Sparver twitched his crossbow to the left and right, seeing cats where there were just black shadows.
“Your point being?”
“This feels like some sort of suicidal endgame. Like we’ve been lured into a house someone’s preparing to burn to the ground.”
“That’s a cheering thought, Dalia.”
But it was one he shared, whether or not he cared to admit it. That image of the digestive tract flashed back to him. They had been shepherded to this point long before they reached the jungle, he knew. Perhaps from the moment the flood brought Thalia and him to Elysium Heights, if not sooner. Coaxed and prodded when they thought they were making independent deductive leaps, so that their actions were always destined to bring them to this place, the arena of this terminal game. And with a shiver of insight—one whose steps he could not have easily diagrammed, even to his own contentment—Sparver intuited that this process had begun not with Wildfire, not with the crisis of the last four hundred days, but years or decades earlier. Some great slow mechanism had been set in patient motion, and this was the culmination of it.
“There’s an opening,” Perec said, excited and fearful in the same breath. “It’s the heart of the chamber. We’ll be safer there.”
“You think?”
“Better than this. We’ll have a chance of spotting the cats before they close in. And maybe there’s some rock, some inert matter, that we can get to. We just need a bridgehead, something we can defend until Panoply arrive.”
Ahead, the path widened out, edges of foliage framing a large open area consisting of a concentric pattern of formal gardens, encircling the tall building whose spiral, organically derived architecture he had already glimpsed. There were windows set at haphazard intervals into the ascending, coiling levels, and doors at the base, facing onto a slightly elevated terrace.
“It’s the Shell House,” Sparver said. “I recognise it from the Garlin case files. But it shouldn’t be here. He was born and raised in Chasm City.”
“Could it be quickmatter?”
Sparver wanted to offer some reassurance, some consoling hint that they might find safety in the structure. But Perec deserved better than that. “Whatever it is, I don’t trust it. Though it seems to be waiting for us, and it would be rude to turn down an invitation.”
“Perhaps the cats have given up on us for now.”
“That would be nice,” he said, clutching his crossbow tight as they broke out of the jungle, into the central area.
There was no sign of company, an observation that did nothing to lessen his nerves. They crept into the open together, back to back and circling slowly as they moved. They were moving along a dirt-lined path, hemmed by rock gardens that had the same too-vivid coloration as the foliage in the jungle, the plants and flowers almost migraine-bright.
Perec jerked suddenly, her elbow jabbing into his back. “I thought …” She caught her breath. “Just a shadow, was all. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologise. It’s all right to be twitchy.”
They walked and circled, gradually narrowing the distance to the Shell House. “Can I say something, sir?”
“You say what you like, Dalia.”
He sensed her hesitation before replying. “I’m glad it was you they sent us, sir.”
“Glad it was me, or glad it was a hyperpig?”
“Both, sir. You have a reputation, and … well, if there was anyone I’d sooner be in this mess with, I can’t think of who they are.”
“Mm.” Sparver mulled this, not entirely certain of how he was meant to take it. “And this reputation of mine?”
“You tend to come out of things, sir. In one piece.”
“It helps being small,” Sparver said. “We get overlooked. Also, we’re good at squeezing out of places.”
“I’m sure there’s more to it than that.”
“You’d be—” But he stopped, his heart racing. He had seen something, some liquid pooling of shadow and light on the periphery of the open area, near the point where they had emerged from the jungle. He raised the crossbow, aimed it at the spot, and was an instant away from firing when he decided the pattern was illusory, just his brain making a cat out of chaos. He breathed out, made to lower the crossbow.
Perec fired. He felt the recoil, her back to his.
Slowly he turned, wanting—and not wanting—to see a cat, because that would mean that she had not wasted her bolt. By way of a bonus, too, it would be good if the cat were dead, or dying.
But there was nothing.
“I thought …” Perec started. “I was sure. I saw it. It was there, coming out of the green …”
“I believe you,” Sparver said.
