"Merry Christmas," he muttered.
In the next storefront was a bank, and Aubry forced the door open and poked around inside. There weren't any bodies to be seen, but a quick investigation proved that the money had been left in stacks at the tellers' windows.
He vaulted across the divider and looked down at the cob-webbed and mildewed stacks of money. He opened the drawers, the light from his helmet making fat sausage shadows of his fingers.
A hand fell on his shoulder.
He pivoted swiftly, not having heard the door open, having heard no footsteps. He felt a quick flare of panic at the thought of someone coming up behind him so quietly.
The man who spoke was large, and had been muscular once. His gaunt cheeks suggested many stretches of hard times, times when food was as precious as air. His eyes were light, and his hair was as pale as straw. The face was angular and strangely soft at the same time. He was about three centimeters shorter than Aubry.
"You're Warrick?" It wasn't really a question. Aubry felt something that was curiously like fear.
The man moved without a sound, almost floating. Knight stepped back as he approached.
Warrick nodded silently. "And you are Aubry Shields." Warrick lifted a hand torch, washing light into the dim, cob-webbed corners of the room. "Because of you, everything that I have done will be undone."
Aubry clamped down on sudden nausea, and pushed the anger away.
"What in the hell are you talking about?"
Warrick sighed, the movement exaggerated by his sloping shoulders. "Never mind. It will become clear enough later." He ignored Aubry's balled fists, and shone-the pale circle of light around the room. "You'll find silver money in the vault. Perhaps a few items in the safe deposit boxes."
The massive vault door hung open. Warrick stalked over to it, carefully avoiding the fallen beams and shriveled corpses of customers who had been crushed beneath them. Out in the promenade, there were workers and lights and sound, and Aubry felt an urge to leave this strange man and go out to them, but quelled it.
Warrick slipped a pry bar into the slender lock protecting a security gate behind the vault door, and broke it with a flick of his wrist. Aubry whistled silent approval.
Aubry followed him in, watched Warrick sort through the scattered piles of money.
"What about this stuff?" he asked, sweeping a handful of it off the counter.
Warrick picked up a hundred, and held it to the light. "Food, gems, and tools are more useful. They can purchase Service Marks." The walls of the vault were lined with little locked boxes, and Warrick motioned Aubry to the left wall while he himself went to work on the right one.
The boxes weren't constructed to stand up to the kind of stress that an immensely strong man can apply with a crowbar, and they popped open, one at a time.
In the first one was a bundle of letters, and a slender necklace. Aubry held it up, noting the way that the gems split the pale light into a rainbow of color. The postmark on the letters was too faded to read, but he rifled through them before throwing them aside.
Warrick pushed his knapsack out behind him with a thrust of his heel. "Anything you find goes in there. Don't worry— everybody gets their share. Right now, though, you're earning medicine for your lady."
"Yeah." Aubry bounced the necklace in his hand once, then threw it in. The boxes yielded up their contents one after another, and almost half of them held some kind of wealth that could be traded for goods and medicine—coins, tiny gold bars, jewelry, a tiny packet of diamonds.
By the time they had been at it for forty-five minutes, the vault was almost completely cleaned out. Warrick hadn't said another word, just tirelessly worked at his side of the vault. Aubry deposited piece after piece in the bag, growing increasingly discomfited at his silent companion. Finally he turned and said, "Warrick, do you—?"
But the man was gone. Aubry snarled, the anger making a wave of nausea roll in his stomach. He gave up the anger, realizing that it was just a flash of transmuted fear, and kept working.
Strange man, he thought. Stayed just long enough to be sure that I understood the rules, then left.
"Now, what is there to stop me from pocketing some of this? Keeping it for myself? I'd be a real asshole to play by his rules just because he says to." He listened to his own voice, but couldn't convince himself. "Oh, to hell with it." He hoisted the bag filled with jewels and coin, and trudged out of the vault.
Outside, the salvage operation was in full swing. Lights had been strung from what remained of the gnarled, dead trees, and the shops were systematically looted. Food seemed to be as highly prized as money, and as he dropped Warrick's pack into the center of the growing pile, he felt a flash of guilt.
As he did a hand gripped his shoulder from behind. At first he thought it was Warrick, and turned to speak to him. It was B any on. Her eyes were aglow, and for a wild second he was startled to find himself thinking of her as attractive. "Good haul," she said happily. "Damned good."
He felt tired suddenly, and sat down to rest. "Yeah," he said, "lot of stuff here."
"Not just here. Warrick thinks we can get into another level, under this one. There's more than just the shop goods that you see. There are generator rooms, some with equipment that can be repaired. Or metal that can be salvaged. There's just no telling."
"What else?" He felt dizzy, and it was an effort to keep his eyes open. "Am I through, or do I go on working, or what?"
She looked at him carefully. "How are you?"
"A little light-headed, I guess."
"Yeah, I thought so. Listen, you may be King Kong, but you've got to get used to the air down here. I think that it's time you go back up." She paused. "Did you dump everything in the pile?"
"Uh... yeah. Everything."
Banyon's expression remained steady, but he could feel the coolness there, felt the change in attitude towards him.
