Earlier that night, he had been listening to Finch and Bane argue on the jetty as they were boarding the gunboat. Apparently Bane had promised Finch some kind of reward for locating Vago. Now Finch wanted his money, and he wanted the Persuader removed, and he wanted to be gone.
“Not yet,” Bane said. “I may need you again.”
“That wasn’t the deal!” Finch cried.
“Then I’m changing the deal,” said Bane. He held up the device that activated the explosive band just below Finch’s shoulder. “Or perhaps you think you’ll argue better with only one arm?”
Finch flushed with rage, his wispy blond hair transparent against the red of his face. “What else do you want with me? I got you the golem!”
“We’ll just wait to see what the golem has to say before I let you loose,” Bane said calmly. “I get the impression that there’s more than meets the eye in this situation. I’d like to know where he’s been all this time. I’d like to know about his companions. And I’d like to know why you were really after them.”
Finch was quick enough not to react to that, but it didn’t matter.
“It’s my job to seek out lies, boy,” Bane said. “And I’m very good at my job. If you won’t tell me the truth about why you’re chasing those ghetto kids, then maybe they will. Stay here and find them. Bring them to me, alive. Same deal applies. If you don’t get in contact soon, I’ll make sure you remember me; and the last thing you hear will be three little beeps before your Persuader explodes.”
Finch was virtually spitting with anger. His rotten fangs were bared in a snarl.
“I’d hate us to be enemies, Finch,” Bane said. “You’ve impressed me twice now. See if you can make it three times. We’ve taken boys like you into the Secret Police before, you know. It’s a better life than the ghetto.”
With that, he left Finch to seethe, and the gunboat set off and carried them onward into the rising dawn.
“Here it is,” said Bane, as they entered the great chamber, halfway up the Null Spire. “This is where you were born. Or rather, where you were reborn.”
Vago ducked through the doorway, his wings folded tight to his body, and stepped slowly inside. It was chilly and empty and its walls and floor were metal. Circular gantries ringed the room high above his head. There were tall devices of strange design, like narrow, leafless trees of gold. Generators and banks of levers mixed with bizarre Fade-Science machines, all fused together in uneasy alliance. At the centre stood a cylindrical brass tank with a single, curved window of green glass in it. Soft white light from overhead flattened the shadows.
Vago crept closer to the tank. He recognized all of this. He had spent time here, a lot of time, studying this place. This room had been the source of great fear. He walked to the glass of the tank and looked in. A golem stared back at him in faint reflection.
Of course. The face he remembered looking in at him had been his own, reflected from inside the tank. It was Tukor Kep. But he had been looking at himself.
Then he hadn’t always been this way. He had been human once, and he had a face and a name; and now he was a monster.
He turned his head slowly, looked across the room at Bane, where he stood with a dozen members of the Secret Police, all holding thumper guns. Bane returned his gaze impassively.
“Tell me how I came to be this way,” Vago said, his voice an old man’s whine.
Bane detached himself from the group and walked slowly into the chamber, running his hands over the devices. Now they were silent, but Vago remembered them humming with power, the tree-like golden structures flickering with energy that darted through their branches.
“There was a project. A project to create a soldier, designed specifically to kill Revenants. Our scientists thought they could do it, with some of the Fade-Science that we’d worked out how to use. With an army of soldiers like you, we could tip the balance of this war. We could drive the Revenants into extinction. But it needed a human brain, a human body. It needed to be a fusion of man and machine.” Bane walked over to Vago, stood next to him as he gazed into the tank. “The experiment was far too risky to try on one of our own, so I decided to choose a subject. We had several ghetto folk taking up space in our cells, awaiting . . . processing. I asked them if they would be interested in a second chance.”
Bane let the sentence hang in the aching silence of the chamber. Vago didn’t move.
“I volunteered,” he said. Of course he had volunteered. No wonder he had remembered the face in the glass as being his creator. He had created himself. That face was the last sight of his humanity before he went under, and the procedure of turning him into this fusion of flesh and metal began.
“I want to live.” Bane put a hand on Vago’s shoulder. “That was what you said. You’d do anything, even this. You’d rather give your life to the Protectorate than die. This was your act of redemption.”
“Redemption?” Vago croaked. He stepped back from the tank, his wings drooping. “Redemption for what?”
Bane took his hand away. “You were a murderer. You killed and robbed upwards of twenty citizens before we caught you. You don’t remember?”
Vago felt numb. He knew he should be horrified, but how could he be horrified at something he couldn’t recall? He couldn’t make any connection between himself and these crimes that Bane spoke of. He wasn’t even sure whether to believe it all; but then he remembered the flashes of rage that had led to him attacking Cretch, and the way he had enjoyed the slaughter of the Revenants in Territory West 190.
“We trained you,” Bane went on. “You had all the instincts, but not the discipline. We made you into a soldier. Then, when the time was right, we made you into a super-soldier.”
“Look at me,” Vago said, staring at his reflection. “Look what you did to me.”
“Yes, look,” said Bane. “You’re faster, stronger, better than you ever were before. Kep, you’re—”
“My name is Vago now,” he snapped. His voice rang up towards the ceiling of the chamber. “It’s Vago. . .” he repeated, quieter.
