Ragamuffin (11 page)

She remained focused and zoomed on the muddy river.

A series of footprints appeared near the far edge, as if by magic, slowly tracking toward the hopolites as they loaded their homemade mortar. A long-haired man in nothing but trousers sighted and gave the thumbs-up.

The mortar thunked. The projectile arced upward leaving a slight trail of smoke. Up, up, Kara and her brother craned their necks looking straight above them to watch until it dwindled into a small dot against the great brown patches that curved far over their heads. The other side of their world right above their heads. It made Kara shiver, thinking of explosions and weaponry being fired all throughout the habitat. Already the air seemed hard to breathe. She wondered if that was due to the great machinery in the depths of Agathonosis failing, or if war had broken the world’s skin. She’d never seen the Outside of Agathonosis nor been inside the world’s skin, but she could imagine the cruel midnight of vacuum shoving its airless emptiness through the cracks of the world, curling into the sky to snatch the air away from them all.

One of the hopolites carried a telescope, she saw. He looked through it intently, then shouted. Kara thought she saw a small flash, a tiny orange ball of flame, on the land far over her head.

A hushed cheer erupted. Yet there was nothing happy in the sound. It was a vindictive-sounding group whoop, cut short by several small spitting sounds. A second pair of invisible feet splashed through the mud.

Kara dug her fingers into Jared’s bony shoulders and stared past him at the chaos behind him. “Oww . . .”

“Quiet, it’s the stratatoi,” she hissed.

The hopolites scattered and ran. Four of them fell to the ground, one of them writhing and screaming. Bright red splotches of blood dripped from his forehead.

Oh, no. One of them zigzagged, running straight toward her. She unzoomed her lenses, looked around.

“Come on.” She pulled Jared along, slowly, very slowly, backing into the dried-up remains of an oak tree that had toppled over. This had once been a gravity-defying copse of oaks. It was now a tortured, surreal nightmare of dead trunks and burned stumps gathered around a failing river. Stomach acid burned at Kara as fear and hunger ate its way up out of her.

“In here again?” Jared complained. They sat underneath the bleached, twisted branches and looked out. Jared hugged their knapsack to his chest, though his bony arms offered it little protection.

The hopolite staggered on, coated in mud. He panted, arms flailing to keep balance. Jared squirmed, but Kara pushed him down and kept him from looking out.

Branches slapped them in the face as something jumped and ran down the length of the trunk. Jared whimpered, and Kara covered his mouth as a mud-covered ghost grabbed the hopolite, threw him to the ground.

Kara strained the lenses over her eyes at the ghost. Despite the Catastrophe, despite the famine, the world of Agathonosis itself still responded to her. The air sang information. Kara could still choose to augment anything she saw with her actual, organic eyes with information overlaid onto them with her implants. The standard public lamina appeared to her: a small triangular tag popped into her vision every time she looked at the tree. Information scrolled at her.

Oak tree 23. Planted the third year of the Evthria’s [the “eastern” side of Agathonosis, click for more] founding by the first human president under the benevolent Satrapy. Commemoration . . .
It would have scrolled more information, but Kara killed the blather with a mental wave of the hand.

Any moron youngster in Agathonosis with a pair of data contacts or a wrist screen could see that particular lamina.

She had something else in mind: her own augmented reality. It would let her tap into a private lamina. It was something darker, more useful, encrypted and never spoken about because it was forbidden, as was any human addition or tinkering with the Satrapic Information Systems.

“Remember,” her mother had said before the stratatoi came for her and Dad. She’d crouched by Kara and run her fingers through Kara’s hair. “Things might get better. This might be temporary. So you only use this if it is an emergency!”

Kara had nodded. “I understand.”

“Take Jared with you if that happens, and don’t talk to anyone. You know the drill, we’ve gone over it enough. We’ll be back. We’ll see what the Satrap says about this. We have to try to petition it. We can’t let this go on.”

Her parents had been archaeologists. They’d studied the lamina, sometimes illegally, digging back down into the tiniest bits that talked and made it work. They were the most known lamina explorers in Agathonosis, well respected.
They’d hoped their position would help influence the Satrap to fix the world and stop the stratatoi.

But they’d never come back.

And things had gotten worse. And worse.

