by Anna Silver
“Better not,” he agreed. “I’m gonna check, you know. From now on. I see anything else unusual, you’re gonna give that guitar back for a stretch and take a break. You look tired anyway. You been sleeping?”
London shook her head. “Not really.”
TWO
Dead Degan
Zen nudged the body with a steel-clad toe, leaving a red smear across the top of his size twelve black boots.
“Don’t,” London told him. “It’s disrespectful.” She frowned, pushing an unruly flop of dark hair from her eyes, and drew a pack of smokes from her front pocket.
The alley behind the club always reeked of sewer gas and stale cigarettes, a combination she’d almost grown fond of, but tonight the salty twang of blood mingled in the air, making smoking a necessity. It seemed the cleanest way to breathe under the circumstances.
“That’s a lot of blood,” Avery said, her voice reduced to a dry whisper.
London took one look at Avery’s paper-white face. “Go sit down, Avery. We don’t need you gettin’ sick all over the crime scene.”
Kim, their bassist, burst through the club’s back door and nearly stumbled over the body. “Bollocks,” he cursed. “Rye just told me. I didn’t know it was this bad though.” He moved to London’s side. “The bobby on the way?”
“Yeah. Avery called the police.” London lit a cigarette. “At least one of us has a license to carry comm-tech.”
“Like a license ever stopped you before.” Kim shouldered her. “Such rubbish.”
“You know, Kim, I wish you’d cut that British shit out. This isn’t the time.”
“Bugger off, London,” Kim replied, his voice thick with the put-on accent.
“You know you’re Korean, right?” London asked with a side smile.
“Don’t remind me,” Kim said under his breath in his normal voice, rubbing self-consciously at his wrist where three thick, black bars, the Trigram—his family’s symbol, marked him apart from crossbreeds like her. He slipped his razor-cut, black hair behind one ear. “I’ve been with the parents all day. Force of habit.”
Why Kim, a full-blooded Korean, several generations deep, invented this ridiculous, British persona was beyond London. Race did funny things to people now that immigration had been laid to rest with the dinosaurs and automobiles and the Breeding Bans erected in its place. Many, like Kim’s family, clung to it with the tenacity of a trap-jawed bulldog, going so far as to tattoo family crests like cattle brands on their children’s skin. Others waded indiscriminately through the gene pools, leaving behind a racially ambiguous generation, orphaned of tradition and heritage altogether. London was of the latter persuasion. But Kim defied them both, shunning his parents’ clannish Korean edicts by adamantly perpetuating his British alter-ego in their presence, a hodgepodge of words and phrases he’d picked up from some old BBC discs he’d scrapped his lunch rations for in the third grade. He was a rebel through and through, refusing to simply dissolve into the quagmire of a cultureless American youth born with the cord already cut. London had to admire that.
She noticed the fatigue on Kim’s face, apparent even in the waning streetlight behind the club. The bruised crescents crowning his cheeks might as well be neon signs flashing, Insomnia. Plus the accent was a sure tip-off. He always slipped up and used it around them when he was stressed. “The dreams back again?”
“Yeah. I didn’t get much sleep.”
“They’ll settle down soon enough. They always do.” She should know. She’d had them longer than anyone. London took a long drag from her cigarette and shouted down the narrow alley, “You okay, Avery? Holdin’ it together?”
Avery nodded weakly and waved a hand, refusing to look back where they stood watch over Degan’s body.
A damn shame, London thought, looking at the grizzly scene before her. Now they would never know what the dreams were telling Degan. She couldn’t help but wonder who the skinny, quiet kid really was. “Rye comin’?” London asked Kim between puffs.
“Yeah. He’s breaking down the drums inside. Putting them backstage for Pauly.” Kim motioned for a cigarette. “Gimme a fag, will ya?” he asked with a wink.
“Get your own.” London scowled, but she passed the pack over anyway.
“You shouldn’t be smoking,” Zen said to both of them as he squatted close to Degan’s body, inspecting wounds. Nearly everyone in the capital smoked, except Zen and Avery. He was always pushing for the rest of them to quit. The cigs were city-issue anyway. London didn’t see the point.
