The Last City (15 page)

He continued to study the Wraith’s face. Why would a Wraith be at the crime scene? They weren’t a curious type of spectral and they weren’t blood-fascinated. Maybe it had just stepped through the wrong wall or the wrong floor and stumbled there by accident? He’d run it by Copernicus when he got back.

Eli glanced at the holo-screen showing the footage of Ev’r Keets’ cell through the spyer he had planted under the table. The fugitive was crouched unmoving in one corner. Eli thought about Jude and his confession for probably the billionth time that hour. He shook his head in disbelief. Ev’r shivered and Eli remembered something else that Jude’s announcement had blotted from his mind – he remembered Ev’r’s warning about Silho. Grabbing the communicator off his weapon belt, he checked the locator screen. The green spot representing Silho was not at her home where it should have been, but in Moris-Isles. Uneasiness wrung Eli’s gut.

‘
Lai Lai
, Silho, what are you doing there?’ he said to himself, then instructed his system, ‘Call Brabel.’

D
roplets of blood shimmered ruby in the lantern light as they dripped from Silho’s head to her trousers, blossoming crimson flowers on the grey dullness of the fabric. She pressed her hands into her face, aware of the other passengers. They looked, but didn’t really see, all eyes focused inward.

A tinny voice erupted over the intercom, ‘Next stop Eastend Station, Moris-Isles.’

Silho dragged herself to her feet and went to stand in front of the door. She looked into the darkened glass and met her reflection’s stare. A sickness spiralled inside her. Oren Harvey’s eyes stared out from under her hood. They looked inside her heart and they mocked what they saw. What did she think she was doing going back to the crime scene? What would disobeying orders accomplish, other than getting herself discharged from the team or even killed, or worse? Why was she trying to retrace footsteps made by shoes she could never fill?
I’m just the ghost of your shadow
. . . Silho took the bottle from her pocket, shook out two more pills and swallowed them down. Synthetic serenity silenced her fear. And distorted her judgement.

The public transporter swooped to a halt at Eastend Station and the doors slid open. A hot gust of Moris-Isles air, stinking like an abattoir, rushed into the carriage. Some passengers covered their noses, others averted their eyes. Silho left them to their silence and stepped out onto the platform underneath a jittering fluoro light swarming with kamikaze moths. The doors closed behind her and the transporter zoomed away.

The neon lights of Eastend, Moris-Isles, gleamed in the distance and a booming bassline thudded in time with Silho’s heart. Bottles smashed, voices yelled and cursed. Someone screamed. Silho took in the barren platform littered with cigarette butts and rubbish. Anything once there, both freestanding and bolted down, had long since been broken or stolen, and graffiti marked every inch of space. Below Silho’s boots the words RIP Dupuesta, Weldido, Brahe sprawled across the concrete – the names of the first gangsters, the originals. Silho crossed the platform towards the top of the stairs, where a group of gang members dressed in the yellow leather of the Penny Little Alliance were loitering. As Silho neared, one of them, a human-breed of leopard blood, stepped out to her.

‘What you looking at, gadfly?’ he spat.

Show no fear,
Silho told herself. She drew her military standard electrifier and pointed it at him. His self-assurance drained and he said nothing more as she passed.

Silho picked her way down towards the street. The steps, termite-eroded and precarious, without a railing to hold, blurred under her feet and she fought to focus around the pulsating of her head. Blood seeped from the wound. Afraid the smell would attract the Midnight Men, she pulled her hood further over her face, then jolted at the sudden buzz of her communicator. She snatched it off her belt, cursing herself for not leaving it at home. Her first instinct was to not answer, but then the team might think she was in trouble and come looking. But what if it was the commander and he sensed she was lying? With shaking hands, she pressed the receive call button.

‘Silho.’

She breathed relief to hear Eli’s voice. ‘Yes.’

‘My locator says you’re in Moris-Isles. Is that right or is my system glitching?’

‘No, your system is right. I’m just – visiting a friend,’ Silho tried to sound casual.

‘In the Isles?’ Eli seemed unconvinced.

‘She lives here. She asked me to come over.’

‘At three hours to dawn?’

‘She’s nocturnal . . .’ Silho winced as she said it.

‘But you should be at home. You should be resting. The commander ordered it,’ Eli reminded her.

Silho swore again silently and replied, fighting to keep her voice calm, ‘I know. I just – she had an emergency, an emotional emergency. Women’s business. Can you just keep this between us?’

Eli paused. His voice dragged with reluctance and uncertainty. ‘I suppose so, but I really think you should head home.’

‘I will,’ Silho lied. ‘Thanks, Eli.’ She pressed the end transmission button, then found the communicator’s power switch and shut it down. She knew it would look suspicious, but she couldn’t have him seeing her return to the same street as the crime scene. The friend story wouldn’t be enough to cover that.

