SEVEN
DANYL CAUGHT A GLIMPSE of the screaming girl as she fell: red blouse, black pants, black boots, long brown hair. Then she vanished, plunging into the piled refuse as though she had leaped into a deep pool of water. He fought his way through the rubbish toward her. She’s probably dead. A bit of broken wood, a steel beam, a lump of concrete . . .
But that didn’t stop him from trying to find her. Forget ’tronics or any of the other things that might have fallen in a Direct Drop from Twelfth Tier. A human being had to be valuable to someone, alive or dead. More valuable than anything else in the Middens.
City Pass-valuable.
Living human beings didn’t just drop out of the City into the Middens, though corpses sometimes did. The only other living human he’d ever heard of being found in the Middens was himself.
The Rustbloods would arrive within minutes. But he was here now.
Panting with exertion, he reached the site of the Drop. He could see where the girl had plunged into the Middens along with a lot of old sheets and curtains. Flinging himself full-length on the rubbish and pushing his goggles up onto his synthileather hood, he peered into the hole.
To his astonishment, relief, and excitement, he saw two wide eyes staring up at him—eyes the same pale blue color as his own. He could see at once what had happened. The mass of cloth with which she had fallen had formed a protective cocoon around her, while the garbage bags—mostly filled with paper, it looked like, and bits of carpet and other soft materials—had cushioned her landing. He thought he could get her out if he had enough time.
He had rope. He sat up, pulled off his pack, opened it, pulled out the rope, tied one end around his waist, and threw the other end down into the hole. “Take hold!” he shouted, and two pale hands gripped the rope. Then he turned, slung the rope over his shoulder, and began inching his way back down the fresh mound of trash, pulling with all his might. For a moment he stalled, unable to make any headway, but then the rope slackened—the girl had had enough wits to help by trying to climb out on her own. A moment later, he heard her gasp, “I’m out!”
He undid the rope, letting it fall, then turned and scrambled back up the slope to where she lay. Blood from a cut on her scalp and another on her cheek coated one side of her face. Beneath the blood, she looked as pale as the paper fluttering all around them, but otherwise she seemed unharmed.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Danyl said. “Can you run?”
“I . . . I don’t even know where I am.”
“The Middens. Can you run?”
She twisted her head to look up at the looming black bulk of the City’s underside. “The Middens? I’m outside the City?”
“You’re under it. And there’s no time . . . What’s your name?”
“Alania,” the girl said. “Alania Beruthi.”
“Alania, my name is Danyl. Listen to me. We’ll figure out where you came from and how to get you back there just as soon as we can, but if we don’t get moving right now, we stand a very good chance of being captured by some very not-nice people who will do things to us that we don’t want done. Do you understand?”
The way she blinked at him, he doubted she did, but at least she struggled to her feet. He leaped up to join her and reached for her hand. She snatched it away. “I’m not allowed—”
He lunged and grabbed it, squeezing it tight to keep her from pulling away again. “I assure you my intentions are honorable,” he snapped. “I intend to honorably see to it that we both survive the next few minutes. Now hold tight, and let’s get out of—”
A red dot appeared on Alania’s face, right between her eyes. Danyl froze.
The Rustbloods had found them.
He dropped Alania’s hand. “Raise your arms,” he told her, sotto voce. “And don’t do anything else.” Then he raised his own hands above his head and very slowly turned to look down the slope.
Four men and two women stood there, their clothing motley and stained. Each wore a rust-colored armband, a rust-colored headband, and makeshift goggles jury-rigged from scavenged glass, far cruder than the Erl-scavenged ones Danyl currently had shoved up on his head. At the center of the group stood a man a foot taller than Danyl and massing twice as much: Cark, the leader of the Rustbloods. His left ear was nothing but a mangled lump of tissue, and an angry red scar slashed down his cheek from it almost to his throat. He held a slug-throwing rifle of antique design at the ready. The red dot on Alania’s forehead came from its aiming laser.
