“Everything won’t be all right. I didn’t turn the water black, but someone did. Likely the same person who blew up North Station, and poisoned Bright Mirror. The Wardens are so busy hunting me they haven’t found a trace of their real enemy. A dark force moves against Dresediel Lex with strength and subtlety. You aren’t safe. No one is. I came to wish you good luck, and warn you to be careful.”
A gust of hot wind stung Caleb’s eyes. He knew even as he blinked that when his vision cleared, Temoc would be gone.
He sat for a while on the empty bench, then set his cup on the curb and shuffled off to his cold bed.
24
Gray dawn brought Caleb bleary and blinking to the pyramid’s parking lot. The previous night’s protesters had swelled to a crowd. Men and women across Sansilva and downtown woke to find their showers would not shower, their faucets would not run. Some sent angry letters by rat. Others came to 667 Sansilva and complained in person.
A line of Wardens separated the crowd from the parking lot. RKC golems and revenants waited behind the Wardens, clanking and moaning whenever a protester staggered too close.
Cheery, middle-aged customer service reps staffed complaint tables just outside the Wardens’ line, listening to those customers who could explain their troubles, and suffering verbal assault from everyone else. No violence yet, so far as Caleb could see. The crowd still shied before the gaze of the dead, and the Wardens.
Mal elbowed toward him through the press of humanity. A golem lumbered to block her way, but she struck its chest with her palm; the air around the golem rippled, and it stumbled aside to let her pass.
Once through the line, she sauntered over to him, smiled, and thrust up her chin in greeting. “Great complaints department you have here. I especially like the guys with the melty faces. Way to make your clients feel at home.”
“Life is hard, undeath is harder. We need someone to keep us safe.”
“I’ll watch out for you.”
“Who will watch out for you?”
“You’ll think of something.”
“You have an exaggerated sense of my abilities.”
“In that case, I’ll have to trust them.” She pointed up.
Caleb’s chest thudded with the approach of massive beating wings. A scimitar shadow passed over him, and another. Couatl circled in the sky, sharks pondering their prey. These were larger than the common Warden’s mount, beasts bred for distance and battle. Baggage studded straps around their bodies: tents, supplies, weapons.
Eight Wardens, come to bear him north to war.
The Couatl swooped lower. Mal frowned. “Our ride’s here.”
The Wardens slung a wide, flat gondola under the largest Couatl for Mal and Caleb, who reclined inside as they flew north. The rising sun burned off the morning fog, but factories and foundries had already lit their fires. An industrial haze cushioned sky and earth, and did not abate until the flying caravan cleared the northern reaches of the suburbs.
Their course curved west over a broken-scab carpet of farms: acres of orange groves, miles of avocados, artichokes, tomatoes, peppers, garlic, grass pasture and waving wheat, all green, all growing, in defiance of the desert two hours’ flight away. Eight-tenths of the fresh water from Bay Station went directly to these fields, where revenants and colossal machines planted and harvested the food that fed not only Dresediel Lex, but cities across the continent and beyond the Pax. A few sapient men and women lived on these farms, tenants for the Concerns that owned the land, but for the most part the fields belonged to iron and the dead.
After three hours of northward flight the farms gave way to rolling hills, the hills to mountains. Rather than follow the First Highway up the coast toward Regis, they curved inland and soared between snowcapped peaks. The air grew cold; Caleb wrapped himself in an alpaca blanket, and Mal produced a long, fur-lined leather jacket from her backpack and draped it over her shoulders. Wind whipped the jacket’s tail behind her as they dove into a ravine.
“I’ve never seen the mountains from up here before,” he said as they flew past temples hung from sheer cliffs by forgotten sages.
“Have you seen them at all? I thought you were a city boy.”
“When I was too young to live in town by myself, Mom brought me out here on her business trips.”
“She raised you alone?”
“Temoc sure didn’t help. You know how it is,” he said, though he realized with a pang of guilt that, being an orphan, she might not. “Mom’s trips into the Badlands took months at a time, but she brought me along anyway. Better than leaving me in DL to get into trouble.”
“What did she do out there?”
“Research, mostly. Interview people, take notes. She works for the Collegium, studying nomadic Quechal tribes in the mountains and the desert.”
“Exciting.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “For the most part that meant wandering through the Badlands, following a bunch of people with a host of diseases any doctor could cure with a handful of pills and halfway decent nutrition. Life out there is a tapestry of danger: Scorpionkind and snakes, desert wolves, trickster spirits and wandering godlets who’ll burn you if you don’t worship them. Then she’d come back to the city and write books about deep truths the tribes know that the rest of us have forgotten. Seems silly to me. I always thought we had life better in DL than they do in the desert—at least as far as the lack of constant danger is concerned.”
She rolled onto her back, laced her fingers behind her head and looked up into the scaled belly of the beast that bore them. “Maybe that’s what the tribes know. The danger, I mean. How often do we really feel close to death anymore? Everyone in Dresediel Lex is wrapped in cotton: ladies worry about a patch of sagging skin, pale women want to be darker, dark women want to be paler. The men are no better. You live in Fisherman’s Vale; you must see them jogging shirtless in the mornings, bodies sculpted for no purpose grander than vanity. In the Badlands nobody has the luxury to worry about stupid shit like that.”
He struck his own stomach, which was flat but hardly sculpted. “I thought that way until I saw my fourth person die of a blood infection.”
“What about the five hundredth person dying on the streets because they don’t have a job, or can’t afford a doctor, or water?”
“Those same people wouldn’t last two weeks in the desert.”
“And you would? If you think we should kill everyone who can’t survive in the wild, you want a lot of blood on your hands.”
He stilled the dozen sharp replies that rushed to his tongue. “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ve fought this stuff over and over with my father. It’s hard to talk about it without getting emotional.”
“It’s a sensitive subject. There are no easy answers.”
“No,” he said after a long hesitation. “I guess not.” Their Couatl rose toward and through the low thin layer of clouds. Water vapor flecked Caleb’s face and lashes and wet his hair. Three wingbeats, four, and the clouds gave way to unbroken sky. The sun warmed them; it cast Caleb half in shade and left Mal in light.
She gathered her legs and stood, slowly, gripping a gondola cable for support. Her coat flared like wings. She wore a tan shirt open at the collar. A row of short scars marred the skin at her collarbone. “Here,” she said, “let me show you what I mean.”
He realized what she was about to do an instant before she released the cable and tumbled off the side of the gondola.
With a wordless cry he leapt for her; his stomach wrenched and his hand shot out. He reached, grasping, desperate, into the clouds.
Too slow, he knew in his bones, too slow, even as a firm grip clamped around his wrist. The sudden weight
