The Apocalypse Ocean (2 page)

Tiago would normally have taken his cut from the day’s picked pockets and stopped right here at the Seaside Plaza. On the very edge, past the vendors on the cobblestone sea walk, Tiago would sit with his legs over the rocky sea wall and look out over Placa del Fuego’s harbor.

Today he only detoured through the plaza to get the crowds in between him and the woman chasing him.

He’d gotten a brief glimpse of her before all the running started: tall, dark eyes, dark skin, dark leather jacket and microfiber pants, and carefully wound dreadlocks pulled back into a ponytail.

She was fast in the crowd. She didn’t dodge around legs, using the ebb and flow of the masses to see open routes like Tiago. No, people who got in her way were just … thrown aside.

She was too damn strong. Some sort of soldier, Tiago thought, refocusing ahead.

Or worse.

He might, he thought hastily, have gotten himself into serious trouble.

Slipping onto the sea-wall path, he sprinted harder. To his right the harbor was filled with ships and their cargo, anchored and waiting for a spot to clear on the docks. One of them was raising a parasail, the same way Tiago would fly a kite. The windfoil at the end of the rope bucked in the inconsistent harbor wind at first, but then filled out and rose hundreds of feet up into the air.

The ship picked its way out of the harbor, headed between the tall forest of wind turbines at the harbor’s edge: a dangerous move to unleash a parasail in the harbor, but now Tiago noticed other ships unfurling and launching sails into the sky with haste. A cloud of brightly colored parasails leapt into the harbor sky like a cloud of disturbed butterflies.

Worried, Tiago slowed and looked to his left. The old warehouses, three and four stories tall, dominated the first row of buildings. Many of them were crammed with subdivided mini-rooms and renters, but some still were used for their original purpose. Behind them, climbing tenaciously up the side of the mountain, hand-built homes and houses crammed up against each other on the steep slopes.

And above all that, Tiago saw a large, dark mass of gray haze that had topped the rocky mountain crest and slowly fell down toward the harbor like a heavy cloud.

“Oh shit.” Tiago stopped. People in the Plaza were turning too. Nervous murmuring spread. People stood up from picnics or meals and stopped haggling over tables in the market as vendors swept up their goods. The edges of the crowd were already scattering for safety.

The dreadlocked woman smacked into Tiago and grabbed his upper arm, crushing it.

“Take your damn money,” Tiago shouted at her, squirming to try and get away. “I don’t want it. I’m sorry. Just please let me go.”

She looked puzzled as he shoved the paper money into the pockets of her jacket. He may have even given her more than he’d stolen, he wasn’t sure.

“What’s …?”

Tiago pointed up the mountain. “It’s going to rain.”

She looked over the buildings and let him go. “I forgot.”

Forgot? As far as Tiago was concerned there were two things on the island to remember: stay out of the rain, and more recently, avoid the Doaq’s attention by staying inside at night.

Tiago bolted. The last thing he saw was the armada of harbor ships, parasails kiting around in the air overhead. They moved fast enough now that their hulls pulled themselves up onto hydrofoil skids that jutted out underneath.

Then the fire sirens began to wail.

From the open sweep of the docks and seawall of the harbor, Tiago sped deep into the upper hills of Harbortown. He could breathe easier seeing overhangs above him and walls he could put his back to.

People hurried about with carbon-fiber and steel umbrellas. Richer folk had already gotten into bright yellow imported hazmat gear.

The klaxons wailed in the background, constantly blearing out their warning for all to find shelter. Shops slammed thick windows shut and bolted them while people yanked tables, chairs, and billboards inside. Customers packed in, shoulder to shoulder.

No self-respecting shop would let Tiago inside, though. Not with his ripped and melted clothes, dirty face, and bare feet.

They’d toss him out on his ass faster than he could get inside.

A stinging mist settled down to street level. Tiago squinted and slowed down. First timers would run faster now, trying to avoid the stinging chemical burn on their skin, but then they’d inhale more.

Tiago cupped his hands over his mouth with a piece of flannel to filter the air. He looked down at the cobblestoned street to protect his eyes.

His calloused, flattened feet knew the street. Knew how many steps it would take to reach the alley, knew how many times he’d have to pull himself up on the old pipe running outside to get up onto the roof, and how many more steps across the concrete to get to his niche.

