Railhead

by Philip Reeve

  Zen pushed the plastic door open and went in. Dim yellow light on fading carpets and cancerous-looking walls. There had been a time when his sister, Myka, had tried to keep the place nice. She’d cleaned daily, and tried out holowallpapers that made the living room look like a beach on Summer’s Lease or a meadow in the Crystal Mountains, if you ignored the downstairs neighbors’ amped-up bhangra booming through the floor. But none of it made much difference to Ma, who was as scared of beaches or meadows as she was of blank walls. When Myka started working extra shifts and hadn’t time to do housework anymore, Zen couldn’t be bothered to take over. Dishes heaped up in the sink, dead flies dotted the windowsills, and the wallpaper had shut down long ago.

  Ma looked up at him with scared eyes as he let himself in. Her fine, graying hair made crazy pencil scribbles against the light from the window behind her. She said, “You’re back! I didn’t think you’d ever come back; I thought something had happened to you…”

  “That’s what you always think, Ma. That’s what you say when I go to the food store for five minutes.”

  (And one day it will be true, he thought. One day soon he’d find the courage and the money to leave this place for good, take the Interstellar Express all the way to Golden Junction, and keep going…)

  “I was sure they’d caught you,” his mother grumbled. “Those people…”

  Myka came through from her small room, still wearing the gray overalls and grumpy scowl that she wore every day to her job in the factory district. She didn’t look too pleased to see her little brother.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Here and there.”

  “Riding the trains?”

  “Those trains are part of it,” Ma interrupted. “And the Guardians. The Guardians see everything.”

  “With everything that’s going on in all the worlds, the Guardians are hardly going to bother watching you and me and Zen,” said Myka wearily.

  She was nothing like him, this sister of his. Or half sister, maybe—Ma had never told them who their fathers were, and they’d not asked. Myka was big, taller than Zen, broad across the hips and shoulders, with darker skin, and a cloud of black hair, which spat angry lightning when she tugged a comb through it. She knew what Zen did on his jaunts through the K-gates, and she didn’t approve, but she never turned away Uncle Bugs’s money. Without it, they couldn’t afford to live anywhere half as nice as Bridge Street.

  “She’s been bad,” Myka said, deciding to talk about Ma rather than Zen and his thieving ways. “She was in a real state when I came home…”

  “They’ve found us again,” said Ma. “They listen to us. Through the walls.”

  “It’s all right, Ma,” said Myka softly. She wasn’t a soft sort of person usually—she was usually angry at everyone—Zen, her coworkers, the company she worked for, the corporate families, the Emperor, even the Guardians themselves. She had taken part in the anti-Moto riots, and sometimes Zen found her frowning over illegal pamphlets, dreaming of rebellion. But with their mother, she always kept her temper.

  “It’s not all right!” Ma whimpered. “They’re watching us! We’re going to have to leave this place…”

  “No one is watching us, Ma.” Myka gently laid a hand on Ma’s shoulder, but Ma, with a hiss of irritation, slapped it away.

  Zen didn’t know where Myka got her patience from. Perhaps it was because she was older than him, and remembered Ma in times when Ma’s imagination was still under control, before the men started hunting her, the walls started listening. Myka just pitied her. Zen pitied her too, but mostly he felt angry. Angry at the way his whole life had been shaped by her delusions. At how many years she’d had him believing in her made-up conspiracies.

  “They’re outside now!” she whimpered. “Spying on us!”

  He crossed to the window, peered out through the misted cellulose. “Ma,” he said, “there’s nobody—”

  And then he stopped.

  He was looking down onto the bridge, at the narrow roadway that ran between the two lines of bio-buildings. It was crowded with pedestrians: day-shift workers like his sister trudging back from the factory district, night-shift workers tramping in the opposite direction to go on duty. Rickshaws and maglev cars pushed through the river of wet rain capes, hats, and umbrellas. And on the far side of the street, the girl in the red coat stood motionless, staring straight at him.

