The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  He didn’t like the idea, so he shoved it out of his mind. He wasn’t about to ask Alania. Instead, he said, “Agreed,” out loud to Chrima. He pushed the filthy clothing and ruined reader back into the pack and kicked it under the bed. The rations would fit into his pack with the rope and spare knife and pocket toolset and canteen and clothes he always carried. No need for Alania to continue to be burdened with them.

  He put the data crystal inside the pack this time, where it was less vulnerable to breakage. It would have to wait, infuriating though that was. He felt woefully ignorant, and he hated that feeling. He undid his belt, slipped the holster onto it, did the belt up again, and put the spare clips of ammo into his pants pocket.

  Chrima lay back on her cot. “I never have an afternoon to do nothing,” she said. “I think I’ll take a nap.” She closed her eyes.

  Danyl looked at Alania. Sometime in the last few minutes, she had also lain down. Not only were her eyes closed, she was breathing deeply and regularly.

  “I’ll keep watch,” he said to no one in particular.

  He made cautious use of the promised toilet across the hall—while it did indeed work, he suspected it hadn’t been cleaned since the River People found it—and then reemerged into the corridor. He looked toward the steps leading up from the tunnel beneath the River. A spectacularly deep silence reigned in that direction, but within hours, Provosts might be storming through it.

  He put his back to the door that would take them to the Rim and beyond, to the mysterious Prime, if all went well, and slid down to sit on the floor. With the slugthrower in his hand, he stared down the silent corridor, his thoughts flowing in dark, sluggish currents like those of the River. But unlike the River, from which useful things could occasionally be salvaged, nothing of worth or note surfaced as the long hours dragged by.

  EIGHTEEN

  YVELLE STOOD on the balcony of one of the topmost decaying guest rooms of the Whitewater Resort, twenty-five stories above the swirling water of the basin into which the waterfall plunged, fingering the locket around her neck, awaiting the end of her world. Above the Canyon, the sky had lightened to a cold gray, and rain sluiced down on the Black River. It would do nothing to stop the impending attack.

  She remembered climbing the ladder to Twelfth Tier twenty years ago. She remembered taking Danyl from his crib, discovering Alania was missing. And she remembered—God, she remembered—how the baby girl’s mouth and nose had felt beneath her hand, the feeble struggles. She had felt the moment the spark of life had left the child. She had felt it night after night since in her nightmares.

  She had no fear of death. If there were any justice in the universe, she would have died long ago for what she had done that night. But then, if there were any justice in the universe, the Captain and First Officer and all the Officers would have died long ago for what they had done to her husband and so many others. At the time, she had thought she was hastening that long-delayed justice with her actions, that somehow she was wreaking righteous vengeance. But as the years had slipped away, nothing, so far as she could tell, had changed in the City, out of sight of the old resort but still casting its dark shadow and excreting its noisome outflows.

  She and her community had scooped what they could from the River, mined the lowest reaches of the refuse heap, and occasionally accepted a refugee or a desperately needed crate of supplies sent their way by Erl. Some couples had produced offspring, children who had never known anything other than life with the River People, for whom the old resort was simply home. Last night those children had been sequestered deep within the complex to await the results of the expected raid.

  Yvelle had told the River People that even the Provosts would not murder children. She hoped she was right, but as she knew only too well, the murder of a child was never truly unthinkable.

  Even from her vantage point, she could not see the hidden fighters waiting in the glass-walled lobby, armed with the handful of crossbows they had managed to construct over the years, the most powerful weapons they could muster. The River People had abandoned the far side of the waterfall pool to focus the Provosts’ attention on the side where Alania and Danyl weren’t. Chrima had taken the beamer rifle Danyl had been carrying, but a single beamer would hardly make a difference against the kind of firepower the Provosts would soon unleash. Better she used it to ensure Alania and Danyl made it to the Rim, then gave it to them so they could have at least some slight chance of reaching the mysterious Prime.

  And then? To what use would Prime put the two surviving candidate babies? Could one or both of them truly bring about the long-awaited revolution?

