Regeneration (27 page)

“And your parents just
volunteered
for that? That's an amazing thing to do.”

“It was Aunt Aryel's idea, because she knew they'd already applied to adopt another child and it was taking a long time. We were in Wales then, up in the mountains. They'd moved to get me away from the city, out of the spotlight, after what had happened when
I
was little. She knew the baby—Eve—couldn't be placed anonymously; whoever took her would have to know what they were getting into, and be people who could be trusted. So she suggested it to Mama and Papa, they said yes, and the authorities were happy—it solved a whole lot of problems for them.”

“What happened to the surrogate mother? Ellyn?”

“Grandpa Reginald became her guardian—she's a batch sibling of Rhys and Gwen and he'd raised them really well. And her injuries didn't scare him. So she's out there running around in the hills, climbing trees and chasing butterflies and being doted on. She's too brain-damaged to understand what was done to her.”

“Maybe that's—” Agwé caught herself and shook her head sharply. She looked at him askance. “I didn't mean to think that!”

“I know. It's really hard not to.”

“Are you sure that Eve has no idea? I mean, when she saw me with the vidcam at the TideFair she got
so
excited—she was saying no one
ever
takes pictures of her and if they do they
never
put them
onstream. I thought she was just being dramatic. Of course I understand now, but I think she knows, Gabe.”

“She doesn't know that it's on purpose, she thinks we just forget or we don't think about it. But I know it makes her cranky; she's really been acting out recently, pushing the boundaries, and it's going to get harder and harder to manage as she gets older. Our parents haven't quite worked out how to deal with that yet. So we were all already a bit worried, and then Zavcka Klist got released last week—and I guess home confinement isn't all
that
different from being locked up in prison, it's not like she can go anywhere, but still.” He let himself sag wearily into the chair. “Hence my meltdown yesterday. I'm really sorry.”

“If you say that again, I will . . . well, I won't hit you, but I'll do
something
.”

He snickered, then glanced at the comcode flashing on his tablet as his earset buzzed with an incoming call. “Good,” he said to Agwé, as he flicked the 'set. “My mom's probably calling to check that you haven't killed me or anything—Mama? Hi, I'm with Agwé, it's all fine . . .”

“No, it isn't,” his mother told him. “Eve's gone. She's disappeared from school. There was a bogus fire alarm, they evacuated the building and by the time we got here she was gone.”

The world dropped away from under him.

It was the longest, strangest walk there had ever been. Eve felt like she was in a bubble, distantly aware of the endlessly slow pick-up-and-put-down of her feet but unable to tell whether she was actually moving or not. She turned her head,
slowly slowly,
and saw her own small hand grasped by a larger one. She noted with disinterest that the hand holding hers was wrinkled and spotted, and that it emerged from the cuff of a dull brown coat. A question pushed at her, pressing against the balloon-surface of her consciousness, but it couldn't get in and when she tried to focus it just slipped away. The edges of her vision were blurred and indistinct, like peering underwater through a dive-mask placed on the surface of the sea.

She found that if she moved her head, the small window of perception through which she had seen the hands and the coat would
show her other things. She looked around, slow as honey, and saw a rough brick wall, a high metal fence, leaves blown into a corner between buildings.

Maybe I'm dreaming,
Eve thought.
I guess I'm walking in my sleep. But why would I come this way?

That question was inside the bubble with her, where she could get hold of it, pin it down, try to force an answer. Something pulled at the puppet that was her, tugging her hand. Someone with a hollow, faraway voice said, “Hurry up.”

The outside question poked at her again, hard, and again failed to penetrate. The inside question had what there was of her attention.

Home is over there, on the other side of this, what are these called? Can't remember. Bricks, these are
bricks.
Alley, behind the brick things, behind everything, why am I dream-walking in the alley?

This isn't the way. This isn't the way we go. Why would I go to the river this way?

