I stared at her. “Last year I killed people, both during the investigation to find your nephew and in the cartel war. That was acceptable, but suggesting the pharaoh take a DNA test that causes no harm is going too far?” Where the hell were these people’s priorities?
She met my gaze. “You killed a psychotic crime boss who kidnapped my nephew, put him in chains, sexually abused him, and tried to murder you. During the cartel battle, you defended yourself.”
I exhaled, trying to calm down. Talking with Vaj Majda always put me on edge. It wasn’t Lavinda’s fault. I walked to the window and gazed out at the landscape. The mountains towered in majestic severity, their silhouette sharp against the glittering sky. Too many memories filled my mind. By psychotic crime boss, Lavinda meant Scorch, the smuggler who had chained Prince Dayj in a cave, but many people had used similar words to describe Dig Kajada. I didn’t want to think about what my best friend had become before she died.
“None of this mess makes sense.” I turned to her. “Why did Calaj try to kill me, but not the people who live where she was hiding? If I’m right about her and the pharaoh, that means I also share DNA with them. If she sought out the pharaoh, why turn on me?”
Lavinda made an incredulous noise. “You don’t stop, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You compare yourself to the ruler of an empire as if you’re discussing the weather.”
I hardly considered my near death akin to the weather. I understood her point, though. “Colonel, I mean no offense. I apologize if I’ve given it.” I came back over to her. “I’m trying to understand Calaj. I’m not sure she meant to harm Pharaoh Dyhianna. I wonder if she sought out the pharaoh for help, the way someone in the desert seeks an oasis when they’re dying of thirst.”
Lavinda pushed her hand through her hair, her fatigue showing, though she had hid well up to this point. “Even if it’s true, which I’m not convinced, I don’t see how she reached the pharaoh.”
I thought about my experience in the Majda control center. “Pharaoh Dyhianna reached me when I wasn’t linked into the console, and I’m nothing like a Jagernaut, with their training, advanced biomech, and high Kyle ratings. If she reached me because she and I have similar minds, that might explain how Calaj reached her.”
“Your point is not without merit.” She regarded me steadily. “You will never say anything of this to anyone beyond myself or my sisters.”
“I won’t. You have my word.” The public would excoriate me if they learned I suggested their revered potentate had ancestors in an Undercity slum.
Lavinda cleared her throat awkwardly. “There’s one other thing.”
“Yes?” I tensed, waiting to hear what other sins I had committed.
“The Cries Tykado Academy has agreed to a match with two Undercity teams.”
I gaped at her, then remembered myself and closed my mouth. CTA, like every other sports club in Cries, had refused to consider any event with the aqueducts. “What changed their minds?”
“Ken Roy from the university approached them, I’m not sure why.”
Impressive. I had only met him yesterday. “I asked for his help. But even with that, I’m surprised they agreed.”
The colonel shrugged. “I told them I would present the awards.”
That was unexpected. Of course they agreed, with two such distinguished supporters and the honor of Lavinda’s participation dangled like a jewel. If I asked for her help with the Cries bureaucracy, Weaver could probably get his license today. I couldn’t, though; he had to want this enough to make the effort himself.
I spoke quietly. “Thank you.”
“We’re getting nowhere in our relations with your people.” She smiled slightly. “Maybe this will kick-start the process.”
“I hope so.”
“Do you have two teams ready to compete?”
“Yes, we can do that.” The choice was between three groups: Ruzik and his gang; Sandjan and the Oey gang; and Darjan and her gang, if it didn’t alienate her parents so much that they never spoke to me again. Ruzik’s group was the top pick, but also the most dangerous.
“CTA has offered their gymnasium for the meet,” Lavinda said.
I had no doubt they meant it as an honor, but hosting the meet in their gym would never work. “Our teams won’t go into Cries. Most of those kids have never left the Undercity.”
“They never see the sun?”
