My arm’s tightening around her before I register what I’m doing, tucking her in against my side. “You did it,” I murmur, turning my head to speak into her ear. “We’re okay. We’re almost out.”
She holds still within the circle of my arm for a moment, and then abruptly she’s pressing in against me, arms wrapping around my rib cage, face hidden against my T-shirt. She’s still shaking, harsh breathing muffled against my skin, and I wrap my other arm around her to squeeze her tight. This isn’t one of her acts. In this moment, she isn’t playing me, I’m sure of it.
I’m sure of way too many things all of a sudden, and first among them is that I’m in a lot of trouble.
“We should go. Once we get across the skybridge, we need to plan our next move while we’re still ahead.”
It’s like my words are a signal, and she clears her throat, pulling away from me, turning her head long enough to give her eyes a quick wipe, which I pretend not to notice as we climb to our feet. “I have to get back to my apartment,” she says, her bone-deep weariness showing through in the way her voice cracks.
“Dimples, you can’t go back there. You know you can’t go back there.”
Her reddened eyes flick over to meet mine. “You don’t understand, I have—I have things there, things I need.”
“You need your life more,” I whisper, my voice escaping as the realization starts to sweep over me. I know where we’re going to go.
Her eyes fill, but she nods. “I know.” She swallows, then echoes, “I know. But where else can we go? I’ve got no money, not even my palm pad or any ID.”
I know the answer, but even as the words rise up, I’m biting them down.
I can’t. My den is sacred. Nobody gets in there but me. Nobody. That rule has kept me alive for the last five years. That rule has kept my identity a secret. I can’t break it for anyone, for any reason—I have too much left to do before they catch me.
But I got her into this—it was me they wanted when they grabbed her—and as I climb slowly to my feet, searching in vain for any other answer that will keep her just as safe, I can feel something shifting in the air. I can feel the course I’ve set myself changing.
“My place,” I hear myself say. “We’ll go to my place.”
One more test, says the blue-eyed man. One more, and then you will go home.
We will do as he asks. We will keep this new planet young and small, nudging this current and suppressing that growth. The ground will stay soft and the sky covered. When we sneak glimpses of the world through the eyes of those who live here, this place is always gray.
You must stay hidden, says the blue-eyed man. By keeping this planet young, we will stay quiet. No one will think to look for us. But there is darkness here, too, like there was in the last place. The fear follows us. This species is angry, always angry, and we are not curious about it anymore. We wish to go home. We wish to end this test.
But there were dreams.
THE MAG-LIFT DOORS OPEN on the slums with an assault of warm, moist air that tosses my hair back from my face. I try not to wrinkle my nose as the smells of pollution and street food mingle in my sinuses, but my stomach roils in spite of my best efforts. It’s nothing like the dry, odorless, many-times-scrubbed air in my penthouse, or even the earthy peat of Avon’s swamps. It smells like people here. Like many, many people all crammed in together in a space much too small to hold even half of them.
Beside me, Gideon raises his head, and my eyes pick out a nearly imperceptible lift at the corner of his mouth. To him, this is home.
I suppose if you grew up in a place like this, it wouldn’t seem so bad. Maybe the constant noise—the din from vendors hawking their wares, billboards playing their looped ads overhead, the kaleidoscope of pedal-bikes, foot traffic, police sirens, freight drones—would be comforting. But I’m used to the soft, quiet nights wrapped in Avon’s mist, and the first two months I spent on Corinth, here in the undercity, weren’t enough for me to get used to the noise. But if this was all you knew, growing up…
Assuming Gideon grew up here at all. At Kristina’s place he handled the SmartWaiter like he was used to top-of-the-line appliances, and when I wasn’t looking, he unerringly picked out the most expensive luxury item in the whole apartment—the Miske artwork. He might navigate his way through the crowds with the ease of a native, but then, so do I. Two months was enough to learn that much. Still, we all came from somewhere, and what matters to me now is that he can keep himself safe—keep us safe—down here. And keeping my eyes on the back of his neck so I don’t lose him in the crowd, I have to admit that it’s nice to see him relax a little.
The whole way down in the mag-lift elevator he didn’t say a word, pretending instead to check a small, handheld device that looked a little like a palm pad. I could tell he was pretending by the far too even rate at which he was scrolling through it, his thumb moving up and down across the screen like clockwork. I can see the truth in his tense shoulders, despite the casual way he slumped back against the lift wall, in the normally amused mouth pressed a little too thin, in the hazel eyes stopping just short of lifting to meet my gaze.
We make a quick detour so Gideon can buy me a pair of cheap shoes—walking barefoot around the undercity is a recipe for getting any number of nameless diseases. But the detour is more than that—he doesn’t want to bring me to “his place.” That much is clear. I don’t know if he’d have even offered if I hadn’t lost it after we made it out of the elevator shaft. It wasn’t hard to find those tears—in fact, it was disturbingly easy, given how hard I was shaking and how tight a hold the panic had on me—but that just made them seem more real.
I knew I had him, outside the elevator shaft, when I felt his arms go around me. Half sprawled on the hallway floor, my cheek fit against the dip just below his shoulder. We fit. Like those pendants they sell in gift shops that form a whole yin-yang symbol when you put them together.
I take a quick, deep breath in through my nose, grimacing at the bright patchwork of smells. Those necklaces are just cheap plastene and flaky paint. They fall apart almost as fast as the friendships they’re supposed to symbolize. Focus. Just because the act is easy to pull off doesn’t mean it’s not an act.
“It’s just up here,” Gideon calls over his shoulder, his voice jerking me back to the present just in time for me to skip sideways out of the path of a particularly single-minded cyclist, bike laden with plastene jugs of homemade sake.
My stomach rumbles again, though this time it’s in response to the faintest whiff of something savory and tart—I crane my neck, but all I can see is a falafel cart half a block back. Still, somewhere, someone’s cooking noodles. For an instant, I can smell soy and garlic and lime. Then Gideon’s reaching out to tug me down a side street, and all I can smell is the wet garbage and old food wrappers littering the gutters.
There are no street signs or helpful maps down here like there are up above. That, combined with shoddy palm pad reception, means that if you don’t know where you’re going already, you’re probably going to end up lost inside a minute. I’m trying to mentally log every turn, but it’s easier for me to memorize routes from a bird’s-eye perspective—with a map or a model, I could learn this whole sector in a few days. Here, muck splashing my shoes and noise everywhere and lanterns tossing in the breeze from air traffic overhead, I’m struggling.