The Forgotten City (4 page)

“I’m just trying to keep you safe,” Jude finally broke the silence. He lifted a hand to remove his glasses and Silho tensed. Jude never took off his glasses in public, always aware the bright blue of his eyes gave away his royal bloodline. His true identity as the heir to the Ar Antarian throne was still the secret of the tracker team. There was no one else there on the rooftop to see him, but it was still uncharacteristic.

Silho met his stare, his eyes shimmering like blue gems, lighter around his pupils, darkening almost to black around the edges. They cast a glow across the silver skin of his face, his features so strong and smooth, so perfect he almost looked like a sculpture, someone’s definition of masculinity, someone’s dream man – just not hers. She wasn’t drawn to nobility or perfection – what captured her were scars and tattoos, dark eyes with a dark past. That’s what felt like home. An image of Copernicus came to her mind and it sent warmth through her even in the freezing rain. She saw Jude’s gaze was searching hers, looking for something that he couldn’t find. A sudden determination in his expression made her discomfort surge.

“I have to go …” she said, turning away.

“No.” Jude caught her arm in his metal grasp. “We need to talk.” He stepped closer to her. “I need to tell you —”

“Later – I have to go,” Silho said pulling away and backing up, pretending she didn’t know what he wanted to say. “There’s only a few hours until the fight-in. We can talk afterward – and don’t worry about me.”

She stepped away from him, heading fast for the edge of the roof.

“I love you,” he called after her.

Her heart thudded heavily and she considered just pretending that she hadn’t heard, but they were still standing too close for that to seem believable. She stopped and looked back at him, seeing in his eyes that he needed for her to say it back. His heart was exposed. She swallowed with discomfort.

“Same,” she managed. “You’re a wonderful friend …”

He dropped his gaze, but not before Silho saw the hurt welling in them. Jude put his glasses back on and she felt a pang in her stomach. Hurting him was painful, but what option was there?

“You have to know – Kane is dangerous,” Jude said, his voice low. “You don’t understand what he’s capable of.”

“I know him,” Silho said.

“No, Silho, you really don’t.” Jude gave a small, angry laugh, staring at her with pity and disappointment. He shook his head and sighed. “He’s an excellent leader, a brilliant soldier – but he’s a completely dysfunctional person. Not just dysfunctional – damaged, twisted – do you understand? I’m not just saying this for my sake, I’m saying it because you have to know the truth. He’s very good at mimicking normal, it’s why he’s gotten as far as he has, but if you stay with him, he will hurt you. One day you’ll cross his line and then you’ll see what I’m talking about … Silho, he’s dangerous.”

“Aren’t we all,” she said quietly.

“No, not like this,” he insisted.

“Jude …” She didn’t know what to say. “In a few hours he’s going up against Caesar for machine-breed rights. He’s putting his life on the line for —”

“His life on the line?” Jude cut in. “If he really cared for the machine-breeds, he would have ordered us to go in weeks ago!”

Silho shook her head, her anger rising now. Jude knew well how hard the commander had been working on a plan to free the machine-breeds trapped in the gangster prison camps – how he’d looked at it from every possible angle – how he hadn’t slept or eaten properly for so long because of it. Everything came down to the fact that they were severely outnumbered by the gangsters, even if Commander Santana and the United Resistance, all that remained of the city’s former military, backed them. If they went into the camps it would be suicide. And now that the imprisoned machine-breeds were facing extermination, the fight-in was their only hope. Silho stared at Jude standing in the rain, and saw in his eyes the desperation and sadness haunting him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He flinched and she realized it had been the wrong thing to say – again.

“Don’t be sorry for me. Be sorry for all the children who are getting tortured while your commander figures out how to make himself look good.”

“That’s completely unfair,” she said.

“That’s how I feel,” he shot back.

“I can’t listen to this,” Silho murmured.

“Then don’t,” Jude said. “Just go!”

SevenM clicked unhappily on his shoulder and Silho turned away. She walked to the side of the building and started climbing down the fire-escape ladder. Before her head cleared the rooftop, she looked back to Jude, and saw he was already gone.

