The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  Alania said nothing. Eventually he had to tell her what he was talking about.

  She hoped.

  He looked toward the door. “Have you been happy as the ward of Lieutenant Beruthi?”

  Alania blinked. “He . . . has taken very good care of me,” she said carefully.

  “He has done his duty well,” Kranz said. He looked down at her again. “But you are twenty now. It is time for your new life to begin.”

  Here it comes, Alania thought, heart suddenly pounding. “Sir?”

  “You’re going to have a new guardian, Alania.” Kranz spread his hands. “Me.”

  Alania stared at him. He might as well have said she was going to sprout wings and fly over the Iron Ring and out of the Homeland forever. Ward of the First Officer? Leave Quarters Beruthi, the only home she’d ever known? Yes, five minutes ago she’d been dreaming of just that, but she’d had in mind a trip into the country, or maybe shopping on Eighth or Ninth, not moving into Quarters Kranz. The idea was . . . ludicrous.

  No, not ludicrous. Terrifying. Quarters Kranz, twice the size of Quarters Beruthi, was a fortress guarded by Provosts. She already felt like a prisoner in Quarters Beruthi. How much worse would it be there? She only had two friends. Would Lissa and Sandi even be able to visit her? And what about Sala?

  She wanted to ask, but . . . this was the First Officer. You didn’t question him that way. It would be impudent, improper, and very likely imprudent. If the whispered stories were true, some people who questioned Kranz’s decisions had simply . . . vanished.

  And looking at the unsmiling man in front of her, with blue eyes as cold and hard as cobalt steel, it was very difficult to discount those rumors.

  “Sir, I . . . I don’t know what to say,” she murmured at last. “Why me? Who . . .” Her voice trailed off. Who am I? was another question she’d learned long ago would not be answered beyond the barest of facts: her parents were dead, and Beruthi had taken her in. How her parents had died, no one would tell her. Nor would they tell her why Beruthi, of all people, had become her guardian. Sala either did not know or would not say. Lissa and Sandi didn’t have a clue. At parties, she’d overheard other girls speculating about it, some of them in ways that made her coldly furious and hotly embarrassed at the same time, but none of them knew.

  Sometimes Alania thought her parents must have died bravely defending the Captain from assassins. Sometimes she thought instead that her parents must have been criminals and that her imprisonment was punishment for her poor choice of ancestors.

  Sometimes she even toyed with the idea that her parents still lived somewhere, perhaps in exile far from the City, and she was a hostage to their continued good behavior. It would explain why she was never allowed to travel into the countryside.

  For a time when she was quite little, she’d believed that Beruthi felt guilty concerning her parents’ deaths and had taken her in because he was a man of deep compassion. However, considering he’d shown no inkling of compassion, deep or shallow, in all the years since, she hadn’t thought that in a very long time.

  In any event, none of those explanations explained this. But she felt certain of one thing: this had something to do with that overheard conversation when she was sixteen and quite probably with her adventure to Fifth Tier, the one Beruthi had clearly arranged, and the subsequent change in her education.

  “I can’t tell you why,” Kranz said. “Not yet. I promise I will as soon as I can, but for reasons of City security . . . not yet.” His gaze sharpened still further, as if he were looking at a fascinating specimen through a microscope. “I have long been observing you, Alania Beruthi. You are important and special. Unique, in fact.”

  Unique? Me? How?

  He stared at her intently a moment longer, then cleared his throat and glanced at his watch, breaking his intense focus on her, as though afraid he had betrayed more than he had intended . . . which he hadn’t, since nothing he’d said made the slightest bit of sense to Alania. “Duty calls,” he said. He lifted his eyes to her again. “Go back and enjoy your birthday party and final evening here, Alania. I will send an escort for you tomorrow—it will have to be rather early, I’m afraid—to bring you to Quarters Kranz. Everything from your rooms will be packed and moved for you; don’t worry about that.” He held out his right hand. She took it and let him help her to her feet.

  She tried to pull free, but his grip tightened. “Just one more thing,” he said. “A . . . precaution.” He reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out a short metal tube, open at one end. “Hold out your hand.”

