Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

*

“In three hundred feet, make a sharp left.”

The voice in Kaz’s ear startles him so badly his entire body jerks to the side, instinctive, as though it could somehow escape the source.

He is momentarily wrongfooted, though he keeps running. It’s not right. His earworm has been silent for near enough a decade, ever since he scraped together enough unregistered credits to pay someone to fry the fucking thing. The procedure left him deaf in that ear, and the sudden burst of sound after years of silence is actually painful.

“What the—who is this?” he demands.

“Do you want to argue, or do you want to get arrested?” The voice - a woman’s voice - takes on a tone that indicates it will not be argued with. “Sharp left, two hundred feet.”

Kaz glances over his shoulder. A Planetary System Enforcement platoon is on his heels; he can’t see them but with his good ear tilted toward the sound he can hear the heavy, metallic clang of boots on the steel walkways. He is only one or two turns ahead of them.

They have systematically herded him up into a maze of suspended maintenance walkways between tightly packed buildings, in a district he is only passingly familiar with. If they catch him this time it will be the liquidation chamber and no mistake.

The earworm could be a trick - it feels like a trick - but he has no choices and nothing to lose.

Fuck it.

The left-hand turn is barely more than a crawl space between buildings and he almost misses it. Only the faint draught signifies it, along with the voice in his ear hissing “Left, you idiot, left!”

“Alright!” Kaz grouses as he corrects course. “Fuck!”

He is on a long, straight walkway narrowing down to a vanishing point of darkness, the end so far away that he cannot see it, the only light coming from the thin sliver of sky above. If the Enforcers follow him in here there will be nowhere to hide. He’s done for.

“In two hundred feet turn left again, down the stairs, and then go right at the bottom,” the woman in his ear says urgently. “You have about thirty seconds to get out of this passageway. Move.”

Kaz moves. The bionic brace on his right leg does nothing for the pain, but it keeps his knee from buckling and allows him to sprint the two hundred feet and duck left into the almost invisible opening just as he hears voices echoing at the mouth of the passageway behind him. He flings himself down the long flight of stairs, sliding and leaping over several steps at once, landing each time with a metallic clang - no longer trying to be stealthy, just trying to be fast - and pain shoots through him with every impact but the brace holds. He thanks all his stars and planets that he had it repaired in time for this job.

He practically falls to the right when he hits the bottom of the stairs, into another narrow passageway, heart pounding. He’s horribly close to panicking. He doesn’t know where he is or what’s going on. He doesn’t know who this woman is or how she knows his location or how it’s even possible for her to speak to him. He doesn’t know where the hell he’s meant to go next.

Before he can so much as open his mouth to ask for further instruction, she speaks. “Left again in about a hundred feet, then the third right, then the fifth left.”

Kaz complies without question, because he has no choice. He is in the labyrinth with no guide but the disembodied voice and the enemy at his heels. He cannot stop, and he doesn’t know how to get out of this on his own. If this woman is going to lead him a merry dance until he is too tired to carry on, or otherwise direct him into the path of an Enforcement platoon, well. At least he lived a little longer than he probably would have done on his own, and he got to experience new and exciting levels of existential terror in the process.

That doesn’t happen, though. She keeps feeding him instructions, navigating him through the maze on a path he could never hope to replicate as he careens around corners and down steps, leading him down, down, down, until his boots hit surface. The final turn spits him out onto a wide, crowded thoroughfare and he blinks rapidly as his eyes adjust to the sudden brightness (brightness being a relative term on this planet).

He is breathing hard, sweating from exertion and pain, but nobody so much as glances at him. The crowd is moving in one direction at a steady pace, as though it were a single entity controlled by a hive mind. All eyes are front, and the only sound is the ambient din of hundreds of workboots and murmured conversation. Must be a shift change.

They put jurda in the water supply in these parts. Inject it into the food. Pump it into the atmo. Only a little, just to take the edge off, enough to keep the masses docile but not enough to hamper productivity. Kaz must be saturated with it by now. Wouldn’t be at all surprised if the strategy of the enforcers was simply to keep him boxed in until the Parem in his system wore off long enough for the soporific effect of straight jurda to take effect. Why get into a fight with someone when you can simply wait for them to sit down and allow themselves to be caught.

“Just go with the flow of the crowd,” comes the voice in his ear once more. “Get in the middle of them. Keep your head down.”

He can do nothing but obey.

