alt.human (17 page)

“!¡
hostility | warning
¡! Dunnat move, gel, ya see?”

Hope stared. She could barely make out a word of what the girl had just said. She knew not to move, though.

“!¡
hostility | demand
¡! Ya get name?”

It took a moment for Hope to work out that she was being asked to identify herself. “My name...” she said. “My name. It’s Reed Trader.”

At that, the girl with the crossbow smirked, and said, “She da one.” She nodded along the street, in the direction Hope had been heading. “!¡
instruction
¡! Ya be going ahead, see? An’ I be right here ahind ya.”

C
ROSSBOW GIRL TOOK
Hope to a bar a few blocks away. She marched her through to a door at the back, past a whole crowd of people dressed in various combinations of leather and lace. There were aliens here, too: a couple more of the tall ones like the checkpoint guard, hunched over and pointing and chittering at a small screen unrolled on a table between them; and in the far corner, cutting strange shapes in the air with a paddle-like hand, a smaller humanoid, with smooth metal arms and a mirrored strip for eyes.

The back stairs were narrow, dark. Hope went up, followed by the girl. Pausing on a landing, the girl gestured to a door. Hope went in, and a moment later, the door swung shut and she heard the click of it being locked behind her.

The small window was only large enough for two panes of bull’s-eye glass, one above the other. Hope peered out at the street and the buildings opposite. She tried the door, but that just confirmed that it was locked.

She sat on the thin sleep mat, knees drawn up.

She closed her eyes and tried to block out the voices.

T
HE GIRL TOOK
pity on Hope, in her tattered brown body-suit, and gave her a change of clothing. All that Hope retained was her knee-length boots. She must have stunk, she realised, as she peeled her clothes off and dumped them on the floor. She pulled on some skinny net leggings and a delicately patterned lace vest, all the time watched by crossbow girl.

When she was done, she was led out and down, out through the bar and on a convoluted route through more narrow, gloomy streets, the dusk light broken only intermittently by the yellow glow of gas lights.

They came to what she first took to be a long, low building but turned out to be a barge, just like those she had seen earlier on the great river, moored on another canal. Steps led on board, and guards with muscled arms like thighs stepped back to let the two through. Hope studied them as they passed. She didn’t believe those two kilted men cradling blunderbuss rifles were all man: they were more – pumped up, greater than, enhanced.

They followed a narrow gangway along one side of the boat and came to an open deck. They paused, and crossbow girl said softly, “!¡
sympathetic
¡! See da boss. No givin’ da lip, see?”

The boss stood at the far end, leaning against a railing with his back to Hope. There were others there, too, but it was clear which one was the boss.

He was an imposing figure in black drainpipe trousers and a dark frock-coat that was covered with a lacy pattern. His hair seemed to glow an unnatural white.

He turned and smiled, stroking his bushy sideburns with a long forefinger.

“!¡
warm | welcoming
¡! So then,” he said, “our guest. Welcome to the Loop. Welcome to my little domain. I trust that First Deputy Ashterhay has been taking care of your needs an’ wishes. That the case, gel?”

Hope glanced back at her guard, who was now chatting with a kilted boy by a doorway leading belowdecks. She remained silent. She didn’t trust this superficially friendly welcome for a moment.

The group gathered around the gang boss were clad in an array of lace, leather and brocade. They wore deathly white face make-up and carried an assortment of knives and pistols.

“!¡
businesslike
¡! So, then, you going to tell me who you are, gel?” asked the boss. “Just wandering in here like this. These are tendentious times. Tough times. Nobody should be just wandering about without a care, ’less they has a reason, gel. So who are you, and what’s your business here?”

She met his look. “I’m Reed Trader 12,” she told him. “I’m Reed Trader 12 and I don’t have any business, here or anywhere else.”

The sudden rush of voices in her head told her she’d got it wrong, long before she translated the wry smile on the gang boss’s face into the cold threat that it was. The murmur of conversation in the small group around them fell silent and, glancing over her shoulder, Hope saw Ashterhay’s pistol crossbow trained on her.

The gang boss’s smile became a soft chuckle.

