The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  “‘Prime says,’” Danyl mimicked. “We don’t even know who he is!”

  “But you know Erl,” Yvelle said sharply, “and it was he who passed along these instructions. Erl promises they will see you safely past the Rim. Once you are in the Heartland, there are more instructions, which will guide you to Prime.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter whether you believe the instructions are valid or not. They’re your only hope of escape. Your other choices are to surrender to the Provosts or join us in fighting them.”

  Danyl glanced at Alania. She gave him a tiny shrug, as if to say, She’s right.

  I know she’s right, dammit. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Because he had trusted Erl all his life, and Erl had told him more than once that there was no way past the Rim Guardians. Now, suddenly, there was.

  He took a deep breath. “Fine. So once we get past the Rim, we have to somehow find our way through the Heartland. I’ve never been out of the Canyon.” He glanced at Alania. “Have you?” She’s a rich girl from Twelfth Tier, so maybe . . .

  She shook her head. “Lieutenant Beruthi has an Estate not far from the City and a retreat in the northern foothills of the Iron Ring, but he never took me to either one. Until today, I’d never been outside the City.”

  “None of this matters,” Yvelle snapped. “What do you want? Someone to hold your hand and pull you along like a toddler?”

  Danyl felt a flash of anger. “I’m not asking for anyone to hold my hand. I’m just trying to figure out what the hell this is all about!”

  “I’ve already told you, I don’t know,” Yvelle said.

  They glared at each other for a moment, and then Alania touched his arm. He looked at her. Her pale blue eyes, so much like his own, met his. “We’ll find our way,” she said, voice determined.

  He stared at her a moment, then jerked a nod. She squeezed his arm, then released him.

  “Very well, then,” Yvelle said. “Chrima will accompany you under the River and to the stairs.” She looked at Chrima. “Grab rations from the dining room on your way. Get them headed up the stairs at first light. If —when—the Provosts attack, they’ll be focused on this side of the River, so Danyl and Alania should have a good head start.”

  “Not to mention that over there they’ll be out of sight all night of any of our people who have second thoughts,” Chrima said dryly.

  “Not to mention,” Yvelle agreed.

  Chrima turned away from her. “Follow me, you two.”

  Danyl said, “Wait,” and stepped closer to Yvelle. He looked down at her and noted, as he hadn’t before, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the furrows at the corners of her mouth. Twenty years of freedom, but also twenty years of carrying the burden of what she did, he thought. She was only a little older than I am now when she . . .

  He cleared his throat. “Thank you for helping us,” he said softly. “We thank you, and Erl thanks you. And thank you, too, for . . .” He hesitated; it seemed an odd thing to say, and yet he felt he had to. “Thank you for abducting me when I was a baby.”

  Yvelle’s eyes flashed, and her lips tightened. “Don’t you dare thank me for that. You might have lived a life of luxury like Alania if I hadn’t. You might have been groomed to be First Officer, for all I know. And I only abducted you because you were the first one to test positive for the genetic markers. It could have been Alania. It could have been the little girl I . . .” Her voice trailed off. Her mouth worked for a moment. “Don’t thank me,” she rasped out at last.

  “I don’t,” Alania said, and Danyl shot her a glance, startled by the coldness in her voice. She turned her back on Yvelle. “Lead on,” she said to Chrima.

  “As I said, it’s this way,” Chrima said. She glanced at Danyl. “Coming?”

  Danyl met Yvelle’s eyes. They looked back at him, brown like Erl’s, but somehow much older and sadder. Then they dropped. Yvelle’s hand went to the silver locket around her neck. And then she turned and walked away, back toward her office.

  She’s going to fight. They’re all going to fight. And most of them are going to die just so Alania and I can reach this Prime.

  It was an uncomfortable thought, so he turned away from it and said to Chrima. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  She snorted and led them in the opposite direction from Yvelle, parallel to the glass wall, to a doorway directly across from the hallway they’d followed to Yvelle’s office. The door opened into a short, utilitarian corridor at the end of which stairs led downward. For a change, the stairs weren’t lit by eternals but by honest white lights. “Wait in here,” Chrima said, and then she went out again, closing the door behind her.