He feeds himself into the crowd, drifting toward the centre in what he hopes is a natural and unobtrusive way, and allows himself to be carried by their momentum. Nobody pays him any attention. He desperately wants to look over his shoulder to see if the Enforcers have followed him out onto the street; between his partial deafness and the clang of his own boots on the walkways and the disembodied voice, he had lost track of whether there was anyone on his tail or not. He daren’t look. One face out of hundreds looking back would give him away immediately, and out here in the open there is nowhere left to hide. He keeps his head down, and keeps moving forward.

Eventually, the voice bids him extricate himself from the crowd and duck down another side street. Just as nobody had blinked an eye at his sudden appearance, nobody seems to even notice him leave. The woman in his ear continues to feed him directions, keeping him to the shadows and the narrow side streets, until he turns a corner and is abruptly faced with the ugly, ungainly black mass of the Barrel.

Kaz relaxes fractionally, enough to shake off the unquestioning obedience that terror and necessity had driven him to.

“Alright, who the hell are you?” he demands again.

But the earworm is silent, and he is alone.

*

Kaz feels better the further he makes his way into the interior of the Barrel. A massive, hulking shanty town, half above ground and half under, shacks built on top of shacks, miles wide and miles deep. He ventures, now, into the very heart of the seething, creeping darkness, where the light never reaches and even the Enforcers fear to tread. As close to safety for his like as it’s possible to get on this accursed planet. It comforts him.

The Barrel is a labyrinth in its own right, narrow passageways barely tall enough to walk upright through, strange branches, floors that give way suddenly to huge drops. You either know the way or wander down the wrong dead end and never come out again. Kaz pulls out a torch as he moves away from the meagre light coming from those dwellings able to power by generator or battery. Those who can afford such a luxury live toward the outer reaches, second only to those fortunate few on the very outside, whose money or power bought them habitation with a window. The most unfortunate live on the lower levels and towards the centre. The most unfortunate, or those who do not wish to be interfered with.

In the pitch dark his torch illuminates maybe twenty feet ahead, red light so as not to interfere with his night vision. He feels live rats skitter over his boots, and dead ones crunch under them. Hears the sudden wet spill somewhere behind him, grey water or worse running down from the upper levels.

He bangs a fist three times against a steel shutter and squints in anticipation as it rolls up and a spill of bright light carves into the darkness, along with a blast of hot, stagnant air. A man stands on the other side, goggled and gloved, red hair plastered to his head with sweat.

“Oh,” says Wylan. “It’s you.”

Kaz says nothing, only shoulders past him into the long, narrow workshop, heading toward the back half. Available space is hoarded jealously by the assorted junk piled high and hanging from the ceiling with only the suggestion of space for walking in between, actively hostile to invasion. It’s hotter than the surface of a star going supernova, and it smells absolutely revolting.

In the back half, a dark hunched figure is doing something that involves fire and a vat of bubbling chemicals. Kaz stops by him, pulling three small vials out of his coat and depositing them one by one on the workbench.

“You got them out intact. Impressive.” Kuwei mutters, blinking slowly as though pulling himself out of a trance. “Payment in kind.”

Kaz frowns. “The deal was half in kind, half in unreg’d credits.”

“Times are tough, you’ll have to take it in kind.”

“Half in kind, half in credits,” repeats Kaz, leaning in until his nose is a scant inch from Kuwei’s, “or I’m going to hold you down and pour whatever’s in those vials down your fucking throat.”

A snort comes from somewhere behind him; Wylan, hidden somewhere behind the junk towers. It’s always been hard to tell if the intense heat is generated by the work that goes on in the workshop or the burning dislike between the two men who occupy it.

Kuwei holds his gaze for a lingering moment, before his eyes slide reluctantly away. “As you say.”

The credits and the small sachets of Parem are counted into Kaz’s outstretched hand with the same sort of pained reluctance that Kuwei might have displayed had he been pulling out his own teeth one by one.

When he’s done counting, Kuwei sits back down stiffly and scowls intently at his burners and his new vials. “I’ll have need of you again soon.”

“As long as the price is right,” says Kaz as he pockets his payment and turns away, almost immediately smacking his head off some bit of metal hanging from the ceiling.

He pauses by Wylan’s workbench on his way out, raps his knuckles sharply on the surface. “What’s eating Yul-Bo?” he asks, fully cognisant of the fact that Kuwei can hear every word he’s saying.

“Killed someone in his latest batch of testing.” Wylan doesn’t even look up from his soldering. “Brace hold up okay?”

