Chapter Text
… from Zone 2 is that Santa Sangre went mask-to-mask with a sweep truck and came out smiling: head over to Unkle Hankle’s for cut-price body-bags all this week.
The voice on the radio filters gradually out of his dream and into his waking consciousness: grit prickles at the back of his nose as he shifts on the lumpy mattress, the day’s heat already beginning to press down under the roof.
Radiation’s going to be off the scale in Zone 4 for the next three rotations – better keep those counters ticking, betabugs.
It stays with him as he struggles up from the sticky embrace of sleep, half-listening for the clang and tap of repairs outside, Kobra’s yelp of annoyance and Ghoul’s hyena laugh, but when he opens his eyes it’s to an unfathomable wrongness. The ceiling above him is featureless plaster, not blistered paint and metal; instead of a ragged blanket he’s lying under clean smooth sheets and the window across the room has a shade drawn against the night, not a patchy skim of white paint to keep out the sun. Everything’s wrong, all except the sound: he can still hear it through the bedroom wall, the dark brown voice that was the soundtrack to long aimless days in the diner, to freewheeling joyrides and frantic chases and the parties that lit up the desert night.
…me, Dr D on WKIL 109, keeping the beats pumping and your pulse jumping – here’s one you can catch on Sunday at the Bitter End…
Caught between past and present, he gets up and pads to the bathroom; when he flicks on the light he half expects the mirror to show him the shock of red hair, the mask and the crooked grin below it, but no. The eyes are the same, washed to green by the stark light, but his hair is straight and brown, his skin is pale and he’s running to fat. He’s Citizen Way.
Dr D’s murmured words morph suddenly into a grinding beat and he turns his head in alarm - if he can hear it so clearly, surely the other habs around them can too. But the music switches off abruptly and he’s left staring into the mirror with the silence ringing in his ears. No need to ask who was playing it. But now’s not the time: the inhabitants of Battery City sleep at night, a regulation seven hours so they’re alert and productive when the cheerfully sunny dawn comes up. He snaps the light off again. No one’s playing Zones radio in the small hours: he never heard it. But as he lies down obediently once more in the hush of the night-time city he misses it, with an ache that’s almost physical.
It’s all still out there, the whole of the life he had – the constant adrenaline high of driving too fast, rushing into danger finger on the trigger; the heady mix of attention and flattery; the nights of raucous music and slicing lights when the pills and the pulsing groove held time suspended, the stars sharp and the dawn infinitely far away. He closes his eyes and lets sparks of colour bloom behind his lids, neon green, yellow, ripe purple, red. The scarlet of Kobra’s jacket, the cherry-red tank of the bike, the crimson stain in the dust beside the road...
He’s doing what they all did, remembering the glamour and danger like a juviehall fan. Drinking rusty water and scraping for food; doctoring wounds with dirty bandages and out-of-date medicine; scavenging for junk and waiting for the patrols; taking the pills and partying so we wouldn’t have to admit we were thirsty and hungry and bored. And then that day, out on Route Guano, the day that still perches on his shoulder like a Mission crow… On a reflex he reaches to the nightstand for the vial with its smiling logo: a good citizen takes a stabiliser if his emotions are disturbed. But his hand stills before he touches it – this is part of the bargain. Regret’s not something he’s going to cure with a pill.
--
He wakes again from confusing dreams as the first sun is slanting in: after the vivid memories of the night the pale hab seems thin and shallow, like a stage set. On the way to the shower he looks in on his brother, but he’s sleeping, flat out and blameless, his orderly’s uniform folded fresh from the disinfector, regulation headphones and ID stacked on top. Gerard scans the room, as blank as his own: if the radio’s here it’s well hidden. He doubts any of their neighbours heard it, the station too faint for anyone who doesn’t already have its rhythm running through their veins. But why now, after so long? Nostalgia? Curiosity? Or something he knows? He itches to ask, but Mikey needs to sleep after his shift, and he has a routine to keep, work to do. Later.
As he stands under the shower spray the bass throb of the song pulses in his brain, a mains current to who he used to be. Poison and Kobra are gone, stripped off along with their tags and left in the desert, and Jet’s with the Witch, may she be good to him, but Ghoul… He’s still out there. What does he look like now? His outfit went with the rest of theirs, the sunrise cutoff that always stank of nitro, the Frankenstein mask; Gerard guesses the long hair that fell over his eyes will be a different colour now, or shaved, maybe. Is he all spikes and studs, or flashy neon-bright? Either way he’ll be sun-scoured and tough – the Zones aren’t kind, and six years of claps and raids will have left scars, his tattoos faded or covered over. The memory surfaces, burning and unbidden, of tracing the skin of Ghoul’s hips where the two of them were immortalised long ago, the taste of salt and gritty sand under his lips… He lifts his face to the spray, snapping himself back to the present. Thoughts like that are dangerous, even locked inside his head.
