As Lanaya listens, the ice in her eyes melts and for a moment she almost looks like a normal. “This girl is your sibling?” she asks.
“She’s my friend,” I say.
Lanaya nods. She thinks about it for a moment and then announces: “I shall take you there.”
IT’S A VERY STRANGE FEELING, riding through a minefield. Knowing that if some little glitch goes wrong and our vehicle doesn’t give out the right signal we’ll be blown into particles, like Lanaya says. Not that it seems to bother her. She knows exactly where we are and where we’re going, and has no doubt we’ll get there in one piece.
“Eden is the center of the Urb,” she explains, tapping her nav screen. “The Zone surrounds Eden on all sides. So we can get to any latch by circling through the minefields. No problem.”
“No problem?” I ask, doubting her.
“I do it all the time,” she says huffily. “Don’t you know anything?”
The way she talks to me I should be mad, but for some reason I’m not. There’s something about being a normal that makes you feel like you deserve it when a proov looks down on you, because they’re doing you a big favor just looking at you, period. So I shut up and listen to Lanaya because I love to hear her voice, even when she’s telling me I’m stupid. Also, she’s so beautiful it hurts to look at her, but the hurt feels good, which doesn’t make any sense but I swear it’s true.
Proovs. Billy Bizmo is right: They’re nothing but trouble even if they are perfect.
“Lanaya,” says Ryter, sounding very formal. “May I ask what your guardians think of your excursions into the Urb?”
“That’s my business,” she tells him. “I don’t have to justify myself to a normal.”
Ryter seems amused by her response. “No, of course you don’t,” he says. “Because you believe that we normals are a much lower form of life than those who have been genetically perfected. But I notice that you seek out contact with us. Why is that? Just for the thrill? The sense of danger? Or is there something more?”
Lanaya scowls, which only makes her even more beautiful. “I don’t have to help you people, you know.”
“I know,” Ryter says. “But you will.”
“Oh, really?” Lanaya says scornfully. “How can you be so sure? What do you know about me?”
“I know that in your heart you are brave and good,” he says. “And that’s not a result of genetic improvement. You can’t engineer goodness like you can engineer a perfect nose.”
“What’s wrong with my nose?” Lanaya exclaims, touching it.
“Absolutely nothing,” Ryter tells her, sounding amused.
“You’re an ignorant old man!” she says heatedly. “You have no right to speak of such things!”
“No right to say you’re brave and good and have a perfect nose?” Ryter chuckles and rubs at his scraggly white beard. “Wait, I understand. What you really mean is, a normal doesn’t have the right to speak on equal terms with a child of Eden. Yes, that’s it,” he adds, musing to himself. “You can’t help but think that way. Superiority has been bred into you from the top of your head to the tips of your toes, and into every chromosome between. And yet still you come to the latches, first to experience adventure, and then to help. Which proves my initial impression, that you have a good heart, despite your breeding.”
All Lanaya can manage to say is, “Hmmpf!” and then she turns away and busies herself with the console. Like she doesn’t care what the old gummy thinks of her. Except even a dumb normal like me can tell she does care.
Ever since we made our escape, Little Face has been staring at her like he’s looking into the sun. When she turns her attention back to the command console, he crawls out of his seat and edges closer to her, like he’s afraid he’ll get burned but still he’s willing to take the chance just to be near her.
“Chox?” he asks in his smallest voice.
Without really looking at him, Lanaya asks, “Is this child hungry?”
“He’s always hungry,” I tell her.
“Tell him I have no choxbars. They were taken by the mob.”
“Tell him yourself,” I say.
“How dare you be so impertinent!” she says.
“I’m not being impertinent,” I explain, as gently as possible. “It’s just that Little Face wants you to pay attention to him. That’s why he asked for a choxbar. It’s the only way he knows how to talk.”
Lanaya swivels her beautiful head at me. “You mean ‘chox’ is the only word he knows?” When I nod, she says, “We’ll see about that!” Then she smiles at Little Face and goes, “My name is Lanaya. Can you say ‘Lanaya’?”
