The Last City (21 page)

‘Shoot,’ he ordered and Silho nodded.

Copernicus moved to the window beside her and repeated the actions for his weapon. Christy Shawe joined them. He punched a porthole and completely shattered it. Copernicus cursed as glass flew inward and ripped at his face.

The three of them began blasting. Shawe fired madly and wildly, but Brabel was a dead-on shot, taking out every witch she aimed for. Copernicus focused his attention on the centre – on the leading witch. She kept vanishing and reappearing, diving in and out of the Murk, impossible to hit. Copernicus could feel the influence of her curses that were trying to force him to turn the weapon on himself. Even with the storm and distance diluting her strength, she was incredibly powerful. Resisting took all of Copernicus’ mental and physical strength. He looked back at Diega and shouted, ‘Diega – how far?’

She glanced over her shoulder at him and Copernicus saw the haze clearing from the front window of the craft. The solid wall of an Outpost tower appeared just ahead of them. He shouted and Diega spun back around. Cursing, she slammed the craft vertical, flying upwards along the wall. The sudden shift of direction threw everyone else to the back of the ship with everything in the room crashing down on them. Copernicus struggled to kick the chairs and tables away. He heard Diega cry out. The craft hit the top of the tower and jolted violently. With the shriek of ripping steel, one side of the ship tore away, taking Shawe with it. The wind screamed around them and gravity caught up, dragging both parts of the craft down the tower tunnel in a nightmare rush.

The narrowing sides of the entry to the lower bunkers slowed their descent. Sparks flew as the sides of the craft scraped rock. Copernicus braced himself for the impact. As they hit, he crashed upwards against the roof, then smashed back down to the floor.

Pain lanced his side but he managed to leap to his feet. Fighting through pieces of the wreck, he ran to the controls at the front of the bunker and typed in his authority override code to engage the lockdown system. Red warning lights flashed. Copernicus looked into the darkness above, searching for signs of the witches. He could hear their distant screams. He saw that the second piece of the craft containing Christy Shawe had crashed onto a ledge above them.

One by one, the floors closed over between the levels of the tower, shutting out the Skreaf and separating Shawe. The final level clamped closed and the building groaned as it settled. The commander leaned against the dusty bench of the control system and breathed out.

T
he resurrection of light at dawn moved Eli from mourning to morning. He stood above the shelter in the middle of his house wreck and watched the new day’s suns wash rainbow colours across the grey sky of the industry-choked level. He clenched his communicator in one hand and lifted it to his mouth.

‘Call the commander,’ he tried again, speaking clearly and loudly into the receiver.

Again his system reached out to connect, but was, as every time before, immediately booted off, as though something was blocking the line. Eli knew it was not a technological block, which meant it was a magical barrier, and the only conclusion he could rationally devise was that the Skreaf were either still hunting his team or had already captured them. The dull blurring of his disconnected communicator suggested the latter, but he refused to believe it. He couldn’t. Instead he listened to the faint whisper of hope that said they had escaped and that he had to help them before it was too late. He was the only one left who knew the truth.

Biting his lip to stop it quivering, he hurried back down the stairs into the shelter where Ev’r sat, still chained to the chair, her head down, an occasional shiver rippling her back. It was an understatement to say she was unwell. Eli had given her every kind of painkiller and antibiotic potion he could think of, on top of the slowing elixir, but nothing was helping. He knew she couldn’t be telling him the whole truth of her illness, but he didn’t have the time to run tests. He had to find a lead to the others before all the tracks went cold.

‘I’m going,’ he said, gathering up various items from his workbenches – body-heat blockers, system scramblers, an electrifier, a blade, an extra skunk bomb and his computer pack. He clipped his communicator onto his weapon belt. ‘But I won’t be back – I mean –
I will
be back.’

Ev’r lifted her head and stared up at him from beneath her lashes in her beast-like way. ‘LET ME GO.’

‘I told you no, Keets. I’m not as weak as you think I am. And just because you’ve never had any friends doesn’t mean they don’t exist.’

He pulled an electro-proof vest over his head and hid it beneath his jacket. It helped to conceal his wings. And as for his face, he stood in front of the mirror and gulped down the potion he’d mixed earlier. The sharp triangularity of his features morphed and shifted. His chin and nose rounded, his ears and eyes shrank. He didn’t exactly look like a different person – more like a badly swollen version of himself, which was hopefully enough to stop anyone recognising him.

Ev’r gave a humourless laugh from her prison chair. ‘You look even more ridiculous than you usually do. You would have done better dressing up as a girl. You already look like one anyway.’

Eli deflected the cutting remark. ‘And you look like a man, so I guess we’re the perfect match.’

He marched past her up the stairs as she yelled abuse at his back. The shelter trapdoor snapped open then shut, silencing her fury.

Eli left the
Summer Holiday
in chameleon mode. It gave him the ability to fly unseen and undetected along the skyways, bypassing the military checkpoints backing up traffic in all directions. There was a disadvantage to it, though. People couldn’t see him, so they weren’t stopping for him. They were pulling out in front of him, swerving dangerously close beside and behind him. He sat on the edge of his seat and tried to look in all directions at once. The sad clanking of Nelly’s empty carry cage wrenched at his heart. He hoped his poor little friend had found a corner to hide in, away from crushing boots and cruel hands. She would be so scared without him.

