The Bronze Skies

by Catherine Asaro

  They were fighting down in the canal, which made sense, since they could easily knock each other off the midwalk. They never paused, fists striking, bodies lunging. One man jumped, kicking first with one leg, then the other, bam, bam, his body airborne for an instant as his feet pounded his opponent. A woman whirled in a roundhouse kick, her fists clenched. They were fast, a blur of speed even without augmentation. Dust swirled around them and saturated the air, gritty against my skin, red in the torchlight, creating a haze over the scene.

  I knew one of the gangs: Ruzik, his girlfriend, and the other man and woman who ran with them, all Dust Knights. They wore ripped muscle shirts that left their arms and abs bare, four violently beautiful youths. Tats of flying lizards covered their skin. Their group had survived intact into adulthood, a rarity for gangs. They protected one of the largest circles in the Undercity, seven children ranging in ages from a baby to preteens, and four other adults, including Hack, the cyber-wizard who had stolen the guns with Ruzik.

  In a culture where intact families were rare, your circle became your kin. When I’d enlisted at, I had done worse than break up our dust gang; I had left behind the people I cared about most. Dig never forgave me, yet in the end, as she had died, she told her daughter to join the army like me rather than take over the cartel. I didn’t know what would happen with Ruzik’s gang, but they had a high standing among the Knights. They were becoming a force for stability in the aqueducts, leaders for our youth to emulate, or at least they would be if they didn’t start some war here over who the hell knew what.

  I didn’t recognize the other gang, two women and two men in their early twenties. In Cries, they would have been college students, studying for exams; here they fought for the right to live on their terms. A girl in the other gang lunged at Angel, Ruzik’s girlfriend, slashing at her with a long knife. Angel, who was about as cherubic as a wrecking ball with spikes, kicked her leg high. Her foot hit the girl’s arm and the knife spun into the air, its honed edge glittering like fire in the torchlight. Her opponent ducked, then hurled into Angel in a move that looked half rough-tumble and half tykado. I’d known some Knights were teaching tykado to kids who hadn’t yet earned acceptance into the group, but I hadn’t realized it had gone this far. Although Ruzik’s gang had the advantage, their rivals knew some tykado moves well enough to use them.

  What struck me more, though, was how they fought, one-on-one, each member of Ruzik’s gang paired off with one fighter from the other gang. A telling choice: with their greater expertise, Ruzik’s dusters could have won faster by dispatching the weakest members among their rivals first and then joining forces against their remaining opponents. Both gangs had opted for rules of honor rather than an anything-goes brawl.

  I could guess what started the rumble. Two dust sculptures stood in the canal, depictions of the giant lizards called ruziks that resembled the extinct T-rex on Earth. One red lizard stood by the opposite wall, a clear statement of Ruzik’s claim to this territory. The remains of another lizard stood a few meters beyond the first, the top of its body lying in smashed clumps around its clawed feet. Someone had sculpted a different figure in front of the broken lizard, a muscled arm raised with its fist clenched around a dagger. This was a turf war, two gangs battling over their claim to the canal.

  Ruzik was fighting a woman who looked like the leader of the other gang, based on the more elaborate tats on her arms. She ducked and parried his attacks with an amazing speed. Gods, I’d love to get that one for training. Although she moved like a street fighter, she showed hints of tykado grace. She didn’t have Ruzik’s mass, but her greater speed offset his strength. A long gash on Ruzik’s arm dripped blood, and his opponent’s nose was bleeding. They struck, ducked, whirled, and struck again, locked in their violent dance.

  I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms, watching the rumble. This had nothing to do with me, which in the Undercity meant it was none of my business. In the code of the Dust Knights, however, it mattered. Ruzik’s gang had engaged their rivals in a fair fight. They obviously meant to pulverize their opponents, but it could have turned into a blood bath if they hadn’t held back. Had Ruzik used his stolen guns, he could have obliterated their competition—and destroyed the interwoven laws of the Undercity that kept our community from becoming a war zone.

