Taz had a glazed look. He held his daughter close and stared straight ahead. I didn’t need telepathy to recognize his shock. The light, the people, the stalls, the colors—it didn’t look like he could take it all in. He had reached saturation. Yet even now he kept walking. The better I knew Taz, the more I understood why Singer loved him. Yes, he was handsome, but that was only the surface. The more I saw of his strength of character, the more he earned my respect. Whatever his inner turmoil, none of it showed except in the protective way he cradled his daughter. I just hoped someday he forgave me for this walk.
We had reached the halfway point of the Concourse, now a wide boulevard with upscale shops and elite restaurants. Enough tourists were out and about in this section that we no longer stood out. Several children ran by, their ragged clothes fluttering in the breeze. Undercity. They were small and cute, however, so most people ignored them, as marks often do. They ran right by us—and gods almighty, one of the little thugs tried to filch the nonexistent purse under my leather jacket. I grabbed her arm and stopped in the middle of the street with Taz at my side.
“Stupid,” I muttered in the Undercity dialect.
The girl, who had started to twist in my hold, froze. “Eh?”
I looked down at her smudged face. “No steal. Tell circle.”
She stared at me with her mouth open. Then she gathered her wits and nodded.
“Go.” I released her arm, and she took off like a bullet, running to join her friends, who had hidden someplace, I didn’t know where, but it would be nearby. We never left our own to fend for themselves on the Concourse.
I set off again with Taz. After a moment, he said, “Little jan thought we were above-city.”
“Guess so.”
The hint of a smile appeared on his face. “We fool Cries people, too.”
For now, at least. We had reached a beautiful area of the Concourse. Clubs, bistros, and chic stores lined both sides of the throughway, thronged with pedestrians. No vehicles were allowed; this place existed to attract pedestrians: tourists, shoppers, people out on the town. To our right, a wide path led to the bridge that arched over the only canal up here in the Concourse. The canal was dry, but if water had run below the bridge, it would have poured into the aqueducts at the end of the Concourse.
As we passed the Rec Center, I pointed it out to Taz. “Testing place.”
He nodded stiffly, his attention fixed on the route ahead.
“Where Singer went for psi testing,” I added, hoping to make this all seem a little less alien.
He said nothing.
As we neared the end of the Concourse, it became a glitzy playland for the wealthy, a world so unlike ours, it seemed unreal. The first time I’d come here, I wondered if I was hallucinating. A café sported a patio with round tables where you could watch holos of whatever entertainment you desired. Music spilled out of a club with a large bouncer standing at the door. Holos of annoyingly cute animals scampered up and down the sides of an import store called The Kitten Shoppe. Okay, they weren’t annoying, they were adorable, but I’d never admit that to anyone. It’d ruin my reputation.
We kept going.
After what felt like years, we left the glamour of the main Concourse and reached the large area at the end, similar to the lobby of a magrail station. A few meters away, stairs led up to the desert. Relief spread over me. Once we reached the surface, we wouldn’t have to worry anywhere near as much about the police. They patrolled the Concourse because it offered the most lucrative tourist attraction in Cries, a substantial source of revenue for the city. People from the Undercity came from below, not from the surface, so they worried less about people at this end.
“Almost there,” I said.
Taz nodded, his tense expression easing. It would be all right—
“You there,” a woman called. “Where are you going?”
Oh, shit.
I turned to see three police officers, two women and a man, all of them surveying us. Taz met their gazes with the forthright stare of an Undercity man, which a highborn man of Cries would never do. All three cops wore the dark blue uniforms of the city police, with the emblem of the Concourse patrol on their arms, a white triangle. The woman in front had a broad face, black hair pulled back at her neck, and a corporal’s chevron on the sleeves of her uniform. They approached us slowly, their hands on the pulse revolvers holstered on their hips. Not good.
I spoke in my most cultured above-city accent. “Is there a problem?”
