Indrani nodded and finally grinned back at him. ‘I think I know where we might find one of those. Perhaps if he were to capture a few of the Commission and threaten to eat them …?’
They both laughed and hugged, the baby wriggling in protest between them.
They sobered as the next few stops brought more eerie scenes of piled-up bodies. Finally they reached a station where the lights worked properly. Here, however, there were no people at all. It was like the paradise so desired by the man who’d shared their car the previous day; a place to walk where nobody would ever bump into you.
‘Can we get out here?’
Indrani bit her lip and jiggled the baby. It was so strange to see her like that with her own child. As if she’d skipped past Stopmouth in the race for adulthood. He didn’t feel like a chief beside her. He was still just a boy.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘Remember, you didn’t want to stop too close to the warship? They’ll only be waiting for us there.’
‘All right. You can go out. It’s just … Where are all the people?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Let me have a look. I’ll wait a few dozen heartbeats next to the car and if I feel I’m getting sleepy, you can let me back in.’
She nodded.
As soon as the door had hissed shut behind him he took a deep breath. The air did taste strange. Like metal on his tongue. But he didn’t feel drowsy. On the contrary, he now realized how much he hated huge numbers of people; how close he’d been to collapse over the last few horrible days. The sight of an empty corridor in front of him pulled his lips up into a smile. The only thing strange about the platform was a slight tremor he could feel in the soles of his feet. It was as if the Roof had a pulse he’d never noticed before, like a dying person, irregular and faint. He shrugged. Perhaps Indrani could make sense of it. He waved. ‘I can breathe fine,’ he said. He wanted her to hurry, desperate for a drink.
A moment later she stood beside him, and both turned to watch the car close its doors and speed away.
‘We’re stuck here now,’ she said. ‘Come on. We need a north corridor.’ Whatever that was.
Stopmouth followed her into a passage as eerily empty as the station had been and longer than any he’d seen before. Windy, sinuous beasts wriggled along the walls, some of them eating their own scaly tails.
‘It goes on for ever!’ he said. ‘I can’t see any turn-offs, can you?’ The far end was nothing but a speck, and all the doors along its length were shut. None they passed would open to Indrani’s command.
‘They were locked,’ she said, ‘not abandoned. The people are either still inside or planning to come back soon. Maybe this is one of those clean areas they showed on the walls, remember? Where the Virus has been burned out and everybody can move back into it afterwards?’ She smiled sadly. ‘Except we know that can’t be true, don’t we, love?’
Even more disturbing was the fact that none of the walls would give them a drink. But surely they didn’t have far to go – surely not.
A little way down the corridor they found an open doorway. An apartment, much larger than any Stopmouth had seen in his time in the Roof. Homes were supposed to be getting smaller, but ten people could have lain down here in comfort.
Indrani held out her hand. ‘Apartment, give me some water.’
A beaker emerged from the substance of the wall, but it was empty. It clattered to the floor and was not reabsorbed.
‘We’ve found a desert,’ said Indrani, her voice hoarse. ‘Nothing but a desert.’
They continued along the endless corridor, not finding any trace of recent occupation. The scaly beasts of the wall – snakes, they were called – undulated around sealed doors and across the ceiling. Sometimes their great bodies dived under the floor, only for the head to surface on the far side of the corridor.
Stopmouth and Indrani walked for a whole two tenths of a day, and still they could see no end to their journey.
‘Are you sure we stopped only half a day’s walk from the warship?’ Stopmouth asked.
‘I can’t be sure of anything any more …’ Indrani said. ‘It’s what I ordered. A sector away, I said.’
‘And all these sectors are the same size?’
‘Mostly,’ she muttered, and saw the look on his face. ‘I know, I know. I should have been more careful, but the Roof isn’t co-operating very well, is it? Ideally, each sector holds the same number of apartments.’
‘Maybe they’re all in this one corridor,’ he said. ‘Those snake things are just a single long creature, aren’t they? And this is Snake Sector.’
