Metropolitan Read online

  The plasm pen is cheap alchemy: it contains a metal-based ink that allows plasm to travel along the length of the ink-streak, but only in controlled amounts depending on the metal content of the ink and the width of the drawn line. The pens are available in varied sizes and densities to permit different amounts of plasm to move along their lengths.

  Aiah crabs sideways along the concrete, drawing her line. She reaches the threshold, draws a line along it, then steps out onto the platform and looks at the result.

  Allow a moment to dry. That’s what it says in the instructions.

  She allows that moment, then another. Aiah starts to take off her glove, then hesitates. Her throbbing heart seems to fill her chest.

  Aiah pulls off the glove, lets it fall to the platform. She takes her little metal Trigram out of her collar, holds it in her hand, stares at it, tries to hold it in her mind. She kneels by the doorway, reaches out a hand, hesitates, reaches out again.

  She touches the line, and the Trigram screams and reaches out to seize her. Her senses roar with the potential on the other end of the line, the yawning well of elemental power separated from her by only a thin line of metallic ink — and she could overcome that, she knows, just spend the energy to create a transmission line of plasm in the air, just as she does every day at work, beam a ray of plasm from the brace to her own mind, just as she radiates the stuff from the Plasm Authority’s transmission horns to receivers throughout the city.

  The empty-eyed face of the plasm diver flashes into her mind.

  Aiah jumps back, breaks the contact. Sensation pounds in her head. Sparks flash across her retinas. She takes a deep breath, tries to calm herself. She just wasn’t expecting it, she decides. This time it’ll be easier.

  She crouches by the line again, looks at the little metal Trigram in her palm. It isn’t hard to keep the figure in her mind, not when it’s been branded into her visual centers by a roaring blaze of elemental energy. She touches the ink line with her finger.

  The Trigram flows with color, deep silver-blue. The plasm roars at her from across the narrow gap of torn cement. Carefully Aiah walls it off in her mind, tries to concentrate only on the small trickle of plasm coming along the ink trail. Then, just as she’s done before, she creates an illusory wall over the toilet doorway, an insubstantial barrier of wracked and pitted concrete.

  Aiah takes her finger off the ink line, steps back, holds her breath. The illusion holds. She watches it for a few minutes and makes certain it doesn’t move or distort, doesn’t fade. And, more importantly, doesn’t become a raging blowtorch of plasm that threatens to consume the district.

  The power is still a pleasant buzz in her nerves. Aiah gathers her gear and carries it up to street level, climbing through the manhole cover she’d used before.

  She drops the manhole cover back into place and stands blinking in bright Shieldlight. The old man and his rickety table of junk are long gone. Only a few people are on the streets. Aiah looks at her watch and discovers that she’s spent most of the second shift underground. It’ll be third shift in another few minutes.

  A few high clouds drift overhead. All fatigue is burned away. Her feet seem light on the pavement even in their heavy boots, and she feels as if she could run for miles. She wonders if she’ll be able to sleep. She wonders if she’ll even need to.

  No wonder, she thinks, the people with access to plasm are so long-lived.

  She turns down the tunnel leading to the Terminal trackline station, and her nerves give a little warning cry as she sees dark figures silhouetted against the yellow tiled walls. Three men, dressed in canvas pants and baggy loose shirts and heavy boots. They’re sharing a ten-pack of beer and smoking cigarets.

  Aiah’s plasm-driven feet have bounded partway down the tunnel before her mind’s foreboding catches up with them, and by then it’s too late. She keeps walking and tries to force a civil smile. The three men look up at her, unshaven faces cold in the light of the overhead fluorescents.

  “What are you doing out here, man?” one of them demands, a burly man with a beer gut peeping out from beneath his short-tailed shirt.

  “Working,” she says. The man seems surprised to hear a woman’s voice.

  “Got a job, huh?” A skinny kid with tattooed arms and pomade in his hair. “More’n we’ve got.”

  “Maybe you’ve got my job,” the first man offers.

