by Lyga, Barry
“I wish we could rest,” he gasped, “but…”
“I know. We have to keep moving.” She found her feet and pulled him up. “Let’s get going.”
“Magistrate?” Markard approached Max Ludo cautiously. The Magistrate was huddled with the scientist—Dimbali—on the sidewalk just outside Dimbali’s building. A swarm of DeeCees bustled around them, shouting out instructions, warnings.
Max Ludo sneered, his voice laden with annoyance. “What is it, Markard?”
“Magistrate, the men have surrounded the building and closed off a perimeter. We’re ready to move on your order.”
Ludo and Dimbali shared a look. “Well, Doctor?” It was the closest Markard had ever heard to deference or even basic politeness in Ludo’s voice.
“Just be careful,” Dimbali said. He was a frightened, nervous thing, but something lurked under that skin that set Markard’s nerves on edge. There was something powerful hidden under the sniveling and kowtowing. How could the Magistrate not see it? “The…” He paused, glancing over at Markard the way most people looked at cockroaches or dung.
“You can trust him,” Ludo said, exasperated. “Markard here had the idea to follow the Ward girl, just in case. He’s been working with me longer than you have, Doctor. He’s loyal. Aren’t you, Markard?”
There was never any question as to the answer: “Of course, Magistrate.” What other option was there? “Now, Doctor, let me get this straight: You were conducting experiments on Rose’s body, and Ms. Ward just… showed up? Out of the blue?” He hoped his incredulous sarcasm came through; sometimes it was tough to tell.
Dimbali clearly wasn’t happy to be spilling secrets and confidences in the presence of a mere cop, but he answered anyway. “Yes, that’s precisely correct. She is—was—an acquaintance of mine. She reactivated the creature, and together they overpowered me. It’s possible she’s a Dalcord sleeper agent. An orphanage would be perfect cover for insertion of a spy.”
Markard nodded slowly. He didn’t know Dimbali, but the man had a point. It was possible.
“Thankfully you were already in the area when I fled,” Dimbali continued, now larding on the sentiment so thickly that Markard felt ill. “The creature is powerful and dangerous. But valuable,” he hastened to remind them.
“It killed my boy,” Ludo snapped. “I don’t care how powerful it is—we killed it once before, we can do it again.”
With anyone else, that would have been the end of the conversation, but Dr. Dimbali, clearing his throat and flickering a smile, said, “Of course, Magistrate. Of course. Technically, though, I…” He shifted gears. “May I remind you, though, that the creature is infinitely more valuable alive than dead? That, alive, it may hold the key or keys to protecting this—your—Territory and defeating your enemies?”
Magistrate Ludo harrumphed. He brought his meaty hands together and rubbed them hungrily. Revenge and pragmatism warred nakedly in his features. Pragmatism—and ambition—won out. “We’ll take the creature alive, if at all possible,” he finally capitulated. “Plastic bullets.”
Dimbali seemed happier than almost anyone Markard had ever seen in his life.
“May I give the order, Magistrate?” Markard asked.
“Do it.”
Markard thumbed his comm and held it to his lips. “Commanders, load stun rounds. You may begin your incursion into the building.”
CHAPTER 49
The first gap was the widest and the toughest. The next building was only a couple of yards away; getting to its roof was easy compared with that first jump. As they made their way across the cityscape, Rose suddenly paused at the lip of a rooftop, staring off into the distance. Deedra was getting antsy—she didn’t like standing still any longer than was strictly necessary. Movement meant life. Safety. The Broken Bubble loomed ahead.
But was he ready to run? After all he’d been through?
“Are you okay?” she asked him. “Do you think you can—”
“My memories are coming back.” He shook his head. “It’s… distracting, but I can get past it.”
“You remember… everything?”
“I think so. And I remember Dr. Dimbali. Standing over me. Talking to himself.”
No, talking to his plants. And his SmartBoard.
He blinked and turned to her, eyes wide with memory. “I heard him… I heard him say that… I’m actually a rose?”
She nodded slowly. “Yes. That’s true. We figured it out after you were arrested. You’re a hybrid.”
“So I’m not human after all,” Rose said.
She couldn’t tell how this news affected him; he said it with the same “isn’t that interesting?” tone with which he discussed something as prosaic as fruit discs.
“You’re part human,” she reminded him. “You’re something new.”
He seemed so vulnerable and tentative, his outline against the gray sky, a single figure backgrounded by the wreck of the Territory’s skyline. She took his hand and opened her mouth and realized that she had nothing else to say. Nothing that needed to be said.
I love you, she thought, but did not say. Not because she was afraid to, but because she realized in that instant that it was unnecessary. He knew.
He turned to her and grinned. “Part human is good enough, right? It’s interesting, at least.”
She smiled back. “You’re the most human person I’ve ever met.”
“You’re the most plantlike human I’ve ever met,” he told her in a joking tone that made her laugh, despite their situation.
“We should get going,” she reminded him. “The machines they—we—built…”
“They’re still building,” he pointed out. “They’ll wait until they’re all finished, until they have enough of them. Then they’ll start. We have some time. To escape. Maybe to warn people.”
