Railhead Read online

  Somehow, among all the shouting and crashing, among the thrashing of severed Motorik limbs and gouts of gel and cries of, “Smash the wire dollies!” Flex found itself outside the con-tainer. The Iron Penguin closed huge claws around it and lifted it off its feet. Flex twisted round and looked through the machine’s windshield, into the face of the driver, an angry brown girl with MYKA stitched across the front of her greasy work cap.

  Angry, but not that angry, it turned out. Myka could have snipped the Motorik into pieces with those claws, but although she’d been as outraged as all the others when she heard about the company’s plans to ship in putala labor, she felt suddenly less violent now that heads were being crushed and arms torn off and the blue gel, which served the wire dollies for blood, was pouring in such startling quantities out of the container. She met the eyes of the Motorik she had caught, and saw nothing in them but confusion. Nobody had bothered telling it that the world was going to be like this.

  “Me neither,” she said disgustedly, and rather than slamming the claws shut, she opened them, turning the Penguin quickly at the same instant. Flex was flung out of the battle, over a hand-rail, and dropped several stories into a pile of garbage that had been slung out on the bank of Cleave River for the next flood to wash away.

  There Flex lay, wondering about what had just happened and why. It hid in the heaps of refuse while the shouting died away above. Its brain had been damaged, it thought. It kept getting strange ideas. It found old tiles in the garbage, and started scratching marks on them with a bit of rusty wire. It looked at the marks and liked them. It discovered that they could be turned into pictures. It concentrated. It drew faces and hands. It drew the Iron Penguin and the girl who drove it. It drew the river, rushing by.

  Night came to Cleave. The strip of stormy sky that showed between the canyon’s high walls turned black, and some of the shops and factories killed their lights. Flex went on drawing, until it heard someone come climbing down the ladder from the factory above.

  It edged backward into a cleft of the canyon wall and watched as a flashlight beam swept the garbage mounds. It did not need a flashlight to see in the dark. It could see that the newcomer was Myka. It wondered if she regretted not destroying it when she had the chance. It wondered if she had come down here to find it and finish it off. It watched her stoop and pick up a tile. She looked at the tile for a long time, and Flex guessed that she had found the picture it had made of her. She looked around in case someone had left it there as a joke and was watching from the shadows, laughing. Flex stayed very still. Nothing moved but the ferns, which danced like slow green flames under the spray from the river.

  “Moto?” she called. “You still down here?”

  It felt the flashlight beam touch it. It saw the girl start as she noticed its pale face watching her through the ferns. She put the tile into one of the big pockets on the leg of her overalls and came crunching and slithering over the garbage. She said a word that Flex had not been programmed to recognize, probably a curse. She said, “What are we going to do with you?”

  “Please, I would like to leave this place,” said Flex.

  Myka snorted. “Good luck with that. They’re smashing all your sort. There are mobs outside the station, dragging wire dollies off the incoming trains, breaking them up, using their heads for lanterns. You’re going to have to stay hidden.”

  “Thank you,” said Flex. “For not breaking me.”

  “I wish I had,” said Myka. “I wish I could. If they find out I’ve helped you…”

  “Sorry,” said Flex.

  Myka picked up the tile that Flex had been working on when she came down the ladder. She looked at the picture scratched on it. She said, “I didn’t know Motorik could draw.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Were you programmed for design work or something?”

  “I do not think so.”

  She put the tile down and looked at Flex’s face again. (Zen could imagine what her expression had been. Exasperated, but kindly. She had been looking after her mother and her kid brother since she was little, and now this stupid Moto needed looking after too.)

  “You can’t stay here,” she told it. “I can show you a stairway that leads up into the stacks. Plenty of places to hide out in the stacks. But someone’s bound to see you, so you’re going to have to stop looking so… You’re going to have to look like a human being.”

  “How?” asked Flex.

  “Your skin’s too pale, and your eyes are too far apart, and…”

  Flex dipped into the menus of its mind. Its white face darkened, taking on a brownish tone not far off Myka’s own. Its eyebrows thickened into a Myka-ish unibrow.

  “Don’t overdo it,” Myka said. She looked at its clothes—the remnants of its papery gray overalls, which hung in rags now, baring its blank and sexless body. “Are you a boy or a girl?” she asked it. “Male or female? Most people are one or the other, in Cleave.”

  “Which are you?” asked Flex.

  “Female, of course.”

  Flex found a setting in its menus labeled GENDER and selected FEMALE.

  Myka went rummaging in the garbage heap and found some overalls, and a lady’s rain cape with plastic flowers for buttons. She made Flex put the clothes on, then sat back on her haunches and studied her. She told her to make her hair longer, and styled it roughly with her hands. “Well,” she said, “you’re an odd-looking girl, but at least people won’t think ‘wire dolly’ as soon as they see you. You’ll need to work at it, though. You need to watch people—you’re good at that, I can tell from the way you draw. Watch us and copy how we move. Listen, and copy how we talk. But don’t go talking to anybody except me, not unless you have to.”

  “No, Myka.”