  “Nation!” the third man says. He’s sitting on the concrete floor and leaning against the crumbling yellow wall tile, bare arms resting on bent knees. His eyes are closed as he half-sings, “Nation, nation, migrants from our nation!”

  Jaspeeri Nation, she thinks, oh lovely.

  “I’m leaving,” Aiah says. Adrenaline wars with plasm in her veins as she passes the fat man. She’s taller than he is but still he seems to loom over her. Her stomach turns at the power of the beer on his breath.

  “Out of our nation, bitch,” the fat man says. He takes a step toward her as she begins to walk away from him.

  Aiah’s grown up in a neighborhood like this and knows the worst thing she can do is run. She plants her unwilling feet and stares into the fat man’s eyes. Tries to radiate the power of plasm at him. And then tries to speak around the pounding heart that seems to have lodged in her throat.

  “I work for the state, okay?” she says. “Don’t fuck with the government, because then the government will find endless ways of fucking with you. And if the government doesn’t, the union will. Understand?”

  The fat man hesitates, just looks at her and tries to think. Then he scratches his unshaven face and takes a step back.

  “Nation!” screams the sitting man, and then he leaps up and throws a beer bottle that smashes into the yellow wall tile a few feet from Aiah. Foam spatters the side of Aiah’s face and she bolts.

  Bolts cursing herself as she runs, because even after the bottle smashed she could still have walked away and probably managed it without pursuit. Now that she’s panicked they’re chasing, excited as a pack of dogs that have tasted blood. Heavy boots pound after hers. Her only hope now is to get to the ticket taker and hope she’ll be let into the booth . . .

  She swings around the turn at the bottom of the tunnel and crashes into a barred metal gate that’s been drawn across the tunnel in front of the ticket booth — the station has been closed on the off-shifts due to lack of traffic. Stunned by the impact, Aiah bounces off the gate, then tries to rip open the zipper on her tote because she knows at this point her only hope is the plasm waiting in the batteries.

  The skinny kid runs up before she can drag the zipper open. Aiah swings her tote and smashes him in the chest with its weight. He gives a yell and falls. And then the fat man is on her and smashes her full in the face with a fist the size of a ham. Starshells burst inside Aiah’s skull and she goes backwards, cracking the back of her head against the barred gate. Her hard hat clatters on the concrete. Aiah falls in a sprawl of arms and legs and hugs the tote to her chest, trying to protect herself as boots and fists begin to fall. Pain explodes her nerves as a metal toe-cap connects with a kidney. Aiah finds the zipper with her hand and tugs, pushes her hand inside the tote. Someone’s hand gropes her crotch. The fat man aims a boot at her face and misses, sitting down suddenly as he overbalances with the force of his kick. A beer bottle clatters on the floor. Aiah feels a plastic safety cap under her fingers and pulls it off the battery terminal. Touches her thumb to the battery.

  The skinny kid screams as a ball of plasm melts his face. His hair pomade explodes into fire. The fat man is halfway to his feet before Aiah gestures at him with her free hand, a gesture like a fist, and the fat man flies backward as if hit in the chest by a wrecking ball. Aiah can hear the crack of his head as it hits the far wall.

  The third man, the bottle thrower, stares in horror at the burning boy, and then clumsily, drunkenly, turns to run. Aiah points at him and gives him a push between the shoulder blades, a shove that flings him skidding face-first onto the concrete.
/>   Aiah staggers upright, half-blinded by tears and pain, and finds her hat. The skinny kid is clutching at his liquefied eyeballs and staggering down the corridor, shoulder thudding against the wall. For some reason the hair pomade is burning bright blue. Clumsy with pain and the weight of her tote, Aiah runs past him, past the other man lying on his face, and out of the tunnel into bright Shieldlight.

  The old brick buildings reel around her. She takes a deep breath of free air and staggers down the street, looking wildly for a cab. Screams keep echoing out of the tunnel. Aiah pulls her hat down over her face.

