Small hands clutched at her painfully. “We are not sure what you mean by that,” the Comprise said.
“Let me spell it out for you,” Wyeth said. “First, we like the boy, and we’re going to keep him. Second, our resources are limited, and we do not have the laboratory equipment to spare, no matter what price you’re willing to pay. And third…” He turned to a nearby samurai. “Those crates of shyapples I had brought here? Destroy them all.”
The floor exploded upward.
“Holy shit!” Freeboy cried, and then fell backwards as something fast glanced off the side of his head. The room was suddenly full of black, acrid smoke. A cable ripped free from the floor, stiffened with voltage, and fell forward, like a huge snake striking. Sparks skittered across the floor. Wyeth flung out an arm to point at Rebel and Billy. “Treece!” he shouted. “Get them out of here!”
Orange figures boiled up from the hole.
The Comprise child was heavy. Treece hustled them through long corridors while electrical equipment hissed and erupted about them. All the lights went out. “What’s happening?” Rebel cried. The boy’s small hands still clutched at her. He kept his face buried in her shoulder.
“Power outage. Wyeth’s crashed the computers. It’ll be on in a minute.”
Something exploded up ahead. There was a chemical stink in the air. “No, I mean—”
Treece grinned thuggishly. “Oh, you mean in general.
The Comprise have taken over our computer systems.
Nothing to worry about. We were waiting for this.” The lights went back on. In the hall behind them, a wall collapsed, and the lights blacked out again. In the dark, a squad of samurai trotted by.
“What?”
“Turn right here.” A sudden wind boomed down the hall, and Rebel almost lost her footing. “The Comprise will always suborn a computer system. It’s second nature tothem. But our systems are built to be crashed. We’ve got manual cut-offs through the sheraton. We can crash the system and rebuild it as many times as they can take it over.”
They stepped into an orangery with a stormy holographic sky. While Treece rummaged through an adjacent storeroom, Rebel stood dully looking at the orrery in the center of the room. Marigolds had been planted at its base. The samurai emerged with two broomsticks and thrust one at Rebel. He also carried a rifle and two singlesticks, one of which he also gave Rebel.
“Feel like you can handle the kid?”
“I feel like a marsupial.” The way Billy was clutching her, he wasn’t likely to come loose. She climbed into her saddle. “Let’s go.”
Treece raised his rifle and blew out the window.
They exploded out into darkness. Almost immediately limpet cameras swooped down on them from all directions. “Son of a bitch!” Treece screamed, bringing up the rifle. He burst all but two of the cameras before the remotes could reach them. One dove for his face, and he swung the rifle around like a club to smash into its complexly-lensed front. Fragments of camera and gun went flying.
The last camera came at Rebel. She slashed with her singlestick and almost lost her seat. The camera bobbed under her swing, and then there was an instant’s darkness as the sheraton’s computers were crashed yet again. The wheel’s lights came back on, and, before the Comprise systems could reprogram the camera, its momentum carried it through a window. It crashed to the floor, buzzing and crippled. Then window, room, and all swung away.
“Go!” Treece shouted, and Rebel got her hands back on the broomstick and kicked the jet nozzles wide open.
They screamed away. “Where are we going?” she yelled over her shoulder.
Treece brought his broomstick up alongside hers. Now that they were out of danger, he was impassive again.
“Anywhere you like, so long as it’s not the sheraton. Or the tank towns. Security is a problem there. This is a rigged fight, even if the Comprise doesn’t know it yet. All we have to do is lay low for a few hours, and it’ll be safe to go back home.”
They cruised the orchid’s edge, Rebel slowly killing speed with short bursts of retro, until they were moving at a crawl. Up ahead, Rebel saw a white rag tied to a stalk.
“Look there. What’s that for, do you think?”
Treece shrugged.
Coming to a stop, Rebel peered into the tangles of orchid. She saw another white rag tied further in. Between rags, several stalks looked frayed, as if they had served as common kickstops. The ghost of a memory from her life in Tirnannog tugged at her. “It’s a path. Somebody lives in there.” She angled her broomstick inward. The boy had not spoken since their flight had begun. She put a hand on the top of his head. It was warm, almost fevered; she imagined she could feel the interplay of emotions within.
His braid stuck straight out. She held it against his skull and wondered how old he was. Seven? Nine? Not that it mattered. “How are you doing, Billy?”
The boy shook his head.
They drifted deeper into the orchid, the light dimming as blossoms grew rarer. Roots and stalks grew thicker here, and more tangled. Rebel had to dismount. She put Billy into the saddle and towed the broomstick behind her. He peered about silently. She tugged the broomstick deeper into the vines, finding handholds and grabspots, and always following the rags. It was almost like a tunnel now, an irregular passage created by training back selectedvines. Treece followed after.
“This would be the perfect spot for an ambush,” he said.
A woman laughed. Not a friendly laugh. “Too true,” she said from the gloom. “So state your business. What do you want with the village? You mean us harm or not?”
Treece gestured Rebel back, then put his hands on his hips. “You see this woman, this child? You try to hurt them—you die. Anybody else tries to hurt them dies too.”
Silence. “But so long as you don’t hurt them, we intend no evil. We’re only looking for someplace to spend a few quiet hours. If you let us pass, we’ll go on. Otherwise, we’ll turn back now.”
A woman floated forward, materializing from gloom and tangled root. She held a rifle. “Fair enough,” she said.
“Pass. Just remember, there’s only the one path, and you have to come by me again on your way out. Behave yourselves.” She was gone.
The village was a handful of stick huts around a central clearing, something like a larger version of the courts in Tank Fourteen. But the huts here were loosely woven frames with wide stretches of orchid between, like a scatter of wicker boxes discarded in the weeds. As they paused at the edge of the clearing, several people peered from their huts with frank curiosity.
Rebel’s broomstick bobbed, and she turned to see Billy slip from the saddle. He darted to a hut where a man sat cross-legged in the doorway, a small pot of luminous ink before him. He had a scholar’s facepaint and was carefully drawing a long line on a rectangle of parchment.
The child approached the drawing slowly, as if hypnotized, the long, glowing line doubly reflected in his unblinking eyes.
The scholar raised his head. Shadows pooled under his brows. “You like it?” He lifted the brush from the end ofthe line and dipped it into the inkpot. “It’s a pun.” With quick dabs he drew an ideogram on a leaf, held it up for inspection. “You see that? That’s my name—Ma. It means horse. My name is Ma Fu-ya. What’s yours?”
“Billy,” the child answered without hesitation.
“Well, Billy, you see this line I just drew? I want you to imagine that it’s the same as this line here”—the brush touched one line of the leaf ideogram—“only stretched long and warped out of shape. You see? Then this next line runs along one foreleg.” Quickly, surely, he drew the other lines, and together they made a horse. “You see?”
The child laughed and clapped his hands.
“He seems to like you,” Rebel said.
The scholar laid his brush in the air before him. “He’s a nice kid. Welcome to our village. We haven’t gotten around to naming it. If you’re staying, I advise you not to build too far from the clearing; one man did that already and lost his hut before he thought to mark the trail. Other than that, there’s plenty of room.”