Once, a long time ago, before the Temple Act gave gems the same rights as every other citizen, before the Declaration released them from forced indenture, before the retrieval squads sent out to hunt down runaways were banned, Zavcka Klist had assigned one such team to reconnoiter the neighborhood of abandoned buildings, cupped by a southward curve of the river, where escapees were rumored to be finding refuge. She had watched the resulting surveillance vids with the squad leader, silently repulsed by the dank streets, the dark, menacing alleyways, the broken windows and the weeds that crawled out of cracks and hung from gutters like the tattered pennants of some defiant army. Shadows not cast by their lights had shifted and moved just out of range, disappearing around the corner of a side street, retreating from an empty casement three stories up; there was the slap of running feet echoing back from one of those narrow, damp passages. The squad leader had frozen and refocused the image a couple of times, identifying head-high glimmers of green and purple and once, a flicker of something that looked like Bel'Natur red.

“They're beginning to congregate,” the squad leader had told her matter-of-factly. “Ours, Gempro, Recombin, the lot. We do a full sweep, we could hit the competition up for bounty payments as well.”

They had started to put together a plan, a good one, but Zavcka had waited too long, or maybe word had gotten out, and one judge ruled standard retrieval practices illegal and another extended that ruling instead of overturning it, and suddenly the police were notifying them that they could no longer turn a blind eye but would be obliged to treat any such actions as kidnap.

And just like that, it was over; just like that the war zone Zavcka's one-time retrieval squad had approached with extreme caution became a haven for wave after wave of first the escaped, and then the emancipated. It acquired a name, an identity, a reputation: the Squats, the place where the gems lived, where the institutionalized learned to be free, the engineered discovered the full range of their talents, and the crèche-born forged the tightest of tight-knit communities. Zavcka had not believed any of it, not really, not until she crossed swords with Aryel Morningstar. And none of the vids she had seen since, from the earliest days when the area began to be safe enough to live in openly through its transition into an edgy, vibrant district for the artistic and the adventurous, to its current status as the most diverse, iconoclastic, liberal, and innovative of the city's many villages, had ever quite supplanted in her mind that first impression of a dirty, derelict, dangerous place.

What she found when the cab delivered her into its heart was so at odds with that recollection it almost induced a sense of vertigo: the streets were still narrow and twisty, but clean and in good repair. Those old buildings that remained had been restored, often with quirky applications of materials and technology that hadn't existed when they'd originally been built. Between them, entirely new structures of shimmering aggregate and biopolymer and recycled brick looked neither out of place nor overbearing. She saw galleries and greengrocers and restaurants and nightclubs, theaters and bakeries and offices and workshops, parks and playgrounds and terraced houses and apartment blocks. Regardless of age or provenance, the
structures looked practical, lived in and well used, a cheek-by-jowl jumble of styles and colors and shapes and textures that nevertheless looked comfortable together.

The feature she found most striking was a strange organic translucence to some of the modern surfaces, as though a light were being shone from behind layer upon layer of melted silicate. That would be the new tech adapted from gillung dwellings: quantum cells embedded in the walls, constantly being recharged and releasing their energy in response to demand. Against all odds, the waterbreathers had found ways to survive and thrive in the wild, and then had confounded expectations again by adapting their inventions to work for topsiders too. Seeing it here, panel after panel on structure after structure, she understood why Bankside, quite possibly in partnership with others, must have felt it necessary to bring Thames Tidal Power to heel. The outcasts had gone from being an embarrassment to an inconvenience to a clear and present threat.

The revolution was here, she thought, in these buildings. It was here on these streets, in the people with glowing, jewel-colored hair or odd anatomies or no gemsign at all who walked and talked and shopped and laughed and quarreled and played and ate and worked together, all lifting their faces to the pale noonday sun as though nothing whatsoever about them was strange. The refugees and their allies had become the pioneers of a new landscape, the citizens of a city remade from its own ruins. She stared through the window, mesmerized, as the cab slid through these altered streets and thought again about the course she had embarked upon, and knew that no other decision had been possible.

