The Bronze Skies

by Catherine Asaro

“Tournament. Two Dust Knight teams, two above-city teams. In the Rec Center.”

  They all stared at me. No one seemed to know how to respond.

  Sandjan spoke up. “Why?”

  “Above-city wants to know us,” I said.

  “Yah, so,” Angel said. “Don’t want to know their sorry asses.”

  One of Angel’s friends laughed. “Maybe know their soft, pretty boys.”

  One of the men snorted. “Their soft pretty girls fuck those soft pretty boys.”

  “Heya,” I said. “Show respect.”

  Ruzik crossed his arms. “Like they show us?”

  He had a point. “Got to start somewhere,” I said.

  “We’ll lose,” Ruzik’s brother said. “Got no fancy Cries fight school.”

  “Don’t need.” I motioned at them. “Got experience.”

  “Not in tykado,” Biker pointed out.

  There lay the problem. Sure, they had more experience than city kids, but in street fighting, not tykado. They learned fast, but they still had a long way to go.

  “Not about winning,” I said. “About making bridges.”

  “Screw bridges,” Ruzik growled.

  “Not much fun, a bridge,” I said. They laughed at that.

  “Make better relations with Cries,” I said. “Get better life.”

  “Don’t want them here,” Hack said.

  “Go to Rec Center,” I said.

  “They don’t got the Code,” Ruzik said.

  “Got their own Code,” I said. “Tournament Rules.” It was part of tykado, a philosophy as much of honor as of defense. “You follow, too.” I didn’t want them trying to kill the Cries kids.

  They all stared at me, impassive. Apparently this wasn’t going to work.

  Just when I was ready to let it rest and start the lesson, Sandjan said, “Two teams from here?”

  Good! That sounded promising. “One team here. Four of you. Other team of younger knights.”

  Angel spoke up. “Dark Singer, Ruzik, Sandjan, and Hack. Good team.”

  I agreed, it was the strongest team they could form out of this group. It was also a nightmare. If Singer showed up at the Rec Center, gods only knew what would happen.

  Singer spoke flatly. “Key clinkers got me on wanted list.”

  No one had a comment on that. Finally Ruzik said, “Me, Sandjan, Angel, and Hack.”

  Everyone waited, watching Singer. She said, “Good team.”

  I let out a relieved breath. “Set, then?”

  Ruzik looked around at them. “Set?”

  Angel’s gaze practically gleamed. “Yah, set. Crush their asses.”

  “The Ass Crush?” I asked. “That a new tykado move?” Laughter went through the group.

  “Set,” Sandjan said.

  “Yah, set,” Hack agreed.

  So we had our first team, the one that would fight the black belts. I doubted they could win, but they could make a good showing, and that meant something. If they knew they could hold their own against privileged, above-city athletes, it would prod them to work harder, until someday they would beat their challengers.

  For now, we started the morning’s workout.

  Someone had invaded the penthouse.

  I felt it as soon as I got home. I stood just inside the doorway, above the sunken living room, and listened. There—a splash. It came from the bathroom that adjoined the room where I slept. I drew my revolver and walked silently to the bedroom. No one. The bed was in the same mess I’d left the last time I had slept here. It looked a lot more comfortable than the ruins of Izu Yaxlan.

  Again! A splash. I inched along the wall until I reached the doorway into the bathroom, which looked like the keyhole for a giant skeleton key. Mosaics gleamed in a border around its edges, blue and green. I stood there, my gun up by my shoulder—

  Splash.

  I lunged into the archway, whipping my gun forward, aiming at—

  “Eh, Bhaajo.” Jak spoke languidly, unconcerned that I had a big, fat pulse revolver trained on him. He was reclining his lean self in the swimming pool that the specs for this place called a “bathtub.” Sleek with water, with his muscled skin dusky against the glistening mosaics that tiled the pool, he smoldered. Gods, that man should be listed as a dangerous substance.

  I lowered my gun. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Taking a bath.” He slid down until he was submerged up to his shoulders. “This is sinful, Bhaaj. You ought to be arrested.”

