Surface Detail (52 page)

She beat back, fell away, swooped and zoomed, glancing fearfully back as the great demon sat back in his great glowing chair, wreathes of smoke from his recent movements pulsing through the air around him.

She killed her first that evening, as the already dull light deepened to a ruddy, sunless gloaming. It was a young female, caught on the rusted spikes of a cheval de frise on a cold hillside above a mean trickle of an acid stream, moaning almost continually except when she had banked enough breath to scream.

Chay landed, listened to the female trying to speak, but got no sense from the piteous creature. She hesitated, looking around, in case anything appearred familiar, but it was not the same hillside she and Prin had sheltered on.

She was crying as she folded her great dark wings round the female, trying not to tear the thin leathery membranes of her wings on the cruel spikes. Chay felt the female’s being move out of her broken, twisted body and into her own before dissipating entirely, just evaporating away like a little cloud on a warm, dry day.

She felt a different kind of hunger, and ate some of the body, tearing through the tough hide to get into the juicy buttock muscles.

As she flew back to her distant roost, she wondered how much pain would accrue as a result of what she had done.

She hung there, digesting.

Later, she was left with a sore tooth.

She had become an angel in Hell.

When the adults were away sometimes they could play in the places where the adults played. She had a group of friends who were all about the same age and they played together a lot when they weren’t being taught in the little school room on the top floor of the big estate house.

The others could still be cruel to her now and again, when they wanted to get back at her for something or when she had won something and they wanted to remind her that it didn’t matter if she came first in a race or got better marks then anybody else in an exam, because in the end she was just a servant really – in fact worse than a servant because at least a servant could just leave if they wanted to but she couldn’t. She was like a mount or a hunt chaser or a game-hound; she belonged to the estate, she belonged to Veppers.

Lededje had learned not to pretend that she didn’t care when the other children were like this. It had taken her a while to work out how best to handle this sort of teasing. Crying a lot and running to her mother made it too easy for the children to use her like a toy when they were bored; press Lededje’s button and off she’d race. So that was no good. Not reacting at all, going all stony-faced; that just made them say even worse things until it ended in a fight and she – it always seemed to be her fault – got them all punished. So that didn’t work either. The best thing to do was to cry a little and let them know that she’d been hurt, then just get on with things.

Sometimes when she did this she got the impression some of the other children thought she hadn’t seemed hurt enough, and they tried to hurt her some more, but then she would just tell them they were being immature. Leave it behind; move on; learn and progress. They were just about at the age when this sort of adult talk could be successfully used.

They played in the places they were supposed to play, places where nobody had said they couldn’t, and – best of all – in the places where they definitely weren’t supposed to play at all.

Of the latter, her favourite had always been the water maze: the complex of shallow channels, ponds and lakes where the adults played with big toy battleships and where they watched the mini -ature sea battles take place from all the big towers and soaring arches and canals in the air.

She had been allowed to watch one of the battles once with her mother, though it had taken a lot of nagging and her mother had had to ask it as a big favour and even then it wasn’t one of the really important battles with lots of rich and famous people watching, it was just a sort of trying out and testing sort of battle that people from the estate could watch sometimes if they didn’t have other duties. Her mother hadn’t enjoyed it because she didn’t like heights; she kept her eyes closed most of the time, her hands grasping the sides of the little flat-bottomed boat they rode around in on the canals in the sky.

Lededje had liked it at first but eventually got bored. She thought it would be more interesting if she could be inside one of the battleships herself rather than have to watch other people working them. Her mother, still without opening her eyes, told her that was a stupid idea. For one thing she was too small. And anyway, only men were stupid and aggressive enough to want to get inside those floating death-traps and be shot at with live ammunition for the entertainment of the spoiled rich.

In the distance, Lededje had seen one of the old dome plinths, busy with people. Teams of workmen with cranes and big vehicles full of electronics were dismantling all the sat domes, two dozen of which had surrounded the mansion house in a ring a couple of kilometres across for as long as she could remember. The first time she had run away, it had been at the foot of one of those stone-clad plinths she had been caught. That had been years and years and years ago; maybe half her life. Now the gleaming white satellite domes were useless and outdated and being dismantled.

Right there and then, for the first time, she felt herself growing old.

They had to wait to be allowed to dock at the little pier on one of the towers, then go down in the coffin-like elevator and through the tunnel that led safely away from the lake and the towers and the channels and the ships. You could hear the guns firing even from the house.

She and the other children – well, most of them; two were too frightened – used to sneak under the fence that went all the way round the water maze. They kept well away from the miniature docks where the ships were maintained and repaired. The docks were usually only busy for the few days around one of the big proper battles, but even on the quietest days there would be one or two grown-ups working there.

Misty days were best. It all looked very strange and mysterious and bigger somehow, as though the toy landscape of the channels and little lakes had grown to be the right bigness for full-size battleships. She had an old foametal plank for her ship; the others used various bits and pieces of plastic, foametal and wood as theirs. They learned how to tie and glue extra bits and scraps of other stuff that floated to their ships, or plastic bottles or that sort of thing, to make them float better. They hid their ships in the reeds so they wouldn’t get caught.

They had their own races, battles and games of group-tag and hide-and-seek. When they had proper battles they threw lumps of earth and mud at each other. One time it was almost dark before they heard adults calling for them. The others said she only won that one because she was black as the night.

A couple of their ships were found one time when somebody doing something to one of the flat-bottom boats in the sky canals saw them playing. Those two ships were taken away and they all got a lecture about danger and Unexploded Munitions. They solemnly promised not to do it again, and watched as the hole in the fence they’d got in through was wired up. It was okay because they’d already found another hole further round.

