“You think they’re sinkholes?” Tremaine began digging in his backpack. “They looked like footprints to me.”
Barko left them to argue about it and approached Morov, who still hadn’t moved. Brood, behind the captain, stared down at the spiny-bush copse with a thoughtful line between his dark eyebrows. Their uniform pants stirred slightly in a thin, freshening breeze. Maybe the nasty, acrid air would begin to lighten up. He cleared his throat.
“What?” Morov watched the small figure of the rifter vanish over the top of the hill, heading at an oblique angle instead of straight on. Just like everything else here.
“Just checking in.” Barko carefully didn’t study the man’s face, looking instead at the bushes. They were moving just a fraction too energetically under the dim, caustic breeze. “How we doing?”
“Shit.” Morov shook his bullet-shaped head, digging in his breast pocket for another half-smoked cigar, which he examined critically. Why he didn’t just smoke whole ones all the way down was one of the mysteries of life. “You don’t want to know. You guys getting what you need?”
“Pretty much.” Not that it’ll make any sense. “Been thinking.”
“Shit, again?” But at least Morov would listen. Brood, right behind him, was probably all ears as well.
“We haven’t seen a single bit of scavenge this whole time. Not even poppers or a lamper.”* Barko found himself scrubbing at his head with his palm again, put his hand down with an effort. “That seem odd to you?”
“No stranger than anything else.” Morov’s eyes narrowed a bit above the snot-rag, that was all. “Don’t you have a rag, for fucksake?”
Barko shook his head. Of all the things to head out the door without, he’d chosen a bandanna or a handkerchief. His mother would have scolded him, if she’d still been alive. “I’m gonna go back up before they get carried away. I just thought, you know.”
“Yeah.” Message received, Morov’s eyes flashed, and Barko trudged back uphill, to the patch that did, despite all his efforts to ignore the fact, look more solid than the surrounding ground.
He just couldn’t figure out how it did, and his headache mounted another notch.
30
YOU WITH ME?
Vetch kept them just below the top of the hillside, working vaguely northwest. The semi-rural houses were slim pickings, but their packs were already half full of loot. Poppers found in groups of three or five in the middle of small rooms or chasing each other in circles across counters, dried happa rosettes* carefully scraped from dark corners and sealed in plastic baggies, sheets of crumpleglass rolled up and stowed—now those were worth a few marks in Deegan Alley. You could spread it over barred windows and run a popper current, and immediately, zappo, you had a nice little hole to reach through. Snatch-and-grabs or loosening a latch, and at least thirty days if you were searched with some on you during a routine checkpoint.
It clouded up as afternoon approached, and Sabby the Pooka kept an eye up. Pinchoks circled lazily, not in tightening spirals that would mean hunger or in the sharp banking turns that would mean curiosity. Instead, the birds just drifted, and that was a good sign.
Less good was the thickening acridity as Vetch led them past a few untouched neighborhoods. Cabra put up with it for a while, but when they finally halted just after the sun reached its zenith, crouching near the mouth of a concrete culvert that felt safe enough should a pinchok dive or a wall go over, she chewed on a protein bar and eyed Vetch narrowly.
“Went past good loot,” she said, finally. Mildly enough. Her hair glowed, a few thermaglit beads glittering sharply among the plastic and glass. “You got a line?”
Sabby tipped his head back, still scanning the sky. Under his undershirt, button-down, and two jackets, his right shoulder bore long ropy scars. A long time ago, only Cabra’s extra weight and refusal to let go had torn him out of the bird’s claws, and sometimes he rubbed under his backpack strap, massaging the bunched-up, well-healed flesh. Il Muto nudged him every once in a while, reminding him to keep eating; the tall thin sunken-chested rifter glanced from Cabra to Vetch with all the interest of a spatterjunkie* watching a tennis match.
“Got business,” Vetch finally said. His stubbled chin lifted a little, stubborn scowling pride bringing his mouth down at the corners and his eyebrows together. He examined the horizon, shifting his weight inside the crouch to keep his muscles loose and ready. “Welcome if you wanna, burn if you ent.”
