‘They killed her?’
‘I’ll never know for sure, but that’s what I think. Mavra believed they were strangling us, withholding the one substance the city needs. Dream Fuel’s dangerous stuff, Tanner — there isn’t enough of it to go around, and yet for most of us it’s the most precious substance imaginable. It’s not just the kind of thing people kill for; it’s the kind of thing people fight wars for.’
‘So she wanted to persuade Gideon to open up the supply?’
‘Nothing so naive; Mavra was nothing if not a pragmatist. She knew Gideon wasn’t going to let it go that easily. But if she could find out how the stuff was being manufactured — even what the stuff was — she could pass on that knowledge to other people so that they could synthesise it for themselves. At the very least she’d have broken the monopoly.’
‘I admire her for trying. She must have known it might get her killed.’
‘Yes. She was like that. She wouldn’t give up a hunt.’ Zebra paused. ‘I always promised her that if anything happened, I’d…’
‘Pick up where she left off?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Maybe it isn’t too late. When all this blows over…’ I touched my head. ‘Maybe I’ll help you find Gideon.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘You helped me, Zebra. It would be the least I could do.’ And, I thought, because Mavra sounded a lot like me. Perhaps she had come close to finding what she was looking for. If so, those who remembered her — and I counted myself as one now — owed it to her to carry on her work. There was something else, too.
Something about Gideon, and who he reminded me of — sitting, spiderlike, at the dark centre of a web of absolute control, imagining himself invulnerable. I thought again of Cahuella, and what had passed through my mind in sleep. ‘The Dream Fuel you gave me. Is that why I had such strange dreams?’
‘It does that, sometimes. Especially if it’s your first dose. It’s working its way through your brain, tinkering with neural connections. That’s why they call it Dream Fuel. But that’s only half of it.’
‘Does that make me immortal now?’
Zebra let the smoke-coloured gown fall away from her and I pulled her to me, looking into her face.
‘For today, yes.’
I woke before Zebra, dressing in the Mendicant clothes which she had washed, and quietly paced her rooms until I found the things I was looking for. My hand lingered over the huge weapon she had rescued me with, which she had just left lying in the annexe to her apartment as casually as a walking stick. The plasma-rifle would have been a useful piece of artillery on Sky’s Edge; using it inside a city seemed almost obscene. On the other hand, so did dying.
I hefted the weapon. I hadn’t ever handled anything exactly like it, but the controls were placed intuitively and the readouts showed familiar status variables. It was a very delicate weapon and I didn’t rate its chances of surviving very long if it came into contact with a trace of the plague. But that was no reason to leave it lying around, almost inviting me to steal it.
‘Careless, Zebra,’ I said. ‘Very careless indeed.’
I thought back to the night before; how the main thing on her mind must have been tending to my injury. It was perhaps understandable that she had dumped the gun at the door and then forgotten to do anything about it, but it was still negligent. I put the gun down again, quietly.
She was still asleep when I went back into the room. I had to move carefully, trying to avoid causing the furniture to move any more than necessary in case the faint noise and motion woke her up. I found her greatcoat and rummaged through the pockets.
Currency — plenty of it.
And a set of fully charged ammo-cells for the plasma-rifle. I stuffed the money and the cells into the pockets of the coat I’d stolen from Vadim — the one Zebra had found so interesting — and then dithered about whether to leave a note or not. In the end I found a pen and paper — after the plague, old-fashioned writing materials must have come back into vogue — scrawling something to the effect that I was grateful for what she had done, but I was not the kind of man who could wait two days knowing I was being hunted, even though she had offered a kind of sanctuary.
On my way out I picked up the plasma-rifle.
Her cable-car was parked where she had left it, in a niche adjacent to her complex of rooms. Again, she had been hasty — the vehicle was powered, and its control panel was still aglow and awaiting instructions.
I had watched her work the controls and judged that the action of driving was semi-automatic — the driver did not have to choose which cables to employ, just used the joysticks and throttle controls to point the vehicle in a particular direction and set the speed. The cable-car’s internal processors did the rest, selecting the cables which allowed the desired route to be achieved or approximated with something approaching optimal efficiency. If the driver tried to point the car into a part of the Canopy where there were no cables, the car would presumably reject the command, or pick a roundabout route which achieved the same ends.
Still maybe there was more skill to operating a cable-car than I’d imagined, because the ride began sickeningly, like a small boat pitching in a squall. Yet somehow I managed to keep the vehicle moving forward, descending through the latticelike enclosure of the Canopy, even though I had no idea where I was going. I had a destination in mind — a very specific one, in fact — but the night’s activity had completely erased my sense of direction, and I had no idea where Zebra’s apartment lay, except that it was near the chasm. At least now it was daytime, with the morning sun climbing up the side of the Mosquito Net, and I could see far across the city, beginning to recognise certain characteristically deformed buildings that I must have seen yesterday, from other angles and elevations. There was a building which looked uncannily like a human hand, grasping from the sky, its fingers elongating into tendrils which quickly merged with others, from adjacent structures. Here was another, which resembled an oak tree, and others which expanded into a froth of shattered bubbles, like the face of someone stricken by an awful pestilence.
I pushed the car downwards, the Canopy rising above me like an oddly textured cloud deck, into the unoccupied hinterland which separated Canopy from Mulch. The ride became rougher, now — fewer purchase points for the cable-car, and longer, sickening slides as it descended down single strands.
By now, I imagined Zebra would have noticed my absence. A few moments would suffice for her to verify the loss of her weapon, currency and car — but then what would she do? If the Game was pervasive in Canopy society, then Zebra and her allies could hardly report my theft. Zebra would have to explain what I had been doing in her place, and then Waverly would be implicated, and the two of them would be revealed as saboteurs.
The Mulch rose into view below me, all twisted roads and floods and barnacled slums. There were fires sending smoke trails into the air and lights there now; at least I had hit an inhabited district. I could even see people outside, and rickshaws and animals, and if I had opened the car’s door, I imagined I would have smelled whatever it was they were cooking or burning in those fires.
The car lurched and began to fall.
There had been sickening moments before, but this one seemed to last longer. And now an alarm was shrieking in the cockpit. Then something like normal motion resumed again, although it was noticeably bumpier and the vehicle’s rate of descent was swifter than seemed prudent. What had happened? Had the cable snapped, or had the car simply run out of handholds for an instant, plummeting before it found another line?
Finally I looked at the console and I saw a pulsing schematic of the cable-car, with a red box flashing around the area of damage.
One of the arms was gone.
TWENTY-TWO
Someone was attacking me.
Trusting the vehicle to find its own way down as quickly and as safely as possible, I retrieved Zebra’s plasma-rifle, steadying myself as the pitch rocked and swayed, my concentration not aided by the shrill insistence of
