“So what’s the plan?” Jaantje asked, and Shadha looked down at the card.
“Private service at the Willowbird Community Center,” she said, “and then the general procession starts at noon.”
Another string of crackers went off ahead of us, snaps of light in a sudden clear space in the crowd. Jaantje winced, said something, but I couldn’t make out the words through the sudden spasm of noise. I touched my ear to warn him and got a wry smile and a nod in answer.
*Too close,* he signed, clumsily, and I nodded.
Tai looked at us, curious, and I touched my ear again. She waved her hand in answer, added, *They’d better be careful, or the cops’ll bust them.*
I looked where she was pointing. Sure enough, another Security floater—FPG this time, which was not so good—was grounded in the nearest layby, blue-and-red warning light slowly spinning, throwing pale flashes of light over the crowd. One lane of the Short-hi, the big trafficway that runs the width of Heaven from the Trifon Gate to the Sinliu Lock, was already closed off, and people were spilling into the center lanes despite the drivers’ gestures and Security’s attempts to herd them back behind the tall orange temporary poles. Off to my right, a light flared, brighter and steadier than the flash of crackers, and a piece of Hati’s last clip rose into the air, washed to pastel translucence by the heavy sunlight. I could just make out Micki Tantai’s ghostly figure, Ajani Maxx and Alva Gabriel behind him, his hands moving in familiar sign, and I looked away, glad I couldn’t hear the music and Gabriel’s clean vocals. Timin shook his head, wincing, and I touched his shoulder.
*Ask Shadha which way’s the Community Center.*
He paused—he’s a three-gen coolie like Jaantje, and his sign isn’t always the best—and Tai waved her hand at me.
*Up there—look, they’re coming.*
She pointed around the curve of the statue, toward one of the streets that led off the interlink. I craned my neck, and saw the nose of a flatbed carrier inching into the crowd. The noise seemed to increase even more, and I reached to turn my ear down. The absence of input was a relief; the faces around me reddened, mouths opening and closing, and beyond a gang of line-workers a Boatman-coolie woman raised both hands over her head to begin a rhythmic chant, the open hands of sorrow changing to Hati’s heart sign. Of all the coolies, Hati probably spoke most to the Boatmen—Hesui Sha, the stick-bass player, was a one-gen Boatman, a child immigrant, actually, and neither he nor the band had ever let him be treated as second-class. Timin was a Boatman, too, which was one of the reasons he had loved Hati. Around her, other people picked up that chant, so that hands rose and fell, catching the sunlight like birds’ wings. The carrier poked farther into the interlink, and the crowd moved for it, flowing out of its way to let it inch toward Short-hi. I could see it better now, an ordinary flatbed draped in plain white for the occasion, the black-lacquered coffin balanced on the open back. Alva Gabriel, her bleached gold mane unmistakable even at this distance, stood at one end, and Hesui Sha crouched beside her, steadying her and it against the irregular motion. Even as I watched, the rhythm player Mays Littlekin pulled himself up beside them; only Ajani Maxx was missing, and even as I wondered where she was I thought I saw her in the crowd beside the carrier. It was hard to believe that Micki Tantai’s body was really in there, that this wasn’t a scene from a videomanga, or an artsy performance clip.
The carrier turned onto the ramp that led down to Short-hi, and the front of the crowd moved after it, the rest of us following in jerky stages. The stairs were too crowded; we climbed down over the retaining wall along with a hundred other people, and I saw a driver caught in the overflow shake his fist and swear, his face contorted and angry. I swore back at him, and a short, stocky man in a Hati shirt slammed his fist down on the runabout’s hood. A woman kicked the tread-carriers, and then people came between us, blocking my view.
Tai touched my shoulder. *That idiot.*
*What the hell was he thinking, taking Short-hi today?* I asked, but Tai didn’t answer. Her head turned, and I realized we’d lost touch with the others.
*This way,* she said, and I grabbed her sleeve, let her tow me through the crowd.
