Dreamfall (5 page)

I searched for a menu, suddenly wondering whether you couldn’t
even get something to eat here if you couldn’t read minds.

“Can I help you?”

I jumped. Someone was standing at my elbow, looking down at me.
I wasn’t sure whether he’d come up behind me without my knowing it or whether
he’d teleported here to my side. My Gift wouldn’t tell me, any more than it
would tell me who he was or what he wanted from me. I took a long look at him
and decided he must be the owner.

“Can I help you?” he asked again, in Standard, and the soft,
lilting way he formed the words hardened just a little.

I realized that everyone in the room was looking at mg now.
The looks weren’t friendly. “Some food—?” The words sounded flat and foreign as
they came out of my mouth.

His face closed as if I’d insulted him, as if he was
controlling himself with an effort. “I don’t know who you are,” he said very
quietly. “I don’t care what you are. But I’m telling you now, either stop what
you’re doing or get out.”

“I’m not doing anything—” I said.

Something caught me by the back of my jacket and hauled me
up. “Get out,” he said, “you damned pervert.” Something shoved me from behind.
It didn’t feel like his hand.

He didn’t have to use his psi on me again. My own panic
drove me out the door and into the darkness.
God, they knew .... They knew
what I was.

Out in the street someone caught my arm. I turned, my hand
fisting. My eyes registered the slack face, the vacant stare of a burnout. The
Hydran mouthed words so slurred I couldn’t tell whether they were even in a
language I knew.

Swearing, I jerked free and moved or, not caring where I
went, as long as it was away from there.

By the time my head had cleared enough so I realized what I’d
done, I was lost. There had been signs, some way of backtracking, when I’d left
the eatery. There were no signs of any kind that I recognized, now. There was
no street lighting either, and Refuge’s single moon hadn’t risen yet. If there
were any shops they were closed and unmarked. The only lights I could see were
high up, unreachable, probably the lights of private homes. The building here
were just tall enough to keep me from using the bridge to guide me back where I’d
come from.

No one else seemed to be on the street now. I felt more
relief than frustration as I realized how alone I was, because I couldn’t have
asked for help now if I’d been bleeding to death.

I swore under my breath. I’d lived most of my life in a
place where knowing the streets meant survival; and now I was lost. There weren’t
even any maps of Freaktown in Tau’s public access; even my databand couldn’t
tell me where I was, or how to get out of here. Why the hell had I even come to
this place, just to prove what I’d always known ... that no one had ever wanted
me, that there was nowhere I’d ever belonged?

I started back the way I’d come, head down and shoulders
hunched, shivering with cold and praying I’d make the right combination of
turns to get my miserable ass out of there before curfew.

At last I saw the bridge lights, somewhere in the distance
up ahead; heard the sound of human voices moving toward me. I turned another
corner, breaking into a jog—slammed into someone running, so hard that we
almost went down together.

A woman’s voice cried out as my hands caught her falling
body. I felt something drive into my brain like a knife of thought. My mind
blocked her instinctively at the same moment that I realized she was holding a
child in her arms.

She cried out again—
shock, fury
—as my mind turned
back her attack She gasped out words in a language I didn’t know, and all the
while I kept shouting, “It’s all right, I won’t hurt you, it’s all right!”
trying to make her listen and understand. “What’s wrong? Do you need help—?”

She stopped struggling, as if my words had finally
penetrated. Suddenly her body went limp in my grasp. The child trapped between
us didn’t make a sound as the woman collapsed against me, panting. I felt her
body’s fever heat even through my clothing.

She looked up at me then, and I finally saw her face: A fey,
green-eyed Hydran face, golden-skinned, framed by a wild tangle of pale hair ....
A face out of a dream, every alien, haunted line of it; and yet every curve and
plane was somehow as familiar as the face of a lost lover.

“I ... I know you?” I whispered, frozen in the glare of
impossible prescience. “How—?” A trapdoor opened under my thoughts, and I fell
through—

The woman made a small sound, almost a whimper, of disbelief.
One hand rose, tentatively, to touch my face.
(Nasheirtah ..
.
?)
she
breathed. (You. You—) Her expression became equal parts wonder and terror,
mirroring my own, as I slowly raised my hands to touch her face.

