Tales of the Republic (The Complete Novel)

by M. G. Herron

  Not a state of disrepair, then. The subway tunnels had been deliberately abandoned.

  He continued on, passing half a dozen more abandoned platforms. One station had a pair of glass doors that had been blown out so long ago that not even shards of glass littered the floor. Ari could have gone to the surface then, climbing through the window and finding his way out through the debris. Instead, he kept following the tracks.

  He was a hundred yards past the platform with the broken windows when he heard a tenor voice mumble something, and the crackle of a radio as the conversation cut off.

  Ari turned and ran back to the station with the broken windows. He hopped up onto the platform, set the backpack out of sight behind a column, and pressed himself up against the wall, to the side of the tunnel out of sight. He hoped his theory about this station being an access point to the surface was right. If so, the man would likely walk right past him.

  He waited a long minute.

  Then, distant, the sound of footsteps moving quickly. They were light steps. An athletic person.

  Now louder, closer.

  A figure’s head bobbed at the level of the platform, wearing a camouflage baseball cap with a mesh back.

  Ari jumped down and grabbed the person from behind, and was surprised to find he was holding a woman a foot shorter than him in a choke hold. He squeezed his forearm across her windpipe to close off her airflow.

  She stomped at his toes, thrashed in his arms. Ari held on tighter, but she was like a wet fish, wriggling and fighting for her life. An elbow dug into his ribs, and she ducked and managed to get out of his grip.

  She came up again and spun, her hands reflexively grabbing for something at her waist—that wasn’t there.

  She looked up into the barrel of her own handgun. Ari cocked the pistol.

  Her eyes widened.

  “You,” Sasha said.

  Ari couldn’t believe his luck. Of course the rebels used the tunnels to get around, and he figured he’d run into one of them eventually, but this was an incredible opportunity. A dangerous opportunity, too, if he wasn’t careful.

  He held the handgun steady with his right hand, and beckoned with his left. “Give me the radio.”

  She hesitated only a moment. Then she pulled the walkie talkie out of her pocket and held it out.

  “Set it down,” he said.

  She obeyed.

  “Move back against that wall.”

  She sat on the floor with her back against the wall and her feet resting against the dead train rail. Ari grabbed the radio, switched it on, and waited.

  “You’re going to regret this,” she said.

  Ari smiled his broken half-smile.

  “Hello, Felix,” Ari said into the radio.

  He waited. His arm grew heavy pointing the gun at Sasha.

  “Who is this?” a voice replied.

  “An old friend. We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER 34

  BITS AND PIECES

  After threatening to kill him several times, an inarticulate string of curses blared through the radio and was cut off when Felix disengaged the talk button. Finally, the rebel leader came back on the line and demanded to know what Ari wanted.

  “I need to know more about my past,” Ari said. “About what happened before I lost my memory.”

  “What do I care what you want?” Felix said. “And how do I know you’re not baiting me into some kind of trap? You already betrayed us once.”

  “I knew you would say that, which is why I have something else to offer…most of my memories are still missing. But a few are coming back. I think I know how to find your riverside storehouse.”

  Ari held the radio up during a long pause from the other end.

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Felix finally said.

  “You don’t,” said Ari. “But what’s your alternative?”

  “You’ve got some fucking balls.”

  “Do we have a deal?”

  “I meet you and Sasha goes free. That’s all I can promise. Whatever happens after that depends on the quality of your information.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “Fine.”

  Ari flicked the radio off and tried not to sigh too audibly with relief. He gestured with the pistol and pointed into the dim light of the tunnel. “Lead the way.”

  He followed Sasha through the burnt-orange ambience in silence for a few hundred yards before she spoke over her shoulder.

  “Felix will kill you if you’re lying.”

  “I’m not.”

  “How can you know where it is when you can’t remember other things?”

  “It comes back in bits and pieces. I don’t get to decide what I remember and what I don’t.”

