The Forgotten City

by Nina D'Aleo

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’ll wait outside.” She hurried to the door and left.

  “You’re unbelievable!” Roth turned on Croy.

  “And you’re a liar!” she yelled back, losing all control. “Get your stuff and get out – once and for all!”

  “I’ll go because I can’t stand to be anywhere near you, but just so we’re clear – this is still my house. I’m only allowing you to stay here because Angie feels sorry for you.”

  His words, each of them, cut inside her.

  “I paid for half of this place.” Croy tried to keep her voice steady.

  “Please.” Roth snorted. “Your wage barely covered the front gate. I had to pay for everything!”

  “Because you’re a Conference assistant and you make so much more than me – yes, I remember. I could never forget, you reminded me enough times.”

  “Because I fought to get where I am and I wanted you to do the same – to have some self-respect, some drive or ambition, other than your ridiculous fantasy of joining the Fleet. But no, instead all you wanted was to stay in your same bog role with that idiot DeCavisi.”

  “Don’t talk about him. Don’t even say his name!” Croy warned.

  “Sorry, did I step over the line and mention the love of your life, did I?” Roth fumed.

  “So I’m in love with John L and I’m in love with Darius and that’s why you had to cheat with her?” Croy shook her head.

  “I fell in love with Angie because you pushed me away, and now I’m going to marry her and have a real relationship. Don’t make trouble for her at the Tower or I’ll make trouble for your beloved Darius – you know I can. Stay away from her. I mean it.”

  “Just get out!” Croy shouted.

  “I’ll come into my house whenever I want,” he growled back.

  He grabbed up the crate and left, slamming the door behind him.

  Croy waited to hear their footsteps on the gridway. When they had faded to nothing, she rushed to her bathroom and sank down in one corner of the cramped space. She covered her face with her hands and fought to slow her breathing. Blades of pain cut through her leg. She tried to stretch it out, but couldn’t – the pain was swelling, erupting, a burning dagger slicing through flesh and bone. She lunged for her toilet pail and struggled, with shaking hands, to unlatch it and push it aside. She grasped her stash from underneath and dragged it out. Croy grabbed one of the pre-filled syringes and tried to inject herself, but her hands were trembling too much and her eyes were blurred with tears. She blinked them back, furious at herself for letting Roth hurt her again so much. Darius was right, she was stronger than this, but it was hard to dismiss Roth’s criticism completely when part of her wondered if it might be true – maybe she hadn’t been loving enough, maybe she had been too cold …

  “Stop,” she hissed at herself. She forced her hands steady and plunged the needle into the scar tissue. Very gradually the pain dulled to numb. Croy dropped the rest of the syringes back into the hiding place with her other contraband and the stash of John L’s papers that she hadn’t turned in with the rest after they locked him up. She dragged herself to her feet and limped out into the sitting room, where she stood in the center of the space, looking around. It felt emptier, lonelier. She could feel the silence pounding in her heart. This wasn’t home. It was a prison.

  Croy rushed to the door and ran out of the house. She raced to her dragger and took off, at first flying with no direction, but then she found herself heading back to the place she always went when things turned bad. Croy landed on the deck of the Dower Brothers warehouse, where over twenty annums ago the Dower Brothers had lost their minds and axe-murdered all their Gray workers. It had been abandoned ever since. Despite Nÿr-Corum’s lack of space, nobody wanted to use it. They said it was haunted. John L had thought no one would find him there – his one mistake. Controllers had shot him as he ran away, and he’d fallen over the railing into the Mother Fire below. Croy lowered to one knee beside the place where her father had fallen and rested her head on the cold metal bars. Her body relaxed and the tears came. Once they started, she couldn’t hold them back.

  “John …” she whispered, “I’m not doing so well … I miss you …”

  She clutched the shrapnel pendant – the last thing he’d ever given her. He’d told her, never take it off, as long as you wear it, I’m still with you … The thought gave her comfort.

  Croy’s I-Sect buzzed in her ear. She sniffed and wiped a hand over her face, then tapped to open the line.

