The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  “I don’t think so,” Danyl said, but he thought, if they are, we’ve already failed. “Maybe they’re planning to move on the Greenskulls?”

  Spika shook her head. “Greenskulls are smarter than Rustbloods. We pay to be left alone.”

  “Bribes?” Alania sounded shocked.

  Spika snorted. “Yeah,” she said. “Bribes. If you can imagine.”

  Danyl chewed his lip. “My best guess is that they’re up there because it gives them a view over the tops of the trash piles. So if something happened to draw their attention . . . we might be able to get by them.”

  “A distraction,” Spika said.

  “Exactly. Any ideas?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.” She sat up and, after a quick glance to be sure her head remained out of sight of the Provosts atop the walls of the waste-holding tank, peered off into the distance. She pointed. “You see that?”

  Danyl followed her finger. “That upside-down dome?”

  She nodded. “AWS.”

  Danyl whistled. “And it still works?”

  “Yeah. We steer clear of it.”

  “Can’t imagine why.”

  “AWS,” Alania said. “Wait, I know this . . .” She frowned, and then her face cleared. “I remember. Automated Weapons System. There should be . . . let me think . . . twenty of them down here?”

  Danyl glanced at her, impressed. “Yeah,” he said. “The City designers, whoever they were, figured the belly of the City was its most vulnerable part, just like the belly of an animal.” He looked at Spika. “I know about them, but I’ve never seen one. Erl told me they’d all been ripped apart a long time ago, scavenged for weapons.”

  “This is the only one that’s still active, as far as we know,” Spika said. “It’s a big Greenskull secret.”

  “Why?” Alania asked.

  Spika gave her an unsmiling look. “Last Greenskull-Rustblood war, Greenskulls took out half a dozen Rustbloods by luring them under that one there. Thing used up a lot of ammo that day. Hope it still has some left.”

  “What do you intend?” Danyl asked.

  “You saw that red barrel we passed a couple hundred meters back?”

  Danyl nodded.

  “The label on the side said ‘Flammable waste. Do not puncture or expose to heat.’”

  “Oh,” Danyl said, suddenly understanding. “Yeah, that should prove a diversion.”

  “You’re going to get the AWS to blow up that barrel?” Alania said.

  Quick as always, Danyl thought. It’s like she’s just as smart as I am. His mouth quirked. Guess that’s understandable. Kind of annoying, but understandable.

  “Yeah,” he said to Alania. Then, to Spika, “How do we rig it?”

  “Roll it up to the top of a heap of rubbish, let it roll down into the kill zone. Run like hell. Even if it doesn’t explode or burn, the fact that the AWS is firing should draw serious attention.” She cocked her head at him. “Unless you’ve got a better idea?”

  “It’ll take two to handle the barrel,” Alania pointed out. “The third should get to the Hazardous Waste Holding Tank and make sure nobody stays behind.”

  “Good thinking,” Danyl said, impressed anew, not only because she’d thought of something he hadn’t, but also that she could be so matter-of-fact about what that could mean . . .

  “That could mean shooting,” Spika said, vocalizing his thoughts. She hefted her rifle. “Not letting either of you take this, and that slugthrower’s no good for long-range work, so that means me.” She looked at Alania doubtfully. “Sure you two are strong enough to move the barrel?”

  “Let’s find out first,” Danyl said.

  Keeping their heads down, they made their cautious way back to the barrel. It wasn’t, fortunately, a particularly large barrel; it had probably been part of a waste-collection system in a workshop or factory, probably intended to be hauled away, emptied, and reattached to some piece of machinery. But instead it had simply been discarded and ended up down here. It was heavy but manageable for two people, though probably not for one.

  “We can do it,” Danyl said. He looked at Spika again. “Just one question. How do we recognize the kill zone?”

  “Remember I told you it took out a bunch of Rustbloods?” Spika said.

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Look for bits of Rustbloods.”

  Danyl grimaced. “Oh.”