  “It’s funny, you know. You’re really the same person you were before the accident. Smart. Secretive. A little reckless. That’s what got you killed. It’s also what made you a good spy.”

  His body went cold. “What do you mean?”

  “Your cover. Felix got you that job as the commissioner’s driver.” She looked at him over her shoulder to drive the point home. “You were working for us.”

  He grunted noncommittally, but a hollow pit churned in his stomach.

  It gave him no pleasure to be right.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE JUNCTION

  After another ten minutes of walking in the orange glow of the tunnel’s emergency lights, the way became treacherous. Piles of rubble spilled out of the curved walls. Ari stayed near the tracks, where there was less chance he would slip on a wet spot or slam his toes into a loose stone. Neither of them spoke after that first conversation, but Sasha stayed calm enough. He had a million questions, but he needed to seal the deal before he could ask them.

  The air smelled of moldy old pennies, damp and rich with a metallic undertone. They climbed over a hill of rubble at a section where an entire wall seemed to have exploded inward. Past that, they had to squeeze through a spot where the ceiling had fallen in. It was remarkable the whole tunnel hadn’t collapsed here, a testament to the skill of the architect. Ari shoved down the feeling of claustrophobia that rose in him as he wriggled through a gap between old, exposed electrical wire and a slanted wall of stone.

  The way cleared up, revealing the train tracks in the floor again. After another hundred yards, they sidestepped an old subway train and emerged from the mouth of their tunnel into a cavernous gray room. There were several of those orange emergency lights here, but more residual light seeped in from somewhere else.

  “Do you remember this place?” Sasha asked.

  “No,” Ari said. But he felt an excitement thrum through his body all the same. Like the tunnels and parts of the poor district above ground, this place felt very familiar, and at the same time very new. He grew more confident that he could find the riverside storehouse as he had promised Felix.

  Or at least know it when he saw it.

  They stepped into the cavernous room. The tunnel mouth they had emerged from was one of dozens. Train tracks led from each opening to the center of the room, where pairs of rails knotted together, crossing and intersecting in a tangle of lines. Six or eight cars stood idle on the tracks in the center of the junction.

  A few of the openings were caved in. One was boarded up. Another was sealed with cement. About half remained clear and relatively free of debris. One other tunnel mouth directly across the room had a train car stuck in it like the one they had come out of.

  The rattle of a kinetic lantern echoed in the cavernous switchyard from the middle of the room near the idle train cars. Then a white light turned on, revealing a tall man with black hair shaved close at the sides. His ear was scarred and his lips were pressed in a hard line.

  Next to him stood a blond man, a few inches shorter. He was lean and had long-fingered hands wrapped around the kinetic lantern.

  Ari reeled and felt very dizzy all of a sudden. His vision narrowed as blood pounded through his head. He mana
ged to stay on his feet—barely. Seeing the blond man was disorienting, like seeing something from your dream in reality.

  His name nagged at Ari’s brain. Something about chess. King? Knight? No—Bishop. His name was Bishop.

  “Hello,” Ari said, forcing a jovial nonchalance into his voice. “It’s good to see you again, Felix. You, too, Bishop.”

  Felix narrowed his eyes, his face full of suspicion. Bishop crossed his arms.

  “First things first,” said Felix.

  Ari nodded and held out an open hand. Sasha calmly walked over to stand between Felix and Bishop. Her fingers met Bishop’s briefly, then they parted.

  Ari felt a brief pang for Po. An image of her disappointed face flashed in his mind. He shoved it away. This was no time to second guess his crazy plan.

  Ari flipped Sasha’s handgun so his thumb was through the trigger guard. “I’m going to put this down now. You can tell your men to come out from their hiding spots.”

  Ari put the weapon on the ground and kicked it over. It slid until Felix stopped it with his foot. He picked it up and handed it back to Sasha.

