Cormorant Run

by Lilith Saintcrow

  Mako cleared his throat. His stubble was wispy instead of thick, and was curling at the tips. “The only thing I ever heard is it’s a fountain and the water makes you young again.”

  “I heard that too.” Barko dropped his gaze to Morov’s thigh. “Gonna have to cut your trousers, old man. I also heard it was a statue. Solid gold. Some kind of bird.”

  “I don’t think it’s just gold.” Brood’s index finger wasn’t tapping anymore. “Nobody knows what it is, just that it’s worth more than all the other fucking trash in here combined.”

  Svin didn’t correct him. She just moved a little, rocking in her crouch. “Do you know what it does?”

  “Kills people?” Mako belched, his cheeks ballooning out briefly. “Like everything else in here?”

  “No, you fuckbucklers. The Cormorant grants wishes.”

  The extraordinary statement dropped like a rock into a quiet pool. Brood let out a half-choked laugh; Mako rolled his eyes.

  “Sure it does,” Brood sneered. “A bird that grants wishes.”

  “They use cormorants to fish.” Barko made a slit in Morov’s pant leg, sawing at the tough material, exposing a patch of strangely innocent skin starred with black hair like pine trees on an icy hillside. Streaks of angry red reached up from the laceration just below, and a ripe, rotting-meat smell rose. “Tie a band around their throats so they can’t swallow, send ’em after the fish like hawks after rabbits.”

  “That’s fucking ridiculous.” Mako’s nose wrinkled. “Christ, Morov, you stink.”

  “Can’t help it.” The commander blinked, slowly. “That what I think it is?”

  “Best money can buy, sir.” Barko’s mouth was a thin line. “This is gonna hurt.”

  “Do … it.”

  Svin exhaled sharply as the scientist popped the needle in and pushed the plunger down. Morov stiffened, his mouth falling open, a damp hole stretched into agony.

  “Yeah.” She tossed the words, one by one, down at the fire, while Morov gasped. “It’ll bring you a fish all right. But maybe not the fish you want.”

  “Grants wishes,” Mako snorted. “What the fuck next? Fairies and dragons?”

  Brood’s ghost-colored eyes had narrowed. That was all. Maybe greed would keep him from cracking, for a little while.

  Svin busied herself with sucking at the sweetness in the bottom of her ration pouch. If she did it a little messily, none of them would see her small, satisfied smile.

  46

  GOT QUIET, OR DIED

  The sun had turned red, hanging above the western horizon; the river glittered fiercely, full of amber and molten gold. The smear of the stampede’s passage cut across open lots and an industrial section, and, when viewed from halfway up a defunct metal skeleton that had once held powerlines, looked too short for the time spent running it. The wall had cut through houses, warehouses, and other structures, its drift clearly shown in the direction every building had been stretched. Like very resilient taffy, warmed and shaped before plunged into a cold bath. Little bits of siding, brick, wooden paneling, all sorts of outer surfaces were crumbling, the pitter-patter of falling debris intensifying as the setting sun breathed across the water.

  Steel resonated under Cabra’s hands and boots, plucked at by the low moaning that carried the reek of cloves, fear, and battlefield shit-stench up to her. She took her time, gazing along the smear, trying to see anything familiar. Asking the silence inside herself the same question, over and over again, and getting the same answer in return.

  She couldn’t spend all night up here, so she climbed carefully down, alert to any sudden change in the structure. It held her just fine, and when her boots hit dry earth again she shook her hands out, wishing she’d brought gloves. Scratches crisscrossed her palms and fingers, and it was going to hurt come tomorrow.

  First, she had to get away, and find somewhere safe for the night.

  Gaining the high ground was tricky, shimmers and squeezers crowding in a thick, milky stream down the first two clear hillsides she came across. There were safe paths up both of them, but those would require running, and her legs were already shaky. She reeked of sweat and mipsik, the heavy fug of cloves and fur wafting up from her clothes and turning her stomach whenever her back was to the breeze. Groping along, following what might turn out to be a false trail, turning back, keeping to a steady walk because if she slowed down she’d have to think about Sabby …

  Too late.