Perec lowered her crossbow. “I shouldn’t have fired. I’ve wasted the bolt.”
“It’s not your fault. Whatever you saw, it’s what this place wanted you to see.” Sparver took a step away from her. “Dalia, I’m going to ask you to accept an order. You’ll take this.” He made to pass her his own crossbow, with the bolt still loaded. “It’s worth more to you than it is to me.”
“Prefect Bancal …”
“Take it, Dalia. When this place really turns against us, this m-suit of mine isn’t going to make much difference. But your armour might buy you a little time.”
“Like it did with Kober?”
“Better a second or two than nothing at all. Have the crossbow.” Sparver reached out to take her empty weapon and hefted it. “I’ve still got a club. You’d be surprised what I can do with a club.”
An order had been given, so she accepted it, nodding once in acknowledgement at the transaction that had taken place.
“Thank you, sir. I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
“You see those doors?” Sparver said, nodding at the base of the Shell House. “That’s our objective. I can’t promise it’s going to be any safer in there than out here. But I’d still sooner take that chance.”
They were moving again, Perec taking the lead this time, sweeping her crossbow around, Sparver feeling the nervous energy coming off her, only ever a twitch away from firing. They left the rock gardens behind, setting out across an open area encircling the building, where all the paths converged. Perhaps the building was a forlorn hope, he told himself—just as likely to be made of quickmatter as the rest of their environment. Perhaps its very walls would bleed more cats, or something worse. But where there was a possibility of shelter, of establishing some bridgehead, he could not ignore it. Besides, one of the objectives of an enforcement action was the securing of evidence. If there was evidence in the Shell House, he was duty bound to record it—even if none of his observations ever made it back to Panoply.
They were nearing the raised terrace when the cats came back.
Perec saw them first, pooling out of the distant margin of the jungle, black ink-blots coalescing into animal forms, moving with the low-shouldered gait of confident predators in clear sight of their prey. Two cats, then three. Three cats for one bolt. Sparver almost laughed. There was no hope of reaching the Shell House now.
“You should run, sir,” Perec said, as the cats gathered speed, approaching along one of the converging paths. “You’ll be faster in that m-suit. I’ll hold them back as best I can.”
“No,” he answered, doubting very much that he would be faster. “We don’t run. Not now. We hold this line, as best we’re able.”
“Sir …”
“It’s all right, Dalia. The game was loaded against us. We shouldn’t feel too bad about it.”
He was impressed with the way Perec held her nerve, waiting until she had a clear shot at the nearest of the cats, taking down one of them when it was only a dozen bounds away, the cat splashing down into a flattened black puddle, the other two moving through it with gathering strides. By now both of their crossbows were useless except as clubs, but they raised them anyway, even as the cats seemed to compress in on themselves before launching into the air. One of them took Perec, the other Sparver
. At the first clawing impact his crossbow was wrenched from his grip, sent spinning away. The cat hammered him to the ground. Perec groaned, and a smear of red washed across Sparver’s vision.
Someone’s blood. It could have been his, but he wasn’t sure. That was one of the odd ironies of his existence. When you got down to corpuscles, humans and hyperpigs weren’t so unalike.
21
Dreyfus detected the shift in his weight which heralded the elevator’s imminent arrival at the base of the shaft. He turned to Garlin, managing a laconic smile as he met the other man’s gaze through the visors of their m-suits. “Any second now, one of us is going to have the great pleasure of proving the other one wrong. I hope you’re ready for it, Julius.”
“Oh, I’m ready. I’ve never been more ready.”
“Nice show of strength. But I know a chink of doubt when I see one.”
The elevator arrived with a soft bump, the airlock starting to sequence almost immediately. Dreyfus touched a reassuring hand against the two whiphounds he carried, preparing himself for whatever lay just beyond.
The inner and outer doors opened.
