The Last City (9 page)

A shadow passed over Silho’s face but she said nothing.

‘So, I mean, she’s never said this, and Diega never would, but I’m sure it affected her badly. I know she ran away from home soon after and ended up in the gangland. And now she never visits her parents, which is sad, especially considering most Fens live for their family and community. She must feel very alone sometimes . . . But speaking of Englan Chrisholm . . .’ He swooped down low over the suburb of Sunnyside. ‘There’s Englan Chrisholm’s house, where they found all his victims’ corpses.’

Eli looked down at the wrecked and desecrated house. Silho touched her head and closed her eyes, grimacing as though the pain was worsening.

‘Sorry, probably not the best time for the Scorpia’s-most-notorious tour. We’ll be at your place in a flash. Is there someone there who can take care of you?’ Eli asked, accelerating.

Silho shook her head.

‘Your parents?’

‘They passed away when I was young.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He knew he shouldn’t push for more information, but curiosity had always been one of his issues. ‘So who raised you?’

‘A friend of the family.’

‘Did you live close to here?’

‘In the outskirts mainly.’ Silho said. ‘The man I lived with was a salt-panner in the Matadori.’

‘Really? Is that where you met Ev’r Keets?’ Eli said before thinking.

Silho looked him squarely in the eyes and said, ‘I don’t know Ev’r Keets.’

He saw she wasn’t lying. Everyone knew Copernicus could see a lie, but few knew Eli also had the skill. There was a saying among the imp-breeds –
you can’t lie to a liar
.

‘So no husband, then?’ he asked.

‘I’m not married,’ Silho replied.

‘Boyfriend?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ Eli asked and Silho squirmed uncomfortably.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, realising he was being invasive, the way his kind usually were. ‘It’s none of my business, but if you’re looking, I’m available.’ He grinned again but Silho didn’t see. She held one hand over her eyes, obviously not doing so well.

Before Eli could voice his concern, the navigation system beeped to signal that they were almost over the target destination.

‘Here we are,’ he said and swooped down low, landing outside number 45 Hall Drive. The building was a huge government-funded high-rise for low-income earners. Most of the lights were out, only nocturnals or night-shift workers still awake at this hour.

‘I’ll walk you up,’ he offered.

‘Thank you, but I’m fine,’ Silho said in a tight voice that told him she was definitely not fine.

‘I insist.’ Eli leapt out of the transflyer and ran around to open Silho’s door. She let him help her out of the craft and he walked with her to the front door of the building. Silho scanned her hand over the sensor and the doors swung open. The lobby light switched on. The elevator was out of order so they took the stairs to the fourteenth floor, where Silho led Eli along a corridor with tattered carpet and flickering overhead lights to her apartment – number 1464.

After opening the door, she turned in the doorway to face him. He peeked around her into her living space, tidy and sparsely furnished with well-worn furniture. A big pod-shaped plant sitting in a pot on the windowsill caught his eye. Plant study was one of his favourite pastimes.

‘Pinkface Lily,’ he identified it. ‘That’s not a common bulb.’

‘True,’ Silho said with an edge to her voice that said she was impressed. ‘I bought it at a flea market – the seller had no idea.’

‘Did you know that the sap of a relative of that lily – the Venus Lily – has the strongest medicinal qualities of all known plants?’ Eli asked.

‘As long as it’s prepared right, otherwise it’s fatal,’ Silho added.

It was Eli’s turn to be impressed. His pitch rose in excitement. ‘True – too bad they’re impossible to breed and beyond impossible to find,’ he said. In truth, there was actually believed to be a bountiful supply of Venus Lilies in the city, on the very lowest level – Level 997 – known as Venus, alleged to be overrun by dangerous and violent plant life. No one but Oren Harvey had ever ventured down there. She had returned with the Venus Lily, but had been seriously injured and had never spoken of her journey except to say there were many more where it had come from, but that she strongly advised against trying to retrieve them. He would have loved to inspect the plant closer, but he could sense Silho’s fatigue deepening.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Call me if you need anything.’

‘Thank you – goodnight,’ she said.

‘No problems at all,’ Eli responded. ‘And I think it’s more like good morning,’ he added with a laugh as she closed the door. It clicked shut and the lock shunted into place.

Eli stood looking at the door. He recognised loneliness in Silho. He himself had been very lonely for a very long time, yet he was also sure, even though they were both lonely, that he would never have a chance with her. They were too different. He was too different from everyone. People said there would be someone out there for him, who would love him and whom he could love, but he was starting to think this might not be the case. Even imp-breed women thought he was too short. Turning away from the door, he headed back down the corridor, only to pause in mid-stride as a ripple in the wallpaper seized his attention. Frowning, he reached out a hand and touched the place where he had seen the movement. But the wall was solid, with not even a scratch on it. Eli guessed it was probably just a spectral-breed, a Wraith or a Ghost of some sort. Shrugging off his unease, he glanced one final time at Silho’s door then hurried away. His wings were cramped and chafed and he couldn’t wait to go home and stretch them.