It was a spot between two old storage buildings where the hill started climbing steeply enough to be more properly called a mountain, almost near the Xeno-town enclave. One of the buildings had a large, reinforced concrete gutter along its edge, and when the second building had been built right alongside, wall-to-wall, the design left a sheltered ledge the length of the building.

Twenty families had taken bricks and concrete and built a wall along the overhang and crammed into the space between the two buildings. It was on the very edge of this that Tiago had fought, paid for, and built his very own room.

Last year the owners of the buildings had paid enforcers to come in and rip it all out. They had taken all their possessions away in a dumpster and beaten anyone who tried to remain.

But after a few nervous cold nights out, most of them had returned with new pieces of weatherized plastic sheets, sticks, bricks, and construction glue to start building all over again.

To get to his piece of the niche, Tiago stepped out over the edge of the building and then behind the wall.

He was safe, now.

His skin stung from contact with the mist, but he could sit in the entryway along the corridor leading down to the seven foot by four foot concrete cubicles they called home and watch the rain to the sounds of families cooking, arguing, babies crying, and someone at the other end singing.

The mist was a floating, frothy jelly spit out from the trees on the other side of the island into the air that slowly floated down. In most cases it just slowly burned at whatever it landed on, like an acid.

That wasn’t the most dangerous part. After that, all it took was a spark to ignite the sludge coating everything.

In the distance the harbor pumps thrummed to life. All over the city the firefighters were washing off buildings as fast as they could to prevent the flammable build up.

The government buildings got cleaned first, and then the trucks moved to the hydrants over in the rich areas. It was better if you lived off in one of the floating towns around Placa del Fuego. No rain.

Usually being on this side of the mountain protected everyone. It’s where the town and harbor sprang up in the protected lee of the mountain. But sometimes the wind changed. Sometimes the fire forests were unusually active.

Either way, you didn’t want to be outside. The burns and scars on everyone here testified to that.

No longer a mist, the rain continued, sizzling as it hit the ground outside.

“Hello Tiago,” said Nusdilla. She lived three rooms over. “Would you like some salve?” She scooted around others taking shelter and showed Tiago a small tube of half-used cream.

He considered for a long second. His skin burned and itched in several places. Particularly around the neck.

But he figured he’d look tougher if he just shook his head. “I’m okay,” he said. “Ran here pretty quick.”

She looked briefly disappointed.

Besides, Tiago told himself. Her whole family needed that tube more than he did. Nusdilla’s father broke into a greenhouse in Riverwoldt to hide from the rain and was arrested. Now he was locked up in the Dekkan Holding Center, working off his debt to society pedaling a bike all day long to run the city’s flywheels and mechanics.

Tiago watched her go, and checked his pockets to see if there was any money he could spare for them.

And then remembered that he’d given it all to the scary woman. Including Kay’s share.

Shit.

Well, he could worry about explaining to Kay why he was coming back with no money from the morning’s work later, as much as that scared him. For now he was just happy to be out of the rain. Maybe he could work harder once the rain stopped and show up late.

Maybe.

Tiago just about leapt out of his skin as the wall next to him crumpled and the woman who’d been chasing him shoved her way in. She crouched in front of him. 

“Hello,” she said. “We still have business to finish.”

Tiago jumped up, ready to run for the ledge and get away. As if anticipating this, he noticed that everyone in the corridor had moved back away from him. But where could he go with the rain coming down so hard?

He looked back at his pursuer. The rain had eaten away at the skin on her forearms, exposing silvery metal underneath. Pistons snicked as she flexed her fingers.

He stood rooted in place, staring.

A cyborg? Here on Placa del Fuego. But that was impossible. They were standing in the heart of the dead zone right now. Machines didn’t work in the dead zone.

Yet here she stood.

#

There was no advanced machinery on Placa del Fuego. Or at least not much unless it was shielded. Tiago once asked why all technology wasn’t just built shielded so it could work in Placa del Fuego, but he’d been laughed at for the question. Apparently it was too expensive to shield everything.

Either way, most of the fancy stuff people built failed until you got a mile away from Placa del Fuego. In Harbortown the sailors said scientists from other worlds came to live on ships that floated right on the border of the dead zone, monitoring what they called ‘an unexplained continuous EMP event.’

The epicenter was somewhere deep under the crust of the planet, right under Placa del Fuego.

When Tiago was little he remembered he could still see the wormholes floating just off the edge of Harbortown. Two tall disks of pure black, with blinking red lights all around the edges. It had been fun to watch ships emerge bow first from the nothingness.

