Cat hadn’t answered my question but had walked on ahead of me in silence, a sudden tightness in her person belying a nervousness that betrayed her in the shaking of her small-boned hands, in the taut line of her shoulders beneath the ripped dress she wore over her scant frame. I repeated myself. “Why do the coloni scare them?”
She looked back over her shoulder at me, brow furrowed as if I were the stupidest man she’d ever met. “They’re demons, Had. Why don’t they scare you?”
I had no answer to that. Only a glimmer of the curiosity and excitement that had moved me through books and holographs as a boy. “You think we can do this?”
“Steal from the coloni?” She shrugged, pausing at a fork in the culvert to get her bearings. Dimly I could hear the tread of several thousand feet in the bazaar above our heads, dull and constant thunder covering up the susurrus of human voices, bleeding down through stone as from another world. “It’s not hard. They don’t guard the fish.” She moved down the path to the left.
I followed after her, kicking my knees up to move more precisely in the water behind her. My added height was a boon and made my progress easier even as my head threatened to scrape the ceiling. “What’s the problem, then?” I kept my eyes on the swaying of her narrow hips in the gloom, on the way the damp fabric of her dress clung to her frame.
She looked back at me, eyes flashing in the gloom. “You ain’t listening. They’re . . .” She shook her head. “They’re wrong.”
* * *
The first thing I noticed was the droning. At first I thought it was the flies; such a plague of the ever-present things was common in the blighted city. Only this sound was deeper than any insect’s patter, deeper than the deepest human voice. All the air resonated as if we stood packed beneath the skin of some mighty drumhead, making all the little hairs on my arms tighten and stand alert. Cat shrank back at the sound, cowering toward the spot where we’d clambered up onto the pier outside the tin-walled warehouse. For a moment I thought the sound was coming from the rockets streaking overhead. This sound had no apparent direction, though it was obviously close. Two great fishing trawlers waited at the end of the pier, bobbing on the surf, their white-painted hulls long chipped and speckled with salt and rust. I darted across the pier, dragging Cat behind me into the shadow of a stack of refrigerated crates, steel-sided and slick with condensation. I pressed my forehead to the metal, grateful for the cold and the brief feeling of cleanliness the brush of that fresh water brought to my salt-caked skin. Looking up, I found what I was looking for: a fire escape, the brown metal structure bolted to the tin siding of the warehouse. I chewed my lower lip, gauging the height, the distance.
The droning had only grown louder. Cat’s jagged fingernails cut into the flesh of my arm, and I looked down at her. How clearly I remember that face. The smooth lines of cheekbone and brow beneath brown skin mottled by sun and salt; the eyes wide and alive and afraid; the small nose; the crooked teeth of her smile, which was absent then, washed over with fear. I squeezed her hand. “We’ll be fine. In and out.” She didn’t say anything. “You can wait here.”
“Alone?” Her amber eyes widened, “What if one comes out?”
“This was your idea!” I hissed, craning my neck to peer over the refrigerated crates and back at the ships. A pair of human douleters descended the gangway, khaki uniforms sticking to their fat frames, bald heads shining. I ducked lower, watching. One man carried a long lash coiled in his fist, the other a stun baton such as the prefects sometimes carried.
Cat averted her eyes, looked down at her bare feet, at the gray sand crusted there. “I know, I . . .” I saw her jaw tighten, resolve stealing over her, through her. She released my arm, and I kissed her forehead before vaulting up onto the crate behind me, fingertips catching on the rubber seal that kept the cold air in. I turned, reevaluating the distance to the collapsed ladder hanging above. “Hadrian, wait! Help me up!”
“I’ll pull the ladder down!” I said back, struggling to keep my voice low. Turning, I leaped into the empty air, hands closing around a strut at the base of the ladder. My few months in Borosevo had boiled all the softness and extra weight from me, and merely moving in the increased gravity had strengthened me. Still, I was lucky not to be seen and luckier still that the horrible deep droning helped to mask the clangor and squeal of the ladder as it came down. I gestured for Cat to hurry up, and before long we were on the roof, the sea wind tearing over us. For a second it was like being home again, above and surrounded by the sea. The smell of salt was the same, though the pink-umber sky and the angry orange sun were wrong. The rippling, turbulent shadows of the air spun arabesques against the white gravel that covered the rooftop. We hurried to the door, opened it slow and steady onto an unlit stair, followed it down onto a catwalk of the same rickety construction as the fire escape.
The songs and operas, the holographs and poems and epics all say that the moment of revelation is a shock, a climax, an instant of crushing realization that alters the world. They are not wrong. Ask anyone who stood with me at Gododdin, who saw that murdered sun go down in fire, and they will confirm the truth of those tales. And yet we are quick to overlook the quiet revelations, the moments that dawn not from the chaos of the world but from a hollow seed in the pit of one’s stomach.
Cat and I looked down from that catwalk onto open crates packed with small, silver fishes in salt and larger ones on ice. We looked down on uniformed douleters with lashes and batons in hand and on their charges. I am not sure what I expected from the coloni, from the indigenes who had owned Emesh before it was a province of man, but it was not this.
