The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  As the door swung shut, he heard the unmistakable boom of Cark’s ancient rifle.

  Erl ran into the dining room and grabbed the late Rustblood leader’s antique slugthrower from where Danyl had left it next to the door into the entrance tunnel. Twelve rounds, Danyl had said. Erl doubted he’d have the chance to use them all.

  He opened the door into the tunnel, propped it open with the hunk of slag they kept handy for that purpose, then knelt and aimed the rifle down the corridor, waiting.

  He wasn’t particularly concerned about getting shot; the Provosts’ heads-up displays would immediately identify him as an Officer from the implant he still carried in the muscle of his right arm. And not just any Officer, but Ensign Erlkin Orillia, a name from the past that should raise all sorts of interesting red flags.

  He’d never removed the tag because it could only be read at very close quarters, and if any Provosts got that close, like now, he wanted them to be able to read it. His sudden reappearance twenty years after he was presumed dead would confuse them, slow them down. He’d surrender, then tell them some story about Danyl and Alania running away together through the Middens. These chambers, prepared secretly for him and the boy before Yvelle’s raid on Twelfth Tier Hospital, didn’t exist on any map. Nor was there any record of the back exit that led to the long-closed stairs from the East Rim to the bottom of the Canyon. Even though the stairs themselves—and the collapsed elevator shaft that ran parallel to them—certainly were in the City’s databases, they hadn’t been used for at least a century. Danyl and Alania should be able to make it to the River People safely, and Yvelle could take it from there. After the warning call from Prime, Erl had contacted her, passing along Prime’s instructions for getting the young people safely to him. Even if the Provosts found the River People—no, not if, when, if he was honest with himself, though he wished like hell they could stay hidden—Danyl and Alania would be long gone, en route to Prime himself.

  Erl didn’t want to kill any Provosts if he could help it; hitting one of them might tempt them to shoot first and ask questions never, and he wanted to be taken alive and unharmed to the City, where he was quite certain Prime would find a way to free him. His biggest worry about Cark’s rifle was that its aiming laser might be so far out of alignment that he’d shoot someone he was actually trying to miss.

  He glanced around at the quarters he had shared with Danyl for twenty years. They’d been good years, but they had already been due to come to an end as the plan he and Prime had put in place so long ago finally came to fruition.

  Still, they hadn’t meant things to end like this. Those lower-Tier idiots Prime had set the task of kidnapping Alania had screwed up royally, and now everything he and Prime had worked toward for so long was in danger. If the Provosts hadn’t done the job for him, he would gladly have shot the feckless fools himself.

  Erl’s gaze snapped back to the tunnel as the front-door alarm suddenly cut off. The door had been unsealed.

  Yvelle will get them to Prime, Erl thought, raising the rifle so the red dot of the aiming laser touched the stone just above the door. She wasn’t happy to hear from me, but she’ll do it. She has no choice—or rather, she made her choice twenty years ago.

  And meanwhile, I’ll get myself into the City. Prime will free me. Working together, we can salvage this. We’ve got both of the Cityborn, after all, and Kranz has squat.

  The door to the hovel suddenly swung inward, revealing the hut’s interior, apparently deserted. Erl fired anyway, the bullet striking right where the laser pointed, ricocheting off the ceiling in a spray of stone chips. That’ll make them cautious, he thought. They’ll stick a sensor around the corner to scope out the situation, realize who I am, and then . . .

  Instead, some maniac burst through the door, spraying automatic fire.

  Erl barely registered a massive blow to his head before his world went black.

  Danyl, the beamer rifle clutched uselessly in his left hand, pressed his forehead and right palm against the closed door’s smooth stone, trembling, that single shot echoing in his mind. The entrance tunnel was a death trap. Even if Erl intended to surrender—even if, for some unfathomable reason, First Officer Kranz wanted him alive—would the Provosts allow it?

  Suddenly furious, he shoved himself away from the wall and spun to look down their tunnel, lit only by the pale-green light of eternals every five meters. He strode past Alania. “Come on!”

