Angel Of The City (3 page)

“
They don’t know you,” he says, tapping his index finger against the side of his head. “Not like I do.”

He wipes his mouth on a napkin and comes around the table to me. He
’s about my size and build. Maybe a little softer, but I wouldn’t want to test that. He’s wearing some sort of robe; silk, I think, with drapes of cloth hanging from both arms. Even though he’s younger than me by a few years, he’s already losing his hair. He compensates by growing what’s left long and braiding it so it hangs over his shoulders. He’s no darker than I am. Except his nose. It’s black as coal.

H
e walks around me, grinning the whole time. When he gets behind me, he puts his hand on my head and I let him. I feel him pushing away the short hair, feeling for the scar. He does it every time we meet, like he still doesn’t believe it.

“
Crazy son-of-a-bitch,” he says, coming around to face me. “Crazy son-of-a-bitch.”

He reaches into a pocket somewhere in the flowing robes and pulls out a tiny silver case. He opens it and pours a fine black powder on the back of his left hand; holds it to his nose and sniffs. The action causes him to snort and cough several times. When he
’s finished, he shakes the case in my direction, offering, but he knows I don’t use.

Coal dust, or coal, has been around so long no one can remember what people abused before it. A synthetic hallucinogen, it
’s as illegal as breaking curfew and if you’re found with any you’ll face the same punishment. But it’s easy enough to get. Easier than food.

The case disappears into his robes.
“So, you figured out how to get the kid’s sister yet?”

“
Yeah,” I say. “I’m going to ring the bell and ask for the urn.”

He laughs, his hands and fingers animated, flittering around in the air; touching his face repeatedly. Effects of the coal.
“Bet it pissed you off when you heard where she was, huh? Bet when you heard I was sending the girl to you, you weren’t expecting that.”

“
No, I wasn’t. How did Pen even get in to see you?”

“
Who?”

“
The girl,” I say patiently.

“
Oh, her.” He taps his head rapidly, as though trying to remember. “Faisal, a Blueshirt I own in the eighty-ninth. He drags her in here, tells me she’s got a story I should hear: the Counselors picked up her sister. I think to myself, so what? Counselors grab people every day. What’s this prick Faisal up to? But then she keeps talking. Turns out her sister ain’t just some nobody.” He grins. “You know them symbols all over the city? The white A’s in a circle?”

“
Sure.”

“
Know what it means?”

“
Yeah, it means some kid is risking a bullet to the head to impress his friends.”

He laughs. “Ain’t that the truth? They want a cheap thrill, they should stick with dust, eh?” He draws a letter A in the air with his finger. “A is for angel.” He makes a circle. “The circle, the city. Angel of the City, get it? That kid’s sister, the one the Counselors took? That’s her. She’s the Angel.”

I
started hearing the rumors about a year ago: a new resistance movement lead by someone calling herself, the Angel of the City. Nothing unusual about that. Resistance movements pop up now and then. What’s surprising about this one is how long they’ve been allowed to operate. Resistance leaders usually quietly disappear after a few months—Counselors see to that. Not only is this Angel still around, but her reputation has grown throughout the city. They say she’s unaligned with any quarter or tribe. How that’s possible, I have no idea. Few people have actually seen her, but that doesn’t stop every quarter from going out its way to lay claim to her, like she’s some kind of savior.

Devon
keeps grinning at me, waiting for a reaction, but all I say is, “What’s an angel?”

He throws his head back and laughs, then goes
to the table and lifts up an ancient book covered in cracked, black leather. There’s a large letter “t” in gold on the cover. “You know this book?”

I shake my head.

“Ain’t many left around. Counselors burned them all years ago, before you even. But it talks about souls; about heaven; about things called angels. These angels, they do good, see? They come down from heaven and they help people, just like this girl’s been doing, the one the Counselors grabbed. I been hearing about her for a while now, going from quarter to quarter trying to get the tribes to work together.”

