Snowburn

by Frost, E J

  She inserts two tickets into the glowing green slot in the archway before she walks through. I follow her lead. Pull up short when I see a figure standing in the shadows behind Ape. I slide my hand into my pocket where I have a blade in a hidden sheath.

  “Moren,” Kez says, nodding at the figure. Ape jumps and turns around to face the man in the shadows.

  “Kezra. Penny’s expecting you. You’re gonna be late.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  The figure nods at an escalator. At his nod, it whirs to life.

  “Thanks, Moren,” Kez says.

  “Welcome.” The figure steps further back into the shadows. With only the flash of teeth and eyes visible, he says, “Hey, Monkey Boy, next time you come through without a ticket . . .” He extends a hand out of the shadows. Each finger is tipped with a shining steel blade. He clashes the blades together, then pulls his hand back into the shadows and disappears.

  Kez slaps her brother upside the head. “What did I tell you?”

  Ape scratches his chin. “Well, fuck.”

  “Just follow me.” Kez reaches for my hand again and when I give it to her, leads me onto the escalator.

  The escalator drops down, down, down. Deep into the bedrock of Kuseros. I’ve never been in the Kuus subways before. I know they’re used as entrances to the metal mines, as well as for moving cits below the surface, important in the mountains, because the winters up here are so cold that the wind can crack the fucking enamel on your teeth. But I had no idea how deep they went.

  As we descend, it gets warm. I’m already sweating from my run. Now sweat slicks my chest. Trickles down my back. I shrug out of my jacket. Kez, watching me, holds out her hand and when I give her my jacket, stuffs it in her backpack. Her knitted sleeves follow. Sweat-slicked, her pale skin glows like marble. She has some definition in her shoulders and arms – not much, she’s more skinny than built – but her little muscles look nice with a light sheen of sweat, gleaming in the light from her hair. I run the backs of my fingers down her arm appreciatively.

  Behind us, Ape makes gagging noises.

  “How old’s he?” I ask.

  “Twenty-one, going on thirteen.”

  “So what’s that, like, half your age?” Ape sniggers.

  “Something like that.” I pull his sister close, just to piss him off. “Not too old for you?”

  She smiles up at me. “I like older men. More experience.”

  “Better staying power.”

  “Sixty minutes?” She winks.

  “I’m going to puke,” Ape moans.

  “Get over it,” Kez tells him. She begins looking intently at the graffiti on the tiled walls as we reach the bottom of the escalator. “There. This way.”

  I can’t tell what she sees. Looks like a bunch of scribble to me. And a warning that someone called Hat Trick has crabs. But she seems sure as she heads off down a dark tunnel marked Silver Line to All Points.

  I keep pace with her and watch the graffiti. She turns again after more scribble and a badly drawn picture of a girl with black pigtails. She pushes through a door marked Authorized Personnel Only and we’re out of the passenger areas and into the service tunnels.

  It’s even hotter in here. Kez’s tank is sticking to her in a way that would be more than interesting under other circumstances. “Hot, kitten?”

  She fans her face. “God, yes.”

  I pull off my tank and loop it through my waistband. “You can take that off.” I nod at her top. “No one’d complain.” Since I don’t think she’s wearing anything under it, particularly not me.

  She smiles and shakes her head at me. “You’ll want that back on in a minute. The Snatchers keep their tunnels colder than a meat locker.”

  But each tunnel we turn into keeps getting hotter. I can hear Ape puffing and muttering behind us. Kez is moving faster and faster until she breaks into a jog. I follow her, noting her growing frown.

  “What’re you looking for?” I ask as we trot along.

  “The signs don’t make sense. The Snatcher marks are here, but a lot of them have been overwritten. I don’t understand it.”

  “Admit it, Kez, you’re fucking lost,” Ape growls from behind us.

  “No, I’m not—”

  “Then they’re not fucking here—”

  “Ape, shut up. You couldn’t read the Downer marks if they were written in Uni, so just shut up.”

  “Call Penny.”

  Kez pulls up short and turns to face her brother. “Part of the test is finding them, you idiot. If I can’t find them, I’m not worthy of making the pickup. Don’t you get it?”

