Landfall (The Reach, Book 2)

by Mark R. Healy

  The visions were the stuff of nightmares, not for their content, but for their intrusive nature. They were both unwanted and beyond her control. After her first encounter with them, she had avoided contact with anyone for more than two weeks, locking herself away in a dark and disused cellar, crawling out only at night to scrounge for food when there was no one on the streets. The pickings were slim and often disgusting, whatever she could get, and there was not enough of them for her to survive long-term.

  Malnourishment began to make her weak, and after a time she realised that there was no choice left to her. She would have to go back out into the daylight, back into the street to ply her trade. It was either that or starve to death in the darkness.

  She had been afraid the day that she’d sat down next to the fruit stall again. So afraid. And the images had surged toward her almost immediately, like ghastly spectres whose only goal was to torment and destroy her, to drive her over the brink of insanity.

  That first day she had simply sat there and wept, praying for it to stop.

  But she didn’t give up. The next morning was much the same as the first for a few hours, until she gathered up every last scrap of courage within her and came to a decision – a decision that would change her life forever.

  She decided to stop being the victim. With every ounce of strength that she possessed, she began to push back against the visions, tentative at first, but bolder by the minute. An odd kind of fury had welled up within her, a resentment that she should lose the sanctuary of her mind, the one place she could always retreat to on the street, and something miraculous happened. To her surprise she realised that the images obeyed her. When she pushed at them they went away.

  A few days later she developed the ability to selectively block or admit any image she wanted, or even close her mind like a clamp when it was required and shut everything out. She also realised that these were not hallucinations, not the product of her own consciousness. They were the thoughts and memories of the people around her.

  She saw an old woman at a trinket stall poring over a bottle of perfume, her wrinkled and leathery hands clasping it as tremors wracked her fingers. As the old woman sniffed the contents, Ursie saw an image materialise – that of a young blonde girl looking up at an older woman who was applying the same perfume to her wrists.

  Ursie knew immediately that the young girl was the old woman herself, a far-distant memory from many years before.

  Ursie made the connection, understood what she was experiencing with a kind of unexplainable surety. This ability to see the thoughts of those around her did not have to be viewed as a curse, but instead could be regarded as a gift.

  As she practised, Ursie found that if she allowed these projections to drift toward her, she could open her own mind and envelope them, as if she were placing invisible arms around the other person’s thoughts. And when she did that, she also found that she could begin to influence them. With the right amount of nudging and tweaking, she could subtly influence the thoughts that she embraced, manipulating them to her will.

  After that day she never went hungry again.

  Now as she looked at the stream of people moving past her in Habitat Thirty-One, she saw very different thoughts stretching out toward her. These people were not concerned about where their next meal might come from, or finding a doctor for a sick child. They were preoccupied with their appearance, with their shopping agenda, the amount of time it would take before they arrived at their chosen habitat somewhere out in the solar system.

  Ursie was baffled. These people were so foreign to her that she had no idea how to interpret their cognitive processes or how to best use those thoughts to suit her own ends.

  “What are you doing?”

  Ursie jumped, gasping. Van Asch had returned and he now stood before her, looking down at her with knitted brows. He had still not removed those impenetrable aviator sunglasses.

  “Uh, nothing,” Ursie stammered. “Just waiting.”

  Van Asch sat down beside her and placed his suitcase by his feet.

  “I should caution you,” he said slowly, enunciating each word. “You should not be reaching out with your… abilities. Not here.”

  “No, I–”

  “This is not the dung heap anymore. You’re not amongst the downtrodden, the worthless. You’re amongst educated people now, people who are not so easily examined. Not so easily swayed.”

  “Yeah, sure. I get it.”

  “And I will caution you about one other thing.” He turned to face her directly. “Do not try to read me. I work among people with your abilities for a living, and I’ve been trained to protect myself against intrusion. I would consider it a betrayal of trust if you were to try digging around inside my head. Is that understood?”

  Ursie nodded meekly, not wanting to get on the guy’s bad side.

  “Yeah. No problem, Mr. van Asch.”

  He reached up and adjusted his sunglasses. “You’re wondering about these, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  He smiled. “I don’t have to be a mind reader to figure that out.”

  She laughed. “I guess I’ve been staring at you.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, relaxing his shoulders and leaning back into a more comfortable position. “Perfectly natural to be curious.” He waved his hand at the windows above. “It’s the sunlight, you see. Here, so close to the sun, I find it so bright. It’s unbearable. I’ve spent too much time out on Callisto, where things are far dimmer, generally speaking.”

  “Callisto?” Ursie said, her mind racing. “Is that where we’re going?”

  “Yes, but uh…” He paused and rubbed at his chin, uncertain.

  “What is it?” Ursie said, alarmed.

  “Well. I have some bad news.”

  17

  Knile watched Roman as the boy turned the stick of meat over and eyed it distastefully. Roman glanced back at Knile, his eyes full of doubt.

  “This thing is truly disgusting,” he said.

  Knile grinned at him as he bit into his own chow stick.

