He looked at the wall. Beyond it, Addy was in her own bedroom, and Marco ached to go to her, to hug her, just to feel her warmth, to let her presence comfort him. But he dared not. He feared the rage that had been growing in her. He closed his eyes and he slept.
In his dreams, as always, he was back there. In the hives. Sometimes it was the mines of Corpus, other times the sprawling labyrinth of Abaddon, but most times Marco couldn't tell the difference. He was racing through the tunnels, as he did every night, desperate to find a way out, the scum pursuing him.
There were always monstrosities in the tunnels. Human and scum hybrids. His undead friends, risen to haunt him, deformed into terrors with centipede bodies. But tonight he saw a different creature in the hives. She stood in shadows, watching him, clad in a wispy gray dress. Her long black hair framed a kabuki mask, and she stared at him through the eye holes. Her arms were long, too long, gray and knobby, and they ended with hands the size of her mask, three clawed fingers growing from each palm.
"Who are you?" the girl whispered.
Marco's eyes snapped open. He was back on the floor of his bedroom, drenched in cold sweat. He couldn't breathe. He still felt trapped. Every breath was a struggle, and he was so hot, dying of heat, suffocating. It was so dark.
Morning dawned hard, foul, and full of hot, stinking wind. The storms of New Earth painted the world umber and mustard today, and stinging ash flew everywhere. They stepped outside. In the courtyard, the junkie was sleeping by the garbage bin. The two pimps—the thin slender one and the ugly brute—were already at work, showing off their photo album to passersby. Marco cringed to see a man park his car and hold out a wad of cash. One of the prostitutes, a middle-aged woman with a bandaged nose, entered the back seat. The car drove away. Marco walked on.
Without their atmosuits, it was a miserable slog to the subway station. For two kilometers they ran. They stuck the nozzles of their air bags straight into their mouths, able to breathe during the journey—just stale air they had collected from their apartment—but couldn't save their skin. They arrived at the station covered in grime, panting. Inevitably, some of the foul air entered their nostrils, entered their lungs, burning. Marco wondered what diseases he was allowing into his body, what rotting death would someday bloom inside him. For now, he had no choice. It had been sell the suits or starve.
For a miserable eight hours, they walked through the underworld, trudging through the tunnels that spread below the city. Many of these tunnels were used for the subways, but others were for foot traffic, clogged with Havenites, lined with shops and eateries. Below each high rise, a staircase led to the lobby. Marco and Addy climbed into every office building, knocked on doors, asked for work, were turned away.
A receptionist wrinkled her nose, staring at Marco and Addy's shabby clothes.
"Next time wear business suits," she said.
In another office, a security guard reached for his gun. "Go, get lost! No soliciting."
At one company that manufactured medical supplies, a kind old Indian chemist sat them down, listened to their story, nodded sympathetically, and promised to be in touch should a position become available. They had no phone numbers for him to jot down. They left, still unemployed, but each holding a tin of curry from the chemist's wife.
"Maybe some of the mom and pop shops in the tunnels need somebody," Addy said. They sat on a subway platform, eating the curry chicken. "Somebody to man the cash register, or sweep, or stock shelves."
Marco looked at the shops. One sold a thousand kinds of dried mushrooms. Another sold dirty movies and sex toys. In a third shop, an old woman sold pancakes she was frying up on a greasy griddle. In a fourth shop, women in lingerie stood on pedestals. A blond man in a pinstripe suit walked up, examined the women, pointed at one, and escorted her into the shadows.
"I don't know about this," Marco said, but still they tried a few shops—giving the brothel a wide berth. They were beyond pride, would gladly have taken minimum wage, part time, anything that could stave off homelessness and hunger. Again they were turned away from shop after shop.
"Well, at least we got curry," Marco said when they returned home that evening.
"I'm still hungry," Addy said. "Fuck it, maybe we should panhandle. I'm not too proud to beg."
Marco's stomach growled. "Let's cook more rice."
That evening, Addy finally opened her can of Spam, the one she had carried with her all the way from Fort Djemila five years ago, her souvenir from boot camp. They fried it up and ate it with the rice. They finished their last can of corn. Tomorrow, unless they begged or found work, it would be just plain sticky rice and tap water.
