As a young child he’d never dreamed he would be stealing cheese and trinkets from market stalls, climbing buildings to live in a hand-built hut, or picking pockets. He’d wanted to be a streetcar conductor.
But after mom died and his father wandered out into a full fire rainstorm with a jug of bad smelling rum, Tiago had been alone on Placa del Fuego. Both his parents had been immigrants to the island. They’d been a tight, private family, not interested in making friends. Just keeping their heads down and surviving.
There was nothing and no one for Tiago after they were both gone.
Kay discovered him on the Seawall. She’d spotted him stealthily snag a loaf of bread in the market.
He’d leapt to his feet when she sat next to him, trying to decide whether to bolt. She’d made no sudden moves, just pulled out an apple and a very large knife.
“I saw you. I can show you how to do that better, without having to run for it afterwards,” she told him. “You won’t starve anymore.”
She offered him half the apple on the tip of the knife, extending it into the neutral space between them.
Tiago had snapped it up. Then looked down at it. “What do you want?” he asked, suspicious.
“Most of the take as a cut,” she said reasonably.
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I’ll teach you how to steal money, which you can hide better than bread. Then walk back into that market and buy whatever you need to not starve. You’ll get more from the quarter take I’ll let you keep than you will alone.”
“And if I say no?”
Kay slowly sliced her piece of the apple into thirds. “See that Ox-man over there?”
Tiago looked. Sure enough, one of the hairy alien-bred Okur immigrants stood further on down the Seawall. “I see him.”
“He will break all of your fingers, and you will be a beggar in a gutter. The market – this whole section of the waterfront – it’s mine now. I’ve taken it. If you want to play here, you work for me.”
And that had been the way things had gone one for almost a year now, Tiago thought, watching the rain fall outside. As soon as this stopped, it was time to go find Nashara and do Kay’s bidding.
After all, he still valued his fingers.
#
Nashara sat at a table outside a seawall restaurant, surveying the Plaza over a cup of tea. A few small fires had broken out the night before, but considering the strength of last night’s storm, it wasn’t too bad. Tiago had certainly seen worse.
Nashara motioned Tiago to sit with her.
“It’s odd,” she muttered as he sat. “To see all this stone, brick, slate. Leather for clothes. No wood, no fabrics. Hardly any trees, not even scrub. Grim.”
Tiago looked down at his patched clothes. She was surprisingly ignorant about the island. She was an offworlder. A famous one. And yet … Tiago had to guess that out of all the Forty- Eight worlds, all of them connected by wormholes, she didn’t know everything about every one.
There were many things Tiago didn’t know about just Placa del Fuego, let alone the off-island towns, and the cities around the two wormholes.
“Rich people have those,” he said. “In the glass houses.”
“Those greenhouses?”
Tiago shrugged. “Sure. Gardens, fancy clothing, fresh fruit.”
In the quieter moments, looking out over the harbor, he always wondered what the places were like out over the horizon and through the wormholes the ships sailed through to get to the oceans of other worlds.
Other worlds where things were made before they were transported here. Where people like Nashara came from.
Lately he chided himself for daydreaming. It was useless to think too much about where the ships went. Because they weren’t taking Tiago along with them. No matter how much he wished for it.
Nashara set her tiny wooden cup down and stood up. “I think Kay will be talking to me now.” She pointed.
Tiago turned around, and saw two Ox-men standing behind him.
He was supposed to tell Nashara to look for them. He opened his mouth, but Nashara was already walking their way.
When they saw that, they just turned around and began to walk away. Nashara followed.
And that, Tiago thought, was hopefully the end of that.
Chapter Five
The Nashara seemed content to wander into Kay’s basement trap. The entire house had been carefully restructured by Kay for meetings just like this.
The kind she wasn’t so sure about.
Here she didn’t have the balance of power she preferred. Here she had to expose her face. Here she was clearly a target now, and not the puppet master.
