The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  Sala laughed a little. “Funny,” she said. “That’s exactly what I was going to say.”

  Alania looked down the servants’ stairs. “Don’t these just lead to the kitchen and servants’ quarters on the main floor?”

  “Sure,” Sala said. “And then lower.”

  Alania felt like an idiot. “Of course. The service level.” Even without her intensive study of the City over the years, she should have thought of that. Deliveries to Officers’ Quarters and the comings and goings of staff couldn’t take place through the front door: too gauche. There was a network of passages—underground streets, really—one level down. Below that lay the infrastructure level, like the one they had traversed on First from Bertel’s Bar to the elevator, where the pipes and shafts and cables and things ran. She frowned. “But aren’t the doors into the Quarters from the service level even more secure than the doors at floor level? And isn’t there a lot of traffic down there, not to mention Provost patrols? They’re not where you’d want to go if you were sneaking around.”

  “You’re right,” Sala said. “So I didn’t use them.”

  Alania shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  Sala looked down for a moment. “I don’t suppose it matters if you know now,” she said, almost as if to herself. She raised her head. “For many years while I was your maid, I had a lover. The third son of an Officer. A low-ranked Officer, a mere Ensign, but still way above my station. We had to meet in secret and needed some way to move around unseen. The Lieutenant found out about it; I don’t know how. He confronted me, but rather than dismiss me or expose me, he showed me how to get even lower than the service level, onto the infrastructure level. Only robots ever go down there—his robots. He charted a path to my lover’s house for me.” Her voice grew wistful.

  “And this lover,” Danyl said. “What happened to him?”

  Sala’s face snapped closed like shutters on a window. “None of your damn business. I don’t even know who you are.”

  “He’s a . . . a friend,” Alania said hastily. “Brother” would have been impossible to explain. “Danyl, be kind.”

  He blinked. “I didn’t know I was being unkind.”

  Alania sighed. “Forgive him, Sal. He grew up in the Middens.”

  “The . . .” Her eyes widened. “What’s going on, Alania? You’re supposed to be in Quarters Kranz!”

  “I can’t tell you,” Alania said. She held up a hand. “Not because I don’t want to, but because it would be dangerous for you. The Provosts are after us.”

  “That’s why they’re watching the house? Why they’re in the house?”

  “Part of the reason,” Alania said. “Also . . .” She hesitated but decided there would never be a better time to break the news. “Also, Sal, I’m . . . I’m so sorry, but . . . Lieutenant Commander Beruthi is dead.”

  Sala’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, no!”

  Alania nodded.

  “You’re sure?”

  Alania nodded again.

  Sala lowered her hand. Tears had started in her eyes. “How?”

  “An explosion. An accident. At Retreat Beruthi. He’d already sent us on our way here. He was supposed to meet us, but . . .” She shook her head.

  “Oh, Alania.” Sala reached out for her, gathered her into a hug. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  Alania stiffened at Sala’s touch, then found her arms going around the older woman. Loss? she thought. Was it a loss?

  She supposed it was: the loss of her childhood dreams that someday her guardian would also be her father; the loss of all childhood dreams, considering what she and Danyl had found out about what they were, what they were fated—designed—to be.

  She closed her eyes, not so much because of the loss of Beruthi but because for a brief moment, she was able to reclaim one of the few good memories of her childhood: Sala’s comforting hugs when things had gone horribly wrong.

  Though they had never gone as horribly wrong as they were going now. She gently pushed Sala away. “You still haven’t told me: why are you in Quarters Beruthi?”

  Sala looked a little shamefaced. “There are some things in one of the guest rooms . . . Beruthi promised them to me. I forgot them when I left, and I’ve been coming back to pick them up one by one. He said I could have them, I swear. I’m not stealing them.”

  As if it would matter if you were, Alania thought. “Of course not, Sal.”