  Ape mumbles something but looks away.

  Kez turns away from him and takes a moment to scan the graffiti-ed walls carefully. “There. It’s not too far. Come on.” She runs down a side branch, patting a picture of a little girl holding a teddy bear as she runs by it. The teddy bear’s eyes flash as I pass. Mirrors, or viewies, I’m moving too fast to be sure.

  “We’ve only got three minutes!” Ape shouts from behind us in a mixture of frustration and humiliation. Kez ignores him and runs down the dark passage.

  The branch ends in a dark, round room. Damp, like it used to be a cistern. The walls are heavily graffiti-ed. Some of the pictures look familiar. The same dark-haired little girl. Now she holds the string of a red balloon. The balloon is a funny shape. Looks like an inverted pyramid.

  Kez walks up to the picture of the little girl. She knocks on the balloon three times. I move up close to her. Watch as her breath appears in small puffs of vapor. Feel the cold seeping through the wall.

  A voice booms through the cistern. “Who goes there?”

  “Don’t be an ass, Tank,” Kez says, looking up at the wall. “You know me. I’m here to see Penny.”

  “How do I know it’s you?”

  “Tank—!”

  “Show me a titty so I can be sure.”

  I raise an eyebrow. This I want to see.

  “I’m going to show you my foot in your ass if you don’t stop fucking around. Don’t make me late.”

  The panel with the girl and her balloon slides to the side.

  “Disappointing,” I whisper to Kez.

  She shakes her head. “Men.”

  Beyond the sliding panel, there’s a series of rooms, each opening off each other without any door or partition. They’re golden-lit, full of strange, skittery shadows, and freezing cold. I pull my top back on.

  Kez moves quickly through the first room and into the second, where several men wait for her. At second glance, men might be too inclusive a term. Each of them have replaced body parts with metal – steel caps welded onto their heads, blades bristling from shoulders, elbows, wrists, fingers, knees, toes. How do they sleep? One of them has a blade hanging between his thighs, through a slit in his loincloth. My balls twitch and try to climb up into my stomach.

  “Freeney,” Kez says to the one with the steel dick.

  “Kezra,” he responds. The steel goggles welded into his eye sockets telescope as he examines each of us in turn. “You’re late.”

  “It’s midnight,” Ape puffs behind us.

  “Atom says you’re late.” Freeney lifts his chin towards the wall behind us. I glance over my shoulder. A mech clock covers the entire wall, exposed gears revolving majestically. At the center of the clock, the local time: eleven-zero-one and thirteen seconds. Above the timepiece, circles within circles show the movements of Kuseros’s binary star, four planets and their thirteen major moons. Below, another set of orbs, the central one gleaming like gold, shows the time and orbits of the eight planets in the Core System. Human figures and arcane symbols move in their own separate, silently turning circles, crossing, eclipsing, obscuring each other. The whole construction is so elaborate it’s impossible take it all in at once. It needs an interpreter, a prophet, and after a moment one emerges from the shadows to the right of the clock. A monstrosity in genSkin and steel.

  Kez bows her head. “Pen
ny.”

  “Kezzy, honey,” says the monster, black lips curling back from teeth so white they fluoresce. Her voice is like molasses. Thick and dark and sweet. Totally out of place in this palace of metal. “It’s been a while.”

  Kez nods. “The Valley’s getting harder to cross—”

  “Even for you, Lightfoot?” the monster asks, a pair of surprisingly pretty hazel eyes glinting under eyebrows that are slashes of mirror inset into her pale skin.

  Kez smiles, as she’s meant to. “Even for me. I brought you something, though. Just like I always do.”

  “Yeah, what’d you bring me?”

  Kez takes off her backpack and pulls out several packages. “This is for your boys.” The wrapping is crinkly. Plaz that won’t stick to what’s inside. Whatever it is is round and lumpy. Squishy. My guess would be the hallucinogenic fruit hyale, native to Kuseros and wholly black-market due to its unfortunate side effects. But anything that looks like these Snatchers probably doesn’t give a shit about psychosis. Steel-dick moves in and takes the crinkly package from Kez.

  She holds out a flat box to the monster. “This is for Jeffries. He around?”