  *

  Just before a train went through a K-gate there was a moment of quiet, so short that only railheads caught it, as the wheels moved from the normal K-bahn track to the strange, ancient, frictionless rails that ran through the gate itself. That was what it felt like to Zen when he recognized the girl: a heartbeat’s silence, and then he was in a new world.

  “Nobody there,” he said, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. He took a step back from the window, although he didn’t really think the girl would be able to see him. He kept watching her. How had she followed him here? She must have been on the same train as him out of Ambersai. But she couldn’t have been; he had not seen her get off at Cleave. It couldn’t be the same girl…

  And then she raised her face and seemed to look straight at him, and although he still couldn’t make out her features through the rain and the shadow of her hood, he felt sure that it was her.

  “Come with me!” she had said.

  She had known his name.

  So what was she? Police? An assassin? The goldsmith must have sent her, Zen thought. That didn’t make much sense. It was only a necklace that he’d stolen, and once it went through the K-gate the insurance would have covered the loss. But it was the only explanation he could think of. The Ambersai goldsmiths must be hiring killers now, to hunt down anyone who robbed them.

  The girl crossed the street toward his building.

  Myka was asking Ma about the evening meal. When Ma was bad she always believed that they couldn’t afford food, and that the water and power would run out at any moment. She didn’t want to eat and she didn’t want anyone else to eat either. Myka was being patient still, asking her if she could manage a little green curry. Zen wondered how he could warn Myka about the watcher without Ma overhearing and getting even more scared.

  Through the smeared cellulose of the window he saw a shape slide past. If it wasn’t the drone that had pestered him at Ambersai, it was another exactly like it.

  He dropped to the floor. Ma screamed. At the same moment there came a knock on the apartment’s plastic door, and a voice calling, “Zen Starling!”

  Zen scrambled on hands and knees across the room and into his own narrow bedroom, shaking his head at Myka when she glanced at him. He stood in the shadows, as still as he could, like a kid playing hide-and-seek. He could hear Ma whimpering, then the sound of the front door opening. “He’s not here,” Myka was saying, and, “Can’t you see you’re frightening her?”

  The girl saying something, too softly to hear, then Myka again, angrier. “He’s not here! Go away! We don’t like your type in Cleave.”

  Zen looked around his room. The unmade bed and strewn clothes. Stuff from when he was a kid: his model trains, and the brooch he’d stolen from a stall at McQue Junction when he was seven. The brooch had been an impulse theft, followed by six weeks of guilt and worry. By the end of that time he’d learned something that he’d lived by ever since: it was possible to take people’s stuff without getting caught.

  But he’d been wrong, it seemed. Retribution had arrived at last. He heard the drone go clattering past outside, circling the building. Myka was telling their visitor again that Zen wasn’t there. Ma was shouting too, words Zen couldn’t catch, angry and afraid.

  There was a window above his bed, smeared and thickened like all the apartment’s windows, but big enough to squeeze out through, if you were desperate. It hadn’t been designed to open, but it turned out that it did if you hit it hard enough. It flo
pped out of its frame and dangled by a few strands of plant fiber. Quickly, before the drone made another circuit, Zen threw himself at the wet square of night outside, squeezed shoulders and hips through, tumbled down the side of the roof. The tiles were modified leaves, thick and leathery, overlapping like the leaves of artichokes. He grabbed a fat cable, swung from it, dropped to a lower roof, jumped across the narrow gap to a neighboring building. From there it was easy enough to reach one of the original supports of the bridge and climb down it, glancing up for the drone as he went, not seeing it. Falling into the microfiber mesh that was stretched under the bridge to catch garbage and would-be suicides, he scrambled on hands and knees through the dark under the roadbed, through the slices of light that came down through gratings, fighting his way past bundled greasy cables and the trailing roots of the houses. Below him buzzed air-jitneys and fat delivery drones. Below them, at the bottom of an abyss of lighted windows, Cleave River took out its temper on the rocks.

