The Deserter Read online

  ‘I have to get away,’ murmured Hiresh. The primitive implant in his arm – it was the best that modern humans could make without the help of the non-political Roof – would lead the Wardens straight here. It was simple enough to work, even in the Upstairs. He would betray Stopmouth, ruin the life of somebody who had risked all for a stranger, a Crisis baby. He tried to warn his companions, tried to speak, but soon he found his strength slipping away.

  Stopmouth carried him in Jagadamba’s wake through the frightening darkness. The light of her torch kept catching on the lumps of meat that had once been citizens. Hiresh imagined the great numbers of them that must be filling the plaza around them and was glad the light didn’t extend further. Most people had escaped to the Downstairs, but here, near the exits, the unlucky ones lay gathered in great drifts, like the piles of petals that had filled the parks of his childhood.

  He tried to find out what they’d died of, and once again received nothing but terrifying Emptiness in reply. How could the Roof not be active here? He’d been brought up to believe Her a goddess; a notion he laughed off when Papa wasn’t there to supervise him. He’d hurt his mother with that laughter often enough. Though without the goddess to answer his every question – to translate for him, to remember for him – without Her he was no better than a savage; a blind man groping through a maze of broken glass.

  He found himself praying between jolts of pain: ‘Forgive me, Great Mother. Do not abandon me. Forgive me, Great Mother …’

  Jagadamba, who must have felt the Emptiness too, took one turn after another through the dark, never looking lost or afraid. She was humming to herself and even seemed happy in all this devastation.

  Somebody had splinted his arm, at least. He only wished they’d used wood for it instead of some dead alien’s bone. It eased the pain of movement, but every time he looked at it, he pictured the creature it must have belonged to: massive; frightening; hungry.

  At last Jagadamba motioned them to stop for a break. She pulled them into a body-free alcove and handed out little handfuls of damp rice. All three of them shivered with the cold, huddling close to the warm torchlight. Beyond their little circle, the only sound was the trickle of some liquid.

  Slime, thought Hiresh.

  The others looked exhausted. He hoped they’d sleep soon. Then, if he managed to get to his feet without screaming, he could escape, hide amongst the bodies on the floor until he became one of them. The trackers would find him dead here and believe he’d done his duty right up to the end.

  ‘Killed by a savage!’ they’d whisper to one another. And they’d have to take care of Tarini then. They’d have to. Hiresh’s only two friends in the world would be safe at last.

  Jagadamba lay down to sleep and he pretended to do the same. Stopmouth, left alone, pulled something out of his robes, bringing it straight to his mouth. He chewed slowly, arching his neck back, his eyes half closed while some dark liquid spattered his chin. Hiresh turned away, unable to watch any more. A savage was a savage, after all. He would not let the fact put him off his decision.

  Eventually his friend sighed with pleasure and lay down beside the old woman. The regular breathing of sleep came quickly.

  Now, thought Hiresh.

  It was no easy thing for a weakened body to stand using only one arm while the other was the source of a terrible, distracting pain that grew with each accidental contact. He used his legs to push back against the wall and inch his way up it. With every jolt, he gritted his teeth and refused to cry out.

  ‘What about your revenge?’ asked the old Hiresh from somewhere not too deep inside him. ‘Your father’s getting away with it now, sauntering about with all those muscles. Plotting a new dark age while Mother starves.’ They were good questions that he’d have to think through as he walked into the terrifying darkness.

  Strength. That’s what it was all about. He’d always wanted it, had fought for it, while Papa kept it from him, stealing his food. But he’d been wrong to obsess so much. ‘This is strength,’ he said to his old self.

  Something caught his foot and sent him plunging to the floor. He twisted in the air to protect his arm, and the wind was driven out of his chest. It was all he could do not to scream. He had landed on a body. Frozen, odourless, lifeless. Rock hard, but at the same time somehow sticky.

  He tried not to gag, but as he pushed himself away, his good hand punctured what must once have been somebody’s eye and his gorge rose.

