Airboards work a lot like two magnets of the same polarity, the way they push each other apart. When an airboard is switched on, it is repelled by matter. So left to itself an airboard will float about half a meter off the ground, bobbing slightly. Fitted with a drive, it becomes your best way of getting around the City. We liked to ride pretty high, but you can go only so long through the air before you start to fall; then you need to find a solid object to slide over that will give you the uphit to rise again. Boarding is the greatest fun you can have in this world. There are plenty of railings, ledges, walls, and cars, moving or parked, to let you dance through the shadows of the City, riding the beat of one uphit after another, flitting erratically like a bat above the heads of the staring walkers.
I took an uphit from a parked car to come out of the nose ride, moving fast toward the factory. My next move was going to be a one eighty off a windowsill, and I needed my right foot back on the tail of the board. Somewhere down in the parking lot, my friends were watching and admiring.
With a screech, the window opened, and a security guard thrust out his helmeted face. “Beat it, kid!”
“Watch out, Ghost!” someone cried from below.
There was no time to pull out of my move. With a snarl, I tried to get some of the downhit from my board to smack the guard’s face as well as the ledge. He saw it coming and, at full stretch, he punched out at me with a wooden baton. My board twisted under my feet and spun away through the air. I was falling. About five meters above the tarmac.
They tell you at the front of every airboard manual that you have to wear a helmet. Then they tell you again. And just in case you don’t get the message, they tell you once more. Only after that do they tell you how to ride your new airboard. But I hadn’t learned much from manuals, just one fascinating fact. A drop to concrete from above ten meters will kill you; that’s pretty obvious. But did you know that there is a death zone created by falling from an airboard headfirst at exactly five meters above the ground? This is because for most people, the one second it takes you to fall doesn’t give you time to get your head out of the way. Funnily enough if you fall from a bit higher, you are actually safer; you might only break a leg.
On the other hand, one second isn’t so bad if you know what you are doing.
I launched a desperate adrenaline-fueled kick, intercepting the middle strap of the board with my left foot, with just enough momentum to swing the board right around over my head, so from my friends’ point of view it would have looked as if I had performed a midair cartwheel, bringing the board back beneath me, inches above the ground.
A fierce jolt of pain shot up my left leg, as if a giant pair of crocodile clips had been shut around my ankle and a switch thrown. I let out a scream of distress and anger as the board and I rebounded back up into the air from our drop. My ankle was probably twisted. But I was furious now and, ignoring the pain, drove the board back into the wall, using its carbon steel edge to cut into the surface of the bricks. Orange dust and the reek of ozone surrounded me, as the thrust of my engine fought the desire of wall and board to push each other apart. Just before the strain burned out my motor, I finished my attack on the factory frontage and looped away, coasting now from aircar roof to aircar roof. One glance over my shoulder confirmed that my writing had been as neat as always. A perfect ♥ about two meters tall. My calling card. See, I told you I was good.
The factory doors opened and three more security guards ran out, shouting and brandishing their batons. My friends hurriedly ducked under the straps of their satchels and buckled their helmets tight. We fled into the amber evening with a motion of sinuous lines and sharp cutbacks, like a flock of starlings.
We had to stick to single file on the main routeway that was Fourth Street, some of the others performing tricks along a power cable down the center aisle. But as the gang scattered into the pedestrian-only Fourier Avenue, on my right I caught a glance of fashionably ripped jeans and a screaming red T-shirt. Jay had come alongside me and we rode the bollards together, bouncing up, then gliding down toward the next as though we were cresting a series of waves.
“You all right? That mudgrubber knew exactly what he was doing. He could have really hurt you.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t say anything about the throbbing ache in my ankle. Thinking about it brought tears to my eyes, but I wasn’t going to show any weakness in front of Jay. He was the oldest of our gang and our leader. Between Jay and me was a friendship, but also a rivalry. I’m sure he disliked the fact that I was a better boarder than he was, and, punk though he was, he just could not bring himself to match my self-confidence by boarding without a helmet.
