The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  Alania had already come to that same conclusion and saw no reason to be shy about it, not with survival at stake. Besides, she thought, he’s my brother . . . right?

  She wasn’t entirely sure her body would register him that way, though, given how deprived of male companionship it had been her entire life. And perhaps it would have been a problem, under different circumstances. But cold and wet and miserable as she was—and Danyl, too, no doubt—her only interest in the nearness of a male came from the fact said male was giving off heat. She spooned with Danyl, pressing her body against his back while holding him tightly in her arms. The backpack beneath their heads made a totally inadequate and very lumpy pillow, but it was still better than nothing.

  Barely.

  Still, there was one thing to be said for climbing half a kilometer up a staircase, running for your life from exploding helicopters and killer robots, and then fleeing cross-country on a multikilometer walk: suddenly finding itself motionless, her body made another sound decision and promptly went to sleep.

  The video from the destruction of the helicopter atop the Rim proved inconclusive. Kranz tamped downed the panic bubbling just under his carefully maintained calm surface and stared again at the last clear image of Danyl and Alania, which showed them running onto the bridge over the ditch inside the Fence. Smoke and flame obscured them in the next frame. When there was a clear image again, there was no sign of them, but there were also enormous blind spots in the surveillance footage; the cameras that would have provided a view down into the ditch had been obliterated along with many others.

  Kranz could do nothing but wait for a report from the Provosts at the scene. Among them were search-and-rescue experts, but it was already clear there wouldn’t be anyone to rescue; everyone who had been on board the helicopter was obviously thoroughly deceased. His heart thumped in his chest. If Danyl and Alania were dead, then the City had just died with them, though its death throes would be far more prolonged than theirs. Thanks to the nanobots within his body, which had given him access to the thoughts and plans of the original First Officer, Kranz—and Kranz alone—knew how to salvage the failing City and the dying Captain, how to prevent the final and fatal failure of all the City’s systems and the carnage and chaos and civil war that would surely follow.

  But to do it, he needed Alania.

  Kranz shouldn’t have been alone in his knowledge. His clone, Falkin, should have been at his side. The boy’s loss had hit him hard. To his shame, he had even tried to convince Beruthi to advance the timetable, to let him have Alania when she was only sixteen. Without his backup in place, it would take only one accident or assassination attempt, something that damaged his body more severely than his nanobots could repair, to bring their only hope for saving the City crashing down. But Beruthi had forcefully reminded him that until the girl was twenty, her brain would not be developed enough to do what would be demanded of it. He had, in a way, talked Kranz down from a ledge. Kranz had doubled his bodyguards and taken very special care of himself ever since, rarely leaving Twelfth Tier. He had survived the last four years unscathed, waiting for Alania to come to him . . .

  . . . only to have her snatched from his grasp and thrown into the Middens in the company of the boy he’d thought dead twenty years ago. If she had died now . . .

  He shook his head, his black thoughts of imminent disaster having circled right back to where they’d started, as they so often did.

  An hour passed. Two. Then he heard the chime he’d been waiting for, and his heart raced. He slapped his palm down on his desk to answer the call.

  Commander Havelin’s sweaty, black-grimed face filled the screen, framed by rising smoke. “We’ve searched the crash site thoroughly, sir.” Havelin coughed and grimaced, then continued, “We’ve recovered the remains of the helicopter crew and the Provosts who were aboard. They were good men, sir.”

  “I’m sure they were, Commander,” Kranz said, though he wasn’t sure of any such thing; it seemed to him the Provosts who had died must have been drooling idiots to have allowed such a thing to happen. “And I will personally talk to the families of each of them.” No, he wouldn’t, but he’d have someone do it for him. “But what about your main quarry? What about . . .” His throat closed, and he had to clear it before he could finish. “What about Alania and Danyl?”

  “No sign of them, sir. Nowhere near the bridge. If they made it to the ditch, they might have survived the blast, and they could have escaped into the farmland after that.”

  Kranz felt as if the giant fist that had been clenching his heart had suddenly released. They’re alive! “Then I suggest you send out patrols to find them,” he snapped.

  “Done, sir, but if they’re out there, they have a huge head start, and there are a lot of different directions they could have gone. And it’s been raining heavily; any tracks they might have left will be very hard to find.”

  “Find them, Commander,” Kranz said, and he put every bit of threatening urgency he could into that simple command.

  Havelin stiffened to attention. “Yes, sir!”

  “I will issue a call to the Officer Estates to be on the lookout. Keep me informed.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Kranz out.” He blanked the screen, then sat back, his mind boiling with relief that the Cityborn still lived, mingled with fury that they had once again eluded him.

  But not for long, he thought. There’s nothing out there but Estates, and there are cameras everywhere, on every robot tilling a field or harvesting potatoes or maintaining a road. It’s only a matter of time. Even if they aren’t seen right away, they’ll get hungry soon enough. If we don’t find them by nightfall, they’ll spend a cold, miserable night in the open and be desperate for shelter in the morning . . . and then I’ll have them. I have only to wait.

  Ordinarily, he was very good at waiting. He’d waited twenty years for Alania to come of age, after all. But this wait . . .