  ‘Go back!’ said the old Hiresh. ‘It’s not too late – go back!’

  ‘No, no …’ He had pretended to be Stopmouth’s fan, to be his friend.

  He took the first corridor he could find, turned down one side passage, then another and another. He’d lose himself so thoroughly that when the fear inevitably took charge of him, he wouldn’t be able to change his mind. Strength – this was strength. Not some constant inalienable quality that a man possessed all the years of his life; you had to fight for it, every day and every minute. Hiresh was fighting now, close to losing. But it didn’t matter. He’d come far into the blackness, through little corridors and big. By the time his courage finally broke he’d been walking for well over an hour and was thoroughly lost. Even if the others came looking for him, they’d have absolutely no chance of finding him.

  Air currents against his face, as well as the reverberating echoes of running liquids, told him he’d come out into another large area, much like the one where he’d left the others. His heart was beating fast, and with every pulse it throbbed pain into his arm. He felt weak and feverish and scared. He wanted more than anything to go back. He turned round to face the way he’d just come. Only blackness awaited him there. All directions were death now.

  He’d been strong. Just once in his life. And now it was over.

  Hiresh started crying again. He leaned against a wall, facing into the dark of what must have been some public square, or maybe a park. The sobs came fast and hard.

  The Commission had promised that the Crisis was coming to an end. Hiresh should have lived to see the return of the times of plenty. He’d have eaten his fill every day; he’d have taken part in sports and other pleasures that were now only memories, while fanatics like Papa faded away. There’d be food and Cosmetics and Medicine. He’d fall in love with Tarini. Why not? They had such fun together. He wished he could apologize for not leaving the Academy as she’d suggested, for being so proud. If only she were here now to hold his hand. The fear was eating him up.

  Through all this, the tears kept running. After a while it seemed to Hiresh that they even sparkled and shone. Confused, he brushed his face clean. His eyes were playing tricks on him. In the distance, something seemed to … glow.

  His jaw dropped open in horror. Had he walked all this way only to come full circle back to Jagadamba’s torch? But no. The group had camped in a little niche of some kind. This light, weak as it was, did not appear to be at ground level.

  Hiresh walked towards it. The muscles in his legs shook with exhaustion and cold. A small number of bodies – there were fewer here than in the area he’d left – caused him to change course several times. His feet felt dead grass underfoot, and sometimes mis-steps into puddles of slime would cause his skin to itch and burn. He never stopped. An extraordinary sight was awaiting him.

  The light rested on top of one of the park’s artificial hills. As far as he knew, most of these held hidden machinery whose function he couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. The hill looked as though it had been ripped open. Ancient tubes and circuits lay exposed and … dripping. That was the only word for it. Beads of slime glittered in the light, much as Hiresh’s tears had done earlier. The droplets fell together from one level of machinery to another, gathering in pools and eventually forming little rivulets that ran everywhere.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ said a croaky voice behind him.

  Hiresh nearly jumped out of his skin. He turned to find himself staring into the broad chest of a Special Operations Warden – an
Elite – with a Talker in his hand. Others emerged from the blackness beyond the circle of light.

  Men and women like these had engendered so much fear during the Rebellion that Religious had often changed sides just at the rumour that one was coming for them.

  And here, despite their rarity in these days of nano-shortages, was a whole squad. What manner of threat would ever need more than one of them to put it down? But Hiresh knew the answer to that too.

  The man opened his helmet to reveal a scarred but handsome face such as Hiresh had always dreamed of for himself. It was a young face too, compared with his crackly voice.

  ‘How you found us I’ll never know,’ croaked the man. ‘But you’re right. We can’t lose them now. Not from here.’ He clapped Hiresh on his good shoulder. ‘You’ve done all we could have hoped for and more. Even if a stupid pair of Neanderthal sergeants nearly ruined everything for us.’ The scarred man looked around at the dripping, devastated Upstairs. ‘Clever of them to hide that bitch up here. She’ll be ours by morning, though. And when I get my hands on her savage …’ He grinned.

  Hiresh could only stare back at him.

