by SJ Griffin
The Vanguard
by SJ Griffin
Copyright 2013 SJ Griffin
License Notes
Chapter One
There was before the flood and then there was after the flood. It was simple. You knew where you were, and when. Everything else was divided into those two states of being, no matter how much more significant or catastrophic whatever happened may have been to the greater scheme of things. The day the oil disappeared was before the flood, the Seven Invasions were after the flood, along with the day that the economic systems collapsed and the world went bust. Then there was me. I was born at the precise moment the flood water inundated the city’s most eastern boundary so I defied any attempts at classification. I wasn’t from any simple place. I was of the flood.
I should introduce myself. My name is Sorcha Blades.
We always found a way to pick up what we needed, to stay one step ahead, to make things happen. We being me, Minos, Roach, Casino and Lola. The five of us were family. As we’d either never had a real one to begin with or lost them along the way we made our own family out of each other. We lived in an abandoned hotel in the northwest of the city, just between Queens and some district they hadn’t bothered to name. A hotel was the only building that met all our requirements, enough space for five to live and five hundred to party, plenty of storage and well located for business, both the legitimate kind, without hope or glory, and our more profitable sidelines. We dabbled in espionage, theft, hacking, pirating, smuggling and fencing, although maybe not in that order. We knew how to make things work in our favour no matter what the odds.
Over the years we’d learnt, through bitter experience, that it wasn’t a good idea to allow our business contacts to visit us at home. There were some very odd people out there. Greasy Clive’s was more than a local institution to us, it was our office. Clive’s cafe was perfect, heaving with the unclean masses devouring set lunches in the middle of the day, and pretty much empty first and last thing. It was last thing after my shift at Packet where I worked as a bike messenger. As jobs went it was one of the best I could have had. I rode my beloved bike around the city all day long, with just us and the road to worry about. It was dangerous enough to make me feel like I was alive, like I was swimming ahead of the tide instead of just keeping my head above water. Clive had started to think about closing up and I was sitting in the window seat opposite Loki and his hair. Birds could have nested in it if Loki could just sit still for a moment, he was in perpetual motion. At the end of the working day it was tiring just watching him.
‘I wouldn’t give just anyone a deal like this, Sorcha,’ Loki said. He said my name with a soar and then a shushing sound, dropping the ‘a’ at the end, like I was a highflying secret. Soar-shhh.
‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ I pushed aside my empty plate.
He picked up the small box from the red plastic chair next to him and placed it on the table like it was checkmate. Inside were a thousand blank identity cards. I slipped it into my bag, certain it would keep us going for a while.
‘Payment, payment,’ he said. ‘You can’t just take them.’
‘Relax,’ I nodded towards small card propped up against the ketchup bottle, this one loaded with credit, accepted everywhere.
Loki nodded in approval at my sleight of hand and as he attempted to slide the card up his own sleeve it caught on his cuff. ‘And you make it look so easy,’ he said. The bell over the door gave its cheerful ding as he left.
Clive stood at my elbow, apron stained with the day’s orders. ‘Sorry Sorcha, you’re going to have to pay your tab today.’
‘Really, Clive?’ I said. ‘Really?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘I’m not running a charity you know.’
‘After everything I’ve done for you, it’s come to this,’ I offered him my payment card.
‘There’s no need to be like that,’ Clive pushed it away. ‘I was wondering if you had any of that rum left. Just a bottle. Just one.’
We were still up to our ears in smuggled rum so I arranged a delivery time along with an extended tab for me and the others. I stretched my tired legs out and watched strange bubbles forming on the top of my tea. The door signalled more company and Casino sauntered across the cafe looking as stylish as ever, his elaborate goatee trimmed to perfection.
‘Did you hear the one about the clumsy friend and the noodle seller?’ he said.
‘I love jokes,’ Clive said, he was clearing the next table.
‘It’s no joke, Clive,’ Casino said. ‘It’s a tragic tale of a young life cut short.’
‘What’s he done now?’ I said.
‘Why don’t you pop up to the market and have a look,’ Casino sat opposite me and took my tea. ‘There’s quite a crowd gathering.’
I left him to deal with Clive’s complaints about tea sharing and its effect on profits and rode up through the mauve evening to the Jubilee Market. I could hear the crowd from the main road as I locked my bike to a lamp post that leant into the road, the victim of an accident or some high jinks. When I came around the corner by the shoe stalls, I could see Minos in the distance. He looked like he was crowd surfing at a very rowdy gig. As I pushed my way through the people I saw he was being held high above the head of a very angry noodle seller who went by the name of Doodle. Doodle was a small man but all muscle. He had worked on his Japanese food stall so long that we all thought of him as being Japanese. He was a little Japanese somewhere, way back before the invasion, but like most of us he’d never left the city, never mind the country. He was shouting in Old Japanese and I remembered enough from school to know that he was threatening to throw the monkey through the window. And we thought we’d never need those obscure phrases we’d learnt. This was an unusual situation. The Minos part was expected but Doodle was a very relaxed fellow. He was not a man to threaten to throw anything through a window, he was a man to help a friend in a fix and never mention it again. Me and Doodle went back a long time, many fixes and favours having passed between us.