A prefect, in full tactical armour, was waiting on the other side of the lock, a fist raised as if they had been hammering against the door until the moment it opened. The prefect almost fell into the elevator. Dreyfus caught a stencilled name, Singh, and some dim association brought a face to mind, one of the intake of ’23 or ’24, or maybe a year or two earlier. A good kid, he thought absently, one of the more promising candidates for rapid promotion …
Dreyfus grabbed Singh before she stumbled.
“Singh. It’s Dreyfus. What the hell’s happening? Where is the rest of your squad?”
“Close it, sir. Get the elevator going back up. They’re still out there.”
Dreyfus took Singh’s beak-visored helmet between his hands. “Singh. Listen to me.” He snarled out her name. “Singh! Where are the others?”
“Gone, sir. It got Gurney. Took him. I don’t know about the rest. Comms went bad after the cat …”
“The cat.” Dreyfus frowned, wondering if he might have misheard. “What do you mean, cat?”
“We’ve got to get back up the shaft, call in Panoply …”
“We are Panoply, Singh. You and me. The first and last line. Now slow down and tell me what’s happened here. Devi, isn’t it?”
“Deepa, sir. Devi was in the stream above me. Deepa Singh.”
“Yes … I remember. I taught you situational processing.”
Garlin leaned in. “Whether she wants to take the elevator back up or not, Dreyfus, it isn’t happening. The controls have just frozen. Looks like we’re stuck here.”
“Did you bring weapons, sir?” Singh asked.
“Nothing out of the ordinary, besides dual whiphounds. Ought we have?”
“It’s wrong here, sir.” Singh twisted back to look over shoulder, as if she expected something to come at them. “It looks like a jungle. But it’s not. It’s a huge mass of quickmatter. The cats were part of it. We couldn’t conjure it, couldn’t make it safe. Our whiphounds started to malfunction, and then Prefect Perec … she sent Gurney and me back for help, sir. To call in heavy enforcement. We were trying to get back up the shaft, to reach Pell … but the elevator was gone. And then the cats came again … all we had was these.” She raised the object that Dreyfus had barely noticed until then: a crossbow.
Dreyfus noted that the crossbow had already discharged.
“What happened?”
“I shot one of the cats. When the dart hit, the cat stopped. Died, I suppose. But Gurney missed and there was still another cat. It took Gurney into the jungle. There wasn’t anything I could do. I was just hoping the elevator would get here in time …”
“Let me see the crossbow,” Garlin said.
“We have to move, sir,” Singh said to Dreyfus, offering the weapon to the other man. “It’s still out there. Others, too. Prefect Perec said they were having trouble. She’d seen the cats. She told us not to engage. I hope they’re all right.”
Garlin caressed a hand along the smooth, seamless lines of the crossbow.
“Is this is a trick, Dreyfus?”
“Why would it be?”
“I know what this is.” Behind his visor, Garlin’s face tightened at the arrival of some unwelcome recollection. “I think I made one like it once. I remember shaping the quickmatter, getting it to form the design I had in mind.”
He kept staring at the crossbow, lost in some rapture of amazement and horror.
“You were here,” Dreyfus said softly, feeling a strange and distant sympathy for Garlin. “This place. It’s where you learned everything that made you what you were.”
“Something happened,” Garlin said, lowering the crossbow but still holding it by its stock. “Something bad.” Anger flared in his eyes. “What the hell have you done to me?”
“Shown you a door.” Dreyfus turned back to Singh. “The cat that you killed.”
“There’s a pit outside, sir. Stairs leading up, then a clearing. That’s where I shot the cat, where it fell. If it’s still there …”
“If the dart kills cats, then we need that dart,” Dreyfus said.
“It’s still just one bolt, sir. I think it was luck that I got that cat at all. Gurney’s got a much a better sidearm rating than me, and … I mean, Gurney was …”
“Singh,” Dreyfus said sharply, sensing that she was on the brink of falling apart. “Deepa. Listen to me. Remember what I taught you. Your situational processing class.”