  Maybe she’d walk into the Tumbledown and see him there, nursing a shot of something while he waited for her, his golden hair tousled and his eyes probably already puffy-bloodshot. He’d ask if she got the payoff, she would have to shake her head, and his told you so would be louder because it remained unsaid, sitting on his face alongside the hangdog expression of a man who knew it was only a matter of time before something bad happened.

  Cabra turned hard right, following the internal tugging. Most of rifting was learning to listen to that urging instead of drowning it in useless chatter. You got quiet, or you died.

  There it was again.

  The problem with that kind of listening was that you couldn’t control what it told you. You ended up knowing, even when you wanted to believe otherwise. What it was telling her now was stupid, unbelievable, and true.

  He’d find me. It wasn’t a lie. If there was anything of Sabby left to find, she could have edged along whatever precarious path led to it.

  Her route led circuitously up a gentle slope networked with residential streets, pre-Event houses set in weed-choked yards. Spiny bushes had invaded this neighborhood, and she kept an eye out for thornbacks or grazers. The sky had turned blue again, swept clean, and the sun beat almost sideways, edging each fringed leaf and serrated grassblade. The weeds, their nodding heads puke-yellow or fluffy white, fought with the thin green vines of merrywell with its prickle-periwinkle flowers. In the distance, the heart of the Rift glittered sharply, downtown’s skyscrapers still throwing back their lying reflections. Easy work, opportunity, losing yourself in a faceless mass.

  Really, the Rift was no different. The lie was just a little closer to the surface, its sharp edges poking like knifepoints stretching plastifreez. You ran the Rift until it caught up with you.

  As she walked, her nimble fingers worked at her hair. Beads, hard and slick, rolled free, and she tossed them like strips-and-bobs, in front of her or off to the side, gauging how they fell. Step step step toss, step toss, step step step step, toss again. Rolling through each footfall, testing the pavement when she crossed a deathly quiet street, a bead glittering sharply as it plummeted through a pocket of gravity not behaving the way it should, slamming down with a sound like popcorn.

  The trouble with rifting alone was having too much goddamn time to think. Her throat was full, her eyes dry-burning. Cabra rolled a gold bead in her scraped, bloody fingers, a blood blister under her thumb, the skin all over her roughening with the atavistic consciousness of being watched.

  She tipped her head back, sliding the gold bead into her pocket. The pinchoks had returned, floating lazily through a darkening sky. Two of them were maybe clocking her, one of those overlapping-circle diagrams they had in school. She refused to glance at where Sabby should be, refused to think about how it had happened, how it had happened.

  The safe path edged her along a dusty overgrown trail alongside a part-brick house, its rooms probably bigger than the shack she’d been born in. Certainly bigger than the room she shared with the Pooka over a bodega near Deegan. His clothes were there, and the clutter they’d made when packing for this run. His busted-ass guitar—he was always saying he was gonna get new strings. Gonna play her a song or two, just as soon as he could. Three years he’d been promising that, in and out of the Rift.

  There it was again. She flicked a blue bead off her fingers; it flashed across an overgrown backyard with a faded plastic playground set quietly bleaching itself out under the Rift’s seasons. The blue bead hit an invisible wall and dropped with a so
und like wood snapping.

  A stampede would get rid of the weak and the sick. Maybe that was part of the ecosystem of the Rift itself. Survival of the fittest, just like outside. Had she decided to go for Vetch’s payoff because she knew Sabby would drop somehow, sooner or later?

  No. Not that. Never that. Still, she wondered, as she wriggled through a hole in gray-weathered wooden fencing, not liking the way the lengthening shadows on the other side of the yard felt. That was the other thing about the goddamn Rift. Everyone was complicit, especially yourself.

  Even when you … loved … someone.

  Cabra glanced again at where Sabby should be, drifting in her wake, clinging to her safety. Swimming for so long with someone else on your back, you didn’t feel lighter when they were gone. You just realized, in the silence, how tired you were, how tired you had always been.

  She kept walking, unraveling her braids as she went. Her dirty scalp tingled at the sudden change. There was a safe hole very near, she could sense it, a snatch of melody overheard from a window the brain lightly teased at, trying to fit into a song.