She came to the last stair and moved out into the street, but her steps faltered as roaring snarls sounded close by. Two packs of Stogs, troll-breeds, turned the corners either side of where she stood. They were wielding spiky mallet-like weapons known as thupclubs and stretching wide, gooey maws full of blade-like teeth. Looking from one pack to the other, she realised she was in the centre of an imminent Stog turf war. She ran, ducking into a transflyer parking lot, which led away from the station district, and into the backstreets of night-time Moris-Isles. Silho’s heart thundered, throat too dry to swallow, but she moved quickly and purposefully, keeping a fearless front and her electrifier drawn.

The brothel district was still in full chorus of squeaky bedsprings, moans and screams when Silho hit the main stretch. As she passed under the windows of one grindhouse, a tall figure stepped out of the doorway and started following her. With her electrifier armed, she turned to face him. He hissed and evaporated – Midnight Man. Silho shivered and pressed onward until she finally reached Whitter Avenue and stopped at the top of the stairs leading to the crime scene. The boards that the guardians had nailed across the doorway to stop people entering had been ripped away. With nerves prickling, she tightened her grip on her electrifier, blinked into light-form vision and moved down the stairs.

A red light shone from the crime scene. Silho crept along the corridor towards the room and stopped beside the doorway. She swapped back to normal sight and peered in. The coroners had cleared away the corpses, but blood still stained the floor and walls. A vulture-faced woman, dressed in a long dark blue cloak, paced the room. Silho’s senses flared in warning. This woman reminded her of one of her early training missions to the cursed city of Glargsh, where the dead had scrambled from their graves and walked out to meet them. They’d been as this woman was, shrivelled and hollow-eyed with gnarled claw-like fingers, their bodies wafting of rot. Silho moved closer and saw the woman pause at a makeshift bench where someone lay squirming slowly, groggy. The cloaked woman arranged small pots around the bench and dipped a fingertip into each. She drew on the prone person’s face in blood red – a triangle within a triangle, within a square. From inside her cloak, the woman took a severed arm and cut flesh from it, dropping pieces into each pot. They began to boil and rattle as her voice uncoiled from the darkness shrouding her face.

‘Power of Morsmalus, accept this flesh offering, accept this blood offering and grant your humble servant guidance to the key. Light the way to its resting place.’ She made some guttural sounds and the chamber shook. The shadows swirled around the walls. Silho stared in disbelief. The woman had used dark-words, curses, forbidden and punishable by immediate death without trial. They smelt of burning tar and stung Silho’s eyes.

The witch untied the cord from around her neck and let the cloak drop to the ground. She stood, naked and hideous, her scabby skin mutilated with symbol scars. A creature was moving inside her, pushing hands and a demon face against her back. Silho’s shock deepened. This wasn’t just a dark witch, this was a Skreaf – the worst of the demon cults. Silho recalled from her training that the Skreaf craft had once been, along with Cos, nature’s voice, the most widely used of the magics, but that the demons had been wiped out long ago in the purges during the reign of King Miron V. The Skreaf literature had been destroyed and little passed on about them, except that their members, born largely unskilled, paid for their power with flesh and soul.

The witch lifted something above her head and Silho saw the shimmer of a blade. The Skreaf plunged it down towards the trapped figure’s face. Silho’s instincts kicked in, overriding her shock. She aimed her electrifier at the Skreaf’s awful, writhing back and sent a massive surge of electricity into her. For a second the witch was trapped in a circle of light, then thrown forward, smashing into the wall. She lay crumpled on the ground, smoke rising from her skin.

Keeping the electrifier trained on the Skreaf, Silho moved swiftly to the trapped person. A spectral-breed, the Wraith whom she had seen earlier in her vision and in the wall, stared up at her with haunted grey eyes. There was nothing visible binding the Wraith to the bench, but her movements were sluggish, eyelids heavy – cursed.

‘Come on!’ Silho tried to help the grey-skinned spectral to sit up.

The Skreaf stirred and Silho sent another blast of electricity into her. The witch palmed away the beam of power and rose to her feet. With a flick of her hand, she melted Silho’s electrifier into a boiling mess. Silho threw it down and the witch started towards her, but then stopped, her eyes widening.

‘You?’

Looking at the Skreaf closer, Silho saw a vague likeness to someone she had known as a child – a woman named Bellum, curator of the Galleria Majora. She used to come to their house and talk to her artist father. Silho remembered Bellum had a cold, clinical stare even when her lips had twitched into the semblance of a smile and when she’d called Silho ‘my dear’.

‘Ms Bellum?’ Silho asked.

