“Or maybe you are a clever bankliving spy,” said the Preacher, who proceeded to crouch so he could lay the baby face-up on the dusty, petal-swirling concrete, its cries louder now that they were no longer blocked by the Preacher’s chest. He then reached inside his patchwork robe and took out a tool with a black metallic handle that resembled a magnifying glass, except in place of a clear circular lens was a parallelogram of translucent, orangish-red glass.
“What spy? Spy for who?” Amon squeezed out, straining hopelessly to slip out his right hand, his eye on his jacket lapel where the duster remained hidden. “I told you! I’m bankdead just like you!”
“Is that so? Well we shall see.”
The Preacher stepped up to Amon and reached out with the tool to bring the glass closer to his face. Amon struggled with all his might against the limbs restraining him.
“Ohhh,” Bafflefrown roared, his jaw muscle bulging, veins popping in the furrows on his forehead, his whole face turning pomegranate red, and booted Amon in the shin. Crying out as pain thundered through his bone, Amon looked up and saw that the parallelogram was now a finger’s breadth from his face, the Preacher’s eye up to the other side of it, inspecting Amon through the colored glass. Up close now, Amon saw that the pattern in the Preacher’s hair depicted what appeared to be hieroglyphs and equations, and that Bafflefrown’s face was covered in strange scar illustrations, like faint inkless tattoos, depicting the same. Amon could smell the Preacher’s foul breath, like old broccoli and vinegar when he said, “A spy after all, precisely as is writ in the Book of Jobs, about the ‘forking tongues of debt and delusion’ that ‘lure the unmarketable down ten thousand roads of mendacious poverty.’”
“I’m not lying!”
“But I have descried the Web’s reflection in your eyes.”
“Web!?” Amon wracked his mind to grasp the Preacher’s words and could only suppose that the lens allowed him to see the fibers of the computer system still implanted in his eyes. “I told you already I’m a special case. I have a BodyBank but it’s shut down.”
“Ohhh!” shouted Bafflefrown again, flexing his muscles and popping the veins all over his body as though his very flesh would explode with rage.
“Blasphemy!” hissed the Preacher.
“What is?”
“That word. It is forbidden by the Book of—”
“What wo—”
“Ohhh!” bellowed Bafflefrown, and Amon stopped speaking.
“So the Web is ‘shut down,’ you say?” The Preacher peered at Amon closely through the glass again, the skin of his face and the whites of his eyes tinted orange.
“Yes!” yelped Amon. “It’s all so complicated, I—” Amon almost said “went bankdead without losing my BodyBank” but corrected himself with, “the Spider cut my connection to the Web but left its reflection in me.”
“That is impious and impo—” The Preacher’s eyes went wide with wonder on the other side of the glass. “Wait! Just as you say, I see the tracery across your eyes but without the throb of color along each strand. Yet this cannot be, for … for …”
The Preacher tilted his head to the side in thought. Bafflefrown turned to watch him, looking as baffled as ever, and Amon felt Slenderarms’s hold loosen slightly as though he were doing the same.
“A figure such as you appears in the scriptures. As is writ in the Book of Opportunity, ‘A marked and tainted one draws near before the Last Crash, kindred of the Spider with an acid soul of debt.’ If what you say is true, then you may be the subject whose appearance is predicted.”
The words Book of Opportunity jumped out as Amon realized that these were the Opportunity Scientists Tamper had warned him about, though he was unsure what exactly was “scientific” about them.
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Amon. “Just let go of—”
“Can you promise you are truly bankdead?”
“Yes!”
“But you have been cut loose from the Web?”
“Yes!”
“So you can no longer pay the Charity Brigade for their protection or the help of their drones?”
“No! I’m totally broke. No money! No bank account! Nothing!”
“But you seek the Gene Sucker?”
“Hippo! I’m looking for Hippo!”
“Ohhh!” Bafflefrown roared again, but this time he seemed to be expressing his excitement rather than his anger.
“Then the divine kindling of the down between your eyebrows will fire up the Lighthouse of Opportunity and lead us all to Jobs in the Free World!
“Ohhh!” Bafflefrown seemed to concur.
