The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  “Rotating cube icon,” Alania read.

  He located it, touched it. The display changed. The new one was labeled “Maintenance Options.”

  “Green circle.”

  Danyl touched it. A new window opened. “To grant Temporary Security Zone Access, enter security code,” he read out loud.

  “842XRCI22133,” Alania read, and he carefully punched in the apparently random mixture of numbers and letters. The instructions warned that he’d only get one chance, and he held his breath until the screen blinked “Temporary Security Zone Access granted.”

  The screen returned to the Maintenance Options screen, but now the green circle glowed red. Beside it, a countdown had already begun: 9:58. 9:57. 9:56.

  “We should move,” Danyl said, but Alania was staring at the screen.

  “There’s another red icon. That V-shape. Something else is turned off.”

  Danyl frowned at it. “You’re right. Let’s see what it is.” He touched the icon.

  A new window appeared. “Air defenses currently inactive. Reactivate air defenses?” Below that, the red V-shaped icon appeared again.

  “Air defenses?” Danyl stared at the screen. “Inactive?” He suddenly realized what that had to mean. “They know we’re up here. They’re sending aircraft!”

  “Well then,” Alania said, and she reached out and touched the V-shape.

  The icon turned green. “Air defenses reactivated,” the screen read for a moment before it blinked back to the Maintenance Options screen.

  The countdown continued. “9:24. 9:23. 9:22.”

  “Now,” Alania said, “we really should move.”

  Danyl nodded, though he felt a surge of admiration . . . mingled with maybe just a little irritation. Alania kept acting without asking his permission, or sometimes even his opinion. It offended his male ego just a little—hence the irritation—but the admiration outweighed that. In the Middens, he would have been the natural leader, but . . .

  You’re not in the Middens anymore, he reminded himself. You’re both on the same footing up here. And if you get to the City, she’ll know more than you do.

  Together they hurried across the parquet floor to a featureless door. Danyl slowed, wondering how to open it, but it opened on its own, revealing rain-spattered concrete. Overhead, lightning flashed, followed by the rumble of thunder.

  Just as described on their instruction sheet, solid yellow lines marking the safe corridor ran straight from the shed to a wall fifty meters away: the Fence. Made of concrete topped with opalescent domes, which Danyl knew contained its cameras, sensors, and weapons, it was a forbidding sight. The outlined path crossed a two-meter-deep trench just inside the Fence via a metal bridge, rainwater pouring from it, which Danyl suspected only extruded when the safety corridor was activated. As they hurried toward the Fence, he looked both ways again and almost stumbled: six Rim Guardians watched them, three on either side of the corridor, black oval bodies on multidirectional wheels. Turreted weapons, both beamers and slugthrowers, tracked them as they moved.

  He couldn’t see the countdown, but there had to be several minutes left before the safety corridor stopped being safe. Lots of time, he thought. Lots of time.

  But even as he thought that, he heard the beat of a helicopter’s rotors rising out of the Canyon. He stopped and twisted around, as did Alania. The first time he’d seen a helicopter, when he was eight, he’d thought it the most wonderful thing ever. Even though he’d seen many aircars come and go from the City before that, there had been something about the beat of helicopter rotors that had truly seized his imagination. He’d dreamed of roaming the Heartland in one of the sleek black vehicles, exploring the rivers and lakes and farms and valleys, flying to the foothills of the Iron Ring itself, announcing his presence everywhere he went with that glorious pounding thunder.

  He’d talked about it so much that Erl had sat him down and explained firmly that only Provosts used helicopters, so the only way he could ever ride in one would be to either be a Provost—and since he did not live in the City and thus could not enlist, that would never happen—or to be arrested by the Provosts, in which case he would have a very short flight to the helipad on Tenth Tier and never be heard from again.

  After that, Danyl had decided that maybe helicopters weren’t so wonderful after all. The sight of this one confirmed that negative opinion.

  “Run!” he shouted at Alania as the whirling rotors appeared above the roof of the pavilion. He needn’t have bothered; she dashed past him as the word left his mouth, splashing through the puddles created by the driving rain. He bolted after her, running between the yellow lines toward the metal bridge.

  “Halt in the name of the Captain!” an amplified voice boomed, echoing weirdly off the Fence and across the pavement. “Provosts will—”

  The voice cut off. The helicopter’s thunder swelled from merely loud to earsplitting. It sped forward, gaining altitude . . .

  . . . but not fast enough to avoid the beamers of the security robots, all of whom fired at it simultaneously.

  The ’copter came apart in midair in a spray of oil and fuel that instantly ignited, the fiery blast slamming into Danyl and Alania just as they reached the bridge, hurling them off of it and into the ditch. They splatted into thick, soft mud as heat and smoke and steam and shrapnel drove like a deadly hailstorm across the open space above them. A second later, the largest chunk of the helicopter—probably the crew compartment, though all Danyl saw for sure was black, twisted metal trailing flame and smoke—tore through the concrete of the Fence like paper. Danyl flung himself on top of Alania and pressed her down into the mud while hell exploded above them. Only the steep walls of the ditch saved them—that, and luck: a lump of twisted metal the size of Danyl’s torso thudded into the muck a hand’s breadth from his head.