  Aiah finds a cab on the next block and asks to be taken to Mudki, a financial and business district fairly close by. One side of her face is swollen and she turns it away from the driver. The Transit Authority’s Mudki Station is a complex of different intersecting tracklines and pneuma stations and will be open at all hours; the tangle is complex enough for her to disappear in there, take the Red Line to the New Central Line and home.

  Covering her trail. At least her mind seems to be working along fairly rational lines. Unless the authorities deploy a plasm hound, she should get away free. Until she returns to Terminal, of course. There will be people looking for her, maybe some very serious people.

  By the time she arrives at Mudki she’s trembling so hard that she spills her change on the floor of the cab. She bends down, picks it up, pushes it across the wide shelf behind the driver’s seat. As she walks beneath Mudki’s fortress tower office blocks, she slips a hand into her tote to give herself a dose of plasm, tries to burn away her jolt of adrenaline, the liquid fear pouring like acid through her veins. The plasm helps to clarify her mind. As the Red Line car jolts away, Aiah coldly plots her next moves. Evasive methods of getting back to the old Terminal Station, procedures for avoiding anyone who could identify her.

  It can be done. And with luck it only needs to be done once.

  The sensation of clinical detachment lasts until she gets home, until she sees the gleaming yellow light of her communications array.

  She presses the play button, hears the etching belt begin to roll, the grind of the communications head that she’s forgotten to lubricate, and then there’s Gil’s voice. There’s a lot of noise in the background, clattering and loud music. Gil sounds bewildered and lost.

  “I’m calling from a club, and I don’t know why because it’s costing a fortune . . . but I miss you so much that I can’t stand it, and I just wanted to tell you that . . .”

  Now, in the silence of her black glass tower, Aiah feels free to go to pieces.

  CHAPTER 7

  Next day Aiah can barely move. One side of her face is so swollen that the ballooning flesh seems a part of someone else. Only the pain reminds her that this disfigurement is hers. Deep purple bruises bloom over her body. Her ribs feel as if they’re displaced an inch to the left. When she tries to walk a bolt of pain shoots up her leg; she takes off her sock and finds someone has stomped on her right foot: two toes are swollen and black, and the nails broken. She doesn’t even remember it happening. She doesn’t think the toes are broken, but she can’t be sure.

  Aiah limps toward the bathroom mirror. She can’t even look at herself: she’s like a member of the twisted, one of the grotesque ones. And, she remembers, she’s supposed to spend the prebreak leading her team through tunnels under Old Parade.

  Aiah hobbles to the plasm batteries, returns to the mirror, hesitates. She’s apprehensive about tampering with herself this way, of making actual physical alterations.

  How did the twisted get twisted? Just this way, some of them.

  But still, healing is the most common plasm art. How much talent does it take? Aiah puts a hand on the battery, feels her heart lift with the onrush of the goods. She raises her metal charm to her swollen cheek, touches it lightly to the sensitive skin. Tries to will the pattern into herself, compel the tissue to heal, edema to flush from the torn tissues. The mummified face of the plasm diver floats into her mind, and she resolutely banishes it. Slowly, she thinks, gradually.

  The battery empties partway through the procedure. Aiah looks at herself, sees the swelling noticeably reduced, the purple bruise lightened. She seems to be on the right track.

  Aiah reaches for another battery.

  A few minutes later the two-tone chime of her array interrupts her. She decides to ignore the call, but when she hears the first grind of the communications head she realizes it might be Gil, and she leaves the battery and limps to the array. She picks up the headset and holds an earpiece to one ear, and hears her mother’s voice. “Here’s what I thought,” Gurrah says, and Aiah doesn’t need to hear any more. She returns the headset to its hook and goes back to the bathroom.

  The communications head grinds on as Aiah continues her attempts at healing — apparently Gurrah’s remembered to keep the message key depressed this time. Aiah’s cheek warms as plasm flows through it. She straightens, takes her hand off the battery, brushes the skin with her fingertips. Acceptable, she thinks.

  There’s an abrasion she can’t seem to heal entirely, and a little bruising around the eye, but she can cover these with cosmetics. The grotesque swelling has faded entirely.