  I’ll never know.

  Yvelle picked up her own crossbow from where it leaned against the railing of the balcony. It was the finest they had constructed; it even had a scope, a miraculous find in the bottom layers of the garbage, its lenses scratched but serviceable, its tube once dented but carefully straightened. It must have fallen into the Canyon rubbish dump centuries ago, no telling how or why.

  There are so many things I will never know the reasons for, Yvelle thought. I’ll never know where the City came from, why it crouches where it does above the Canyon, how the Officers took power, if the Captain has truly lived for centuries, or if she is mere myth.

  Children were taught that the City had been placed where it was by the will of the blessed Captain, “may she live forever,” and that the location had been carefully chosen: the center of the vast circular plain called the Heartland, surrounded by the impassible Iron Ring, mountains so high that no aircraft could fly over them and no human could ever scale them, teeming with deadly (and inedible) wildlife and plants. Children were taught that the first inhabitants of the City had awakened, full-grown, with no memories of whatever had come before. They were taught that the Officers had been appointed by the Captain to rule the City and order its affairs and that the Provosts were the Captain’s right hands, ensuring her will was done.

  They were not taught why the City had become such a miserable place to live; why nothing seemed to work; why raw sewage and industrial waste and refuse dropped like excrement from the City onto the Middens day after day; how the Officers continued to live in luxury despite the ever-worsening conditions in the Tiers beneath their lofty perch.

  Yvelle used to think the teachers knew the answers but weren’t telling anyone. Later she had become convinced the teachers knew no more than they taught, that no one in the City apart from the Captain (if she truly still lived) and perhaps the First Officer knew the truth about its founding and ongoing decay.

  Perhaps Prime knows, she thought. Somehow, all the mysteries of the City had to be connected to those candidate babies. To Alania and Danyl.

  To our imminent destruction.

  A siren sounded: an alarm salvaged from an aircar wreck, triggered by the lone scout she had posted at the bend in the River upstream from the falls. But it was hardly necessary. Almost at once, she heard the beat of rotors.

  She raised the crossbow scope to her right eye.

  She’d been certain the Provosts would arrive by helicopter. They could do nothing else—it was impossible to get boats to the River from the Middens or down the stairwell behind Erl’s quarters. Nor was there any place to land a boat, since Yvelle had ordered the landing stage destroyed; they simply would have been swept over the waterfall. The reconnaissance drones must have made that clear to them.

  The first ’copter, sleek and black, thundered around the bend, then hung in place, thirty meters lower than her balcony perch but well above the cauldron of the waterfall. An amplified voice boomed from it, echoing off the walls. “Lay down your weapons and show yourselves! By order of the Captain, this illegal community is to be dismantled. Comply, or we will use deadly force to make you comply!”

  No one appeared in response to that command. Yvelle had counted on the Provosts offering surrender before attacking, since their primary p
urpose had to be to capture Alania and Danyl alive. Her own fighters stayed out of sight; they wouldn’t attempt to fight aircraft, saving their bolts for the men who would descend from them.

  Only Yvelle was in the open. Only Yvelle had a crossbow with a scope.

  And only Yvelle had the two special crossbow bolts crafted with care by a particularly bitter engineer who had fled from the City to the Middens and been immediately recruited by Erl, who had somehow known he was coming. Strake Hanning had been his name, and he was long dead, poisoned by a River-contaminated cut—one that would have been too minor to worry about in the City—during a time when they were short of medical supplies. But during the two years he had lived as one of the River People, he had managed to concoct explosives from supplies carefully obtained through Erl. Most had been used to open collapsed tunnels and blast new spaces out of the Canyon walls. Only a few of those demolition charges remained, scattered amongst the fighters to use as they saw fit. Yvelle had made sure Chrima, for one, had one tucked away in her backpack.

  But Strake Hanning had been interested in blowing up things other than rock. Just before he’d died, he had constructed two experimental crossbow bolts with blunt metal tips. One of those bolts was already loaded into Yvelle’s crossbow. The second waited beside her on the balcony floor.