He dresses and eats, refills the coffeemaker for Mikey when he gets up, then picks up his portfolio and headphones and lets the door slide shut behind him. The elevator doors at the end of the hab’s corridor reflect him back at himself as he approaches, stark and monochrome in his company-approved white shirt and black tie, conformist in every way except for his hair, curling slightly long over his collar with an artist’s leeway. He catches his own startled gaze, permanently surprised by this unrecognisable self. It’s what you do, not how you dress. Hair dye and painted decals never brought the revolution.
It’s a lovely morning in Battery City as it always is, bright and warm, the broad avenues freshly swept beneath soaring white office blocks. A human tide of citizens, cups in hand and headphones leaking tinny muzak, moves briskly along the slidewalks under screens reeling out BetterDay’s cheerful updates, and Gerard slots in among them, carefully anonymous. The crowd carries him from hab complex to transit plaza to hub station, and then across a tiny urban park where sprinkler-fed rain comes pattering down from the dome at precisely calibrated intervals to nurture shrubs, slender trees and a soft carpet of grass. It’s orderly and geometric, its paths and low hedges clipped and tended to within an inch of their life, but it’s green and alive; none of the other hurrying commuters seem to notice it, but after the thorny scrub and cactus-dotted waste of the Zones this artificial oasis is the ultimate indulgence and Gerard is embarrassed by how much he likes it: he crosses it every morning and evening, and sometimes, as now, he drops out of the flow of office workers and uniformed schoolchildren to sit for a little while on one of the metal benches beside the gravelled path.
A little girl, bright-faced and neat, comes skipping along the path, chattering to her mother, though she’s absorbed in the messages she’s scrolling on her hand terminal. ‘… and then Mousekat gave them all pills and made them all the same size again.’
‘Did he?’ asks the woman automatically, frowning at her screen.
The girl hops on one foot, then on the other. ‘All except for Monkey. He spat his pill out, I saw him, and he was only pretending to fitinto the box.’
‘Mousekat shows everyone how to take their pills,’ the woman assures her absently, tapping at the terminal, but the girl pauses, puzzled, stands on one foot while she thinks about it, then shakes her head with conviction.
‘Monkey didn’t,’ she reassures herself. ‘He didn’t want to be the same as everyone else.’ Satisfied, she chases away after her mother again.
It’s these moments, more than anything else, which give Gerard hope. Finding a job at the animation studio wasn’t difficult – in a community of citizens raised to be obedient and unquestioning an unfettered imagination is a rare asset. Holding it in check, that was the challenge. Mousekat, Captain Visible, the Turn-‘Em-In Gang – they’re simple propaganda, not even an attempt to disguise the message, hammered home relentlessly: Don’t stand out. Don’t be different. Take the pills and make sure you behave like everyone else. Endless variations on the same theme, cycling daily on a screen in every hab.
Gerard’s good at his work and the directors like it – the censors scan every reel, but they’re adults and he’s not speaking to them. It takes a child’s eye to make sense of the detail, taking the time to pore over a single panel of a comic, watching the same cartoon twenty times in a row, and a child’s open-mindedness to see the message inside the message. No one’s born conformist and obedient, not even here: the citizen mindset is taught, reinforced through regulation and repetition, in work and play alike. But this way he can reach them before their imagination and creativity is stamped out and lost, while the world’s still an adventure and everything is possible. It’s slow and it’s not spectacular, but he knows he’s getting through.
There are people in the City worth saving. The first time Cola said it Poison had laughed. Cola had swung by the diner on an unaccustomed visit, talking to Jet and Ghoul about some WKIL live show, and Poison had left them to it, taking himself outside to practise his shooting in the building’s late afternoon shade. Cola had wandered out after a while and stood there, watching with arms folded as Poison squeezed off a series of shots, quick and accurate, sending the empty soda cans clattering and bouncing. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Pretty good.’
‘Cut that shit out.’ Poison tossed him the blaster and picked up one of the cans which had spun to rest near his foot. Cola motioned for him to throw it and Poison made it a good one, high and fast, flashing in the sun, but Cola’s draw was quick and his aim accurate, picking it cleanly out of the air. ‘You know we could use-‘ he began as Cola handed him back the gun, but Cola’s face had set.
‘Shooting’s no answer.’
‘Seems pretty convincing when you’re looking down the barrel at a Drac.’
Cola had helped him gather the cans and restack them. ‘Some of them were us,’ he said quietly. Poison grimaced: it was the possibility no one talked about, that under the bleached overall and blank rubber face could be someone you used to know, a friend, or worse. Cola had smiled thinly. ‘And some of us were them. Not everyone can run.’
‘Most of ‘em don’t have the guts.’ Cola did, he knew; everyone knew the stories of how he used to be out in the hot zones, hair-trigger angry and nothing he wouldn’t swallow. ‘You grab your chance or you let them stamp a barcode on your face.’
Cola had given him one of those slow thoughtful looks that made him feel the gap in experience between them. ‘Sometimes people wait. Because they have to. Because someone needs them.’
Poison took aim at the can on top of the stack and picked it off, sending it rolling in a puff of dirt. ‘Me and Kobra, we made a pact – Zones or nothing. No more rules, no more control: live in colour or die trying.’