  She led Flex along the riverside, along the rusted walkways, which jutted from the rock face there, up wet stairways, into the complicated alleys between the stacks. Before they parted she pinged something from her headset into Flex’s brain: a messaging address. “Anything you need,” she said, “you call me. I can bring you food, or whatever. But I guess your sort don’t need food?”

  Flex did not need food, but she needed power. She made her way alone through the stacks, and into the rail yards. She recharged herself from the unit that drove the huge loco-motive turntable outside the station. In an access space between the tracks she made a small lair for herself. She listened with her mind to the big, calm minds of the trains as they came and went. She heard their songs. They knew that she was there, but they didn’t seem to care. On the walls of her den, where dirt and damp had stained the ceramic, she started scratching draw-ings. She drew trains and Iron Penguins and flowers and trucks and clothes. She drew Myka. She went out into the streets and watched people and came back and drew them. She delved into the Datasea and found other things to draw, things she didn’t even know the names of.

  Every few days there was a message from Myka in her mind. “You still there, Moto?” or “You need anything?” One day she messaged back. “Please, I would like things to draw with…”

  “So Myka started bringing me paintsticks from the factory stores,” said Flex, smiling at the memory while the Damask Rose carried him farther and farther from Cleave. “I started drawing on the trains. And when people started to recognize my pictures, they came and found me, and asked me to paint signs for shops and decorate taxis and trucks. They paid me in paintsticks and free power. And Myka helped me buy stuff, clothes and things, so I’d fit in better. She came sometimes just to talk. She told me about you, and your ma. She said I was a good listener.”

  And all this had been going on, thought Zen, while he’d been off on his thieving trips to Ambersai and Tusk, or hanging out at the Spatterpattern, or lying on his bed at Bridge Street, listening to Ma moan and fret. Myka would come home wet and tired and he’d always just assume she’d come straight from her dead-end job. He felt lik
e a fool for not noticing that Flex was a Motorik; he felt a bigger one for never imagining that his sister might have this other life going on, this adventure of her own.

  “Myka’s right,” he said. “There’s so much I don’t know about her.”

  Flex smiled. “She’s good. Like you.”

  “Me? I’m not good.”

  “But you are going to all this trouble to help a Motorik, just like Myka helped me.”

  “It’s different,” said Zen.

  “When we get to Sundarban,” said Flex, “you’ll have to get into orbit to find Nova. How will you do that?”

  “I have a plan,” said Zen.

  Which wasn’t true. He had only a fragment of an idea, more of a desperate hope than a plan. It was going to be risky, and perhaps impossible, but he had to try. If he could steal Nova back from death, perhaps it would make up for all the deaths he’d caused at Spindlebridge.

  33

  The Damask Rose did not go all the way into Sundarban Station. Zen told her to stop when she was still deep in the tunnels outside the station city.

  “Do you want me to come?” asked Flex.

  Zen shook his head. “You wait here. If you don’t mind the bugs.”

  “I don’t mind them,” said Flex.

  He spoke in a whisper, not sure how good Hive Monks’ hearing was. They clustered at the far end of the carriage, rustling. Uncle Bugs and his two friends, who seemed to have no names. If Nova had been there, Zen thought, she would have made up names for them: Buzz and Cricket, something like that. But if Nova had been there, he would never have been caught up in this mad venture.

  “Well, keep an eye on them,” he warned. He didn’t trust those bugs. They had come on this trip for their own reasons, and they didn’t care about him. What if they found some way to make the old train listen to them, and persuaded it to move off before he got back?

  “I’ll watch them,” said Flex. “And I’ll get busy with the train’s paintwork.”

  One of the train’s maintenance spiders led Zen for miles through the tunnels, until he came to an access stairway leading to the surface. He took a deep breath, and began to climb.

  *

  Sundarban turned out to be the fanciest city he’d ever seen. It was the Noons’ hometown, and they had built it to impress. Proud towers rose into the afternoon haze like fairy-tale rocket ships waiting to leap into orbit. Between them shone the station canopies—a hundred platforms, serving the K-gates, which lay hidden among the surrounding mountains. Wherever he looked, bright trains were moving, crossing bridges above the busy streets, passing through archways in the buildings. Sundarban’s malls seemed open for business as usual, but Motorik work crews were busy removing the giant portraits of Mahalaxmi XXIII from their facades and replacing them with images of Priya I, who looked nervous and uncertain of herself, even in photographs. The public screens were profiling a woman called Rail Marshal Delius, whom they said had arrived in Sundarban to show her support for the young Empress, although the gossip sites that Zen picked up on his headset claimed she was really there to decide whether Priya Noon was worth supporting, or whether Railforce should side with her uncle. In times like these, when there were two or three rivals for the job of Emperor, the one who came out on top would be the one who had the backing of Railforce.

  Bluebodies in combat armor patrolled the moving stairways and stood guard outside the entrances to the station platforms. Zen rehearsed a story to tell if anyone asked him who he was, but no one did.

  His first plan had been to pose as a salvage hunter and hire a shuttle to take him into orbit. That was before he found out how much hiring a shuttle cost. No wonder space travel had never caught on. He wasn’t sure he could afford it. Even if he could, transferring that sort of money through the Sundarban data raft was going to draw him to the attention of all kinds of people.