He puts his hand on my shoulder and draws me near. His eyes are dilated and blood-shot. I think he sleeps less than I do.
“I got things to atone to,” he says, solemnly. “If she really is an angel, then I want to talk with her.”

He’s looking me straight in the eye, yet everything about his manner screams, liar. There’s more to this than he’s telling me, but I can’t worry about that right now. The headache has started again, deep beneath the scar and along with it, the rising anger. I’m still not sure what an angel is, but at this point it doesn’t matter. I have to get out of here.

“
Devon, she’s in the One Twenty Seven,” I say, although I shouldn’t have to. Maybe it’s the coal; maybe he’s so stitched on dust he can’t understand. “The One Twenty Seven is…”

“
Hey! Who you taking to? I ain’t some first-day shade. I know where she is.”

“
Then what are we talking about?”

He drags me to an overstuffed chair and pushes me into it; pulls up a stool and sits close to me.

“She was taken in the early morning,” he says. “Not by Counselors, but by Blueshirts. They came to her place in the sixty-fourth and dragged her out.”

That
’s unusual. Resistance to the government is considered an act of terrorism and those arrests are almost always handled by Counselors. I shrug. “So some over-reaching Blueshirt was trying to make an impression with the Council. No doubt he got slapped down quick enough.”

“
Yeah, sure, but here’s where it gets strange. A few hours later, the Blueshirts take her from their holding cell with sirens blaring. Wee-ahhh, wee-ahh!” he says, mimicking the City Security Force vehicles. “Middle of the day and they let the whole village watch. Made it a point to keep the noise up as they drove to the One Twenty Seven. Front door,” he emphasizes, “not the back. Paraded her right up the steps and handed her over to Counselors,
in front of everybody
.”

He
’s staring at me in anticipation, his hands twitching so bad it’s a wonder they can keep themselves attached to his arms. But I’m not really paying attention. My brain is busy elsewhere.

The Blueshirts are nothing more than
bullyboys, underpaid and undertrained. Their job is to keep small things from becoming big things; from turning a simple disturbance into something the Counselors have to get involved in. Start a fight, steal a loaf of bread, get drunk and vomit in the street—and it’s the Blueshirts who come running first. As a rule, they’ll crack heads and loosen teeth, but being picked up by them rarely risks being turned over to a Counselor. When it does happen, it’s done in secret or after curfew when there are no witnesses. The Blueshirts have to live with the rest of us, after all.

But it
’s more than the open transfer to the Counselors that bothers me, it’s where it took place. The trip from the sixty-forth to the One Twenty Seven would have passed by dozens of station houses. Why choose that one? To make a point maybe, but for whose benefit? Almost no one outside the Council knows what the One Twenty Seven is used for.

My eyes refocus and I see Devon still staring at me, like he
’s followed my thoughts. “That’s right,” he says, “who was that little show for?”

I don
’t know and don’t pretend to. “I give up. Who?”

“
The resistance,” he says, and starts to laugh. “The Council was sending a message to the fucking resistance.”

For a minute I stare blankly back at him, then I laugh too. Only my laugh is louder, longer, bringing tears to my eyes until he realizes I
’m not laughing with him, but at him.

His palm
slams across my face. “Respect!”

The urge to leap at hi
m is almost more than I can bear, but if I do, I’m dead. I grip the chair arms and will myself not to move. From the corner of my eye, I see his bodyguards take a step closer, their hands on their weapons. We stare each other down as the seconds tick by, my teeth grinding. I finally speak only when I’m sure it will come out as something more than a growl. Even then, the words leave thick from my lips. “The Coonsil dinna sen’ messages tae terrorists.”

I wonder if he
’s heard me or even if he understood, as he just keeps glaring at me. Finally, he settles back. “You can take the bobby out of Alba...,” he mutters. “You mean they never have. I say this time they did, and they made sure only a handful of eyes would have understood it.”

It
’s pointless to argue, so I don’t. I concentrate and speak the next words clearly. “So what’s the message?”

