The Last City (5 page)

‘I’ll have a psychic analyst evaluate her and rule her as withholding information. Under the present conditions in the city, the courts will grab at anything to stop the deaths.’ The commander rubbed a hand over his forehead in an uncharacteristic display of stress.

Jude shifted uncomfortably on the couch and said, ‘I’m sorry, Commander, but how could Keets have anything to do with what’s going on? She hasn’t been anywhere near Scorpia in year-cycles, before I even joined the Regiment, and besides, aren’t Keets and Christy Shawe enemies?’

‘So?’ Diega asked.

‘So if he’s the instigator, he wouldn’t have recruited her, would he? What’s the point of purging her mind if she doesn’t know anything?’ Jude said.

‘She knows everything,’ Diega insisted. ‘This is Ev’r Keets we’re talking about. And since when have you been against purging?’

‘What do you mean since when have I been against purging?’ Jude demanded, sitting forward in his chair. ‘You know very well how I feel about that sort of thing.’ SevenM moved restlessly on his shoulder.

Diega shook her head. ‘You’re against the death penalty, you don’t agree with imprisonment, you don’t like purging. Are you sure you’re in the right profession, Jude?’

The Ar Antarian’s face flushed deep grey. ‘I’m in the profession of saving lives, Diega. What’s your vocation?’

Diega laughed. ‘My vocation? You know what Jude, come back and talk to me after you’ve been a tracker for a few more year-cycles, because you obviously haven’t been on the job for long enough.’

‘Long enough for what?’ Jude raised his voice. ‘To become so desensitised and cold that I stop feeling anything at all?’

Diega snorted and Copernicus stepped in. ‘Jude, Keets has been marked as a traitor by the king himself. He will want to make an example of her. Keets won’t be shown any kind of leniency.’

‘And neither should she,’ Diega added. ‘She is a murderer. She took life, she deserves for her life to be taken, and before she does, we’ll split open her mind and expose her thoughts. She will be of use to us whether she agrees to it or not.’

‘Commander,’ Jude said. ‘Maybe if we just reasoned with her —’

‘Did you not see what happened back there?’ Diega talked over him.

Jude ignored her and spoke again to the commander. ‘Just keep talking to her. Maybe she will give us something.’

‘Why would you even care what happens to Keets?’ Diega demanded.

‘I understand how you feel,’ the commander replied to Jude. ‘But Keets won’t give us anything. I know her. She’s a scullion. She will never talk. She will never change. There is no way to reach her. There’s nothing I can do. End of story.’

Eli thought of the way Ev’r Keets had looked at Silho and wondered if this was completely true. It had definitely appeared as though she had recognised the new recruit. Eli glanced at Silho. She was keeping silent so he decided not to mention what he’d seen in front of everyone. He would talk to Copernicus when they were alone. In the meantime, there was an unveiling to be done.

‘Okay,’ Eli jumped in at the pause in conversation. He dumped an armful of equipment onto the table in front of the others. ‘As promised – the new and improved tracker communicators.’ No one responded, deep in their own thoughts. It wasn’t the level of excitement Eli had hoped for, but he ploughed on regardless. ‘New functions of the Communicator 8020 include holo-speak, multi-talk and multi-message, which means I could call everyone on the team at once and either have a conference call, with or without image display, or leave a group message, which you could all access. Additionally, it has an automatic message function, so if the connection doesn’t go through or the machine is switched off, you can still leave a message, which will sit in the lines until the other system can receive it. As well as that, it has improved sound quality, range and speed of connection. It works underwater, underground and at high velocity, and it also has the highly anticipated detachable locator function, so we can check our systems and see exactly where everyone is at all times.’

‘Great,’ Diega said, her tone flat. ‘Exactly what I needed – minus zero privacy in my life.’

‘You’ve done well, Eli, as always,’ Jude said. He sat forward and took one of the new communicators. SevenM scurried down his arm and patted at the locator screen with one metal limb.