The Umandh stood like pillars swaying in an unfelt wind, like walking turrets as tall or taller than a man, each balanced on three bowed legs that emerged radially from what I suppose one might call their waists. Where true towers had crenellations, crowns of time-eaten stone, these coralline creatures with flesh like white-pink rock had fleshy cilia wide as a man’s arm and nearly three times as long. Without being told I knew that they were the source of the omnipresent droning. Despite the baking heat within the warehouse, I felt a chill wash over me, whispered, “They’re singing.”
Cat looked at me sidelong, but I did not linger to watch her. I only had eyes for the inhuman things below us. I had spent years, countless hours, in study of the Cielcin: their language, their customs, their histories. Suddenly they—the implacable enemy of man—seemed very human to me indeed. The Cielcin had two eyes, two arms, two legs, two sexes, however bound up one was in the other. They had a spoken language, wore clothes and armor, ate at tables, talked of honor and family. They had blood that moved through veins in shapes so like our own.
The Umandh were different, as if Red-Handed Evolution, in her caprice, had wrought the Emeshi natives as a critique of our similarity with the Pale Cielcin. Two of the creatures lifted one of the crates with their cilia, twining them round the massive carrying bars. Their trunks vibrated, changing the pitch of the droning song. For the first time, I noticed the thick collars tight about their midsections, the metal chafing their gnarled, pearlescent flesh an angry red. They put me in mind of trees about which a wire had been tied so that as time passes and the wood grows, it cuts deeper and deeper still.
One of the humans cracked his whip in the air. “Faster, you dogs!” he shouted, rough voice recalling for me Gila and the dock workers who had robbed my unconscious body and looted Demetri’s ship. The huge creatures lurched, their steady droning flexing like a plucked harp string with the effort.
“They’ll be taking it to a barge to go into the city,” Cat whispered, her breath hot on my neck as she leaned in close. “One of those boats. We need to hurry.”
It was my turn to grab her by the arm. “Wait until they’re outside again.” She sucked on the inside of her cheek, torn between hunger and fear. “And give me the sack.”
She glared at me. “I can do it, Had.”
“I know you can, but let me.” I kept watching, a frown deepening on my face. “Why are they using them as slaves? You’d think there would be easier ways.”
“They can live in the water,” Cat said. “They walk the seabed.”
“Shepherds?” I frowned again. “For fish?” The droning shook my whole body as I snatched the plastic sack from Cat’s fingers and shook the water of the culvert off it. We wouldn’t need much. A sackful would last the two of us a week, longer if we could find something to brine the fish in. As I watched, one of the douleters lashed out with his baton, striking the narrow trunk of one Umandh. The creature let out a cry like an elephant’s trumpeting, like a whale song, like a choked human sob. I cannot describe it. No human word was meant to capture that alien agony. It lurched, going to one of its three knees, trunk sagging, wilting like a flower in the first rush of summer heat. The huge wicker basket it carried upended, spilling fish out onto the floor of the warehouse.
The douleter swore. “The fuck’s wrong with you, Seventeen?” While he spoke, a man with a heavy console twiddled a pair of dials, altering the pitch and frequency of the great droning hum that filled the air. He was translating, I realized, and an ancient, half-forgotten part of me grinned within, forgetting the horror of the moment. I wanted nothing more than to take the box apart, to sit and talk with the man and with the creatures he was trained to speak to. Was it a language, then? Or something else entirely? I wanted to know. Had to know. Until my stomach turned over within me, groaning with the hunger that had become a part of me, of my life.
The timbre of the drone changed again as the stumbled Umandh worked to pick up its fallen fish, tentacles grasping, shuffling across the smooth concrete floor. It was strange, for most of the alien song remained unchanged, the difference something fine, something minute—counterpoint in a symphony whose notes were so indistinct I could not make out one from the next.
The man with the console spoke. “It’s apologizing, Quintus.”
“It had fucking better,” the first man said, and he struck his charge again. The Umandh let out another groan, though the droning never ceased. “Look at this, fish all over the Earth-burning floor,” he hissed past his teeth. “You fucking . . . beast!” He kicked the spindly creature to the ground between the second word and the last, stomped on its midsection. Though it had no face I could see, I was reminded of that day—it felt like ten thousand years ago—when I had watched our gladiator stomp on the face of a mutilated slave in the Colosso. Here it was again: the face of our species, raw and red and exposed. The douleter, Quintus, spurred the fallen Umandh in the ribs. “Stand up!” It didn’t stand.
I tell myself now that I could have stopped it, that I could have stepped in, dropped off that catwalk and onto the hot-blooded overseer. It is hard remembering those brief years of powerlessness after all the power I held in the war. The gears of the Empire grind their human chaff to powder, and it is only the rarest creatures who endure. Who grow. Who rise. We sing songs, spin tales of Sir Antony Damrosch—born a serf himself—or of Lucas Skye, stories I had shared with Cat by night a hundred times. We like to imagine it is easy to rise, to stand. The be a hero. It is not. This was not my moment. I was not a hero. Am not, or was not then.
I was only a thief.
