Crunch.
24
THE REAL FUN
She hit just right, thin slugwall breaking like a golden crust on a really well-fried meat pasty. On her toes, skipping sideways to give those behind her room to pop in, a hot flat bite of adrenaline to the back of her throat like a shot of burning pine. It was warmer, and golden early-morning sunshine lay butter-thick over a stretch of cracked pavement arrowing away, undulating gently in the distance. Small weeds had forced up through the fissures, and the stripes painted down either side and the middle of the concrete were blue-green because of the hexmoss* clustering old paint full of metal chips, chewing through in pillowy geometric patterns.
The first few seconds were the most dangerous. She took it all in, every hair on her body tingling, trying to rise. Her breath puffed out and she denied the urge to take a deep lungful until she had cautiously sniffed, rolled the taste on her tongue, and decided it was okay.
Not just okay, but wonderful. Rich, heavy, beautiful air full of softness and a breeze much further along the curve to spring than the one on the other side of the shimmer. Dawning sunshine ran thick yellow over every surface, picked out small mica glitters in the pavement, edged the weeds with gold, sank into the hexmoss with a grateful murmur. Svinga’s skin was alive again, a bath of delicious tiny bubbles sliding over every part of her. A shimmer bounced high up on her left, far enough away to be of little concern and heading north, rippling in puffs as dust found itself suddenly lighter by comparison.
Oh, yes. They had all sorts of stories about why rifters kept going back, even with the risks. All sorts of reasons why they drank when they weren’t in, why they were different, strange, why they tapped on doorframes and tested each step even outside the shimmer. None of them were right, and no rifter would ever tell. It wasn’t something you could put into words, anyway. It beat behind your heart and inflated your lungs, danced between your nerve endings and filled you out to fingertip, and even if you fucked another rifter, or God forbid loved one, you could not get at the heart of their mystery. The secret was just that: a secret, an excruciating loneliness you couldn’t drink fast enough to escape.
The space inside you where the Rift lived.
The men piled through after her, and Svin crouched easily a few feet from her entry, watching. The slugwall, moving in its own slow, looping fashion, was already drawing away down the road, only temporarily touching this part of the Rift. To an observer inside, it would seem that Svin had just stepped out of thin air with a tearing sound, because the wall had already moved on.
Morov was the first, his noise of entry less crisp and more blundering than hers. His two prime goons appeared next, staggering into the sunshine and immediately spreading out to standard flanking. Right on their heels were the thin overburdened pruneface scientist and the loud-breathing, bespectacled one.
Then the bald one—Barko—piled through with a limpet.* It was the boy Aleks, clinging to Barko’s backpack and propelling them both to the left, for the edge of the road. The slugwall retreated, picking up speed as it rushed down the telescoping road.
Shit. Svinga unfolded, set her heels, and darted in, grabbing Barko’s right arm. “Stop!” she yelled, and the last two sardie goons came piling through thin air with a long cloth-ripping noise, the pale-eyed one digging his toes in and going to one knee with his rifle coming up, as if he expected to be shot at.
She didn’t even have time to consider him the idiot he was, because Barko had more mass and momentum than Svin could scrape together. Aleks was pushing from the other side, maybe maddened by the passage through the wall, maybe just exuberant. Stupid kid, she’d specifically told Kopelund he was a liability inside the blur, what in the fuck had—
A grassy verge rolled down at the edge of the paving. At its bottom, something that looked like water shimmered innocently blue, its surface ruffled perhaps by a breath of the pollen-laden breeze. Svin did the only thing she could, throwing herself down and thrusting a foot between Barko’s. The bald man fell, a short cry forced out of him and choked off midway. He almost lost a chunk of tongue, too; the click of his teeth meeting was unnaturally loud.
Aleks yelled. Maybe it was sheer happiness, or maybe he realized he was about to run right off the paving. Svin tore her boot free of Barko’s knees and scrambled to her feet, burning both palms on the concrete, lunging for the boy even though she knew it was too late.