  “Erl will be all right,” she said from behind him.

  “How would you know?” he snapped at her over his shoulder.

  “He’s an Officer. Provosts would never—”

  Danyl stopped so suddenly Alania ran into him. He spun to face her. “He’s what?”

  “An Officer. He told me while you were in the bath.”

  “He told you . . . ?” Danyl stared at her, outrage and more than a little plain old rage bubbling up inside him. “You’re lying. He’s raised me since I was a baby. I’ve asked him thousands of times to tell me where he came from. He’s never answered. He’s known you for a couple of hours, and you want me to believe he told you his life story?”

  Alania took a step back, her expression wary. “He would have told you just now, if that call hadn’t—”

  “A call.” Danyl clenched his fists so hard his nails dug into his palms. “I knew he had contacts in the City because he knew when Drops were coming—like the one today—but I never knew how he knew. I figured some trader was passing him information at the Last Chance Market. Now I find out he’s been in direct contact with someone high up the City all this time. And then just like that, we’re on the run.” He looked back down the corridor. “What the hell, Erl?” he shouted. His voice echoed back, but no one answered.

  “I guessed before he told me by the way he talked,” Alania said. “He just confirmed it, if that’s any consolation.”

  “I don’t need consolation,” Danyl snarled. “I’m not a child.” He shook his head. “He’s an Officer. And now Provosts are after us.” He shot her a look. “After you. The First Officer wants you. You’re his ward.”

  “As of this morning,” Alania said. “For twenty years he’s ignored me. I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do, Danyl.”

  He stared at the closed door into the kitchen for another long moment, then turned and hurried on. “Damn him!”

  “At least you care about him, and he cares about you,” Alania said in a soft voice behind him. “I’d give anything to have that.”

  Danyl didn’t turn around.

  They reached the right-angle turn, then jogged along the new tunnel. Two hundred meters really wasn’t very far, but it seemed to take forever to travel. At last they reached a ramp sloping down. At the bottom there was another long, straight corridor, and at the end of that they emerged through an open, red-painted door into the promised stairwell.

  The metal landing, the stairs leading both up and down from it, and the supports for the stairs bolted into the stone were pitted and rusted. And unlike the eternals in the corridors they’d just traversed, which had burned as bright as eternals ever got, the lights in this stairwell, a square, smooth-walled shaft about fifteen meters wide, were dim or entirely absent. In the uncertain light, it was impossible to ascertain how far the stairs extended in either direction. Danyl stared up. Erl had said the stairs led to the Rim, which in this location meant they also led to the mysterious, impenetrable Cubes . . . but why? Had these stairs been built at the same time as the Cubes?

  He looked down. The Canyon was half a kilometer deep; the stairs simply disappeared below them into darkness the failing eternals could not penetrate. “I had no idea these existed,” he said. “But they must have been here for decades . . . maybe centuries. Stick close; we don’t know how sturdy the—”

  With a sharp crack! a puff of dust and chipped stone erupted from the wall just outside the red-painted
door. Danyl grabbed Alania and hustled her down the metal stairs. “Provosts!”

  “They won’t shoot me,” Alania said. “If I give myself up—”

  Danyl’s rage surged again, and he swung the beamer toward her. “Erl wanted both of us to escape,” he snarled. “He said it was important . . . so important he may have . . .” He couldn’t say it. He gave Alania a shove toward the stairs. “You’re not going back to them. Move!”

  Alania glared at him, then gave a jerky nod, turned, and clattered down the rusty stairs. He followed.

  Above them, the slap of booted feet on stone mingled with hoarse shouts. He and Alania were no more than twenty meters down the stairs when the shouts suddenly shifted from faint and muffled to loud and clear: the Provosts had entered the shaft directly above them. Danyl grabbed Alania again and thrust her back against the wall, one arm pressed across her chest, his other hand clutching the beamer rifle.

  “Are you sure you saw something, Jerrik?” a man called.

