It was the girl without pids, the girl with no identity.
I must have faltered, because I realised Frankhay was suddenly leaning towards me, staring.
“The... !¡
embarrassed | confused
¡! The...”
“!¡
scathing | amused
¡! The beams?”
“...beams of light from the sky. From orbit, we think.” It was important to emphasise the
we
rather than have this be just someone else’s story I was recounting. “They burnt entire city blocks, first targeting resistance nests, but then becoming more and more indiscriminate. Everything they struck was destroyed, melted to glass.”
All the time, she sat there, not really paying attention, just glancing across every so often. She didn’t look as if she really belonged with this mob, but then yesterday she hadn’t looked as if she belonged in Precept Square, either.
At one point I caught her eye, but she just looked right through me, not recognising me as the one who had saved her the day before.
“!¡
sceptical
¡! Sol thinks it’s going to happen here like it did in Angiere? That it?”
I shook my head, and said, “She doesn’t know. But it’s possible, and if it does, then we need to be prepared.”
“!¡
dismissive | sceptical
¡! And how can we defend ourselves against being melted like glass?” said the nest boss.
“We retreat to the caves. We hide.” Frankhay was hard to argue with: what
could
we do? Would the beams penetrate even the caves, or might we really find shelter there?
Frankhay was shaking his head. “No, we’re in good with the Green chlicks and the joeys,” he said. “That’s how we protect ourselves. We don’t need Sol Virtue hiding behind our petticoats.” He leaned towards me, and said, “Come here.”
I approached, cautiously, and he beckoned me to lean forward, as if he was about to whisper in my ear.
Just then, with a click and a sliding, scraping sound, a dagger blade emerged from his wrist. Its tip came to rest on the underside of my chin, pricking at the skin like a needle.
I didn’t flinch, didn’t try to back off.
“!¡
warning
¡! You tell your nest-mama not to mess with us, you hear? You tell her thanks for the kindly message but no thanks, we’re not having it. You got that?”
With the blade against my chin, I chose not to nod until I had straightened.
I backed off, turned, passed through to the public bar where someone on the impromptu stage was singing an old song about lost love, and then I was out on the street getting my bearings from a shaft of sunlight breaking between the buildings.
Chapter Six
L
ET ME TELL
you about Hope.
Hope. A girl with no pids, no identity. A girl who was nobody.
Her story begins in darkness, with voices, a babble of voices...
S
HE HAD THOUGHTS
in her head, too. Knowledge. Language. Some degree of understanding.
She knew this was some kind of hospital, for instance. The people talking outside her door, the footsteps, the mechanical buzzing and humming, the smells of chemicals and old vegetables. The room: a bed with frames on either side, like a cage, to hold her in, tubes hanging from machines with electrical read-outs and dials and strange pulsing glows, the bland near-absence of colour, the lack of any kind of personality, life, soul...
Then, like a blast, a whirlwind, her head was full and booming and ringing like a million bells, so that she felt sick, felt that her skull must explode under the godsawful pressure.
Voices. Not bells, but voices. A million voices in her head, all run together into a single monstrous boom.
S
HE HAD KNOWLEDGE.
Her name, for instance, was Hope. Hope of the Burren in full, although she did not know what or where the Burren might be. She liked it, though. It was a positive name, and it was one attached to a place or thing or clan. A name with optimism and connections was not a bad kind of name to have.
That day, in the hospital... The explosion of voices might only have lasted for an instant, but it left her shaking, nauseous, her skin slick with a cold, greasy sweat.
She did not know how long she had been there. In her head there was only an unconnected set of fragmentary images and sensations. The night-time smells of disinfectant and piss, all the more intense when lying in the semi-darkness of a room lit only by machine light. A doctor, a human one, with a nose like a blade and bushy black hair that grew in a fringe round a bald crown bulging with implanted hardware; leaning over her, speaking a language she did not know, prodding at her belly and running scanning devices across her chest and head. Another doctor with the puckered grey skin of a high-ranking chlick, leaning too close, green spit running in channels down its neck, staring at her with one glassy black eye and a pale one that looked as if it was made of polished chrome. The chlick’s touch had been cold, rough, painful, too intimate and yet impersonal; she was like a slab of meat, a piece of furniture, a
nothing
to them.
