by Ren Warom
“Yes?” he asks, terse, slightly rude. He doesn’t remove his goggles, but it’s obvious he’s spied Stark and isn’t impressed.
“I’m B—”
“Bone-Man, I know, you’re welcome here. But why,” the man snaps, still fixed on Stark, “do you bring pork into my shop?”
Bone waits until the man’s gaze returns to his face. “Regina sent me,” he tells him. “You’re Striga, yeah? Regina says you know where Satyr is. That’s all we want, just directions to his place.”
The goggles are pushed upwards, revealing orange eyes with vertical slits of pupils like a snake. “I’m Striga, all right. Regina send him, too?”
Bone smiles. “Not really. She said best to leave him tied up outside.”
Striga cracks a grin, and sharpened teeth flash in the dim lighting by virtue of the metals encasing them. “You should’ve listened to her,” he says. “Down where Satyr is, they eat live pork.”
A long trudge into hell later, they head into yet another side-tunnel off-shoot, following a simple scrawl of a map doodled in haste on a scrap of ill-cured leather Bone suspects is human skin. They’re both exhausted. Streaks of grime riddle their faces, their arms. They’ve abandoned the idea of jackets, leaving them in a heap somewhere far behind, and wander along in shirtsleeves, see-through with sweat. Their heads wring with it, too, hair plastered flat to boiling foreheads. It’s small relief that none of the punters or their considerable Skat escort are any better off.
Satyr’s place is deep in what’s known as the Apex, a collection of natural tunnels found whilst digging the Boreholes eastwards. It’s become the place where only the most illicit of the surgeries available can be found. Satyr’s shop is a small, womb-like obtrusion within the rock, dripping milky water from various tiny stalactites on its roof. A sputtering neon sign is welded over the opening. If it worked, the shop would be called Scourge, but half the letters are out and instead it reads “sore.” Stark chokes with laughter as Bone drags him inside.
Satyr’s in his surgery, and Bone and Stark are forced to stand watching his arm-deep intrusion into the tender-looking cavity he’s sliced into a man’s gut. It makes Bone, accustomed to the view under skin and past muscle, a little queasy. He’s used to seeing this sort of handling on a dead body, not on a soul who expects to wake up from anaesthesia in a few hours, and he realises this is why Striga’s shop runs to a soundtrack of screams.
After a moment, Satyr pulls his mask down under his chin and grins at them, busying his hands once again in the viscera of the man on the table.
“Well, well,” he says, “The Bone-Man and a genuine side of pork. To what do I owe this insalubrious trespass?”
Bone nods. “We want to talk about some tattoos you scratched a few months back.”
Satyr raises a brow, expressing surprise. “Months?” he says. “Make it last week and you’d be right.”
Stark and Bone exchange stunned glances and Stark exclaims, “A week?”
Satyr nods, he’s found what he was looking for, a vaguely healthy looking section of lower intestine, and is preparing his needles, a 3.5 mm and a 4 mm. “That’s right,” he tells Stark, then volunteers, “They started coming about seven months back. A whole flock of them at first.” He chuckles and leans in to concentrate on his piercing. “I was a bit taken aback, you understand. My tattooing skills were always a little … deficient.”
“No shit,” mumbles Bone.
Satyr glances up, his eyes dark with humour. “As I said, deficient, but they came and they paid and who the hell am I to question what these idiots will pay good money for?” He pokes the man he’s working on. “Take this moron here. This is the third time this month he’s been in. I’ve had to remove two lengths of necrotising intestine, but he still wants more of it pierced. Fucker’ll be shitting out of a nostril if we remove much more. He’s got a colon like a little finger.” He blows snot out of one nostril onto the floor of the surgery, leaving a smear of dark blood on the side of his nose. “They’re dumb, but I don’t ask questions. That’s the beauty of this little world down here. No fucking questions. You do what you’re paid to, and if they die, it’s their fault, their choice.”
“Right,” says Stark, his voice hard, angry, “and you have no responsibility whatsoever.”