Danyl recognized all the other Rustbloods, too. The young women, Sara and Lora, were identical twins. Danyl had heard they were lovers, too. That might have been just a nasty rumor, but their sadism and viciousness were nasty facts. The second-largest man was Burl, Cark’s second-in-command, bald and bearded. The other two men were Jisk and Rori. This was the very core of the Rustbloods. Clearly Cark had realized a Drop in this unexpected location had the potential to be very valuable indeed and had come with his most trusted associates.
Only Cark had a firearm; the others wore long knives at their belts and carried spears fashioned from bits of wood and scrap steel. Faced with those weapons alone, Danyl might have been tempted to try to outrun the gang. But Cark’s rifle made that impossible.
Danyl had no idea how the Rustblood leader had come by the weapon—firearms were tightly controlled in the City above and certainly didn’t find their way into the refuse stream by accident—but its provenance hardly mattered. What mattered was that Cark’s rifle made him the most powerful man in the Middens, the Tyrant of Trash. Danyl used to wonder if the thing even had any ammo. Then he’d stumbled over a bloated Greenskull corpse with a massive hole in its head, staked in the rubbish at the border between Rustblood and Greenskull territories, and he knew the weapon had held at least one round.
“Hello, Danyl,” said Cark, without lowering the rifle. “What have you got there?”
“Who are these people?” Alania whispered from behind him.
Danyl ignored her. “She’s nobody, Cark. Let us walk away, and you can have everything in the Drop.”
Cark laughed, a nasty chuckle echoed by the other Rustbloods. “She’s not a nobody, Danyl. She’s a woman. And she’s mine.”
“I am not!” To Danyl’s horror, the girl suddenly pushed him to one side so she could stand beside him. She glared at Cark. “They’ll be coming for me. Leave now, or you’ll be sorry.”
Danyl stared at her, startled by a level of spark he never would have expected to see in a pampered Twelfth-Tier girl. Both her wounds had already stopped bleeding, but the blood drying on her face made her look fierce and fiery.
It didn’t change the fact she’d get them both killed if she wasn’t careful.
Cark frowned. “Who’ll be coming for you?”
“Provosts.”
Danyl hurriedly interposed himself between the girl and the gang leader again. “She’s bluffing, Cark. She fell out with the garbage, probably from First Tier. No way are Provosts going to—”
“Shut up, Danyl,” Cark said. The rifle twitched, and red light flashed across Danyl’s eyes. “Or I’ll shut you up permanently.” He returned his gaze, and his aim, to the girl. “What’s your name?”
She shoved Danyl aside again. “Alania Beruthi.”
Cark blinked and lowered the rifle a fraction. “Beruthi? As in Lieutenant Beruthi, the robot manufacturer?”
“That’s right,” Alania snapped. “I’m his ward. Now will you let me go, or will you wait for the Provosts to come make an example of you?”
Cark’s lips pulled back from his teeth into a savage grin. Danyl knew exactly what he was thinking, because he was thinking it, too.
Alania was the ward of an Officer.
Ransom!
He didn’t take the threat of Provosts suddenly descending on the Middens seriously, and he knew Cark didn’t either. The Middens were huge and n
avigable only by those who lived there; even old paths and hideouts Danyl knew well had been known to disappear overnight as the unstable Middens shifted position like a restless sleeper. Provosts who raided the Middens rarely found who or what they were looking for, and they sometimes vanished in the attempt. Cark might have the only firearm Danyl knew about, but spears, bows, and booby traps worked just as effectively.
When valuable objects were inadvertently dropped into the Middens—like the firestone necklace Cark had found tucked away in a hidden pocket of a bloodstained jacket a year ago—the preferred method of retrieving them was to offer a reward. A knife fight with the leader of the no-longer-extant Bluesmoke gang had secured the necklace for Cark (and given him his facial scar). Then he’d let the traders at the Last Chance Market know he had it, and what he wanted before he would give it back.
Money served little purpose in the Middens, but food supplies and tools and technology were invaluable, and both had been forthcoming. The impressiveness of the Rustblood fortress had increased substantially after that. It now boasted airtight walls of cinderblock and proper windows that could be sealed against the noxious vapors that occasionally swept over the Middens when the wind blew from directly under the City.