“W-what are you talking about? I-I—”
Ignoring Amon, the Preacher said something to the other men. Bafflefrown immediately pressed down with his boot on Amon’s toes, before grabbing the back of his neck with one hand and underneath his chin with the other to lock his head, while Slenderarms kept the rest of him immobilized. The Preacher then pointed the lens edgewise at Amon’s face and he realized for the first time how sharp it was. It didn’t look like glass, but some sort of transparent ceramic sharpened like a knife. The Preacher started to wave the blade from side to side, enacting some ritual as he hummed syllables that sounded neither like standard Japanese nor the local dialect.
“The Voice of the Market has spoken! All we require is a sample of your down for our Scientists.”
“A sample? My—no! Off me! I’m—”
“Fear not. You will encounter no serious harm. Only your eyebrows will be enough.”
Amon flinched as the Preacher lightly pinched his left eyebrow between thumb and index finger and pulled it outwards, bringing the edge of the knife towards the skin stretched from Amon’s forehead.
“No! Let go!”
“This is the only path to Delivery.”
“Eeh-yah,” Amon rasped at the sharp touch of the knife on the side of his brow, gritting his teeth as he braced for more.
But he only felt the vibration of Slenderarms’s voice on the back of his neck as he shouted out something and both Bafflefrown and the Preacher whipped their heads to the side. Over their shoulders, Amon saw that the woman had picked up the baby and had been crawling for the ledge from which they came, but was now frozen in her tracks, looking back in quivering terror under their stares. The Preacher released Amon’s eyebrow and barked something at Bafflefrown, who let go of him to stomp towards the woman, who appeared to be the mother of the baby.
“GYAHHHHHHH!” she shrieked as the man approached. Putting down her still-wailing baby, the mother scrambled to her feet as if to run, but her ankle appeared to be twisted as she only managed to stagger a few limping steps before he grabbed her shirt from behind and smacked her in the back of the head, knocking her to the ground. There she lay on her belly, trembling and whimpering. With Bafflefrown no longer holding him, Amon thought to break out of Slenderarms’s hold, but the nearby Preacher’s knife made him hesitate. Before he could decide, Bafflefrown, apparently satisfied that the mother had been subdued, picked up the baby and lumbered his way back towards Amon. Once he’d laid the baby down a few paces away, the Preacher turned towards Amon and readied his knife as Amon felt blood trickling down his left cheek. Only then did he begin to writhe against the hold, ready to endure any punishment so long as he could stave off the grabbing hands and keep his eyebrow.
Gwah-aaahhh-gwah-aaahhh-gwa-ah-gwa-ah-gwa-ahhhh. The baby’s wails grew louder and more urgent.
As Bafflefrown tried to get a solid grip on Amon’s bucking neck and the Preacher’s fingers fumbled at his brow, Amon saw something move rapidly in the edge of his visual field and Slenderarms let out another call of alarm. Amon and the other three men all looked to the stairpath entrance, from which a woman was sprinting across the square towards the mother at incredible speed. It was Mayuko.
Or so Amon cognized for a flash, until she stopped beside the prostrate mother and her blurred form stabilized into focus. She was too tall and muscular to be Mayuko,
with broad shoulders and hefty calves showing from her shorts. Her face was also wider and rounder, her short hair lacking Mayuko’s special luster.
“What insult is this?” shouted the Preacher in Japanese. “You dare to trespass on sanctified Opportunity land?”
“We’ll only be a moment,” the woman replied, bending down to put a reassuring hand on the mother’s shoulder while glowering fiercely at the Preacher. “Just give us back her baby and we’ll be off.”
“Give YOU the—” The Preacher shook with such rage he couldn’t finish his sentence, and squeezed the handle of the blade tight in his fist. He barked at the two men in camp dialect, spurring Bafflefrown to let go of Amon’s head before pulling his fist back and slugging him in the stomach. Amon retched out all his air with the nauseating impact and went limp in the hold of Slenderarms, who released him and let him crumple to the ground. Amon had a split second to lie there unmoving before a blow landed on his side. Slenderarms began to kick him repeatedly in the ribs, pulsing spots and stars across Amon’s vision at a steady tempo, his chest thudding with sharp, sickening pain.