The Skreaf released a terrible high-pitched shriek. She lunged at Silho and grabbed her neck, strangling with impossibly strong, vile-smelling hands. The shadows in the room swirled. They formed shapes that stepped out of the walls and came towards them.

Silho gasped and shifted to light-form vision. She saw the writhing demon creature living inside the Skreaf’s skin. She drew power from the demon’s body-lights into her gloved hands, but had only taken a small amount before she felt a terrible burning, as though her skin was being set alight. Forced to break the connection, she used the power already gathered to shove her attacker away. As the witch flew back her fingernails scratched across Silho’s neck. Silho thought she saw a fleeting emotion in the witch’s eyes of something like surprise at the strength of Silho’s retaliation, but it was quickly glazed over by rage. The shadow figures caught the Skreaf, Bellum, before she hit the wall and she slunk back towards Silho, sinking low to the ground, her hair becoming snakes, her face a terrible sunken skull with blood-red eyes. She opened a foul, rotting mouth and spoke dark-words against Silho. Silho collapsed to the ground, agonised, as though stabbed by a thousand needles. She convulsed, unable to control her body. Her head and feet smashed against the floor again and again.

Behind Silho a voice hissed a Cos enchant, ‘
Indigo.
’

It caught the Skreaf by surprise, throwing the witch and her shadow army backward to the wall, which swallowed them up, trapping them inside the concrete. They stretched the rock like plastic trying to get free.

Silho rolled onto her stomach and warm blood spilled from her nose and ears. Her heartbeats sounded loud and detached. A figure appeared beside her and she stared up at the skeletal spectral-breed, wrapped in a giant moth-wing cloak. The recovered Wraith stood perfectly still, more like a sculpture than a real being. An image born out of a troubled mind, blending with the shadows, beautifully grotesque. Blood gurgled in Silho’s throat. The Wraith bent down and touched her face with velveteen fingertips. Silho struggled, unable to breathe, her vision blurring. She coughed and sparks flew from her mouth, burning her lips. A red glow ignited behind the Wraith’s eyes, and it lifted Silho to her feet with a strength belied by sickly thin limbs. It whispered a word:
Omarian
. Silho’s senses regathered around her and she saw the wall holding the witch starting to shake and crumble.

‘Run!’ she yelled at the Wraith and they both bolted for the exit. The spectral-breed passed through the wall, Silho through the doorway. She crashed along the pitch-black corridor and up the stairs. She didn’t stop at the top, but kept running, losing track of the Wraith and all sense of direction, not caring now who saw that she was afraid. Buildings blurred on either side of her and she hurtled over holes in the road made by the Burrowers. A terrible presence followed her, gathering, gaining. Silho grabbed at her weapon belt, her fingers finding her communicator. She ripped the device up to her mouth, grappling to turn it on as she raced forward. It buzzed to life.

‘Call Eli!’ she shouted.

The machine whined and whispered and found Eli’s system.

He answered. ‘Silho. Why did you —’

‘Eli!’ she screamed into the communicator. ‘Help me!’

‘What’s wrong?’ Eli yelled back, his voice rising several octaves. ‘What’s happening?’

‘A witch is chasing me! She’s behind me!’ Her feet pounded on the concrete and she gasped for air. A stitch ripped along one side of her body and blood streamed from her nose over her lips and chin. She glanced behind her at the shadows swelling like a storm. Another voice murmured behind the static of the communicator, but Eli’s reply blurred it out.

‘Keep running! I’m calling the commander.’ Silho heard sounds of Eli crashing around, then his frantic calls, ‘Boss! Boss! Come in – are you there? Diega – are you there?’ He spoke again to Silho. ‘Their machines are off, but I’m coming for you right now. I’ll find you! I’ll . . . Oh no!’ Silho heard a clunk and Eli’s voice dissolved into static.

‘Eli!’ Silho struggled to breathe. ‘Eli, answer!’

‘Silho!’ Jude’s clear, deep voice cut in through her machine. ‘I’m here, not far from you. I’m under attack as well. Look at your locator. Can you see me?’ She heard the zapping sound of Jude firing his electrifier and something screamed horribly. Silho lifted the machine to her eyes, the dots blurry through her watering eyes, but she made out the blue spot that was Jude. He was close.

‘I see you!’ she said.

‘Keep running towards me,’ Jude yelled over the noise of weapon fire. She heard him groan. Silho took a sharp turn down an alley and a stranger lunged at her and grabbed her by the shoulders. With the entire force of her terror behind her, Silho punched him in the face and smashed him out of the way. He screamed abuse after her, but his voice was cut to a bloody gurgle by whatever was chasing her. Silho didn’t look back. She was almost to Jude – two more corners. One more corner.