Tracer (21 page)

The furnace chamber where the noise is coming from is dimly lit, but even in the low light I can see
it’s almost deserted. It’s a mess, strewn with discarded boxes, but at the far end, lit by a single light, is a water point. A man in overalls is bent over it, his back to me.

As I watch, I hear another soothing gurgle of water. The sound is a soft hand which reaches deep down into my body and then grips tight. The pain in my dry throat swells and stirs, and then I’m walking into the furnace,
hoping and praying that I can get just a little water. The tiniest sip, just the tiniest.

The man stands up as I approach; I expect him to take a drink immediately, but he just places a small bottle in the pocket of his overalls. I sidle in beside him, giving him a big smile and a nod. Last thing I need is more hostility.

Instead of moving, he blocks the water point from me, staring me down.

“Hi,” I say. He doesn’t respond. My heart falls slightly, but I keep smiling.

“It’s still working right?” I continue. “I’ve been running all day, and I don’t have any with me. I’m really thirsty.” I force a laugh, hoping to put him at ease, but he does nothing, his hand holding tight onto his pocket. I hear the water inside his bottle slosh ever so gently, and it takes everything I have not to
reach for it.

Instead, I spread my arms, trying to be as friendly as possible. “If you’re in control of this water point, maybe I can trade for it,” I say. “I’m a tracer. I’m with a crew called the Devil Dancers. Fastest on Outer Earth. Maybe there’s something you need transporting? Some cargo? A message maybe? I’ll take it wherever
you need, really, even one of the upper sectors …” I’m babbling
now, and he still hasn’t uttered a word.

I tail off. This isn’t working. I’m torn between pushing my way past him, trying to fight him, and going to look for another water point. In the end, the third option wins out. I’m in no state to fight anyone right now.

“Thanks anyway,” I sigh.

“Please don’t move,” he says quietly.

I’ve turned around already. There are three stompers, standing in the
shadows. Their stingers are out, and every one is pointing right at me.

“No ID, no entry,” says the stomper.

“Come on, man,” says Prakesh. “I
work
here. I’m an Air Lab tech.”

“Then where’s your ID?”

“Lost it.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, really. I left it behind in the Air Lab, right before the fire. Which, coincidentally, I helped contain, so maybe you should cut me a break, move out of the way, and let me in so I can do my job.”

“You don’t even have a lab
coat.”

“Did I mention the fire?”

The guard pauses for a moment, then shakes his head. “Don’t know you.”

“Of course you don’t know me. I don’t know you either. I’ve never seen you in my life.” Prakesh makes himself stop. This is getting nowhere. The door to the Air Lab – one of the auxiliary entrances, one that he was sure would be unmanned – remains stubbornly shut. And now the stomper has
his stinger
out, not pointed at Prakesh but not exactly held at ease, either. He jerks his head. “Go somewhere else.”

Prakesh mutters under his breath, walking away. Ordinarily, he’d look for someone he knows, someone who could vouch for him. But there’s no one around – not Suki, not Dumar, not even bloody Chang. They’re probably all inside already.

It doesn’t matter. There are other ways to
get into the Air Lab, access points this moronic stomper wouldn’t even
think
to look for. He quickens his pace as he strides down the corridor, heading back towards the galleries, searching for the storage room which he just
knows
has a loose panel on its back wall.

He stops. If he couldn’t get into the Air Lab through the regular channels, what luck is Grace Garner going to have? If he gets
in there, they won’t let him leave – he’ll be pulled in a dozen different directions, asked to oversee everything from soil quality to the UV emitters. For a moment, he’s torn – that’s what he
should
be doing. But then he sees his parents’ faces again, remembers how helpless he felt when he visited them.

He decides to look for Grace Garner in the galleries, in the endless corridors surrounding
the Air Lab. He’s on edge, waiting for another crackle of static over the comms system, waiting for Oren Darnell to appear. But the only thing he finds in the corridors is very scared people. Habs are locked down, barred and shut. Lights flicker above clusters of young gang members, talking in hushed voices and casting dirty looks at Prakesh as he walks past.