If this had been an ordinary Drop and Danyl had been jumped by the Rustbloods, he would have surrendered without a fight and slipped away to scavenge elsewhere.
But this was no ordinary Drop, and Alania, if she really was the ward of an Officer, was the biggest score in the history of the Middens scavengers.
All that flashed through his mind in an instant.
“Grab the girl,” Cark said, lowering his rifle. “Kill Danyl.”
“No!” Alania cried.
He is short of ammo, or he’d do it himself, Danyl thought. That means we’ve got a chance. The slope of the mound on which he and Alania stood was unstable, making the Rustbloods’ ascent a struggle. He glanced over his shoulder. Just past the mass of cloth and garbage bags from the Drop, the mound sloped steeply toward a pool of oily liquid, black lumps floating on its iridescent surface.
At the top of the slope teetered a flat piece of standard white-plastic City wallboard. Without another glance at the Rustbloods, Danyl grabbed Alania by the shoulders and threw her backward and himself forward onto the cracked plastic sheet. Their momentum sent it and them tobogganing down the rubbish heap toward that noxious black pool. Danyl quickly snugged his goggles back into place.
“Get them!” he heard Cark roar, but the Rustbloods still hadn’t fought through the loose rubbish to the top of the mound when the particleboard hit the black pool. Foul liquid—raw sewage, from the smell—sprayed Danyl and Alania. The girl gasped and choked.
“Now we run!” Danyl shouted, grabbing her hand and trying to pull her to her feet. Infuriatingly, she resisted.
“There they are!” a voice shouted, and he looked up to see Burl glaring down at him. “Sara, Lora, that way.” The Rustblood second-in-command pointed right, and the twins angled in that direction. “Jisk, Rori, the other way. Head them off.” Burl hefted his short spear, a nasty-looking weapon with a jagged steel blade bound to a shaft of black wood, and started directly down the slope.
“Come on,” Danyl said, and Alania, staring up at the goggled Rustblood thug, at last understood the danger and scrambled to her feet.
They could run neither left nor right. That left only one direction, and Danyl began to scramble up the slope in the direction of the City. It was far higher than the one they’d just slid down, and he knew perfectly well what awaited them when they reached the top of it, where greenish vapor drifted.
“Where are we going?” Alania asked breathlessly.
“Hell,” Danyl said, and kept climbing.
EIGHT
ALANIA FELT LIKE she’d fallen into hell even before Danyl announced that was where they were going. The plunge into the garbage; the terrifying moment when she’d been trapped, blood pouring down her face; Danyl pulling her out; the sudden appearance of the vicious ragamuffin warriors; the orders to seize her and kill Danyl; the plunge down the hill into the noxious pool of . . . had that been what it smelled like? No part of that had not seemed hellish.
She touched the cut on her head and found it already closed, as she’d expected, as was the cut on her cheek from the flying splinter of brick up on Twelfth. She’d always healed very quickly. She just hoped the cuts had closed before any of that black liquid had gotten into them . . . although she’d never been prone to infection, either. She’d never had so much as a cold.
She and Danyl were toiling up another tottering slope of paper and cloth and bits of wood and chunks of foam and round slimy objects that could have been anything, toward a strangely well-defined ridge over which drifted smoke or vapor of a most unpleasant green. She still didn’t know who she was fleeing, or who she was fleeing with.
And yet . . .
There had been a shock of recognition when she had first looked up at the face staring down at her in the hole in the trash, as Danyl had pushed his goggles up and reached down for her. Those eyes, a pale, icy blue, were identical to the ones that stared back at her from the mirror every morning. She’d never seen eyes that color on anyone else, though the First Officer’s cold gaze came close. Danyl had pulled her from the nasty embrace of the trash, and after that . . . well, the expression “lesser of two evils” seemed to have been crafted specially to suit this circumstance.
