Absence. Of . . . what?
I peered into the dark trying to make sense of the lights flickering in a crisscross pattern above me.
Veiling. Electrical impulses used to created a mirage.
I’d heard of this type of thing, never seen it before. Teece said Southern Hem drug barons had invented it and sold it to the Militia. An efficient disguise if you were hiding from an air recce. It worked like a one-way mirror and from underneath the grid I could see the starry night sky - not a thing I was at all comfortable with.
I trembled.
The Tert got you like that if you stayed there long enough. It overfed you with people and place until you felt hungry and bare without it. I felt bare right now looking out into so much space. The hungry went without saying.
Eyes adjusting, I realised I’d come up on the other side of a vast wall erected along the backs of the villas. On this side it ringed a perimeter of space. I roughed its distance at, maybe, a klick wide and several long. Tall enough to obscure the rooftops.
Out towards the centre squatted several buildings flanked by an array of shadowy, upright statue shapes and a large canopy over the top. White light leaked out of the windows of one of the buildings.
A faint crackle and a whiff of ions came to me. I twitched up my olfaugs and breathed in the smell of av-gas, corrosives and electrical energy. Av-gas could have been the heavy ’copter traffic - there was enough space to land—
I suddenly lost my train of thought. Cries of celebration resonated from the bar. Something had just happened in there and its consequence carved up my insides and messed with my head.
I couldn’t remember why I was here. Or what I wanted to do. I knew I should go and explore the darkened buildings, but my sense of purpose was gone. When I should have been buying in, I bailed.
Breath short and panicky, I scrambled down through the hatch, jamming it shut behind me. Stumbling down the stairs, I paused only to scrape the milky corrosion from my boots before I made my way back to the private booth.
Shuttered against the world I swallowed what was left in the jug. The whisky further unwound my mind and body.
Something had lowered my resistance and the Eskaalim swooped in like a vulture, stripping the last of my self-confidence with a carrion cry.
Feel me, human. Feel me make ready. Feel me take you down . . .
No! A shred of denial got my legs up and moving. I stumbled through the bar toward the outside as if I could outrun it - past the barkeep passed out in the drip tray and the remaining patrons scattered in a tangle of bodies on tables.
The grainy light spoke predawn and the world teetered on the wrong side of reality.
As I pushed opened the door, the python’s lifeless body slapped me in the face. It had been nailed to the doorframe like a trophy. Right there on the doorstep I vomited up whisky. And guilt.
I wandered - stoned, possessed, fully deranged. How many names were there for it? My appetite had deserted me though it had been several days since I’d eaten. Mouth dry, senses altered.
A recurring wail and a light drumbeat echoed off the gutterless roofs and crumbling walls. I clung to the sound and followed it. Anything but this emptiness . . .
At the narrow end of an alley I found the wailer crouched, crying like a grief-stricken bird, her face daubed white and red in the manner of shamans. As I approached she raised a warding hand. Her coarse, dark hair was knotted wildly around a jumble of bones and painted beads. It framed accusatory eyes and a worn face.
Yet her power emanated like a storm.
‘You’ve abandoned your familiars. One lost, one passed back to the spirits.’
‘What familiars?’ With energy my words would have tinged hysterical, instead they rasped hollow and dry.
‘Your safe passage through the Belts and into Mo-Vay. You think it normally so easy? You were granted protection by your guides. Now they are gone. Betrayed by your selfishness when they would have showed you the path to the healing you so desire.’
‘What guides?’
She made an undulating movement with her arms.
The python?
Followed by the growl of a feral animal.
Loser?
I struggled to remember something of shaman practices. I knew their drugs of choice were distilled fungi, cactus and vines: mushrooms, peyote and caapi if they could get it. Here in The Tert, though, it was more likely to be datura or morning glory.
They said it got them to the higher places.
Mei Sheong had talked to me once of her familiars, spirits who guided her through the treachery of these planes. But they were illusory creatures, drug induced, not real animals like Loser and the python.
