City of Miracles

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “We’ll be going in during rush hour,” says Sigrud. “We want to be as difficult to spot as possible. So we have a bit to wait. Be on the lookout for a Saypuri woman of about forty, with yellow eyes.”

  “Is she…Divine?” asks Taty.

  “No. I get the impression that she is our enemy’s lieutenant. And I am almost positive she is stationed here in Ahanashtan. If anyone is here, it will be her.”

  Two hours later they pull into the train station garage and step out of the car. Sigrud is dressed in his usual peacoat and knit cap: the civilized world has grown accustomed to the sight of Dreylings in sea laborers’ wear, though he keeps black gloves on, to hide his scar. Ivanya, however, is dressed like a Continental businesswoman, with a stern black skirt and a high gray jacket, and a sharp-brimmed hat perfectly perched atop her pinned-back hair. It’s a terrific change of pace from her usual attire, which is about as fancy as a bandsaw. Taty is dressed in similarly formal wear, though she’s been given a clipboard and a large leather bag—clearly the harried young assistant to this reputable businesswoman.

  “The station has two floors,” says Ivanya as she arranges herself, “and the concourse is usually very well trafficked, with big crowds. Or, at least it used to be. I haven’t been here in years.”

  Sigrud eyes the doors. “You both walk ahead of me. I’ll stay behind surveying the area. If something goes wrong—anything—wipe your nose and drop a handkerchief. All right?”

  “All right,” say Taty and Ivanya at the same time.

  Together they walk toward the station. Sigrud drops back, hauling the weapon-filled steamer trunk, and watches as the two women enter the door. He waits ninety seconds, then follows, entering the station.

  Heat and smoke and noise. The Ahanashtani train station is a long, thin, busy structure, with two floors: restaurants and shops up top, and train platforms below. The tunnels are dim with smoke, and the concourse at first appears to be just a sea of hats, dark hats and white hats and gray hats, surging back and forth like schools of fish. He spies Taty and Ivanya in the crowd and lumbers ahead to keep up with them.

  As they move, Sigrud keeps his eyes open. He sees many people, all nondescript, and a few Ahanashtani police officers—these he is especially mindful of—yet he sees no one looking, no one watching, no one quietly surveying the concourse. He wonders if his skills have faded, but he doesn’t think so: he cannot help but feel that they are alone, safe, and unwatched.

  That’s not right, thinks Sigrud. Could it be this easy?

  They continue on. A conductor whistles loudly, and a crowd of passengers streams toward one open train door and slowly congeals into a messy line. The express platform is somewhere up ahead, but he can’t see it yet. It feels like the journey through the station is taking an eternity. He keeps watching for hostile movement, yet none comes.

  Perhaps we’re not important, thinks Sigrud. Perhaps we don’t matter. Perhaps Nokov has better things to attend t—

  Taty and Ivanya have stopped on the concourse. Sigrud watches as Taty bows her head, wipes her nose, and a small, flittering handkerchief falls to the floor.

  Something’s wrong.

  Sigrud rolls the giant trunk over to a small wooden bench beside them, where he sits and pretends to examine his shoelaces. “What’s wrong?” he says quietly.

  Taty’s eyes are terrified, while Ivanya’s are simply confused. Then Taty, still smiling, says in a quavering voice, “If we get on that train right now, we are all going to die.”

  Sigrud pauses, bewildered. He glances at Ivanya, who gives the tiniest of shrugs. “What?” he says.

  Taty gives a nervous laugh and says, “If we get on the express train to Bulikov, we will die. All of us.”

  “What do you mean? I haven’t seen a tail yet.”

  “Because we’ve already been spotted,” says Taty.

  “You think we a—”

  “Look across the concourse, northwest. Then look up. Up above the shops on the second floor. As if there’s a third floor, a hidden floor. Look. Look for the mirror.”

  Sigrud casts a quick glance northwest…

  And sees it. It’s a small mirror, smaller than your average window, mounted in the brick wall about eight feet above the shops.

  “A two-way mirror?” says Ivanya.

  “It must be,” says Sigrud. “A security office, perhaps.”

