Heart of Gold

by Sharon Shinn

  It was about an hour before true dark by the time they arrived at number 1811. The midsized house was small by indigo standards, but comfortable-looking nonetheless, and certainly respectable enough for the locale. It was painted with colorful stripes of sky blue, pale orange and yellow, and its slanted roof was copper tile. Out front played a small fountain in the shape of a lily whose petals narrowed into streams of water.

  “Not the sort of place I would imagine Colt coming from,” Melina said under her breath. “But I rather like it.”

  “Does he live here alone?”

  “I didn’t ask. I wouldn’t think so. Let’s see who’s home.”

  The woman who answered the door was a tall, beautiful, tawny-skinned woman about Melina’s age. She had the longest, thickest gold hair that Nolan had ever seen and eyes the color of amber. She looked terrified to see them. She seemed to want to crouch behind the door to hide as much of herself as possible, and her flustered greeting was incomprehensible.

  Melina stepped forward and spoke in her usual brisk voice. “I’m Melina Lurio, this is Nolan Adelpho. We come from the Biolab in the city. Is Colt here?”

  The woman stared at them, her eyes growing even wider. Her hands appeared to tighten on the edge of the door. “Colt?” she repeated and then asked a question in an unfamiliar language.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, she can’t speak bluetongue,” Melina said, her voice a mix of frustration and disbelief. “How can anybody live in this city and not bother to learn the language?”

  “Maybe she never ventures out of the neighborhood,” Nolan said. “Maybe she’s just moved here.”

  “What do you suppose she is to Colt? Sister? Wife? Lover?”

  “He doesn’t have a wife. As far as I know.”

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter what her connection to him is. Listen, young lady,” Melina said. She switched to a slow, emphatic tone of voice and asked a question in a set of words Nolan could not understand.

  “I didn’t know you spoke goldtongue!” he exclaimed.

  “I don’t. Just enough to ask if anyone here speaks our language. I had to learn a few phrases when I did a summer internship at a clinic in the Lost City. I can say some other choice words, too, like ‘fever’ and ‘broken bone,’ but I don’t think any of those will help us now.”

  The gulden woman had nodded vigorously and replied at length in her own language, but Melina flung up a hand to cut her off. She repeated her request and then assumed an impatient, imperious pose. The woman spoke again, a little more briefly, then disappeared into the recesses of the house.

  “Is she coming back?” Nolan asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  But she did return, less than five minutes later, followed by a boy who appeared to be about fourteen. He was tall and gangly, awkward for his height; his face looked incomplete, as if he had not yet mastered all its expressions. But there was an indefinable arrogance to his carriage, an incipient self-assurance that made it clear he couldn’t imagine what blueskins were doing at his door and he hoped he would not have to deal with them for long.

  “Can you speak bluetongue?” Melina demanded.

  He looked down at her out of mint-green eyes and visibly wondered at her manners. “There is a woman at my door speaking the indigo language,” he said, pronouncing the words with a perfect accent. “Is that why I was called here?”

  Oh, yes. Nolan had forgotten. This was the way an uncooperative gulden would always speak to an impatient blueskin, in the most roundabout, indirect fashion imaginable. At the lab, they were all too busy to indulge in such affectations, though Nolan had heard Colt and Dade and even Pakt use such oblique commentaries when they were dealing with vendors or security officers or anyone else who had raised their ire. The practice nearly drove the efficient Melina mad; she could not stand any senseless waste of time.

  “Yes. To interpret for me. I am Melina, this is Nolan, we’re friends of Colt’s. Is he here?”

  “Strange to think that a guldman might have friends among the indigo,” the boy replied.

  “Strange but true. We’ve come to offer him help—anything he might need. Can you tell him we’re here?”

  “With such a commotion at the door, anyone within would know there are visitors.”

  Melina digested that a moment in silence. “You mean he’s not here? Will he be coming home anytime soon?”