She just wanted it gone, whatever it was that had blown up in her skull.
She didn’t want to be special, which was what the chlick doctor said to her later that day. “Special, Hope.” She-he clicked deep in her-his voicebox, but Hope didn’t know what the sound meant. “We will make everything all right.” The chlick’s voice rasped and wheezed, as if unaccustomed to speaking in this language that Hope understood.
H
ER ROOM
:
THE
ceilings too high; the walls a sandy off-white, finished in some kind of wipe-clean plastic; the floor grey, with the same finish. The windows were tall and frosted and far too bright, and had horizontal bars running across them.
Her room. She did not think she had ever had a room before. But this room was more like a cell.
Was this a hospital, after all, then, or some other kind of place?
She slept, and dreamed vivid, too-colourful dreams of aliens and big machines with tubes and wires and scanning pads, dreams where everyone was shouting at her, yelling, leaning in close and bellowing. And she woke sheened in sweat, a knot of puke in her throat, her heart raging and racing like a heavy fish trapped in the cage of her ribs.
S
HE HAD TO
pull the tubes out of her arm before she could get out of that place.
Two needles, buried deep in the crook of her elbow, held in place by scabbed green gel. Tubes attached to the needles. Tubes that had made her feel better, calmer.
She wasn’t calm now, though.
Outside, engines revved and sirens blared and wailed.
Inside, beings shouted and screamed and ran. She could see them through the frosted inner window of her room. Hear their panicked footfalls and cries.
This was why she had to get out.
She heard gunshots and the
zip
of beam weapons. She heard voices immediately outside her door, one hissing, scratching voice saying, “Where is she? Where
is
she?” and a snapping sound, a scream of pain, a thud as of something falling.
She yanked the needles from her arm, swung her legs, noting how skinny they were, wondering if they were even strong enough to support her weight. She could not remember the last time she had stood.
Her head felt as if it was still moving, even though she had halted, perched on the edge of the bed.
The floor, unexpectedly warm beneath her bare feet. It almost felt alive.
She stood, and breathed deeply to counter the dizzy rush and the blurring and blackening of her vision. The room was not so much spinning as bucking, trying to knock her off balance.
She took a step, another, another. She reached the door and edged it open. Outside her room she saw the back of a body-armoured grunt so tall its black-helmeted head nearly touched the ceiling. Beside it was a shorter officer, a chlick in a chain-weave bodysuit that clung to the uneven bulges of its asymmetrical body.
She stepped out into the corridor, all in that brief moment with their backs still turned towards her.
There was a trolley in the corridor and she caught herself, leaning on it for fear that her legs would buckle. It started to move and she had to stagger forward in order to remain upright. When she looked down she saw a small being wrapped in blankets, its head almost entirely obscured by a breathing mask full of steamy vapours.
A baby? Had she abducted a baby?
She didn’t think so. On one arm it had touchpads grown in, ports and zip panels. She didn’t think a baby would have such mods. Just a small being, then.
Pushing the trolley, she was ignored by the rushing, yelling troopers, but then the being in the trolley seemed to realise something was wrong, and started to shrill a crescendo of high-pitched clicks and claw at its wristpad.
She gave the trolley one last push and sidestepped through a door.
She was in a cupboard now.
More than just a cupboard. Some kind of storeroom. It had been ransacked already, with shelves pulled off walls, cabinets toppled, benches smashed.
She crawled under a leaning metal cabinet, shivering, sick, her arm icy and throbbing where the needles had been.
She pulled her knees up, rested her chin on them, hugged herself. Waited.