‘See,’ Eli leaned in and pointed to the screen, ‘we’re all a different-coloured marker. I’m yellow, Diega is pink, Silho is green, the commander is black and you and SevenM are blue. And the whole system is fingerprint operated, so if anyone else grabs your communicator it will immediately shut down, and if someone tries to access the internals without a security pass the communicator will explode. I’ve already programmed them to override the old system, so all we need to do is activate them and you can hand in your old machines.’

‘I don’t want to be pink,’ Diega complained.

‘You’re pink. Deal with it,’ the commander said. He leaned over and took one of the communicators. He powered it on and pressed the locator screen to activate the machine. As he did, the communicator emitted a deafening high-pitched squeal. Eli hurriedly fiddled with the settings and managed to stop the sound.

‘It may take a bit of time to iron out all the glitches.’ He gave a nervous giggle.

The commander’s new communicator buzzed with an incoming call and Copernicus answered.

‘Yes.’ He paused. ‘Yes.’ He moved away from the group to talk.

The others handed in their old systems and activated their new machines. Eli noticed Silho didn’t have to take off her gloves to activate her system. She just flipped up the capped end of one of the fingertips. He found himself staring. She really was unusually stunning.

His stomach rumbled, gurgled and gave a flatulent squeak. Diega looked at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Hungry?’

‘I was up before dawn this morning and early rising gives me gas,’ he explained.

‘That and everything else,’ the Fen teased.

‘Not everything,’ Eli said. ‘Just silence, emotional speeches, running, sudden bouts of laughter, baked beans, lentils, cabbage . . . Please, like I’m the only one.’ He grinned. Nelly sprang off the edge of the bench and landed back in Eli’s pocket. She curled up and fell asleep.

‘What’s that?’ Diega asked, pointing to something on Eli’s workbench.

‘This,’ Eli said grandly, picking up the object, ‘is my latest design in shielding technology.’ He showed them the large mirror-faced shield. ‘It’s made of smash-proof, lightweight sagittarian glass, resistant to extreme heat or cold, with the unique radiating protection designed to completely shield the holder, even the parts of the body not covered.’

‘
Dimenef reflets
,’ Diega said. The shield shivered and shrank down to a compact palm-sized mirror. She gave a teasing grin.

‘It’s a work in progress,’ Eli said, mentally kicking himself for not taking morphing skill into consideration when he was designing it. ‘Here.’ he handed it to Silho, ‘a welcome to the team gift from me!’

The new recruit spoke a soft thankyou and took the mirror.

Copernicus rejoined them. ‘There’s been another attack – another hollow body.’

Diega cursed. ‘Where?’

‘Fortitude Hill. Eli, I want you on site for this one. I want you to evaluate the injury and tell me what kind of weapon could have made it.’

‘Yes, boss.’

‘And try not to upchuck this time,’ Diega poked Eli in the ribs as she got to her feet.

‘I have everything under control,’ Eli said, his voice projecting far more confidence than he felt.

T
he suburbs of Moris-Isles and Fortitude Hill were 640 levels and an entire universe apart. Somewhere between the two, desperate, dirt-dredging, seven-families-to-one-room poverty had given way to pristine, sculpted gardens, highly polished transflyers and seventeen-rooms-to-one-man mansions. Here, under the eternal blazing stare of high-powered laser-globes, the feeble lantern-lights of the city slums and the shadow people who subsisted beneath them faded to a half-forgotten dream. Silho stood on the corner of Saint Wickham and Berry streets, surveying the neighbourhood through the underwater waver of a concussion. Her head throbbed in a remorseless pounding rhythm and a migraine pain ached behind her eyes, but she fought not to show it. Not today – the first day of really living after a lifetime of dreaming.