“Vago, then. It’s a good name. You see, all the modifications we made seemed to take. You’re fast enough and strong enough to take on a dozen Revenants at a time. You have a targeting system and enhanced reflexes. You’ve got a metal exoskeleton that allows you to not only absorb aether but to draw energy from it. You don’t need to eat, you don’t need to sleep, the only thing you need to survive are Revenants, and even then only rarely. You’re powered by aether! As far as Revenants are concerned, you’re practically invincible. It worked! The project worked!”
Vago thought back to their escape from Finch and his mob, through Territory West 190. He remembered how the Revenant that nearly killed Moa had faded away on contact with him. That was how she had survived: he had absorbed it. He had guessed right when he suggested that to her. He really had saved her life.
“What about these?” he said, flexing his wings.
Bane gave him an apologetic tilt of the head. “I insisted on wings. I wanted our soldiers to be able to fly, to catch the ghosts. But the physics are all wrong. Wing span versus body weight versus gravity versus whatever else makes something like a jagbat take to the air. I don’t pretend to understand it, but the scientists warned me. I wouldn’t listen, though. Probably you can glide a fair distance with practice, but you’ll never take off.”
Vago digested this. After a time, he looked at his hand, flexed it, watched the jointed metal rods slide together along the backs of his fingers.
“Why don’t I remember?” he asked quietly, his voice tortured by his throat. He raised his head and stared at Bane. “What happened?”
“You were like a newborn at first,” Bane replied. “The process was hard on you. There was surgery, and electricity, and processes I don’t even know the name of. You . . . retreated into yourself, I suppose. Became like a child again
. We began conditioning you, coaxing you out bit by bit. But the probability storm took you away from us. After that . . . well, we learned the rest from the toymaker Cretch, at least until you went wild and disappeared. The remainder of your story I would be very interested to hear.”
Vago looked over at the group of Secret Police, watching his every move.
“What now?” he asked.
“Now we have you back. We resume conditioning.”
“Conditioning?”
“We have machines that teach you how to think.”
“How you want me to think,” Vago corrected.
“Very good,” Bane replied, mock-impressed. “You’re picking this game up quick.”
Vago considered making a run for it, lunging at Bane, doing something; but his heart had been crushed, and he couldn’t make himself try. It would mean his almost certain death, and for what? There was nothing for him outside in the city. He had no memory of his life as a murderer from the ghettoes. He knew who he was now: a creation of the Protectorate. How could he go back to Moa, knowing that?
He sagged. “Why do you treat us this way?”
Bane laughed in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“The ghettoes, the disappearances, everything. What you do to the ghetto folk. Why?”
Bane’s laughter faded. “Because you ruin our world,” he said.
Vago met his eye, and saw that he was perfectly serious.
“We all have dreams,” Bane said. “Mine is of a world of order, where everything has its place and everything works, where people can walk the streets in safety. A society of citizens who are happy, happy because they are secure and because their lives are overseen by us.” His face soured, and Vago could hear the disgust and hatred in his voice as he went on. “All I want is a society of good, healthy people with enough food to go round and enough jobs to satisfy everyone. But there are always you filthy ghetto folk, getting in my way. The poor and the weak and those with criminal genes who breed more criminals. The sick and the useless, taking up our food and our space. Don’t you realize how small Orokos is, compared to its population? Already our hydroponics farms are stretched to the limit. Our fish stocks deplete daily; even the sea is not inexhaustible. And with the Revenants appearing all over the city we can never be certain of any kind of steady supply. You people are leeches, draining our society dry, and we can’t allow that any longer.”
Vago regarded him silently.
“But we can’t just kill you. The citizens won’t allow genocide. So we do it quietly. We take you away a few at a time, and then we shut down one ghetto and move all the inhabitants to another. One day Orokos will wake up and you just won’t be there any more. There’ll be no poor, no sick, no criminals. Everyone will be happy and content. Then once we’ve defeated the Revenants, there’ll be a new age. An age of peace and order and perfection, like there was in the days before the Fade.”
There was one last thing Vago wanted to know. “What would have happened to me, if I hadn’t volunteered for this? What happens to all those who are taken away?”
Bane’s face was stern, rigid with conviction. There wasn’t a flicker of doubt there in the righteousness of his cause. “That’s the most elegant part. As I said, we don’t have enough food to go round, and wasting it on ghetto folk is foolish. The nutrient gruel that we feed them to stop them from starving and rioting . . . it’s made from the people we take away.”
Vago lowered his head, and his features fell into shadow. The horror of it was too much. All of it was too much.
Bane motioned to the Secret Police near the door, and they came closer, guns aimed at the golem.
“Come, Vago,” he said. “In a short while you’ll understand that this is all for the best. That’s what the machine does. It helps you understand.”
Broken, defeated by the sheer cruelty of the world, Vago was led away from the chamber to finish his conditioning.
Moa shifted nervously, glancing around the gloomy interior of the Coder’s workshop. Next to her, Rail was waiting, his eyes on the owner, who was counting out platinum chits on to a metal counter. Dim morning light shone through slatted windows behind them. It was cold, but Moa felt colder. She was utterly miserable.