  He reached the canyon wall that way, went sideways along some of the thick sewage pipes that clung to it, then down to the level below, using the neon ideograms outside a restaurant as a ladder. Waiters shrieked at him, but waiters were the least of his worries. What were they going to do? Flap him to death with their napkins? He scanned the busy air behind him for a glimpse of the drone, found none, and sprinted toward Uncle Bugs’s shop.

  Uncle Bugs wasn’t the sort of person you’d usually turn to for help. But Zen had been thinking while he swung about on that mesh under the bridge. He reckoned his only hope was to buy the necklace back, return it to Ambersai, and make a full and groveling apology.

  The shop was shuttered when he reached it. “Uncle Bugs?” he said, loud but not too loud, and knocked at the peeling door.

  Which swung open, giving him a view into the cluttered shop, and a bad feeling.

  He went inside. The back room was full of rain and the window-light-flutter of a passing train, both of which were coming in through a large hole in the roof. Uncle Bugs was still there, and yet he wasn’t. On the floor lay his burlap robe, his paper mask, and a few pathetic twigs and wires that had been part of his stick-man scaffolding. The robe, the floor, the walls, the furniture were covered with insects. A lot of them were dead: crushed or scorched. The rest scuttled around waving their feelers, or buzzed heavily through the air, which still held the burnt metal smell of recent gunfire. Monk bugs only became intelligent when enough of them clustered together to form a Hive Monk: scatter them, and they were just mindless insects again.

  That was bad enough, but as Zen stood there staring, he noticed something worse.

  The necklace that he had stolen was still on the counter.

  So it wasn’t about that necklace at all. There was something else going on, and he had no idea what it could be.

  4

  On his way back out he helped himself to a rain cape and a hat from the rack of secondhand clothes near the door. The cape was too small for him and came down barely past his waist, but the hat fit. He pulled the wide brim down to shade his face as he walked quickly back to busier streets, trying to hide in the crowds. He reasoned that the girl and her drone would be following him, told himself he was leading her away from Bridge Street, drawing the danger away from Ma and Myka.

  Truth was, he just wanted to be safely out of Cleave. He would hop on an outbound train, change at Chiba to the Spiral Line, change again onto the O Link at Kishinchand, be half-way across the galaxy before his pursuers knew he’d left town…

  But how was he going to do that? The girl might have friends. That drone she had sent after him in Ambersai might be buzzing the streets. She would be watching the station.

  He needed a plan. He stopped for a while in a damp, fern-grown cleft in the canyon wall where holo-images of the Guardians billowed like tethered ghosts above a row of data shrines. People kept stepping out of the crowds on the street to stand in front of this shrine or that, uploading electronic prayers. Human beings had always dreamed up gods to guide and guard them, and the Guardians were the last, best gods they had ever invented. Artificial intelligences, created on Old Earth, as immortal and all-knowing as the gods in old stories. It was the Guardians who had opened the K-gates, and helped the cor-porate families lay out the rails and stations of the Great Network. In olden days they had downloaded themselves into cloned bodies and walked among humans. Now they mostly kept themselves to themselves; beings of pure information, spread across the data rafts of every world, busy with thoughts too huge and strange for human brains to hold. Zen was pretty sure they wouldn’t be interested in his troubles.

  He decided to call on human help instead. He stole a disposable headset from a vendor’s cart and found a quiet spot among the shrines. The headset was just a cheap plastic one, but it did the job. One terminal fitted snugly behind his ear, transmitting sound through the bones of his skull. The other pressed against his temple, streaming images straight to the visual centers of his brain. As he opened a connection into Cleave’s data raft, a storm of gaudy ads was superimposed over his view of the wet street. He blinked them away and found a messaging site.

  He wanted to call Myka, but it was too risky; the girl in red was certain to be watching for messages. So who else could he turn to?

