Fade to Black (12 page)

Jake’s smile froze for a moment before it came back, rather forced this time. She tried a nonchalant shrug but there was a tension in her shoulders that she couldn’t hide. “Nothing else I’m good at. Besides, suicide is against my religion.” She laughed but that deadness was behind her eyes again. Pasha hunched into his chair and chewed at a nail.

“But you two, known each other long? You seem to trust each other.” I didn’t know anyone I’d trust to stitch me up with no anaesthetic. Dendal was all thumbs and Lastri would take great pleasure in my discomfort, especially if she could make it worse.

Jake’s smile melted away. “Long enough. You always ask so many questions?”

Pasha stared at me intently, a scared sort of look on his face, the mousy little monkey again, but he didn’t say anything.

A waitress ignored everyone else in the bar, slipped out from behind the counter and came to take our order. I looked around; no one else had service like this, they all went to the counter for drinks. The waitress was a trim little thing, all dark eyes and long black hair framing a pert face. I couldn’t conjure up a flirty smile, not even when she leaned over and gave me a flash of ample cleavage. I must have been sickening for something; and she was sitting right opposite me.

The waitress bobbed her head towards Jake. “Usual?” Jake slid her gaze towards me and back again. “No, we’ll take the whole bottle and three glasses. Have another bottle on ice for later.”

We were silent until after the waitress came back with a bottle of something so green it almost took my eye out. She laid the glasses out on the table, gifted me a cheeky wink and left.

I squinted at the bottle. The liquid sloshed viscously as it settled. It looked dangerous. “What is that?”

“This? Oh, this is just booze,” Jake said with a cultivated air of innocence belied by a crafty smile. “Big, strong man like you shouldn’t be afraid of booze.”

Pasha poured three generous glasses and didn’t manage to hide a grin.

The stuff stank, an acrid, biting smell that promised more than just alcohol. It promised oblivion. I looked at Jake as she drank, grimacing the stuff down, her eyes blank of feeling. Pasha gripped his glass too tight, whitening the skin on his fingers, before he knocked it back in one hit. I wasn’t the only one in need of a drink, but I didn’t have mine just yet.

Jake poured herself another, her hand wobbling only slightly. She didn’t take her eyes from the garish green that slithered in her glass, as though it was the only salvation she was likely to get. “So, Mr Dizon, no questions. You tell me all of it.”

“You know it. My niece was kidnapped and brought down here. I’ve come to find her and take her home.” I sniffed at the glass and almost choked on the fumes.

“That’s not all though, is it?”

“What more do you want?”

She raised her eyes to mine. They were a soft blue, like the sky on a sunny day, from my few glimpses of it. In other circumstances those eyes might have seemed attractive or feminine. Right now all I was getting was a cold calculation regarding whether I was worth talking to, with an undercurrent of something that made me want to lean forward and kiss her. Luckily, I’m not
that
stupid.

“Ministry or not, do you think you’re the first Upsider to come down here with a sad story, hoping to smoke out trouble? Tell me everything,” she said. “All of it. Her, your magic, why you’re really here. Why I should trust or help you. Everything.”

I sneaked a look at Pasha, hoping for help. The booze oiled up and down his glass in time to the way his hand shook, ever so slightly. He didn’t look at either of us and a brick-red flush crept up his neck. When I looked back, Jake’s eyes locked on mine. This whole thing was giving me the creeps something fierce, but I had no choice. They knew things I couldn’t know, people I couldn’t know. They were my link, my – no, Amarie’s – only hope.

I took a hesitant sip of the green stuff, choked it back over a tongue that wanted to reject it and felt it worm its way to my stomach. Almost immediately a warmth began to work its way out, seeping into me and soothing me. Telling me everything would be OK. I could see then why they drank it. It gave me the nerve to say it all.

So I told them, about Ma, about Perak and our estrangement, Amarie’s kidnapping. About my magic and how it’s not such a good thing to use Upside, not if you want to live. How I don’t like using it, and don’t unless I really have to.

Jake took it all in without a word or flicker of her eyes, without even a twitch of her face. Until I named the Goddess, when I mentioned the hospital and the doctor. She shut her eyes, just for a moment, scrunched them up as though warding off a blow. A heartbeat later it was as though nothing had happened.

