The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

“Yet you want to go back?” Alania said.

  “I was wrong,” Spika said. “Turns out it is worse down here.” She smiled without humor. “Besides, I’ve learned a few . . . skills . . . down here. Maybe the bastard I ran away from is still alive up there, and maybe he isn’t. All I know is, after what I’ve seen and done in the Middens, he doesn’t scare me anymore.” She turned her gaze back to Danyl. “So what’s your way into the City?”

  “Hazardous Waste Holding Tank, near the southeastern strut,” he said. “You know it?”

  Spika nodded. “I know it. Never been too close to it, though. Not healthy.”

  “I have,” Danyl said. He glanced at Alania. “We have. There’s a maintenance hatch into the Bowels. This key will open it.”

  Spika chewed on her lip. “Not easy getting from here to there in one piece.”

  “I know,” Danyl said. “But that’s Greenskull territory if it’s anyone’s. There must be safe paths.”

  “Safe might be a little strong,” Spika said. “I think I’d go with likely—no, make that possibly—survivable.”

  “Good enough. Do we have a deal?”

  “Show me that key again,” Spika said. “No teasing this time. The whole thing.”

  “Sure.” Danyl drew out the key. Even in the gray, rain-dampened light, it gleamed.

  Spika blew out a breath through pursed lips. “That’s the real deal, all right. When I lived up top, I saw an Officer use one once to open a hatch I didn’t even know was a hatch.” Her eyes narrowed. “How’d you get it?”

  “Traded salvage for it,” Danyl said. “That’s all you need to know.”

  Spika grunted. She looked back at the doorway in the wall of trash, then pointed right. “Over there. A path all the way to the top.”

  “Watched?” Danyl said.

  “Yeah. But mainly by me. Come on.”

  She led them a short distance along the rocks of the riverbank to where the rubbish began. As always, Alania couldn’t believe how much of it there was. But tens of thousands of people lived in the giant City somewhere out of sight in the mists above, and they had lived there for centuries. All their trash had to go somewhere, and for most of the City’s existence, that somewhere had been the Canyon. The settlements in the Heartland carted their rubbish here, too. At least this way all the pollution is centralized, she thought. Very efficient, when you think about it.

  Down here, as at the bottom of the Middens to the south where they’d seen the mine shafts the River People had excavated, the weight of years had compressed the trash into a kind of conglomerate, hard as rock in some places and soft and porous in others. Sharp bits of glass and metal and plastic and wood pushed through the oozing black surface down which the rain ran in rivulets that seemed to darken the moment they touched it.

  Spika paused to pull on heavy gloves. “Don’t want to get cut,” she commented. “Nasty bugs live in the Middens. Goes with the nasty people.”

  Alania looked down at herself. She still wore the baggy blue shirt and rolled-up pants the River People had provided, soaked and thin. The canvas shoes she’d put on after the decontamination shower in the Whitewater Resort squelched with every step. She felt almost numb with cold. At least climbing would warm her up.

  She wasn’t worried about cuts. Not anymore. The tiny robots living in my bloodstream will take care of that, she thought, and she shivered with more than the cold.

  “Path is pretty clear, just steep,” Spika said. “We’ve stuck in some handholds. Use them. First challenge will be at the top. There’s another watch hole there. Might or might not be anyone in it; there’s supposed to be, but Greenskulls aren’t all that great at following orders. If we’re lucky, the sentry’s gone back to bed because it’s raining.”

  “And if we’re unlucky?” Alania asked.

  “Then we deal with him. Or her.”

  “Could be a friend of yours,” Alania said.

  Spika snorted. “I don’t have ‘friends’ down here. Nobody does.” She looked up into the rain. “Let’s climb.”

  At first the going was easy, a not-too-steep ascent diagonally across the trash. Somewhere far beneath it, the clear mountain stream they had entered in the Iron Ring was being transformed into the vile black current scavenged by the River People. The light grew, but only a little—the thick clouds and mist and continuing rain saw to that. Alania’s hope that climbing would warm her up proved false; she felt every bit as miserably cold and wet twenty minutes into their long upward hike as she had when they’d set out.

