Cabra didn’t reply. She shoved her canteen back in its sheath-carrier at her belt, and her nostrils flared slightly. That was all.
“You comin’?” Vetch persisted, shifting from foot to foot without moving either, testing his balance. The stimtape on his boots glittered dully under the dust and blood and filth; his dungarees were spattered to the knees. His belt buckle held dots and slashes of bright crimson, too. Their small safezone wavered slightly, fraying at the edges.
Cabra examined him for a long moment. Finally, she shook her head. “I’m gonna find Sabby.”
“He ent—”
“He’d find me.” She bared her bright, thermabonded teeth. “You headin’ for the Alley. I find him, we catch up.”
“Fine.” His eyes glittered, his proud nose lifting a little. “I ent splitting.” If she was going to bug out now, there was no cut waiting for her, if he managed to get his hands on what Zlofter wanted. Except that wasn’t really why he’d taken the job, and maybe she guessed as much by now.
That earned him a single contemptuous snort. “Didn’t ask you to.” She tapped the brick wall twice, lightly, and the sound was too hollow for such a solid structure. Which brought her up out of her crouch; she skipped away, each foot placed with a finicky drumbeat. Vetch jumped too, sensing the safe bubble closing like an iris shutter in a high-end corporate skyscraper. There was no good place to put his feet, and he went down on instinct, his shoulder hitting with a deep crunch.
A shimmer birthed itself into being above and between them and Cabra yelled, a short, desperate sound. The thrill of weightlessness along each nerve turned painful, and Vetch continued rolling, on his side now instead of tumbling head over heels. Cabra thrashed, her right foot catching the brick wall, its fabric now turning friable as the shimmer warped at gravity. It spat her free with a sound like tearing cloth, but Vetch didn’t wait to see if she hit the ground running or not. He was too busy gaining his feet with a muscle-splitting lunge, everything in his pack rattling now that he’d rolled over it, and searching for a safe direction to throw himself. The Rift pressed against him, sharp edges around a tender morsel, and he popped his hips left to avoid a sudden, half-seen danger. Running, then, with no mipsik herd to shield or carry him, the empty aching inside that made him a rifter dilating as he dragged his reluctant tired body along.
There. His feet found a thin, fraying thread, his boots slipping in greasy dirt that melted into rough pavement as he galloped along the expanding edge of a ripple. Not quite a pressure wall, merely a potential path, the breathless moment before lightning arcs between sky and earth.
Finally, the thread underfoot broadened into a ribbon, then swelled again into a pathway. Vetch slowed, his head swiveling, his left side gripping again with another monstrous cramp that threatened to empty his stomach and curl him into a witless worm on the ground. He denied it, sensing more than seeing the buildings rising around him and silver tape festooning a weird shape in the middle of their huddled group. The Rift had rolled him ’round like the small silver ball on the outside of a roulette wheel, and deposited him here.
He ducked aside, through an opening he barely saw, and found himself in a small dark room. A hole in the wall was a shattered window, and a circle of potzegs glowed translucent-egg on the floor, the surface beneath it charred.
Vetch curled over, went to hands and knees. His sides heaved. He retched, then toppled and shook for a short while, listening to the wind play with the silvery flutters outside. Come nightfall, there would probably be boogaloos browsing on it. This place felt safe enough, and it also felt used. Someone had been here not too long ago, burrowing into the safe space and moving on before it was exhausted.
“Shine,” he muttered, when he could breathe again. Another retch brought up hard sour liquid against the back of his throat. “Fuckbuckle shine.”
He’d found her trail.
44
COURTESY CALL
Kope’s tetherphone buzzed; the little bell inside it smacked mercilessly until he scooped the handset up. Nothing but problems, goddammit. Already today his coffee tasted like boiled piss and his pen ran out of ink halfway through a Form 38a. The goddamn thing had to be all finished in blue or black, not a mixture of both. Not that anyone would care about anything it said, just if it arrived obviously piebald.
“What?” he snarled into the receiver.
