by Liam Clay
“I know I shouldn’t be here.”
Even as I say this, I’m wondering what someone observing us would see. Can our past be mapped in body language and half glances? The shared trials, the young lust, the mirrored hopes and hardships followed by disillusionment, denial and finally, dissolution. Or would they just see two tired strangers in a hallway?
“No, you shouldn’t.”
Her voice, always husky, has a slight rasp to it now. A side effect of years spent working with chemicals, maybe, or just standard Underworld lung issues. “You should get yourself to a bolthole.” She elaborates. “Things are too unsettled down here right now.”
“Mother, who’s that at the door?”
I almost cut and run. I swear, my feet actually twitch. My face must register some degree of the panic I’m feeling, because Kalana smiles, revealing stunningly white teeth.
“It’s an old friend, honey.” She calls over her shoulder. “Why don’t you come and meet him?”
Now I’m just confused. “Are - are you sure this is okay?”
“Positive. I expected you to show up years ago, to be honest.”
I had thought to encounter anger, scorn, disgust. This casual acceptance is hard to fathom. It feels like the world is reordering itself around me, forming new and unfamiliar shapes. And then she’s there, or one eye of her is anyway, peeking around her mother’s dress. It’s the color of lavender, with a floral design done in aquamarine. The dress, that is.
“He’s big.” Sophie says in a lilting falsetto. “What’s his name?”
“You can call him Anex, dear. Why don’t you shake his hand?”
And so I meet my daughter for the first time. She is a miniature version of her mother, only with a smile made of pure hope, untarnished by years of living with, well, me.
“How are you, Sophie?” I ask in my steadiest tones. (I remember hearing somewhere that kids are good at telling when you’re messed up.)
“I’m very well, sir. And how are things with you?” This kills me a little, and I get sort of choked up. Kalana comes to my rescue.
“Why don’t you run along to your room?” She says, bending over to look her daughter in the eyes. “Momma’s got business to attend to.”
Sophie pouts, brow furrowing. “It’s mother, not momma. I’ll expect you to do better in future.” She turns to me. “It was a pleasure meeting you, sir. Welcome to our home.” And then she skips away, off to do whatever it is kids get up to on their own time. Kalana flashes me a rueful grin.
“Thought I was dodging a bullet when she took to the whole manners thing.”
I smile carefully back. “Could be worse, I suppose. Has she started quoting Shakespeare?”
“Not yet.” Her smile fades. “Have you visited Five since you got back? He says he hardly sees you anymore.”
“I just came from Church. He’s the one who told me where to find you.”
“Good. He would never admit it, but I can tell he misses you. Why are you here, though? Somehow I don’t think this is a house call.”
“No, it’s not. Can I come in?”
She steps aside and I enter, trying to act like it’s no big deal. The apartment is new to me, of course. Two bedrooms with the doors closed. A small kitchen painted rust red, leading onto a living room with windows overlooking the hazy ocean. But the décor is classic Kalana. Most of the free space is taken up by scrubbed steel tables - some to hold chemistry equipment, the rest for datapads. I was always fascinated by her work, but I resist the urge to start poking around. Instead I sit in a threadbare armchair, trying my best to forget how many times we’ve had sex on it. Kalana takes a seat on the couch opposite.
“So, what can I do for you?”
Her attitude is really messing with my head. Anger and disdain, although negative, are emotional reactions at least. But this comfort level speaks of forgiveness, and forgiveness is the last step to moving on. Ergo, I’m nobody to Kalana now. Best stick to the program, then.
“I need your help.”
“With what?” She’s not being rude; Underworlders simply don’t agree to do favors on spec anymore.
“Two things. First, I need you to extract a data signature off my retcom.”
“Why can’t you do it yourself?”
“Because it’s complicated. Someone tried to hack my system last night, but I was rolling at the time, so they got a belt of Anex for their trouble. Which means the signature should be buried somewhere in the drug’s sub-programming.”
“I see. And the second?”
“I want you to get me an interview with the Constant, preferably before this meeting Five told me about.”
Kalana’s expression closes down. “After what happened last time? You don’t want to do that.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” I smile as I say this, like I’m at the point where I can joke about the whole thing, but I’m faking and it shows. “I’ve got information that could be important, though.”
“Explain.”
When I first met Kalana she shone bright as the sun, so full of life that it could be overwhelming at times. Now she’s all scientist: spare with her words, more concerned with raw data than sentiment.
“Pull the info off my retcom first. If we’re lucky, it will tell you more than I could.”
We’re both hunched over a tablet ten minutes later, staring at the Key’s ID file.
“The Thresh?” I say doubtfully. “She didn’t look much like a farmer to me... although that would explain the strength.”
(For the uninformed, the Thresh is a walled compound crouched around the only remaining fertile land in the region. They let no one in, barely anyone out, and look down the ends of their well-fed noses at us. They also lack the Korezon family’s aversion to non-organic augmentation.)
Kalana shakes her head. “Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Even assuming she was able to get a travel visa, no one from the Thresh would voluntarily relocate here. They’ve seen what lies behind the media veil.”
“So, a fake file then. How hard is that to do?”