  “And that’s where she is,” says Taty. “The woman with the yellow eyes.”

  “Are…Are you sure, dear?” says Ivanya. “How can you know this?”

  “I just know,” says Taty. Panic leaks into her voice. “I just know!”

  “How will she kill us?” says Sigrud.

  “She’ll get on the train car behind us,” says Taty. “Then she’ll wait two days to do it because there’s a snowstorm. On the third day she’ll use some kind of device….Something that throws explosives. She’ll shoot at our car and stick explosives to us, then detach us from the rest of the train and blow it off the tracks. Us and everyone caught with us.” Her voice shivers. “It takes you longer to die, Sigrud. The car smashes into the mountain slope and most of us die on impact. But you die with the snow around you turning bright red from your blood…Cherry red.” She shuts her eyes. “And your last thoughts are of the sea.”

  “How do you know this?” asks Ivanya. She’s starting to sound terrified.

  “I don’t know,” says Taty. “It was like I could smell it in the air….And then I just knew.”

  The three of them fidget in silence for a moment, trying halfheartedly to maintain their various charades.

  “What do we do?” asks Ivanya. “Do you believe her?”

  “It…It seems impossible,” says Sigrud.

  “I know,” says Taty. She sounds like she’s on the verge of tears. “But it’s true. I swear it’s true. I don’t know how, but it is.”

  “Do you believe her, though?” asks Ivanya.

  Sigrud remembers Taty sitting on the porch, knees clutched to her chest. I dreamed you’d come back far sooner than we expected. Than you expected, even. It would be as if you hadn’t even left….

  And she’d been right. He hadn’t thought of it until now, but somehow, impossibly, Taty had known what would happen.

  “I…I believe she believes it,” says Sigrud. “And I think that something is wrong. I think this is a feint, a trap. There is no one looking for us.” He glances up at the mirror in the wall. “Because we’ve already been found.”

  “So now what?” says Ivanya. “We don’t exactly have a backup plan for getting to Bulikov in five days.”

  “I…think we do.” He sighs deeply and looks at Taty. “I suppose all those finance papers you read wouldn’t have told us if the aero-tram has any tighter security, would it?”

  “The aero-tram?” says Ivanya, aghast. “You really want to try that?”

  “It’s almost impossible for someone to just swoop in and nab a ticket for that!” says Taty.

  “I suspected so,” says Sigrud. “A very good thing, then, that we happen to have a millionaire in our midst.”

  Kavitha Mishra narrows her eyes as she watches from behind the mirror. Something’s definitely wrong. Restroyka, the Komayd girl, and the dauvkind have all stopped on the concourse and are conferring with one another. Which shouldn’t be happening.

  She looks back at her four officers. They’re all waiting in the back hallway of the security office, ready for her orders. One raises an eyebrow, as if wondering if they need to move.

  “What in the hells,” she mutters, turning back to the concourse. “What in the hells…”

  “Problem, ma’am?” says the train station security chief behind her. He’s a Continental, and is far too interested for his own good.

  “Yes,” she snaps. “But not one of your concern!”

  “Oh, ah…Sorry.” He turns away, and she’s glad of it: she’s been allowed to commandeer the office here solely through her Ministry credentials, but she doesn’t need any
more attention than this. She definitely doesn’t want the train station security officers trying to stage an arrest: knowing the dauvkind, that would get messy fast, and messiness attracts eyes. If someone finds out that Ministry officers or even station security officers were trying to arrest Ivanya Restroyka and the daughter of Komayd, it’d be sure to cause a stir.

  It was pure luck that they caught it. Mishra had told all of her sources to watch every communication going into or out of the Ahanashtani train station—and one just happened to come through late last night, purchasing an entire train car. Mishra had reached out to a few of her Ministry contacts, who assumed she was working a case, and traced it back to the tiny, sheep shit–spattered town of Dhorenave. Which had one very famous yet reclusive resident.

  Mishra frowns as she watches Restroyka listen to the dauvkind. Her contacts had long suspected that Restroyka was somehow connected to Komayd’s “charity” networks, but they’d never been able to prove anything. Because Komayd had been good. Surprisingly good.