“
T
his building stands as a reminder that demons walk among us. We must be ever vigilant …”

Words – that’s all they were. But they hurt. They burned. Silho hated them as though each was a person with a twisted mind and ill intent. She’d arrived at the house with tension already burning holes in her stomach, and to find this here pushed her beyond her limits. She grabbed the rusted sign bolted onto the front gate of her childhood home and wrenched it off. She snapped it in half and flung it into the gutter, which was flowing fast with murky storm waters. Fury boiled inside her, threatening to explode out, but she caught it and pushed it back down. The sign had been written by people blind in a lie, believing that her father was a monster, a serial killer. They’d been deceived by the real demon, the Skreaf Bellum. During the war, Copernicus had released an announcement across all levels of the city that her father, Englan Chrisholm, had been exculpated from his crimes. In reality, it hadn’t had much of a response or impact. With the gangs and machine-breeds fighting, people were too busy trying to keep themselves and their children alive to worry about old news.

But for her, it had meant everything.

Yet unanswered questions had continued to haunt her, forcing her to resume the search into her parents’ past. She’d expected to find little, but instead found nothing. For all intents and purposes, they had just stepped into existence as adults – her father as an artist, her mother into the military. Silho remembered even Hammersmith, her carer, who had mentored her mother, Oren Harvey, saying that he didn’t know where she’d come from. It was as though they’d just appeared, then vanished again, like shooting stars. Silho had followed every possible lead, except one – and so the search had dragged her back, like the inevitable tide, to this place where the nightmare had begun. “Home,” she whispered and felt the strength drain from her legs.

She breathed in deeply and pushed open the gate. It gave a grinding shriek. A broken path led through a garden, overwhelmed by weeds, to a cottage. Silho surveyed it through the greenish hue of her nocturnal mask. It was modest, tiny really, but had once been loved. Now it stood bashed in and busted out, defiled by words scrawled across every surface. This neighborhood, Sunnyside, had avoided bomb blasts while many of the surrounding suburbs were flattened.

This building still stands as a constant reminder that demons walk among us …

Silho forced herself forward, every step taking effort as though she was dragging something heavy behind her.
Baggage
, that was what Eli had called it – he’d said that everyone has baggage, some more than others. Silho reached the doorway. Once a blue door with a dragonhead brass handle stood there, but now only an open cavity remained. Drawing her electrifier, she stepped over the threshold and swept the room. Then she lowered the weapon, taking in the ghost of the kitchen where she had sat and watched her father paint nearly every night of her young life. It seemed shrunken compared to the images in her mind. The last time she had been here, when she was six year-cycles old, an army of State Guardians had burst through the windows and door and arrested her father. They’d knocked over all the chairs. They still lay where they had fallen, broken and covered in thick dust and mold. The soldiers had dragged him away and she never saw him again. There were no goodbyes.

Silho picked her way across the treacherous, rot-devoured floorboards. One by one, she lifted the chairs and tried to straighten them under the table. She paused, preparing her mind, then turned and pressed her fingertips against a wall. She sensed the connection, and allowed the images of the past to flow into her. In her mind, life flooded back into the room. Color spread out, renewing every dust-dulled and broken surface. She sped through flashes of the near past, over the faces of people who had dared a peek inside this so-called chamber of horrors – the morbidly fascinated, the scientifically curious, and a few young kids on a dare who had run away screaming. She continued on – back – back – back in time – past the day of the arrest; she didn’t need to see what was already indelibly burned into her mind. What she wanted was before that time – what she wanted was a better time – she wanted to see her dad again. She snap-stopped on an image of her childhood self sitting at the table with him. She let the memory play forward. He was teaching her to paint. He was talking and she heard his soft, reassuring voice.

“Now some red.”

The child-Silho shook her head. “I don’t like red.”

The corners of Englan’s mouth curved upward.

“You don’t like red? Why don’t you like red?” he asked.

“It doesn’t taste nice.”

“What does it taste like?”

“I don’t know … like something bitter.”

Englan nodded. “I understand, but sometimes we have to use colors we don’t like to make a picture live.”

“They’re just pictures, Dada,” she said. “They’re not actually alive.”

