Power.
To do what with?
She remembered Gurk’s face. Grey from years of living in a world he couldn’t live with. Next to him, Magrat Smog telling her she was already dead. A bloody Chesire-Cat smile. A slit throat. Frome’s grin.
Power over the world would never be enough. Not if you couldn’t stomach the world.
The memory stick felt hot against her skin in its Keep-safe. An idea fizzing and flowering, like that Lethene tab in water the night she lost her job.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Icara had a strong feeling that there was something wrong with the Lethene kitchen. But they left too quickly for her to take a closer look. Maybe Gretna had been spooked by all the talk of moles. Whatever the reason, they were retracing their steps through the Tranquelle jungle before you could say Children of Frome. As she pushed dangling Tranquelle fronds out of her path, Icara wracked her brains. What had been so wrong?
Caught up in her thoughts, she lost Gretna in the sea of purple. Suddenly. Panic. Asphyxiating panic. But only for a fraction of a second. Gretna surfaced, up ahead. A life raft.
‘Keep up, sweedpea! You don’t want to get lost down here on your own.’
***
As she lay staring up at the false desert sky on a pile of blankets that failed to make the hard ground any softer, Icara couldn’t get the Tranquelle farm out of her mind. The light. The heat. The chemical tang of un-processed pods. What was it that had made her feel uneasy? That place was the secret nerve centre of the whole Off-Gridder operation. The other Off-Gridders were right. Icara could quite easily have been a mole. But Gretna had trusted her. Taken her in. Shown her everything.
The kitchen had been spotlessly clean. Which in itself in the chaos of Off-Grid living was strange. But there was something else. One corner. Warmer, warmer...colder...warmer... There it was.
She vaguely recalled something in the dark behind Jinx. Hardly visible at all. A small corner of fabric. The orange of Memory Processing Plant overalls.
Pigeon wings!
Gretna hadn’t shown her everything.
She should have seen it immediately. She was getting soft.
Icara padded out over the sleeping bodies. She retraced the steps she had taken with Gretna earlier that day.
What kind of person doesn’t trust their only friend?
She was just testing a theory, that was all. Nothing shameful about testing a theory.
What kind of person welcomes you back after a betrayal like that? What kind of person is just so nice? There aren’t any such people.
And…and if there were, and if she was wrong, then she certainly wouldn’t find any incriminating evidence in the kitchen.
Tranquelle stalks shimmered under the blue light. They looked insubstantial. Ghostly. There was the door. Hanging on its hinges like over-ripe fruit. She shouldn’t. Maybe she wouldn’t. She had memorised the code. No need for Bioware. Gretna was still her friend. She couldn’t.
A jubilant belly-flutter later, she was inside the warm darkness behind the door. She couldn’t stop herself. She was rooting around. Giddy on the need to find out. She pulled open cupboard doors. There was a lot of cracked hardware; about thirty monitors, all stacked together. They were old. Probably City rejects. Or rejects from some disused Memory Processing Plant. There was a gurney. Tranquelle pods, veiny and throbbing in jars. Pink kidneys. Containers of chemicals and powders lined up around the walls. Acres of piping and cable.
Nothing.
She wiped her forehead, and sat in the detritus. How could there be nothing? She felt she was going mad.
And then Icara saw something that made her stomach flip. A stain, from under a door she hadn’t seen before. She tried the door. Mercifully unlocked.
Whatever is in here wants to be found.
There was a lot to find. Barrels upon barrels. A teetering tower of them. Barrels marked with worn stickers. Lt. 458.
Lot 458. Lucian Ffogg’s Lethene supply. Stolen by whistling Off-Gridders. And here they were. And there was something else. The orange fabric she had somehow subconsciously registered. Someone must have moved it. Lucian’s dirty overalls. For a brief disgusted second, she wondered if the lumpy matter they were covering now was Lucian Ffogg. Her shaking hand sought out the truth, jittering. And closed on chunks that, thank Scientifically Proven God, didn’t have the give of human flesh.
