Metropolitan (43 page)

“This way, miss!” a guard says, opening the sliding rear door to a small van. His tone shows impatience. Aiah jumps into the back along with Red and Trucker. In the instant before the door slams she glances up at the screens and sees only orange fire.

The van is in motion before the factory door has completely slid open. Aiah balances herself against a violent turn as the van swings into traffic, its horn bleating to clear pedestrians out of the way.

The driver looks at Aiah through mirrored shieldglasses. “Where do you need to go, miss?” he says. “We haven’t been left instructions.”

“Take me to Rocketman trackline station,” she says.

“I don’t know where that is. I need directions.”

Aiah makes her way forward and slides into the passenger seat. In the rearview mirror she can see two other vehicles in convoy behind. Startled pedestrians are jumping out of the way of the vehicles.

“How are you people getting out?” she asks.

“InterMetropolitan Highway,” the driver says. “We’ll be out of Jaspeer in less than ninety minutes, traffic willing.”

Aiah stares at a flash in the rearview mirror, a bloom of orange and black.

Her heart gives a cry of anguish.

“The factory!” she says. “It’s on fire!”

The driver gives her another expressionless look. “When mages clean,” he says, “they clean.”

*

09:00.

New Central Line to Mudki Station. Mudki is huge, and Aiah makes a point of wandering through a lot of it, making it difficult for any plasm hound to trace exactly where she intends to go. She buys fresh bread and rolls from a vendor, then takes the Red Line home.

10:44.

Aiah walks through the door of Loeno Towers. She had hoped to enter unseen but the doorman — not the one she’d taken to the chromo — smiles and opens the door for her. She offers him a roll and tells him she’d gone out for breakfast supplies.

In her apartment she depolarizes the windows to full light, makes breakfast and watches the video news. A new military government in Caraqui, she hears, much fighting and loss of life. A burning aeroplane crashed in a crowded residential area of Makdar, creating an explosion and fire that killed over 160 people. A punctured airship had draped itself over several buildings in a district of Liri-Domei, but no one has been injured. An old factory building on fire on 1190th Street, the neighborhood threatened, no deaths reported.

Scarcely tasting it, Aiah eats slice after slice of the bread. She’s never been hungrier in her life.

She wonders if Aldemar made it out of the factory. She doesn’t see how.

13:02.

The hourly news broadcast shows Caraqui’s new government, little Drumbeth in a fresh uniform, Parq in full clerical regalia, red and gold, wearing the Mask of Awe that demonstrates he’s acting in his official capacity as head of the Dalavites. Apparently he joined the winning side in time. A third figure in the triumvirate is a spare, disdainful civilian she’s never heard of, a journalist described as a “leading dissident”.

All the cameras are on Constantine, though, looming behind the three in his long snakeskin coat. Sorya stands next to him, a self-satisfied smile on her face.

And standing on the other side of Constantine is Aldemar, her face neatly made up, eyes gazing complacently at the cameras from under her level bangs. Aiah stares and wonders how she escaped from the factory that she herself had set on fire, let alone got to a Caraqui still in the midst of a revolution.

Teleportation, she thinks. The rarest and most dangerous of mage skills.

Aldemar, it would seem, is a much better mage than even her chromos made out.

Almost all the journalists’ questions are addressed to Constantine. “This is not my moment,” he finally says, “but Caraqui’s, a metropolis that has been rescued from generations of government by bandits. Please address your questions to Colonel Drumbeth.”

This
, Aiah comforts herself, is her responsibility as well.

*

15:20.

A feather touch in Aiah’s mind, a stimulation of the senses — the scent of soft leather, musk, a deep voice that speaks gently to the inner ear.

— Precious Lady, can you hear me?

Aiah touches her throat and sits down suddenly on her unmade bed.

— Yes. Yes, I can hear.

—I wish to thank you. Aldemar says that you did very well today. You were right to divert plasm to the Martyrs’ Canal, I was too close to the fighting to realize that.

There is a lump in Aiah’s throat.

— That boy. He died.

— You were not responsible for that. He overestimated his own abilities.

