Alita

by Pat Cadigan

  But then he couldn’t imagine really confessing to Ido what he’d done. He was no angel—he’d messed up plenty, let people down, done the wrong thing or failed to do the right one. But this was a betrayal he didn’t want to admit to; he didn’t want to admit this was something he was capable of.

  Except he was, and even if no one ever found out he’d carry it with him.

  Hugo fetched up at CAFÉ café, bought a coffee and sat at the counter running along the side window. This counter was shorter and it faced away from the city, towards the towers of broken causeway. Today the way they held their fragments of road aloft seemed oddly defiant, as if they didn’t care that the time of highways was over. They stood because they had been built to stand, and they would continue standing until time itself was over.

  Lack of sleep was definitely making him weird—super-weird, even. He had never made up crazy stories about the old crap left over from days no one remembered. The only thing he’d ever really wondered about, still wondered about, was Zalem.

  This wasn’t the best angle to look at the flying city. He should have got his coffee to go and taken it to the cathedral. It was a bit tricky climbing up to the spire platform with a cup of coffee but he’d done it before. He should have been climbing up there every morning. If he had to be awake at sunrise, he could have been watching the daylight come up on Zalem, the most beautiful place in the world.

  One million credits: that was the price of a one-way ticket out of Iron City to the only place he’d ever wanted to be. One million credits: that was the price of a future where he would no longer be looking up at the underside of a better world. Instead, he would look up and see—well, whatever wonders danced across the skies above Zalem.

  What did the sky look like from a place so much closer to heaven? A million times better than it looked like at ground level, for sure, but the price of that view was one million credits and no matter what, the price was the price. Whether he had to jack a cyborg in an access tunnel above a sewer; whether a member of his crew got her arm broken in the process; whether he worked for a bad man, or betrayed a good one, or couldn’t sleep—the price was the price: one million credits. Vector had said so.

  Vector might not be a good man like Ido, but he was the man in charge. Hugo was certain that Vector couldn’t have got to where he was unless he were a man of his word.

  He was also certain that he wasn’t going to get any sleep until he knew whether Ido’s “accident” had been courtesy of Vector. Not that it would change anything. The price would still be the price, and the price was one million credits.

  Hugo’s phone vibrated, making him jump; he’d dozed off with his chin cupped in his hand. Tanji was texting about a crate of servos that had fallen off the back of a truck. Hugo texted back, telling him to stash them in their own truck at the loading dock.

  Lets not sell 2 Doc cut-rate, OK? Tanji replied.

  Never thot it, Hugo lied. Going bak 2 bed.

  “I didn’t know they had beds in here.”

  Hugo turned to see Tanji by the front door.

  “Is there really a crate of servos?” Hugo asked wearily.

  “Yeah, and I already put them in the truck.” Tanji took the seat beside him. “We can take them to the stadium for the next game. It’s all brand new; the pit crews’ll go nuts.”

  “Fine,” Hugo said. “I don’t think the doc’s buying right now anyway. The clinic’s still closed.”

  “Shoulda known,” Tanji said. “Otherwise you’da already sold them to him.”

  “The doc’s a good guy,” Hugo said.

  “The doc doesn’t pay enough,” Tanji said. “I’m getting a coffee. You want another?”

  “Yeah. Extra-large.”

  “How do you want it?” Tanji asked.

  “Just throw it in my face.”

  “Don’t tempt me.” Tanji chuckled and went off to order. Hugo turned back to look up at Zalem. Unbidden, the sign on the door of Ido’s clinic blossomed in his mind’s eye. One million credits and the price was the price.

  I’m sorry, Doc, Hugo said silently.

  But now the image in his head was of Nana, his brother’s wife. I had to—it was him or us, life or death, Hugo imagined her saying. What’s your excuse?

  He didn’t have an excuse—he had a million of them. Because the price was the price, no matter who paid.

  EPILOGUE

  Time did what time always does: it passed, and, even in Hell, it healed all wounds in one way or another.

