by Neil Clarke
But she had to admit she was curious, too. She’d seen only a slice of the crate and now she wanted to know what was inside, the same way she’d always wanted to know what was inside an upcar carapace or engine block.
Kit crept them back around the corner into the alley, which was now deserted. The other vans and drivers had gone on their way. Halfway down, she stopped in front of a rusty metal door in the alley wall. After a few moments of tuning the smartglove, Kit found the lock and popped it.
She swung the door open, and Eris could feel a damp coming from inside. She would have shivered. Even Kit seemed hesitant for a second, but maybe she was only scoping things out. As they stepped inside, retrofitted biolights bloomed to life, providing stark contrast to a grimy cracked corridor. Eris’s eyes stung a bit as Kit did something with the smartglove again.
Not picking up any surveillance cams. Good.
“Great,” Eris echoed. They walked forward. Foam insulation was oozing from the walls, and at the end of the corridor she saw an ancient-looking elevator with actual physical buttons to push. Only the down arrow was still intact.
They were going to go even deeper. Eris felt a whine rising in the back of her throat and tamped it down. Kit thumbed the call button.
Dispatch might have a hard time finding us down here. This is pre-Calamities architecture. The City’s old bones. It has a way of screwing with our scanners.
“What about with the brainshare?” Eris demanded. As much as she disliked having Kit run the show, she didn’t want to find herself suddenly alone down here, either. She’d never fired a biogun, or any kind of gun, and she had a feeling stunspray wouldn’t cut it if Schorr and his thugs suddenly popped out of the dark.
That uses an entanglement drive. I wouldn’t worry.
“I’m not worried,” Eris said. “Hop in the elevator already, chicken shit.”
Kit did, and as the doors slid shut behind them Eris felt like she was going to be sick with fear, and couldn’t help but wonder if some of it was from Kit. The elevator sank and sank. The air felt like it was thickening, squeezing her temples. Maybe just her imagination.
She was relieved when the box came to a stop. Kit jammed her thumb on the close door button to keep it from opening. Eris listened, wondering if Schorr was standing on the other side, waiting for them. But when Kit fed a little hairline cam from her smartglove through the crack in the doors, it showed all clear.
They slipped out into a tunnel. Its ancient concrete was splinted by nanotube resin that glistened wetly, making it feel like the gullet of some animal. The air was definitely thicker down here. Damper. It clung to the back of Eris’s throat. Kit moved them forward slowly and stealthily. The lights flickered, like the power was being rerouted, and it made Eris see things in the shadows that weren’t there.
A T-intersect approached, and as they reached it Eris heard footfalls. Kit scuttled back a step. Crouched. They clung there against the wall as one of Schorr’s men trundled past. Eris wasn’t sure if it was her or Kit holding her breath, but it didn’t get released until he disappeared around the next bend.
They started moving again. Eris wanted to suggest that maybe Kit should have just shot him, to give them one less problem to deal with later, but Kit had her mouth sealed shut. They came to a halt outside a door that made Eris’s heart hammer hard. They had passed plenty of doors, but this one was different. It had been widened to fit the crate.
Kit sent another hairline cam, jiggered another lock, and then they were inside. Lights flicked on unbidden, harsh white, surgical, and Eris saw the crate had been opened.
A glass-and-metal sarcophagus was propped upright facing them. And inside it, she saw a mass of thick green-black ivy and decomposed flesh that she knew had been a human being once.
Eris’s stomach revolted, but she couldn’t avert her eyes, couldn’t keep from tracing the poisonous green roots and tendrils that tangled through cracked bones, the bubbling brown spores clustered at the groin, under the arms. The face was burst open and flowering a bright poisonous red.
“Shit,” she whispered.
Shit, Kit agreed.
“I see you’ve met the Green Man,” Schorr’s voice said from behind them.
Kit whirled; Schorr had something out of his pocket, a spindly metal thing that Eris didn’t recognize. He flung it outward, pointing it right at her face, and instead of somersaulting away or snapping it out of his hand or doing any other kind of ninja thing, Eris found herself frozen again. The thrum was all through her body this time.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, it’s a halo. I’m going to lose you. Look, Eris, just stay calm and—
Kit’s voice cut out. Schorr stepped forward, twisting the thing together, making it into a circle. He set it gently on her head like he was crowning her. It tightened and clung there.
