Regeneration (11 page)

The physio slipped out, followed shortly by the other doctors. Dr. Carvalho, who had also been up all night, had begun to yawn hugely.

“Are you going home?” Aryel asked as she and Rhys walked arm in arm out to the hospital's main lobby, following Mikal, who had moved forward to take point and deal with the press pack who'd no doubt be waiting. Like Sharon, he was issuing a steady stream of instructions into his earset as he strode ahead.

“Not yet,” Rhys said. “A lot needs to be confirmed in the next hour or so, and we'll probably get the answers quicker if I'm the one asking questions. Not that they don't trust norm doctors, but . . .” He nodded at the portraits of eminent physicians lining the walls of the lobby. “You know.”

Aryel regarded the gallery of notables without expression. “We need more gem doctors. I know.”

“So I think I need to stay close to this. They should be ready to try the treatment on Pilan pretty quickly, and if it looks like it's working, we'll get the others in too. I'm the only one here who really knows any gillungs—the only one who's ever been swimming with them, all that stuff. I might spot things the others won't.”

“I agree—but not just because it'll reassure the patients.” She looked up at him. “With the best will in the world, Carvalho and the others wouldn't have figured this out so quickly without you. You're not just a good doctor, Rhys, important though that is, and I think we're going to need the full range of your talents. This feels too precise to have been an accident.”

He'd already thought the same himself. “Thanks, Ari. Now I just need to persuade the department.”

“I'll have a word with your masters at GenMed, but given how serious this is I can't see them objecting to loaning you out for a while. Besides, I suspect Sharon would happily shoot anyone who tried to take you off this case.”

The medical team's conclusions, hinted at but expertly left hanging when Mikal spoke to the press outside the hospital, were confirmed by an official bulletin at noon. Lapsa, Agwé, and Gabriel had been updated just before that by Pilan, speaking from the hydrotherapy pool where he was supposed to be staying quiet and immersed.

“It's a fucking miracle,” he said, via the tablet Rhys was holding for him. They could see he was lying on a gurney a couple of feet underwater, tilted to allow his face to break the surface while his body remained submerged. “It's like I was never even sick.” There was an emphatic splash and a small wave lapped over the lower edge of the screen. Agwé chortled and Lapsa's drawn face went slack with relief.

“I wouldn't go that far,” Rhys said drily. “You only get a couple of minutes topside to talk, so make the most of them.”

“But I'm better.”

“You're
feeling
better. There's a difference.” The image tilted a little.

Rhys must be crouched on the edge of the pool,
Gabriel thought,
leaning over with the tablet
. The hospital wouldn't have had time, nor necessarily the inclination, to rig up a sub-aquatic communications system.

“Pilan's gill function is definitely improving,” Rhys said, speaking now to the listeners in Sinkat, “but we don't yet know how long it'll take to flush all the toxin, or how quickly his other organ systems will recover. He definitely won't be going home today. We might start to think about it tomorrow, if things go exceptionally well.”

“But—” Pilan objected.

“But nothing. Say your good-byes before I tip you back under.”

“We need to work out how this stuff got into the basin,” Pilan said rapidly. “Everything that came in for the TideFair needs to be checked. There were repairs to one of the wet buildings last week—”

“Pilan,” said Lapsa, while Agwé and Gabriel grinned at each other.

“One of their products might've become contaminated offsite—”

“Pilan.”

“Which is one way this poison could have been introduced deliberately. I know we don't want to say that yet, but—”

“Pilan!” Lapsa and Rhys shouted together, and Lapsa added firmly, “Shut up.”

Pilan's face sank lower in the water as Rhys prodded threateningly at the gurney.

“We know all this,” Lapsa went on. “Environmental Management teams are all over the basin and the river, taking samples and testing the monitors. Turns out they're months behind on their regular checks—”

“No surprise there,” muttered Agwé.

“But we now appear to have their undivided attention. The police are interviewing the repair teams and the vendors, testing everything they brought onsite, and searching the entire area including the canals, topside and below. We've spread the word to avoid going into the water until further notice. We're on top of it.”

Pilan still looked worried. “What do people think is going on?”

“The toxin rumor's already out,” Gabriel said. “We're just waiting for the hospital to confirm it.”

“That should happen in the next few minutes,” Rhys put in.

