He was thin to the point of gauntness, pale, and even from his vantage point twenty meters away, Kranz could see that he was shaking. Kranz could barely recognize his own features in the youth’s emaciated, stubbled face, though the ice-blue eyes flicking nervously from side to side were certainly the same. The boy’s dark brown hair stuck up in all directions. Kranz frowned. He’d been warned that Falkin had not taken the reprogramming well. A day or so of unconsciousness was normal—Kranz had been out for some thirty hours himself—but Falkin had been unconscious for three days and all but catatonic for another five. He’d hardly spoken since.
Well, Kranz thought, I’ll soon whip him into shape. Who better to get through to him than an older version of himself?
Science Officer Prentis, who had overseen the nanobot reprogramming, came out next. She saw the First Officer and started toward him, saying, “Bring him,” to the Provost. Then, to Kranz, “First Officer, I’m pleased to—”
A sharp bang echoed through the hangar. Kranz jerked his eyes from the approaching Prentis to the aircar. The Provost, clutching his stomach, blood welling over his fingers, dropped to his knees and then to his side on the black tiles. Falkin dropped the man’s slugthrower and leaped back into the aircar, the door closing behind him.
Kranz started to run toward the vehicle, but it was far too late. It lifted, spun, and roared out of the hangar, the backwash of its rotors tumbling Kranz across the hangar floor. Groaning, he sat up just in time to see the aircar, still accelerating, drop its nose toward the ground and vanish from sight.
A moment later the hangar vibrated with a thunderous explosion. By the time Kranz had staggered to his feet and run to the lip of the hangar, Prentis at his side, the black smoke from the wreckage had already climbed as high as Twelfth Tier.
Danyl stood in the Last Chance Market, trying not to look as nervous as he felt as he faced the trader he’d contacted surreptitiously two weeks before via a mail drop he wasn’t supposed to know about. Four years had passed since the trashslide. He didn’t think this was the same trader he’d seen Erl talking to the day he’d almost died, but it was hard to be certain, not only because so much time had passed but also because the trader’s face was hidden behind a stained red handkerchief and dark goggles. None of the traders in the Last Chance Market showed their faces if they could help it. Danyl wouldn’t even have been certain it was a man if the trader hadn’t said, “Well?” in a gruff bass voice.
“I want to know what it would cost me to get into the City,” Danyl said.
The man cocked his head to one side. “You want a City Pass?”
At least he didn’t laugh in my face, Danyl thought. “Yeah.”
The trader shrugged. “It’s not impossible. Takes a hell of a salvage score, though.”
“I know that,” Danyl said impatiently. “But what, exactly?”
“That’s valuable information, that is,” the man said. He crossed his arms. “TANSTAAFL, kid. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. What’ve you got to trade?”
Danyl had expected that. He reached into his pocket and pulled out something that gleamed even in the gloom of early morning, made all the gloomier by the shadow of the looming City. “Jewelry,” he said. “Found it in an old box eight feet down. Looks like diamonds.”
“Synthetics,” the man said. “Diamonds have more fire. But good enough.” He took the necklace and tucked it into one of his deep pockets. “So. I’ve heard of only two scavengers who scored something worth a City Pass. First was a woman who found an old-style data crystal from Officer country. Don’t know what was on it, though I have my suspicions.”
“You didn’t make the deal?” Danyl asked.
The man snorted. “Wish. No, she traded with Char. Char got her a City Pass, all right, and they both went in. Char dropped out of sight soon after; no one I’ve talked to knows what happened to her. Maybe she got rich and she’s up on Eighth or Ninth. On the other hand, maybe she’s rotting in Tenth.” He shrugged as if he didn’t care either way. “Know what happened to the woman, though.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the black underside of the City. “She came back out again. In pieces.”
Danyl ignored that, fiercely focused on what really mattered. “But she got in.”
“She got in.”