  The monster shakes her head, the chrome ribbons of what used to be hair clinking. “He’ll be back tomorrow. Are those the calibrators he’s been looking for?”

  “Better. Marla made these for him special.”

  “He’ll like that. I’ll tell him.”

  Kez smiles and holds out the last package on her palm, a small tube. “I’ve been saving this for you.”

  The monster reaches out. Her hand trembles. “Kezzy, what’d you find me?”

  “It’s got both, mirror and glitter.”

  The monster sighs, takes the tube and uncaps it. Runs her fingertip around the bottom. A blunt spear of silver rises out of the tube. The monster runs the spear across her lips. Presses them together. Liquid silver turns her mouth to mirror, a shade brighter than her chrome eyebrows, cheekbones and hair.

  Kez taps her viewie, turning it into a mirror, which she angles toward the monster, who checks her reflection and smiles, a knifeslash across her pale skin.

  The monster nods. “Very nice.”

  “I’m really sorry I’m late.”

  The monster touches Kez’s shoulder with her steel-tipped fingers. It could be the cold that makes goose bumps rise on Kez’s arms, but I don’t think so.

  “You know how I feel about punctuality.”

  “I do.” Kez hangs her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was here at midnight. Now it’s not, so you’ll have to go collect it.” The monster pauses. “You sure you want it, honey? It’s got Company written all over it. Some fuckers you don’t steal from.”

  “I’m not stealing.” Kez holds up two fingers. “Honest.”

  “Your funeral, honey.”

  Kez nods. The monster beckons and one of her minions, his face hidden behind an antique gas mask, comes forward. He holds out a small metal contraption on the palm of a hand that bristles with hypodermic needles in place of fingernails.

  “This gives you one hour free passage into the Deeps. The Pack will want the two hundred you promised me for it,” the monster tells Kez.

  Kez holds out her hand. Hypo Boy passes the machine over it. Kez flinches and a red welt rises, bright against her pale skin.

  The monster reaches out and runs a steel claw down the edge of Kez’s cheek. “Still not into pain, honey?”

  Kez turns her head slightly, meets my eyes, and winks. “Never learned to like it.”

  I give her a grin – she liked the spanking well enough – and hold out my hand to Hypo Boy.

  He turns toward the monster, who shrugs. “You said two, Kezzy.”

  Kez points to herself and then to me. “One, two.”

  The monster glances at Kez’s brother, who remains wisely silent. “Sorry, I just assumed your monkey would be going in with you. Mark the man, Owl.”

  Hypo Boy passes the machine over the back of my hand. After a second, I understand why Kez flinched. The pain’s intense. Fucking dermal laser. I bear down, endure it, and the worst passes. I tilt my hand so I can see the mark. It’s an inverted pyramid within a circle. Same as the graffiti on the door. Looking closer, I can see the circle’s actually a ring of tiny dots, and as I watch, one dot fades back into my skin. A timer.

  “Fifty-eight minutes, fifty-one seconds,” the monster says to Kez. “Do not be late this time. The price for passage if you’re late is one strip of monkey hide per minute.” Those pretty hazel eyes flick to Ape, and she gives him a whetted smile.

  Ape says nothing, raising him a little in my estimation, and silently hands the bag he carries to his sister. Kez smiles at him and starts to sling the bag across her chest. Her backpack’s in the way. Before she tangles the various bags and straps, I take the bag from her. Nod at her to get her moving.

  She takes my free hand and starts back the way we came. “Thanks, Penny.”

  “Beware the lastminute angebot,” the monster says. Glancing at her, I see that her eyes are fixed on the clock, and I wonder if she’s warning us or prophesying.

  Kez nods and breaks into a jog. She releases my hand at the exit to the Snatchers’ lair, where the panel slides aside for us silently, and the heat hits us like a blast furnace.

  Kez sneezes and wipes her nose ruefully. “I hate how cold it is in there.”

  “Yeah, what now?”

  “Now we have fifty-seven minutes to find the Pack, pay them.” She nods at one of the bags slung across my back. “Get the case, and get the fuck out of here.”

