Danyl’s fork stopped in midair. “A Direct Drop? From Twelfth?” Direct Drops, Drops that simply fell out of the bottom of the City without being sorted by the desultory recycling crews who worked on the First Tier, were rare. They occurred only when those crews—mostly made up of drunks and addicts who didn’t work very hard or very well, which was why so much salvage made it to the Middens at all—were unable to keep up with the trash generated by the many Tiers above them. But a Direct Drop from Eleventh or Twelfth—Officer Country—was unheard of. Any Direct Drop might contain treasures. But one from Officer Country . . . ?
This could be the day.
Trying to hide his excitement, Danyl gave a thoughtful nod. “I’ll keep my eyes open,” he said, then resumed eating.
“You always do,” Erl said.
Danyl didn’t ask how Erl knew what would be Dropped that morning or where it was coming from; he knew Erl wouldn’t tell him. “Mystical means of divination” was the closest he’d ever gotten to an answer, but Erl wasn’t mystical about anything else. Danyl suspected Erl had some sort of contact very high up in the City, possibly through the trader who had helped rescue him from the trashslide when he was twelve, though he couldn’t imagine how a Last Chance Market trader could have high-level City contacts, either.
He shoveled in the rest of his breakfast, uneasily aware of the passing time. “Better be going,” he said, wiping his mouth with a ragged-but-clean napkin and getting to his feet.
Erl took the kaffpot off the cookbox and poured its steaming blue-black contents into a silvery tube. He twisted it closed, then handed it to Danyl. “Be careful.”
“Always,” Danyl said. Tube of kaff in hand, he opened the steel door, revealing a tunnel with smooth walls of reddish stone. That smoothness and precision, here and in the rest of their dwelling, was testament to the undeniable fact that excavation bots from the City had carved out their hidden refuge sometime in the distant past. Why, Danyl didn’t have a clue, and Erl claimed he didn’t either. Danyl wondered if it had something to with the Cubes, many of which were scattered on the other side of the fenced and fortified Canyon Rim above them. Since no one knew what the Cubes were, why they had been placed there, or what, if anything, their impenetrable shells might hide, the notion was only idle speculation.
Just before he reached what looked like a dead end, Danyl stepped into a side chamber. It smelled of decaying food and mold and general rot, but he hardly noticed; it was the smell of the Middens, nothing more. He pulled on a hooded coverall made of tough synthileather, painted and stained to a muddy brown color, overlaid with green and yellow smears. Around his waist, he buckled a tool belt from which hung pliers, a hammer, a good-sized crowbar, and his particular pride and joy: an actual sword, a Provost’s ceremonial blade that had somehow been lost in the Middens, which Erl had given him on his fourteenth birthday. Thanks to the virtual reality teaching machine, he even knew how to use it.
He pushed his socked feet into dark green waterproof boots, hung a pair of shiny black gloves and the tube of kaff from his belt, tugged the hood of the coat into place, and snugged the attached goggles over his eyes. Then he went out into the corridor, reached into an alcove in the wall, and pulled the metal handle inside. Silently, the stone blocking the end of the corridor swung inward, letting in a flood of mist-softened light. Danyl stepped through, then turned around and pushed at a protrusion in the cliff. It sank in a couple of centimeters. The stone door swung back into place, and the entrance vanished.
Danyl turned. He stood in a one-room shack, furnished solely with two rude rag-covered cots on either side of a circular stone depression in the floor, blackened by fire. A few old pots and even older clothes hung from hooks on the walls, which were made of different-sized planks of wood chinked with scraps of metal and plastic. Orange plastic roofed the shed, held up by a central metal pole rising from the middle of the fireplace. A ragged smoke hole was cut in the plastic just to one side of the pole.
Not for the first time, Danyl thanked the Captain that Erl had been the one to find his infant self mysteriously abandoned in the Middens. This hovel hid their real living quarters in the comfort of the tunnels, but had Danyl been scavenged by one of the gangs, he really would be living in a place like this . . . or far worse.
