The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  “Silence, please,” said the docbot. Then, “What is your name, female patient?”

  “Alania,” she replied.

  “This may sting a little, Alania.” A port popped open on the smoothly curving metal of its top, and a jointed arm reached out, the end spreading into a flat, flexible pad that the docbot pressed against the wound. There was a snicking sound and Alania flinched; then a hiss. The arm lowered. The wound now glistened, less angry-looking than before. The scanner orb lifted to it and bathed her forehead in an eye-hurting purple light. The light went out. The scanner orb retreated slightly. The jointed arm reached out again, and the docbot repeated the process on the cut on her cheek. “Wounds cleaned and disinfected. No stitches required,” the docbot said. “Wounds sealed with analgesic artificial skin. No further aid required at this time. Please monitor for signs of infection.” A pause. “Code Three.”

  “Code Three?” Alania said. “What’s that?”

  “It always says that after it’s worked on me, too,” Danyl said. “We don’t know why.” He glanced at Erl. At least I don’t.

  “Something in the programming,” Erl said, which of course was no answer at all.

  The scanner orb twisted to look at each of them in turn. “Are there any other injuries?”

  “You’re okay, Danyl?” Erl asked.

  He nodded. “Not a scratch.” Which was true, though he thought he might have pulled a muscle battling the twin he’d sent into the hazardous waste tank; his shoulder ached. Still, injuries like that never hurt him for long. By bedtime the pain would fade.

  “Then I’ll see to the stew,” Erl said. “Show Alania the bathroom. She’ll need clean clothes—she’s a little smaller, so she can probably wear your last set of castoffs.”

  Danyl opened his mouth to protest, then caught a whiff of Alania’s stink and thought better of it. He indicated the hallway to the bedrooms. “This way.”

  The docbot scuttled ahead of them. Beside its alcove, it turned back into a featureless sphere. Danyl lifted it back into its cabinet, grunting as his shoulder twinged.

  “I don’t understand,” Alania said, but she wasn’t looking at the docbot; her hand was pressed to the smooth reddish stone of the wall. “Why was a place like this built into the side of the Canyon? It obviously wasn’t dug out by hand.”

  “Don’t know,” Danyl said. “Erl just says he was lucky to find it.” Like he was lucky enough to find something worth a beamer rifle? He led her to the closed door near the end of the hall and opened it. “Here’s the bath.”

  The bathroom was one of the glories of their tucked-away little corner of civilization. A proper toilet, a tiny shower—just a brick ring surrounding a drain with a showerhead above—and a tub big enough to double as a small swimming pool, lined with blue tile, constantly filled with ever-recirculating water from what Erl swore up and down was a clean source far away from the noxious pools of the Middens.

  Danyl opened the cabinet under the sink to show Alania the motley collection of towels, crafted from bits of cloth scavenged over the years. He left her examining them while he went into his room and dug out from the trunk at the foot of his bed the last set of clothes he’d outgrown—now that he was twenty, maybe he’d stop doing that. He found a clean pair of drawers, an undershirt, and a patched pair of socks and put them on the low wooden bench at the foot of the tub. “Get cleaned up,” he said. “Then it’ll be my turn.”

  “How do I lock the door?” Alania asked as he turned to go.

  He looked back at her. She stood, face pale beneath the dirt and drying blood, one hand on the wall as though it were the only thing keeping her upright—which it might well have been. “Why?”

  “I’m in an underground cavern in the most lawless place in the Heartland with two strange men, and I’m about to take off all my clothes and get into a bath in which I’ll be completely vulnerable to attack,” Alania said evenly. “Why do you think?”

  Danyl frowned. “Do I look like a rapist to you? Does Erl?”

  “I don’t know what a rapist looks like. It’s my understanding that they can look like anyone.”

  Danyl felt a flash of anger, but took a deep breath to quell it. “There’s no lock on the door, but you’re safe here. And you’re going to stay safe. Believe it or not. Be clean or be dirty. It’s up to you. But hurry up either way. I want my own bath.”