  “Croy,” Darius’ voice came through with the sounds of cheering and chanting in the background. They’d obviously won their game. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she lied, trying to disguise the thickness of her voice. “You won?”

  “Game was dirty,” he replied with disgust. Darius preferred losing a good game to winning dirty. “Where are you?”

  “Nowhere.” She used the rail to help herself stand. The knee was already hurting again. Panic stirred insider her, but she kept her voice steady. “Just on my way home.”

  “Do you want me to come over?”

  More than anything she wanted to say yes, but instead she said, “No, I just want to sleep.”

  A woman’s voice spoke in the background close to Darius’ ear, something about going back to her place.

  “Are you sure?” Darius asked Croy, and she heard him taking a drag from his tigaro.

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’ll just be sleeping anyway.”

  “Right.” Darius said. “Call me when you wake up.”

  Croy tapped out of the conversation and looked over the edge. When she needed her partner the most was when she pushed him away the hardest. Maybe Roth was right. Maybe it was all her fault.

  *****

  Croy reached home just as the high winds siren started to scream. A massive frozen-air hurricane was hammering at the Saint’s Door. She lay in bed, shivering under her blanket, watching the shadows flowing across her ceiling, the winds shaking her whole house. It was too dangerous to light a fire in these conditions, and she felt sorry for the Controllers who were out on shift this nighturn. The wild winds made people go crazy at the best of times – and these were the worst.

  She closed her eyes, physically and emotionally exhausted, but she couldn’t sleep. Her mind kept dragging her back through the argument with Roth over and over again. She thought of everything she should have said but didn’t, and everything she did say that she shouldn’t have. Her knee had started pounding with pain and her stomach was cramped with hunger, but finally she managed to drift into a restless sleep of realistic nightmares. She lay there in her bed with a dead-eyed Mortician standing over her holding a scalpel. He snarled and stabbed it down into her knee. She woke screaming into another dream where she now stood over Victoria Kilner scratching symbols into her flesh, except the girl was still alive and screaming, her face becoming John L’s as he ignited into flames. He was yelling for her help, but she was lying on the floor, one of her legs severed at the knee, spilling blood. She couldn’t stand, she couldn’t get to him. She saw a flash of eyes, the darkest that she’d ever seen, and heard a whisper … Shah … Shah-Jahan …

  Croy woke, lathered in sweat, her shirt stuck to her skin. She ripped back the blankets and sat up, gulping, feeling sick to her stomach. She staggered into the bathroom and kneeled beside the toilet pail, but nothing came up. Hunger pains crunched her in on herself. Something very strange was happening to her and it crystallized in her mind at that moment that the Crematorium was at the heart of it.

  She forced herself up and was dressed before she fully realized what she was doing. She slung her kit over her shoulder, pushed the Firestorm into its holster and battled her way out into the howling winds. Objects sailed past her head, smashing into houses and gridways. She made it to her dragger and had to force it to start. The ride coughed and lifted up with the greatest of reluctance, as if it knew where they were going.

&nbs
p; Chapter 27

  Eli

  Aquais

  Scorpia (Nineva)

  The herd of seahorses raced the predatory shadows chasing them through the deep waters, carrying Eli and Ismail past the sunken wreck of a public transporter and downward toward a dome of light – a vast underwater city encased in a transparent film – Nineva.

  By the time the seahorses neared the dome, Eli’s lungs were screaming and the sharks’ jaws snapping right behind their feet. The horses darted into a glass tunnel at the top of the dome and the water started churning. Eli felt an artificial tide dragging him and Ismail off their seahorse’s slippery back. They fought to stay on, but lost their grip, the powerful current sucking them through to the end of the tunnel, where a trapdoor opened and dumped them in a cascade of water down into a pool inside the dome. Ismail dragged Eli to the surface and hauled him, coughing and gasping, to the edge. Eli hauled himself out and kneeled there, rubbing the salt water out of his eyes.