  Peering down through her scope at the hovering ’copter, she had a clear view of the pilot’s helmeted head through the transparent canopy of the cockpit.

  She fired.

  The bolt punched through the canopy, shattered the pilot’s helmet and skull . . . and exploded.

  Orange flame devoured the front of the ’copter. It twirled crazily out of control and fell, trailing smoke, chasing the shrapnel and bits of bone and flesh that were all that was left of its forward quarter. With an enormous splash and gout of steam, it plunged sideways into the black pool at the bottom of the waterfall. Its spinning rotor shattered. Some pieces hurtled skyward: one, a chunk of metal as long as Yvelle’s leg, whirled over her head so fast she barely registered it, smashing into the edge of the balcony ceiling and spraying her with shards of concrete.

  She reset the crossbow, reached for the second and last of her explosive bolts. She was just nocking it when the second ’copter thundered into sight.

  The pilot of this one had seen the fate the first machine. He came in much higher. The black barrels of the machine guns on the ’copter’s nose swung toward Yvelle. Through her scope, she saw the pilot’s goggled face. She fired her second bolt at the same instant the machine guns spat fire in her direction.

  The bullets traveled much faster than the bolt, but the bolt traveled fast enough. Even as the slugs tore through her body in a spray of blood and shattered bone, Yvelle felt the flare of heat and light as her second bolt blew the second helicopter and all the Provosts aboard it into the same oblivion that engulfed her.

  In its final instant of consciousness, Yvelle Forister’s dying brain produced a faint flicker of satisfaction.

  Alania woke and wasn’t quite sure why.

  She stared up at a stone ceiling. Not her room in Quarters Beruthi. Where . . . ?

  Everything that had happened the day before hit her with the force of an aircar dropping on her head. She sat up, gasping. The attack . . . the Middens . . . Danyl . . . Erl . . . the stairs . . . the River . . . Yvelle . . .

  She’d slept all afternoon, as had Chrima, while Danyl kept watch. For supper they’d shared some of the rations from the River People’s dining room: surprisingly good, thanks to the greenhouses she’d seen earlier and a meatvat provided, Chrima said, by Erl. No one had seemed interested in learning how to play bridge—not that they had cards to play it with, anyway. Instead, Chrima had gone over and over exactly what they would have to do, once they reached the robot “nest” high above, to evade the Rim defenses and slip out into the Heartland. It seemed simple enough. She suspected that was an illusion.

  Despite sleeping all afternoon, she’d had no trouble at all sleeping again that night, though her dreams did tend toward falling and drowning and exploding heads and other unpleasantries.

  But neither memories nor dreams had awoken her. Something else . . .

  “An explosion,” Chrima said. She was at the door, peering around the corner in the direction of the stairs down to the tunnel beneath the River.

  Danyl was sitting up now, too. He rubbed sleep from his eyes. “Provosts?”

  Chrima gave him a withering look. “You think?”

  “Then let’s get moving,” Alania said. She swung her feet over the side of the bed. “I get the toilet first.”

  She was crossing the hallway to the nasty bathroom when she heard the second explosion. The rock didn’t tremble—they were too deeply embedded in the Canyon wall for that—but the air somehow quivered. She gasped, then hurried on to complete her business. When she emerged, Chrima went in, then Danyl. As he came out again, Chrima turned to the rusty red door. “It’s a long climb to the Rim, and you can’t enter the nest until 1000 precisely. Any sooner and the Guardians will take your head off. Does either of you have a working watch?”

  Alania looked at her wrist. She still wore the decorative silver-and-glass timepiece Beruthi had given her three birthdays ago. It hadn’t been designed for dropping out of the City into the Middens, floating down the Black River, and plunging over a waterfall. Neither had Alania, come to think of it, but she’d held up better than it had—its display had gone dark. “Not me.”

  “Mine’s working,” Danyl said.

  “Is it accurate?”