  After a moment’s silence, Danyl looked at Alania. “How are you holding up?”

  “All right, I guess,” she said. “Do you really think we were babies together on Twelfth Tier?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Danyl admitted. “But why would Yvelle lie?”

  “I don’t know.” Alania stared at the floor for a moment, then looked up. “Has it occurred to you that if all this is true, we’re almost certainly brother and sister?”

  “Yeah,” Danyl said. He didn’t let the regret he’d felt at that realization color his voice, but it was there all the same, like he’d lost something before he’d even had a chance to have it.

  And yet . . . he kind of liked the idea of having a sister. A twin sister, at that—or a septuplet sister, anyway. Actual flesh-and-blood family.

  He didn’t say any of that out loud. They waited in silence.

  Chrima returned within ten minutes. “Rations,” she said, holding up a cloth bag. “I’ll divvy them up when we get to the other side of the River. Come on.” She set off down the stairs.

  Danyl followed, and Alania brought up the rear. They walked down the first flight of stairs, turned right, walked down another, turned again, and again, descending a squared-off spiral, though a tighter one than in the shaft that had led them down to the River. “How do we know,” Danyl asked the beamer bouncing on Chrima’s back—his beamer!—“that you aren’t simply taking us down here to execute us and dump our bodies in the River for the Provosts to find in the hope they’ll let you all off easy?”

  “You don’t,” Chrima said without looking around. “How do I know you’re not going to push me down the stairs, steal the beamer, run back and assassinate Yvelle, and then turn yourselves in?”

  Danyl laughed. “You don’t.”

  “Well then,” Chrima said, “let’s all just pretend we’re going to do what we said we’re going to do, and before you know it, we’ll have done it.”

  It took Danyl a couple of more flights to untangle that sentence.

  At last they reached the bottom, another plain corridor. To their right was a door labeled “Hell’s Cauldron: Maintenance Access.” To their left, another read “Sub-River Tunnel Access.” Chrima opened that one, revealing—hardly a surprise—still more stairs. Alas, these were lit by eternals, faded and failing. They descended another thirty meters, and as they did so, the walls changed from concrete to red stone glistening with moisture.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs. “Why is there a tunnel under the River?” Danyl asked. He ran a hand over the damp rock. “And why is it leaking?”

  Chrima shrugged. “The rock is a bit porous. Sometimes you have to wade down here. I hope you’re not afraid to get your feet wet.”

  “In that River? Yes,” Alania said.

  Chrima laughed. “Fair point. But by the time the water makes its way down here, it’s much cleaner—the rock filters it. It won’t kill you . . . well, unless this is the day the tunnel finally collapses entirely. That’d be bad luck.”

  “Considering the way things have gone downhill since my birthday party yesterday,” Alania said, “don’t even joke about it.”

  Chrima laughed again. />
  The tunnel was not only dank and cold, but it also smelled like a sewer. Danyl thought Chrima was overestimating the stone’s effectiveness as a filter. But they made good time along it, and although they did have to splash through a few puddles, the water never rose higher than his ankles and thus never overflowed his boots, which made him very happy.

  At the far end, they trudged up steps identical to the ones they had trudged down and emerged through a metal door into a long corridor running deep into the rock. To their right was a closed door of bare metal. At the far end was another door, painted red. An eternal—rather bright, for once—still burned faithfully above it. “Rim Garden Maintenance Access” white letters proclaimed on a door which seemed to be red as much from rust as from paint. There were two other doors opposite each other just shy of the red one.

  Chrima led them to the one on the left and opened it inward, revealing a small chamber with four cots and a food preparation area, lit by an ancient light fixture. Thankfully, it was not an eternal; this one gave honest white (well, yellow) light. “We’ll spend the night here.” She pointed to the door across the hall. “Toilet. It works. More or less.”