Kaz grunts the affirmative, and fingers the sachets of Parem in his pocket restlessly. A miracle drug, really, the method of its manufacture a closely guarded secret, given up for neither bribe nor torture. Just a little under the tongue can counter the effects of jurda for an entire day; the upper echelons of New Ketterdam Colony, from the factory bosses to the Merchant Council in their shadowy chambers, take it so they can move freely among their stupefied underlings with no ill effect.

It is made only in the Barrel, and so for the most part its denizens are left to their own devices, so long as they don’t cause trouble. Kaz loves causing trouble, though.

He flicks idly at a bit of exposed wire. “Testing what?”

“Ask him yourself,” says Wylan, testy, but then he sweeps his damp hair back from his forehead and pushes his goggles up. “Antidote for the bastard stuff.”

Bastard Parem, that’s what they call it. A slightly altered strain of Parem, a narcotic so brutally addictive that one hit is enough to get you for life. So pervasive in the Barrel, now, that even the rats are addicted to it, writhing and twitching in corners until their hearts give out in the withdrawal.

Kuwei’s father is its creator and primary producer in his labs in the upper levels of the Barrel, and Kuwei has long been in the family business.

Kaz raises an eyebrow. “Doesn’t seem like that would be in his interest.”

“It’s all fun and games until someone you love gets hooked on the shit,” says Wylan, with no small amount of bitterness in his voice.

From the back of the workshop, the sound of glass breaking.

Kaz has no interest in Wylan’s interpersonal drama. Most everyone is in the same position. Bastard Parem and sex work are the Barrel’s bread and butter, so much so that the drug barons and the whores have combined forces to form a sort of joint guild system, and expand their rule every year that passes.

Kaz keeps out of it. He’s got himself to worry about and that’s plenty.

“Is it ready?” he says in lieu of addressing Wylan’s previous statement.

Sighing as though terribly put upon, Wylan reaches under his workbench and places a short, thin, cylindrical object in front of Kaz.

Kaz picks it up, squeezes just so, and it jumps in his hand, extending to form a sleek black cane, inlaid with silver reinforcement. Incredibly strong and perfectly weighted, a weapon and a backup for his brace.

He collapses it and slides it into the empty holster under his coat, reassured by its familiar weight. “How will you take payment?”

“In kind,” says Wylan. “Come back in two days, I’ll have a list for you.”

Kaz nods and turns away without bothering to say goodbye. When he gets to the door, though, he hesitates.

“Is it possible for someone to hack the earworm system?” he says, half turning back to Wylan.

“If anyone ever has, I’ve never heard of it,” says Wylan, and looks up at Kaz with an unpleasantly piercing gaze. “Thought you had yours fried?”

“Yeah,” says Kaz, and ducks through the doorway, back into the darkness.

*

“At your present height, it would take you almost twenty seconds to hit surface, you know. That’s a long time to contemplate your imminent demise.”

The woman’s voice makes him jump again, the sudden loud noise in his deaf ear so painful it makes him dizzy, though he does not step back from the edge.

He keeps his discomfort out of his voice. “Maybe I want to contemplate my imminent demise at my leisure.”

“If I’ve estimated your weight correctly, your velocity at impact would be around eighty-eight metres per second,” she supplies, matter of fact. “Splat.”

Splat. Kaz peers over the edge of the building, down, down, down. All he can see, far below, is soupy grey smog. Thick today, so thick he probably wouldn’t see surface until he was almost level with it, and then—

He takes one step back from the edge of the building, discomfited, and looks around suspiciously. He is standing on the rooftop of one of the tallest buildings in this district. He’s just robbed the neighbouring building, but he was in and out in record time with no alarms tripped, and sometimes he likes to get above the smog and the clutter and the noise. Sometimes he likes to look over the rooftops and the towers, as far as the eye can see in every direction. Sometimes it helps to remember how small he is, on days when he feels too big for his skin.

“It seems I owe you thanks for the assist the other day,” he says to cover his unease.

“I try to do one good deed a day,” says the woman.

“I see,” says Kaz, though he doesn’t, at all. “How’s that working out for you?”

“Well, you’re my first.”

“I’m honoured.” A short pause. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Nobody important,” says the woman, and if it’s a self pitying statement, it doesn’t come across in her tone. “I just thought I’d drop in and let you know that an Enforcement platoon entered the building you’re standing on top of a few minutes ago.”

Shit. Kaz looks around frantically, but there is nobody on the rooftop with him. And the only way off is the way he came up. Or…splat.