  “Can’t be certain, sir,” a second replied, “but I thought I saw movement.”

  A moment’s silence. Then a light flashed on, flickering through the metal grids of the stairs above them. “What the hell is this place?”

  “Shaft to the bottom of the Canyon in one direction, looks like.” The light flashed up. “Goes up to the Rim and the Cubes in the other, I’d guess. It’s old. Old as the City, maybe.”

  “Corridor we just came through wasn’t old,” the first man said. “Somebody cut that to join up with this.” The lights flashed around some more. “This shadow you shot at, Jerrik. Did it go up or down?”

  “Can’t say, sir.”

  A moment’s silence.

  “All right.” A crackling sound: a communicator. “Corporal Storlin, Captain Mirral here. Status, please.”

  “The old man’s on his way to the City, Cap,” a voice came back. “Bit of a firefight happening over on the other side of the Canyon, but shouldn’t be a problem on this side.”

  Danyl’s heart skipped a beat. The old man? Erl? On his way to the City? But . . . alive, or dead?

  “All right, then. Preskot, Torgan, head up the stairs. Jerrik and Xarver, you’re with me. We’ll head down. Helmet lights, everyone.”

  Shit, Danyl thought. He turned his head and barely breathed into Alania’s ear. “Move when they move. Quiet as you can, but we have to stay directly underneath them or they’ll spot us and be able to shoot at us.” She turned to resume the descent, but he pinned her where she was a moment longer. “Wait . . .” He listened. Footsteps, lights flickering, maybe four or five turns of the stairs above them. “Now.”

  Around and around the shaft they went, always directly below the descending Provosts. The air grew cooler as they descended, and the walls dampened. The stairs, which had seemed solid enough when they first stepped onto them, now occasionally quivered as though their anchors to the shaft walls had loosened.

  Then they rounded the shaft for the thirty-third time, and with a groan and a bang and a squeal of tortured metal, the stairs fell away beneath their feet and pitched them forward into darkness.

  TWELVE

  ALL I HAVE TO DO is let the Provosts catch me, and I could be back on Twelfth Tier by dinner. The thought circulated in Alania’s mind in time with their revolutions of the shaft. “They won’t shoot me,” she’d told Danyl, and she knew that was true. Kranz, for some utterly inexplicable reason, valued her so highly that he’d sent Provosts into the Middens after her.

  Erl, for some equally inexplicable reason, considered her so valuable that he might well have given his life to give her the chance to get away.

  Well, considered her and Danyl that valuable: both of them, as Danyl had pointed out. But whereas she could understand Erl’s concern for the boy he’d raised from infancy, he’d had no clue she had even existed until today . . .

  Until he was told by his mysterious contact on high, and she didn’t mean God.

  She remembered the surveillance cameras she’d found in her bedroom. Lieutenant Beruthi hadn’t been her guardian—he’d been her warden, enforcing her house arrest. She clenched her fists in renewed anger at that violation. So, yes, she could turn herself in to the Provosts and return to Twelfth Tier, just like any escaped prisoner could turn herself in and be returned to prison.

  Funny thing was, she didn’t want to go to prison. No matter how pleasant a prison it might be. No matter how uncomfortable freedom might be . . . and so far, she thought, her calves aching with the constant descent, it had proved pretty uncomfortable.

  There was another thing. Erl wasn’t the only one who had risked his life so she could escape. Men had died in the raid on Twelfth Tier. She hadn’t asked for any of it, but those deaths were at least partly on her shoulders, and to go meekly back to the First Officer and whatever fate he had in store for her, certainly never to escape again, would make a mockery of those deaths. She had to find out what was going on. She had to know why everyone wanted her so badly. She had to learn what her connection with Danyl was. She had to . . .

  She had to get to the bottom of this bloody staircase. Was there no end to the damn thing?

