“Gone? What do you mean he’s gone?” Reede said, feeling his mind stop functioning. Ilmarinen, you can’t abandon me again.
“He was sent back to Kharemough, charged with treason. Police Commander Vhanu has declared martial law; he’s in charge now.”
“No,” Reede said fiercely. “He can’t be, that goddamn son of a bitch—” He “looked at the guns trained on his heart, as the full realization of what he had done to himself hit him. He turned suddenly, shoving Ananke aside as he pushed toward the doorway.
Someone fired; the stunshock caught him full in the back, deadening his entire body. He drifted, helpless, as they hauled him ignominiously into the systems center again. They locked his hands together behind him; did the same to Ananke and Niburu. They searched him; he watched in numb despair, unable even to protest as they took the vial containing the water of death from his belt pouch.
“He’s sick,” Niburu protested, as the marines confiscated the drug. “He needs that. It’s medicine, let him keep it.”
The lieutenant shook his head. “That’s not what it looks like to me.” He glanced at the man holding the vial. “Send it down with them. Have the Police check it out.” Reede shut his eyes, unable to make any sound at all; feeling as if the frustration and rage inside his brain would explode his skull like shrapnel.
The lieutenant pointed toward the access behind him. “Take them out. Contact the Police.” He looked back at Reede. “Too bad the Chief Justice can’t see you, Kullervo. But Commander Vhanu’s going to be overjoyed.”
By the time they reached dirtside his voluntary nervous system had come alive again, letting him stand and walk on his own feet as the marines turned them over, with the water of death, to the waiting squad of Blues.
The Blues took them back through the umbilical tunnel that connected the starport to Carbuncle. Reede slumped in his seat, saying nothing, staring straight ahead into the blackness shot with light.
They did not take the usual lift ride, up through the hollow core of one of the city’s pylons to an exit somewhere along the Street. Instead, the Blues forced them on into the twilit docks below the city, toward the main access ramp the Tiamatans used to get to and from their ships.
“Why are we going this way?” Reede snapped, breaking his silence at last, irritable with tension and fear.
One of the Blues glanced at him. “Lift’s not functioning,” he said.
Reede looked at him in disbelief. He looked away again, already too aware of the crawling itch beneath his skin, the bum of his soles as the ground pressed against them, the separate exquisite pain of every cut and laceration on his battered body, as his nerve endings became hypersensitized. He tried not to think about how much longer their journey would take this way, how much more effort it would take, how much less time and strength he would have at the end of it.
The Blues halted him at the foot of the ramp, as another cluster of patrolmen came toward them, carrying what looked like a corpse in a body bag.
The sergeant in charge of his squad moved forward, his face tight. “Who is it?” he asked.
“Not one of ours,” the woman leading the other detail said. “Some local.”
The sergeant’s expression eased. “One of those Motherloving Summers fall overboard again?” His mouth turned up in a hopeful smile.
She shook her head. “A Winter. One Kirard Set Wayaways. We’re turning him over to the city constables.”
Reede stiffened. “What happened to him?” he demanded
The female Blue looked toward him, surprised. “The Queen’s justice,” she said sourly. “Guess he wasn’t much of a swimmer.”
Reede felt his own face form a smile more like a rictus. “Out of his depth …” he murmured. His guards urged him forward again, and he began to climb.
As they ascended the ramp he realized that something else was wrong with the city: it was growing darker instead of lighter as they climbed. Carbuncle had always been filled with light, day and night—he had never even thought about it, taking it for granted, like the automatic climate control of the city’s self-contained system. It had existed that way since before the Hegemony’s recorded time, a product, a relic, of the Old Empire. He had been told that Carbuncle ran on tidal power, that there were immense turbines in caves somewhere deep in the rock below the city. He had been told that it always ran perfectly, self-maintaining, self-perpetuating.
But there was no such thing as perpetual motion. The city’s darkness, waiting above to swallow him, filled him with a strange emotion, that was as much urgency as it was fear. “What the hell happened?” he asked. But he knew what had happened; he knew, these signs were important, he had to act now. If he could only remember what he had to do—
“The lights went out,” the Blue walking beside him said. “Everything went out. The city’s stopped working.”
“Why?” Reede asked.
“I don’t know.” The Blue shrugged, frowning.
“How long ago?”
“Two days,” the Blue said.
“Three days,” Reede murmured. “Two gone …”
“What?” The Blue stopped him.
“I have to see the Summer Queen,” Reede said. “I have to see the Queen.”
“You know something about this?” the Blue asked. His hand struck Reede’s shoulder, when Reede did not answer. “Do you—?”
“He doesn’t know anything, for gods’ sakes,” another man said. “He’s trying to jerk us around. Get moving—” A hand caught Reede between the shoulder blades, propelling him forward.
Reede went on without protest, stupefied by the seething mental energy that the darkened city had set loose inside his brain. Yes, he thought, looking left and right at the batteries of portable lights, at the flickering dance of candles being carried along the night-filled alleys of the Lower City, where mostly Summers lived. Yes. I’ve come home…. But he did not know why he thought it, and the thought only filled him with desolation.
They went on, circling slowly, ever upward, the helmet lights of the Police surrounding him like glowflies, showing him the way ahead. The few other lights he aw passed them by like the motion of strange creatures in the black depths of the sea. ‘Most of the citizens seemed to be staying at home, by choice or otherwise. The air sit stagnant to him, although the transparent storm shutters at the ends of every alleyway stood open now, letting Carbuncle’s human hive breathe on its own. His face ran with sweat; he could not wipe it away, with his hands locked behind him. They went on, through the Maze, although he had difficulty even recognizing it with so much of it in darkness. Even Persiponë’s Hell was closed down and dark, find him Kedalion swore, breathless from trying to keep up. He had not realized he was slowing down too, until someone shoved him again from behind. He stumbled into Ananke, who was ahead of him now. Ananke lurched sideways, with a clumsiness Reede only recognized as intentional when Ananke collided with the Blue shadowing his own steps. The Blue went down with a grunt of surprise, in a sudden lightstorm of intersecting headlamp beams.
“Reede, run—!” Ananke’s voice shouted, as Reede dodged groping arms and flailing legs. Reede broke away from their struggling bodies, looking back as he Ananke cry out in pain behind him. Run— He ran, with no choice but to abandon them. He had to make it to Street’s End, to the palace— A random stunshot grazed his arm; he felt it go numb and tingling.
He ran faster up the black, nearly empty street, knowing that he still had a third of the city to go, all of it uphill through the darkness. He wondered if the Blues were able to call for reinforcements. The darkness must be crawling with Police, out doing their job, harassing potential thieves and troublemakers. Thieves and troublemakers; gods—