  Angel rolled her opponent over her hip and slammed her to the ground. The other girl groaned, lying on her back. Angel could have grabbed the girl’s knife from the dust and gone for the kill, but instead she waited, breathing heavily. The other girl climbed to her feet, wary and tense, and she faced off with Angel, both of them glowering. The man fighting Ruzik’s brother raised his hands, palms out, surrendering. Ruzik’s brother stopped his next blow, his fist raised, his features contorted with the effort of holding back, because he obviously wanted to smash the other fellow in the face.

  Within moments the other two matches finished, the rival gang raising their palms in defeat. Everyone stood glaring at each other, anger simmering. Ruzik spun around and strode down the canal in my direction, sending dust swirling in the torchlight. He didn’t even glance at me, but I had no doubt they all knew I was there. He stopped in front of the sculpture with the raised arm and kicked it hard. The top half fell into the canal. Another kick, and he had broken the arm into pieces that crumbled into canal dust. No one spoke. They needed no words. Triumph and defeat were already decided.

  The rival gang dispersed, melting away into the aqueducts. Ruzik’s people set to work redoing the destroyed sculpture, but he didn’t join them. Instead, he turned and looked straight up at me. I could have motioned him to join me on the midwalk. Out of respect for his leadership, and the honor he used in their fight, I jumped down into the canal. My hydraulics kicked in and analysis routines in my biomech web timed my movements so that despite the large drop, I landed easily. Angel and the others looked up with a start, but Ruzik just nodded, cool and casual.

  I motioned at the bleeding gash on his arm. “Got cut.”

  He shrugged. “Not a problem.”

  The others came over and stood behind Ruzik, listening. I could almost feel their curiosity. They wanted to know what I thought of their fight.

  “Good tumble,” I said.

  Ruzik inclined his head, accepting the compliment. Angel stepped up next to him with the ease of long-time lovers. It reminded me of my youth, with Jak.

  “Got new circlers,” she said. “Little dusters.”

  Good gods, they had taken in even more children? That would make their circle the largest in the Undercity. No wonder they wanted more territory. And they had done it without killing or crippling their competition. The other gang wouldn’t forget. They had lost, but with honor, and that mattered here as much, sometimes even more, than the territory itself.

  “New dusters lucky,” I said.

  The four of them stayed put, watching me, no smiles, but they didn’t shift their weight or glower either, which down here was equivalent of an emotional thank you.

  “Didn’t use guns,” I added.

  Ruzik shrugged. “No need.”

  “Yah. No need.” My voice cooled. “But got guns.”

  They all went still then, like statues. No one spoke. Apparently it was none of my damn business. I motioned at the tats on Ruzik’s arm, blue and green spirals, all stylized lizards. My voice sounded like ice. “Kajada.”

  Ruzik’s brother tensed, his shoulders stiffening. By now everyone knew I had once run in a gang led by Dig Kajada, who later became one of the most powerful drug bosses in the Undercity. I kept my thoughts private about how my closest childhood friend became my enemy in the cartel war. Jak and Gourd, they understood. We lost part of ourselves when Dig died. I never spoke about how the contradictions of Dig had torn me apart, but everyone knew the Code of the Knights. No drugs. Nothing. Use, and you were out. I made no exceptions. That said all that needed saying.

  The Kajada cartel used a ruzik as their symbol, and Dig’s people had stolen ISC
laser carbines and neural disruptors to wage war against the Vakaar cartel. Now Ruzik, with all his lizards tats, had stolen high-end weapons, working with a rider named Hack. Yah, Hack took his name from his work on the meshes, but hack was also one of the most common drugs sold by the cartels.

  I looked at them, they looked at me, and it felt like the tension would crack us in two.

  Ruzik spoke. “Got Code.”

  “Yah,” Angel said. “Got Code.” The other two dusters echoed the words.

  So. They swore by the Code. I had to believe they wouldn’t give their oath unless they meant the words. I hoped I was right. As a symbol, the ruzik had a long history among my people. Dig had chosen it for her cartel for the same reason Ruzik chose it for his gang; it represented strength, and the ancient, enduring power of those large animals.

  “Need talk.” I considered them all. “Ken?”

  They met my gaze. Ruzik said, “Ken.”

  Good. They understood Jak’s word. His reputation loomed large in the Undercity. Ken meant they wouldn’t reveal to anyone what I was about to tell them.