“Why? Is it gonna kill me?” London said sarcastically.
“Yes,” Zen answered, cutting his large gray eyes up at her. Everything about Zen was large. His feet, his frame, his mouth. But especially his heart, though he liked to keep that under wraps. Except when it came to Avery. Then, and only then, he wore it on his pleather sleeve.
“The less time I spend on this shithole of a planet, the better,” London said.
Zen shrugged. He couldn’t argue with that. They both knew the air inside the city walls was hardly better than the recycled smoke of their cigarettes. It was cluttered with a palpable, collective body odor and lingering year-round humidity, all stewing under a lid of ozone punched through like Swiss cheese. Not to mention the fumes of the reprocessing plants, which sputtered their toxic breath over the dismal skyline, day and night.
The historic Energy Crisis was supposed to make oil—and with it, pollution—a thing of humanity’s past. Instead, it just seemed to keep resurrecting the past, dredging it up from the pits outside the city walls and “reprocessing” it. The only thing it really got rid of was New. In Capital City, there was truly nothing New left under the sun. And nothing pure or original except scrap.
“So,” London started, “let’s get down to brass tacks. Who?”
“Coulda been anyone,” Zen said, rising to his full height, an impressive six-three at seventeen. “Do people even need a reason anymore?”
“For this? Maybe, maybe not. Seems pretty brutal just for kicks,” London answered. It was the fifth corpse she’d had the pleasure to witness, in line behind two Tigerian shootings, one expired homeless guy, and a knifing on Canal Street. But it was the first time she’d seen or heard of a nerd like Degan getting shanked for no obvious reason. And that shook her right down to her bony metatarsals.
“Whoever did it,” Zen told them, “was really, really pissed. His throat’s slit. Looks like someone was trying to saw his head off. We’ll know for sure when they turn him over.”
“I’m not sticking around for that,” Kim said.
“Me neither,” London added. “Ave? How ‘bout you?” London hollered down to her friend. “You wanna see the po-po turn him over?”
Avery visibly gagged.
“Now who’s being disrespectful?” Zen scowled, ever defensive of his wilting crush.
“Where the hell is Rye?” London asked no one in particular.
“I think it was the truck drivers,” Kim suggested.
“The Tigerians? No way. They’re crazy, but they wouldn’t do this,” London reasoned. She knew the trucks were bad news, running on gas no one in the free world could afford, slinging scraps and black market technology, doing the Tycoons’ dirty work. But she had her own Tigerian contact and she couldn’t picture him hassling with a scrawny high-schooler who never spoke more than ten words to anyone in his whole life. “It’s gotta be someone else.”
Gangs were common enough inside city walls, especially gangs like the Tigerians. Founded by a core of dogmatic street thugs, they attracted the loyalty of every wayward punk for miles, like scrap metal to an auxiliary magnet. They were mostly known by the hallmark of their operation, a fleet of boxy, armored vehicles that were used before the Crisis for errands as benign as delivering mail and selling ice cream. Motorized vehicles were an oddity, even for well-connected cartels inside the walled cities. Not to mention jacked-up trucks on monster tires with salvaged scraps like loudspeakers, guns, mirrors, and lights g
rafted onto the frames to make them more intimidating. If a gang were going to get a fleet of decrepit trucks up, running and fueled, Capital City would be the only place feasible. After all, the Tycoons moved the seat of government there for a reason. Which could mean only one thing, the Tigerians had Tycoon funding. That made them the kings of Capital City, as far as anyone was concerned. And kings don’t usually waste their energy on lowly peasants, which Degan certainly was.
“I don’t know,” Zen said. “Kim could be right.”
“Why would the Tigerians want to kill Degan?” London demanded. She was not buying it. The Tigerians were just an easy target.
“I don’t know,” Zen said again, “but maybe we should be worried. After all, he was coming here to meet us.”
London started to argue, but the shrill sound of a siren on the fritz interrupted her thoughts.