“This should help you feel a little more like yourself,” he said.
Eris realized her muscles were hers again, but when she tried to move her arms they didn’t respond, hanging there heavy as lead. The halo was fucking them up, too. Her chest went tight with panic.
Kit was gone, and now it was only her, stuck somewhere underground with the leader of a doomsday cult and two of his thugs, one of whom had already found the biogun in her waistband, and Schorr knew about the OCI and the brainshare and she was dead dead dead. She felt oddly numb as they stripped her of the weapon and the smart glove and dragged her away from the sarcophagus. Her arms dangled uselessly.
“All this for a fucking corpse?” she asked. She knew she should be using whatever time she had left to make a case for her life, but somehow, even facing imminent death, the Green Man was still the scariest thing in the room.
Schorr didn’t answer for a moment, walking to the sarcophagus instead and placing his hand against the glass. “You’re from the colonies, aren’t you? At first I wasn’t sure. There are so few of you in the City. Only a handful in nearly a billion inhabitants.” He paused. “Do you like it here?”
Eris gave a shrug that she hoped looked contemptuous and unafraid. Whatever Schorr was playing at, he hadn’t killed her yet.
“From a certain perspective, it’s everything our ancestors dreamed of,” Schorr said. “Triple the size of any the old metropolises built before the Calamities. Towers to heaven, cars that fly, one language, no hunger, no . . . disease.”
His face turned hard and angry.
“And all it cost us was seventy percent of the world’s population in a century of mass death,” he said. “But after all that, all the wars, the floods, the famines, we didn’t learn a thing. Not one thing. Forward thinkers did their best in the aftermath. The Neoprim movements, for one, tried to show people a better way.” He gave a smile that reminded Eris of the tweaker Kit had wasted. “The fact that you were born at all is thanks to that better way. You would have been an early termination here in the City. It’s easier to be cruel when people become populations. When they become numbers.”
Eris couldn’t help thinking of the serial numbers on her arms, the license holo on her cab, the figure in her Bank account that seemed to be always eroding and never growing. The City did make her feel like a number. The City was cruel in a lot of ways.
“But the colonies aren’t enough,” Schorr continued. “The mass exodus we envisioned never happened, and now the City is swelling like a tick. Repeating all our old mistakes. The only true solution is a full reset. Acknowledge that everything from agriculture onward was a blip on the radar. That’s where the Green Man comes in.”
Eris shot another look at the sarcophagus and wished she hadn’t.
“The colonies made themselves useful in another way,” Schorr said. “As a breeding ground for disease. One of which was a fast-acting fungal infection, a particularly vicious strain we’ve never seen before. It decimated two separate colonies before it was contained.”
Eris’s heart dropped. “Bullshit,” she said. “I would know.”
But she wouldn’t, she knew she wouldn’t. She av
oided anything to do with the colonies because it was easier to slice off that part of her life and cauterize it, and here in the City people didn’t care what happened in the colonies. They didn’t talk about them.
“This was the only body I managed to save from incineration and have smuggled over,” Schorr said. “A lot of lives were lost. More to come. But none in vain.” His eyes were shining. “Humanity’s going to return to its rightful place. Gaia to hers. We’ll be at peace again, like we were for the first hundred thousand years.”
A cold question had assembled itself in the corner of Eris’s mind. She asked it now, hoarsely. “Which colonies? Which colonies were wiped out?”
“Which colony are you from?” Schorr asked.
She could barely force the syllables from her lips. “New Tenochtitlan.”
Schorr’s face twisted. “I’m sorry,” he said. “None in vain.”
Black pushed in the sides of her vision. Eris felt herself sink to one knee. She was back in the colony, sitting in the compound dirt with her dad across from her, the magnetic chessboard between them. He was tall and stern with his white beard stark against lined brown skin. He was saying that it would be better for her in the City, and she was thinking that if she could just manage to win the game, he would let her stay.