More likely, he would already be dead.
The thought of the gangs propelled him out the door. He needed to reach the Drop Zone unseen and get tucked out of sight before the Drop. If the Rustbloods got there first . . .
He didn’t like to think about that. He’d seen the remains of Rustbloods, losers in some internal power struggle, staked out as punishment in the Middens in the primary Drop Zones. If they didn’t starve or die of thirst first, they died when tons of garbage fell on them from the City’s Bowels.
Danyl didn’t want to die. He especially didn’t want to die buried in garbage. He’d escaped that fate twice: once as a baby, once when the trashslide caught him when he was twelve. He intended to keep right on escaping it.
No one lived directly under the City, in what was known as (rather unimaginatively) the Undercity. The residents of the Middens stayed out here, where sunlight could still reach during at least part of the day and where the rubbish was years or decades old. Half a kilometer deep, the Middens grew every day, not just from City trash but from rubbish from all over the Heartland, which automated disposal trucks dumped into massive chutes near the main gate.
Every few years, a trashalanche—a massive, roaring catastrophe that dwarfed the ordinary trashslides—thundered down the middle of the Canyon. To avoid that and other hazards, the wisest and longest-lived of the Middens’ various squatters clung to the Canyon walls. One of those walls, the east one, rose fifty sheer meters directly behind the hovel, barren of vegetation, a mass of smooth red rock offering no purchase to anyone who might think to climb out of the Canyon into the Heartland above. Not that succeeding at such a climb would do the climber any good—armed bots patrolled a fenced no-man’s-land on the Rim and would shoot to kill anyone who so much as raised his head up above ground level.
Danyl ignored the Canyon wall. He had to make a different climb: dangerous, but at least not impossible.
The Middens sloped sharply up to his right. Overgrown with sickly green weeds and with noxious streams trickling through the valleys between the mounds, it might almost have been mistaken for a natural—if highly unpleasant—landscape. But dig into it, Danyl knew, and you would find no honest soil, nothing but moldy paper and cloth, rotting wood and rusting steel. Dig too deep or in the wrong place, and you might never dig again, should you puncture one of the bubbles of gas trapped beneath the surface. You’d die of incineration should the gas ignite, asphyxiation if it didn’t; neither choice appealed to Danyl. Smart travelers through the Middens—if that wasn’t a contradiction in terms—stuck to the well-marked paths.
But the well-marked paths were also well-watched by the Rustbloods and the handful of solo scavengers, and so Danyl ignored the one that wended its way past the base of the rickety stairs leading down from the hovel’s door. Instead he cut across it and over two ridges, their surfaces quaking like gel beneath his feet, to follow his own path. It was as safe as the others—or nearly so—but secret, picked out with markings only he could recognize: a twisted bit of aluminum, a blue wire stuck into a piece of packing foam, a doll’s head. It wound up the mountain of trash between tottering piles that hid it from any watchers along the Canyon walls.
Looking up to the first marker, an upside-down jug of red plastic, he took note of the City for the first time that morning.
From down here you couldn’t see much of it, but Danyl didn’t need to; he had studied it in detail in the teaching machine. He knew it was shaped like a giant, elongated egg, pointy end up, bottom end flattened and truncated; that it had thirteen Tiers, plus the Bowels at its base; that the Captain lived alone in luxury under the pearly dome at the v
ery top and had supposedly done so for centuries, though how that was possible Danyl didn’t know; that the Officers lived in the two Tiers below that, and the rest of the populace lived in the Tiers below those. But Danyl had never seen the inside of a City Tier except in simulations, where they were devoid of people and looked as they had on the Day of Awakening, which had very little to do with the way they looked now. All he had ever personally seen of the City was what he could see from here. The Bowels, the four-story black underbelly of the City, hung in his sky like a permanent thundercloud of metal, supported by four impossibly massive jointed legs on enormous feet, sunk so far in the stone the legs seemed more to grow out of the Canyon walls than to rest upon them. They held the City in its permanent crouch above the Canyon, some two hundred and fifty meters wide at this point.