It was thinning out anyway as the carrier settled to a comfortable walking pace, and we caught up with Jaantje and Timin without having to step outside the lane that had been blocked off for us. Shadha was walking a little ahead of them, keeping time to some music I didn’t hear, but she turned back to wave us on, her mouth moving. Like most midworlders, she doesn’t sign; she knows the lyrics of our songs, and not much more. Beyond her another holoprojector was playing one of Hati’s older clips, the image nearly transparent even at what had to be full power. Tantai’s shape seemed to waver into existence as it was shadowed by a passerby, and then faded again as full light hit it. I could see people mouthing the lyrics, and then by a trick of shadows the picture came clear just long enough for me to see the signing hands: famous signs, *another piece of the grave,* and for an instant I imagined I could feel the heavy bass that carried them. More crackers flashed ahead of us, and the sharp scent of the burnt powder momentarily drowned the smell of sweat and beer. The gutters between the lanes were already choked with shreds of black paper, mixing with the sand that blew in through the doorlock at Senlui.
Then, ahead of us, at the head of the procession, light flashed, bigger than any cracker, and a hot wind slapped my face. It smelled of fire, of gunpowder and more, scorched metal and cooking, and next to me I saw a midworld woman’s eyes and mouth open wide in a soundless scream. For a second, I couldn’t understand what I’d seen, couldn’t make sense of it—an accident, something gone wrong with the power plant? An effect, even, the protest Fortune had been talking about? Smoke was billowing from the carrier, where the coffin had been, where Gabriel and Sha and Littlekin had been standing, and I swallowed bile. It was real, no effect, at the unlikely best an accident, and at worst—The people ahead of me surged backward, and a stranger caught at my shoulder. I fended him off, not wanting to think, to know, and someone else hit me, shoving me out of the way. I grabbed Jaantje’s sleeve, not wanting to be separated from the rest of them. I could see Timin beside him, saying something I couldn’t read, but Shadha was gone, disappeared behind the wall of moving bodies. Overhead, in the apex of the tunnel, the fire-lights were flashing orange, and then the nozzles that hung beside them opened, spraying thick cold foam down on us. I ducked, hands over my face, and a glob of the stuff slid down my back beneath my shirt. It smelled thick and sour, an ugly smell I could almost taste, like a tang of copper at the back of my throat. I reached for my ear, fumbled with the switch, and heard nothing but a jumble of screams and shouting.
“—fucking bomb!” Timin yelled, and someone grabbed my arm again. I caught Tai before she fell, and pulled her close as a man shoved past us, punching at anything in his way. His clothes—ordinary work clothes, coolie shirt and workcloth trousers—were stained, his shirt torn open, and his face was smudged with soot. The nozzles were still spurting foam, and in the distance I could hear the shrill wail of sirens.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Tai said, and repeated it in sign.
“People are hurt—” Timin began, and Jaantje cut him off.
“Where’s Shadha?”
*I don’t see her—* I began, and switched to speech. “Shadha!”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Tai said again. “Now, people.”
“Shadha?” Jaantje called.
People were still shoving past us, more of them now, fighting to get out of the falling foam, struggling back toward the interlink plaza and Tin Hau Upper. An older man, grey-haired and thin, went keening past, staggering not just with age, almost knocking me over. There was blood on his shirt and in his straggling beard. I knew I should do something, help him, maybe, but I didn’t know how, and before I could even reach out the crowd had swallowed him. Another man, a young, dark-skinned coolie in a blockprinted Hati shirt, slipped in the foam and fell to his
knees. Timin caught his flailing hand, dragged him sliding in the foam out from under the feet of the people behind him. He fetched up against my knees, and I saw he was bleeding from a long cut that ran across his chest, ripping through the band’s faces. His nose was bleeding, too, and I reached stupidly for something to wipe the blood away, but he scrambled to his feet and was gone.
“Shadha!” Jaantje shouted again.
And then there she was, staggering out of the crowd, her eyes wide and staring. She didn’t look hurt, and there were no scorch marks on her clothes, but a handful of her oiled braids were undone, their beads and charms missing, as though someone had grabbed them, falling, and torn them free. Jaantje caught her, pulled her tight against him, and Tai said, “Come on!”