  When at last the path switchbacked the other way, it also grew steeper. The mass of rotted wood, compacted paper, chunks of plastic, bits of cloth, strips of metal and broken glass they traversed changed, too; it was no longer as tightly compressed and was far more likely to shift underfoot without warning. Climbing that mountain without a path would have been more than a nightmare; it would have been impossible. But the Greenskulls had obviously put a lot of effort into making their territory traversable. As the trash mountain became looser and more precarious with height, they moved from walking directly on it to a rough boardwalk, though not every “board” in it was made of wood—some were stone, others metal, others plastic. Even when it moved underfoot—and it often did—it still provided better purchase than the garbage itself.

  As they approached the middle of the mountain again, Spika held up a hand. “Watch hole is just ahead,” she said. “Wait here.” She moved forward. The downpour that had greeted Danyl and Alania when they’d opened the boat’s escape hatch had lessened to a miserable drizzle, but visibility remained poor, and after just a few steps, Spika faded into a vague gray shape.

  “How are you doing?” Danyl asked.

  Alania looked at him. With his hair plastered to his head and his red shirt plastered to his body, he looked like a drowned rat. She shoved a stray lank strand away from her own face, knowing she didn’t look any better. “I’m cold, I’m wet, I’m terrified, and if I survive climbing the Middens, I figure I’ve still got several excellent chances of being dead before the day is half over,” she said. “How about you?”

  He stared at her, then laughed. “The same, I guess.”

  Alania looked after Spika again. “Do you think we can trust her?”

  “I think we can trust her to get us to the Hazardous Waste Holding Tank and the access hatch,” Danyl said.

  “But what happens after that?”

  “One thing at a time,” Danyl said. His eyes narrowed as he peered through the drizzle. “Damn. Looks like someone is home.”

  Alania squinted. Sure enough, there were two figures visible now. She couldn’t tell them apart. She heard shouting, though she couldn’t understand it. The figures suddenly clinched, struggled. Light flashed, and the sharp report of a firearm rang through the rain. One of the figures crumpled to the ground. The other kicked the body hard in the side. It tumbled over the edge of the path and down the trash mountain, rolling in a loose welter of garbage to a sharp drop-off and then out of sight. Alania thought she heard it hit somewhere below them with a wet thud, but that might have been her imagination.

  The remaining figure turned and came back toward them. “Is that Spika?” Alania whispered.

  “Can’t tell.” Danyl drew his slugthrower and aimed it at the approaching figure.

  “You shoot me, you’ll never get where you’re going,” Spika’s voice came through the drizzle, and Danyl took a deep breath and put the gun away.

  “Couldn’t be sure it was you,” he said. “What happened?”

  Spika’s lip was bleeding; she licked it and said, “Jameson Harker. Damn fool. Told him he could come with us, but turned out he is—was—actually loyal to Shanky. Had to kill him.” A tremor in her voice belied her calm words.

  “Shanky?” Alania asked.

  “Head Greenskull,” Danyl said. “Makes the late, unlamente
d Cark of the Rustbloods look like a Twelfth-Tier socialite.” He paused. “Um, no offense.”

  “None taken,” Alania said.

  “No going back for me now,” Spika said. “And someone may have heard that shot. Let’s get moving.”

  A minute later they passed the watch hole Harker had been manning. Alania glanced inside. At the back of a small chamber excavated in the trash and shored up with plastic panels, a similarly braced tunnel continued into the mountain, lit (of course) by dim eternals. After a few meters, it turned sharply right. As the three of them pressed on, Alania pictured gang members pouring out of that hole at their backs and wished Spika would climb even faster.

  They finished that traverse of the mountain and paused on a broad wooden platform. The drizzling rain continued. Alania doubled over, puffing. Danyl and Spika were barely breathing hard. “One more time across,” Spika said. “No watch holes on this part of the path. Guard post at the other end, but we won’t get that far. There’s a shortcut up to the Undercity—well, there used to be one. Might have collapsed or been swallowed by a trashslide since the last time I used it.”