‘And what would you have done if Kobra couldn’t leave?’ The next can should have been easy, but Poison’s shot crackled wide, kicking up a stray stone. ‘Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is live the struggle each day.’
A waste of a fighter, Poison had thought then, his spark gone out so all he was good for was poetry and platitudes, but Cola had been right after all, hadn’t he?
--
He has his own space in the studio, bright and well organised; the walls are empty apart from the camera perched high in the corner, but within this blank space he can conjure limitless life and colour from his imagination. The tools he has at his disposal are an embarrassment of riches – a latest-model tablet, a drawing board, high-quality paper and any art supplies he can name, all delivered fresh-boxed from the factory. When he first came back his guilt at the ease of city life was paralysing – clean water at the touch of a faucet, climate-controlled buildings, stores with racks of new clothes and shelves of food, endlessly replenished. Of course the illusion of choice was just that, the clothes in every outlet the same, the cans and packets nutritionally-balanced but bland and packed with emotion suppressors, the coffee as ersatz as the cream; even so, to begin with he choked down guilt like desert sand with every mouthful. But there’s no virtue in martyrdom: his own suffering doesn’t help anyone else.
There’s a vending machine just along the corridor here too, lined with Mindful patches and TruCalm pills for chilling out and cans of WakeUp and PowerThru for optimal performance; it has coffee too, and he drops in a carbon to fetch himself a cup before settling down to work. The pages absorb him easily as he teases out the delicate equilibrium between creativity and subversion, the careful weighting of each tiny detail, and he’s soon lost in it, sketching and rejecting, tossing crumpled sheets in the direction of the trash, feeling his way to a connection to his juvenile audience.
He works on undisturbed, empty cups and balls of paper accumulating around him, until the cleaning droid comes buzzing purposefully along the corridor. It’s a simple model, blocky and cylindrical, with just enough brain for simple repetitive tasks; the light on its camera blinks as it sweeps the floor clean. Droids were something else he had to relearn: you don’t find them in the Zones. The Zones are for humans doing their human thing, fighting and fucking, farming and salvaging, making and creating. There’s electricity out there, coaxed from jury-rigged solar panels and clunky generators, but patchy stop-start power’s no use for a droid; the humming grid that powers everything from the weather to the slidewalks and elevators ends at the city limits. Droids stay where they begin, doing the menial work of cleaning and maintenance, delivery and transport; providing services for entertainment and pleasure, tuned to the whims of their client or owner; programmed as humanoid replicas to replace unreliable parents or rebellious teachers. They’re everywhere in the city and when they get obsolete, when they run down and malfunction, if they’re not worth mending or repurposing they drift to the twilight of the Lobby, glitching on faulty batteries, patching themselves together and telling each other stories about the god who’s going to save them. Gerard’s learned a lot about droids in the time he’s been here.
Now the bot rolls into his room, circles to gather the balled-up sheets that have missed their target, then seizes the trashcan to empty it. ‘Thanks,’ says Gerard absently. The can clatters back down again and the droid hums off, leaving him to his work. It’s long gone by the time he comes to a stop, stretches and picks up the empty cups to clear his desk. Only then does he notice what’s lying in the bottom of the trash – a square of crudely-printed card, black on white. He knows better than to glance up at the surveillance camera: he stoops, angling his body carefully, so he can scoop it up as he drops in the cups. The image of a crow in flight, its wingtips feathered: his heart thumps guiltily as he holds the message in his fist. Bad news on the way. Coincidence, after last night? Of course not: BL/ind’s not the only one watching him in here.
--
It was losing Jet that day on Route Guano, nearly losing Kobra, but that wasn’t where it began. If it would have made a difference, if sacrificing their lives would have brought down BL/ind, would have meant the end of raids and bombings and night-time disappearances, he would have paid, would have lived up to his own hype and gone down with his gun in his hand and his mask on. He was never afraid, out in the Zones; he was hyped up, angry and messianic, too fast and heady for fear and maybe that was why the Witch carried him through. What stopped him, what brought him to his knees in the end, wasn’t the enemy he could fight, the strangling corporation and its dictatorial overlords, the faceless Dracs and ruthless exterminators; what stopped him was the slow swell of conviction that he was fighting for a revolution that was never coming, because it was a revolution no one wanted to see.
He’d lived it himself, swallowed the belief down whole when he was just a kid. Zonerunners were better than the mindless masses in the city: zonerunners were rebels, visionaries, turning their backs on a bland safe existence for a real life of colour and freedom and danger. And killjoys were the best of the best, true believers, desert aristocracy. He lived it, through the claps and the raids, the parties and the funerals, bathing in admiration and worship, revelling in the power of a raygun in his hand and the sense of importance when every face turned to him as he walked through a door. And they say BL/ind control their citizens with drugs. But you keep running, you fight dirty and party hard, because killjoys don’t live forever, that’s a given. Sooner or later they go down fighting, burn into legend, and a new crew stands up to take their place.