The boy, blond hair glowing in the golden light, teetered on the edge in the middle of his victory cry. He’d scrounged a backpack, and it was hastily shut—a sock-toe flopped from the top where the zippers hadn’t quite met. He was in a heavy dark parka and waved his arms wildly, his trainers slipping as the edge crumbled underneath them.
Just a little. Just enough.
He fell, careening head over heels, and landed with a sickening crackle instead of a splash.
The liquid, rippling quicksilver now, was not water. It flushed, crimson spiderthreads spreading from Aleks’s point of impact. He twitched, and the pain must have set in then, because he began to scream as the corrosive semi-solid began digesting.
Sloslime. The only thing it wouldn’t eat was ceramic. Outside the Rift it turned into a black, clinging mass of carbon they liked to use for growing industrial diamonds, but inside, it was deadly.
“Shit shit shit,” Svin yelled, and got her feet under her. The sloslime rippled more, fringelike fingers now questing among the viciously green, overgrown grass at its edges, blindly seeking uphill. “Get back get back get back!” She had Barko’s backpack now, and hauled on him as he thrashed, adrenaline singing coppery in her mouth. “Shitsucking fuckbuckle shit!”
Aleks’s screams continued, and queer crunching noises began from the bottom of the hill. The pale-eyed sardie—Brood—moved forward, quick as a striking snake, and she threw out a hand as if to stop him, too. He paused, but didn’t glance at Morov for orders, and pitched forward again.
“Christ.” Morov had gone chalky-white. It made him look sickly next to the camouflage combat uniform. “Get him out of there! Help him!”
“Don’t fucking help!” Svin snapped. “You want to stay alive you just don’t!” She got her knees bent and her hips down, dragged Barko a few more feet. “If it’s hungry enough it’s coming up that slope, and your rifle won’t do jackshit.”
Brood slowed. He looked over the edge, half turned away. “Fuck,” he said, and hawked as if to spit, thought better of it. “Cap’n. You’ll wanna see this.”
Aleks’s voice spiraled up in agony, the last cry of a hunted rabbit. Barko had shut his eyes, his feet moving weakly, trying to help her move him along. There was another shattering crack, a gurgle, and a low satisfied humming.
“It’s eating him.” Brood kept stealing glances, then snapped his chin forward. “Teeth? And … acid?”
“It extrudes chewers to break up organic matter. Back away before it decides you’re next.” Svin decided she wasn’t going to tell him again, and further decided she and the bald scientist were at a safe distance. Sour sweat filled her armpits, soaking into the back of her waistband. “And you. Open your eyes. Get up. Come on. The rest of you, tighten up. We have a safe bubble here, but it’s not a big one.”
“Fuck,” the thin walleyed scientist breathed, craning his neck to stare up. His glasses glittered. “Would you look at that.”
“Don’t!” Svin barked. “Eyes on the ground, fuckface!” The last thing she needed was for one of them to get sky-hypnotized and go wandering, too. Was there a slick up there? One could have been attracted by the commotion.
A hissing burble rose over the edge as Brood backed away, carefully, not feeling behind him with each foot like a rifter would but still doing all right.
“Shit,” Barko moaned. “Not Aleks. Just a kid, for Chrissake.”
“The young and weak casualty first,” she told him. Why hadn’t he learned as much yet? He was goddamn old enough. “Just ask your sardie buddies about that. Get on your feet, baldy, or I’
ll leave you here to rot.”
He thrashed a little more, finally managed to achieve verticality. Svin dusted her hands off, ignoring the stinging. She glanced at the pale-eyed sardie, who was retreating from the edge step by step, his rifle trained down.
Maybe that asshole did have a sliver of brain. Even if he was probably the one Kopelund had sent in to kill her once she ID’d the Cormorant.
They think it’s something porty, Ashe’s letter whispered in her head. Oh, wasn’t that amusing. She could almost hear the Rat’s snuffling laughter, see Ashe’s slow crooked smile. “All right,” she said, finally. “Do not stare at the sky. Look at your feet, and tighten up. All of you. This way, toward me. One at a time. Nice and easy. Good. Very good.”