She sighed. ‘You must be right. What a place to run out of water! Come on, we have to keep going.’
They passed more open apartments on their way. None of them had anything to drink. One room was choked with furniture, and no amount of waving from Indrani could make the floor reabsorb it. Even as they watched, a box emerged from the wall to land on a table. Other shapes jutted from every surface – half a chair, a cup – unable to emerge fully for lack of space.
And the snake continued. Finally the little black dot in front of them resolved itself into a doorway filled with flickering light. ‘Can you hear that?’ asked Indrani.
Stopmouth shook his head, afraid to speak.
‘Listen.’
He did, straining with all his might. A faint draught ruffled their hair. The baby stirred sleepily in her mother’s arms. And then he heard it. The dripping of water falling into a pool. Indrani saw the look on his face and grinned.
‘Come on!’
She led the way at a jog that woke her daughter. Indrani greeted the baby’s wails of complaint with laughter and didn’t stop moving. Stopmouth smiled, his eyes now on the exit from Snake. It was further than it looked, and he wondered at the perversion of the people who could design such a place where water would retreat from a hunter even as he ran towards it.
He’d never been so thirsty in his life. It had to be the Medicine, he realized. He’d hurt his knee fighting the stick-men and the nanos needed large quantities of food and water to heal him properly. No problem, no problem at all for a normal Roofdweller living in normal times. But dangerous in a desert. His throat felt like it was burning and his vision made the whole corridor waver before him as though he were looking at it through the haze above a fire.
A hundred paces separated them from the exit. No lights shone from beyond it, but they could feel the cold air that wafted from out of the blackness and hear the delicious tinkling of liquid. They had to stop as soon as they had passed the end of the corridor, for what little light they had came from the corridor behind them. A large pool blocked their way.
‘You can’t swim, of course,’ said Indrani.
But Stopmouth didn’t care about the possibility of being trapped here – or indeed anything else. He got down on his hands and knees and scurried towards the pool. He cupped his palms and had them halfway to his mouth before he realized that something was wrong. His skin tingled. His parched tongue didn’t want him to stop, but as he hung there over the pool, the tingle turned uncomfortably sharp.
‘Oh no!’ he croaked. Not in the Downstairs!
Trails of slime ran from holes of rot in the ceiling and were spreading along the walls.
20. THE AIR OF PRIDE SECTOR
HIRESH RECEIVED NO training, for the Academy staff had all been sent to quell the Rebellion or to keep the fighting away from the warship. There wouldn’t have been time, anyway, to make him a proper Elite.
He found he didn’t care. After the injections his whole body had burned with a fever. He’d heard about this in the Academy; about the tiny machines even now digging into the muscles of his body, re-forming them for speed and strength and endurance.
But he just felt sick and cloudy all the time, with none of the pride he’d expected. He’d always been small and skinny and starved. Now his clothing was beginning to tighten around his arms and legs, and all he cared about was what T
arini would think of that.
He hadn’t been allowed to speak to her again from the moment he’d heard about the end of the world. Any attempt to communicate met with the blank wall of an ancient jamming device. So whenever he was conscious he recorded as much of his experience as he could to share with her later.
He kept playing back memories of holding her hand after their one long kiss in the shuttle. The kiss itself, because it had happened during a quake, had not been recorded, although he tried again and again, in the midst of his fever, to re-create it.
Sometimes the walls of his room would come alive with pictures of Rebels in exile on the surface. The forces of the law sent down thousands of them every day. Others, the peaceful ones, the co-operators, earned rewards. Smiling, they frolicked in the vast open spaces of the ‘cleared areas’.
‘Live free!’ blared the wall. ‘All contamination gone and the old days restored!’
Hiresh turned away, shaking with fever and longing for those ‘old days’ that he himself had never experienced. But he knew the truth of the smiling faces; knew what lay in store for Tarini and his mother and everybody else he’d ever met if Indrani could not be found and made to part with her secret.