He walks up to one group, a mix of
what look like Area Boys and Black Hole Crew. Some of them have ritual scars on their faces, parallel lines cut into the flesh and made to heal badly. The livid red scars look like war paint.

Prakesh doesn’t hesitate. You show fear with these guys, they’ll break you. “I’m looking for someone.”

They look at him like he’s crawled out of the buzz box. He
keeps talking anyway. “Old woman, ’bout
sixty, blue headscarf. Seen her anywhere?”

Someone yells for them from the other end of the corridor. The gang takes off at a run. One of them looks back and says, “Doesn’t matter who you’re looking for, man. We’re all done. All of us.”

He keeps looking. Garner is nowhere. It’s maddening – she could be behind any one of the locked doors. She could also be in Apogee, or Chengshi, or in the middle
of the Core, for that matter. It’s less than an hour before Prakesh gives up, furious with himself. He sits down on one of the benches in the gallery. A dull ache has settled into his limbs, and no matter how much water he drinks, his throat keeps returning to its shredded state. The crowd outside the main doors to the Food Lab has become mad with fear, screaming slogans, arms around each other.

He leans back, closing his eyes, weighing up the options. Option one: sneak into the Air Lab, get to work making food. Option two: go back to Apogee, find Riley, tell her that Garner is gone. For the second time, Prakesh tells himself that he should be in the Air Lab. He should be doing what he’s supposed to.

Which is how, hours later, he finds himself crossing the border into Apogee. The further
he gets from Gardens, the worse it gets. He avoids the galleries as much as he can – they’ve become boiling cauldrons of anger, of stompers trying to hold back growing crowds who are demanding to have their sector councillors address them. The Apogee main gallery has been closed off, blocked by lines of stompers. Prakesh can’t understand what they’re doing there – they’re guarding an empty room.
And he can smell the aftermath, a sick, sulphurous smell with an edge of burned fat. It’s enough to make his gorge rise, and he quickly makes his way upwards, climbing the levels towards the Nest.

He takes the last few steps at a jog, suddenly desperate to find Riley, to know that she’s OK. But as he enters the corridor where he can get into the Nest, he sees Aaron Carver and the Twins. They’re
collapsed against the wall, and the trapdoor above them is wide open.

Carver looks up as he approaches. “P-Man,” he says, using Prakesh’s least favourite nickname.

The Twins raise their heads towards him. Kev’s face is one big, mottled bruise. Yao’s shirt is ripped, and there’s a grimy crust of blood under her nose.

There’s a sick feeling in Prakesh’s stomach, made worse by the absence of Riley,
or Amira. “What happened?”

“Your friend Riley’s pissed a lot of people off,” says Carver.

“Riley – why would—”

“They wrecked the Nest.”

“I hate ’em,” Yao says, her voice small and furious. “All of ’em. Why can’t they just leave us alone? What did we do?”

Prakesh takes a deep breath, and asks them to start from the beginning. The Twins fill him in on what happened at the market. When they
tell him what happened to Riley, the sick feeling in his stomach swells and rises, threatening to overwhelm him. “Then we got back here, and they were tearing the Nest up,” Yao says.

Kev shakes his head. He seems to have gone beyond words.

“Where’s Riley?” Prakesh says. His voice is turned into razor blades by his dry throat.

“We don’t know,” says Carver. “We’ve lost Amira too.”

“We have to
go find them.”

“Where?” says Kev.

“Where is right,” Carver says. He sounds worn out, more tired than Prakesh has ever heard him. It occurs to Prakesh that if the Nest has been destroyed, that means Carver’s workbench, and all his experiments, will have been wrecked as well.

“You want to go looking for her, be my guest,” Carver goes on. “But right now, Devil Dancers aren’t too popular round
here. Or anywhere, actually.”

He stands, dusts his pants down. “We need to go. Probably best for us to lie low for a while.”

“What if Riley and Amira come back?”

“They’ll know where to find us,” Carver says, glancing at Yao. “Trust me.”

The cell I’m in is six paces long, five across. I’ve counted them out. Twice.

There’s a camera in the ceiling, enclosed behind tough plastic. The white light from the thin fluorescent strips on either side of the camera captures and destroys any shadows it finds. Beyond the transparent barrier at the front of the cell, the brig is dark. The sound of the station is muted here, dwindling
to almost nothing.