Well. Three-hundred stories ought to be enough to lose them in. He hurries back toward the door. “That’s another good deed,” he says as an aside to the disembodied voice.

“I’m on a roll,” she agrees. “You’re really not very good at this.”

*

It is much, much later when Kaz finally crawls into the little box in the Barrel he calls home. Deep in the interior, one room with no door. It is reached via a tight tunnel hidden behind a false wall panel, and an access hatch secured with about a hundred jumbled locks that do not have keys, and no other way in. He must break in every time he gets home, but it makes him feel more secure. And if anyone else does manage to get past the locks, he has some very nasty booby traps waiting for them.

Tonight he only just manages to get himself inside and secure the hatch behind him. He is drowsy, fumbling, fighting the urge to sit and rest somewhere, and it is only the voice in the back of his head screaming that he must not that drives him forward. He can no longer tell if it’s his own voice, or the woman’s.

“Hey,” he says, voice thick and slurring slightly. “Hey. Girl. Whoever you are.”

Silence.

Kaz rubs his eyes savagely, half convinced he’s losing his mind. He’s full to the gills with jurda, out far too long without a spare pack of Parem because he’s stupid. Every sense is dull and sluggish, which is just as well because he’s bleeding through his trousers where the brace has dug into his flesh with overuse.

When he disengages the brace and pulls it off, it sticks to congealed blood, and when he yanks his trousers off they take some skin that has stuck to the inside with them. Feeling faintly ill, he only just manages to keep from screaming when he pours a bottle of gut-rot Barrel booze over his wounds, almost certainly closer to pure ethanol than anything safe for human consumption.

“Girl,” he slurs again, black spots clouding his vision. “Speak to me, will you? Are you there? Are you even real?”

There is no voice but his own, landing flat on the soundproofed walls of his hovel.

He collapses face down into the pile of blankets in the corner, and knows no more.

*

Another night, another rooftop. Kaz has made the long climb to the very top of the Barrel with only the aid of his reinforced cane. He will pay for it later, but he cannot wear the brace until the ulcers have healed, not if he doesn’t want to lose the leg to gangrene or worse. There is no true privacy in the Barrel, except for inside his dwelling, but he has managed to find himself a quiet corner of the rooftop where he can sit and gaze out at the smog, surrounded by effluvia from hundreds upon hundreds of chimneys and ventilation shafts. It’s as good a spot as there is, certainly good enough to sit a while and eat the supper he bought from one of the rooftop food hawkers; reconstituted vegetables and meat of indeterminate origin.

He glances about him to make sure nobody is too close, before he speaks. “Girl,” he says, and waits.

He’s tried calling on her for the past week, to no avail. He’s beginning to think he imagined her voice entirely, finally driven mad by isolation or some hitherto unknown side effect of the Parem he puts under his tongue every morning.

He needs answers about this, though. On the off chance that he’s not losing his mind, his earworm is functional again. It shouldn’t be possible but he’s no expert in bionics. Who is he to say what’s possible or not?

If it’s functional again, he has a serious fucking problem.

“Girl,” he mutters again around a mouthful of food, not truly expecting any answer, and almost chokes at that sudden, awful sensation of sound on his perennially silent left side.

“I have a name,” she says.

Kaz is silent a moment, chewing, swallowing what suddenly feels like a rock. “Nobody important?”

A small sigh in his ear. “It’s Inej, actually. Inej Ghafa.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “Is that your real name?”

“Yes,” she says. And then, as if she can read his thoughts: “Don’t bother looking me up, you won’t find anything.”

Kaz takes another bite and ponders on this. She seems confident in that statement, which means she’s either lying about it being her real name, or she’s a planetary official with a record under fifteen different kinds of seal. For such a strange turn of events, either seems as likely as the other, for different reasons.

He takes a punt. “System Enforcement?”

“Planetary Maintenance Corps,” she says, betraying not the least bit of surprise at his guess. “High Orbit Division.”

He looks up instinctively, though of course this is a ridiculous action. There is so much light pollution that even on the blackest night, the sky is never anything but a muddy, muted orange. Kaz has never seen the stars.

High orbit maintenance means she’s up there in a satellite somewhere, if what she’s saying is true. If it is, his worst fears are confirmed.

All good and system abiding citizens have the earworm implanted at birth, for Systems Comms and to monitor their location and vital stats. The risk of having it fried is worth it not only for the pleasure of not having the Word of Ghezen fed into his ear four times a goddamn day, but because it makes a person invisible and untraceable.