Danyl kept climbing, and ten minutes later, he passed into the City’s shadow. There he paused, breathing hard, and took a welcome swig of hot, bitter kaff while he studied the Bowels.
That metal overcast was far from featureless. At the very center of the Bowels gaped an enormous opening, stretching right up through the Bowels to the underside of First Tier, as though there had once been some vast mechanism there that had been dismantled. Everywhere else, yellow, red, and pale-green lights glowed and flashed and rotated amidst a bewildering maze of pipes and chutes, exhaust vents and antennae. Things clanked and swung, groaned and twirled. Black, oily ooze slicked large areas, like pus from some vast, infected wound. Sometimes streams of boiling green liquid poured from the pipes, sizzling when they hit the trash. Sometimes steam erupted in vast howling clouds, hot enough to scald the skin from a man should he be unlucky enough to be caught in it. At fairly regular intervals, one of fifty-six huge hatches opened, a chute extruded like a vast tongue of bronze metal, and the City excreted another mass of trash, sending it thundering down into the Middens in a cloud of choking dust and stink.
Shortly afterward, the scavengers always arrived.
In the City above, social rank determined the Tier on which you lived: Captain, then Officers, the higher ranks on Twelfth, the lower ranks on Eleventh; factory owners and celebrities; small business people and skilled artisans; workers and shopkeepers. Each tier was a little larger, a little more crowded, and a little more common than the one above.
Down at the very bottom, just above the Bowels—or sometimes within them—lived the most menial of workers: the cleaners and swabbers and garbage-sorters, and a few starving artists.
And then, down here in the Middens . . . down here lived those who had fallen so far from respectable society that they had plunged out of the City altogether.
Thieves, murderers, escaped convicts; addicts, abused children and their abusers; those chased from the City and those who had fled, the City as willing to be rid of them as they were to be rid of it. Sometimes the City even provided safe passage down into the Middens via the Last Chance Market . . . but a path up again was only possible for those with City Passes. Once you moved into the Middens, you no longer had the right to even enter the City, much less live in it.
These human dregs were even more unwelcome in the Heartland than in the City, hunted down and arrested (or shot) if they dared to try to flee out into the illusory peace of the farm country. So they fetched up with the rest of the City’s trash in this place of final resort, where only the strong-arm tactics of the gangs—Rustbloods on this side of the City, Greenskulls on the other—held total anarchy at bay.
Erl had never said how he had ended up down here. As for himself, Danyl liked to think he was the illegitimate offspring of some powerful Officer who would swoop down and take him to his true home on Twelfth Tier someday. But knew in his heart that he was most likely nothing but the unwanted—and for some reason unaborted and unstrangled—by-blow of a meaningless liaison between Rustbloods, born in the Middens and likely to die there.
But not today, he told himself as he resumed his scramble up a shaking slope of paper, precariously welded together by damp and mold. Not on the first day of my twenty-first year. And maybe . . . just maybe . . . not ever.
Because Danyl had a plan. He wanted up and out, into the City. Even the Bowels had to be better than here, and he would work his way out of them and up the Tiers as far as he could, given half a chance.
Thanks to Erl’s mysteriously obtained teaching machine, he knew the layout of the City in detail. He understood City technology. He knew how to fight barehanded or with any weapon that came to hand. He even knew how to shoot, though he’d never held a real weapon. He could take care of himself in the City, but to get there, he needed a City Pass. With that, he could walk right in through the main entrance. A Pass wouldn’t guarantee him a job or a place to sleep or food to eat, but then, neither did the Middens.
He didn’t need a handout. He just needed an opportunity.
And maybe, just maybe, he’d find something in today’s Drop that would give it to him.