“They’re here,” Avery trilled weakly just as the rusted out squad car pulled into view, riding on one spare tire and missing the back windshield. Two bicycles followed behind, the officers gripping the handlebars with fingers fat from disuse. They didn’t even have guns.
At least they have gas, London thought. More than the rest of us can say.
“Let’s go before they break out their nightsticks and beat Zen for tracking his boots through the blood,” Kim joked with a nervous tug on Zen’s jacket.
Where the hell is Rye? London wondered.
London moved past the front entrance to the club, both hands shoved deeply into her pockets, a cigarette dangling from her lips, unlit. Tonight was certainly fucked up. Degan dead, throat slit. Kim’s dreams back again. The police with their asinine questioning. The band had a water-tight alibi. They were on stage when it happened. Zen and Avery watching from the crowd. Pauly and a hundred others could vouch for that. He was dumping garbage out back when he discovered the body and cut their set short.
It’s not like they were really going to look into the case anyway. No one gave a rat’s ass about a band of teenage renegades. Only a dead Tycoon would solicit a true investigation. The whole measly force was just a front.
The streets were dark and empty, save for the vagrants London could hear clustered inside an abandoned parking garage, their small fires flickering in place of floor lamps. She watched her slouched reflection slinking past in grimy store windows, thin and bent. Dark. Depressing.
A leftover campaign poster caught her eye. Its circus colors were pronounced against the gritty brick façade of the old building. The election was last year. What a joke. So funny, I forgot to laugh. Everyone knew the Tycoons were the real leaders. Yet they insisted on maintaining the pageantry of a presidential election every ten years, parading whatever new puppet they dug up that decade to hide behind from one walled city to the next. He didn’t even have an opponent. No one had the balls to run against the Tycoons.
London kicked the poster with a thickly treaded sole, leaving a dirty print across the candidate’s face.
“Hey London! Wait up!” the familiar voice called out.
She turned to see Rye running up behind her, drumsticks in hand, his crop of ruddy hair pointing in several directions at once. He was the only person she knew whose eyes were the exact color of his hair, something she noted with more affection than she liked to admit. “Where the hell have you been?” she asked him.
“Packing up my shit. And everyone else’s. You didn’t even come inside to get your guitar.”
“Pauly said we could leave our stuff there tonight.”
“Yeah. He’s pretty freaked about what happened. Said to give it a few days before we come back. I think he’s worried about you.”
London gave an ambiguous shrug. She didn’t want to think about how this might reinforce Pauly’s concerns for her.
“Did you play the song for him yet?” Rye asked her eagerly.
“Nah,” London lied, afraid to disappoint Rye. She was as protective of him in her own way as Zen was of Avery. “No chance.”
“It’s a good song though, isn’t it? You think he’ll like it, don’t you?” Rye was always overanalyzing stuff, thinking things to death. It made her crazy.
“I guess,” she said curtly, hoping to discourage him off the subject.
“We put a punk spin on it. I think the Dogma crowd will love it.”
Dogma was the name of Pauly’s grubby hole in the wall with poor lighting, bad acoustics, and a ragtag patronage. But his reputation for authentic pre-Crisis discs and live music meant more to a lot of people than expensive seat covers or a state-of-the-art bar. Pauly knew a good thing when he saw it. He’d been loaning them discs, letting them practice tracks since they formed the band just over a year ago, after the dreams began. Drawing a bigger crowd to Dogma, and more rations for the cover charge, was the least London could do to repay his years of kindness.
“Maybe,” London sighed. “Maybe not.” She didn’t feel like reminding Rye that some people feared New the way little kids feared the boogieman. Seemed silly until she’d actually created something New herself and had Pauly’s paranoia blow up in her face. It had come so easy, they kept forgetting it was supposed to be impossible. Then again, so was dreaming.
Rye picked up on her reluctance to discuss it. “You goin’ to class tomorrow?” he asked, changing tactics.
“I don’t know.” London shrugged. “Seems kinda pointless.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean. I still can’t believe he’s dead. I never even talked to the kid till he approached us at lunch last week. And now—boom. Dead.”