  But all this is quite bad for Mishra. She doesn’t like the dauvkind having a damned real-estate tycoon on his side. It’s a lot easier to hunt desperate people, and that much wealth can keep desperation at bay for a long, long time.

  She watches the three of them talk. They’re spooked.

  Without thinking about it, Kavitha Mishra pats her right pocket. The small silver box is still there, and inside that, she knows, is a little, tiny black pearl…

  Only use it if it’s an emergency, he told her. Only if everything is at risk.

  And things aren’t at risk yet, but she’s worried.

  Suddenly there’s movement: Restroyka and the Komayd girl turn and go north. Fast. The dauvkind, however, stays behind, standing next to the big steamer trunk. He turns and looks up, staring directly at the mirror with a grim, implacable look on his face.

  Mishra looks at the two departing women, then back at the dauvkind. He’s still looking up, looking right at her.

  Does he know I’m here? Does he…Does he see me?

  She hesitates. Restroyka and the Komayd girl aren’t going for the train platforms, she sees, but going north, far north, to the…

  “Shit,” says Mishra. “They’re going toward the fucking aero-tram!”

  “What’s that, ma’am?” asks Nashal, one of her officers.

  “Let me think,” she snaps.

  This wasn’t at all what she expected—they bought out a damn train car, not an aero-tram ticket! The aero-tram is, unfortunately, pretty damned exclusive. She could maybe commandeer one of the cars, but doing so would raise a lot of questions back in Ghaladesh, and piss off a couple dozen very wealthy Continentals.

  It’d ruin me to do that, thinks Mishra. I’d be blown. Ghaladesh would know right away something was amiss.

  She debates going downstairs and stopping Restroyka and Komayd. Yet the dauvkind is still staring up at her with that grim expression on his face.

  His meaning is painfully clear to her: Come downstairs, and things will get violent.

  Which is not what Mishra needs right now.

  “How the fuck did he know,” she whispers.

  Then, finally, the dauvkind turns and strides away—but he’s stayed long enough to give Restroyka and Komayd a good lead.

  “Hurry!” Mishra says to her team. “Downstairs, to the aero-tram platform! Now!”

  “The aero-tram platform?” asks Nashal, bewildered.

  “They’ve changed something up! They know they’ve been made! Hurry!”

  “How in the hells are we going to get on that?” he asks.

  “I’m going to have to pull rank,” says Mishra through gritted teeth.

  The team turns and starts off downstairs. “That’s a lot of rank to pull,” Nashal says.

  “We don’t have a choice!” says Mishra.

  As she follows them out the door, she grabs the big, heavy briefcase in the corner. Inside this is a relatively new Ministry creation, a device that hurls an adhesive mine several hundred yards. Of course, the Ministry can’t publicly avow that it has created and is deploying such a device in the field—it is, obviously, a weapon system used specifically for sabotage, and the public feels very negatively about such things—but it should do well in this situation, with all these trams and trains and whatnot, all very big with such delicate connection points.

  Make it look like an accident, he told Mishra. The girl will survive. I know she will, she just will. And when she does, capture her. And bring her to me.

  Mishra, grunting with the weight of the briefcase, runs downstairs.

  “I will have you know,” says Ivanya indignantly as she rejoins them in line for the aero-tram, “that I have never bribed anyone in my life.” She hands them their tickets.

  “There is a first time for everything,” says Sigrud.

  “How much did you have to give them?” asks Taty, looking at hers.

  Ivanya says a number.

  “Wow,” says Taty.

  “Wow,” says Sigrud, who has never thought of money in such sums before.

  “Yes, so it had better be a damn pleasant ride!” says Ivanya. “It was some commercial banker and his family who thought the tram would make a fun jaunt across the Tarsils. The rich, it turns out, are very, very expensive to pay off. Apparently we’ll be in the Jade Cabin—so we’ll be alone for the journey.”

  “Hopefully very alone,” says Sigrud, looking backward through the crowd. The golden-eyed woman is nowhere to be seen. Hopefully their last-minute gambit paid off.