But the possible payoff was too high, Kay thought, watching the whip-lean woman walk in through the door after the Ox-men. Kay had heard her coming, her weight, that combination of machinery and flesh, had stressed the wooden planks almost to breaking point.
Nashara walked through a beam of light sparkled with dust, and stopped and looked right at Kay.
There was another shift in the balance of power. Kay couldn’t read this person. She was a blank slate.
Her primary talent, and curse, didn’t work on this one.
Contrary to whispered rumors, Kay couldn’t actually read minds. But she’d been bred from generations of humans that could intuit what others were thinking, and manipulate them. The ultimate in managerial stock. It was a sense as integrated and apparent to her as sound, and it felt discomfiting to suddenly realize it didn’t work on this person.
Just like it didn’t work on aliens.
Kay didn’t like the feeling. It made her feel vulnerable. A little bit of the old fear crept into her. The uncertainty. The lack of control. She fought it back with a fiery explosion of willpower and anger.
“Now that you are here, Nashara let me explain your position,” Kay said. “You stand on a large trap door. Underneath is a hundred-foot drop. The side of the pit is lined with explosives to cave it in after you. Each of those window slits has a sniper with a high-powered rifle, and each of the columns around you has a shaped charge buried inside. You are standing in the blast zone. I am not. Over you is a brick floor designed to fall in afterwards. Those are the things I’m prepared to tell you. I don’t know if those would kill you, but they would slow you down enough so that I could leave.”
Nashara didn’t look down, or at the columns. She didn’t seem surprised. “Okay,” Nashara said. “You’re a little bit nervous about meeting me. I understand.”
And Kay couldn’t tell if that was a dig, an attempt to undermine her with the Ox-men standing about, or Nashara’s honest assessment.
Kay gritted her teeth. “You are, I believe, a Nashara?”
“As far as I know, the original Nashara,” the cyborg lady said.
“The first one in the Xenowealth?” Kay had spent time reading about history, trying to learn about the Forty-Eight worlds. Things she’d been denied as a child. “You’re the one that assassinated Gahe on Astragalai? You fought the Satrapy and unleashed copies of yourself all throughout their computer networks and ships?”
“Among other things.” Nashara stood still.
“So you’ve worked for the Xenowealth for nearly a century and are still alive and very dangerous. You’ve blunted the League for so long you are on their most wanted list. And now you’re on Placa del Fuego.”
“And now I’m on Placa del Fuego,” Nashara said. Her black eyes regarded Kay, expressionless, calm, and alien.
Even though Kay had a good feeling she already knew the answer, she asked, “Why?”
“You know why,” Nashara said, cocking her head. Those long dreadlocks around the shoulders shifted slightly with the movement.
“You’re looking for the man who fought the Doaq,” Kay said.
“His name is Pepper.”
Kay blinked. Telegraphing her shock, yes. But it was genuine. “The old-father of New Anegada.” And, as she’d suspected, a very dangerous man. The man
she’d led into a trap with the Doaq. Shame that he’d died. Kay leaned forward. “Why was he here on my island, then?”
“That would be giving up information for free,” Nashara said. “Why would I do that just yet?”
Kay waved that aside. “You can read me, much like I can read most humans. You saw my mild shock; you would have seen my momentary worry and guilt as well. I cannot play games with you, I don’t have the leverage. All I really have is the fact that you think I may know where Pepper is, as you don’t trust hearsay, and you don’t trust what a handful of confused people in Palentar have to say before it almost burned to the waterline. Am I right?”
Nashara nodded. “Yes.”
“He’s dead,” Kay said. Sharply enough she’d hoped to have gotten a reaction.
Maybe. Maybe there was a slight stirring.
That gave Kay hope. “It makes no sense to lie to you. I tried to get him to fight the Doaq, just like I would like to try and get you to fight it. They would have done it, anyway; I just set it up in a controlled environment where I could watch. I was hoping Pepper would kill it.”
“And he failed?”