And yet the cynic in me was running on a dry tank. Right now I was way too vulnerable to all manner of possibilities. Hadn’t I ended up in that particular bar because I’d followed the python? In there I’d found Leesa Tulu. The coincidence of it unnerved me.
‘I didn’t know they were guides,’ I croaked. ‘How could I know that?’
She restarted a beat on her small drum. I felt my heartbeat slow to match its rhythm. As dawn stole in, she seemed to waver and fade before my eyes.
‘She calls the power of Baron Samedi and Marinette. With them she will suck you dry.’
Tulu? ‘What do I do now? Tell me . . .’ I reached out a tentative hand to her. ‘Please . . .’
She stood and hobbled away, despondent as me, out of the alley until she was lost in a jaundiced Mo-Vay day-break.
I stayed crouched in a huddle of misery, unable to find any reason to move. Had this happened to the other shape-changers? The breakdown of beliefs. The loss of purpose.
What was next? Total possession? How long before the cellular changes became irreversible? How long before the Eskaalim had its way?
I had no will to fight. Nor any idea how to atone for the loss and deaths of my spirit guides. I didn’t even know if I believed in them.
Tremors racked me instead of tears. I had no tears.
Only blur . . .
Small furred hands tugged and tapped insistently at my knee. With effort I forced my attention and focus to a child’s face. Like a distant observer I saw coarse, bristling hair on her chin, forearms and the tops of her bare leathery feet. Her head was almost bald. Her upper arms bled from deep scratches.
‘Food. Pay with hair,’ she pleaded, pulling at the few remaining tufts.
I shook my head, dimly wondering why she used the hair on her head as currency instead of the unsightly body hair.
She gave up on me and moved on to ferret among the rubbish heaped along the sides of the alley, slipping happily among the waste as if she was harvesting flowers.
I watched as she felt her way around a pile of broken furniture, first putting everything to her mouth like a baby. She stuck odd useful bits into her pockets.
I lifted a hand and tried to call to her but was defeated by my own inertia. My energy depleted in that one small movement.
A gang of thin-shouldered bigger girls came trolling the alley. Almost asleep, I took in their pre-pubescent hairless bodies and the chequered pattern of tattoos and raw, healing skin on their nakedness. Tattoo grafts.
One of the gang seized the feral child, tipping her upside down. She spat back at her tormentor, beating her with wild, desperate hands while the collection of oddments tumbled from her large pockets.
Dumping her into a pile of refuse, they pounced on it, pilfering their fancy: a used derm, a clump of hair, and a near-empty container of blue fluid.
Afterwards one of them kicked her and another tried to set fire to her arm hair with a Zippo. Another spat on her and doodled her fingers through it. Another pulled her top up and squeezed her tiny, immature nipples cruelly.
Pulse-quickening excitement steamed into me as I witnessed the torment. The parasite raptured.
Savour it . . .
No! I fought back from somewhere deeper than the Eskaalim could ever burrow.
Y
ou can’t deny me . . .
I can! My conviction grew as I twisted the tainted energy into something else. Slowly . . . so slowly . . . it grew.
The parasite shrank from it.
As the girls passed by me, laughingly callous, I sprang from nowhere like long-buried grief.
‘Back,’ I rasped. ‘Give it back.’
They spread automatically in a circle, producing shoksticks. For a bunch of pre-adolescent Mo-Vay scum they had a more than tolerable arsenal.
Dizziness came and went over me. My heart thumped painfully to meet the sudden muscular demand. Part of me wanted to kill them outright. The other part cogged some pity for their strange, wretched lives.
I wavered between the two.
Wise enough to keep some distance, one of them threw a live shok at my head. I batted it away, almost welcoming the pain - anything to dispel the numbness.
With the other hand I unsheathed the Gurkha, glaring at her. ‘You could be that kid,’ I said.
She stuck her finger to the tip of her nose in contempt. Her grafts looked so fresh they might bleed. One of them was a man’s face. Someone familiar.
‘She’s a ma’soop. You see any rug on me?’ Her feral-green pupils dilated with disgust.
