyes sunk deep beneath plates of bone. He has a Cheloki accent, which, Aiah now realizes, Constantine does not. The big man is taller even than Constantine and wears casual clothes, a giant blue windbreaker zipped up to the chin. If it’s to make him inconspicuous it fails.
Aiah tries to swallow her mouthful, finds it’s too hot, nods instead.
“My name is Mister Martinus. I’m to transport you.”
Aiah manages to swallow her food. “
“All right,” she says.
“This way. “
Walking after him is like following a moving wall. She has to make little skips to keep up with his long strides. He leads her through the park and past a section fenced off as an exercise yard for hospital patients, but which looks more like something in a prison complex, barren and old and grimy. As Aiah walks by, two young men in wheelchairs, bundled against the wind, grimly wheel themselves back and forth, a little circuit to nowhere.
Beyond is a rooftop landing field. A pair of small helicopters, emergency orange, wait with blades drooping, and a pair of aerocars stand on their pads. One of these is orange, with the hospital logo on its flank, and the other is a gleaming black, with an opaqued cockpit, and a serial number beginning with the three-letter code for a private vehicle. Martinus heads toward the last.
“Is that car yours?” Aiah asks. It’s a Sky Dart, she recognizes, the classic TX3 from before the Dart company went downscale.
“I have the use of it,” Martinus says.
“Can you land it here? This is a hospital.”
“No one prevented me. It’s a public pad, even if it’s only the hospital that uses it.” He punches an access code on the aerocar’s twelve-key pad and the cockpit rolls open. It’s a four-seater, with twin controls. Martinus turns to Aiah and helps her into one of the front seats, then takes the other himself.
Aiah’s never flown before, and nervousness stirs in her blood. She looks down at the sandwich in her hand and wonders what to do with it — her appetite is long gone. She puts it in her lap and fumbles with the crash webbing, and Martinus reaches over and fits the clasps with quick, efficient movements of his enormous hands. Aiah sees heavy slabs of callus over his knuckles and realizes he’s spent a lot of time practicing to hit people. Or maybe, she thinks, it wasn’t all practice.
Fear crawls like a spider through her belly. Maybe she won’t come back from this. But no, she thinks, if they wanted her dead they could have ...
Martinus dons a headset and begins moving through a checklist written in wax crayon on slick, erasable plastic. A starter ratchets, coughing like some exotic animal, then turbines whine. Martinus peers out to watch the turbines gimbal, then checks control surfaces. He frowns diligently at the checklist as he jacks wires in and out of sockets to reconfigure the car’s computer to its new destination. He gets a series of amber go-lights across the instrument panel, then reaches for the controls.
Suddenly the air is alive with plasm. Aiah can feel the hair on her arms stir. The turbines howl, and then the car is airborne, moving on a stream of plasm to its destination. Aiah’s stomach is left behind; the smell of the cooking grease on her fish sandwich suddenly revolts her. The turbine noise fades. Aiah remembers to look out of the cockpit and sees the city far below, the long gray roofs going on forever, all the way to the horizon, their monotony occasionally broken by the skyscraper complexes, Mage Towers or Loeno or the area around Bursary Street, rising toward the aerocar like foreshortened claws. It’s a bit frightening to see that far, to see a distant horizon unblocked by a frowning office building or the brick wall of an apartment.
And then she’s descending, tall buildings reaching up toward her. Directly below is the flat concrete surface of a pad marked with a large target symbol, and Martinus uses the turbines to do some fine maneuvering, one eye fixed to the padded rim of a thing like a bombsight that lets him view the landing park below. The sharp wind buffets the car, making Martinus frown, but he lands with supreme gentleness, and then taxies the car to a parking area and shuts down the turbines.
His eyes scan the sky. “No one following,” he says.
The landing pad is built atop a parking structure meant to service the office buildings that surround it. Aiah follows Martinus into an elevator that takes them below ground. She still carries her sandwich; she can’t seem to find a place to get rid of it. They step out of the elevator and wait for a long moment, and then a large car pulls up, a stretched-out Elton painted a subdued gray. The car’s design is purely functional, with no ornamentation at all, and that’s more impressive than all the chrome in the world; it suggests luxury and ease and pampered living, economic security so all-encompassing it eliminates the need for display. The windows are opaque and marked with a fine crosshatching of bronze wire: armor against plasm attack. The Elton’s turbine sings softly. Martinus opens a rear door and waits for Aiah to enter.
Sorya sits in back, her penetrating green eyes fixed on Aiah. Her blonde hair is tucked up under a knit cap, and she’s wearing overalls over a gray sweater. The overalls are black and shiny and tailored, with silver buttons, and they’re belted fashionably at Sorya’s slim waist. Aiah wonders if there are boutiques for such things.
“Hello,” she says, and sits by the other woman. The door closes behind her with a firm metal thunk that makes Aiah think the car might be armored.
“Sorry to interrupt your meal,” Sorya says, and looks at the sandwich. Aiah feels her cheeks flush. The car has a trash container and Aiah drops the sandwich in it, drops the silvered metal lid.
“Any trouble?” Sorya asks.
“Should there have been?”
Martinus gets in next to the driver. There
is a soft singing sound from the two big contra-rotating flywheels in the built-up area behind the front seat, and the car smoothly pulls away.
“Certain formalities,” Sorya says. “Sorry.”
Aiah sits stiffly while Sorya searches her, pale competent hands probing her body for batteries, recorders, antennae. She manages to avoid twitching as Sorya clinically explores her crotch. Sorya finishes the job, then settles back in her seat.
“You’ll have to give us directions to your glory hole,” Sorya says.
“Ah.” A chauffeured Authority worker, Aiah thinks, now that’s inconspicuous. “Let me think. Just head in the direction of Terminal.”
Saturday first shift, she thinks. Around midbreak. Lots of people on the streets. She wasn’t going to be able to sneak Sorya through the old apartment building. They would have to use the tunnels, and she didn’t dare use the nearest access, not with the possibility of being recognized by one of the men who’d attacked her.
“Will Constantine be joining us?” she asks.
Sorya looks at her. “Constantine is far too fastidious to do his own dirty work, ne? I hope you’re not disappointed.”
Aiah shakes her head. “In fact, I’m relieved.”
Amusement twitches the corners of Sorya’s mouth. “Why?”
“Because if he were with us, there’s no way I could hide him.”
Sorya’s laugh trills out. “Very good,” she said. “You are perceptive.”
“It will be hard enough hiding you.”
Sorya’s brows arch. “How so?”
“You’re beautiful, which means people will notice you no matter what. You’re dressed better than anyone we’ll meet today — certainly better than anyone I’ve ever seen go down a manhole. And Mr. Martinus is not inconspicuous, either.”
Sorya judges this. “Perhaps you have done this sort of thing before.”
“No. But I’m learning.” Aiah looks at her. “And at least you didn’t bring the panther.”
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