“Business.” Cabra’s teeth gleamed. She chewed, nice and slow, until the protein bar turned to mush in her mouth. A conservative swallow from her battered red canteen wrapped with stimtape, and she cleaned her teeth with a quick swipe of her tongue, pushing her lips out a little. “Anything to do with Pol Mavery?” He had ambitions of being a warboy, that four-eyed lundie, and word had it Vetch had stepped on his toes.
Vetch had a cold meat pasty, wrapped in greasy paper. He took small bites, masticated thoroughly, and swallowed before he spoke. “Dead business.”
“Lot of that going around.” Cabra’s dark eyes hooded themselves. “Rafello says lots of people asking about Ashe Rajtnik, for example.”
Vetch barely grunted. Sabby’s shoulders hunched. Il Muto went still, his gaze arrested somewhere between Cabra and Vetch, held in stasis just like a shimmer.
There was a line between Cabra’s eyebrows, a sure sign of unease. “Had herself a hole, I heard. Institute fuckers brought her out of deepfreeze.”
“Saw her,” Sabby said, surprising everyone, including himself. “Skinny. Hard time.”
“What else you see?” Cabra took another hit from her canteen.
“Pine bender. Threw every second for Ashe.” Sabby shifted uncomfortably. “I dunno.” Meaning he wasn’t willing to add whatever else he’d witnessed, or what he guessed.
“Now why they defrost Rajtnik’s old hole?” Cabra wondered aloud. “Got me curious.”
Il Muto made a soft sound, not quite a whistle. They all looked up, a pinchok’s shadow floating unsteadily over them. They finished in a hurry, Sabby shaking his head when Cabra offered him another protein bar. Vetch took point again, uphill on an acute angle this time. They all dropped, a synchronized motion, before their heads could be seen poking over the hill-line, and muscled up on elbows and knees.
A pressure cup lay between them and the city’s dusty spires. Today the skyscrapers of what had been downtown were the color of sandstone, filtered through a thick haze gathered in a ragged dome. The edges of the cup were breaking up, its miasma shredding on an eddy in the Rift’s flow. Pleated ridges fell down from the height Vetch and his team occupied, and moving lazily along their sides were streams of thornback. It would look like a stand of spindly, scrawny, spiky young trees, but get too close and those branches would start to shake. Mostly, if you left them alone, they’d clear out in a day or so, moving along in their slow ropelike fashion, leaving scars of black churned-up earth behind them. That dirt was probably worth a fortune, but no rifter wanted to haul it out. It was heavy, and if you took it outside the blur anything dropped into it grew like mad. Rub it on your hand, and you might wake up with a tumor crawling between your fingers.
Crossing the wall was bad enough, but crossing it with a load of thornback drag on your back was just asking to be mutated into something hideous. Sometimes a rifter took the risk and brought back a sealed jar, but not often.
“Fuckbuckle,” Cabra breathed. “Whazzat?”
There was movement on a slope in the middle distance, near an isolated stand of young thornback that had not yet begun to drag a black streak behind it. The spines shook violently, and the stand began to move, dragging itself uphill. Popping noises filtered through the edges of the pressure cup, distorted by time and distance. The pinchoks took notice, veering close to the edge of the pressure cup and away when the vapor got too thick.
“Sardie cracks.” Sabby the Pooka ducked a little further, pulling his blond head back turtle-like as if a stray bullet might come all this way
to smack him. “What the fuck?”
Vetch stared, his eyes narrowing, his fingers driving into the dirt. His lips twitched a little, and under his stubble, his cheeks had paled. A flash pierced the pressure cup; the cough-burr of a grenade reached them.
“Fuckbuckle.” Cabra squirmed down, away from the hilltop. “Institute sent sardies in? That’s why we came carrying. You bastard.”
Il Muto, his entire long face creased with worry, plucked at Vetch’s coatsleeve. All four of them flinched a split second before a smear of greasy orange and yellow rose. The thornback’s bark-rubbing scream rolled across the ridges, and the pressure cup shivered, its edges shredding even faster. A thin point of blue appeared, took a breath, expanded like a star.
A potzeg, cracked and flung.