“Good,” Gabriel replied. “That should send one set of scaremongers packing. But we won't need to bring up the possibility of sabotage. It's in the air already.”

“Who's saying it?” asked Pilan.

“Who isn't?” said Agwé. “Everyone here thinks that the point must have been to try and disrupt the TideFair—which it sort of has, because instead of talking about how great the fair was, the streams are full of this.”

“The police are going to issue an appeal for information,” Gabriel added. “Aunt Sha—I mean, Detective Superintendent Varsi says that'll give every crackpot in London something to do for a couple of days, but it's worth it in case someone out there noticed something important.”

“The problem is, we don't know
what
might be important,” said Agwé. “Do we? Do
you
?”

“We have some ideas,” Rhys replied. “Remember, a toxin is a poison of biological origin. We know this one was produced by an engineered microorganism—”

“That doesn't exactly narrow it down,” said Lapsa, and Agwé added, “Half of everything is produced that way.”

“Yes, but everything that's a legitimate product or by-product is registered. Maybe some rogue microbe farmer decided to chuck an experiment down a storm drain rather than pay for proper disposal—that might explain why the toxin isn't on any of our databases. The point is, it's possible that the by-product of an industrial process got into the water without anyone knowing or intending it to cause harm.”

“Or,” said Agwé, “they
did
know, they
did
intend, and this was specially planned to hurt us and no one else.”

“That can't be ruled out,” Rhys said grimly, “but just remember, that's only one possibility.”

It turned out to be far from the only possibility the streams latched onto. Gabriel had thought himself impervious to even the nastiest of innuendoes, but as the afternoon wore on he became more and more appalled. Along with an outpouring of relief that there was no risk of contagion and speculation about terrorism came a wave of mostly anonymous assertions that the situation must, somehow, be the gillungs' own fault: who knew what they got up to in their secret laboratories and subaquatic dwellings? What illicit experiment of
theirs
had come back to bite them? And wasn't it just typical that they would try to blame
normal
people? In contrast to the public support that had followed the turbine sabotage—praise for the speed of the repair, delight at Agwé's vid, the huge turnout for the TideFair—it was as if those of a different disposition had finally found a hook upon which to hang their rage.

Gabriel found himself staring for far too long at what was becoming far too typical a comment:

It was another avatar, one of the ephemeral battalion that Gabriel had collectively come to think of as Kaboom, although he could not tell whether it was a shadowy network with a central command or just disaffected individuals with a shared ideology. Either way, they were making great sport of a leaked image of patients on their submerged beds, detoxing in the hydrotherapy pool, and ridiculed the efforts of the police and EM officers crawling all over Sinkat and as yet finding nothing.

He did what he could to counter their scorn: wit and sarcasm here, updates from the hospital and the smoothly operating power plant there, links to newstream reports. He didn't need to add anything to the sober assessments of journalists who were openly discussing the likelihood of a targeted attack, and there was nothing he could do to counter the thread of anger and fear in the minds of his friends, his colleagues, and himself. It showed in the unfamiliar emptiness of Sinkat Basin, where boats nosed in and out but people more used to swimming walked the quays and bridges instead; it flared in the tension between himself and Agwé when he made the mistake of musing aloud that some live shots of business as usual at the turbines, farms and factories of the estuary would be a useful counter-narrative. It had been wishful thinking rather than anything he wanted her to act on, but she hopped aboard the next shuttle-boat, chin tilted high and full of braggadocio.

“No way,” she said, when he wavered and tried to claw the idea back. “We're
professionals
. No matter what these fuckers say, we get the job done. Right?”

“Right,” he'd replied weakly. “That's us. Professional.”

He knew in that moment it would be their lifelong in-joke, a shared armor against every insecurity and slight, the tune they would whistle past the graveyard. They would work twice as hard to maintain that aura of impregnability, in the eyes of others as well as in their own.

He was on his way home, still monitoring despite having handed over to the night shift, mired in a swamp of unfairness and meanness. As he walked, the cranial band brought him the latest iteration of Kaboom, slipping into a streamchat with a group that had started off more sympathetic than suspicious; a few well-placed barbs later and they were talking conspiracy and cover-up. He noted that Kaboom had added nothing new for several exchanges now; in all probability had gone to seed doubt and distrust elsewhere. Something in him snapped.