His smile returns.
“You think you know it all, but you don’t. If all they wanted was to extract information and kill her, they could have taken her anywhere. Let me ask you something: how long after arrival to the One Twenty Seven before the bodies are burned?”

“
Depends. Usually five days.”

“
And that was the message: you got five days till she’s dead.”

The headache is worsening and my gut
’s tightening into a knot. I don’t want to go where this conversation is heading. “Even if all that’s true and she’s still alive,” I say as evenly as I can, “it only means they
want
someone to try and get to her. It’s a trap.”

“
Of course it’s a trap! That’s why I need a crafty old rat.”

He leans forward, whispering for my ears only.
“She’s been in there three days. That means you got two days left to go get me my angel, mister ex-Counselor.”

I
leave Devon’s place as quickly as I can. My skull is pounding and my vision is beginning to blur. I should get off the street, but I need to reach my nest in the one seventeen. At least the street traffic has thinned down. Being pressed up against a bunch of people would only make things worse. The last thing I can afford is to lose it out in the open and draw attention.

I lift my hand and touch the scar on the back of my head. Maybe Devon
’s right; maybe you’d have to be mad to let a shadow maker cut into your brain. But it was the only way. The only way to leave the Council for good.

My right eye sta
rts twitching and I duck into an alley just as the headache explodes in full fury. The first wave of nausea hits and I lurch forward and heave, vomiting long and hard until I’m gasping for breath; spitting bile to clear my mouth and holding onto the wall.
Shit
. I close my eyes and try to control the shaking as a cold sweat washes over me.

Devon holds me to my past like a leash
on a dog. He never told me how he found out. Just had me brought to one of his nests on the east side five years ago; one year after I had slunk into a shadow maker’s dirty hovel, still in uniform.

Shadow makers
—self-trained surgeons who cut out tags and turn people into shades—can be found in every quarter of the city. Most are no better than butchers. As a Counselor, I had access to files and found one less barbaric than the rest. He had once been a real doctor—a neurosurgeon. Just what I needed.

It was pouring rain when I showed up on his doorstep. He almost shit himself; even more when I told him to cut the tags from my arm and leg.
No doubt he thought he was being set up. That changed when I put a gun to his head and gave him a choice: my tags or his life.

Usually they give you something to put you out before they cut. The tags are deep. But I couldn
’t risk it. Even with Counselor training, it’s tough watching someone slice into you with a knife, but I laughed when he finally removed the second one. The arm tats took only a few minutes with the laser. He was still shaking when I threw the envelope down on the bloody table. But that stopped when he looked inside.

I
’m sure it was more money than he’d ever seen in his life; more than his entire block made in a month. He smiled, bowing his head again and again, thinking it was payment for services rendered. He was wrong.

People have no idea what it takes to be an officer in the Council for Internal Security; the training; the sacrifices; the time. It translates into a significant investment for the Council and the Ministry. They don
’t risk losing such assets lightly. All Counselors get a third tag: a brain tag. Oh, it’s very safe. Only the finest surgeons get those commissions. But it’s planted deep; deep enough so that no sane person would ever try to remove it.

I brought the scans in another envelope. Tossed them next to the money. Take it out.

He began to shake all over again. Worse this time. I sat back in the chair and closed my eyes. Look at it this way I told him. If you make a mistake, I’ll never know it.

He numbed the scalp, but that was all. The brain can
’t feel pain. It’s hard to describe, having something pressed into your brain while you’re awake. You hear things; smell things that aren’t there. Memories flash in and out: Keillor on the day of my advancement; my father, talking to me, clear like it was yesterday; my last fight with Cole at the trash pile. Every memory comes screeching by and is just as quickly replaced by another. There is pain at the end though, in spite of what they say. The tag’s imbedded in the limbic system, where emotions arise. When he finally tears it out, I feel pain. And anger. So much anger.