“How did you know we weren’t building air scrubbers?”
He hesitated. “I’ve seen things, Deedra. I saw the remains of a machine once. Far from here. It looked very similar to what we were building at L-Twelve.”
He looked down. They were many stories up and the only nearby buildings they could reach were in the wrong directions—north or west, when the Broken Bubble lay directly to the east.
“Let’s get down to ground level. We’re out of the search zone, so it should be okay.”
She looked around. There was a door nearby, but it was metal, sturdy, and—from the feel of it when she pushed against it—barricaded from the other side. “Well, the stairs are—Whoa!”
Rose had enfolded her in vines and pulled her tight to him, and then—without a word—stepped off the edge of the roof. Deedra didn’t have time to yell or scream, as her breath fled her. They dropped a few feet and then stopped, flush against the side of the building. Another vine snaked up and over the rooftop.
“You could warn me before you do that!” She focused all her attention on not looking down.
“Sorry.” His tone, impish, was anything but apologetic. He was still grinning. “This is going to be the quickest way down.”
“Really?”
“I’ve done this before,” he reminded her. He shot a vine out to their left, this one studded with thorns. It lodged into a crevice. Rose pulled slightly, testing it, then released the rooftop vine. They swung gently down and to the left.
“Of course,” he admitted when they came to a stop, “I’ve never done it holding someone!”
“Don’t remind me!” But even though she felt the need to chide him, she didn’t actually sense any danger. She’d never felt safer or more secure than right then, dangling several stories above the hard ground… wrapped up in Rose.
He zigzagged them down the face of the building a bit more, then stopped to catch his breath and reassess their position.
“You didn’t kill Jaron after all.”
“What?” Distracted, he turned to her. “No, of course not.”
“Then how did you get my pendant back?”
He pu
shed off and dropped them a little. When they caught—a few feet lower—he said, “I went to Jaron’s that morning, before light. To sneak in and take back the pendant. It wasn’t really stealing if I was taking it back, right?”
It seemed to matter to him, so she nodded.
“But he was dead when I got there. I took the pendant and ran. I was going to explain it all to you, but…”
Lockdown. The gunfire. The arrest. Lissa, shot.… She closed her eyes against sudden tears.
“It was a mistake,” he said. “All a mistake. Even trying to fit in. I was tired of being on the road. I was alone all the time. And here was my chance. I knew I would have to have an actual identity to pass among other people, and I knew everyone had brands. I thought maybe I could fake it. I…” He shook his head. “Stupid. Stupid mistake.”
“The brands have special—”
“That’s not what I mean. That wasn’t the mistake. The mistake was trying it at all. Trying to be someone else.”
She thought about that. They stared at each other.
“It’s an easy mistake to make,” she said.
“All the more reason not to,” he said, and without preamble retracted his vines. Deedra gasped and fell…
… less than a foot, stumbling on the ground. Rose had lowered them the rest of the way while they had talked.
“That wasn’t funny,” she grumbled as he dropped into place next to her.
“It wasn’t supposed to be,” he said. “I was tired.”
She looked up. The building seemed infinitely tall, and Rose seemed infinitely small. He was pale and breathing hard.
“You did well.” She kissed his cheek. “Do you have a little more left in you? We still have to get there.” She pointed off to the Broken Bubble.
“Let’s go,” he told her, taking her hand.
They stuck to alleyways and cramped walkways. Deedra had never gone so far in this direction before. The Broken Bubble squatted on the very edge of the Territory’s boundary in this direction, perilously close to the Dalcord Territory. No one in Ludo would go any closer to Dalcord than was strictly necessary. She lost the path quickly, but Rose had come this way many, many times, and he guided her.
Nightfall was still a few hours away by the time they gained the Broken Bubble.
Up close, it didn’t look like a broken bubble at all. It was a massive, oval building, several blocks long, with a domed roof that had collapsed at points along its surface. From here, it looked more like an egg, only this one lay on its side and was cracked along the top.
This far out, the heaps of trash and wreckage were older, less picked-over, more massive.
For the two or three blocks leading up to the Broken Bubble (she still thought of it that way), they had to creep their way over chunks of concrete and mountains of garbage, as well as a profusion of junked cars, the likes of which Deedra had seen before only on wikis. Rats skittered underfoot, unafraid. Blue flashes of fur darted in and out of her field of vision, and she kicked out when she had to.
Eventually they stumbled over the last piece of trash and stood before a massive stone arch that, once upon a time, led inside the Broken Bubble.
Once upon a time. Now it was choked with debris, packed solid and impassable.
She caught her breath and stared at it. The Broken Bubble was immense in a way she’d never encountered. She was used to tall buildings, to skyscrapers, but not something so sprawling and gigantic. Looking left or right, she couldn’t see either end of the thing.
Most of the signage on and near the building had long since decayed into illegibility, but Deedra managed to pick out letters that spelled ARENA.
“What was this place?”