“It’s rare.” I hesitated. We never spoke to outsiders. After a moment, though, I added, “I was fifteen the first time I stood under the open sky, the day I went to enlist.” They sent me home, saying I had to be sixteen to join without parental permission. I returned on my sixteenth birthday.
Although Lavinda didn’t say anything awkward, I had an odd feeling, as if behind her neutral expression, she grieved. Mercifully, she said only, “Where do you suggest we hold the meet?”
“How about the Rec Center? Ken Roy has an in with them.”
“All right. I will see what we can put together.” Wryly she added, “But please, no jokes about the Ruby Dynasty competing on teams for the Undercity.”
I smiled. “I promise.”
Her expression lightened. “Be well, Major.”
“And you, Colonel.” I nodded and took my leave.
Someone was tailing me.
I walked home through Aurora Park at the center of Cries. Streamer-leaves hung from the imported trees and rustled as breezes stirred them under a sky rich with stars. I passed a statue of the ancient god Azu Bullom, a male figure with a massive build and horns curling around his head. He stood with the deity Ixa Quelia. She wielded the axe of lightning and brought rain to the desert, which made her a fierce warrior goddess, sure, queen of the pantheon and all that, but it had never made a lot of sense to me. I mean, seriously, a rain deity? The Vanished Sea got maybe a micron of rain every year. Okay, that was an exaggeration, but the sea had freaking dried up. Izam Na Quetza stood on her other side, the god of flight and transcendence who rose above the ills that plagued humans and healed their spirit, probably because they were so demoralized by the lack of water.
A rustle came from somewhere, so faint I barely caught the sound.
Max, crank up my hearing, I thought.
Done. Then he added, Someone large is following you.
A prickle went up my spine. And doing a good job at it.
Professional.
Can’t be a mugger. The security bots that patrolled the park kept the place safe with fanatic dedication, hovering around anyone they found suspicious, until trying to mug someone became an exercise in frustration. So had loitering in the park to enjoy its beauty, but hey. This was Cries.
Release a beetle-bot, I told him. I had two, both top of the line. Send green.
The pocket of my jacket stirred as an iridescent green beetle slipped out of it. The little bot winged into the night, vanishing as its surface changed so that it no longer reflected light.
Connect me to its visual, I thought.
Suddenly I was flying over the park, above the trees. The beetle’s view overlaid my own vision in a translucent image so that as I soared above the trees, I also walked down a path between two lawns. A philosopher could probably find a deep meaning in that double image, something about how our tech-intensive civilization divided our psyche into human and nonhuman spheres. I just wanted to see better; that was as profound as I got. Ixa had been on her job here. The grounds of the park below glistened with water from sprinklers, and fountains of water arched up into the night. It spoke more to the wealth of Cries than even the Majda palace. Queens always lived like queens. In Cries, everyone lived well, at least above ground.
I don’t see anyone suspicious, I thought.
I may be picking up a heartbeat, Max said. I’m not certain, though.
Go closer. Given their small size, the beetles had limited sensor ability.
We soared toward a row of trees. As the beetle dropped into the foliage, Max sw
itched on its IR so I could see better. Paths meandered under the trees, their surfaces scattered with wood chips in an artistically haphazard manner. Rustic benches stood here and there where people could sit and relax, or in the one below me, where a young couple could be romantic. They were certainly enthusiastic.
Uh, Max, is that the heartbeat you detected? Given their energetic activities, they’d be lucky if a security bot didn’t arrest them for trying to mug each other.
I don’t think so. I’m getting another farther on. It’s disguised.
The beetle continued under the trees. Lower still, and we were skimming over a hedge of night-blooming jaz, the purple blossoms filling the night with their aromatic scent.
Wait. Someone was crouched behind that hedge. Max! Closer.
The beetle descended.
Stay by the hedge, I thought. And slow down.
The beetle crept toward a figure in a black sleek suit, someone hunkered in a corner where this hedge met another. She turned—and looked straight at the beetle, her face unmistakable.
GO UP! I mentally shouted the words at Max.