— So many others must have died.

Constantine’s tone is matter-of-fact.

— Yes, certainly. But compared to what happened in Cheloki, I think we got off lightly.

Aiah cannot entirely find ease in this thought. Constantine continues.

— You were brave and most resourceful, he sends. I wish to give you a reward if this can be done safely. There will be money in a bank account in Gunalaht, and I will send you the numbers and a chop when it’s safe.

— Those people who lost their homes, Aiah sighs. Take care of them first.

— Yes. Yes. I am, finally, in a position to do that.

A phantom hand seems to stroke Aiah’s hair. Constantine’s scent rises in her nostrils.

— Farewell, brave Lady, he sends. I will not forget your brightness.

Constantine fades from Aiah’s mind as tears spill across her cheeks.

Some dreams have come true today, she knows, but not her own.

*

18:22.

The police are at Aiah’s door.

CHAPTER 20

LIFE EXTENSION

MORE AFFORDABLE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK

Police have a knock louder than anyone else in the world, and there’s no mistaking it. Aiah stares at the door while fear grips her throat. Then she walks to the door and tries to calm herself.

There are at least three different kinds of police outside: the two in suits and subdued lace are plainclothes Authority creepers, big men who threaten to fill the doorway. Behind them are a pair of district police in their brown uniforms, and a blue-uniformed Loeno security woman who seems bewildered by the whole thing.

Aiah suspects there may also be a mage floating invisibly overhead on a plasm sourceline, there to guard the cops in case Aiah dares to smite them with magework.

“May we come in?” the first creeper says, brandishing his ID. He has fatty eyelids that fall like curtains over his pebble eyes.

“No,” Aiah says.

Something else she learned at her granny’s knee. Once you let the cops in, you can’t get rid of them.

“We can go to a pross judge and get a warrant,” the creeper offers.

Aiah shrugs. “I’m sure I can’t stop you.” There’s a tremor behind her left knee that threatens to capsize her at any moment. More for support than anything else, Aiah leans a shoulder against the door jamb, though she tries to turn the movement into a confident gesture.

She looks up into the creeper’s eyes.

“What’s this about, exactly?”

The man looks at his partner, and it’s the partner who speaks, a man in a worn green suit. “Your name is Aiah, right?”

“Yes.”

“Where is your place of employment?”

Aiah smiles. “I work at the Plasm Control Authority headquarters on the Avenue of the Exchange.”

The cops look at each other again. Apparently they hadn’t known this.

“What do you do there?” says Green Suit.

Aiah’s smile broadens. Somewhere in the back of her brain is a nasty little imp who’s enjoying this more than she should.

“I’m a Grade Six. Right at the moment I’m assigned to Mr. Rohder, the head of the Research Division, engaged in a special project solving major plasm thefts.”

The creepers seem to sag, the big shoulders crumpling inside the worn suits, and Aiah knows she’s won, at least for the present. She knows just what’s going through their minds: some hopeless bungle, one division of the Authority chasing another, lots of reports to file and probably someone’s ass on the hot seat.

Aiah’s imp tells her to follow up while she still has the advantage.

“Does this have to do with the arrests at Kremag and Associates?” she asks.

Her interrogators give her blank looks. “Where?”

“An Operation plasm house down on 1193rd Street, near Garakh Station. The Authority took it down late Friday. I provided the information that secured the warrants.”

“1193rd?” Fat Lids makes an effort to retrieve the situation. “How about 1190th? Were you at the factory that exploded first shift today?”

Aiah narrows her eyes and opens her arms, inviting them to feast their eyes. “Do I
look
like I’ve been through an explosion?”

“
Were you there,” patiently, “
before
the explosion?”

“Possibly. Late Friday. I went down to look at the Kremag raid, but there was a lot of pepper gas and not much to look at, so I wandered around the neigborhood for awhile and then came home.”

Aiah considers herself lucky that the creepers are Jaspeeris who probably wouldn’t consider how implausible it is that any Barkazil would wander around Terminal by herself at an odd hour of the sleep shift.