  The boy looked up at the sky as if gauging time. The saffron twilight had deepened to an opaque blue; filmy curtains of night seemed to hang suspended between each of the neighborhood houses. “Wherever a guldman is now, he will most likely stay till dawn,” was the unhelpful reply.

  “What? He’s not coming home? Is that what you mean?”

  Nolan touched her on the arm to catch her attention. He thought she might be ready to grab the boy and give him a good hard shake. Bad idea, though. “Curfew,” Nolan said briefly. “If Colt’s not home now, he can’t come in after dark.”

  “Damn. I forgot. A wasted trip, then.”

  “Not if the point was to let Colt know you were worried about him.”

  “I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to see his face.”

  Nolan addressed the boy. “Can we leave him a note? Can you bring us something to write with?”

  The boy didn’t seem to be able to come up with any oblique way to say “yes” to that, so he nodded and ducked away from the door. Melina paced back and forth on the narrow porch, more agitated than Nolan had expected.

  “Don’t be so upset,” he said. “You couldn’t do anything for him even if you saw him face-to-face. He might not even be pleased to see you. Did you think of that?”

  “Of course I thought of that! He’d probably throw us out in the street if he saw us! It’s just that—I’m worried about him. He can’t come to me if he needs something. And I’m just afraid—he’ll do something stupid. I wanted to tell him not to.”

  “He’s Colt,” Nolan said. “He’ll do whatever he wants.”

  The boy reappeared a few minutes later with several sheets of paper and a couple of pens. Clearly, he thought each of the visitors might have something to communicate to Colt. Nolan took a page and a pen and wondered blankly what he might write to the guldman. He had never considered Colt a friend and rarely even an ally. He was always a little on edge around the gulden man, afraid to make some unwary remark that would fire the combustibles that appeared to lie, ready mixed, just beneath the surface of the golden skin. And yet Colt was an integral part of Nolan’s life in the city, one of its colors, textures, sounds, delights, trials, foreign frightening elements that had become, over time, part of the pastiche Nolan had grown to love. He could not imagine the lab without Colt. It would seem wrong, a chemical formula that would not combine. The loss of Colt would trigger some malfunction that would throw something else out of synch, and eventually the whole place would fall into chaos and disorder.

  Melina was hastily scrawling out a long message; she seemed to have no trouble deciding what to say. But Colt had touchy notions of honor and pride, and Nolan did not want to run afoul of those by any expressions of sympathy or offers of aid. It was pointless to ask Colt to keep in touch—he wouldn’t—and anyway, what could they possibly talk about if they attempted a social meeting? So Nolan braced his paper against the front of the house and wrote only, “We miss you already. Nolan” and folded up the paper.

  Melina was just adding her signature to her message, and soon enough the young guldman was accepting both their notes. “Now, you’ll give this to him as soon as you see him, won’t you?” Melina said sternly. “It’s very important. You will see him again, won’t you? He’ll come back here tomorrow or the next day, won’t he?”

  “A man always returns to his home,” the boy replied. Melina seemed satisfied with that, but it made Nolan wonder. This might not be Colt’s home after all; and then who would b
e poring over their notes the instant they were gone?

  “Well, thanks. Really. You’ve been helpful,” Melina said, and even Nolan was not sure if she was sincere or sarcastic. “I guess we’ll be going now.”

  “Then go,” the boy said, and closed the door on them before they could say another word.

  “Well! That was an interesting cross-cultural adventure!” Melina said as they stepped onto the street, back in the direction of Elmtree. It was true dark now, and the only illumination came from the houses themselves—and that was directed more inward than out. Indeed, the gaily colored buildings seemed like nothing so much as oversized lanterns laid down on either side of the road. Nolan stepped carefully. Melina, of course, strode on without once looking at her feet. “That boy! Could he have been less helpful? Whoever taught them to talk that way?”

  “Maybe that’s not how they talk to each other in goldtongue. Or maybe it is. All that honor stuff. Maybe they phrase things so indirectly to avoid offending anyone.”