Eli navigated the craft towards Eastend, Moris-Isles, where he had last seen the green dot representing Silho. The commander had said Jude was also attacked there, and that he and Diega were going to find them. This was where their trail ended and it was the logical place for him to start.

He managed to fly in right behind a lumbering public transporter craft and rode directly in its wake. It led him into the Isles, where he veered off and flew low along several backstreets until his navigator beeped their arrival at the approximate destination. Since he had lost his new communicator with the locator function at Headquarters, he could only go on memory of where Silho had been, though his memory rarely let him down.

Eli brought the transflyer down to the ground. He checked no one was in front or behind him, then opened the door and jumped out. Shrugging deeper inside his jacket, he pushed his hands into his pockets. Eli moved towards the alley mouth, trying to walk with the casual swagger of a person who knew that they were the baddest on the street, but when he caught sight of his reflection in the window of one of the buildings enclosing the alley, he saw it was more like the uptight hobble of someone desperately seeking a toilet.

He came out onto the main thoroughfare heading to and from Mortimer Road Marketplace. He stood for a moment watching people pass – refugees, scullion-gypsies, outlaws and illegals. Here in the underside everyone was hiding something, so the appearance of a puffy-faced imp in an oversized jacket didn’t draw so much as a glance. Eli found his eyes following the pockets of passers-by and his hands tingled. They longed to explore what he was seeing – to take, to steal. His nervousness tested his therapy-achieved control, but he managed to hold himself in check. He joined the relentless flow of buyers and sellers, hagglers and stealers, and began retracing the steps Silho had run the night before.

Elbows jostled him from side to side and the scents of rotting garbage, heavy body odour and gypsy incense mingled unpleasantly under his nose. Women leaned out of buildings, beating carpets on windowsills, raining dust down on the crowd. It made Eli sneeze. Scullion children played and laughed, shoving their way through, under and around everyone. They poked grubby hands into Eli’s face and demanded payment. He sidestepped them, not lifting his eyes. A streetwalker standing in a doorway singled him out and hissed a price and proposition of what it would buy.

‘Yes,’ Eli said, then mentally kicked himself and said, ‘No, I meant to say
no
, sorry.’

She gestured rudely and called into the dingy hallway behind her, summoning someone Eli knew would be very large, very ugly and not very sympathetic to an imp with speech impediments. He scurried faster and vanished into the crowd.

Finally he reached the place where Silho had turned off the main street into a back alley. He tried to take the same turn and stopped short. State guardians had cordoned off the street and a group of forensic investigators stood around something lying on the ground. Through a gap in the onlookers, Eli saw an arm skewed at an unusual and horrible angle.

‘Move along,’ a guardian Eli recognised as Harper Patterson barked at him.

He complied as quickly as he could, crossing the street and hurrying to the next alleyway. He ducked into it and peered around the wall to see if anyone was following him. It didn’t appear as though anyone had recognised him.

Someone grunted behind Eli and he spun around. A human-breed man leaned on the opposite wall, drinking from a bottle of Araki. The man’s scruffy, dirt-trap beard and mismatched, moth-eaten clothes screamed homelessness.

‘Hey there,’ Eli said, giving an awkward wave.

‘Kicked me out of my home, didn’t they!’ The man drew back and spat fiercely onto the street.

Eli guessed at a goat-blood heritage, though the man’s bushy arm hairs concealed his bloodline marks.

‘Think they’re so good – trutting state trutting gadflies,’ the man ranted. A noxious stink of liquor seeped from his mouth and possibly his skin as well.

‘Yeah.’ Eli nodded along. ‘Who do they think they are?’

‘Damn right,’ the man rumbled.

‘What happened there?’ Eli asked, nodding to the crime scene.

‘Didn’t see nothing.’ The man spat and Eli dodged the spittle spray.

‘Looks like someone got theirs though,’ he tried again.

‘Something like that.’ A sneer stretched the vagrant’s dirt-crusted face. ‘Too bad, hey? One less stinking scullion to steal my treasures. What a damn shame.’

‘Someone cut him?’ Eli asked.

The man’s eyes flickered up to his and they weren’t as unclear as Eli expected them to be. Several decades of street cunning stared from behind them.

‘I didn’t see nothing – now trutt off. This is where I stand.’ The man took another chug from the bottle and Eli decided not to challenge him on that.

He ducked out of the shadows back onto the main strip. Crossing the road again, he headed into another alley, intending to cut through and search for signs of Silho on the other side. Halfway down the backstreet stretch, Eli heard a scuttling of feet following him. When he glanced back he saw no one. He started again and the scuttling continued. He increased his pace and the scuttling grew faster. He broke into a run, and the sound clattered louder. Eli sprinted to the end of the alley, turned into another and flung himself behind a massive dumpster. That was when he saw a figure break around the corner.

