Hemi eyed the cash. He hesitated. He reached for it slowly.
“Nuh-uh,” Deeba said, pulling her hand back. “Cash on delivery. Get me to the bridge— it’s all yours. Or at least to the market— we’ll work something out. Promise. Please.”
“I’m not sure about this,” Hemi muttered. “I’m really not sure about this.”
They were at the edge of Wraithtown, peering across a stretch of concrete at the market, the traders and shoppers. A wall must have stood there years before, and they were huddled behind its ghost. Deeba squinted through misty spectral bricks, past the upside-down bathtub and concrete mixer and supermarket trolleys that were growing at the plaza’s edges.
“It’ll be fine,” Deeba said.
“It will not be fine,” Hemi said. “They hate me.”
“Well, I guess now I’m here, you don’t have to come in,” Deeba said hesitantly.
“Whatever,” Hemi said vaguely. “I might as well stick it a bit longer, earn the rest of the dosh.”
“Okay,” said Deeba without looking at him.
She held on to his hand and walked through the ghost of the wall. She felt a faint resistance, and then she was through.
“And I promise,” Deeba added, “I won’t let them chat any rubbish at you. And that includes Obaday.”
Halfway to the market, Hemi stopped.
“Wait,” he said. There was terrible urgency in his voice. He pointed up.
Light was leaving the sky. Racing across the pale circle of the UnSun came black cloud, like squirted ink. It was rushing up from the streets, spreading above the roofs, tugging itself through the air, approaching the market.
People had seen it. Some were standing their ground and looking up, scared but trying to be brave. Many were running. They scattered towards the surrounding houses.
“Quick, quick, quick,” said Hemi. “We have to get under cover. It’s the Smog.”
“What about your unbrella?” he said as they ran.
“It’s not an unbrella,” Deeba said breathlessly, “it’s an umbrella…”
“Can it protect us? No? What’s the point of that?”
Hemi looked around quickly, and ran to a manhole cover in the street.
“Help me!” he said, and he and Deeba began to pry it from the ground.
Hemi’s hands moved fast. He tensed with effort, and for a moment she couldn’t see what he did with his fingers.
“Got to get the lock,” he muttered, then: “Yes!” Something clicked, and they hauled the cover from the street. “Get in, quickly.”
He followed Deeba onto the ladder in the dank hole. Hemi hauled the covering back over them, wedged it with a stone, so they could peer through the crack.
Ankles in shoes scampered around them, as well as wheels and other odder limbs. The air was darkening.
There was a clattering. The metal lid began to ring like a cymbal. Pellets ricocheted.
Some way off, Deeba could just see a woman who had been issued an unbrella standing unafraid as the onslaught began. The unbrella leapt, pulling the woman’s hand above her head, spun, blocking the Smog’s attacks, sending its missiles flying.
Chunks of carbon were slamming into the pavement, centimeters from Deeba’s face. The air was full of slugs of metal that hit hard enough to chip the pavement.
“It’s too dangerous,” said Hemi, and lowered the lid.
They clung in darkness. The noise was enormous. Below the hammering of the Smog’s attack Deeba could hear shouts, and screams of pain. And underlying everything a noise that could be thunder, or could be an enormous growling voice.
“It’s showing what it can do,” Hemi whispered. “It’s been attacking like this every few days. And it’s had its addicts or its smombies start fires. It’s declaring war.”
The cacophony eventually eased, and stopped, and only the moans of injured could be heard. Slowly, Hemi pushed back the lid and they stepped out.
Throughout the market, injured people lay. A few were lying still, punctured and bleeding from where the Smog’s missiles had hit them. The stalls were ripped and smoking.
All over the pavement and between the rows of tents the market was littered with remnants of the attack. Nuggets of metal and mineral from thumb- to fist-sized lay and smoldered. As Deeba watched, they slowly evaporated. They fizzed like dissolvable pills, and their matter boiled off in smoke that wafted away.
The sky was clear. The Smog had gone.
People emerged from dugouts and the cellars and the barricaded emptish buildings into which they had leapt. They examined the shredded awnings.
There were also the lucky few with unbrellas.
“This is going to work,” said a woman. She twirled her broken unbrella, its spokes bent into an ugly claw, its upper surface boiling with smoke from the attacks it had deflected. “Did you see?”
Her companion was a man in an outfit of tied-together ribbons. “You’re right,” Deeba heard him say reverentially. He twirled his own unbrella. It was bent in its shaft. “Nothing could touch us. I wasn’t even doing anything— were you? It’s all Brokkenbroll. They’re all obeying him.”
Hemi knelt by a victim of the terrible mineral rain, a woman in a puffy dress interwoven with ivy. He looked up at Deeba and shook his head.
Some of the injured were being carried away, or tended to by various strange-looking doctors. There were a few others beyond help.
The market after the attack was a strange mixture of the exhilarated and the destroyed. Deeba and Hemi walked through the triumphant, the injured, and, here and there, the dead.
46. Old Friends
“Obaday!”
The needle-headed designer looked up in astonished delight.
“Deeba!”
Obaday was dressed in a natty suit of poems. He was sweeping up chunks of coal and iron into a big pile in front of his stall, which effervesced back into little threads of smog and drifted away even as he built it. He swept Deeba up in a hug. She laughed and hugged him back. “Deeba, what are you doing here?” He held her at arm’s length and looked at her.
From the rear of Obaday’s stall came an excited snuffling.
“Is that…?” Deeba said, and Curdle came bouncing out from behind the curtain. The little milk carton rolled its cardboard body at them and leapt into Deeba’s hands.
“Curdle!” she said. She tickled it and it squirmed. “What’s it doing with you, Obaday?”
He looked sheepish.
“Well,” he said. “After you left, the silly little thing was miserable. It was pining. Lectern was going to let it go back in the Backwall Maze, but I thought that maybe it would rather…live with someone who knew you and the Shwazzy…sort of thing.”
“Oh right,” she said and smiled. “You’re keeping it for its sake. You don’t care one way or the other.”
“Alright, alright,” he said. “Anyway. How on earth did you get here? Why did you come? It’s a difficult time…”
His words petered out. He stared at Hemi.
Hemi stood tense and ready to run. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t take him for part-ghost— but you’d know he wanted to be somewhere else. He looked at Obaday suspiciously.
“Obaday,” Deeba said. “Think what you say.”
“But Deeba,” he hissed. “You don’t know who that is. He’s a—”
“I know exactly who that is. His name’s Hemi, and he’s a half-ghost. He’s a pain in the arse, but he’s also who got me here, and who helped me.”
“But he’ll try to—”
“Shut up, Obaday. No he won’t. I mean it.” Deeba spoke sternly. “He helped me. And we’ve got something really important to show you. Hemi’s with me, and I don’t want to hear anything about it.”
Obaday thinned his lips.
“If you say so, Deeba,” he said. “You are of the Shwazzy’s party, after all. If you say so. Come and have a cup of tea. And…” There was a long pause. “And your guest, too.”