Riley shook his head. “Even in a city, everything belongs to someone.”
He stopped suddenly in front of a building capped by two forty-story towers, its doors scarred by deep fissures running diagonally across their length as if giant claws had sliced through the metal. A thick layer of grime had turned the facade a dark, earthy brown. The windows at street level were all boarded up, but through the cracks I could see figures moving around inside.
“There are people in there,” I hissed as Riley started toward the door.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, well, shouldn’t we go back the way we came? What about all those empty houses?”
“You don’t get it,” Riley said.
“So explain it to me.”
“Now?”
I crossed my arms. “Now or never.”
So he did. Some of the buildings we’d passed probably were empty, he explained, but in the city, empty was death, home to roving bands of the desperate and hungry, as bestial as the outside authorities made them out to be. We couldn’t be killed, but we could still be attacked, robbed, dismembered… he left the rest to my imagination. There was safety in numbers as long as you chose the right numbers. Which was why most of the city crowded into the skyscrapers at its center, seizing a place as either protector or protected. Every gang had its own territory, some owning whole towers, others sharing space in a precarious balance of power, as in this building, Riley’s building, where west and east towers coexisted as uneasy allies and occasional combatants.
We entered the lobby, a long, narrow space with ceilings that towered three stories over our heads. At ground level, the windows were boarded up with jagged-edged wooden boards. But above, a latticework of steel beams and broken glass let in the light and—judging from the puddles, the rust, and the mold—the elements. Facing the entrance, a sleek wall of black marble rose from floor to ceiling, small holes smashed into it at regular intervals like hand- and footholds for a mountain climber. And at the point where the marble met the ceiling: the climber himself, hanging from a narrow cable, his long rifle aimed out at the street. There was a matching sniper at the other end of the lobby—one to guard the west tower, I decided, the other to guard the east. On the ground, two clumps of sentries mirrored the division, each protecting the entrance to one of the towers, all with their weapons trained on us.
Riley had called them “sentries,” but they were children, alongside a few decrepit and aged men and women. All carrying guns, all settled into wheelchairs or leaning on crutches and canes.
“Not enough power to run an elevator,” Riley VM’d. “So either you climb the stairs…”
Or you didn’t.
Apparently, in a tower everyone had some job to do, even the ones forced to stay on the ground.
“Which floor did you live on?” I asked him as if I could somehow gauge where he’d fit into the vertical hierarchy.
“The ground,” Riley murmured aloud. “With them.”
“But—” I stopped myself. Of course. Jude had stayed on the ground; Riley had stayed with Jude. “You sure about this?” I asked, nodding toward the nearest weapon—too near for my taste.
“Ground level’s neutral territory,” Riley said. “Just keep your mouth shut.”
I bristled at both the implication and the tone. But I did as I was told.
Riley strode up to one of the younger boys guarding the west tower. The kid sat malnourished and one-legged in a rusted wheelchair, a long, black gun laid across his lap. “Skinners?” he said, fingers rigid on the arms of the chair. “You don’t belong here.” One hand dropped casually, almost as an afterthought, onto the handle of his gun.
“Let ’em stay,” gargled an older man leaning on a crutch. “We can have some fun.”
“Shut it, Ches,” Riley snapped. When he spoke to the boy, his voice was gentler. “It’s me, Jay,” he said. “Riley.”
“Yeah, right. Prove it.”
“Fine.” Riley slipped his hand into his pocket and drew out the crushed coin he’d found, then tossed it to the kid. “For your collection.”
The boy’s eyes widened. With a furtive glance at his fellow sentries, he shoved the coin into his pocket. Then, never taking his eyes off Riley, scrawled something onto a piece of paper and shoved it into a long tube that ran up the side of the wall, disappearing into the ceiling. The page whooshed away.
“Pneumatic tubes,” Riley VM’d. “Works on compressed air. Best way to stay in touch without power.”
“Since when do you know how to write?” he asked the kid.
The boy scowled and hocked out a mouthful of thick, yellowish saliva. “Gray made me. New rule. Reading too.”
Riley grinned. “Since when does Gray make anyone do anything?”
“Things change,” the kid said without matching his smile. “You should know.”
The response arrived a few moments later. The boy retrieved a crumpled piece of paper from the tube, read it over slowly, his lips moving as he pieced the letters together into words. Then he nodded. “Fifteenth floor,” he told Riley. “They’re waiting for you.”
Riley gave him a half shrug, half nod, then pulled me past the group of guards toward the stairs.
“Hey, Riley!” the kid called after us. “So what’s it like, anyway?”
“Quieter,” Riley called back, and then the stairwell door closed behind us and we were on our way up.
“Quieter?” I repeated as we climbed the steep, narrow flights, stepping over piles of garbage. The stairwell was a windowless concrete chimney stretching endlessly above us and echoing with the clatter of pounding feet.
“What’d you want me to say?” Riley took the stairs two at a time, keeping me at his back. “That while he’s stuck in shit for the rest of his life, I’m rich and safe and never hungry?”
“Just wondering what you meant,” I said. “Quieter.”
“There’s always people around in a city,” Riley said. And as if to illustrate his point, a crowd of slummers pushed past us on the stairs without pausing, their pupils wide and faces streaming with sweat, telltale signs of a shocker trip. They probably hadn’t even seen us. “Nowhere belongs to just you.”
The door marked 15 released us into a long, gray hallway lined with doors, windows at either end letting in little light. Three orgs were waiting for us, their limbs bundled tight into thick sweaters, their breath fogging in the chill air. The two guys were a couple years older than me, while the girl looked about my age.
“It’s hotter than I thought it would be,” the shorter of the two guys said, looking me up and down, his ratface scrunched like he was trying to pick up my scent.
The other shoved an elbow into his gut. “So this is the guy claiming to be Riley? What’s the game?”
The girl shook her head. “No game,” she said, her eyes laser focused on his face. “It’s him.”
The taller one spat out a bitter laugh. “Says who?”
“Says me.” The girl took a step toward him, then stopped with a foot of distance still between them. Riley stayed silent.
“How do you know?” the ratface asked.
“He voiced me a couple times. And sent some pics. After.” The girl blushed and ran a hand through her spiky red hair. She was wearing makeup, I realized. A red smear across her lips and something sparkly over her lids—compensating for her lack of genetic perfection with a layer of paint. As if she could make herself pretty through sheer force of will. Add to that the baggy clothes, no tech anywhere in sight, just plainprint on the shirt and, from the look of it, shoes that didn’t even conform to her feet. She looked like a total retro, which made sense, since the retro slummers my sister hung out with were just shoddy imitations. This girl was the original. Zo will be glad to know she’s doing it right, I thought instinctively, before remembering that I wouldn’t be telling Zo anything any time soon.