  Danyl looked at the red door at the corridor’s end. “Why on earth was there a garden on the Rim?”

  Chrima shrugged. “Place was a resort. I think they had dances and dinners up there. They ran guests up to it in a big elevator.”

  “Which there’s no chance we could take, I suppose? I mean, it was one thing to come down a few hundred meters of stairs, but going up them’s going to be . . .”

  “Challenging,” Alania put in.

  He flicked a quick smile in her direction. “One word for it.”

  “It’s out of commission,” Chrima said. “Cable broke at some point. I’ve seen the shaft. There are some old bones mixed in with the rusty metal. It wasn’t empty when it failed. Must have been long after the resort closed—squatters, probably.”

  Danyl winced at the image. He turned back to the room with the cots. “And what was this for?”

  “Maintenance workers’ lounge, we think. Where they took their break. We put the cots in.” Chrima pointed back down the hall to the unmarked door they’d passed at the top of the stairs. “That leads to stairs up to the ledge where this end of the net is anchored. Nobody on duty there now, though. Nobody ever again, I guess.”

  Alania sat down on one of the cots. “So,” she said. “We have the rest of the afternoon and all evening to wait. Anyone for bridge?”

  Danyl blinked at her, confused. “There isn’t any bridge. That’s why we took a tunnel.”

  Alania chuckled. “It’s a card game.”

  “Erl and I didn’t play cards,” Danyl said.

  Alania’s grin spread wider. “We’d really need a fourth, although I know a three-handed version where the fourth is a dummy.”

  Danyl blinked again. “The fourth is a what?”

  Alania laughed. “Never mind.”

  Danyl looked at Chrima. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”

  “Not a clue,” Chrima said. She sat on another of the cots. “Did you really grow up on Twelfth Tier?” she asked Alania. She unslung the beamer and put it on the bed beside her. Danyl eyed it. He didn’t intend to go in search of the mysterious Prime without it.

  Alania nodded. “What about you?”

  “Born on First. My parents got into trouble . . . I don’t know what, exactly. I was eight when they fled to the Middens. Rustbloods found us. Mom and Dad hid me inside an old crate. They were dragged away. I hid for two days, too scared to leave, waiting for them to come back. But they never did. Instead, Erl found me and sent me down to Yvelle.” She sighed. “I owe him my life. A lot of us do.”

  “He never mentioned any of this to me,” Danyl said. “Not once. I never knew he was rescuing other people from the Middens, never saw him do it, even though they must have passed right through our quarters . . .”

  “In case you haven’t figured it out,” Chrima said, “Erl is very good at compartmentalizing information and keeping secrets.”

  Danyl shook his head. He still found it hard to believe that Erl, the old scavenger he’d thought of almost as a father, was in fact a revolutionary, a leader in a decades-long effort to overthrow the Officers and Captain. He found it even harder to believe that he, and apparently Alania, too, were vital to that effort.

  Did Erl ever really care for me at all? he wondered, and the thought burned like acid. Or did he look after me only out of a sense of duty?

  He didn’t want to believe that; he found it hard to believe, since he had so many memories that seemed to belie the notion. Erl tucking him into his bed, birthdays celebrated with cake and other delicacies traded for at the Last Chance Market (or so he’d thought—now he wondered if Erl had had them sent by his contacts in the City), endless hours of teaching and training and playing games and . . .

  But it seemed clear that Erl would have been an equally supportive guardian to some entirely different child. To Alania, if Yvelle had found her. To that other baby . . . the one Yvelle had murdered.

  He felt a little sick thinking of what the woman they had left behind in the resort had been willing to do, not even for the supposedly noble goal of overthrowing the Officers but simply because she had been angry and vengeful.

  Then another thought struck him, even more sickening: if Erl had been a part of this revolutionary effort for as long as it seemed he had, then he must have known about the plans for the seven babies. He must have approved of the plan to murder all but one of those who had the mysterious genetic tags.

  And that made his “love” for Danyl even more suspect. How loving could a guardian be if he had no compunction against the murder of a baby?