(Anything ...) I murmured as my entire life telescoped into
that single moment’s contact. (Anything at all.)

(Always. Forever ...) Her eyes filled with tears, her hand
dropped away. (Nasheirtah—)

“What—?” I whispered, uncomprehending.

She looked down suddenly, as if my eyes were a searchlight. “Help
me,” she said, in perfect Standard, but with her voice just barely under
control. “Please help me—they want to take my child!” She looked over her
shoulder. Light-echoes danced across building fronts in the distance down the
street.

“Who does?” I asked.

“They do!” she cried, shaking her head at me, with a look
that was half desperation and half incomprehension. “The Humans—”

And in the depths of her green eyes, their black slit pupils
wide open to the faintest hope of light, I saw another midnight:
Another
Hydran woman and her child ... light-years away, a lifetime ago
—
with no
one they could turn to, no one to save them from that Oldcity alley where their
world was ending in blood and pain ....

“Please—” she said, and pressed something into my open hand.

My fingers spasmed shut. I nodded, not looking at it, and
let her go. She disappeared down a side street I hadn’t even noticed.

I stood frozen a few heartbeats longer, with my stupefied
mind trying to follow her into the night and my body begging me to get it out
of there. And then suddenly the ones who’d been after her were in front of me,
shouting; I saw lights, I saw weapons—I ran like hell.

Behind me I heard someone bellow, “Corporate Security!”

Shit
—I ran faster.

Lights appeared ahead of me, dropping out of the sky, as a
CorpSec cruiser landed in the street.

Before I could even slow down something invisible slammed
into me like a tidal wave, and I drowned ....

I opened my eyes again to the blinding glare of an
interrogation room. I squinted them shut. “Shit,” I said. But that wasn’t what
came out of my mouth. The sound that came out of my mouth was completely
unintelligible.

My face hurt, because I must have fallen on it. My hair had
come loose from its clip; it was full of dirt and getting into my eyes. Every
nerve ending in my body was sparking like a live wire as the stunshock wore
off.

But that wasn’t what was wrong with my mouth: They’d drugged
me with nephase—flypaper for freaks. I knew without feeling for one that there
was a drugderm on my neck, put there by the Corpses to short-circuit my psi, if
I’d still had any psi ability that I could use. I remembered the nausea, the
slurred speech: the simulated brain damage. I tried to reach up, to make sure
there really was a patch on my throat—

I couldn’t move my arms. Either one. I looked down, saw my
body held prisoner in a hard metal seat, my arms strapped to the chair arms. I
stared at my hands, feeling panic abscess inside me.

Don’t lose control .... Don’t.
I took a long, slow
breath and made myself look up.

Half a dozen Corpses were waiting there, as if they had all
the time, and patience, in the world.

“Where is he?”

I looked at the one who’d spoken. Borosage, his data-patches
read. He was a District Administrator, from the flash that showed on his helmet
and uniform sleeve. He looked like a real bottom-feeder. These were the Corpses
I knew, not the kind who wore dress uniforms to corporate receptions. These
Corpses were wearing riot gear: dressed for business, their real business==
which had always been making the existence of street rats like me even more
impossible than it already was.

Borosage was massive and heavy; his body was starting to go
to fat, as if he’d been promoted to a level where he didn’t have to give a damn
anymore. But there was nothing soft in his eyes. They were bleak and
treacherous, like rotten ice. A gleaming artificial dome covered the left half
of his skull; blunt fingers of alloy circled his eye socket and disappeared
into his skull, as if some alien parasite had sunk neural taps into his brain.

I couldn’t imagine what kind of injury would leave him alive
and leave him looking like that. Maybe he’d had it done on purpose, to scare
the living shit out of his prisoners. I looked down as he caught me staring;
looked at his hands. His knuckles had more scar tissue on them than mine did. I
knew how they’d gotten that way. They scared me a lot more than his face did.

I looked away from his hands with an effort, down at the
data-band on my wrist, the undeniable proof that I was a citizen of the Human Federation,
and not some nameless piece of meat. “I want a legal advisory link,” I said.