  “Don’t worry,” Spika said. “It was a few months ago. The smell is probably mostly gone by now.” She gave him a grim grin, teeth flashing white against her dark-skinned face. “I’m heading back to where we were. I’ll wait there for an explosion or something.”

  She set off, disappearing between mounds of trash a moment later.

  Danyl turned back to the barrel. Alania was staring past him, after Spika. “What if she decides to turn us in to the Provosts for a reward?”

  The same thought had crossed Danyl’s mind. “I don’t think she’d risk it,” he said after a moment. “Not down here. They could just throw her back into the Middens, and if the Greenskulls haven’t figured out what she’s done already, they will soon enough. She doesn’t just want access to the City now; she absolutely needs it, same as us. Until we’re inside, I think she’ll stick to the plan. After that . . . well, we’ll worry about that when we get there.” He bent down and put his hands under his end of the barrel. “Let’s get moving.”

  Walking over the loose surface of the trash heap had never been easy; it was doubly difficult with the barrel. They sidled their way along winding paths, Danyl uneasily aware the entire time that if they were attacked, he couldn’t do a thing about it. One shot into the barrel could flambé them both if its contents really were flammable.

  But no one attacked them, and eventually, panting with the effort, they drew close enough to the dome of the AWS that he called a halt. “I’ve got to figure out where the kill zone is,” he said. “Stay here.”

  “No,” Alania said. “I need to know, too.”

  Danyl hesitated, then nodded. They climbed cautiously up a particularly large heap of tangled, half-melted plastic toward the AWS, and a moment later they peeked over the mound’s top.

  “Oh,” Alania said in a small voice. “The kill zone.”

  Spika had told him what to expect, but he still felt his gorge rising at the carnage below . . . and the smell of decay rising from it, not anywhere near gone. He counted six bodies, little more than skin and hair clinging to shattered bones: skulls, femurs, rib cages. The AWS had pulverized the men and women below, and the deadly threat it posed was best proven by the fact that several highly salvageable objects glinted among the remains: knives, chains, even something that looked ’tronic—a mapping unit, maybe. No one had dared go down there after them.

  The slope below them looked both steep and reasonably solid: the perfect location for their ruse.

  “What did they have to fight about?” Alania asked as they scuttled back down to where they had left the barrel.

  “Who?”

  “The Greenskulls and the Rustbloods.”

  “Prime scavenging grounds,” Danyl said. “There are places where Drops happen regularly. The Rustbloods wanted to expand their territory; the Greenskulls fought back. The Rustbloods have never had any luck trying to take on the Greenskulls. They probably don’t even exist now, with the Provosts all over the South Middens. The Greenskulls have always controlled the best Drop zones. If they have a deal with the Provosts, they probably control all of them now.”

  “Fighting over trash?” Alania said.

  “People down here survive on trash,” Danyl snapped more harshly than he intended, but her disbelieving tone had stung. “Scavenge, then barter what you scavenge at the Last Chance Market for food and whatever else you need. People will do what they have to to survive.”

  Alania didn’t
reply, but she looked thoughtful.

  They took hold of the barrel and, grunting, hauled it up the slope. “The minute we let it go, we jump down this side again,” Danyl said as they neared the top. “We don’t know how wide its firing range is. Also, if this really goes up with a bang . . .”

  “We don’t want to go up with it,” Alania said. “Got it.”

  They eased the barrel up onto a plastic crate half buried in paper. The crate sloped toward the AWS; all they had to do was release the barrel, and gravity would do the rest.

  “Ready?” Danyl asked Alania.

  “Ready,” Alania replied.

  “On three. One . . . two . . . three!”

  They let go, and the red barrel started to roll, faster and faster, toward the kill zone below.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  KRANZ’S DESPAIR LIFTED slightly when the second team of Provosts sent to Retreat Beruthi reported that their tracker had found signs that two people had fled before the explosion. It lifted more when the Provosts reported that the tracks led to wooden stairs down to a pier in the River. There must have been a boat, Kranz thought.

