alt.human (21 page)

Where the fire burned into the surface of the chamber, amber liquid oozed out and scabbed over, healing the damage as fast as the fire could burn. Skids broke these scabs off and chewed on them, spitting out the husks when he was done. “!¡
matter-of-fact
¡! There aren’t many nutrients,” he had told us when he first did this, “but it stops you being hungry.” Eventually I tried it, and he was right: the sweet juices released by chewing on the scab material deadened the hunger in my belly.

But this couldn’t last: we could not survive like this for long. We had to get out of this city.

“!¡
frustrated
¡! But where?” said Divine. “We know this city. None of us knows what’s beyond.”

“Harmony,” I said softly.

“!¡
harsh
¡!... is just a word,” said Sol.

“It’s more,” said a voice from the shadows. Hope. “It’s a place. A safe place. Sanctuary.”

“!¡
harsh
¡! And you know that, eh?” said Sol. She was agitated tonight, rocking back and forth as she sat, as if she were about to erupt. “!¡
dismissive
¡! You’ve seen it, have you?”

Hope leaned forward so that her face was suddenly caught by the flickering light of the fire. I saw that she was crying. She put hands to the sides of her head. “It’s in my head,” she said. “The voices... Harmony means something to them.”

I looked at her and thought she was mad, then. Had the bugs that had eaten half of her face pushed her over the mental precipice? Or had she been mad already?

“!¡
matter-of-fact
¡! Callo told me about Harmony,” I said. “She...” I was on the verge of saying that she was different,
other
, but I pulled back. “She knows more. Where is she? Or the others from Angiere? We should make them tell us what they know.”

S
HE WAS IN
Pennysway Ipp, with the others from Angiere, when a watcher-bound starsinger made it not real.

Skids and I saw it happen.

That night in the tunnels below the city, Sol told us that she had seen Marek that morning, and knew that the four were working over in Pennysway, trying to convince clan-mother Faithsway of what was unfolding in the city. “!¡
wry
¡! I think they’ve given up on me, eh?” said Sol, calmer than after her earlier agitation.

“!¡
reporting
¡! They said it was urgent,” Divine added. “They said there were signs of things escalating in Pennysway, said they’d seen it go that way back in Angiere.”

Pennysway was Cragside’s neighbour to the west, the two Ipps separated by the craggy limestone ridge that divided the city from north to south.

Skids and I set out the next morning to find Callo and the others. As soon as I said I was going, my old nest-sib said he would accompany me. “!¡
urgent
¡! I want to know,” he said. “I want to hear about Harmony.”

I still didn’t know what to make of him. In many ways he scared me. There was an intensity he had never had when he was younger, an earnestness. He reminded me of Pedre, the wraith I had encountered in Constellation district when I had looked for Skids the first time; there was a phreaked, mad-preacher look in his eyes. It unsettled me, and it jarred with the Skids I remembered.

Early the next morning we passed through Cragside, the streets deserted save for a few trogs and a roof-high buzzing of sentinels. Villa Mart Three had been burnt out and now there were black smudges around the windows and doors.

We hurried along the rutted streets, heads down, stunned into silence by the extent of damage to the Villa and the burnt shells of neighbouring buildings.

We followed a trail up over the crags, and as trees closed around us the atmosphere lifted. I started to breathe more freely, unaware until then of the tightness in my chest.

As we climbed the steep trail, I glanced across at Skids and, briefly, it was almost like old times.

I was kidding myself, I knew. My old sib was haggard, pale, his eyes sunken. His long hair grew in patches where a caul had been. It was not old times at all. Too much had happened to pull us onto diverging paths.

“!¡
hesitant | sincere
¡! I’m sorry, sib,” I said, almost choking on my words.

He looked across at me. He didn’t know what I was talking about.

“!¡
guilt | anguish
¡! For what we did. For how we treated you.”

He looked ahead again, dismissing my words.

“We drove you away,” I said. “!¡
anguished
¡! We thought we could force you to get better. We didn’t understand what was happening to you.”

