I smiled as Weaver gave me one of the glasses. “You make?” I asked.
“Yah.” He handed one to his daughter, who accepted it with a shrug, as if it were perfectly normal to drink from a work of art, but she watched with undisguised fascination as he snapped open the bottle and filled her glass. They valued fresh water more than the masterpieces Weaver created.
Time to remedy that situation. “Been working on your Concourse license,” I said.
Weaver came over and settled into some cushions. “Thought it wasn’t going to happen.”
No way did I intend to let Cries deny him a vendor’s license. “Got a fix for the birth thing.”
“What birth thing?” a woman asked.
I glanced up. Dara stood in the entrance of the room, dressed in her slinky jumpsuit, her skin glittering from cosmetic dust. In Jak’s casino, she fit right in, but here in the mundane setting of her home, she gleamed like a sensual phantasm.
Weaver was staring at her. “Good see, Dara.”
She smiled, her cool demeanor softening. “Eh, Weaver. You too.”
This flood of romantic gushing was more than I could take. “Come sit,” I told Dara. “Got snap.”
Weaver went over to his common-law wife and nudged her toward me. “Go sit.”
As Dara sank into the cushions, the toddler gave an annoyed wail. Weaver scooped up the child, then came over and thrust her at me. “Dara’s tired,” he said, by way of explanation.
Startled, I took the small girl. As Weaver left the room, making the beads sing, I awkwardly settled the kid into the crook of my arm. I never knew what to do with little kids. Still, we learned early in the aqueducts to look after our young. My gang had looked after several younger children when we were hardly more than kids ourselves. We grew up fast, children having children and dying young. Change was in the air, though, like dust particles floating in sun rays, as the above-city took notice of our culture hidden beneath their sleek towers. They hadn’t denied our poverty before; that would have taken a conscious realization that we existed as a society with our own language, lives, economy, and culture. They simply ignored us. Prior to last year, most people in Cries saw the aqueducts as no more than a wasteland of gangs and the homeless.
Dara watched me trying to hold her adopted kid. “Baby remembers you.”
I squinted at her. “Don’t see how.”
“Saved her life.”
I felt cold, though runoff from an underground hot spring heated the room. “Not remember me. Just born when I found her.”
The baby cooed in my arms and closed its eyes.
“Remembers,” Dara said. She settled back and closed her eyes, resting.
I wanted to thrust the child at her, not because I didn’t like the baby. She was good. Dara and Weaver had agreed to take in both this girl and her then five-year-old brother, who called himself Pack Rat. Their mother had died in childbirth. I tried to banish the memory from my mind, how I had found the mother’s body. Pack Rat had led me there, asking me to “wake her up.” I’d commed for help and then sat there holding the dead woman and her children, rocking them back and forth while I wept for another mother, the one I had never known, the woman who also died alone after giving me life.
In my earliest childhood, I had longed for a home like this one instead of that sterile collection of barren cubicles that passed for an orphanage in Cries. Unfortunately, families like this one were rare in the aqueducts. Dara’s bartending job was as illegal as everything else about Jak’s casino, but he paid a good wage and looked after his employees. The Cries police would have shut him down in a hot minute, except that certain members of his elite clientele were the same people who paid their salaries. Jak, the undercity king of vice. He sat on the throne of cognitive dissonance. Devil or savior? Hell if I knew. My emotions on that subject were too tangled to touch.
I shifted the toddler in my arms. “How’s Pack Rat?”
Dara opened her eyes. “Loud. Got a dust gang. Says he’s grown up.”
I chuckled. “Big kid. All of six.”
She smiled. “Wants to be a Dust Knight.”
“Family talent.” Dara’s oldest daughter, thirteen-year-old Darjan, had been among the first of my knights. In the Undercity, we had always called ourselves dust rats. When my first tykado students had used the name, I told them No! You are human. Rats are vermin. You aren’t vermin. You are better than rats! They had stood there, a ragged collection of children, waiting for me to replace the name I had just ripped away. So I called them Dust Knights. The title became known throughout the Undercity, an honor for those who earned a place within their ranks.
