Fearsome Dreamer (7 page)

Police uniform.

Police.

Prison.

GET UP GET UP GET UP

He could hear himself. Incoherent. Screaming no.

Jospen was against the wall, hugging his arms close, staring.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I'm sorry, okay?' He kept saying it.

I'm not going back there.

You're not going to make me go back! You can't make me! I'll die before you make me!

He screeched in his utter fury. An explosion against everything that had ever, ever existed to stand against him.

He felt the pressure on his legs release suddenly. His arms were free.

‘What's wrong with you all?!?' screamed a man. ‘Hold him down!'

White's eyes locked with his brother's.

Then he Jumped.

A moment of nothing, of in-between places. A vast void of empty, yawning black.

A moment where he thought he was dead.

Then he squirmed forwards, and found himself crouched in the back end of an alley.

Its smell hit him like a punch.

Noise and light and life. His Angle Tar alley, his escape.

The cobbles were wet and slimed against his hands. He didn't care.

They couldn't find him here. They couldn't follow.

Safe.

White put his back against the wall and curled into a ball, his whole body pounding.

He didn't have his bag.

He didn't have his bag
. They had taken it off him, and he had left it behind.

His heart sank.

He had nothing.

But at least he was safe.

He closed his eyes.

When Frith first saw the most fascinating person he had ever met, it was in an interrogation room. Frith tended to meet a lot of new people in these kinds of rooms. He enjoyed interrogation in the same way that he enjoyed the rest of his job – a lot of it was dull, but the interesting bits made up for it.

Occasionally, someone would end up here who presented a challenge for Frith, or a curiosity in some way. It had become rapidly apparent that the young man they were currently holding was both.

Frith had been sat outside the room for over an hour, watching him. He couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen, but held himself the way someone much older would. His skin was a beautiful, impossible kind of white underneath the grime, and his dark hair would have been long and striking if it were clean. At the moment it was pinned loosely back in a ragged, dirty plait. He was a lot less strange-looking than some Worlders Frith had met, but a Worlder he definitely was.

Frith walked into the room.

‘Good evening,' he said.

The Worlder didn't stir.

‘I understand that you were arrested for assaulting a guard. And that you demanded to be brought to a government building for interrogation.'

Silence.

‘I'm told you can speak Angle Tarain quite well, even if you choose not to reply.'

Silence.

‘When you were taken in this morning, you refused to give your name. Would you care to tell it to me?'

Not even a flicker. Frith folded his arms.

‘You're foreign, of course. I am sure you would have known, before coming here, that skin augmentation doesn't exist in Angle Tar. But you chose to keep your skin colour. That means you didn't expect to stay here long.'

It was the merest movement, but Frith saw it.

‘Ah, I'm wrong. Then perhaps you kept your skin because you're proud of your differences. Stupidly proud, one might say. Because you'll keep them even if it means that you're persecuted for them.'

The Worlder turned his head and looked at Frith.

‘A victim of persecution, and you come to Angle Tar. The one place that will not tolerate difference.'

‘There are many places that will not tolerate difference,' said the Worlder. His voice was hard and cold, burred with disuse. He was obviously homeless, but hadn't been for long. The clothes looked too new and he was slim, but not on the wrong side of thin.

The accent was familiar. Frith tried to place it. Eastern World, for sure. Some New Europe nation, perhaps. Maybe even as far East as United Russian and Chinese Independents.

‘You wouldn't be the first to leave, you know,' Frith remarked. ‘You wouldn't even be the twentieth. Plenty of others have come before. From Germany, from URCI, any number of World countries. All over the place.'

There. A twitch on URCI. Frith smiled inwardly.

He sat on the other chair.

‘May we talk frankly?' he said.

For a long moment, the Worlder was still. Then he nodded, once.

‘So. I'm wondering what your reason is for coming to Angle Tar. You must understand why I need to know. Foreigners don't officially exist here. When they do, they are accepted for a reason, for a purpose. They can give us something that makes them valuable. What do you have that makes you valuable?'

‘Nothing,' said the Worlder.

‘That's not quite true, is it?' said Frith. ‘Otherwise you wouldn't be here. Because you knew what would happen if you didn't at least try to blend in a little better. You knew what would happen if we caught you.'

