Unity by Elly Bangs (free e reader txt) 📕

We looked back at each other through a tendril of wafting smoke.

“It should be less than two klicks from here to Bloom’s land port,” I said. “There might still be trains running.”

Danae shifted uneasily. “A train. I’d expected we’d travel by cargo truck. We’ll be much harder to track that way.”

She was right. All my tactical sense told me to follow her lead away from the city, anonymously bribe a long-hauler with a meter or two of empty space between crates, but that would take time. I said, “A train will put distance between us and Bloom a lot faster. Under the circumstances, and given your time constraints, that’s my suggestion.”

She gave me a half-hearted nod, and the three of us started down the shattered highway. Thirty wordless minutes later we were scrambling up and over the barricades of rubble that ringed Bloom City’s lone remote foothold on dry land: a small, dirty port serving the aquapolis’ offshore elevators and algae fields.

There was almost no security left in the passenger terminal. I suspected most of the guards had been called to fight over more strategically important locations, and in their absence the wastelander tent city had pushed over a section of fence and spilled into the waiting area. It was a hollow victory: the ferries would only be carrying passengers to shore once the main elevators were repaired. Refugees fleeing death under the waves would merge with those running from the Holy Western Confederacy or the pure environmental brutality of surface life, but we had some time before that particular riot kindled. The remaining Medusas were high-strung and trigger-happy, but easily avoided and not especially concerned with checking our identities.

Still, the hairs on my neck kept standing up. Something was watching us. I kept looking over my shoulder, but there was never anyone there.

We passed a group of people who had stopped, all cupping their eyes against the sun to gape upward and murmur among themselves:

“Tell me I’m not the only one who just saw that.”

“I saw it.”

“What? Ain’t nothing.”

“It’s gone now, but it was there. I saw it too.”

“Like it was invisible, but the sun lit up its edges.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck’s sake, what was it?”

“It was a . . .” The spectator hesitated. “Had to have been a sundog. Some kind of an optical illusion.”

My pulse quickened and my feet stopped under me. My spit tasted metallic when I dared to look back and follow the lines of their pointing fingers up into the hot, empty sky.

“A giant fuckin’ eyeball,” someone muttered. “That’s what it looked like to me.”

My clients had stopped. They were taking their cues from my body language and bracing themselves to run. I shook my head and pushed myself forward.

I struggled to keep up at least an appearance of vigilance as we headed for the train platforms, scanning the crowd for possible threats—but whenever I resisted the urge to look upward, my attention wandered back to the clusters of aquapolitans who had somehow made it out of the city without the main elevators, all of them showing the effects of unsafe decompression. Mottled skin. Shaking hands and stumbling motion. Occasional tears of blood. Any sub pilots with the right mix of greed and guts would be ferrying people up from the depths now—taking their passengers for all they were worth, decompressing them in a hurry, maybe not even giving them Pascalex before letting them out into the terminal to sicken and collapse. I wondered how many had simply tried to swim.

In the corners of my vision, their bruised and bloodless faces transformed. They were all there: the forty-six dead in Antarka.

The adults.

The children.

“Standard?” Danae called, and I blinked, and they were gone. When I caught up, she looked out over the crowd and leaned in to whisper, “I just overheard that the trains are mostly empty and unstaffed, but Duke ordered them all to depart. Whether that’s to bring in reinforcements or just to keep Bloom locked down, I don’t know. We might still have time to get on the train to Crossroads Station. What do you think?”

“About what?” My voice sounded almost drunk. I was crumbling much faster than I’d expected.

“Do you think it’s safe?”

I took a last look around. The crowd was a blur. “There’s no one here. Let’s go.”

We paid our bribes and climbed onto the train as the levitation was humming noisily to life. I picked out an empty compartment and Danae heaved herself inside and sank onto the thin couch. I muttered something about settling in while I kept watch outside, but Naoto followed me into the corridor and slid the door shut behind him.

“I asked you a question, but you didn’t answer,” he told me quietly. He stood close with one hand obviously grasping something in the pocket of his coat. “Tell me what you saw on that medical scanner.”

“You’re my clients,” I answered emotionlessly. “I saw . . . whatever you want me to have seen.”

“What do you think you saw?”

If my silence wasn’t good enough, I didn’t know what he wanted from me. I enunciated carefully. “The scanner identified it as a nanoweapon. Is that accurate?”

“It’s the opposite of a weapon,” he said.

What was the opposite of a weapon? I shook my head and said, “If it isn’t dangerous, it isn’t my business.”

He stared into me, close enough for me to count the burst capillaries in his sclerae—deciding whether he believed a word I said. Estimating how hard it was safe to push me.

“Danae knows the surface a lot better than I do,” he told me. “Better than anyone alive. If she says we need someone to guard us up here, I believe her. Just remember you’re not the only one guarding her. Or her secrets.”

I nodded.

He locked the door behind him, and I was finally alone again, standing in the narrow corridor and staring out between the bars on the window, useless.

I wondered if any car on this train had a bar. A drug dealer. Anything. The Major’s