Beneath the Gated Sky Read online

  But Porsche didn’t mention any of those fanciful logics.

  Instead, she told Cornell, and herself, “I’ve never believed—never—that Trinidad is doing this for human money or simple revenge, or even both. I know him. At least I think I know him. And those answers just don’t work.”

  “But if it’s true,” Cornell sputtered, “what does it mean?”

  Many things. Some obvious, and others lying in wait like hungry tigers.

  One obvious possibility reared up before Cornell, and he gasped, then managed to say, “Fuck,” in jarrtee, then battered English.

  Then, silence.

  This time the silence was brief, and it was broken by the distinct sound of a door handle being turned, its titanium mechanism clicking gently as Porsche rose to her feet in a single smooth motion, and she glided over to the door, navigating in the darkness by memory, reaching toward the chill brass handle, grabbing it and feeling the little points of wear caused by a child’s impatient hands. Years of being grabbed and yanked had left tiny marks, which was perhaps the only genuine trace of the little girl who had once treasured this delicious cave.

  The handle and door were being pushed toward her, with force.

  Porsche stepped back, bracing herself. The hallway lights seemed brilliant for an instant, causing her to squint, and a large jarrtee figure stepped toward her without warning, without sound.

  She moved by instinct, kicking one of the solid ankles hard enough to make it fly, then letting gravity do the rest.

  The man dropped on the floor with a pitiful grunt.

  For the second time in his life, Uncle Ka-ceen was on his ass, knocked flat by his niece. But this time he wasn’t angry, or embarrassed. He wore a pitiful expression built around milky blind eyes, and his voice matched his face, telling her, “I came to get you.”

  Softly and sloppily, he said, “We found your friend. And my superior thinks we can save him.”

  “Are you all right?” Porsche whispered.

  “Not at all,” he admitted, his breathing quick and useless. “I’m not seeing very much at the moment.”

  Misery brought the blindness.

  With the frailest of whispers, Uncle Ka-ceen confessed, “I was listening to you…to everything. Everything.”

  He sat motionless for a long moment, probably wishing that he had beaten his son to death years ago, in Yellowstone.

  Then with the trapped calm of a hero, he said:

  “Take my hand. Take me where I have to go.”

  Salvation

  1

  The building had once served as a small neighborhood zoo, its cages and sealed tanks designed to hold diurnal animals, deep-sea fish, and other creatures people never saw in the normal course of a night. Almost nothing had been changed to create a small prison. Suspected members of the Order were purged of biorhythmic hormones, tagged, and laid out, estivating in the dying light of the day. Every cage and drained aquarium was crowded with prisoners awaiting interrogation. The backlog looked enormous, but otherwise the building felt empty. Most of its guards had been sent off into the mountains, thrown into the desperate hunt for the kidnapped Masters. Only the interrogators were at full strength, but they weren’t accomplishing anything; moments ago, Uncle Ka-ceen had stunned them, leaving their bodies lying limp on the floor of the main aquarium.

  Bloodied prisoners sat along one glass wall, restrained by silk ropes and tangles of tubes and wires. None were Timothy. Porsche looked twice to make certain, and Cornell wiped clean a tall man’s face, taking a hard look before he asked, “Where next?”

  For every reason, time was short.

  The four of them rushed from cell to cell, and Uncle Ka-ceen examined the coded tags, searching for a single prisoner brought through the proper checkpoint. It was frustrating work, and as the nameless woman liked to point out, “He might not be here. Records could be wrong, which means—”

  “Nothing,” Uncle Ka-ceen replied, glaring at the woman for a half-instant. “Mr. Kleck is here somewhere, and we’ll find him.”

  “I certainly hope so,” she offered, without hope.

  No one had mentioned the Abyssian’s speculation. Not in the woman’s presence, they hadn’t. And among themselves, they had said maybe twenty words, deciding only to keep secret what Porsche suspected.

  For now.

