“Can ya help Flatline?” Whisk pointed at the man.
Den’s tribe had called Althea pale as a ghost, but they were not used to seeing Caucasians. Compared to this person, she felt dark. Flatline even made Zhar look like she had color.
His skin resembled undisturbed snow, tinged with dark smudges around the eyes. Eyelids painted over with bruise flicked with random spasms that extended down past violet lips through his cheeks. Short black hair dodged around a metal plate behind his ear with several sockets. One still had a length of carbon-caked melted wire hanging from it.
Althea made a pained face at the sight. The surface thoughts rattling around in his mind went in and out, the ramble of a consciousness trapped in a body no longer connected to it. Strange written language flashed through his mind, with as many numbers as letters.
“Ol’ Flatline here’s got Coreburn. Happens to them net-heads what get black iced too much.” Grey Tatters scratched flakes out of his beard. “He used to poke around places he didn’t belong till somethin’ bit him in the ass.”
“He bin like dat fer weeks,” Whisk muttered.
“Hey, Whisk. You ain’t wheezin.”
“Yeah.” He pointed at Althea. “Told ya you gotta see this.”
She stepped over the low wall separating his chamber from the drainage trench, parting the shambles passing as curtains with her hands. Flatline’s entire body shook with an attempt to move, resulting in one eye shifting to focus on her.
An incoherent moan came from him. “Whuyu.”
“I’m Althea.”
His thoughts gained clarity, but remained a mess.
“Wawamnt.”
“I want to help you, if you like.”
“Nob felp me. Whakidgondu?”
“I can try.”
“K.”
An ashen arm slid out from the blanket, fingers flapped in the erratic dance of uncontrolled nerves. She took his hand in her left, placing her right upon a forehead as cold as the ground. Whisk and Tatter leaned into each other to watch, keeping the gathering arc of vagrants out of her way.
“You have metal things in you,” she muttered, and sensed he wanted to keep them. “Um… Okay. They aren’t making you sick?”
“Nmf.” A surge of drool dangled from his lip, a raindrop of translucent slime with a cloud of blood swirling within.
Eyes closing, she searched out his essence. The amorphous forms came to her, withered and small. The brain spot looked like a sack of tiny stones rather than a single blob; a wretched crack that fanned out from the shadow of foreign hardware. Of all the hurts she had mended, never had she seen anything close to this level of damage in the brain. One raider had a knife there, and it had taken a lot out of her.
This one was going to sting.
She glanced at Whisk. “I may sleep after this. Don’t be scared.”
Drawing a deep breath, she knelt, expecting to fall when she was done. After placing her hands on his chest, she projected her influence into his body. One by one, she forced the little shards back together, gasping from the exertion. His arm moved, rising to her hip and holding on. His other hand clasped her arm, then let go.
Minutes passed.
“Imfworking,” he moaned. “Can think… I see angels!”
She felt a hand on her cheek. Caress; it slid down to her chest.
A whispery voice rasped in her ear. “Silver ribbons, light like wings.”
“Dang. He been in the net too long.” The alcohol breath of Whisk’s chuckle floated by.
Minutes stretched to an hour or more.
Her body slackened; his hand held her upright. More pieces drew together; the cracks sealed. Shuddering with the effort, she fed power into him until it hurt. A dribble slipped from her nose, warmth on her lips; she tasted blood.
His hand left her hip and wiped her face. She blinked her eyes open and smiled at pale eyelids no longer bruised. The wagon man had forced her to work until she bled; this time she did it because she wanted to. She tried to say something to Whisk, but had no voice.
She remembered falling backwards onto something soft.
Althea’s consciousness returned in the black and white confines of a cargo box. Fleeting threads of hurt laced through her body, centering on a stab through her stomach. She sat up and wailed, curling into a ball to chase away the soreness. It had been years since she had overextended that far, and hunger had advanced to the point of pain. Her cry drew Whisk, who opened the side like an awning and smiled until he saw the face she made.
“You hurt?”
She dragged herself to the opening, wincing. “So… hungry.”
“Oh. No probo. Bennie just got a pity sack.” He scurried off, returning with a plastic bag soon after.
His attempt to chuckle sent a dry, alcohol-tainted wheeze over her face. “Here, tek two. Lookin like ya could use it.”
A pair of clear clamshell cases landed on the derelict cloth between her ankles, each containing a round, beige object. She picked one up, looking it over for a moment. The scent of meat came through the carton. Althea bit it, gnawing on something hard.
Plastic.
“Hah!” The creases around Whisk’s eyes deepened. “Open ‘em first. You sure Querq ain’t a different planet? How the hell you ain’t never seen a cheeseburger afore?”
“What is it?” She fiddled with the offering, stymied by the container.
He took it from her and pinched the edge, popping it open. “Almost fresh.”
It did not have a chance. The second one went faster than the first.
“Guess’n ya like ‘em.” Whisk handed her another. “Night man at Cyberburger gives us a pity sack sometimes, round midnight. Whenever the vat’s too low ta keep for the mornin’. They’d chuck it otherwise.”
