by Rose Francis
If they could escape notice just long enough to talk to him, she knew he would help her get help for Ilsa. She’d gotten her Two stealing syringes for him.
DuMonte was late today. She hoped everything was okay. Last she’d seen him, he was struggling with severe agues that that affected his ability to heft crates of fabric. She hoped she might barter some of the items in her bag for Ilsa’s care. Just knowing how much the items were worth on the black market made her skittish; she didn’t want to wait in public and make a target of herself. She would have felt better if Tyson was there, or if she could have left Ilsa at home, but it would have looked too suspicious. Right now, they just looked like two Lower Level women marketing.
Christine could hardly look at Ilsa, wearing the same gown she had last worn in the City. Ilsa had lost weight—far too much. Christine’s sickness at the thought was amplified by the memory of Ilsa’s curvaceous shape, flushed with early pregnancy, ripe with vigor and new life.
“Christine,” she heard the voice behind her ear. “Don't know where you've been playing, don't particularly care. But I don't do business with the likes of you no more. I'm respectable.”
“I'm not here to fence,” she said. “My friend is sick.” She gave him a glimpse inside her bag, “and I've got salvage to trade.”
“Hmm,” he said, and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “Well, you've piqued my interest. If you'd like to accompany me, I might have some most rare wares to interest yourselves.”
They followed him down the street. DuMonte stopped and tipped an invisible hat at an Engineer as they passed.
Christine wondered if it was a signal, but she had never known DuMonte, or the Engineers, for that matter, to be clever enough for that. They entered the back of a fabric store that bore DuMonte's name. There was a door inside, that looked like it entered a closet, but in fact, entered the other half of the building.
A woman slightly past the middle of her life, with tawny hair pulled back in a severe bun and small, rectangular spectacles regarded them the way vultures had outside the Foundation. “The pregnant girl?” she asked DuMonte. He nodded furiously.
“Payment?” she asked.
“The salvage'll cover it,” he said, “if only just.”
Christine knew it would more than cover it, and braced herself to argue, but she also knew that her hand was weakest, bartering for services Ilsa couldn't walk away from. She faltered—as much as she wanted to support the clinic, they needed some of the salvage to barter passage away.
“This the child?” the doctor asked.
“Yes,” Ilsa said, in a monotone.
“I assume the girl isn't usually this color—or lack of color,” the doctor sad.
Ilsa frowned, but the question was complex enough she couldn't find the answer herself. “No,” Christine said.
“Was there an afterbirth?” the doctor asked.
“I don't think so, but we were pretty fucked up at the time. She gave birth outside the Foundation.”
“Hmm,” the doctor said, and held out her hand to touch Ilsa's forehead. “The correct answer would have been, 'Yes, there was, only it wasn't expelled with the infant.' It's rotting inside her, poisoning her from the inside out. I'm going to need medicines, stronger than what we keep here. I'll need you to go to the stores,” she said to DuMonte. She scribbled down some notes on a slip of paper and handed them to him.
“Will you be all right?” he asked.
“I don't believe the poisoned pregnant woman and her friend are part of an elaborate scheme to steal pharmaceuticals.” He nodded and left. “We don't keep narcotics here; we rarely procure anything that can be used for fun by the Pocas. To limit our exposure, we keep only the standard antibacterials and the like here.”
Christine couldn't feign casualness over the doctor's concern, and she didn't understand half the words the doctor had thrown around. “Is she going to be okay?” Christine asked.
“At this moment I can't state with certainty. If this condition persisted through the climb up the Foundation, it's obviously progressed. The first step is to remove the decaying tissue. If the sepsis has spread to other organ systems, or turned gangrenous, or... we won't know until she either gets better after removal or continues to deteriorate.” The door opened, and Christine assumed it was DuMonte, back with the medicines. It was DuMonte, but he wasn't alone. He let out a saddened sigh, and for the first time showed an ounce of emotion. “I'm sorry,” he said, “but we help those we can. You were beyond our reach.”