So now Kara triggered the filter her mom and dad had created. When
that
filter came down over the world, the artificial rods and cones in her eyes painted very different things.

The ghost, the invisible man, appeared to her outlined in reds and oranges. She watched the man raise a large weapon, point the barrel at the hopolite’s forehead, and pull the trigger. The hopolite’s head exploded, fragments dripping to the ground. Kara looked down at the mud.

Jared squirmed. She grabbed his hand and squeezed as hard as she could. He understood and froze. Kara’s fingers waved a quick mantra to execute the code the whole family had worked on in secret when the troubles had begun. The invisible man turned, looked right at them. His face twisted, a rictus of heat lines.

Now you know, thought Kara. Now you know if it works. There’s always info around. Like air, but more pervasive even. Info gathered by nearby sensors under the ground, in the remains of the tree, built into the very fabric of Agathonosis on a molecular scale. Infodust hanging in the air, testing the ecology of the habitat. Information gathered, reformatted, and presented to her when she asked for it.

She’d accessed lamina all around her since she was a kid, seeing things that weren’t really there with her contacts on, playing games with other children that other people weren’t a part of. The world was always more mysterious, more layered, deeper, than it would have been without the various lamina they all used.

And the invisible killer staring right at her would see
nothing
of her because he used the lamina too. Like all stratatoi he got orders, maps, plans of attack, and info from his fellow murderers through
his
augmented reality. Kara’s private lamina had been developed slowly over three hundred years, exploiting small bugs in the meshes of realities the Satrapy had created inside Agathonosis. Kara’s parents were descended from a long line of tweakers who had carved out some small freedoms for themselves from the ever present and powerful eye of the Satrapy. Such as invisibility to allow them to gather and hold meetings.

They’d thought that one special, but it looked as if the stratatoi had it as well.

She let out a deep breath as the invisible man turned around and ran back toward the homemade mortar.

“Go,” she ordered Jared.

He obeyed her, slowly crawling out and skirting the oak tree with her.

They left the river. Kara didn’t think it was safe anymore. More stratatoi had appeared. They were securing the water, she guessed. Turning off the river’s pumps. That hadn’t been in short supply yet, and the Parvati was muddy, but apparently they wanted control of that too.

Like everything else inside Agathonosis.

Kara returned her vision to normal unaugmented reality as they walked out of the brown wastes of the public park and into a series of alleyways. The park reeked of urine, and it was worse here. Perfectly recyclable sewage oozed out of the gutters, piss stains splattered the paper walls of houses. Many maiche walls drooped, ripped off in the first rounds of riots. The houses revealed the insides of rooms and apartments. Frames poked through like skeletons.

A dead neighborhood. Flayed.

They passed houses with roofs that sagged from recent rain.
Rain
. In what had been a perfectly controlled ecosphere. It had all gone so wrong so quickly. Agathonosis had been a paradise. Lakes near great forests that had trees reaching up, unhindered, and less and less constrained by gravity as they grew taller. Sure they were somewhat crooked from Coriolis forces, but at those heights, you couldn’t tell if it they were bent or just
tall
.

Now Agathonosis was a festering disaster.

An occasional face peeked out from a hole in the walls, then disappeared.

“Can we stop and eat?” Jared asked. Too loud. Idiot ten-year-old kid. And all she had left. She hadn’t talked to any of her peers or seen her parents in weeks.

“Shhh. We’re not far from where we need to be,” she whispered. Don’t mention food, Brother. Damnit.

The air-lock door lay just around the next small alley, down underneath a manhole cover. Air locks would lead them into the skin of Agathonosis, into the heart of the Satrap’s traditional domain, but also to freedom.

She hoped.

Kara double-checked a heads-up map display in her personal lamina, looking around at markers and tags. She looked back down the street, at the good
soil running down the gutters washing off into the storm grates, and heard something rustle.

“Open the manhole cover,” she ordered Jared.

He looked piteously at her. “You make me do everything. Carry the—”

“Do it,”
she hissed at him. “The sooner we get there, the sooner you can eat.”

Her temple hurt as she concentrated. I am a shadow, she thought. Just a shadow. She backed up against the plastic frame of an alley wall, tiptoed, and waited as Jared grunted and yanked at the manhole cover.