  When he could see again, he looked around and saw they’d landed in some kind of grand entrance chamber in a palatial coral building. Eli checked his navigation. They were not far from the Superior Hall where the portal hung; they just had to get there. Amphibious marine-breed of all varieties, walking in and out and around the chamber, cast the pair suspicious looks. Outside the transparent film, a mighty blue whale swam alongside the building. It stopped and opened its monstrous jaws. A crowd of marine-breeds poured out from inside its mouth. They began to enter the chamber, dropping in from the sealed-off tunnels above, as Eli and Ismail had a moment ago. He watched the creatures fall, their flippers changing to legs just before they touched the ground. Some of them were marine-breeds and some of them were human-breeds of aquatic blood.

  “Incoming,” Ismail muttered from where he stood beside him.

  Eli staggered to his feet and saw a group of armed guards approaching fast. He recognized them as Johanians, a type of deep-sea marine-breed that had come to Scorpia after their city, Latlas Seaport, had been destroyed. Fins protruded from their backs and arms, which were covered with blue wave bloodline marks. Their scaly skin held many scars, and gills sliced the sides of their necks. Each carried a trident spear, their clothes made of green sea-plant clothing. Their expressions were of grim mistrust, but their round shark eyes moved over the strangers with a cautious interest.

  “Vak marak pak martak,” the guard at the front of the group called out.

  “He’s asking why we’re here,” Ismail translated to Eli.

  “We mean trespass – I mean – we do not mean trespass,” Eli replied, as the group circled them. “We were just out walking, exploring – and took a wrong turn.”

  The last thing he wanted was to let on that they were there to steal something.

  The guard replied in Urigin, exposing gold and silver teeth, “Really? Because you don’t look like explorers. More like soldiers, I’d say,” His eyes focused especially on Ismail, on his shark bloodline marks. The other guards around him nodded in agreement.

  Eli tried to cover. “Well, we were both soldiers, before the war. We were attacked by some razor-fins – in a tunnel.” He pointed to the transparent ceiling where the sharks were still circling in the waters above.

  The guard didn’t look up, just eyed Eli then said, “I see. In that case, you can stay and rest a time. They’ll tire in a day or so and then you can leave.”

  “Thank you,” Eli said. “We really appreciate it.”

  “Your gratitude is acceptable, but of course you’ll have to hand over any weapons you’re carrying,” the guard continued. “Unless you have a problem with that?” His eyes bored into them.

  “No, not at all,” Eli said, while cursing inside his mind. He took his electrifier and blades off his belt and handed them over, then stood still while the Johanians checked the rest of him, taking his lightblaster and rope.

  Eli glanced at Ismail. He’d given over his spare electrifier and all the other weapons, but not the Morsus Ictus. The blade was nowhere in sight. The Johanians patted him down – twice – and didn’t find it.

  Once the guards stepped back, satisfied they were clean, their captain indicated to a cluster of female marine-breeds who had appeared behind them and said, “Follow the women. They will show you to a place where you can bathe, feed and rest and they will alert you once the hunters have gone.”

  The women bowed and Eli nodded back. It seemed like the perfect opportunity – follow them, and then when they leave go and find the portal. Except nothing in life was ever perfect and he could feel the eyes of the guards consuming them as they left the entrance chamber.

  Their guides took them through a series of hallways fashioned from smoothed coral and into a bathing room lit with large, glowing pearlescent shells. Three sides of the room were the same white coral as the hallways, with the fourth made of seamless glass. It gave them a view of the lights of another city far below Nineva. This city, which Eli assumed was Nereus, the best known of Adliden’s suburbs, didn’t have the transparent dome stretching over it – it was a pure underwater kingdom, and alarming in its beauty. Even though they were still in Scorpia, below a man-made sea with mechanically propelled waves, Eli felt as though he was actually under one of the fantasy oceans from the fairy’s tales his gran’pa used to tell him.