  A week after the unfortunate incident in the ruined cathedral, Dyson Ido reopened the clinic for business as usual. His patients were startled by the sight of him hobbling around with an orthopaedic boot, but the boot drew attention from the bruises on his face and around his neck, and masked the stiffness of his movements. Most people accepted his vague explanation of a traffic accident. Only certain patients knew about his night-time life as a Hunter-Warrior, and they didn’t show up during regular office hours.

  Maybe none of his patients in more mundane jobs would ever imagine that bounty hunting was how he kept the clinic open; they did have their own problems, after all. When something good came along, especially something like medical care costing next to nothing, you just went with it and hoped it would last.

  It was more likely that a number of patients knew how he was financing the clinic now that he was out of Motorball—this wasn’t the first time he looked like he’d been worked over. But pretty much everybody in Iron City had something they didn’t talk about.

  * * *

  Ido used the time he was incapacitated to upgrade the Rocket Hammer. That it had been the weapon that had saved his life wasn’t lost on him. He seriously considered adding an extra pocket to the case for a chunk of rock with a length of iron rebar sticking out of it, but there really wasn’t room. Perhaps he should rework the blunt side of the Hammer to pop out a six-inch iron bar? But that would interfere with the propulsion elements.

  In the end he decided to stick with his original design—it worked and it was deadly. He replaced a few worn components and improved the propulsion, tripling the force of the swing. Tests he conducted in the cellar yielded good results. Unless he was fighting a giant of unprecedented proportions, anything he hit with the Rocket Hammer would go down and stay down.

  The quiet period also gave him time to reflect. He’d had a remarkable stretch of good luck, he realised. Since he’d started hunting, this was the first time he had come away with more than a hairline fracture or two. But thanks to Gerhad, his ankle was going to heal with no problems.

  There were so many bones broken in his ankle that Ido had insisted on using the scanner to guide her through the setting process. Gerhad seemed to have a real talent for this sort of thing. She got everything right on the first try while causing him a minimal amount of pain. He wished he found her a lot sooner. Maybe if he’d hired her right after the clinic had opened, things would have turned out differently.

  Or maybe the addict who’d broken in would have killed Gerhad too, and he’d have her death on his conscience. Or maybe it would have been her instead of—

  Ido made himself stop. Second-guessing regrets was hardly constructive. All the more reason to get back to seeing patients as soon as he was well. They needed him, and he needed the structure and discipline as well as the human contact. Without it, he might disappear into himself and never come out again. Exile was bad, but solitary confinement was much, much worse.

  There were all kinds of prisons, of course. He’d made the Total Replacement cyborg body to free his daughter from the prison of incapacity and poor health. He’d wanted to be the hero who had freed her—he could admit that now, that he’d done it as much for himself as for her. But wanting to be a hero to his daughter wasn’t such a bad motive. There were people who only did things for material rewards. Maybe that felt like freedom to them.

  Ido doubted what Chiren had now was freedom, except from him. But perhaps that was all the freedom she needed. Witho
ut him, she had nothing left to lose.

  * * *

  Gerhad couldn’t get over how quickly Ido’s ankle healed. The orthopaedic boot came off a full month earlier than was usual in Iron City. Granted, as an ER nurse she seldom followed up with any of her patients. They would come in, she would do her best to keep them alive, then on to the next case.

  Not everything in the Emergency Room was life or death, of course. She’d seen her share of broken bones and assisted with casts and braces and orthopaedic boots. Eight to twelve weeks was the usual for anything worse than a hairline fracture. The diet of the average Iron City resident wasn’t ideal for building strong, healthy bones, which was why so many of them decided to swap a broken limb for something sturdier.

  Ido’s boot came off after only four weeks. Gerhad had tried to argue for one more week just to be on the safe side, but the scanner showed it wasn’t necessary. The day after, Ido went back to a programme of physical training in the cellar. It was practically supernatural, as though he was a superhero—which was just plain silly. Superheroes didn’t need to call someone to scrape them up off the street or the stone floor of a ruined cathedral, and they didn’t need pain relief.