‘You did not catch me, I walked in.'

‘Yes, you did. By the rather surprising method of deliberately attacking a guard. I wonder why.'

The Worlder gazed at the table top, his mouth in a stubborn frown.

That was all right. He didn't have to speak. His body talked for him.

‘You can relax,' said Frith. ‘I'm not threatening you. I'm sure I don't have anything I can do to you that's worse than what you've already endured. Right? Prison, was it? I've heard they're very good at torture in World prisons.'

The Worlder flinched.

Frith leaned back.

‘I'm going to make a guess about you now,' he said. ‘I hope you'll be suitably impressed. Would you like me to tell you something about yourself that I could not possibly know?'

‘Yes,' said the Worlder.

Frith clasped his fingers together and stared at the tabletop for a moment, assembling his performance. Sometimes he did like to show off. It was a bit of a weakness. But in a situation like this, where he held all the power, it couldn't do that much harm.

He'd known the Worlder's secret within minutes of laying eyes on him. There was a good reason for being so desperate that he'd committed treason by leaving World. The boy obviously had a healthy distrust of authority, and a whole lake of arrogance in that silent face, which he clearly tried to use to cover his fear and his youth. A surging restlessness. More than that, though. The Worlder's whole body thrummed with his secret, somehow. You couldn't always see it as easily as that, but on this one it was obvious.

‘You,' he said, pointing at the Worlder, who looked at his outstretched finger as if it were poisonous, ‘can do something. Something that is so frightening that some would like to lock you away for ever, and so valuable that others would like to study you for ever. And you were certain that here, in Angle Tar, you could use it as a bargaining chip to help you get what you want. Perhaps you thought you'd find only simple people here who'd believe that you were some sort of magician, rather than just an ordinary boy with an extraordinary talent.'

The Worlder closed his eyes.

Frith watched him patiently.

Silence pressed inwards, rolling around the room in slow, syrupy waves.

‘Well?' said Frith, enjoying the game. ‘Am I right?'

I've got you. I've GOT you.

The Worlder pressed back into his seat, as if he was afraid. And then he disappeared.

No warning. No gathering of himself, no concentration on his face, nor momentum in his body structure. No signs to read.

Just a gentle pop, and a big load of nothingness where his shape had been.

Frith watched the place where he had been sitting for a few moments, as if it was patently obvious that the Worlder was just tricking him.

Oh brilliantly done, and who's got the power now, yes, you showed me, yes, very good you little trickster, now come back and stay put. Come back.

Come back.

When he didn't, Frith said a short, sharp, ‘Fuck.'

Frith never swore.

It was several hours later before White reappeared in the room.

Frith had gone, but the guard on duty completed an impressive full body jerk and stumbled back, hitting his elbow on the wall behind him.

They stared at each other.

‘Grad HANG me,' the guard swore, his voice trembling angry. He opened the door and banged it shut after him, giving White a rapid backwards glance, as if to make sure that he was still there and the whole thing hadn't been a hallucination.

White was left alone.

He sagged, sitting back on the same chair. He resisted the urge to clutch the table edge and rest his forehead against the splintered wood. He couldn't afford to look weak, or show how afraid and tired and alone he really was. Not for one second. Not with this Frith man, who seemed to pick him apart as easily as breathing.

He stared at his dirty hands.

It had been three weeks.

No money. No change of clothes. No body gel or skin-suit.

Three weeks of misery on Parisette streets.

He was dirty.

He was humiliated by his own smell. He couldn't wash. The best he had been able to manage was splashing himself with hurried cups of water from the ponds in the public gardens he slept in at night; but they were full of plants and fish, and often made him feel almost as grimy afterwards as before.

He was starving, too. He'd held out for two days; then, in desperation, resorted to Jumping into eating houses and shops at night to steal food. It was the first time he'd ever tried to move such short distances, but he found it easy enough. Sometimes he could be bitterly glad that at least his talent was not going to waste. But he still felt furtively guilty about stealing food, and did it as little as he could stand.

He had all the time in the world to think, on the streets. Seconds and minutes and hours rolling into days and for ever and ever. His brother's face often flashed, unwanted, through his mind. He tried to imagine killing Jospen for what he had done, but couldn't bring himself to do it. All he managed to feel was a dull, incredulous pain.

