Earthbound (The Reach, Book 1) (50 page)

“I think your friend is a little worried about the Redmen,” Knile said.  “Looks like he’s never done this before.”

Ursie said nothing, and now she too seemed nervous.  Her good mood had vanished in only a few strides, and now she stared at the m
an in the aviators with a sickly expression on her face.

She did not look like a kid about to score the fortune of a lifetime.

Something was wrong.

“Ursie, what’s going on here?” Knile said, but the girl ignored him.  She only had eyes for the man in the suit.  Knile reached out to pull her back, to demand she talk to him, but she was having none of it.  She shrugged him off and kept going, and now the Redmen and the man in the suit were right in front of them.

Ursie stopped and stood staring at the man, and the man stared back impassively.  Knile reached them and glanced between the two of them, his uneasiness growing by the second.  A terrible thought occurred to him.

I’ve been behind the game this whole time.  There’s something very important that I’ve missed.

He still had no idea what that was.

Knile opened his mouth to protest, but the man in the suit spoke first.

“A disappointment,” he said in a deep, authoritative tone of voice.  He enunciated the syllables in each word very carefully.  “A great disappointment.”

“I’m here,” Ursie said angrily.  “I made it, didn’t I?”

The man simply shook his head.  “That is simply not good enough.”

“What the hell is going on here?” Knile demanded.  “Ursie, make the deal and let’s get out of here.”

“There is no deal,” the man in the a
viators said.  “Not now.”

“It doesn’t have to end this way.  You can do something,” Ursie said to the man.  “Can’t you?”

The man seemed to consider this, then sighed heavily.  He shook his head.  Then without warning he placed a hand inside his jacket and drew out a handgun, levelling it at Knile.  Knile flinched backward at the unexpectedness of it, expecting to feel bullets tearing through his chest, but suddenly one of the Crimson Shield materialised beside the man and wrenched the weapon from his grasp before he could fire it.

“What the hell are you doing?” the Redman said, his voice muffled behind his mask.  “Weapons are not permitted here.  You should know that.  Your organisation could have its license revoked for a stunt like this.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said, adjusting his sunglasses uncomfortably.  “I don’t know what came over me–”

“There’s going to be a report about this, you understand?  There will be repercussions.”

“Yes.  I apologise.”

“Conclude your business and get the fuck off my platform,” th
e Redman said.  The man in the aviators bobbed his head obediently.  The Redman scowled at him, then stowed the gun in his suit and turned his back, resuming his position nearby.

The railcar began to emit a whirring noise and several lights flared along its length.  Departure was imminent.

“Ursie, are you going to tell me what on earth is going on here?” Knile said.

Reluctantly, she turned her face toward him.  Tears were shimmering in the corners of her eyes.  Knile saw the shame, the guilt and the embarrassment written across her face.

And suddenly Knile knew.  He understood.

His eyes dropped to the satchel.

“What’s in the case?” he said quietly.

“Knile, please–”

“What’s in the fucking case, Ursie?”
he roared at the top of his lungs, and his ferocity caused the girl to stumble backward onto one knee.  She sobbed and held up one hand defensively, but Knile brushed past it and stuck his hand inside the satchel.  He pulled out the small briefcase with the encrypted lock.  “Open it!  Open it right fucking now or I’ll throw you off this goddamn roof!”

Ursie fumbled for the keypad on the case, her hands shaking, tears rolling down her cheeks, and began to press the digits in sequence.

“Faster!” Knile bellowed.  “Hurry up!”

“I’m trying!” Ursie wailed.  “I’m trying, okay?”

She pressed the final digit and the case clicked as the locking mechanism disengaged.  Knile attempted to wrench the case from her hands, but only succeeded in knocking it violently aside.  It bounced once across the concrete roof and then skidded, its contents flinging out in all directions.

Bits of cloth flapped in the breeze.  Shiny pieces of metal caught the last of the day’s light.

Knile surveyed the guts of the case as they continued to spill out and scatter at the touch of the swirling wind.  He felt numb, foolish.

“You were the cargo,” Knile said without turning to look at the girl.  He moved over to the case and picked out a grubby doll with one eye missing, turned it over in his hands.  Ursie sobbed again but made no reply.  “There’s no priceless artefact here.  There’s no merch.  This is your luggage, isn’t it
,
Ursie?  It was
you
they wanted delivered to the Wire.  And they used me to get you here.”

“Knile–” Ursie began, but he wasn’t listening.

“These people needed to get you to the Wire, but they knew you couldn’t get past the Enforcers yourself.  No.  They needed someone who could sneak you through the Reach undetected.  Someone like me.”  He picked up a little brass box with a flimsy catch and a handle on the lid, anot
her worthless keepsake Ursie had
stuffed into her luggage.  “So they put my name on a passkey and then arranged for you to tag along for the ride.  But I’m guessing from your friend’s reaction,” he said, looking up at the man in the sunglasses, “that I wasn’t supposed to be here at this point.  That wasn’t part of the plan.”

“You said you could take care of this,” the man in sunglasses said to Ursie.

Her face darkened.  “Shut up.  Just shut up,” she replied acidly to the man.

“So why is it that they want you, Ursie?” Knile said, dropping the trinket back in the c
ase and getting to his feet.  “
Why did they go to all of this trouble to bring you here?”

“Does it matter?” she said, overwrought.  She had not bothered to pick herself up off the concrete yet.

“Yeah, I think it does.”

“Who cares now?  It’s over,” she said, defeated.  “Take your magic ticket and get out of here.  You won.”

Knile narrowed his eyes as he considered.  He thought about their journey through Gaslight, scaling the walls to the Greenhouse.  The party in Lux.  All of the strange little occurrences in between.  The events began to align in his mind and he recognised the patterns therein.