  “Sets automatically to the City time signal,” he said. “Not that it’s connected to that here, probably, but it shouldn’t have lost time since yesterday morning.”

  “Good.” Chrima dug a key-rod out of her pocket and inserted it into the hole in the door’s lockplate. A bolt released with a bang. Chrima pushed at the door, and it opened inward, though it groaned as if it would have much preferred to stay closed.

  The staircase beyond was, of course, lit by green eternals. Alania sighed.

  “You’ll need this at the top,” Chrima said, holding out the key.

  Danyl took it. “What about my beamer?”

  “I’ll be right behind you, protecting your rear,” Chrima said. “I’ll give it to you at the top if we all make it that far.”

  “You think we won’t?” Alania asked. She looked back down the corridor toward the tunnel.

  “I don’t know what those explosions were,” Chrima said. “What I do know is that the assault has begun. If there aren’t Provosts inside the resort already, there will be soon. And if they’ve done their homework, they know the layout—at least the parts that the River People haven’t modified.” She grinned viciously. “And booby-trapped. That means they know about this tunnel. They may not consider it very important, since it only leads to the Rim, and they don’t know you have a way through the Rim defenses. But sooner or later they will come this way, especially when they don’t find you anywhere else.” Her momentary smile faded. “My friends may be dying back there. My home is dying. They’re dying so you two can escape, because Erl said it’s important, because Yvelle said it’s important. So you two are damn well going to escape. You’re going to make it across the Rim and into the Heartland and do whatever the hell it is you have to do to bring down the Officers, because if you don’t I’ll kill you myself, even if I have to come back from the dead.”

  Alania swallowed. People were dying—people had already died—because of her, because of Danyl, because of whatever they were, whatever they represented to the First Officer, to the shadowy figures of the supposed revolution she’d never even dreamed existed. She hadn’t wanted any of this. She didn’t want it now. She hadn’t chosen it; it had chosen her. And there was nothing she could do to stop it.

  She remembered how free she’d felt just yesterday. But she knew now that she was no freer t
han when she had been imprisoned in Quarters Beruthi with hidden cameras watching her every move. She was still trapped by the strange circumstances of her birth.

  Maybe she always would be.

  “Let’s move,” Danyl growled.

  They passed through the door. Alania and Danyl began to climb while Chrima hung back. After eight flights, Alania glanced down to see Chrima closing and locking the door, then following them up the stairs at last.

  The dank, stale air in the stairwell didn’t seem to contain as much oxygen as it should. Alania’s lungs were laboring before she’d climbed fifty meters, a tenth of the total distance. “Slow down,” she gasped up to Danyl. “We’ll never last at this rate.”

  “We have to be there by 1000,” he said, but he slowed all the same.

  “What time is it?”

  Danyl checked his watch. “0812.”

  “Then we have time. We have to conserve our strength, or we won’t be able to do what we have to at the top.” If we reach the top. In many places, the stairs no longer had handrails—another reason to slow down. A stumble or a faint, and . . .

  Alania pushed a little closer to the stone wall and kept climbing, trying to ignore the growing ache in her calves.

  Up and up . . . and up and up. Just as in the stairwell they had descended on the far side of the Canyon, the eternals barely burned in parts of the shaft, so at times they climbed in near darkness, faint green glow above them, faint green glow below them, neither doing much to light where they were at the moment.

  Up, and still up. Time and consciousness collapsed into the endless now of climbing, climbing, climbing. Alania didn’t know exactly how long they had been on the stairs or how much farther they had to go when there was a flash of light and an enormous bang below them—and then a shockwave ripped up the narrow chimney of the stairwell, so powerful it threw her from her feet. Her right hand dropped into the void, and she hastily rolled over onto her back, then hauled herself upright. Her ears rang, and when she swiped the back of her hand across her suddenly runny nose, it came away with a smear of red. Above her, Danyl was likewise pulling himself to his feet. He drew the slugthrower, shook his head as though trying to clear it, then turned and peered downward.