All three paused. It helped that I hadn’t learned to speak the Cries dialect until I was sixteen. I had an accent. Few people recognized it as Undercity, however, because no one above ground had reason to hear their language spoken in an Undercity accent. They would assume I was an offworld tourist spending my credits on their Concourse. I hoped.
The corporal looked Taz up and down. “We need to see your IDs.”
Damn. Taz had no ID. I tried to put the same note of impeccable disdain into my voice that the Majdas injected into everything they said without realizing it. “He does not carry ID or speak.” Thank goodness he was carrying a toddler. They would assume he was my husband. I couldn’t fool them into thinking he was a cloistered noble; such a man would never come to the Concourse or dress so casually. However, among the more conservative element of Cries, some women still treated their men with the sexist constraints of past eras, denying them financial independence or identification, effectively cloistering them because you couldn’t go much of anywhere without an ID.
The cops considered the implications. They were all looking Taz over now, especially the two women. Probably the only thing that kept them from demanding a search were my words and tone. Yah, right, they needed to frisk him. If they tried, they would get an Undercity warrior defending his child, not the compliant boy they expected. Both Taz and I would end up in jail.
I needed to distract them. I spoke carefully. “Officers, I am carrying a weapon in a holster under my jacket. As a retired army major and a licensed private investigator, I have a permit to do so. My ID and other documentation are in an inside pocket of my jacket, on the other side of my body from the holster. How would you like me to retrieve them?”
That got their attention. They all turned to me. The corporal said, “Raise your arms.”
As I lifted my arms, my jacket shifted enough to reveal my weapon. The corporal stepped forward and removed the gun. “Nice issue.” She glanced at me. “Top of the line.”
I stood there with my hands in the air, feeling stupid. “Thanks.”
She handed my gun to the man. He looked it over while the corporal took my ID out of my inner pocket. She glanced at my ISC card, which listed me as retired military, and I could actually see her relaxing, her shoulders lowering. Although Cries was a government rather than a military center, ISC had a strong presence here, especially the army, the long-time stronghold of the Majdas.
The corporal scanned my gun permit with a sensor in her wrist gauntlet. After a moment, she glanced at me. “You can put your arms down.”
I lowered my arms, keeping Taz in my side vision. The other female police officer was standing too close to him. I didn’t like it.
The corporal handed my cards back to me. “This all looks in order.”
My relief lasted about one second. Then the other woman spoke to Taz. “One of us can hold the baby while we search you.”
I hoped Taz wouldn’t understand her, but from his sudden icy look, it was clear he knew exactly what she had said. Most Undercity parents, when faced with such a “request” would adamantly refuse, using some choice words in the process, which would get them arrested. You could get a year in prison for disrespecting city authorities in Cries.
Taz did the one thing that avoided a confrontation. He pretended he didn’t understand.
I spoke in a neutral tone. “I am sorry, officer, I don’t wish to be trouble, but neither of us consents to a search.” Unless they had probable cause, they had no righ
t to frisk us. Most citizens didn’t realize they could refuse, but I made it my business to know my rights in any place I lived or worked. I had gone for too many years in my youth thinking I had no rights at all. Never again.
They all scowled. Tough. I’d divulged my weapon and given them my ID. They had no basis to demand a search. They might anyway, and if we didn’t comply, we’d have trouble. Sure, I could file a complaint later, but the damage would be done. It wouldn’t take them long to figure out Taz was Dark Singer’s common-law husband. With him and the child in custody, I’d lose my advantage in negotiating for Singer. The authorities could use her family as bargaining chips to force her cooperation.
I needed to defuse the situation. I could invoke my Majda connection, but they’d want to verify the claim, which could piss off my aristocratic employers. I was going to have enough trouble when they found out I was harboring a cartel assassin. If the officers hauled us into the station, everything would be shot to hell. Taz would go ballistic if they separated him from his child. The Dust Knights would lose faith in me if they thought I handed Singer’s husband and child over to the cops.