“I’m not sure,” Rose admitted. “I think people used to gather here. For entertainment.”
Deedra couldn’t imagine why people would need to commune in such a place to watch a vid.
“Live entertainment,” Rose amended. “Contests of some sort, I think. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“I guess not.” She sniffed the air. There was the lingering, rotted scent of garbage from behind them, but also something else. Something temptingly familiar.
Of course. She leaned in close to Rose. He was redolent of his usual perfume smell, but the smell in the air was different. Similar, but not the same, like different shades of the same color.
“What’s that smell?” she asked.
Rose hesitated. “It’s probably best to show you.”
He took her hand and led her along the right-hand side of the Broken Bubble. The curve of the building became more apparent the farther they walked. Eventually he stopped and looked up.
“Wait here,” he said, and before she could speak, he was gone, clambering up the side of the building with his thorny vines. He looked like an enormous green spider, and that image thrilled rather than terrified her.
Midway up, he stopped… and vanished. A moment later, his head poked out and he dangled a vine down to her. She grabbed ahold. It was cool and strong; it wrapped around her arm for support and stability.
And stop thinking of it as “it.” It’s him.
She started to climb and Rose retracted the vine at the same time. Faster than she could have imagined, she ascended the wall until she joined Rose in a shaft that cut through the building. The new scent was even stronger now, carried on a powerful rush of air from farther in.
“I think this used to be an old air shaft,” he explained. “For ventilation. I’m not sure. But this is how I go in and out.”
“How long have you been coming here? What have you been doing?” Another thought occurred to her, completely out of the blue: “Do you ever even sleep?”
“Of course! I just need less sleep than you do, is all. Come on.”
Together, they crawled down the air shaft. The smell became more overwhelming. Up ahead, gray light shone through.
And they were out in the open again, Rose helping Deedra climb out of the duct.
She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She began to understand how that DeeCee had felt when the strobing light patterns flashed in her helmet.
She had emerged from the duct onto a concrete platform that overlooked the interior of the Broken Bubble from a height of maybe one story. Above her, the roof was a shattered patchwork of crumbled concrete and a webbing of steel beams, so distant and so wrecked that it might as well have been missing entirely. Clouds clustered overhead, but there was just enough light that she could see something so staggering that Deedra actually lost her balance. Rose caught her, held her upright, as she stared into what was the greenest, most beautiful tableau she’d ever witnessed.
The interior of the Broken Bubble was hollow, with seats and aisles ranged around the perimeter. But below, it was a lush, vibrant carpet of colors, greens, reds, yellows, oranges.… More colors and more intense colors than she’d ever witnessed before. The colors alone assaulted her, battered her deliciously. Her eyes drank them in, as though starved of such hues and desperate for them.
“Beautiful…” she murmured, and then stopped talking, all her energy, her attention, her focus directed on what was before her eyes.
“Welcome to the Arbor,” Rose said.
Grass. Not the scraggly, brownish threads that occasionally poked up from sidewalks. But a whole swath of it, green and fresh and swaying in a light breeze. Trees! Slender and raw and young, their branches an explosion of many-fingered hands of multiple shades and colors. Insects buzzed and swarmed, gentle clouds of them migrating from bushes, clotting the air over a cluster of yellow-petaled flowers.
In the middle of it all was one tree that towered over the others, spreading its broad branches wide. A wild, untamed hedge ran around it like a crowd. She couldn’t stop staring at it.
“I call that one Big Boy,” Rose said. “He was the first thing I saw when I came here. Half dead, but still reaching for the sun. I tended to him and he’s grown… a lot.”
“Did you name every
plant here?”
“Just him, so far.”
She felt small and insignificant, and in the same moment enormous and magnificent, that she could witness this. The world was alight and alive.
“The smell…”
“Flowers,” Rose told her. “No roses. Not yet. But others.”
She cocked her head at a sound. “Are those… birds?”
“Yes.”
“How—” There were no birds for miles and miles and miles.
“They were attracted by the insects. And the insects were attracted by the plants. That’s how it’s supposed to work. That’s how it used to work, as best I can tell. It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
She nodded, her voice fled again in wonderment. He allowed her to gawk for a little while longer, then asked, “Do you want to go down there?”
To walk among such splendor? She could only bob her head in mute, spasmodic enthusiasm.
He guided her down several turns of broad, concrete stairs, then through a break in an old interior wall. The scent was stronger now, and she could detect different notes to it: Bark and leaves. Grass and flowers. Soil and water.
“We should be safe here until nightfall,” Rose said.
They found a spot under an overlap of tree branches and settled in. As she sat down, safe at last, all the panic and terror that had driven her since fleeing her apartment finally drained away, and a surge of emotion broke through the dam she’d built out of fear and necessity.
“They killed Lissa,” she whispered. “For no reason at all.”
Rose set his jaw, his fists clenched. “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all you can—” And she interrupted herself with a flood of tears. Rose crouched down and put his arms around her, and she realized after a moment that he was crying, too.
“None of this should have happened,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry. None of this should have happened.”