  Sounds good to me. It’s her brother’s hide that’s on the line, but I’m not interested in being on the sharp end of any of the Snatchers’ blades, either. They carry more blades than I do. Anyone who can cut you with his dick . . .

  Kez leads me back into the tunnel with the little girl and her mirror-eyed teddy. She turns the other way at the mouth of the tunnel, pushes through sheets of hanging plaz onto an empty platform, and drops onto an old maglev line. Scurryings in the darkness say the line’s unused, but not deserted.

  She holds a hand up to me and I jump down next to her. “That explains some things,” she says as we trot down the track.

  “How’s that?”

  “The Snatcher marks were overwritten almost right to their doorstep. The Pack is honing in on their territory. They’ll have to move the clock soon.”

  “Can they?”

  Kez shrugs. “They haven’t since I’ve known them, and that’s going on six years. But they change these tunnels around all the time. I never get in the same way twice. If they can reconfigure the tunnels, maybe they can relocate the clock. I don’t know.”

  I nod, quietly impressed by who and how much she knows. I’ve been flying into Kuus for the better part of a year and I’ve never even heard of the Snatchers and their cybernetic prophet.

  “Who’re the Pack?”

  “Deep Downers. Seriously hard-core underground. Most of them haven’t been above ground in decades. Some of them, never. Don’t be surprised by how they look. It’s just bad geneering. And don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re blind. They’re not. Don’t let them touch you. Some of them have poisoned claws.” She slows, checks the graffiti. There’s less scribble here. More pictures. Some of them carefully and beautifully crafted. One shows a mermaid rising out of a sea of luminescent foam. I stop and look at it for a long moment, capturing it in my mind’s eye.

  “That’s C.J.’s work,” Kez says. “First Deep Downer I met. I only know two others well and I heard that Java was killed a couple of weeks ago, so I’m hoping Nacht or C.J. is around. Otherwise I’ll be flying blind with these guys.”

  I lift an eyebrow at her.

  “I told you this could go wrong.”

  “Way I remember it, you said you’d signal if anything went wrong. What’d you think I was gonna do, fly down here and rescue you?”

  “Would you?” She gives me that mischievous grin.


  Still not knocked back by anything. I shake my head at her.

  She begins trotting down the line again. “The Pack is okay. They can be nicer than the Snatchers. Especially one on one. C.J. made this for me.” She shakes her wrist, jangling the viewie. I have to admit it’s a nice little piece of tech. I wouldn’t have guessed what it was until she put it together. If I’d been searching her, I’d have dismissed it as jewelry. “I haven’t had to deal with more than one at a time before, though.”

  A Pack. With poisoned claws. While not as ball-clenching as Steel-dick back there, the bad feeling I have about this gets steadily worse as we continue down the line.

  The growing smell doesn’t help. The reek of meat left to hang for too long. And of scavengers who aren’t picky about eating it.

  “Kez—”

  “I know. It’s not far now.”

  Chapter 4

  Not far at all, as it turns out. The line bends around to the left and waiting just on the other side of the turn are a group of men. Eight by my quick head-count. And men may be too inclusive a term again. They’re all furred. Clawed. Four sets of eyes luminesce in the light from Kez’s dreads. The others’ eyeballs are scummed over with a thick layer of cataract, a side effect of black-market geneering. I can see why they’d be mistaken for blind. I’m glad Kez warned me they’re not.

  Kez pulls up short. Puts out a hand and I stop next to her.

  “I’m the runner,” she says. “I’m here for the pickup.”

  “We know who you are, Lightfoot,” one of the blind-looking ones says, in an accent so round and perfect that he should be teaching at one of Kuseros’s academies, not scuttling around in its sewers. “Nacht sent us.”

  Kez smiles at the rat-man. “How is he?”

  “Hungry. As we all are.”

  Kez’s chin rises. “Nacht will have told you I’m not for eating.”

  “So he did, Lightfoot. And so too your blood-brother. But the one you’ve brought us is not your blood.” The rat-man’s snout turns toward me, lifts, sniffs. “Although he does smell of you.” The rat-man’s chuckle bares too many pointed teeth.

  “He has safe passage. He bought a ticket. He bore the mark.”