Dr Narindi woke him with a call. You’re needed, he said. We’ve found them. Quickly now!
Hiresh looked at his apartment wall. Some strange boy stared back from its burnished surface. He looked haggard. Sick, even. Strangely sheened with sweat. But his body had become that of a man, a hero. As though the Roof had manipulated the mirror to play tricks on him or to flatter his vanity.
A uniform emerged from the wall, a single red stripe running down each leg, and it moulded itself to his new form while instructions from the doctor wrote themselves into his memory.
One last thing, sent the doctor. There is a present for you. In the corner.
Sure enough, a strange object lay gleaming on the floor. The Roof identified it as a hammer. A priceless antique made of steel rather than the more flexible bio-metal he was used to.
He picked it up, unsure what the doctor wanted of him.
Bend it.
‘What?’
You heard. Make a little arch of it.
Hiresh had to strain to obey. But not much – not too much at all. In moments he had the head of the hammer butting up against its own tail.
Good. I wanted you to see. Now go. You have your orders.
Outside the apartment, a squad of Wardens waited for him. Most carried pistols, a technology so simple it could be relied on to survive the coming downfall. Two others bore little lasers from the early Age of Expansion.
Such weapons were so dangerous that their manufacture had been banned long ago. Only registered Wardens could fire the few that remained.
A tough-looking middle-aged woman came forward. She limped ever so slightly. ‘Captain Hiresh’ – even the newest of the Elite automatically became Captain – ‘I’m Sergeant Divya. I am to be your second in command.’ She kept her face expressionless. All the others stared, confused perhaps by the new officer’s extreme youth.
‘He doesn’t look well,’ somebody muttered from the back.
‘I’m not,’ said Hiresh. ‘But I’m what you’ve got. Come on. They’ve found Indrani and we need to get there fast.’
It was easier said than done. Many in the crowd were packed too tightly to move out of the way. Sergeant Divya fired over heads with her laser on the lowest possible setting.
‘No,’ said Hiresh. ‘We could cause a stampede!’ Tarini would be disgusted. But the Wardens were too old to have learned gap-skipping, and in the end they had to rely on forming a wedge and pushing through, with their truncheons flashing in warning.
Nobody wanted to rely on shuttles any more, so instead, the squad spent twenty full minutes shoving their way towards the old docking bay where the squatters had been expelled and five Globes lay waiting for them.
‘How’s the fever?’ whispered Divya.
‘Better,’ Hiresh told her. Perhaps it was a lie. He wasn’t really sure how he felt. But a thrill went through him as soon as he strapped himself into a Globe and felt it take off. The pilot made sure he had a perfect view as they soared out over the plains and hills of the surface. Darkness reigned down there, in every sense of the word, but its barbarous inhabitants fought back with the little fires that seemed to drift by beneath his feet. All too quickly they docked again.
‘Why are there only four Globes now?’ he asked his pilot. ‘Has the fifth come in to dock elsewhere?’ There was nothing about that in the briefing Dr Narindi had slipped into his memory.
‘It – it fell,’ said the pilot.
‘Fell? Globes don’t “fall”! They can’t “fall”.’
‘I know,’ the pilot whispered. ‘But it … fell.’
Some of the Wardens had lost friends now and they looked angry. Hiresh felt that way too, remembering that it was probably the Rebels who had caused all these malfunctions when they had invented the slime.
One of those missing (though not, thank the gods, Sergeant Divya) had been carrying a laser. Still, ten armed Wardens no more than two sectors away from their target should be capable of anything.
They came out into another corridor with half-melted walls and air that stank and tore at the throat. The Wardens coughed, but none seemed to be in any difficulty. The crowds here were thinner than he was used to, and more lethargic too.
‘Help us,’ said one woman. She may have been pretty once. Now, like a great many of those around her, she had sores around her mouth and just under her nose.
‘I’m trying,’ he said. ‘We’re all trying.’