  He glanced at the Captain’s monitor, grimaced, and then turned back to his desk and the endless trivia of administration. At least it will pass the time. He glanced over the list. The usual litany of system breakdowns on all Tiers and crime and squalor on the lowest ones; a series of execution orders to approve; the latest crop reports; it went on and on and never changed—worse, never improved—day after day, year after year.

  But it will, he thought. Once I have Alania back. It will.

  He keyed up the first item and set to work.

  Not even her exhaustion could keep Alania asleep when another helicopter came thundering over their hiding place in the middle of the night. She went from oblivion to trembling wakefulness in an instant, and her arms tightened around Danyl’s chest. He put his hands on hers. “Are they looking for us?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so, at that speed. They’re trying to get somewhere in a hurry. Might not have anything to do with us.”

  “What time is it?”

  Danyl’s body shifted as he raised his arm to look at his watch, a faint rectangle of green illumination in the otherwise pitch dark. “Still an hour until dawn. We should be ready to move the moment it’s light.”

  Alania groaned. “I don’t know if I can.” Now that she was awake, she could feel how stiff and sore her muscles were from the previous day’s exertions and a night on the ground. Her stomach suddenly and embarrassingly growled with hunger, and she felt an increasingly pressing need to relieve her bladder. But there seemed no hope of that until it was light. If she tried to get out of their shelter in the dark, she’d probably break her leg or fall in the river.

  More sleep seemed unlikely, too, however. So she stayed where she was, miserable, while Danyl, to her envy, slipped back into a doze, signaled by his deep, even breathing. She felt his chest rising and falling within the circle of her arms, and a wave of tenderness washed over her.

  Brother
.

  And as the last hour of the night wound slowly past, as she lay there, uncomfortable, chilled, and aching, she realized a surprising truth: there was nowhere else she would rather have been. Certainly not in her comfortable bed in Quarters Beruthi with the hidden cameras watching her while she slept. She used to think she’d been a prisoner there, but now she realized she’d been even less. She’d been a lab animal, always under observation, while Kranz and Beruthi waited for her to turn twenty, old enough for Kranz to haul her away and do whatever it was he intended to do to her, or get her to do whatever it was he intended for her to do. Had Kranz gotten his hands on her as intended, would he already have carried out his plans? And if he had, where would she be right now?

  She shuddered. Having seen the lengths Kranz would go to to get her back, she really didn’t want to be in his hands.

  At least none of this seems likely to be because he has a thing for girls less than half his age, she thought. Despite the cameras in my room. Not even Kranz would use all the resources of the City just to have sex with me.

  Would he?

  She snorted. Get over yourself. No, he wouldn’t.

  Danyl stirred again, and she realized she could kind of see him now—just a black blob, but somehow blacker than the blackness around him. She twisted her head and could make out against the sky the silhouette of the tangle of tree trunks and branches over their heads. Dawn at last!

  Danyl reached up and gently pulled her arm away from his chest. She withdrew it, and both of them sat up. The movement made her gasp involuntarily and put more pressure on her bladder. “Getting light,” Danyl said.

  “Yes,” Alania said. She rolled over onto her hands and knees and crawled out of their impromptu shelter onto the water-smoothed stones of the riverbank. Danyl followed her. They both got stiffly to their feet. The sound of rushing water made the chill morning air somehow even colder and made bladder-relief even more imperative. Alania could now see well enough to spot a screen of bushes just a little ways upstream. She pointed at it. “I need to . . .”

  “Me, too,” Danyl said hastily. “I’ll go the other direction.”

  A few minutes later, with the light waxing all the time, they reconvened at the rocks. “That helicopter,” Alania said, holding her arms wrapped around herself, desperately missing the warmth of Danyl’s body against hers. “Are we sure it wasn’t looking for us?”

  “Can’t be sure,” Danyl said. He was digging in his backpack, and from it he produced two rectangular, foil-wrapped packages. He tossed one to her. “It didn’t have a searchlight, so it wasn’t looking for us visually. Could have been using a heat sensor of some kind, but it went by awfully fast. Anyway, it didn’t land.”

  Alania examined the package. STANDARD RATION PACK read a white label with a string of numbers and a convoluted swirling pattern below the letters. “How do I . . . ?”

  “You’ve never seen a mealpak?” Danyl asked, sounding astonished.

  “They’re not exactly in vogue on Twelfth Tier,” Alania pointed out.

  Danyl laughed. “Guess not. They’re a staple in the Middens. I don’t know how the traders get hold of them, since they’re normally issued to Provosts, but they always seem to have plenty to offer. Probably some kind of bribery/kickback scheme going on.” He held up his own ration pack. “Pull this tab.” He tugged. The top of the mealpak unfolded itself, and steam rose into the chill morning air. “It’s kind of tasteless,” he said, tugging out a plastic fork set diagonally across the top of the yellowish, mush-like contents, “but it’s supposed to provide enough calories and other nutrients for a day’s march. And it’s hot.”