“Good.” He glanced across at me. “I thought you were going down that time.”
“Yeah, it was close. But I caught it. No worries.”
Turning into Turner Square was a pleasure, lots of easy riding along the tops of the tidy bushes and plenty of room for the walkers to get out of our way. Then a number of climbs: the Castleford Hotel’s convenient awning; a series of window ledges; a grind along a power cable; an ollie to get that extra bit of height you needed to take you up to the stone ornaments of an ancient government building; finally we rode along the lamps that beamed light up onto a huge billboard, currently selling a popular brand of toothpaste. As we came between the beams of light and the board, we were casting fleeting dark shadows like cavities on a whiter-than-white smile, so gigantic were the teeth. A quick glance and, having checked the sky was clear of surveillance choppers, a sharp cutback. We were gone.
Behind the billboard was a disused office, and this was our den.
Chapter 2
MALL RAIDERS
Our den was
class. It had once been a grade-orange workplace, with a million glowing threads of energy flowing in and out of a wide rectangular space. Imagine an open-plan office, ablaze with metallic-white strip lights and noisy with the hubbub of workers, buzzing like suited bees as they got up from their swivel chairs, talking all the while into their headsets. Time is money. I bet they didn’t even pause to flirt by the water dispensers. This wide space was dark now; the only sound an occasional fluttering of pigeon wings. The windows were fastened up tight with shutters, sealing out any natural daylight. That is, apart from a broken one, which first the pigeons and now our boarder gang used to get in.
Jay discovered the room and the first time he showed it to us, we simply thought we had found ourselves an indoor board zone. Our combat-dressed pair of friends, Carter and Milan, were strong lads; they had no bother dragging around filing cabinets and tables to make a stunt course, with lots of ramps for lift and half walls for cutbacks. It turned out, however, that the roof was just a little too low for our best tricks. And anyway, it wasn’t long before the toilets and the kitchen area were discovered; amazingly they were still connected to running water. We all instantly realized the possibilities. So now, as a precaution, the four interior doors to the rest of the building were heavily barricaded, in order that we could have this vast room for ourselves. It had been our den for the past three months.
A personal touch that had grown and grown as the weeks passed was that provided by our very own artist, Nathan. He was a gentle lad, so mild mannered in fact that you had to worry for him, hanging around with a gang of punks like us. But we all treasured him as he had a genius for tattoos, tags, and murals, without which a gang could never hope to have any sense of identity.
The vast canvas provided by the walls of our den had been Nathan’s biggest opportunity for showing his talent. By the violet bubble-plastic glow of portable xenon lights, a wild jungle had grown up around us. Leaves of black and indigo twisted a design of intense complexity, in which you could lose yourself, following a tendril as it looped toward the roof and back down to the carpeted floor. Deep in this fantastical jungle lurked all sorts of wonderful creatures and absurd characters. We were all there, of course. I was little more than two shadowy eyes peering from a tree trunk that displayed my trademark ♥. Swinging from a vine came Jay, the boss, lord of the jungle, jaw set proud, king of all he surveyed. Below him, comically anxious that he might fall, were Carter and Milan, both in their martial-arts gear. Our techie, Athena, was portrayed sitting in a tree house, quietly reading, while Nathan painted himself as walking dreamily through a grove of giant palm trees. We loved it, even Jay, who had understood the mockery signaled by his pose in the design but still enjoyed the world that the mural created. It was as though by entering our den we left the City behind, to live in a magical forest where we were free to pursue our dreams.