‘Hello Doodle,’ I said.
‘Oh, Sorcha Blades her very self,’ he said as though he wasn’t holding two large handfuls of gangly ginger man above his head.
‘How’s it going?’ I said, quite enjoying Minos’s incredulous expression at how casual I was being.
‘Not too bad,’ Doodle said. ‘How are you?’
‘All good. Are you sure you’re OK? You seem a little tense.’
‘Well, to be honest, an incident has occurred. Someone smash my stall all up. Smash it all up. What is Doodle to do?’
‘First may I say, Doodle, how sorry I am that someone has smashed your stall up,’ I said. ‘The damage does appear to be quite extensive.’
The stall looked like a pile of chopsticks. The crowd were nodding in agreement. There seemed to be more of them now, reasonable negotiation being a more intriguing event than the more commonplace threat of extreme violence. A woman caught my eye, she was as short as a child and fat, but more interesting to me was that she seemed to be taking notes. Doodle shifted the weight of Minos over his head and Minos clamped a hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.
‘I would be as upset as you are had it happened to me,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we see how we can proceed without any more damage being done to person or property?’
‘This is your friend, right?’ Doodle said. ‘I thought he looked a little bit familiar. Now I know why.’
‘Unfortunately, he is,’ I ignored Minos’s glare.
‘Then I put him down,’ Doodle said.
Minos dropped to the ground as Doodle let go and stepped out from under him as neat as a martial artist. The crowd sounded their approval as Minos landed in the mud among the scraps of food and paper that harboured who knew what fatal
germs.
‘So, I think it over,’ Doodle said, in no time at all. ‘And what Doodle want is cash for the stall.’
‘Cash?’ I looked at Minos. The crowd murmured, the woman scribbled her notes. I tried to catch her eye but she was engrossed in whatever she was writing.
‘Cash. Let’s say two thousand,’ Doodle said.
I pulled Doodle to one side, away from the crowd who began to disperse muttering various complaints about the excitement being over, I noticed the woman and her notebook slip away with the rest of them. Minos hovered nearby, shuffling like a kid waiting outside an important office.
‘What’s going on?’ I said.
Doodle, like everyone, had his vices. Gambling was one and even more gambling was another. But he wasn’t a man who sought the kind of kicks that cost cash. He was in trouble.
‘Doodle will do you a favour,’ Doodle said. ‘I not tell you. But if he doesn’t get me the cash I will tell the people I owe it to all about him.’
‘But cash, Doodle, come on,’ I said. Even we, with our extensive network of contacts, would find it impossible to lay our hands on cash. It wasn’t worth anything so no one used it, not even on the black markets. Everything was traded on credit now the economy was dead. Whoever Doodle owed they were just making a point, putting Doodle through hell for the fun of it.
‘And what about that favour you owe me?’ I said. I hated to pull that one but there was something about Doodle’s defeated demeanour that worried me.
‘Yes, I remember that,’ Doodle said. ‘That’s why I not ask for the ten grand I need.’
Ten thousand in cash.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Give him a few days. He’ll get it.’
Minos made a noise like a puppy in a bag finding it had a brick for company. I dragged him away as Doodle turned back to the ruined stall.
‘I slipped on a half eaten kebab,’ Minos said. ‘A pitta did for me. It wasn’t my fault.’ He looked miserable.
‘Could be worse,’ I patted him on the arm. ‘You could owe the people Doodle owes instead of owing Doodle.’
‘We’ll never find that much cash,’ he said. ‘Then I will owe the people he owes.’
‘We,’ I said. ‘We will owe them’
I tried to look positive, but without a stroke of luck, the kind I’d never encountered, we would be in trouble too. Big trouble.
We sat in the kitchen, around a table littered with half eaten pizzas, proving that a problem shared might be halved but it wasn’t any closer to being solved. The kitchen opened out onto the restaurant so that the well heeled could watch the chefs creating their dinner. But that was once upon a time, just then five scruffy individuals sat in the kitchen and the restaurant’s new clientele was the hardware that covered most of the tables. Weird-looking computers and other machines that Minos had snagged from the docks and that we’d reprogrammed to oil the mighty wheels of our empire murmured and hummed. We had so much technical kit we’d had to install our own generator, the drain on the official energy grid would have brought Enforce to our door. Besides, we needed round the clock electricity and the official juice went off between midnight and five in the morning. That was no good to anyone but the government that switched it off.