  * * *

  Stopmouth felt the cold even in his sleep. He dreamed that Indrani was shivering up against him, raving as she had after her poisoning. So fragile she’d been then, where before she’d been so strong. The babbling increased in volume the harder he hugged her. He woke to find Jagadamba beating feebly at his face and shouting in outrage.

  He released her and received one more thump for his troubles. She spat a little ball at him, barely a tenth of the volume she might have managed when he’d first met her. Then she busied her stiff frame with gathering up a few small things – packs of food and the like.

  That was when he noticed that Hiresh had gone. He cursed, thinking the boy had crawled off somewhere to relieve himself and fallen over. He must have been in great pain – every step would be agony with an arm like that.

  ‘Hiresh? Hiresh?’

  He stole Jagadamba’s little light-maker and searched the plaza for a hundred steps in every direction, calling his friend’s name all the way. Nothing. Except dozens of corridors and passages leading who knew where? The boy might be lying among all the other bodies; he might be crouching in an entranceway. It didn’t matter. Stopmouth had no idea how to track someone in this place.

  Hiresh had gone, most likely of his own accord. He probably felt he was slowing his friends down and had sacrificed himself for the Tribe. He was ‘volunteering’, as Stopmouth’s people would have said, and nothing in the world was more beautiful or noble. But in this case – surely less than a day from Indrani’s hideout! – it seemed so unnecessary, so wrong.

  The hunter began looking down one corridor after another, prying apart piles of wasted flesh.

  ‘Hiresh!’ Stopmouth called his friend’s name several times more, his voice growing increasingly desperate. ‘Hiresh!’

  The only reply, however, came from Jagadamba. She strode into the small circle of light, her steaming breath like clouds of fire. She grabbed two fistfuls of his clothing and forced him to choose between breaking away from her and looking her in the face.

  ‘Indrani,’ she said. She pointed a claw off in the direction they’d been travelling. ‘Indrani.’

  And his tribe too, of course. How much closer had the Diggers come in the time he’d been sleeping here? How long did they have left now? A day? Two?

  Stopmouth sagged and allowed her to take the light from him. He looked back to where he’d been searching. ‘Hiresh had many days left in him,’ he said. Ritual words used for those who’d given freely of their flesh. They didn’t feel right here amidst so much wasted food. He watched Jagadamba moving away from him, allowing the dark to wrap him in its embrace for a few heartbeats more. Then he followed the bobbing light.

  In the dark, one corridor looked much like another and Stopmouth still had no idea how his old guide found her way.

  They passed very few bodies now. Most people must have escaped the final collapse. Otherwise the Downstairs would not have been so crowded. He wondered what terrible thing had happened here. Sometimes, when he trailed his hands along the walls, he could feel more of the tiny holes that had pocked parts of the stairwell. It was as if something was eating this place one tiny morsel at a time, the way the insects gorged themselves on moss back home. What if this … this Emptiness, as they called it, came to the Downstairs too? Where would all the people flee to then? He shuddered. He had no way of counting the Roofdwellers, but he knew the surface couldn’t support so many.

  They came to a small passage, indistinguishable from any other the hunter had seen. But Jagadamba knew it. She turned to her companion, a triumphant smile on her face. She crouched down and touched her famous left hand to a spot on the floor. A green glow formed around it and a panel slid open. Below were the first lights, other than Jagadamba’s, that Stopmouth had seen since the stairwell. Two straight sticks of metal stood parallel to each other, joined together by smaller bars. Jagadamba quenched her light and used the bars to climb down into the hole. The hunter followed, his heart beating with excitement.

  It was a long trip to the bottom, with Jagadamba’s hoarse breathing increasing in tempo all the way down the height of twenty men. The air warmed the lower they climbed, and Stopmouth could feel his armpits growing sticky.

  A committee was waiting for them – two old men and a crone. One of the men was practically naked, his bony body painted in swirls, while robes covered the other from head to foot. The woman looked strangest of all: her skin hung in wattles at her neck, and one eye rolled towards the ceiling every now and again, seemingly of its own accord. The other blinked rapidly as though it were trying to send Stopmouth a signal of some kind.