“Very. The data integrity branch is one of the few government departments Korezon actually cares about. Hold on a second, though. I’ll see if I can dig deeper.”
While she does something inscrutable on her tablet, I turn the Key’s name over in my head. Arella Calendo. I’m sure the moniker is made up, but it has a nice ring to it just the same. I wonder if she thought of it herself.
Time passes, and I keep looking at Kalana expectantly. I used to love being there when she made a breakthrough, the childlike excitement it brought out in her. But it is not forthcoming on this occasion. “Are you sure this woman wasn’t some drug fueled hallucination?” She asks at length.
“The cops thought she was real enough. They said she broke through my firewall in like, two seconds or something.”
“But that’s just not possible. Whenever retcoms link up - even in a hijack scenario like this one - the two sides exchange digital signatures. A good tech can disguise the info contained in that data packet, but the real stuff should still be hiding somewhere under the hood. But this woman’s signature is like a shell. There’s nothing beneath the false layer.”
I bite back the urge to swear - Sophie might hear me. “So you’re saying she’s a ghost.”
“I don’t know what she is. Where did you meet her?”
“A christening on 220.”
I had expected Kalana to be impressed by this number, but her reaction indicates something else. Fear, I would say if I didn’t know better.
“That high?” She asks quietly.
“It’s the Anex.” I say, anxious to include her in my success. “I’m not sure if you know this, but I have sold every drug you’ve made since I started up the ladder. And I’m telling you, this stuff is on a whole new level. I’m selling for more, and to better connected people, every day.”
Again, her response is not what I’d expected.
“So you like it then, living up ther
e?”
“I don’t know if like is the right word. It’s different, and that lets me be different too. But it’s been changing as well, this past year especially.”
“In what way?”
“I’m not sure, exactly. It just seems as though every time I look, the rationing sanctions have crept a few floors higher, and the riots too. Sometimes it feels like I’m racing chaos up a burning ladder, and the next deal, the next Mark, are the only things keeping me from being pulled back under.”
She frowns. “That’s a little melodramatic, wouldn’t you say? The Underworld has been dealing with food shortages for decades, and we’re still here.”
“Yes, but you’re used to it.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Don’t you mean we’re used to it?”
I feel my cheeks redden. “Sorry, slip of the tongue.”
“If you say so. And you can use the sanctions to justify your need to climb all you want, but we both know it’s more than that. You’ve been obsessed with reaching the 300s since the day we arrived here.”
“And so what if I have? You used to be all for me climbing too, as I recall. It was only after I got sent up that you backpedaled.”
Kalana shakes her head. “I changed my mind about you climbing years before that. It actually happened around the time we...”
“First hooked up.” I supply. “That night at Church?”
She nods. “That’s right, almost two years to the day after we arrived in Opacity. And I’m still against it now.” With a visible effort she forces her muscles to relax, sinking deeper into the couch. “After the incident, I should have made the Constant assign you to a bolthole in the Slump, or had you act as trade liaison in another district, even. Anything to keep you from climbing the ladder.”
“Why does it worry you so much?”
Her laughter has a raw edge to it. “Because for most people, reaching the 300s is a pipedream, a bit of harmless escapism. With you, though... I’m starting to think it could actually happen.”
“And you’re afraid I would get myself into trouble up there?”
“I know for a fact you would.” She replies with surprising intensity. “You have always had an irrational hatred of Korezon. I was hoping you would get over it, but...”
There is truth in what she’s saying, I can’t deny that. But how do I explain an urge I can’t quantify to myself?
“I hear you Kalana, but can we talk about this later?” I point to the tablet in her hands. “This Calendo woman, or whatever her real name is, tried to have Letiva killed. It’s all over the networks.”
It takes her a few seconds to react. “You mean the Letiva?”
“Yeah, and it almost worked too. A bunch of her security detail got blown out of the sky saving her.”
I’m about to go on, but she holds up a hand to stop me.
“You’re right, the Constant needs to hear this.” She blinks up her chronometer (Kalana is one of the few people down here who owns a retcom) and frowns. “There is still time before the meeting, but we will have to leave right now.”
“What about Sophie?”
“I was about to drop her off for a play date at a neighbor’s place anyway. They have twins around her age.”
This is the most domestic phrase I have ever heard Kalana utter, and it plunges a spike of jealousy into my chest. I stand abruptly.
“Then what are we waiting for?”
CHAPTER 8
We are poling along a canal in Kalana’s personal skiff. Like everything else she owns, it is elegantly designed and flawlessly functional. I wish I could say the same of my thought processes. The uppers are fading fast, drowned out by my body’s increasingly urgent warning signals.
“So what is this meeting about?” I ask in an effort to stay focused.
“Well, the call went out right after the power failure, so it may have something to do with that. But I don’t really know.”
“And if you had to make an educated guess?”
“Now that I’ve heard your story? I would say someone just declared war on the industry, and the Constant thinks it might affect the Underworld.”
Sickly fingers twist themselves through my gut.
“What is it?” She asks.
“Probably nothing. But the cop I talked to said that if she doesn’t find your ghost soon, her bosses might start tossing blame our way. I thought she was just trying to leverage me, but...”