“Is Darjan here?” I asked.
Dara shook her head. “Out. Training.”
“Good.” After all her years in a dust gang, Dara had become an ace at the rough-tumble, what we called street fighting. Tykado required a more sophisticated discipline, but the dusters loved the process. It had taken them a while to get that tykado was a sport with rules. You couldn’t do whatever you wanted to smash your opponent. They did eventually accept it. Unwritten rules of combat also existed among dust gangs, who used the rough-tumble as both a violent sport and a way of establishing dominance. Darjan took well to tykado and worked with the younger kids when she wasn’t practicing with her peers. I hoped tykado, with its philosophy of violence as a last resort, would give the gangs something more civilized to do than trying to pound each other senseless all the time.
Weaver returned with a filled glass for Dara and settled next to her in the cushions. Taking a deep swallow of water, she closed her eyes. After a moment, she lowered the glass and looked at me. “Good snap.”
I nodded, accepting her thanks. “How goes?”
She held out her arm, showing me a comm bracelet around her wrist. The metal shimmered, reminding me of the holos in Jak’s casino. “Got new talk.”
“What code?” I asked.
She gave me the code, and I tapped it into my gauntlet comm. Her wrist comm buzzed and she grinned as she tapped receive.
“Eh, Dara,” I said into my comm. My voice came out of her bracelet.
“Eh,” she said into the comm. “Talk too much.”
We both laughed and switched off our comms.
Dara settled back with her water. “About the license. We got no birth records.”
“Yah.” It was the latest roadblock the bureaucrats had raised to giving Weaver a vendor’s license for the Concourse. “Get a doctor. Verify your birth.”
Weaver gave a snort. “Because I don’t know I’m born, eh?”
“Make it official.” I patted the toddler, who was fussing in my arms.
“Got no doctor,” Dara said.
“Got no interest,” Weaver said. “My birth, my business.”
I pushed back my frustration. Of course he didn’t want to jump through these hoops the Cries authorities kept inventing, but at this rate he’d never get his license. Which was the point, of course. The baby let out with a wail, announcing to the world what it thought of my cuddling technique.
“Eh.” Dara held out her arms.
I gave her the child, and she settled against Dara, her curly black hair reflected in her mother’s sleek-suit. The girl cooed, much more satisfied with her new digs.
“Can get a doctor,” I said. “Come to the Rec Center. Thirtieth hour. Today.”
“No!” Weaver and Dara both said it together. “No go,” Weaver added, just in case I didn’t catch their drift.
I had known this would be tough. No doctor would come to the Undercity, especially after the attack on Duane, and neither Dara nor Weaver would visit Cries. I might have convinced Darjan, if only for the daring excitement of it all, but never her parents.
“One visit,” I said. “Just the Rec Center. You get license, sell goods, help family.” I knew it bothered Weaver that Dara was the entire support of their family. I thought he worked harder than any of us, but he considered his art fun and he liked looking after the kid
s. He was a wonderful father, in a culture where we were lucky even to have one living parent, let alone two of them.
“Good coin for weavings, glasswork, carvings,” I added.
Weaver held up the water bottle I had brought them. “Trade for snap?”
“Trade for credit,” I said. “Buy lots of snap.”
Dara scowled at me. “Credit useless. Can’t see it.”
Pah. Always, I ran into this argument when it came to the credit that the entire rest of the freaking universe used for commerce. The Undercity ran on bargains. Period. People here were perfectly capable of learning to understand credit, they just didn’t want to. They raised the concept of “stubborn as a bulkhead” to new heights, a trait which, yah, all right, I had to admit applied to me, too. I needed to put this in terms of our own economy.
“Listen,” I said. “Got proposal.”
They regarded me warily. “What?” Dara asked.