‘We are already in big trouble,’ Casino said. ‘It is when he tells them rather than if, after all.’
‘We’ve been in worse situations,’ Lola said, picking a chunk of pineapple off her pizza and sticking it on mine.
‘Like what?’ Minos said.
Lola thought about it for a minute, turning her large hooped earring round in her ear, tangling it in her unruly blonde hair. ‘I’m just trying to be positive. We haven’t.’
‘She’s right,’ Casino slapped Minos on the back. ‘Well done.’
‘What are we going to do?’ Roach said.
‘Could we print the cash?’ Lola said.
‘No, it’d take months to get the parts together,’ Minos said.
‘Chunk has a press,’ Roach said, referring to one of their colleagues, in the loosest sense of the word, at the dock.
‘It’s the paper,’ Minos said. ‘Impossible to get hold of. The ink we could fake, but the paper, no way.’
‘Would they know?’ Lola selected another slice of pizza.
‘If you’d seen the state of Doodle, you wouldn’t want to test them,’ I said.
We lapsed into a thoughtful silence that was tinged with a little despondency, the hum of the computers and the occasional beep the only sound. A scanner stuttered into life and we listened to an Enforce officer call in a street robbery just around the corner. They were on the broadcast channel so it was only for show, all the interesting activity was reported on the closed channels, which we also listened in on.
‘How long have we got?’ Casino said.
‘He didn’t say,’ I said.
They exchanged concerned glances. No deadline, that was a worry.
‘Who is after Doodle?’ Roach looked horrified at his rhetorical question.
It was a bit upsetting as he was the toughest person I knew. Not much frightened Roach because not much was bigger than him.
My wristset bleeped. It was Packet. An automated message to call for a code four. That meant an urgent delivery.
‘But I’m on call,’ Casino said, checking his own wristset.
Minos built them to keep us in touch with each other and hooked up to the DarkNet wherever we were. They received and made all kinds of voice calls, text messages and other kind of short communications over secure channels. They also linked to our tablets so we had access to a larger screen and more information when we needed it. They looked like cheap, knocked off wristsets from decades ago so they’d never been stolen. And even if they were, they were locked down with the kind of security it would take years to penetrate, that’s if Minos didn’t blow them up by remote first. In another world Minos would have been a lauded inventor, but in this one he was forced into a life of crime.
‘Maybe it’s a mistake,’ I wandered out to the restaurant to call. ‘Despatch. It’s Sorcha. You have a docket for me.’
‘Blades. Good evening. I do indeed have a little old docket here that has just come in,’ it was Yum. The worst, most long-winded dispatcher at Packet. He had never been a courier and therefore had no idea how annoying it was to be standing around in the freezing cold waiting for a job while he wind-bagged his way through the simplest information.
‘Casino’s on call,’ I said. ‘Should he take it?’
‘I’m afraid not, lazy bones. This one has come in with a special request for you to do it. And it’s got special bonuses attached if you do it on time. Cash on delivery. What job number did we send?’
‘886498,’ I said, annoyed by the inappropriate cash joke. I couldn’t believe people still used that phrase. Yum seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to finding ways to annoy me.
‘OK. The address is Lower Ground, 345 Golden Square. Ride safely.’
I cut him off and waited for the text confirmation and codes.
The information scrolled across my tiny display, the fee was massive. I ran back to get my jacket, already mindful of the bonuses.
‘You up?’ Casino said.
‘Yeah, they asked for me particularly. Big, big fee. It must be some serious data.’
‘Where?’ Lola said.
‘Pick up in Golden Square.’
‘Then on to?’
I stopped half in, half out of my jacket. ‘I don’t know.’
Everyone looked a little bothered by this. Not having all the information up front was not in itself unusual but an off roster docket with a special request made it uncomfortable. But I could handle myself. I was the top rider at Packet, I’d run down more jobs, made more bonuses than anyone. I’d also had more accidents than anyone else, and caught more Enforce tickets too but they were a small price to pay for the glory.
‘I’ll get into the system and find out more,’ Minos said. ‘We’ll find out where it c
ame from.’
‘Run along, dear,’ Lola helped me on with the rest of my jacket. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
The streets were still busy. There were a couple of hours left in the day until the power went out on the stroke of midnight, so my fellow citizens were buzzing around trying to get by before medieval times descended upon us. I quite liked the switch-off hours, they didn’t affect me and my generator but they did force a kind of peace on the city. At three in the morning everyone ordinary would be inside and the street belonged to people trying their luck and beating the odds. It was my favourite time. The switch-off worked better than the curfew did, we’d ignored that for so long I couldn’t even remember when it was supposed to start.