“Turn around,” an authoritative voice cut into the room. The figures behind DuMonte came into view. Christine swore. She didn’t recognize the man in the doorway, but she did recognize the others arrayed behind him, or rather she recognized what she needed to, from their batons, short blades, and stern demeanor.
Ilsa wheezed something, and for Christine’s conscience, she hoped it was “Go”. There was no way she could take Ilsa and the child with her, though, and she knew to the core of her being, that she had to keep Azure away from the man who had hurt his mother so deeply. She seized him from Ilsa’s arms and threw herself out the window, into the street below.
She landed as gently as you could hope in a pile of discarded baubles. She could already hear the boots pounding as the Engineers exited the clinic.
She glanced to the stairwells, but knew already that they would be blocked off.
There was one place that she had always used to get between the levels, which so far as she knew, had never been discovered. They used the elevator shafts for disposal of the parts of bodies they wouldn't Cycle. The elevators themselves hadn't moved in ages. But in one of the shafts, the cable still dangled down into the dark. She hated the idea of telling the Pocas where it was, but she was desperate. She ran for it, with the sound of footsteps from the pursuing Engineers growing as they closed in.
As she ran, she dumped the heaviest salvage from her pack, and tossed them behind her. “Free!” she yelled to passersby, and a few dashed in front of the Engineers to grab the trinkets to sell. She set the baby inside and cradled him as best she could, before sealing the top with its drawstring.
She didn't have time to gingerly reach for the cable of the old elevator, the Engineers were so close behind. So she launched herself into the blackness above the pit of human offal. She grabbed the cord, but fell a full two stories. The flesh on her hands wore away as it broke her descent. The Engineers stood dumbfounded on the Middle Level a moment. “Get her,” one yelled out.
She lowered herself several more levels and leapt out. The Engineers on this level weren't looking for her. In fact, there was a strong likelihood they had been poached for the show of force on the Middle Levels. She paused for a moment in a doorway to pull a hooded sweater from her pack. The baby cooed at her from inside, though she closed it up quickly to cut off the noises. She changed into it, pulled it up over her ears, and disappeared into the crowd.
Christine knew how to move in a crowd, and that was a small mercy. She ducked, wove, and threaded her way through, just like in old times. She had to fight the urge not to pick any pockets while she was at it.
The crowd started to thin, and she looked for cracks and spaces—ducking between stalls and walls in the absent, focused way that said, “I’ve misplaced something; I’ll get it and go about my business.” Walking on tip-toe, she followed a graffiti-scribbled wall around a corner. She blinked and exhaled as the pungent smell of rotting meat hit. It wasn’t an unusual smell, but there was a lot of it. She followed the path along a stairwell and tried to breathe through her mouth. She patted the pack absently, reassuring Azure, who made a few soft noises. He seemed to have fallen asleep for the moment, she noticed in relief. Christine tried not to move too quickly to avoid jarring him even more.
She stepped further into the staircase and followed it upwards. The bad smell was stronger here. As she turned, a few scraps of rotting meat revealed themselves. A gangrenous hand, severed at the wrist, dangled limply ove
r the stairwell.
Christine frowned to herself. Rotting meat? Not kept for reCycling? That made no sense. Then she heard a rattling noise and pressed herself to the wall. Footsteps.
“Another batch spoiled,” the guard complained.
“Not my fault. Just drag it down the stairs and to the second door where they dispose of the rest of them.”
“It’s damn heavy. Can’t we just drop it?”
“If you want to clean corpse juice off the steps, be my guest.”
Christine glanced upwards. From the echoing sound, they were two floors away and getting closer. Even the wide, ruined stairs wouldn’t hide her for long. She glanced at the door next to her, inhaled a breath of foul air, and yanked it open as silently as possible.