  And now the rest. She treats her foot, her bruises. Skill grows with practice. As a finale she pours energy into her body, banishing the after-effects of pain and fatigue.

  Better. The battery indicator glows purple, so there’s still a half-charge in it. Aiah puts on her jumpsuit and hardhat and leaves for work, arriving late to find Lastene and Grandshuk waiting. She leads them off on the day’s assigned search. Far underground she finds an isolated, uncharted pipe with a small plasm potential, and she notes it on her charts and marks it with a red tag.

  Making the city a little richer.

  After lunch bought from a street-corner vendor Aiah returns to the Avenue of the Exchange. From a hardware store she buys a pair of alligator clips, then after buying her usual one-dalder lottery ticket passes warily under the mosaic of the Goddess of Transmission. She wonders if anyone waits in her office. She changes in the Emergency Response Team locker room, puts on the suit and lace she’d worn the day before.

  She doesn’t even know how frightened she should be. She considers this fact and wonders if it is not pathetic.

  No one waits in her office, not even Telia and her baby, though the room has a faint odor of uric acid. She sits down at the scarred metal desk and throws her computer’s start switch, watches the yellow dials begin to glow. Promptly at 1300 she puts on her headset and tells the operator her station is open.

  It isn’t a very busy postbreak and she has a chance to make a few calls. Her authority as a member of Emergency Response goes unquestioned; she has some flimsies sent up in a pneumatic message cylinder with the account numbers of everyone at Mage Towers. Once she has Constantine’s account number she calls another department and has another set of flimsies sent up with his records. These are sufficiently thick that they have to come up by messenger, not by tube.

  When she isn’t monitoring the computer or setting up transmissions, she spends her time studying the patterns of Constantine’s plasm use.

  He doesn’t call for transmission very often, she finds; the normal plasm relays within Mage Towers are for the most part sufficient for his needs. But that’s only because he lives in a place like Mage Towers, where huge plasm connections are available: his weekly bill for plasm is greater than Aiah’s yearly salary, and he pays them on time.

  He has money, and apparently lots of it. Considering that he’d left a shattered Cheloki behind when he finally withdrew, a deserted pile of rubble only now beginning a recovery, Constantine seems to have come out of the deal with his bank balance to the good.

  So much the better, she thinks.

  Plasm, in Constantine’s system, is the foundation of a nation’s wealth as well as the guarantee of the people’s liberty. She wonders how much cold cash a glory hole like Terminal would be worth to him.

  Her phone rings �
�� the outside line, not one of the Authority tabulators — and she unplugs her headset from one socket and into the other.

  “Da,” she says.

  “Aiah?” Her grandmother’s voice. “You were never home when I called.”

  Aiah’s heart gives a leap. “I’m working a lot of overtime,” she says. “Looking for that leak.”

  “Your mother is a fool,” Galaiah says, “but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong, ne? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  Aiah tries to keep her voice level. “No,” she says. “No, I’m not.”

  “You can talk to me, you know. I won’t tell Gurrah. Or anyone else, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

  Aiah hesitates, wanting badly to be able to tell Galaiah of her discovery, her plans, her terrors.

  Then the other line buzzes. “Excuse me, Nana,” she says. “There’s another call. I’ll be right back.”

  She shifts her headphone jack to the internal line, hears a familiar cigaret-husky voice call breathlessly for a ten-minute plasm transmission at 044 degrees.

  “Da,” she repeats. “15:30, Horn Five transmit 044 degrees at 08 mm, transmission to cease 15:40. Confirmed.”

  She programs the transmission into her computer and scalar, then shifts the headphone jack back to the outside line.

  “Nana?”

  “I’m still here.”

  Aiah takes a breath. One hand covers the flimsies on her desk, as if hiding them from her grandmother’s sight. “I’m not in any trouble,” she says, “and my only real problem is that Gil has been gone too long.”

  There is a little silence on the other end, and then, “If you’re certain.”

  “If I ever need help,” Aiah says, “you’ll be the one I call.”