I almost made it.
Sybilline saw me first, shrieking in either delight or fury. She raised a hand and her little gun appeared in it, springing from the sleeve-holster I had guessed she was wearing. Almost simultaneously, a flash of muzzle-fire whitened the chamber, the pain of its brilliance lancing into my eyes.
Her first shot shattered the staircase below me, the entire structure crashing down like a spiral snowstorm. She had to duck to avoid the debris, and then she got off another shot. I was halfway through the ceiling, halfway into whatever lay beyond, reaching out with my hands for some kind of purchase. Then I felt her shot gnaw into my thigh, soft at first, and then causing pain to blossom like a flower opening at dawn.
I dropped the crossbow. It tumbled down the flight of stairs onto the landing, where I saw a pig snatch it from the darkness with a snort of triumph.
Fischetti raised his own weapon, got off another shot, and that took care of what remained of the staircase. If his aim had been any better — or if I had been any slower — his shot might also have taken care of my leg.
But instead, holding the agony at bay, I slithered onto the ceiling and lay very still. I had no idea what kind of weapon the woman had used; whether my wound had been caused by a projectile or a pulse of light or plasma, nor could I know how severe the wound was. I was probably bleeding, but my clothes were so sodden, and the surface on which I was lying was so damp, that I couldn’t tell where blood ended and rain began. And for a moment that was unimportant. I’d escaped them, if only for the time it would take them to find a way up to this level of the building. They had blueprints of the structure, so it would not take long, then, if a route existed at all.
‘Get up, if you’re able.’
The voice was calm and unfamiliar, and it came not from below, but from a little above me.
‘Come now; there isn’t much time. Ah, wait. I don’t expect you can see me. Is this better?’
And suddenly it was all I could do to screw my eyes shut against the sudden glare. A woman stood over me, dressed like the other Canopy players in all the sombre shades of black: dark, extravagantly heeled boots which reached to her thighs, jet-black greatcoat which skirted the ground and rose behind her neck to encircle her head, which was itself englobed in a helmet which was more black openwork than anything solid, like a gauze, with goggles like the faceted eyes of insects covering half her face. What I could see of her face, in all this, was so pale it was literally white, like a sketch that had never been tinted. A diagonal black tattoo traced each cheekbone, tapering towards her lips, which were the darkest red imaginable, like cochineal.
In one hand she held a huge rifle, its scorched energy-discharge muzzle pointed at my head. But it did not appear that she was aiming the rifle at me.
Her other hand, gloved in black, was reaching out to me.
‘I said you’d better move, Mirabel. Unless you’re planning to die here.’
She knew the building, or at least this part of it. We didn’t have far to go. That was good, because locomotion was no longer my strong point. I could just about move along if I allowed one wall to take most of my weight, freeing the injured leg, but it was neither rapid nor elegant, and I knew I would not be able to sustain it for more than a few dozen metres before blood loss or shock or fatigue took their debt.
She took me up one flight — intact, this time — and then we emerged into the night air. It was a measure of how squalid the last few minutes had been that the air hit my lungs as something cooling and fresh and clean. But I felt myself on the verge of unconsciousness, and still had no real idea what was happening. Even when she showed me a small cable-car, parked in a kind of rubble-strewn cave in the building’s side, I could not quite adjust my perceptions to accept that I was being rescued.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked.
‘Because the Game stinks,’ she said, pausing to mouth a subvocal command at the vehicle, causing it to jerk to life and slink towards us, retracted grapples finding purchase points amongst the dangling debris which covered the cave’s ceiling. ‘The Gamers think they have the tacit support of the entire Canopy, but they don’t. Maybe once, when it wasn’t quite so barbaric — but not now.’
I fell into the vehicle’s interior, sprawling across the rear seat. Now I could see that my Mendicant trousers were covered in blood, like rust. But the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and while I felt light-headed, it hadn’t got any worse in the last few minutes.
While she lowered herself into the pilot’s seat and brought the controls online, I said, ‘There was a time when this wasn’t barbaric? ’
‘Once, yes — immediately after the plague.’ Her gloved hands took hold of a pair of matched brass joysticks and pushed them forward and I felt the cable-car glide out of the cave with rapid whisking sounds of its arms. ‘The victims used to be criminals; Mulch they caught invading the Canopy or committing crimes against their own sort; murderers or rapists or looters.’
‘That makes it all right, then.’
‘I’m not condoning it. Not at all. But at least there was some kind of moral equilibrium. These people were scum. And they were chased by scum.’
‘And now?’
‘You’re talkative, Mirabel. Most people who’ve taken a shot like that don’t want to do anything except scream.’ As she spoke, we left the cave, and for a moment I felt sickening free-fall as the cable-car dropped, before finding a nearby cable and correcting its descent. Then we were rising. ‘In answer to your question,’ she said, ‘there started to be a problem finding suitable victims. So the organisers began to get a little less — how shall I put it? Discriminatory? ’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I understand, because all I did was wander into the wrong part of the Mulch by mistake. Who are you, by the way? And where are you taking me?’
She reached up one hand and removed the gauzy helmet and faceted goggles, so that, when she turned around to face me, I could see her properly. ‘I’m Taryn,’ she said. ‘But my friends in the sabotage movement call me Zebra.’
I realised I’d seen her earlier that night, amongst the clientèle at the stalk. She had seemed beautiful and exotic then, but she was even more so now. Perhaps it helped that I was lying down in pain having just been shot, fevered with the adrenalin which came from unexpected survival. Beautiful and very strange — and, in the right light, perhaps barely human at all. Her skin was either chalk-white or hard-edged black. The stripes covered her forehead and cheekbones, and from what I remembered seeing in the stalk, a large fraction of the rest of her. Black stripes curved from the edges of her eyes, like flamboyant mascara applied with maniacal precision. Her hair was a stiff black crest which probably ran all the way down her back.
‘I don’t think I’ve met anyone like you before, Zebra.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘Some of my friends think I’m rather conservative; rather unadventurous. You’re not Mulch, are you, Mister Mirabel?’
‘You know my name, what else do you know about me?’
‘Not as much as I’d like to.’ She took her hand from the controls, having set the machine into some kind of autopilot mode, allowing it to pick its own trajectory through the interstices of the Canopy.