Kaz is not Barrel-born, but he’s made a home there, and as far as the Merchant Council and Planetary System Enforcement are concerned, Kaz Rietveld died nine years ago.

Whose attention does it catch, he wonders, when he pops up alive after all this time?

“Alright,” he says, keeping his voice steady with gargantuan effort, glancing over his shoulder to make sure nobody is within earshot. “How is it you’re talking to me when my earworm has been dead for years?”

There is a hint of confusion in her voice. “Earworm?”

Interesting. He files that away.

“Cochlear tracker,” he clarifies. Ventures a question on the off chance she’ll provide him with an answer, though he cannot see why she would. “The technology is self-repairing, then?”

“Not quite,” she says. “It’s gene-coded, though. Just like your body works to repair itself when it’s hurt, it also repairs the, uh, earworm.”

Kaz closes his eyes in despair.

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck.

He licks his lips, mouth suddenly dry. “So they can track me with it?”

She doesn’t answer immediately, and for the first time he hears some ambient noise, the faint electronic whir of holo-screens being rotated through at pace.

Inej hums thoughtfully. “No, it seems that only the audio link has regenerated.” A beat. “So far, at least.”

It’s not much, but it’s not nothing. He’ll take it, for now.

“You’re sure?” he demands.

“If I can’t track you, they can’t track you.”

“You are tracking me.”

And she is. She directed him in real time, she knew precisely where he was. She must have a little green dot with his name on it on a huge map right in front of her and he is so incredibly fucked.

“Not with your implant,” she says, and then goes silent so abruptly he thinks for a moment the connection has been severed. When she speaks again, her voice is defensive. “It’s only because I have nothing better to do.”

Kaz blinks. A sudden crawl of unease slides down his spine as he absorbs the implications of that statement. “Are you watching me?”

“I’m responsible for your district, you get to know faces after ten years, that’s all,” says Inej, sullen and sulky, like she’s been caught doing something wrong, because she has and she knows it. “Anyway, you’re quite the interesting character to watch, going about committing all your little system infractions.”

Kaz objects to the characterisation of little system infractions. He commits crimes for profit. He wants to correct her on this point, but his brain is still struggling to sort through an abundance of new information and it snags on another detail.

“Did you say ten years?” he squawks, horrified. “What the hell have you been watching?”

“Oh, calm yourself.” Before this moment, Kaz didn’t know it was possible to be able to hear someone rolling their eyes. “I can’t see you when you’re inside, I don’t have x-ray vision.”

That is not at all comforting. “Your damn satellite might.”

“Don’t worry. Contrary to the propaganda, Planetary System Enforcement has not yet developed the ability to see through walls.”

So says she, but he has no reason to believe she’s telling the truth. There is also nothing he can do about it if she’s not. What can he do about fucking satellite spies in orbit? He is at her mercy.

“So, Inej Ghafa of the Planetary Maintenance Corps,” says Kaz, coming to the crux of the matter. “What is it you want with me?”

“I can help you,” she says, and Kaz will admit to being genuinely astonished in this moment. Of all the directions he could possibly have anticipated this conversation taking, this was not one of them. “You know, with your system infractions.”

This time he does correct her. “Crimes.”

It sounds petulant, even to him.

“Right,” she says, sounding vaguely baffled. “If you say so.”

A pause as Kaz absorbs this.

“You can help me,” he repeats.

“Yes.”

“Aiding and abetting doesn’t really seem like something that would be in the remit of a SatBod.”

“I’m a human being,” she says, something raw in her voice that he cannot place a finger on. “They want everyone to think these processes are automated, they forget themselves that there are real people up here. You can treat a person like a robot all you want, doesn’t mean that I don’t have a will of my own.” A brief pause, and he hears her take a deep breath, and when she speaks again her voice has slid back toward sardonic. “Anyway, I have to entertain myself somehow.”

“You could lead them right to me,” Kaz points out. “Just by talking to me you could flag me to others with…less transgressive sensibilities.”

Inej snorts. “I’ve been sneaking around in their systems for years and they’ve never once caught on. I like my chances.”

Well, then.

She could help him. In truth he’s not sure he can stop her from helping him. It might be welcome. He might be the best thief-for-hire in the Barrel, but he’s far from the only one, and his fees are high. High because he brings in the goods, but the Enforcers are on his tail, more ruthless and more efficient with every year that passes. Having someone on the inside, so to speak, would be the most unbelievable advantage. She’s already proven her worth. He could use her.

“A ghost in the machine?” he muses.

“Just call me your eye in the sky, baby.”

*