Did anyone in the Zones really want things to change? They wanted small things – better food, a faster car, more carbons – but did they want to share the life they had with the office-bound drones of Battery City? What zonerunner could respect them, the colourless compliant masses? They needed the citydwellers to despise, to reflect themselves back larger than life in all their style and arrogance. What’s difference without the blank page that defines it?
It’s a game no one can win, but that’s why BL/ind play it. When he’d seen, finally, it was like walking through the surface of a mirror. BL/ind could choke off the Zones any time, cut the gas lines and the crates of smuggled food, pick off the juvies before they breach the city limits. But they don’t, do they? They keep the rebels ticking along, let the middlemen bleed off just enough to keep their communities viable, dogfood and fresh water and all, because if the Zones didn’t exist they’d have to invent them. What do you do with your revolutionaries? You can try to crush their spirit, make them conform, but if that doesn’t work then best to let them go. Make them fight their way out like he and Kobra did, like they all did, so they feel they’ve won a prize worth having, then let them wear out their lives in the desert, playing cat and mouse with the Scarecrows, putting their faith in music and art and the Witch – and all the time they’re far from the city.
It makes him think of Ghoul, perched at the table in the diner, shoulders hunched in concentration as his tattooed hands wired a detonator, steady and delicate. You need two halves to make an explosion: bring them together and Boom!, but keep them separate and a bomb is just a box of wire and junk. BL/ind always knew what they were doing – easy to make the citizens fear the Zones, labelling their inhabitants as terrorists, violent, crazy, and just as easy to make sure the zonerunners despise the sheeplike orderly citizens. Divide and rule.
He’d already begun to feel it over months and years, the never-ending waves of Dracs, the well-worn choreography of ambushes and raids, the sense that he was dancing to someone else’s tune. It didn’t make walking away any easier, even when Jet was gone, his blood-stained gear scattered at the side of the road; even when Kobra was lying white-faced and weak, shivering with infection. The three of them had – not agreed, it wasn’t that pretty, but they’d argued themselves to a standstill and a decision.
It shouldn’t have been possible. The Fabulous Killjoys were BL/ind’s most wanted, their faces on every gas station wall, but a nemesis is a powerful thing. Korse had made them his personal project, staked his reputation on bringing them down. Exterminators’ only permitted emotions are ambition and hatred, but hatred bleeds quickly into obsession, and obsession into something else. When they thrashed out the deal, alone and wary in a room behind the robot fighting arena, when he spat in his palm and took Korse’s soft pale hand, he could read the hunger in his eyes. Korse needed the kill, he needed them to show the pitiless company hierarchy he was still the most ruthless, the most successful, still better than his younger, faster rivals. Ghosting the Fabulous Killjoys would make his career secure, and what he offered in return was trivial – new IDs and fake bios, a stack of carbons and a clean slate. As long as the images were captured for the newsflash, the bodies sprawled in the dust beside a burning car, what happened to the three men who stepped out of their husks was no concern of his. The ease with which the sleight of hand was done made Gerard wonder even then. So many legendary killjoys who never made it home, rumour telling how they were ghosted, dracced, swiped and wiped: was every story true?
--
At the day’s end he joins the flood of citizens back to the hab complexes, back to family and dinner and company-approved edutainment, or for the more adventurous the tame thrills of the Lobby’s sex shows and fight clubs. He thinks about it sometimes, the life that’s just a breath away – juviehalls and wannabe rebels making music in underground clubs and hidden raves, fixers and smugglers dropping notes and sending consignments, hackers and underground medics doing favours for the Zones. It wouldn’t take more than a glance across an alley, a muttered word outside an unmarked door and he could step back into the past. But his choice is up and awake, sitting in the hab unit’s kitchen with a bowl of HealthiGrain and a pink smoothie in front of him. He’s filled out since the desert: as Kobra he was always tall and skinny, but the years of city living have made him stronger and less bony. Gerard still gets a wash of simple gratitude, even after all this time, seeing his brother bright-eyed and whole.
In the heart-stopping minutes after he and Ghoul found the bike and Jet’s singed gear, he thought his brother was gone too: when Ghoul shouted and he saw Kobra bloodied but breathing under a clump of spiny agave he’d gasped a prayer of thanks to the Witch. But it didn’t take an expert to recognise the kind of injuries only a city facility could hope to treat. Maybe a Zones hospital could have pulled him through with a half-trained surgeon and out-of-date drugs, if the water stayed clean and the generator held up, but they’d have patched him together, not cured him. He’d thought wildly of getting him into the Lobby to one of the underground infirmaries, but even there, if a Drac sweep didn’t find him, still no guarantee he’d come out walking. Kobra was facing at best a lifetime of pain and hardship, at worst a slow death, and it turned out Cola was right after all: there was a thing he couldn’t do and a place he wouldn’t go.
Now Mikey looks up from his bowl and asks, ‘Good day?’ Behind him the screen is running, sound muted.
