Earthbound (The Reach, Book 1) (31 page)

“Yeah, but if you were, who would you be leaving behind?”

Ursie scratched at her neck self-consciously.  “No one.  I
, uh… I never really had anyone to look after me.”

“There has to be someone.”

“Not really.  I’ve spent my life on the streets.  I’ve never really called anywhere home, or anyone family.  I had a few people come into my life that I might have called friends.  There was a kid called Jerry, same age as me.  We used to run together a lot, got into trouble, got out of trouble.  Set fire to the Enforcer barracks once, just for shits and giggles.  Most of the time we lived hand to mouth, like you have to on the streets.  But Jerry wasn’t careful about what he ate.  Ended up with too many toxins in his bloodstream, and that was it.”  She shrugged as if it were all inconsequential, but Knile could see the hurt in her eyes.  “Who gives a shit, right?  That’s just how life turns out for some of us.  I don’t care.”

“It shouldn’t be that way.  Not for anyone,” Knile said.

“Hey, don’t feel sorry for me,” Ursie said with a laugh tinged with bitterness.  “I’ve always been a loner anyway.  This is the way I like it.”

“If you say so.”

Ursie drew her satchel to her chest and snaked a hand inside, running her fingers along the edge of the case as if for comfort.

“Who is it that you’re leaving behind?” she said.

“Just some friends.  No one you’d know.”

“Mianda?”

Knile almost dropped the holophone, such was his surprise at hearing the girl utter that name.  He stared at her, not sure whether to feel rage or astonishment.

“How the fuck do you know about her?”

“Hey, calm down, Knile.”  Her hand drew back from the satchel and extended toward Knile in a placating gesture.  “I didn’t–”

“Tell me!”

“You were talking about her.  In your sleep, all right?  Last night.  You were saying her name.”

Knile thought back to a few hours previous in the storeroom.

The dream.

How much had he said?  How much had he revealed?

“What did I say?”

Ursie raised her hands helplessly.  “That’s about it.  You just kept saying that name over and over again.”

Knile grunted, not entirely sure she was telling the truth.

“Yeah.  Okay.”  He continued his work on the holophone and Ursie leaned forward intently.

“So who is she?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

Ursie shrank back, disappointed.  “Y’know, this is going to sound bad, but you’re the first person I’ve opened up to in years.  I haven’t told anyone else the shit that I just told you, not about Jerry, not about–”

“She’s dead, all right?” Knile snapped.  “Mianda is dead.  Are you happy now?”

Ursie placed the satchel aside and drew her legs up against her chest, placing her chin on her knees as she stared at Knile with those big, round eyes.

“What happened to her?”

Knile sighed and gave her a glare that was meant to silence any further questions, but his heart wasn’t in it.  In truth, he did feel awful for not sharing anything of himself after she had confided in him.  She wasn’t so much trying to dig up the dirt on Knile’s past, he realised, but more simply wanting to share an intimate moment with a friend, something she had evidently not done in a long time.

Knile relented.  “She was everything to me,” he said wistfully.  “She was my future, the only thing I ever really wanted.  We were leaving here together.”  He smiled sourly.  “Can you believe that?  I managed to get hacked passkeys not just for one person, but for two at the same time.  Most would believe that to be impossible.”

“So how did you do it?”

“I found a married couple who were heading up the Wire together.  They had capsules side by side, the whole works.  It took me months of searching to find the right circumstances.  This one was perfect.”

“You stole the passkeys from a married couple?” Ursie said, dismayed.

“Yeah.”  Knile gave her a quizzical look.  “What’s the problem?  If you’re going to hack a passkey, you have to steal it from someone first.”

“And you’re proud of that?”

Knile bristled.  “Of course I’m not proud of it.  Don’t you think I would have chosen another way if I’d had the choice?”  He tapped angrily on the phone.  “We do what we can to survive, to get ahead.  Sometimes you have to walk over someone else to do that.”  He looked up again and glared at her.  “As if you can talk, anyway.  Are you proud of stealing that prize of yours?”  She glanced down at the satchel.  “Wouldn’t you rather have earned it honestly?  I bet you would.  You’re walking over someone yourself, right now.  You’re about to take money, a
lot
of money, for something that isn’t yours.”

“All right, man, cool it,” Ursie said.  “I’m not judging you.  Why are you overreacting to this?”

“When you’re born into poverty, like you and me,” Knile went on, “you don’t get to make that choice.  If you want to escape you have to take what you can.”

“Yeah, I get it.  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to set you off like that.”

Knile glowered at her for a few moments longer, then dropped his face back to the phone. 
From the corner of his eye he watched her, and from the look on her face he guessed that she was somewhat surprised by his outburst
.  He had to admit that it was
incongruent with his normally calm and collected demeanour, but he couldn’t help that she’d inadvertently hit a raw nerve.

“In the end it didn’t work, right?” she said after a while
.  “You didn’t make it out.”

“No, we didn’t,” Knile said quietly, his composure somewhat restored.  He lifted his face and stared off into the distance, his eyes unfocused as his thoughts returned to the past.  “Things went bad in the end, things I couldn’t anticipate.”

“So what happened?”

Knile sighed, rubbing the heel of his hand into his eye socket and then allowing his head to thump back into the wall of the garden behind him, like a man who had held out for a long time but was now ready to confess.

“Those Stormgates in the Atrium, they’re built to admit anyone holding a passkey.  Anyone else who tries to go through gets blocked.  Simple, right?  Except things get complicated when you’re talking about a hacked passkey.  The hack is never quite one hundred percent.  Sometimes it doesn’t work like the original, and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.  So I added in an extra safeguard.