  I holstered my gun. “It belongs to the Majdas. Arrest them.”

  He scowled. “They let you stay here so they can keep tabs on you.”

  “Yah. And I untab their tabs.”

  His laugh rolled out, full and deep. “Untabbing tabs? Sounds dangerous.”

  I grinned, more pleased than I’d ever admit. My boots clicked on the tile floor as I went over to where he relaxed in the water. I sat down at the edge of the pool and set my gun on the tiles.

  His voice deepened. “You come for my honor?”

  “Yah,” I murmured. I left my clothes on the wet floor and slid into the water next to him. “How’d you get in my apartment?”

  “Your EI likes me.” He tangled his arms and legs with mine. “Let me up.”

  Interesting. I usually considered the EI that ran this place one of life’s more annoying creations, probably because Majda security had programmed it. If the EI had figured out it should let Jak up here, though, it had a redeeming quality.

  For one blissful hour, I forgot about Calaj, the Pharaoh, Weaver’s license, and everything else. We eventually fell asleep, leaning against each other and the tiled edge of the pool.

  The blare of an alarm woke us up.

  XI

  Darkness, Expanding

  I jumped out of the water, colliding with Jak as he lunged to his feet.

  “EI!” I yelled. “What is that noise?”

  “An alarm,” my EI answered, its voice calm.

  “For what?”

  “To wake you up.”

  “Yah, but why?”

  “Because you were sleeping,” it said, as if the obvious way to wake up people was to scare them half to death with noise.

  “Sometimes I hate that EI,” Jak muttered.

  “It makes no sense to feel antipathy toward a code,” the EI said. “Do you wish to know the reason for the alarm?”

  For flaming sake. “Yes, we wish to know.”

  “You are in danger. An assassin is attempting to access this apartment.”

  An assassin? No, it couldn’t be, not in the middle of Cries. I went to the bedroom and grabbed the robe lying on my bed. Jak wandered in after me, holding his trousers in one hand.

  Pulling on my robe, I turned to the console by the bed. “EI, show me who is here.”

  “On viewer,” it said.

  The screen cleared to reveal the lobby downstairs. And yah, there in the middle of all that chrome, glass, and modern architecture stood a huge woman in black, her biceps bulging, her face scarred, and her hair cut short. Dark Singer had shown up on my doorstep.

  “Gods,” Jak muttered.

  “Yah.” I doubted Singer had ever left the aqueducts before today. She’d cleaned the dust off her face and clothes, but she still looked Undercity, through and through. She hadn’t brought any weapons, at least none that showed on the building sensors. Then again, she knew plenty of ways to hide her stuff, besides which, she always had her fists.

  “Let her come up here,” I told the EI.

  “I recommend against this precipitous action,” the EI told me.

  “Fine,” I said, “Now let her up.”

  “She could kill you with her bare hands.”

  “Quit arguing,” I growled. “And let her the hell up.” Otherwise the cops would show up and arrest her. Singer’s reputation extended beyond the Undercity.

  “Lift released,” the EI said.

  I turned to Jak, who was standing there in his trousers and nothing else. “You better
get dressed,” I said, suddenly awkward.

  His laugh rumbled. “That dark songstress isn’t interested in me, Bhaajo. She sees only her pretty boy.”

  “Her what?”

  “Her man. Baby’s father.”

  “Oh.” I knew Singer had a baby. So duh, that meant a father. Sure, other ways existed to have kids, but not in the Undercity. “He a drug punker?”

  “Hell, no.” Jak shrugged. “She keeps him hidden. Probably he takes care of the kid.”

  “He can’t nurse a baby.”

  That gave him pause. After a moment, he said, “I guess Singer does.” He squinted at me. “It’s hard to imagine.”

  No kidding. Singer seemed about as motherly as a dragon lizard. I wondered, though. This man and the baby might explain why she’d acted so out of character this past year.

  A strange thought came to me. I stood there, silent, looking at it. Actually, I was staring at a point on the opposite wall while the thought crept into my mind, turned everything upside down, scared the shit out of me, and then wouldn’t leave. It was like saying, “Don’t think about a pink ruzik.” Of course after that, you couldn’t stop thinking about big pink lizards.