  Their faces glowed in the light of a tiny sphere that Stopmouth recognized with relief: a Talker.

  The woman with the fluttering eyelid followed his gaze. ‘It doesn’t work perfectly, for some reason – the translator.’ Then she gave a slight smile. ‘A bit like myself.’

  He’d never heard of a broken Talker before, but nor was he very interested. ‘My wife …’

  ‘She is well, but … exhausted. She is sleeping.’ Was there a hint of pity in her tone? ‘I will take you through to the back room in a moment. We are glad to have you here – she might listen to you!’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

  ‘She came to us for help when first she escaped from the surface. You understand, my kind – the Religious – we did not like her, but the Commission wanted to catch her and we were happy to spite those sinners in any way we could. Even to the extent of protecting the Witch …’ She patted the hunter’s shoulder to take the sting out of her words, to show that she herself did not mean them. ‘But we did not bargain for how … how fierce they would be in their pursuit, how unrelenting. And as Indrani became increasingly vulnerable—’

  ‘Vulnerable?’

  She looked at him strangely, and opened her mouth as if to speak; then closed it once more before finally saying, ‘We’ll get to that.’ She patted him again. ‘In the end, the only place the Commission could not find Indrani was here in the heart of the Emptiness. It is quiet Upstairs. It is safe. The gods guard us as machines cannot … But your wife insists on leaving now, and you must persuade her to stay. Do you understand, young man? We can no longer protect her Downstairs. Here! Take this Talker. It will help when you see her.’

  Stopmouth had no intention of staying in the Roof, let alone the Upstairs! Nor would he need a Talker to look at Indrani’s lovely face, to feel her warm body in his arms. But he had no desire to waste time in arguments, and accepted the little sphere.

  ‘It’s … it’s hot,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman agreed. ‘And don’t be surprised if it fails to translate for you sometimes. Now, come. But step quietly.’ She took the hunter by the hand and led him through a metal door into what appeared to be the only other room.

  His heart was hammer
ing in his chest. Pallets lay on the floor. Indrani was sleeping on one of them, and his breath caught to see her.

  How had he allowed this woman to leave him? Her features seemed so delicate in the low light, eyelashes as fine as the wings of a mossbeast, hair so black that he thought he might fall into it, longing to lose himself there. Above all, he noticed her skin, having somehow forgotten the smoothness of it as it swept in sweet curves around her body. Stopmouth approached, forgetting the old lady who still stood beside him. He lay down at an angle to his woman, supporting his head on his arms, dying to kiss her, but afraid to spoil the perfection of the moment.

  She stirred. Or rather, something stirred beside her. A tiny hand, clutching and unclutching from the depths of what the hunter had assumed was a pile of clothing. A baby? Indrani had always gathered children to her. When a small group of Religious had been expelled to the surface, she was the one who’d collected up the orphans and tried to keep them safe. In a way, Stopmouth was another of those she’d adopted, falling for him (or so she’d said) when he’d been helpless and vulnerable.

  The baby had woken up, but it didn’t cry. Instead, it looked over at Stopmouth, and its face— The hunter gasped. He suddenly realized that since coming to the Roof he’d never seen anybody with the light-coloured skin that everybody had in Man-Ways. Except this baby.

  The tiny thing yawned and went back to sleep.

  The old woman was still behind him. ‘Indrani?’ she said. ‘You have a visitor.’

  Indrani blinked awake and cried out. She sat up for a moment, hands over her face. Plenty of time for Stopmouth to remember the occasions when she’d feared the savagery he represented; when she’d rejected him. And did she even recognize him now, with his change of colouring?

  She threw herself on him, her skin cool against his, both of them laughing and crying and kissing – she whispering a stream of endearments against his cheek, interspersed with his name. The Talker fell unnoticed to the ground. Behind them, he heard the old woman quietly leave. They kissed some more, passionately now, until the baby awoke with a cry.