It was Paks at the gate. “Kope, we got a shiny blackbird* with an alpha pass headed up to you.”
Shit. “How many heads?”
“Three. Driver, some egghead with a carrying case, and a guy in a hair coat.” Paks sounded nervous, and well he might. There was no official visit scheduled for today, goddammit. Kope had paid off the last inspection team to come through handsomely, and that was just last month. If the bastard had reneged, Kopelund was going to have to get creative.
“Thanks.” A single brusque word, as if the general had been expecting this. He dropped the handset back into its cradle and cast a critical eye over the office as he surged up from his squeaking chair. The room was a fucking mess, paper all over the desktop, but that was to be expected. The window was half open, and the end-of-winter bite drifting through it was saturated with the smell of mud and the sounds of the drillyard. The second set of books was safely at home, behind a painting that looked glued to the goddamn wall since the Event. He ran a hand back through his hair and straightened his jacket, aware of hating himself for doing it but unable to stop.
The thought that it was someone from District was unpleasant, to say the least. He settled himself behind the desk again, opening a ledger from the stack to his left and bending over it, the very picture of a good little bureaucrat. Was it about Bechter? Nothing should be wrong with that little bastard’s paperwork, and even in his haze of painkillers the snot had seemed to understand that his pension was dependent on Kope’s goodwill.
Nothing but problems today, ever since he woke up and found out his wife had gone to visit her goddamn parents. Stupid bitch hadn’t even asked him, or turned the coffee on. He should never have married the high-and-mighty praying mantis, even if her father had been a colonel.
When his visitors reached the door, giving only a courtesy knock, he found his palms were sweating. Hopefully it was a routine inspection, but his contact in the dispatch office should have given him a heads-up.
Two men. One, with a high pointed widow’s peak of graying fuzz and iron-rimmed spectacles, had the round doughy face of a pen-pusher and the watery blue eyes of a sadist who enjoyed watching his victims squirm over closed-circuit. Two, a broad-shouldered, rock-faced thug with a shoulder holster. Both of them had very fine coats, the pen-pusher’s leather and the thug’s woolen, and both uniforms sported the blue stripe next to the red that proclaimed Second Branch.
Oh, fuck. They could be from Central instead of District. If they suspected he’d sent resources into QR-715 …
It was the one in spectacles who was running the show, because he was the one who spoke first. “General Kopelund?”
Kope let his gaze roam over both of them. A few seconds of silence, just to show he wasn’t intimidated. “Appointments can be made with my secretary.”
“He stepped away,” the meat-slab said, his large mouth turning into something just short of a smirk. He wore a wide leather standard-issue belt, but tucked discreetly back on his left hip was a small sheath that, unless Kope missed his guess, carried a set of brass knuckles.
“General Timor Kopelund?” Spectacles persisted. A bit of a pedant, then. He tilted his head back slightly, and the overhead lights glared off his spectacle lenses, turning his eyes into silver coins.
“I said, appointments can be made with my secretary. I am very busy. Good day.” He bent back over the ledger, the stub of a pencil scratching in his sweat-greased fingers. A single word, repeated over and over again, just to give him the appearance of working.
Spectacles reached into his jacket pocket.
Kope braced himself. His righ
t hand kept scratching at the paper. That word, over and over. He could salvage this, he just needed some time to think. His nose twitched, once.
Spectacles beamed gently, his cheeks bunching under those silver-coin eyes. “Agent-Major Ochki, Second Branch.” The badge was legitimate, any idiot could see as much.
Which meant he was fucked, but he could perhaps bluff for some time. Kopelund shut the ledger with a snap and a sigh, and rose, heavily. Time to appear slow and stupid. He paced around the desk and approached his visitors, his hand itching for the service revolver slung at his side. One step, two. Three, and he was halfway across the office, drawing himself up to his full height, the steely glint in his eye and the cloak of authority resting secure as usual upon his shoulders.
“A courtesy call could have been made—” Kope began, and he barely saw the big man move.