“Ohhh!” The sound of Bafflefrown’s roar, the ensuing cry from the woman, and the continuing wail of the baby reached Amon’s ears muffled and faint, as though his hearing was insulated with fluff. Without realizing, he found himself curled up in the fetal position as the thunder in his ribcage no longer carried pain, the hard ground drifting away … Do something or you’re dead! a primal voice called up from his depths, and suddenly remembering the duster holstered in his jacket, Amon reached for it, fumbling for the lapel twisted behind his back.
“Grahhhhhh!” the man above him yowled as Amon aimed blindly in the direction of the kicks and pulled the trigger. Slenderarms’s unconscious body collapsed onto Amon, who threw him tumbling aside and pushed himself slowly to his knees.
The Opportunity Scientists had been so eager to take a sample of him they hadn’t bothered to search him yet. Amon had been lucky. The fools.
Raising his head, Amon saw the Preacher staring at Amon’s duster fearfully, his ceramic knife outstretched in his hand. Beyond him, the woman prowled slowly around Bafflefrown, poised to lunge with a surgical scalpel held beside her hip, while Bafflefrown warded her off with a white club that appeared to be a human thigh bone, which he held over his shoulder like a bat.
Amon raised the barrel of his duster to shoot the Preacher who had tried to mutilate him, but paused when he saw the infant held in his arms. While nerve dust might only cause pain in adults, it could cause neurological disorders in babies. Instead, he pointed the barrel at Bafflefrown, waiting for the woman, who for the moment at least seemed to be helping Amon, to circle around and give him a clear shot.
Fwoo-fwoo-fwoo-fwoo. Amon whipped his head towards the approaching whir just in time to see a spinning metal disc strike his wrist. Pins and needles shot through his forearm and the duster went flying from his hand, hitting the ground and skittering away, coming to a stop equidistant from him and the Preacher.
Amon looked in the direction the disc had come and saw a man standing at the foot of the stairpath, having just entered the square. As the man reeled in the disc on a wire and it rolled along the ground towards him, Amon saw that it was a small wheel and that the man had what looked like a yellow children’s tricycle strapped to his back. Out of the corner of his eye, Amon saw the Preacher bolt for the duster and started for it a split second after. The Preacher had a slight head start but was hindered by the load of the baby and looked set to reach the weapon at the same moment as Amon, only two more steps until they collided, when the woman launched between them, her legs moving faster than anyone Amon had ever seen. Scooping up the duster, she spun to face them as they converged on her, raising the barrel and pointing it back and forth from Amon to the Preacher while jogging backwards out of reach. Amon stumbled to a sudden halt, transfixed by the weapon, and saw the Preacher do the same.
“Ohhh!” yelled Bafflefrown, and looking over, Amon saw him raise the thigh bone high above his head, the mother prostrate just below him. He stared at the woman with Amon’s duster wearing a frown of the most intense bafflement, challenging her to make a move. But the man hurled his wheel overhand so that it spun in the air and began to roll on its rim towards Bafflefrown. He held two metal rods joined into a T-shape with wires attached like a marionetteer’s control bar, and when Bafflefrown sidestepped the wheel the man pulled on two of the wires so that the wheel leapt up on its side like a hockey puck, whacking him right in the temple. Bafflefrown raised his arms to block the wheel after the fact and fell flat on his buttocks as the man pulled on two different strings to retract the wheel like a yo-yo. The woman shouted something to the prostrate mother and she began to scramble away from Bafflefrown who, abandoning his original prey, charged at the man. When the man hurled another wheel along the ground, Bafflefrown was ready this time and brought his forearms arms up to block it while his legs brought him charging almost within clubbing range. But before the wheel struck, the man pulled a wire to send it flying wide and pulled another so that it fired a spoke that impaled itself in Bafflefrown’s shoulder as it passed. “Ohhh!” Bafflefrown roared and swung his club into the man’s ankles, knocking his feet out from under him. The man pulled another wheel from the tricycle on his back and was about to throw it up at Bafflefrown as he raised the club again when the Preacher shouted, “Stop!”—the word identical in both dialects so that Amon understood it. The Preacher had the tip of his blade up to the baby’s neck and everyone froze, Bafflefrown with his club aloft, the man with his wheel recoiled, the woman with Amon’s duster aimed at the Preacher, the mother cowering in the dust. And Amon—disarmed and surrounded by enemies, his body a pounding cacophony of pains—wiped a dribble of blood from his forehead with the back of his hand as his gaze twitched between the four combatants, terrified and confused. Gwah-aaahhh-gwah-aaahhh-gwa-ah-gwa-ah-gwa-ahhhh.
