by Travis Hill
*****
Departure: -19y 08m 13d
I watched her from across the street, the darkness holding me in its arms and safe from the prying eyes—both organic and electronic—searching for prey. Or in the case of the Guardians, lost souls who had wandered too close to the barrier. The automatons wouldn’t go more than a couple of blocks into The Bower. Any time they ventured too far in, the gangs who controlled the blocks would ambush them.
The blockers were so adept at it in the maze of rubble and broken-down buildings that the Justice Ministry only used the Guardians to keep the violence and lawlessness from boiling up out of the undercity. They stopped sending the Guardians in beyond the secondary barrier when the gangs began to create powerful weapons based on the tech they salvaged from disabled automatons. The Ministry must have decided it was better to use The Bower as a steam valve for the misfits and criminals who didn’t fit into their neat, ordered society instead of sending in an army of ten thousand of the black and bronze peacekeepers.
I glanced down the street, then behind me. I’d been in The Bower for two weeks, somehow surviving by avoiding anyone and everyone. I spent the two weeks in terror, afraid at every moment one of the undercity’s predators would make me pay for a mistake, of which there were many I was sure I kept making since I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know the life, couldn’t grasp the mindset.
My whole existence was as a law-abiding citizen up above, but I couldn’t go back topside unless I wanted to sit in a cell for nineteen years until my departure date. Or be immediately sent through the Justice portal. No one knew what was beyond either portal, but we’d been taught that the “other” one inside the Upperjustice Ministry basically led to the worst hell humans could imagine.
I was afraid to move. I’d made it half a klick into The Bower but there were too many scabs patrolling the trash-strewn streets. Most of the overhead lights had been shot or blown out long ago, and the floodlights from the barrier only penetrated so far. Where I was, they made long, garish shadows that resembled my worst nightmares after sitting up with my friends and telling ghost stories when I was a child.
I looked back to the woman who had her back casually parked against the concrete facade of a demolished corner store. She looked as out of place as I did, but for her, it was because she held herself with the kind of confidence that not even the blockers did. I stood out because I was a scared topsider. I might as well have a spotlight following me everywhere. The fact that I’m a girl only made me that much easier of a target. I hadn’t seen a single female in the time I’d been in The Bower other than the one now staring at me. Or at least in my general direction.
I held my breath as she began walking toward me. I knew I should run. I had to run. All of the tales of murder, rape, and slavery in The Bower flashed through my mind. They were punctuated by the holos of failed departures we’d watched in school. If those were true—and I’d seen two live departures go wrong in my twenty-one years already—then The Bower tales were likely true as well. Those thoughts were wiped away by the fact that the woman had simply disappeared into the shadows. I strained my ears and eyes, my mind screaming at me to not even breathe.
“You should probably come with me unless you want to end up a corpse,” a woman’s voice said from behind me. I whirled around to see her hunched down, finger over her lips. “Keep your voice down,” she whispered. “Some Rockos are nearby, and we’re still close enough for the Guardians to venture in. Trust me, you don’t want to get caught between those two.”
I only nodded my head, too frightened to do anything else. I didn’t trust her, but she seemed more trustworthy than any of the other humans I’d avoided up to this point. She held out a hand and I took it, feeling the hard, callused pads of her fingers contrasting the soft, warm skin of her palm.
“I’m Mellisandra, but I mostly go by Melly,” she said softly.
“I’m Drea,” I said. If she didn’t have a last name and lived down here, then I wouldn’t have one either.
“Where are you from, Drea?” she asked, looking around with eyes as alert as any Guardian’s.
“Haven District,” I said.
“Yeah? How’s life up there, these days?” I wasn’t sure if she was just making smalltalk or not and only stared at her. “I grew up in Ellsworth District,” she said.
She gestured for me to get ready to move. Ellsworth bordered Haven on the north side, and I’d been there plenty of times. I started to answer but she put her finger over her lips again with one hand and silently counted down from five with the other. When she made a fist and slipped into the shadows, I followed, praying I wouldn’t trip or make a noise that would give us away.
*
Three blockers stood at the end of the alley, backs to us. Melly and I waited behind a rusting dumpster. I hadn’t made much noise, but she was a ghost. Twice I hadn’t seen her turn down another alley or slip between piles of rubble and nearly screamed when she reached out from the darkness to pull me in the right direction.
“What do we do?” I whispered. The blockers looked like they weren’t going anywhere for a while.
“We wait,” she whispered back. She leaned in close to my ear. “They’ll eventually move on when some unfortunate bastard slips up and makes a noise or is seen.”
The Bower smelled like an old, smoky chimney with an underlying odor of unwashed humans and open sewers. Melly smelled like she’d just bathed in a tub of citrus and roses. Her scent was intoxicating, and I felt stirrings within me that I had disconnected after Navine and I parted two weeks earlier. Stirrings that died when I murdered Navine.