  So he found a quiet booth in a café, put on his headset, and quickly scanned the social nets. Kobi Chen-Tulsi was not hard to find. His smug selfies grinned from a dozen different sites. Zen chose the site that Kobi seemed to use least, and messaged him. “It’s Tallis here. From Jangala. How are the bruises healing?”

  *

  Threnody was walking beside the stream that wound through the Chen-Tulsis’ gardens when Kobi came to find her. When she first heard his voice calling, “Thren! Thren!” she pretended not to hear, just so she could have a few seconds more by herself, but when he came limping over to where she stood, she put on a smile and turned to meet him. She was surprised to see how worried he looked.

  “Something’s happened,” he said. “You remember that cousin of yours, on the train? Tallis?”

  She thought, So they have found him, and he’s dead. Kobi’s family had been coordinating the salvage efforts, sending up shuttles to gather the larger bits of wreckage. She thought, They have found Tallis’s body, and Kobi’s come to tell me…

  But Kobi said, “He messaged me!”

  “He’s alive?” She should have felt happy, but she didn’t. The news made her wary, and she was not sure why. Where had Tallis been, since the crash? And why was he messaging Kobi? Why not her?

  “He’s threatening me!” said Kobi.

  “What?”

  “He says I have to do something for him, or he’ll upload his headset recording of the hunt on Jangala to every newsfeed and gossip site on Sundarban. He says he wonders how my parents will react when they see his footage of the… the fight.”

  “It wasn’t a fight, Kobi,” said Threnody. She glanced behind her to check that none of the servants or security drones were in earshot. “You knocked him down from behind. You tried to kill him. At least, that’s how it will look…”

  “I know!” said Kobi miserably.

  Threnody felt sorry for him, and surprised at Tallis. He must be looking for revenge after what Kobi had done. She thought it seemed petty of him, considering everything that had happened since.

  “So what does he want you to do?” she asked.

  “He says he needs to get into orbit,” said Kobi. “I know—it’s bizarre. But he says he knows my family’s shuttles are making regular flights, and he wants to go up on one.”

  “Have you told your family?”

  “No! Only you! I shouldn’t even be telling you. Tallis was very clear about that. He said, ‘Tell no one. I’m smarter than you. Do you think I haven’t mapped out all the twists and turns this thing could take? There’s no way out for you that’s any easier than just doing what I ask.’ ”

  “That doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Tallis would say,” said Threnody. But what was the sort of thing Tallis would say? If she was honest, she had barely known him, and anyway, her memories of him were all smudged and muddled by the more vivid, physical memories of the train crash. She didn’t know him, and she didn’t know anything about his branch of the family, the Golden Junction Noons. For all she knew, they might be angling for the leadership themselves, or in league with Uncle Tibor. For all she knew—

  A terrible thought came to her. What if Tallis had been working for Uncle Tibor from the start? What if he had come aboard the Noon train as a spy? What if the crash had been something to do with him? She remembered how she had welcomed him aboard. How she had waved him through security. This was going to look bad, she thought. If it turned out Tallis had been up to something, then she would be accused of helping him. She hadn’t meant to, of course; she had only done what any of the Noons would do; she had had no reason to suspect him, none at all.

  But Priya wouldn’t see it that way. Priya would think that she was part of cousin Tallis’s conspiracy. Priya would have her tried as a traitor to the family, sent to the freezers… Even the thought made Threnody feel cold.

  “You were right not to tell anyone,” she told Kobi. “Can you message him back?”

  “He said he’d contact me.”

/>   “And is there a shuttle you could take him up on?”

  “I suppose. We have a scheduled flight leaving from Launch Pan 50 at twenty-hundred hours.”

  “Tell him you’ll meet him there,” said Threnody. “We need to find out what this is really about.”

  “Yes,” said Kobi. “Yes, Thren.”

  He looked so meek, so defeated, that she felt quite fond of him.

  *

  Zen had spent that afternoon looking for a weapons shop that accepted cash and asked no questions. It had taken awhile, but he had found one in the end, and they had printed him a little snub-nosed pistol and sold him a cassette of ammunition. He could feel the weight of the gun in his pocket as an air-taxi took him out to Launch Pan 50.

  The launch pans were in sandy hills south of the city. Evening by then: the sun going down red behind veils of dust. The ship that waited on Pan 50 was called the Spacehopper. It looked pretty from a distance, but when Zen stepped out of the taxi and walked closer, those creamy circles on its yellow wings turned out to be only spotlight beams, and the dark leading edges were just where the ceramic had been scorched and pitted by countless descents through the atmosphere.

  Kobi was waiting for him at the foot of the boarding ladder, as he had promised. But he wasn’t alone. He had brought Threnody with him.

  Zen had not imagined that Threnody would come anywhere near Kobi, given how she felt about him, and what Lady Sufra had said about their engagement being broken. When he saw her, he almost panicked, almost turned and left, but his taxi had already taken off.

  “She’s the only person I told,” Kobi said, hurrying across the pan to meet him. “I had to. We were supposed to be going out this evening; I had to explain…”