The tired onesie was wrapped around a pile of plastic casings, the size of Tranquelle packets, only circular. Icara would have recognised them anywhere. The explosive devices she had found on the servers at Lot 458. Off-Gridder sabotage after all. In a crate with the Glitz logo on the side.
Anger and fear itched in Icara’s chest, threatening to explode. Gretna. She had blown up Hangar 3. Working for Frome. She had kidnapped Lucian. And murdered Gurk and Magrat. She had pushed Icara into the path of the oncoming Superloop. Why hadn’t she just finished her off? She’d had ample opportunity. She must be playing with her. Like cats play with their food.
A whisper over her right shoulder sent high voltage down Icara’s spine.
She relaxed a little, as she whipped round. Jinx. Jinx she could take.
‘So you are a Frome mole,’ he said, ‘should I raise the alarm or do you want to explain what you’re doing on the forbidden level on your own? Rooting through Gretna’s personal effects.’
Gretna must have told him. He was in on it. Icara’s thoughts raced, refusing to settle.
‘Do you know what these do, Jinx?’
She picked up one of the incendiary devices and crushed it under her foot.
He looked at her stupidly, blankly. As blank as a blinking server. As blank as desert sand.
‘That’s what they do to human life. And that’s what they did to Lot 458. When your friend blew up the servers. Don’t play stupid with me. She must have told you. Your duplicitous sister from the Children of Frome.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Inspector.’
Icara launched at him, dangling Lucian’s onesie.
‘Where is he, Jinx? Where’s Lucian Ffogg? Is he dead?’
Jinx wasn’t very good at defending himself. But his wearable tech was excellent at it.
There was a flash like a sick-stick, from his index finger, and before she knew what had happened Icara was on the floor.
‘I don’t know anything about any Lucian Ffogg, except that his mother probably couldn’t spell. But I will tell you one thing. If Gretna killed him she had good reasons. Now put back what doesn’t belong to you. I told her she could leave that here for safe keeping. And I intend to keep it safe.’
Through the distortion from his tech-enhanced voice-box Icara thought she’d heard him pronounce it correctly. Fuh-fog-guh.
How does he know? Did I tell him? Did I say it? I think I said it.
She sized him up. The Lethene cook. Standing over her. He hadn’t given the alarm yet. Why? If he really thought she was a Frome mole? Did he really not know that his friend was working for Helena Frome? Had he not guessed?
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘why would Gretna blow up a Memory Processing Plant?’
He was putting his life on the line every day, she thought. He deserved the truth. Her voice was heavy as she said it.
‘Frome, Jinx. Our childhood friend is working for Helena Frome. She’s a Bureaucrat. She helped Frome blow up Lot 458, to cover up a server full of Bad Memories. Cover her tracks. Keep the Bureau in power.’
Jinx face changed. The disbelief was real at least.
‘How do I know you’re not lying? You come here among us, like a snake in the grass. Spreading lies. Turning us against each other.’
He was starting to hiss. He didn’t want to believe it. Neither did she.
She looked down at the pile of Lethene barrels. She remembered the conversation about Magrat Smog an
d the aeroplane part, the registration number. How could Gretna have just happened upon it? What had she said? The Lethene River. Here it was. The Lethene River. The simplest explanation had to be the true one. It was in all the texts they had studied at the Academy. The truth was simple. Light as paper. Clear as the Lake. Clear as the walls of the Temple. Icara was incensed at her own stupidity. At her own willingness to believe. You couldn’t escape from Frome. They were all her children. And they were loyal. Loyal only to Frome.
Jinx was still deciding whether to believe her. There was nothing she could show him. Except the memory stick.
‘She was on a contract. To get this! All the Bureau’s Bad Memories, including Helena Frome’s. And it fell, Jinx. Right into her lap. And me along with it. Believe it, Jinx.’
His fingers flexed.
‘I won’t blame you if you sound the alarm.’