  Zen didn’t have friends. He’d left a few behind when he moved from Santheraki, and never bothered making new ones. The trouble with friends was, sooner or later he’d have to tell them about Ma’s troubles and his life on Bridge Street, and those were sadnesses that he preferred to hold close and secret. It fitted the image he had of himself, too—the lone thief, all stray-cat-cool, walking solitary down some midnight street. Oh, he’d talk and joke sometimes with the kids who met up at the Spatterpattern Club, but he couldn’t trust any of them to help him out of trouble this deep.

  That just left Flex. Flex was Myka’s friend, really, but maybe she would help him for Myka’s sake. Flex had just the skills he needed.

  With quick movements of his eyes he typed her contact details on a virtual keyboard, which folded away into the corner of his field of vision when he was finished. He blinked on the “Audio Only” tag. The “connecting” icon flashed for ages.

  At last Flex’s voice said, “Hey?”

  “It’s Myka’s brother,” said Zen, afraid to say his name in case anyone was watching for him on Cleave’s communication nets. “I need help.”

  “What sort of help?”

  “I need to get on a train, but I can’t go through the station.”

  “Okay.” Flex didn’t seem to need any explanation. “Meet me here.”

  Coordinates pinged into Zen’s headset. Battery Bridge. He thanked her, took off the headset, dropped it down a storm drain as he hurried on.

  *

  All the way to the bridge he kept wondering if the drone had intercepted his messages, but Flex was the only person waiting for him when he got there. A short, stocky figure, rain hat shining like a wet toadstool. Under the hat was another, with trailing earflaps, and under that a kludged-together headset with a big viewing lens that hid Flex’s right eye.

  Zen had never really been sure if Flex was a boy or a girl, but he mostly chose to think of her as “her.” Her plain brown face and shapeless clothes gave no clues, but there was a gruff gentleness about her that reminded him of Myka. She lived rough somewhere in the Stacks, but sometimes the factories called her in to paint their vehicles and the murals over their gates. That was how Myka had met her.

  The rest of the time, Flex was a tagger, one of those feral artists who liked sneaking into the rail yards to paint their designs on waiting freight containers, passenger carriages, even on the locos themselves. The trains’ maintenance spiders would usually clean the graffiti off before the paint was dry, but if the work was good enough, some locos let it stay, and wore it with pride as they went on their way through the K-gates. Flex’s stuff was more than good enough. Z
en didn’t know much about art, but when he looked at the things Flex painted he could tell that she loved the trains. She never rode the K-bahn herself, but her quick, bright paintings did. Her leaping animals and strange dancing figures were seen by people in all the stations of the Network, mobile murals traveling the galaxy on the flanks of the grateful trains.

  More importantly for Zen, the long game of cat and mouse she’d played with the trackside security systems meant that she knew of ways to get to the trains that didn’t involve passing through the station.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Anywhere,” Zen said. “Away.”

  Flex grunted. “Myka always said you’d end up in bad trouble.”

  “I live for trouble,” said Zen. “Anyway, you paint trains. Does Myka ever lecture you about that?”

  “That’s different. And I’m not her little brother.”

  “Will you help me?” Zen asked.

  Flex nodded. “ ’Course. Myka saved my life once. I owe her.”

  They climbed a stepped alleyway that led up beside the plummeting foam of a waterfall. The rumble of passing freight trains came down at them from above. Zen wondered what his sister had done to save Flex’s life, and why she’d never men-tioned it. But the industrial districts were dangerous, everyone knew that. People were probably saving each other’s lives down there all the time…

  Halfway up the staircase, Flex stopped. She must have sent a signal from her headset, because a rusty hatch cover slid open in the alley wall. She ushered Zen through it and came after him, switching on a flashlight as the hatch slid shut behind them.

  “Used to be a power station round here,” she said. “It served some old rail line that got closed down. This is one of the access passages. It comes out in the freight yards behind Cleave Station.”