  A cold smile grew on Felix’s face. He held a thumb and forefinger to his mouth and gave a high-pitched whistle. About ten people jumped down from the roofs of idle train cars or stepped out of the shadows of empty tunnels, all carrying weapons—automatic rifles or handguns. One woman even held a crossbow. The ragtag band of bandanna-clad insurgents gathered around, encircling him.

  “This is quite the welcome party.”

  “We don’t respond well to threats.”

  “You never would have met me otherwise.”

  “That’s true. Probably would have shot you from a distance instead of up close.”

  Fast as a whip and ten times as heavy, Bishop stepped across the gap between them and drove his knee into Ari’s gut. Ari doubled over.

  “What the hell was that for?” he managed to say.

  Pain exploded in his right temple as his head snapped to the side. He saw a blur of polished metal as Bishop brought the pistol back up. Ari touched his hand to his face. His fingers came away red.

  The unmistakable noise of a pistol slide racking a bullet into the chamber resounded in the tense silence. Ari’s whole body went rigid. A second passed, and then two. Ari slowly raised his head. He drew a deep breath and forced himself to stand tall though the barrel of Bishops’ gun rested against his temple. He could feel Bishop’s arm trembling.

  Doing his best to ignore Bishop and the cold feel of gunmetal on his skin, Ari met Felix’s eyes.

  They were as cold as the gun. Hard and full of hate and pain.

  “I’m sorry,” Ari said. “It was the only way. But what good would killing me do?”

  Felix stared at him for a long time. Finally he shook his head. Bishop huffed a breath out like an angry bull. He pulled the gun back a few inches, but didn’t lower it all the way.

  “You didn’t remember where the riverside storehouse was before. What changed?”

  “My memories are returning, such as they are. Not all of them, but bits and pieces.”

  “Prove it.”

  Ari swallowed against the dryness in his mouth. “That mech attack on Congress last night. That was your doing. That was Citizen.”

  “Anyone who’s been paying attention could have guessed that.”

  “Would anyone else know that Bishop made the microchips that flipped the mechs into attack mode? Would anyone else know that there were supposed to be four APUs in the attack, but only three of the microchips worked?”

  Felix’s eyes darted to Bishop.

  “All right,” Felix finally said. “What do you want in return?”

  “Talk to me. Answer my questions. Bits and pieces of my memory are coming back, but it’s slow and unreliable. I need you to help me fill in the gaps.”

  “First you give us the location of the storehouse.”

  “I’ll do better. I’ll take you there.”

  Felix narrowed his eyes. “Give me the address.”

  Ari wiped the blood from his forehead with the back of one hand. “Doesn’t work like that. I don’t remember the address.”

  “Can you show me on a map?”

  Ari looked up into the seemingly endless darkness of the vaulted ceiling and thought about it. Yes. It might come to him if he saw a map. It better. These guys weren’t fucking around. He gave Felix a firm nod.

  “All right. Fine.” He looked at Bishop. “Stand down.” Bishop clenched his jaw muscles and held the pistol out, his arm trembling visibly now. “Bishop!” Felix said.

  Bishop finally lowered the weapon and stuffed it into a holster at his waist. He stormed off and Sasha went after him.

  “He’s still bitter about how you betrayed us for the magistrate.”

  Felix exchanged a few whispers with the rest of his people, speaking out of Ari’s range of hearing. They dispersed back into various tunnels. Sasha had her arm around Bishop, trying to comfort him. He pulled her body into him, his fingers wandering over her back, reassuring himself of her presence. Ari reminded himself to tread carefully around Bishop.

  “Walk and talk,” said Felix, pointing ahead of him.

  Felix led Ari to the mouth of a tunnel two openings down from the tunnel through which they’d emerged—four o’ clock. Bishop and Sasha tailed them by twenty yards.

  “What do you want to know?” Felix said as they walked into the darkness.

  “Everything.”