In this neighbourhood, only the snip-snip of water sprinklers and the gurgle of fountains broke the silence of night. Scents of freshly cut lawn and citrus leaves perfumed the air. Silho glanced around at the others climbing out of the transflyer. Their movements were shaky. Diega had put them through a punishing trip of speeding swoops and swerves and very near misses. Silho hadn’t needed to be an empathetic sensor to feel the Ohini Fen’s undercurrent of frustration sparking into anger. Ev’r Keets had got to her badly, though in exactly which way Silho didn’t know, and, in truth, didn’t care to know. Diega’s nasty attitude was getting old fast, and Silho’s dislike for the Fen, though she hid it behind a well-practised mask, was growing by the second. As for Ev’r Keets . . . Silho’s chest constricted painfully and her throat tightened as the memory of what had happened in the interrogation cell replayed again behind her eyes. During her military training, she had never connected the renegade Keets with the scullion-gypsy girl Zingara Ohavor – someone she remembered as a friend, someone she had looked up to, had wanted to be, if only because she reminded Silho of her mother. What she felt seeing Zingara after so long, in such a way, could only be described as heartbreak – if what was already broken could be re-broken – because it meant only one thing. Ismail had died and taken to his grave every grain of hope and goodness Zingara had tried to hold on to, and she had tried, leaving behind the shell – Ev’r Keets.

Silho blinked away the empty sadness misting her eyes. She forced it back into a dark corner of her mind, to stay until she was alone, in her own room, where she could press her face into her pillow and cry as loudly as she needed to.

‘Silho.’

A voice jolted her out of her reverie and she turned to the imp-breed tracker, Eli Anklebiter, standing beside her.

‘Sorry, I meant to startle you – I mean, I did
not
mean to startle you . . .’ He tripped over his words and angry red splotches broke out all over his neck.

Silho considered him. He was short and slight with a shaved head and protuberant ears. His large, dark eyes sparkled and a mischievous smile played constantly at the corners of his mouth. His bloodline marks were a harlequin colour struggle between the blue stripes of a Glee and the purple dots of a Greer. That explained a lot.

‘How . . . how are you holding up?’ he asked.

Silho opened her mouth to reply, but was interrupted by Diega calling out beside them,

‘
Eizenef aregz’amon
.’ With an unnecessarily loud crack of Fen magics, she morphed the tracker’s transflyer, the
Ory-4
, into a silver coin and then pushed it into her pocket.

The commander spoke to the group. ‘Number 201 Berry. Move out.’ He stepped out into the street and everyone fell in silently behind him. They walked along the avenue lined with identical straight-trunk trees pruned to a tedium of perfection. Tall street lamps, placed at exact and equal intervals behind the trees, blazed above their branches. Silho kept a vigilant watch on her surroundings as much as she could with the sick haze veiling her sights. She looked up into the lights and saw that no bugs swarmed the glowing globes.

Eli, trotting at her side, noticed her looking and said, ‘It’s because of the nets, super-fine Wraith-woven silks, encircling the entire suburb. They keep everything out.’

‘Look at this trutting place.’ Diega sneered at the angular mansions completely encircled by front, side and sky gates like big cages. Silho stared at all the darkened windows, searching for some light.

‘Not a soul in sight,’ Eli commented.

‘Murder tends to scare away the well-to-do,’ Diega said nastily. ‘In case they get blood on their fine linen and manicured hands.’

Silho noticed Jude grit his teeth. SevenM, riding on his shoulder, stroked the side of the Ar Antarian’s face with one multi-jointed leg in a soothing motion. She’d been too stressed to really think about it when they’d first met, but it now occurred to Silho how strange it actually was for an Ar Antarian to be a tracker – or any kind of active soldier for that matter. Ar Antarians, the upper-level racial group to which the king of Scorpia, Miron U, belonged, usually held positions of power and left the grunt work for everyone else. Jude was obviously an exception – and obviously not afraid of murder.

As they neared the end of the street, Silho registered a shift of shadows up ahead. She blinked into light-form vision and saw a glowing figure standing beside an open gate in front of one of the houses. The person saw them as well and drew back. Silho hesitated, but when the others didn’t pause or draw their weapons, she continued on as well. They took several more steps before she placed the shape and size of the form as belonging to a machine-breed. When they came within talking distance, the Androt stepped out into a pool of light and Silho changed back to normal sight.

The Androt woman wore a white uniform with a blue servant’s apron. Her dark hair was pulled severely back into a low bun, exposing the barcode numbers on her neck – 363430. She wrung her hands like a wet cloth.