Turns out there were six stompers, not three. I’m still not sure how they knew where I was going to be. I can only guess that I must have been caught on a surveillance cam somewhere: when so many have failed over the years, you forget that there are some that still work.

The moment they grabbed me, I started demanding to know what they wanted, but all I got was an order to
shut up, and they marched me right back into Apogee, to the same prison that Darnell was in yesterday. There was a small crowd outside the prison. They started shouting the moment they saw me, but I was hustled straight through and pushed into the cell.
When I realised where we were going, I started hoping that Royo might be there, but he was nowhere to be seen.

After I was thrown in here, and
after I’d finished banging on the plastic in frustration, screaming at the backs of the retreating guards, I collapsed on the cot, lying back on the thin mattress.

The water point in the cell isn’t working, and nobody’s given me any food since I landed in here. My stomach is rolling with nausea. I’m back where I started, my crew has no idea where I am, and outside is a mob that wants me dead.

Brilliant.

Sometime later – hours, maybe – I hear a noise from beyond the cell. The main lights in the prison were turned out some time ago, and I can’t see anything. I sit up on the bed, squinting, trying to peer into the blackness. There: footsteps. Very faint. Someone approaching from the end of the block.

In an instant, I’m up and banging on the plastic. “Hey,” I say, my voice ringing inside
the small space of the cell. “Need some more water in here!”

As my voice fades, I hear the footsteps again. If whoever it is heard me, they give no answer, and continue walking steadily towards the cell. I fall silent, waiting, my hand on the plastic, and Janice Okwembu walks out of the darkness.

She wears the same white jumpsuit. Her expression is grave, her lips set in a thin line. She folds
her arms, and her luminous eyes lock onto mine. I’m so surprised that I just stand there, staring back at her.

“You’ll have to forgive my lateness,” she says. Her voice is dulled by the plastic barrier, stripped of its warmth. “I was in Apex when I heard you’d been found, and it took me some time to make my way over.”

My voice comes back. “What am I doing here?”

“You’re here for your own protection.
Or wasn’t that
explained to you?” Her voice is even, her expression impossible to read.

“I can take care of myself.”

“No, you can’t.”

I don’t have an answer for her. She pauses, then continues: “People seem to believe you are responsible for the bombings today. I can’t allow any more vigilante justice. Not now.”

“But it’s not true. I had nothing to do with it!”

She doesn’t say anything.

“You can’t think I did?” I stammer, my confidence leaving me. The room seems suddenly smaller, the darkness at the edge of Okwembu’s feet becoming thicker.

“All you have to do …” My voice cracks. The thirst is raging worse than ever. I start again. “All you have to do is get on the comms and tell people that I’m not responsible. That way, I could move freely. My crew could protect me. And I saw
the people outside – if they get in here, I’ll be trapped. Out there, I can run. Please.”

I’m regretting the last word the second it leaves my mouth. Okwembu seems to sense the give, the little pressure point, and steps forward, closer to the barrier.

“How much control do you imagine we have, really?” she says. “The only way we keep the peace any more is by letting people do what they want.
We have to give them so much room. If the council were to crack down, to try and force people to do things in a certain way, even on the smallest thing, we’d be destroyed in hours. The only thing we can do any more is advise, and protect.”

“So you’re just going to leave me in here?”

“Until this crisis is over, yes.”

Something occurs to me. I stare at her through the plastic. “And you came down
here personally to tell me this?” I say, fear lending an edge to my words. “With Darnell about to
destroy the station, you come down to Apogee to tell me that you’re going to keep me in jail? I sort of knew that anyway. Why are you
really
here?” I’m slightly out of breath, but I hold her gaze.

Eventually, she says. “I’ll be honest with you, even though you haven’t been honest with me. When I
asked you if there was anything else you wanted to tell me about Oren Darnell, you said no. You lied.”

“What?”

“If you’d told me what you knew, we might have been able to stop Darnell’s plan before the bombings. But that doesn’t matter now. What matters is that you tell me everything, before more people die.”