  The likelihood of a boat capsizing and drowning all aboard in the white water of the upper Canyon seemed high, but Kranz refused to consider that possibility seriously; the abyss waiting on the other side of Alania’s and Danyl’s demise was too deep and dark to contemplate for long. It was an abyss into which he might fling himself headlong, like Falkin flying his aircar into the ground.

  The River led eventually to the City, of course, but it seemed unlikely that a boat would take the duo all the way there. Delivering Alania and Danyl to the gangs in the Middens couldn’t have been Beruthi’s plan, and the Greenskulls who ran the northern side of the trash mountain would report anyone who came their way to the Provosts, as per the “arrangement” the Greenskulls—and the Provosts—thought Kranz didn’t know about. A foolish thought. He hadn’t done anything about the bribery because it kept the peace in the Middens. Not that he’d ever thought anything that happened in the Middens could threaten the City—at least not until three days ago—but having hooks into one of the gangs that ruled it seemed an excellent way to exert some kind of control down there.

  A similar arrangement had never been managed with the Rustbloods, because they kept changing leaders: all brutal, none very bright. Now, of course, there was nobody left in the southern Middens, not after the Provosts’ vicious sweep of the trash heap in the wake of their embarrassing loss of Danyl and their near-Pyrrhic “victory” over the River People. Three helicopters lost, two of them to a crossbow? They’d wanted revenge on someone, and while they’d taken a great deal of revenge on the River People themselves, very few of whom had emerged from the Whitewater Resort intact and ready for incarceration in Tenth Tier, blowing off a few Rustblood heads had apparently helped ease their shame as well.

  Commander Havelin had delegated the Middens Expeditionary Force to a Sergeant Paskal. Kranz woke the Sergeant and told him to check in with his Greenskull contacts at first light to see if anything or anyone had washed up in their territory. He had also made it very, very clear that if anyone did, they were to be captured alive, disarmed, and turned over to the Provosts immediately. Paskal didn’t turn on his video—Kranz couldn’t blame him at 0200—but he suspected the Sergeant was blanching at the realization that the First Officer knew all about the Provosts’ arrangement with the Greenskulls.

  Not that Kranz cared.

  “Send out drones along the Canyon at first light as well,” he continued. “You’re looking for a boat and possibly a camp on the shore. Circulate the photo of Alania to the Gate guards and any informants you have in the Bowels. I want her arrested the moment she makes an appearance.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sergeant Paskal sounded very much like he was trying hard to stifle a yawn he was worried might offend Kranz.

  “Sorry to have woken you, Sergeant,” Kranz lied. “Get some sleep. But I want those orders issued before dawn.”

  “Yes, sir,” Paskal said again.

  “Dismissed.” Kranz cut the connection.

  He supposed he should follow his own advice and get some sleep, so he left his office and went down the hall to his bedroom. He stripped out of his uniform and got into bed, but sleep, as he had expected, proved elusive.

  Morning would tell the tale. Either Danyl and Alania lived, or . . .

  He dozed at last, falling into a fitful sleep punctuated by nightmares in which the red lights of the Captain’s medical panel turned into the aiming lasers of beamer rifles tracking him as he fled through a maze of darkened hallways.

  Alania had never heard—had never even imagined—a sound like the thunder of the Automated Weapons System firing at the barrel of waste they had rolled into its kill zone. However ancient the turret might be, its targeting systems clearly still worked perfectly. The barrel exploded just as they’d hoped, a splash of orange flame rising above the crest of the hill of plastic, followed by a mushroom of black smoke that reached all the way to the City’s underside, spreading out into a rolling cloud.

  “That’ll bring ’em running,” Danyl panted. “Come on.”

  They hurried as quickly as they could back down the path along which they’d lugged the red barrel just moments before, and a few minutes later, they were looking at the stained concrete walls of the Hazardous Waste Holding Tank once again. “Dammit,” Danyl muttered. “There’s still one up there.”

