The elevator started descending. Father snatched his fingers from the trellis as if it had become electrified. I looked up at him, foreshortening as the elevator took us below the level of the floor. For a second or two he was frozen in place, like an actor who’d forgotten their stage directions. Then he started for the stairs.
‘Quoins or no quoins,’ Morcenx said, ‘you’ll never get as far as Incer.’
I had to summon all my reserves of control not to stab him then and there.
The elevator worked its way down to the entrance level, passing the main floors and the dim, windowless service corridors between them. It had travelled slowly and Father had easily beaten us even though he had taken the stairs. He was clutching a bag, out of breath, his face sweaty and possessing a deathly lack of colour.
‘We can talk about this,’ he wheezed.
‘We have,’ I said, as Paladin opened the trelliswork door and moved out of the elevator, with me and Morcenx immediately behind. ‘And we’ve said all we need to.’
‘There’s no need to be so hurtful.’
‘Hurtful?’ I spat the word back at him with a laugh. ‘You don’t even know the meaning of it. Hurtful is doing things to people with harpoons and crossbows. Hurtful is making people scream just for the fun of it. Hurtful is what Bosa Sennen will be to Adrana when she finds out how she lied to protect me.’
He hefted the quoins. ‘These won’t get you far.’
‘Then you won’t miss them. Toss Paladin the bag.’
He grimaced, then did as he was told. Paladin whipped out an arm and caught the bag with effortless ease.
‘Scan it, the way you used to scan our pockets.’
‘The bag contains quoins,’ the robot said. ‘However, I cannot determine the contents or value.’
‘It’ll do.’ If Father had skimmed a quoin or two from my bag, I was sure I still had enough to get to the dock, and a little left over for emergencies.
We advanced down the hall. Father moved to the main door, trying to block me off.
‘Open them,’ I said.
‘Fura, please. Let’s at least sit down and—’
‘She means it,’ Morcenx said, in a high, strained voice. ‘It is my considered medical opinion that your daughter is no longer responsible for her actions.’
‘Oh, I’m responsible all right. I’ve never been more responsible. Open the doors.’
‘I won’t just let you go,’ Father said, unlatching the double doors. ‘You understand that, don’t you? I love you too much. I’ll send the constables, get word to Mister Quindar, to the authorities at Incer Dock . . . there’s nowhere for you to go.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said, as he flung the doors wide and the morning cold surged into the hall. ‘There’s everywhere. Fifty million worlds, and all the baubles and all the Empty. And I’ll scour every part of it until I find her.’
I edged past him, still holding Doctor Morcenx as hostage. Paladin’s wheels bumped down the flight of long, low steps that led up to the house from the garden. He could cope with that sort of stairs, provided they didn’t go on for too long.
‘You have nothing,’ Father called after me. ‘Just your nightclothes. You’re barely dressed. You don’t even have shoes! You can’t go out into the world like that.’
Paladin picked up his pace. I pushed Morcenx forward. The cold stone paving chilled my feet, but it also made me feel sharp and alive and fearless. I looked back. My father was framed in the doorway, silhouetted against the yellow glow of the interior, all the warmth and security of my home, and I knew a quiet, thrilling shame at my own cruelty.
Father came down the steps. He started walking faster, then broke into a kind of shuffling run, trying to get to me before I reached the gate. It would have been locked, normally, but Morcenx had been paying his visit and the gate had been opened for him.
‘Fura . . .’ Father called, and there wasn’t anything in his voice but breath, all ragged and dry.
Then he stopped. I thought he’d had the sense not to chase me, but it wasn’t that. He was touching his chest, looking down at where he had his hand pressed, a dark dawning surprise on his face. Then he toppled forwards, ending up on the ground with his arms tucked under his chest.
It was another of those moments where there were two of me, poised to take different histories. There was a kinder, nicer Fura who went back to her dying father and comforted him, even though she knew it wouldn’t make any difference in the end. And there was the harder, icier one who looked back from the gate and measured these things like they were the numbers used to navigate between baubles, cold and indifferent as the fixed stars.
Setting this down now, scratching out the angles of the letters in a way that’ll never be natural or easy to me – I can’t say I’m proud of what I did, not at all. After all the love he’d given me, I ought to have gone back to him. Ought to have let Morcenx go and treat Father as best he could, not that I think there’d have been much to do. But I didn’t. I just stood there, looking back at him, and it was all I could do to mouth a ‘sorry’, and that one word nearly cost me my resolve. And then I turned, knowing he was dying, knowing I wouldn’t see him alive again, and still I went. You think I was cold, carrying on like that, pursuing my plan just as if nothing had happened to my father? I wasn’t cold at all. It was tearing me wide, what I’d just seen, and tearing me even wider to know that I had to keep thinking of Adrana, no matter how much it had hurt my father or was going to hurt me when the dust had finished settling.
All I could do was keep mouthing that word under my breath, like I was saying it to myself more than him.
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
And then we passed through the gate, and a fussy sense of decorum had me latching it properly shut behind us.