  Melina snorted. “Ridiculous way to behave. Never get anything accomplished. Pakt and Colt never talk like that.”

  “Pakt and Colt know how to get along in the blueskin world,” Nolan said. Or at least Pakt did. Whether or not Colt had really learned the trick was yet to be seen.

  The trip back seemed longer than the trip out, mostly because of the dark. They had arrived at Cloverton before it occurred to either of them to wonder if buses would be running after dark—particularly now, with the curfew in place. In fact, since most drivers were guldmen, the answer was probably “no,” which meant they faced a long, dreary trudge ahead of them.

  “Well, nothing to do but start walking,” Melina said after they had waited on the corner for a few minutes and seen no other traffic. The retail stores at the intersection had all been closed for the day, so there was no shopkeeper to ask for information, and the only souls who appeared to be out at this hour were young children playing in their own yards. The guldmen, it appeared, were obeying the curfew; and the guldwomen, or so they had guessed, were not out much anyway. Therefore, they were on their own.

  “It would have been nice if Dade had mentioned this little transportation problem,” Melina grumbled as she stumbled once over an obstruction in the road. “I might have timed our visit a little differently if I’d known the shuttles weren’t running.”

  “He probably didn’t think you’d really come.”

  “I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t. How far do you think it is to the Centrifuge?”

  “Five miles. Maybe less. Take us about an hour and a half.”

  But they had not walked more than fifteen minutes down Elmtree when Nolan heard the lumbering, sighing wheeze of a big vehicle coming up behind him. He spun around and began waving his arms before Melina had even caught the sound. It might be too dark for the driver to see them, but Nolan hoped his white shirt would reflect some of the nearby light—and sure enough, much to his relief, the bus groaned to a halt beside them in the road.

  “Thank goodness you saw us,” Melina exclaimed, hopping aboard. The driver was a gulden woman who looked to be in her late fifties; no curfew on her. There were no other passengers. “We weren’t even sure there’d be a bus out this time of night.”

  The woman merely nodded, clearly not understanding a word. “Centrifuge?” Nolan asked, pointing straight down Elmtree. She nodded twice, repeating the word back to him. He was washed with a complex mix of relief, exhaustion, elation, and guilt (he was ecstatic to be getting out of this neighborhood, the quicker the better, but he felt bad about the intensity of the emotion). They were on the road to home.

  He took a seat across the aisle from Melina, for he had nothing to say to her in bluetongue, goldtongue, or charade. This time, he watched the neighborhood unfolding outside his window, noting how the houses grew smaller and more dilapidated the closer they drew to the Centrifuge. He would have been truly alarmed to be passing through this district on foot as the night grew blacker around them.

  But now they were delivered, safely and rapidly, to their destination, and soon they were in the familiar confines of the Centrifuge, albeit at an unknown gate. There was even a car awaiting them.

  “You go to South Zero, right?” Melina said, letting him precede her so he could take the controls. “I’m South One. Let’s just share this one, and I’ll drop you off.”

  “Sounds good,” he said, and pulled away from the curb. That was all they said to each other until they made brief good-byes at South Zero, and Nolan was finally on his way home.

  * * *

  * * *

  And that day had been strange enough, but the next day was even stranger. Pakt had called an afternoon meeting that kept them all in the lab an hour past their usual closing time. Hiram and Varella, squirming in their seats, made no attempt to hide their disapproval of such a use of their time. They had barely wrapped up their discussion when they heard a faint “boom!” echoing through the mazelike baffles of the city’s skyscrapers. They all looked at each other in bewilderment.

  “Did anybody else hear that?” Hiram asked.

  “Was it inside? Outside? It sounded so far away.”

  “Was it an explosion?”

  “I can’t see anything out the window.”

  “Wait! That was another one! I could feel it!”

  “What direction did it come from?”

  “West, I think.”

  “No, south.”

  “Could it have been something important?”

  Almost as if in answer, the city began to wail with sirens, originating from police posts all over the city but converging toward one central spot. “Turn on the monitor,” Pakt said suddenly. “I think this is bad.”