The driver got her as close as he could, down a lane that dead-ended at a line of bollards. Beyond them she could see it continuing as a pedestrian way lined with small shops and cafés, sloping down until there was just the wide sky above the river, dotted with the soaring, calling shapes of seagulls. She scanned for a larger airborne figure but did not see it.

“Just down there,” said the driver, pointing, and she thanked him and paid double as promised. He asked if he should wait.

“No,” she said, “I'll have different transportation from here,” and walked away quickly. She had beaten the estimate she'd given to Crawford by a full five minutes, but it would not do to linger.

By the time they had worked their way down a network of narrow passageways and stopped beside the old sailor's hostel that faced the riverwalk, Eve realized that she no longer thought she was dreaming—or maybe she was now waking up? She could see further; directly opposite the mouth of the passage was the narrow jetty where you got the boat upstream to Sinkat or Southbank or Westminster, or down to Limedog, or even all the way down, through the barriers and out into the estuary and to sea—Gabe and her and Mama and Papa had done that one time when the quantum-battery banks were being built on the north and south banks. There had been lots of talk about energy storage and conversion ratios and other things that weren't interesting, but they got to dock at the floating platform and then go down into the airwalk on the seabed. From there they were able to watch all the people swimming outside, their green hair like clouds of shimmering seaweed around their heads, carrying stuff that would have been way too big and heavy for them on land but was light because it was in the water. Gabe said they were working, but it looked like fun to Eve. And there were fishes and crabs and eels and snails, and she had spotted a tiny, delicate seahorse in the weeds at the base of the thick, transparent airwalk membrane, and that was
really
interesting. The memory came back to her clearly, and it suddenly struck her that she could
see
clearly now too, and could hear the gulls screeching as they skirmished above the jetty, and that they no longer sounded echoey or distant. She had walked here in a dream, but now she was here for real—how had that happened?

She turned her head to look up at the man who was holding her hand and the motion no longer felt weirdly slow and disconnected; instead it was like she was moving too fast now and a wave of nausea washed through her. She felt herself grimace and sway a little on her feet, and she closed her eyes to stop everything from spinning. When she opened them again the man was looking down at her.

“Are you feeling sick?”

She nodded.

“Well, don't be. Just take a few deep breaths. We're almost there.”

“Almost where?” she asked, thinking there was something strange about this situation, this man, and that there was another question she should be asking, if only she knew what it was.

He did not answer, but looked out at the jetty and then leaned around the corner of the hostel, peering up the riverwalk to the left as though searching for something in particular. Eve leaned forward too, carefully, so as not to make her head go funny again. The morning's fog had dispersed into a thin haze, but the air above the riverwalk was bitterly cold, far colder than the sheltered alley, and mostly empty. She saw two people in the distance, a man and a woman, wearing the kind of formal business clothes that meant they were probably visitors to the neighborhood, not residents. They had proper coats on over their suits, and it dawned on her that she was only wearing her sweater and it was way too cold to be out here in just that.

Why am I not in my coat?
she wondered, and almost grasped the main question, the
important
one, the one that kept slipping away.

She was so intent on it that when the man said, “There they are,” in a relieved voice, pulling at her hand as he stepped out from the passage onto the riverwalk, she failed to move with him. The fingers grasping hers tightened and she was dragged out, stumbling. The unexpected jerk, the frigid air, the sight of approaching faces she did not know, combined to shock her all the way back to herself. She tried to yank her arm away, and was suddenly struggling to free herself, and the slippery question was there in her mind and she was shouting,
“Who are you?
”

She dug her heels and tried to wrench herself away from the Brown-Coat man, filled with a sudden terror of him. His hand slipped and she was almost free, but he still had the cuff of her sweater and he grabbed her wrist, gripping it so tight she thought it might break. She turned, her wrist twisting painfully, looking for the two people coming up the riverwalk, about to shout for help; but as her eyes fell on them the woman made an impatient gesture, waving at the jetty toward which she was being dragged, and she knew at once
that they were with Brown-Coat. He was trying to drag her toward them. The man walking next to the woman had a worried expression and was looking past where Eve was still thrashing frantically. Was someone coming from the opposite direction, someone who might help? As Eve tried to swing around to look, above the screaming of the gulls and the hammering of her own heart she heard the sputter of a boat's engine starting up.

