by Oisin McGann
“Is it the money?” he persisted. “I could give you some on credit.”
“No, thank you.”
Estella said that Cortez was no small-time hustler. Cleo knew that his little store was just a front for his black-market operation. But even that was only the tip of Cortez’s personal iceberg. Estella claimed that Cortez was head of the Fourth Quadrant Family, the gang that ran most of the Filipino District. It was not a good idea to be in debt to a man in his position. He shrugged, giving her a flat grin.
“It’s there if you want it,” he said.
The door in the back of the store opened and closed again, and a young man came out to the front. He had some guitar strings in his hand, but leaned down to whisper something in Cortez’s ear. The old man nodded, took the strings, and dismissed him.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you, my dear,” he told her. “Here are your strings. Let’s call it twelve credits, if you please.”
She handed him three plastic, five-credit coins, and he opened his till to give her change. As he put the money in her hand, she felt a small rice-paper bag folded around the coins. Without opening it, she knew it would be a “sample” of the flaky brown powder her friends coveted. She was always able to impress them with her street contacts.
“Give my respects to your family,” he told her, knowing she wouldn’t. “I’m sorry I have to rush off, but duty calls. I’ll see you again soon, Cleo.”
And he knew he would.
Cleo decided to take the elevator back up to the lowest tram level. She should not have taken the stem. That was a mistake. She had to come here for the strings—metal was a precious resource in Ash Harbor, and nonessential items like guitar strings could only be had on the black market. But taking the stem without paying for it was a bad move. Now she was in Cortez’s debt.
The first elevator she tried was out of order. So was the next. And the next one after that. Heaving a sigh, she found a flight of stairs and started climbing. When she came to the first walkway, she looked out on the level she had just left. Something was wrong. Water was pouring down the main street, washing around the ankles of the people, causing them to stumble for higher ground—a dirty, foamy water that had some kind of debris floating in it. One of the drainage pipes in the levels above must have burst. As she watched, the electric lights of the stalls flickered and went out. The water had knocked out the electricity supply. Only the gaslights remained, giving the area a haunting glow.
“What the hell’s happening to this city?”
Sol looked down on the city from the elevator. White light burned down from the dome, its hexagonal lattice of girders casting a delicate weblike shadow over the cityscape. The daylighters would be on normal maintenance duty, with no snow and ice to clear. That would mean they’d be in a more welcoming mood, and more likely to help him find answers. The workers would scrape the dome clear one day, and the next day the ice would be back. If it was just the freezing air, it would start as a feathery coating that would grow slowly, like a rock-hard fungus. But a blizzard could bury the glass in snow in a matter of hours. And when the temperatures had risen back to a manageable level—say, around –70ºC on a good day—the daylighters would get back out there to clean it off once more and give Ash Harbor what little sun there was to be had.
The depot where his father worked was relatively quiet. There were a few men in the workshops where the tools were fixed or recycled and a couple of people in the canteen. But the man he was looking for was on the exit floor. The highest area on the West Wall of the city, this was where the men and women went up through the air lock to the outside skin of the dome. Harley Wasserstein was a huge man, with a full, white blond beard of curly hair that helped compensate for his polished cranium. Two wings of curls rose up on either side of his bald pate, giving him a comical look that alleviated his otherwise fearsome appearance.
He sat on a bench, having just come down from the job. His safesuit was pulled down to his waist, and he had taken off the fleece he wore underneath to cool his huge, sweating torso. Hard labor under direct sunlight on glass could heat you up despite the Arctic temperatures. Around him, the twenty-nine men and women of his team were stripping off and changing back into normal clothes. Shovels, picks, and barrows and other tools sat neatly in racks; heat-hoses lay coiled on their rigs; and pneumatic charges were packed against the wall.
Sol stole a glance at the webscreen that showed the weather conditions outside. The outside temperature—without windchill—read –85ºC. Positively balmy. In weather like this, the daylighters from the four depots could clear nearly half the dome in a day. In an ice storm, the temperature could drop to –180ºC or more. Even in a safesuit, a man could freeze solid in minutes. Harley waved wearily to Sol, beckoning him over.
“Come about your dad, I expect,” he boomed. “We haven’t seen ’im. You any idea where he might be?”
Sol shook his head. “I was hoping you could tell me. You know he’s…They’ve accused him—”
“Don’t you mind that crap.” Harley grimaced. “There’s no way Gregor killed Tommy. Hold on there while I change and we’ll go down to the cafeteria. I need to get some food in me.”
The food hall was filling up, and the background sound of voices meant Harley and Sol had to speak loudly to be heard even across the table. The smell of cooking oil, fish, onions, and overcooked vegetables pervaded everything. The walls, once white, were a seedy yellow.
“Haven’t seen your dad since Wednesday,” Harley said over a large plate piled high with vegetables and steamed carp, fresh from the fish farm. “We were out on the glass, and he just up and left. Didn’t even tell me he was going, simply unhitched his safety line and slid down to the air lock. He’s never done that before. Your dad’s a reliable man—one of my best. Tommy was working nearby; he saw your old man take off and followed after him. Something must have got Gregor worked up, but I couldn’t tell you what. That was the last time I saw either of them.”
