“My dad can be a jaguar,” Lucy said. I winced. Thanks, Lulu.
“That was no jaguar this afternoon,” Alec said, raising his eyebrows.
“I didn’t like those teeth,” Lucy said. “Don’t do that one again, Dad. Why don’t you just be a wolf, like everyone else up here?”
Dolph lifted his head off his paws and roared with laughter. “She got you, Alec.”
Alec looked miffed. Lucy had put her finger on the weakness in his recreation of a San Damiano household. Everyone up here was a wolf. On San D, we always try for a good mix of animal forms. I can remember my mother allotting animals to a raggedy line of preteens, one finger pressed thoughtfully to her lips, referring to the ecosystem-balancing software shimmering above the kitchen table. Her word was law. But here on Ponce de Leon, we make our own decisions, for better or for worse. They call it discernment. And Alec had let himself be discerned right into becoming the leader of a wolf pack.
“When the shit hits the fan, we’ll be better off if we have a variety of skill sets,” he said. “That’s why I’m inviting y’all to stay with us. Improve the mix.”
“I’ll consider it,” I said. “But I got a low tolerance for San Damiano bullshit.”
I was referring, this time, to another glaringly obvious but unspoken fact: everyone around the fire was in animal form, except for the under-twelves, a couple of pregnant women who couldn’t Shift, Alec, and me. I would’ve liked to lounge in animal form, too. The woodsmoke, the warm night, and the good, rich food cried out for fur. But if I Shifted, it would signal submission to Alec, or else a challenge to his authority over his own household. Such bullshit.
I credited Lucy with being more aware of Shifter culture than most S-Town kids, but she didn’t know about its dark side. “What bullshit?” she asked innocently.
“Language,” I said automatically.
“You said it.”
“Your dad thinks we should live like normies,” Alec said. “I think that’s case by case, but on the whole, it doesn’t work.”
Dolph said, “Whereas Alec thinks our future is our past. I don’t entirely agree with that, either. We’re a spacefaring species, for better or for worse.”
“But we could lose our access to space,” Alec said. “Either the next attack on Mag-Ingat succeeds. Humanity in the Cluster undergoes major dislocations, the interstellar economy crashes, and the people who survive are the ones who can hunt their food and sleep in trees. Or else, the normies finally get tired of having us around.”
What he was saying about access to space was a good point. Access to space is power. One man with a spaceship can lord it over millions on the ground.
Dolph followed up the point. “Parsec’s in jail. The Great Bear got sold to Techworlders. The St. Clare is the only Shifter-owned spaceship left on Ponce de Leon.” He gazed at me. “Still planning to sell her?”
A little while later I went for a piss. Exiting the latrine, I tilted my head back. The stars were amazing up here. The Core was just one bright point among thousands. As I gazed up, the stars blurred and stretched out, as if I was on board my ship—but it wasn’t FTL blurring my vision now. It was tears.
The St. Clare was not mine, after all. She was a security guarantee for all the Shifters on Ponce de Leon. Lucy’s safety depended not on my selling her, but on my finding some way not to.
I owed this realization to Alec’s “San Damiano bullshit.” I went back to the fire and swallowed my pride. “With your kind permission, we’ll stay for a while.”
34
I rose early the next day, mainlined a cup of gritty Mazepardo-style coffee, and drove back to the city. Dolph was ahead of us on his bike. Robbie yawned in the passenger seat beside me. “Fuck that hunter-gatherer shit,” he said. “Naw, I don’t mean that, but it’s nice to be human again. You know what I mean, sir?”
We regrouped at the Savannah Grill, on 13th and Armstrong. It was a hole in the wall the size of a hangar. At lunchtime the people who worked at the helioba presses and back-street textile printers and chop shops of Smith’s End would flood the place, but at this hour it was empty. The morning sun jabbed under the tables, where cockchafers, the heralds of autumn, crawled, scraping their ruby wings together. We drank espresso, black and strong.
Robbie’s associates trickled in. I knew some of them: Sep, Marco, and Robbie’s rather terrifying sister, 22-year-old Cosima. She wore a cotton scarf with fur tassels on the ends. She unwound it and ceremonially folded it on the table before me.