"Marco, I have an idea," Addy said when their meal was done. "Why don't you write an intergalactic bestselling novel that makes us millionaires? I mean it. I'm not mocking you this time. You need to write again. How long has it been since Loggerhead?"
"Four years," Marco said. "I've written many short stories since then. Novellas too. No other novels."
Addy grabbed his backpack and pulled out his notebooks. Some of them, years old, contained his original manuscript for Loggerhead. The other notebooks were still empty.
"Well, either sell this one or write a new one!" Addy said. "A more commercial one. There are still empty notebooks and you have a few more pens."
Marco looked at the notebooks, at the ones with Loggerhead and the ones still empty.
"I've tried to sell Loggerhead," he said. "You know that. It's not like the old days before the Cataclysm. Back then, you could just upload your book to the internet. Anyone could. And you'd find readers, make a few bucks. But now . . ." He sighed. "The golden age of ebooks is over. You have to sell it to a publisher these days. There are only five publishers, all of them on Earth, and they've all turned down Loggerhead." He pulled his rejection letters out from one notebook. "See? They all say the same thing. Thank you, but we receive hundreds of submissions a day, and we can only publish one or two new novelists a year. It's hopeless."
Addy grabbed the rejection letters from him. Before he could stop her, she tore them up.
"Well, fuck them," she said. "And fuck Loggerhead. Come on, Poet. I love you, but a book about a turtle? You need to write something people want to read. Not about fucking sea turtles. Write about . . . swords. Guns. Shit like that. Add some sex. Some hockey."
"People don't want to read about hockey," Marco said.
"Sure they do! You can make me a character. I can defeat evil monsters by whacking them to death with my hockey stick. Maybe your villains can be mutant turtles."
"Ninjas?" Marco said.
Her eyes widened. "Yes! I like the way you think."
Marco sighed. Obviously, Addy was not a twentieth century buff like he was.
That night, as Addy retired to her room, Marco sat on the living room floor with his notebooks. He took a pen, an empty notebook, and sat for a long time.
No words came.
After an hour of staring at the blank page, he began to draw.
He scribbled aimlessly. He drew himself in a towering prison cell, arms over his head, a single ray of light falling on him from a window high above. Serpents coiled in the shadows, threatening to constrict him. He flipped the page, drew another drawing, this one of tunnels delving deep, a network, a small figure lost within it. On a third page, he drew an anguished face, claws reaching out to grab it.
On a fourth page, he found himself drawing the feline schoolgirl from All Systems Go!, the anime show he had seen posters of. She stood ready for battle, holding her katana, her black hair flowing in the wind, ready to fight the evil agents who sought to capture her, to study her superhuman powers. Except as Marco kept sketching, he found that instead of giving her a Japanese schoolgirl outfit, he was drawing the girl with a long, wispy, tattered dress. Instead of cat ears, he gave her a kabuki mask, its expression blank.
The drawing seemed to stare at him.
A whisper filled the apartment.
Who are
you?
Marco dropped his pen, and his heart burst into a gallop. Eyes. Eyes were staring at him from the kitchen! He spun around, stared at the shadows. Nothing. Nothing there.
It was just the humming air filtration system. Had to be. The damn vents were probably a century old, dating back to Haven's founding, and rumbled and moaned when the storms outside swelled. Or perhaps it was the junkie speaking outside, the one who rummaged through the garbage bin for needles; that bin was directly below the kitchen window.
But Marco had seen this girl in the kabuki mask before. And not just in his dreams. Not just in his notebook. He had seen her in an alleyway, standing under a poster of All Systems Go! He had seen her on the subway.
"Or am I going completely crazy?" he said. "And now I'm talking to myself too."
He returned to his notebook. He stared at the girl. She was part All Systems Go!—the katana, the fighting stance. But she had the ashy dress and kabuki mask of the shadowy figure he had seen. Around her, he began to drawn her enemies, creating claws, fangs, webs, until spiders appeared. Spiders with huge jaws. With skulls on their backs. Skyscrapers rose around them, and a neon sign hung in the background, proclaiming: Girls! Girls! Girls!