Satyr stops for a moment, his largest needle stuck, a spit of silver, amongst purplish coils. “No,” he says, betraying only light amusement. “I’m a mod-surgeon. I work the Apex. You come to me, you know what you’re coming for. I’m not here to act as anyone’s conscience. I’m not their fucking nursemaid. I’m here to cut, to pierce, scarify, and otherwise mangle organs. If you don’t want that, then don’t come. And if you do, don’t ask me to feel any kind of guilt for your choices or their consequences.”
Bone’s impatient to get back to the point. He gives Stark a fierce look to silence further argument. “The tattoos,” he asks. “You said you had one a week ago?”
Satyr nods. “End of last week. So a few days ago. They used to come regular, almost in packs. One after the other, like there was a damned line. Now I’ll get maybe one every week or so.” He sighs. “That was some good money for almost nothing.”
Bone’s feeling dangerously off-centre, as if the ground beneath his feet has shifted, become fluid. He doesn’t know what to say, to ask. He glances at Stark and sees the same look of bewilderment in his eyes, an identical air of loss. He raises his brows at Stark in a silent plea. Stark clears his throat.
“Packs?” he asks Satyr, his voice cracking on the word.
“That’s right.” The energetic movement of Satyr’s hands never ceases as he replies. “Three or four tags a day, every week they’d come, two or three days of it without fail. Then the numbers started tailing off, and now, like I said, I’ll see one at a time. Still fairly regular, but not like it was.”
Stark swallows. “They, er … tell you what it was for?”
Satyr frowns. “No,” he says, as if the very idea is ludicrous. “No one’s required to explain anything down here. They pay, I do.”
Bone finds his voice at last. “Do they seem at all reluctant?”
Satyr flips a loop of metal through a series of pierced holes, winding it around the loop of small intestine and shrugs. “Not really. They look like everyone I get down here, determined and brainless.”
“Do you have their details?”
At this, Satyr stops entirely. He seems reluctant to answer, but Bone lets the silence draw out, as does Stark, and eventually, defensive, Satyr tells them, “No.”
Bone lets out a furious deluge of the most repellent curses he can draw upon. “Even you fucks are required to get their details!” he yells, advancing upon the table. “What the fuck were you thinking? If you’re found out, the Establishment will rip your fucking face off and shove it up your arse.”
Until Bone mentions the Establishment, Satyr’s all fixed up to fight, scalpel raised, teeth bared, but at their name, he pales, drops the scalpel, and steps back, raising his hands in placation.
“Look,” he says, his voice shaking now. “I usually push, but these people paid triple.” His face begs them to understand. “They wouldn’t put down their names, only the tattoo tags they wanted. All their records, all I have, are the tags. I can give you those and I can give you whoever comes here next. Just don’t grass me in.”
Bone’s still standing over the table, belligerent, as Stark explodes. “You really think they’re blind to this? Are you that insane?”
Satyr shoves the intestines back into the cavity, hard. “They don’t hold us to much scrutiny. We’re all of us just struggling to get by. I took a chance I was given. I won’t regret it, and I won’t justify my actions to fucking pork.”
Bone leans further forwards, every line of his body an implied threat. “If you don’t want to regret this, Satyr, you give those records and hold that next tattoo job. Hold them till we get here. I don’t care how you do it. Anaesthetise them, if you have to. You do that, and
I won’t accidentally let anything slip next time I see Spaz, understand?”
Satyr’s mouth whitens. “You have my word.” He jerks his head to a metal drawer unit in the corner of the surgery, crammed into a slight depression in the rock. There’s a slender, rather outmoded alu-glass monitor on top of it, jacked into a huge battery. “Tag records are in the top drawer, in a red folder. You take them and leave me your cell number in their place and go. Please. I have work to do, and the longer you two stay here, the more curious people who I don’t want even thinking about me are going to get.”
As they exit Scourge to begin the long trek to the surface, their Skat patrol in tow, Stark keeps looking sidelong at Bone, his face full of questions, and when they reach their jackets, still in a heap by the filthy wall, Bone finally cracks.
“What the fuck’re you staring for?”