“!¡
mirth | menace
¡! How enchantin’!” he said. “You’re Reed Trader, you say?”

Cautiously, she nodded.

“!¡
gentle amusement | menace
¡! Well then, just how funny is that then, gel? ’Cause you see, so am I. I’m Reed Trader, and someone’s been playing fuck games with copies of my pids, and that hasn’t left me rightly amused. See what I mean, gel? !¡
menace
¡! See what I mean?”

H
E PUT AN
arm out, inviting her closer, and Hope had no choice but to join him at the railing. The canal water looked oily black from up here, and a long way down. The height made her realise just how big this barge was; it had been hard to get a sense of its scale when they had approached through the narrow streets.

The gang boss, this other Reed Trader, put an arm across her shoulders. His hand was like a claw on her arm. He smelled of sandalwood and sweat.

“!¡
hierarchy
¡! My apologies,” he said. “I didn’t make any introductions, did I, gel? Let me make amends. See, I’m only sometimes known as Reed Trader. That’s my given. That’s what’s in my pids. Most times I go by the name Frankhay, clan-father here in the Loop. You see all this?” He waved a hand, gesturing at the closely packed buildings of the Ipp. “It’s mine. I’ve earned it. I’ve taken risks. I’ve won fights. I don’t like it when someone screws with me and risks what I’ve gone out and earned. You see that, gel?”

The claw on her arm was cold, like a bird’s talons. She looked at Frankhay and said, “I’m new here. I didn’t know.”

He chuckled.

“!¡
confiding
¡! I have dealings,” he said. “That’s what I do. I have friends and contacts. A few days ago a chlick partner of mine, h’she tells me his-’er nest-sibs had a lab where they’d been holding samples, pids from their contacts, that kind of thing. Only they’d been broken into and the samples stolen. And then today I get the heads up that I’m on a seek list, identified in some incident at Precept Square, a place I never go. It’s really not a good thing to be on those kinds of lists, particularly not now when the city’s being ripped apart all around us.”

The arm, the claw. So tight.

“!¡
menace | hierarchy
¡! And then who should come a crossing the canal an’ into the Loop but a young waif who tells the border goon she’s Reed Trader, and when it scans her it finds that her pids confirm this?”

“I can’t explain,” she said softly.

He looked at her. “!¡
encouraging
¡! I really didn’t think you could,” he said. “But you could tell me, gel. You could tell me all about it an’ see if
I
can do the explaining.”

She told him.

She told him about being at Precept Square, about the rush of the crowd and how it had buffeted and battered her and left her feeling dizzy. She told him about being caught in the round-up, detained and imprisoned behind a fence of jagwire, which had grown around them the instant it was released from its pod by an orphid grunt.

She told him about the young man who was not much more than a boy, his touch, the fizz of something exchanged and how that must have been when it happened and now she felt an intense stab of guilt at betraying him because she had said too much already, and would only be forced to say more.

“!¡
intense
¡! Describe him,” Frankhay told her, and she realised that her words might just have sentenced that young man to death when all he had done was save her.

“Taller than me, a little paler,” she said. “Dark hair. Thin.” Could have been almost anyone.

“!¡
insistent
¡! Who was he with? He can’t have been working alone.”

She looked at the dark surface of the canal. She wanted to lose herself in it. And all the time, in her head: voices. Insistent voices.

The claw. Tighter on her arm.

“There was a woman, I think.” The one who had hissed at her to get going when her pids had given her the all clear and the chlick officer had started to get agitated. She had been one of the four who had rushed in to start with. “Tall, dark, strong. Bald, I think. She had a white scarf tied around her head, but there wasn’t any hair poking out. I think they were together.”

That was when Frankhay started to work it out. He didn’t know me at all, had probably not even heard of me. But he knew Sol Virtue from old times.

M
Y VISIT TO
the Loop the next day with Sol’s message was about as bad as timing can get. I didn’t know Frankhay’s pids were among the stolen batch we used to cover our tracks that day in Precept Square. I didn’t question why that lab had kept several batches of pids separately. I just took them.

