by Rose Francis
She looked down. For someone who had grown up with nothing taller than a factory ceiling or the multi-level open atriums, the air below her was alien. She saw clouds below her feet, along with Ilsa’s frightened face peeping through the window. She couldn’t help but notice where sections of the ledge had crumbled off already.
She swore the birds were now watching her, chastened by Ilsa’s missiles. The bastards were laughing. She would give anything to be able to fly like them. For a moment, she contemplated sprouting wings. When she realized the thought process, and how that had gone for her last time, she forced her mind to narrow, allowing herself only to think of the feel of the handholds and footholds, and then only as much as was needed to reach the next one without misjudging the distance or seeing it as a Hal. The world shifted around her, pushed to the edges by her focus but still teasing, taunting, twisting.
She secured a section of the rope to a loose section of piping, a simple loop to help prevent the rope from sliding, and pressed forward. Really, it shouldn’t be so dissimilar from the walls she’d shimmied up as a burglar.
Tyson reached down a gloved hand and hauled her up once the rope was secure. Christine caught her breath as he called down to Ilsa. “Tie it around, hold Azure for all you're worth, trust me, and walk along the wall.” He looked back towards Christine. “Are you ready to help pull her up?” Christine fought her own anxiety as she nodded and positioned herself behind him, her hands on the rope. “Well then pull.”
Christine felt momentarily ashamed of her own weakness as she strained. Only Tyson’s slight frame struggling similarly convinced her that she wasn’t failing Ilsa in some way. As much as she wanted to stop breathing, to wait for Ilsa to reunite with her, she had to focus, had to keep pulling.
* * *
Ilsa’s breath whistled through her teeth. She’d always had somewhat of an aversion to heights, but feeling the fragility of the decaying building beneath her toes, trusting her life, and her child’s, to a piece of rope anchored to a derelict pipe… She wanted to throw up, but there was nothing but bile, and she had no way of removing her mask, or stabilizing Azure. He was what was important—despite her panicked inhalations and the threat of retching. Her throat muscles trembled and contracted, threatening to take the rest of her muscle control with them. She focused on the child’s breathing and on maintaining her grip on him. There was nothing in the world to her but Azure in that moment, not even Christine. The child glowed blue in her arms, a soft and reassuring colour. She blinked, fighting the Hal and concentrating on him.
* * *
After several minutes of intense labor, Christine heard Tyson whoop. “I can hold it. Just go help her up, and make it fast. Take the baby first so she has both hands.” Christine hurried forward, leaned over the edge of the floor, tangling her foot in a pipe in the wall, just in case. Azure was crying, hiccuping, entranced by Ilsa’s fear and her tight grip. Christine set her jaw and pulled the little fellow to safety, set him aside, reminding herself not to rock him or comfort him until his mother was on solid ground. His squalls behind her broke her heart.
Ilsa clutched at Christine’s arms. She concentrated entirely on their grip, contracting her torso and her locked legs to pull Ilsa the remaining distance up the wall.
Ilsa had barely gotten solid floor under her when she tore the mask away and threw up. Christine held her hair back and stroked the nape of her neck. Ilsa wiped her mouth clean and put the mask back on. She looked into Christine’s eyes, the primal look already fading. Tears were streaming from Ilsa’s face, but as their eyes met, there was nothing else, just Ilsa and Azure, safe in Christine’s arms.
Twenty-Six
Tyson offered a rat to Christine. Christine coaxed some of the blood into Ilsa’s mouth, begging her to swallow. When Ilsa was full, Christine drank what was left.
Christine was too tired from carrying Ilsa, helping trap food on top of the preoccupation with the voices and shapes that followed her to have much hunger of her own. She hadn’t pressed Tyson earlier when he asked her to use her power. But it sank in, that he thought she should have been able to help. Maybe if she was better trained in Service or was stronger. The guilt tore at her that night as she slept next to Ilsa. She recognized that each morning she picked Ilsa up, she was less and less responsive. It chewed through her like the rats in her stomach every time she passed Ilsa’s limp frame to Tyson, when she saw resentment and disappointment in his face.
But she’d told him the truth; she could kill Ilsa just as easily as she could heal her. And the odds were in favor of kill, due to her own Hal exposure. Even if she knew what she was looking for and pushed for it, it might be an illusion. She could accidentally turn Ilsa’s blood to vinegar, or command her body to cook itself alive, or something.
She tried to help, cleaning the baby’s diapers and rinsing them out as best she could at night, and supporting Ilsa’s arms while the child nursed. She coaxed Ilsa to eat. She massaged her trembling limbs when they paused to rest.
The feeling was utterly alien to her. No one in her family had had time or health to care for each other this way. She vaguely remembered her mother leaving to work in the factory, with her newborn sister strapped to the woman’s bony back. She remembered her uncle wasting away on a pile of rotten rags on the floor, surrounded by his nieces and nephews, but touched only by his own filth. Her mother tried to take the rags away before he ruined them, as they could still be worth something, but then her father had gotten home, and not had the heart to reinforce her mother’s command. This was his brother, dying day by day. How could he deprive him of the little padding the rags offered?