  The largest cage was packed, prisoners stacked three deep on the slick ceramic floor, and there was a thick, powerful stink in the close air. Bodies lying against the floor were ravaged by the jarrtee equivalent of bedsores—infected patches of blackened flesh, much of it rotting, fat green grubs enjoying the choicest portions. Hundreds of tags needed to be read. It would take too long. Porsche knew it, and standing back for a moment, she gazed at the motionless bodies, the scene possessing an inert and subdued dignity, utterly unexpected, and in a fashion, beautiful.

  Life enduring every insult, every abuse.

  “We can’t leave him,” Cornell whispered. “Not here. Not like this.”

  He could see the possibility looming, and he was hoping for Porsche’s encouragement and conviction. But the best she could offer was silence and a purposeful nod.

  “Low-grade prisoners,” her uncle called out. “That’s all that are here!”

  If Timothy was here, he had been brought in recently. The guards would have carried him on a stretcher, and they were probably sloppy men, and hurried, and they despised their enemies.

  She tried to read the bodies.

  The angles of repose; the general mix of limbs and upturned faces.

  She strode out to a stack of prisoners not far from a secondary door—a titanium door through which zookeepers might once have thrown meat and nuts to a band of terrors—and she grasped a spidery arm, yanking hard and finding the attached face, turning it up to the dim ceiling light as her uncle shouted out:

  “I’ve already checked them over!”

  It wasn’t Timothy’s face. She was wrong, and surprised. And an instant later, angry. Taking a step backward, her slippered foot clipped a sharp jarrtee chin, and she wheeled and glanced downward, staring at Timothy for several moments before the first sense of recognition struck.

  “I have him. Here!”

  Dubious, the woman asked Cornell, “Is it him?”

  A nod. “Yes.”

  Timothy was buried beneath a layer of even newer prisoners, his tag tucked out of easy reach. With a laser knife, Uncle Ka-ceen cut the tag free. Then as an afterthought, he read the security code, shaking his head in a human fashion and laughing grimly.

  “What’s it say?” asked Cornell.

  “It prescribes his interrogation,” he explained. Then kneeling, he patted the long chalky face with a strange affection, adding, “You can’t know it, son. But this is your lucky day.”

  Two figures lay unconscious in the back end of a little float car adorned with security emblems.

  It was Jey-im who drew the nameless woman’s attention. “What would be a likely place?” she asked Uncle Ka-ceen. “To leave him, I mean. Someplace where he will be found, but not too soon.”

  The last storm of the day was pummeling their car. Buildings were dark blotches against the gray of air and angry water. They could slow anywhere and dump Jey-im onto the pavement, and nobody would notice. They could stop and prop up his motionless body in the middle of a normally busy intersection, and the poor man would stand alone for an eternity, the scant traffic seeing nothing in the mayhem.

  But the woman seemed to need to act with some modicum of decency. When Uncle Ka-ceen didn’t reply immediately, she turned on Porsche, trying for a reasonable voice that turned shrill despite her best efforts.

  “This gentleman made some unfortunate decisions,” she reminded her. “And besides, the Few aren’t responsible. The agency holds the blame, and your cousin…”

  “And so do I,” Porsche added.

  The woman discounted those words with a simple grunt.

  “I could have warned him,” Porsche explai
ned, her own voice crisp and certain. “A few words before we left the school, and his life wouldn’t be over now.”

  “And in the process,” the woman countered, “you’d have doomed your own family. Would that have been best?”

  Porsche didn’t say the obvious. How safe was her family as it stood now, and what were their prospects?

  Instead, she turned to her uncle, asking, “How’s Trinidad? What’s the latest?”

  He closed his eyes, listening to the prattle of eavesdroppers, then after a little while, he announced, “The City still hasn’t found him. But it’s doubling its search area, including sweeps of the coastal mountains.”

  Their car was slowing.