  “What will you do now?” Sala said. “If Beruthi is dead, why did he send you here? You can’t stay in Quarters Beruthi. The Provosts—”

  Alania looked at her steadily. “We’re not staying here,” she said. “We need to go somewhere else.” An idea had come to her as Sala talked. Beruthi had been planning Danyl’s final ascent to Thirteenth Tier for a long time. He knew they’d have to go through Quarters Kranz, and he must have had some plan to get them there. Alania thought Sala might have just provided a clue as to what that was. “Can you take us to the infrastructure level? We need to get to Quarters Kranz.”

  Sala’s eyes widened. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Dead serious,” Danyl said. He held up the slugthrower.

  Sala took a step back. “You’re going to kill Kranz?”

  “No,” Alania said. She shot Danyl an exasperated look. “No. Danyl is just being overly dramatic.”

  He frowned at her. “I am?”

  “Yes,” Alania said. She turned back to Sala. “We just need to get inside.”

  “But you can’t,” Sala said. “I mean, yes, the infrastructure tunnels lead there—but Beruthi left the entrance from them into this house unlocked for me. Every other door I’ve seen is security-sealed. You can’t get through an Officer security seal.”

  “Yes, we can,” Danyl said.

  Sala gave him a skeptical look.

  He sighed. “I’m not being ‘overly dramatic’ this time. We have a key.”

  “To Quarters Kranz?”

  “To everywhere,” Danyl said, then laughed. “Okay, that probably was overly dramatic.”

  “Just take us there,” Alania said. “Take us there, and then forget you ever saw us.” She glanced at the closed door to the third-floor hall. “And whatever items are left here that Beruthi gave you . . . leave them. You don’t want to be found sneaking around Beruthi’s house. Not now. Believe me.”

  “Oh, I do,” Sala said fervently. “I don’t know what’s going on, but whatever it is, I want no part of it. I’ll take you to the Quarters Kranz entrance, and then I’m going home to Quarters Praterus to stay.” She turned to descend the stairs.

  “Wait,” Alania said, suddenly struck by another idea. Sala glanced back. “This entrance to Quarters Kranz . . . will it lead into a servants’ stair, like it does here?”

  “Probably,” Sala said. “Though there’s no way to know for sure.”

  “Are there servants’ uniforms downstairs?”

  “Yes,” Sala said. Her eyes widened. “Oh, I see.”

  “What?” Danyl said.

  Alania turned to him. “If we’re going to sneak into Kranz’s Quarters, we need something to wear that doesn’t scream ‘These two people just sailed down the River in a boat, climbed a trash mountain, blew up a barrel in the Undercity, and sneaked in through the Hazardous Waste Holding Tank. Which is what we both currently look and”—she lifted her sleeve to her nose, sniffed, and made a face—“smell like.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything . . .” Sala said, and Alania grinned. Her former servant chewed her lip. “There should be some servants’ uniforms in the dressing rooms near the kitchen. But there could be Provosts in the kitchen itself.”

  “We’ll be quiet as ghosts,” Alania said, then wished she hadn’t. Ghosts, after all, were dead.

  Sala led the way down the stairs to the first floor. She put her ear to the door, liste
ned, then nodded and very carefully eased it open.

  The corridor beyond was dark, but they could hear voices through the doorway facing them, which led into the kitchen. If the Provosts weren’t in the kitchen, they were nearby.

  Sala motioned to their left and led them to a different door, which opened into a small, drab room with lockers all around it and two benches running its length. A quick investigation revealed several servant’s uniforms: simple black trousers and shirts for men, black skirts and blouses for women. “Turn your back,” Alania told Danyl.

  “You’re my sister,” he said, but he obeyed. Alania turned her back, too, and stripped out of the filthy clothes she’d worn since leaving the River People. She pulled on a clean uniform, which proved to fit reasonably well. Sala had turned her back on Danyl, but she stared at Alania—whom, after all, she’d often helped dress—with an intensely curious expression.

  “Sister?” she asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Alania replied.

  “Done,” Danyl said behind them. Alania turned around to find her brother looking dapper and almost respectable, though she could still smell him. The last shower either of them had had was in the decontamination rooms of the River People, and a lot had happened since then.