  Then, just like that, it was over, except for the stench of burning fuel and the hiss of rain falling on flaming wreckage.

  Alania made a muffled noise, and Danyl rolled off her. She sat up, plastered with mud, and swiped a hand across her face to clear her eyes, nose, and mouth. “I guess the air defenses worked,” she said in a shaky voice.

  “Yeah,” Danyl said. “Good call, turning them on. Well . . .” He looked pointedly at the half-buried chunk of steaming metal. “ . . . kind of.”

  “We need to get out of here,” Alania said. “Now. This is our best chance to get away. Maybe our only chance.”

  Danyl blinked at her. His ears still rang from the noise of the helicopter’s sudden demise, and his head felt stuffed with oily rags. “What?”

  “Anyone watching will have seen the helicopter go down apparently right on top of us. With luck, they’ll think we’re dead. And all the sensors and cameras on the chunk of wall the helicopter just took out means we’re in a blind spot.”

  Danyl felt his brain click back to life. “Right,” he said with sudden excitement. He scrambled to his feet. The edge of the trench was just above the top of his head. “Boost me up, then I’ll pull you up.”

  Seconds later they dashed across the road beyond the broken Fence and threw themselves down into a wheat field, the tall stalks offering some cover while they stared back at the destruction wrought by the crashing helicopter. It had torn a fifteen-meter-wide gap in the Fence, now shrouded in smoke and steam. Flames still poured from the shattered hull, which had ripped a gouge in the wheat field some thirty meters from where they lay. Bits of metal—and of men, Danyl realized sickly—covered the wet road.

  To their left, the City rose in the distance, dimmed by the rain. He had never seen it from any vantage point but underneath, where its vast mechanical underpinnings dominated everything and the Tiers above were all but invisible. Now he could see all the Tiers at once, and the City was revealed as a gigantic, elongated ovoid, flattened on the bottom, topped by a silver-gray dome, home of the mythical Captain. Danyl on
ly spared it a glance before looking the other way, to the south, where a windbreak ran east-west along the edge of the field, a thick line of trees and brush running up and over a slight rise. “That way,” Danyl said. “Let’s get as far away from here as possible. Then we’ll worry about getting to Prime.”

  Together, they ran through the rain for the shelter of the trees.

  TWENTY

  THE DESTRUCTION OF yet another helicopter was so sudden that First Officer Kranz stared at the screen for several seconds before he fully registered what had happened.

  He’d heard the calm chatter as the helicopter rose above the Rim, saw Alania and Danyl running for the wall through the ’copter’s cameras, heard the Provost’s squad leader say, “Halt in the name of the Captain! Provosts will—”

  And then he’d heard another voice, calm no longer, ringing with panic: “The air defenses are active! The air defenses are active!”

  The helicopter had roared, trying to leave the Rim airspace, but no human could react faster than robot sentries. Beamers had sliced it apart, it had burst into flame, and seconds later it had crashed and exploded . . .

  . . . right where Alania and Danyl had been standing seconds before.

  The loss of a third helicopter and crew meant nothing to Kranz compared to the catastrophe the deaths of those two represented. They were the culmination of three decades of preparation for an event that could not be postponed much longer. If they were truly lost . . .

  If they’re lost, all is lost. If they’re lost, the City will die, and everything the First Officers have worked for since the beginning will die with it. If they’re lost . . .

  If they’re lost, I am lost.

  Patrols were already racing to the site. He’d know soon enough.

  He sat back in his chair, stomach churning, staring at the smoke and flames rising from the burning wreckage of the ’copter, the perfect visual metaphor for what might have just happened to everything he had worked toward for so long. If Danyl and Alania had died, the City itself would soon be nothing but a burning hulk.

  He clenched his trembling hands. Then he took a deep breath, leaned forward, and began calling up other camera feeds. He needed to see exactly what had happened to Alania and Danyl. Until their bodies were discovered, there was hope.

  There had to be.

  By the time they reached the windbreak and plunged into its welcome shadow, Alania’s heart was pounding, and her legs, already worked to their limit by the long climb from the base of the Canyon, felt like they were on fire. She collapsed on all fours on the wet ground in the middle of the windbreak, where there was a kind of corridor between the two rows of trees and shrubs that formed it. “We can’t stop,” Danyl said, but he stopped anyway and helped her back to her feet.

  She remembered how he had thrown his body over hers as he tried to protect her from the inferno of fire and metal screaming over their heads. Of course, he’d almost drowned her in the mud, and she wondered exactly how he thought his body would have saved her had the wreckage landed on top of them, but it was the thought that counted. Just yesterday, he’d seen her as nothing more than a way to get a pass into the City. Now he was willing to risk his life to keep her safe.

  He’s my brother, she thought. She was certain of it now, and despite everything that had happened, it made her unreasonably happy. So this is what it’s like to have family.

  And there might be more. Seven candidate babies . . . though candidates for what, she still didn’t know. Yvelle had murdered one, and Danyl and Alania made two more; that meant there should be four young people out there who were also their siblings.