  They sat side by side on the ground as they ate with their backs to the boulders that had sheltered them through the night. Privately, Alania thought “tasteless” would have been an improvement. The stuff was more bitter than bland and had a grainy texture she found off-putting . . . but three minutes later, she found herself scraping out the last yellow blob with her fork, licking the interior of the mealpak, and wishing there was more.

  At least they weren’t short of water. The stream here flowed clear, unlike the noxious River into which it would eventually plunge, and they both drank deeply of it before at last, beneath a sky feathered with long, wispy clouds tinged pink, they set out once again along the gully.

  Remembering the helicopter, they kept as much under the screen of overhanging branches as they could, but there were fewer trees now, leaving long stretches of the river gully naked to the sky. They scurried across those like skitterbugs surprised by the light, scuttling back into the protective shadows the moment they could.

  Late in the morning, they came at last to their next landmark: a bridge spanning the river, a single concrete arch cracked and stained with age. As they watched, a transport—a featureless black box on twelve wheels—hummed over it.

  Danyl again consulted the folded piece of paper in his pocket. “We’re supposed to go under the bridge, then climb out of the river cut and follow the road, keeping to the trees, for another ten kilometers,” he said, confirming what Alania remembered. “A side road will cross our path. We’ll follow it east for five more kilometers. There’ll be a gate. We’re to stop there and wait for transportation.” He looked up at Alania. “And that’s where the instructions end.”

  “Transportation to where, is what I’d like to know.”

  “You and me both.”

  There was nothing in the instructions about how or where Prime would contact them. It made Alania uneasy, but it wasn’t as if they had any choice. They couldn’t go back. They could only go forward.

  She hadn’t escaped being a lab animal after all. Not yet. We’re rats in a maze, scuttling along blindly, turning corners at random, hoping there’s a reward and not dissection waiting at the end. She winced. Well, that was an unfortunate metaphor.

  They passed under the bridge and scrambled up the bank without difficulty. The road they now followed ran through uncleared land, and the importance of keeping to the forest was brought home immediately when another transport zoomed by. Another followed fifteen minutes after that, and another fifteen minutes after that. They stayed as deep among the trees as they could without losing touch with the road, and right where the instructions promised, they found a side road crossing their path, narrow but well paved. It wound through the woods in what Alania assumed was intended to be a picturesque fashion rather than slashing through them straight as a laser, even though the terrain would have permitted that. They hurried along it, again keeping to the trees, but no vehicles came their way at all.

  At last the path straightened, running between two lines of equidistantly placed trees whose branches reached over the path to form living arches. It led them to a closed gate of black metal bars set in a three-meter-tall brick wall, then ran on into the land beyond. Stymied, Alania and Danyl stood side by side at the gate. Nothing moved beyond it. The mid-afternoon sun, burning overhead in a clear blue sky, made Alania feel a bit less like a lab animal and more like a specimen on a microscope slide, awaiting examination.

  Examination or extermination? her brain insisted on asking.

  Shut up, brain, she told it.

  “Wait for transportation,” the instructions had said, but they hadn’t said how long the wait might be. Minutes passed, and nothing happened. Alania stared through the gate, wondering where the path led. A slight rise not far beyond the wall hid whatever might lie behind it. The trees were far more widely spaced on the other side of the wall, the grass surrounding them neatly trimmed . . .

  She stiffened. “What was that?”

  Danyl looked up from where he sat on the ground with his back to the wall, idly stripping the bark from a twig. “What was what?”

  “I saw something move.” Alania stared hard into the green shadows of the trees beyond the gate.

  Danyl scrambled up and stood beside her. “Where?”


  She pointed. “By that flowering bush over there.”

  Danyl followed her finger. “I don’t see any—oh!”

  A robot suddenly popped into view, a fat cylinder about half as tall as Alania with four spider-like legs emerging from the bottom and four arms extending from the top, fitted with clippers and spouts and trowels. “Oh!” Alania exclaimed. “It’s a Beruthi 2900.”

  Danyl stared at her. “A what?”

  “A Beruthi 2900 gardening robot.” She felt almost homesick at the sight of it; one had tended the garden in front of Quarters Beruthi for as long as she could remember.

  “Who has a robot as a gardener?” Danyl demanded.

  “Officers. Every one of the families of the girls I knew growing up has an Estate in the country, and you can’t expect Officers to do their own gardening.”

  “Don’t they have servants for that sort of thing?”

  Alania shrugged. “Some do, some don’t. Robots are less expensive.”

  They watched the little green robot roll through the woods, clipping grass around the trunks of the trees. Then came a whisper of sound from behind them. Alania turned to see one of the big black transports they’d watched zipping along the main road rolling along the path toward them. “Danyl,” she said, touching his arm.

  He turned around.

  “Our ‘transportation’?” she asked.

  “Presumably.”

  “They don’t have crew compartments, do they?”

  Danyl shook his head. “No. They’re just boxes with wheels and computers to drive them.”

  The transport rolled up to the gate. The front of the featureless container lowered, becoming a ramp into the empty interior. A band of illumination a hand’s-breadth wide ran its length. Danyl looked at Alania. “I guess that’s our invitation.”