That was how Placa del Fuego had grown. A spit of land on a large ocean around which the wormholes could be floated. Ships coming from Reception were from the Xenowealth, and would dock here to unload cargo. Trumball’s wormhole led “upstream” to League worlds. Trade happened at Placa del Fuego at first. As the dead zone expanded people had built longer and longer piers extending out of the harbor, so ships could dock outside the slowly growing dead zone. Eventually the floating docks appeared and turned into floating cities that could keep moving away from the dead zone.

Now the big cities and their docks floated around the wormholes and Placa del Fuego was just a place people drifted to.

Some people on the island believed that alien immigrants had buried a device under the island during the human war for independence, intending to use Placa del Fuego as a last stand.

Four years ago a bunch of angry older women from a slum farm tower on Elysium Street lynched Raskassus, a Gahe immigrant alien. They’d hung him from a street lamp by his mouth tentacles and beat him like a piñata until Raskassus stopped screaming and just hung there.

When the island police arrived the women rioted, barricading the street and setting furniture on fire. Three whole nights the street burned, and it wasn’t until the island rained fire that everyone scattered and returned to life.

Those old women blamed the aliens. But it didn’t matter what or who caused the dead zone, Tiago thought. The end effect was that the town made do. It used pneumatic tubes to send messages. Ox-men from Okur pulled rickshaws around, or people used the compressed air-powered trolley cars. Everything ran on compressed air: the town’s reservoirs were filled by the wind turbines that festooned the harbor entrance and the exposed ridges of the mountain.

But because of all that, life as usual on Placa del Fuego, this woman shouldn’t have been standing in front of him, Tiago knew. She shouldn’t even
work
. Yet the cyborg woman now squatted on Tiago’s hand-carved wooden stool in the center of his room.

He led her in to avoid all the prying eyes now crammed into the corridor, trying to see this wonder talking to him.

Our Tiago, people tittered.

Tiago turned on a bright white LED lamp as she counted off a lot more money than he’d stolen, or given back to her. Bill after bill after bill. A massive fistful. A month’s takings. He was glad he’d come back to his room and drawn the curtain.

The massive stack of cash hovered between them.

“Before you tagged me and made the pick,” the cyborg lady said, “you seemed to know your way around the harbor. I need someone like you.”

Tiago took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure if he needed someone like her.

She was trouble.

She smiled as he hesitated to take the money. “Okay. I’ll double what you think you want.”

Tiago thought about that. He could want quite a bit.

She added more bills to the stack, to the point where Tiago could not ignore it. Even if it meant trouble. Even with Kay’s cut off the top.

He’d be a fool not to.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I’m looking for someone.” The woman shifted, and the stool creaked. Tiago grimaced. It was made of imported wood, and it was his most precious possession. 

“Who are you looking for?” he asked.

“I’m looking for Kay.”

“Kay?” Fear stabbed at him as Tiago feigned confusion. He felt trapped. And a little bit scared again.

“You know who I’m talking about.”

He did. He
so
did.

This woman was as scary as Kay about being able to read your face and study you, tell that you were lying.

And Tiago had never been a good liar. He was quick with his fingers, for sure. Not good at playing cool. He swallowed nervously. “What do you need from her?"

“I need Kay’s help.” Tiago waited for more, and the lady continued, “To find my grandfather. How do I find her?”

“You don’t find Kay,” Tiago said. He folded the money away into the depths of his ragged clothes before she could change her mind about the payment. “She finds you. Go find yourself a nice room along the waterfront somewhere. Kay will show up now that someone knows you’re trying to find her. That’s how it works.”

“Word on the street.” The woman leaned forward and held out her hand. A card rested in the palm. “I’ll pay you the other half when I meet Kay. Come find me tomorrow at noon.”

Tiago took the card, trying not to choke on the thought of “the other half.” An address had been scribbled onto it. 

“What shall I tell Kay your name is?” he asked, still looking down and working at reading the letters.

“I’m Nashara.”

Nashara? A cyborg called Nashara.
The
Nashara? 

Was he really talking to a living, breathing legend? A heroine of the human uprising? One of the League’s most hated agents of the Xenowealth?

Tiago’s hands shook.

She was a lot more than just trouble.

He’d gotten caught up in something big. So big, he was liable to be stepped on by accident without anyone noticing.

Tiago joined everyone in the corridor. They all watched her walk right back out in the fiery rain of Placa del Fuego as if it were just … a normal morning mist.