  Still, even servants probably smelled bad sometimes, and hopefully they wouldn’t get close enough to anyone for it to matter.

  “All right,” Alania said to Sala. “We’re in your hands.”

  Sala nodded once and led them back to the stairs.

  THIRTY-ONE

  DANYL FELT FAR more at home on the infrastructure level far beneath the floor of Twelfth Tier than he had in Alania’s palatial childhood dwelling. Growing up in the Middens, where the stone-walled quarters he’d shared with Erl had been the height of luxury, hadn’t prepared him for wood paneling and posh paintings and plush carpet. There’d even been a different scent to the air: flowers, perhaps, though Danyl had never smelled anything that sickly sweet in the Middens and wasn’t even sure he liked it.

  Sala’s sudden appearance had startled him, but Alania clearly trusted the servant, and it wasn’t like he had any better ideas for getting into Quarters Kranz. The key would presumably allow them access through any electronically sealed door they found, but that wouldn’t help if the door was guarded by half a dozen beamer-carrying Provosts.

  Of course, it was one thing to get inside Quarters Kranz and quite another to find and access the elevator to the Thirteenth Tier without being stopped. But—how many times had he told himself this already?—one step at a time.

  After donning the servants’ clothes—Danyl admired Alania’s foresight in thinking to do so—they descended one more level, emerging into a short corridor. “That’s the door into the main below-street delivery corridors,” Alania said quietly, pointing to the far end of the hallway. “There’s a freight elevator next to it. But I presume we’re not going out there.”

  “No,” Sala said. She led them the other way, to the underside of the stairs they had just descended. The wall panel there looked the same as any other, but when she touched it, it slid aside. She disappeared into the dimly lit space beyond, and Alania followed. Danyl took one more quick look around the corridor they were vacating, then stepped through himself.

  The door slid shut. Narrow stairs led down, lit, of course, by eternals; these were near death. The metal walls looked pitted and rusted with age. The contrast couldn’t have been greater between this stairwell and the rich Twelfth-Tier mansion above.

  How did it all happen? Danyl wondered as they descended the stairs and began moving along passages as decrepit-looking as the ones down on First. The City had metal bones; the wood and other structures crammed into its Tiers were later additions. Here and there, as they had seen on First, the metal walls remained intact, and in other places they had been cut apart. But the infrastructure—the crumbling, rusting, often-failing infrastructure, which dumped raw sewage into the Middens and collected hazardous liquid waste in an ancient tank that would likewise fail someday and render the Middens uninhabitable for even the gangs—was all metal, an impossible amount of metal. How had the City been built? Why had it been built? And why just the one? All the villages of mine and farm workers out in the Heartland, ruled by the overseers appointed by their Officer owners, were built of local stone and wood. How had this one enormous metal tower come to squat here above the Canyon, excreting its waste into the chasm below like a vast incontinent beast?

  The “history” he had learned offered no clues. The City was the work of “The Builders,” who had placed it there and left it in the care of the Officers. They had been in control since the Awakening, when the original citizens awoke knowing their names, who their families were, and whatever skills they had been taught, but with absolutely no memory of how they had come to be where they were.

  The First Officer ruled in the Captain’s name and with the Captain’s authority. The Provosts, though drawn from all the Tiers, were absolutely loyal, their families hostage to their remaining so. There could be upward mobility on the lower Tiers—workers from the Third might aspire to someday own Quarters and a business on Fifth or Sixth—but no one ever ascended from even Ninth to Eleventh or Twelfth. The prison level of Tenth was both a warning and a barrier to any higher aspirations.

  Officer positions were hereditary; the few Officer families lost over the course of the City’s history had fallen prey to disaster, or so history said. Having witnessed Beruthi’s demise, Danyl wondered how many of those vanished Officer families had in fact dared to challenge the authority of the First Officer and paid the ultimate price.