Marco paused for a moment. He scratched out the sign. He added a new sign above it. Kill! Kill! Kill!
"Kill 'em, girlie," Marco said. "Kill or be killed."
He wrote words beneath her: Le Kill.
He paused again. Then he added: A novel by Marco Emery.
He flipped the page and began to write the first chapter.
* * * * *
He sat at the breakfast table, meaning the pizza box on the floor, eating sticky rice. His eyes were bleary, his stomach rumbling.
"God, I wish we had coffee." He rubbed his eyes and yawned. "I've been up late writing your damn book."
Addy gasped. "Did you add hockey?"
"No hockey."
"Turtles? Ninja turtles?"
"No turtles this time, Ads."
She leaped toward the corner, grabbed his notebook, and flipped to the first page. She read the title out loud. "Le Kill." She frowned and looked up at him. "Le Kill? What does that mean?"
"It's French," Marco said. "It means the. The Kill."
Addy placed her hands on her hips. "So why didn't you just write The Kill?"
"Because it doesn't sound as good."
She flipped another page. "Hey, the rest is in English! I thought you said it's French."
"Addy! For God's sake. I don't speak French. Just a few words. Just half the title is in French. For literary effect."
She scrunched her lips. "I think hockey has more of an effect than French. What's it about, anyway?"
"It's cyberpunk," Marco said. "About a futuristic, crumbling metropolis, full of urban decay, neon lights, graffiti, drugs, and gangs. A girl named Tomiko is the heroine. She wields a katana, and she hides her identity behind a kabuki mask. She fights mutant spiders created underground by an evil corporation—the same corporation that gave her super senses, that now tries to capture her, to experiment on her. It's an urban noir tour de force full of hailing gunfire, social breakdown, dark technology, and the seedy underbelly of a high-tech world. It's—Addy. Addy! Stop writing in my notebook!" He snatched it from her.
"What? I was just adding hockey turtles!"
"No hockey turtles!" Marco said.
"What if they're low-life cyberpunk junkie turtles with tattoos?"
"No! Now get ready, Ads. Put on your best clothes and your best smile and a-hunting we will go."
They left the apartment. They ran for two kilometers, breathing from their air bags. They delved into the tunnels. They kept searching for work.
Every day—a run. Burning nostrils. No money for trains, so they walked, crawling through these tunnels, these hives of man, as stifling as the hives of insects. Receptionist after receptionist. Frown after frown. A shameful trip to the soup kitchen, where they picked up more canned corn, more sticky rice. And more anxious looks from Grant. And another threatening letter from Grant's father-in-law, warning of eviction.
"Wear a suit next time."
"Is this how you show up looking for work?"
"We're just not hiring right now."
"You mean you have no experience in this field?"
Day after day. Days of grime and hunger. Nights of writing Le Kill, of vanishing into the nightmarish, decaying world of neon lights, of mutant spiders, of girls with kabuki masks and katanas fighting the agents of an evil corporation. Days of pimps and prostitutes. Of junkies digging through garbage bins. Nights of spiders, nights of sirens and gunfire and flashing blades, of Tomiko leaping between skyscrapers, cutting down nefarious agents. Nights of men outside his apartment, handing over money, buying women for an hour. Day after day, and the two worlds—the world of Haven and the world of Le Kill—blended in Marco's mind. His existence had become one of dark fantasy, and when he saw the kabuki girl again one day, eating noodles in an eatery by a subway platform, then vanishing when he approached, he didn't know reality from fiction.
Every day, Grant seemed more uncomfortable when he saw them, his "good morning!" less enthusiastic. Soon he began to mumble about his father-in-law running out of patience, the bastard. Then he warned, eyes dour, that the firm was preparing eviction papers, "but I'll fight them off as hard as I can, same as we fought the scum together on Abaddon." And Marco knew it was a losing fight.
"Look," Addy said the morning the first warning letter appeared posted to their door. "Here's the plan. We find the next spaceship heading to Earth. We hide ourselves in suitcases. And we sneak on board."