Copernicus spoke to her. ‘United Regiment Oscuri Trackers.’ He held up his identification, but the Androt didn’t look at it, gazing instead at their faces, studying their facial features and movements with expert, robotic precision.

‘You called about a suspected murder.’ Copernicus pocketed his ID.

‘Yes, sir.’ She spoke with a lowered voice. ‘If you wish, I’ll show you in.’

‘Show us,’ Copernicus consented.

The Androt led them up the path, towards the mansion house. She glanced back several times with nervous eyes. Silho noted the distinct lack of light in the yard compared with the other houses. Garden sculptures crouched in the shadows like stalking beasts. The Androt showed them up a set of stairs and through open double doors into the lobby of the mansion. Silho noticed two things immediately: the biting cold and the smell of blood. Her eyes followed two grand staircases leading up from either side of the lobby into a second storey. A chandelier twinkled above them. Works of art hung on the lobby walls, mostly portraits of sad-looking girls, barely dressed and strewn over lounges. Silho avoided staring too long at the pictures. She looked instead at Copernicus Kane and saw, by the rapid movement of his eyes, that he was taking in the surroundings – not just looking
at
but
beyond
and
through
. He felt her stare and turned towards her, studying her with the same deep scrutiny. She quickly lowered her eyes, nerves buzzing inside her.

The Androt maid closed the door behind them and said, ‘If you wish, please follow me.’

Copernicus nodded and she led them again, through the lobby and into a corridor dimly lit by overhead globes. They passed many rooms big enough to swallow Silho’s apartment whole and headed towards the end of the corridor where a light shone brighter. They reached the doorway and the Androt stepped aside. She gestured for them to go in and bowed her head. Copernicus and Diega entered first; Jude said a quiet thankyou to the Androt and followed them. Eli went after him, tripping and almost falling on the carpet. Silho grabbed his arm to steady him. He gave a nervous giggle and whispered, ‘
Oops
’. They entered together and Silho heard the maid’s footsteps retreating back down the hallway.

The room was a parlour with tasteful tapestries lining the walls, delicate china displayed in glass cabinets, a large fireplace with various sculptures posed above it, and, on the ground in front of the fireplace, a hollowed-out corpse lying in the centre of a shaggy rug. A dark red stain had spread out around the body of the middle-aged woman.

Silho’s eyes were drawn to the corpse’s glassy dead stare, then down to the terrible gaping wound in her stomach and chest. The wound looked as though it had been cauterised, like the two other hollowed-out victims at the Moris-Isles crime scene. Silho noted no signs of torture apparent at first glance, but the bruising on the corpse’s legs and arms, and the overturned and smashed objects and drag marks all over the carpet suggested a violent struggle. Silho immediately noticed an inconsistency. The corpse was a human-breed with red blood, but the rug and walls were also splattered with white machine-breed blood, so much of it that she doubted even a fast-healing Androt could survive the loss.

So there had to be a second body somewhere.

The sound of the commander’s voice broke Silho’s concentration. ‘Mrs Parkingham,’ Copernicus greeted a short woman, wearing a lavender satin dressing gown. She stood beside the fireplace staring at the blood-stained walls. Two Androt maids flanked her.

The woman jolted and turned. She was a human-breed with the petite, pinched features of rabbit heritage. She stared at the commander with bloodshot eyes streaming tears behind thick glasses and held a scrunched handkerchief close to her nose. It gave an occasional twitch.

‘I’m Commander Copernicus Kane of the Oscuri Trackers.’ He gestured behind him. ‘My team.’

Silho noticed everyone else had dispersed around the room, as though by silent command, to do their own tasks. Jude and SevenM were examining the shattered window of the sitting parlour, a possible entry or exit route for the murderer. Diega and Eli knelt on either side of the corpse. Silho didn’t know what she should be doing, so she stepped back to stand beside Jude and continued to observe the commander speaking with the woman.

‘Mrs Parkingham, I need to ask you a few questions.’

The woman dabbed her nose with the handkerchief and her maids helped her to sit on one of the couches. Copernicus sat opposite her, leaning forward.