“Meet doctor at Rec Center, get license,” I said. “Set up stall. Sell goods. You don’t make enough in one tenday to buy twenty snap bottles, I give you twenty snap.”
Both Dara and Weaver laughed, their good humor restored by my outlandish idea. “Twenty, eh.” Dara said. “Make Bhaaj poor again.”
Although I smiled, I didn’t know which hurt more, that my friends lived a life where twenty bottles of water were considered wealth, or that I remembered the time when I believed the same. I wished I could make them see. If Weaver presented his merchandise well on the Concourse, he wouldn’t need to trade for snap bottles. He could earn enough to buy shares in a Cries water purification plant.
“Bargain?” I asked.
“You sure?” Weaver asked. “Lot of snap for you.”
If they’d let me, I’d give them twenty bottles now, and the hell with the Undercity antipathy toward anything perceived as charity. They would never accept a gift of more than one bottle, a bargain in return for my enjoying the hospitality of their home. My proposal changed that. If we didn’t get the license, I’d have to pay up, no choice, because I’d lost the wager. That would appeal to Dara, who never gambled but enjoyed the games vicariously at Jak’s place.
“Yah,” I said. “I’m sure.”
Weaver nodded. “Deal.”
Good. We now had a bargain as binding as any above-city contract.
“Deal what?” a young voice asked.
I looked up with a start. Darjan was striding into the room, disheveled and glowing with youth. She bowed to me the way tykado students did to their teacher. “Well met, Chi Bhaajan,” she said, using the formal greeting, a mouthful down here in the aqueducts.
“Eh.” Dara gave me an apologetic glance. “Jan talks a lot.”
Darjan glowered at her mother, but didn’t deign to answer.
“Knights have to talk that way,” I told Dara. “I tell them to.”
“Dust Knight,” Dara informed her mother, as if this was news.
Dara scowled at us. “Knights jabber.”
“Read and write, too,” I said.
“I read,” Darjan’s sister called from her place under the lamp. She held up her holobook.
Weaver snorted. “Next, Bhaaj insist I read, eh?”
Yah, well, I wished both he and Dara would learn to read and write. I could only push them so far, though. One step at a time.
“Got snap,” Darjan observed as she sat down with us.
Her father handed her the bottle. “Yours.”
She finished the remaining water in one gulp.
I regarded Darjan. “Got proposal.”
Everyone was suddenly attentive. “Why does Darjan get a bargain?” her sister demanded.
“Dust Knight proposal,” I said.
“I’ll be one, too,” her sister said.
Darjan frowned at her. “Never interested before.”
“What proposal?” Weaver asked.
“Tykado contest,” I told them.
Darjan wasn’t impressed. “Every day is a tykado contest.”
“Don’t mean dust gangs fights,” I said.
“With cyber-riders?” Darjan looked dubious. “Most can’t fight worth spit.”
“Better not be punkers,” Dara said flatly. “Got guns.”
I thought of Singer and her Mark 89 Automatic Power Rifle. “Nahya, no punkers, no riders.”
They all looked confused. “No one else,” Weaver said.
“Above-city team,” I said.
Dara stared at me. “Like hell!”
“Never,” Weaver stated flatly.
Darjan’s eyes gleamed. “Yah. We kill.”
I scowled at her. “Not kill. Contest.”
“Never.” Dara leaned forward. “You got that, Bhaaj? Never the hell ever.”
“Always the hell ever,” Darjan told them. “I do.”
Instead of getting angry, her parents stared at her blankly. “Why?” Weaver asked, as if she had suggested hanging upside down from the ceiling.
“We beat them,” Darjan said.
“Maybe not,” I said. An above-city team had more training than a dust gang.
“They beat you. Humiliate,” Dara said, stressing her point with a four-syllable word.
Darjan crossed her arms. “We fight.”
“Will think on it,” Dara said. When Weaver frowned at her, she raised her eyebrows at him.“Maybe think,” he told Darjan.