But she’d never won against her dad, not ever, and she never practiced with anyone else because she spent all her spare time in the field driving the village’s battered utility upcar or taking apart motors in the garage. She didn’t win that last game, either.
Eris kept her head down as one of his men led her out of the room, back into the tunnel. If she didn’t look up at all, she wouldn’t be able to look for traces of her dad in the overgrown green corpse.
They put her in a storage room, under guard, with a folding chair that sprang upright when she bumped into it. She’d asked, dully, if they were planning to sacrifice her or some culty shit like that. Schorr had laughed before walking out.
She ignored the chair and collapsed down against the wall instead. It felt like she was having a nightmare. She felt hot thick guilt for how she never talked about the colony, how she pretended to herself she’d been born in the City like everyone else. She’d spent so long trying to forget her father who’d sent her away. Trying to focus on her arms, on her cab, on things she could change and repair. Now she could see so many old familiar faces in her head, and they kept bursting apart like the Green Man in the sarcophagus.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make it all just disappear. It didn’t.
She would have to change it.
Eris opened her eyes. No matter how cruel the City was, it was full of innocent people, same as the colonies. Kit and the OCI needed to know about the Green Man, and that meant she needed to get rid of the halo somehow. She turned and dragged her head along the wall, feeling for the halo’s metal edge. It wasn’t loose enough to knock free, but not as tight as she’d feared, either.
Eris kicked off her shoes and pawed off one sock and then the other. Her arms were dead useless weight at her sides, but they hadn’t tied her legs. She scooted back, leaning her shoulders against the wall, and stretched.
She’d lost a lot of flexibility since she’d gotten her artis, but not all of it. Brushing her big toe against the halo, however, resulted in a sharp shock. She swore, yanking her foot back down.
“Alright,” she breathed. “Fuck it.”
She stretched again, muscles straining taut, and wriggled her big toe underneath the edge of the halo. The shock bit hard; she saw a hot blue spark fly in her peripheral. Clenching her teeth, she gripped the halo between her big toe and long toe and pulled.
It clattered to the floor, spinning like a coin. She silenced it with her other foot. Hopefully the man standing outside hadn’t heard it. Eris tipped her head back against the wall, breathing hard, as feeling returned to her arms. The pads of her toes were blistered red, but not blackened. She figured she would be able to walk properly.
What’s happening? Kit’s voice came blurred, indistinct. Are you alright?
“Yeah, I’m fucking great, Kit,” Eris said in a whisper. “Schorr’s got a sample of some kind of plague. Something he brought back from the colonies. He’s going to release it here, and then everyone is fucked.”
There was a pause that nearly made her panic, made her think Kit’s signal was gone again. The Green Man cometh. Shit. That thing was supposed to have been eradicated. Kit’s voice was agitated, but louder now, clearer. There’s a strike team waiting in the alley. But we’re not equipped to contain a bioweapon. I’m coming in.
Eris’s body thrummed and her head started twisting without her volition, making a sweep of the storage room.
Have you seen anyone else down here?
“Still just Schorr and the two big fuckers,” Eris muttered. “He told one of them to watch the door.”
She shut her mouth as Kit pushed her face up against the door, listening. Eris heard the sound of shifting weight, fabric rubbing fabric. Kit nearly lost their balance as the door swung open.
For an instant Schorr’s man was framed in the doorway, and Eris looked up him like a mountain, the hormone-popped muscle and buzzed head and green tattoos creeping out from his cufflinks. His face was unworried, Eris figured because the last time he’d seen her she’d been crying like a little baby and because she didn’t have working arms, besides.
“Schorr wants you at the ceremony,” he said, and then he realized the halo was no longer on Eris’s head and his eyes went wide.
Kit dismantled him. Cartilage cracked, air thumped out of a collapsed lung, dead weight slammed the floor. He was still struggling for breath in the fetal position as Kit retrieved the biogun and used Eris’s arms to lever him into the room. She shut the door neatly behind her and the lock buzzed active. It was a good thing Kit was still using her mouth, because Eris knew she would’ve let out a triumphant whoop right about then.