The NW sector appeared on all the maps and the most official paperwork but it was, to all intents and purposes, hidden. A clandestine town lurking in the dark shadow of the seen city, clinging on to ermine robes like an out of favour court jester. I took the one maintained road into the favoured realm. The only other vehicles were drivers for hire ferrying goods, information or people. Once in a while one of the driverless cars would glide by with that eerie whine they made. The roads used to be full of them running their set routes around the city. Some of them had been hacked and stolen or commandeered by joyriders but the rest still drifted around the city like ghosts, looking for pickups. The only ordinary people who used their vehicles spent the working day in them, or on them. The more affluent citizens, of course, had cars but they were the kind that sat on driveways looking expensive, you never saw one on the road. The fuel was hard to come by in the upper classes and they couldn’t use the unlicensed homemade oil that we used. Appearances wouldn’t allow. They used taxis to get around and to get them around taxis used a synthetic fuel supplied by the government which eroded fuel lines. In double rush time the ragged posters and graffiti of the NW Sector made way for the digital display screens of the Administration Sector, so called because that’s where all the slippery wheels of society were greased – Enforce headquarters, all the ministries and some of the Academies were housed there. The buildings were grey, grand affairs and few people knew or cared what went on behind their blank windows. I had all the relevant permits to deliver throughout the sector so I had a fair idea of what went on and it was not much, so far as I could tell. It was a world away from the NW Sector.
I jumped a red light at Arch and Park and cruised down the road to Loho. When the floods came, the river inundated huge sections of the city, pouring through streets almost a mile north of embankments that had stood firm for hundreds of years. Loho used to be in the heart of the city, a throbbing throng of narrow streets hiding a vibrant scene that ran round the clock, now it stood nervous and skittish on the edge of the black water. In the early days people had abandoned it, fearing further flooding, but in the last few years some cafes and bars had opened. People, desperate for housing, had moved back in bringing the shops and the other services they needed with them. They were on the whole the plastic dolls of the Work and Labour class. A few little media companies had sprouted up, trying to make a name for themselves running data and information in a saturated market. It was an easy market to get into but even easier to get out of. I rode round and round the square looking for number 345. There was a 344 and a 346 but their odd neighbour was nowhere to be seen. Then I saw a narrow ramp leading down. I could only just fit my skinny bike between the boards covering the old entrance. It opened out into a huge underground space that might have been a car park at some point. Now it just smelt damp and harboured gigantic rats. I guessed this would be lower ground, what with it being lower than the ground. There was an impressive display of graffiti and in the far corner someone had taken a lot of trouble to whitewash over a couple of square metres on the wall. On it they’d sprayed the number 886498. My job number. The tag said Imagination Industries. At first I thought it might be a viral campaign, something to do with the games they pumped out to the eager masses, but who would come down here to see it?
Imagination Industries was one of the few multinational corporations still operating. Most of them had gone under - pharmaceuticals, energy, old media, financial they all went. The financial sector went fastest and dragged everything else down. But Imagination industries were growing. They were so secretive that no one, not even the government knew what they were up to. It was rumoured that they kept a huge amount of credit off shore somewhere and were worth more than most countries. They had the monopoly on the gaming houses, the news channels, their hateful logo spun round and round on every television screen in every house, in every country in the world. They were a phenomenon. They made me suspicious. They used the old retail models laid out in dusty old manuals, their holy trinity was consume, consume, consume.
The more I looked at the number on the wall, the more it felt like a clue. I called home.
‘Lola, what’s Imagination Industries reception address?’
‘Excellent work, I was waiting for your call. We think you’ll want the Administration Sector office,’ she said. ‘They placed the order.’
‘Why did they give the Golden Square address then?’ I’d wasted precious minute cycling around Loho when I had bonuses to chase.
‘They moved this evening. Order was placed this afternoon, with a time stamp.’
Imagination Industries had been able to get round some of the peskier corporate laws by never having a physical address but the Ministry of Work and Labour had managed to persuade them, with a big government contract no doubt, to have one registered address and to at least pretend to comply with government policy. Imagination Industries treated that as another game and changed offices like people changed their socks, more if those people were Minos.
I pedalled out of there at speed, swooping up the ramp. A car was parked opposite the entrance to 345, I noticed it because it was so shiny, light bouncing off its waxed black body. As I took a left along the waterfront I looked over my shoulder and saw it pull out to follow me. Good luck with that, I thought.
I was not unaccustomed to being follow. It could be rival courier company. Swift, called that even though they were anything but, were the worst. They tasked their rookies with following riders from the best companies in the hope of some of the sparkle rubbing off on them. They also hijacked packages and delivered them on your behalf, along with the message that the client should give their business to a company with better security, like Swift. It was surprising how often it worked. Or maybe it wasn’t. Everyone was paranoid about security and couriers were the safest way of moving data and information around. The fastest way to tell everyone what you were doing was to put it in the hands of the web and its mighty data cloud. Nothing was safe there.