Little Face crawls back to his seat, where he snuggles up next to me, hiding his eyes from the beautiful proov girl.
“What did I do?” Lanaya asks, sounding upset.
“You did nothing wrong,” Ryter assures her. “He’s a feral child. No mother, no father, no one to care for him or raise him or teach him how to be human. So he’s existed much like an animal, without language. He thinks in images, not words.”
“How strange,” says Lanaya, sounding amazed.
Ryter shakes his head sadly. “Not strange, I’m afraid. His condition is all too common in the latches. And becoming more common every day.”
Suddenly an electronic voice speaks from the console. “PATROL VEHICLE APPROACHING,” it announces.
“Uh-oh,” Lanaya says. She issues a command to the takvee: “Evasive action. Keep out of range.”
The takvee turns and picks up speed.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Eden security patrol,” she explains. “We’re not supposed to be here. No one is. That’s why they call it the Forbidden Zone.”
“Right,” I say, feeling dumber than ever.
“If they catch us, will we be detained?” Ryter asks.
“They wouldn’t dare,” Lanaya tells him. “But I’d be reported.”
She makes being reported sound worse than being detained, but the way it works out, the takvee avoids the security patrol no problem and before long we’re crossing out of the Zone into the next latch.
The latch where Bean lives. If she still lives, which is something I can’t stand to think about, so I don’t. Of course she still lives, she has to. Bean wouldn’t dare not be alive when we’ve taken all this trouble to get to her, would she?
“Something wrong?” Ryter asks me.
“No,” I tell him. “I’m fine.”
“Uh-oh,” Lanaya says again. But this time it’s not the Eden security patrol she’s worried about. It’s what has come out of the rubble to greet us. Vandals swarming from nowhere on their jetbikes, waving splat guns and forcing us to stop.
And there, riding high and mighty on the biggest jetbike, is someone I know, someone I hoped never to see again.
Lotti Getts, boss of the Vandals, boss of the latch.
BOSS LADY. The Latch Queen. Nails. The White Widow.
Lotti has a lot of names, none of them good. Nails because she has special razors glued onto her long fingernails, razors that’ll spill your red so quick and deep, you won’t even feel it. White Widow because most of her luvmates don’t seem to live very long. She has other names, too, names that are only whispers, names that’ll get you canceled if she hears.
The first and only time Lotti Getts ever noticed me was the day I lost my family unit. And on that day Lotti tickled me with her razor nails, looked at me with eyes of stone, and said, “You’ve got bad blood, boy, and we can’t have that in our latch, can we?”
Now we’re surrounded by her gang the moment we cross into her territory. Like they knew we were coming.
“Nothing to worry about,” Lanaya announces, sounding almost cheerful. “They know me here.”
Before I can say anything, she pops out the top hatch and waves a greeting. “I come to trade!” Lanaya announces. “Let me pass!”
The Vandals rev their jetbikes so loud it makes the air feel as thick as jelly. So loud
you can almost see the noise shimmering. Exhaust flames scorch the ground, and the Vandals are all grinning in that hard, mean way they have, like they can’t wait to hurt something.
Lotti Getts raises her fist. When the engines fade away she stands up in her saddle and stares hard at Lanaya. Most normals would be afraid to stare like that at a proov, but not Lotti.
“What trade have you?” Lotti demands.
Me and Ryter and Little Face are hiding in the takvee and watching on the vidscreens, but even so I can tell that Lanaya is surprised by the question. Like nobody ever dared ask her before. “The, um, usual items,” she says, sounding uncertain. “Is there a problem?”
“Yes, there’s a problem,” Lotti says. “Someone has been running mindprobes into my latch. Probing is forbidden here, under penalty of death.” The jetbikes rev, as if in agreement.
“I’m not a runner,” Lanaya protests. “I don’t know anything about mindprobes.”
“No?”
Lotti gets off her jetbike, climbs up on the hood of the takvee like she’s mounting a throne in her stab-heel boots, and stands eye-to-eye with Lanaya. All around there’s maybe five hundred of her best and meanest Vandals armed to the teeth with splat guns and gut-rippers and armor-piercing crossbows. If Lotti gives the signal, they’ll fight until they win, or die. That’s the rule of the Vandals, win or die. And they always win.
