The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  Stone pillars supported a portico from which hung ferns and trailing vines, ablaze with red and yellow flowers. Along the front of the portico, green-glowing letters spelled out TWELFTH TIER HOSPITAL. Through the glass doors below she saw movement—people in white coats, a few robots—but her intended entrance lay on the far side of the building. She closed her eyes, consulted the memorized map, and backed up ten paces to yet another maintenance hatch, this one in the surface of the street. It, too, opened at the touch of her stolen tool, and she climbed down a short ladder into another utility corridor. Presumably it connected at some point with the ones she’d been in when she’d first entered the Tier, but for whatever reason, it had been deemed safer for her to approach the hospital at street level. She pulled the overhead hatch closed, then headed along the corridor in the direction of the hospital.

  Her tool unlocked a doorway into the hospital’s sublevel in an out-of-the-way corner behind an air-filtering unit. Unlike the corridors, the hospital basement was brightly lit, but Yvelle had been assured that all surveillance cameras would be disabled here as well: The Officer’s work again. He was burning through all his access privileges tonight. But then, after tonight, as she understood it, he wouldn’t be an Officer any longer.

  That was probably just as well. Once the Provosts figured out who was behind the various outages and overrides, as they surely would, he’d be a dead Officer if they found him.

  Yvelle hurried past laundry facilities and a darkened kitchen to a particular stairwell in a particular corner. Up the stairs to the fourth floor. A quick peek through the door: dark—another “lighting failure”—but bright enough to her enhanced vision, which had adjusted again to the dimmer illumination. A dash along a deserted hallway. She used the maintenance tool to unlock a room. She slipped inside.

  Seven bassinets, a baby in each, long pale-green cocoons in her night vision.

  Yvelle’s breath came in short gasps now. Her heart thudded in her chest. She went to the first bassinet. It had a name written on a card tucked into a plastic sleeve: Danyl.

  The babies had names. She hadn’t considered the fact they might have names. The realization hit her like a blow to the stomach . . .

  . . . no, a blow to the womb, the womb violated by the City, the womb scarred and burned and ruined by the chemicals that had slain her unborn child.

  “Danyl,” she whispered. She pulled a new device from her belt, a short metal tube. She pressed it to the sleeping baby’s hand. He stirred but didn’t wake. She pressed a button. A light flashed green.

  She took a deep breath, then lifted Danyl from the bassinet and slipped him into the harness on her chest. He whimpered a little but his eyes never opened, and after a moment he slept soundly once more.

  The unfamiliar weight made Yvelle feel strangely unbalanced as she moved to the next bassinet. A girl. Astril. She pressed the metal tube to the child’s hand. It flashed red, and she heaved a sigh of relief.

  The next child: another boy. Karril. Red.

  The fourth child: a girl. Stellina. Red.

  The fifth child: a girl. Mari.

  Green.

  Yvelle whimpered. She looked at the sleeping child, at the downy hair on her head, her perfect, tiny hands curled into loose fists, her long eyelashes, her beautiful mouth, slightly open. Yvelle reached out a trembling hand. Forgive me, she whispered to God, or the universe, or Thomas, or no one at all . . . and then she covered the sleeping girl’s nose and mouth and pressed down hard.

  Mari struggled feebly, but she had no strength, none at all, and in a surprisingly short time she stopped struggling and turned blue, and then she was dead.

  Yvelle pulled back her hand. It shook. She clenched it into a fist, whispered, “There, there,” to the child sleeping between her breasts, though he hadn’t stirred, and moved on to the sixth bassinet. Another boy, Kevi. She reached out with the small metal cylinder. Please let it flash red, she whispered to whomever she had asked for forgiveness, and He or She or It must have heard her, because flash red the cylinder did, when she touched it to the boy’s hand.

  The final bassinet. She moved to it, looked down into it. Alania, said the card at the foot of the bassinet, a girl’s name . . .

  . . . but the bassinet was empty.

  Yvelle stared at it. She had no orders covering this eventuality. She’d been told there would be seven babies; that she should take the first one for whom the strange little device flashed green; that any for whom it flashed red could be left undisturbed; that if it flashed green for any besides the first baby she took, that baby had to be eliminated.

  But if a baby were missing . . . ?

  Yvelle looked around wildly. She must be ill, she thought. They took her somewhere else . . .

  Could she find . . . ?

  Even as she thought that, the lights flashed back on in the hallway outside. She had already waited too long. She had to move now.

  She ran to the door, looked both ways down the deserted hallway, and dashed to the still-darkened stairwell. She clattered back down to the basement, holding on to the railing, her balance still thrown off by the weight of little Danyl on her chest.

  Through the basement, back into the utility corridor, up the ladder, down the wide alley, through the garden, back down the narrow alley, running as fast as she could now, expecting at any moment to hear a hue and cry, alarms, shouts, to see Provosts or robots bursting into the streets to search for her . . . but all remained quiet.

  Down into the service tunnel. Back to the maintenance hatch . . . and there she pulled up short, heart racing, because someone was waiting for her: a man, dark-skinned, dressed in black. Someone was supposed to be waiting for her, but was this really . . . ?