  Once she hit the blur on the way out, it would be time to look for another Rift. Otherwise she’d come back into this one, looking for what couldn’t be found. Taking worse and worse chances until it caught her, too.

  Or, she supposed, she could stop. Just stop hitting driftburn, take a cog-in-a-wheel job in a factory somewhere or just starve to death. Yeah. Sure. She could do that.

  Surviving made you complicit, too. “Oh, Pooka,” she whispered, tossing another blue bead in front of her.

  It fell in a gentle arc, as if she were out past the slugwall already. Cabra’s face contorted once, smoothed itself.

  Carefully, cautiously, her eyes dry and her heart a knot of writhing thornback, the rifter moved on into the gathering dusk.

  47

  STILL BREATHING

  The hallucinations were actually quite gentle. They reminded him of raindrops on a window, only the drops were huge, slow wheels of moving color. It was triphase plasma, his leg a red-hot bar of pain where the substance was freshly thermabonding a hairline fracture of his tibia as well as spreading up to fight the infection from the deep gash in his thigh above. Triphase was expensive because it fixed just about everything—if you applied enough of it. It was a minor miracle Barko had found a medikit containing a syringe that hadn’t been stripped out and pawned by an enterprising sardie or janitor. Nowadays they put less spendy—and much less effective—stuff in the kits.

  Morov watched the globs of color flow and meld. They were a little like the soap-bubble swirls of the Riftwall, but these colors obeyed laws. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue—they shifted through blessedly easy-to-name shades in a slow, logical rainbow, melting like ice cream but not merging. Each border was crisp and distinct.

  His eyelids drifted up once, when a hazy shadow intruded on his thoughts. Blinked, the movement stretched out into an eternity, a blackness lowering and rising. The pale smear above him was a face.

  Someone crouched next to him. There was a dark crop of hair on the skull, so it wasn’t Barko. Too chalky to be Mako. Too goddamn big to be the rifter.

  It was Brood, his strange light irises disappearing and reappearing once as he blinked, too. His blond tips were darker than usual, wet and slicked-down. His breathing was even and slow, and when Morov moved slightly, the other man didn’t flinch.

  A cold fingertip traced down Morov’s sweating spine. His hands were limp and useless, and even though the agony in his leg was retreating, it was still throbbing badly enough to make him want another painpatch. Or maybe a jolt of something, anything, even pine, just to take the edge off.

  There was a sliding sound, cloth against a surface. A sharp, deep cough. Something moved, high up on a shelf—no, it was the rifter on the countertop, pushing herself up on one elbow and hacking like she was about to throw a lung. Sleeping up there, she was probably drier than the rest of them—it was damp in here, even though the heat-ray had sent little critters scurrying out of the carpeting and shattered furniture. The bugs were still here, even though everything else was gone. When humanity choked to death on its own blood, the cockroaches would take over. Maybe they’d make a better job of it.

  The idea of cockroaches evolving to take on office jobs was amusing enough to distract him. It would be so easy to drift away.

  He brought himself back to consciousness with a jolt, his vision sharpening. Brood’s face, half shadowed, was calm and thoughtful. Why was he just sitting there?

  The rifter finished coughing. There was another scraping sound, and the unscrewing of a canteen. She hawked and spat, a dry gobbet thoughtfully ejected toward the doorway instead of into the cubbyhole they were all sleeping in. A splashing—she took a mouthful of water, and the tiny glitters that were her eyes reflecting the punky glow of the fire were fixed on Morov.

  Was she going to watch?

  “Sir.” The pale-eyed soldier’s teeth showed, a facsimile of a smile. “Making sure you’re still breathing.” He slowly unfolded, towering over his commander, and Morov’s sweat had turned cold and oily. How long had the bastard been sitting there, a vulture just waiting? Didn’t they prefer rotten meat to fresh?

  Well, Morov would rot soon enough with a knife buried in his femoral artery. Or his throat, maybe. Or Brood could do it the quiet way, the crunch of a neck breaking—the noise like a glass shattered under a towel. Or steady pressure against the carotid.