  “And if it has?” Danyl said.

  “Then we’ll need that slugthrower of yours, and you’d better be a damn good shot with it,” Spika said. “There’ll be at least two at the guard post, and if we have to go that way, we’ll need to get them both at once to stop them sounding an alarm.”

  Danyl nodded. Alania wondered how good a shot he could possibly be, since from what he’d said, he and Erl had never had any firearms. Simulations were one thing, but . . .

  Fortunately, they didn’t have to find out. Three-quarters of the way back across the mountain, they reached a kind of ravine slashing across the path, spanned by a rope-and-trestle bridge that Alania didn’t like the looks of. But Spika didn’t cross it. Instead, she swung down off the path onto the slope of the ravine, and when Alania followed, she found herself standing with Spika on top of an old dining room table, its thick black wood split down the middle. It shifted a little as Danyl stepped onto it behind them, and she tensed. “Is this secure?”

  “Who knows?” Spika pointed up the ravine. “There’s a whole tangle of old furniture up there. All locked together, more or less. It’s tough going, but after about a hundred meters there’s a rope ladder that will take us the rest of the way . . . or there used to be.”

  “Tough going” was one way to put it, Alania thought a few minutes later. “Nightmarish” would have been more accurate.

  At some point, it seemed a warehouse full of wooden tables and chairs had been dumped into the Canyon. Out of style? Wood rot? Bankruptcy? She couldn’t understand why the furniture hadn’t been salvaged, or recycled, or at least burned for warmth in some underpowered corner of First or in a last-ditch squatter’s hole in the Bowels or in the depths of the Greenskulls’ hideaway. Whatever the reason, here it was, and Alania picked her way through the tangled table and chair legs, trying to avoid the splintery bits, feeling the whole framework shift with every move she, Danyl, and Spika made. She had no trouble at all imagining the whole thing collapsing, either impaling them all on wooden stakes or sending them sliding down the steep ravine to the same drop-off the unfortunate Harker’s body had fallen from, hitting somewhere far below with the same wet, crunching thud . . .

  Her arms and legs trembled, and her heart was racing even more than the climb could account for by the time they arrived, wet and exhausted, at a relatively flat spot in the trash wall. “It’s here,” Spika said as she stepped onto that sanctuary. Alania looked up and saw that the slope above them was even steeper than the one behind them . . . but there was indeed a rope ladder with rungs made of random materials stretching up out of sight. The sky was much darker here, and for a minute she thought it must be about to rain harder. Then she realized the darkness above the mist wasn’t cloud but the vast bulk of the City.

  Rain still fell on them, so they weren’t quite under it yet, but they would be soon. “What’s at the top of the ladder?” Danyl asked as Spika took hold of the lowest rungs.

  “A path. I hope.”

  “You hope?”

  Spika shrugged. “Things change, and I haven’t been up here for weeks. Last time there was a path.” She looked at him. “Does it matter? Got a better option?”

  “I suppose not,” Danyl said. He glanced back at Alania and gave her a wet, crooked smile. “All right?”

  “Never better,” Alania lied. She wanted to rest. She wanted to be warm. She wanted to be dry. She wanted to be clean. But none of those things were possible, so instead she said, “What are we waiting for?” She was rewarded by another quick smile from her brother, then followed him and Spika up the ladder and deeper into the looming shadow of the City.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  DANYL WAS ONLY FAMILIAR with the southern fringes of the Undercity. Despite having grown up in the Middens, he wasn’t prepared for what he saw when they reached the top of the rope ladder, passing out from beneath the miserable drizzling sky as they did so.

  He’d been aware for some time of the sound of falling liquid, as though they were approaching a waterfall. Now, as he straightened, a gust of warm wind blew an incredible stench toward him. He gagged.

  “What is that?” Alania choked out as she climbed up beside him.

  He shot her a quick look. She looked pale and was as soaked to the skin and streaked with nameless grime as he was. Her eyes were wide and white, her mouth half open, her nose wrinkled in a look of almost comical disgust.