The beetle swerved upward in the same instant the woman grabbed for it. If we hadn’t moved so fast, she would have caught my little spy drone.
Holy shit, I thought.
I don’t know about sacred waste products, Max thought. But yes. That is Calaj.
Follow her! And let Majda security know she’s here.
Done. The view swerved as the beetle-bot flew toward a woodsy path. Calaj was jogging in a steady lope, the stride of a distance runner who could go for hours. She looked like her images, a long legged woman with dark brown hair cropped to just below her ears. I stayed above her, but high enough so she couldn’t detect my beetle. Its little shrouds should be hiding it, but apparently they weren’t enough to fool a Jagernaut at close range.
Calaj kept running—and vanished.
Damn! Max, she’s using a shroud. Don’t lose her.
I can’t find her.
She’s right below us.
Max swerved us off the path. I’m detecting a heat signature—
Ignore it. Stay with the original direction. A heat signature that was suddenly visible could be a smoke stick, a small light, or anything else Calaj threw to distract us. I’d used that trick myself.
The beetle continued to fly about the path in the woods. I can’t tell if she’s there, Max said.
She’s wearing a holosuit. I’d recognized her black jumpsuit because I wore one myself when I wanted to hide. Made from holoscreens and interwoven with sensor chips, the suit analyzed the surroundings and projected holos of what lay beneath and behind a person, so they seemed to vanish.
If you go close enough, I thought, we should be able to see a ripple effect of the holos.
We descended. To get near enough to distinguish the holos from the real park would put my beetle within Calaj’s reach, but we were coming at her from behind. She would have to turn to grab the beetle, giving it time to swerve out of her reach.
I don’t see any ripples, Max thought. We lost her.
No, wait. The air up ahead blurred in the outline of someone’s shoulders. You see that?
The blur disappeared.
See what? Max asked.
My view of the park vanished. For one instant, I was blind. Then my brain reoriented and I could see only with my own eyes. The translucent overlay of the beetle’s view had disappeared.
“Damn it!” I stopped on the path and swung my fist at the air. “She fucking stole my beetle.”
“I don’t believe any form of sexual reproduction was involved,” Max said.
“Ha, ha. Funny.” He spoke because I had sworn out loud. We switched so easily between speech and thought, it felt as if I were talking to myself.
Sometimes it might help me organize my thoughts if I spoke them out loud. I set off running. “Figure out likely routes based on her speed, direction, and anything else you can think of.”
“I have insufficient data to narrow the search parameters by any significant measure.”
“Is that Max-talk for saying she could be anywhere?”
“Pretty much.”
“This is nuts. She comes to Raylicon, hides in the Down-deep, tries to kill me, then spies on me in a park.” I came to a branch in the path and went left, headed in the direction Calaj had been going before she filched my beetle. “She could have shot me here and finished what she started down below.”
“Killing you here would be foolish,” Max said. “No one knew she shot you before except the people in the Down-deep, and they aren’t going tell anyone in Cries. Out here, she reveals herself.”
“I suppose.” I kept jogging in the direction Calaj had been headed, toward the terraces on the outskirts of Cries. “I’m still surprised she didn’t try. I’m the one closest to finding her.”
“She didn’t know you were a psion before she shot at you,” Max said. “She did afterward.”
“How the hell would she know afterward?”
“You reacted the instant before she fired.”
I ran harder, pushing myself. “No, I didn’t.”
“You are quite well aware that you did. Shall I show you my records? You lunged zero point eight ninths of a second before she—”
“All right!” I slowed down, catching my breath. I could have thought to him, but at just this moment, I didn’t want him in my head. “I get it. I might be a psion. But for all she knows, I reacted because I heard her.”
“Even so. She may suspect.”
“And that matters because—?”
“You’ve theorized that she sought the pharaoh and went Down-deep because she is an unusual psion in need of unusual help. If she thinks you are a psion, your familiarity with the Down-deep takes on a new character. Maybe in her mind, you went from being the enemy to a potential ally.”