At the top of the paper mountain, he lay flat and slowly raised his head to examine the west wall of the Canyon, two hundred meters away. The Rustbloods kept a lookout there sometimes . . . but today no one moved atop their platform of scrap lumber and rusty iron. Danyl seized his moment and snaked over the top of the mound on his belly, then rolled down the other side in a cloud of stinking dust, splashing into a stagnant pool at the bottom. He ignored the damp and the smell, scrambled up, and squeezed between the rusting hulks of two old-fashioned groundcars. He found himself in the dim shade of the most secret of his paths: a narrow, winding almost-tunnel always threatening to collapse but never quite doing so—at least, not yet. Thick yellow-green tangleweed leaves shaded the path for more than a hundred meters. When he emerged at its end, he’d be safely past Rustblood territory and on the verge of the no-man’s-land of the Undercity . . . and not far from the small, seldom-opened hatch through which Erl predicted today’s very special Drop would arrive.
A Direct Drop from Officer Country! Danyl let the excitement he’d squelched in Erl’s presence ratchet up again as he squeezed between walls of compacted paper, crawled under rusting girders, and eased past corroded, goo-oozing barrels. The trader he’d talked to four years ago had made it clear that if he were ever going to escape the Middens, he needed a big score. Someone up above needed to make a mistake and discard something valuable—valuable enough that Danyl could barter it at the Last Chance Market for a Pass.
The trader had known of only two examples, but in the four years since Danyl had spoken to him, there had been a third: one of the Rustbloods had unearthed a locked box containing . . . something. No one knew what, but she’d knifed two of her gangmates to keep it and get it to the Market, and she’d gotten her City Pass.
Of course, two weeks later, she’d shown up in a Drop as a naked, bloody corpse, presumably having been robbed, raped, and murdered by one of the equally vicious lower-Tier City gangs, but that wouldn’t happen to Danyl. Just let him into the City, and he would make a new life for himself, and then he’d come back and free Erl from this hellhole, too.
It could happen. It would happen. And maybe, just maybe, it would happen today.
He reached the end of the almost-tunnel and, crouching in the shade of its mouth, peered out into what Erl had said would be today’s Drop Zone. It was within a few dozen meters of a familiar landmark: the Hazardous Waste Holding Tank, filled with the most dangerous of the many nasty liquids discharged from the City, originating from the factories and Captain knew where else. As Danyl knew from his studies, it had originally contained a multitude of special tanks, each designed to hold a particular type of hazardous waste. When a tank filled, it was supposed to be hauled away for safe disposal elsewhere. But the interior tanks had long since vanished, the roof that had covered them had been stripped away, and even the baffles meant to separate the tanks had corroded and failed. Now there was only a single hellish lake, a witch’s brew that gave off noxious, corrosive vapors and bub
bled and seethed as though boiling—and into which new waste was still pumped on a regular basis. The only time he’d ever seen anything leave that tank was in a steaming, deadly gush of fluid as an overflow valve triggered automatically. The liquid had eaten through four stories of trash before vanishing into the depths of the Middens. If the main tank walls ever failed, Danyl thought the resulting flood would burn its way to the Canyon floor and probably cause a massive collapse of the trash pile on which he now stood. Whether anyone in the Middens would survive such a calamity, he didn’t know—but he doubted it.
One more reason to get out.
Nothing moved—nothing he could see, at least, in the uncertain light beneath the vast metal sky. The gangs didn’t have access to Erl’s mysterious knowledge of Drops, so Danyl almost always had a few minutes to himself before and, most crucially, after a Drop, especially a Drop from a little-used hatch like this one. But only a few, and how few depended on how close he was to one of the gangs’ compounds.
Today he was very close indeed. Even if the Rustbloods didn’t know this particular Drop was about to take place, it wouldn’t take them long to react once it began.
Which should be any moment. Danyl gathered his legs under him and waited.
For a minute . . . two . . . an eerie silence hung over the Middens. And then . . .
High overhead, a light that had been burning green suddenly turned red and started to flash. A klaxon sounded, a harsh blatting sound, and Danyl knew Rustblood watchers would be scrambling onto their platforms to pinpoint the site of the impending Drop.
The klaxon sounded for thirty seconds. Then, with a spine-chilling screech, a rusty-red hatch irised open, and Danyl’s heart suddenly beat faster.
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