I cycled up towards the Riverside Sector, slowing as I came to the edge of the Cathedral Quarter. The narrow lanes of the oldest part of the city would be rife with rich folk and taxis. Taxis hated couriers. The tro-tro and van drivers of the NW and N sectors were no threat to their business as they weren’t licensed to carry data, but cycle couriers were. We could take it anywhere we liked and we did. Data was where the credit was, information was the most valuable currency we had. We carried it cheaper, faster and suffered less bureaucracy. Taxis just couldn’t bear us elbowing into their lucrative territory so they tried to run us down. There had been cases of messengers being hit by taxis and their deliveries being stolen for Enforce. About three quarters of my deliveries weren’t legal but as a courier I was protected by the laws of privacy. One advantage of having self-serving lunatics making the laws was that they came up with lots of laws that we could manipulate to our own ends. If we couldn’t open the packages or even ask what was in them, we couldn’t be held responsible for their contents. We couldn’t name our pick up or drop off addresses either. The clients were protected by a similar web of strange laws, some contradictory. Enforce were allowed to do pretty much as they liked, within this strange arrangement of conflicting legislation, so if a taxi pulled a package from a courier they got a nic
e kick back for all the information inside and another courier got taken off the road, sometimes for good. That was what I hated most about the taxis, they were in with Enforce. I was going to keep a low profile and keep my delivery. I arrived at the address Lola had given me in next to no time at all. It was a narrow kiosk between an old fire station and some burnt out flats. I was admiring the irony when I saw Casino free-wheeling down the pavement.
‘All right?’ Casino said.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘This is driving me nuts. I’ve been all over the place already. What do you want?’
‘Now, play nicely,’ he said. ‘You need an ID chip. Yum called in a terrible panic.’
‘Why didn’t he call me?’
‘Fear,’ Casino handed me a card which would identify me as an authorised rider. They only insisted on ID if the package was over a certain value to the sender.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Have a nice evening,’ Casino said, bunny-hopping off the kerb and into the light flow of traffic.
I knocked on the door. A small slot opened.
‘Yep?’ said a pair of eyes, eyelashes thick with mascara. ‘What is it?
I passed her my chip.
‘Pause, please.’ The window closed.
I watched the traffic rolling past. The car from Golden Square cruised by, or one very similar. It was one of the few cars with two working headlights.
‘Pick up number?’ The eyes were back.
‘886498.’
‘Pause, please.’
The window closed again. I waited. Then it opened again and a hand pushed a slim brown envelope towards me, the ID card balancing on top.
‘Go, go,’ said the eyes.
The envelope suggested I went all the way back to where I had come from and out to the offices on the edge of Kensington Fields. I felt the envelope to see what was in it. I hoped it wasn’t an invoice, which would mean another pick up, but I knew it was. It had an aura of futility about it.
The clock was counting down faster than I would have liked so I rode down into an old underground station and into the tunnel heading west. The flood shut down the whole underground train network, what wasn’t underwater was crippled by a system that wasn’t set up to deal with even the smallest crisis, never mind an apocalypse. By the time the Ministry of Environs and Conurbations had begun to think about starting up some of the lines again, for the commuting Work and Labour force, enterprising citizens had already stolen most of the track. We had appropriated some cabling so were in no position to judge.
It was much quicker underground, much more direct. In no time at all I passed the turning for Mole Town, one of the underground communities that had sprung up. Mole Town, like some of the sub-settlements further north, was a no go area. It was just like above ground, there were places you couldn’t go if you didn’t belong. There was a legendary section of tunnel that had been colonised by some group insisting that the world had already ended and that the sun was killing us as revenge for the damage we’d done to the planet. Three generations had been born underground and now, again according to stories, the babies were born half-mole half-human. Casino said that was what happened when children started inbreeding. Some people said they’d turned cannibal but no one had dared to try and find out if it were true. A couple of years ago one of the kids left the community saying it was like a cult and he wanted to be free above ground. He lasted three months and then his skin ate him because it couldn’t stand the light. He had very angry skin.
I rode along the gaps left by the missing rails until I reached the basement entrance to Elijah Blue’s cafe. He had a back door below stairs for those times when the party wasn’t ready to call it a night but Enforce were keen to break things up. Elijah would just move everyone underground leaving a couple of decoys upstairs for the officers to interrogate. I used my bike light to show the way through his dark cellar, slipping between the stacks of chairs and tables that would be spilling across the pavement upstairs come summer. Although, given we’d missed the last three summers, they might be down there for a while longer.
‘Evening, Elijah,’ I said.
‘Hello, Sorcha,’ Elijah said, holding the door open for me. ‘What brings you up through my cellar?’