  “Good work,” he said, unsmiling.

  “You’re The Officer?” she said, though obviously he was, or she’d already be under arrest.

  “Not after tonight. I think we’ve done it.”

  “But what have we done?” What have I done? The baby boy on her chest stirred and whimpered, and she put a hand on his back to calm him.

  “What needed to be done,” The Officer said. He reached out and touched the baby’s cheek. “What’s his name?”

  “Danyl.” Yvelle looked down at the boy’s downy head, yearning and loss mingling in her heart. “I could take him,” she whispered, before she’d even realized she was going to. “I’d be a good mother to him . . .”

  “You know where you’re going,” The Officer said. “It’s no place to raise a child.”

  “And where you’re going is? The Middens?”

  “There’s a place prepared. I will raise him and protect him, give him what he needs to survive, teach him what he needs to know, so that when the time comes, he will be prepared to do what he must do . . . just as we have.”

  “But what does he need to know? What will he be prepared to do?” Why have I done what I have done this night? That was the real question, but she left it unspoken, knowing no answer would be forthcoming.

  “He will know what he needs to know when it is important that he knows it,” The Officer said. “As you know all you need to know. You have done an immeasurable service to the Free Citizens. And you have avenged your husband. Someday you’ll be honored for it.”

  “When?” Her throat closed on the word. The thought of being honored for what she had just done repelled her.

  “Twenty years will tell the tale.”

  “Twenty years?” Yvelle stared at him. “I’ll be in my forties.”

  “And I in my sixties. But the time will be upon us before you know it.”

  An alarm echoed through the streets, an angry ringing attenuated by distance.

  “Time to go,” The Officer said. “Give me the child.”

  Reluctantly, Yvelle slipped out of the harness and handed Danyl over to The Officer. The boy whimpered a little, but h
e quieted again as The Officer settled the harness in place. Yvelle turned and touched her maintenance tool to the lockplate by the door. The door slid open, and she hurried down the stairs beyond to the service tunnels and along them to the hatch into the old elevator shaft, The Officer a few steps behind. She squeezed through the hatch and began her descent. The Officer climbed onto the ladder above her, and a tool the twin of the one Yvelle carried flashed eight times as he sealed the hatch behind them.

  Together they descended into the depths of the City . . . but neither of them would stop in the Second Tier, or the First, or even the Bowels. Their destinations were far, far lower than that.

  Twenty years, Yvelle thought. Will I even remember Thomas in twenty years?

  The lump of the silver locket hung between her breasts so that she felt it anew against her skin with each beat of her heart. Yes, she thought fiercely. I will. As I will remember what I have done to avenge him.

  She could still feel the little girl’s warm lips and nose beneath her tightening hand. She knew she always would.

  Twenty years.

  The ladder led down, down, down into endless darkness.

  ONE

  PANTING HARD, ALANIA Beruthi peeked through the barely open door of the servants’ staircase and watched the humanoid robot that was supposed to be keeping an eye on her stride past with its peculiar too-careful gait. A moment later she heard a series of thumps. She let out her held breath in a rush and promptly burst into giggles, echoed by Sandi Praterus and Lissa Smilkoni, her best friends, who were crowded onto the off-limits landing with her. Both the same height, both skinny, Sandi pale-skinned, Lissa dark-skinned, they looked like matching chess pieces from opposite sides of the board.

  “How did you do that?” Lissa whispered breathlessly.

  “Disabled some sensors,” Alania said, trying not to sound proud of herself but failing miserably. “Pulled some wires. Lieutenant Beruthi told me I should learn as much as I could about robots since it’s the family business. So I did.” She rubbed the backs of her knuckles. She’d scraped them badly on the sharp edge of the watchbot’s skull hatch when it had moved unexpectedly and she’d jerked her hand back. But she’d washed away the blood, and the skin was already closed; she’d always healed quickly.

  “But it fell down the stairs!” Sandi said, sounding slightly shocked. “Won’t it be damaged?”

  “No, it’s tough,” Alania said with more certainty than she felt. If the watchbot were damaged, whatever punishment she was already guaranteeing herself with today’s escapade would be ten times more severe. “But it won’t be able to get up with its sensors disabled. It will just lie there until we get back and I fix them.”

  “You’re terrible,” Sandi said, but now she sounded less shocked and more impressed.

  Alania grinned at her. “Thank you!” she said cheerfully. “So now the coast is clear. Ready to go?”

  Strictly speaking, they weren’t supposed to go anywhere. Which was the whole point of this exercise. They were supposed to stay right there in Quarters Beruthi and have a tea party or something. They weren’t even allowed to go out into the safe, pristine white streets of Twelfth Tier, although at least Lissa and Sandi weren’t completely forbidden from doing so, like Alania was.

  They definitely weren’t supposed to go to another Tier altogether, but that was precisely what Alania had in mind.

  Had there been an actual human in Quarters Beruthi to chaperone them, escape would have been far more difficult. But the only human employed in the house of Lieutenant Beruthi was Sala, Alania’s private servant, and she was away on one of her four-times-a-year visits with her parents. They lived in Agricultural Compound 27, a hundred kilometers east of the City—a farm that was, oddly enough, owned by Sandi’s mother, Lieutenant Commander Varia Praterus—and Sala would be there for another two days.