Pasha kept clenching and unclenching his hand on his glass, but he said nothing either. So we sat in silence again for a while, until Dog came in. He stood in the doorway and
waved his hand over his head. “Hey, Jake! I got something for you!” He was like that five-year-old again, one with sweets, or something secret to share.

Funny how her face changed. She went from wary and sharp to soft and smiling in a moment, stood up with a fluid grace and went to him.

“What’s the problem, Pasha?” I asked when she was out of earshot.

His mouth stretched in a grin I didn’t believe. “It’s – it’s difficult, Rojan. Down here, it’s all different. Most of them don’t know it, you know?”

“Know what?”

“What they are. Cows, that’s what they are, we all are. Well-fed fucking cows, fattened up before they get slaughtered, and those that do know it can’t do much about it. We try, but – it’s hard. We get caught, we’re dead, and so are the people we’re trying to help.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “Fattened up for the mages, and they don’t even know it.”

His hands trembled, making the booze roil in the glass. My own hands didn’t feel much better.

“Pasha, I—”

“Girls, boys too sometimes, go missing every day. No one dare say a thing, because if they do, they disappear too. So they pretend it’s not happening, except in the back of their brains, they know. Going from Upside too now, so you say. Well, don’t expect a pity parade. A thousand. That’s right, a thousand that we know of in the last year. Probably more,
getting worse every week. As many as that and we can’t –
can’t
, you understand – give preference to one girl. No matter who she is. But we’ll try. If you can find her, there’ll be others there. You can be an asset, Rojan. A real help, if you can use your magic like you say.”

“Mages? But we’re banned, there are none except me and Dendal, far as I know. Why though, why are they doing it, taking children? What for?”

But it seemed Pasha had said all he was going to, or maybe all he was going to in front of Jake, because he clamped his mouth shut and turned away just as she came back.

“So the girls, you rescue them,” I said. “Why? It seems you’d make a lot of enemies.”

“Someone has to. No one else gives a shit,” she snapped. I was doing well on the insulting front, even if I wasn’t sure what the actual insult was. Several of the matchers turned to look at me when Jake raised her voice. Dog took a step towards us with a growl in his throat. Pasha shook his head and Dog stepped back, but kept a wary eye on us all the same. Maybe tact might be worth a try. I’d certainly live longer.

I looked back at Jake. She was all closed up. I’d said something, done something to stop her wanting to talk to me. But I needed to know. “So what exactly do you do to help them? Once you’ve found them, what do you do?”

Jake tapped her fingers on the table and scowled. Pasha drained his glass and the girl was there instantly to top it up. He set it down, laid his hand on the table just out of touching
distance from Jake’s fingers, and waited for the girl to go before he spoke. I had trouble hearing him over the blaring music. What I did hear was that he didn’t like talking about it; it was in the jerky way the words came out.

“We look after them. Most of them don’t know where they came from, even their own names. They forget, because they have to, are told to, forced to. Even if they do remember, we can’t send them back to their families.”

“Why not?”

Pasha’s mouth twitched sadly. “It’s just how it is down here. I don’t know about Upside, but down here, they catch a branded girl – the Ministry have smoked through rumours about them, about the brands. Brainwashed people, really, so they don’t ask questions, hate who they’re told to hate. They have to, have to pretend they don’t notice all these kids going missing, because if they say anything, they go too. The kids aren’t safe on the streets, or anywhere once anyone sees those brands, because if you’re caught helping one, you’re dead. So they believe the lies the Ministry tells them, the priests preach to them. Little Whores they call them, an affront to the Goddess. Had a case last month. Girl escaped, a while ago. Managed to hide it, found herself a guy who wanted to marry her. Until he found her brands. Throttled her on the spot.”

I took a hasty glug of the drink and coughed a bit at the fumes. It beggared belief. “Why? It wasn’t her fault.”

Pasha shrugged and stared down into his drink. “Just the way it is down here. He felt she’d, I don’t know, dishonoured
him, dishonoured the Goddess? They all think that way down here, all but a few, because they believe what they’re told. If it had been a woman found her out, she’d be just as dead. Little Whores.”