‘Annoying job,’ I said.
‘No rest for the wicked,’ he said. ‘Get Roach to give me a ring will you? I need some security for a party next week.’
The office down by the Fields turned out to be inside the arch with half a horse statue on top of it. I didn’t know where the other half had gone. It was some kind of library that I’d never heard of. A man with a croupier’s visor gave me a padded envelope.
‘Is this the actual delivery?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve been back and forth all over the place.’
‘Oh, I am terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought that was your job. Must have been terribly inconvenient for you.’
Before I could say anything smart he’d gone. I looked at the delivery address, and wasn’t at all surprised to see that I would be going back the way I had come to the Cathedral Quarter. As I was unlocking my bike I spotted the car from earlier speeding back towards the Administration Sector. I thought they might be extra security for the magical mystery tour, someone wanting to protect their package without taking any of the risks themselves. They’d pick the padded envelope from my cold, dead hand before they would let someone else get hold of it. I pulled my bag tighter and pedalled back into fray.
I decided to take a route over the rooftops, it wouldn’t be any shorter but it would be more discrete and no car could follow me. No one outside my social bracket would dare go up there. I doubted some of the Administration class even knew people lived up on the roofs. The only time they’d see one of the sky people would be when there was an accident or a dispute, and then they’d only be a sky corpse lying crumpled on the pavement. Not worth bothering about at that point.
The sky people lived on the roofs, along the northern bank of the swollen river, maybe to balance out the people who lived in the tunnels. They had set up a system of bridges and springboards with old planks and driftwood so that anyone could get around up there, away from the streets below. The springboards were fun, like flying, but no good on a bike so I stuck to a longer route over flat bridges. Once in a while, you would find some Enforce officer up there trying to pay people to vote or looking for new recruits amongst the hardened street fighters who’d seen it all. Not that they ever had much success. Many of the people who fled up onto the roof after the flood refused to come down again, so now there were children up there who had never set foot on the earth. They just stayed up in the sky, wind burnt and gazing off into the far, far distance.
It was dangerous riding up there with the dramatic possibility of falling to your death at every turn, but it was one of the few ways to get into the Riverside sector without getting caught on camera. The flatter roofs had been turned into narrow streets lined with shops, stalls and houses and even late at night it was a bustling place. The sloping roofs were peppered with makeshift doors leading to the dwellings inside. I sometimes thought that I would have liked to live up there but I knew that in the end it would have driven me crazy, like living on a small island. There was no technology up there either. The sky people had turned their back on many of the old ways and tried to plot their own course in the clouds, my path was on the ground with the tricks of my trade.
I stopped on the roof of the Old Coliseum to make sure of my path down to the narrow canals that had replaced the streets below and the nearest gondola stop.
‘One doesn’t often see a bicycle up here,’ said a voice.
‘No?’ I turned around to see Latch loitering in the shadows.
Latch was Enforce to the bone. He spent all his free time lifting weights, probably in the hope that they would make him taller. Latch was the only officer to have been removed from the Detention Centre for enjoying it too mu
ch. It was considered a punishment for wayward officers. They’d levelled a square mile of residential streets in the N Sector to build the Centre and it was a useful deterrent on the whole, but more against getting caught than committing any crime. Enforce hated it if they got sent there because it was a move in the wrong direction. Deeper into the security side and further away from the power. That was all Enforce people wanted – power. Not Latch. He was in it for kicks and he found many a kick in the Detention Centre.
‘And what brings you up here?’ he said, coming towards me. ‘So far from your little stomping ground.’
‘Work,’ I said. ‘Delivering for Imagination Industries.’
‘You are licensed to ride after curfew, I assume?’
‘Of course I am.’
‘May I?’ He held out his hand for the package. His leather gloves, black and expensive, were scuffed at the knuckles.
‘Under code 47 dash 3998 backslash 43 I can’t do that. I’m not authorised.’
‘Quite right,’ Latch said. ‘But consider me special authorisation.’
He took a step forward, he was only half a wheel away. His breath was minty fresh but beneath it I could smell booze, a lot of booze.
‘I know I have a reputation, it has taken me many years to establish, but there’s really no need to be so standoffish about it. I just want to take a little peek,’ he said.
I just stared at him trying to look tough and unconcerned. But inside I was counting up the number of accidents I could have up there if I didn’t hand over the package. I got to six. The more I thought, the more unpleasant and imminent they got. There would be no witness, no report, just my corpse keeping its counsel.
‘If you don’t let me, I’ll make you,’ Latch said. ‘And then I’ll make you do some other things you probably won’t like much.’
‘Evening,’ Roach said.