Gerard slings down his bag. ‘Not sure.’ He could do with a drink, but in Battery City alcohol’s not permitted for citizens; it makes performance suboptimal, though rumour says the directors have their own high-quality supplies. Instead he gets himself a soda, cold from the fridge. Mikey’s already in his scrubs, the white ID band round his wrist. ‘Another late shift?’
‘Got switched around.’ After all the months he spent in the hospital Mikey still works there, behind a desk now. He registers and directs clients, books appointments and synchs records, keeps the facility running smoothly: what better occupation for a citizen injured in an industrial accident who’s trying to repay his care? And just like Gerard he’s let himself ease into the opportunities slowly.
All that data buzzing under his fingertips – ID numbers, addresses, family and biomedical information - and an unguarded back door into BL/ind’s central databank of credit ratings, security checks, aberrant behaviour reports. If Gerard can open the door to a child’s imagination, Mikey gets to be the ghost in the net for their parents: not for everyone and not all the time, but for when it really counts. A deleted record here, a tweaked report there, an unpaid payment inexplicably logged, an inhumane system coming up with a miracle when it’s most needed. And every time there’s one more outwardly obedient worker with a shared secret, a citizen become a rebel, someone who wished against hope for help and found they’re not alone. Mikey’s careful, each tiny action all but indetectable, but sometimes, he’s told Gerard, it’s as though the system tries to help him, sending data ghosts gliding through the streaming traffic to show him the way.
Gerard sits down, expectant, but Mikey keeps his eyes on his bowl. He can’t ask outright: surveillance of individual habs is sporadic, but they’ve everything to lose. ‘I woke up last night,’ he says. ‘Thought I was dreaming.’
Mikey looks at him then, searching his face for something. ‘Maybe you were.’
Gerard reaches out a hand. ‘I don’t think so. Why now, Mikey?’ He’d done it himself in those early days when Mikey was in the hospital and he was alone in their blank hab, part of his mind still screaming at him about betrayal, cowardice, drowning; he’d listened to the radio then, letting it buzz almost inaudibly through the night, aching to be part of the technicolour tide of Zones life, hungry for the heads-ups and ads and news, always trawling for a hint of Ghoul. Who was he now – Garage Banned? Trash Star? Death Spell? It was hopeless, the thinnest possible thread of connection, yet still one he couldn’t bear to sever. But gradually he learned to ride the wave, his long-term plan wrapping around him and gathering momentum, and as he found his purpose he let the desert and the regret recede into the past.
‘It’s…’ There’s a blank space on Mikey’s arm where the spider tattoo used to be and sometimes, as now, he rubs at it, stroking over the empty space, though Gerard’s never sure if he’s aware he’s doing it. He doesn’t look up, and his voice is so quiet Gerard barely catches the question. ‘What if none of it was true?’
‘You mean-‘ starts Gerard, equally quiet, but Mikey raises his head, his face pale and strained.
‘I remember it. Or I think I do. Everything we did, how it all was, the diner, the parties, everything. And I remember the accident, kind of. But then I woke up here and I was ill.’ He’s clutching his arm, thumb digging in painfully, and Gerard lays his own hand over it.
‘Of course it’s all out there – the crews, the towns, the radio station…’ Everyone we knew.
Mikey’s bony fingers close on his wrists, his words strained and urgent. ‘How can you be sure? What if it was just a story we told each other, and they keep the broadcasts running to make us think it’s real?’
It’s so far from what he expected: Gerard presses their foreheads together. ‘Mikey, we were there.’ He can’t say it, but he traces the outline of the cobra head on his skin. ‘You know it was true.’
Mikey pulls his arms away. ‘Look at you. Look at us. What’s left to prove it?’
Nothing, Gerard knows. No clothes, no colour, even the scars smoothed away to leave two outwardly model citizens. They’re close enough that Gerard can whisper, ‘What's happened?’
For a moment is seems that Mikey’s on the verge of saying something, then he shakes himself free. ‘I have to get to work.’
After his brother’s gone Gerard sits alone, looking at his own hands around the soda can. His skin is pale and soft beneath his rolled white sleeves. No scars? It’s true the sunscour and ridges were smoothed away and now his skin is pale and soft, but they both have scars aplenty. Losing Jet, leaving his friends and comrades-in-arms, and the deepest cut of all. The memory still pierces him, of the day he saw Ghoul for the last time – how sick he looked, how he turned away angrily when Poison would have hugged him, how he revved up his bike and took off, leaving them to swallow down the plume of dust he left behind. His own feelings are a difficult compound - loss, shame, conviction, gratitude; Mikey's must be equally complex.
Why now, though? As if he need ask: he slides the card with its flying bird out from the lining of his portfolio and props it against the coffee maker where Mikey will see it when he comes home. Someone else knows. Someone else cares enough to warn them.