Danyl glanced around. They still had the platform to themselves. That didn’t mean they weren’t being observed—the Rustbloods certainly kept a watch, although the Market was a safe space by long-standing tradition. Nobody in the Middens could afford to spook the traders by starting anything anywhere close to it. If the traders stopped coming down, life would get even nastier, and probably shorter, than it already was.
Danyl looked back at the trader. “And the other person?”
“Guy who used to run the Rustbloods was sifting through some wastepaper, found a document that shouldn’t have been there, covered with some very interesting figures showing that the finances of a Fifth-Tier Bank were not exactly—or even close to—what was being reported to regulators. Guy got out, handed the paper over to the Bank in exchange for a nice nest egg—keeping a copy tucked away somewhere it’ll get passed on if anything happens to him, of course. He runs a respectable cleaning business on Fifth Tier now.” The trader grinned. “Can always get a loan, I hear.”
Danyl frowned. “Neither of those is helpful. How can I look for something like that?”
The trader laughed. “Kid, that’s the point. You can’t look for that kind of score. You can only luck into it. But I’ll tell you this—you’ve got a good eye for salvage. Wouldn’t expect anything else from someone Erl’s raised. If anyone can find something that’ll net him a City Pass, it’s you.”
“Are those the only two City Passes anyone has ever scored or just the only two you know about?”
“Now, how can I answer that?” the trader said. “Of course I can only tell you about the ones I know about.”
Danyl grimaced. “Sorry. But there could be others?”
“There could be,” the trader said. “But I doubt there are. You gotta understand, kid, it’s not easy even for one of us to get a City Pass. You can’t just buy one from the first Provost you see. You have to make a deal with some people it’s not always safe to deal with. They take a big cut, so whatever you’re trading has to be worth a lot. Besides, nobody knows exactly what something like that is worth until they try to sell it. And sometimes just trying to sell gets you dead or hauled off to Tenth Tier.” He shrugged. “Keep looking.” He gave a rough chuckle. “You’re young. Maybe by the time you’re Erl’s age . . .”
That felt like a punch to the gut, and Danyl’s hands clenched. He would have loved to have shown the trader just how far along he’d come in his combat training in the simulator. But he controlled himself for the same reason the Rustbloods did near the Market—he and Erl couldn’t afford to risk losing access to the Last Chance Market, and that was what would happen if he stepped out of line.
“Don’t think I got a fair trade for the necklace,” he growled. That much he could say.
The trader laughed. “I told you, kid, the stones are synthetic. I’ll be lucky to get twenty creds for it. You got exactly what you paid for.”
Danyl forced his hands to relax and took a deep breath. “What a waste of time.” He turned to go—then looked up, startled, as something roared out of the City from somewhere very high up. Just an aircar—four or five of them launched from or landed in the higher Tiers every day—but they didn’t normally dive like—
The aircar vanished from his sight beyond the Canyon Rim. The explosion a moment later echoed from the bottom of the City and Canyon’s far wall like a clap of thunder. A tower of black smoke poured up above the Rim.
“What the hell?” The trader dashed for the ladder stretching from the Market to the Rim. Danyl couldn’t follow—not up there. He stayed where he was, staring at the smoke, wond
ering what damage the aircar had done to the warehouses clustered outside the City Gate. Or had it hit the giant, mysterious, white Cubes scattered haphazardly around the City on both sides of the Canyon? Would that be enough to force one open? He doubted it; no one in the entire history of the City had ever managed to make so much as a mark on their shining surfaces, much less pry, cut, or blast one open.
There was no sign of the aircar’s passenger compartment, which should have separated at the first sign of trouble and descended safely. A shame, because if there was one thing Danyl was sure must be worth a City Pass, it was rescuing some upper-Tier VIP from an ejected aircar passenger pod that just happened to land in the Middens.
He pulled his synthileather hood up over his head, snugged his goggles over his eyes, and headed for the ladder he could take from the Market back down into the trash. Turning to get on it brought the City into view once more. As he descended rung by rung, he stared up at the massive metal tower, wreathed in fumes and vapors from hundreds of exhaust vents and pipes as well as in the black smoke from the burning wreckage of the aircar.
