by Amber Stuart
Like Ledi, maybe, I felt the urgency to get out of there as quickly as possible.
Either way, within minutes, clothing for me and Nihkil had been procured. Now both of us wore military uniforms, so I blended in with the rest of the uniformed guards. My black hair had been hastily slicked back and tied at the base of my neck, and I'd washed every remaining speck of make-up off my face, so that my features would be as nondescript as possible.
I couldn’t do anything about my darker complexion, of course, other than to be glad I lived in Seattle before all this. If I’d been from California or Arizona or something, the difference with the natives would have been even more extreme.
Either way, wearing practical clothing and boots, along with having a clean face and a weapon at my side, I felt almost like myself again.
According to Ledi and Nihkil, my features still stood out. Especially my eyes, since they were significantly more almond-shaped than a Pharei’s eyes, but also my chin and jawline, since most Pharei seemed to be lacking either. My body was a fair bit shorter than ninety percent of the Pharei, too... but, as disguises went, it would at least keep most people from staring openly.
Being lost in the sea of black would minimize the other differences.
Or so we hoped.
Nihkil still hadn't been happy with how I looked.
I saw him grumble at Ledi, although in a language I didn’t understand, and one he wouldn’t let me translate. Still, I saw the scowl on his face, and I saw him staring at me. From the way he gestured up and down my body, and motioned at the guards, I definitely got the impression that he thought I was far too visible still.
Maybe for that reason, he seemed to be the driving force dictating that I walk behind him, and well surrounded on all sides by Ledi’s guards. Unfortunately, the positioning didn’t reassure me much, since I found none of them particularly trustworthy, either.
I still felt like a target had been painted on both of our chests.
Even more guards stood around Nihkil than they did around me, but that would be expected. Anyone passing who recognized him would expect to see him well-guarded. Nik seemed to think it was likely he would be recognized if people looked at all closely at their group, and Ledi hadn’t disagreed.
Ledi hadn’t ordered him cuffed, at least.
I saw Ledi pass Nik a few weapons before we left the room, too: a hand-held thing Nik stuffed in the inner pocket of his uniform jacket, which he now wore over a black uniform shirt instead of just his bare chest, and something that might have been an explosive of some kind. I watched Nik shove that one in a side pocket of his new, clean pair of uniform pants.
Now, his eyes looked sharper than I’d ever seen them.
A pale yellow in color, they cased the layout of every hallway, corridor and room through which we passed, scanning every face. He seemed to note in particular where each person’s eyes fell when it came to our little entourage.
I could tell he was doing his damnedest to keep those people looking at him, too, rather than at me. He did so partly by staring at their faces, but maybe by doing other things, too... things that felt more related to his morph nature, somehow. The closest I could come to describing it would be as a kind of tugging, pulling feeling, mixed with a near-aggression, like a challenge to fight.
Whatever it was, it drew eyes seamlessly to his.
Once there, the pale color of Nik’s irises held them long enough for the rest of our group to pass by unnoticed.
As for me, I didn’t let myself look up, not even when we reached the end of the military complex. When I got my first glimpse of the famous sky tunnels linking the two capital cities, I almost couldn’t help myself, though.
By then, we were already aiming for the central tunnel of the three.
I knew from Ledi that all three of those transparent tunnels offered panoramic––if vertigo-challenging––views of the canyon below, and that a lot of people got sick their first time riding the moving platforms. Ledi himself, having moved to Palarine with military parents as a small child, didn’t remember the first time he’d ridden the tubes. He theorized, however, that the sickness likely arose from the speed of the walkways along with the dizzying view.
I wasn’t too worried.
I’d never had an issue with heights before, and I rode a motorcycle, so I figured I’d be okay.
Then we left the platform... and the walkway began to accelerate.
It also began to slope sharply down.
Rather than being a single tunnel, the sky bridge turned out to be made up of a series of individual glass tunnels even within the three main branches I’d seen from the gates. Passengers switched levels up, down or sideways, depending on which code you keyed in when you first got on. We all stood on individual segments of walkway, too, I discovered.
My feet got locked inside some kind of miniature force field as soon as my destination code had been logged and accepted.
So yeah, claustrophobia wasn’t a sensation I’d been expecting.
I felt my stomach drop violently at the first big drop.
I’m not sure how the platform separated our group from the one in front of us, either. It seemed to know how to keep those traveling together in a single unit, despite the individual codes. All I know is that I blinked, and the group in front of us was flying upwards at an accelerated speed while we descended in a steep curve on a different segment of track.
Below us, the valley floor was already tingeing gold.
I could make out the outlines of pinnacles and plains below my feet, shadows lengthening into odd shapes under the advance of the sun’s light.
Sunrise.
Between the speed of the platform, the steep slope, and that lightening view of the valley floor, I found myself fighting vertigo, in spite of myself. The platform moved silently, gliding us along at maybe thirty or forty miles per hour. Fast enough that I had to hold onto the rail to keep my balance at all... even with the force field... and even without the view below my booted feet.
Meanwhile, the cliff walls of the civilian-side pinnacle grew larger every second.