“What do they want me for?” she panted out now. She glanced over her shoulder. The big man with the nasty-looking short spear was fifteen meters behind them, cursing monotonously and not making much headway; his mass seemed to be working against him in the soft, shifting footing. To her left, the two other men were now angling in their direction; to her right, the two women were doing the same. Of Cark, the man with the rifle, there was no sign. He seemed to be the leader; maybe he felt himself too important to go scrambling through garbage personally. Or perhaps he was busy imagining what he would do with her once he got his hands on her. She was pretty certain that the Twelfth-Tier focus on young ladies maintaining their virtue until they were properly married—fictitious though that virtue might be in some of her friends’ cases—held no sway at all down here in . . .
Could this really be the Middens? She supposed it had to be.
You wanted out of the City, she thought. Careful what you wish for.
“Ransom,” Danyl said. He wasn’t breathing nearly as hard as she was. Only slightly taller than she, he looked older, his tanned face lean and stubbled. “You’re a ward of an Officer. You’re worth . . .” He bit off whatever he was going to say. “Save your breath,” he growled instead. “You’re not going to want to be gulping too much air where we’re headed.”
She looked up at that sharp ridge, very near now. “Hell?”
“Close enough.”
Then, suddenly, they were at the top, and Alania realized the strangely sharp edge of the ridge was in fact a wall, one onto which Danyl scrambled, then turned to help her. She clambered onto it on her hands and knees. It was about a meter and a half thick, solid concrete, and on the other side . . .
Red-lit, smoking, seething, and bubbling, it would certainly do as a simulacrum of hell until the real thing came along. The vapor rising from the foul surface below stung her eyes and brought on a coughing fit. She jerked her head back and turned the other way, trying to clear her lungs of the stinking fumes, clapping one hand over her mouth and nose in a futile effort to filter them out.
“Hazardous Waste Holding Tank,” Danyl said.
He’s right, Alania thought with a sudden shock. I’ve seen it in the teaching machine. But . . .
“But it’s not supposed to look like this,” she gasped out. “It should be covered, and—”
Danyl stared at her, one hand over his own nose and mouth. “How would you know?” he said, the words muffled.
; “I’ve studied the City in detail.”
“Well, this is the way it is now. Come on.” He set off to their right, where the tank met a wall of metal descending from the City’s underbelly. Alania scrambled to her feet and followed, her hand still pressed to her lips and nostrils, though it seemed not to make much difference—every breath burned. The big man with the spear shouted something, and she saw the two women change their angle of approach so they would intercept Danyl and Alania at the top of the wall.
But just before the twins reached the wall, and just as the big man, grunting, hauled himself onto it behind Danyl and Alania, Danyl suddenly stopped and took his hand away from his face. “Ladder,” he choked out. “Follow me.” He turned, knelt, lowered himself over the wall, and vanished.
Into hell? Alania thought, but unless she wanted to throw herself at the mercy of Cark and his followers—all of whom seemed unlikely to have any—she had little choice. She knelt and felt a hand on her ankle, guiding her foot to the first rung of the ladder below. She eased herself over the edge and descended.
The ladder didn’t go far—only three meters or so—but the choking vapor thickened as she descended. Eyes streaming, coughing, she stepped off the rungs. Danyl, standing to her right, turned without a word and hurried along a ledge whose end she couldn’t see in the uncertain light. The City hung over their heads like a night sky made of metal, and the handful of red lights hanging from the inside of the wall lit the swirling green vapor but did not penetrate it.
Danyl must have hoped to get past the women—Sara and Lora, Cark had called them—but he and Alania had stumbled barely twenty meters before the duo dropped onto the ledge in front of them, landing with cat-like grace. They were the same height and size, and though their goggles hid their eyes, their faces had the same structure. Twins? The only other twins she knew were the Letaria sisters, Lilli and Lotti. Three years younger than she was, they were the most annoying people she’d ever met.
These twins didn’t look annoying. They looked deadly. Without a word, they advanced toward Danyl, knives as long as short swords at the ready.
The Cityborn Page 10