  He left the bathroom and closed the door firmly behind him.

  Erl had made it clear they wouldn’t be trading Alania at the Last Chance Market. He clearly knew who she was and had other plans for her.

  Well, whatever it is, the sooner we’re rid of her, the better, he thought, and he went to see if Erl needed help in the kitchen.

  TEN

  FIRST OFFICER KRANZ looked up from the report he’d just been handed at the grim-faced Provost Commander who had done the handing. Achil Havelin stood straight as a lamppost, staring ahead, like a lowly recruit expecting a dressing-down from . . . well, from Commander Havelin, who excelled at such things.

  “Four armed attackers somehow obtained a key that allowed them to board a personnel lift on First Tier, lock out all other passengers, and ride it all the way to Twelfth, where they attacked my ward and her escort—whose movements they had clearly been apprised of—as they were en route from Quarters Beruthi to Quarters Kranz,” the First Officer said. Though he spoke in a flat, conversational tone, Havelin’s jaw clenched. “The fortuitous arrival of four additional Provosts heading to the Core on a completely unrelated assignment meant that the attackers were all killed, but Alania, for some unfathomable reason, jumped into a freight elevator and was summarily dumped into the Middens. Have I correctly summarized events?”

  Commander Havelin still did not meet his eyes. “Yes, sir.”

  “Have these killers been identified?”

  “Yes, sir. Three were ordinary workers from First and Second Tiers who have not come to our attention before. We believe the fourth had connections to a First-Tier criminal organization. We’re continuing to question suspects to try to determine how they obtained such a high-level access key.”

  “I should think that’s obvious,” Kranz said. “Someone among the Officers is a traitor.”

  “I . . . can’t speculate about that, sir,” Havelin said carefully. “Investigating such matters is outside my jurisdiction.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” Kranz said sourly. It could hardly be otherwise, since investigating such matters was very much within his jurisdiction. He looked down at the report again. “According to this, the trash elevator delivered its cargo directly to the Middens with no stop for sorting or recycling along the way. Have you questioned the waste-disposal workers who made that unusual arrangement?”

  “Yes, sir,” Havelin said. “They were hired by relatives of the Officer who died and whose quarters were being emptied. They admitted after considerable . . . encouragement that they feared there might be incriminating evidence among the Officer’s possessions that might fall into the wrong hands if those possessions were not summarily disposed of.” He grimaced. “It concerned sexual perversion. Not related to the attack, so far as we can determine.”

  “I see.” Kranz said. He found his heart beating faster and his hands wanting to tremble as he asked the next question, though of course he concealed it from Havelin by pressing his palms against the glass desktop and let nothing of it into his voice. “And what happened to Alania Beruthi when she fell into the Middens?”

  “Security cameras are few and far between down there, sir,” Havelin said. “But one did record her, alive and apparently uninjured, being rushed away by two men.”

  Kranz felt a surge of relief, followed by a surge of fury. “I presume you are going after them.”

  Havelin nodded. “Yes, sir. A retrieval team is being assembled.”

  “How large?”

  “Six armed P
rovosts. And a medical team, of course.”

  “Expand it,” Kranz said flatly. “That side of the Middens has been left undisturbed for too long. Use overwhelming force. Find my ward. Arrest everyone you find for questioning. Kill them if they resist.”

  Havelin saluted. “Yes, sir.”

  “I also want you to conduct thorough sweeps of every Tier below Tenth. We’re looking for weapons, seditious literature, known agitators.” Kranz reached out and picked up the ancient dagger, made of meteoric iron, that had graced the desk of every First Officer Kranz since the original, centuries ago. “I will oversee the investigation of Eleventh and Twelfth myself, of course.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dismissed, Commander.”

  Havelin saluted smartly, turned on his heel, and went out the wood-sheathed double doors, which opened and closed automatically.

