Coil

by Ren Warom

  Bone’s chuckle reverberates down the line, crackled by poor reception, and then he says, all seriousness, “You need to get back here. Little as I like the thought of taking you on official business into the Zone, let alone the Boreholes, you’re the head of this case, you need to be present.”

  “Can you get me in?” Stark’s not sure he wants the answer, he knows how hazardous it’ll be in the Zone for him, entering as a CO. The Boreholes will be even worse. He likes a challenge, but he’s fond of being alive, too, though he knows he often gives entirely the opposite impression.

  Bone sniffs. “Of course, I can. But you have to promise you’ll stand down from trouble. I can’t help you if you do any stupid shit. Now, are you coming back or what? I’m thinking Satyr’s a more concrete lead than Burneo.”

  Stark’s not going to question that. It’s logic pure and simple. “Sound reasoning. I blew my cover here, anyway. I’ll do a touch of recon, so my trip isn’t entirely wasted, then I’m on my way. I’ll buzz you when I’m close.” Bone grunts, then there’s a click and silence. Stark replaces the comm in his pocket. He looks down into the depths of the cavern. Breaking his cover wasn’t smart, but secretly, he’s always wanted Burneo to expect him, to know that judgment is coming. Justice for Teya. That unspoken desire causes him to say aloud; promise, not threat, apparent in his gruff voice: “I’m coming back for you, brother. You can count on it.”

  Chapter 12

  Bang in the middle of the Spires, the Zone dominates a crater that was once New Detroit city centre. Time and the creep of nature have softened it to resemble a deep geographical basin, but the scorched rock at its edges will never allow it to forget its origin. Thick clouds drift across its breadth, slow moving as vast cattle. Through their white bellies protrudes a disarray of mismatched architecture, sharp as teeth. Amongst unclassifiable composite creations rise spears of plascrete, the bleak stone roofs of ancient-looking terraces, assorted spires, and haughty glass skyscrapers, their surface reflections casting ghosts of light onto the backs of the clouds.

  Near the crater’s centre, the Zone Lake gleams oily black under mid-morning sun. Huge and lethargic, this blackened slick is fed at its arse end by both the Spine and the Wern. Their brown waters boil over steep cliffs at the Zone’s west border and race along to enormous weirs, where they burst through colossal outlet pipes to disappear beneath the lake surface, as if consumed, tamed. Stretched out across that surface are five piers, each crammed along its length with a tangle of spiked and aggressive masonry. Here, amongst bohemian malls and rag markets, between clean, white laboratories and the granite-faced splendour of the genetic industry’s corporate buildings, some of the most exclusive and private Zone clinics reside.

  In the Zone, modification’s the main trade. From surgical enhancement and augmentation to genetic re-coding or patching, whatever’s desired, as long as it’s legal, someone in the Zone caters to it, whilst the Boreholes beneath provide adequate surgeries and practitioners for an eye-watering range of illegal requirements. Here in the Zone, through delicate relationships with surgeons, modders, artists, and scratches, Morts negotiate for IDs when no other record exists. Imagine very little body left, but attached to the anklebone, a spike like those used in cock fighting. Chances are, it’s the work of Tyrone on Bash Street, or perhaps Pedro out on Pier Five, or tiny, shifty Misha at Lock House on Yarrow Square, three of many artists who make such spikes.

  If the inquiring Mort has a good relationship with the artist, or asks politely, they’ll make an effort to look through their records and provide ID info. In every case, it’s not just in who a Mort knows, but how they treat them, their aptitude for diplomacy. The Zone’s an independent state, owned, protected, and run by the Establishment, and the ability to maintain often tripwire working relationships is an essential skill. Consequently, Zone etiquette comprises an integral part of a Mort’s training. If they fail at any level, they find another profession, which is what makes Bone so unique.

  After his difficult start, his inability to gain their trust, he’s become revered here for his encyclopaedic knowledge of mods and his deep respect for Zone folk and their way of life. In recent years, their respect has come to encompass the purity of his flesh, the strength of his imagined convictions. They’ve recreated him as a legend, one the man himself has been caught up within almost as an afterthought. Usually he finds it uncomfortable, has no idea how to take it, but today it’s served him well, the guards at the Zone wall allowing Stark in purely on Bone’s rep, despite their intended destination.