What the mural could not possibly have portrayed, though, was the tension that existed between Jay and the rest of us, arising from our classifications. All of us were reds, holders of the lowest-ranking social card. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t even a red because I hadn’t been issued a card at all. But I considered myself to be a red; you simply can’t get any lower. On the other hand, Jay was a yellow. His parents were managers of the biggest printing company in the City. Half the posters and paper media you saw around the streets were theirs. Like the big smile outside. Normally, being a yellow was not a problem, but an asset. A yellow card got you into pleasant shopping areas, nice restaurants, civic utilities like libraries and museums that the rest of us were banned from. But if you were the leader of an anarcho-punk board gang, being a yellow was more than slightly embarrassing. Which is why Jay overcompensated by being more reckless, wilder, more dangerous than the rest of us. He played guitar in a band, NoPhuture, took heeby-jeebies like they were chocolate biscuits, and had spiderweb perma-tats down both his arms. This meant he fooled everyone, including himself.
Right now, Jay was rummaging in the filing cabinet he had made his own, tearing open a foil pack of jeebies and scooping out a couple.
“Want?” he asked.
The rest of us shook our heads, apart from Carter who held up his hand. A dark disc flitted through the air. Carter gulped it down, then lay back with his eyes closed to let the hit sink in.
“Ouch.” I winced as I settled into a big black executive chair, relieved to be taking the weight off my left leg.
“Did that drop hurt you?” Nathan came over, catching his blond bangs back behind his ear to look at me sympathetically.
“Aye, maybe sprained it.”
“Let me see.” He moved his satchel around behind him so he could kneel and take my foot in his hands. The boot I was wearing took some effort to remove, but he worked at the laces gently until, with one hand bracing my leg, he could lever it off. Then he rolled down my sock, and, although it was painful, the sensation was also sweet. “Yes. It’s swelling badly. You’d better have some ice on it.”
I nodded and watched fondly as Nathan left for the kitchen, having first carefully placed my sore leg on a desk he had dragged over for the purpose.
“That calls for revenge.” Milan looked over at me with a scowl. Revenge. This was Milan’s way of showing concern for me, and I smiled back at him appreciatively.
“Yeah,” responded Carter immediately; you could see the rush of energy that the jeebie had released in the flush of his face. “Yeah, let’s do something.”
“You really want to do something?” Jay’s face glowed eerily in the pale violet light cast by the strips of xenon bubbles that we had stirred into life by boarding over them on entering the room.
“Yeah.” Carter was rubbing his hand around and around his close-shaven head. “Yeah, let’s do something really class.”
“How about a mall raid, on a green mall?” suggested Jay, looking around the room from one of us to the next, knowing he had our attention.
“Green? Which one?” It was Athena who was going to have to deal with the security system, and I could see how the idea had instantly appealed to her. Up to now we had ridden only yellow mall raids.
“Fourteenth and Coleridge. Mountain Vistas Mall.”
“Got it.” Athena had already unrolled her notebook, the glow from its screen reflecting in the piercings of her lip, nose, and eyebrow and turning them from silver studs into turquoise jewels. She switched on a projector that I had stolen for her the previous month, and soon we were focused on a 3-D image, which she scrolled around so we could all examine the mall from every angle. It was a beauty, with only the world’s most exclusive chains on display: clothes by XFK, 0n02, and mr. green; jewelry by +++, and Quintain; perfumes by L’yele. They made me snarl like an angry dog, these companies who paid a great deal of money to shut me out of their world, and I suddenly found I was no longer weary or feeling the pain from my ankle.
“Sweet.” Carter looked around, laughing. “That’s a sweet-looking mall.”
“Class,” agreed Athena. “This has to be done.”
“But how did you check it out if it’s green?” asked Milan.
“Just from the outside, just the outside. But don’t worry. Athena can get us all the schematics. The only question is access. See here.” Jay switched on a red laser pen and flashed its light at the projection. Athena kept up with his moves, zooming in as the red beam led us around to where a road dipped into a tunnel under the building. “There. Underground delivery access, elevators to the top. Security just seemed the usual to me, trips and echo stuff. Ghost, you can get us through that, right?”
“Yeah.” I spoke that one word with confidence because I knew that I could enter any building from red all the way up to violet, card or no card, and maybe I could even get into violets, too. I’d have tried, but for the fact I’d never even seen a violet-access building.
Nathan returned, the only one of us not interested in the luminous emerald structure that revolved as we examined our target.