alt.human (24 page)

Hope nodded, but she had a faraway look in her eye. The voices had risen, a swell of noise. She tried to listen to them, but couldn’t. There were no words, not even any recognisable syllables.

“Where are we now?” she asked.

“!¡
matter-of-fact
¡! We’re at the west end of Riverside,” I told her. “It’s a trading zone, non-residential. The smoke across the river is coming from Satinbower Ipp. Farther west is the Loop – that’s where Frankhay and his mob come from. South, beyond those buildings, is Central. Back east along the river is the Hangings, Cragside. What’s left of it.”

She turned to me. “You go. Go to the Monument to the Martyrs. Find whoever else has survived.”

“!¡
confused | alarmed
¡! What will you do?”

“I’ll join you there,” she said. Remembering her arrangements to meet up with Callo and the others when they came to Laverne, she added, “Be there at midday every day. I’ll find you.”

I moved onto my knees, facing her. “!¡
urgent
¡! No,” I said. “We can’t split up now. Why would we do that? Come with me to find the others, and then we’ll work out how to get out of this city. !¡
insistent
¡! We need to stick together!”

She shook her head.

“No. I’ll find you later. I know what to do. I’m listening to the voices, like you told me to.”

S
HE INSISTED, AND
there was nothing I could say to persuade her otherwise. She listened to the directions I gave her for finding the Monument to the Martyrs, and patiently answered my questions until I was convinced she knew how to find it. She wouldn’t tell me what she was doing. She must have known I would argue. Frankhay and his mob had attacked us at Cragside, and they had made it clear that they didn’t want to have anything to do with the other clans, even as the city was demolished all around us.

And now she wanted to go to him.

As soon as the thought had occurred to her, the voices had lulled, faded into a background murmur.

She must go to Frankhay.

As I walked away into the industrial zone that backed onto Riverside, she started to doubt. I was leaving her alone in this dying city. Would she see me again?

She waited until I was gone, then headed west.

As she approached the Loop, the city came back to life a little, with aliens and trogs in the streets, and flyers buzzing around the rooftops. She passed through a small area where dome-shaped buildings clustered and bat-like creatures flew about, entering and leaving the buildings through slots around the apex of each dome. She did not know if they were aliens or not, or if they were a threat. It seemed almost shocking that in these pockets of the city normal life could continue, regardless of what was happening elsewhere.

She stuck to the alleyways where possible, fearful of being challenged, not knowing if her pids allowed her passage on main streets in this zone or not. Even before the city had started to fall, Laverne had been so much more hostile to humans than Angiere had been.

She couldn’t help but feel that what was happening was personal. The watchers – the Hadeen, Saneth had called them – were systematically wiping out all that was human. She – and me, Divine, Jemerie and the others – were being hunted down, and she could see no end to it.

Beyond the bat domes there was a cliff-like building, square and long, not much more than a wall with windows. She passed through an archway in its base and came to the canal. A small bridge crossed it, and on the far side there was a checkpoint guarded by two of the tall aliens they called joeys.

She knew that some joeys had allied themselves with Frankhay and had joined him on the Cragside raid, but she had no way of telling whether these guards belonged to him or were from a different faction.

She hesitated briefly, but could think of no other way to enter the Loop.

She crossed the bridge and the joeys ignored her. They stood facing each other, almost touching, as if they were staring each other out. Some kind of argument, perhaps. She did not know. She hurried on past them and found herself on a narrow street, with half-timbered buildings huddling in on either side.

She didn’t know where she was heading, only that the voices had stayed in the background since she had chosen this course of action.

Last time she had come here, the checkpoint guard had sent word ahead, and she had been stopped by Ashterhay and Jerra by the time she had reached the end of the first street. This time, she doubted the guards had even noticed her pass.

She came to a small square she thought she recognised. Apricot trees and vegetables grew within an enclosing fence of black iron railings.

She turned left and took the first exit from the square. She knew, at least, that she needed to stay near to the canal.

At the end of the next street, she saw that she was in the right area. A spur of the canal left the main body here, spanned by a narrow humped bridge.

She crossed, and there was the bar where Frankhay held his council, and where Hope had been kept prisoner in an upstairs room.

She managed to get all the way to the door before a sudden jag of pain ripped through her shoulder and she looked down and saw a crossbow bolt protruding from her collarbone, blood spreading fast and scarlet across her shirt. And then she looked up again and saw a face at an open window, a sickly white face fringed with dark hair, a movement of the body as a pistol crossbow was withdrawn, dropped with a clatter, a cry. A swirling rush of darkness, starting in the fringes of her vision and then spreading, spiralling inwards.

And then... nothing.

Chapter Twenty-One

I
HEARD IT.
I heard the voices crying out. And there was nothing I could do.

When I had left Hope in Riverside, I had felt powerless. There was no shifting her, no getting her to explain what she was planning. All I could do was hope that she would survive, hope that she would find us again at the Monument to the Martyrs.

The direct route to the Monument was through Central and Precept Square, but I wasn’t happy with that. It was a risky enough route at the best of times, travelling through the most alien part of the city, and the most hostile to humankind. With things as they were now, I didn’t believe I would pass through even the first of the checkpoints, let alone get through Central where there were checkpoints on pretty much every block. Instead, I headed back through the city towards the southern fringe of Cragside; from there I would be able to follow the ridge of limestone crags south, looping behind Central, until I reached the densely-packed district of pap-houses, bars, gambling dens and brothels known as Cunnet.