Pasha played with his glass as he spoke, not looking up from the reflections that moved on its surface. Jake was staring at the other matchers as though she had no interest in what we were talking about. Which was pretty odd when you considered that she risked her life to save these girls on a regular basis. But then she risked her life in the matches often enough. Maybe she really didn’t care about that, about living. Maybe she only cared about dying. “So why do you and Jake do it?”

“Wouldn’t you, if you had to live here? We’re not all animals, no matter what you Upsiders think.”

“Most Upsiders don’t know you exist. I didn’t until Tam told me, right before I arrived. So what
do
you do with them?”

“You ever seen a cow, Mr Dizon?” It was Jake again, her voice low and measured, as though it was taking a lot of self-control not to lose her temper. Or maybe just to get the words out. Her fingers kept tap, tap, tapping on the table next to Pasha’s hand, like she was nervous or not used to talking to people.

Seen a cow? What was I, Archdeacon? No one from the city ever saw a cow, except maybe him. I wasn’t even sure there was one within a hundred miles. “Once or twice. In a book.”

“I have, and not in a book,” Pasha said.

Down here? Where in fuck could you keep a cow in this cesspit? And how could the ’Pit be richer in those things than Upside? My disbelief must have shown on my face because Pasha flushed a little. “I have!
Outside
.”

I sat there with the glass halfway to my lips. Outside was, was, well, almost mythical to anyone brought up in the city. It had to exist, of course, but only the super-rich even got to see it from their windows up in Clouds or Top of the World. All I could see from my apartment was a stretch of rubbish and a bunch of other buildings. You could catch a glimpse of mountains on a clear day from Trade, but they were just shadows, far-off and unreal. Up there, in the rarefied heights that only Ministry could afford, they said you could see the
real
Outside. Grass, trees, the mountain range that enclosed us, everything. Getting to go there was something that was a fabulous but unlikely dream. Like, I don’t know, unicorns. “How? Where? How’d you get out?”

“How do you get anything? Money, and connections. One of the girls we found, we managed to find her parents and they weren’t from in here. From Outside, where they don’t see the girls the same. It’s not the place they told you. Not at all. Their daughter was safe to go back – it’s like another world out there. So Jake bought a piece of their land. And that’s where we take them. Outside. We get them surgery to cover the brands, the scars, and that costs a lot, to have that surgeon on hand. We help them come to terms, get rid of the shadows. Some of the parents of the missing girls, they help us, hoping
that one day it’ll be their girl coming in. And when the girls are ready, then we help them have a life. A good one, as good as it gets down here, like they might have had. Some of them stay and help us, but we don’t have room for many. A few find places Outside, but they’re pretty wary of new people so it’s difficult. Most of them come back to the ’Pit. It’s what they know. But we make sure they stay safe, set them up in a little business or find them a legitimate job. Takes a lot of money. We make some from the cows on the farm, the meat and leather, but it’s not enough, not near enough. That’s why Jake does the matches, because it’s the best, almost the only, way to make any decent money down here. And that’s where all the money goes.”

I sat and stared at him, speechless, for a while and then the girl came back with three plates. “Thought you might be hungry.”

She popped them down on the table and it was all I could do not to dribble on to the food. Real meat. Lots of it, and smelling so good there was a possibility I was dead and in heaven. I might have thought so, but I don’t think they have bars like this in heaven. Shame, or I might start believing.

I restrained myself from wallowing my head in the gravy, instead eating as though meat was something I got on a regular basis, and returned to the topic at hand. Damn, though, that was tasty. “So, you’ll help me find her?”

Pasha sighed. “I spend all my time trying to find these girls in any case. Finding just one, among all of them? I don’t know
if it can be done. But if we find her, we’ll welcome any help getting her out, along with any others we find with her. I’ll let you know. Now, do you need a place to stay? That Ministry place might be a little warm for you right now, if you really aren’t one of theirs. You can stay at my place.”

“There’s not enough room there for two.” There had been barely enough room for two people to sit, never mind lie down, in the room Tam had sent me to.