  He could, really, do it anytime he liked. Was that why Kope sent him?

  No, Kope sent him to do for the rifter. Still, he’d never liked Brood. The feeling was pretty mutual, kept in check by the routine of military discipline. One of those things on a back burner. Except here, everything was in front, and it was boiling harder the longer they stayed. The closer they got to the center and that goddamn Cormorant.

  Brood stood there for a few more seconds, his weight shifting back and forth. Maybe his legs were cramping, or maybe he was considering doing both Morov and the rifter. That would be a fool’s move, though, and while the blond-tipped motherfucker might be killcrazy, he wasn’t an idiot.

  He understood the rules, just like every other sardie who edged close to murder for the fun of it.

  “Still breathing,” Morov managed. His throat was dry as sanded glass. His gaze shifted past Brood, to the rifter. She was utterly still, only those betraying little sparkles of her eyeballs turning the shadow of her head into something recognizably human. “For now.”

  Brood’s smile disappeared, or maybe he just turned his head. He sank down on his bedroll, and Morov realized he could hear Mako snoring and Barko’s long, loud inhales. Was Brood on watch?

  There was another gleam, very low, in the rifter’s shadowed shape. A slight noise of metal releasing the tension of fleshly pressure. It was there and gone so quickly Morov thought it might be another hallucination, and the pain in his leg began to retreat on scorching little padded feet.

  Every time Morov drifted out of thready, uneasy sleep, he saw the rifter’s shape sitting upright on the counter. She was there all through the deepest part of the night, when the noises began outside. Creaking, groaning, the tossing of iron branches in a cold unforgiving wind. A rippling singsong screech in the distance turned into an agonized, throat-cut cry and ended with a gurgle. Soft sneaking footsteps pattered past the office door, but the rifter didn’t turn, just watched Morov.

  And Brood, from his bedroll, watched her.

  She didn’t lie down again until Mako woke up three hours before dawn for his watch. Brood passed a few murmured words with the other man, and soon he and the rifter were both asleep as Mako edged around the countertop and pissed in a corner instead of risking going outside.

  48

  NO IMAGINATION

  The commander’s office was a shambles of cardboard boxes, the full ones with official labels attached and a string of heat-tape sealing their tops. The half-empty ones were labeled in Ochki’s spidery scr
ipt, case number and evidence code written neatly but the number fields left blank.

  Ochki, his suit jacket draped on the back of Kopelund’s expensive chair with its ironed creases intact, glanced at the corporate drone with his shiny pompadour and little silver bead stuffed in his ear. The Second Branch agent neatened a pile of paperwork, tapping it against the desktop and setting it carefully in the current box. “I am not quite sure I understand,” he said, finally. His round, steel-rimmed spectacles sent a tiny jet of light into the dark corner where the safe stood wide-open, its contents disarranged. Its mysteries would be thoroughly plumbed soon enough. The other safe, behind the painting on the wall in Kopelund’s quarters, had been discerned but was not opened yet. Instead, the painting had been surgically removed and a blank metal face watched an empty room, the dial in its center just waiting for a thermaspray to turn it to mush but leave the safe’s contents undamaged.

  “Just a courtesy call, really.” Zlofter’s smile was smooth and plastic as the rest of him. “We had a close working relationship with General Kopelund.”

  Ochki nodded. Though he had taken off his jacket, he still wore his hat, and one could be forgiven for thinking it was to cover a bald spot. His suspenders, dove-gray and probably regulation issue, were well cared for and not new. His soft, shaved cheeks puffed slightly. “How close was that, Mr. Zlofter?”

  Zlofter studied him for a moment, holding his very black, very expensive bowler. “Professionally close, Agent Ochki. We are shocked by the allegations.”

  “No doubt, no doubt.” Ochki’s round, pale face didn’t change. “Shocking things here at QR-715. Unsanctioned experimentation. Graft. Quite a profitable side trade in government materiel. Yes, very shocking indeed.” The window was not open, and it was much warmer in here than it ever had been during Kopelund’s tenure.

  Did Zlofter pale a shade or two? At the door, Ochki’s slab of a bodyguard loomed. He was not blocking the entrance.