--
The crow’s not long in flying home to roost. At first it’s just a newsflash following him from screen to screen along the slidewalk – a terrorist cell destroyed, a reckless attack on vital infrastructure prevented; a commendation for Commander Flare of the Scarecrow Unit following a successful raid. He’s heard stories like it often enough to roll his eyes; the propaganda is always the same and the truth far less dramatic. The ‘killjoy ringleader’ BL/Ind have in their custody is probably just some battery rat with a half-assed plan to blow out a gas pipeline or a juviehall hacker caught trying to rewire a fighting bot.
It’s mid-afternoon, the plaza free of crowds as he crosses it: the early finish he’s negotiated will probably be listed on his record as a minor infraction, but things can’t go on the way they have been. Mikey’s been avoiding him, a run of night shifts that can’t be coincidence taking him out as soon as Gerard comes home, and back while he’s long since asleep. He’s permanently tense and strained – whatever’s eating him is clearly not getting any better, and Gerard’s determined to confront him before he breaks.
At the door of the hab he stills, hand poised for the ID reader. Inside music is playing, rebel music, faint but unmistakeable. Zones radio in the middle of the day? BL/ind can’t monitor everyone all the time, but right now any neighbour could call them in, any passing security officer alert the exterminators. Why take such a risk?
The radio’s not even hidden, its battered casing incongruous beside the bright screen where a BetterDay announcer mouths silently. Mikey’s waiting, pale as the walls that surround him and his hair sticking upright where he’s been running a hand through it. ‘Have you-’ he starts, and Gerard drops his case to engulf him in a hug.
‘What’s wrong?’ To his surprise Mikey shoves him backward.
‘Listen,’ he hisses.
The music could be any crashqueen band he used to know, stabbing guitars over a churning bass beat; he doesn’t know what he’s listening for. ‘What-?’
Mikey cuts him off. ‘Wait.’
When the song ends the voice that cuts in is Cola’s, calm and sorrowful. We honour them, the fallen and the lost, and today we mourn our brothers and sisters of the Future Violents whose luck ran short in a Scarecrow ambush. They stood their ground and the car came limping home; we send a prayer to the Witch for Jersey Devil and MBD: but their leader, the man of many names, Future Violent, Death Spell, Dr Frankenstein?
There’s a band round Gerard’s chest: he can’t draw breath. Future Violent? It’s not a name he recognises, but the certainty settles on his shoulders with a clap of dark wings
They took him, friends, his colours swallowed up in Battery City’s sterile maw. Time corrodes and wind wears the rocks to dust; without our Future we’re all a little more exposed, and the dark will lie heavy on all of us tonight.
Gerard snaps the radio off, eyes flicking to the screen. ‘Do they have pictures?’ It comes out as a croak.
Mikey shakes his head. ‘Not yet.’ He turns up the sound and they wait out the looping roundup: a report on a satellite launch and a weather bulletin, then the killjoy raid again, but the only footage is distant surveillance cam of a speeding van and a burnt-out car. A wipeout: how badly is Ghoul hurt? Will they put a hood over his head without asking questions, or will they try to interrogate him?
‘How long do you think it’ll take them to realise?’ As he asks it his stomach falls: maybe they know already, a squadron of Dracs already on their way.
Mikey’s bleak. ‘They’ll go for Korse first.’
‘No, wait.’ Gerard narrows his eyes, remembering. Commendation for Commander Flare… ‘Flare won’t know what she’s looking at, not straight away, and when Korse hears he’ll have the investigation stopped.’ He didn’t think he could feel colder. ‘One way or the other.’ He stares at Mikey without really seeing, his mind racing. There is something he can do, isn’t there? He’ll need to find the right clothes so he doesn’t stand out…
Mikey’s hand closes on his wrist. ‘There’s something else-‘ but Gerard shakes himself free, gesturing to the radio .
‘Stay here,’ he tells Mikey. ‘See if WKIL says any more.’ There’s still time, there has to be.
Contacting security’s not hard – there’s a dedicated channel available from any terminal to report infractions or suspicions, and rewards for enthusiastic informers. Private channels, though, they’re something else entirely. Korse wanted to turn his back the same as them, bury the truth six feet down and let the lie flourish, but the secret bound them in an unbreakable bond, the other’s fate in their hands. So there was always a back door, layers of encryption on an illegal circuit, a number Gerard never expected to use. It’s not easy: it’s not intended to be.
Like most zonerunners he knew the Lobby well before, tapping into its network of fixers, smugglers and underground sympathisers, but that doesn’t mean that he liked it. And now he’s a citydweller, he doesn’t like it any better, not because it’s a slum, the place you drift to when the job fails and the carbons run low, full of defective droids and dirty cube hotels, but because it sells its dirt and despair as an attraction, a playground where the upright and uptight can take their worst nature.