‘You are the owner of this house?’ he asked.

Mrs Parkingham nodded.

‘Did you discover the deceased?’

She nodded again and said in an accent that swapped between commoner lower-level Urigin to uptight upper-level Urigin, betraying her newly rich status, ‘I heard a sound. I came downstairs and . . . and . . .’

‘And what did you see?’

‘This room – like this . . .’ She gestured around.

‘You didn’t see anyone exiting the room?’

She shook her head.

‘Do you know the deceased?’

‘Which one?’ The woman’s lip quivered.

The commander gave her a look that prompted her to explain. ‘Well, look,’ she squeaked, pointing to the walls. ‘How can he still be alive? Tell me how. Our poor Kry!’ She covered her face and dissolved into sobs. The Androt maids also began to cry. Copernicus turned to them.

‘Who is Kry?’

They glanced at each other and one answered hesitantly, ‘Mrs Parkingham’s gardener.’

‘Kry is an Androt?’ the commander clarified.

They nodded. Silho felt a tug of surprise – most Androt owners called their servants by their numbers, not their names.

Mrs Parkingham spoke again, her voice choked and wet. ‘This
person
,’ she gestured to the body, ‘must have broken in with someone else. Kry heard them and tried to save me. It would be like him to do that. He managed to stop this one, but the other one must have injured or killed him and taken away his body. We’ve searched all the house and garden and there is no sign. Maybe he could still be alive somewhere. What are you going to do about finding him?’ she demanded.

‘Everything we can,’ Copernicus assured her.

‘What do you care?’ Jude spoke abruptly from where he stood at the window. He stared at Mrs Parkingham with open hostility. His silver face had flushed to dark grey. ‘Are you concerned your garden will fall into disarray without your slave to tend to it?’ SevenM stood to his full height on Jude’s shoulder, also glaring at the woman. There was a moment of silence broken by the parlour chronograph ticking over and chiming two hour cycles past darkfall, with a long night still ahead. The commander lifted an eyebrow at Jude in silent question. Diega and Eli sat staring in suspended motion beside the corpse, Eli’s mouth making an O.

Mrs Parkingham stammered, ‘I’m concerned for him. For his . . . his wellbeing . . .’

‘I can imagine,’ Jude replied, his upper-level Ar Antarian accent pronounced in his anger. ‘It must be expensive to buy good slaves, especially ones willing to risk their lives for your silverware.’

‘How dare you!’ Mrs Parkingham said. ‘I have never —’

‘Jude, Brabel,’ Copernicus interrupted, ‘go into the next room. Run a body-heat scan.’ When neither moved, he gestured with his head, ‘Now!’

For a moment Jude didn’t budge, then he turned and barged out of the room. Silho hurried to follow. She closed the door on the sound of the commander explaining that Jude was still learning his role in the trackers.

Jude stood beside the window, looking out into the unlit garden. The many red lights of SevenM’s eyes reflected in the glass.

Silho approached the Ar Antarian carefully. ‘Are you alright?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘I’m fine. I shouldn’t have said anything.’ But it didn’t sound to Silho as though he meant it.

‘You said what you felt.’

‘Exactly,’ he replied, his words heavy with bitterness.

‘You don’t like the way Androts are treated?’ Silho said.

‘You could say that,’ he replied.

‘Neither do I,’ she admitted. She glanced around the room for signs of hidden spyers recording their conversation. ‘Never have. I hope it changes.’

Jude exhaled and his rigidly held shoulders sagged. ‘Nothing changes without action,’ he said. ‘Action by braver men than me.’ He lowered his head and his tinted glasses slipped a little down his nose, showing a hint of electric blue – the eye colour of an Ar Antarian noble. Silho couldn’t help but stare. Jude was not just one of the upper-level Ar Antarians, but had obviously come from one of the few noble-blood families. It was difficult even to imagine why someone like him would want to go from being nobility to military – especially considering the two groups were mutually exclusive. Jude must have left everything behind to become a soldier. Silho was lost for words and desperately searched for a different topic.