I woke before Zebra, dressing in the Mendicant clothes which she had washed, and quietly paced her rooms until I found the things I was looking for. My hand lingered over the huge weapon she had rescued me with, which she had just left lying in the annexe to her apartment as casually as a walking stick. The plasma-rifle would have been a useful piece of artillery on Sky’s Edge; using it inside a city seemed almost obscene. On the other hand, so did dying.
I hefted the weapon. I hadn’t ever handled anything exactly like it, but the controls were placed intuitively and the readouts showed familiar status variables. It was a very delicate weapon and I didn’t rate its chances of surviving very long if it came into contact with a trace of the plague. But that was no reason to leave it lying around, almost inviting me to steal it.
‘Careless, Zebra,’ I said. ‘Very careless indeed.’
I thought back to the night before; how the main thing on her mind must have been tending to my injury. It was perhaps understandable that she had dumped the gun at the door and then forgotten to do anything about it, but it was still negligent. I put the gun down again, quietly.
She was still asleep when I went back into the room. I had to move carefully, trying to avoid causing the furniture to move any more than necessary in case the faint noise and motion woke her up. I found her greatcoat and rummaged through the pockets.
Currency — plenty of it.
And a set of fully charged ammo-cells for the plasma-rifle. I stuffed the money and the cells into the pockets of the coat I’d stolen from Vadim — the one Zebra had found so interesting — and then dithered about whether to leave a note or not. In the end I found a pen and paper — after the plague, old-fashioned writing materials must have come back into vogue — scrawling something to the effect that I was grateful for what she had done, but I was not the kind of man who could wait two days knowing I was being hunted, even though she had offered a kind of sanctuary.
On my way out I picked up the plasma-rifle.
Her cable-car was parked where she had left it, in a niche adjacent to her complex of rooms. Again, she had been hasty — the vehicle was powered, and its control panel was still aglow and awaiting instructions.
I had watched her work the controls and judged that the action of driving was semi-automatic — the driver did not have to choose which cables to employ, just used the joysticks and throttle controls to point the vehicle in a particular direction and set the speed. The cable-car’s internal processors did the rest, selecting the cables which allowed the desired route to be achieved or approximated with something approaching optimal efficiency. If the driver tried to point the car into a part of the Canopy where there were no cables, the car would presumably reject the command, or pick a roundabout route which achieved the same ends.
Still maybe there was more skill to operating a cable-car than I’d imagined, because the ride began sickeningly, like a small boat pitching in a squall. Yet somehow I managed to keep the vehicle moving forward, descending through the latticelike enclosure of the Canopy, even though I had no idea where I was going. I had a destination in mind — a very specific one, in fact — but the night’s activity had completely erased my sense of direction, and I had no idea where Zebra’s apartment lay, except that it was near the chasm. At least now it was daytime, with the morning sun climbing up the side of the Mosquito Net, and I could see far across the city, beginning to recognise certain characteristically deformed buildings that I must have seen yesterday, from other angles and elevations. There was a building which looked uncannily like a human hand, grasping from the sky, its fingers elongating into tendrils which quickly merged with others, from adjacent structures. Here was another, which resembled an oak tree, and others which expanded into a froth of shattered bubbles, like the face of someone stricken by an awful pestilence.
I pushed the car downwards, the Canopy rising above me like an oddly textured cloud deck, into the unoccupied hinterland which separated Canopy from Mulch. The ride became rougher, now — fewer purchase points for the cable-car, and longer, sickening slides as it descended down single strands.
By now, I imagined Zebra would have noticed my absence. A few moments would suffice for her to verify the loss of her weapon, currency and car — but then what would she do? If the Game was pervasive in Canopy society, then Zebra and her allies could hardly report my theft. Zebra would have to explain what I had been doing in her place, and then Waverly would be implicated, and the two of them would be revealed as saboteurs.
The Mulch rose into view below me, all twisted roads and floods and barnacled slums. There were fires sending smoke trails into the air and lights there now; at least I had hit an inhabited district. I could even see people outside, and rickshaws and animals, and if I had opened the car’s door, I imagined I would have smelled whatever it was they were cooking or burning in those fires.
The car lurched and began to fall.
There had been sickening moments before, but this one seemed to last longer. And now an alarm was shrieking in the cockpit. Then something like normal motion resumed again, although it was noticeably bumpier and the vehicle’s rate of descent was swifter than seemed prudent. What had happened? Had the cable snapped, or had the car simply run out of handholds for an instant, plummeting before it found another line?
Finally I looked at the console and I saw a pulsing schematic of the cable-car, with a red box flashing around the area of damage.
One of the arms was gone.
TWENTY-TWO
Someone was attacking me.
Trusting the vehicle to find its own way down as quickly and as safely as possible, I retrieved Zebra’s plasma-rifle, steadying myself as the pitch rocked and swayed, my concentration not aided by the shrill insistence of the alarm. I moved back onto the rear bay, past the passenger seat where I’d lain the previous evening. Bracing myself, I knelt and opened the side door, watching it gull open. Then I leaned across and opened its counterpart on the other side, and pushed myself out as far as I could, into the wind, the ground still several hundred metres below me. I risked a quick glance up at the arm assembly, observing the cauterised stump where one of the arms had been shot clean off with some kind of beam weapon.
Then I looked up and back along my route of descent. Two other cable-cars were following me, about two hundred metres higher up and the same distance behind me. A black figure was leaning from the closest car, shouldering something which — even as I watched — flashed a light too intense for words. A line of pink ionised-air slammed past me like a piston, ozone hitting my nose almost before the thunderclap of the collapsing vacuum-tunnel sheared open by the beam weapon.
I looked down. We had lost another hundred metres, but it was still too high for my tastes. I wondered how the vehicle would manage with only one arm.
I flicked on Zebra’s rifle, praying that the weapon was not equipped with a user-recognition facility. If it was, she’d disabled it. Sensing that I was bringing the weapon to shoulder level, the sight adjusted itself to bring its retinal-projection systems into line with my eyes. I felt the weapon shiver as gyroscopes and accumulators came online, making it seem as if some magic energy coursed through it. Reserve ammo-cells weighing down my pockets like lead ballast, I waited for the retinal aiming system to adjust to my eyes so I could get off a shot. For a moment the system was confused, perhaps because it was configured for Zebra’s own peculiarly dark and equine eyes and was having trouble adjusting to my own. The retinal graphics kept springing up, almost focusing — and then crashing in a morass of indecipherable error symbols.