I looked past her, saw what must have been a hundred people charging at us, heading for Tin Hau Upper. They all had the same look as Shadha, as the guy with the bloody nose, desperate to get away. It had been maybe two minutes, maybe less, since the bomb—was it a bomb? Timin had said it was a bomb?—had gone off on the carrier, and the sirens still sounded a long way off. Smoke was still rising, though I couldn’t see flames, and a steady drizzle of foam wept from the tunnel ceiling. The Security floater I’d seen earlier was nowhere in sight now.
“If we get separated, meet at the goddow,” I said, and grabbed Jaantje’s sleeve. He swung Shadha around, protecting her with his body, and Tai reached for Timin, but the crowd was on us before she could hold him. It was either run with them or fall and be trampled. I tried to stay with the others, then just with Jaantje—the tallest of us, easiest to see—but the ground was slick with the suppressant foam, and it was all I could do just to stay on my feet. A woman caught me, held me up with main force when I tripped on the stairs up out of the trafficway, but I barely got a look at her smoke-singed face before she was swept away again. I looked back once from the plaza to see people scrabbling at the wall, trying to pull themselves out of Short-hi, and more spilling out into the traffic lanes, where the runabouts and haulers shrieked to a stop, rocking on their tires as bodies cannoned into them, but then I had to give all my attention to staying on my feet.
Security or Transit had locked the doors to the Tin Hau Upper Station, automatic answer to a crowd out of control; I saw people flattened against the armorglass, smashed there by the people behind them who didn’t know or care that the doors were sealed. A man crouched in the lee of one of the concrete pillboxes that protected the ventilator controls for Shaft Four, wrapping his body around a screaming toddler. Beyond him, a thin coolie girl clung for a moment to the base of the statue, her long hair dark against the gold-washed metal, and then someone dragged her away. I fought to stay upright, to stay well away from the station, and by some miracle managed to pass between it and the trafficway. Past the station, I got into a side street, praying it wasn’t a cul-de-sac where I’d be trapped, and finally managed to get free of the crowd. Underfoot, the paving was dry—the fire foam had been pretty localized, just on Short-hi—but there was still smoke in the air, and a window opened above one of the red-painted doorways. A woman leaned out, the bright orange and purple and steel blue print of her jacket a violent contrast to the pale stone and her white hair, and called something down to me. I saw her lips move, but couldn’t read them, and my ear didn’t seem to be working. I pressed the reset switch, got nothing, and signed in answer.
*Sorry, bi’, I can’t hear you.*
She switched to sign with the ease of a one-gen coolie. *What’s wrong? Is there a fire?*
*I don’t know,* I answered. *At the funeral—there was a bomb, I think—*
*That funeral,* she said. *Damn Hati.* She slammed the window down again, and left me standing in the middle of the street.
I’m still not quite sure how I got home again. I walked for a long time, following Broad-hi, very aware that I was West-of-Four, a yanqui alone without a working ear. The electrobus line to Tin Hau was closed, red shutdown glyphs glowing from every display screen; the doors of the local lift at Western Phoenix were barred and a Security floater was grounded in the center of the plaza, lights flaring. Armored Security was everywhere, Cartel and FPG mixed, and the few locals still on the streets were clustered in the doorways, watching them and me and the other stragglers who’d gotten this far with the same wary fear. At the intersection of Ginniver and the Milagro, I caught a glimpse of myself in the darkened door of an exchange shop, closed against the same trouble I was running from. My shirt was stained green from the chemicals, my hair was plastered to my skull, and there were more streaks of green on my face and hands. Someone, sometime in it all, had torn my trousers, and my hip pocket hung by a thread. I touched my belt, feeling for my wallet, but it was gone, too, and with it had gone my cash cards, my keys, and all my ID.