By day he wandered the city, achingly lonely, longing to talk to someone for more than a sentence or two. Longing for someone to do something to him, anything to make him feel like he was here and still a part of the real. When he grew too tired to keep moving, he would sneak into an abandoned building. There was a particular district that had more empty buildings than not. It was a haven for the homeless, but the buildings were regularly cleared out by groups of Parisette guards. He had learned to run when this happened. People here were afraid of the guard. Police were the same everywhere, it seemed.

His instinctive distrust of the other homeless he found himself bedding down next to made him feel ashamed. Some of the people who lived on the streets of Angle Tar were frightening; some were as sad and strange as ghosts. They mostly gave him a wide berth, caving into that natural fear of foreigners that everyone here seemed to have. Some of the older ones tried to speak to him sometimes, though, as if they were too desperate to care where he was from. But he couldn't face them; just tightened up and turned his head until they stopped trying and left him alone. The guilt over it gnawed insistently at him.

Ideals were all very well when you had a warm place to live and enough food to make yourself sick on; but everything melted away in the face of this endless, dull nightmare. It wasn't living. It was existing. He had no reason to be. No one wanted to notice him, so no one did. It felt like he was fading out of the fabric of the world.

So he made a decision.

It was the only way, and he knew what it would cost him. He didn't agonise over it. Maybe that would come later, when he could afford it to. So he had gathered his courage, gone up to a Parisette guard, smiled at him, and then taken a wild swing at his face.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

The door opened.

White tried to sit upright.

Frith walked into the room, gave White a cursory glance, and folded his arms.

‘That was an over-dramatic little trick you pulled,' he said, his voice pleasant.

White said nothing.

‘You look awful.'

‘It is very hard here,' said White eventually.

‘You've only been gone six hours. What happened to you?'

White shook his head. He couldn't explain it well. He'd had a sudden connection with Frith, a connection that had lasted an entire conversation. To have that taken away, just as suddenly and by his own doing, had been more than he could bear. He had planned to stay away for an entire day, or even two to show off, but hadn't been able to face it.

‘Disconnection from Life takes its toll. I've seen it before. You should have prepared yourself for that before you decided to come here,' Frith remarked, not unkindly.

‘That is not the problem,' snapped White, before he could stop himself. ‘I have no addiction to Life.'

‘I understand completely,' said Frith. ‘When you visited before, you always came with the knowledge that you could jack in, as you call it, and go back to that sea of voices and presence. Now you've made the decision to be here, and now you're starting to realise that you will never have that again. Ever. You'll now have to spend your time alone with yourself in your mind, feeling like you're in a box that you can see out of, but no one can see into. Feeling that no one will be able to touch you, to know you, any more. Just like the rest of us poor Angle Tarain, in fact. What have you been up to the last few hours? Did you go back to World?'

‘I cannot,' said White, dizzied by Frith's change of gear. The speech had unnerved him completely. It was as if he had told Frith everything already, as if the man could pick him up and flick through him until he found the page he wanted, and read exactly what he needed to know. ‘They will know as soon as I am back in World.'

‘Yes, through your implant, I presume. But if your implant has told them of your previous visits to Angle Tar, why didn't they arrest you earlier?' said Frith.

‘How do you know that I have come here before?' said White, his skin prickling. Did they have their own kind of tracking system here?

‘A guess. Tell me.'

‘Information from … the machines that track our implants … it takes time to be collected. They could not know I left World until I already came back. But they knew, after time. That I visited here. When I was in prison, they gave me a better implant. It tracks only a few people more accurately. People they want to watch. It will tell them to a minute when I go back to World. They will send people to find me.'

‘Do you still have your implant?'

‘Of course,' White said impatiently. ‘I will die without it.'

‘No you won't.'

White opened his mouth, and then shut it again.

‘You won't,' said Frith again, casually. ‘I've met Worlders who have had it removed and continue to live just fine. I'm afraid that's just what you're told. There are doctors in your nation that specialise in the removal of implants. Illegally, of course. But it can be done.'

‘You are lying.'

Frith spread his hands, a smile on his face. ‘For what possible reason?'

White couldn't reply. But he had no reason to trust anything this stranger said.