It all made sense now.

“You really
are
a psycher, aren’t you?”
Knile said.  “That’s it.  That’s probably the only words out of your fucking mouth that weren’t a lie to me.  You’re a goddamn psycher.  You can influence people’s minds.  Make them see things.  Make them
do
things.”

Ursie just looked at him, and Knile turned to the man in the aviators.

“Let me guess.  One of the scouts from your organisation discovered her and told you to get her off-world, and since she was wanted by the Enforcers, this was the only way you could manage to do it.”

“Please, Knile, just go–”

“You’ve manipulated me this whole fucking time, haven’t you, Ursie?” he said, turning and stalking toward her menacingly.  “You’ve been pulling the strings every step of the way.  You manipulated Hank to get an introduction with me, then you convinced me to bring you along on this trip, even though it was a dumb idea to haul your ass across the Reach in the first place.  I should have known something was up right from the start.”

“No, Knile.”

“You made me see that kid out on the wall during our first climb, didn’t you?  The little boy with no shirt.  You wanted me to go investigate, waste my time so that dark
ness
would come and I’d be forced to take you back inside.  That way you wouldn’t have to climb anymore.”

Her eyes were wide with fear.  “No.”

“You stole my gun down in the Mechanisms when you bumped into me on the walkway, didn’t you?”

“I needed it more than you.”

“You made me see Mianda. 
Mianda!
” he yelled, and she flinched away.  “That wasn’t her in Lux, was it?  You put pictures in my head.  Voices.  You made me think that Mianda was still alive.  You figured I wouldn’t leave the Reach without her, and that I’d hand the passkey over to you.  But you didn’t dig far enough inside my head to find out how she really felt about me.  You stole a few snatches of my dreams and figured that would be enough.  That was the plan, wasn’t it?”  He advanced further, and Ursie squirmed backward, vehemently shaking her head.  “That was the plan, wasn’t it Ursie?  You little fucking rat!”

Something inside her snapped, and she ceased her retreat.

“Fuck you, Knile!” she yelled, tears streaming down her cheeks.  “Don’t you dare judge me!  Not you!  Not after what you’ve done!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“These people,” she said, waving at the man in sunglasses, “are the only ones who ever saw anything good in me.  The only people who ever thought I was worth a damn.”  She glared up at him.  “Do you know what it’s like to live on the street and never have anyone to call your friend?  To never have anyone there to comfort you when things go bad?  No one to miss you when you’re gone?  That’s my life!  I live that every single day.  And these people were the first ones to ever look at me and think I was
special
.  That I had worth.”

Knile shook his head, incredulous.  “What do you think they see in you, Ursie?  Do you think they want to be your friends?  Maybe they just want to put you on an operating table and cut your head open to see how it works.”

“Yeah?  And what are my other options, Knile?  Maybe I should sit around here living hand to mouth, waiting to die from the toxins in the food?  In the air.  Maybe I’ll get thrown into the Cellar by the Enforcers and never come out again.  No.  Screw that.  I’ll take my chances up there.”  She jabbed a finger upward.  “Because that’s the only place I have a chance of finding happiness.  Of living
my
dream.”

“No, Ursie,” Knile said calmly.  He held up the passkey.  “That’s
my
dream, and you’re just an interloper.  You’re just a thief.”

She shook her head at him in disdain.  “Will you listen to yourself?  Do you hear what you’re saying?  You’re a hypocrite, don’t you realise that?  You tried to steal someone else’s dream too, remember?  Isn’t that why Mianda hated you?”

Knile stepped back as if she’d slapped him in the face.  “What?”

“You’re a walking contradiction, Knile.  You just can’t see it.”

He turned away from her, staring down at the golden passkey in his hand.  He ran his thumb along the indentation in the key.

Knile Oberend.

It was his name on the passkey, his DNA tha
t was encoded.  The man in the aviators couldn’t stop him from boarding the railcar, and he knew it.  Knile could blow right by him and take his place on the Wire, ride the railcar up to Habitat One and never see this place again.  He could leave all these people behind.

All these bad memories.

Alton Wilt’s words reverberated in his mind.

You’re like me, aren’t you?  You know what it’s like to sell your soul in order to see your dream come true.

Knile pressed a hand to his forehead. 
No, Wilt.  I’m not like you.

He thought of Talia, condemned to a life in Link, and Roman, who was, at this very moment, being drawn into the web of a monster.  He thought of Hoyer Honeybul’s grinning face.

He thought of Roman’s last words to him.

See you on the other side.

“I’ll find a way to help them,” he said out loud, but the words were hollow in his own ears.  There was no conviction in his voice.

Wilt had been right.  He had to admit that now.  Knile had left people in his wake, friends like Talia and Roman who had been cast aside like afterthoughts of his own all-consuming obsession with leaving the Earth.  Hell, even the girl he’d rescued in Lux, the Candidate, had been discarded and left in the arms of the Enforcers, those Knile knew to be corrupt.

No one was going to help Talia.  No one was going to help Roman.  Least of all Knile Oberend.

He suddenly felt that burning sensation in his fist again, just as he had felt in Lux at the sight of the girl on the bed.  In his mind he heard
her voice and the voices of all those others who had been oppressed, those who were buried in the depths of the Reach and who would never be
heard.  People who had sheltered him when he had been in need, people who had shared his moments of joy and commiserated with him through his failures.  People like Talia and Roman.

It was then that he realised that there was no point running from those bad memories.  No point running from his failures.  Those thoughts would chase him to Saturn, to Jupiter, to wherever he went.  To the ends of the universe.