“Stand up!” the douleter commanded, his assistant twiddling the dials to add this tone to the song. “Stand up, damn you!” The stony flesh was not stone, and it cracked under the man’s boot, leaking something yellow and glutinous that filled the air instantly with a stench like the deepest pit of hell. When the Umandh didn’t stand, the man swung his baton down like a lictor’s sword. Once. Twice. Three times. The creature’s groaning ceased, collapsed into blubbering as it bled onto the floor.
“Quintus, stop!” The other overseer let his console fall, dangling by the strap about his neck as he hurried to stop his companion. “Leave the beast alone!” Something in my guts unclenched, untangled, for there it was: the other face of humankind, Mercy. He caught Quintus by the shoulder, pulling him back before he could strike another blow. “Boss will have your bonus if you kill the colonus.”
The thing in my guts twisted back into place. Not the other face of humanity at all. Only old greed. Cat whispered beside me, “We need to hurry.”
“Not yet!” I said, resting a hand on her leg where she crouched at the railing beside me. “Soon.” I gritted my teeth, watching as the second douleter—with the help of another of the coloni—helped the wounded creature back to its three splayed feet.
The droning shifted, rose in pitch, ululating, pulsing like a heartbeat. The second douleter checked the screen on his console, said, “They wish to take Seventeen to the surgeon, Quint.”
“Fucking . . .” The slavemaster shook his head. “Fine! Do it! Engin will have my ass if we lose another one.” He massaged the arm that held his baton as if it pained him, as if it and not he were responsible.
Then they were gone, passing out the door and into the afternoon light. “I’ll be right back.” I patted Cat’s leg, dropped down the nearest ladder, hit the floor next to one of the open crates. Acting fast, I dropped two large fish—tuna, I thought—into the plastic sac, along with two snake-like creatures whose names I did not know. I proceeded in this fashion, stuffing fishes into the sack. I had enough for three days, then four. Enough to feed the little orphan boys Cat cared for when they couldn’t beg bread from the chanters.
Grinning, I mounted the ladder and climbed.
CHAPTER 31
MERE HUMANITY
CID ARTHUR FOUND MORE than poverty when he escaped his father’s palace. He found sickness, too. As did I. The Gray Rot had been on Emesh for some years, brought by some unscrupulous trader from offworld. The natives had no immunity, and the animalcule chewed through them like paper and festered in the street. I was palatine. I was immune, Mother Earth have mercy on me.
Have you ever stopped to think about what it would be like to sit in the belly of an epidemic, untouched by it? I felt like a ghost. My body’s almost-alien biochemistry—the legacy of tens of generations and of millions of Imperials marks worth of genetic recombination—preserved me from every weeping sore, every bout of necrosis, every bleeding cough. It sounds like a blessing. It is no blessing to watch other men die, even less to watch the ones you love waste away. When I started this account, I thought to skip this part, so painful was my loss of Cat. But I was wrong. She matters. She must matter.
She held on longer than most, longer than could have been believed for someone so small.
It stank in the storm drain where I had left her on a high ledge above the main track of tunnel. We were beneath the stock exchanges on High Street and so elevated above the level of the canals. Night had fallen, and the light of Emesh’s two moons—one white, one green from the nascent terraforming projects scrambling across its surface—bled up the track of the storm drain to where the girl lay on a damp cardboard palette. Beneath the smells of moss and rotting garbage I could make out the sweet and rotting pall of sickness, the rot from weeping sores. You could smell it on every street, in every canal, on every rooftop in that city. I had to pause at the base of the stainless steel ladder a moment before climbing up to where I’d left her, long enough to marshal my forces, to quiet my stomach and settle my nerves.
We’d been together—partners in crime—for just under two standard years. That was all ending now, I knew. Had known for weeks.
Cat shivered beneath a thin sheet that had once been the curtain of an abandoned tenement. We had spent a week in that house as it crumbled into the sea, playing as tramps might at the lives of common folk. Cat might have gotten a job if she’d wanted. I was doomed. Any employment, even the base-level jobs guaranteed by the count’s Ministry of Welfare, would have required blood-typing from me. They would have wanted to screen for health risks, for congenital defects, for drug addiction and mental deficiency—anything to deny me honest work.
They would have discovered who I was, and I would’ve been packed off to a tower cell to await the word and envoy of my father. Cat and I had been happy that week—happy and naked and clean. The patterns of purple hyacinth printed on the curtains, which in the broken window had appeared bright and beautiful, now lay upon her like funeral garlands. But she was not dead, not yet.
Nor did she notice me. Instead she mumbled in her sleep, shuddering like a candle flame. I had never known sickness in Meidua, in Devil’s Rest. When I was small my grandmother’s mind had been faded, but Lady Fuchsia Bellgrove-Marlowe had been nearly seven hundred years old; my father was the child of her age and the same birthing vats whence I had been decanted. Cat was eighteen, younger than I had been when I left Delos, when my life truly began. And her life was over. Proper medicine was in short supply, so I had spent what cash we had on compresses and new bandages. I had seen the broadcasts; images of beautiful newscasters on screens wrapped round street corners declared the disease proof against antibiotic treatment. Whole chunks of the city had been cordoned off, canals dredged for corpses, bodies burned in city squares when the morgues reached capacity.
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