A fist the size of a ham socked into his gut. Kope bent over, his tasteless breakfast threatening to leave him in a boiled-piss-coffee rush. All the air in the room had fled, and the only thing left was a heavy, colorless gas. It was too hot, despite the open window, and the lowest part of his belly felt suspiciously loose. Like his sphincters might give way after another hit like that. Kope hadn’t been on the drillyard in years, and it had made him soft.
“There is no need for courtesy when dealing with corruption,” Ochki was saying, but none of it reached Kopelund’s staggering brain. “You’ve made yourself a nice little nest here, haven’t you? Well, the feathers all had to come from somewhere.” The dapper little man tucked his badge away, and his smile was almost benevolent. “Come now, sir. Do not be … undignified.”
“—warrant,” Kopelund wheezed, straightening as well as he could, just to show it hadn’t hurt that much. “Bastard.”
“Certainly.” Ochki smiled. “I have it in triplicate, along with statements that will be produced at the court-martial. Some of them may even be sworn statements, if the investigation goes well. Which I think it will.”
Now solicitous, the large man brushed at Kope’s shoulders, tugging his uniform jacket to straighten it. “Sorry about this,” he said, sunnily, with the absurd good humor of the subnormal follower of horrific orders. His tongue—strangely pale, as if starved of blood—flicked out, wet his thick lips, retreated. “Can’t ever tell when a fellow will get a bit excited.”
Ochki passed close by Kopelund, and the gasping man caught a hint of expensive aftershave, an expensive cologne the whores in town would call Figsnap, for a sickly sweet liqueur. Run right through you and leave your bowels loose, they would joke. These same women called Kope a word in their slurry-slang language loosely translated as Pigfart, for the unfortunate sounds he made during coupling.
Later, in the prison, he would be named something similar for the sounds he made during beatings.
In the ledger, scrawled several times in pencil, with large looping consonants and small, cramped vowels, was a single word.
Cormorant. Cormorant. Cormorant. Cor …
And there, the marks died away.
45
THE FISH YOU WANT
Two bundles of scavenged wood carried on her back—they now had enough to last the night, if they kept the fire small—hit the floor with a thump. The tiny blaze, set behind what had once been a large reception desk to keep the heat from escaping too far, crackled merrily. This building was safe, but the dusk outside held hints of a funny heatless scent Svin didn’t like. There would be no slipping away to explore the shifting margins of safety and feel out possible paths for tomorrow. No eating outside, where the walls didn’t conspire to choke her and there were no avid little eyes focused on her mouth, either. A canteen was bad enough.
She could probably go up and find a quiet corner, but that would put them between her and the safe exit. And really, just because the building was relatively safe on the ground floor didn’t mean some of the other floors didn’t have things best left undisturbed.
The captain looked bad. He was shivering between fits of dozing, sweating through his clothes, and Svin didn’t need a pic-dictionary to figure out the sly little glances Brood kept giving him. Or the worried ones Mako and Barko kept exchanging. At least they weren’t stupid, but Svin had no illusions they would be able to stop the pale-eyed man or even slow him down. He was beginning to crack under the Rift’s pressure, just like the goggles had. Only this sardie would take all of them with him, if he could, because that was the way he was wired.
The Rift didn’t show you anything you didn’t already know. It just peeled back the layers, and exposed the bedrock.
So they were locked in a room with a hungry wolf, like the old fable. Maybe it was time to tell them what they were really after.
“Good job.” Mako, his eyes twin gleams, tossed her a silvery ration pouch. “It’s warming up. Enjoy.”
“Thanks.” Svin didn’t bother to tell him she had pouches of her own. It was probably his not-so-subtle way of trying to keep her at the campsite. “It feels bad outside.”
“How bad?” Barko immediately wanted to know. As if she could put a number on the instinct.
“Just bad.” She grabbed the strap around one load of wood, hefted it onto three other similarly strapped bundles. The other one—heavy because some of the pieces were larger, she’d had a hell of a time breaking them up—settled in its place, a neat pile instead of a mess. The ration pouch was indeed warm, welcome against her chilled fingers.