Her father smiled. “Of course, my love.”

A knock sounded on the door and Englan looked up with a sharpness to his eyes that Silho had never noticed as a child.

“One moment,” he called out. He lifted the painting and paints off the table and locked them into a hidden safe in the wall behind the stove. Once everything was back in place, he went to the door.

Silho skipped back again – rushing past six year-cycles of memories – over games and laughing, lessons and stories – all the way to herself as a baby where her father stood rocking her and singing in a language she’d never heard since, then everything went dark as she passed into a time before the house had been built.

Silho pulled her hands back from the wall. Grief struck with such renewed force that it took her breath away. She’d forgotten so many things about her father, and it was torture remembering everything again without any way to get back to him. Memories fade for a reason. Copernicus had tried to tell her that.

Silho’s thoughts focused in on the picture her father was painting with her. She’d never realized at the time, but he was showing her how to make a realm portal. Since recovering from the burns she’d sustained defeating the Skreaf, she’d been trying to paint, testing if she had the skill, but her pictures were just that and nothing more.

Silho turned away from the wall and her eyes went to the stove. On the day of her father’s arrest, all his hidden safes had been blasted open and found to be full of dead children, but it looked as though the stove was still intact. Silho went to it and dragged it out from the wall. The hidden compartment behind held the original lock. Silho reached for her weapon belt and drew out Solace – her mother’s blade. It sliced the lock clean in half, and she let the pieces clunk to the ground. Expecting to find some kind of skeletal remains behind the door, Silho braced herself and wrenched it open. She narrowed her eyes. The safe was empty, save for one folded piece of paper. She reached in and took it out. In the center of the paper, someone had hand-scripted one line in black ink.

In my mother’s house are many mansions – Silho Brabel.

Silho felt a strange rippling over her skin and instantly refolded the note.

As far as she knew, her mother, Oren Harvey, had renamed her Silho Brabel in the desert, and her father had never known of it. So how could this be here? Not once in all the wall’s memories had she seen Oren in this house. And what did the words mean –
In my mother’s house are many mansions
? A creeping unease whispered in the silence. Could this be something the witches had planted – something dangerous?

Silho’s com buzzed at her side with an incoming call signal. She viewed the caller ID –
Copernicus Kane
– and answered.

“Silho,” Copernicus said. “It’s time to move to the meeting point.”

“Understood, I’m on my way,” she responded, tucking the folded paper into her weapon belt. “Are you already there?”

“No, I’m here, outside the gate,” he told her.

Silho froze, then she stood and edged to the window to peek around the frame. She saw Copernicus standing in the shadows near the front fence. Without any information of where she’d gone, without her locator activated, he’d managed to track her. He always did – and it sent chills of thrill and panic surging through her. It made her feel like running away, but at the same time, she would have been crushed if he stopped chasing. It was a little unbalanced, she knew that, but Copernicus didn’t seem to need any explanations to understand how she felt, which was fortunate since she still found herself struggling for words when he was close – never sure if what she was saying actually made any sense, and whether she was talking to the man or the commander.

Her feelings for him now were so intense that she felt almost drugged-high when he was around and flat and empty when he was gone, as though he took all the color in the world with him wherever he went. Many times over the past months, she’d looked up from her research to see his eyes on her, and a thought had continued to replay in her mind –
While I’m chasing the ghosts of the dead, I’m missing out on living
. A few days ago, she’d begun to think that maybe it was time to let her parents go. She wasn’t sure how to actually go about walking away – but she wanted to try. The thought was terrifying, but less so than losing him, and that had to mean something. It was the main reason she was here now – desperately searching for some kind of final door to close – but there wasn’t any, just more questions.

At this moment there was only one thing clear to her: she would never come back here again. Silho felt like she wanted to say something, but what and to whom? She took one last look around, then turned and left the wrecked house. That was all it was now.

Copernicus opened the gate for her as she neared it. Half-light shadows darkened his face, making his scarlines glow and eyes burn with black fire. They consumed her, and even if she could have looked away, she didn’t want to. All the pain of her argument with Jude faded now that he was close. His attention shifted sharply to the end of the street, sensing heat and vibrations that Silho couldn’t.