I touched the tassels. Six of them. “Bears ain’t got much to lose, huh?”
“Na sir.” Cosima spoke street dialect. All these kids could speak normally, but we were in their territory here. “They totem’ hard to get ahold of. Ya gotta fork ‘em on the floor and kitt the tail at the root.”
The tassels—which were attracting flies—were the tails of bears. This was a ripper stunt. It’s interesting what happens when you cut off a body part that Shifters don’t have in human form. Sometimes it doesn’t show at all when they Shift back. That would be the case with bears, whose tails don’t use up much mass. If you cut the tail off a wolf or another creature with a long tail, you’ll end up with a dent in the buttocks or lower back area. It skins over, but I hear it keeps on hurting. There were six bears out there now suffering phantom pain.
I gave the trophy scarf back to Cosima. I did not mention how much it reminded me of a Traveller coat. These kids were our allies, and I had already learned that criticizing their methods was a waste of breath. All I said was, “Don’t tell me you guys vidded this?”
“Ya,” Robbie said. He added defensively, “We gotta pay the troops, yo.”
A cop car drove past, and although it did not slow down, everyone in the diner fell silent until it was out of sight. I remembered Alec’s prediction that the normies would get sick of having us around. It seemed less improbable now. Viral videos of tail-cutting were too commonplace for the cops to get worked up about, but Molotov cocktails get attention. If this feud escalated any further, we’d be facing an old-school crackdown.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s see where the Bad-News Bears are on this fine morning.”
I laid my phone on the table. I’d loaded Alec’s tracking software onto it. Larry Kodiak, Skylights, and Hokkaido were still out at Cecilia Parsec’s house in Ville Verde, but Gary Kodiak had got up early and come back into the city.
“Dolph?” I pointed to the tag moving south along the Strip.
“Yeah.” Gary K turned inland on 27th. “Looks like he’s going home.”
The Kodiak twins lived in two of Parsec’s properties in Shiftertown. Word was that Parsec had tried to sell those, too, to pay his legal bills, but he had no takers for those colonial-era dumps. The upper twenties had been slow to get redeveloped, in my view because so many bears lived there, and they are damn hard to kick out of their homes.
“Search Suzie Shivers,” Cosima said.
“They still going together?”
“Ya, like gin and tonic, yo.”
“She like that scarface look.”
I said, “We’re still missing one key player. Nunak.” It turned out that Nunak’s real name is James Whitehead. I had typed his name into the software, but I couldn’t see his tag. I zoomed out and moved the map view around.
“There.” Robbie pointed at the northern fringe of Mag-Ingat, beyond Shoreside University, where the city petered out in depots, overnight lots, and suburban cul-de-sacs. Nunak’s tag blinked over …
“Trident Overland,” I said, staring at the satellite reference picture of long-distance rigs parked outside a shabby warehouse. “Dolph, didn’t Parsec sell his trucking business, too?”
“Maybe he sold it to Nunak.”
The rumored distance between Nunak and Parsec was looking smaller and smaller. Was looking, in fact, like a misleading fiction. The old rumors of Parsec’s dislike for the polar bear must either have been exaggerated, or if they were real, Parsec had got over i
t when he landed in jail and found himself in need of friends.
Friends who would sign their names to fake documents of sale, so that Parsec could keep control of at least some of his businesses.
Friends who would take receipt of half a million in dirty money from a blackmail scheme.
I drank the bitter dregs of my espresso and stood up. “Dolph, why don’t you take some of these guys and mosey on up to 27th? This seems like a good time to stop by and say hey to Gary K and Suzie. You might even find empty bottles and accelerants in their shed.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Pay a call on Mr. Whitehead.”
*
Morning rush hour traffic on Creek crawled. Crowd-control drones rode the onshore wind overhead, hawk-winged, obvious. Those were new. They backed my feeling that the police were shifting into crackdown mode. It would have started when Parsec lost control of the Shoreside precinct. The cops down there used to be a disgrace to their badges, but at least they were on our side; well, on his side, but their indolence made up for it. In hindsight, Parsec’s era was starting to look like the good old days.