The creeper starts again. “This factory—”

“
I don’t really remember a
factory
,” Aiah says. “Although it’s possible that your factory might be one of the plasm houses I reported to Mr. Rohder. I don’t remember all the addresses, and I never actually saw any of them — except for Kremag, I mean.”

“Our plasm hound,” the creeper says, “led us from the factory straight to your door.”

Aiah shrugs. “Well,” she says, “I
was
in the neighborhood.”

“And you had nothing to do with the plasm station in the factory on 1190th that was used to assist in the overthrow of a foreign government?”

Aiah tries to look impressed. “I don’t
think
so,” she says. “Not unless it was on the list I gave to Mr. Rohder.”

The creeper circles back to the beginning. “And you won’t let us in?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Aiah folds her arms. “Because there’s obviously been a fuckup at the Authority,” she says, “and whichever of our superiors is responsible will be looking to foist the blame on someone else. Why should I cooperate in cutting my own throat?”

The creeper gives up. “We may have more questions later.”

“I’ll be at work tomorrow. You can talk to me then.”

The creeper nods. “Till next time,” he says.

GRADE B EARTHQUAKE IN QELHORN MOUNTAIN DISTRICT

100,000 FEARED DEAD

DETAILS ON THE
WIRE
.

Just act normally.

It isn’t hard. Nothing remaining in Aiah’s life is abnormal.

While brewing coffee early Monday she listens to the early newscasts. The casualties in the Caraqui coup are in the 50,000 range, divided about fifty-fifty between the firestorm victims on the Martyrs’ Canal and the Metropolitan Guard, who died almost to the last man. By now the authorities have connected the crashed plane in Makdar and the deflated airship in Liri-Domei with the coup, and some of the airship’s crew are being held pending charges.

There’s plenty on the news about the factory — neighboring buildings went up in smoke, and hundreds are homeless — but the reporters, as opposed to the police, haven’t as yet connected the building with Constantine or his coup. At least there’s no mention of Constantine’s mystery lover. It seems clear to the reporters that, whoever he was meeting with in the Landmark, it was to plan his attack.

On the pneuma, she reads Rohder’s
Proceedings
. At the kiosk on the Avenue of the Exchange, Aiah buys a lottery ticket, then heads for work. She stops by her office to pick up messages, and finds the office empty: no Telia, no Jayme. The message tube in her wire tray, from Mengene, informs her of an emergency meeting at 09:00.

She takes the elevator to Rohder’s office on the 106th floor. Rohder’s sitting at his desk, his pink face in his hands. It’s the first time Aiah’s ever seen him without a lit cigaret. When Aiah walks in, he straightens and looks at her with his head cocked to one side.

“The Investigative Division’s been onto me about you.”

“Yes. The creepers showed up at my apartment yesterday.” She walks up to his desk. “What’s it about? They asked a lot of questions but they didn’t tell me much.”

“That plasm well in Terminal we were looking for, the one that probably caused the Bursary Street flamer —” His pale blue eyes gaze up at her expressionlessly from behind his thick spectacles. “Well,” he continues, “someone used it to kill fifty thousand people yesterday.”

The shock that clamps a cold hand on Aiah’s throat isn’t feigned. She hadn’t considered the facts in quite this brutal light before.

She clears her throat. “Was it one of the addresses I gave you?”

“No.”

“Well — at least we were looking for it. If those others had backed us, maybe we’d have found it before this, ah, disaster happened.”

Rohder nods slowly, his eyes fixed on her. “Since I last saw you I’ve procured two more warrants, by the way. There was another big arrest late yesterday.”

“
Well,” Aiah restrains an impulse to wave her arms. “What more do they
want
from us? We were
looking
— and that’s more than the creepers ever did!”

“
Ah. Yes.” Rohder frowns and looks at his hands. “As it happens I had a call from the Intendant earlier today. He congratulated me on the way I —
we
— had managed to discover so many plasm houses in such a short time. But he pointed out — nicely, I thought — that it wasn’t really my
job
to find criminals, and that we should really share our methods with the Investigative Division, who could then finish the work for us.”