“Vacate the square now!” snarled the Preacher in the standard dialect.
“If you do anything,” said the woman, “I’ll dust you.”
“And risk ruining the gift value of this baby?”
The woman said nothing in response, keeping the duster trained where it was.
Amon had no idea what they were talking about, but saw that he was not party to their dispute and made a run for the tunnel by which he’d entered the square.
“Halt, or I’ll shoot!” shouted the woman.
Amon stopped and looked back over his shoulder to see his duster aimed in his direction.
The Preacher shouted something to Bafflefrown and he began to back away from the man with the tricycle towards the mother, who had snuck halfway to a wall of shelters at the edge of the square.
“No!” the woman shouted, turning the barrel on Bafflefrown this time. “If you touch that woman I don’t care what happens to the baby. You’re both getting dusted and I can promise you won’t ever wake up.”
“You pretend to threaten us?” demanded the Preacher. “In our domain?”
“You kidnapped these two right from our doorstep. As if you—”
“War! You’ll be lucky to escape war for coming here, you gene-sucking witch!”
Bafflefrown continued lumbering towards the mother as he’d been instructed, the shoulder of his patchwork T-shirt now dark with blood from where the spoke protruded.
“I don’t give a shit about turf or war,” cried the woman. “All I care about is this baby right now, and if he doesn’t back off you’re all just done!”
The Preacher and the woman glowered at each other for a tense few seconds. But the Preacher soon looked away and called out something in the camp dialect. Bafflefrown changed directions, still eyeing the man warily, and backed now towards the Preacher. When the two men were side by side, the Preacher looked over at Amon, hungry fervor in his eyes, then over at the woman as though he might persuade her to take him. But when his eyes drifted over to Slenderarms, his fallen companion, he seemed to rethink things. He
said something to Bafflefrown, who sheathed his club into the back of his shorts, the top hidden beneath his shirt, and went over to Slenderarms to lift him up over his shoulder. The two men, each carrying a different person, then went to a stairwell in the corner of the square opposite the man, shambled up two stories, opened a sliding door, stepped inside the room, and were gone.
The pain in his ribs shifted into a deeper, duller ache, as Amon brought his gaze down to find the woman aiming his duster at him again and the man stalking over with a wheel poised ready to throw.
Fuck.
7
THE COUNCIL CHAMBER
1
Spirals of multitextured petals raised by the scuffle whirled slowly in the tepid breeze around the two figures that faced Amon in the empty square. They remained utterly still, with their weapons trained on him, watching him cautiously. Blood trickling from his eyebrow, his heart pounding against his sore ribs, Amon glanced fearfully back and forth between the two, awaiting their next move.
The woman was tall and looked to be in her early thirties, her body shapely and athletic with muscular legs and shoulders, and a narrow, curving waist. Her short hair was shaved on the sides and rose in unruly waves on top. With long, striking eyelashes and clear, golden-brown skin, her face was almost what would normally be called pretty, if not for her off-center jaw, which tilted her long chin to the right and revealed a few crooked teeth between the left side of her thin lips, giving her a horse-like appearance. While her brow was unfurrowed, her tired, light-brown eyes seemed to frown, as though she had little patience for anything she saw, and Amon wondered how he ever mistook her for Mayuko.
Her companion was built like a stuntman: short and slim with taut muscles, the veins sticking out on his lean yet toned forearms. His features were small and delicate, except for his forehead, which was broad and roughly hewn like the face of a boulder, his brown hair parted in the middle and clinging flat to just below his ears, a smattering of dark bristles on his cheeks and chin. Like the woman and most other bankdead Amon had seen, his expression was grim and stony, but unlike them he radiated a certain calm watchfulness, his sharp eyes shifting slowly about as though always readying him for the unexpected. From the metal cross he held, thin wires ran to the hubs, rims, and spokes of the two wheels on the chipped mustard yellow tricycle on his back and to those of the one he held in his hand, ready to throw.
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