  Alania recognized the device. Every six months, a doctor came to examine her. She poked and prodded Alania from head to toe and then bundled her into the full-body docbot (kept in a room near the swimming pool) for an even more detailed examination. Alania was put to sleep for an hour during these exams, so she never knew exactly what was done to her. When she woke, the doctor helped her out of the docbot, then performed one final test: this one. Neither Beruthi nor the doctor would tell her what it was for, but at least she knew it wouldn’t hurt. She held still as Kranz turned her hand over, then placed the open end of tube against her palm. He pressed a small switch on the tube’s side. The light on the closed end of the tube flashed green, as it always did.

  “Good.” The tube vanished into Kranz’s pocket. “Well then, I’ll leave you to your celebrations, Alania. Once again, congratulations. I’ll welcome you to your new home tomorrow.” He strode to the door and out.

  The moment he was gone, Alania’s knees buckled, and she collapsed back onto the couch, feeling as if her whole world had not only been turned upside down but dropped on its head. She didn’t want to return to the party, but she knew her guardian—her former guardian—must be tiring of Sandi and Lissa, whom she was even more certain must be tiring of him. Still, she had to sit another three or four minutes before she could gather wits and strength enough to rise.

  Tomorrow I’m leaving this house forever, she thought as she walked to the music room door.

  Twenty minutes ago, that would have seemed a dream come true.

  Now it felt more like the start of a nightmare.

  Kranz was not a frivolous man, but he was willing to admit—to himself, if no one else—that he was somewhat vain about his position as de facto ruler of the City. And so, though it was not strictly necessary, he exited Quarters Beruthi as he had entered: right through the middle of Alania’s birthday celebration, although this time without endangering the acrobats, who would not resume their act until Alania returned. Along the way he rescued Lieutenant Beruthi from the attentions of Alania’s two young friends. He pasted one of his bright-but-utterly-fake smiles onto his face and waved to the rest of the girls as he passed them. Unusually, despite the enormous, pressing sense of urgency and approaching calamity that darkened every hour of his days, he felt the smile turn genuine as he and the Lieutenant made their way to the main entrance. “You’ve done good work, looking after her all these years,” he said to Beruthi.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the Lieutenant.

  “I’m sorry to have to take her away. I’m sure you’ve grown very fond of her.”

  Beruthi opened one side of the double front door. “No, sir. I have been very careful not to.”

  Kranz stepped through the door onto a broad portico overlooking a small garden-courtyard, one of many scattered through Twelfth Tier. Other Officer’s Quarters bordered the other three sides. Six Provosts stood at attention on the broad stairs leading up to Beruthi’s front door, three to a side: Kranz’s bodyguards. He turned to Beruthi. “Very wise, Lieutenant Commander.”

  Beruthi froze in the act of closing the door, then turned toward Kranz somewhat jerkily, as though he were one of his robots with a motor-function fault. “Sir?”

  “You heard me,” Kranz said. He held out his hand. Beruthi took it, and he shook it firmly. “Congrat
ulations on your promotion. Considering everything the Beruthi clan has done for the City, the First Officers, and of course, the Captain . . . it’s long overdue.” He released the new Lieutenant Commander’s hand and looked up at the house’s imposing greenstone façade. “Although considering how Beruthi Robotics has prospered in its long service to the City, I don’t believe there’ll be any need to find you quarters more befitting your rank.”

  “No, sir,” Beruthi said. “But the honor to the Beruthi name . . . I’m very appreciative.”

  You should be, Kranz thought. Promotions were few and far between; the last one had raised Sub-Lieutenant Praterus, father of Alania’s friend Sandi, to the rank of Lieutenant fifteen years ago, after Lieutenant Sparrow had carelessly drowned while water-breathing before fathering an heir or even freezing sperm. Since Beruthi had never married, remained childless, had likewise failed to bank his genetic material, and was already in his fifties, Kranz thought it likely the promotion and the Beruthi name would end with this generation. He didn’t understand why Beruthi had chosen that course of action. Perhaps it was due to a misguided desire for revenge—he knew the current Beruthi had hated his own father. Whatever the reason, it was of no real concern to Kranz or the City; if the Beruthi line failed, there were many others eager to take over his rank, Beruthi Robotics, and especially his luxurious Quarters, Estate, and Retreat. Science Officer Prentis came to mind . . .