  “Jagernaut,” I said. “Down-deep.”

  Ruzik scowled at me. “Bad jib.”

  “Not jib,” I said. “Not joke. Real.”

  Angel spoke flatly. “Intruder.”

  “Get rid of it,” Ruzik’s brother said.

  It. Not her or him, but “it.” They gave voice to the unease Jagernauts caused many people, the belief that with such extensive biomech in their bodies and brains, they were no longer human.

  “She,” I said. “Not it.”

  “We push her out.” That came from the girl whose name I didn’t know.

  “Can’t,” I answered. “She hides. Murders.”

  “We fight,” Ruzik told me.

  “You fight, you die.” They were good, yah, but they had no chance against a Jagernaut..

  “Four of us,” Angel pointed out.

  I knew Calaj could kill all of them, but they wouldn’t go down easy. I didn’t want them going down at all. “Listen,” I said. “Might be after riders.” Cyber-riders were invaluable in the aqueducts. As much as I hated knowing the Ruby Pharaoh had figured out their true value, I understood her concern. Calaj could do a lot of damage if she got control of our cyber-wizards and their tech-mech creations.

  “Not steal rider tech,” Ruzik said. “Or riders. We protect.”

  Whatever they planned to do with the guns, it didn’t sound like it had any connection to Calaj. It also sounded like they didn’t intend to tell me squat about the weapons.

  “Code is about ethics,” I told them.

  “Yah,” Ruzik said.

  “Right and wrong,” I added.

  Angel answered this time. “Yah.”

  “Taking guns wrong,” I said.

  Ruzik’s gaze never wavered. “No guns.”

  I scowled at him. “Code says no lies, either.”

  “Not lie,” Angel said.

  This was getting me nowhere. Whatever they had stolen, “borrowed,” or taken apart, they had just denied they had the guns, which meant I wasn’t knowingly abetting a crime. I still didn’t like it. Keep the Code, I willed them. Don’t make me hunt a murderer among the Knights.

  My walk out of the aqueducts took me past places I didn’t want to see. No, it didn’t “take” me. I chose that route. What I wanted and what I needed to see weren’t the same. Memories haunted me like ghosts adrift in the crumbling tunnel. This passage had seemed so much larger in my childhood. I remembered a girl I’d known back then by the name of Sparks. I’d been eight when I found her in this narrow passage. She had been four, a child with her face smudged by dust and tears, holding her hands out to me as she cried from loneliness, hunger, and fear. I’d lifted her up, whispering what little comfort I knew how to give.

  Sparks had no parents. She became part of the circle my gang protected, along with several other children and a single-parent family. Two years later, while Sparks and I had played here, I realized she was sick. We called it Carnelian rash, an illness that prowled the aqueducts and attacked with no warning, turning your skin red and scaly. Even if I’d known how to take her to Cries, no hospital in the above-city would treat a dust rat. We had no healer. I nursed Sparks myself, cooled her skin with cloths soaked in mineral-laden water and dribbled filtered water between her cracked, swollen lips. When she cried, inconsolable from the pain, I traded with the drug punkers, giving them food I stole from the Concourse in return for the hack that eased Spark’s misery.

  I held her in my arms as she died.

  Gods, why did I do this to myself, coming here? Whoever claimed that time healed all wounds hadn’t known shit. The pain never stopped.

  Today Jak and I had shared a different color of memories, those painted with joy instead of pain. I had so few, but making love with Jak topped those. He’d found that sparkling cave decades ago during one of his explorations into hidden places of the aqueducts. Always, Jak had been that way. He just disappeared. Once when we were fourteen, he left for days, never warning us. Gourd, Dig, and I had searched everywhere, looking for him, and then for his body. Grief tore us into shreds. One day he just showed up, grinning and satisfied with himself. He’d gone to Izu Yaxlan, invading that sacred city to live in the ruins, daring our pantheon of goddesses and gods to punish his audacity. He stayed until the Abaj showed up and told him to leave. That they let him stay at all surprised me, but maybe it had taken a while for his presence to annoy those taciturn, impassive warriors.

  We’d wanted to strangle him.