‘I did it ten minutes ago,’ he said. He looked almost sorry. ‘If it’s true what you said about Gretna, if she really is a mole, then maybe Scientifically Proven God will look after you. Maybe he’ll give you time to run. But if it’s not true, and you’re a perfidious traitor, then you’ll get just what you deserve.’
Did he really believe in Scientifically Proven God, after all he had been through? She supposed he must. She didn’t think too long about it.
Adrenaline like a bullet. He got out of her way.
Just like that, she was running again.
Jinx watched her go, his implanted alarm lights blinking.
As she tore her way through the underground Tranquelle plantation, Icara looked over her shoulder for Off-Gridders. Ten minutes ago! She didn’t have long. The old fear was back. The kind of fear she’d felt in Memorial Park. The jaws of fate were an interminably spinning saw. And she was inching towards them. No matter what she did. Whom she trusted. Whom she avoided. A sick feeling in the pit of her stomach told her she couldn’t run from those gnashing teeth. iRemember teeth. Her grandmother’s molars.
Gretna had told her Frome had a hundred eyes in the tunnels. She should have known Gretna was one of these sets of eyes. Gretna probably couldn’t believe her luck when the prey had suddenly fallen right into her lap at the Glitz.
She was never helping me. She was just keeping me safe. For Frome.
Icara had allowed herself to be wafted on the soft cloud of friendship, stronger than Tranquelle. The cloud of hope.
How could she have been so stupid? There was no hope.
She clutched at the obsidian snow-globe that still hung at her chest. Feeling its presence in her palm now was a relief. She could already see the brown veins where the Bioware was degrading from her body heat. The memories wouldn’t last long hung around her neck. Waiting to be plucked by prying fingers of thieves or simply melted away by oblivion like so much Fromemass snow. She would have to release them. For Gurk. For Lucian. For Magrat Smog who had fixed the bodies of the sick and dying, until she became one of them. For herself. For Icara Swansong. And what could have been a brilliant career.
An endless sadness washed over her. She had hoped she and Gretna could do it together. That she had found her friend again. She should have known that you could never trust the Children of Frome. She had been so ready to learn how to like someone. To trust someone. To be a friend. All that silly, sickly nonsense. The kind of stuff you found in Mardi Frome greeting cards in the Hallmark District. She had started to believe in it. Believe in other people. And they’d fooled her.
She heard the whistles before she saw anyone. They called to each other in the tunnels in the dark, hemming her in like prey. She dared not return to the central cavern. She randomly picked a tunnel mouth she had not gone down before. It looked disused. If she couldn’t escape outright, she could at least hide from them and wait for an opportune moment.
The tunnel hadn’t been used for decades, probably. Long enough for cobwebs to choke out nearly all the air. There were a thousand obstacles to cross. She wondered, as the calls behind her grew louder, if she would ever make it out alive.
The Frome dollars Gretna had given her made noises in her pocket as she ran.
Then she heard something that sounded like rushing water. With the metallic reek of agricultural run-off. The Lethene River had finally caught up with her.
If an ex-Bureau Inspector falls in an Off-Gridder tunnel, if it can be proven that she exists at all, how long will it be until she doesn’t?
***
It was preternaturally hot that night when Icara emerged from a quadrant of Tranquelle crop.
She had barely noticed her clothes and skin being torn to shreds by scratchy Tranquelle stalks. The sky without a geodesic lining. No orange fireflies. No misters. No air-conditioning. Plant life rustling. The glow of a moon that made her head ache. The celestial reflector shone across fields and fields of quadrants of Tranquelle. The cavern cannot have been set as deep in Desert Ring 2 as she’d originally thought; here she was, clearly deep within the poisonous zone of the Belt.
The giddy feeling, induced by run-off fumes and by looking up into endless space, made Icara forget that the City had ever existed. There was no Bureau. There was no betrayal. Just a sugar-coated tunnel. A bowl full of dark blue Lethene with stars in it.