I provoked more than a few amused looks when I stumbled off the end of the walkway, nearly landing on my knees.
I caught my balance at the last minute, but only by grabbing the arm of another uniformed soldier in our group, nearly taking him down with me and earning myself a dirty look from him in the process. Keeping my face calm, I released him to follow the others to the nearest security checkpoint, feeling Nik frown at me like I was a badly-trained dog.
In terms of the watching civilians, however, I distinctly got the feeling that the laugh had been more at the expense of the military than at me, specifically. Residents of civilian side clearly didn't place the same premium on loyalty to the hierarchy as those in the military capitol.
Already, I felt the shift in identification and loyalties.
In fact, most of the expressions I glimpsed held varying degrees of resentment as we passed, even contempt... and in a few cases, open hostility.
We entered the scanning portal at the checkpoint one by one, stopping and starting in a line that indicated having a uniform didn't grant us any special privileges here, either. Even so, I tensed when the green-uniformed guard working the gate indicated for me to stop. It turned out he only wanted me to look at him, so he could confirm the image he read through my implant, but it briefly sent my heart jack-knifing in my chest.
Seconds later, we were through.
I found myself in the teeming chaos of the Pit, the non-military, semi-equivalent to the Great Hall I’d encountered my first day on Palarine.
Looking around, I realized that the Great Hall, with its ornate skylights, four-story monitors and people in high-tech clothing and expensive headgear, positively reeked of money and privilege compared to the Pit.
The Pit lived up to its name.
It reminded me more of a cave than the squeaky-clean reception area of
the Great Hall.
Red and black slabs of rock crawled up towards a grimy, dust-covered skylight, leaving the space almost completely dark despite the pinkish streak of sky above. The floor looked polished more by shoes and feet than the ubiquitous robotic cleaners of military side. I didn't see any other illumination apart from a few dingy-looking monitors, and several dozen basketball-sized glow worm sacs that hung, somehow obscene-looking, from the rough walls rimming the wide space.
Instead of holograms and virtual simulations, real, flesh-and-blood vendors approached me just outside the checkpoint, offering headsets, data-cards, reprogrammed implants they'd probably pulled off corpses, different forms of transport, rec centers and at least five different kinds of sex.
I could tell they weren’t holograms in part because they smelled bad.
A small group knocked into me, and a cloud of body and urine odor nearly knocked me down. I couldn’t keep the grimace off my face, not even out of politeness.
I saw fewer holographic panels, but also more women and men who appeared to be close to real nakedness. Based on their behavior, I guessed at least a percentage of them were prostitutes. I saw a few whose eyes changed color, along with their hair color, texture and length. One grew a tail right in front of me to entice a possible client, whipping it around sensually before the same morph or hybrid grew briefly taller, his brown hair turning silver to match his irises.
When I looked forward that time, I caught Nihkil staring at me.
I stared back, bewildered at first, until I realized I felt jealousy on him.
Nik thought I was checking out that other morph.
At first, I had to fight not to smile.
My humor faded abruptly, though, when it occurred to me that Nik himself wasn’t in a radically different position, vis-a-vis the Pharei military and their system of cards. What he did might not be quite so public, but I had no doubt he got asked to “perform” as a morph, too, whether behind closed doors or not.
Hell, Ledi admitted as much to me, the one time I broached the topic with him.
Shoving the thought aside, even as it caused me to grit my teeth, I glanced at a cluster of people packed shoulder-to-shoulder, staring at transport schedules and adverts on the considerably dingier-looking, wall-length monitor that shimmered from a wide pillar in the center of the room. Just then, another cluster of people knocked into me, again nearly bowling me over with their stench.
One stole my sidearm.
Realizing a half-second too late, I whipped around, scanning bodies.
"Leave it," Nik said through the link.
"I might need it," I transmitted back, fighting my own emotional reaction.
"It won't matter," he said, his thoughts flat, the opposite of mine.
I frowned at his words, but only nodded.
Seconds later, Ledi led us through the stone mouth of a dragon.
I knew it wasn’t real, but I still had to fight a visceral reaction to the illusion.
The dragon’s head blended seamlessly with the colors of the cliff until we stood directly in front of it. Once there, however, the jaws jutted straight out from the red rock face. Its green eyes shimmered under glow-worm sacs. Long stone teeth hung down and pointed up like stalactites and stalagmites, carved to thin, curved ends.
I paused for a bare instant, watching as the dragon appeared to swallow pedestrians as they walked through the tunnel that lived between its stone jaws.
Then I took a breath, entering the tunnel with the others.
I was still trying not to feel naked from the loss of my only weapon.
We emerged a few seconds later in a mirrored hallway. The faces staring as we passed now held even more of that resentment and contempt, only now they looked aggressive, too.
We stopped next to a blank wall, where a small crowd had already gathered. I jumped when two sets of double doors began to rise, revealing an entrance over two stories high.
Then I found myself being pushed, shoved, pinched and squeezed as my group joined a few dozen others entering an elevator car the size of a small barn.