  “No need to accompany me further; I’ll make my own way from here,” Kranz said. He nodded to the Provost Captain who commanded his bodyguards and started down the steps, the Provosts falling in behind him and to either side.

  The unnatural lightening of his mood faded as he crossed the garden-courtyard. One of the few green indicators on the Captain’s status panel had slipped to yellow just that morning, something to do with liver function; a week before, a yellow indicator had turned red as she entered the last stages of heart failure. The medical machinery had been pushed to the limit, and so had her ancient, frail body, which was aswarm with nanobots. As for her mind . . . well, that had been overwritten so many times it barely connected with reality anymore.

  The City had been declining for decades, but the rate of decline had increased during Kranz’s lifetime, as the Captain slowly failed. Living in a world of delusion, the Captain did not give the orders that would have sent out the maintenance robots to fix failing systems; she believed all systems were operating normally. The cursed Builders had insured that only the Captain could give those orders, and despite everything else he had accomplished, First Officer Thomas Kranz, Kranz’s original, had not been able to change that.

  Of course, there were some things humans could fix on their own, but there were many more they couldn’t, because they didn’t have access to the necessary details of the City’s construction, which were locked within databases only the Captain could access. All repairs were jury-rigged at best, and some attempts at repair only made things worse. From the smoothly functioning, integrated machine it had been at its founding, the City had deteriorated to little more than an extremely large and ugly building housing far more people than it had been designed to hold.

  Kranz’s hands clenched at his sides. Four years ago, he had almost despaired. The suicide of his clone, Falkin, meant that he would be the last First Officer Kranz. He had wanted to advance to the endgame of the Cityborn Project then, afraid that something would happen to him and that all the knowledge—the dark, secret knowledge—that had been passed through the Kranz line since its beginning would be lost. Without that knowledge, the City would fail finally and utterly, and everyone in and around it would eventually die.

  But as Beruthi had reminded him then, there had been no way to hurry things along. Alania had not been ready, her brain not yet developed enough. And so, for the four years since Falkin’s death, the fate of the City had dragged on Kranz ever more heavily. The fear that he might die by accident or assassination despite every precaution or that the Captain would die too soon filled his days with dread and his nights with nightmares

  Kranz shook his head, furious all over again at the raid twenty years ago that had forced him to put all his eggs in one Alania-sized basket. Seven candidate children had been produced. Genetics dictated a fifty-fifty chance any particular child would be suitable. Sure enough, of the seven, only three had been. Of those three, one boy, Danyl, had been stolen away by Erlkin Orillia. The second, a girl, had been murdered. No doubt Alania would have been murdered as well if she had not been fortuitously ill that evening and held in a different part of the hospital. The unsuitable children had been left unharmed by the kidnapper, though of course Kranz himself had ordered their elimination, just a few months later, once he was certain they were of no use to the project.

  As for the kidnapped boy . . .

  Nobody knew why Orillia had stolen Danyl, but there was no doubt he was behind the kidnapping and the murder. He had made no effort to conceal his meddling with the environmental and security controls, to cause convenient blackouts to cover his entrance into the hospital, and he had left an equally clear trail afterward. Not fifteen minutes after the boy was taken, Orillia’s personal aircar had launched from the same hangar from which Falkin had flown to his death sixteen years later. Orillia had also disabled the City’s air traffic control systems, so his flight had not been tracked. It had taken the Provosts a week to locate the aircar, abandoned in the foothills of the eastern reaches of the Iron Ring. Any trail that might have led from it had vanished beneath fresh snow, the first freezing onslaught of a particularly vicious winter.