The stalks ended at a chapped tarmac tongue. It must be the Pink Alley. That’s what they called it. She had read about it. The Tranquelle convoy route that ran all the way through State territory, across Belt and Desert. A great big artery, pumping the pink stuff. With smaller, rockier roads criss-crossing it like capillaries.
The tarmac was cracked. It looked ancient. An artefact exposed by falling sea levels. She could feel the oppressive weight of the hurtling Tranquelle convoys, even though the road was empty. They had left their heavy scent behind them, their cheap, poisonous fuel caking the asphalt. Pheromone-heavy. A vehicular mating call.
She lay down on the road, breathing heavily. It was still warm. Either from passing trucks, or from the sun.
She heard the round-vowelled shriek of some kind of Tranquelle Belt bird. And then nothing. Where were all the farmers? Their farms weren’t anywhere reachable by foot.
Her chest shuddered as her heart rate returned to normal.
Then came the euphoria of too much running. But the sweat dried on Icara’s washed out T-shirt, and heat turned to shivering.
Who would have thought that a sultry, tropical evening could leave a body feeling this cold and lonely?
This was worse than the moments after the Superloop. Worse than when the City no longer felt like her friend. Worse than the memory of having betrayed Gretna and having founded her Bureau career on nothing.
A vast valley of loneliness, as big as the world that contained iRemember, the City, the Deserts, the Belt and all the Children of Frome opened up around Icara. The coin spinning in mid-air stopped. It only had one side. It had no sides at all. She was death. She lay down in the dust and cried. There was nothing else to do. She had survived. The Superloop. The Lethene patch. Lot 458. And so what? She would die here. In the Belt. Breathing the poisonous air. And Frome would go on living. Weaving her miserable iRemember tapestry, like a shroud to wrap them all in. iRemember. A place so stained with blood and misery that it could never be washed clean.
Icara was so sorry for all of it. All of them.
But mostly for herself. The City she had loved and the Bureau she had worked so hard for had been whipped out from under her and replaced by something more rotten than she wanted to believe was possible. And Gretna, her last hope, had been whipped away as well. Replaced by Ronnie Spoon.
I can’t run any more. I’m going to die out here. And no one is going to know. Or care.
The long-vowelled shriek again. Dust and sand clung in sticky rivulets to her cheeks.
I’m going to die here, and that bird, whatever it is, is going to feast on my poor, lonely insides.
There
was nothing left to cry. She closed her eyes and wished it bon appetit. What was the point of fighting any longer?
You go Off-Grid, Icara Swansong, this is what you get.
Sooner or later, we all end up disappointed. Tranquelle stems made obscene shapes as they bent. Melting in and out of shadows. She lay there, staring up at a moon that reminded her of street lights. And then her eyes refocused. Up. Up. She saw it. A glitter in the sky. More colours than she had ever seen. Belters called this the Shining. She didn’t know, but it was created by a combination of poisonous gasses. The shimmer of toxic air.
She watched it for what felt like hours.
She dried her eyes. The tarmac was less cold underneath her. And then she felt it. A murmur in the fat in her hips, and thighs. A shiver that rumbled slowly along her spinal column. She stumbled up, craning forward to see. The road dipped. There was total darkness everywhere. And on either side of the black ribbon of road nothing but the quivering stalks of Tranquelle. She walked a little way by the side of the road. Deciding that perhaps, in spite of everything, it would be better to exist for a few more years as something more sentient than carrion. The Shining had worked its magic.
Another shriek. Accompanied by juddering. A shriek the Inspector now took for what it was. A mechanical whistle, not some Belter bird. More rumbling. She could make out a fast-moving, dark mass. A Tranquelle truck! As if it had picked up the scent of its kind and was hurtling towards a spawning ground.
Icara crossed herself.
She had lost faith in Scientifically Proven God. Which is not easy to do. But he was Scientifically Proven. It said so on every Tranquelle packet. On all those billboards covered in floral designs and Government logos. She should have known he would answer her prayers.
How to get its attention? It was moving very fast.
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