“There’s a field generator located in the level below the Stormgates.  I happened to come across some information about it when I hacked Hank’s terminal.”

“Hank the Consortium guy?  How did you do that?”

“He got a little too trusting and left me alone for a couple of minutes at his desk.  That’s all it took.”

“So what did you find?”

“It was a maintenance report, something really unremarkable
, but it caught my eye.  One of the Consortium techs had sent around a routine bulletin, letting the staff know that they’d detected strange behaviour with the Stormgates during power fluctuations of the field generator.  More precisely, when there was a dip in power, followed by a sudden restoration of charge, the field generator would oscillate at a certain frequency that caused the Stormgates to reverse.  It was only for a millisecond, so it wasn’t viewed as a major problem, but I saw an opportunity there.

“By overriding the power regulator to the field generator, I was able to increase the juice and cause those oscillations again.  But the problem was, it was only meant to last for a few minutes.  Instead, it went on for almost half an hour.”

Knile was plagued by regret at the thought of it, but at the same time he experienced an odd sense of relief, as if finally telling someone the story was like a kind of catharsis.

“The Stormgates were open for half an hour?”

“Yeah, and talk about that kind of thing spreads like wildfire.  By the time Mianda and I reached the Atrium, there were people everywhere.  I think they all must have thought that the Consortium had finally thrown open the gates and were letting everyone out.”

“So what did you do?”

“We tried to get to the elevator that led up to the Wire.  There were people all over the place.  Lots of confusion, lots of excited and hysterical citizens.  Then I saw the
insurgents.”

“Insurgents?”

“Yeah, one of the groups who want to see the Reach destroyed.  They’d tried to recruit me a few months before, and that was how I recognised them.  They called themselves ‘Children of the Planet’ or something.  They’d brought improvised explosives with them, and took their opportunity to do some damage inside the Stormgates.”

“Oh, god,” Ursie breathed.

“Yeah.  A lot of people got killed.  I was lucky to make it out of there myself.”

“Mianda?” Ursie said softly.

Knile shook his head.  “She couldn’t have made it.”

“Why not?”

“She just couldn’t.”  Knile waved the thought away.  “Anyway, the Enforcers had been trying to track me for a while, and I found out that they blamed me for the explosion.”  He looked at her as if imploring her to believe him.  “I’m responsible for reversing the Stormgates, but that’s it.  I didn’t try to kill anyone.”

“I know you wouldn’t, Knile.”

He grimaced.  “And now I have to do it all again.  I have to get you through the Stormgates, so I’m going to have to reverse the field one more time.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“Not this time.  I know what I did wrong.  This time I’ll only make them reverse for a much shorter amount of time.  No one will even notice.  We’ll just have a smaller window to get you through, is all.”  His
mood lifted
.  “Either way, I’ll be fine.”  He grinned roguishly, attempting to shrug away the last of his melancholy.  “I have a passkey with my name on it, so the Stormgates won’t pose any problems for me.”

Ursie returned his smile.  “And then away you go, right?  Up into the heavens?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Who’s waiting for you up there?  Who’s your Sponsor?”

Knile just shook his head.  “I don’t know that yet.”

“What?  How can you not know?”

“That part of the deal wasn’t revealed to me.”

“Do you think it could be–”

“I don’t know who it is,” Knile said, not wanting to hear what she had to say.  He had no intention of playing that particular game.  “I’ll find out when I get there.”

“What if it’s someone you don’t like?”

“Then I’ll do the same thing I’ve always done.  I’ll improvise and get myself out of trouble.”

Knile lifted his head and looked through the vines again, cursing softly.  “This old guy is really giving me the shits.”

“Why do Sponsors even exist?” Ursie said thoughtfully, not ready to relinquish the conversation just yet.  “If the Consortium is here to make money, why not just take payment from the people down here?  Why go through all the hassle of involving Sponsors?”

“It’s a way of regulating the traffic,” Knile said.  “The place that sits at the to
p of the Wire, Habitat One, is
just a transit station.  It’s not a refuge for the masses.  What would happen if people down here spent their last cred on a passkey, and then had no way of booking passage to one of the habitats in the outer colonies?  They’d sit there milling around in Habitat One, steadily increasing in number until the whole habitat burst apart – or at least until it ran out of food and air.  The Sponsors are a way of ensuring that the passengers have somewhere to go once they step off the Wire.”

“It doesn’t seem fair,” Ursie said.

“Of course it’s not fair.  Who ever said it was?”  He shook his head at her.  “You know that most people are never leaving this world, right?  Most of them are going to rot here.”

“Yeah,” Ursie said.  “People like me.”

Knile felt a pang of guilt, realising he must have sounded like a self-satisfied prick right at that moment, wallowing in his own sense of superiority.

“Look, Ursie.  You’re a good kid.  I’ll
, uh… once I’m off-world I’ll find a way to get you out of here.”

She gave him a wan smile.  “How many people have you told that lie to, Knile?”

He frowned, indignant.  “What?  It’s not a lie.”

“Oh,
really?  How exac
tly are you going to get me off-
world?  Do you have all the money and power it takes to become a Sponsor?  Do you have any idea about how things work up there?  Any contacts?  Or are you just going to improvise everything?”  Knile looked away from her, unable to come up with an answer.  “You don’t have an answer, do you.”  It was not a question.  “You just sprout that bullshit to deflect people who look like they might get in your way.”

“That’s enough,” Knile growled.

“Well, guess what?” Ursie went on.  “I don’t want to leave here.  Why would I?  This plac
e” – she jabbed a finger to the floor –
“is where I grew up.  It’s the place where I learned to survive.  Everything I know is right here.  Why would I want to go off-world, to a place where I don’t know anyone, where I have to figure out how to survive all over again?”