  Neither Orillia nor the boy had been seen since. Whatever his plans, it seemed clear that the Ensign and the baby must have perished in the Iron Ring, as had many other people foolishly seeking freedom there from the rule of the Captain. Neither the vegetation nor the wildlife could be safely eaten—the wildlife couldn’t safely eat humans, either, but that didn’t stop it from trying—so all food had to be stolen from the farmlands. Such thefts were always discovered sooner or later, and the Provosts inevitably arrested the thieves shortly after that, if they even bothered taking them alive, which they usually didn’t. Some bandits had survived for a year or two, but never longer.

  Kranz had spent several fruitless days hoping Orillia would be found so he could thoroughly, painfully, fatally interrogate him. The man had almost destroyed everything.

  But not quite, because Alania had escaped. Beruthi, who knew more about the true scope of Kranz’s plans than anyone else—the Beruthis had been loyal supporters of the Kranzes since the beginning—had raised her as his ward. Carefully watched her whole life, carefully educated, she was the only one who could save the City.

  Tomorrow she would be safely ensconced in Quarters Kranz, though not for long. Within a week, she would fulfill her destiny, and the City would be reborn.

  Today, though . . .

  He sighed. Today he still had mounds of reports to get through and dozens of decisions to make. Not to mention an execution to attend on Tenth. As Kranz and his bodyguards exited the courtyard, he glanced over his shoulder at Quarters Beruthi, sheltering Alania, the Cityborn, behind its tall stone-covered walls, as it had for twenty years. This had better work. It’s our last chance.

  It will work, he reassured himself, facing forward again. She’ll be in my Quarters tomorrow, and she won’t be out of my sight again after that. When the time comes, she’ll be ready.

  And so will I.

  FIVE

  ON THE DAY after his twentieth birthday, Danyl woke early to the insistent beeping of his watch. He groaned but rolled out of bed at once; within two hours, he had to be in position.

  His feet hit icy rock, and he gasped a little. He could have had a rug by his bedside, of course, but he preferred the shock of the cold stone against the soles of his bare feet. He could have made the room warmer, too, but the isotope-powered space heater Erl claimed to have found and repaired long befor
e Danyl was born stood cold in the corner. Danyl had found that rising naked in a chilly underground chamber was another excellent method of bringing oneself to alertness.

  Shivering, he grabbed his underwear, pants, and shirt from where he’d dropped them on the floor the night before, pulled them on, tugged socks onto his feet, and padded out of his chamber and down the hallway to the bathroom. He didn’t shower; he’d definitely need a shower after the day’s adventure, and why shower twice? Bladder relieved, he washed his hands and went in search of breakfast.

  Erl was in the kitchen, through an archway to his right as he entered the living/dining room. No matter how early Danyl rose, Erl woke first and had breakfast waiting. Danyl paused in the archway, breathing in the comforting smells of fresh bread and crisping vatham. Erl stood by the cookbox, which looked as new now as it did in Danyl’s earliest memories. Erl claimed he’d scavenged it and the meat-growing vat next to it just a month or two before he’d scavenged Danyl, bringing the squalling infant he’d found abandoned in the Middens into his hideaway to raise as a son, but Danyl had never seen anything in such pristine shape in the Middens since.

  Or another infant, he reminded himself. Yet here I am. Just because something is highly improbable doesn’t mean it is impossible. He liked to remind himself of that every single day, since all his hopes for the future rested on it being true.

  He took the plate Erl proffered him, then sat at the table in the main room to eat his breakfast. The bread dripped with sweet oil, obtained through trade at the Last Chance Market like all their foodstuffs other than the vatmeat, and he savored his first mouthful in silence before asking, “What do you expect today?”

  “Not certain,” Erl said. “But I have high hopes. Some Officer died without an heir, and someone else is taking over her Quarters on Twelfth Tier and throwing out everything she doesn’t want. Could be anything from bed sheets to ’tronics. I’m hoping for ’tronics, of course.” He lifted the lid of the pot he was heating on the cookbox, sniffed the pot’s contents, then replaced the lid. “Best thing: it’s a Direct Drop.”