  “You’ve been living the good life in Grove for too long, Roman,” he said good naturedly. “All of that fresh produce has left you spoilt.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I could check to see if they have a raspberry soufflé?”

  Roman rolled his eyes and half grinned at the jibe. Then he drew the cube-like wad of meat that was stuck to the end of the stick toward his lips and took a tentative bite.

  “Yep,” he said thoughtfully. “Tastes as bad as it looks.”

  “Chow sticks are full of essential vitamins,” Knile said facetiously. “And right now they’re all we have to eat.”

  “What meat is this, anyway?”

  Knile shrugged. “That’s the great thing about chow sticks. You never really know. Could be rat, weasel–”

  “Human?”

  “If you’re lucky.”

  They sat side by side on a pair of stools at the counter of a little snack outlet as the proprietor, a little man with a thin moustache who was as greasy as his wares, regarded them while he cleaned a steel spatula. Named ‘Tuckerbox’, the place had been the only eatery open in the middle of the night in this part of Gaslight, the others shut up tight behind graffitied steel roller doors.

  “Lamb,” the proprietor said in a thick accent. “That’s what you eat there.”

  “Lamb turds?” Roman said.

  The proprietor scowled. “Finest ingredients,” he said in his broken English, waving the spatula at them. “All meat imported.”

  “Yeah, I can guess where this is imported from,” Roman grimaced. “The sewers out in the slums.”

  “It’s protein, and it’ll fill you up,” Knile said. “Keep you going. That’s all you need right now.”

  “Shouldn’t we actually be walking instead of sitting here? What if we’re late for meeting Talia?”

  “We’re on time.” Knile glanced at his watch. “Rest your leg
s for a minute while we eat. There’s still a long way to go.”

  Roman looked as though he were about to say something, then seemed to think better of it.

  “Something on your mind?” Knile said.

  Roman shrugged, but then turned his body to look at Knile more squarely.

  “I wanted to hate you,” Roman said soberly. “You and Talia both.”

  Knile had been waiting for this, and in some ways was surprised it had taken this long.

  “You probably have every right to, Roman. We sent you off to Grove instead of asking what you really wanted. Instead of listening to what you had to say.”

  “Yeah. I guess you did.” Roman chewed a greasy piece of meat and swallowed uneasily. “But you came back for me. You could be off-world by now, but you chose not to go.”

  Knile nodded. “In the end it wasn’t really a choice, Roman. I had to come back.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth… thank you.” Roman seemed embarrassed by opening up in this way, but Knile was thankful for what he had said. It meant a lot to him that Roman had, in some small way, found a way to forgive him.

  Knile smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  He took another bite and glanced around the marketplace. It was a lonely sight at this time of night. There was an old man in a yellow station cap cleaning stains off the floor nearby with a mop, and a drunk who’d passed out on the other side of the thoroughfare, but otherwise there was no one else to be seen.

  “I kinda expected more,” Roman said absently as he too stared across the marketplace.

  “Huh? More what?”

  “The Reach, I mean. I expected life to be better for these people than down in Link.”

  Knile cast his eye again over the drab surroundings – the grey, rusted walls and scuffed walkways, the cramped confines and shadowy corners.

  “Not here. Not in Gaslight. Sure, the people who live here are one step closer to the Wire than those in Link, but they still do it tough.”

  Knile had to remind himself that the boy had never really seen the Reach before, apart from the lower levels that he had frequented while working on Grove convoys. Roman had lived all of his life in Link. After all of those years staring up at the place and dreaming what it would be like within, Knile could understand Roman’s feeling of being underwhelmed. Gaslight itself was nothing special to look upon.

  “Things aren’t so bad up in Lux,” Roman said.

  “Sure, they eat better. They have more shiny things to play with.” Knile dabbed some grease from the corner of his mouth. “How much of it did you actually see?”

  “A little. Honeybul took me straight to Rojas’ place, and after they did the deal I went inside. That’s when the bastard jabbed me. Knocked me out with some kind of drug.”

  Knile stopped chewing for a moment and leaned forward, concerned.

  “You haven’t spoken about it yet,” he said carefully. “Did he do anything to you? Did he–?”

  “How should I know? I was out to it. When I came to, I was alone in the room and tied up like a hog. By the time I’d loosened up the ropes I heard him coming back, so I pretended to be asleep.”

  “And that’s when I got there?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. He asked me some weird questions. Called me by some other name.” Roman shrugged. “Who knows? The guy’s a basket case.”

  “What do you think he wanted with you?”

  “Don’t know. I didn’t want to hang around to find out. When his back was turned I slipped free and slammed him across the head, and that’s when you walked in.”

  “Well, you got out. That’s the main thing.”

  Roman turned the stick over and began to eat from the other side.

  “What about the other Candidates?” Roman said. “You said you gave the old man a good scare.”

  “Yeah, I did. I’m going to keep tabs on our friend Honeybul. If he doesn’t shut the program down and let the kids go, I’ve told him he’s going to take a leap from a very great height.”