Four days left. Four days before Kittiwake sailed, and the chance to reach her heart’s desire was gone.
They had been ejected from Kilatas in disgrace. They were let up through the winding ways by stern-faced guards, passing the gates beneath the disapproving gazes of the sentries. Moa had spent most of the time sobbing, but nobody had any sympathy for her. Even Rail had been distant. That she could understand. He was going to help her break into the Null Spire. He was going to risk his life and his own dream of riches to get back Vago, whom he had never liked anyway, so that Moa could return to Kilatas and subsequently leave him. There was absolutely no reason for him to be doing what he was doing, except because Moa wanted it.
That made her feel worse. Her own selfishness crushed her. How could she ask that kind of sacrifice of him? And yet, how could she not? She needed his help, and she needed Vago. Maybe the golem was in trouble. Unlike Rail, she had some real affection for Vago, and she would not leave him to his fate if she could help it.
“Trnsctn s vr,” the Coder whirred.
Rail shook his head. “More.”
The Coder remained still. It was impossible to tell what his reaction was. His whole body was encased in an interlocking exoskeleton like chitin on a beetle, and his features were hidden by a full-face helmet of smooth black. Two bulbous, blank eyes glowed pale blue from within. There was a circular grille on his thin chest where his voice came from, flat and mechanical.
“Vry wll,” he said, and continued counting out chits.
Nobody knew how much of a Coder was machine and how much was human. They liked to give the impression that they were integrated flesh and metal, like Vago was, but the truth was that only the Protectorate had that kind of science. Coders surrounded themselves in a shell of technology, but inside they were human, and ashamed of it.
Coders wanted to be machines, like the machine-god they worshipped. They believed their god lived inside the Fulcrum, inside the Chaos Engine. The probability storms, the Revenants: these were the evidence that their god existed, and that it was angry with them and needed appeasing. Coders were mechanics, whose purpose was to understand the fingerprints of the deity in circuitry and the interlocking of a gear or a cog. They could always be relied on to buy technology like a glimmer visor. Rail was selling his now, to make extra money for their passage up-Artery towards the centre of Orokos.
Unbeknownst to them, Rail and Moa were following the same route that Bane and Vago had gone the night before.
“Stsfd?” the Coder asked. Coder language was tricky to follow as they didn’t use vowels, but Rail had enough experience that the half-spoken words were clear enough.
He scooped up the chits into a bag. “That’ll do fine.”
The transaction completed, Rail and Moa left the workshop and ambled out into the dull grey morning. Here on the canalside terraces, buildings rose to three or four storeys, and each one was a different shopfront. Weathered staircases and walkways creaked under the weight of booted feet as people slid by one another on the narrow throughways. The air was full of the smell of gutted fish and dirt.
The workshop was on the third floor, so they made their way down to ground level where the jetties were and headed for the boats. Barges and haulers were slowly departing up-Artery, heading for the Fulcrum or the smaller canal networks that ran all through the city. None were going the other way: only a short distance west was the edge of the city and the colossal wall, where huge intakes sucked in the water and spewed it out on the other side in a vast cascade.
They walked through cobblestone alleys down towards the canal. Houses of dark stone and metal rose up around them. Neither of them said
anything. Rail, in fact, had been virtually silent ever since he had agreed to try and rescue Vago. It felt like he was punishing her. After some time, Moa couldn’t bear it any longer.
“It’ll all work out, Rail,” she said weakly. “You’ll see. We’ll get Vago back.”
“And then what?” he replied. “Then you’ll get on a boat and get yourself killed. One in three, remember? Or had you forgotten the odds of getting off Orokos alive?” He glared ahead into the middle distance. “That’s even assuming Kittiwake knows what she’s talking about.”
She was about to reply, but he cut her off: “And another thing, what if she’s right about Vago? What if he is an enemy? What do we know about him? Nothing! If he’s at the Null Spire – and again, we’ve only got the word of some girl in a painting for that – then he’s probably already blabbing about Kilatas and our artefact.”
Moa fell silent again. She didn’t have an argument. He was right. And she knew now that she would never, never manage to persuade him to come with her. Even the prospect of losing her for ever wasn’t enough to make him subscribe to Kittiwake’s plan. If only she could make him see what she saw, the spectacular lands that might be just out of reach over the horizon. If he could see that, then he’d know they were worth risking anything for. But there were no words that would make him understand.
Now that she felt herself and Rail splitting apart, she realized how tightly they had been entwined. Always together, always valuing the other more than anything else. But now this, now Vago and Kittiwake and the fact that they just didn’t want the same things any more.
She wished they had never found the Fade-Science artefact that was stashed in the inner pocket of her dungarees. She wished she had never gained the power to open doors. Some doors should stay shut, because once opened they could never be closed again.
As Rail haggled with a boatman for their passage upriver, she found herself thinking of the Null Spire, of what they would face when they got there. Maybe they could get in, with the artefact she had. Maybe it was suicide. But she had to try. She knew that Rail didn’t understand that, but she had to try.