“Didn’t you go after them to find out what was going on?”
“Sure I did. You don’t cut out in the middle of a job. Not on my watch. But by the time I got in, they were both gone. Just dumped their gear where they came in and bolted.”
He shoveled some fish into his mouth, chewing as he talked. “It’s just not like your old man to do that, Sol. I mean, he’s got his interests outside work, you know….” He looked anxiously across the table.
“I know about the gambling,” Sol told him.
“Right. Well, that’s his own business, y’know? It’s never got in the way before. But if this is down to some debt or somethin’…”
Sol thought about the betting slips he had found in his father’s room. “I don’t know,” he said quietly.
His mind turned to the man Gregor was supposed to have killed. “What kind of man was this guy Hyung?” he asked. “Was he into gambling?”
“Tommy?” Harley looked at the ceiling. “Not sure. Didn’t know him too well; he was fairly new. Bit of a tough guy, I think. Kept to himself mostly. He and your dad got on well, though. When the two of them ran off at the same time like that, I just assumed Tommy was going after Gregor to see what was wrong.”
Sol nodded. “Where were you working?” he asked. “When they cut out?”
“Third Quadrant, halfway up the grid.” Harley stuck a whole potato in his mouth. “Didn’t see where he actually stopped. It’ll be on his marker. Go on up and have a look if you want.”
Sol thanked him and got up to leave. Harley reached across and grabbed his arm. His huge hand made Sol’s upper arm look like an infant’s.
“Sol, if you know where he is—or if you find him—tell him to come to me if he’s in trouble. I’ll see ’im right. It doesn’t matter what he’s done. Debts can be settled, y’know? There’s no need for him to get hurt over money.”
“Yeah, thanks, Harley,” Sol replied. “Appreciate it. But, to be honest, I just want to know what’s happened to him. It�
��s drivin’ me nuts, not knowing.”
The big man nodded, staring into Sol’s face. “You need any help, just ask.”
Sol left the cafeteria and went up to the changing room. Punching up his father’s marker program on the webscreen, he entered Gregor’s password, Southpaw, and brought up the last record. It showed a stylized display of the dome and his father’s path across it on the Wednesday afternoon. It stopped at section D63 in the Third Quadrant. It meant nothing to him. He used the cursor to turn the display so that the image of the dome spun around, showing all 360 degrees of the structure. It didn’t tell him anything.
He logged out and sat down on the nearest bench. This was starting to get him down. A thought occurred to him, and he stood up and walked over to his father’s locker. Tapping in the combination, he opened it and looked inside. It was in a state. Things had been thrown in; clothes, boots, and hats were stuffed in as if in a rush.
The old books that Gregor read while he was on standby had been crushed in at the back, their pages crumpled. Sol took one out, straightening it up and smoothing the pages. It was a real paper book. A copy of A Clockwork Orange. There were a couple of Gregor’s other favorites in here too: The Name of the Rose and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sol was shocked at the way they had been creased. Gregor would never have done this, not in a million years. And he never left his locker in this kind of disarray. Somebody else had been through his things. Sol examined the lock, but it showed no signs of having been forced. Maybe Harley had put some of Gregor’s gear back in, making the mess in the process, but Sol suspected what had happened.
The men who had turned their apartment over had gone through the locker as well, he was sure of it. Sol smoothed out the books and put them carefully back on the shelf, placing a heavy box of nuts and bolts on top of them to help flatten the pages. Closing the locker, he tested the door, but it was shut tight. Whoever these men were, they had no problem with combination locks. Sol strode out of the depot, following a walkway that skirted the rim of the crater, just below the dome’s base. From here, he could see clear across the city. The four huge tower cranes from each of the four quadrants were moving, their various arms swinging loads with delicate precision. On the massive gantries that stretched across the top of the city, smaller cranes swept along rails and, above them, he could see people gathering on the sun platforms. Pigeons wheeled in among them.
These platforms offered the best exposure to the cherished daylight, and a lottery decided who would get the opportunity to spend a few sweet hours on the public spaces. Sometimes they were even used by thrill-seekers for BASE jumping with homemade parachutes. Not all the chutes worked.
The government was being forced to sell off these platforms as it struggled with the higher costs of running the public services. Most of the platforms were privately owned now. The one closest to Sol was one of these; it belonged to the Dark-Day Fatalists. He gazed up at the dark-clad figures in disdain. Every Sunday, they gathered to offer up prayers to the elements. He didn’t know an awful lot about them, but the gist of their philosophy seemed to be that the Machine was an abomination, that nature would win out, and that Ash Harbor was just postponing the inevitable. The platforms had railings, but some of the more despairing DDF members would use the height to make a final, dramatic statement—by throwing themselves off the edges of the platforms. Prices for property directly below DDF platforms tended to be lower than average.
In fact, high falls had become such a popular choice for anybody committing suicide that police had taken to routinely questioning anybody on the upper levels. The DDF maintained that they did not encourage people to take their own lives. But there were those who said that when the Fatalists gathered up on those platforms, they prayed for a disaster that would split open the dome and destroy life in the city. There were always rumors about what the DDF did in their secret sanctums. Some said that they even started false rumors themselves, to give their movement an air of mystery.