“What are you hiding?” Lotti demands.
“Hiding?” says Lanaya. “Nothing.”
“We’ll see about that,” says Lotti. And with one hand she lifts Lanaya right out of the hatch and sets her down on the hood. On the vidscreen Lanaya’s face looks astonished, like her whole world just got tilted.
The next thing we know Lotti is looking down into the open hatch. She doesn’t seem a bit surprised to find us there. “Two choices,” she says, smiling with her teeth. “Come out or I’ll firebomb this vehicle with you in it.”
We come out. Ryter first, then Little Face, then me.
“I can explain, my lady,” says Ryter, in his grandest voice.
“Don’t ‘lady’ me,” Lotti snarls. “And don’t explain. I see what I see,” she says, looking hard at me. “And what I see is a traitor, a rule breaker, a latch runner.”
“Don’t hurt them,” I say. “They were just trying to help me.”
Lotti seems delighted to hear it. “Helping you disobey your latchboss is a killing offense,” she says. “You knew that?”
I nod.
“We all knew it,” Ryter says.
“Shut your hole, geez! I’m talking to the spaz boy. Tell me, Spaz boy, what’s in my latch worth risking your life for?”
My heart is pounding so fierce, I can hardly think, but I know if I don’t tell Lotti, she’ll slice the truth out of me anyway. “My sister,” I tell her. “I want to see my sister.”
I get the idea Lotti already knows why I’m here, that she heard all about it from Billy Bizmo. They say Billy was once her luvmate, one of the few who survived, and that’s why whenever there’s a latch war, Lotti and Billy are usually on the same side.
Lotti gets in my face, so close I can smell the anger on her breath. Like the air after lightning strikes. “Give me a reason,” she says. “A reason to let you live.”
“Let me see Bean and I’ll do anything you want.”
She strokes her razor nails under my chin. “That’s not a reason,” she says.
“I’m begging you.”
“There’s a rule against begging, Spaz boy.”
I decide maybe it’s better to shut up. Lotti’s just playing with us. She doesn’t really care why we’re here, or what we want. “You’ll do anything, eh?” she says, turning the idea around in her mind. “Hmmm, that might be interesting. Let me confer with my warriors.”
The way Lotti saunters back to the Vandals, you know she rules the ground she walks on. We can’t hear what her gang brutes have to say, but several of them nod and glance at us as they talk among themselves.
A few moments later she comes back to the takvee. “I, Lotti Getts, queen of the Vandals, boss of the latch, task you with this. Find me the probe runner. Deliver the vermin into my hands, and Spaz may visit his wretched sister. That is my ruling.”
Ryter strokes his wispy beard and says, “But my lady, there may not be time. We must —”
“Shut it!” Lotti shrieks. “Do as I command, old man. Bring me the probe runner! Do it or die!”
Even if we’d dared to object, we couldn’t have made ourselves heard over the air-shaking rumble of the jetbikes, or the earsplitting cheer of the Vandals chanting for their queen.
“Nails! Nails! Nails!” they roar. “Nails! Nails! Nails!”
Finally she rakes the cool gray sky with her red-cutting fingernails and fixes me with a pay-attention stare that says without speaking: I mean it, boy, find me the probe runner or die trying.
THE FIRST THING Lanaya wants to know is, can we get away with disobeying. “I mean, what’s to stop us from finding your sister and then just running away?” she asks.
Ryter sighs and looks at me, like he thinks I’m the one who should tell her.
“Lotti will have my family unit under watch,” I explain. “Just by coming here I’ve put them all in danger. We don’t have any choice. We have to find this stupid probe runner.”
Some runners carry messages, but some carry things to trade, forbidden things, and Lotti has forbidden probing in her territory. She must have seen what happened in the nearby latches when gangs spent more time probing than taking care of business.