“It’s her.” Maybe Sabby had just figured it out. He rubbed at his bloodshot eyes. “Ashe’s girl on a pine bender. In with sardies.”
“Blur your fucknozzle,” Vetch said, finally. “Got a payday from an interested party. Big enough to send us all broadside.”
“The fuck you do.” Cabra was having none of this. “Sardies shoulda been the first line, not in the fine print.”
“You wanna burn off, go ’head.” In other words, Vetch didn’t need them. Not now, not when he was past the patrols and actually in the Rift.
“Oh, man.” Sabby grabbed Cabra’s elbow. She had her knees under her and her fist raised, ready to fall on Vetch’s back. Sabby wrestled her away, and they rolled down the gentle rise, neither her fury nor his attempt at soothing loud enough to cause problems outside their bubble. Professionals, both of them.
Well, as far as the term applied to rifters.
Vetch’s mouth, thin and hard, didn’t relax. He finally turned his head slightly, studying Il Muto, who still had his sleeve, long spidery fingers plucking at tough cloth over a flexarmor patch. He’d left Cabra to choose a fourth, guessing exactly who out of the crowd would get her stamp.
“I knew it would be you,” Vetch muttered. “You know what they’re after.”
The lean, mournful face turned sadder, if that was possible. Il Muto nodded, lips parted as if he would break his silence. Rafello said Il Muto could talk, he just didn’t see any need when people were fucking fools.
Rafello was an ass. But a smart one.
“You with me?” For a moment the past turned over against him. Outside the blur two and a half years ago. Svin right before they went into the sting, her dark thoughtful eyes huge and her hair pulled back, her lips relaxed and glossed with cherrybalm.
You with me? she’d asked. All the way, Ashe had said, not turning around, and Svin had shaken her head a little, ruefully amused as she moved out, not giving Vetch time to answer, too.
To the end of the line, he’d wanted to say, which was stupid. You didn’t give a hole that kind of promise, even if she was a rifter too. It could easily end up bad all through you, like when you heard she’d been there when the warboy’s crew made their move on the Rat.
Lying on the floor of a Rift with roaring and gunfire in the distance, Il Muto nodded. A spark had lit, far back in the man’s dusty eyes, mirrored by the dull, sick, caged heat in Vetch’s own.
“Good,” Vetch said. Sabby would calm Cabra down. After all, they were in the Rift, and the odds got better if they tailed another group. They could slide along the disturbance the lundies were making, the stupid shit a rifter knew better than to do making waves.
Sooner or later, one of the sardies was going to try to tangle Svin, and Vetch would be there. Zlofter’s promised payday was enough to tempt anyone.
Maybe she’d even be grateful, if he showed up at the right time. And if she wasn’t, well … he had a plan for that, too.
31
WHO WAS GONE
George Tremaine was having the time of his professional life. It was a huge opportunity to get in and get actual field data, and his only problem was that the rifter wouldn’t let him gather enough of it.
Take, for example, the shrubs down the hill. The thergo went crazy whenever it was pointed at them, but he had to get closer to get a good reading. It was the first time a signature had seemed identifiable, and his heart raced at the prospect of classifying a flora mutation. Perhaps even one that would be named after him. He could publish, and Molly would maybe stop complaining about being posted to this horrid place with no proper tea, no proper shops, and no hope of advancement since it was a bigger Rift, meant only to be monitored from outside.
Thinking of Molly dampened his mood a bit. He could make a case for a pay raise if he discovered and published, not through that parsimonious bastard Kopelund but higher up at regional level. That would ease the bitter lines around her mouth and maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t push his hands impatiently away when he crept timidly into bed each night. Maybe she was even missing him, though sometimes he suspected … well, no self-respecting woman would go about with any of the locals. It was silly to think otherwise.
Still, she was so much younger.
That was another uncomfortable thought, so he drifted to the edge of the group. Eschkov was nattering on about one of his pet theories, that the Rifts were the product of some kind of natural disaster, and Barko was making listening noises as he nodded his bald, empty head. The old man was nearly useless; he was of the old generation and more inclined to view the Rifts as acts of God or some such foolishness. Tremaine suspected Aleksander had paid Barko to carry him through the energy wall or something. George himself had always snubbed the young blond nuisance, mostly because the boy’s English was so poor. Barko’s wasn’t any better, but he had seniority, and that counted. Rank gave even a foreigner an element of respectability.