  Now Stark and Bone stand at their next hurdle, the large black iron extrusions of the gates marking the entrance to the Boreholes, the helter-skelter network beneath the Zone. With them is a tall woman who stands mid-way in height between the squat breadth of Stark and the vertiginous gawk of Bone. She sports a blood red Mohican of medusa-like braids caught atop her head in a clasp to expose the stripes of jagged steel puncturing her skull. Rising from behind her ears to the edges of her Mohican, they turn her head into a savage display, a hedgehog ball of razor-sharp defences.

  She regards Bone with an amused lapis gaze, the specks of gold glittering. “You sure you want to take City Pork in there with you, Bone-Man?”

  Stark snaps his head around to glare at her and Bone chokes off a laugh behind his hand, spewing the lungful of smoke he’s just inhaled. “I’m sure.”

  “Your burden.” She sniffs. “I’d as soon leave him here. He’s going to shut mouths you might need open.” Bone just stares and waits until she carries on with a flippant, “Whatever.” She points at the gloom. “You go in and keep going straight, don’t deviate, there’s tunnels down there even I don’t know, you dig? You’ll reach a shop called Terrox, belongs to a guy named Striga. You give him my name first, and then ask about Satyr.” She jerks her spiny head at Stark. “You tell this tombstone to keep his lips zipped.”

  “All right, spike,” rumbles Stark, “less of that shit!”

  She raises a much-pierced brow at him, disdainful. “Whatever, dick. You just do as I said, or Bone-Man here is going to get about as much from these folk as you get blood from a stone.”

  Stark raises his hands, chuckling. “Okay, sister.”

  “Don’t mind him,” Bone says, sharing a grin with Stark. “I’ll make sure he behaves. Thanks, Regina, you’ve been a help.”

  “I’ve been a fucking idiot,” she replies, scornful. “If you come out of there with all the limbs you went in with, it’ll be a holy freaking miracle. I’m out. Try to stay intact.” And she strides off without a backwards glance.

  Bone drops his cigarette butt and grinds it beneath his toe, nodding to Stark.

  “Nice girl,” says Stark as they enter the lair of the Zone’s more unprincipled practitioners.

  “She’s not wrong,” Bone answers, tone dry. “Getting you into the Zone was one thing, entering the Boreholes could be seen as grounds for insanity. This place is for Skats and gangs, fucking psychos who get distinctly nervous when they smell pork.”

  Stark pulls at his suit. “You saying I should’ve come casual? Tried to blend in?”

  Bone snorts. “These guys can smell pork at a thousand paces.”

  “If I’d have known, I’d have worn pink,” Stark quips with heavy amusement, then looks Bone up and down. “You look like shit, by the way.”

  “I feel worse.”

  “Ever thought of trying a meal you have to chew?”

  “Ever thought of minding your own business?”

  “Nope.”

  The tunnel’s steep, heading deep into the ground, and they’re no more than fifty feet in before the last vestiges of surface light fade away, drawing uneasy darkness around them like bad company. No true breeze makes it this far, and the air’s unpleasantly clammy. Around slow vents, the sweating bricks of the tunnel are covered with flyers and vast works of graffiti, all spattered with Rorschach patterns of blood. Doubtless the aftermath of some recent Skat fight. The stench is all grease,
steel, and gore, the scent of a massacre in a machine shop. Small red lights overhead illuminate their way, making the blood gleam almost black against the bright chaos of the ornamental array it despoils.

  The Boreholes spiral for miles, this entry boulevard merely the tip of an amaranthine tangle, all of it dank, dark, and dangerous. Deeper in, just as the red lights space out to ten metres apart, reducing visibility to almost zero, the first small shops start to appear, casting out bright oases of radiance. These initial dens are all bespoke steel workers, tattoo gun merchants and dealers, who serve the needs of the surgeries, further in. The sound of lathes, polishers, and loud, insane music pours out of them, accompanying a sharp smell of heated metal, burnt plastic, and the underlying tang of sweat. Bone wonders how deep Satyr is, worries how they’ll get to him without trouble.