Stark screws his jacket to a ball rather than putting it back on. It’s soaked with sweat and foul with dirt. “Way you spoke about Spaz,” he says. “Got me to thinking is all.”
“Care to share?”
“I’m not judging,” he says as they resume their exit, “because I know you have to do your job. It’s just … look … the Establishment machinates a great deal of the shit we at City deal with.”
“And you wonder if I’m not in bed with the devil?”
“I do.”
Bone doesn’t reply at first. When he does, it’s thoughtful, considered. “Spaz offered the hand of friendship after I was made Head Mort at Gyre West. I got the feeling that it would be impolite to reject it, and so I didn’t.” Bone looks at Stark. “Maybe that’s not very commendable, but the alternative is to say no to the Establishment, and the fact is that saying yes means I get to give some extra families their loved ones to bury. That’s a lot. It’s worth the price I’m paying. I’m not much good for anything else.”
“You ever thought to question why he’s made a point of befriending you when it doesn’t benefit him?”
“Of course I have,” Bone says, “but never to his face. Questioning the Establishment is about as unwise as it gets, and Spaz is the fucking Establishment.” He gives Stark a frank, meaningful grin. “He has a pretty harsh policy concerning people who ask the wrong sort of questions.”
“Extermination?”
Bone shakes his head. “The last person who asked too hard about the Establishment had his mouth removed. Nothing left of any of it. Lips, teeth, tongue, vocal chords, all gone. Just a hole in their place.”
“He die?”
“No. He isn’t dead. He just can’t ask stupid questions anymore.” Bone shudders and strides on, too fast, saying over his shoulder, “Let’s get the fuck out of here and read those records. I can’t breathe in this fucking place.”
Out of the Apex, the Boreholes, sitting in light refracted by mounded banks of snow, Stark and Bone neck bottles of water. The cold is fierce and they’re both shivering, but they’re swathed in shock and silence and barely notice it. Stark’s reading the records for the third time in a row. Bone’s read them more than once himself, and still can’t digest the contents; they won’t filter through. Stark lowers the papers to his lap. He’s drenched in sweat and grime and his fingers leave smears on the documents.
“There’s too many,” he says, his voice laden with defeat.
Bone breathes out, trying to hunt for reason. “They can’t all be waiting somewhere, already bound, hoping we find them. It’s not possible.”
“But we have to assume they might be,” Stark says heavily.
“So, what do we do?”
Stark sighs. “I’ve got every man I can spare out looking with Faran’s Buzz Boys. They’ve found nothing, only LoveHeart, and it takes hours to search even one of the deserted tenements on any given street near likely sewer exits. Too dangerous to hurry it. I don’t anticipate we’ll have anything new any time soon.”
“So?”
The silence catches like a chill, stretching out, long and frozen. Bone knows what Stark will say. He wants to prolong the moment, because he knows what his response will be, and it frightens him. He’s invested in this case. It’s a puzzle directed solely at his particular abilities, and not just his abilities, but him. For him. To him. About him. These bodies are his body. Their controller, Rope’s, remarkable ability to coerce them into cooperating with the removal of their identity parallels his experience with Leif. Like Rope’s victims, Bone chose the label locked into his empty skin. He wants to excise it, wants to excise his father with it, and it’s easy to convince himself that helping Rope’s victims is the answer. By freeing them, he may free himself. He understands it’s illogical, but that’s how his end will begin, and you can’t have an end without first having a beginning.
At last, Stark speaks. “I’m going back to the cavern tomorrow,” he says.
Bone nods. “Okay,” he replies. “Okay.” He readies himself internally, shoring up his reserves because he left his comfort zone behind what seems like forever ago and all he does these days is wander ever further into territories that make him feel thin, excoriated. “I’m coming with you,” he says.
Chapter 14
It’s about 3:00 a.m. Lower Mace is submerged in a profound hush, but then, this part of Lower Mace is a residential area next to the Zone, with no clubs or bars to speak of. It’s the safest route in, but it feels dangerous moving in such silence. Skyscrapers surround her, a modern day henge illuminated by the white glow of solar lamps in lieu of starlight. They loom, almost threatening, making the delineations between light and shadow severe. Leaving no clear line to be taken that will evade unwanted eyes.