L
ONG AFTER THE
corridors had gone quiet and the revving engines had departed and the sirens stilled, Hope pushed herself to her feet and went to the door.
Peering out into the corridor, she saw carnage everywhere. Windows smashed; doors hanging from hinges, panels caved in; trolleys tipped on their sides; pipes twisted and snapped off, hissing steam; cables dangling from the ceiling, occasionally crackling and flashing electric blue.
In the first room she checked, a young woman lay half out of her bed, her back at an impossible angle, a burnt hole like a black bowl scooped out of her chest and her head smashed bloodily against the floor. A wallscreen flashed jagged graphics and bleeped warnings, and a clear tube hung from a pump, drip-drip-dripping into a spreading milky pool on the floor.
In the next room, or cell, a man with an oddly square head lay on the floor, eyes staring into space, mouth half-open as if he was about to speak. His body was black and looked like it had been coated with tar. Then... Hope saw that the black surface was moving, and the man was not tarred but covered with tiny bugs, flies. They swarmed over his flesh, and into it, she realised, when she saw that the white lines across his chest were exposed ribs.
She looked again at the man’s head, and saw that his eyes had turned, were fixed on her. His jaw twitched, as he tried to speak, but then a surge of black bugs moved up his neck, across the lower half of his face, and soon he was completely submerged.
Hope backed away into the corridor.
In the next room she saw a family of monkey-like fettorals, harmless and kindly beings, but these... all six of them had been beaten to death, their naked bodies pulped and flattened.
A short way along the corridor, she came across the trolley and the chittering midget she had abandoned earlier. The small being was clicking no more, its body sliced diagonally by some kind of weapon that had cauterised the wound as it passed. The creature smelled of burnt fish.
She felt dizzy, but snapped out of it when a tiny black fly buzzed in front of her eyes.
She backed away, then turned, ran, careering off trolleys and walls, stumbling over corpses, bare feet slapping and slithering on the wet floor, not knowing where she was going but only that she was going.
S
HE FOUND HER
way outside.
What she still took to be some kind of hospital was part of a complex of low, blocky buildings. The door she found opened onto a courtyard, where water ran through channels set into an austere paved surface.
She stepped out, and was instantly cold. Her thin t-shirt came to mid-thigh. She had no other clothes, no footwear.
Her bare arms goosebumped, and cold air stole up inside her top. Almost instantly, her feet went numb.
She felt exposed, and pulled the hem of her shirt down.
Cautious, she took a few half-running steps to the end of the building, where a low wall divided the courtyard from... as she approached, she saw a roadway beyond the wall, empty, save for an abandoned, burnt-out transporter.
She swung her legs over the low wall.
There was a body in the front of the transporter, possibly human, burnt beyond recognition. She moved on.
A short distance farther, she could see through a line of trees to an open grassed area, some kind of sports field. There, one last troopship was lifting, the air bent and hazed beneath its square, khaki bulk. In the distance, three more were already miniatures in the sky, heading out across a bay. The waves were edged with white in the stiff breeze that suddenly gusted off the sea and through the trees; they made her recall the white lines of the dead man’s ribs, beneath the mass of flesh-eating bugs.
It felt like a slap, that rush of air, someone shaking her to her senses.
She felt something. A gut thing. A thing in the dark recesses of her mind. Elemental.
She started to run.
The chorus in her head came back and was almost enough to drive her to her knees, but instead she realised she could suppress it, with the pounding of her bare feet on uneven ground, the burning of muscle-pain in legs that could barely support her, the wheezing and gasping for breath in lungs that did not have the capacity for all the air she needed to suck down to feed her muscles, to fuel her escape.
Her throat burned. Her head was spinning. She reached a ridge of dunes and stumbled up them, battling through tough twists of sea grass and loose, shifting sand. At the top, her legs gave way and she fell, slid, slumped in a heap into a hollow before the next dune started to rise.
She heard a sound. Felt it. Didn’t know what she did to sense it, but it was there, all around her, all through her.