The next day, her mother went out and stole some ointment to bring home, to ease the bedsores for her husband’s sake. She was caught and marked—number Three. And Christine had never forgotten the guilt and horror on her father’s face when the Engineers dragged the woman away a month after his brother’s death.
In her head, she knew with utter certainty that if you got sick, you were dead. Some said the Pocas had black magic to extend their lives, but she knew better. She knew they just had people in Service using power to help them, when their power was not needed to maintain the community resources.
She tried to reconcile herself to the possibility of Ilsa’s death. She tried to reconcile herself to the futility of her own efforts, and wished she could distance herself from Ilsa, to not melt during the few moments of lucidity when Ilsa looked into her eyes and saw her. But she couldn’t. She understood the same terrible need her mother must have felt to filch that medicine.
The rat in Christine’s mouth turned to poison as it sprouted her mother’s face, at least how she remembered it. She was pretty sure her mother’s face hadn’t had that angular bone structure, or whiskers quite so prominent. Christine shuddered and passed the rest of the rat back to Tyson. As Tyson kept watch for the larger predators, she cried herself to sleep.
* * *
Thankfully, as they got higher into the Foundation, the structure seemed less fragile, less rotten. Christine tried to remember Tyson’s warning that the Hals were the worst in the middle of the Foundation, where the cloud was the densest. After the first time Ilsa looked out a window, saw trees below them, and threw up, Christine counseled her to keep her distance from the windows.
Christine understood both the impulse and the terror of it. On the surface, the openness held its own fear, but now, rising high above it, all Christine could focus on was how fragile the floor beneath her feet was, how easy it would be to fall back to that earth, be claimed by the fanged deer and sharp-beaked birds. She saw the surface below. It came with the enormity of a thousand rodents’ incisors on her limbs, the trauma of the deer stomping her bones open to extract the marrow, and the birds tearing pieces of sinew from her flesh.
Christine marveled at how she once felt distant from that world. At how many people still had no clue of their own place in this crumbling, rotten ecosystem, connected only by the shared Hal that was
the idea of control over their life under the Poca.
Twenty-Seven
“You were a Lower Level kid, weren't you,” Christine said as Tyson looped the rope around a pillar at the top of another staircase. They had learned not to take their chances with the crumbling infrastructure.
“Yup,” he said. “How'd you guess?”
“You know too much about the Foundations not to have spent time down here. And not just time scavenging. Time when you weren't so worried about running out of air.”
“And my Hal tolerance is nearly as good as yours,” he said, finishing his knot. “You can send them up.” Christine kept her end of the rope secured around the pillar at the bottom of the steps—just in case she could try to anchor it.
“How'd you end up on scavenging?”
“You mean instead of scraping out an existence in a factory?”
“I've never seen anyone whipped on a factory floor.”
“Then you haven't been watching close enough,” he said. “And scavenging, you get more than three chances, so long as you don't make them in too rapid a succession. And I was doing better than scraping.” He realized too late he'd said more than he should. “I had a nest egg.”
“Had?”
“When we fled...it was in my bunk on the Mercury. Coronetto's found it by now, claimed it as just more salvage.” He shrugged. “It probably about pays him back for the equipment we took with us.” Ilsa and Azure made it past Tyson. “They're up,” he called down.
“Spirits,” Christine said, and loosened the rope from the lower pillar. “I had no idea.”
He sighed. “Que sera.”
“Why don't I buy that you're so blasé about your impoverishment,” Christine said, handing him the rope. He started to wrap it around his forearm.
“Because you're not a complete idiot. But I'm also not as torn up as I probably should be. I had some money saved, but not as much as I needed—and it seemed every trip out, the captain found new ways to make it pay worse. He was an ill-tempered beast before we found you. It only got worse after. But it also wasn't...I think you just hurried him along to where he was always going.”
“Insane, you mean?”
“Not right, at least. But you wanted to know how a Lower Level kid ends up on a scavenger ship? My mom was sick. Growths and lumps, like the captain had. Cancer's the proper name. I got to know that word real damn well once the doctors saw her. Only she couldn't afford any treatment. So I took the only job that paid more than board—on a scavenger. And sent money back. She rallied for a couple of years. And I liked the work. Then she died, and I think I liked the work because it kept me from having to think about missing out on my mom's last few years of life. Maybe that's why I'm not quite so upset about losing my nest egg.” His eyes lingered on Christine, who looked worse than she had even the day before. “Or maybe I just got reminded that there's more important things in this world than cash.”
Twenty-Eight
“Home sweet home,” Christine said bitterly.
“It was your idea to come here,” Tyson said.
“Doesn't mean I have to be happy about it.” She glanced back towards Ilsa. She didn't want the girl hurt by her sentiment, but Ilsa's entire world was absorbed by the little baby wrapped in her arms. “But I... I've been meaning to ask since the other day. Your mother's care... that didn't come out of the infirmary, did it?”
“Cancer treatment? No. Pocas hoard that shit for themselves—if even they can get the supplies. Underground clinic. Scavengers take care of their own.” There was sadness in his voice.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “For dragging you away.”
