Complete short fiction, p.19
Complete Short Fiction, page 19
He turned, taking in every detail.
A copper-skinned boy stood in the doorway.
Cage’s face gave away nothing. His posture changed, opening up his stance. He’d seen the boy once before.
The boy in the doorway responded subtly, the map of muscle shifting tension beneath his skin. Had his foot moved? Cage thought perhaps it had, shifting toward the opening Cage had presented. Cage hadn’t seen another boy in years.
Nothing happened in the next second, or the next. Cage took everything in, weighed it, ran his hand over the texture of silence that hung between them. The boy was long and gangle-limbed, but his face looked young. He carried no visible weapons. It was hard to guess his age—the body older than Cage, the face younger—but the sheer size of him meant he couldn’t be overpowered. Copper skin contrasted sandy brown hair that was tied back from his face in a mass of tangled curls. His black eyes sharpened themselves on the sack Cage carried. Dangling from the boy’s long fingers was a finely woven net. This was his window.
Cage considered trying to rush past him but decided against it. There was no room to evade, and the boy was bigger than he was. The doorway was a killslot.
After a moment of thought, Cage stooped to the floor and wiped clean a layer of grime with his knee. He removed the crust of pea bread from his pocket and put it on the tile. He stood.
“The bread is for you,” he said. He tightened his grip on the sack and threw it over his shoulder. “This is for me.”
The black eyes moved to the bread on the floor. Then lifted to Cage’s face. Cage walked deliberately toward the door.
The boy stepped out of the way and let him pass.
#
Later that night, when Cage told his mother what happened, she surprised him. He’d expected her to overreact, to cry, to lecture him about being more careful where he ventured; instead, she looked almost happy. “Another boy?” She asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“The one from before, with hair lighter than his skin?”
“Yes.”
“I thought the boy must have died by now. I thought you were the last.”
“He was in the deeps.”
She pulled the blanket tighter around her on the pallet, a grease spot shining one corner of her mouth—the pidge meat seemed already to have strengthened her. “Life is hard here,” she said. She looked off into the darkness, her eyes focused on something only she could see. “It’s good to have allies. Think about that.”
#
Cage had first seen the boy across the prison’s central court—a broad, open place called the Oi-jon bazaar. The Deej ra had once ruled from the Oi-jon, enforcing a controlled form of chaos on the prison’s population. Back then the corridors were dangerous but not yet insane, the Dogs still just another insignificant dissent faction that roamed the prison’s barren center.
The broad court had been the seat of the Deej ra’s power. It was where things happened, the Oi-jon. A tiered chamber nine stories high opening around a dead fountain. It had been a shopping center once, generations earlier, but had become a thing part marketplace, part arena—the prison’s capital, if it had such a thing.
A few floors above the Oi-jon was the exchange zone, the no-man’s land where new prisoners were pushed through, their crimes tattooed to their wrists.
Above the exchange zone were the free-levels, the rest of the world, heaven.
The boy had been crossing the Oi-jon when Cage first saw him, one floor down, hand on the railing, moving centerward toward the spoke. Just a flash of copper skin, limbs like jointed table-legs, then gone.
With a constant supply of fresh women, there were always a lot of newborns in the prison levels. It was the two-year olds you didn’t see many of. And the five-year olds you saw even less.
If a child lived to ten, he did it by learning how not to be seen at all.
#
Cage’s mother never moved far. Above were the gangs; below, starvation. She called it their comfort zone—those levels just beneath the main prison population, but still high enough that the sunlight would support a few stunted plants in their sill gardens. Food was hard to come by that low in the world, but it was better than having to deal with the gangs. A slow death was always preferable to a fast one. But there are more than just two ways to die.
For three days the fever baked her. Cage only left her side to retrieve water, soaking the rag on her forehead while she tossed and turned in delirium. On the third day, she lost consciousness.
Cage held her hand throughout the night. In the first minutes of morning, when the blackness in the window had just begun fading up into gray, his mother’s voice woke him. “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“For leaving.”
A few minutes later, she died.
It was two days before he could let her go. He dressed her in the better of her two shirts and wrapped her in a thick blanket he’d received in barter from Middle-Man for most of what remained of their food. When he lifted her body, he was shocked at how light she had become. He carried her down the stairwell, the soft tap of footfalls unreal in his ears, the risers unreal to his bare feet. Only her body was real, stiff and empty in his arms. When finally he stepped from the well, the long bright hallway seemed somehow disrespectful.
The room he’d prepared was in the periphery. He swung the door wide, and a blast of cool air struck him. He pulled the blanket back and kissed her cheek, letting the tears wash her face. She wasn’t beautiful, his mother—there were too many scars for that—but she’d been smart, and she’d taught him well. She’d kept him alive. She’d loved him.
When he stepped to the broken window, he peered down. The sides of the world descended for hundreds of levels before disappearing into the swirling clouds below. There was no bottom. He held his mother closely to his chest one final time then stepped up onto the ledge. “Goodbye.”