I’ll get in there. Someday I’ll get in there.
He reached the rubbish, turned his back on the City, and headed for home.
As Alania, wearing a fuzzy pink robe over a damp swimsuit, crossed the entrance hall of Quarters Beruthi on her way back to her room after a morning swim, she heard voices coming from the Lieutenant’s reception office, the first door on the right.
She hesitated with her hand on the banister of the stairs leading to the second floor. Both voices belonged to men. One was the Lieutenant. The other . . .
. . . the other, she was almost certain, belonged to First Officer Kranz, and that was what gave her pause.
As First Officer, Kranz ruled the City—in the Captain’s name, of course, but since there had officially been only one Captain in the centuries-long history of the City, it was widely thought she was not just a figurehead but an embalmed figurehead.
As Alania had learned from the rigorous course of study Lieutenant Beruthi had imposed on her since her adventure to Fifth Tier with Sandi and Lissa four years before, there had been many First Officers in the almost five hundred years since the First Citizens awoke and set about making lives in the Homeland, but all of them had been Kranzes. To be sure, all Officer positions were hereditary, and though there were occasional shufflings in the ranks (when, for example, an Officer died without issue), the line of Kranzes had not only remained unbroken, it had remained male. The First Officer was always a man.
Staydmore Kranz, now sixty-two years of age, had been First Officer for some thirty years. His own son had just turned twenty—or so Alania had heard; she’d never met him. She saw Kranz himself once a year at Lieutenant Beruthi’s midwinter ball, as de rigueur a social requirement for him as the tiresome birthday parties involving all the other girls near her age was for her.
She recognized his voice, but she’d never heard it like this: tight with emotion, raised to a strangled shout. At first she though he was angry, but then she realized that wasn’t quite right. He wasn’t angry, he was anguished. Or perhaps both.
She hesitated on the stairs. The Lieutenant didn’t know she was there. Sala was upstairs, cleaning her room, and she knew Alania was swimming but not for how long. Since Sala was on duty and the Lieutenant was home, the watchbot was inactive. Alania was in the relatively unique position of being able to act freely.
The proper thing to do was certainly to demurely climb the stairs and shut her ears to the First Officer’s pain. But for Alania, any chance at rebellion was worth taking, so instead she slipped off her pool shoes, figuring bare feet would be quieter, and hurried soundlessly across the marble floor of the main hall to the closed door of the office.
She put her ear against it.
“. . . too soon,” Beruthi was saying, voice intense. “Sir, you know it’s too soon. She’s only sixteen. Her brain development . . .”
Sixteen? They’re talking about me! Alania realized with a shock. But . . . why?
“Don’t talk to me about brain development!” Kranz raged. “Falkin’s brain is never going to develop, is it? And he was the last.”
Puzzled and intensely curious, Alania pressed her ear to the door harder.
“Sir,” Beruthi said, “I understand your problem and the magnitude of your loss. But it’s a physical impossibility.”
“You understand nothing. The magnitude of my loss is greater than you can possibly imagine.”
“Sir,” Beruthi said, and he sounded hurt, “you know that’s not true. I have been by your side from the beginning of this endeavor. I know what you are trying to accomplish, and I have done everything I can to help you achieve your goals, as my ancestors always helped your ancestors. I do understand. This tragedy is shocking and adds risk to your efforts, I admit, but it hardly presages disaster. It has removed a fail-safe—one that would be nice to have, I admit, but is hardly crucial. You just have to wait and keep yourself safe for four more years, sir. Just four more years.”
Kranz muttered something Alania didn’t catch, but she was pretty sure it was obscene. “The little fool,” he said then. His voice dropped so she had to strain to hear just a few words here and there. “ . . . Thomas . . . the nanobots shouldn’t have . . . Prentis says . . . the Captain . . .”