  Alania had already spotted the Provost at the northwest corner of the tank, looking through binoculars in the direction of the AWS, which continued to fire intermittently—at what, Alania wasn’t sure, unless the black smoke was triggering its motion sensors. “Where’s Spika?” she whispered.

  “I don’t—”

  The AWS fired another brief burst, and at the same moment, a single sharp report rang out from off to the left, much closer to the hazwaste tank. It was almost lost in the AWS’s thunder. The Provost arched his back and dropped out of sight. Alania imagined the body falling into the poisonous pond inside and hoped the man was dead before he hit it.

  Danyl scrambled up and dashed for the hazwaste tank. Alania stumbled after him, shooting a look over her shoulder in the direction of the AWS and the still-billowing smoke. The guns spoke again. The Provosts wouldn’t be able to get close to the turret unless they figured out some way to disable it, and all their attention was almost certainly focused on it.

  It had to be, because if they were wrong about that . . .

  They reached the pitted wall of the tank and moved along it to the northeast corner, where they found Spika tucked away just out of sight. “Worked,” she said laconically. “Now what?”

  “There’s a ladder. South side. Come on.” Danyl led the way through the drifted trash, and a few moments later Alania found herself looking at the very spot where she had fallen from the City just . . . the day before yesterday? Is that all?

  They hurried to the same ladder Danyl had taken her up when the Rustbloods had been chasing them, and soon after that they stood on the ledge from which one of the twins had fallen to her death. The fumes rising from the liquid below both choked and burned them, much worse than the last time Alania had been at the tank. “We can’t . . . stay here . . .” Spika gasped out.

  “Won’t,” Danyl spat back. He hurried along the ledge.

  The last time, Alania had barely registered the door at the end of the ledge. Holding her arm over her nose, she stumbled in her brother’s wake to where the eternal gleamed above the smoothly sealed hatch. Danyl pulled out the golden key and slipped it into the port in the lockplate to the right of the doorframe.

  With an ear-splitting groan, the hatch slid half open, fortunately just wide enough to admit entrance . . . and stopped.. One by one they squeezed through into a short corridor ending in an elevator. Danyl closed the hatch behind them, shutting out the choking fumes, then inserte
d the key into the elevator’s call panel. The door opened at once, though it shuddered as it did so. White lights flickered to life, and they crammed into a chrome-walled car. There were only two buttons: up and down. Danyl pushed the up button. The door slid closed.

  Coughing, Alania lowered her arm and wiped her streaming eyes. Danyl blinked at her, his own eyes bloodshot. Spika’s nose had dribbled blood; she swiped her hand across it, registered the red streak, then ignored it. “Where will this take us?” she demanded.

  “I have no idea,” Danyl said, but Alania knew that wasn’t true. He’d studied the City as thoroughly as she had. He just doesn’t want Spika to know it.

  He drew his slugthrower. Spika raised her rifle to her shoulder.

  The car stopped. The door opened. Alania tensed, but no Provosts waited to arrest them. White lights flickered to life but kept flickering, never steadying. They stepped into what she knew from her own studies was the hazwaste tank’s control room, though the display screens and control panels were dark and covered with dust. Clearly no one had been there in years . . . which rather explained the state of the tank.

  Living on Twelfth Tier, she had never realized just how badly the City had deteriorated. In the plans she had studied, it was pristine. But down here was raw sewage flowing from broken pipes, a mountain of trash, the oozing Black River downstream, security systems that were mostly broken, dark and dusty control rooms . . . how had it come to this?

  The dying Captain, Beruthi had claimed, but surely some—maybe most—of the fault rested with the Officers, who kept their Tiers functioning without regard to those below them. They escaped the City at every opportunity to live in the pristine countryside, kept pristine by dumping all the waste generated by their Estates and workers’ villages into the Canyon.

  And the leader of the Officers, ruling with an iron fist, was First Officer Kranz. The man who had spied on her her entire life, watching, waiting until she was old enough to plug into the City and ensure his rule continued.