  The whole edifice seemed both as solid and eternal as the City seemed from the Heartland and as rotten and rusting as it truly was here in its guts. A good, solid push might just topple it.

  Clearly that was where Danyl came in. He had no idea what it would mean to become Captain, no idea what, if anything, would be left of him on the other side of that astonishing prospect. And yet he found himself as excited by it as he was terrified. There was no other possible future for him, after all. There could be no escape, as the attack on Retreat Beruthi had made clear. The Heartland was neither big enough nor wild enough to disappear into, and the Iron Ring was uninhabitable and impassable.

  He frowned, wondering suddenly if the reason aircars could not cross the Iron Ring was because they had been designed that way by the Officers, who had a vested interest in ensuring the entire population remained trapped inside the Heartland. Was the landscape beyond the Iron Ring in all directions really the hellish place they’d been told it was?

  Well, he thought, maybe I’ll find out once I’m Captain.

  They had turned several corners and traversed a couple of hundred meters of corridor by the time Sala called a halt. They had also passed several doors, all sealed, all with red lights glowing above them. The one she stopped in front of looked exactly like all the others: plain green-painted metal. “You’re sure this is the one for Quarters Kranz?” Danyl said, staring at it.

  Sala gave him a withering look, but it was Alania who replied. “The path we followed corresponded to the streets between Quarters Beruthi and Kranz—it’s the same path I was following when the Provosts escorting me were attacked and I jumped into the trash elevator. This is definitely Quarters Kranz.”

  Danyl nodded and drew out the golden key. Sala’s eyes widened when she saw it. “You really do have a key. I’ve never seen anyone but an Officer with one of those.”

  “You’ve never seen anyone with one like this,” Danyl corrected. He stepped toward the door, but Alania grabbed his wrist.

  “Wait,” she said. She turned to Sala. “You should go. We don’t know what will happen when we open this door. You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I agree,” Sala said. She gave Alania another hug. “Be safe,” Danyl heard her whisper into Alania’s ear, then she turned and hurried away.r />
  Alania watched her until she rounded a corner and vanished from sight, then sighed and turned to Danyl. “All right,” she said. “Let’s try it.”

  Danyl drew the slugthrower with his right hand, then inserted the key into the lockplate with his left.

  For a moment nothing happened, and he felt a surge of anxiety. But then the door groaned open with a horrible metal-on-metal cacophony that would surely have brought Provosts running if any had been within earshot. There was only darkness beyond—not even the green glow of an eternal this time.

  Alania cautiously looked inside. “Can’t see a thing.”

  Danyl retrieved the key, stepped past her into the shadows, and peered around. “It’s just like at Quarters Beruthi,” he said. “Stairs at the end leading up to a door.”

  “I guess that’s where we go next.” Alania came through the door. The moment she did so, it slid shut, grinding closed and sealing with a rather alarmingly final-sounding thud and the clunk of steel bolts driving home. It cut off the next-to-nothing glow of the eternals outside, leaving them in pitch darkness.

  “You’d think,” Alania said from the blackness, “that we would have thought to pick up a flashlight somewhere along the way.”

  “I’ll put it on my list for next time.” Danyl put the key back in his pocket, gripped the slugthrower with his right hand, and reached out blindly with his left, feeling for the wall.

  He promptly banged his knuckles; apparently he’d been taking bigger steps than he’d thought. But there was the door. He felt around its edges, found the port, and inserted the key.

  The door slid open just as noisily as the last. The honest white light beyond was dim but still enough to make him blink. He retrieved the key, and then he and Alania stepped cautiously through, the door once again closing behind them.

  As expected, they appeared to be at the bottom of the servants’ stairs. A well-lit corridor to their left ran to what had to be the entrance to the main service tunnels and a freight elevator, as in Quarters Beruthi. Danyl caught a glimpse of a camera dome above the door and hurriedly pulled Alania out of its line of sight, though it was probably focused on the door to the outside and not on the locked door leading to the infrastructure level. That didn’t mean there weren’t others, though, and he shot a look up.