‘Stop! I’m armed,’ Eli yelled, poking the end of his electrifier out from behind the metal bin.

The hooded person halted and slowly raised its arms. It had no hands, just metal hooks on the end of fleshy stumps.

‘What do you want?’ Eli demanded.

‘I want to sell you some information,’ the figure, a woman, spoke. ‘I heard you talking to Rupert. You’re a reporter, right? Your kind always come down here looking for something juicy. Well I’ve got something nice and ripe, but it will cost you.’

‘How much?’ Eli asked, playing along.

‘Seven sovereign coins,’ she said.

‘I’ll give you one, but only after you tell me.’

‘Two – half before and half afterwards.’

‘One and a half and you tell me everything now or I shoot you.’ Eli tried to keep his words from trembling. The electrifier rattled against the side of the dumpster. The hooded woman took the sound as a sign he was serious and said, ‘Fine. I was on the rooftop last night. I looked over the edge and saw a girl running through the alley. She —’

‘What did she look like?’ Eli interrupted. There was nothing rare or special about girls running for their lives through Moris-Isles.

‘I dunno. I only saw her from above. She ran into the dead guy back there, except he was still alive, but not for long. She thumped him and kept going, and something dark ran over him and ended him real quick. I saw the girl go into Smiths Pass. It’s a dead-ender and she never came back out. So she, or whatever is left of her, is still there. You’ll get pictures for your story before the guardians find her.’

‘Smiths Pass?’ Eli repeated. ‘Where is that again?’

‘Down there.’ She pointed a hook to the end of the alley where they stood. ‘Turn left, then it’s the first left. Now pay up.’

Eli withdrew a quarter-sovereign from his money pouch. He flicked it onto the ground it front of the woman and said, ‘Payment rendered.’ He knew enough about the underside to know no one expected to be paid the full agreed amount. It just went without saying that you were lying to each other.

‘Take it and go,’ he instructed.

She lowered one of her hooks and the money clanked magnetically to the steel. As she straightened up, her hood slid back off her head. A deep X-shaped scar ran from one side of her face to the other, crossing on the point of her nose, which had been half hacked away. It was the sign of a disgraced gang girl – a rat. It reminded him of the meeting he had witnessed in the Gangland – of Christy Shawe’s threat against the commander. The girl hooked the fabric and pulled the hood back over her face. She backed away and Eli saw her feet were also robotic replacements, probably cut off with her hands at the same time she’d gained the X.

Eli waited until the girl had vanished from the alley and then he bolted. It was highly likely that she was running to rally a group of friends to rob and bash him. He would only have moments to find Smiths Pass, check it out and leave. So he dashed to the other end of the street, ran left, then veered left again almost straightaway, only to freeze in front of a breach in the street where a Tangelan Burrower’s tunnel had broken out of the ground. Up ahead, the walls of the dead-ender were stained black with dark magics and splattered with Androt blood. A cloaked figure stood in the alley, its back to Eli. His skin prickled and his senses warned him of danger. The stranger began to turn and Eli dropped into the Burrower’s hole. He hit the rocks and rolled several times, then scrambled into the shadows. He stared upwards and held his breath, expecting a face to appear above, but nothing happened. Eventually he dropped his gaze and his eyes zeroed in on a square object partially buried in the rubble. He reached forward and pulled it free. It was an ID wallet. It belonged to Silho Brabel.

Eli’s heart thudded louder. He studied the ground around him and saw drag marks. The marks took him deep into the ground to a place where the ceiling had partially caved in. Here rocks had been pulled away, and footprints and drag patterns suggested two people had freed a third person. Eli took out his fingerprint analyser and checked for familiar prints – both the commander’s and Diega’s registered. They must have found Silho here and taken her out.

Eli looked around for alternate exits and saw another tunnel leading upwards. He took it, and eventually crawled up out of the burrow onto a side street beside a pub called ‘The Counting’. Here there were more fingerprints around the fractured street and Eli felt a tremor of hope. This was where the others had entered and left the burrow. He scanned the area. It was deserted save for a few stray people here and there, mostly bar patrons entering and exiting the pub. This struck him as strange, since secluded backstreets like this tended to attract gatherings of sellers selling and users using, both groups trying to keep out of sight. So why not here?

Something nestled under the overhang of the pub roof drew his attention. It was a security I-eye surveying the area. Eli threw himself back out of its range and grabbed the computer pack from his weapon belt. He quickly hacked into the frequency of the camera and a holo-image of its current footage appeared before him. He flicked backward through the captured footage to the previous night. The images blurred and cut out. Someone had scrubbed the machine’s memory. Someone who didn’t want to be linked with anything the I-eye had captured. Eli worked fast, splicing in repair codes and memory patches. The images he retrieved were grainy and sliced, but he clearly saw the commander and Diega pulling Silho out of the ground and carrying her towards the pub. Diega morphed away the lock on the storage shed at the back of the building, next to the icehouse, and they entered. The hologram fuzzed up and the next momentary flash of image Eli caught was Christy Shawe moving the three trackers out of the backroom at gunpoint. Eli froze the image. Shawe held SevenM in one hand.