Detective Reed didn’t talk to me, which suited me fine. The pantsuit she was wearing was strangely alluring, and I had to keep a tight rein on myself to keep my gaze from slipping to the hint of cleavage that appeared above her purple V-necked shirt. Sure, beautiful women scare me, but I was still a man, and one in the middle of a dry spell the size of the Sahara desert. Detective Reed didn’t appear to take any notice of my glances, which was probably for the best.
We stopped in front of an overweight uniformed cop sitting behind a plate glass window, the one who had taken my things when I’d gone through processing.
“Miles Franco,” Detective Reed said to the man. “Give him his stuff back.”
The cop swiveled around in his chair without looking at me and shuffled through several paper bags. He finally reemerged with a grunt and a bag with ‘Myles Falco’ scrawled on it in black ink. Goddamn cops. They really needed to up their admission standards.
“Wallet,” he said, pulling it from the bag and sliding it beneath his window to me. “Key ring with three keys. Cell phone. Folding knife.” I pocketed the knife before he could have second thoughts and confiscate it. It was a good knife, with a carbon steel blade about five and a half inches long. It was a tool, not a weapon, but I could see the disapproval spreading across Detective Reed’s face.
The cop started to scrunch the bag up and throw it away, but I spoke up. “I had some coins.”
The cop frowned at me as if I was deliberately trying to make trouble. “Bag’s empty. Check your wallet.”
My wallet was as empty as it always was. It was more for show than anything. “I need my coins.”
Detective Reed checked her watch and made an irritated noise. “Check the shelf again, Will. This one’s stubborn.”
The cop scowled but did as he was told, hefting his considerable weight off the office chair. He disappeared beneath the desk for a few seconds. I could hear him shuffling around, and he finally reemerged with a handful of silver coins.
He tossed them toward me then slapped a clipboard with a release form down in front of me. “Sign.”
I scrawled my name before I could make any more enemies and snatched the five coins from the desk. They settled comfortably into my pockets, and my hands stopped shaking quite so much.
“A uniform will give you a ride home,” Detective Reed said as she led me toward the front doors of the station. “You can find your own way back here?”
I nodded. Anything to not have more cops loitering outside my apartment waiting for me to get ready.
Detective Reed returned my nod and strode back the way we had come. I spent a couple of distracted seconds admiring the way her hips slid from side to side, then kicked myself out of it. Hell, I had more important things to be thinking about right now.
I shoved open the doors to the station and stepped out into the night. The cold air kept the smog smell out of it, which made breathing a little more bearable. You spend long enough in a city breathing car fumes and industrial smoke and soon enough you’re wondering where your sense of taste went.
The street was well-lit for Bluegate. Streetlights cast an orange glow onto the street and the drab concrete buildings. Occasionally, cars trundled past the station, probably containing married men off to visit their mistresses or gangsters on their way to rough up a troublesome drug dealer. Call me jaded, but some days it seemed like everyone in this city was one brand of immoral or other. Hell, I was no exception.
The police station was just to the east of the city center, in between the territories of the Gravediggers, the 23rd Street Bikers, and the Andrews Family. This was an older part of town, from back when Bluegate was called Garanade. A horrible name for a horrible town.
The cop Detective Reed had promised me was waiting at the bottom of the stone stairs leading out of the station, leaning against his squad car. He was a lanky kid who looked about thirteen, with a mop of blond hair and a uniform that was too short for him. He held up his hand in greeting as I approached and gestured to the back seat. “Can’t let you ride up front, sorry. Rules, and all that.”
I didn’t mind. At least the kid seemed friendly enough. I’d give him six months before he was as calloused as the rest of them.
My apartment was on the other side of Central Bluegate, about a fifteen-minute drive if the traffic wasn’t too bad. Most people tend to stay off the streets after dark in Bluegate, so we had the road almost to ourselves.
The young cop tried to engage me in conversation once or twice, but when I responded mostly with one-word answers, he gave up. I was still in a brooding mood, and I wasn’t going to let any cheerful conversation spoil that. I had to find a way out of this pit of snakes I’d been dropped in. Like hell I was going to trust the Bluegate PD to be looking out for my best interests. Something fishy was going on, something they weren’t telling me. Goddamn cops were like that.
I’d tried to keep out of gang business for my entire freelancing career. It wasn’t easy, when skilled Tunnelers are a key part of any good drug smuggling business. I’d been offered piles of cash for my services, and I’d been given more than a few lumps on my head as an incentive to consider taking up a career within their fine institutions. But I tend to be a stubborn son of a bitch when I get backed up against the wall. I don’t much like being told what to do. But that wasn’t why I stayed freelance. Tunnelers who threw in their loyalties with either a gang or the cops tend to have a short life span. I happened to be rather fond of living.
The cop flicked on the radio to some easy-listening jazz as we ambled through the seedier streets. Prostitutes stood smoking on the footpaths, half-hidden by the shadow, cheap decorations for the closely packed slums behind them. I caught a few glimpses of pimps and drug dealers further back in the alleys, and expensive cars pulling up then speeding away with a vial of Ink or a half-dressed woman. Strolling down these streets at night was akin to suicide unless you were in good with the gangsters, and even then you’d better hope you backed the right gangs. Most people played it safe, fixing padlocks to their doors and praying this winter wouldn’t be as cold as the last.