“It’s good.” She licked the taste from her fingers.
Her voice drew a dozen bums to her little house. Word of Flatline had gotten around, and they had come as they always did. One by one, she tended to them despite that it hurt to call on her gift so soon. Finding herself in her usual role felt comfortable in a depressing way. Even the great City-Beyond-the-Fire followed the laws of nature. These men prayed to her once she had cured them of everything from broken fingers to sores to odd things that made them cough squiggly sicks onto the ground. Their adulation brought with it a familiar sense of foreboding.
“I shouldn’t stay here.” She sighed. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
Whisk was perplexed. Once the line of injured homeless had dissipated, Flatline sauntered over with a cheeseburger in each hand and one in his mouth.
He sucked the mouth burger down in one gulp. “Holy shit, I thought I was fucked. I don’t know what the hell you did, kiddo, but I owe you big time. What do you mean, get hurt?” He jammed another burger in his mouth. “Fuck, I’m hungry as hell.”
Althea reached for one more from the bag when no one was looking, chomping at it as if she had to eat it before the theft got noticed. “Bad people always come to take me away. They will hurt you to get me.”
Flatline looked her over. “You’re a Scrag, aren’t ya?”
She nodded.
“Badlands rules aren’t city rules. Yeah, we got our gangs here, but they don’t do the whole takin’ slaves thing. Cops get their panties in a knot about that.”
“What’s panties?” She tore a piece of burger off.
“That…” Flatline pointed at her as he chuckled through his last burger. “Is a conversation I am not having with a ten-year-old. The cops don’t much like that, either.”
“I’m twelve,” she grumbled, wondering why she bothered.
“Oh, yeah, that’s so much better. Hey, I guess you don’t need my services seein as you’re from the shitsmear, but if you ever do, just ask.”
“What can you do?” She rubbed her belly, finally full.
He offered a rube’s explanation of what a net pirate does, trying to frame it in a way a kid from the Badlands might grasp. When she still had cl
uelessness stamped on her forehead, he sighed. “I sneak around a digital world, grabbing information people are willing to pay for; information other people don’t want found.”
“Can you find my mother?”
“Doubt it if you’re from the Badlands. They don’t have much in the way of computers out there. Not sure I could help.”
She thought about the memory in the old man’s mind. Her blue clothing looked more like what the people in this strange city wore than anything from the tribes. Althea stared at Flatline, sending the image of the pale-faced woman into his head.
“Whoa…” He stumbled away, holding a hand to his forehead. “That’s fucked up. Is that your mom?”
She looked down. “Yes.”
“Well, okay. I can try. You know what her name is or anything else I can use?”
“No.”
“Well…” He laughed. “I’ve had less to go on for other jobs, and you did bring me back from the dead. The least I can do is try. Might take me a couple days to get my hands on a deck and get back into the swing of things. As soon as I got somethin’, I’ll come find ya.”
“You’re not going to hurt yourself, are you?”
Flatline shook his head. “No. Fuck that. I ain’t goin’ anywhere near a grade six corp-net again. Not till I get my hands on some Icevest softs.” He turned to Whisk. “Hey man, if you see a pizza delivery bot come out of nowhere in a few hours, you’re welcome.”
Cackling with glee, the strange man in black danced to the end of the drainage channel and climbed the ladder, singing.
iping tears from her face, Althea climbed out of her metal box and squinted at the setting sun. Three days had passed since she had crossed the gates of fire, and no amount of bawling would get her back to Karina and Father. It was time to do something more than sit around feeling sad. The stiff breeze channeling through the drainage path blew icily through her clothing and tossed her hair about her face. She wandered among the fragments of a dozen shattered lives stacked around the repurposed boxes and shipping containers that formed this enclave of the unwanted.
At the center of it all, she plucked the pity sack from the ground to find it empty save for a cup of flesh-toned slime with no appreciable fragrance or flavor. The sky held no answers; even the stars hated this place. Only the receding sun had the strength to peer through the indigo gloam. That, at least, told her which way Querq was. “Generally east” was good enough for her to try.
The narrow rungs of the metal ladder were unpleasant to bare soles, and colder still than the air. The vagrants had gone off in search of charity, the Bumwallow had fallen silent save for the scurrying bits of trash frolicking in the gusts and a distant gurgle from the corroded grating.
With her back to the fading day, she walked. The phantoms of this place followed her, inhabiting the howling gale and appearing in darting movements in the shadows at the edges beyond her sight. Being alone had never been something Althea liked; being alone in this place was worse. The lack of rain put one thing in her favor, and as the streets went by, she dodged the curious stares of the vagrants and the hoodlums; the people who lived in the bowels of this dreadful city had thoughts and feelings quite similar to the raiders.
A great light rode in from the side on the wings of a blaring horn, and she crossed her arms over her face and screamed. Blinded, she could not see what shot past her with the screech of a demon’s wail. The light vanished. Blinking, she faced toward angry yells, but the trembling visage she presented drew the vitriol out of the charging man’s voice. Her eyes adjusted, finding a car sideways on the strange metal road, door open, and its driver looming over her.
