City on Fire

“No. I didn’t.” Anger blazes up in her. “I should have been told!” she says. “If they’d found out—”

If they’d found out, Aiah thinks, she’d have been killed.

Lamarath opens a briefcase and drops the cartridge into it. “A dolphin will carry it beneath the front to our friends,” he says. He pats the case. “Insurance,” he adds, “to make sure our mercenary friends won’t betray us.”

And insurance, Aiah knows, in case they’d failed to make an agreement at all. If the negotiations had failed, Constantine could have threatened to release the video to the Provisionals, which Holson and Galagas would have realized meant the end of them.

Displaced anger and fear rattle in the hollow of Aiah’s chest. Constantine, she thinks, is willing to sacrifice her here, if it means a greater chance to win his war.

She feels a tremor in her knees.

One must keep one’s true end in view. His end is victory, and Aiah herself—her life, her happiness—ranks somewhat lower on his scale of priorities.

Aiah walks unsteadily to Lamarath’s chair and lowers herself into it.

“Insurance,” she repeats, and thinks, Who is insuring me?

TIMES CHANGE, BUT OBEDIENCE IS ETERNAL.

A THOUGHT-MESSAGE FROM HIS PERFECTION, THE PROPHET OF AJAS

—I am very pleased with this, Constantine sends. His tone, silky and satisfied, rolls through Aiah’s mind.

—I expect the Escaliers will keep their agreements, Aiah replies. Which means that those recordings made by Lamarath can be destroyed… I would like, in fact, to see them destroyed personally.

Their mental contact is sufficient for Aiah to receive Constantine’s jolt of surprise, along with his reaction, chosen from an array of possible responses. He rejects a lie, first thing of all.

—It was to protect you, he ventures. If they had attempted treachery…

—The recordings could not have been produced until it was too late. You have put me in danger with this.

—Very little. It was all carefully calculated…

Wordless fury rages through Aiah’s mind. She can feel Constantine recoil.

—Apologies, he responds quickly. It was a bad decision, and shall not—

—It will not have the opportunity to happen again. I shall guard my own back in future, and not let you do it.

For a moment she senses thoughts rolling in his mind, their exact nature beyond her reach, imponderable.

—That is wise, he judges.

In answer she just radiates anger at him. Constantine absorbs this, and she senses, strangely, his approval.

—You are growing, Miss Aiah, and that is good.

He breaks contact, and leaves her with a reluctant sense of surprise tingling in her bones.

WANTED HANDMAN FOUND DEAD

“CAROUSED TO DEATH” IN NEIGHBORHOOD BAR

Head down, arms folded over the dangling Trigram on her ivory necklace, Aiah paces along the deck, thoroughly in the grip of the Adrenaline Monster. It is third shift, the two officers could arrive at any time, and she is too nervous to wait in Lamarath’s stuffy office. It is dinnertime, and the twisted families are settling in for the sleep shift that will begin at 24:00. Cooking smells join the miasma over the dark half-world, mingled with the odor of sea, garbage, and feces. Video screens light the darkness here and there, blue video light glowing on twisted faces, reflecting off dark water. Judging by the laughter rolling up from barges here and there, most are tuned to the weekly episode of Folks Next Door. Aiah wonders what these people make of the video they watch, the constant display of goods, wealth, and security they have never possessed.

No one, she thinks, will ever make a weekly comedy about life in the half-worlds.

And then something blows up.

Right in the middle of the half-world, fifty paces away, a bright flash followed by a hot wind that presses on Aiah’s face, that blows her hair back and ruffles the lace at her throat and wrists. In the roofed space of the half- world the sound is deafening. Aiah claps her hands over her ears, but this does not shut out the screams and cries for help or the sudden startled pounding of her own stammering heart.

She stands on the iron deck and stares into the darkness, but there is a huge bright bloom on her retinas that dazzles her, keeps her from seeing any of the explosion’s aftereffects. Suddenly there is a firm hand on her elbow, and she jumps.

“Miss, you should take shelter.” Statius’s voice. “It’s probably just an accident, there are all these pressurized hydrogen tanks here and open burners, but we should—”

Another explosion rips through the darkness. The pressure wave punches Aiah in the solar plexus and tears a cry from her throat. Statius wastes no more words; his hands close on her shoulders and he half-carries her toward the hatch.

A third explosion, on the other side of the barge from the first two, turns the darkness bright. Actinic light etches the ramshackle structures, the hunched bodies of the twisted people, bent over their meals and only now beginning to react. Aiah can hear metal fragments whistling through the air. There is a terrible stench, the smell of the explosive chemicals themselves. And then Aiah hears sirens, a terrifying wailing that echoes dizzyingly from the concrete and iron that surrounds them, and the sound of a machine gun, thud-thud-thud, and sees tracer rounds flying overhead in a regular stream…

Statius throws her inside the hatch and slams the door shut behind them. Cornelius is there, machine pistol ready in his hand. He licks his lips. “What’s happening?”

Statius answers as he propels Aiah through the neat, whitewashed rooms of Lamarath’s headquarters. “Some kind of attack. Mage throwing mines or shells, I think.”

“Who’s doing it?”

“No idea.”

The oval hatch to Lamarath’s office looms ahead. It is shut. Statius throws himself onto the central wheel and heaves the hatch open as another explosion shifts the deck beneath their feet. Aiah stumbles through the hatchway, pain shooting through her leg as she catches a shin on the lintel.

“Hold the hatch, please,” says an odd, reedy voice. Dr. Romus, the snake-mage, swims over the lintel with powerful, swift pulses of his body—for all the weight of his thick trunk, he is fast—he shoots across the room and lunges up the wall to the hook, the plasm connection, where he usually hangs, and coils himself around it.

“I will protect you as best I can,” he says.

“That’s our job,” Statius says, crossing the room toward Romus. Behind him Cornelius slams the hatch to, spinning the wheel and dogging the hatch closed.

Dr. Romus’s eyes are closed as he concentrates on the plasm world. “I am used to this connection,” he says. “I am used to working with the little plasm available—you’d use it up in a minute or two.”

Statius reaches for the plasm hook, grips it firmly. The barge lurches to a near-explosion. Plaster drifts from the ceiling like pollen. “I deflected that one,” Romus says. “It would have killed us all. Please—let me do my job.”

Statius looks uncertain for a moment, then takes his hand away. Cornelius is by the communications array, jiggling the headset hook. He shrugs. “Line’s cut,” he says. “I’ll have to radio for an evacuation.” He picks up the