Dark Sky (Keiko) (16 page)

‘Please,’ Rourke gasped, doing her best to look desperate and pitching her voice slightly higher than usual, ‘English? You speak English?’

‘Yes,’ the Indian man nodded, which was entirely the point: get someone to agree to something you said, no matter how trivial it was, and they’d unconsciously be more likely to agree again.

‘Can I …’ Rourke continued, not needing much acting to appear a little breathless. ‘Can you get in here?’ She pointed at the door, but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Can I come in with you,
please
? I just want to get out of the way, they’re using real bullets, I’m sure of—’

‘No,’ the Uragan man broke in sternly. He was little more than a youth, really, but was trying to look older by cultivating the side-whiskers-and-moustache combination that seemed to be some sort of fashion here. ‘No, you must go.’

Rourke ignored him and returned her attention to the Indian man. ‘Please? I won’t be any trouble, I just want to get off the street but I can’t get back to my hotel.’ She paused a second, anxious not to come across as histrionic and therefore a potential liability. How did Drift manipulate people so easily? She had to think about her body language, pace her delivery, time things carefully … he just breezed ahead and
did
it. She tried an appeal to a shared concern. ‘I think the cops might blame this on us off-worlders!’

The man’s face twitched behind his beard. She’d struck a nerve there, although she couldn’t say what or why exactly. He looked at his companion uncertainly.

A gunshot sounded, and suddenly the shouts of the tide of people crammed into the street turned into screams again. Rourke poked her head out for half a second, then ducked back in again. She hadn’t seen anything, but the other two didn’t need to know that. ‘They’re coming!’

‘Open it,’ the man in the turban said, gesturing to the door. The Uragan hesitated, but his companion looked none too relaxed himself and slammed his fist against the metal. ‘For fuck’s sake, man, open it!’

Rourke turned her face a little, as though she was peering anxiously for signs of approaching
politsiya
, but her sideways glance was enough to see and memorise the combination punched in by the scowling Uragan. The lock buzzed open, the noise barely audible over the crowd still piling past in their rush to get further away from the plaza, and the two men slipped inside. Rourke darted after them before either of them could change their mind, pressing up close behind her new friend in the turban.

She found herself in a white-walled stairwell. Steep and narrow concrete steps, marked with yellow safety strips at the edge and flanked by metal handrails with flaking blue paint, rose up about a storey’s height to another door, which was slightly ajar. The Uragan youth cast a dark glance at her and went up first, followed by the Indian man. Rourke brought up the rear, surreptitiously double-checking the hidden wire sewn into the sleeve of her bodysuit. It wasn’t that she distrusted these two any more than she would any other pair of strangers, but it was always best to keep your options open and close at hand.

The upper door opened into a room which continued the white theme, but rather than paint over rough concrete the walls here were polished panels interspersed with mirrors. The tiled floor was also white and one side of it was occupied by swivelling, padded chairs upholstered in what had to be fake leather, given how expensive the genuine stuff would be down here. Here and there on the walls were prints of good-looking men and women sporting a selection of unlikely hairstyles, with a couple showing off the same style of whiskers sported by the young man who’d led her up here.

They were going to be taking shelter in a hairdressing salon, apparently.

More surprising than the location was the fact that they weren’t alone. There were already three other Uragans, judging by their appearance and clothing, none looking much older than the one she’d entered with. Still more curious was the presence of another two off-worlders: a pale, skinny kid with tribal tattoos down one arm,
standing slightly hunched, either poor posture or in some sort of pain
, and a middle-aged man whom Rourke would have pegged as having Native American ancestry if she’d had to hazard a guess,
left-handed and not happy to see me, given the way he started to reach for a gun at his left hip that isn’t there
.

‘Skanda?’ the older man said, jerking his chin at Rourke with a suspicious look on his face. ‘Who’s this?’

The man in the turban, apparently named Skanda, looked suddenly rather less certain than he had when thumping the door downstairs. ‘Ah … she was outside with us, and the cops were coming … I guess she must have followed us in …’

Rourke didn’t like the sound of that at all, and it took no acting effort to protest indignantly. ‘Hey, wait a second, you let me in!’ The whiskery Uragan was scowling and she appealed to him. ‘He let me come in, right? You didn’t want me to come in, but he told you to open the door anyway.’

The young man’s eyes flickered between her and Skanda, apparently uncertain which of them he currently disliked more. He settled for biting out a sullen, ‘Yes,’ and folding his arms.

‘Okay, but look, I didn’t know you guys were gonna be here
too
,’ Skanda protested, waving his arms to encompass the salon. ‘I thought me and Ruslan were just gonna duck in here and then leave after.’

‘That’s all I want!’ Rourke spoke up, raising her hand. ‘I don’t know if you’re having some sort of gathering or … or what, really, but I don’t want to get in anyone’s way. I just want to stay off the streets until the shooting stops and then I’ll be out of your hair.’ She was getting a nasty feeling about this group; she’d clearly stumbled into something less innocent than a simple group of salon employees and their off-world friends. She edged towards the salon’s window which overlooked the plaza, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jenna and Apirana from a higher vantage point, but was interrupted by a door banging open. It was the salon’s main entrance this time, rather than the back way she’d come in by.

‘—the hell you think you’re playing at?’ a male voice was shouting angrily in English.

A Uragan woman stormed in first, her dirty blonde hair cut into a bob with a fringe. There was nothing to visually set her apart from her compatriots in the room apart from a few additional years, but Rourke noted how everyone, including the off-worlders, moved aside for her. The new arrival threw one arm up in a motion clearly intended to dismiss the ranting of whoever was following her, then slightly spoiled the effect by turning in place to address them.

‘This is the start,’ she retorted at the closing door, ‘this is what we have been building towards for
years
! This is what you have been working for!’