The first few minutes were always the most dangerous. They’d gotten off lucky, with just the kid dead.
Svin stood for a few moments, her own head upflung, looking over the group of lundies. Big and brawny, or lean and nervous, and none of them with a lick of sense.
They were over the slugwall, now. After two years rotting in prison, she was right where she wanted to be. Over the blur and into the blue, out of their world and in hers.
Now the real fun began.
25
BITCH FEELINGS
Barko’s head ached. He could still hear the screaming, for God’s sake, and the glaring sunshine wasn’t helping. All of them were sweating under their heavy packs, except the rifter. She probably wasn’t big enough to sweat.
They walked in single file down the humpcracked road under a beautiful, deep-blue spring sky. The breeze wasn’t quite enough to cool them under their clothes, but it ruffled the rolling grassy undulations on each side. The ditches were sometimes shallow, sometimes deeper, and the occasional sharp glitter on the horizon was probably an unbroken window in a pre-Event skyscraper throwing back the light with a vengeance.
So this had been the city, before the Event. There was no pall of exhaust hanging over it, the air was clear. They were too far away—they should have been about five miles from downtown, in a heavily built-up business district. Instead, they were, as far as Barko could judge, in the rural belt, a good twenty miles out. The sun was too high for when they had crossed the slugwall, and part of the disorientation was that somehow, coming through the wall had pointed them east instead of north.
He’d heard that the Rifts played havoc with distance and direction, but this made no sense unless the damn bubble was bigger inside than out. Which had been tossed around as a theory, but it was goddamn uncomfortable to be in the middle of.
The rifter kept going at a steady, ground-eating pace, sometimes stopping while she reached into her hipbag and brought out a small heavy washer or nut. A strip of cloth tied to the bit of metal fluttered as she tossed it, and sometimes she would consider its fall with her stubbled head cocked. Other times she would start moving as soon as she threw it. Warm, buttery sunlight gilded the dark fuzz on her head, and even Morov was quiet after what they’d witnessed.
The kid. He shouldn’t have done that. The kid should not have done that.
Young and weak first. Ask your sardie buddies about that.
His mouth was still full of acid vomit-taste. The two men behind him moved quietly, and occasionally floppy-haired, muscle-heavy Tolstoy lit hand-rolled makhorka in a strip of cigarette paper. Each time, Eschkov in front of them jumped guiltily at the click of the sardie’s popper-fed lighter.
On either side, grass spread in rolling waves, broken by stands of trashwood and bushes clumping between rows of pre-Event houses when they passed through a residential belt. Some windows here were intact, too, glittering sharply; the Institute’s section of the shimmer faced almost precisely onto what had been a main artery running through a quiet residential section. The houses had been bigger then, and there were so many of them. Now, atonal birdsong rose instead of traffic noise, and the underbrush was full of slithering almost-sounds. Even the passage of the breeze against different surfaces sounded … wrong, somehow. Too heavy, or too light.
At each crossroads there were listing signposts. The signs would have held street names if hexmoss hadn’t crawled over them, finding the paint and metal a very acceptable habitat. It didn’t survive outside the Rift, for whatever reason, and there were stories—nobody knew how true—of amateur rifters going in to scrape the stuff and smoke it. The stories never agreed about the effects of such behavior, which was thought-provoking in and of itself.
The greenery surrounding the houses grew narrower and taller. Scraps of gardens long gone to seed, drunkenly leaning antique lamp-posts with shattered lenses. Sometimes there were sidewalks, sometimes not; the rifter turned seemingly at random, right or left, following curves and avoiding anything like a straight line for too long. Sometimes she took them off the road and between houses, or through fields of strange, sawblade-tooth grass that rasped against boots and trouser legs. Then it was back to the road for a little while, sometimes on the left side, sometimes on the right.
This particular intersection was slightly off-kilter, the roads meeting in an X instead of a cross. She stopped well before reaching it and sank into a crouch, which meant the rest of them hastily went down too, except for Barko. His entire body ached, and he’d seen her go down for just long enough to get everyone almost on their ass before rising again and continuing as if to spite them. His knees were already complaining. So he stayed upright, conscious of being taller, much older than anyone else, and probably the next one to get killed by something in here.