What came out of my mouth was more unintelligible sludge.
The Corpses laughed. I took another slow breath, my hands clenching. “Want. A.
Legal.”

The laughter got louder. Borosage closed the space between
us in one step. He held his fist in front of my face. “You want advice, you
Hydran fuck? My advice to you is, answer the questions, because it’s going to
get harder to talk every time you don’t.”

“Not Hydran! Regishurred ... ci’zen,” I said; spit
splattered his fist. “I. Got. Rights.”

“You can inscribe your rights on the head of a pin this side
of the river, freak.’)

“Databan’—!” My arm jerked against the restraint. Cold sweat
was soaking through my shirt.

He took a step back; his hand dropped to his side. I let out
the breath I was holding as he looked down. His face twisted. He poked my databand,
and it beeped; pulled on it until I swore. “This is yours—?” he said finally,
looking hard at my face, at my eyes. ‘Are you trying to tell me you’re human?”

I nodded, my jaw muscles aching as I waited for his
expression to change.

He looked at the others. His grin split open. “What do you
think, Fahd?” He jerked his head at the lieutenant leaning against the door. “This
prisoner claims he’s a registered citizen Got the databand to prove it.”

Fahd peered at me. “You know, in this light he almost looks
human.” He moved closer. “The eyes could be a cosmo job, if he’s one of those
perverts.” He smirked. “Except I’ve never seen anyone but a freak talk that way
after we put the patch on him.”

“Exactly my point.” Borosage looked back at me again, and
his grin soured. “So what is it, boy? Are you mixed blood? A ‘breed?” He ran a
thick finger along my jaw. “You do look like a ‘breed .... “

I tried not to listen to what they said after that, about my
mother, my father, about whores and gang rapes and how no decent person would
let a thing like me live .... I sat motionless, breathing the stagnant
overheated air, until they ran out of ideas.

And then Borosage freed my wrist—the one that wore the databand.
Disbelief leaped like a fish inside me.

He didn’t free the other hand. “Look at you,” he said,
picking at my sleeve. “Dressed up like a Gentleman of the Board. Wearing a
databand. Trying to pass. Who did you think would believe it? Did you think we
would? ... You know what I think, freak?” he said to me, holding my hand. “I
think you stole that databand.” He jerked my arm forward, and one of the other
Corpses handed him a descrambler.

I swore silently. [‘d had one of those, once. A descrambler
could access the personal code of a databand in less time than it took the
owner to remember it. It was about as illegal as everything else that was
happening to me right now. I watched a run of data flow across the digital
display, and then suddenly the datafeed stopped. It flashed no access, the
symbols so clear that even I could see them.

Borosage swore, this time. I started to breathe again; glad,
not for the first time, that I wore a thumb-lock on my deebee. Unless I thumbed
it in the right spot, the only way it would come off my wrist was if somebody
cut off my hand. I’d bought myself some extra security, because I knew how easy
the regular locks were to descramble.

“What did you do to jam this?” Borosage shoved my hand into
my face.

“
Mine
—!” I said, and then, looking down, “Phone fun’shun!”
The function light didn’t go on—the processors didn’t recognize my voice.
Borosage made a disgusted noise, as if I’d just proved that the band was
stolen. I tried to see what time it was. I didn’t get the chance, &s he
strapped my hand down again.

I told myself that someone had to be wondering where I was.
They could trace me as long as I still had the databand on. Someone would come
after me. I just had to hold everything together long enough so that these
bastards didn’t maim me before it happened.

Borosage’s scarred hand caught me by the jaw. “You know you’re
in real trouble no\w, freak. The sooner you tell us everything you know, the
sooner I’ll think about letting you make a call, or even take a piss.” He let
go of me, with a twist of his hand that made me grunt as it hurt my bruised
face. “Where’s the boy?”

“What. Boy?” I mumbled. I braced myself as his open palm
came at me, but that didn’t make it hurt less when it hit my face. My head
slammed against the seatback. I tasted blood; felt it leak from the corner of
my mouth.