  A ragbag of Skats in brothel creepers and drainpipe jeans, their vari-coloured hair schooled to ducktail mohicans, begins to follow them in the gloom, flexing unnatural muscles and displaying spike-knuckle mods and fortified joints. Bone tries not to panic. Spaz knows they’re down here; he even sent a tag-team to follow them through the Zone—Bone heard their feet pounding across rooftops, their bird-like cries trailing them until they reached the Boreholes. It’s a given word will have spread about these watchers outside the gates and the implied expectation of good behaviour, which means these Skats are all show and no intention, towards him at any rate. Stark’s another matter entirely, and he’s radiating repressed hostility. Bone can see this going all sorts of pear-shaped.

  “How’d your first foray pan out?” he asks as a distraction, and out of genuine curiosity––Stark’s connections to Burneo intrigue him, as does his undeniable preoccupation.

  Stark breathes out slow. “I found the lake. The cavern.”

  Bone glances sidelong at the stocky man pacing along at his left side. “Big?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it unless you saw. It’s ridiculous. Weird. Hallucinogenic almost. Makes you see shit you haven’t seen.” Stark huffs, disgruntled. “I can’t fit my head around the size of it even now, and it’s only the first one. The caverns where they built the Spiral City are supposed to be even larger.”

  “Just don’t be getting any ideas about looking.”

  Stark throws Bone a look that just about screams, shut the fuck up. “I’m looking for Burneo,” he says, “not abandoned cities.”

  “Okay. Fine. So what about Burneo? Who was he?”

  Stark shrugs, clearly uncomfortable. “He used to be a man, just like you and me. An ordinary guy.”

  Bone chokes a little. “Ordinary?”

  Stark gives him a wry half-grin. “Well, maybe not ordinary, but a man, nonetheless, however strange. Whatever he is now, don’t forget that he was a man and that he’s acting as a man. The whole legend crap is the same as yours. Half based on what he’s become, and half based on the way it’s seen. It has little to do with the man himself.”

  Bone’s not surprised by Stark’s insight, but he’s deeply disturbed by the airing of it. He feels pried open, exposed. “You’re really not worried about going after him?” he asks. “I don’t know about you, but these subterranean places make me distinctly uncomfortable. You get lost and you’ll be real far from safety, from any kind of assistance.”

  Stark utters a dark chuckle. “Sometimes, brother, you’ve got to get lost to find your way, and when I find my way, when I find him,” he says, his voice filled with shadows, “I’ll find a way to put an end to all of this.”

  Something about that tone in Stark’s voice disturbs Bone even more deeply than Stark’s too perceptive observation. He asks quietly, “What if he’s not involved at all?”

  Stark stops walking. Several of the Skats shadowing them crowd in, menacing, but Stark doesn’t seem to see them; he’s focused on Bone. “You ever see any of the people who made it back from Burneo’s sewers? People he’s changed? You see what he does to them?”

  Bone glances around at the Skats. They seem confused by Stark’s lack of interest. He licks his lips, hoping the confusion keeps them from attacking. “No. But I’ve read reports; it’s an interesting research project.”

  Stark catches Bone’s eyes in a stare that seems to start from miles away. “I’ve seen some,” he tells him, voice weighted with repulsion. “One of them, think it was female, you couldn’t really tell. Don’t know how the poor thing was alive, the mess he’d made. Just a pair of eyes staring out from a pile of broken up crap that might once have been a body, lumps of steel wound into muscle and bone. I put a bullet through the skull. Felt like I was shooting a fucking puppy. I know they make a choice, I know they don’t go into it innocent, but what he does, it’s inhuman. And leaving that poor thing suffering, it would’ve been a cruelty, you understand?”

  Bone’s chest tightens as though his ribs have become fingers and curled into a fist. He nods. “I understand.”

  “Before he became what he is,” Stark continues, as if he hasn’t even heard, his voice low and intense, still miles away, “there was another girl. I had to put a bullet in her, too. Through the chest. The heart. That was just before he disappeared down there for good. Afterwards, like he’d planned it, all the unrest in the Wharf, the Gulley, the Outskirts, started to bubble in towards the rest of the Spires. Twenty years of gradual escalations, and now it’s like we’re trying to contain all of hell in a little paper bag.” Stark looks at Bone, who finds it almost impossible to hold a stare so bleak, so very lost. “I wonder at times if this hell we’re struggling so hard to contain started with that girl, that bullet. I wonder if, when he ends, it might not end with him.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to wonder,” Bone says.