"Uh, wait. I've got one more thing." He pulled out the ham and handed it over.
Her expression still didn't change, but he knew that she was relieved.
"You know," she said thoughtfully, "a lot of this canned stuff is still good. Tell you what—we'll test this, and if it is, we'll send it along to your ladyfriend. How's that?"
"Test it, huh?" He grinned.
"Absolutely." She stenciled his name on the side of the can with a grease pencil. "Botulism is nothing to sneeze at." She squeezed his shoulder.
"Now go on back to the upper levels. You probably need some rest."
He hated to admit it, but the throb in his temples, and the slow burning in his legs and back said that she was correct. "You've got that right," he said, grinning weakly. "Thanks, Banyon. When's my next shift?"
"As soon as you can get back. I'll leave that up to you." She paused, then added, "Let's see what you're made of."
"Yeah, well, right now I'm made out of tired." He shrugged his shoulders, trying to ease the pain in them, and trudged off.
The route back led him through the basement, the electrical vault, and a collapsed service tunnel.
The Scavengers got to it through a ventilation duct, or by another pedestrian tunnel that went the long way around, connecting through a broken wall in the main tunnel. He sighed, trying to make up his mind—did he want to take the long way, the way taken by the Scavenger technicians and their loads of equipment, or did he want the shortcut, and the probability of skinning a few hairs off his shoulder?
Shortcut. He squeezed up into the ventilation duct, and snaked along on hips and elbows for about thirty meters before reaching the spot where he had to flop over onto his side to make the corner.
There was a glowing red marker in the shaft when it came to a branch, and he took the right fork, crawled another three minutes, and came to a widened-out ventilation grille.
Aubry crawled past, then backed up into it, easing himself down until his toes touched the ground, wincing and cursing simultaneously as he realized that he had indeed skinned the living hell out o
f his elbow. Again.
The room was a warehouse, and the old man organizing the battered packages and tubs of merchandise barely looked up as Aubry entered. There was really an amazing variety of goods, gathered from all over the roughly square kilometer that the scavengers worked in central Los Angeles.
Nearby tubs were filled with scrap metal, pulled out of the walls of the nearby buildings, to be sold to the junk dealers who formed an interface between Maze and outside world.
This office building had been chosen for a base of operations because some of the machinery remained in working condition, the freight elevators and lights restored to operation by the Scavenger technicians.
Aubry had taken one jerking, halting ride up in the reconditioned elevator, and preferred the stairs.
The Firestorm that had destroyed most of central L. A. had left four stories of this one building intact, except for minor smoke damage.
A hospital of sorts had been rigged up, with clean beds (sheets found God knows where) and even running water, perhaps the most ambitious addition to the "hospital."
The rooms were plain but very clean, and here in this area was the only place he could count on finding Scavengers who didn't look as if they had been rolled in grease and mud and left out to dry.
Promise looked asleep when he walked in, and he closed the door quietly, watching her, chewing the inside of his cheek as he tried to decide whether or not to wake her up.
Then she stirred, and opened her eyes, making the decision for him.
It took a few moments for her eyes to focus, but then they immediately became guarded.
"Knight," she said cautiously. Her plastiskin was turned off, and formed a milky-pale layer over her left side.
"How're you doing?" he said awkwardly.
"I feel—" Something almost surfaced then, bobbed once, and sank. She turned her head into the pillow and stared at the wall. "All right. Just all right."
He wished that he had something to bring her—flowers perhaps. Anything at all.
"Yeah, well—you look fine, just fine," he said lamely. He came up to the edge of the bed. "Do you mind—?"
"Would it matter?" The words were bitter.
He recoiled at her voice. "What do you think? Of course it would."
"Oh, go on." For the first time she made an effort to put the pieces of her face together, and a flash of her beauty crept through. "Please."
He sat, feeling the tired bedsprings creak under his weight. She peered out of the reconstructed plastic window of the "hospital" room, out at the twisted and ruined wreckage of a city. The street was bright with sunlight, but there was little sound out there, and no traffic or machine noises at all.
"Well," he said, "look at us. Both alive. I guess we never counted on that, did we?"
"Alive," she said slowly, wonderingly. "Am I? I've got nothing left. I can't go back to my life. I can't be seen in public. All I've got is charity from a damned bunch of tramps, and—" She closed her mouth, embarrassed and confused.
"And me?" he chuckled softly. "You don't 'have' me, Promise, and I don't have you. We've just bumped heads for a while, and until we can figure a way out of this, I think that we should try to get along."
She rolled over in the bed and looked at him appraisingly. "You're supporting me now, aren't you?" Her eyes were muddy.
"If—if I hadn't, they would have sent you to one of the topside hospitals. We both know how long you would have lasted."
"So you just pitched right in, is that right?"
"Yes, but—"
"I just want you to know," she said quietly, "that I pay my debts. In full." Her eyes met his, and he saw the weakness there, masked by a desperate facade of strength. "You just tell me what I owe, and I'll handle it."
"Listen." Aubry tried to keep his voice even, didn't succeed entirely. "You don't owe me anything. You helped me get away alive. You were hurt. I have this habit of sticking by the people who don't do me dirt—I'd do as much for a man or a dog."
