I can’t linger here. They’ll flush me like they did in the dump at 121. I gotta go up. Carefully, I leave the shadows and push on, searching for a lift. But all the tenement houses here are stunted buildings underneath the foundation lattice that supports the highrises. Those that are connected to the highrises are fortified and secured with huge doors. I pound on several, but they won’t let me in. So I follow old elevated tram tracks, looking for a station. Might be a lift near one. Up ahead, I hear a nostalgic sound through the rain—a zither. Reds. They might help me.
Underneath the tram is an a
bandoned, derelict station skinned in graffiti. A tent city of vagrants has sprouted up around it. Electronics glow from inside the tents and men gather around a burning barrel for warmth.
“Oy, what’ve we got here?” a man asks, spotting me. “You lost, little lass?” He’s from Mars by the sound of him, and I know right off I’ve made a mistake.
“?’Lo, brother. There a lift near here?” I ask. “I’d settle for stairs.”
“What would a little thing like you need to go up for?” another Red asks, this one from Mars too. “You’d look better going down.” I step back from him.
“Some nice silk, that,” another says.
“Fancy silk. Gamma silk.”
“Righto! Have we got a Gamma on our hands, lass? Teeth all clean. Hair all nice.”
“What’s your name, lass? Where you from?”
“None of your bloodydamn business,” I say. “But if you want to point me on my way, might be some chit in it for you.”
“Might be we just take that chit.”
“Why you holdin’ your arm?” one of them asks. “You fall from the sky? Aerial accident?” His teeth are black and crumbling from demondust. He’s got the black tip on his nose, the cartilage eroding between the two nostrils. “Come here, let us take a look at it.” Two of the men on the outskirts of the group have started inching toward me from the sides. I back away; my shaking hand drifts into my jacket.
“You wanna mind yourself,” I say thinly. “My people will be looking for me.”
“We’re your people, lass.” Memories of Red Hands in the moonlight seep into the moment. “Come on and get warm by the fire. We got some swill and some dust if you wanna see angels, sister. We’ll show you that. All the sights of the Vale.”
“You warm each other up,” I snarl. “Touch me and I’ll burn your bloody balls off.”
“Nah, nah, mouthy one,” the one with the teeth says. He’s been slowly walking toward me. “That’s not what a lass’s mouth is for, doncha know?” I pull the pistol out of my jacket and point it at his balls. The men recoil but the one with the black teeth just laughs at the trembling barrel. “Nice scorcher, that! Classic lines. Where’d you get your hands on a piece like that? Master give it to ya?” As he waits for an answer, his eyes flick up. It saves my life.
I wheel around and see a man lunging toward me from behind. I fall back and pull the trigger. The gun is silent and without recoil. His leg explodes as the metal slug tears into it. The skin of his thigh peels back like the flesh of an overripe peach. His severed leg kicks back across the pavement, hissing steam and blood. He screams, looking at the stump, and falls. I wheel on the rest of them with the gun. They cower like children. I step toward them, heart raging, wanting to kill every last piece of shit. The man on the ground moans in pain, clutching his mangled stump, and I feel sick.
I turn and run from them till my legs are numb.
Shaking, I collapse between two crumbling tenement complexes. Dogs bark and babies scream out open windows. My stomach lurches and I sick up all over the trash. When my stomach has emptied, I fall back on my ass and shake. The man is going to die. I was going to kill the rest of them. I toss the gun away, disgusted.
There’s a loud roar and the sound of a crash from the street.
I crawl to peer out of the alley and see a street stained by the green sign of a tenement complex. A hoverbike idles in the center of the street. A huge man gets off the back and pulls off his helmet. White hair flows down his back. He can’t be more than twenty, though it’s hard to tell with Obsidians. The man stalks toward a person he just shot through the leg with a harpoon reel from the front of his bike. Faces watch out the windows of the complex. The Obsidian picks the person up with one hand and draws a pointed hammer from a holster on his back. I look away and almost throw up again when I hear the wet sound of the skull caving in. The faces disappear from the windows and the bike roars away, dragging the red-haired body behind on the harpoon reel.
I pick the gun back up.
If I stay on the streets, they’ll find me. I look up and see the rails of the old tramway. If I can climb up there, I can move without being on the streets. But someone might see me. I gotta risk it.
My fingers are bloody by the time I climb the cracked concrete support column up to the tramline. There’s a depression between the rusted rails that I can scramble along without being seen from the ground. It’s all that saves my life. As I work my way along the tramline, more bikes search the streets. Like the whole underbelly of Lost City has woken to try and find me. Who are these people?
Over the next hour, I pass several public gravLifts, but they’re all guarded by men in black coats with chrome nightshades. Finally, exhausted and shivering, I find an abandoned stairwell beside a derelict gravLift. It’s unguarded.
Feral dogs snarl at me, their eyes glowing from under the covered stairwells as I make my way upward toward the lights of Hyperion ninety levels above. As I ascend level by level to brighter, more reputable zones of the city, fliers speed through the air in the avenues. Surface cars and trams rattle on crisscrossing bridges.
I duck my head when I feel eyes on me and keep a white-knuckled hold on the pistol inside my jacket. Now that I have it, I don’t ever want to be without it again.
I stop glancing up at the smog layer above. It seems no closer each time I do. This city wasn’t meant to be crossed on foot. But there’s no one to ask for help, and even if I did find Watchmen down here, I’d be too frightened to approach them. Not after last time. Who would believe my story? And who’s to say they aren’t on the payroll of the man Philippe works for? Remembering that Pink’s smile chills me as much as the rain.
Slick, pretty, but rotten underneath. Just like the rest of this forsaken city.