We waited an hour before the blockers took off at a run. Melly pulled me from our hiding spot and ran to the intersection, veering right, the opposite direction of the three men. We ran and walked and holed up for the next four hours until we came to a culvert under the broken road. The pipe was sealed with welded metal, but Melly knocked softly on it. Two return knocks followed, to which Melly responded with another coded knock. The whisper of locks disengaging was followed by the eerily silent opening of a door just large enough for us to duck through. We walked for another five minutes until we came to a wide platform that ended in concrete stairs leading down.
“What is this place?” I asked, hoping she wasn’t leading me to the slave pits or to a pimp in exchange for whatever currency they used down here.
“You’ll see,” she said and squeezed my hand.
When we reached the bottom of the stairs, I looked out over the platform to the small village below. The light was dim yet penetrated all but the darkest shadows, and there seemed to be normal activity going on in the narrow streets.
“Welcome to Garden City,” she said, reaching out for my hand again. We stood at the railing staring down at the city-within-a-city-within-a-city below.
“You live here?” I asked, relishing the warmth of her hand in mine.
“Sure, this is one place I call home.”
“There’s others?”
“Of course. The Bower covers the entire city. A sort of undercity. Just like topside, there’s districts down here, though none are official beyond the group holding on to the territory.”
“So it’s true,” I said, more to myself than Melly.
“What? All those tales of lawlessness to the point the Guardians won’t even venture more than a few blocks in?” She laughed. “Yeah, it’s true.”
“How do you know who controls what block? How do you get from each safe spot to the next? How does anyone live down here without sunlight or food services or any of that?” I became exasperated, almost panicking at the thought of what my life was to be like living down here. What I’d done to be forced to live here.
“Shhhh,” she whispered, cupping my cheek with her gentle, soft hands. Hands that I envisioned had killed someone in order for her to survive in The Bower. Hands that made me want things I’d left behind when Navine became nothing more than a painful memory.
“I’m scar
ed,” I said softly, holding back tears that I’d abandoned long ago.
“I know,” she whispered, pulling me into a hug. “I was in your shoes once.”
CHAPTER TWO
Departure: -11h 57m 30s
I checked the webbing that held extra knives and other odds and ends, then did the same for Melly. I gave her a thumbs-up. I felt scared inside. More scared than when I’d first ventured into the city’s underworld as a wanted woman. I couldn’t decide if I was more scared at having to step through the Justice portal or at the phantom pains that shot through me when I thought of the inevitable outcome if I didn’t step through the Justice portal.
Melly cracked a grin and slapped me on the shoulder. I made sure my pistol was ready one last time. Over the last two decades, I’d learned some hard lessons. The ugly scar that littered too much surface area of my shoulder was the worst—a grim reminder from a blocker’s scattergun when my own pistol jammed during an encounter almost a decade ago. I always triple and quadruple checked my gear before venturing outside of the safety of our various havens after that.
“I love you,” I said, trying to keep my emotions in check.
“I know,” she said with a wink. “You ready?”
“No.”
“Drea…”
“I know, I know. But I’m not. I know we—I—have to do this. Even if we had two millennia together, I’d still not be ready.”
Dark clouds of bitterness crossed her expression before she shrugged them off. I hadn’t meant to hit a nerve.
“Melly,” I begged, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
She held up a hand to stop me before I could launch into an apology that would only make both of us begin crying again.
“It’s okay, Drea. I know you didn’t mean it. It just hurts more than you’ll ever know.”
“It was a mistake. You can say it.”
She turned on me with a hateful expression.
“Don’t you ever say that!” I waited for her to lash out at me, to hit me, to scream at me, but she did nothing at all except stare into my eyes until I looked away. “Falling in love is never a mistake. Ever. Remember that, wherever you end up.”
“I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice, but she’d already shouldered her pack and began walking toward the security door to the undercity.
*****
Departure: -19y 05m 02d
“I’ve never fired a gun before,” I said, afraid to take the murderous tool from her hand. “They’re illegal up above.”
“Yeah, well, they’re essential down here if you want to survive any minor encounter with strangers.”
She shoved the gun into my chest until I took it from her. Mellisandra immediately tsk’d and showed me how I should never hold a weapon by its trigger guard. She stood behind me, breathing softly on my neck as her arms surrounded me, her hands gently forming mine into the right shape and grip to aim the gun properly. I wanted to close my eyes and fall into the dreamworld I’d been living in for the last three months, but I knew this was important. As important to Melly as it was to my survival.
“Okay,” she whispered after assuring herself I wouldn’t blow my own head off with the gun. “Take this.” I felt something hard against my breast and looked down to see the gun’s magazine in her hand. “Pop it in the grip, then use your thumb to lock the slide forward.”
An ominous click was followed by a short whine as the pistol’s tiny computer powered up and fed data to the goggles covering my eyes. I was instantly inundated with wind speed, air temperature, time, my movement speed, and an icon for myself and for Melly. The readouts changed slightly as her gun’s computer networked with mine over the LoS link two seconds later.
“Ready?” she asked. I turned to see her grinning at me, her own tactical goggles hiding her eyes. I nodded. “Okay, point it at the target over there, inhale, then slowly begin to exhale. Before you finish your exhale, hold your breath and squeeze the trigger. Do it in one smooth motion. Don’t pull the trigger, as you’ll just jerk the gun and the shot will go wide.”