When I awake, it
’s three days later. He had the good sense to destroy the tags, then scatter the ashes. They moved me, him and his wife, tossed me in a basement, terrified I might not live. He tried to convince me to stay; said I could still die from internal bleeding. But I can’t. They’ll be looking for me soon. I tear all the insignia from my coat and walk out after curfew. I’m stumbling, still blind in my right eye and barely able to lift my left arm, but I walk out.

The nausea begins to wane along with the headache. I open my eyes and straighten up. When I
’m certain I can keep myself together, I start back again toward the nest. Unfortunately for the shadow maker, he never got a chance to spend his money. A week after I walked out, his place burned to the ground in a freak fire with him in it.

To be a Counselor is a great privilege, but it comes at a price.

There
’s also a price to be paid for invisibility and not just the upfront fee; that’s the easy part. It’s the ancillary costs, the things you have to do to stay invisible, that drives up the price. I’ve been paying for six years and the meter just keeps on ticking.

The entry to the nest is through the cellar of a first floor laundry. The people who work there aren’t even aware the cellar exists. The door has been sealed for decades, painted over so many times it’s just another section of wall. The land behind the building was excavated three or four years ago, exposing the concrete foundation. Maybe they were going to upgrade the plumbing, but like most things these days, it never got finished. The hole is still there, a huge muddy scar thirty feet across and ten feet deep. I climb down in it and find the gap in the concrete, just big enough to squeeze through.

The cellar is damp and rank with the smell of rat shit, but I don
’t mind. Keeps most people out. I flick the lighter on and move toward the north wall. It looks solid but a small section is plywood, painted concrete grey. The crowbar is just where I left it, against the wall. Just another piece of junk to anyone who might be curious enough to look inside the cellar. I use it to pry the wood away and slip in behind. The opening leads to another set of steps and another door. I grab the handles on the plywood and pull it tight, shutting it behind me. And shutting out the rats.

There
’s no tunnel behind this door, it opens into a room; bigger than the nest in the seventy-first, but not as large as Devon’s. Compared to him I live like a beggar. I hit the heater and the lamp and turn the light up. This nest has two separate bedrooms as well as the living space and an actual kitchen area with a hot plate and stove. More importantly, it has a shower. The piping was all shot to shit, but I rigged a connection from the laundry. They don’t miss the water.

I strip and enter the shower, leaning with my palms on the wall and letting the hot water flow over me
. This place had been sealed tight when I found it, the door still shut with what looked like the original lock. Took me forever to finally hack my way in. The air in it had that dead smell, not rotting, but like it hadn’t been breathed in a couple of centuries. Maybe it hadn’t.

The official history of the city begins two hundred years ago, but
the evidence is clear that it was built on the bones of an older one. Reed says the tunnels and underground rooms were where people living in the old city ran to for safety. Same as me. What they were running from—war, disease, natural disaster—Reed doesn’t know. Whatever it was, I guess whoever built this one never made it. I never found any bones.

I finish dressing and leave, making sure the plywood wall is sealed tight. I want to check out the One Twenty Seven. I haven
’t been in the area in a few years and while little has probably changed, it’s the little things that can get you killed. Then I need to get back to the seventy-first nest. I doubt saving this girl Abby is even possible, but if I’m going to have any chance at all, then I need to know more about her. And if it isn’t possible, well I’m dead either way. There’s nothing Devon has done or will do in his entire sick, miserable life, that they won’t forgive in return for a rogue Counselor.

When I
’d failed to appear in my office, they would have started a tag trace on me. I can only imagine the looks on their faces when even the brain trace returned only static. The logical conclusion would have been that I’d been killed. It’s happened twice in the past that I know of. Both times the body was recovered and the killer apprehended. Kill a Counselor and you can forget the usual punishments. It’s not only you that will pay, but your entire family, probably down to second cousins.

My
having gone “missing” for six years with no resolution in the case must be the worst black mark in the history of the CIS. No, there’s nothing they wouldn’t give to learn I’m still alive. And so Devon owns me.