  The line’s moving again. The three of them shuffle forward, Sigrud hauling the big trunk up the ramp to the aero-tram platform. The cold morning air slaps his cheeks, and he finally gets to see the vessel they’ll be spending the next three days on.

  The aero-tram car is like a giant, long, bronzed egg, with a fat glass bubble or dome in the top, some kind of viewing room for passengers or perhaps the crew to see forward and backward. Above this dome is a large frame, sprouting up to cling to a thick cable running above the car. Within the frame, Sigrud sees, are a dozen or so wheels, which currently aren’t rotating. A second frame is below the tram car, clinging to a bottom cable. The whole thing is about seventy-five feet long and twelve feet wide at its thickest point, about the size of a small ship.

  But how will it perform in the air? Sigrud knows he has an unusually specific experience in this: he has piloted a watercraft through the air before, in Bulikov—but that one was buoyed by miracles. What is in front of him is very loud, very heavy, yet also very fragile—and not at all miraculous.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” says Taty, her voice hushed with awe. “It’s amazing….”

  “It’s something, all right,” says Ivanya. She stares at the tram car as if it were a large, threatening dog.

  Sigrud watches as two mechanics open up a large hatch at the back of the tram car using a wrench, which they then store away in a bag of tools. One of the mechanics climbs into the hatch and hooks a hose up to a spigot. They then begin to pump something out of the tram car—human waste, he suspects. After all, the passengers probably can’t just void their bladders out the windows.

  The conductor smiles at them and says, “Tickets, please.”

  The three of them hand over their astronomically expensive tickets. The conductor takes them, then does a little bow. “Much appreciated! Please take your seats quickly, if you would. We depart in five minutes. No exceptions, I’m afraid—there’s a big storm coming.”

  “Will that be an issue for the tram?” asks Ivanya.

  “Oh, no, ma’am. The tram’s as steady as a mountain. But it can make getting up on the line a bit longer.”

  The three of them thank the conductor, then turn and board the aero-tram car. No one on the platform notices as Sigrud grabs the bag of tools from beside the mechanics as he boards.

  The door and interior are, as Sigrud expected, incredibly tiny. The trunk barely fits: people grouse and grumble at him as he hauls it
down the tiny aisles, glaring as he mutters “excuse me” and “pardon me.” Finally the three of them stagger through to the private quarters at the very back—the Jade Cabin that Ivanya purchased.

  The Jade Cabin is small but relatively opulent, considering the lack of space aboard the tram car. Four berths, wooden walls, bronzed fixtures, electrical lighting, and—perhaps most important—a private toilet, which he examines carefully, thinking.

  “Is that it?” asks Taty. “Are we safe?”

  Sigrud shuts the door, sets down the stolen bag of tools, and walks over to a porthole on the aft wall of the quarters. Through it he can see the tram platform and the tremendous rotating gears of the massive machine. At first there’s nothing. But then…

  The Saypuri woman’s face surfaces in the crowd.

  “Shit,” he says.

  “What? What is it?” asks Ivanya.

  The Saypuri woman doesn’t move. She just looks at the tram car with a furious expression on her face. Sigrud knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that, at the very least, he’s thoroughly ruined her morning.

  “Is that…Is that her?” asks Ivanya.

  “Yes,” says Sigrud.

  “And she knows we’re on board?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why isn’t she…Why isn’t she doing anything?”

  “She’s waiting for us to depart,” says Sigrud grimly. “So that way she knows we’re trapped on here.”

  Someone blows a whistle. There’s a knock at the door, and one of the service crew sticks his head in. “All comfy?” asks the man. “We’re about to start up the line.”

  “Very comfy,” says Sigrud.

  The crewmember looks at Taty and Ivanya, who are pale with horror. “Ah—are you sure?”

  “Yes,” says Sigrud angrily.

  “Oh. Uh. All right. Well, you’ll want to take your seat, ladies and gentlemen. It could be a bit bumpy at the start.”

  “Thank you,” says Sigrud.

  The man leaves, but none of them sit. They keep looking out the window, watching the Saypuri woman. Then there’s a whistle, then a clacking, and the car slowly begins moving forward.