After that they were supposed to carry comms – kid-phones – that told the adults where they were at all times but a couple of the older kids had shown everybody how to turn them off completely or make them give out signals that said they were a hundred metres away from where they really were.

The last day they played in the water maze it was very bright and sunny, though they only got to play there as the sun was going down, after school. All the adults were very busy because Mr. Veppers was coming back after a long time away on a business trip way out in the stars and so the house and the whole estate needed to be made to look as pretty and clean as possible.

She didn’t like hearing that Mr. Veppers was coming back because he was the man who owned her. She didn’t see him very often when he was in the big estate house – their paths seldom crossed, as her mother put it – but just knowing he was in the place made her feel funny. It was like being breathless, like when you fell on your back and hurt yourself, but worse than the getting hurt was the not being able to draw a breath. It was a bit like that, except all the time when Mr. Veppers was at home.

Lededje hadn’t run away for a while, though she still thought about it sometimes. She was thinking about running away the next day, the day Mr. Veppers came back, but for now she wasn’t thinking about it at all and was just having fun in the last insect-buzzy heat of the day under a sky that was all red and yellow.

She paddled along, lying on her front on her old ship, the trusty battleship made from the length of foametal that had been an off-cut from one of the dock pontoons. She’d shaped it a bit over the years to make it more aerodynamic in the water; it had a point at the front and it bent over at the back where you could brace your foot. Actually hers wasn’t a battleship at all because battleships were big and heavy and slow and when she was on her ship she wasn’t any of those things; she was light and quick and so she’d decided she was a light cruiser.

They were playing group-tag. She hid in the rushes close by one of the wading points between islands as the others slid quietly or splashed noisily past. Most of them were calling out her name and Hino’s; Hino was the second youngest and small like her and he was very good at tag and hide-and-seek, also like her. That meant that probably they were the last two to be found and tagged. She liked that; she liked to be the last to be caught, or not to get caught at all; sometimes they heard the adults calling them, or one of the older kids got a comms call they couldn’t ignore, and so they had to give up on the game and that meant whoever still hadn’t been caught by then had won. Once, she had fallen asleep on her light cruiser board in the sunlight and discovered that all the others had got bored and hungry and just gone off, leaving her there alone. She’d decided that counted as winning too.

Stuck into the mud near where she was hiding was a metal and plastic shell. You rarely saw these because they had locator things in them like the kid-phones did that meant they could be tidied up after each battle, but here was this one lying with a badly dented nose that must have doinked off the armour of one of the ships. She picked it up carefully, just to look at it, holding it in two fingers like it might explode at any moment. It looked very old and dirty. There was writing on it she couldn’t make out. She thought about putting it back where she’d found it, or throwing it onto the nearest island to see if it would explode, or dropping it in one of the deeper bits of the lakes – she even thought about leaving it where it would be found really easily by one of the maintenance people – but in the end she kept it, making a little mud nest for it right at the front – the bow – of her foametal light cruiser.

Leaning over to scoop up the mud to do this must have caused ripples, because next thing she knew there was a loud shout from alarmingly nearby and Purdil – one of the bigger, older boys – was almost on top of her, powering his plastic warship towards her along the channel using both hands, raising a breaking bow wave that shone in the red rays of the setting sun as he turned to head straight for her though the reeds. She struck out as hard as she could, angling out and away through a gap in the swaying stalks, but she knew she would never make it; Purdil was going too fast and she could never outpace him anyway.

Purdil was a bully who sometimes threw stones instead of mud when they had proper battles and was one of those who most liked to tease her about her tattoo and her being owned by Mr. Veppers, so the best she could do would be to get out into the channel and hope at least she’d get caught by somebody else.

She flattened herself on the board and started paddling desperately, both hands digging deep into the warm water, raising clouds of mud towards the surface. Something flew over her head and splashed just ahead of her. Purdil was shouting and laughing close behind her. She could hear the dry, rattling sound of the reed stems being pushed aside and under by the curved prow of his plastic ship.

She got into the channel and almost collided with Hino, who was being pursued by two of the others. They both manoeuvred to avoid hitting each other. He sat up when he saw it was her and was struck in the face by a clod of earth with some broken reed stems still attached. Hino nearly fell off his board, which curved back round, blocking Lededje’s course. She’d never get past him now. She started to pull up, using both hands to slow herself as the front of her craft slid in towards Hino.

Oh, she thought. She hoped the shell she’d found didn’t blow up when her ship hit Hino’s. It didn’t. Phew, she thought.

Hino wiped the mud off his face and glared past her at Purdil. Led felt Purdil’s craft smack into the back of her own just as Hino reached out to the little lumpen nest of mud she’d put the shell in, at the bows of her ship. She saw him pick up the muddy shell and throw it in one quick movement.

Lededje had time to draw breath.

The shell tore past her, half a metre away.

The explosion seemed to slap her once, right across the back. It made her head ring. Sound seemed to go away. She was still looking forward at Hino and raising her hand to try to say, No!

She felt the ringing noise everywhere in her body. She saw Hino’s face go pale as fast as clicking your fingers. The two other kids behind him wore the same expression. It was those expressions she would never forget; they were worse than what she saw when she looked round. Their faces; the three of them, staring, open-mouthed, eyes wider than she thought eyes could go, all blood draining from the faces.

She pushed herself up and turned to look behind her. It seemed to take a long time to do this. She looked away from Hino and the other two children, away from the channel behind and the setting sun and the reed beds stretching alongside. As she turned she saw the low hill of the miniature island forming one bank of the channel; above was the arch and spire of a sky canal and a tower above that.