  She wondered how it had been done almost as much as why it had been done. In vitro fertilization, artificial wombs, she thought. She knew from her study of City technology that artificial wombs existed and had been used more than once to ensure an heir for a great Officer family, and you couldn’t coordinate ordinary pregnancies closely enough to have seven identically aged babies in the hospital at the same time.

  She frowned. Or could you?

  She thought about it. The mothers—presumably surrogates—would all have had to be implanted with embryos at the same time, then all the births induced or C-sectioned at the same time. The thought made her shudder: seven women treated like so many brood cows. Maybe it wasn’t impossible, but it seemed unlikely, especially given the existence of artificial wombs.

  Whatever the mechanism of their births, she was sure she and Danyl were brother and sister. While in a way it was disappointing that the first young man she’d had the opportunity to spend time with (even if most of that time had been spent running for their lives) was not someone with whom she could kindle a romantic relationship, she still liked having a brother. And there would always be time for romance later.

  Well, if there was a later.

  Danyl pulled the creased piece of paper bearing their instructions from his pocket, bent over it to shield it from the water dripping through the trees above their heads, and opened it up so both of them could look at it. “We’re off to a good start,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about it when we ran this way, but this windbreak is the first landmark.”

  Alania studied the notes and distances given. She added them up in her head and blinked in dismay. “That’s fifty-six kilometers. That’ll take us . . .”

  “All of today and most of tomorrow,” Danyl said. He looked down at their feet. “I foresee blisters.”

  Alania sighed. “So let’s get started making—” She stopped and spun around as a sound penetrated her consciousness. Rotors! “There’s another helicopter coming!”

  “Can you run some more now?” Danyl asked.

  “Oddly enough, I think I can.”

  They splashed off down the muddy corridor between the windbreak’s trees and bushes. The surge of adrenaline the sound of the helicopter sent through Alania’s veins masked the pain in her legs (and other places—she suspected she had black and blue patches all over her body), but not for long. Eventually the ache returned, and her pace slowed. Danyl was clearly struggling, too. But though they were eventually reduced to a shambling walk, and though the fire in her legs was more than countered by the chill of the rain that had soaked her to the skin, they kept moving.

  Alania kept expecting the sound of the rotors to swell behind them, for the new helicopter with a fresh squad of Provosts to come screaming by overhead, searching for them among the trees. But instead the sounds from the crash site diminished as they ran and were silenced completely by the time they crested the small hill and started down the other side.

  The windbreak ran for five kilometers, after which they turned left and continued another five kilometers along a second windbreak, following Prime’s instructions. This one brought them to a river flowing along a deep gully toward the Canyon, where Alania thought it must make a spectacular waterfall as it leaped into the depths somewhere downstream from the Whitewater Resort.

  The last place they wanted to return to was the Canyon; they scrambled down the side of the gully to the rock-covered bank and turned upstream instead. For the rest of the day they followed the stream’s winding path, hidden from above by overhanging trees with long, trailing branches. The scattered rocks made for uncertain footing, and Alania worried what would happen if one of them turned an ankle.

  But they survived unscathed until nightfall, though they were drenched periodically by a series of thunderstorms chasing each other across the Heartland. By then Alania was so tired she could hardly see straight, and she definitely couldn’t walk straight. The sky finally cleared as the sun neared the horizon. Danyl looked around uneasily. “It’s about to get a lot colder,” he said. “We can’t stay down here. We have to find shelter. We could die of exposure.”

  Alania tried to reply, found her teeth chattering, and clenched them for a moment before managing, “There . . . may not be any shelter up the
re, either.”

  “There’s got to be something,” Danyl said. “It’s all farmland. An equipment shed. Something . . .”

  Hoping he was right, Alania followed his scramble up the muddy side of the gully.

  They’d had no view of the surrounding countryside since they’d started following the river, and when they reached ground level, they found things had changed. Contrary to Danyl’s assurance, it wasn’t all farmland. Instead they were in a forest, a thick tangle of small trees and brush growing up around massive tree stumps, all that remained of the long-since-harvested first-growth trees. The welter of greenery competing to fill the ecological niche had created a barrier Alania and Danyl would have difficulty forcing their way through and would probably get lost in if they tried, especially with night coming on.

  “Shit,” Danyl said, summing up the situation perfectly.

  “No shelter,” Alania pointed out completely unnecessarily. She felt she should contribute something other than another swear word, although that was her first inclination.

  “We were better off down by the river after all,” Danyl said. “Maybe we can find a cave.”

  “It’s almost dark.”

  “I know.” Danyl turned and half slid, half stumbled back down the muddy slope to the stony riverbank. Alania slid down on her rear end and stood beside him. He stared around in the fading light. “There,” he said suddenly, pointing. “Maybe among those rocks?”

  “Those rocks” were a pile of boulders tangled with dead trees at a bend in a stream: a remnant of a long-ago flash flood, Alania guessed. They reached the rocks as the last of the twilight faded. There was just enough room for the two of them to squeeze in among three of the largest boulders. The branches overhead would have done nothing to keep out the earlier rain, but fortunately the sky remained clear. Alania was still wet and shivering, though, and so was Danyl. “We’ll have to . . . um . . . share body heat,” he said diffidently.