The alleys are crowded with droids and humans, all hurting for Plus or pills or carbons - a bunch of juvies jostle and shove each other, spilling into his path in challenge; a yellow-haired pornodroid holds out a hand, face alight with programmed enthusiasm; a dealer stares speculatively from under a stack of pixilated screens. Time was he’d have turned heads the moment he set foot here, his mask and tag instantly recognisable and a ripple of attention following him, but now he’s just another mark in his company clothes under a shabby jacket, a salaryman who can’t afford a droid of his own, but with enough carbons for a few hours of illicit pleasure. He hurries past, shoulders hunched: the place he’s going doesn’t advertise with a beckoning neon sign: it’s a rundown brick of a hotel on a badly-lit street, an unmarked door you have to know. Outside a ruined droid, one arm shattered into a mess of wires and circuits, is tumbled under a graffitied wall, and as he passes she flickers into sudden life. ‘Come to pay your respects, pilgrim? The writing’s on the wall.’
‘Destroya’s not coming,’ snaps Gerard, irritated in spite of himself, but as he brushes past to the entry his skin prickles with the sense of someone watching him through her eyes.
He presses the button on the cracked intercom. Most sex workers are droids – the basic models are cheap, and those who can’t afford one of their own can rent by the hour in the Lobby. All your needs catered for – but there are always a few looking for a more specialised experience. No one’s ever told him what goes on here, but he thinks he knows. The answer takes so long he’s beginning to suspect the building’s empty and the contact expired; then the intercom crackles into life with a brusque question. ‘I’m here to see Sally,’ he says, and the door jolts open.
Most cube hotels are automated, comfortably anonymous, but there’s no datalink here, no terminals or cameras; presumably the customers who frequent the place prefer it that way. The receptionist is human, a kind, motherly-looking woman who puts down a badly-printed novel and eyes him with amused curiosity. ‘Sally, dear? Not many come to see her.’ She reaches under the counter and brings out a dusty box. ‘Her services don’t come cheap.’ A sudden wail, high in pitch, echoes down the stairwell before cutting off abruptly; the woman clicks her tongue. ‘Thirty minutes or the full hour?’
Gerard scrutinises her as he slides over a thick stack of carbons, but there’s nothing to indicate that she knows the truth. ‘Thirty’. He’ll have what he wants in ten if he’s lucky; less, if he’s not.
The woman takes the money and proffers an antiquated key. ‘Room 31, dear.’ She winks, grotesquely. ‘Your secret’s safe with us.’ Gerard has to grit his teeth: it makes sense for this to be his contact point – where else could you find shielding so comprehensive? – but it’s also a calculated insult.
The corridor’s grimy and uninviting, half the light plates out and the air stale and dead from the soundproofing. The room is right at the end, of course; as he walks the greasy carpet visions of what’s going on behind the other doors make his belly squirm and he has to fight the desire to turn around and check that no one’s watching. When he turns the key and the door swings open it’s an anticlimax, a room as bare as an interrogation cell with a dated terminal on a desk, headphones clipped to one corner, and a single hard chair. Gerard locks the door, activates the terminal, then closes his eyes to reach inside himself. Can he find Party Poison still in there?
Korse must have been expecting the call: the screen bursts to blurry life and there he is, his face as smooth and hairless as it always was, enough to make you believe the stories of emotion wipes and stasis tubes. Korse looks him up and down, disparaging. ‘Citizen Way?’ His intonation is flat. ‘I wouldn’t have recognised you.’
Staring into his expressionless face makes six years seem like yesterday. ‘That was the idea.’ Does he hate Korse? He did. He should. In the desert he was the personification of everything they despised, a man intelligent enough to know how destructive and repressive the corporation he worked for was, and ambitious enough not to care. But confronted with the living reality Gerard’s emotions are more complex, as slithery and self-hating as the hotel itself. When Korse had pursued them, made the four of them his focus and target, it became – not a game, too deadly for that, but a contest of equals, a relationship of grudging respect. And in the end they’d made their pact, each becoming the thing they were supposed to despise, the snake swallowing its own tail. ‘You know why I’m here.’
‘I do.’ The knot in Gerard’s chest relaxes fractionally; if Korse is willing to talk it means Ghoul is still alive. ‘Flare brought him in, but she doesn’t know what she’s got. Yet’.
Gerard sits down, finally. ‘Where is he?’
‘Scarecrow cell.’ Korse’s unease is obvious; he turns his head, eyeing him like a snake. ‘Once they ID him it won’t take a genius to start asking questions. They’ll be onto you in a day or two.’
All at once the confidence and contempt burn up inside him, the fire only ever banked. Gerard smiles. ‘You know you’re not sitting this one out. If we go down I’ll make sure it’s worse for you.’
Korse scowls. ‘Believe me, if I could think of a way I’d have had him killed already.’ And there it is, the flicker of a glance over his shoulder to whoever is in the hab with him. Korse cared about something, even then, something hidden, the way Poison cared about Kobra, and he still does.
‘Tell me exactly where he is.’ It’s been a long time since he had to do this on-the-spot strategizing, but the machinery is all still there in his brain.
‘What makes you think you could get him out?’ It’s a sneer, but Korse wants this, Gerard can tell, even through the screen.
‘Because I’m better than you.’ He finds he’s wearing Poison’s grin again, lazy and mocking. ‘An embarrassing failure for Commander Flare and no need for anyone to think about the past. Just give me a window. I know you can.’ Korse has the codes, the clearance: the risk to him is minimal. ‘Loop the cams, make a blind spot and I can make your problem vanish.’