Sol just thought they were a sad bunch of losers.
He watched them for a little while longer, then shook his head and walked toward the nearest elevator. The only threat the DDF posed was the damage caused by their falling bodies.
Section 7/24: CORPSES
CLEO STOPPED AND looked back the way she had come. In the dim light from the gas lamps, all the walkways looked the same. In front of her, the path forked off in three different directions. None of them seemed to lead upward. Biting her lip, she looked back again. She was lost. Somewhere nearby, a bank of pistons pumped away, and all around her was the rubbery stink of cat pee. Seeing a reflective sign with grid numbers on it, she walked up to it, staring at the numbers and trying to work out where she was. But she was no good with the grid system; she needed street names and buildings to find her way around. If she could see the dome, it would help. But there was just the damp, musky darkness.
Off to her left, she heard the sound of voices. The left-hand walkway led into a corridor that would take her in that direction. She put her hand in her pocket, her fingers closing around the little canister of pepper spray. This was a rough part of the city, and people were known to disappear down here in the darker sections. A young girl lost in the works would be an easy victim for the kinds of people who hunted in the shadows. But she could wander around the lower levels for days if she didn’t find her way up. Fervently wishing there was more light, she gripped the pepper spray and edged forward toward the dark corridor.
The corridor led out onto an observation balcony that looked down on the level below, three lines of large sewage-treatment tanks. Two men and a woman were dressed in sewage workers’ overalls with tool belts and head flashlights and were manhandling a large bundle toward the intake hopper of a grinding rig—its massive wheels used to crush any solids in the system into slurry. Cleo crouched close to the floor, her gaze glued to the scene below her. The more she looked at it, the more the indistinct bundle seemed to have a decidedly body-shaped appearance.
They heaved the body over the edge and into the hopper. One of the men—a ghostly looking man with white hair, white skin, and pale eyes—slapped the big button to start the machine. It didn’t start. He pressed the button again. Nothing. They all leaned over the edge to look into the bottom of the hopper.
“It’s not working,” he announced.
“Do ya think?” the woman said sarcastically. She was an Asian with the gray pallor of somebody who rarely saw daylight. “I can see it’s not working! We’ll have to try another one.”
“How we going to get it out of there?” the white-haired man asked.
“You’re going to have to go down there and get it.”
“The hell I am. I’ve seen what happens to bodies in that thing. Human jelly, that’s what you get. Bolognese. If you want to get it out, you go down there!”
“You turn it off again, you moron!” the woman snapped. “Now get your ass down there and get that damn thing up here before somebody sees us!”
“And what if it’s the switch that’s faulty?” he retorted.
“I could get down there, it turns on, and suddenly I’m toast. I’m not doing it—”
Cleo shuffled farther back from the edge…and the balcony creaked beneath her. Suddenly the shouting stopped. She pulled her head away from the edge, but it was too late.
“There’s somebody up there!” she heard the woman bark.
“Damn it!” another voice spat. “How long do you think they were there?”
“It doesn’t matter. They saw us here; they’ll be able to identify us when news breaks about the job. Split up—find them!”
Nothing more was said. Soft footsteps took off in either direction along the catwalk leading off the platform. Cleo crawled back into the corridor and stood up, her pulse throbbing through her body, her limbs trembling. She continued to stand there, frozen against the wall, while her mind tried to make sense of what was happening.
“Run,” she whispered to herself, willing herself to move
. “They’re coming. Run!”
Almost as if she needed a push, she shoved off from the wall and set off at a sprint. She had to assume that, whoever they were, they knew their way around. They would find a route up to her, and then…She didn’t want to think about it. It didn’t matter who they were. All that mattered was that they were after her and they dumped bodies in sewage grinders.
Her footsteps were painfully loud, echoing down the narrow corridor, signaling to her hunters. She slowed down, softening her footfalls. The route along which she had come was too long and straight; if they had guns, they could shoot her from a hundred meters away. What she needed were some corners. Off one branch of the corridor, she spotted a ladder beside a gas lamp. Hurrying up to it, she grabbed the rungs and started to climb. Stopping for a moment, she reached over and turned the valve on the lamp, switching it off. Maybe now they wouldn’t see the ladder, and at least she could climb in darkness.
Running footsteps approached below, and she winced as the ladder squeaked with every rung she climbed. The footsteps slowed and advanced more carefully. All around her was pitch darkness. To her right, she could feel the breeze from a ventilation duct. Cleo went completely still as somebody reached the bottom of the ladder. A flashlight was switched on, and the beam played across the floor of the corridor below her, then found the foot of the ladder. It swept upward, but stopped just short of her shoes. Then it shone away and down the corridor. In its glow she could see a white face, white hair, and the dull shine of a gray gun barrel. The man began to move away, but then he sniffed at the air and turned back. He felt the body of the gas lamp, and pulled his hand away quickly. It was still hot. His flashlight beam came back up the ladder, and this time it found Cleo.