‘No. But I see someone who could be her sister.’
‘We got no famlee in Mo-Vay,’ she said.
They chanted in practised accord, ‘Famlee’s a dysfunc’nal kustom. It’s got no use in pos ‘humanity.’
The crude recital sounded like it had come straight from the mouth of an idiot prophet. But which idiot prophet?
‘Here’s my phophecy.’ I lunged to my right, hauling the nearest girl into my arms, twisting her arm up hard and pressing the Gurkha across her throat. ‘Leave her alone or I’ll separate this one’s tonsils.’
‘No!’ shouted the shok thrower.
The others joined in with a screaming protest.
I smiled tight and tense at the abhorrent noise, feeling deranged as all fuck. ‘See, you do know about family.’
I shoved the girl away into the arms of her gang. In seconds they scarpered, yelling obscenities at me.
I sank back on to the pavement, weakened with the effort of speech and the confrontation. I must have dozed because the hairy kid woke me, tugging on my arm.
‘Youse can’t stay here during the daytime. Youse’ll get it. Lemme show you a place to sleep.’
Grateful for a reason to live a bit longer, I struggled after her into a villa and up a home-made ladder into the roofs.
She told me her name was Glida-Jam and pulled the ladder up behind her. Though there was no resemblance, she reminded me of Tina, the feral child who had taken out fifty ’goboys with a bio-bomb in the war - a single act that had shifted the momentum of things in the favour of me and away from Jamon.
Glida-Jam and I crawled through a warren of cut-thrus. She chivvied me along and waited patiently every time I faltered.
My body ached unendurably, wasted by too little food and its recent saturation in raw, potent booze. My compass implant told me we moved south and east in a kind of semi-circle.
Finally we stopped in a heavily boarded-up attic where slivers of light lanced through the dust from roof to mouldy ceiling. On her assertion that it was safe to stop I collapsed on a raft of planks and slept.
When I woke, Glida-Jam forced a broken beaker of fluid into my hand.
I took it shakily, wondering if the other equally hairy kids, crouched in the darkened corners of the attic, were real.
Glida forced some heavily sweetened bread on me, and more of the salty, mineral-bitter water. I sucked greedily at the bread. My tongue swelled after the water, but I felt faint fingers of hope revive along with my blood sugar.
‘I saw you in Splitty’s,’ she said.
‘Splitty’s?’
‘Splitty’s bar,’ she said impatiently. ‘Not safe for us. Too close to Home. Roof is wired.’
‘Home?’ My mind felt heavy.
She frowned, stroking the hair that bristled out from the back of her hand. ‘Where we was reborn. The flying angels brought us there and let God remake us.’
That word ‘reborn’ again. I tried to make sense of it but the meaning slipped away and I dozed.
The next time I woke stiff all over but better able to concentrate. She gave me more water and bread and with it my mind got sharper. I saw rather than sensed the small, furtive creatures gathered at the fringe of the light.
‘How long have I been asleep?’ I asked.
She made a hand motion. One half of a circle. A full day. I was running out of time.
‘No more bread,’ she told me.
I chewed the last mouthful slowly, smiling to show my appreciation. ‘I’m looking for a shaman, named Leesa Tulu. You know her?’ I asked.
The girl shook her head. ‘Not know that one. Only know Home.’ In frustration she started plucking at the hair along the top of her feet, twisting it into tiny plaits.
I rubbed my eyes and nose with the back of my hand and tried another tack. ‘Tell me how you get there? To your . . . home.’
She shook her head. ‘Youse crazy if youse go there,’ she pronounced.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tell me about it. I can’t pay you. But if you want, afterwards I can take you away from here.’
She stared at me in disbelief. In the shadows, the others gave a perceptible murmur. ‘Can youse take me to the city? Torlee’s?’
‘How do you know the name Torley’s? I’d never heard of Mo-Vay. Where I come from, we call this place Dis.’
She blinked. A flush crept up her hairy neck and into her cheeks. ‘I’se met someone from there.’
‘Who?’ I snapped, immediately thinking of Loyl.