Everybody here was lying down and nobody had to be shoved out of the way. The odd accidental step of a Warden onto somebody’s body elicited no complaint other than a low groan. But it made Hiresh wince every time. He didn’t even want to ask what had gone wrong here. Every area seemed to be dying in its own unique manner and he had to smother his pity. ‘There’s only one way to help these people,’ he told himself, but it was hard not to look.
Another hundred metres brought them to the beginning of a new sector, or should have. Instead, they found that the corridor had been blocked off with piled-up furniture. The people on the near side of the barricade had given it a wide berth, and only the twisted corpse of a Warden could be seen on the floor. The sight turned his stomach. Was this how the last Rebellion had started? It made him feel shaky, strange.
‘We’re armed,’ called a rough voice from behind the barrier. ‘Pride Sector belongs to the Rebellion now.’ The speaker then started coughing and another voice could be heard speaking quietly. Apparently the bad air didn’t respect the new border.
‘Religious scum,’ growled Sergeant Divya at Hiresh’s side.
Hiresh nodded. His head felt so cloudy. He was facing a thousand men and women who were just like his father – destroying the Roof in their ignorance and hate. Robbing all the food from the mothers to feed their warriors. His heart started beating faster, rattling in his chest, and it was only with a huge effort that he managed to calm it down again and push away the wave of sickness he felt.
He took a deep breath. ‘Pride Sector is nothing to us,’ he called back. ‘Let us pass through to Snake and you can keep your barricades for all I care.’
‘Snake is ours too.’ Cough, cough!
‘I don’t care. We want to go in, collect some of our friends and leave.’
‘Yeah,’ called a new voice, female and clear, ‘and send them to the surface to be eaten. We know all about what you’ve been up to. Well, your time is over now. You and all your kind. Turn round and we won’t kill you where you stand, even if you are only a little boy.’
The mocking tones of her voice stirred an anger in Hiresh: all his limbs seemed to stiffen with it, and he pressed his hands to the sides of his head. His face was burning.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Sergeant Divya. ‘Should I … should I burn down the barrier?’
The un
seen woman continued her tirade. ‘We have some of the new pistols your kind have been hoarding. We’re prepared to waste a few bullets if that’s what it takes to send you home to your mammy!’
Hiresh didn’t know if it was the mention of his mother that did it or the earlier insults. Or the fact that the Elite injections had simply turned him into another Chakrapani.
He roared like an animal, and all the Wardens jumped away from him. And suddenly Hiresh found himself charging across the open space, leaping over his dead colleague and smashing into the pile of furniture. It barked his shins, and an outstretched table leg bruised one thigh. It didn’t matter – nothing mattered, not even the hurried orders from the far side and the clicking sound that indicated the loading of a weapon. The shot never came. Instead, the whole pile of chairs, a bed and tables toppled under his machine strength. Laughter turned to fear and screams. He heard the woman’s voice calling: ‘Go back! Get the others. We’ll hold him here!’
He flung wreckage out of his way and caught her, middle-aged and lanky, reaching for a fallen gun. Her back broke under his fist. Such a satisfying snap! Others came at him, their knives pricking his skin, hurting and stinging, building his rage. Hiresh roared again. He grabbed one man from among the others. A boy really, his own age, with blue-painted, sweat-soaked skin. Hiresh used the body as a shield until it stopped screaming, and then as a weapon. He swept the boy in a circle, driving his enemies back into the usual corridor crowds. He saw their faces. He saw their terror.
‘They’re gone, sir! They’ve run off!’
Other Wardens stood around him, as if they had appeared out of nowhere. His enemies lay like empty sacks, no more alive than the pulped rag doll still clenched in his fists. Slowly, slowly, with none of his squad approaching too near, his heartbeat calmed and he managed to unclench his fingers enough to release the dead boy.
He saw concern on the faces of the other Wardens. And fear too. And disgust. Hiresh found it hard to look them in the eye, but it was even harder to catch a glimpse of his own fingertips, which had been strong enough to sink right into his victim’s back.
The Deserter Page 26