There was a narrow ledge separating her from a pit and the floor, and just enough of a rim to keep her from falling. It wasn’t much, but to an experienced burglar, it might as well have been a landing. The rim circled around—clearly not meant for more than emergency passage—and ended in a set of narrow steps beneath a second half-layer on the floor. The metal half-layer supported rows of tanks. She looked up to squint at them, then down at the pit below her and the storage shelves next to it, and started to inch her way around.
Christine’s eyes watered as she looked below her. It was a mass of red and white, putrefaction rising up in a miasma from the open area. The Cycling pit, she supposed—few people ever saw it, but she’d never thought it would be quite like this. It was worse than the worst Hal. She scooted around the corner of the ledge and beneath an overhang. It wasn’t much, but with her dull-colored hoodie, she’d be able to hide a bit.
“Dump the bastards and let’s go,” said one of the voices. The other one grunted and moved sideways. He unzipped the bag, and out plopped a horror. Too many arms, a missing leg, two torsos—Christine had to rub her eyes to make sure she wasn’t on a Hal. The pure air and reek argued otherwise. It was too real. They kicked the thing into the pit. She thought she saw one of the heads open its eyes briefly as it landed with a sickening crunch. The men zipped the bag up and marched off, the complainer still griping indistinctly.
Christine watched as the river of flesh, meat, and human leftovers churned towards a tunnel. The rendering, then. But that still didn’t explain the sad monstrosity she’d seen. Perhaps those with her abilities in Service could keep these creatures alive. Some sort of experiment gone wrong? She inhaled and cursed at herself to keep her eyes from watering, then scooted in closer to the wall, against the net-like grid structure of steel girders supporting the second layer. No-one had seen her yet. She kept her breathing as quiet as possible.
Boots stomped above her as she slowly made her way across the girders. There was another entrance to the stairwell a level down from her, slightly kitty-corner. It was a risk, but it wasn’t guarded, and unless she bumped into someone or got caught by one of the workers using the dumbwaiter next to it, she would be all right.
Black and yellow boots circled and stomped, and she waited in the shadows. Christine looked upwards, through the diamond metal grate.
Bluish tanks about twice or three times the size of a Poca’s ceremonial bathtub stood in rows above her. They were made of transparent glass. Swimming or floating in them were—what were they?
Christine watched, uncomprehending and motionless, as the workers walked from one end to the other. They seemed to be doctors. There were machines hooked up to the people, but mostly, they sat in that strange, bluish fluid, and in obscenely luxurious amounts of water. But what she could see looked wrong.
Too many limbs. Not enough. People sewn together at the waist, the hip, the belly, or the back—not just tangled or cuddling, but sewn together. They were strange patchwork-people. They looked a little sick, but most simply floated, resigned, talking together or snoozing. Some had mottled skin or patchy flesh, missing sections. The muscle beneath the thin, translucent layer flexed. She saw bones sticking out, arms and legs missing.
And when people from the Lower Levels disappeared, they didn’t need the same resources…because they cut them up like salvagers cut technology. A lung here, for a woman with a tumour; a liver there, a heart or kneecap…but to keep the bodies from losing their value, dying and rotting, they sewed what was left of the living together. She saw two men’s heads turn to each other, saw one pat the other’s shoulder, then guide their shared body to the edge to accept a morsel of food from someone in a yellow, full-body covering suit.
Christine sat still, holding back her nausea. Between the smell, the sweet sickly reek of death, and the floating monsters above her, she thought she’d faint. Then Azure stirred in her pack. Her weakening, sweaty hands remembered their grip. Slowly, painstakingly, she inched through the girders and towards the door.
It took a long time. She watched the dumbwaiter platform rise and fall twice. Only holding her breath and her stance saved her. Then, finally, she heard a buzzer, and the floor began to clear. Her arms aching, her legs aching, and the smell of a soiled diaper leaking from her pack, Christine inched towards the door, crept to the ground, and finally cracked it open.
She raced up the stairs, the pack shaking, and found the stairwell she’d been in before. The floor seemed closer than she’d remembered. She rushed out, her mind full of the horrors of what she’d seen, her mouth and nose full of death.