“Hey, you two are scavengers, too,” he said, and smiled. “I'm sure the captain got the rest out okay.”
“Do you remember where the clinic was?”
“This Block,” he said. “S'why we're here.”
“I thought it was just our rotten luck.” She nodded to a stairwell watched by Engineers. Behind them, in gold leaf, was the seal of House Aureum.
“He the abusive father?” Tyson asked.
Christine stared at him suspiciously.
“He's of their house,” Ilsa broke in. They were both surprised she had been listening, let alone that she was speaking.
Christine glared all the harder. “You have some serious trust issues,” he said. “After we've been through—all I've given up...” he stopped.
“I never met a man who didn't try to dick me over when the opportunity arose; of women, I've met one.” She nodded in Ilsa's direction.
“My mother always said there were two ways to react to mistrust. You can see it as a challenge to be better, or you can prove them right by being weak. You remind me of her, if rougher round the edges. But as to trust—”
They rounded a corner into an alley, and there was an Engineer only a couple of feet in front of them. Christine's eyes widened. She wanted to run, and glanced to Ilsa, but she could tell from the distant expression on the woman's face that this time she wasn't prepared to flee. So she rooted in place.
Tyson smiled and sauntered up to the Engineer. “Got a delivery of some piping. Need to go through.”
“We don't let just anybody have passage through this section of the merchant district.”
“I know,” Tyson said. “And under other circumstances, I wouldn't ask. But this delivery goes to the other side of the block. This alley gets us right there. Otherwise I got to circle the whole block. And were it just me, I'd say that's the price of losing your way. But I've got my wife and her sister, and she's doing poorly after having a baby.”
“A baby?” he asked. “Can I see it?”
“You'd have to ask the mother. They both almost didn't make it, so she's extra-protective.”
The Engineer removed his helmet and approached Ilsa. Christine found herself reaching for her concealed blade. “Can I?” he asked.
Ilsa didn't say a word, but held the baby out. Christine wondered if she even knew where they were, or that the man asking wasn't Tyson.
The Engineer took the baby into his arms and cradled it. Christine had the knife out of her waistband and concealed in her sleeve. Tyson noticed and held up his hand. “You're a cute little thing,” the Engineer said, and softly touched the infant's cheek. “Thank you,” he told Ilsa, handing Azure back to her. “You can go through.” Christine thought she saw a tear slide out of his eye, but she couldn't be sure, because he quickly popped his helmet back on.
They walked by him in silence, and Christine stowed her response until they reached the end of the alley. “You are a jerk,” she said finally. “You could have given me some warning.”
“Sorry,” he said. “They used to have that checkpoint at the other end of the alley. Thought I'd have another thirty feet to explain.”
“It was a risk, taking her past an Engineer.”
“An unavoidable one. The clinic's in an out of the way area. Engineers keep it locked off. On the bright side, they don't pay much mind to folks leaving.”
“And what the hell was that response, anyway?” she asked.
“With the birthrate so low, and the infant mortality rate so high, folks don't get to see a lot of babies. A lot of them have that reaction.”
“You know a lot more about babies than I might have guessed.”
“I had a girl in port. She had a kid—wasn't mine.”
“How'd that work out?”
“She had another—also wasn't mine. Not so as I blame her, understand? Waiting for a scavenger ain't no kind of life. But I took it for a sign we could neither of us provide what the other needed, and left it at that.”
Tyson led them to a brick building that had once been a bookstore, and took them into the alley. He knocked on four successive bricks from the corner. The fifth was hollow. He pulled it out and slipped a piece of paper under it, before replacing the block.
“What was that?” Christine asked.
“Clinic's man, DuMonte, makes regular rounds to drops like thi
s. If he finds a note and a description, he finds you and brings you to the clinic. I told him a pregnant woman, baby + 1 would be waiting at Halifax and Jordan, in the Middle Levels. Usually didn't take any more than an hour for him to make his rounds. There's a couple nice stores, there—nice, but not so nice they'd look at your states and throw you out.”
“Where are you going?”
“I want to get us passage booked out of here. If Aureum wants her as bad you say, we can't linger any longer than we must.”
“I can get behind that,” she said. Tyson hugged each of them in turn.
“Stay safe,” he said, then turned and walked away.
Christine rummaged in her pack, pulling out the clothes she’d stowed away among their equipment. Scavengers were respected, conspicuous, even in uniforms as tattered as theirs. Ilsa’s limbs felt like rubber in Christine's hands as she guided them into the appropriate areas of her faded dress. Christine felt unnatural without the weight of the items in her equipment belt, but it was less eyecatching to shove them in her pack than it was to wear them. She walked with Ilsa into one of the levels closest to the Middle Levels.
Christine was certain she knew DuMonte from her thieving days, and the dead drops inside hollowed bricks had been part of his MO even back then, along with the hour wait time.
Christine held Ilsa’s hand, willing the life to return to her skin. Ilsa grimaced as Christine helped her to sit. It was early yet, but the fellow she was looking for was a slender man who sold used fabrics, which covered for the stolen goods he fenced.