  Alania had sneaked out even on Sala once or twice, using the stairs they were on now to get into the service tunnels beneath the streets and then climbing up into a public building, but before now she’d always limited her adventures to Twelfth Tier. Since she was under constant surveillance whenever she was in the streets, like everyone else, she was perfectly safe, and her guardian’s reprimands had been mild, the loss of vid privileges and lack of dessert for a week well worth the break from the mundane. She’d broached the idea of a real adventure today with Lissa and Sandi at her twelfth birthday party a week before, a dreary affair to which all Officers’ daughters within two years of her age had, by custom, been invited. As usual, Lissa and Sandi had sat with her at the head table, and that had given them time to scheme. Alania had invited them over today with her guardian’s permission, knowing that Sala would be away and babysitting would be a robot-only affair. Now the watchbot was disabled and they were free, as she had never been before in all her twelve years, and she knew a secret she didn’t think her guardian knew she knew: he had a private elevator.

  A noise had awakened her one night, and she’d peeked through her door just in time to see him enter the utility room a few meters down the hall from her . . . and not come out again. Since the room where the cleaning robot switched attachments and stored itself for charging was only about three meters on a side, that was, to say the least, peculiar. After twenty minutes, she’d gathered enough courage to go and knock in case the Lieutenant had had a heart attack or something, but there’d been no answer. Then she’d tried the door. Although it was normally locked, it had opened to reveal a utility room that looked the same as always, with no sign of the Lieutenant.

  Puzzled, she’d gone back to bed. In the morning, the Lieutenant was back, and the door was locked.

  Not that that had stopped her investigating. She’d simply waited by the room one morning until the cleaning ’bot came out, then grabbed the door so it couldn’t close and lock. A quick examination of the walls had revealed the room’s secret: a standard elevator control pad behind a sliding panel. It needed a key, of course, but Alania happened to know where the Lieutenant kept a copy of his. She probably wasn’t supposed to know that either, but you couldn’t spend the bulk of your life confined to a house, however spacious, without exploring every nook and cranny, and Sala didn’t watch her nearly as closely as the watchbot did. The Lieutenant didn’t even keep the spare key locked up; it was in an open drawer in his desk, and he was equally careless about locking his office door.

  The key, a golden rod about ten centimeters long and a centimeter in diameter, was already in Alania’s pocket. It would open the utility room door and let them use the elevator. And from there . . .

  “It might let us go to any floor we want,” she said. “So which one?”

  “Not Eleventh,” Lissa said. “I go there all the time.”

  “We can’t go to Tenth,” Sandi said. “That’s the jail.”

  “Ninth is still too ritzy,” Alania said. “Let’s head to Eighth—no, Seventh!”

  “Five Tiers down?” Lissa said excitedly. “I’ve never been lower than Ninth.”

  “I’ve never been lower than Eleventh,” Sandi admitted.

  “And I’ve never left Twelfth,” Alania said. “So it’ll be new for all of us!”

  “Won’t it be dangerous?” Sandi asked, though she sounded a little ashamed for doing so.

  “We’re not talking First or Second,” Alania said. “Although if you really want an adventure, we could try the Bowels . . .”

  Sandi blanched. “Captain, no!”

  Alania laughed at her. “Not serious,” she said, although deep inside she wondered very much what the Bowels looked like. Or First and Second, or Third, or Fourth. Sometimes even the Middens sounded intriguing. Anywhere but Twelfth.

  Her friends had not only been allowed to travel to other Tiers—high-level ones, at least—they’d even been allowed to leave the City. Their parents had Estates in the farmlands of the Homeland and Retreats in more scenic locations,
and they visited them often, as well as the Resorts that catered to Officers and their families. Lieutenant Beruthi also had an Estate not far from the City and a Retreat way up in the northern foothills of the Iron Ring, but he’d made it clear Alania wasn’t allowed to go to either, though he’d never told her why.

  He’ll kill me after today, she thought, but even that thought held little dread. He couldn’t literally kill her. The usual loss of privileges, even for an extended time, would be worth it, and what other punishments could he come up with? Lock her in her room, she supposed, but that wouldn’t be noticeably different from her regular life.

  “Seventh it is, then,” she said. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” Lissa said.

  “I guess,” Sandi said.

  “Follow me.” Alania opened the stairwell’s door wide and stepped boldly into the upstairs hall, although she couldn’t help glancing to the right, the direction the watchbot had gone. It hadn’t climbed back up the stairs, which it surely would have if it had somehow recovered. Emboldened, she strode to the utility room door, produced the Lieutenant’s spare key with a flourish, pushed the golden cylinder into the round opening in the lockplate, and opened the door when the end of the cylinder flashed green. Retrieving the key, she held the door open for her friends. “After you!”

  They crowded in. Alania let the door close behind them. Lights came on automatically, an antiseptic white illumination from glowtubes in the ceiling. It made Sandi look even paler than usual.