I’d have worried less if these were Majda police. As much as I disliked Captain Takkar, she ran a clean force. I hadn’t heard of scandals in the Cries force either, but in my youth, whenever the cops arrested any of us, rumors ran wild about beatings and rapes. A man who looked like Taz, who knew nothing of Cries, who couldn’t even fully speak their dialect—no, I didn’t want to think what might happen.
“What do you have to hide?” the corporal was asking me, her voice clipped and cold.
I kept my voice respectful. “Officer, I’m not resisting and I appreciate that you’re doing your job, but neither of us has to consent to a search.”
She scowled at me. “What are you hiding in that pack?”
Screw that. I didn’t have to open my pack, which was good, because if they saw the shroud I carried, who knew what jar of bile bugs that would open. She had to tell us if they intended to detain us. Even if they did take us into the station, we could refuse to speak until we had a lawyer. If they did a search here, it would never stand up in court, especially with Max recording everything, but by the time we had it all sorted out, the damage would be done. The way that one officer was looking over Taz, I had little doubt that if it had been up to her, she’d have insisted on taking him to the police compound and searching him in private.
“Corporal,” I said. “Are you detaining us?”
Her gaze flicked to my wrist gauntlets, then back to my face. “You got an EI in those?”
I didn’t have to answer that, either. Fortunately, common sense overcame my anger. “Yes, my gauntlets contain an EI.”
“Is it active?” she asked.
Well, double damn. I hadn’t warned her that Max recorded my interactions. That meant his files weren’t admissible in court. I had no good answer, so I said nothing. It was looking more and more like I’d need a lawyer.
The male officer suddenly spoke. “Corporal, look at this.”
She glanced at the small screen of his gauntlet. “Well, fuck me,” she muttered.
I had to bite the inside of my mouth to stop myself from commenting on the anatomical implications of that comment.
Bhaaj, Max thought. Behave yourself.
The corporal glanced at me. “Your gun permit was authorized by the Majda police captain.”
That was news to me. It made sense, since I worked for the Majdas, but given how much the captain disliked me, she could have given me grief about the permit. That she resisted the temptation also spoke to her clean shop. Even better, it gave me an incontrovertible connection to the Majdas, one I didn’t have to claim and have them contact Takkar for verification. Her running a clean force didn’t mean she’d make things easy for me.
So I just said, “That’s right.”
The other woman stepped away from Taz. He stayed still, watching us all, but I knew was ready to fight.
The corporal spoke curtly. “You’re free to go.”
“Thank you.” They still had my gun, which they had no good reason to keep, but I could pick it up at the station later. I just wanted out of here, and fast. Glancing at Taz, I tilted my head toward the stairs. He nodded, slow and careful, no sudden moves. Smart. Even in a situation that had to be alien to everything he knew, he kept his head.
As we walked to the stairs, I could almost feel the officers watching us. Taz held his daughter close, his head bent over hers as if that would protect her.
I spoke under my breath. “Taz.”
He lifted his head to look at me. “Eh?”
I motioned to the stairs. “We go up. Stand under the sky.”
“Sky?”
“Outside world.”
“No ken,” he said.
“Will soon. Be ready.”
He nodded, his face impassive.
As we climbed the steps, he kept looking around, probably searching for the cracks, crevices, and hidden ways of this staircase. In the Undercity, nothing consisted of long, even ledges, all perfectly spaced. The first time I had seen these stairs, I couldn’t understand them. It had taken me a few minutes to realize I was supposed to go up rather than through them.
The Concourse ceiling was only about four meters above the steps. Although we could see the large archway at the top, the artfully designed holo screens within it showed only washes of color, hiding what lay beyond. We reached the archway and stood in front of the shifting colors, which looked like an aurora brought from the sky to fill this entrance to the rest of the world.
“Ready?” I asked Taz.
“For what?”
I motioned toward the archway. “The sky.”