“Me neither. Pretty jacked up, huh? Makes me feel like some kind of curse.”
“It’s not like it’s ever happened before. We’re all okay,” Rye comforted her. “Even after we started hanging with you…and dreaming.”
London rubbed at her eyes. “Let’s just hope this isn’t the start of a new trend.”
Rye was pensive. “If it is, Avery will be next. She’s the newest. Except Degan, of course.”
London stopped Rye with a hard punch to his shoulder. “Don’t say that, Rye. Don’t you ever say that! Degan wasn’t one of us. He wasn’t Otherborn.”
“Okay, relax. I know he wasn’t officially in our little circle yet. But come on, London, you have to admit it. He was Otherborn. He was one of us.”
“We don’t know that for sure.” London decided to finally light the dangling cigarette, which had migrated from her mouth to behind her ear then back to her mouth during the course of their conversation. Degan’s murder was making her edgy. “We never really talked to him. We didn’t get the chance.”
“We knew enough,” Rye said. “He told us enough last week.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” London exhaled a cloud of smoke and picked at her pouty bottom lip. “I’m just saying this doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of us.”
“Do you really believe that?” Rye pressed her as they began walking again, their building coming into view.
“No one even knows about us, Rye. Not about the dreams,” London reasoned. She hated the way he overanalyzed everything.
Rye paused in front of their building, taking a drag off London’s cig. “Degan did,” he said, blowing the smoke back in her face.
THREE
Kingsnake
“London, that you?” her mother’s raspy voice called as she came in through the door.
“Yeah, Mom, it’s me.” London avoided entering the cramped living room, knowing her mother would be lying in front of their ancient television set, her hundredth cigarette burning in one hand, a near empty fifth of bourbon in the other, the same colorful images flickering onscreen.
She stole the small set with Kim’s help from an open apartment three buildings over a couple of years ago. There was only one channel in the walled cities, which broadcasted obsolete turn-of-the-Crisis reruns to the mindless masses. Her mother, Diane, watched it religiously every night. If the Tycoon’s didn’t approve of something in the show, they simply spliced it out. Last night they’d shown a
whole ninety-five minutes of the ancient classic An Affair to Remember. Tonight they were screening random blips of something called Seinfeld Season One.
London stood in the doorway a second, looking on. The show didn’t even make sense. But she didn’t think her mother cared or noticed, wading through her whisky haze, chuckling at all the wrong moments.
Another hard day at the office, London thought.
She detested her mother’s surrender to apathy even though she understood it. Diane was assigned a job clerking in a drugstore a few blocks away. The hours were unimpressive, and the pay was meager, basic rations, and skimpy at that, but it was considered decent by city standards. Why she’d ever taken up with a pit worker, no one could comprehend. Though Pauly knew London’s dad from school and insisted he was better than his assignment. Not that it mattered. Since London’s dad stopped returning thirteen years ago, the bottle had become his faithful replacement.
London ducked from the kitchen into her room and slung her bag onto the unmade bed. The seven-by-nine hole was her sanctuary. Meant for dining, it was borrowed from the tiny kitchen, concealed behind a pressboard partition with a bed sheet for a door. Her mother mostly occupied the space beyond, where their dingy sitting area doubled as a bedroom. All things considered, they weren’t bad digs. Sure, the building was unquestionably old and shabby. Once upon a time, it had been a hotel or something, the stairwells and lobby still fashioned from the vintage brass and marble fittings they’d first known, the elevators permanently “out of order.” But the building maintained a certain dystopian chic that London had come to identify with.
City lights flickered outside the little window, casting a sickly glow over her things. London loved that sallow light, loved having the window at all. She was lucky. Rye lived two floors up with his dad and none of their rooms had a window. By contrast, Zen lived a couple blocks over in a recycled bank. All their rooms had floor to ceiling windows with dark, purpling tint to keep out the sun. Several residents there had taken to boarding up the interior, but Zen said his parents thought the open views made the tiny space feel bigger.