S
ilho stood in the centre of her lounge room, present in body, but gone in mind. Alone in the sanctuary of her own square of the city, she dissected the day, her every utterance, her every step. Every raw and ugly detail magnified and processed with the harshest of scrutiny. Hours passed in seconds, and when she emerged into the present, blinking in time with the dripping kitchen tap, her stomach muscles ached and her jaw was throbbing. She unclenched her teeth, released her fisted fingers and drew in several deep breaths, blowing out each one slowly to regain equilibrium.

Today she had failed, but it wasn’t the first time and it wasn’t the end of time, so tomorrow she would try again. This was the way she did things. This was the way she survived. Take it in, let it out, keep moving. Hammersmith had taught her that. He had never tried to replace her father, but he’d always treated her like his own child, and made her work so hard she’d screamed her hatred at him and learnt day by day that wherever her limitations lay, she hadn’t yet reached them. This knowing fed her strength, but at the same time, Silho understood she was unwell. She could see that she was living a life of contradiction, spending her days half-asleep and her nights fighting to stay awake. When she spoke, she lied, and when she lied, she was trying to speak a truth so horrendous there were no words for it, just images seared into eternal remembrance.

Today, she’d taken all the hits everyone had aimed at her, and had, as always, bitten back her violent words and swallowed her anger. It tasted of bleach and burned her black from the inside out. It wasn’t that she was faking, it was that she was fractured, both full of courage and fear, full of doubt and certainty, so anchored to her purpose and so lost inside it. She knew this conflict within her was responsible for her nightmares, where her parents lived grotesque half-lives in the witching hours between mid-dark and dawn, but she didn’t know how to reconcile herself. Only that she had to keep going. She had to find the truth within the twisted lies. That was why she had enslaved herself to her study and training, day and night, for three year-cycles without a break, without a life, to become a tracker. She’d risked everything – always half a step from being discovered.

Silho moved on automatic, looking up to the ceiling, searching for I-eyes and spyers. She blinked into light-form vision and searched the apartment for traces of any body-light. When she saw none, she physically checked under every surface and behind every door. Once the task was complete, she did it again, prisoner to a mind that always doubted and second-guessed itself. When she was sure she was alone, unwatched and unrecorded, she unclipped her weapon belt and shed her gloves. Flexing her fingers, she allowed herself to stretch out and touch one of the apartment walls. Her hands sank into the plaster and images flashed through her mind – hazy pictures of what had happened in her apartment while she was away. The hands of the chronograph on the wall spun through time. Outside her windows daylight faded to nightlight and the shadows of the stray cats she fed brushed against the pane of glass. Her Pinkface Lily yawned and idly snapped at a passing mosquito. Her door opened. She saw herself saying goodbye to Eli . . .

Silho pulled back from the wall, satisfied, only to gasp in agony as the pain from her injury lanced through her skull with renewed force. Using the wall as support, sparking images with her bare fingertips, she staggered towards her bedroom. Christy Shawe’s fist had actually barely skimmed her skin and yet still had felt like a sledgehammer blow. It was almost unimaginable how destructive the full force of the gangster king’s strength would be –
enough to punch through a man’s stomach?
Scenes from the breakwall replayed in her mind, causing her to inwardly shudder –
Why didn’t I move?
She had been too focused on the commander. Seeing him fighting with Shawe, seeing the cold rage in his dark eyes, had both repelled and mesmerised her. Silho wasn’t sure why, but wasn’t surprised that she was so conflicted.

She made it to her bedroom, but left the light off, seeing well enough by the street lamps outside. Their glow called to her and she moved to the window and peered out behind the edge of the curtain, looking into the apartment block beside hers. There was something comforting about seeing other people living their lives and knowing she wasn’t alone. In one apartment, a couple lay in bed kissing passionately. Their flimsy curtain, fluttering in the breeze, gave them little privacy. They didn’t notice or maybe didn’t care. Silho looked away, embarrassed to be watching, but her eyes were drawn back. She wanted that closeness with someone, to be unafraid and unashamed, and held skin to skin, but she couldn’t imagine that ever happening. Her thoughts hovered momentarily over images of Copernicus before she blocked them out. It could never happen.

In an apartment several storeys above the couple, a man struggled to hang a large painting by himself. Silho glanced at the canvas then immediately turned away, but as she did, vibrant colours appeared on the white wash of her deliberately blank walls, dazzling blues and pale pinks, oranges and yellows. They spread, twisted with each other, becoming new colours, which further fused to create more. The picture evolved before her eyes, faces, bodies, landscape and sky. She couldn’t just see the colour – she could taste it. Black was aniseed, pink musk, blue blueberry – sweet and sour tingled on her tongue. This wasn’t just a painting – it was alive, and it called to Silho to create it, to buy paints and let other people see what her mind made from blankness, but she couldn’t. So she squeezed her eyes shut, and when they reopened, the colours had disappeared and her mouth was dry.