“Like hell. And you don’t get people to ally with you by stealing their bots.”
“You were using it to follow her.”
“Damn right.”
“It’s the risk you run with using a bot. It’s hers now.”
“Like hell.” I intended to rescue my little spy droid from her nefarious clutches.
Within moments, I reached a boulevard outside the park. I jogged down the street, past giant stone pots engraved in a trio-of-gods motif that echoed the park fountain. Jaz flowers grew around them in a rich loam that the city imported, since Raylicon had no true dirt. The native plants thrived in mineral-laden dust, which made most of them poisonous to humans.
I soon reached the outskirts of Cries. Large stretches of land separated the buildings here. The city had far more area than it needed. It was the only substantial settlement in this region, and one of the few on Raylicon. It took immense resources to keep it livable; had it not been the ancestral home of Earth’s lost children, I doubted we would have bothered.
I looked back at the city. Its towers glittered against the night sky, bright with lights while people worked at their jobs. In a few hours, when most everyone went home, the towers would go dark by city decree, eliminating light pollution. The star-swept sky would become glorious, its panorama made even more intense by the thin atmosphere. I never felt any lack of oxygen because I had grown up here, but when I’d first left Raylicon, I had felt drunk on the rich atmospheres of worlds better suited to human life.
I soon reached plaza outside the city, with its blue and purple lights. I headed toward the entrance to the Concourse, which lay about a half kilometer beyond the terraces.
“Did you want to stay on Calaj’s most likely path?” Max asked.
“You mean you actually calculated one?”
“I tried. I estimate a fourteen percent probability that she went into the desert.”
I smiled. “That’s definitive.”
“I did my best.”
“Do you have anything more specific than ‘into the desert’?”
“Given her general direction and taking into accoun
t what we know of her actions, I’d say she’s headed for Izu Yaxlan.”
“Really? Why would she go there?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps to see the Abaj Tacalique.”
Interesting. “Call me a flyer.”
“I’m contacting the city transit authority.”
I kept walking. The temperature was pleasant, cooler than in daytime. Even if we humans didn’t need a sleep period here during our forty hours of daylight, we’d still probably rest at noon. It was just too damn hot. It not only hardly ever rained here, it never stormed or hailed or did anything interesting. If you described snow to Raylicon natives, they laughed at the ridiculous suggestion that frozen water could fall from the sky. The weather was astonishingly boring, a serious shortcoming when it came to small talk at parties.
“The flyer will meet you at the edge of the plaza,” Max said.
* * *
The pilot landed about one hundred meters outside the ruins. “This is as far as I go,” he told me. “I have to get back to the city.”
“That’s fine.” I hadn’t expected him to fly into Izu Yaxlan. I was lucky Max found someone willing to come even this close to the ancient city. Most people avoided the sacred place, as much out of fear as respect. After I disembarked, the pilot took off, headed back to Cries. I watched his craft dwindle in the sky until it became a mote dwarfed by the uncaring majesty of the stars.
Max would have to coax another pilot to pick me up later. Or I might just jog back to Cries. I savored the isolation in the desert. No city hum, no voices, no lights, just a sky rich with nebulae, wind blowing across my face, and a silence as deep as time. It felt like freedom, unfettered and pure.
I turned and walked to Izu Yaxlan. Starlight silvered the ruins, giving them an otherworldly quality. A creature scuttled somewhere, probably a lizard. Wind sent sand swirling around the buildings, and their dark entrances gaped in the night. I almost expected a ghost of my long dead ancestors to step out from behind a crumbling house. I wondered what they would say as I invaded their city. Got no style, Bhaaj.
No one lived here, unless you counted the Abaj. As far as I could tell, none of them actually resided in these ghost buildings. It seemed like something they might do, though, living close to the land, one with nature. Then I thought of the pharaoh’s Abaj bodyguards. I couldn’t imagine them communing with anything except each other, planning how they would pulverize anyone who threatened their royal charge.