“Stop struggling,” said Brown-Coat, sounding like he'd lost all patience with her. “This is for your own good.” Another vicious tug on her wrist made Eve yelp with pain, and then she saw the small, dark thing coming at her in his other hand and remembered the schoolyard and the puff of white mist that had made her go all foggy, and she screamed.

Another hand came down over the dark spray-thing, covering it, and though she heard the hiss of the mist and saw its edges blow out at the side, it was caught and stopped by the long, pale fingers that had slammed down over Brown-Coat's own age-spotted hand. Instinct made Eve close her eyes, hold her breath, and duck her head away so she wouldn't get any of the spray in her face. She felt her bruised wrist finally pull free and she fell, sprawling on the cold stone of the quayside.

High above her she heard a woman's voice, haughty and arrogant and very angry, exclaiming, “What is the meaning of this?”

It wasn't exactly a shout, but it was crackling with authority: the voice of someone who is used to giving orders and being obeyed without question. Eve looked up and then scrambled awkwardly to her feet, her hurt wrist cradled in her other hand. The woman who had spoken, who had blocked the sleep-spray and broken Brown-Coat's grip on her, was tall and blond and elegant. She wore an ankle-length, golden-brown coat made of some stuff that looked soft and luxurious and even to Eve's inexperienced eyes, very expensive. A richly shimmering green-blue scarf was wrapped around her throat. She looked a bit older than Mama, though Eve couldn't have said how much.

Brown-Coat had staggered away and was staring at the Blond Lady with a stunned expression on his face. The man and woman in
business suits had come up to them; the man looked flustered and the woman looked vexed, but both were also staring at Blond Lady as though awestruck. Eve's wrist was throbbing so badly she could barely think, let alone run, and her head was starting to hurt too, but she shuffled backward, further away from the other three. She had decided that Blond Lady was the safest of the four strangers, although the tall woman's next words made her slightly less certain.

“You said that Eve would not be harmed, Crawford. You gave me your word.”

“She . . . she hasn't been, madam,” said Business-Suit Man, then he turned to Brown-Coat. “Has she?” he added anxiously.

Brown-Coat was still staring at Blond Lady as though she were a ghost. “Y-y-you never said,” he began, stuttering, “you never said
she
would be here—you never
said
!”

“Change of plan,” snapped Business-Suit Woman, who kept looking out toward the river and the sound of the motorboat. It was purring now, and Eve saw it come into view, curving toward the jetty with two more people on board. “Now we have both.”

“Oh,” said Brown-Coat, staring at her and sounding amazed. “Well, I had to give the young one a dose to make her come along quietly. It must have worn off. You saw what she was like; it's not my fault if she's stubborn. Just a little more and she'll be fine.”

His hand holding the spray-thing twitched and Eve shrieked, “No!” and pushed herself backward, away from him but keeping her distance from Blond Lady too now. Blond Lady turned, watching her. There was a small smile playing on her face.

“Going along quietly has never been my way,” she said, which made no sense to Eve. She held out her hand. “Eve? Come here, dear.”

“No,” said Eve, and then, “Who are you?”

“You don't know me, my dear, but that doesn't matter. I'm here to help. I won't drug you or hurt you or make you go anywhere you don't want to.” She waggled her fingers encouragingly.

“She can't be left behind now,” said Business-Suit Woman angrily. “The boat is here and we're wasting time.”