  What if Jak and I had a kid?

  No. Impossible. Neither of us was parent material. Poor kid. Never, in a million years.

  “Bhaaj?” Jak was watching me. “Don’t worry about Singer. Seriously.” He put on his shirt. “See. I’m covered.”

  “What?” I focused on him, the real him, not the terrifying thought of him as a father that wouldn’t leave my beleaguered brain.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  My face heated. “Nothing.” I walked out of the bedroom. “EI, where is my visitor?”

  “It took her a while to figure out the lift,” the EI said. “She is on her way now.”

  I scowled at the air. “You didn’t help her?”

  “You didn’t ask me to.”

  Jak came up beside me. “You should get dressed.”

  I looked at myself, in a skimpy robe that barely came to my thighs. Embarrassed, I headed back to the bedroom. I had just finished pulling on my clothes when the front doors pinged. As I returned to the living room, the two double doors opened and Singer stood there like some wildly gorgeous warrior goddess, so out of place in my penthouse, she defined the words “cognitive dissonance.” She glowered as if she were ready to explode.

  “Eh, Singer.” I motioned at the sunken living room. “Come with.”

  She walked inside, looking around, so tensed up, she looked ready to explode. When the door closed behind her, she swung around, her huge fists raised and clenched. She stared at the smooth wall where and doorway had stood just moments before. When nothing more happened, she lowered her arms. Turning in a circle, she checked out the room—

  —and froze when she saw the window-wall. With the sun behind the building, no light slanted into the window, so the glass hadn’t darkened. That left us with a panoramic view of the desert. She walked to the window and stood there, a lone figure against the magnificent view of the Vanished Sea that stretched from Cries to the mountains on the horizon.

  She stayed that way for a long time, staring. Finally she turned to us. “Bhaaj.”

  “Yah?” I asked.

  “This what you meant by ‘Make better relations with Cries, get better life.’?”

  Softly I said, “Yah.”

  She crossed the living room, passing the brocaded coach and crystal table, walking on a rug so thick, her boots left footprints in it until the smart pile sprang back up and resumed its sleek, unbroken expanse. She went into my bedroom. As Jak and I followed, she stopped in front of my bed and stared at the mess of covers and pillows. Then she walked to the bathroom archway. Her boots clanged on the tile floor as she entered the room, which was misty with the warm water. When she saw the pool, she went absolutely still. Jak and I stood in the doorway, watching her.

  It seemed like eons before Singer turned to us. “Above-city lives this way? All?”

  “Not always this nice,” I said. “But yah, mostly.”

  “This much water?”

  “And more.”

  “Drink it?”

  “Not this. Comes from other places. But yah, as much as you want.”

  “Bhaaj—” Her voice had a strangled sound. “Going to be sick.”

  Jak ran to a cabinet for a bowl and got it to Singer just in time. She sunk to her knees clenching the blue tub while she lost her last meal. Jak and I both stayed back, giving her room.

  After a while, Singer set down the bowl and stood up, up and up, back to her full height. The lights on her cybernetic arm flashed. She walked to the pool and picked up a wet towel Jak and I had left there. Moving methodically, she wiped her mouth clean and dropped the towel into the pool. The water frothed as its nanobots went to work, cleaning the cloth. Singer turned to us, slow and careful, her movements measured with a controlled anger I recognized, after having known her for a year.

  “Cries keeps us under the city.” Her voice rasped. “Makes us stay below. Steals our children, puts them in work houses, says we’re nothing, worth nothing, got nothing. And they live like this.”

  My old anger stirred, never appeased, all those years of people telling me to give up and go home, that I could never succeed. One teacher in officer candidate school had told me I was less than human. When I succeeded on sheer cussed determination, because I was too damn stubborn to fail, the same people who insisted I would never win told me that if I had managed, obviously the rest of the Undercity could as well, so their miserable lives were their own fault. Everyone assumed our culture had no worth. If we insisted on preserving our way of life, then it was our choice to live in poverty, another indication of our inferiority. They saw it is as all or nothing: we accepted the crushing hardships that defined our lives or we gave up what it meant to be Undercity.