What a thought.
He scrubbed at his face. His beard wasn’t thinning, even though his noggin was steadfastly naked. Would there be any water safe to shave with? Maybe one of the others had a popper-fed razor. Would there even be water to drink in here? They were carrying some, of course, but QR-715 was a fucking huge haystack and Barko was now aware of just how tiny-needle he and his fellow scientists were.
You could tell a lot about a man by how much quiet he could tolerate. Morov took about ten minutes, pretty much a record for a sardie. Which was probably why Barko liked him better than most of the others, too.
“What are you doing?” Morov finally whispered, shifting uneasily as he crouched. Sweat glistened on the shaven back of his head. He hadn’t brought out a cigar yet, and that was a bad sign, too.
The rifter didn’t respond at first. When she did, it was a familiar set of words. “Thinking. Shut up.”
The sun beat down. The noise of bored, anxious men shifting intensified, under the moan and slither-rasp of wind through grassblades and between empty houses. Tremaine had already unlimbered a handheld thergo and was taking readings. Eschkov had a digicap and was snapping shots—the grass at the edge of the road, the hexmoss growing wherever paint and metal mixed, the weeds—they didn’t look like native plants, for God’s sake. Too angular, the yellow ones that should have been dandelions blowsy and nodding on too-strong stems, white seedheads on older plants sharper, burrs instead of parachutes. The grassblades were too thick or too spindly, most of them serrated; the daffodils and hyacinths stood in garish colors but with their flowers already elderly. It didn’t feel like the cusp of a cold spring in here, and that was flat-out uncomfortable.
Even though the weather was mild, it was wrong. And for all Barko heard the noises in the grass, and the birds, he didn’t see a damn one.
The rifter made small movements, rocking back and forth. It was probably to keep her muscles fresh, Barko realized, and decided he should probably try to get some data, too.
It was a struggle to get his pack off, but thankfully what he needed was at the top. Getting the backpack back on was a hideous cursing struggle as well, and by the time he’d finished the rifter had unfolded, slowly, swaying a bit. The spectra hummed as he powered it up and folded the keeper straps over his wrist and palm, and that familiar sound comforted him.
It didn’t drive Aleks’s screams out of his head, but it helped.
“Kid went straight in,” Eschkov
murmured, as if reading Barko’s expression. Lank, graying hair clung close to his skull, and that wandering eyeball of his was disconcerting as fuck when magnified by the thick shatterproof lenses in their heavy black frame. “Shit. Kope ain’t gonna be happy about that.”
“Pension’s automatic, and it doesn’t come out of his budget.” Blond, foreign Tremaine poked at his thergo. As usual, his accent made every word ponderous and unstable. He must have patted on aftershave this morning, because the sourness of his sweat was overlaid with a sweetish biscuity odor. “All sorts of different signatures. We’re simmering.”
“Anything fun?” Eschkov blinked, his pupils trying to float in opposite directions. Every fifteen minutes he fished the rectangular gappa tracker out of his coat pocket and thumbed it, making sure it was taking in movement data and comparing it against the last session. It beggared belief, but he was the best cartographer in the country.
Just as Tremaine, for all his prissy foreign ways, was very good at departmental infighting—and had unlocked one or two new uses for poppers. “Well, there’s something big over that way.” Tremaine pointed to their right, where two ramshackle houses squeezed an alley between them. “I wonder if we could go in?”
“Will you all shut up?” Morov barked. “We’re not here to follow your little fart fantasies, egghead.”
“Then what precisely are we here for?” Tremaine kept his eyes on the thergo, deftly inserting a fresh memory chip now that everything was warmed up. “Someone else’s fart fantasies?”
The rifter half turned. “Your boss wants the Cormorant.” Half her mouth curled up, her generous lips barely covering those horseteeth. Her cheeks had flushed, and in this light, she didn’t look prison-gray at all. Just so pale the vein-traceries under her skin showed. She would probably turn blue in cold water.
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