“She’s an intelligent leader,” Ryter offers. “Brutal but brilliant. If Mongo had been half as smart, he’d still be Mongo the Magnificent.”
We’re back in the takvee, trying to put some distance between us and the Vandals. I expected them to follow, but so far they haven’t. Maybe Lotti thinks we’ll have a better chance of finding the runner if she’s not around. The trouble is, I’ve no idea where to start. I feel like I’m slowly falling down a bottomless black hole and the more I try to get out, the deeper I go. The worst part is, I’m dragging everybody else down with me.
“We must think deeply,” Ryter suggests. “All of us. Put our heads together and come up with a plan.”
The takvee rolls to a stop in a deserted area known to locals (and I used to be a local, remember) as the Brick Yard. All that’s left of the old buildings are huge piles of broken bricks slowly eroding into dust. Nothing lives here anymore. Nothing on two legs, that is. Even on the vidscreens the red eyes of long-tailed rodents wink like stars among the brick mountains. On certain nights — the blackest nights — the Brick Yard comes alive with a chittering that sounds like conversation, as if all the rats are trying to talk at once.
I don’t mention the rats, but Ryter notices me shivering.
“We’ll think of something,” he promises. “Lanaya, my dear, do you have any thoughts? If you were on your own, how would you go about identifying a probe runner?”
Lanaya shrugs. “I don’t know. Find where to buy the probes, I guess. That’s where I’d start.”
“Excellent!” Ryter exclaims. When the old man gets excited, his face looks younger, as if ideas have the power to melt the years away. “It has the advantage of simplicity,” he says, rubbing his withered hands together, “and the best ideas begin with simplicity. Yes indeed, child, I believe you’ve struck on a viable strategy. If we find a source for the forbidden mindfliks, we may be able to make a connection to the person supplying them — namely the probe runner.”
An idea blinks into my head. “What if we pretend we want to trade for probes?” I ask.
“Yes!” Ryter says. “Yes! Yes! Make him come to us! Brilliant!”
And that’s how we hatch a plan to become criminals, and enter the very dangerous underworld of traders who deal in things forbidden in the latch of the Vandal Queen.
Lanaya takes us to Traderville, where hundreds of merchants keep their stalls, and even the strolling beggars
have things to trade. She’s been there before and knows where to leave the takvee, and who to see.
“Let me do the talking,” she announces. “They know me here,” she adds, with her beautiful nose up in the air. Making sure that we never forget she’s Little Miss Genetically Perfect.
Traderville is this crowded-up jumble of stalls and shacks and security shelters shoved together under the old skyrails. They say in the backtimes that trains flew through the air, just overhead. Trains that moved so fast, they made their own wind. Trains that went faster than the sound they left behind. It might even be true, but the trains are gone now, and all that remains is the old elevated track system. Parts of it fall from the sky now and then, but that doesn’t stop the merchants from gathering there to trade and haggle — and steal, if they can.
They say “trader” is just another word for “thief.” I don’t know if that’s true, exactly, but you have to be very careful or you’ll go into a stall to trade for clothes, let’s say, and end up without a shirt on your back. I know because it happened to me once. Charly, my former dad, told me I’d learned a valuable lesson that was worth more than the stupid old shirt. As far as I’m concerned, the valuable lesson was “don’t bother complaining to Charly.” And, like they say, don’t give up your goods until the trade is on the table.
Lanaya leads us to the most densely crowded part of Traderville, under the rusty metal awnings that provide shade from the naked sun, or protection from the acid rain, depending on the weather. The stalls display goods from all over the Urb. Boots from Latch West, velvet capes made by the famous Beastie slave girls, ironware for cooking, every kind of edible, weaponry, body armor, exotic luv-scents guaranteed to “cloud men’s minds,” herbs and potions and poisons, holos and 3Ds, cheap crib gear (inflato chairs that leak), expensive crib gear (inflatos that don’t leak), thumpers and flutes, three-legged dogs (It Barks And It Bites But It Can’t Run Away!), twenty-eight flavors of noodle, and last but not least, choxbars.
The Last Book in the Universe Page 7