“And was she good looking, this cop?”
I gape at her. “Uh -”
“Because you never trust women you’re attracted to. So if you thought she was hot, then she was probably telling the truth.”
“I’m not sure I accept your logic.” I reply stiffly. “But yeah, she was doing alright.”
A loud splash saves me from having to expand on this statement. Something has just fallen into the water nearby, and it was either big or fell from very high up. Kalana poles toward the sound. But by the time we arrive, there’s nothing to see but a wash of bubbles rising slowly to the surface. She shrugs and carries on.
A few minutes later, we turn onto my favorite of the three arteries that emanate from the Kaleidoscope. Sure, the bars on the Perfumed Canal have their seedy charms, and there isn’t an Underworlder alive who hasn’t visited the floating soup kitchens on the NGO Strip. But the Avenue Bazaar will always be closest to my heart. The markets are where I met Five, where I first learned the bootlegger trade, and most importantly, its residents were the first people to accept me as one of their own.
Although immensely wide, the waterway is divided into narrow lanes by rows of barges tied end to end. Most haven’t moved in years, and would probably sink if their owners tried, so loaded are they with goods ranging from clothes, cutlery and sex toys to prototype tech and blackvat organs. The shopkeepers here like to say that if you can’t find it in the Bazaar, it isn’t worth owning. (Customers often reply that not much in the Bazaar is worth owning either, but you get the idea.)
Nor is the market content to operate solely at water level. In a decades-old attempt to spruce the place up, a forgotten artist strung a meshwork of glowing cables over the canal’s entire length. But in true Underworld fashion, the installation was repurposed almost immediately, and peddlers now swarm over the flickering relics, displaying their wares on colored lengths of string.
“A steal at 800 credits!” One woman shouts, swinging a bag of hydroponic radishes in front of our skiff. Looking up, I notice a young girl perched atop the roof of a nearby junker. She extends a longbladed contraption and severs the bag’s supporting string, sending it tumbling into the drink. The tiny thief laughs, salutes us, and dives after her sinking prize. Never a dull moment around these parts.
It takes an eternity to navigate the Bazaar. But at last we leave the market behind, entering a stretch of water populated by smog-blackened seagulls, the occasional dead rat and not much else. The canal ends at a hulking concrete wall bearing the Kaleidoscope’s triangle motif. Two reinforced iron gates flank the logo. One is an entrance, the other an exit, with the formula repeated at the mouth of the NGO Strip and again at the Perfumed Canal.
I will never forget my first passage through the right-hand entry gate. Kalana and I had broken into a derelict drug lab three months before. She started reading the old chemistry tablets we found inside, and ten weeks later, she produced her first drug from scraps the previous owners had left behind. It was nothing fancy, just a mediocre batch of mdma, but worth far more than I’d been making running bootleg with Five. It meant money to buy food, proper oxygen masks, shelter. It meant a future.
I moved maybe a quarter of the batch before the Constant’s men picked me up. I was defiant, enroute to what turned out to be a job interview, but the sight of these gates took the wind out of those sails. The whole setup was just so damned huge. I could go in there and never come out, and no one would ever know. Kalana would think I had abandoned her.
But she is with me now, and a good thing too, because
the Kaleidoscope looks like its visiting hours are over. I’m talking machine gun nests, floating perimeter mines, the whole nine yards. As a result of my last visit here, none of the guards arrayed along the wall would hesitate to shoot me first and ask questions of the corpse later. But Kalana, they trust.
One of the guards throws a rope down to her. She ties the end to a ringed post at the skiff’s waist, and backs water until it pulls tight. A second man hooks an L-shaped bar over the rope and ziplines across the oily waves, alighting easily in the skiff’s bow. I pretend to be unimpressed by this feat as he turns to face us.
“You chose a bad time to come back, Kal.” He says with a faint accent. “We’re locked up tight as a virgin, no ins or outs.” Although only of average height, he is heavily muscled with a spray of what looks like shrapnel scarring across both cheeks. Three lines of flowing script have been tattooed to his forehead as well. I don’t know what cultural heritage he’s identifying with, but the look is working for him. Kalana isn’t backing down, though.
“I need to get inside, Tariq. It’s an emergency.”
“We’ve got plenty of those to go around without adding yours. Can’t it wait for another day?”
“No.”
The man sighs; clearly he’s tried arguing with Kalana before. “Alright, I’ll take you through. But once you’re inside, there will be no leaving without permission.”
Kalana and I trade a glance, reach an unspoken agreement, and nod in unison. Tariq taps a code into a keypad he carries on a chain around his neck. There is a groaning sound and the gate eases open, revealing an enclosed pool large enough to accommodate a luxury yacht. His men use the zipline to pull us inside, and the gate swings shut.
None of the guards seem to recognize me. Which is good, because they make the Paradigm bouncers look like precious little flowers. It’s a difference in the eyes, the way they stand. The Topsiders want to convince you they’re badass so you will be too scared to try anything, whereas these guys look ready to shatter my sternum regardless of what I think of them. (Which, it goes without saying, makes them way more badass.)