Maybe there’s no such thing as bad luck, though. Maybe that’s just cover for sloppiness. I shouldn’t have taken the easy pickings from that lab. I should have been sure of myself. I should have taken more trouble to find out whose pids we were using.

And above all, I shouldn’t have wandered into the Loop with Sol’s message alone and unprotected.

But I did, and Hope was there, the girl who had caught my eye the previous day, only now she was part of Frankhay’s entourage. I wasn’t to know that he had just brought her out of her locked room when he heard that his little crossbow-packer Ashterhay had captured me entering the Ipp. Hope looked like part of his set-up to me.

I wasn’t to know that all the time I was trying to convince him to join an alliance to defend humankind against what had happened in Angiere, Frankhay was playing games, stringing me along in the knowledge that I was the messenger from a clan that had somehow set him up.

I wasn’t to know that after he had drawn me in, held his wrist-knife to my throat and warned me and my clan to back the fuck off, after he had watched me make a hurried and grateful departure from that back-room of a bar in the heart of the Loop... that he would have one of his laced thugs bring Hope over to him and he would lean towards her, making her breathe his sweat and sandalwood scent, and say to her, “That him, gel? !¡
pointed threat
¡! Was that the one you saw in Precept Square?”

She didn’t need to answer, didn’t need to nod falteringly.

He knew.

Chapter Fourteen

I
SHOULD HAVE
known that seeing the girl again would mean trouble. The one from Precept Square. The one with the walnut skin and honey-brown bangs and double-take eyes. Seeing her in Cragside Ipp would definitely be trouble.

But all I knew was that she had some kind of a hold over me, some kind of connection from that moment when we touched, so briefly, and exchanged pids. Maybe before that.

On the day after Sol’s return, the girl was hanging back in the shadows on the cobbled street at the foot of Villa Mart Three, dressed in the black lace of Frankhay’s gang and looking as if she was about to take to her heels at any moment.

There was someone with her. A boy, a good couple of years younger. I recognised him from my visit to the Loop. He was wearing a black kilt, and he was carrying a blunderbuss.

And that was when I realised there was trouble brewing.

E
ARLIER THAT DAY,
I’d gone out looking for Skids and nearly hadn’t made it back alive.

“Skids,” I’d told Pi and Jemerie, over flatbreads and tea that morning.

“!¡
dismissive
¡! Skids? You out of your head?” said Jemerie. “How’s he going to help us against chlicks and their grunts, armed to the eyes with weapons we don’t even understand, and all overseen by the watchers’ supermind?”

Skids had always been the bright one. His mind made connections, deductions. He saw patterns. He understood.

Ever since we were pups, he had been drawn to anything alien, fascinated by them. Since leaving the nest, he had devoted himself to getting close to the starsingers. He had become a wraith. He was the one person I could think of who might be able to understand at least something of what the aliens were doing, what they were thinking.

“!¡
patient
¡! He might just have some insights,” I said. “He might help us understand.”

The last time I’d seen Skids, he’d been with the human wreckage on Riverside, a notorious area for dossers and street gangs. It wasn’t a place to be after dark, or on your own at any time of the day. It was like a magnet for all that was broken in humankind.

Last time, I’d been with Ruth and Divine, heading back from Precept Square and avoiding the more direct route through a part of Central always heavy with intoxicated and hostile species: chlicks loaded with phreaks; flitterjacks hyper and violent on a narc they injected from venom sacs harvested from one of their domestic bugs; orphids, off-duty and leery on the contents of assorted pods stuck onto any exposed body part.

The aliens came to Riverside to beat up the human flotsam that ended up sleeping in the narrow strip of trees that flanked the river. It was as if it was some kind of sport for them. It was certainly not something forbidden by any of their codes of conduct or laws.

Skids had been huddled under a scrap of tarp, half-arsed protection against the drizzle. He’d been wasted, and his scalp bald save for a few tufts of hair, a sure sign that he’d been under the caul until recently, hosting an alien growth. The wraiths believed it brought them closer to their starsinger gods, gave them some kind of insight rather than being just another kind of brain-junk for an addict’s easy hit.