We moved into Haligon Street, the tall tenements and town houses rising on either side like purple canyons. Most of the windows were still dark, or curtained, but a few lights were on as people rose for the day and were drawn by the raised voices coming from the Ness household. The street was still quiet, though. I had counted on abandoning Morcenx and quickly losing myself in the flow of pedestrians and vehicles, but no one else was moving on Haligon.
‘You are despicable. You have behaved with abominable cruelty. To abandon your father in such a wanton, callous manner . . .’
‘You don’t know cruelty from kindness, Doctor. And I’d stop waffling if you don’t want a jab from this.’
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘Somewhere nice. A treat for you, because you’ve been so good.’
We turned right and followed Haligon around a sharp bend to the junction with the larger Jauncery Road. Jauncery was one of the main thoroughfares cutting through Hadramaw, and even at this early hour it was busy enough for my purposes, with vehicles of all sorts moving in both directions. A tram was winding its way towards us, coming around the curve in the road where it came out of Mavarasp Park. A flash of electricity sparked from its roof and caught the edges of the rails and cobbles on Jauncery Road, and I thought of all the times Adrana and I had taken the tram to the park, for ices and skating and dancing at the bandstand.
This one was going in the opposite direction, though. In yellow letters it said INCER STATION above the tram’s front.
I raised a hand and the tram began to slow.
‘You get on quietly,’ I whispered, moving the syringe from Morcenx’s neck to the small of his back. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’
‘I can’t see.’
‘No one’s asking you to. Just find an empty bench at the back of the tram.’
The tram stopped for us. Morcenx got on, fumbling his hand around until it found the safety rail, and then at an encouraging jab from me he began to work his way down the length of the compartment. I slid a one-bar quoin through the slot by the driver.
‘That’ll c
over the three of us to Incer Station. Me, my uncle, and the robot.’
‘That’ll cover you for a return,’ the driver grunted. ‘But the robot stays at the front.’
‘Fine.’ I shrugged. ‘Stay here, Paladin, by the door.’
If the driver thought it strange that a heavy moon-faced blind man in black clothes should be accompanied by a damaged robot and a barefoot girl with glowing skin, nothing was made of it. Nor were any of the other passengers much interested in their new travelling companions. I was careful not to look any of them in the face, for fear that I might have been recognised. But at this early hour, I think most of the people on the tram were shift workers, and they had better things to bother themselves with.
I settled in next to Morcenx as the tram picked up its journey.
‘If you’ve blinded me, I’ll bankrupt you.’
‘There’s gratitude, after all the employment you got out of us. You really are an unpleasant specimen, Doctor Morcenx. I should have listened to Adrana all those years ago.’
‘By now all that commotion will have drawn out the constables. They’ll work out what you’re up to and block the connecting trains to Incer. All the quoins in the world won’t help you then.’
‘Oh, shut up. Do you want everyone on the tram to know what we’re about?’
But in fact there wasn’t any risk of that, over the clanging, rumbling noise of the tram. At the junction between Jauncery Road and High Hill Road it clattered over a diverging set of rails and I used the distraction to ease myself from the bench. My feet made no sound on the floor as I moved slowly towards the front of the tram. I looked back, Morcenx still lost in his recriminations.
I leaned in to the driver.
‘There’s an extra one-bar quoin if you stop now, let me and the robot off, and carry on as if nothing’s happened.’
The driver moved a hand to the brake lever. ‘I thought you were going to Incer Station.’
I slipped the quoin through the slot.
‘Change of plans.’
15
Jauncery Road and High Hill Road both ended up at the Hall of History, and from the tram stop at the Hall of History it was a short walk into the noise and bustle of Neural Alley. We entered the Dragon Arch at the northern end of the alley. There were periods when the place was quieter than others, but there was never a time when it was truly quiet, not even this early in the morning. I counted that a blessing as we moved through the rowdy, pungent tide of the alley’s customers. The lungstuff was heavy with perfumes, pheromones, narcotics, alcohol, not to mention a fine reek of urine and vomit, and it was best not to dwell on the condition of the stones under my feet, or speculate on the reasons for their greasiness.
I walked with my head held high, directing a challenging glare at anyone who so much as glanced my way, or who in their expression gave the slightest indication that I seemed not to belong. I am Fura Ness, I imagined myself saying. I read bones under Rackamore. I saw the Nightjammer, and I lived. And your story is . . .?
‘I have some information,’ Paladin said, wobbling close behind me. ‘I should not admit to this capability, but I am more than able to detect and intercept the squawk bands used by the constables. They have been tasked to locate a young female personage as a matter of urgency, and there is word of a tracking device.’
‘I’ve got to get rid of this damned thing. If you can do that with the constables’ squawk, can you read the bracelet’s tracking signal?’
‘No, but it may be intermittent, or on a band I cannot intercept. What are you hoping to find here?’
‘A locksmith. We saw something like that, the night Adrana and I came here. Wait, what am I saying. You came after us. You must have a perfect record of all the shops here.’
‘I would,’ Paladin said. ‘But my memory of that evening was never properly consolidated to my long-term registers.’
‘Never mind. We started at the Dragon Arch and we didn’t get very far down the alley before we spotted you and hid in Madame Granity’s.’