  The woman was pulling off into a building’s rain shadow, and with the calmest, coldest voice, she said, “This is where we’ll leave him. The jarrtee.”

  No one made a sound.

  “Very well,” she said. “I’ll move the man myself.”

  Porsche said, “No.”

  Saying nothing, Cornell pulled a little closer to her.

  Uncle Ka-ceen kept his mouth closed, feigning deafness.

  Then the woman reached for Jey-im, and Porsche intercepted her hand and held it tightly, staring hard at the cold black eyes, saying, “No,” with finality.

  An electric moment passed.

  Then the woman shrugged, human-style, and remarked, “I hope you have something reasonable in mind.”

  Porsche explained, in brief.

  “I’m not going to be responsible for any of this,” the woman growled. “It’s your project, and all the blame is yours.”

  Porsche had to laugh.

  “What have I been saying?” she asked, shaking her head in astonishment. “When have I said anything else?”

  The last time Porsche was here, it was nearly dawn, the sky was clear, and she was accompanied by a young lover who would soon betray her.

  This time, each of those geometries was neatly reversed.

  She barely recognized the tiny courtyard. Lush weeds and an ankle-deep pond obscured the glass disk, and the surrounding compounds were shabby enough to look abandoned. Which they were, perhaps. Did security people still keep tabs on this intrusion? She asked, and her uncle, shouting over the drumming of rain, said, “Not for years, they haven’t. The war demands all their attentions.”

  Uncle Ka-ceen and the woman were half-carrying, half-dragging Timothy Kleck.

  Cornell and Porsche were following them, Jey-im strung between them, limp as mud and about as helpful.

  “Hurry!” the woman implored everyone.

  Porsche felt the glass beneath her, and as her foot skated forward, she kicked a day salamander. A fat golden tail flopped out of the water, vanishing with a sharp splash, and again she looked up, her own dose of paranoia making her scan the nearby windows, watching for masked faces.

  The woman let Timothy fall into Uncle Ka-ceen’s arms. From beneath her bulky shirt, she brought out six tiny statues molded from cultured diamonds.

  Lightning crossed the sky, making the statues glitter and dance.

  Then the woman was kneeling, trying to find the disk’s center, and with a loud, happy voice, she told the world, “Another moment or two…”

  Uncle Ka-ceen’s face was hidden by his mask, but something about its angle and his posture told Porsche what he was doing. In another moment, he would lose the eavesdroppers. Which was why he was asking for a final update, his eyes closed beneath his impenetrable mask, his whispered commands obscured by the rain and tumbling white thunder.

  “There!” the woman announced.

  Then again, she told everyone, “Hurry!”

  A gust of wind came barreling down the alley, thrashing the weeds and kicking up waves on the water. Porsche leaned into the wind. But Uncle Ka-ceen remained motionless, holding Timothy around the chest, the two of them immune to that elemental force.

  Then the wind dropped to nothing.

  “What?” Porsche asked, the sudden quiet making her voice seem loud. “What’s wrong, Uncle?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  He never moved so much as a finger.

  Then the woman said, “Hurry,” one last time. “We have people waiting for us on the other side.” Then as if to sweeten the prospects, she added, “It’s a dry world. Come with me, now!”

  “Trinidad,” Uncle Ka-ceen muttered.

  “What about him?” asked Porsche.

  There was a long pause that ended at no particular moment. Porsche heard nothing, then she heard her uncle’s voice, and she realized that she had been hearing it for several moments, the words unclear, jarrtee mixed with ragged English and several other languages from worlds she couldn’t identify.

  Again, he whispered, “Trinidad.”

  The woman took hold of Cornell, tugging on his arm as she said, “Come with me. It will be all right.”

  “What’s happening?” Porsche shouted.

  “They just found him,” her uncle reported, his voice suddenly strong. “The City found him. And the entire convoy.”

  Cornell took back his arm, asking, “What about their base camp?”