Tremaine placed his boots fussily as he took another few steps down the slope. One of the guards—the one with the light eyes and the close-cropped dark hair with bleached tips—was too busy lighting one of their foul-smelling, very strong cigarettes to care. The reek of that tobacco got everywhere, even inside Tremaine’s own house. Molly didn’t appear to notice, but she always wrinkled her little snub nose whenever they passed a smoking local on the street. Filthy habit, that, George would say, and she would hasten to agree.
He glanced back, hearing a small commotion. The rifter had come back, wiping at her bloodless, too-large mouth. Maybe she just didn’t like eating with them around to see. She was an odd one, her froggy eyes and her horseteeth, and Tremaine had almost made some sort of overture.
Hear you were in Birmingham, he could have said, breezily. Very close to home, that. What did you think of it?
In the end, though, he hadn’t.
The light-eyed guard had turned toward the group. George saw his chance and stepped a little more quickly downhill, training the thergo at the stand of bushes and small trees. They were very close together in a mass, what his mother would have called not quite a bit of woods, with one of her slight but devastating little sniffs. The thergo fuzzed a bit and he adjusted the knob on the side two clicks, waiting until it settled to take another step, then another.
Yes, there was a definite signature. When he got close enough he would hold the scan button, and who knew—maybe a paper. Maybe just a bonus for identification. He could buy Molly something small and shiny.
Perhaps that would shutter her complaints. His mother had warned him not to marry the little bint, but there had been the scare with the urine test. He had to do what was right, and she was so pretty, with her golden curls and her snub nose. A real blush-cheeked English rose, especially when she sat so nicely with her ankles crossed. He had told her—in the spirit of honesty, really—that her ankles were one of her best features, and given her a pamphlet his mother had recommended on how to keep oneself trim for the old husband.
She had seemed grateful, even though the stapled paper had vanished.
George found he had drawn much nearer the bit of woods, and the thergo was flashing happily along. He had never seen this particular signature before—plateaus in the top third of the array
, a quickening pattern of spikes in the middle, and a slow rise in the bottom. If he could gather enough, it might be just the breakthrough his career needed.
Imagine Molly’s adoring expression when he told her of the pay raise! Mother was dead, of course, but imagine her finally wearing a faint look of approval, lipstick feathering into the cracks around her aged mouth and her dim eyes blinking nice and moist. Sometimes he thought he had married Molly because he detected a hint of familiar sourness in her expression every once in a while. A shade of disappointment, well hidden but still there.
The bit of woods was making an odd creaking noise. The breeze must be up, though he didn’t feel it. His eyes watered a bit, but he concentrated on the thergo. Really, there was no reason to stay out of the Rift. It stank, certainly, and little Aleksander had a bit of bad luck falling into a puddle of some nasty waste, but—
“Hey!” someone yelled in the distance. “Hey!”
He didn’t look back. The thergo fuzzed again and he let out a harsh breath with a term his mother would not have approved of. A man sometimes just had to use a bit of strong language, really—
Something curled around his ankle. George glanced down, irritated, and his eyes widened.
It was a long cable of plant matter, somewhat like a blackberry vine. Juicy, green, fat, and furred with small serrations; he had perhaps stepped into its curve? But no, he had been a fair bit away from the bit of woods. The thergo had a good range, and he hadn’t meant to get really close, just down the hill a bit and—
“Forget it!” someone else yelled. “He’s gone! Fucking forget it!”
Who was gone? George had only a moment to wonder before the cable around his ankle gave a terrific yank, dragging him into the copse that was not, after all, very far away. His shirt came untucked, the toothy grass tearing at pale tender skin beneath, and the thergo went flying. His head bounced against a rock, the world turned over and a starry pain filled his skull, and he was thankfully, blessedly unconscious when the final crunch reverberated through the whip-moving shrubs and slim, violently shaking trunks. There was a dense mat of wriggling roots and quasi foliage near the bottom, and he vanished into its embrace without a scream.