Inside, Ledi and his guards reconfigured around me and Nik against a segment of wall.
The doors closed.
Immediately, my stomach plummeted.
An old man fell to the floor.
A nearby woman dressed in rags helped him to one of the suspended chairs, where he strapped himself in with a frayed seat belt. The chair rose up the wall, pulling the man out of reach of the milieu. I noticed only then that a number of other people were already attached to the walls in similar chairs. I gazed at them for only a moment before I intercepted another warning stare, that time from Ledi, who stood closer to me than I’d realized.
The elevator car continued its series of sickening drops, stopping periodically to let passengers off and take on new ones.
As we fell, the crowd began to thin and change. Even fewer people wore colorful clothes, holographic panels or headdresses. More wore handheld weapons instead, and had their faces obscured in clothing, cloaks, dark paint or wraps.
Two enormous people, probably human, stood a few yards from Ledi and me, their oversized heads visible above the throng. Instead of the wide, round faces and black eyes of the Pharei, they had thick, jutting features, pale blue and green irises and rectangular heads two sizes too big, even with their trunk-like bodies. Their heads were adorned with long, curly, scarlet and green-streaked hair, greased or waxed somehow into curls, and both also wore elaborately sculpted beards, making them look almost like cartoon dwarves.
They spoke a language I’d never heard, either. I tried using my translator when I caught them staring at me.
"That little one... you think she's a real black-coat? Did they buy her, do you think?"
I felt my shoulders tense, but kept it off my face.
"High priced meat. I’m thinking they picked her up from one of ours... from that colony on Resci, maybe."
"They have a morph with her. Why else would they need him, if not for protection?”
The other grunted. “Maybe she’s supposed to fuck it.”
“Yeah, yeah... sex show. Maybe she's meant for a bigwig blackie. Little blackie with a little dick who likes to watch... ?" The giant stared at my body, as if trying to discern it through the uniform I wore. "She’s Small. Too small for me... my cock wouldn’t fit in her."
The first one laughed. "I like Smalls... I like the noises they make when you break them." He smacked his friend on the chest with the flat of his hand. "Farglen likes Smalls, too. He might even pay us, if we bring him a treat. What do you say?"
I glanced surreptitiously at Nik.
His face didn’t move.
"Don't know," the other said. "A lot of blacks with her."
"A lot more of us at the bottom.”
“Yeah, but you know how the blackies whine, when we piss on them in their fancy clothes.” The first giant shrugged, staring at me. “Is that little thing worth the headache?”
The other laughed. “They should know better than to come underground like this. Riding the rails like commoners. The arrogant pricks are just asking for it...”
“What about the morph?”
“We’ll stun him at the bottom. Call ahead.”
I glanced at Ledi, saw a warning on his face.
Clearly, I wasn't the only one who'd been eavesdropping. The giants must be used to working around humans without implants or translators.
Either that, or they just didn’t give a damn.
The lift screeched to another halt. People flooded in and out of light-filled openings. I stumbled as the lift lurched back into motion.
I heard the two giants notice and laugh.
I glanced again at Ledi.
"We'll handle it," he told me through the implant.
I nodded, but felt my hands clench a little. I knew what that meant. Guns blazing, likely a full-on standoff at the end of this ride, at least
a few dead on either side. I made up my mind. Hell, I might as well put my weeks of excruciating boredom to use, watching every aboge I could get my hands on in the military educational vaults.
Clearing my throat, I deliberately made my face and posture more submissive.
"Are you sure they can cure it?" I whispered to Ledi in audible Pharize, glancing around with a worried expression on my face. "The special doctors you said you have. They can make me better again? Are you sure? I've read such terrible things...”
Ledi stared at me blankly.
"You promised," I said to him carefully, biting my lip. "You said I wouldn't give the blood-worms to my husband. If he finds out––"
In front of me, I heard one of Ledi's guards stifle a laugh.
Ledi's face smoothed into seriousness, even as he gave the guard a scathing look.
When I saw the expression there, I had to fight not to show my relief. It was exactly the kind of look a Pharei soldier might expect to get if the object of his laughter happened to be a superior officer's mistress. Either way, Ledi seemed to get where I’d been going with that whole thing, even as he laid a comforting hand on my shoulder.
"I promised, my sweet," he murmured, his own voice audible, if quiet. "We are only bringing you out this way to ensure that we are not stopped before reaching my emergency medical team. I have my own wife to consider, you know."
I heard another soldier grunt, but didn't look that way.
Biting my lip, I nodded Pharei-style, even as I kept my face worried, and maybe just the slightest bit clueless.
"And you can fix me?" I whispered, as if still trying to go unheard.
"I told you I could, yes? Would I lie to you, my sweet?"
I almost smiled at that.
He'd hit just that perfect note of false comfort that most men and uninterested women would hear as a lie... but that a woman who really wanted to believe a guy she was sleeping with might choose to believe. Anyway, I'd read about the blood-worm thing. Supposedly there was no cure, and it was said to be highly contagious.
I heard the giants muttering to one another. I glimpsed disgust in the big one's eyes, right before both of them took a few steps back.