  Once the Commander had left his office, Kranz stood and took half a dozen steps to the left, to one of the paintings that hung on the dark paneling. It showed a twilight view of the City from a distance, its curving metal skin shining in the last rays of the sun, diamond flecks of light beginning to glow here and there where windows and balconies had been cut through the skin. He reached up and tugged at the right side of the frame. The picture swung back from the wall, revealing a glowing screen. It was a medical monitor, though most City doctors would not have recognized many of its displayed readings, and they would’ve found it hard to believe that those they did recognize belonged to a living person. But even a non-doctor could see at a glance that the patient being monitored was not doing well—not with that many readings displayed in red.

  Beneath the monitor was a small metal plate with a hole in the middle, into which an access key had to be inserted to call the elevator whose doors, artfully illuminated by concealed lights, glowed gold not far to the monitor’s right. Ostentatious as hell, but then, it was meant to be. It was visible proof to those select few who were allowed into the First Officer’s office that they could ascend no higher, that he and he alone had access to the Thirteenth Tier and to the Captain.

  The Captain, whose vital signs were weakening day by inexorable day.

  Kranz frowned at the medical monitor for a long moment, then pushed the painting back into place and returned to his desk. He picked up the dagger again and stared down at its dark, mirror-smooth blade. There was a traitor among the Officers, someone who had attempted to subvert the plan he had put in place more than twenty years ago, someone whose attempt to kidnap Alania threatened not only Kranz’s personal power but potentially the continued existence of the City itself.

  Another traitor. Twenty years ago, Ensign Erlkin Orillia’s attempt to subvert the plan had failed, but it had come perilously close to success. Today’s attempt had come even closer, and the plan might still fail if something happened to Alania down in the Middens.

  Kranz could do nothing more to rescue her than he had already done. Havelin was a competent commander, and his men would track her down and return her to Quarters Kranz, where she belonged.

  He thought of the monitor behind the painting.

  Not just where she belonged, where she had to be. Soon.

  In the meantime, he intended to find out who the traitor was, starting with a thorough interrogation of the family members of the recently deceased Officer, the ones who had paid the workers to send their “sexually perverted” relative’s belongings straight to the Middens. Perhaps the fact that the trash elevator had been open at the moment of the attack had been coincidence. Perhaps not. Either way, they were clearly guilty of subverting regulations, at the very least, and punishing those who broke regulations was one of the duties of the First Officer . . . a duty, and sometimes a joy.

  Like this time.

  Kranz put the dagger back on the desk, then touched the glossy surface next to it. The glass lit with an image of Ensign Bothnis, his secretary, ensconced in his own office three floors below Kranz’s. The Ensign looked up. “Sir?”

  “Order my bodyguards to meet me at the front entrance. I’m going out and may be some time. Cancel my appointments.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kranz left the office without looking back, but even so, the grim red readouts of the medical monitor hidden behind the painting seemed to follow him, hanging in the back of his mind like the first flickering flames of a coming conflagration.

  The moment the bathroom door closed, Alania’s knees gave way and she sank to the stone floor, trembling.

  For the first time since she had landed in the Middens, she was alone. Only a little more than an hour had passed since the Provost’s head had disintegrated and she had run for her life. She’d had almost no time to think. Now she did, and that, as much as shock, reduced her to a shivering lump on the floor. She wrapped her filthy arms around her stinking knees and tried to wrap her mind around everything that had happened.

  The Middens. She was in the Middens. She’d heard the phrase “Go to the Middens” all her life from girls who had been brought up in polite society and thus were not allowed to use words like “hell.” Now she actually had “gone to the Middens” and had even seen the part the residents called hell. At least there’s nowhere worse I could end up, is there?

  Is there?

  She pressed her face into her knees. Of course there was. She could end up gang-raped, or dead, or both. She could be enslaved. Tortured. She gripped her legs even more tightly.