  So they hurried into Pakt’s office and turned on his little monitor and huddled around it in silence until a shaken indigo broadcaster appeared on screen, interrupting an everyday program.

  “We’ve just learned there’s been a series of explosions near the South Zero exit of the Centrifuge,” the reporter said in an unsteady voice. “Medical and police units are on the way. At this time, we don’t know how extensive the damage is or how many people have been hurt. Officials are closing the Centrifuge immediately, leaving thousands of commuters stranded, in the city and in the tunnels themselves. We’ll be back with more news when we have it.”

  The screen went blank, then returned to its scheduled picture. They were left staring at each other, drenched in horror. “The Centrifuge,” Varella said, but there was nothing any of them could add in elaboration. No one needed to point out that, without Pakt’s impromptu meeting, nearly all of them would have been in the Centrifuge at that exact moment, heading into the scene of the blast. If the explosion had been fatal, Pakt had just saved all of their lives.

  CHAPTER NINE

  At first, Kit was embarrassed that she had fallen unconscious. She had been trained in basic first aid; she could have been of some help as the medics fought through the smoke and rubble to find the broken bodies in the downed cars. Then she learned that, of the three hundred men and women caught in the explosions, only thirteen had survived. Then she felt lucky.

  These were the emotions that came to visit her over the next twelve hours, when her mind was clear and she could actually think. The hour she had spent on the tunnel floor, semiconscious and bleeding in her crumpled car, was pretty much a blur, and the following hours of rescue and medical attention were hard to reconstruct coherently. They had taken her to the gulden hospital, that she remembered, because it was closest and because the two other survivors they had recovered at that time were both guldmen. The pain had made it hard to focus as they wheeled her through the neat, bright corridors, but she did notice that nearly all the faces peering down at her were gold. It confused her; she thought she was somehow back in Geldricht, that the explosion had catapulted her across the Katlin Divide and into the territory with
which she was most familiar.

  “Is Chay here?” she asked one of the attendants, causing him to look down at her strangely and check her temperature. “Is Jex?”

  “Do we have an I.D. on this one?” the doctor asked someone striding along behind him. He spoke bluetongue, so he must have thought she was conscious enough to understand him. “We’re going to need to notify relatives.”

  “I’m checking her handbag right now. Looks like—Candachi. Might not have relatives in the city, though. Sounds high-caste.”

  The doctor was gazing at her again, clearly impressed or at least informed. He knew who she was. “Oh, she’s got people in the city,” he said softly. “She’s Anton Solvano’s daughter.”

  “Who?”

  He shook his head. “Never mind.”

  She drifted off again as they began to examine her, though she had the impression they badly wanted her to stay awake and talk to them. It seemed like minutes later, but was probably hours, that she woke to find Sereva in the room, speaking in a calm voice with the physician. “How soon can I take her home?” Sereva was asking. “How soon can I get her to a doctor?”

  “Hela, I am a doctor,” was the edged response.

  “I mean—I’m sorry—but I’d rather have my own doctor see her.”

  “Have as many doctors see her as you’d like. She has a concussion, a sprained wrist, a twisted ankle, a possible broken rib, and she is about the luckiest woman in the city. I don’t want her moved for twenty-four hours, because I don’t like the way she keeps passing out, but after that, if she’s no worse, you can take her to any medical facility you choose. But she’s not leaving here tonight.”

  “But—” Sereva looked around fearfully, as if afraid to find mold growing on the walls and insects feeding on the patients. “But she can’t stay here.”

  “I assure you, my staff and I are fully capable of setting the broken bones and monitoring the pulse rates of even the most select heiress of the Higher Hundred,” the doctor replied in an icy voice. “And judging by the vaccination scar she has on her left arm, she’s spent some time in a gulden clinic before this. That’s a shot they only give in Geldricht, for a fever you can’t catch here. I don’t think Anton Solvano’s daughter will suffer at my hands.”