  I didn’t know how to put all my anger in words. I had never learned. I just said, “Yah.”

  Bitterness honed Singer’s words. “And they call me the criminal.”

  I remembered Lavinda’s words last year, after she saw over four hundred people follow me out of the Undercity, a slum she and the rest of Cries had believed housed a few homeless criminals—that day we discovered the incredible concentration of psions among my people: I don’t know if it’s our greatest crime or our greatest miracle. Right. A miracle—now that we had something they wanted.

  Singer motioned at my penthouse. “You got this. Why go to the aqueducts?”

  “Aqueducts are my home,” I said. “Pay forward.”

  She took a while to digest that. “So.”

  “Why come here?”

  “See you.” She paused, probably hampered by our terse dialect. With a frustrated grimace, she tried again. “Wanted to fight. Go to Rec Center. Can’t. Key clinks will throw me into the box.”

  I hadn’t realized how much she wanted to join the tykado team, It wasn’t clear why that drove her into Cries, though. I could only guess what it had taken for her to walk here. In my youth, I had struggled for years with the decision to come above ground, planning hidden routes through the Concourse to avoid the police. The day I finally left, I walked through Cries in wonder, under a sky I had never before seen, terrified someone would stop me, put me in a cell, turn me away. At the recruiting center, I had stood in front of a flustered army officer and changed my life forever.

  I regarded Singer. “You want offworld?”

  “Want light.”

  Although I knew she might mean sunlight, I suspected it went deeper. Her life had ground her down. She looked well into her thirties, but I doubted she was more than early twenties. She had strength, intelligence, drive, and loyalty, but she had also committed multiple murders in the service of the Undercity’s worst drug boss.

  “Singer.” I lifted my hands, then dropped them. “That name means a lot of dark.”

  “Yah.” She made no attempt to deny her former profession.


  “Still dark?” I asked.

  “Don’t want.”

  That wasn’t a ringing cry of remorse for most people, but from Singer it spoke volumes.

  “Change?” I asked.

  “Too late for me.” She took a deep breath. “Not too late for baby. For Taz.”

  “Taz?”

  “Baby father.”

  “Bring them light?”

  “Yah. Talk to cops. Give me up. Get good life for Taz and baby.”

  I understood now. She was offering to turn herself into the police if she could negotiate a deal for her family. I could help, but this step would destroy the new life she had made in the aqueducts as a member of the Dust Knights.

  “You sure?” I asked.

  She spoke in a ragged voice. “Testers say I feel moods, hear thoughts. Say my baby will even more. Taz didn’t test, but if baby is more, they say Taz is more, too.” She clenched her big fists at her sides. “I put up walls and walls and walls in my mind, but nothing works. Never enough. Don’t want that for baby, for Taz.” She spoke simply. “Help them.”

  It was the most I had ever heard her say at once. So she wasn’t just an empath, she was also a telepath. As a cartel assassin, she had lived the ugliest side of life; as a strong psion she would have absorbed it all. It was a wonder she hadn’t become a monster. I had never believed the drippy platitudes about what love could do for a person, but if this Taz had helped keep her sane in that cesspool of human nature called the Vakaar cartel, he had worked miracles.

  An insight came to me, like a falling mace. “The reason you sang for Kajada—did it for Taz, Yah? For the baby. Feed them. Protect.” The cartel had paid her well, even if she had been barely out of her teens when she started the job. “Protect family from the dark.”

  “Worked. For a while.” Bitterly she added, “Who protects them from me?”

  “Ah, gods, Singer.” I felt as if I were breaking in two. To give her family the “light” she sought, she would live in the darkness of prison for the rest of her life, which might not be long if the courts gave her the death sentence. I had no answers, so I just said. “Bring them here. Bring family.” No, that wouldn’t work, either. She couldn’t leave my apartment. She was lucky she had made it this far. Gods only knew how many security systems in Cries had sent warnings about her to the authorities. She’d never make it back to the aqueducts.