“He jumped off a Palentar dock into the water rather than lose to the Doaq,” Kay told her.
Nashara frowned. She wanted Kay to see that, Kay thought.
“What direction?” she finally asked.
Now that was an interesting response. “Why should I help you?” Kay asked. “What do I get? Because I could just bury you in the pit, here, and call in someone from the League. They have their agents here. And I like the League. They were the first revolutionaries; they fought against the aliens, to free us. And according to them, you’re a traitor. So why should I help a traitor?”
“Because I’ll give you what you’re going to ask for,” Nashara said. She smiled a long, wicked smile. “You know something more, and if it helps me get Pepper, I’m willing to give you the weapons they won’t let onto the island. Not the League, not anyone else.”
Kay swallowed. Nashara was right. There was something else. Her single bargaining chip. “I want whatever you’re thinking of and one thing more.”
“What’s that?” Nashara asked. No doubt she would be thinking that maybe Kay wanted the chance to leave the island. Go out where the dead zone didn’t make life so hard.
But that wasn’t that Kay wanted at all.
“I want a shielded and dead-zone operable, limited-yield nuclear weapon,” Kay said, holding her hands a foot apart. “Just a small one.”
Because after Pepper, and after Nashara fought the Doaq, Kay would still be here.
She wanted to take this whole thing up a notch.
And that expression of surprise on Nashara’s face that slipped through, that was just extra cream on the pastry, Kay thought.
Chapter Six
Tiago nervously stepped into one of Kay’s many lairs. It was at the end of Onyx Street, down a set of stairs cut into the side of the road and in the basement of an old house. The house sat in a chipped-out area of a rock outcropping at the very edge of town,
He hated being summoned to one of Kay’s constantly moving headquarters. It had only happened a few times before. He preferred anonymity. He just wanted to keep doing what he was doing without trouble.
But he’d gotten ambitious, hadn’t he? He’d pickpocketed a visitor to the island. And she turned out to be more than she had appeared. This was what happened when you reached too far, Tiago thought. You got into trouble.
Amber late-afternoon light pierced the dusty windows inside the basement of the lair and a menagerie of Placa del Fuego’s shadowy denizens milled about. There were more Ox-men, some Runners, and even a few simple-minded Servants. A veritable conference of Kay’s entire criminal enterprise was being held, Tiago thought.
Things were happening. And like a piece of flotsam on the edge of a tide, Tiago was getting picked up and carried along. He’d had this feeling once before, when a riot he wasn’t involved in had happened right around him.
He’d spent five months in the Dekkan Holding Center when the police shoved in and started arresting rioters, even though Tiago had insisted he’d been innocent. He could have told them he was just there to pick pockets and not riot, but that wouldn’t have been a very good defense.
Tiago recognized familiar faces from Elizan’s old crew crowded in here, as well as other shady sorts from all over the rest of the city. Of course, all of them were Kay’s crew, now. She controlled the Waterfront and the Back Ring, and was almost done finishing up controlling the Harbor.
If it was criminal, and happened in Placa del Fuego, Kay wanted to run it.
Most of the other pickpockets had once worked for Elizan (a high-strung old man who would leap at a chance to whip anyone who’d held back the take). A tough life: many of them showed the scars to prove it, but it beat trying to live outside alone. When Elizan disappeared and Kay took over, most of these kids shrugged and got on with it. Because Placa del Fuego had no heart for the unsheltered. It was a literal death sentence.
Bakeem was talking to several of his Ox-men, and they were all heavily armed with pistols in belts, rifles on their backs. “I’m not sure if the Doaq contingency plan is going to be enough,” one of them growled at Bakeem.
Fear stabbed deep into Tiago’s spine.
What the hell all was going on down here? What was Kay up to?
When Kay appeared on the streets in the Back Ring, rain-burned, tired, and hiding in the gutters, she’d been ignored for the first week. The second week she’d figured out the command structure of one of the drug cartels. The story was that she’d killed the commander with a sliver of knapped flint.