"Yes, because spaceport security will never suspect two suitcases with legs hopping into the cargo bay," Marco said. "Especially one that keeps talking about hot dogs."
Addy scrunched her lips and tapped her chin. "All right. New plan. We find a junkyard. We build a spaceship out of old vacuum cleaners and popcorn machines, and—"
"Addy!"
"—and when the engine runs, it'll make us fresh popcorn, and—"
"Addy!" Marco waved the notice at her. "This says we have only a week to find a job. This is no time for joking."
Addy turned away from him. She faced the apartment window. The storm had finally died down, revealing the brick wall of the neighboring building. Her fists tightened, and she was silent for a long moment.
Finally she blurted out, "I got a job offer."
Marco frowned. "Addy, what—when—?"
"A few days ago," she said, still staring at the window.
"What—?" Marco laughed. "Addy! That's great. Isn't it? You're not smiling. It's not something . . . demeaning, is it?"
She spun around and punched him—hard. "It's not being a stripper, if that's what you mean. Though I'm sure you'd love to see that." She sighed. "It's to be a security guard. On the subway. For the rougher stops, some that had assaults and burglaries."
Marco thought for a moment, not sure how he felt. Finally he said, "That's not bad. That's a good start."
"Poet, I came to Haven to get away from fighting in tunnels," Addy said. "And it wouldn't even be as a soldier! It would be just me and a baton and a fucking Taser. Standing there all day. In the dark tunnel. With all the nightmares of Corpus and . . ." She bit down on her words. "And I don't know. But I have no choice. So tomorrow I'll show up and see if they'll still have me." She raised her fist. "But you better finish that killer turtles book of yours and make a fortune!"
Along with his relief—by God, soon they'd be able to buy more than rice—he felt guilt. He wanted to contribute too. It felt unfair that Addy should support them both. The next morning, as Addy went to her new security firm, Marco continued his search, finding no more leads, only more raised noses.
That evening, he returned home, dejected, to find Addy in a security uniform. The uniform was navy blue, and a baton, a flashlight, and handcuffs hung from her belt. A bruise spread across her cheek, and her knuckles were cut.
"Addy!" he rushed toward her. "What happened?"
She looked at him, eyes damp. "You should see the other guy." She sniffed. "I can't have a gun yet. I'll get one in a month, they said." She pointed at a plastic bag in the corner. "I bought you a gift."
"Let me take care of your knuckles," he said. "Addy, what—"
"Forget it!" she roared, clenching her lacerated fists. "Go open your present."
Inside the plastic bag were clothes. Black dress pants. A button-down white shirt. A blue tie. A poncho to ward off the ash that forever fell here.
"They paid me my salary in advance," Addy said. "Benefit for veterans of Abaddon. I got some canned goods too, and there's meat in the fridge, and—Poet. Poet! Enough with your sappy hugging!"
But he kept hugging her. His eyes dampened. "Thank you, Addy. Thank you."
"Get off!" She squirmed free. "You're getting my uniform dirty." But soon she was smiling. "Now you won't look like a stinky pig when you go job hunting. Just like a sweet smelling therapy pig."
On his first day job hunting with his new shirt and tie, Marco found a job.
It was in a cluttered call center, a warehouse crammed full of desks. It paid minimum wage and offered no benefits. It was ninety minutes away from their apartment. But it was a paying job and he took it and that evening, he used his first paycheck to buy Addy a rake and hot dogs. They stood in their kitchen, holding the rake, roasting ten hot dogs over the stove while laughing like idiots. After two months of privation and hunger, it was one of their best nights, and they spilled the rice out the window and let the storm claim the grains. The rice flew in the wind like a million snowflakes and vanished into the night.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ben-Ari sat, chained to the chair, head lowered.
Above her, the judge loomed like a vulture over a carcass.
"Captain Einav Ben-Ari." His voice boomed through the shadowy courthouse. "You have been accused of the following." He listed her crimes. Theft of military property. Assaulting a superior officer. Resisting arrest. Hacking into secure military databases. Orchestrating a prison break. With each crime listed, the crowd murmured. Ben-Ari did not look up.
Earth Fire (Earthrise Book 4) Page 19