Brood, his rifle across his lap, was slurping from his own packet. His stubble was dark except for the scar dropping down from one side of his mouth and running along his jawline, a line of silver.
Svin hopped up onto what had been a kidney-shaped counter. This looked more like a waiting room than a shop. If she were rifting by herself, she would poke around a little, see if there was any salvage on this floor. It felt like a place poppers would collect, those little blue spheres with their secretive glow. Or lampers, the long metal cylinders with various effects—a few of them, when you twisted the central portion, would begin to hum and rise away from gravity’s clutching fingers. Most of them emitted a glow from one end or the other, freed by that same twisting motion, varying in intensity from a halogen glare to a weak golden beam. They were impervious to human tools, and scientists—let alone mechanics—could not break them open to discover their secrets. There might be coils of that soft gray extrusion that could be used as a rope that wouldn’t fray, or as electrical wiring that conformed easily to any contacts and could be passed even through a hair-thin hole. You could never tell what might turn out to be valuable; you had to rift enough the instincts would start to wake up and tingle.
Crouching easily, she folded the top of the ration packet and tore the spout with just the right amount of force. A slight whiff of steam rose, meaty, salty, with an undertone of floury noodles. Good enough, and there would be the sweeter portion at the bottom, once the rest of the paste had been swallowed. Once they’d figured out how to make it contain the required fiber, every military—even the pissant warboys—had laid in stocks of the pouches wherever and whenever they could.
Mako had even kneaded this one, so there were no little pockets of scorching almost-fluid. It was an unexpected gesture, but maybe he was just inherently thorough. Or the pouch had been squeezed and bumped around enough in his pack to make it smooth and conductive.
Morov didn’t want to eat, but Barko pestered him with the gentleness of a bluff blunt man unused to children or invalids. The bald scientist made sure the commander was swallowing the paste, then cracked open a small red box from the bottom of the medikit.
That got Brood’s attention. “Wait a second. That’s expensive stuff.”
“Well, we’re in a bad situation.” Barko’s reply was the essence of mildness. He slid the syringe free and examined it critically for breakage or bending. “Now’s a fine time to wish I majored in biology.”
“What did you major in?” Mako slurped at his own packet. Svin’s had cooled enough to taste. Chicken so
mething. Maybe even some cheese.
“Physics.” Barko’s expression turned set with distaste. The dirt veiling his head could almost be mistaken for stubble. “As if the shit in here doesn’t violate every goddamn law I ever learned.”
None of them looked at her except Brood. She controlled the urge to turn away, hunch her shoulders. It was never good to show any weakness to a brittle-skinned man. “You want the longer-gauge needle. Right into the muscle mass on the quads, if that’s what I think it is.” Svin suckled at her own pouch. The rations were meant to keep large men carrying heavy weights supplied with enough calories for combat. It was good to feel the hunger retreat, to feel her strong thermabonded teeth warm up with the paste sliding past them.
“Now she’s a nurse,” Brood muttered. “You shouldn’t give that to him. He’s a goner.”
“He’s not dead yet.” Mako glared at Brood. “Regs say we don’t leave our wounded.”
“Fuck the regs. You think they matter in here?” Brood just shook his head, the long-healed scar along his jawline flashing paler, and Svin sensed something ugly rising in the situation.
It wasn’t time for that. Yet. So she finished a long slurp and wiped her mouth with the back of one narrow hand. “I’ll tell you about the Cormorant.”
That froze all three of them—Mako with a mouthful of paste, Brood with his index finger tapping the butt of his sidearm again, Barko’s pupils dilated and his head turned to look at her. Morov’s eyes glittered under half-shut lids, a fever-sparkle like the lights you saw over low-lying areas in a really active part of a Rift at night. Watching those foxfire pinpricks mass and flow was another good way to get hypnotized and end up dead.
“This is the Run,” she continued. “The biggest Rift and the most active. Right in the middle is the Cormorant. You know why they call it that?”