And within days the cartel was hers.
Rumors said she came from a Nesaru colony on the planet Okur, where the birdlike alien Nesaru ruled with absolute control under the Bacigalupi Doctrine. With the war for human independence boiling over, the Nesaru had been worrying they would lose their access to fuel. They thought the collapse of interstellar travel would happen as a consequence once the Satrapy, which had ruled the Forty-Eight worlds until then, fell.
So the Nesaru had bred humans into a variety of forms to serve them, to create a calorie-based slave society instead of a fuel-based one. Like breeds of dogs, the Nesaru rapidly genetically engineered, bred, and reshaped humanity into Ox-men, Runners, Servants, Pickers, Gardeners, Calculors, Luminoids, and many more. Many of those humans had fled Okur to Placa del Fuego after the war, where their services were needed.
So had Kay, Tiago heard.
She was something else, the strange Okur refugees said. Most of them were terrified of her. She was something designed to control the modified human slaves under the Nesaru’s thumb. She could read your thoughts by the slightest change in your posture, a twitch in a facial muscle. She emitted pheromones to calm you, convince you, and used her body to control your personal space.
Everyone was a computer, waiting to be programmed by her. She was the taskmaster. A perfectly bred, engineered, manipulator of humankind.
And here they all were, in the basement with her. All in thrall.
Talking about Doaq contingency plans?
“Tiago.” Kay beckoned him closer. He moved to fall into her orbit. “I have quite a job for you.”
Tiago saw that everyone was looking at him. It unnerved him.
“There will be considerably more money in it for you,” Kay said softly, as if sharing a secret between the two of them. She walked around the wooden table in the basement and put a protective arm around Tiago. A warming gesture of trust, support, and confidence. “I really need your help with this, Tiago.”
He struggled to fight back. Getting involved was bad. He did what he did, couldn’t she just keep him on in that limited, distant role? “I … what do you need?” he stammered.
“You keep a low profile, Tiago. Back of the crowd. You don’t try to cheat me of my cut. You wouldn’t even dare think of it.”
Tiago nodded – don’t get n
oticed, don’t cross dangerous people like Kay unless you could run and melt into the background. These were his core life principles. He glanced at the silent crowd of varying human shapes and sizes studying him, then retreated back into the intimacy of the personal space between him and Kay.
“What’s wrong, Tiago?” Kay asked. “You’re shaking.” She held his hands in hers.
He wanted to throw up. “I don’t want to die,” he said.
“Tiago, you’re not a soldier. We’re not asking you to pick up arms. We have something else in mind. We need your quick hands and your quick mind. Besides, you are part of the moneymaking arm of this all. It would be stupid of me to risk your life. There’s no profit in it. Trust me,” she insisted, squeezing his hands.
And he did trust her.
He couldn’t help himself, no matter how hard he fought it.
“I need you to do something that will be tough, though,” Kay said.
Here it comes, Tiago thought. In the distant background the sound of rain alarms drifted through the streets. A night storm. The worst kind.
He waited.
“You spent some time in the Dekkan Holding Center. I need you to get on a prison wagon, and possibly go all the way back there.”
Tiago shivered. “You want me to go back?” Moist memories of the dark warrens bubbled back up to the front of his mind.
“Hopefully not.” Kay pointed at a kevlar poncho and gas mask hanging by the door. “But I have made a deal with Nashara. You and I are going to help her get something she wants.”
She was getting up to leave, not paying attention to him. A woman was holding out a selection of scarves and necklaces, and Kay smiled and pointed at one, then ducked her head in to have it placed around her neck. But Tiago had backed away. He was thinking of running.
No, he realized. He was going to make a run for it.
Where? He had no idea.
“Tiago!” she said, her back still to him.
An Ox-man grabbed him by the upper arm. The grip was furry and yet utterly implacable. The man picked him up and moved him back to the table.
The Apocalypse Ocean Page 3