  I understood now the insatiable curiosity that drove Jak, that urge to push boundaries and challenge the unknown. Back then, when I thought I’d lost him, I had died inside. Nothing prepares you for that at fourteen. Hell, nothing would prepare me now. I’d never admitted it to him, but I had given up trying to hide the truth from myself. I hadn’t enlisted only to escape the Undercity. I had also needed to deny the intensity of my bond with a lover who never felt real, one who could disappear anytime. Yet in the end, after decades elsewhere, I’d come home, forced to acknowledge that this elusive, heartbreaking world would forever be a part of whatever defined my flawed self.

  Eventually I reached a spiral staircase that climbed to the main aqueducts. I went up the steps, around and around, trying to forget the Lock staircase, around and around, like my memories of this place. Too much history.

  The stairs ended in the main aqueduct below the Concourse, an aqueduct canal fifty meters across, its midwalk the height of two people above canal floor. Ancient architecture showed clearly here, arches, columns, and buttresses supporting the ceiling. I passed construction equipment left by the Cries team repairing the two nearby canals that had collapsed during the war. The teams should know better. Usually they took their stuff with them. They wouldn’t be back for hours, at least halfway through the forty-hour night, which would have already begun to stretch its long twilight across the Vanished Sea above. They had locked up the equipment, sure, but their protections wouldn’t even slow my people. Anything left unattended would be gone by the time they returned. I didn’t know the people running the crews, but I commed Duane Ebersole and left a message, asking that he look into it before all this lovely equipment vanished without a trace.

  I could have left the Undercity by any of its hidden exits. As kids, we used those passages so no cops would catch us coming onto the Concourse. They always sent us back to the aqueducts or found a reason to arrest us. Well, screw that. We had a right to walk on the Concourse. Today I followed a wide path to the official exit from the aqueducts, a cave we called the Foyer. Small, with a high ceiling and sawed-off rocks where you could sit, it offered nothing remarkable—except that it was the official exit from the aqueducts into the Concourse. I strode into the Foyer, angry at a world that let children die from a sickness we knew how to cure, a world where I had to choose between protecting Ruzik’s thieving gang or obeying laws passed in a city that had never cared spit about us,
at least not until they found out we had a priceless resource they coveted—our Kyle minds.

  The exit out into the Concourse stood across the Foyer, an archway about three meters high and a meter wide. An ancient sculptor had carved geometric designs around its border so long ago, no one remembered who created that exquisite artwork. I walked through the archway onto the lower end of the Concourse. Haze filled the air, created by braziers that warmed the market stalls on either side of the narrow lane. Mist also formed here, where cool air from the aqueducts met the warmer Concourse. Smoke curled up from stoves, with tantalizing aromas of cooking meat and pizo spice that tickled my nose. A single street lamp shone through the haze.

  Vendors staffed the stalls, women and men stranded here in the dregs of the Concourse, probably because they couldn’t afford the license for a better location. I’d paid the application fee for Weaver’s license so he wouldn’t end up here. If his license ever came through, no when it came through, he could pay me back from his first sales. We didn’t use the word loan; he called it a bargain, my help for credits that didn’t yet mean anything to him. He figured he had the better end of the deal.

  The vendors stared as I passed their stalls. Red dust covered my muscle shirt and scuffed my boots. I had a splint on my left wrist, and I carried my pack in my other hand, holding its straps easily despite its weight because I had the muscles to make that a trivial exercise. My leather jacket only partially covered the pistol in my shoulder holster. I appeared younger than my age, and I stood taller than most. Yah, so, okay, maybe I looked threatening. I was surprised they weren’t calling the cops, the way they had last year when I brought four hundred people through here. If Lavinda Majda hadn’t guaranteed us safe passage that day, gods only knew what would have happened.

  I passed a pizo stall. Faded yellow tassels hung from its roof and blue streamers wrapped the poles that supported its canvas sides. Meat sticks dipped in pizo sauce sat in a rack on the counter, making my mouth water. I loved those sticks. The stall’s grizzled owner stood behind the counter, watching me. He looked familiar. Of course. He had been here last year when we came out for the Kyle testing. He nodded to me, and I nodded back, appreciating the détente.