“!¡
matter-of-fact
¡! That is the way our paths were sung,” he said. “We sing together. We sing apart.” Then he smiled, and the faraway look snapped out of his eyes. “I mean it’s no biggy, see? It led me to the last four years of my life.” He clapped me on the arm and then turned back to the trail, the conversation over.

Close to the top, we paused to look back.

Cragside was sporadically burning, a few blots of black smoke hanging in the still air. Across the river, Satinbower, too, lay under a heavy pall of smoke.

And yet, to the left, the jagged spires and mushroom towers of Central lay in full sunlight, the air crystal clear, flyers and transporters darting and hanging over the rooftops. It was like another world altogether. It was clearly only the Ipps that were being targeted.

We turned, cresting the ridge, and before us we saw Pennysway being torn out of existence.

The uncanniest thing, at first, was the silence.

Until we passed over the last ridge, there had been nothing to indicate what lay ahead. No smells of burning, no sounds of conflict or of hanging troopships orchestrating the action. Nothing.

Even the birds and the normally ever-present rasp of cicadas and crickets had fallen silent as we stood and tried to make sense of what lay before us.

It should have been a district where streets were laid out in a grid. Industrial units, mostly run by craniate work gangs, would mix with U-frame terraces of housing: instant buildings erected by the gangs in mere moments. Some of these would be occupied by the Sway clan, led by clan-mother Faith. The Sways were the closest clan to us, both geographically and socially, and I knew some of them reasonably well from occasional gatherings and shared festivals.

It wasn’t, though.

The air above Pennysway shimmered like the hot air above an open fire. The light was unnaturally intense, bleaching the colour from everything.

And the buildings... all corners and edges that should have been sharp were blurred, indistinct. All detail was gone.

I found that my eyes would not rest anywhere. There was nothing for them to settle on, nowhere to focus.

It made me feel dizzy, as if I were about to fall.

It made me feel sick.

And in my head I heard a song, a raising of voices, a chorus that simultaneously jarred and harmonised.

I turned away and saw that Skids had fallen to his knees. Tears poured down his face and ran into the sparse stubble lining his jaw; his mouth was open as he breathed shallowly, almost panting.

At first I thought he was in some kind of religious ecstasy, but then he turned to me and I saw his pain.

I opened my mouth to speak, to ask him what was going on, for I was suddenly sure that he understood far more than me, but then Pennysway began to unhappen.

It started from the centre, an intensifying of that already unreal light, a leaching away of colour, of detail. Lines blurred and merged, colours faded together.

I had to look away. My brain couldn’t make sense of what my eyes reported.

It spread.

The leaching, merging, blending.

And from the centre, Pennysway started to fold in on itself, to collapse, to cease existing.

“!¡
distress | disbelief
¡! It’s being unsung,” said Skids, softly.

He stood then, and turned his back on the infolding of Pennysway. Clutching at my arm, he tried to turn me too. “!¡
urgent
¡! Dodge,” he said, “we have to go. We don’t know where this will end.”

But I was transfixed, glued to what I couldn’t quite look at.

A big industrial block slipped into the ground; a U-frame terrace undid itself from one end to the other, like a sea serpent sinking below the water. Left behind was bare ground, dirt and rock and a thin green fuzz of vegetation.

Another block went. A building made up of three tall spires with platforms near the top. Another row of U-frames.

The undoing was creeping closer to the crags, and suddenly the sound of insects and birds shrilled all around us, screeches and clacks of alarm and whistles and trills. Birds threw themselves from the trees, all plummeting eastward, away from the unravelling.

I turned and ran with Skids.

Back across the ridge and down the rough trail, almost falling headlong as one or other of us lost footing, slipping on rubble and dry dirt. My breathing was ragged, painful; the muscles in my legs burned. I ran until taking another step was more painful than anything I had ever known, and then I kept on running.

We finally came to a halt where the trees ran out and the buildings of Cragside Ipp began.