  Can any supposed greater good be worth the murder of a baby? Danyl thought, but had no answer. He swiped the back of his hand across his suspiciously watery eyes. Maybe that’s why Erl has worked so hard to save children like Chrima. To try to salve his conscience for what he’d agreed to twenty years ago.

  I wonder if he succeeded?

  Enough! Almost violently, Danyl pulled off his backpack. He opened the outside pocket into which Erl had placed the data crystal and drew it out. It glittered in the light from the overhead fixture.

  “Very pretty,” Chrima said from her cot. “But what is it?”

  “It’s a data storage device,” Danyl said.

  “I saw Erl give that to you,” Alania said, “but I’ve never seen one before.”

  “Erl had a few of them,” Danyl said. “He said they were ‘archaic technology,’ which was why they were thrown into the Middens.” He held the crystal up to the light. It looked undamaged, but that didn’t prove anything. “He said I should read it when I had time. It looks like we have time.”

  “And he said the reader’s in my backpack,” Alania said. She shrugged out of it and put it down on the stone floor by her cot. “I haven’t even looked in this thing.” She unzipped the top, peered inside, and grimaced. “Uh-oh. I thought it was waterproof, but everything in here is . . . sludgy.”

  “Everything?” Danyl put the crystal down on the bed and went to her side. Kneeling, he peered into the pack. “Shit,” he said, which was certainly what the inside of the pack smelled like. He pulled out the reader and recognized it immediately as the one he’d used a million times growing up. Black water . . . or something . . . dripped from it. “That can’t be good.”

  “Maybe it will still work,” Alania said, but not as if she really believed it.

  Danyl put the reader on the floor and gingerly touched the power button. No lights sprang to life. The reader just sat there, inert as a rock and twice as useless.

  “Shit,” Danyl said again. He looked into the pack. “Clothes, ruined . . . bottled water, should be all right . . . maybe a dozen mealpaks. They should be all right, too, if we wash them off
.” He pulled things out, and at the very bottom, he discovered a sealed black pouch. He lifted it; it was heavier than he expected. He put it on the floor and unzipped it.

  A slugthrower in a black synthileather holster gleamed at him. “That’s more like it!” He lifted it out and pulled it from the holster. He’d never handled one in real life before, but it was weighted the same as the mock one he’d used to train with in Erl’s “scavenged” simulator, just as he’d trained with so many other weapons. Underneath the weapon was another black pouch containing three ammunition clips, each holding ten slugs. Thirty shots. Not a lot, but better than nothing.

  He pulled out a clip, popped open the bottom of the slugthrower’s grip, slipped the clip inside it, and closed it up again. He thumbed the power button. A red light sprang to life on the opposite wall. He thumbed the power off again.

  “Nice,” Chrima said. “Guess I can keep the beamer, then.”

  “Guess again,” Danyl said. He didn’t point the slugthrower at her, but he didn’t exactly not point it at her either. “Erl gave it to me. Not you.”

  Chrima studied him for a moment. “Fair enough,” she said at last. “But I’m going to keep it until you reach the top of the stairs. Just in case.”

  Danyl didn’t have to ask, in case of what? He knew what Chrima was thinking. If things went badly, Provosts could come charging along the River tunnel before they’d gotten very far up the stairs and be in the stairwell with them moments later. In which case both he and Chrima had better be armed.

  Alania deserved a weapon, too, but there wasn’t one to spare, and unlike him, she hadn’t trained with even simulated versions. He wouldn’t have hesitated to arm her otherwise; she’d shown remarkable grit from the moment he’d encountered her, far more than Danyl would have expected from a girl raised in the lap of luxury.

  The lap of luxury.

  He wondered for an uncomfortable moment if that was just a figure of speech. A beautiful girl raised by an Officer . . . her guardian, sure, but not really family. Had this Beruthi been tempted? Had he taken advantage of his power over her? Alania hadn’t said anything to indicate it, but Danyl couldn’t help wondering.