She took one of the half-empty glasses of water that sat on every surface of the room. This hoarding was a peculiarity she’d developed after growing up in the desert where there was never enough water. Her guardian, Hammersmith, had believed in the character-building effects of deprivation. Big and bearded, with a booming voice, people had been terrified of him, until they got to know him. Zingara Ohavor, now Ev’r Keets, had said he must have had some giant in him. Silho clearly recalled the slight gypsy girl facing off with the huge hulking form of Hammersmith. Ev’r had stolen from their food stash and, being an ex-Oscuri Tracker, Hammersmith had hunted her down easily and demanded it back. He believed in discipline and getting things the hard but honest way. Zingara believed in every man and woman for themselves – except when it came to Ismail.

Silho remembered him. She remembered him sitting with her and listening quietly as she’d gabbled on about nothing important, overwhelmed to see other people after only having Hammersmith for company for so long. Though she’d been much younger than them, she’d recognised the deep love in their eyes when they looked at each other. She’d also seen, in light-form vision, the darkness closing in around Ismail’s glow – and understood what that meant. When she’d started crying, he’d taken her hands in his own much larger ones, scarred rough from years of military duty. He had spoken softly to her. He’d told her it was okay, that he wasn’t afraid. Paradise was waiting for him. Zingara didn’t know and Silho didn’t tell her because something in the darkness of Ismail’s storm-black eyes had begged her not to. Zingara and Ismail had left together, hand in hand, walking through the desert towards the setting northern sun.

Hammersmith had said to let them go. Silho was sure he knew. He had a certain unusual sense of things. He used to look into the night sky and tell her stories about other worlds. It was his one and only dream to fly into space and find these worlds hidden among the stars. When Hammersmith had passed away she’d buried him in the sand and left immediately for Scorpia City, her steps driven by the need to prove her father’s innocence.

Silho looked back out of the window and down to the street below. A small group of Androts had gathered in an alley beside the neighbouring apartment block and stood talking. Being out at this hour, they were breaking machine-breed curfew. This was something she had been seeing with increasing regularity – something that never used to happen. Things were changing, she could feel it.

The pain in her head forced Silho away from the comfort of the window. She went to the bathroom, where she turned on the light and looked into the mirror. A shiver ran along her back. When had she fallen asleep and woken up as her mother? Her thoughts flickered back to the night in the Matadori Desert – the last time she had seen her mother, Commander Oren Harvey. Silho spoke to her silently in her mind, as she stared at her own reflection,

The last time I saw you, you were kneeling in the sand, you said to recognise this deadland for what it was – a pilgrim’s rest, away from walls and thoughts and a million pleading voices, a place to right my mind and soul before the final battle. You said that here the circular, binary universe of iniquities revisited and patterns repeated started to make sense to you – where your fight ended and mine began, where the future became the present and the present the past.
The past where Silho’s father, the paintsmith Englan Chrisholm, had been condemned and executed by the state. They took blood for blood – leaving only the fractured reconstructions of the man resurrected every night in her dreams. His truth according to her mind’s eye. And this truth screamed his innocence. Englan Chrisholm had not tortured and murdered all those children. There had been forbidden places in their house, rooms with locks, cupboards with chains, but he’d stored his important art there, not the twisted pieces of flesh that the soldiers had dragged out on the day of his arrest. In the aftermath of his arrest and her incarnation, Silho had begun to hear the walls speak and knew she was either insane or gifted – and since she was sane enough to consider insanity, she decided she was gifted, but horribly so. She was someone whose very life was heresy. Imprisoned by palace enforcers, her mother had been her saviour. Oren had freed her and taken her to Hammersmith for a new identity, a new life, but too injured from the battle, Oren had been unable to save herself. Tears misted Silho’s eyes and she didn’t look like Oren anymore. It was said that her mother had never been afraid of anything.
I’m just the ghost of your shadow
, she told her.

Silho took a bottle from the sink and shook out two black pills into her hand – black pills to blacken the past. As she swallowed them down, a sense of calm settled over her.

She stripped off her clothes and the bandages binding her arms and stepped under the shower. The warm water streamed over her bloodline marks, the orange flame of her Pyron mother and the firebird dragon of her father. She ran her hands over the colours and up to the picture on her neck and chest. They had first appeared in the desert without explanation or possible cause.

When the aching of her head had eased and the water was completely cold, she grabbed a towel and went back out to her room to sit at her desk.

‘Activate,’ she told her computer system.

The last image she had been looking at before she’d shut down the system earlier that day came up on her holo-screen. It was a hologram of Copernicus Kane. As she stared at the picture, the pills she’d taken numbing her emotions, dulling her pain, a thought came into her mind.
Why not go back to Moris-Isles and search for the samples, just for yourself? Just so you know you can do it, so you know that they are wrong and you are right.

Blood trickled down the side of Silho’s face. The wound had reopened in the shower, despite the stitches. They
were
wrong that she was incapable and she
would
prove it to herself. The next thing she registered, she was already dressed, her arms rebound and weapon belt clipped around her waist. Silho left her apartment without looking back, not thinking for a second that she’d never walk through that door again.