  “They haven’t found it,” Uncle Ka-ceen reported. “Not yet, at least. But the City is screaming for reinforcements.”

  The woman decided on silence, for the moment.

  Then Porsche said simply, “I’m staying here. I can’t help anyone if I walk away from Jarrtee now.”

  “No,” the woman replied. “You need to stay with us.”

  “I’m not going, either,” Cornell promised.

  The woman tried to touch his arm a second time, and he slapped her hand away, adding, “I’m tired of you.”

  “Take Timothy,” said Porsche. “And Jey-im, too.”

  She was speaking to her uncle.

  “Keep Jey-im stunned, I guess. Stunned, and innocent. I’ll come get him as soon as possible.”

  “You two won’t stand a chance,” the woman warned them. “Minimal equipment. Just that little float car to drive…staying here is insanity!”

  Uncle Ka-ceen turned to face her, and with a sudden composure, he asked, “Is the intrusion open?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he said, “Good. Fine.”

  Without warning, he let Timothy slide down into the water and stepped over him, lifting both hands and giving the woman a single hard shove.

  She stumbled, then seemed to fall into the pond’s secret depths.

  The water swirled, then grew still again. Then he calmly picked up Timothy and dropped him into the intrusion. He then lifted up Jey-im and half-flung him down again, making him vanish. And he finally kneeled and brought up each of the six intrusion keys, counting them twice, then handing them to Porsche while saying, “We might need these.”

  She nodded, speechless.

  The tiny diamond statues portrayed heroes in the midst of their famous deeds. One of them was Po-lee-een, Porsche realized. Another was Ka-ceen, the great warrior who had personally slaughtered a thousand of the City’s enemies with nothing but a steel blade. And the other four were named for her parents and her brothers.

  “The witch let me camouflage these keys,” Uncle Ka-ceen explained, a thin amusement breaking to the surface.

  Then with a different voice, he said:

  “Hurry.”

  As if they needed prompting.

  2

  Porsche drove, Cornell sitting to her right, nervously passive, and Uncle Ka-ceen behind them, his eyes more closed than open, keeping careful watch over the world.

  They would talk on occasion, but never for long.

  Plans were discussed. Tactics were debated. Hypothetical problems were invented, then dissected and solved with a glossy ease that left everyone feeling uncomfortable. The truth told, they didn’t know what would happen when they found Trinidad, or even if they could reach the mountains. It became more and more apparent that this was a pure gamble, an over-the-back full-court shot, and they wouldn’t be able to even guess thei
r prospects for a long time to come.

  Sometimes Porsche would talk about her cousin.

  And the Abyssian’s bizarre speculation.

  Uncle Ka-ceen grew silent and cold in response, his face like marble, very pale in the waning light.

  Then Porsche took a deep breath and said, “Yellowstone.”

  She took a second breath, then aimed at a specific moment. “After Trinidad and I talked about forbidden things. After the two of you had your big fight. That next scene has always stuck in my mind.”

  The man behind her didn’t react. If anything, he grew even more distant, one white hand stroking his bare head, the barest tremor of the fingers betraying his true mood.

  It was Cornell who asked:

  “What scene stuck?”

  Their fight was done, and Trinidad—bruised and still furious, and thoroughly embarrassed—won comfort from his mother. Aunt Kay had embraced him, pulling his head down against her chest, and in plain view, she had whispered something into his ear. Porsche didn’t have any idea what she said. She considered asking if her uncle had been eavesdropping, but he probably hadn’t been. And even if he had been, she doubted if anything important was said.

  “I guess what it was,” she allowed, “was the way he leaned against his mother.” Porsche glanced at Cornell, but she was talking to her uncle. “I guess what bothered me—this is going to sound awful—what bothered me was that sudden realization that Trinidad had two parents. And the parent who mattered most wasn’t born into the Few, which was startling. And a little wrong, I kept thinking.”

  There was a long silence broken by the distant rumble of thunder.