It’s an hour walk to the One Twenty Seven. Besides rickshaws, there are city buses and even a few cabs, but all passengers are scanned as they board. A red light on the driver’s panel means you’re wanted and you can bet they’ll be a Counselor waiting for you when you get off. Not sure what they’d do if nothing flashed at all and I don’t want to find out.

It
’s rare to see a private vehicle in this end of the city. They’re expensive and the laws on who can own one are restrictive. If you rated, you wouldn’t be living here.

There
’s a bottleneck just before the precinct house. A crowd of people, six deep are blocking the way and I have to push and squeeze to get through. I get to the front and see why everyone has stopped. A man is lying in the street having convulsions, his arms and legs flailing about, his eyes rolled back in his head. As we all stand and watch, his body stiffens unnaturally, all his weight supported on just the back of his head and his heels, his mouth gaping. Suddenly he spews. Not vomit, something worse. A greenish black liquid, thick like honey.

There are screams around me and people start running, knocking each other down to get away. I stay and watch. It doesn
’t last long. Twenty seconds later and he’s lying flat; unmoving; dead. I realize I’m the only one left standing in the street and make my way to the coffee house across from the One Twenty Seven just as the vehicles arrive.

Two black vans with
no insignia pull up within minutes of the man’s collapse. Four men in yellow biohazard suits get out. Two hurriedly work on getting the dead man into a body bag as the others spray white foaming chemical over the entire area. The whole procedure only lasts a few minutes and they’re gone, the black vans disappearing around the corner. I feel like clapping.

Instead, I go inside and take a seat. The place is empty, the lone waiter still staring out at the window at the slowly dissolving foam, his face showing disgust
—and fear. Everyone fears the plague, but that fear is a little misplaced. It isn’t catching; it isn’t even a disease. What went on out there was all performance art. Not the man lying in the street, he’s dead all right. He just didn’t die from disease. He wasn’t sick; he was foul.

The CIS scientists call it
‘enhancement’—specially developed nanites that once injected, allows for the receiving and transmitting of auditory signals—but the term never caught on with us in the field. It turns a human being into the ultimate listening bug. The problem has always been slow rejection by the host body. Six months; a year maybe; and the body shuts down. Dramatically. The certainty of repulsive death made it a little hard to find volunteers.

So they don
’t ask for any. If the Council thinks you may have access to people they want to monitor, they wait until you go to the clinic for your yearly vaccine. Or if they’re in a hurry, they may have Blueshirts pay you a visit—just enough to get you into a hospital. Either way the injection gets done. The myth of the plague is perpetuated by the Council as a cover and so every few weeks somewhere in the city, we get to watch biohazard theater, even though the nanites aren’t infectious and break down as soon as the body dies anyway.

I finally manage to pull the waiter
’s attention from the window and give him my order: coffee and eggs. Only there aren’t any eggs. There’s a shortage of something every week these days, even in the nicer precincts.

There’s nothing to gain in dwelling on it, so I concentrate on ordering breakfast. The list of what he does have is pretty short and after a little back and forth, I settle for potatoes and sausage.

The station
doesn’t look any different from what I remember, although I had little reason to visit when I was a Counselor. A granite façade with One Twenty Seven carved in large numbers above the double doors. Below it, in smaller letters, CIS. It’s difficult to tell from the street, but there’s a large covered garage in the back, accessible from the alley. Like most station houses in the daytime, there’s not much activity going on right now. With no windows, it could almost be empty, but officers are moving around somewhere inside. It’s all paperwork now. They won’t start the ovens until late tonight.

Getting in won
’t be too hard; precincts aren’t heavily guarded. No one breaks
into
a Counselor station. Getting to the girl and getting her out will be the real difficulty. And then there’s the matter of them anticipating it, setting this all up for just such an attempt. I feel the knot reforming in my stomach as the waiter brings the coffee and food. Only then do I realize I don’t have any money. Devon’s men took all I had on me and I haven’t had time to stop by Reed’s yet.