I rested against a tree trunk, my breath rasping painfully. When I could move again, I turned to Skids and grabbed him by the shirt, wincing at the sudden pain in my damaged hand.

“!¡
intense | serious
¡! What was that?” I demanded. “What happened?”

He was scared. Very scared.

“!¡
shocked
¡! The ’singers,” he said. “They can sing realities. They can make pockets of reality that are different from the reality around them.”

I remembered my search for Skids when he had run away, years before. Wraith Pedre had directed me towards a starsinger. The Lord of the Stars, Pedre had called it. That building: I had gone inside and it was as if I had entered another world, another reality; the tumbling hills, the trees, the child-like flying beings. I had thought it was some kind of phreak, a hallucination fed by vapours and other trickery.

But now... I remembered the song in my head, an alien chorus without rhythm or tone but somehow still intensely musical.

“!¡
urgent
¡! The starsingers,” I said. “What about the ’singers, Skids?”

“!¡
hesitancy | confusion
¡! It was as if... as if they were unsinging the reality of Pennysway,” he said. “!¡
shock
¡! Unravelling the strands of world so that it stopped
being
.”

I released him. His words were messing with my head, just as what I had seen had messed with my head.

I didn’t know what to think.

I backed away from my old nest-sib, doubting his sanity, doubting my own.

I turned and started to climb the trail again.

Skids hung back for a moment, then followed.

I paused below the top. Everything seemed normal, everything seemed fine. A bird sang loudly from an oak tree. Crickets and cicadas shrilled. The sun beat down, strong now that the early morning chill had lifted.

At the top I could see westward to where Pennysway had been.

The ground was flat, bare, fuzzed with thin green. Other than that, no features. Nothing.

Pennysway was no more.

Pennysway was, if Skids was to be believed, unsung.

Chapter Eighteen

H
OPE WAS USED
to living in the present moment. Her past was a blur, her future uncertain.

Now should have been no different.

She woke in darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim light from the dying embers of the fire. She was in the underground chamber, the living drainage channels through which the city regulated itself.

Now, she understood: the city was a living thing. A tree with a network of roots spreading under the ground. A fungus, a mass of fibres and tubes sprouting mushrooms above the surface.

She wondered, when a city like Angiere, and now Laverne, was destroyed above the surface, turned to lakes of frozen glass – did the city survive below ground? Would it regrow when the human pestilence had been wiped out? Was there, even now, a fresh, newly formed Angiere sprouting by the sea to the west? Sheets of blackened glass splitting, parting, as fledgling buildings pushed up from the soil below?

She rolled onto her side. Her neck ached, and the left side of her face felt numb, as if she had been sleeping on it awkwardly.

She raised a hand to her cheek, found the dressing the Cragsider Jemerie had applied, and remembered.

The previous day in the clan nest, it had felt as if her face was dissolving, and the pain had been almost unbearable. She remembered the old rug dealer who had taken her in his wagon to Angiere – because she made the view prettier, he had said. No one would say such a thing to her now.

She did not know how she felt about that yet. Her looks had got her by: work in bars and on her back above bars, Marek’s attachment to her... Little things too. People are always more eager to help a pretty girl.

She sat, and saw that Sol was watching her.

The clan-mother was a big, strong woman, her skin like polished tree bark, her eyes dark pools.

“!¡
strong | restrained
¡! You’re different,” said Sol. “There’s something going on with you I can’t quite place...”

Hope didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to be different. She wanted to get by. But she knew it wasn’t normal to have no past. She couldn’t change that, but she could start to think about the future, perhaps.

“You have to leave,” Hope said, recalling the discussion around the fire last night. “We all do. I was in Angiere. I saw it happen, just like this. Clans wiped out. City blocks burned to glass. They won’t ease off now that this has started.”

Sol was shaking her head. “!¡
patient | hierarchy
¡! This is our home,” she said. “This is what we know. This is our place. Pups like Dodge and Jemerie might dream of some place better, but that’s all it is: dreams. The reality is that our only place is in the Ipps. !¡
firm
¡! We can’t leave. It’s how it is.”