“Gangsters?” she asked, backing further into the shadows beside him.

Copernicus nodded. “They’ve been sweeping all the levels, setting off ebombs, trying to flush out the remaining machine-breeds.”

“I know. I came across a few in Ishtamar,” she confessed.

His jaw tightened with disapproval, but he didn’t say anything.

He stepped out in the opposite direction from the gangsters and Silho followed him. They moved down the street, fast leaving Sunnyside behind and entering Knox, a former shopping district. Street lamps that had once twinkled now stood askew in the broken, caved-in paved roads. Every shop was trashed and looted; some were fire-ravaged, blackened. War had turned their colors monochrome – shadows and white. Mannequins lay, half-staggered in twisted positions, doll faces burned and crushed. Tangled among the fake dead were real corpses. The stench of rot made Silho gag. She held her breath, but could still taste it. Copernicus gave no outward reaction, and she thought that it must be a terrible thing to have witnessed so much horror that crossing paths with death became a casual encounter. She glanced at his gloved hands and wondered how he’d react if she grabbed hold and held on.

Copernicus halted so suddenly that Silho ran into his back. He stood, studying the shadows ahead of them.

“Go! Move – in there!” he told her, the sudden urgency in his voice sending her running in the direction he pointed. She climbed through the shattered front window of a shop, Copernicus just behind.

She heard it then, the dull rumbling of a gangster mass-mover, a prison-craft, flying low over the streets. She pushed further back into the destroyed shop, turning into a partially collapsed aisle. Her stomach lurched and she shifted into light-form vision. The silhouette of a person stood several paces away. Copernicus seized Silho’s shoulder and dragged her behind him. He drew his electrifier and raised it, but didn’t fire. Silho could see the stranger’s flaring body-lights, but his silhouette was completely still. With his electrifier primed, Copernicus edged forward to the stranger. Silho followed, and when they were right in front of the man and he still hadn’t shifted at all, she blinked back to normal sight. It was an Androt soldier, covered in body armor head to foot, a heavy artillery weapon hanging from one hand. Silho stared at his face. It was completely unmoving, the features frozen in an expression of anger and pain, and he wasn’t breathing – but, by his body-lights, he was definitely still alive. Silho glanced at Copernicus, who was examining a wound in the machine-breed’s chest. It was extremely deep and his clothes were saturated in white blood. Androts were usually rapid healers, so it was strange the wound was still open and extensive.

“What’s happened to him?” Silho whispered.

“Shut down,” Copernicus replied. “It’s what happens when machine-breeds suffer catastrophic injury. They shut down their bodies to preserve their minds.”

“I haven’t seen this before,” Silho said. Corpses of Androt soldiers had been turning up everywhere, but none like this.

“They’ve been dying rather than letting themselves be taken,” Copernicus told her.

“So they could be reanimated?” she asked.

“Sometimes, yes, if their injuries can be healed.”

“And this one?”

Copernicus shook his head. “Surprise attack, I’d say … and by the looks of it, taken out by his own kind, otherwise the other Androts would have found him by now.”

“Was he a traitor?” Silho asked.

“Maybe, or perhaps just a man tired of fighting.”

Silho considered his words as Copernicus dragged a leaning shelf over in front of the Androt, blocking him from being seen from the street. The mass-mover roared closer, bringing with it the sound of marching boots. Copernicus and Silho quickly picked their way to the very back of the shop, where they hid behind several rows of high shelves. They crouched in the shadows, electrifiers aimed at the shop’s front. The prison-craft roared closer, shaking the ground. Silho pressed back into the darkness as light-blasters shone into the shop and scanned across the interior. Gangster voices called out to each other. She glanced at Copernicus, waiting for his direction. He gave a slight shake of his head.
Hold
. She clutched her weapon tighter, waiting, until the thunder of the craft moved on, growing more distant as the search left their street. Copernicus lowered his electrifier and holstered it. He stood and looked down at Silho. His expression was cold and detached, fight-ready, but it softened as their eyes met. It was very rare to see behind his control and Silho felt suddenly overwhelmed by panic.