As soon as I was away from Riverside, the city seemed disturbingly normal. There were a few more checkpoints, but the grunts waved me through after the usual quick scan of my pids; there was the occasional drone of a distant troopship, the occasional whizz and rush of a passing military flyer, low over the rooftops, but nothing more than that. I passed through Grape West, another of the trading districts that gathered around the fringes of Central, and the streets seemed just as busy as normal. Off-duty grunts huddled around recharge pods, phreaking and play-fighting. Chantras and headclouds filled the open bars, drinking and melding and playing games involving hooded heads and strange body movements, the action taking place in some virtual world, or so Vechko had once explained.

I stopped by one of the bars and looked in. A screen divided it in two, and the smaller section away from the door and windows bore the five-fingered hand sign to indicate that humans could drink there. Save for a pair of wired-up orphids, the place was deserted, and that reminded me that normal for orphids and chlicks and chantras did not necessarily mean normal for us.

I hurried away, not so fast that I’d draw the attention of any grunts or sentinels in the vicinity, but still as fast as I could manage.

I cut through an alley I had used many times in the past, an unofficial route that took me behind the main street and through an industrial block to the jagwire boundary of my home Ipp, Cragside.

But the jagwire was down, and it took me a moment to comprehend what my eyes were telling me: beyond where the jagwire should have been, Cragside was no longer there.

Cragside had been unsung.

Before me stretched land covered with a fuzz of new green growth. The soil was dark, as if mixed with ash. The landscape rose and fell in gentle folds like a rucked blanket until the great crags rose up, denuded of trees, their gnarled faces and corners smoothed to a marble sheen.

I turned, and saw the familiar view of Grape West that formed a buffer between Cragside and Central. It was a view I knew well. Clan Virtue did much of its trading in this zone, a place where clans and gangs and various factions of aliens could mix freely. There were times when I had almost lived in the dives and dens of Grape West.

I turned again and Cragside was still gone.

Now that I had come this far, I had to go on. I had to pass through the area that had been my home Ipp in order to hit the trail that would take me down to Precept.

I stuck to the fringe, walking close to where the jagwire boundary had once been. Apart from anything else, out in the open I was completely exposed, an anomaly. The sentinels would be on me in no time.

The soil was loose and tindery. In places, embryonic seedling trees had sprouted. The air smelled like a summer street after rain.

It was all unnaturally natural.

And then, when I looked back at the rest of Laverne from within what had been Cragside, I found that my eyes wouldn’t focus. The detail was gone, the sharp lines of reality blurring.

For a heart-pounding instant I thought the rest of the city was being unsung, and I didn’t know what to do.

I blinked, rubbed at my eyes, and the city came back.

Struggling not to lose myself in blind panic, I ran to the former boundary, crossed into the city, and everything was normal once more.

I stayed in the city proper for as long as I could, only crossing into Cragside when I had to. I felt sick, just walking there.

I reached the first rise of the crags. Again, this should be familiar terrain, but the trees had gone and the rocks had been remoulded.

I climbed the incline and eventually found a shelf in the rocks where the trail had once been.

I followed it round the crag face, deeply disturbed by the smoothed rocks and the lack of birds and insects and other creatures. This landscape was newborn, unravaged, unlived-in.

Soon I was clear of my old home Ipp. It felt much better to walk with trees around me, with birdsong in the air and the whine of crickets from the bushes and undergrowth. It felt much better to look back across the city to Central and beyond, and not have it all blurring out of reality.

I came to a fallen tree and sat there for a time, soaking up the sounds and smells of the normal, the familiar.

We had to leave.

If I hadn’t really believed it before, I knew now that there was nothing for us here in what was left of Laverne.

We had to gather ourselves and leave. No alternative remained.

I straightened, about to push myself up from where I sat, and that was when I heard the voices in my head, a sudden clamour, so loud and
sharp
that I reeled, fell sideways, retched into the dusty dirt of the trail.

I looked down and saw red spreading across my shirt from a hole in my shoulder. I felt the pain, burning and intense, as if someone had tried to rip my arm out of its socket.

I felt blackness, numbness, nothing.

Some time later, I came round, opened my eyes. Grit was stuck in the side of my face, stinging.

I sat up, reached for my shoulder, and there was nothing. No pain. No blood.

It was fine.

In my head: silence.

It was Hope, I knew. Something had happened to her.

I listened hard, but my head was empty.

Whatever connection had linked the two of us, it was now gone.

I had never felt more alone.

I
CAME DOWN
from the crags by a back trail that led into Cunnet.

The trail led through a cluster of pap plants and packing houses onto Nightcut Alley, which led down to the storm channel and onto Night Street, one of the district’s main thoroughfares.

I entered Cunnet with a knot of dread in my gut, my head full of Hope’s innocent observations about how unlikely it was that anyone would have survived by fleeing through the drainage ducts at Riverside.

I had seen Divine in there; I knew others had reached the rocks, and had seen nothing to indicate that they had been caught or killed. They must have made it underground.

But could they really have passed any distance through the channels? And was there any way out, other than the openings by the river?

As I walked, I convinced myself that the grunts would have gone after them and caught them easily. Again, I felt alone, and I wondered why I had allowed Hope to abandon me. I remembered the intensity of the pain, the vision of blood spreading, the rush of voices in my head. Whatever had happened to her... would it have happened if we had stayed together?

I remembered that moment when we had held each other and I had suddenly been aware of her skin against mine. She had sensed it, had pushed me away.

Had something changed between us, then? Was that the moment when she had decided to turn me away?

I had responded to her just as I would to any half-naked girl in my arms, but... Hope was different. I realised then that my feelings for her were something more, something complicated that I had never known before, and then I realised that all this was futile, going round and round in my head when I had felt her pain, heard the roar of voices, seen her blood.

Futile, when I had somehow witnessed Hope’s death.

Where the Alley reached the storm channel I paused. There was a plank bridge here, held together by rope and wooden pegs. It looked rickety, but I had seen horses haul wagons across this bridge and knew it to be stronger than it appeared.