  “Sewers,” Spika said. “Ruptured pipes.” She pointed off to the right, and Danyl saw the source of both the waterfall sound and the stench: a torrent of brown liquid falling from high above, turning into a noxious mist as it hit the trash heap.

  “Why don’t they fix them?” Alania cried.

  “Been that way ten years, I’ve been told,” Spika said. “No doubt ‘they’ will get around to it any day now.”

  “We’re not going that way,” Danyl said. He supposed it was a question, but he hoped it came off as a command.

  “No,” Spika said. She turned in a slow circle, staring up at the vast black underside of the City, then down at the mounds of trash all around them: more recent stuff, mostly paper and plastic. Lights flashed here and there among the tangled pipes and conduits on the City’s belly. In the distance, Danyl could see the vast empty hole in the middle of the Bowels, which stretched up to the underside of First Tier. “Everything still looks the same,” Spika said. “Maybe we’re lucky.”

  She turned to stare back down the slope they’d just climbed, down into the ravine and its tangle of old furniture, and then out into the mist that hid the Canyon. She stood there for a long moment, then turned abruptly. “This way.”

  To Danyl’s great relief, her chosen path did indeed take them away from that torrent of raw sewage. They wound their way through the mounds of rubbish, dark and gloomy beneath the City’s shadowing mass. The uncertain footing made the going very slow. Spika kept looking up, and Danyl realized she was using the City’s underside as a map, judging their location by landmarks high above.

  The “path” seemed aimless, winding and sometimes doubling back, and two hours later, they were only halfway across the City’s underside, by his estimation. They stopped to rest on a slab of slightly tilted sheet metal. Alania sat down and pulled her knees to her chest. Danyl remained standing. “How much farther?” he asked. He followed Spika’s upward gaze, but he still didn’t recognize anything.

  “Just a few hundred meters,” Spika said. “This has gone a lot better than I feared. The path hasn’t changed. All the Drops since the last time I was up here must have been in other sectors.”

  Danyl nodded. A few hundred meters, he thought. The key in his pocket seemed to burn against his thigh. Just a few hundred meters, and then into the City at last. He glanced at Alania. Home for her. Terra incognita for me. />
  Although he doubted Alania’s sheltered upbringing as ward/prisoner of Beruthi on Twelfth Tier would give her much advantage over him when it came to finding their way to Bertel’s Bar on First. She’d only studied the lower Tiers virtually, same as him.

  Spika might be able to help, but he had no intention whatsoever of telling Spika where they were really going. Once she was in the City, she’d be on home territory, and she’d already proven she’d betray her companions in a heartbeat if she could benefit from it. Poor dead Harker was proof. But maybe we can use that . . .

  “Any City security systems to worry about?” he asked.

  “Not here,” Spika said. “What about at this hazardous waste tank?”

  “Never seen any,” Danyl said.

  “Well then,” Spika said. “We’re practically home free.”

  “Practically,” Danyl said.

  Half an hour later, the Hazardous Waste Holding Tank came into sight, and he realized just how wrong he had been.

  The tank rose out of the sea of trash all around it. Here under the City, the rubbish had not piled right up to the top of the concrete wall as it had on the other side, where he and Alania had climbed the morning she had dropped so unexpectedly into his life. That was just the day before yesterday. Seems more like the century before last. Danyl had planned to circle around the tank to his old stomping grounds and get inside the same way he and Alania had when they were fleeing the Rustbloods. But that plan shattered when he caught a flicker of movement atop the wall. It took him only an instant to realize what it was.

  “Provosts!” he half cried, half gasped. “Down!”

  He suited actions to words, flinging himself behind the nearest trash heap, out of sight of the watchers on the wall.

  Spika and Alania crashed down beside him. “How many did you see?” Spika asked. “I only saw one.”

  “Two,” Danyl said.

  “Three,” Alania said. “Two directly ahead, one rounding the corner to our left.”

  “Could be ten for all we can tell from here,” Spika muttered. “What the hell are they doing up there? I thought they’d mostly cleared out after they took out the Rustbloods.” She shot Danyl a look filled with suspicion and anger. “Waiting for you two?”