The door ricocheted open again before it had fully shut, admitting a black-haired, well-tanned man with a thick moustache and a red-and-white spotted neckerchief. ‘
I
have been working to get
you
some damn guns and get
me
some damn money,’ he retorted, jabbing a finger at her and his own chest alternately to furiously underscore his words. ‘I don’t give a flying fuck what you
do
with them, but getting us caught up in a fucking
war
when we’re stuck down here with you doesn’t seem like—’

He broke off in mid-rant, staring at Rourke with an expression of stunned fury.

‘
Ta tudo fodido
…’ He looked around the room. ‘What the fuck is
she
doing here?! Huh?’

Rourke centred her weight, dropped her bag and folded her hands in front of her stomach, so she could easily draw her garrotting wire from her sleeve. She relaxed her face and let her voice come out naturally, free from the artificial strain and pitch she’d injected to make herself seem more vulnerable, and allowed the man’s name to slide from her lips with an appropriate amount of scorn laced into it. There was no point acting now.

‘Ricardo
fucking
Moutinho.’ She sighed. ‘I should have known this would be your fault somehow.’

WHEN JENNA SAW
Apirana fall, her first thought was that he’d somehow been shot through the crowd.

Rourke was nowhere in sight and she had no idea if the other woman had even seen their crewmate go down. She tried to fight down the sudden sucking dread in her chest and angled herself ever so slightly across the flow of the crowd, nearly tripping over someone’s legs and only staying on her feet through good natural balance and sheer bloody-mindedness. Someone’s elbow caught her in the side of the head and she staggered, but the flash of pain kick-started a violent response. She lashed out in anger and frustration, hitting someone to her left and gaining a half-second of space as the nearby Uragans veered away from this sudden minor disturbance, which gave her an opening to head for where she’d seen Apirana fall. She was on him almost before she expected, the only warning being the people directly in front of her stumbling slightly and suddenly shifting direction. Then she caught sight of one of his boots and the familiar navy blue of his jumpsuit on the ground, and shouldered a dark-haired woman aside to scramble down into a crouch by his side.

‘A.!’ The big man’s arms were covering his head and he was breathing, but he was face down and otherwise motionless. She couldn’t see any obvious wounds on his body, but—

Someone fleeing headlong tripped on Apirana’s foot and nearly went over, only saving themselves by dint of planting a foot into his back. Jenna heard a quiet moan of pain as air was expelled from the Maori’s lungs: she nearly got a knee in the head before she could react, then the man was gone into the throng.

She came up to her feet snarling, unslung the bag of hastily grabbed possessions from their hotel room and starting swinging it in a figure-eight, straddling Apirana’s prone body and yelling wordlessly at the onrushing Uragans. The sight of a screaming, red-blonde girl using a backpack as a weapon seemed to do what a fallen Maori couldn’t, and within a couple of seconds the crowd was parting around her.

Of course, they were still fleeing from
politsiya
using live rounds, and the mass of onrushing bodies was already starting to thin out into stragglers; the older, the younger or the infirm. When even they were gone, Jenna would be left to face the authorities down with nothing but bad language and a bag that was already making her arms ache. She caught her first glimpse of black body armour through the thinning press in front of her. She had to get away, and get A. away too, but to where? And how?

Two more pale-faced Uragans split apart to pass on either side of her, revealing a dark-skinned man behind them. He was wearing a red bodysuit decorated with a lattice of gold lines that formed geometric shapes, and the sight of him made Jenna falter where she stood. There were three metal studs along one side of his shaven head, his eyes were covered by a thin visor and the outline of his torso was strangely angular as though it wasn’t flesh and blood beneath the fabric he wore.

A Circuit Cult logicator.

He slowed from what had been little more than a jog and Jenna saw the brief downwards tilt of his head as he took in Apirana’s body beneath her. Then he stepped forward and spoke a sentence in rapid Russian.

Jenna shook her head, shrinking back instinctively. ‘I … I don’t …’

‘Ah, North American, yes?’ the man replied, switching to English with what sounded like an accent from the Federation of African States. He gestured down at Apirana. ‘Your friend is hurt.’

Jenna wriggled her fingers, checking her grip on her bag in case she needed to swing for him and aware of how fast her heart had suddenly started beating.
God
, but she hated circuitheads. ‘I think so, I haven’t been able—’

‘His ankle is broken,’ the logicator said, pointing. Jenna followed his gaze, realising almost absently that the circuithead’s mere presence seemed to be enough to divert the remains of the fleeing crowd away from them. Sure enough, one of Apirana’s feet was twisted at what looked to be slightly the wrong angle. She hadn’t had time to notice it before, being too busy trying to ensure that he didn’t get trodden on.

Well, that was it. She’d been watching via co-opted security cameras when they’d assaulted Kelsier’s asteroid base with the Europans, and she’d seen the Captain trying to support Apirana’s weight when the big man had been shot. He’d barely managed to help Apirana move thirty feet, and Drift was certainly bigger and stronger than she was. Apirana probably weighed well over twice what she did, there was no way she could—

‘We will help,’ the man said, pressing a button on one of his wrist cuffs. ‘I am Kunley Ngiri, of the Universal Access Movement.’

‘You’ll help?’ Jenna was taken aback, and becoming even less comfortable with the situation.

Kunley appeared to take her reaction as a comment on his modest size and build. ‘I have friends,’ he said with a smile, and suddenly there they were at his shoulder: two Uragans, a man and a woman, in white jackets with the Circuit Cult’s gold lattice on the sleeves, although the fabric did little to disguise the unnatural shape of their limbs. Jenna swallowed, uncomfortably aware of exactly how strong augmentations could make a person. These two could certainly pick Apirana up and move him even if he wasn’t able to do anything for himself.