Korse looks away, tapping at an unseen keyboard. Eventually, ‘Thirteen-hundred tomorrow,’ he grits. ‘One chance.’
‘You’ll never have to see me again,’ Gerard assures him.
Korse holds his gaze, unblinking. ‘That’s what you said last time.’ He reaches out to break the contact and the screen goes abruptly dark.
Gerard walked down the corridor: Poison walks back. The woman looks up from her novel again. ‘Feeling better, dear?’
Korse has made it easy for him after all, his hatred of the city burns sharp and pure again. He rattles the key onto the counter. ‘Business like this, you must have friends in high places.’
The woman’s mouth pulls down, disapproving. ‘We don’t gossip, dear. No one wants that.’
Poison leans closer, his tone conspiratorial. ‘If you think no one’s keeping count, think again.’
--
He’s home late, but not too late, a citizen back from an evening’s entertainment; Mikey’s still there waiting, the radio packed away and the screen burbling a cheery vacant beat that itches in Gerard’s brain. ‘Good night out?’ he asks, deliberately casual.
Gerard positions himself with his back to the screen, just in case. ‘Met an old friend I hadn’t talked to in a while. Caught up on the news.’
Mikey’s eyes go wide. ‘Worth your while going, then,’ he says, deliberately flat.
Gerard holds his gaze. ‘It was fun.’
‘Shit,’ Mikey mouths silently.
Gerard flicks a glance to the screen. ‘Heard about another show to check out tomorrow. You should come with me.’
Mikey leans forward, face hardening. ‘Can’t wait. But-’
Gerard shakes his head: he can still feel the grime clinging to him, literal and figurative. ‘I need a shower.’
He turns the spray scalding hot and stands under it, the reel of images tumbling relentlessly in his head. Ghoul in a white cell, injured, tortured, waiting for the hood over his head. Korse said they don’t know yet, but how good is his word? Korse needs this, he reminds himself, needs it as much as we do; he sees again the crack in the robotic façade, the naked emotion shining through. And the Dracs aren’t here yet, are they? Ghoul won’t give up, he’ll fight to the end; he must know they’ll come. He closes his eyes against the images. He must.
--
He’s lying awake in the oppressive quiet of the night when his door cracks open and the bed dips as Mikey sits down. ‘Jet Star.’ Gerard blinks at him, a dark figure in the dark, his whisper no louder than the tick and hum of electricity in the night bedroom. ‘He’s still alive. I saw him.’
‘Mikey…’ Gerard wraps an arm around his ribs and tugs him down to lie beside him. He’s done it himself often enough, a figure half-glimpsed through a window, a stranger walking on the other side of the plaza or disappearing ahead of him into the transit hub. No one looks like Ghoul, not here, no one has hair that long or tattoos or a crazy grin, but sometimes he sees the line of a jaw, a gesture, a turn of a head, and the hope comes bubbling up, irresistible. He’s seen Ghoul a dozen times and more; why shouldn’t Mikey see Jet Star?
‘You don’t believe me.’ Mikey muffles his face in Gerard’s shoulder. ‘A week ago two paramedics came in with a casualty, and one of them was Jet. His hair was short and he was in uniform, but it was him.’
The rush of sympathy Gerard feels is painful. ‘Jet died, Mikey.’ They found his brother half-unconscious, teeth gritted against the pain, and Jet already gone, stripped and bagged; the story of what happened that day is one he’s kept inside.
‘I know.’ Mikey shivers against him. ‘It’s impossible. I thought I must be wrong, someone just like him. But he came in again, and his voice – they couldn’t change that, or the way he was so kind to his patient.’ Gerard starts to feel it then, the first cold wash of premonition, the sand shifting under his feet as the tide ebbs. ‘I found his record.’ Mikey swallows. ‘He doesn’t know who he is.’
And down it comes, the towering wave. Re-education? It’s impossible to make out his brother’s face in the dark, but he can’t risk putting on a light. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Mikey ducks his head, his voice small. ‘I was waiting so I could see him again. I kept thinking he was just pretending, he’d give me a sign, but – it’s like the real Jet is gone.’
Gerard rolls away to sit on the other edge of the bed, fighting the images in his mind. How long must they have had him? How long would it have taken? When he realises he raises his head, fighting down nausea, and it’s Mikey’s turn to hug him as he forces the words out. ‘They must have showed him the footage.’ The Fabulous Killjoys ghosted, the bodies in the right clothes, the burning car: they’d have played it on a loop to make him understand that he was completely alone.
Ghoul caught, a prisoner in a white cell, and now Jet, walking out of his grave? He shivers as Mikey coaxes him back under the covers. Did Korse know? It’s a stupid question – of course he did. Maybe not at the time, but after… BL/ind never sleeps, never drops a stitch in their web.
‘We can’t leave him,’ says Mikey, almost inaudible in the silent room.
‘We won’t,’ whispers Gerard. ‘And here’s how.’