Latch, being of average height, turned to look at Roach and found himself staring at a point somewhere between his nipples. He looked up and Roach brought his hands together at great speed over Latch’s ears. Latch keeled over backwards, out cold. Roach bent his enormous frame down to Latch’s prone body and slipped a small envelope into his coat pocket.
‘That should put him off making a fuss,’ he said. ‘Some things a man wants to keep secret.’
‘How did you know I’d be up here?’ I said.
‘We’ve been following you,’ Roach said, showing me a small tablet showing my location with a flashing blue dot. ‘Lola’s at the controls, the rest of us are out with you.’
I felt the tracking pin in my collar, Lola must’ve slipped it in. I would have complained about it being over the top, but Roach had already stepped over Latch and was gone. He was very stealthy for a big man.
I hauled myself and the bike down to the water and I wasn’t surprised to see Minos sitting on a lopsided bollard by the edge of the canal, crossing and uncrossing his restless legs. The moonlight danced across the thick water as it lapped against the half-submerged doorways and windows.
‘Roach get Latch off your case?’ he said. ‘He’d been skulking around up there for hours for some reason, we thought you’d bump into him.’
‘Yeah. As if my magic he appeared. What was in the envelope?’
‘Just some stuff we rustled up earlier for him. You don’t want to know. Boy stuff. Not for sensitive souls such as yourself.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Checking up on me?’
‘Of course, but I am here also to share a couple of interesting snippets. First snippet, you’ll get hard payment on delivery.’
That was odd, most of the time payment would be transferred into my account through Packet. ‘What else?’
‘You’re being followed,’ Minos said.
‘Thought so.’
‘I wonder what’s in that package.’
‘We may never know,’ I said.
‘You definitely won’t open it?’
‘There’s a code.’
‘I thought it was a guideline?’
‘It’s a code,’ I said. ‘You never open the package.’
‘Is a code like a rule?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t break a code.’
A gondola made no sound as it floated up behind Minos.
‘I see,’ Minos said. ‘I’m glad I don’t have any codes, it must be very inconvenient.’
‘I ain’t taking that thing,’ the gondolier said, pointing at my bike. He had a huge waterproof poncho that made him look like an aquatic monk.
‘Why not?’ I said. Gondolas were only allowed to carry people, to stop them carrying more profitable freight across the river, but most gondoliers couldn’t care less about the legalities and would take anything and anyone anywhere for a fee.
‘Because it’s too big and too dirty.’
‘We’ll pay,’ Minos said. ‘What do you want? We can get most things.’
‘I don’t want most things, what I want is a clean gondola. That’s all I want.’
‘I’ll carry it,’ I said. ‘I’m only going to the Cathedral Quarter. It won’t touch your boat.’
‘No,’ said the gondolier. ‘You leave it or I leave you.’
‘Come on,’ Minos said. ‘Don’t be like that.’
‘Don’t you be like that. You wait here for another gondola stupid enough to take you and your stupid bike. You’ll be waiting a long time. There’s no one else around.’
Minos and I looked at each other. The clock was ticking, waiting was not an option. He was right, there wouldn’t be anyone around at that time of night. The river was teeming in the day but deserted at night.
‘I can’t leave it,’ I said. ‘I need it at the other end.’
‘Sorry, I guess it’s not your lucky night.’
He hefted his pole to cast off again but Minos caught it, unbalancing the gondolier who swayed back and forth waving his arms to try and stop the momentum. Minos opened his mouth to make his new offer but his words were cut off by a hungry gulp as the gondolier tumbled from his boat and into the water. We waited for the bubbling to stop.
‘What do you think?’ I said. ‘Drowned or poisoned.’
‘Poisoned, I should think. At this time of year,’ he said, looking sheepish and still holding his end of the pole. ‘Your carriage awaits.’
I lifted the bike onboard and took the pole from Minos.
‘You don’t want me to come?’
I laughed. No way was I getting in a gondola with Minos.
Minos bowed as I pushed off into the canal. ‘Bon voyage, Madam. I’ll wait here for you, just in case.’
I found the canals eerie, I didn’t like not knowing what was beneath me. Under the dark waters of the narrow canal, between the buildings, lay the old streets, roads with white lines down the middle littered with debris from miles and miles away. The water wasn’t very deep but it was very toxic. I punted the gondola across the square and away, over the relics of the old city and its past lives.