  Gerhad insisted on making up a medical chart for him. Ido had balked, but she told him she didn’t want to start from scratch every time a cyborg kicked his ass so hard it turned him inside out. It gave her an opportunity to run a lot of tests that told her what she already knew: Ido wasn’t from around here, or anywhere else she knew of. Wherever he was from, the people there enjoyed good nutrition as a matter of course, in an environment lacking most of the pollution and contaminants that were normal in Iron City.

  As curious as she was, Gerhad didn’t pry or investigate any further on her own. Whatever Ido’s story was, his ever-after was in Iron City, and that said it all.

  * * *

  When Ido’s clinic reopened, Hugo’s first thought was to ask Ido what had happened to him. Not immediately, of course—he’d hang around like before and eventually, in the course of some lecture about a chemical or something, Ido would talk about the funny plastic boot he was clumping around in.

  But the clinic was immediately deluged with patients. Some had actually been camping on the sidewalk outside, unable to work because a cyber-limb had malfunctioned so badly it had shut down altogether. There were other cyber-surgeons in Iron City but none that would treat a patient before asking how they were going to pay. And none of them were willing to accept, say, home-made mole poblano or a bag of oranges in lieu of credits—not even if the oranges had been smuggled out of a grove that morning.

  Hugo tried to make it an opportunity to show Ido how useful he was. Now that Ido had a nurse, however, Hugo discovered he was more in the way than at their service. Gerhad was nice enough—she didn’t take a swing at him anyway—but she had rearranged everything in the cabinets and on the shelves. Nothing was where it had been, and, for some reason, Ido didn’t seem to mind, even though he’d always complained if Hugo put something down half an inch to the right of where it had been when he’d picked it up.

  Even stranger, when Hugo asked him if he needed any particular parts, Ido had told him to ask Gerhad. Except in the case of servos—they always needed more servos, in all sizes.

  All of that made it impossible for Hugo to tell whether Ido blamed him for the theft of the chip. Maybe not; he hadn’t banished Hugo from the clinic. But Ido didn’t get talkative the way he had before. Of course, playing catch-up meant he was a lot busier than before. Hugo would comfort himself with thinking that was all it was. But then Ido would look through him and ask Gerhad for something.

  He was just going to have to ask Ido, Hugo realised. But how?

  Hey, Ido, did Vector beat you up because you stole your chip back? Did my name come up?

  Or he could just keep it simple: Ido, will you ever forgive me?

  Yeah, because crews who jacked TR cyborgs always worried about shit like that. He should have kept it all business with Ido, no matter how much he liked him. Once you started caring about people, everything got complicated and screwed up. He didn’t need that. He had his dream, and everything he did was to make it come true. Nothing else mattered, nothing and nobody—

  Abruptly he saw Koyomi in his mind’s eye, coming out of the emergency room in blue paper scrubs with her hot-pink cast. Koyomi’s face when he put his mother’s bracelet on her wrist, looking surprised and touched, as if no one else had ever done anything like this. And most likely, no one had, not for her.

  So he’d done a good thing because he cared. And because he cared, it would have been wrong not to.

  But did that make any difference to his dream?

  Maybe not… But it made a whole lot of difference to Koyomi.

  * * *

  It was time for a change, the Watcher thought, and he had a nice big one waiting in the wings—or, more precisely, the sewer. It wasn’t brand new, but he hadn’t really explored Grewishka’s full potential yet. And, frankly, he was just as glad not to have to break in a completely new person. Originally he’d planned to team Grewishka up with the cyborg with all the fancy extras. The cyborg had only just started trying to talk Grewishka into coming back up to street level. If only he’d got Grewishka to follow him—that would have given the jackers in the access tunnel a night they’d never forget, no matter how hard they tried.

  But no, Grewishka had curled up in the muck like the great big failure he was. He was going to have to figure out some other way to get the great big failure out of the sewer and up to the street, make him remember what it was like to walk upright, reignite the spark of bitterness in him till it was a raging inferno of hate. Now that would be entertainment!