I nodded again then aimed down the sights at the old steel barrel twenty meters away. I slowly, calmly exhaled, then squeezed the trigger. The roar of the gun surprised me almost as much as the way it nearly jumped out of my hand. I almost pulled the trigger a second time, and gave it some extra thought as my ears burned from Melly’s laughter.
“I’ve never done this before!” I hissed, angry that she was making fun of me.
“I know,” she giggled. “I just can’t help thinking how Dogan looked just as frightened when he stood right here in this same spot the day I taught him exactly what I’m teaching you.”
“Who’s Dogan?”
“I’ll tell you some other time,” she said, her face becoming a dark storm of emotions. Her smile returned a second later, but I could sense that Dogan was a painful subject. “For now, hup hup. A girl has to be able to defend herself from the whims and fancies of a most unsavory crowd.”
I laughed at her oddly stilted words, then spent the next ten minutes teaching myself to be in control of the gun. I’d learned in my short time in The Bower that ammunition was worth more than food, and felt bad that I’d wasted enough of it during my practice to have maybe bought us a ticket topside, complete with armed escort and all bribes or toll fees paid. Melly’s advice was what stuck in my mind the most: Ammo is expensive. Use the least amount to do the most damage.
She spent two more hours instructing and drilling me on other important survival skills. I was getting the hang of fighting with a knife, though I didn’t like the haunted look she got in her eyes whenever she’d tell me how awful such a close combat battle could be. I never pressed her to tell me how many people she’d dispatched. I didn’t want to think about how I would probably have to do it one day unless I wanted to be on the receiving end of a killing (or raping) blow. The fact that I’d already killed two citizens topside made the prospect of doing it again that much more horrifying. But I had a strong will to live. Strong enough to escape into The Bower instead of being arrested, tried, and forcibly marched through the Justice portal.
We finished with a ten minute wrestling match which left us sweaty and panting. I had barely graduated to lasting more than three minutes against her in the last month. Melly was too slippery, too strong, too wily to allow me to get her in a vulnerable position. She almost broke my arm one day trying to teach me a lesson. I couldn’t lift my arm for a week, but the lesson I learned was that I wanted to improve, to last more than a minute or two just so I could feel her body next to mine, to feel her breasts pressed against my arms as I tried to immobilize her with a grapple.
The best was when we’d collapsed into a heaving, writhing mass of tangled limbs and tongues, our fingers locked in each other’s hair, but those times were rare. They were the times I didn’t let her fool me into lowering my guard so she could stun me with an open palm or sweep my legs out from under me. But even then she’d punish me physically for thinking about sex instead of survival. We ended tonight’s match with a lot of heavy petting that was interrupted by my rumbling stomach. She laughed and tickled me a bit more until my stomach unleashed a frightening, rebellious noise, which made both of us break into cackles.
“Come on, let’s go see Kavi,” she said, standing up and offering a hand to me.
I tried to pull her back down on top of me just to get one last kiss in but she jerked me to my feet. Her hand gripped my buttock, the other rubbing my stomach while making grinding noises with her mouth. Just hearing Kavi’s name made me almost hungry enough to let her escape when she peeled away and ran toward the stairs up to the market level. I caught up and seized her hand, both of us laughing as we raced up the stairs together.
*
Kavi Urtan was one of the strangest men I’d ever encountered. His skin was an odd color of orange and his eyes were too bright. Melly explained that it was a side effect of having his timer deactivated. He was lucky to still be alive, to b
e honest. Less than one in one hundred have a successful deactivation. At least ten, sometimes twenty percent of the time, the deactivation attempt is fatally unsuccessful. About as often, something weird happens within the body of those who do get their timers deactivated. Most of the time, those weird things were very unpleasant. Usually crippling.
“Ladies!” Kavi cried out in his big, loud voice. “You’re just in time!”
“Load us up, Kavi,” I said with a grin.
“You got anything for me?”
“Only because you make the best noodles on the planet,” Melly said, slapping down two circuit boards and five bullets.
“In the entire galaxy,” Kavi said with a sniff as he made the items disappear. “Guardian tech, eh?” he inquired, pulling one of the PCBs back out to take a second look at it.
“Fresh and hot, just like you like it,” Melly said without looking at me.
It was still a sore spot between us. Three days earlier, she’d gone out to the barrier to scavenge, dragging me along with her. Halfway to the barrier, she commanded me to stay put in a hiding spot. I refused until she explained that there were too many signs of something big going on.
I thought it was bullshit, but I obeyed her. I was too green to last long on my own, and after the violence and death I’d seen in my short time in The Bower, I knew better than to run off after her. Less than half an hour later, the sounds of a prolonged firefight rebounded off the concrete. Melly arrived half an hour after that and practically yanked me from the hiding spot without a word. I knew better than to ask. Her face was hard, her concentration focused on picking our way through the crumbling undercity without becoming trapped or injured.