  Almost as she thought that, it ended. Suddenly. It collapsed beneath them, and she and Danyl toppled forward. It happened so fast she had no time to react, and then she slammed onto the still-solid next landing—not a long fall, but enough to drive the breath from her body. For a moment she couldn’t move, paralyzed with pain and shock. Then Danyl jumped down beside her; he must have managed to grab something as the stairs came apart. “Are you all right?” he asked anxiously. “Can you move?”

  She managed to gasp in a tiny, tiny amount of air. “Breath . . . gone . . .”

  “Any broken bones?”

  She tried to consider that as spots danced in her vision. “I . . . don’t think so.” Her breathing eased. Her vision cleared. “Not . . . arms and legs, anyway. Ribs . . . I can’t tell.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “Again?” Alania raised her hand to her head. Her fingers came away dark with blood. At least it’s in a different spot than the last cut, she thought inanely.

  “Someone below us!” came a shout from above them, where the lights flashed.

  “Alania Beruthi!” called the voice of Captain Mirral. “Is that you?”

  Danyl raised a finger to his lips, but Alania wasn’t about to answer. Even if she’d had the breath.

  “Sounded like the stairs collapsed, sir,” the first voice said. “She could be injured.”

  “Keep moving. But spread out. These things clearly aren’t safe.”

  Understatement of the year. Alania pushed herself upright, wincing. Bruises, scrapes, and her bleeding forehead seemed the worst of her injuries. In fact, she already felt better than she had a moment before.

  “We can’t stay directly below them if they spread out around the shaft,” Danyl whispered. “We have to move now!”

  “So help me up, idiot,” Alania whispered back. Danyl looked startled, then grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet.

  They’d only gone a few more steps before someone shouted, “Halt!”

  Danyl didn’t hesitate. He flung himself against the wall, raised the beamer rifle, and fired at the bright spot of light above them and across the shaft. A man cried out, and the light bobbled and dropped. “Run!” Danyl shouted to Alania, and the two of them pounded down the stairs, which shook and trembled beneath their feet.

  A flash lit the shaft, and a bullet whined off the railing to their left. “Cease fire, you idiot!” roared Captain Marril. “You might hit the girl!”

  “They shot Xarver!”

  “Grazed him. He’s out of commission but he’ll live. But we won’t if we kill the First Officer’s ward. So stop shooting, turn off your helmet light so they can’t shoot you, too, and keep going down! We’ll catch them at the bott
om. It must empty out onto the Canyon floor, and there’s nowhere for them to run down there.”

  There’d better be, Alania thought. Stumbling, aching with every step, she pressed on down the stairs. Erl sent us this way. Told us to find the River People. Some woman named Yvelle. There must be a way out.

  Or at least there used to be. The stairs were starting to fall apart. Who knew what shape the exit might be in? What if it had collapsed and they found themselves trapped at the bottom of the shaft?

  The stairs weren’t the only thing deteriorating. Only a few eternals still burned down here and only with the faintest green glow. On the plus side, it was too dark for their pursuers to see them. On the minus side, it was too dark for them to see what might—

  Danyl gasped and grabbed her right arm, making her grunt with pain as her already abused muscles were abused still more. But she forgave him as she realized he’d just saved her life.

  They had come to the end of the stairs . . . but not the bottom of the shaft.

  The last two turns of the spiral were simply gone. Or not exactly gone—looking over the final step past the torn metal bracing, Alania could just make out a dark mass of twisted metal beneath them, where a single eternal still managed to glow. “Dammit,” Danyl muttered. He turned and looked up. “From the sound of it, they’re farther back than they were. That gap in the stairs probably slowed them down. But they’re coming.” He lifted the beamer. “I’ll have to take my shot when I—”

  “Wait,” Alania said, peering into the dimness below. “I think we can get down there.”

  Danyl turned. “What?”

  “Look.” She pointed. “The braces . . . brackets . . . whatever you call the things that hold the stairs to the wall. They’re still there. The stairs came off the supports, but the supports didn’t come out of the wall. We should be able to use them like stairs.” Very skinny, bendy, uncertain stairs. Are you crazy? part of her wanted to know.