I’d just hit 100th when Nunak started moving. His tag swung out of the Trident Overland depot, heading north. He cut beneath Upperway and kept on going.
I called Dolph. “Are you seeing this?”
“Yup.”
“I’m gonna go after him.”
“He’s on the Buonaville road.”
“What do you think? There’s nothing out there …”
“Except the prison.”
“Exactly.”
“He might be going to visit Parsec in lockup.”
“Yeah.” I smiled humorlessly. “And that’s a conversation I’m interested in joining in on.”
Traffic noise swelled and faded in the background. “I’ll go with you.”
“You wouldn’t make it in time. Stick to the plan. Go after Gary K. The Kodiaks are the dangerous ones. This guy is just a patsy.” I both believed what I was saying, and didn’t believe it. Nunak was the key to the whole scheme.
I filled up my truck’s battery at a charging station on 110th. The Buonaville road would be a bad place to run out of juice. Half an hour later I achieved escape velocity from the city. Nunak had gotten ahead of me while I was stop-starting through traffic, but I still had him on the tracking software. Unlike the inland hills, the coast has full wireless coverage. I broke the speed limit as much as I dated, steadily closing the gap.
Less hilly than the Cascaville road, the Buonaville road cuts through the coastal jungle. The Tunjle, is what we call it: the Tunja jungle. It makes the woods around Alec’s place look like a public park. Roadkill littered the road in such profusion that it looked like it had been raining giant frogs and narcosloths, so called because they secrete a powerful anesthetic in their anuses. Every bump of my truck’s wheels over a corpse was a tiny victory for civilization.
I shared the highway with self-driving and manned trucks, the former making the run to Buonaville, the latter heading further out, to the remoter colonies on the coast.
And of course, I shared it with Nunak.
I caught up to within a couple klicks of him, and stayed there for three hours.
Nunak didn’t stop for lunch. There was no place to stop at. He may have brought something along. I should’ve bought some food at the charging station, but I hadn’t. Hunger cramped my stomach, making me edgy and impatient, as Nunak, and then I, reached Buonaville just shy of 2 PM.
It was a miserable little town. Hacked out of the jungle on a rocky stretch of the coast, where the cliffs broke into a deepwater harbor, Buonaville was founded in the early days when colonists optimistically supposed that terrestrial fish stocks could out-compete the PdL’s pseudokrakens, jellies, and rainbow sharks. Buonaville’s future as a fishing port had died on the drawing board. However, it was still a good harbor, and where there is a good harbor, there are Gillies. That’s who mainly lived there now. Their fish farms—ringed by shark netting—dotted the silver shield of the sea.
Buonaville Penitentiary stood on a hill above the harbor, visible from everywhere in town, like a concrete ship about to set sail into the sky. Satellite dishes, radio antennas, and fire towers poked up from within the maximum-security wall surrounding the complex. It radiated badness.
I expected Nunak to continue on up to the prison. Instead, he stopped in town. I had his phone and his car on the tracking software; the tags overlapped, proving that he hadn’t got out of his car. He was just sitting there on a side street.
I hung a hard right at the next cross street, spattering some Gillies with water from a street-wide puddle, and pulled over to the curb. The sun baked the rickety buildings and mountainous garbage dumps that spring up wherever Gillies go.
I sat there for a few minutes, waiting for Nunak to do something.
He didn’t, so I got out of my truck and went to get something to eat.
35
There was a burger joint on the corner. Cristo Rey umbrellas shaded sun-bleached outside tables. I went in and ordered a fishburger. Rubbish on the floor, stink of fish guts, cats fighting in the sunlit door to the back yard. Gillies.
They had reddish slits on their necks, closed up tight like scars. Bundles of webbing like crumpled clingfilm between their fingers. Big flapping feet. Chests broader and deeper than normal, hips slimmer. Gillie women are said to go through hell in childbirth. Hasn’t stopped them spreading their shiny-skinned, lank-haired genes all over the Cluster, wherever there are oceans and fish.