Then he released her into the embrace of the wind. She tumbled end over end into darkness and mist. He was alone.
Cage’s left foot moved off the ledge, easing out into open space. It would be simple enough to do—transfer his weight to that unsupported leg, and gravity would take care of the rest. He could imagine it. He could imagine uncurling his fingers from the window frame and just . . . letting go. He wouldn’t scream. Not like some of those he’d heard—flailing streaks he caught at the edge of his vision sometimes when he was near the windows, just a flash then gone, voices trailing them on the way to their next life. No, he’d fall like the dead fell. He’d fall silent, with his eyes open.
His foot wavered. His grip on the frame grew slick with sweat. He closed his tearing eyes and put his foot back on the ledge. Death would wait, he decided. At least for a little while longer.
The next day, he gathered together what belongings he had, and then, with nothing left to lose, set out to find the copper-skinned boy.
#
“Heard of him, yeah,” Middle-man said. The old lice-crab was in the mood to help. The Middle-man was always in the mood, for a price.
“Where can I find him?” Cage asked.
The Middle-man smiled, leaning back in his chair. Behind him, the spoils of his trade lined shelves against the wall. Blankets and clothes—things bartered from the free-levels across the hundred-foot empty. The Middle-man was one of the few unaffiliated who didn’t have to hide from the gangs, didn’t have to move from place to place. He paid well for the privilege.
“And I give you this information, this valuable information, and what do I get from you?”
Cage looked at the man. Trade was sex to him, every transaction an exchange of body fluids. Cage could see it in his eyes, that slick-brightness heating up as they talked terms.
“You get a happy customer who’ll come back again,” Cage said.
“Bah! “ The Middle-man slapped his fat belly with his hand. “Happy customers don’t feed the middle. Happy customers I don’t need. Angry customers is what I like. Angry ’cause they paid so much. Angry ’cause they got so little. Man don’t eat well making customers happy. Customers should make me happy.”
“Call it a favor then.”
“I don’t do favors. Particularly for boys who don’t shave yet, go half weight. Tell me, you old enough to want girls? Or is it boys?”
Cage put the situation in terms the Middle-man could understand. It took only an eye-blink.
“Now,” Cage said, increasing the pressure a bit, blade against the fat throat. “Where does the boy stay?”
“So this the deal you want to make?” The Middle-man asked. He was perfectly still; only his pulse moved, exactly at the place where Cage’s blade touched his skin.
“Yeah,” Cage said. “This is the deal you get.”
“My life for the information?”
“Call it that.”
“You only get that deal once, you know.”
Cage pressed the knife.
“So what you want to hear?” Middle-man asked.
“Where he stays.”
“I only know what people tell me, and nobody tells me that.” He was sweating now. At first Cage thought the old man was nervous, but then he realized it was the exchange excitement, the game. They were working their deal, and the Middle-man liked that. The Middle-man lived for the trade. Even a trade like this.
“So what do people tell you then?”
“Lotsa things.”
“What things?”
“The boy’s mother’s name is Ingred something. Originally from the one of the uppermost free-level sects.”
“The top-top?”
“Yeah, a long way to fall in one lifetime. People call her beautiful, but she’s dying.”
“The conviction?”
“Heard it said she was an adulterer. Had an angry husband powerful enough to get her dropped for it. Also heard it said that he’d been the adulterer, arranged for her conviction to get her out the way. Either version could be right, I suppose. But I seen the tattoo on her wrist, and it tells a different story altogether.”
“And what about her son?”
“She gave birth to him in one of the warm-air return ducts a little more than a year after being dropped. Rumor tells it, when she found she was pregnant, she made the climb back to the exchange zone and spent weeks wearing calluses into her knees for the guards. The money went for pharms to prevent passing the slowvirus to the baby.”
“What else do you know?”
“What else you gotta know, boy? Nobody tells me where they stay. But people you don’t see, people that show up only every so often—only one place they can be.”
Cage eased the knife back.
“This deal over, boy?” The Middle-man said.
“It’s over.”
“That your last deal then, boy. I see you again, we through with deals.” The Middle-man glanced toward the door. It took an instant, but when he looked back, Cage was gone.
#
The Consul Assembly shall enact no law that creates or permits the existence of an under-caste. Crimes and grievances shall be redressed within the bounds of a compensatory and vertically mobile society, for the presence of any formal penal class would necessarily be at cross-purposes to the larger civil welfare. Society, in a place such as this, cannot tolerate a prison.
—Partial transcript, from the Floor of the Second Governance, 211a.f.
The stairwells took him deeper than he’d ever been.
The levels he entered were strange to him, the floor plans unfamiliar. Even the light was a new kind of thing—dim and gray/white, filtering through the windows in the peripheral halls, barely rising to the magnitude of dusk.