I dumped the gondola between two of the buzzing machines that projected the screen around the Project shielding delicate paper doll eyes from the ragged anarchy of the ghetto that rose into the skies above the river. I rode up the hill to the Cathedral Quarter address on the package. The Quarter was a small part of the Riverside Sector, the part of the city where the richest people lived. We called them the paper dolls because most of them worked in the Ministries or the Academies and therefore spent their time pushing irrelevant pieces of paper around large desks in giant offices that could each have housed at least three of the thousands of homeless families forced to squat in the NW sector. There was a middle class, the people who worked to keep the paper dolls in paper, we called them the plastic dolls because they couldn’t afford such good cosmetic surgery and they all looked the same, as though they were manufactured. Each faction lived on either side of the river and the Riverside Sector was on the north side. The south side hadn’t been given a sector designation, it was just part of the SE sector, no
one important enough lived there. The very rich had commandeered the skyscrapers that glared at the upstarts across the water. The Cathedral Quarter was where all the old art and antiques were stored, once they had been recovered from the flooded galleries and museums. There were huge halls in the Quarter full of old masters but no one ever tried to steal anything. There was no market for it so it was all donated to the Arts Academy who gave polite thanks and left it all where it was.
I had no trouble finding the right address. It was an ancient door set back in a crumbling stone archway. Original features meant old money, the kind of money that somehow stayed safe. I locked the bike out of habit rather than necessity. There was no one about. The residents of the Riverside Sector observed the curfew. They had to, they invented it. As I raised my hand to ring the bell, the door opened and I almost fell inside. There was a hallway beyond the door. The floor was made up of large flagstones and the walls were covered in heavy scarlet and gold curtains. Dark wooden furniture stood around the edge of the long space, medieval and grand. A woman stood there. She had very long red hair, the many tones picked out by the candle light. Her skin was ceramic in its clear, pale perfection. Her eyes were a shade of green I had never seen. She smiled.
I handed her the package, opened my mouth and closed it again. I was aware of how I looked, how I was too tall and too skinny.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I really need what’s in here.’
She turned the package over in long, slim fingers and I found that I really wanted her to open it and show me what was inside. I’d never cared before, the code ingrained in my very being.
‘Follow me,’ she said.
She led me into a library. Green leather sofas hugged a fireplace with a roaring blaze and thousands of books lined the walls. I stared, you didn’t often see so many books together. There were far more than Minos had salvaged and ours weren’t lined up on shelves, they were in a pile on the floor. The woman was standing over a desk by the window, intent on something in a drawer, so I wandered over to a shelf just to touch the heavy bound books. I pulled off my dirty cycling gloves and ran the clean back of my hand across the spines. The books were old and gold embossed lettering betrayed their subjects; witchcraft and magic. Old magic. Not the magic of codes and pixels, the magic of spells and spirits.
‘Cash on delivery, I believe,’ said the woman, close behind me.
She handed me a thick packet, three times the size of the one I had given her.
‘Check it,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the full fee. And a tip.’
She had this way of looking at you that wasn’t looking at you, it was looking into you. Lola had a way of doing that, but this woman was on a whole other level.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I won’t be offended. Besides I think you’ll be pleased.’
She sat on one of the sofas while I peeled back the corner of the envelope. It was full of cash, cash on delivery.
‘I thought that was just a saying,’ I said. I put the envelope in my bag. I guess I should have had questions but if there was one thing we never did then it was let an opportunity pass us by. No matter what the consequence might turn out to be.
‘Most of the time,’ said the woman. ‘Do you want to know what’s inside my envelope?
I nodded.
She opened the envelope and out slid a disc with a red label on it. It had the Imagination Industries logo on it.
‘What’s on it?’ I said.
‘It’s a copy of some data from one of the gaming houses,’ she said.
‘Do you work..?’ I stopped myself. It was none of my business.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t work for them. I think you could say the opposite.’
‘I see,’ I said. Espionage was a big machine and I was but a little, occasional cog. I didn’t need to know how she’d placed an order to herself on their behalf.
‘Were you followed?’
‘Yes, but I lost them.’
‘I thought you would,’ she said. ‘Thank you. I don’t have security, I like to think I don’t need it.’
‘I see,’ I said. I groaned inside. I see, I see. She’d think it was all I had to say for myself.
‘Let me show you out,’ she said.
We walked back through to the hallway and for that moment it felt like the door to another world had been opened. I can’t explain why. Maybe it was the woman. I wondered who she was because she was someone. Someone special. She opened the forbidding front door set in its stone archway.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I should introduce myself. That was one of the points of dragging you all the way out here, after all. My name is Étienne. I know who you are.’
I shook the hand she offered me. It was warm and soft but her handshake was firm.
The door shut with me on the wrong side; outside. The point of dragging me out here? There was a point? How did she know who I was? The city seemed to roar in my ears. I could hear every sound. The water, the sirens, the traffic. I shook my head, put the cash in my bag and went to unlock my bike. I had a ridiculous thing for red heads, that was all.
I rode back to my gondola. There was a kind of code that made it mine. The moon was turning orange in the distance, an autumn sign suggesting we’d skipped summer again. As I pushed off in the boat to give Minos the good news I looked back and saw the black car making a three point turn in the road. I wondered whose security they were.