He looked around, realizing that he had passed unheeding from Sinkat into the Squats and was working his way home through the narrow streets on autopilot. He changed direction, messaging his mother as he did so.

That might prove to be very true, if Herran was not in the mood for visitors, but he responded immediately to Gabriel's next message and admitted him before he'd even rested his fingers on the identipad at the entrance to Maryam House. As the door slid sideways, Gabriel blinked in surprise.

He must have hacked the security vidcam.
Waving at it, he stepped into the building that had once been his home.

Sadness lapped at him as he crossed the lobby. He had known death in this place, had felt the lights of other minds go out, and he still remembered the numbness that had descended on his own. The magnitude of the loss then had been so great that he, just a child, hadn't been able to comprehend it. He wondered if he would handle
it any better now, and wondered too, as he mounted the steps and stopped outside Herran's door, how much of his willingness to wear the band was down to his wish to protect himself, not just from the fears of others but from his own fear of ever experiencing that sudden, gaping emptiness again.

He tapped out a familiar pattern on the door—of course Herran knew he was here, but it was a necessary part of the ritual. It slid open, and he stepped inside.

Herran had lived in the same small, tidy apartment for as long as Gabriel could remember. He was a diminutive man, much shorter than Gabriel, with a mop of curls in the faintly glowing Bel'Natur red also borne by Gaela and Callan. As always he was sitting in front of his bank of screens, watching vid images, stream feeds, and code scrolling across. The tiny pulsing light of his cranial band was almost lost against the riot of his hair; Gabriel's mind balked at the thought of how many channels he must be monitoring. He had pale gray eyes with long lashes and a scarred upper lip, in a face as imperturbable as glass.

Gabriel stopped just at arm's length and held his hands forward, palms out. “Hello, Herran,” he said. “Are you well?”

The little man looked at him obliquely. His head and upper body were rocking slightly as he reached out and touched Gabriel's offered hands with his own. “Gabe,” he said. “Well. You?”

“Yes. Well, no, not exactly.” He pulled up a chair. “I'm fine, but a lot of the people I work with are in the hospital.”

“Bad water. Getting better.” He blinked. “Rhys fix.”

He was still looking at Gabriel. It felt strange to be so much the focus of Herran's attention; before the band, he would most likely have been gazing at something completely unrelated on the screens while talking to a visitor. This new, more normal arrangement should be less disconcerting. Oddly, it was not.

Gabriel shook his head and focused on the problem at hand. “Yes, they're getting better, and Rhys and the police are going to find out what made the water bad. But in the meantime there are streamers saying horrible things, trying to turn other people against them.”

“People stupid on streams.” Herran's voice was matter-of-fact. “Always.”

“They aren't being stupid, Herran. They're actually really clever. Remember when you showed me how to monitor streamchats, when we talked about avatars? Well, they're using avatars for this: a
lot
of avatars.”

He paused, trying to organize his thoughts. His own sense of outrage would not simply sweep Herran along; the little gem's rigidly logical mind meant he had to explain things in a way that conveyed the precise nature of the problem.

“They're telling lies about Thames Tidal,” he started, “saying things to make people think we're dangerous or careless. That would be okay if they stayed up long enough for us to respond, but they're like . . . like midges. They're everywhere, stinging and stinging, but you can't grab hold of them.” He mimicked flailing at a cloud of invisible insects. “They pop onto the streams, into chats and forums, and they always sound like they belong so the regulars don't realize they're being infiltrated. They never post direct accusations, nothing that could be reported to administrators, or the police—it's always just suggestions, insinuations, the kind of thing that gets people thinking there really
must
be a problem. But there are no links to anything out in the real world, no evidence, nothing that could be followed up. They post maybe five or six times, then they dump the avatar and they're gone. The real users mostly don't even notice—they're too busy turning the slander into gossip. I've been seeing the same pattern for more than a week now, ever since the turbines were damaged. It's getting worse—it's become really nasty, and I don't think it's random. I want to know who's behind it.” He looked Herran in the eye. “I want you to help me.”

Herran looked back at him, impassive. “Bad people,” he agreed, “but not against rules.”

“It might not be illegal, Herran, but it's
wrong
. They shouldn't do it. And everyone says they
don't
do it, which is why if I can find out who's breaking their
own
rules, I can make it fucking embarrassing for them.”