“Alania!” came a sharp whispered rebuke. Alania straightened and spun to see Sala staring at her from the bottom of the stairs; she had been so focused on the half-heard conversation that she’d neglected to keep watch, and now her heart pounded in her chest. “What are you doing?” her maidservant whisper-shouted. “If the Lieutenant catches you . . . !”
Alania shot a regretful look at the closed door, then hurried across the room to Sala. “It’s First Officer Kranz,” she said in a low voice, pushing her feet back into her pool shoes. “I heard him talking to the Lieutenant—he sounded upset. I just wanted to know what was going on.”
“No excuse for eavesdropping,” Sala said primly. “Up to your room.”
“You won’t tell the Lieutenant?” Alania asked, starting up the steps.
“Of course not,” Sala said, following her, and Alania grinned. Sala might be her servant, but she thought of her more like a big sister most of the time—sometimes more like the mother she’d never known. “No harm done. And anyway, I can tell you why Kranz is here.”
“Why?” Alania asked, glancing back at her.
Sala made a shooing motion to keep her moving, and Alania climbed the last few steps and then turned to look at her servant again. “Why?”
Sala glanced down the stairs, then leaned in close. “His son died,” she said in a low voice. “Aircar crash earlier this morning. Terrible thing.” She straightened. “Now get into your room, get out of that wet swimsuit, and get dressed. Lunch is in half an hour.”
Alania didn’t move. “Did someone kill him?” she asked, fascinated. “Was it an assassination?”
Sala snorted. “You read too many adventure stories. Of course it wasn’t an assassination. It was a tragic accident, that’s all.” She strode past Alania to the door of her room, opened it, and motioned her inside. Alania sighed and obeyed, but as she passed Sala, the servant said thoughtfully, “Might mean things are going to change when Kranz dies, though. As far as I know there’s never been a First Officer without an heir.”
“No, there hasn’t,” Alania said. “And his wife died a long time ago, didn’t she?”
Sala nodded. “Giving birth to his son, I heard. Never saw her; never knew anybody who did. They say she never came into the City at all—lived and died on the Kranz Estate. She’d be too old now, anyway.” She shrugged. “Well, won’t matter to me, whoever’s in charge. Nothing will change. Nothing ever does. Now get dressed, and don’t be late for lunch.”
“Will the Lieutenant be joining me?” Alania asked hopefully, thinking she
might be able to ask a question or two without revealing she’d been listening at the door.
“Not he,” Sala said. “He’s leaving for his Retreat as soon as he can get away. He’ll be gone for a month.”
The door closed.
As she changed, Alania thought back over what she’d heard. It made no sense. Kranz had sounded upset—furious, even—but not sad, not like a man grieving the loss of his son. He’d seemed more worried about something else entirely, something his son was supposed to play an important role in . . . important, but apparently not vital.
She’s only sixteen, Beruthi had said. Her brain development . . .
Me, presumably. But what could I and my brain development—or lack of it—have to do with the loss of Kranz’s son and some enormous problem facing the First Officer?
And what would change in four years, except that she’d be twenty?
The same age as Kranz’s son, who had just died. That thought was a little shiver-making.
She shook her head and reached for her brush to swipe the tangles from her wet hair. Nothing ever changes in the City, Sala had said, and it certainly seemed like nothing ever changed in Alania’s life. It was hard to imagine what difference four more years would make.
I guess I’ll find out.
FOUR
FOUR YEARS LATER, not quite eight years after their nearly disastrous “adventure” to Fifth Tier, Alania sat with Lissa and Sandi at a table at the front of the Quarters Beruthi dining room, supposedly celebrating her twentieth birthday while really suffering the torments of the damned with a fake smile plastered on her face.
The Amazing Belgrani’s Hour of Magic and Mystery was finally—finally!—drawing to a close. The titular magician climbed a spindly plaster column. Teetering on tiptoe, he spun three times, then vanished with a sound like tinkling wind chimes in a puff of purple smoke. A collective gasp followed by applause dispersed the smoke into the general haze of the candlelit and overly warm room.
The Cityborn Page 5