Cage wandered through the rooms and corridors, looking for sign that someone had been there recently. The ceiling bulbs—in those places where they still worked—hummed down on only pale, dusty tile and dry-rotten carpets. Everywhere empty rooms, empty halls, echoing empty chambers whose once-purpose Cage could only guess at.
After five days, the food ran out.
It took more than an hour to smash open a window in one of the ancient, barren halls. It was hard work; the window kept trying to heal. Cage had another hour invested in widening the hole when he heard the voice.
“You’re wasting your time,” were the boy’s first words to him.
The steel bar slipped from Cage’s hand and clattered to the tile. He turned.
“The pidges don’t fly this low,” the copper-skinned boy explained.
#
The boy’s name was Mykel.
They hadn’t gone far. “Stay here,” Mykel said.
“Why?” Cage asked. They were in a long hall with many doors. Some of the doors hung at odd angles, jutting crookedly from ruptured hinges. There were holes in the wall; like a battle had been fought here, and the room had lost.
Cage didn’t like this place. It was too small, too cramped—nowhere to move if he had to fight. And worse, he had the feeling that was the point.
“Mother will have to decide,” Mykel said.
“So I’ll follow you then.”
Mykel shook his head. “No, it’s for your own good.”
“How’s that?”
“If you stay here, and mother don’t like the idea of you, then you’ll go on your way and never see us again.”
“And if I went with you?”
“If you saw where we stay, and mother don’t like the idea of you, then maybe you never see anybody again.”
“You think it’d be that easy?”
“No, maybe I don’t.” Mykel looked at him closely, sizing him up. “Another reason you stay here.”
Mykel disappeared through a hole in the wall. Cage backed into a corner, shoulders against peeling paint. He saw the blood stains on the tile. Huge dark pools of it, dried to flakes of rust.
#
Ingred didn’t keep him waiting long.
And Middle-man had been right. She was beautiful. She was beautiful the way rich men’s fancy-girls were often beautiful when dropped through from the free-levels, faces like something you’d dream, a symmetry you recognized though you never saw it before. It was a type you saw sometimes. But there was something different, too, in Ingred. Something different from other fancy-girls.
Cage watched her walk into the room. She ducked the doorway. She was, he realized, the tallest woman he’d ever seen. She was blonde and pale—scars showing pink instead of darker, like most people. The top half of her right ear was missing.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I never counted it.”
She moved closer, looking down on him. Her eyes lit the shadows, so blue they weren’t blue really, but a lighter color—the opposite of King’s eyes. She held him with her gaze; he didn’t move.
“Open your mouth.”
He did as he was told.
“Good teeth still,” she said. “Molars coming in make you about twelve, maybe thirteen standard. You look surprised.”
“I figured older.”
“You look younger. So how is it you’re here?”
“Your son brought—
“I know that, I mean how is it you’ve survived? We haven’t seen a boy your age in a long time.”
“My mother.”
Cage noticed the tattoo. She caught him looking. She rotated her wrist so he could see it:
—Ingred Anderson—
—life sentence—
—criminal sexual deviant—
He looked back up at her face. Something showed in his expression.
“So you know how to read then,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Where’d you learn?”
“My mother.”
“And where’s she now?”
“The wind.”
Ingred smiled for the first time. Her teeth were wide and white. “The wind taketh us all.”
It was not a long walk to where they stayed. The broken hall was a kind of gateway, Mykel explained. All the other passages were blocked, doors barricaded; so you had to pass through the broken hall to find the door leading to where they stayed.
The rooms of their hab were small, like all the other quarters, but they were many. Ingred and his mother had taken over a whole unit—a series of rooms interconnected by a long hall.
The largest of the rooms contained a table, several couches, and three large lamps.
“This is the front room,” Mykel said. “Look at this.” He walked over to a plastic box in the corner. One of box’s faces was glass, a window looking into nothing.
Cage bent close, and the dark glass reflected his own face back at him, a pale angularity materializing out of nothing—gray eyes like smoke, like the mists, like his mother’s eyes. He touched his cheekbone. I am thirteen, he thought.
“Watch,” Mykel said and hit a small button.
The box exploded into gray/white light—sound rushing out of it like hard rain on a window, only more so, louder, more frantic.
“Mother calls it static,” the boy said.
Cage looked at her.
“They had a few of these in the free-levels,” she explained.
“What are they used for?”
“Now? Lighting, mostly, and conversation pieces at parties. Very old. Very expensive. They used to do more a long, long time ago.”
“I found it in the deeps,” the boy said.
“How far?” Cage asked.
“Seventy levels.”
Cage clicked his tongue. He couldn’t imagine going down that far.
“I’ve been deeper,” the boy said.
“How much deeper?”
“So far the sky stays dark. So far the wind don’t blow.”
“How far?”
“A hundred levels from here. Maybe a little more.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to go as far as I could.”
“What stopped you?”
“The ruins stopped me. A hundred levels down, the rooms were all black and burned, level after level. A fire had burned up everything. There was no food, no pidges, no sill gardens. I had to turn back or starve.”