She slit the paper with a pocketknife and stepped through. She sealed it back up with several tiny pins fished out from her pocket and looked around. A few weeks ago this was someone’s apartment. A dead woman lay on the bed, the back of her head staved in. Spoiled cans of fish lay underneath the bed.

The manhole cover rustled outside. Jared grunted, then paused. “Kara? Are you sure we’re allowed to do this? This goes
in
.”

Someone had tried to eat the cans of fish, then thrown up.

“Kara? Where are you? Please don’t leave me. I’m sorry. I won’t complain again.”

Kara cut two small eyehole slits and watched the street as Jared turned around in a slow circle, looking for her. She could hear muffled sobs. Kara swallowed the lump in her throat, squeezed her wet eyes.

Sorry, Brother, she thought.

After another moment of crying Jared stopped, looked with a few sniffles, then unslung the knapsack and unzipped it. Kara looked down the street and saw what she’d been fearing: a wiry man with a bat walked down along the torn paper wall toward Jared.

She waited, waited until the man’s shadow crossed the paper in front of her, then burst out with the penknife. She stabbed him in the back with the four-inch-long blade as hard as she could, thrusting at his shadow through long, ragged strips of paper wall. The blade sunk in with a sickening puncturing sound and her victim screamed. He backhanded her, reaching up for the knife.

Jared sat and stared as Kara sprang off the ground. The man got hold of the knife and screamed again as he pulled it out.

“Get in the manhole, quickly.” Kara grabbed the backpack and zipped it. Jared looked up at her in something approaching awe. And fear.

They clambered down the ladder into the skin of their world, aiming for the hull.

“Faster,” she ordered her little brother. Neither of them had the strength
to replace the manhole cover from inside. Soon someone would come after them. Either the man she’d stabbed, or someone else noticing the racket.

It was quiet down here. And sterile, like the inside of a house, but on and on and on. No natural sounds, just a steady thrum. Biolights ran along a track on the floor and a strip over their heads. The smoothly bored rock walls with metallic vacuumseal sprayed on were physically painted blue with red or green numerals indicating where they were, just as Kara had hoped.

Stratatoi would soon realize they had intruders in the heart of their domain, inside the warrens and corridors honeycombing the great hull of the world. She had mumbled the words to shut down the telltales inside her that would report where she was, but she wasn’t sure she had done such a good job on Jared. Thankfully they couldn’t see through his eyes; she’d taken his contacts out the day the Catastrophe had fully realized itself.

Kara kept Jared moving with expert shoves and a kick or two. He stumbled a lot. Eventually he sat down, refusing to go farther.

“We’re lost,” he cried.

“No, we’re not,” Kara snapped. Then, softer: “I know where we are. Trust me.”

“We’re lost and
they’re
going to find us.” Jared clutched the sack.

If they stayed here, giving up, then, yes. Kara grabbed his arm and squeezed it. “You get back up or that man will come after us and kill us for sure. I can leave you here for him.” Jared got back up. “Keep going straight,” Kara said, her voice cracking.

Somehow he’d forgive her. For know, she just wanted to make sure he lived. Her little brother was all she had left.

They went deeper in, following mental maps. Twice she used her invisibility trick to avoid stratatoi walking the corridors. She would hold a hand over Jared’s mouth, lean against the cold wall, and freeze. The stratatoi were looking for something. She hoped it wasn’t them.

Jared’s stomach growled loudly enough for her to hear several times. She wondered if that would give them away at some crucial point.

They finally got to it: a small access door leading to what looked like a utility room. Kara stood and stared at it for a second, looking at a tag that told her the door was more than it seemed. She walked forward and kissed the cold metal.

Did the stratatoi know about this place? Her parents had found the location when digging around ancient hand-drawn pictures from the original colonists, the pireties. History was frowned on but protected by the general Emancipation. People like her mom and dad pieced together what they could from records hidden deep in human-made lamina. And they’d found this alternate control room. The primary control room had been destroyed in a suicidal fight between the hopolites and the stratatoi two weeks ago when the hopolite insurrection against the habitat’s Satrap began. The hopolites had slowly been exterminated ever since. The Satrap was rumored to have moved into the secondary control center and reinforced it with hordes of stratatoi.