She opened the door and shut it, panting, leaving the stairwell and its horrors behind.
The dim and non-existent lighting of the broken corner stretched before her. The market’s burble penetrated and echoed, but this side of the vast room was broken and scrawled on. She tiptoed forward, planning to walk around the wall. Christine’s heart pounded as she wondered if the people here knew about the human factory just a floor away from them. But then, who left their floor? Only a fool strayed outside the boundaries, or went higher than they were supposed to.
A special kind of fool. She didn’t see the idiot with an acid scar on his face until he bumped into her, dropping his bag of needles, and swore.
When he looked up, his face was pale. Christine’s stretched into a wild grin. He tried to bolt, heading for another door up the way. She chased him, scrambling over the cement blocks on the floor. He feinted left, then right, and she grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the wall.
“Well hi, Brant. Wherever you’re going, we’re going.”
“Bitch,” he muttered.
“Bitch who saved your sister’s life that one time in the Foundation. And then yours, you miserable rat’s ballsack. But it’s your lucky day. I need a favor.”
“No deal,” he spat. Christine pushed him harder into the wall, then dragged him over to the door.
Twenty-Nine
“You owe me, Brant, and you know it.”
“There are Engineers fucking everywhere, Chris,” he said, though he knew her well enough to move the hell out of her way and let her inside. The slamming door behind her woke Azure, and he started to wail. He glanced at her pack with an eyebrow.
“Shit,” she said. “Does your sister still wetnurse?”
“Enough,” he said, “if you've got coin.”
She glared at him. “I’ve had a long couple of months. I’m awful tired. Guess I could rest real nicely if I told that Poca lord who caught his daughter in a change room and—”
“Fine. Let’s go,” he grumbled hastily. “I’ll take you to our place.”
Christine soothed Azure, absently patting his head through an opening in the pack, then whirled to get her knife against Brant’s throat. He stopped mid-reach to his belt.
“Nice try. You should learn a new trick.”
He cursed at her. “Say what you want,” whispered Christine. “Just get me to your sister. I’m sure she’ll be happy to see me.”
He said nothing to her, only swore until they reached his section on a different floor.
“No money, I guess?”
“Dream on.”
“Ruth!” he called, turning b
ack to Christine. “You were always real bad for business.”
“And as I recall I had to slap the shit out of you on numerous occasions for trying to get a peek up girls' skirts at their business—including the one nearly put a price on your head.”
“How was I to know she was a Poca?” he asked with a shrug.
“It shouldn't matter. If a woman wants you looking up her skirt, she'll offer it.”
Ruth came down from the odd little overlook apartment she slept in. Originally, it was probably just for storage, until some enterprising resident hollowed it out.
Ruth had large, docile eyes, and a face maligned by a disorder that only made her look more childlike. “She's got a hungry baby, Ruth.”
The woman took the crying child gingerly from Christine, and in a single smooth motion, cradled it into her breast. The woman's expression changed to one of satisfaction.
There was a loud knock on the door. “Hide,” Brant said, “upstairs.” She started for the steps, and he handed her her bag. He waited while she tiptoed up the steps, then muttered so loud he was nearly yelling. “Ain't it always like that? Get your dick hard in your hand and there's a knock at the door?”
He fell backwards from the door, landing with a loud thump, and Christine tensed. Then she heard a familiar voice. “We knew a lot of the same people. If she's got a hungry baby, she'd come here. That's the best I can do, for you. Now, please, please don't hurt Martine.” She'd know DuMonte's snivel anywhere.
“Martine?” she heard a deep voice say. She thought she recognized it, too, but knew better than to expose herself based on a hunch. “Who the fuck's Martine?”
“The doctor. At the clinic. She didn't know I was fetching the Engineers; she never would have let me. It wasn't her fault. But I was trying to protect her.”
“I've got no interest in hurting your doctor. You—” he said, and Christine felt a shiver down her spine, she was almost sure it was him, “that depends on the state of my friends when I find them.”