  Maybe I should try to escape, run back to the City, find some way up to the Gate. They’d recognize me—the Provosts must be looking for me. I could be home by sundown . . .

  Except “home” meant Quarters Kranz, not Quarters Beruthi, where she had lived all her life. And without a guide, she didn’t have a chance of making it back to the City. You couldn’t exactly lose it, not with it hanging above the canyon like a thundercloud, but that wouldn’t help her navigate the torturous paths along which Erl and Danyl had led her after they’d fled the Rustbloods. And she already knew some of the hazards. She’d seen the tottering piles of trash threatening to collapse at any minute—and having already been buried in trash once, she had no desire to repeat the experience. She’d been covered in sewage and had almost plunged into a pool of flesh-melting hazardous waste. She wouldn’t last twenty minutes on her own.

  Here, at least, she was relatively safe . . . and the more she thought about it, the better she thought she understood why.

  The men who had attacked on Twelfth Tier hadn’t just been thieves or killers out to murder some Provosts and loot some rich Officer’s Quarters. They’d been after her, specifically. She had no clue as to why, but it was undeniably true.

  It had to be tied to the change in her circumstances from ward of Lieutenant Beruthi to ward of First Officer Kranz. It had to have something to do with the test Kranz had performed on her, the same test that had been performed at regular intervals throughout her life; with the fact she’d never known her parents; with the way she’d lived her whole life as a virtual prisoner; with that mysterious half-overheard conversation four years ago. All that was clear, but she still lacked enough information to even begin to put those pieces together into something that made sense of why she was so valuable.

  Of course, in the Middens, in this anarchic, violent realm, no doubt she had intrinsic value just by virtue of being female. Cark had made that clear. But if the attempt to kidnap her on Twelfth Tier was proof she had some value up above as well . . . then Danyl and Erl might value her for a reason besides the obvious one.

  They think they can trade me for ransom.

  It was the only possibility that fit the facts, and the thought both reassured and outraged her. It reassured her because it meant Danyl had been telling the truth and she could safely take a bath; it outraged her because it meant that as kind as he and Erl were being at the moment, they were doing so only because they thought they would be rewarded for it
. If it turned out they were wrong and she had no value to the City, then she’d wager they’d be ready to trade to her to someone much nearer . . . like the Rustbloods or that other gang they’d mentioned, the Greenskulls.

  She shuddered and pressed her lips together. They won’t find that easy!

  She hauled herself upright. Sitting there quivering like one of the gelatin desserts at her birthday party—had that really just been yesterday?—wouldn’t accomplish anything. One step at a time. Get cleaned up. Get dressed. And then confront Danyl and Erl.

  She tested the swirling water in the bath, found it pleasingly hot, and then gave the unlocked door another slightly uneasy glance before turning her back on it and peeling off her ruined blouse and pants, boots and socks and undergarments. She lowered herself into the steaming pool, gasping a little at the heat but then sighing with relief as the warmth soaked into her body. There was a bench built into the side of the bath, and she settled onto it. She closed her eyes. Exhausted from her early rising and everything that had happened since, she drifted into a doze . . .

  . . . the Provost turned toward her as if he were going say something, and his head burst like an overripe fruit, spraying her with blood and brains . . .

  She jerked upright, gasping, gorge rising. She gulped to keep from fouling her bath, and reached for the soap. She scrubbed her hair hard, then every inch of her body even harder, remembering everything that had sprayed, dripped, or splashed onto her during the course of the morning. She kept one eye on the door the whole time, but it remained closed as promised, and finally she pulled herself out and toweled herself dry.

  She’d never worn boys’ clothes before. She hesitated before donning the drawers, but they looked clean, and she could hardly go without underwear. She pulled on a rather gray undershirt, then buttoned a black flannel shirt on over top of that. The pants were dark green. All of the clothes looked worn and oft-repaired, but they covered her and were comfortable enough.