I leaned back in the seat and tried to take my eyes off the scenery. It was easy to get jaded in a city like this. I’d lived there most of my life, bar an unfortunate attempt at making a new start in Corton, the next city along the North River. I’m not a masochist. I didn’t stay for the fun. I stayed because it’s the only place I can Tunnel.
The cop drove the car along the top of a sweeping hill that overlooked the river and the bay to the west, and I could see the reason I stayed in glimpses between the buildings we passed. A series of huge, glowing concentric circles, 600 feet across, hovered a few inches above the surface of Tunnel River. It cast an eerie blue glow onto the platforms and buildings that had been built out around it, bright enough to be seen despite the city lights. Even at this late hour, the platforms around it were swarming with machinery and people, moving equipment and vehicles back and forth from the circles.
It was the sort of thing you couldn’t help but stare at, even after you’d seen it a million times. You told yourself you stared because it was beautiful, in an unearthly way, but really you were scared, because even after all this time you still didn’t know what it truly was.
They called them Bores when they appeared, a couple of years before I was born. Some said the twenty-four Bores around the world were the result of some government scientists with a penchant for risk-taking and an unlimited purse of taxpayers’ money. More than a couple of cults were convinced it was part of some deity’s screwed-up plan for humanity. Me, I didn’t know who to believe, and I figured there wasn’t much point thinking about it too hard.
It took all of five minutes for the government types in their black suits and their sunglasses to start poking at the Bores to see what they could make them do, or so the stories go. Turns out, the Bore only did one thing, but it did it damn well. A portal, I suppose you’d call it, a portal to another world. With the special kind
of arrogance reserved especially for politicians, the government began exploring the world on the other side of the Bores.
I closed my eyes to block out the sight of the Bore. Looking at it too long stung my eyes. The Bore was the reason I could do what I could do. Tunnelers are all tied to a Bore, and this one was mine. If I went too far outside the city limits, my ability to Tunnel decreased, until I couldn’t even form a Pin Hole. True, I could have left anyway, taken up some other job, but Tunneling was the one thing I knew, the one thing I was good at.
Today, though, I was reconsidering that position.
As the car reached the crest of the hill and the radio started playing a nice saxophone solo, I opened my eyes again. I could just make out the Immigration and Customs offices at the edge of the Bore. Immigration still liked to pretend they held the only path for migrating between Earth and Heaven, as if there weren’t several hundred Tunnelers like me scattered throughout the city.
The clock on the car’s dashboard read 1:26 a.m. when we finally pulled up outside my apartment building. 2310 Marlowe Street was a building that I’m pretty sure must have been condemned about a decade back, but had never been demolished. It stood ten stories high and was constructed mostly of dry wood that would go up like a tinderbox if someone tossed a lit cigarette at it. It was packed in between a laundromat and an almost identical apartment building, with a narrow alleyway on either side that was a haven for the homeless and anyone else looking for a nice pile of cardboard to bed down on.
I tried to open the car door, but the kiddie lock seemed to be on, so Officer Lanky had to let me out. He tried the friendly chatter thing one more time before finally giving up and returning to his car. I tried to summon some guilt for ignoring him, but I couldn’t manage it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d got some shut-eye, what with the annoying Vei family and being arrested and all. I tend to get cranky when I stay up past my bedtime.
I rammed my key into the door to the building and jiggled it for a few seconds, muttering incoherent swear words to myself, before the lock finally yielded and allowed me to shove the door open. The hinges protested with a low creak, and I slipped inside. It was dark and dusty, as usual. The light bulb had burned out about two years ago and no one had bothered to replace it. I’ll willingly admit the whole place was a shit-hole, but it had a quaint, shit-holey kind of charm about it. Also, the rent was dirt cheap.
Unfortunately, my earning capacity is less than dirt, so the last thing I wanted to see was my landlady’s sixteen-year-old daughter leaning against the handrail on the first floor, wearing a thin nightgown that could only have come from a XXX store.
“Hi Miles,” she whispered down to me, doing her best impression of a sultry temptress. “I heard you at the door.”
I groaned inwardly, expended a considerable amount of energy to avoid groaning outwardly as well, and ascended the stairs. I live on the ninth floor, and apparently the building was built before some genius thought of elevators, so I had no choice but to go past her. Tania wasn’t a bad girl. She’d just learned too much about dealing with men from her mother.
“Not this again,” I said. “I’ve had a long night. Besides, it’s past your bedtime.”
She leaned against the handrail, awkwardly thrusting her narrow hips to the side, and batted her eyelashes at me. “It’s so cold and lonely there.”
I cringed, praying that the neighbors couldn’t hear her. I was in enough trouble already.
I tried to move past her, but her hand snaked out and grabbed my tie, pulling me close. She purred.
“Knock it off, kid.” I grabbed her hand and pushed it away, trying to be gentle. “You got no interest in an old man like me.”
Her seductress act dissolved in an instant, and she transformed into something much more comforting and familiar: a pouting teenager. “Mom says you’re three weeks behind on the rent.”