Lever glides along at street level, sticking as close to shadow as possible. Tension thrums along taut tendons, vibrates through muscles, and she takes extra care to move unnoticed, alerting none of the runners she knows must be above to her presence. At night, in this preternatural stillness, the streets are their webs, the tiniest movement or sound will alert them to her presence, and it’s imperative she reaches Spaz unseen. Lever shivers. She’s cold inside. She’s never been this frightened, never had the need. It’s a new experience to feel openly threatened and out-manoeuvred. She won’t run from it, but she has to see Spaz, has to have Spaz see her. Reaching the Zone’s edge, beside the twin roar of the Spine and Wern waterfalls, she peers over the edge, and a deep, burning ache blooms in her chest, to see the Zone glistening in the darkness, all those familiar haunts and heights contained within sheer walls, secured from the city. She’s not been back in weeks, too damned long, and the loss of it is a hole in her centre, ragged and sore, a sort of homesickness. It surprises her. She’s never seen the Zone, or the Spires, as her home. There’s no way she can scale those walls, so she’ll have to use a loop.
Gang-loyal Monks created the first loops as safety routes, but they seem to spring up by themselves these days, and only gangs know them all and use them. Loops are a network of etheric pathways, strung across the city like a cat’s cradle, above and below. They compress time and distance, make the city an easier, safer place to navigate. It’s how she’s made it here so quickly, how she’ll get back before her absence is noted, though she still has to hurry and it won’t be easy, not here. Most of the loops around the Zone are as heavily guarded as the gates, but Lever knows one beside the Spine she can use to sneak in. It’ll take her near to Pillion, near enough to Spaz’s home that she won’t have to worry about evading the Establishment runners.
She slides down the cliff, under cover of the roaring of the waterfalls and their clouds of vapour, on a steep path a long way away from the conventional lift platforms and travel-pods. It’s scary steep and slippery, and her feet slither down the precipitous stone barely under her control. Her heart pounds so loudly she’s worried some random gate guard might pick it up even under her watery camouflage. Half of them were once runners, making them perfectly suited to a life as a gate sentry, always on the alert. Rising to a half-crouch, she runs the last fifty yards, not as steep, though just as w
et. The waterfalls are almost equidistant between the west and south west gates, and directly ahead of her, through a thick stand of trees, beyond a natural rock formation, are the gated semi-circles through which the Spine and the Wern enter the Zone. She flits amongst the trees to the rock, towering in craggy leaps over twenty feet above her head. This outcropping ranges between the banks of the Wern and the West Gate, a forbidding wall on its own merits, but still easier to scale than the Zone’s precipitous defences.
The Spine’s drilled a channel through these rocks, a too-narrow tunnel, widening further along to become an open passageway. That’s where the loop is, and Lever scrambles up and over, the solid gold fingertips of her left hand clicking on the stone. She lowers herself in cautious increments to a narrow shelf just above the water. This route is perilous, dipping in and out of the rock and often disappearing for several feet at a time, requiring leaps only a runner could make. Even the most experienced runners have come a cropper here, but Lever’s got a psi-gen implant to help steady and guide her leaps. Still, she holds her breath as she makes her way towards the faint purple shimmer of the loop entry, far too aware of the rushing power of the Spine mere inches away. It’s about twelve feet deep here, savage with riptides and forced by the compression of the rock to terrifying speeds. She wouldn’t even want to go down it in a white water raft, safety-jacketed to the gills, let alone fall in and have to attempt a swim. These rocks would mangle her.
As her fingers dip into the loop she exhales a sigh of relief, but moves no faster, the smallest mistake will cost too much. She edges in, slithering the last few inches, and then she’s off, running, ignoring the mild headache these things always give her. She pops out behind an empty marketplace and, in her element, fleets through the narrow streets to Spaz’s home, scaling the walls swift as a shadow across street lamps, her hands and feet sure on the brick even under cover of darkness. She slips in through the window, and as her feet soundlessly touch the floor, a small bedside light pops on. His eyes reflect in the glow like a wolf’s.