“The goddamned light was green, stupid kid.” A man, clad in dark shimmery fabric with a strange grey strip of cloth hanging from his neck, stared at her with incredulity. “Are you fucking blind or something?” He ran his hands through his short, black hair. “Fuck. If I hit you that woulda jacked my insurance rate.”
Lowering her hands, she bowed her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.”
“Damn street kids. Don’t you know what a traffic light is?” The man stopped inches away from her.
“I don’t. Please don’t hit me.” She took a step back, afraid of the emotion billowing off him.
“Oh for fuck’s sake. I ain’t gonna whack a little girl. You serious you don’t know what a damn light is?”
“I’m from the Badlands.” She ventured eye contact.
His hard face softened. “Look, kid. See that.” He pointed at a red circle. “They put them by roads where people are supposed to walk. If you see red, you wait for green. If you see green, you can cross. You walk out on a red light you’re gonna get creamed.”
“Creamed is bad?”
“Guess it’s true what they say about blondes, eh?” He laughed. “Yeah, creamed is bad. You were almost a hood ornament.”
She knew he mocked her, and did not like it. His mental imagery of the meaning of “hood ornament” proved gruesome enough to distract her from indignation. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Thank you for telling me the lights.”
“Strange kid. Hey, ain’t it a bit late for you to be out alone?”
She shrugged.
“Where you goin?”
“Querq.”
“Yeah, we all got ‘em.”
“What? No, the city, Querq.”
“City? There’s only two cities, one east and one west. Oh, shit, you mean out there in aborigine land.” He laughed. “Good luck with that, kid.”
She watched in silence as he went back to his car, pulled the door closed with a dull thunk and drove off, leaving a cloud of fog. The orb had returned to being red, so she waited. No cars came, but she did not take a step until it turned green. Fanciful music drew her gaze to the clouds, at a strange box as big as a car sailing through the air.
Two great panels of light shimmered below it, angled to face the ground on either side. Moving images spread across them: a field of black glinting with stars, at the center of which gleamed a long, white machine. The view zoomed in on whatever it was, revealing an uncountable number of light dots covering it. Shaped a bit like a loaf of bread, it tapered from a narrow end to a fat end where plumes of white energy streaked off into the black.
The music cut out and a man’s voice echoed off the canyon-like walls of nearby buildings. “The senate confirms earlier reports that the CSS Angel, the largest military starship produced by the UCF to date, is slated for active duty within months. One hundred patriotic citizens are eligible to win tickets to attend the launch event and accompany the vessel on its maiden tour around the moon.”
After a few seconds of black, the panels changed to show a man’s upper body. His green shirt was dotted with little bits of metal in various shapes. Althea got the feeling other people considered him important. Words appeared, scrolling below him.
“The admiralty is pleased with the progress the build crews are making. As you know, orbital construction is still a developing industry. However, we are proud to see this great symbol of freedom and patriotism take to the far skies of space. The level of support a ship of this type is capable of bringing to colony worlds is an order of magnitude above what we have today.”
Boring.
The fancy lights and pretty coat with all the shiny bits on it were not getting her home any faster. Two blocks went by in quiet. Again stopped by one of those red orbs, she curled and uncurled her toes over the curb, waiting for it to change.
“Hello.” A strange little voice, not quite male, came from her right.
“Hi.” She spoke before looking, and turned around twice, having seen no one.
“Do you need a ride?”
She jumped; the voice again came from where no person stood. From a box atop a post by the corner, a drawing of a small man waved at her. Light came from the top, with pictures of little cars around the smiling figure in blue.
“Who are you?” She walked over to the pedestal.
A rectangle with noodles for arms and legs, and a circle for a head saluted her. “I am a PubTran taxi terminal. I can dispatch a PubTran taxi if you are in need of transportation.”
“Transportatoes?” She stared at the glowing panel at face level.
A pre-programmed laugh felt insincere. “Do you need a ride? Do you need to go somewhere far away?”
She jumped and clapped. “Yes! Please.”
Bouncing, she waited. Minutes later, a tiny car skidded to a halt by the pedestal. Silver on the roof and doors, its powder blue fenders looked quite battered. A door that took up almost the entire side swung up into the air to reveal two facing bench seats. She stooped under it and climbed into a warm space that smelled of old shoes. The seat was much harder than the ones in Anita’s car, but still softer than a steel box. She sat, gawking at the front end, and lack of anyone driving it.
“Please state your destination.” The same voice came from a small flashing panel on the wall to her left, opposite the door.
“Querq, please.”
Several seconds of silence later, the voice returned. “Destination not found. Please provide additional detail.”
“It’s far to the east in the Badlands. An old city named Querq.” She spelled it out.
After a long pause, the voice spoke in a lifeless cadence that attempted to sound pleasant. Whenever it recited numbers, the tone dipped out of the rhythm of the sentence. “Closest match: Albuquerque, New Mexico. Population:
Prophet of the Badlands (The Awakened Book 1) Page 30