I slowed involuntarily as I caught sight of the blue-and-white striping of her tent. I’d gone inside thinking it was chance; that Adrana just happened to have found a useful hiding place for us. But by then I had already been caught up in the clever clockwork of her scheme. She’d meant full well for us to find the bone merchant.
‘There is a locksmith,’ Paladin announced. ‘It must be the one you meant.’
It was three premises down from Granity’s, on the left-hand side of the street – a proper shopfront, too, rather than just a tent squeezed into an available gap. I recognised it. There were shelves of locks and tumblers and keys in the window. The signage above the door read: Locks of all worlds opened or repaired. New and duplicate keys. All Eras, all Occupations. Monkey and alien. Robot-proofing. No mechanism or combination too complicated.
‘If they can’t do it,’ I said, ‘no one can.’
I went in first. An aproned man stood at a counter, peering down with a magnifying visor at something on the bench. Otherwise the shop was empty.
He looked up slowly, setting aside the delicate tools of his profession.
‘May I help you?’
I walked up to the counter, Paladin behind me, and thumped my wrist down onto the surface.
‘I want this thing taken off.’
The man took my hand in his, and bent his visor down to examine the bracelet. ‘I’ve never seen anything exactly like it. I’d say Eleventh, maybe Twelfth . . . but I wouldn’t put quoins on it. What does it do, since it obviously isn’t jewellery?’
‘It’s a tracking system. The man who put it on told me that it had a coded lock.’
‘And this man has the key?’
I held my silence until he had raised his visor and was looking me in the face.
‘Yes.’
‘And I suppose there are good reasons why you want it removed.’
I thumped the bag of quoins down onto his counter. ‘Get it off me quickly – say in the next five minutes – and there’s a three-bar quoin in it for you.’
‘You’re in a hurry, then.’ He shot a watchful eye in the direction of Paladin, then bent down to open drawers concealed behind the counter. He came out with a fistful of probes, connected to cables, and with little lights in them. He set an angled device on the counter, like a small cash register, and plugged the probes into it. Then he tapped them against my bracelet and watched as the device made tiny little clicks.
‘There is a lock, and it is electromagnetically encoded,’ he said in a low, thoughtful voice. ‘Never seen anything exactly like this before, though. Seems to be a ten-parameter key . . . octal encoding. There’s a tamper circuit, so . . .’
Something in the bracelet went clunk.
‘What?’
‘I think I just tripped the tamper circuit.’
Paladin said: ‘The bracelet has begun to emit a location pulse. I do not have the means to jam it.’
I looked up at the man with the visor. ‘Your sign says no mechanism or combination too complicated. Which part of that did I misunderstand?’
The man tapped the probes against the bracelet again. ‘The lock has reset itself. You’d need something more than an electromagnetic code to open this now. Some kind of master bypass. I don’t have anything like that.’
‘Then you’re going to have to get it off me by some other means. You must have to open safes or drill through locks, when the keys get jammed.’
‘This is fixed around your wrist.’
‘And I want if off.’ I thought of the location pulse, already alerting constables. It wouldn’t take them long to narrow my location down to Neural Alley.
He bent down, slid open drawers, rattled through tools. He came out with a tiny pick, and tried to scratch a mark across the casing of the bracelet. ‘It doesn’t even touch it,’ he said, sha
king his head. ‘If that doesn’t, none of my cutters will. Whoever put this on you really didn’t want anyone removing it.’
‘Do you have energy tools? Effector batteries? Coherence beams?’ Paladin asked.
‘No . . . nothing like that. What are you, a soldier?’ Then the blood flushed out of him as if someone had opened a spigot in his neck. ‘You want it off that badly. There is a way, but you won’t like it.’
I looked at him unflinchingly. ‘Cut my arm off, you mean.’
‘Just the hand. It would only need to be the hand.’
‘No,’ Paladin stated, with a commanding tone. ‘I will not permit this.’
‘Three doors down, on this side of the alley,’ the locksmith said. ‘The Limb Broker. That’s what they do. Take things off, put things on. They’re good. Reliable. Quick and clean.’
‘No,’ Paladin said again.
I turned back to the robot. ‘It’s just flesh and bone. It’s nothing compared to my sister – nothing compared to what she’s already been through.’
‘It’ll cost you more than three quoins,’ the locksmith said.
‘I should charge you for botching this job.’
‘I am against this,’ Paladin said, but with less force than before, as if on some level he’d had resigned himself to my decision. ‘It conflicts with my protective imperative.’
‘You want to protect me,’ I said, ‘you’ll help me with anything that slows down those constables.’
‘Tell them I sent you,’ the locksmith said.
We left the shop. I pressed the bracelet against my belly, as if that might muffle the tracking signal. Paladin swerved ahead of me as we travelled the short distance to the Limb Broker. ‘This is a hastily conceived course of action. We have yet to exhaust all the other possibilities . . .’
‘I don’t see many other possibilities, Paladin. You can’t jam that signal and the locksmith couldn’t get the bracelet off. What are the constables doing now?’