‘He’s’ll come here soon. Youse’ll see.’
Chapter Eleven
Glida gave me a muddled idea of the physical layout and the distances around Home. When I tried wringing more detail from her, the feral couldn’t explain it.
‘Youse’ll know - when youse see it,’ she said.
‘See what, Glida?’
‘How it is.’
‘How is it?’
‘Youse’ll see.’
I gave that up and tried working sideways. ‘How come you never left here?’
‘I never heard of no other place now the monsters have taken over.’
‘Monsters?’
‘On the other side of the water.’
‘Those are just animals. Lizards and canrats.’ The monsters are here. ‘Who’s that hiding in the shadows, Glida?’
She made more clicking noises, interspersed with single words. I’d heard some weird lingo before, and could speak some pidgin myself, but this patois . . .
Half a dozen children crept forward. Like Glida-Jam, hair covered them in places usually reserved for bare skin. Unlike her, they closely resembled ugly monkeys. They smelt like them as well. Several of them dragged primate tails.
Shock made me recoil.
‘This is my . . . what’d youse call it? . . . My famlee.’ She gestured grandly.
‘How did this happen?’ I cried.
Glida frowned, confused. ‘What’d youse mean? They’s belong to Ike. We’s all do. Only they’s didn’t work.’
Didn’t work? I took a breath. ‘Where I live, some kids have mekanical parts. We call them Pets. Medics fooled around on them, is that how it happened?’
‘Just one medic, boss.’
I swivelled where I crouched. ‘You!’ I accused the darkness.
Roo picked his way across the cut-thru and balanced on the beam in front of me. He scratched his hair under his hat. In the other hand he carried a pack. ‘Yeah. Me.’
‘What the—’
‘Teece told me to tell you that if you send me back he’s quitting his day job.’
‘That’s blackmail!’ I growled.
‘Yeah.’
Glida crept up to him and put a small, furred hand
tentatively on his arm.
‘She’s . . . jus’ like youse said,’ whispered Glida. ‘Nuts.’
I felt annoyed - and pleased beyond words - to see Roo. ‘How did you find—?’
‘Him.’ He un-Velcroed the sack and a mangy canrat poked his head out.
‘Loser!’ I felt like the moon had suddenly risen on a pitch-black night.
‘That what you call him?’ said Roo. ‘I’ve been trailing you since back before the canal.’ His eyes widened. ‘How’s them dinosaurs?’
‘Lizards,’ I snapped. ‘You mean you watched all that happen and didn’t lift a damn finger to help me?’
‘Teece said not to interfere unless you was frigged. I figured you could handle it . . . mostly.’
Mostly!
Roo was scratching again. ‘Beats me how he fixed up that big canrat.’
Loser scrambled out of the pack on to the ceiling floor. I stared hypnotised by the mangy creature scratching its balls with its extra half foot. ‘Charisma.’
‘Car-what?’
I sighed. ‘Never mind.’
‘I lost you for a while after that but he found me near the canal. He was barking so hard I guessed you must have dumped him. Anyways he jumped on the raft I made.’ He held up corroded digits on his left hand. ‘That water bites.’
‘Copper sulphate,’ I said automatically.
‘He sat on my head the whole way across. Then wouldn’t let me touch him. I guess you two got some special . . . y’know . . . bond.’
My mouth opened and closed, suffocating fish-like.
‘I found you again near that bar. She came along while you was drinkin’ and I was waitin’.’ He nodded to Glida. ‘She was stealing food. While I wuz watchin’ her I lost you again. She showed me some safe place to sleep.’
His injured hand tightened on Glida’s furry arm in gratitude. Glida grinned at him, and the flush crept back on to her face.
Not to be ignored, Loser limped over to me, panting like trouble. Unable to stop myself I scratched his matted, vermin-riddled hide. The movement sent energy and certainty flooding through me. Whether Loser was my spirit guide or just a filthy piece of fur, I didn’t care. I wouldn’t dump him again.
Inside I felt the shrinking Eskaalim protest at the sentiment.
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