  Stark smiles, it’s a thing of pain and horrid tension; makes Bone’s jaw ache to look at it. “That it is.”

  A thought strikes Bone. “Why is he in Rope’s game, then? If his thing has been such extremes of modification, why side with a killer who strips mods? It’s a huge degree of change.”

  Stark considers that for a moment. “It’s not his vision, but it is his cause. Message has got to be to the Notary, to the Zone. Something about mod restrictions, about taking down those last few barriers to modification chaos.” He laughs, a grim, dreadful sound. “As if that wouldn’t go wrong here just as much as trying to restrict mods has. Fucking madness.”

  Stark sets off again down the long, red-tinged subway. The Skats look at Bone, who shrugs and follows Stark, hoping the psycho-billy crazies will keep their distance. Stark’s unintended display of superior cool might just have been enough to make them decide to content themselves with keeping an eye on the intruders into a place they consider their responsibility, but with Skats, you never really know what might hold them back or set them off, they are not much beholden to convention.

  As he catches up with Stark, Bone has to ask, “Is Burneo sane enough, clever enough, to be aiding Rope? He’s supposed to be a raving lunatic. Supposed to be trying to make himself immortal by transforming into a machine.”

  Stark cocks a brow. “Dunno about immortal. But he was always smart as hell. Look at how he operates. Half Spires folk think he’s a fucking myth, wouldn’t believe such a creature could be real, despite the shit they see day in, day out, right on their doorstep. But every year, dozens of believers go down to the sewers to find him, and do we ever hear of them again? Like hell we do. He spirits them away into oblivion, and of those that resurface, they’re either too damn far gone to speak of what they saw, what happened to them, or dead. No witnesses. No proof. Nothing. Clever.”

  Bone recalls what he’s heard of Burneo, the man-machine whose whole body is a modification in progress. Those who seek him are deviants for whom even the most extreme modifications in the Boreholes aren’t enough, the type of folk who campaign endlessly for gut-churning perversions of the body to be passed for new clinical trials by the Notary. If the woman Stark shot in the head sought Burneo in the sewers, chose her fate, what is it Stark wants to believe he
re? Why does he really want Burneo? The anger’s real enough, but there’s something darker, much too personal, behind it.

  Stark’s got a reputation for digging his way through to the truth, but he’s making his own truth here, or hiding truth he doesn’t want to share. Bone thinks Stark has the capacity to be a very dangerous man. When he sets his mind to believing something, he goes for it at full speed, ploughing through any obstacle in his way, including, it would seem, his own logic. He’s not just a bull in a china shop, he’s a hammer in a world of glass people, bound to leave debris.

  Chapter 13

  Half an hour later, their Skat escort still in tow, Stark and Bone pass the first murky hollows, marking the entrance to offshoots from the boulevard. There in the heat, the dank air, the clamour and bustle, they finally find Terrox. It’s a ragged hole chopped out in a roughly semi-circular shape, selling bright ripples of metal and fierce spikes. At a worktable, curved around one edge of the hollow, a tangled-haired man in goggles and a leather apron stands polishing a riddle of metal on the whirring brush of a lathe.

  Beside him, through a grime-streaked cloth and down a dingy passage, is a surgery where you can get your ribs bifurcated, half pulled outside your body and encased, or spiked, in steel: Striga’s specialty. It’s not illegal to bifurcate ribs, but the dangers of pulling one half outside the body and adding foreign objects without the aid of expensive immunogen mods places his business just outside of what’s legal, forcing him to work down here.

  Though the Zone holds itself outside the Notary’s full control, it’s still subject to law everywhere but in this looping maze of a loophole, engineered to keep the Notary at bay. The loophole constitutes a major headache for the Notary, but they’ve no recourse to counter it as long as it hovers this close to legal and keeps its records clean. As Bone and Stark enter Terrox, the muffled resound of distant screams ricochets into the room from somewhere down that corridor. Stark tenses and reaches towards his holster, but Bone stops him with a cat-fast hand clamped around the forearm, praying the Skats outside haven’t seen. When Stark relaxes, he eases away and approaches the tangle-haired man at the lathe. The man knocks off the power switch, leaving the distant screams, the burr of noise from the tunnels, to fill the void.