I tried again to move past her. “Didn’t she get the check I slipped under the door?”
“You did no such thing, Miles.” She put her hands on her hip, blocking the narrow walkway. “You haven’t had a paying job in ages.”
I shrugged off the uncomfortable sensation of having a teenage girl monitoring my financial situation better than I was. I knew what was coming next. Tania was nothing if not predictable.
“I want you to teach me,” she said, right on cue.
“No.”
“That’s what you always say. Why not?”
“Because.”
She folded her arms and tilted her head to the side. “That’s not an answer.”
“Sure it is.”
She paused and glanced back at the door to her apartment. “Maybe we should wake my mom, see what she says.”
Aw, hell. The universe really wasn’t going to cut me a break. “Didn’t take you for a blackmailer.”
She raised a hand to her chest and put on an affronted look. “Me? How can you say such things?”
The kid had definitely been taking lessons from her mother. When the hell had she got so devious? She had me over a barrel, and the damn thing was full of splinters.
Still, I knew what she was asking, and there was no way I was going down easy. “What makes you think you’re even able to be taught?”
A grin broke across her face, and I got a sinking feeling somewhere in my intestines. “I already did it once.”
“No you didn’t.” I said, hoping that denying it would make it go away.
“I did.” Her voice rose, and I gave her apartment door another glance. She must’ve seen, because she leaned in close and whispered, “I opened a Tunnel.”
“You’re lying.”
She glanced away from me. “Well, it wasn’t a full-sized one, and it only lasted a second before it collapsed, but I did it. I really did.”
She met my eyes and held my gaze. Damn it all. She wasn’t a good enough liar to pull this off. The only reason I’d been able to avoid teaching Tania this long was because I was playing the odds. People with the ability to Tunnel were rare and most couldn’t do so without guidance. If she was telling the truth, that made my life a whole lot more difficult.
There were two types of Tunnels, although really they were just different manifestations of the same thing. A proper Tunnel was large, at least seven feet in diameter, big enough for someone to walk through.
The other type of Tunnel we called a Pin Hole. The circles were much smaller, only an inch or two across. A Pin Hole was a channel to Heaven, and it allowed us to tap some aspects of the world. Specifically, its instability.
Everything is fluid and malleable in Heaven, from the creatures that inhabit it to the land itself. If you go there unprepared, you’re likely to find the world shifting around you so fast you lose whatever trace of sanity you have left. A Pin Hole channels that instability into the real world, allowing a skilled Tunneler to transmute objects. What a thing can be transmuted into depends much more on the type of object it is, rather than what it’s made of. A fork could be turned into a pair of chopsticks, even though one is metal and one is wood. That sort of thing.
The trouble was if Tania was getting into this sort of thing without knowing what the hell she was doing, she was going to wind up turning her skull into an insect’s head, or her necklace into a noose.
As if I didn’t already have enough to worry about.
Then a thought occurred to me. “Hang on, kid. You need Kemia to make a Tunnel. Where the hell did you…?” The guilt on her face would have been comical if I wasn’t already so pissed. “You broke into my apartment?”
“It’s not breaking in if you have a key,” she said, attempting defiance but coming off petulant.
“You don’t have a key. Your mother has a key.” I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “How much did you take?”
“I could only find one bottle—”
“I only had one bottle.”
“Then I guess I took all of it.” She grinned at me sheepishly, and I forced down another sigh. Ca
lm down, Miles.
I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t a million times worse when I was her age. When she was old enough she might be able to get her Tunneler’s license. Her mother wouldn’t be able to afford her training, but maybe she could get in on scholarship, like I had. But I could see in her eyes that she wasn’t going to wait that long.
Hypocrite, a little voice inside me whispered. Like you weren’t stubborn and stupid as a goddamn donkey.
“All right,” I said. It felt like I had to drag the words from my mouth. “You win.”
“You’ll teach me?” Her eyes were so bright they would’ve blinded a deer.
I nodded. “I’ll teach you. But I’m in the middle of some crap right now. As soon as I get everything wrapped up, we’ll begin. Okay?”
She leaped into my arms, wrapping herself tightly around me, and I became acutely aware of how thin her nightgown was. Seriously, this would not be a good look if her mother came out right now.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” she squealed in my ear.
I peeled her off me, feeling my face growing hot. “Back to bed, kid. I’ll be in touch.”
Tania nodded, beaming, then practically skipped back to her and her mom’s apartment. I ran a hand through my curls as she closed the door behind her, then started trudging up the stairs again.
I felt like shit for lying to the kid. She wouldn’t understand. Kids never did.
But now it was time to go. The cops would be expecting me back soon, and it wouldn’t take them long to start looking for me when I didn’t show. There was no way I was getting mixed up in this Chroma business. I never pretended to be an honorable man. I was a survivor.
I had to pack my bags. It was time to leave Earth.
CHAPTER THREE
My apartment was both my home and my site of business. I had an office once, back when I thought being a freelancer was like being a private eye, where long-legged dames strolled in late at night and offered you a chance at danger and glory.
The Man Who Crossed Worlds (A Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) Page 2