He seemed more puzzled than anything else. “Yah.”
We walked through the holoscreen—into the daylight.
XIV
Ruins of the Vanished Sea
Since the day that humans first came to Raylicon, lost and terrified, my people have written songs about the parched, unforgiving beauty of the desert. Those songs survived even for my people, who had spent millennia denied the freedom of the open sky. In the aqueducts, our songs mourned that loss, filling the ruins with music, their haunting beauty our only consolation for our loss of the sky.
Taz and I stood at the edge of the Vanished Sea and looked out at the desert. It stretched to the horizon. The first time I had seen this view, I believed the red sands went on forever, even though I knew they ended at the jagged edge where the world met the sky. I hadn’t perceived ground and sky, only a sense of distance greater than my mind could absorb. I stood under the freedom of the open sky and knew my life had changed, but I’d had no referent how to understand what that meant. In the decades since, each day of my life I came to terms with another fraction of that freedom, but it would take me a lifetime to fully comprehend the open sky.
Wind stirred our hair and tugged at our clothes. I loved the moving air. It felt filled with promise, bringing me alive in a way I had never known before I first stood here, taking deep, astonished breaths. Taz stood frozen, his gaze sweeping the land and its forever spaces. He tilted his face up to the sky. The sun was behind us, and I didn’t think he even knew it existed. He stared at the pale blue expanse, then at the horizon, then at the sky, again and again.
“Gods,” he said.
“Pretty, eh?” I said.
He glanced at me. “Real?”
“Yah. Real.”
Taz closed one eye, squinting at the horizon. “Can’t see. Only parts.”
I nodded. My first time, I hadn’t seen it as a single scene, either, only in pieces. My mind couldn’t process all the visual information at once.
“Will see better,” I said. “Takes time.”
As Taz shifted his daughter to one arm, she gurgled. Although she looked around with a bright gaze at the landscape, she seemed far less impressed than her father. This one view would probably change her visual perception for life, preparing her min
d to see large spaces and open sky when she was young enough that she wouldn’t have to relearn how to see them as an adult.
Taz lifted his free hand into the air, turning it first one way, then the other. “Is breathing.”
I blinked. “Your hand?”
“The air.”
Ah. “Called a breeze.”
“Breeze.” He repeated the word thoughtfully. “Soft.”
“Yah.” Such a simple thing, to feel moving air on your skin. In aqueducts, air vented through cleverly designed ducts, which kept it clean, and it even smelled nice, with the faintest scent from the traces aromatic benzene compounds in the canal dust. No breezes, though.
Taz took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. “Good air.”
“Yah.” I wanted to give him time to process, but we needed to leave, in case the police decided to come up to see what we were about. I didn’t want to call a flyer and load more shocks on Taz. He handled himself well, but if he was feeling anything like what I had experienced the first time I walked out under this glorious sky, the last thing he needed right now was to ride in a machine that soared at high speeds above the ground.
To our right, the terraced plaza outside Cries led to the city, all pale blue stone, each “step” more than thirty meters wide, with the distant fountain shooting water into the air. My first time here, I hadn’t been able to tell the difference between the terraces and the sky. It wasn’t until I walked on the plaza that I realized I couldn’t touch the sky. Beyond it, in the distance, the towers of Cries reflected the endless blue sky in their glass panels.
I motioned at the city. “I live there.”
“And Singer?”
“Yah. Singer is there.”
He nodded. “We go.”
We headed for Cries.
My penthouse EI didn’t even wait until I arrived home to badger me. It started on the ride up to the penthouse.
Taz and I stood in the carpeted lift with its mirrored walls. In this enclosed space, he seemed less tense than in the city. He couldn’t stop staring in the mirror. He tapped his daughter’s shoulder, watching his reflection touch the reflection of her shoulder. He grimaced at his image, then jerked as his reflected face grimaced. Tilting his head, he watched his reflection tilt its head. He looked at my reflection, at me, back at our reflections.