Darjan started to protest, and I shook my head slightly. Her parents needed time to process the idea. “Got to go,” I said.
“You stay,” Dara told me, friendlier now that I had backed down on the contest.
As much as I’d have liked to stay, I couldn’t. I still had to find out why Ruzik and Hack were stealing pulse rifles. Gods only knew what Hack could do with an amped-up rifle.
“Got to find Ruzik,” I said.
“Training,” Darjan said. “At Lizard Trap. With his circle.”
I knew Lizard Trap. I’d run there in my youth. I stood up. “Be well,” I said.
Dara walked out with me. When we were alone, she said, “Heard Singer sang to Driver.”
The memory of Singer blasting apart Driver’s body jumped into my mind, too vivid. I took a breath. “Saved my life.”
“Careful with yourself.”
I nodded. “Be well.”
“You too,” she murmured.
With that, I took my leave of one of the wealthiest homes in the Undercity, riches that came neither from coin nor credit, but from the love sheltered within those tapestry-covered walls.
I knew Jak had found me even though I couldn’t see him. He stood beyond the sphere of light cast by my stylus, somewhere up ahead on the midwalk where I’d been striding along. No matter. I could sense exactly where he was standing. I stopped and turned off my stylus.
“Sneaking up,” I said into the darkness.
A throaty laugh came from about twenty meters away. “How know?”
I smiled. “Always know. Can’t fool me.”
“Sure, can.” His voice rumbled like a sensual promise. “Any time.”
I snorted. “Not likely.”
“Very likely,” he murmured, suddenly in front of me.
Ah, that voice. It turned me into custard. Not that I’d ever admit it. “What want?” I said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he growled. “A civil word, eh?”
“Okay.” I spoke pleasantly. “Civil word. That’s two.”
He laughed, a sexy rumble that vibrated like an invitation. “Ah, Bhaajo.”
I put out my hands and encountered his well-muscled chest. He put his arms around me and I put mine around him. Closing my eyes, I just held him, enjoying the familiar strength of his embrace. He felt like a balm I hadn’t realized I needed until we touched.
After a while, he spoke into my ear. “Remember that place near here?”
I remembered. A short distance down the midwalk, a small aqueduct intersected this larger throughway. Its narrow path led to a cave lined with phosphorescent crystals, a glowing
wonderland when you turned on a lamp. As children, we had loved that hideaway.
“Been a long time,” I said.
“Yah.” He moved his hands to places I liked. “Should make it a short time.”
“Got business,” I told him. “Job to do.”
“Got business with me.”
I shouldn’t go with him. I couldn’t, not in the middle of the day.
Really, I couldn’t.
Really.
We headed off together in the dark, needing no light to find the places we’d loved in our youth.
I reached Lizard Trap several hours later than I intended, alone now, but feeling better than I had in some time. Jak was like a potent swig of whiskey. I could’ve drunk all day, if I’d had the time. He had his casino, though, and I had Lizard Trap.
The canal inherited its name from the small reptiles that scuttled through the swirls of dust at its bottom. Gangers trapped the lizards for food. Located about three levels down from the Concourse and well removed from the main canals, Lizard Trap saw less traffic than the major throughways. Although the approach looked deserted, I knew better. Duane might think no one lived here, but when he’d stood in a seemingly empty canal, the life of the Undercity had hummed around him, hidden from his view.
I heard the fight first, grunts and thuds, no yells or words, nothing that used energy. I was following a small tunnel, probably an ancient maintenance conduit. Lizard Trap crossed it up ahead, and an orange glow came from the intersection. I didn’t hide my approach, I just walked out onto the midwalk of the canal. Someone had crammed a torch into the wall, and other torches burned at intervals along the canal, their flames flickering in the air currents, a fierce light far different from the cool bioluminescence of the Down-deep. All that heat and energy, like the rough-tumblers below, intent on their fight.
The Bronze Skies Page 14