That’s music, isn’t it?
Eris concentrated. It was. Chanting and drumbeat, faint but audible. The kind of faux-primal shit she remembered hearing as a kid in the Neoprim colony.
“Yeah,” Eris said, finding her mouth was hers again. “Let’s go.”
They followed the sound of the synthesized drums and wailing, quickly and quietly. Normally Eris’s feet slapped a bit when she walked, but not with Kit moving them—she was poised now, all coiled and balanced like a cat. It made her more hopeful Kit could handle whatever they found at the end of the labyrinth.
Rounding a pitted corner, the music grew louder and Eris started to see small bundles lining the walls, shoes on top.
“Clothes?” she demanded in a whisper. “Why the fuck are people taking their clothes off?”
Don’t know. Maybe it’s for some kind of fertility ritual.
“As in, a big fucking orgy.”
Yeah. Some of them do that.
The music reached a fever pitch, then cut out entirely. Eris’s ears felt swamped by the sudden silence. Kit hesitated, then moved ahead even more slowly, creeping towards a pale yellow light leaking from the next corner. She hunkered low and poked Eris’s head around to look.
Their tight corridor was one of several emptying into a much larger room, and the room was full of people. They were all naked, and as much as Eris wanted it to look funny or stupid, it didn’t. It looked eerie, all of them standing there in rows in the ghostly yellow light. Some of them had smartpainted their bodies in twisting green vines that slithered up and down their bare skin. Other than that, they were stock-still, all of their eyes fixed on the makeshift plinth in the center of the room.
The figure standing on top of it wore ragged robes over a long coat. Their face was hidden under some kind of military issue gas mask, vaguely insectoid, daubed green and brown and set with skeletal antlers. Eris felt a shudder that might have been hers, might have been Kit’s. That had to be Schorr. And looming behind him, propped upright in a sort of groove, was the sarcophagus.
“You’ve been called here to receive the Green Man’s blessing.”
Schorr’s voice, dead and amplified, split the air.
“Tonight is the beginning of the end, my friends.”
The naked men and women started to chant something back, raising their hands, then Eris’s view was blocked as Kit pulled her shirt over her head.
“What are we doing?” Eris hissed, muffled by the fabric.
He’s inoculating them, right? These are his followers. Kit peeled her trousers off next, see-sawing them off her hips. We can join in. Get close enough.
“And then?”
Kill Schorr.
“What, with my bare fucking hands?” Eris demanded. Kit kicked off her shoes and shucked off her bra and underwear.
With no hands. I’m going to have to take your arms off, Eris.
Eris blinked. All the naked bodies, some of them scarred, none of them with visible implants or prostheses. She remembered back to what Ndirangu had said all those eons ago. Neo-Luddite. Rejection of technology. She wondered if they knew Schorr had Optiks.
Okay? Kit’s voice sounded almost ashamed.
Eris tongued the gap in her molars. “Okay,” she said. “Let me do it.”
Now she was almost sure it was a nightmare. With Kit directing her steps, Eris felt like she was gliding through the crowd, magnetically drawn to the plinth where Schorr and the Green Man waited. Her bare skin was swathed in goose bumps and the nubbed ends of her arms felt every cold current in the air. When she brushed the left by accident against someone else’s clammy skin, her nerve terminations screamed.
The biogun was tucked into her right armpit, blunt muzzle all but concealed. Schorr was still speaking, but Eris couldn’t hear it. Too absorbed in the rest of it, in the naked bodies pale and dark sliding against hers, in the quickcrete—no, concrete, this stuff was ancient—that spiked cold against the bottom of her feet. The sweat trickling from under her armpits. The blank and fevered faces all around her.
She was sure at any second they would spot the biogun and realize she wasn’t one of them and tear her to shreds. She wanted to turn and run, scoop her arms back from where she’d stashed them in the corridor, make like hell for the elevator. But she couldn’t. Not with Kit propelling her forward, and not with Schorr planning to turn the whole City, the City she sometimes hated so much, into overgrown corpses like had been done to her colony.