  And while he was at it, the Watcher thought, he should check the Factory-installed chip at the base of Vector’s skull. Vector seemed to believe he was calling the shots. It was time to remind him who was really in charge.

  * * *

  Ido was immersed in the trash pile, literally and figuratively. In the month he’d been away from it, the refuse and rubbish had shifted quite a lot. Much of what he came across now was new, brought to the surface by a combination of different forces—the steady traffic of scavengers, the addition of new trash at various times throughout the day and night, and occasionally thunderstorms with winds strong enough to send some of the northland rubbish all the way to south-town.

  But none of the new things were novel. And all of it was unequivocally trash.

  Still, Ido felt his spirits lift. Getting back to scavenging was a return to normal, like seeing an old friend.

  Speaking of which; Hugo had been following him for almost ten minutes. If the kid didn’t work up the nerve to approach soon, Ido would have to put him out of his misery.

  The kid. Ido chuckled inwardly. How old was Hugo anyway—seventeen, eighteen? He probably didn’t see himself as a kid. Kids grew up fast in Iron City, everyone said so, especially the kids themselves. Only it wasn’t true. Kids ended up in situations that were definitely not for children and they reacted like kids, handled themselves like kids, and when they came out the other side, they were kids with scars.

  Kids didn’t grow up too fast here; they got scarred too soon. Some of them got so many scars, it stunted their growth, and instead of growing up, they only grew old.

  Ido didn’t want to think Hugo would end up that way. Hugo was bright, intelligent, lively. He wanted to believe something in Hugo made him better than that; that something could blossom or light up or wake up just in time for Hugo to save himself.

  Of course, for that to happen, someone had to care about him.

  Ido stopped and turned around. “Are you going to say hello or just stalk me all night?”

  * * *

  The doc seemed friendly enough, but Hugo was still nervous. After the nurse had told him Ido was out here, Hugo had figured it was now or never. But when he spotted the doc, he’d hung back like a kid afraid that Daddy was going to spank him. He should have known
he couldn’t sneak up on the doc. At least Ido hadn’t sounded like he was mad. But he didn’t sound normal either. Hugo hoped it was just because he was still recovering.

  As they walked together, Ido told him what had happened—how the cyborg had beaten him up twice within a few days and how Ido had been forced to kill him in self-defence. He even talked about Gerhad giving him hell when she’d come to retrieve him from the ruined cathedral and then threatened to quit.

  “I’m glad you’re going to be okay,” Hugo said when Ido finished. No mention of Vector; Hugo was so relieved he was practically lightheaded.

  Ido didn’t reply. The silence between them began to stretch. Hugo tried to think of something to say, something that would be normal and natural and not even a little weird, but his mind was fresh out, weird or not.

  “I know it was you, Hugo,” Ido said quietly. “I know you were the one who told Vector about the chip.”

  Hugo’s heart tried to leap out of his chest. He had to swallow before he could speak and his mouth was still dry. “I didn’t—it was—it just happened. I didn’t know. I was in a tight spot and I needed something I could—” He knew he was babbling but he couldn’t stop. “These guys in south-town beat me up and, and I was late delivering and I didn’t know. I didn’t, I just—”

  “It’s okay,” Ido said, talking over him. “I don’t blame you for anything.”

  Hugo felt his jaw drop. “But it was my fault—”

  “It’s your fault Vector’s a scum-bag?” Ido said. “Or that my ex-wife would go along with him out of a desperate need for—” He gave a short, humourless laugh. “All the things she needs so desperately.”

  “I was in a tight spot,” Hugo said, forcing himself to speak slowly. “I was late delivering and Vector was really pissed off. That was my fault—”

  “It’s not your fault some people are so greedy they don’t care who they hurt,” Ido told him firmly. “When you talk about something—just have a conversation—do you worry about what the person you are talking to might do about it later?”