  CHAPTER 36

  THE DOCKS

  The crew of four walked along a rail that led them out of the switchyard down a different tunnel than the one through which Ari had emerged. Sasha and Bishop lagged behind while Ari walked abreast with Felix. He had to force himself not to keep looking over his shoulder.

  “Why were these subway tunnels abandoned?”

  “You can ask me anything, and that’s your first question?”

  Ari nodded. He needed to draw Felix out, get him comfortable talking now so that he could ask him the harder questions—the ones about Ari’s involvement with Felix and the cover that Sasha mentioned—later.

  “The subway system is old. It was built in the 1980s, a few years before Tiananmen Square broke the country into pieces. During the civil war, the laborers who built and maintained this tunnel on government contracts lost their jobs. The trains stopped running. After the restructure, when the new borders had been drawn and the Republic of Enshi got its act together and placed the capital of the newborn country here, they built the new city on top of the old one—or, sort of to the side, around the newly built Capitol building—but they didn’t unseal or restart the subway system right away. So it was forgotten.”

  He shrugged. “When the refugees started pouring into the country, the shanty towns were built on top of the old subway system. The shanties became permanent slums. Since the tunnels didn’t connect to the new downtown, no one thought it was worth the money to invest in restoring the trains or getting the system running again.”

  They picked their way along a blown out section of wall. On the other side of the small mountain of stone and metal slag, they came to a ladder that led up to a drainage system through the roof of the train tunnel.

  “And the army doesn’t know about them?”

  “Oh they do. They’ve tried to scare us out. To blow us out. To drag us out. Where do you think all this rubble came from? But there are many unmapped additions. We connected the subway system with the many sewer and drainage systems that have been built on top of each other over the years. Besides, the general is busy with the protests, and since they’ve fallen back they aren’t close enough to the tunnel system. Still, every exit has eyeballs on it. The tactic the general has embraced now is to starve us out.”

  “Which is why you want to find this storehouse.”

  Felix’s eyes focused on something out of sight and far away. “Yeah,” he said. He began to climb the ladder.

  Bishop gestured for Ari and Sasha to follow Fel
ix. He brought up the rear.

  “How did you get involved in all of this?” Ari said.

  Felix kept climbing. “No more questions until you show me where the storehouse is.”

  The ladder led to another, which led to a pipe, which lead through a square hole in the ceiling covered with time-worn wooden slats. They emerged into the darkness of a cramped room with marble walls and a low ceiling. A thick, locked wooden door barred the exit. In the center of the room, a smooth marble rectangle with elegantly sculpted scrollwork etched along the edges took up most of the space, and a shrine with a laughing buddha was carved into one wall. Decomposing flowers sat on the countertop of the shrine.

  “I like what you’ve done to the place,” said Ari.

  Sasha snorted. Bishop mumbled something under his breath. Felix stared at him.

  “What?” said Ari. “That wasn’t a question.”

  Felix walked around the room and pulled two waterproof plastic boxes off the floor. He set them on opposite ends of the sarcophagus.

  “The general won’t bomb graveyards, or temples, so they make good places to come and go. Though they’re not always unoccupied.” He put his ear to the door for a long minute. Apparently satisfied with what he heard—Ari heard nothing, which he presumed was good—Felix pulled a paper leaflet from the crate on the left and began to unfold it on top of the coffin. He flattened the paper against the marble.

  “Show me. Which one is it?”

  Ari had never seen a paper map like this except in the movies. It was cracked and torn at the intersection of the centerfolds and smelled of dust. It was the kind of map with wavy topography lines in addition to a grid of roads and landmarks. He licked his lips and bent over it.

  A river swept across the dense, sprawling city from northwest to southeast, curving around the downtown core and nestling the group of state building in its elbow as it turned. The topography lines showed that the land dropped off steeply behind Congress. It had been built on the edge of a cliff. The elevation also increased the more you went in the opposite direction, to a place labeled King Valley in the west.