That was the final straw, somehow, and I sat down abruptly on the exchange shop’s doorstep and leaned my forehead on my knees, not caring if Security came to move me along. It wasn’t so much that I had to make any decision; I knew what I had to do, which was get back to the goddow and find the rest of the band, but for some reason I couldn’t seem to move. Finally, though, the smell of the foam got to be too much, making my eyes water and sting, and I sat up, wincing, to strip off my shirt. That was a little better—and, perversely, I looked a little more respectable without it, despite the ripped trousers—and I looked around at the street signs. I wasn’t that far from the Miracles Interchange; I could get down to Broad-hi from there, and either walk or take a ‘bus home if they were running again. There was a public bath across the street, mobile glyphs flashing *wash* and *cheap* above a realprint banner that proclaimed “the best recycled water in Milagro,” but I no longer had the cash even if it had been open. I pushed myself to my feet—every muscle in my body hurt, and I felt like crying—and hobbled down the road toward Miracles. My ear was working, or maybe I was just able to sort out the signals again, but the shop windows were all dark here, and the newswalls had fallen silent.
Miracles looked closed, too—I found out later that Security had closed off all the interchanges in Heaven, on the off chance that whoever had planted the bomb had been dumb enough to stick around for the explosion—but as I got closer I could see that the doors were open and Security had set up a checkpoint inside the lobby. I didn’t know if it would do me any good, since without my ID I had no way of proving that I lived in Ironyards, but I couldn’t think of anything better to do, and took my place in line behind a stocky, unhappy-looking man in a red-and-black sarang. I couldn’t help wondering about him, especially when he wouldn’t meet my eye, but Security passed him through without hesitation. They took my name and codes because I was technically a witness—though neither I nor they thought I’d be much use as one—and then bounced me from officer to officer until finally a plump coolie girl, an intern, I think, said she’d seen Fire/Work play and would swear I was who I said I was. They verified my residence from that, and finally let me through.
It took me about an hour after that to get home—the ‘buses still weren’t running—but when I knocked at the main gate Jaantje was waiting in the courtyard. If anyone was going to make it out of something like that, it was Jaantje, but I grabbed him, or maybe he grabbed me, and we stood there clutching each other’s elbows. His fingers dug painfully into a bruise, but I really didn’t care.
“Oh, man,” he said. “Oh, man. I thought I was the only one.”
“You’re all right?” I asked, and then what he’d said really hit me. “You’re the only one?”
Jaantje nodded, stepped back to let me into the courtyard. The sunlight was still hot on the dirt, and our door was open, the media wall flickering in the shadows. “It’s just you and me, so far.”
“When—how did you get back?” I asked. “I had a hell of a time getting through the checkpoints—I lost my ID and everything.”
“I walked down to the main level at Western Phoenix,” Jaantje said. “The ‘buses were running from there. I’ve been back about half an ho
ur. Maybe forty minutes.”
That would not have been fun, sitting here by himself thinking that maybe some of us were hurt, dead even, and I shivered. “What’re the newsdogs saying?”
He looked at me, and I could see what he’d look like when he was an old man, his skin waxy, the fine crisscross lines from the summers on the surface assembly lines suddenly starkly visible. “It’s bad, Fan.”
I hadn’t expected it to be good, but I shivered again anyway, in spite of the sun.
“And,” Jaantje said, suddenly practical, shaking away the horrors, “they were saying the foam’s not good for people, so you should get it off you.”
I looked down at the green streaking my hands and arms. “If it’s not good for people, why do they use it?” I asked, but started toward the door anyway. I could feel the cooler air spilling from it, and realized that Jaantje had the ventilators turned to full cold.
“Because most people can take a bath, can’t they,” he answered, and reached for the room remote, unmuting the media wall. The babble of voices made a static in my ear, the displays split among half a dozen channels. Jaantje grimaced, and touched the controls again, cycling among the voices. It was still hard to hear, hard to pick out the words without the help of the Sign Font mobiles at the bottom of each screen, and I looked at Jaantje.
“So what exactly happened?”
He shrugged one shoulder, his eyes fixed on the screens. “It looks like it was a bomb, planted in the coffin. They’re not saying anybody’s dead…”
His voice trailed off, but neither one of us needed to speak the thought aloud. Gabriel and Sha and Littlekin had been standing on the carrier, the last I saw, right next to the coffin. Just from what I’d seen, I couldn’t imagine they could have survived. “Maybe they weren’t on the back, I hadn’t seen them for a while.”
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