He heard Singh take a deep breath. “You said there was no situation so bad that we were ever justified in giving up, sir.”
“Correct.” Dreyfus spoke slowly, calmly. “We have suits and air, and the entire resources of Panoply ready to swoop in on Lethe any moment now. You’ve proven that this environment has rules.” He gave her a sharp pat on the shoulder. “Now let’s see if that cat’s still where you left it.”
“And me?” Garlin asked.
Dreyfus took the crossbow from him and passed it back to Singh. “I’d stick with her.”
Outside the elevator was the sheer-walled pit that she had described, with a set of blocky stairs climbing to the surface at the other end of it. Singh went up first, pausing as she approached the top, cautiously raising her head over the rim, then scrambling up onto the level ground with the crossbow still in hand. “I can see the body, sir. It’s still there.”
“Any sign of the other one?”
Singh looked around. “I think we’re all right for the moment. But we’re going to have to get close to the edge of the clearing, and it could be hiding.”
“Then we’ll be sharp about it,” Dreyfus said.
He followed Singh up the stairs, taking only the briefest of moments to assess his surroundings. Blue sky above, with a barely detectable trace of domed curvature. Dense green foliage hemming an open area, the leaves, ferns and vines almost glowing with an inner luminosity. It was unreal, a dream made manifest.
“It wasn’t like this when we got here,” Singh said.
Dreyfus settled his gaze onto the puddle of black that was his objective. “I’ll retrieve the dart. Do you remember where it went in?”
“Just behind the shoulder, on the left side.”
“Good.” He nodded at Garlin, who was standing with his hands on his hips, looking around with a dazed look on his face. “Stay with Prefect Singh.”
Dreyfus deployed the first of his two whiphounds in a moving cordon and jogged to the cat, crouching low as he approached, ready to make an immediate retreat. He could only see a few centimetres into that thick green curtain, and yet that was enough to convince him of its full and belligerent potential, a machine that now had him in his gears. He forced his attention to the corpse, a black form like a cat-shaped hole punched into some other reality. He had assumed that its details would become more pronounced as he neared it, but even now his eyes seemed to slide off it, finding no purchase. It
had no depth, no texture, no gradations of light and shade.
He reached out, his gloved fingers seeming to stretch into a bottomless void before they contacted the hard tail of the dart. If the cat and the crossbow were made of quickmatter then in all likelihood so was the dart. But it felt solid and metallic in his fingers, and tugged loose with only a pop of resistance.
He closed his fist around it and jogged back to the others, stooping from breathlessness when he arrived, the whiphound scooting to his side.
Sparver heard the voice before he placed its origin. He was lying on the ground, playing dead after coming round from unconsciousness, certain that this subterfuge remained the only survival option open to him, however slight its chances of success. He had assumed it was only a matter of time before the cats came back for him, finishing off their brutal business. He was weaponless now, exhausted and shocked. The only mystery was why they had left him alive in the first place. Dalia Perec was silent, but he could still hear her moans playing through his head.
Yet the voice was insistent. “You can get up, pig-man. I see you for what you are. Something ridiculous, even if you weren’t lying in the dirt like a discarded toy. But you’re not one of them. You carry the burden of crimes committed against your kind, but you were not—as far as I am aware—the direct perpetrator of crimes against others.” A kind, solicitous tone entered the voice. “You may stand. If you and I have business—and that may be the case—the nature of it has yet to be determined.”
Footsteps padded softly on grass. A pair of shoes came into view, belonging to legs that rose up and beyond Sparver’s immediate field of view.
“Prefect,” the voice said, lower now. “Let’s put aside the pretence, shall we? It’s not very dignified, lying like that. Not a very fitting posture for someone who has come this far, against such odds. You deserve better than to lie there in the dirt like a dead thing.” The figure stepped closer, a shadow fell across the ground, and Sparver felt a hand close around the scruff of his neck, grasping him by the m-suit. “Here. Let me help you to your feet.”