You might wonder why, if Irene was right about the secret agenda behind the ShifterKids Summer Experience!!, the Fleet didn’t simply use Gillies for whatever they were cooking up. The answer would be that Gillies can’t pass military cognition tests. The genetic engineering seems to have done something to their IQs, or maybe it’s just too much swimming. Anyway, they haven’t got much upstairs.
My burger was burned on one side and raw on the other, slapped between two halves of a bun that had been thawed in the microwave, but I was so hungry it tasted all right. I took it outside and listened to Gillies quietly speculating about my parentage and sexual habits, while Nunak sat in his car a couple of blocks away.
My phone rang.
Aw, not again.
“Hey, Bones.”
“Tiger. What happened? You were gonna call me back.”
“I was just about to get back to you,” I lied.
“Yeah, right. Whatcha doing in Buonaville?”
Of course, he could track me at the touch of a button. He had the real version of the software I was running on my phone. “It’s called reconnecting,” I said. “Long FTL trips screw with your mind and body. When I get home, I like to get out into nature, breathe the sea breezes, stretch my legs.” I licked tartar sauce off my fingers. “Enjoy local cuisine.”
A pause, and then a roar of laughter. “Good one. So your little trip up the coast has nothing to do with our mutual friend.”
“Course not. Prisons are unhealthy places.”
“He ain’t there, anyway.”
“No?” I blinked, thrown. In that case, what was Nunak doing here?
“I warned you how it was going to be. It came down to jurisdictional issues, and we lost.”
The truth dawned. D’Alencon was talking about Rafael Ijiuto. “Shit. He walked?”
“Sure did.”
My thoughts raced. “Did he go home to the Darkworlds?”
“Not yet. Guess he’s having trouble finding anyone to take him out there.”
So Ijiuto was walking around Mag-Ingat. Did he still have his TrZam 008, the twin to Pippa’s? So what if he did? I no longer had a bot that could read the device. All the same, I wanted to talk to him. Yes, talk. For starters. After that, it might get ugly for the crown prince of New Gessyria.
I almost asked d’Alencon where Ijiuto was lurking at now, but erred on the side of caution. “You win some, you lose some, I guess.”
“That�
��s right. We still got Parsec, anyway. Matter of fact, that’s why I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. We’re bringing him into the city today for a pretrial hearing. In connection with that, the prosecutor’s office wants to go over a few details with you and your employees …”
A cold sense of panic lodged in my gut. D’Alencon didn’t say exactly what details they wanted to discuss with us, but it sounded like the holes in Irene’s frame-up may have grown too large to ignore. My attention wandered as I tried to decide what to do about it.
“The hearing is tomorrow. So, we gotta do this today. When are you available?”
I filed away the silver lining that at least he wasn’t asking about our Hurtworlds run, and negotiated a meeting at 9 PM. “You familiar with Snakey’s?”
“The Shifter bar on the Strip?”
“Yeah.”
“I gotta wear an animal costume?”
“No, they hand out badges at the door that say DON’T EAT ME.”
I hung up and checked on Nunak. He still hadn’t moved. I called Dolph, without much hope of getting him—he and the others had turned their phones off once they got into position, to hide their activities on 27th Street. To my surprise, Dolph picked up. Video and all.
“Lost them.” He was squatting on a street corner, smoking. Robbie, beside him, kicked a soda can against the wall. The antique brickwork told me they were still in the twenties. “Gary K only came home to switch vehicles. Wasn’t here ten minutes.”
“Where to?”
“That’s what I’m saying. We’ve lost them. Look at the software.”
I split the screen and pulled the map back to Mag-Ingat. All the bears apart from Nunak had vanished.
“Gary had another car waiting for him at his house. Plenty of places in Smith’s End you can pick up third-hand burners with old registration codes. Heck, Skylights’s cousin runs a place like that. They’ve turned off their phones, dumped their cars, gone dark.”
“Guess you can teach a dumb ursine new tricks. Listen, Dolph. Bad news from downtown.” I told him about d’Alencon’s call. “Can you make Snakey’s at twenty-one hundred hours?”
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