Page 17

The Afterbirth

On Luna, there is no dark. No true dark, at least. Lights of a million shades swim together, glossing over the moon’s jagged, cracking steel skin of cityscape. Snaking public trams and air thoroughfares, flashing communication centers, bustling restaurants, and austere police stations weave into the metal dermis of the city like blood capillaries, nerve endings, sweat glands, and hair follicles.

We fall away from Gold districts, forsaking the high reaches of the city where stately shuttles and gravBoots ferry Golds to opera houses atop kilometers-high towers. We dive down past the wealthy Silver and Copper districts, wending our way through rungPaths and aerial trains, through the midDistricts where the Yellows, Greens, Blues, Violets reside, past the lowDistrict where Grays and Oranges make their homes.

Down and down we go to the gutters of the city where the roots of this colossal steel jungle burrow into the ground. Myriad lowColors ride public transportation from factories to their windowless apartments, some no larger than one meter by three. Only room enough for a bed. Cars rattle out exhaust in clogged beacon-lit boulevards. The deeper we go, the fewer the lights, the dirtier the buildings, the stranger the animals, but the more brilliant the graffiti. I glimpse Gray police standing over arrested Brown vandals who covered an apartment complex with the image of a hanging girl. My wife. Ten stories tall, hair burning, rendered in digital paint. My chest constricts as we pass, cracking the walls I’ve built around her memory. I’ve seen her hanged a thousand times now as her martyrdom spreads across the worlds, city by city. Yet each time, it strikes me like a physical blow, nerve endings shivering in my chest, heart beating fast, neck tight just under the jaw. How cruel a life, that the sight of my dead wife means hope.

No matter our reputations, no enemy would seek us here. No ears to listen. No eyes to see. This is a place of gang killings, robberies, turf battles, drug trade. That my new friend wants such human privacy, privacy not even a jamField can really offer in the Citadel and the High City, means much. It worries me. Means the rules are void. But Victra was right and Roque was not. Patience will do me nothing. I must take a risk.

The team of lurchers has secured an abandoned garage. They provide security for the shuttle while Valentin’s team escorts me from the garage into the bustle of the dirty street outside. Refuse and water make bogs out of alleys. Humid air is thick with the sweet musk of rot and the charred soot of burning garbage. Hawkers cry out wares from cracked sidewalks, clogged with Reds, Browns, Grays, Oranges of all species—urchin, invalid, working class, gangers, tweakers, mothers, fathers, beggars, cripples, children. The lost.

Eo would say this is the hell they’ve built their heaven upon. And she’d be right. Gazing up, I see more than half a kilometer of tenement buildings before the polluted haze makes a ceiling for the human jungle. Clotheslines and electrical lines crisscross overhead like vines. This sight is hopeless. What is there to change here but everything?

We’re to meet at the Lost Wee Den. It is a large, tall tavern with a flickering red sign covered in pithy graffiti. Fifteen levels, all open and looking down on a central drinking hall of tables and booths filled with some two hundred customers. I can smell the piss in the metal booths, which sag from use. Bottles rattle and glasses clink as swill is slammed back. Indigo and pink lights flicker on the fifteenth floor, where they’ve dancers and private rooms for customers. I pass with Valentin through two bouncers with biomod hands—one Obsidian with skin pale as bleached marble and arms thicker than mine, the other a dark-skinned Gray with a scorcher muzzle built into his arm.

The rest of my Grays filter in behind me in staggered intervals. Some wearing contacts, pretending to be other Colors. One even wearing a fleshMask to look pretty as a Pink. Can’t even tell it’s digital till you put a magnet near it. They look like they belong here. I doubt I do, despite the Obsidian dye job they’ve done to me.

The Sigils on my hands are covered with Obsidian prosthetics. My hair is white, eyes black. Skin made paler with cosmetics. Victra and I are too large to pass for any other Color. Fortunately, Obsidians, though rarer than the other lowColors, are not out of place down here. I follow Valentin to a table in an alcove near the back of the hall where a young man lounges behind a pack of mercenaries and a single Obsidian. A deep silence fills me as I watch the Obsidian stand and leave the table to sit at an adjacent one. Others eye him too before remembering themselves and looking down at their drinks—like water birds as a crocodile glides past. The Obsidian is a foot taller than I. And the whole of his face is tattooed with a skull. Stained.

So much for a low profile.

“Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven?” I ask the reclining man.

“Reaper! Even Milton knew Lucifer was a petty son of a bitch.” He smiles enigmatically and waves to the chair across from him. “Do stop towering over me.”

He’s not even wearing a disguise. I look over at Victra. “Thought it was going to be a new friend.”

“Well, you two have never been friends before. That’d be the new part. You boys have fun now.”

“You’re not staying?” I ask.

“I showed you the door. You have to walk through it.” She squeezes my butt playfully and sways out. The Jackal watches her leave, leaning slightly to get a better view.

“Didn’t think you cared about women.”

“I could be dead and I’d still appreciate her. But I don’t have to tell you that. Alone in space for months on end. Ship all to yourself. Whatever was there to do?”

I sit across from him. He offers me a bottle of greenish liquor.

I shake my head. “I drink to forget about men like you.”

“Ha! An Arcosian insult, if I

’m not mistaken. One of Lorn’s best. Though there’s enough to choose from.” He leans back. Enigmatic in his dullness. Face plain. Eyes like smooth, worn coins. Hair the color of desert sand. Lone hand twirling a gold stylus with the quickness of an insect skittering over blasted ground, crack to crack. “The Jackal of Augustus and the Reaper of Mars, together again, at long last. How we have fallen.”

“You chose the venue,” I say as he sets his stylus behind his ear and takes a chicken leg from a platter on the table. He strips the skin with his teeth.

“Does it unnerve you?”

“Why would it? We both know how fond you are of the dark.”

He suddenly laughs, a whining high-pitched bark, like a dog being stabbed. “So much pride to you, Darrow au Andromedus. Family all dead. Disgraced, penniless things. So average that your parents didn’t even try to introduce you to society. No friends remaining. No one who knew you before you slipped into the Institute, so unassuming-like. But how you rose when given a chance.”

“Well, at least you still like to talk,” I mutter.

“And you still like to make enemies.”

“Everyone has a hobby.” I examine the stump where his right hand should be. “Desperate for attention? You’re the only Gold alive that wouldn’t bother getting a new hand.”