"Thanks," she said, nodding her head slowly. "Just thanks a whole hell of a bunch." She turned back to look out at the street again.
There was no anger in Aubry, only a vast sadness, and he knew that he had been a fool to hope that she could fill his void with a word or a smile. "Listen, lady—what do you want from me? Should I have left you at Luis's? Or maybe let the Scavengers send you out to die? I mean, just what in the hell was I supposed to do?"
"I don't know." The words were soft enough, but there was a scream hidden in them. "Once, I thought I knew what was happening in my life, but now I'm flat on my back with no ideas about what I'm going to do. None."
"I don't—"
"Aubry, you have some kind of an idea what all of this is about. An idea of the world that the Ortegas live in, the violence and the scheming and... and all of that. I wasn't ready for this kind of thing. You had five years to think about revenge, and what it might cost you. You fought your way out of prison, and you fought your way into my life, and you fought your way in and out of that damned house, and with your bare hands you killed the man who'd hurt you. How wonderfully macho. But me—" There was a catch in her voice, and now he was sure that she was crying. "—I was living in my little world, making do, dreaming that my life was stable and secure, even if it wasn't exactly fairyland, and then suddenly, because I tried to help someone, everything falls apart." She laughed, and it was an ugly laugh. "Ain't that a burn? If I had just stuck to my own game, I would have been fine. But I tried to do something decent, and look at me "
"Look at what?"
"Look at me!" She screamed it now, and her eyes flared at him with an awful light as she threw the sheets back. On her side, a little above the hip, was a patch of slightly paler skin, about three centimeters across, and roughly circular.
"Do you see me? Do you see this? Don't you realize what's happened to me?"
He shrugged, feeling confused. "You've had a transplant. You came out of it without being infected... they say that you're going to be fine."
Her nostrils flared with anger. "Fine, am I? Watch this, Mr. Knight." She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply and arched her back, then exhaled with a slight tensing of her abdominal muscles. The left side of her body began to glow, the colors running in irregular ringlets, flowing around the restructured area. The colors were muddy, not bright as they had once been—except for her hair, which still flashed a brilliant blue and red.
The inhalation ended, and she collapsed back into her pillow. She stared at him defiantly as she grabbed the covers and pulled them back up over her naked body.
"My life has fallen apart, and it all started the day that I met you." She turned back to the window and wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. "All right, then, Knight. You've seen me bleed, and you've seen me cry, and that's all you're going to get out of me, dammit. You're nothing but a gutter-rat, a lowdown tramp who thinks with his feet, and if you think that you've got some kind of a hold on me, you've got another thought coming. But don't worry—like I said, I pay my debts."
She seemed pitifully small and frail and afraid. Part of him wanted to grab her and shake her and scream loud enough that the part of her that was still unscarred and unfilled with hate would hear: What in the bloody hell do you have to be sorry about? So, part of your body is different now. You're still more beautiful than any three women I've ever seen. And your life is ruined because you tried to do the Right Thing. Join the club honey — guess what, there are a few more of us out here who've had our brains beaten out with our own dreams.
And in his imagination he said those things to her, and more. Angrier, viler things. And as he thought of them, the parasite in his stomach rose up, spitting acid into his throat and blurring his eyes.
He turned while he still could, squashing the thoughts and feelings until they were only warm ashes. Silently, he headed for the door. "Aubry?" He didn't turn around, but he did stop.
"Yeah?"
The voice was even smaller this time,
a child's voice. "Thank you."
The hall outside was much dirtier than the room, and stocked with all of the Scavenger medical supplies that didn't need refrigeration.
Mira was there, sitting, watching him with inquisitive eyes, and a thin smile that was too warm to offend him.
He crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall, sighing.
Mira scratched the space behind her left ear, and stood, laying a hand on his shoulder. "How is she?"
He shook his head. "I think she'd be a lot better if I just went away and left her alone."
"Don't you believe it. That girl is fighting massive shock. Virtually everything in her life has changed, all in the course of a week. What do you think that would do to you?"
Aubry grew very still, very cold, and Mira flinched, wondering what memories she had ripped out of his past. Afraid to stop now, she stumbled on. "You're that girl's only bridge between her old world and her new one—this one. She needs you, and hates needing you—I'm not totally sure why."
"Yeah. Well, I'm just supposed to be made out of understanding, or what?" He paced up and down the hall, trembling, then pivoted on his heel. "What about me, huh? Just what in the living hell about me? What am I supposed to use for feelings? I'm not supposed to hurt, I'm not supposed to get tired, I'm not even supposed to dream — "
His voice climbed and almost cracked. Mira's expression was neutral, accepting, and somehow that made it worse.
"You couldn't understand," he said. "I was stupid to think you could."
Then he turned and stalked away, his footsteps thundering on the hallway floor.
She waited for a moment to be sure that he wasn't coming back, then walked into the hospital room.
"You and Aubry have a little row?"
Promise was still looking out of the window at the ruined buildings, ignoring the question. "What's it like out there?"
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