  Between them and Nereus lay another wreck, this one a ship, its tattered sails swaying in the undulating water. A diffuse light shone through its hollow window eyes, as though the ghosts of lost sailors were still feasting in a parlor aboard. Marine-breeds swam in pairs and groups between the amphibious Nineva and Nereus, a multitude of glowing starfish lighting the sea sky above them. Under other circumstances, Eli could have spent hours entranced by the scene, but their reason for being there hammered at his mind and he turned his back on the window. He looked over the various soaps, cloths and lotions that the girls had set out for them. Some of them were shaped like flowers and fruit. Eli’s stomach growled. His supplies hadn’t gone far to fill the void. As though on cue, the women returned with platters of food and jugs of juice.

  “Let us take your clothes,” one of them said, starting to undress Eli. “We will wash them for you.”

  He clung to his shirt and said quickly, “No thanks! Really, that’s okay.” If growing up in Ufftown had taught him anything, it was never to let anyone take your clothes “to wash them”. “I don’t take off my clothes – ever. It’s part of … my religion.”

  The marine-breed women looked confused, but didn’t argue. They glanced at Ismail and he folded his arms over his chest to indicate he wouldn’t be getting nude either. They lingered for a moment longer and then filed out, closing the door behind them.

  Without warning, all the taps and shower heads in the room spluttered on and started spraying out warm fresh water, filling up the numerous white rock tubs around the walls. Steam rose, twisting to the ceiling. Ismail opened his mouth and dragged out the Morsus Ictus, which somehow he’d been hiding inside there. Eli couldn’t understand how he’d done it without choking himself or cutting up his throat, but somehow he had.

  “Extremely impressive,” Eli said.

  The scullion shoved the blade into his belt and moved to the door. He opened it a fraction and peered out.

  “Confirmed presence. Five armed hostiles,” he whispered to Eli.

  “What?” Eli asked, moving to peer around the scullion. All he saw was a glimpse of the women still standing in the hallway.

  “They’re not hostiles. They’re just marine-breed girls,” he said.

  “They’re not girls, they’re guards,” Ismail replied. “And they’re keeping us here.”

  “Why? What would they want with us?” Eli asked.

  “I don’t know. Their electro-shields block their intentions from me, but in my experience the Johanians are pure mercenary.”

  “You think they’ll try to sell us out?”

  Ismail’s face darkened, something flickering in his stare, and Eli knew he was thin
king of the witch.

  “Is there any way around them?” Eli tried to peek past Ismail again.

  “Not out there,” Ismail said, carefully closing the door. He scanned the room and his gaze settled on one of the tubs. Ismail moved to it and started using the Morsus Ictus to cut the seal joining the tub to the ground. He worked fast until, with a heavy grinding, he shoved the tub to one side, exposing a large open pool underneath it.

  “Hold your position here while I scout an exit,” Ismail said to Eli and without a further word leaped in.

  Eli stood on the edge staring down into the dark waters. Several minutes after the bubbles stopped surfacing, he was well and truly panicking. He didn’t know what to do. What if Ismail had gotten stuck somewhere and needed help? Should he jump in, should he stay there? The door started opening and he rushed over to block it. The marine-breed woman on the other side peered in, looking shocked and slightly angry that he was barring the door.

  “Is everything alright? We heard a sound …” she said.

  “No … I mean, yes! Yes! Absolutely everything is perfect. It’s just that my friend is … bathing his body … naked, of course … and he’s very shy and embarrassed – so if you wouldn’t mind just waiting for a few more moments before coming in, that would – that would be great.” He grinned.

  The marine-breed gave him a very suspicious up-and-down look but said, “Very well,” and stepped back a few paces.

  Eli gestured his thanks and slammed the door shut. He raced back to the water and took a wild leap in. As he did, Ismail surfaced, and Eli ended up sitting on top of his head. Ismail dragged him off into the water, giving him a look.

  “Sorry,” Eli said, treading water. “I thought you might need assistance.”

  The door to the room started opening again and Ismail barked, “Dive!”

  Both of them dropped down beneath the surface and Eli felt Ismail grab him by his jacket, then with a whoosh, the scullion took off, dragging him through the water.