BLUEMANTLE by Karen Langston (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud TXT) 📕

he plotted their separate routes to cover the forty hides he had established across the city.

By the time they left the basement, the first batch of bundles carefully hidden inside their clothes and in a discrete satchel slung over their shoulders, it was early afternoon. As they stepped out into the sand-clogged air, they both welcomed the unexpected cover it provided. A moment’s pause, a silent acknowledgement, then they parted, disappearing into the folds of the dense dust cloud.

–

The railmotor trundled through Glade, dropping southward and looping through the district of Tempur. Visibility from the Elevated had deteriorated to zero. The cloud trapped the engine’s steam, causing it to linger over the trailers like a delinquent mist. As it condensed, moisture caught particles of fine sand and clung to the windows, adding to accumulating layers of caked dust. The trailers rode blind. Early evening and the passengers already sat in darkness.

Chase regretted his decision to take the tramway. He had a couple of hours before he was due to meet Weldon. His intention had been to kill time and avoid the cloud by taking a circuitous route to his destination: Riat’s on Second Went. Hunched in the dark, with no view to distract his myopic attention, his plan had failed. Grunting, he alighted at Tempur Main, having decided to walk back the way he had come.

Weldon had put a call through to him that morning, asking to meet up for a drink. When Chase had met Naylor and Tinashe the previous evening, Tinashe had mentioned how Weldon had stormed out shortly before Chase had arrived. Without going into details, Tinashe had hinted at the cause of his frustration. Knowing Weldon to be a man who spoke his mind without precautionary kid gloves, Chase was curious to hear what he had to say.

As he walked beneath the Elevated, his work-weary body laboured under the effort. All week, his shifts at the quarry had been extended to help cover the growing number of absentees. Employers were not permitted to recruit replacements. As hundreds of citizens remained incarcerated without charge, the paperwork didn’t exist to legitimately declare their posts vacant. Consequently, those at liberty to work were forced to pick up the slack. Since the raids and the subsequent arrests, Chase’s hours had risen from sixty to seventy-two a week, without adjustment to remuneration. His co-workers cursed the Scene, blaming the extended hours on the Users who participated in it. Chase didn’t regard the cause and effect in such simplistic terms. However, he sympathised with and shared their rumbling frustration. Another reason, he thought.

But the justification didn’t break the arris in the way it usually did. His mind dwelt on his meeting with Wulfwin, struggling in vain to pinpoint the cause of a gestating disquiet. The encounter had progressed as it had done so in the past. Information provided in exchange for a deal struck long ago. A deal whereby he would always be in debt. Yet, the enduring terms of repayment had never troubled him. On the contrary, he had become a willing informer, finding an ulterior motive that sweetened the pill. So, what’s changed? he wondered.

With his mind still preoccupied by the question, Chase found himself on the approach to Tempur Cross, the district’s central square. Realising he must have exited the tramway station and turned right instead of left, he cursed under his breath. Turning around, he picked up his pace, hurrying along the underpass in the opposite direction.

A movement to his right caught his eye.

He paused involuntarily, eyes peering through the gloom towards the cause of his distraction. What had appeared to be a bulbous shadow in the throat of an alleyway, now became elongated and hovered towards him. The dust cloud parted to reveal a man, shoulders hunched and eyes darting from side to side. As the man shuffled past him, there was something in his expression that Chase recognised. Baffled, he couldn’t place the face. Then recognition struck him. Ah, that’s who! he thought, smiling at the satisfaction of a mystery solved. Then the reality of the stranger’s identity slowly dawned on him. He didn’t have a name. The association was enough.

It was the man he’d seen at Chief’s show. The man who Ursel knew.

The man who created Bluemantle.

Chase watched him merge with the cloud, feeling an odd sense of relief that he hadn’t been recognised in return. But why would he? he thought. And why would it even matter? Then the questions faded, overcome by a compelling curiosity as to what the man was doing. Intrigue, laced with the scent of opportunity, snapped his mind to attention. He hurried after the receding form, afraid that he would lose sight of him in the sandy gloom.

Whilst the cloud gave Chase cover, it also made it far more difficult to follow from a safe distance. Darting between the stanchions of the Elevated, Chase tailed the man on the underpass, heading east, away from Tempur Cross and at right angles to his route back to Bayley Road. He had already decided Weldon would have to wait.

After a short while, the man looked both ways before slipping down a narrow side street. Chase approached, peering cautiously around a dilapidated building on the corner of the junction. He strained to make out the man’s nebulous form. Bending down, he appeared to be tampering with something fixed to the side of the building, knee-high from the ground.

The man stood up and headed back to the underpass. Chase ducked into the shade of a building’s open porch. Once again, the man walked straight past him, oblivious of his observer, despite his furtive glances this way and that. Confident that the man was unaware of his pursuer, Chase followed.

A few blocks on, they broke away from the underpass, heading down a side street, off which the man turned left then right. Eventually he paused outside a six-storey block of residential quarters. Tiny apertures perforated the concrete, affording a view truncated by identical blocks opposite.