  Roman raised an eyebrow. “You’d kill him?”

  “I won’t need to. He’s spineless. He’ll do what he’s told.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  Knile picked the last morsel from the chow stick and placed it down on the counter, then picked up a new one.

  “I guess I should have asked you this before,” Knile said, changing the topic. “Where do you want me to take you?”

  Roman’s brow furrowed. “I don’t get you.”

  “Well,” Knile explained, “I assumed that if you had the choice of where to go from here, that you’d want to come off-world with me. If you don’t, you should speak up now. I’m not going to force you into anything.”

  “You mean, would I rather just go back to Grove?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, I don’t want that.”

  “You don’t like it there?”

  Roman sighed. “Giroux had me working on his financials for a while. I’m good with numbers.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Knile grinned. “Remember all those nights you complained when I made you do sums? And how I told you they’d come in handy one day?”

  “Oh, learned master,” Roman drawled. He made a mocking bow. “You are so wise.”

  “Gratitude,” Knile huffed.

  “Anyway, Skinny was Giroux’s regular financials guy, but he got sick and there was no one else around.” Roman paused. “I saw enough to know that things aren’t going well for Giroux. Grove is a sinking ship. There’s no long-term future there.”

  “So that’s why you joined the Candidate program?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t see a point in waiting around for the whole thing to come crashing down. Better to get out of there before that happened.” He picked something out of his teeth and tossed it away. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s a nice place. I just can’t see how it’s going to last. And I’m sick of worrying about whether or not I’m going to have somewhere to live next week or next month. Y’know? I want some security. Seems every place I ever lived in has fallen apart.”

  “So you’re happy to come along for the ride with Talia and me?”

  Roman shrugged. “Sure. I don’t see a better option right now.” He seemed to think of something. “How are you going to do that, by the way? Get all three of us off-world.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “And how are you going to get Talia inside the Reach?”

  “I haven’t figured that out either, but I’m sure there’ll be some way to do it.”

  “You certain of that? There’s a lot of security down there at the gate.”

  “There’s always a way through.”

  Roman gave him a sceptical look. “You think?”

  “The Enforcers aren’t really interested in keeping one hundred percent of the illegals out. That’s not really feasible, not with the resources they have. As long as they hit ninety-five, ninety-six percent, they’re happy. They’d have to make a lot of changes to catch that last five percent, and they’re not going to do that. Too much hard work.”

  Roman nodded. “I remember that you used to come and go from the Reach all the time.”

  “Exactly. When I had all of my contacts, the people who could do things for me, I could slip in and out whenever I wanted. I was one of those five percent they couldn’t be bothered catching.”

  “In the end, I hardly saw you,” Roman said. His voice was even, containing no bitterness, as if he were simply recalling a routine event. “You’d spend weeks at a time up here.”

  “Yeah. I was busy learning everything I could about the Reach.” He gave Roman a rueful look. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you–”

  “Look,” Roman said, holding up his palm, “we’ve been over this. It’s all right. You don’t have to keep apologising because you had your own things to do.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “You want beer?” the proprietor interjected. “I have good Martian beer.” He held up a bottle with
‘Red Dust Lager’ printed on the label. “Imported. Finest ingredients.”

  “Tuckerbox only stocks the best, right?” Knile said wryly. He gave Roman a wink.

  “Tuckerbox best, yes,” the man said, oblivious to Knile’s mocking tone.

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Five creds,” the man persisted. “Bargain.”

  Knile ignored him and turned back to Roman, then jabbed a thumb over his shoulder.

  “Do you want another chow stick?”

  “Shit, no.”

  “Let’s get moving, then.”

  Roman tossed the remains of his chow stick on the counter, then they both pushed off their stools and began to walk away.

  “Four creds!” the proprietor called after them. “And free chow stick!”

  “Maybe next time,” Knile called back. He clapped Roman on the shoulder. “There. Don’t you feel better now with a chow stick in your belly?”

  “No. I feel sick to my stomach.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get used to the fine cuisine of Gaslight in time.” Knile glanced around as he planned out where to go next. “Now let’s go find Talia.”

  18

  The man known as Mr. Silvestri sat across the table from Talia, watching her carefully as the other patrons in the crowded tavern laughed and drank and did whatever else tavern patrons do at two in the morning. Talia wished she were just another among their ranks, someone who had come out for the night for some fun and who could simply lose her troubles at the bottom of a pint of ale.

  Instead she was here trying to make a deal with a dangerous man she hardly knew.

  Silvestri continued to sit there, arched back in his chair as he idly turned an antique silver coin over in his fingers. He regarded her with a measuring look but said nothing. He was a dark-skinned man dressed smartly in a burgundy satin vest, and around his neck he wore a heavy gold chain that matched a gold front tooth that Talia had glimpsed when he’d offered her a welcoming smile. He was somewhat guarded, reserved, she thought, playing his cards close to his chest. While he hadn’t been outwardly threatening, she couldn’t help but feel a little unnerved by his demeanour.