My building was still standing, but two doors down a block was burning. I staggered out into the crimson dark and joined a chain dragging buckets from a broken pipe in the street to throw water not on the building, but on its neighbours, the people of Glastya Row briefly united in protecting what property they had. By the time the sun rose, I was a filthy shadow sitting beneath the scars of my home. I thought of my parents and their shop, but in the broken-toothed landscape it was hard to orientate, to work out which way was north, south, up or down. Familiar landmarkswere gone, and as I tried to stumble through the ruins of the city, I kept spinning round and round, the bodies of strangers in the street becoming a more distinct landmark than broken buildings I had known my whole life.
In the end, I stumbled into Corporate Security Services.
Antekeda Venture had drafted in operatives from Halsect and Blue Land to assist the local forces. When I saw them, I felt relief, staggered towards them with arms open and mouth wide, thinking they were here to help, to help me, please, help!
I don’t know what they communicated with each other behind their faceless white helmets, but I imagine it was something along the lines of “here’s another one”, because they shot me without warning.
Chapter 5
This was not how I died; that will be soon enough.
Instead, Corpsec stunned me, barrelled me into the back of a truck, sent me straight to trial in an emergency court held in a tent on the edge of the city.
I will not bore you with the details of my case. I was accused of subversion and civic disobedience. The evidence was that I had lived in Glastya Row, and Glastya Row had committed subversion and civic disobedience. I could not afford representation. Every minute I spent in the court, my Chint accrued another 50 Glint of debt, for time being handled by civic authorities. I was sentenced to the debtor’s collar, along with two thousand three hundred and fifty-one other survivors who had been unlucky enough to stumble into Corpsec in the ruins of Glastya Row. My debt – and therefore my labour – was sold at discount to Halsect, to do with as they would.
Children always feel injustice keenly. The first time they are lied to; the first time they realise that words are not truths, but promises that can be broken. Now they are a little closer to being an adult, and it is a tragedy.
In the courts of Glastya Row, people who should have known better wept, begged, cried out against injustice. And because they were distraught, so was I; I have always tended to tag along withwhat other people feel.
They said I was being sent off-world, to a labour camp. I mumbled: “My parents…”
No one listened.
I blurted: “My parents, will they be informed, will they… It’s important, my parents, they have to…”
Someone hit me, which was a kind of answer.
I thought I might actually cry then, mostly because my mother and father would be worried sick, the only people who had ever hoped for me, ever dreamed for me, ever wanted me to be something more, and I had disappointed them, let them down, let them down, and there was nothing respectable about me after all.
Seventy-nine light years away, two stars are dancing around each other, spinning towards their final, thunderous end, and it is not that I do not care, rather that I have other things on my mind.
Chapter 6
It was raining when I met Theodosius Rhode, the man who would be king. The rain did not clear the smoke and dust of destruction, merely thickened it into running rivulets of filth across the blasted city.
I was sitting on the same landing strip where for so many years I had directed incoming and outgoing traffic, with five hundred other souls who had rebelled, or not rebelled, or just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were underdressed for the cold, arms wrapped around knees, chins tucked into chests, shoulders pressed to our neighbour in the hope that like some winter mammal we might feed on each other’s heat. There was a kind of kindness, transgressive, intimate, in our huddling.
We had not been told exactly where we were going, were not permitted to speak. Our collars, the markers of our crime and shame, pressed into our throats, pushing down, a bloody weight digging into bone.
Yet through the cold, the shock, the shame, I knew enough of the rhythms of this place to know that someone special was arriving. Vehicles cleared, blast walls raised, overhead traffic scurried out to a safe distance. Thus I was only somewhat surprised when the Shiniest yacht I had ever seen came into port.
Many outside the Mdo struggle to understand what makes anobject of lesser or greater Shine. They think it is merely about displays of wealth, lavish and ostentatious flares of precious metals, and debtors kneeling at a Manager’s feet. This was far Shinier than that. The surface of the ship seemed to shimmer and change as it moved, sometimes the colour of the reflected sky, sometimes the deepest black where it passed through pools of shadow. It had neither the cheap electric whine of a standard passenger craft nor the guttural roar of your usual spacefaring vessel, but rather seemed to purr on a lilting, musical note as if the engines were on the verge of ecstasy at being deployed. There were, I felt sure, windows – real, actual windows – all along its surface, but they were so well integrated into its form that I could not tell, and when it landed, the light that emerged from its belly was not the harsh white of the loading ramp, but a soft, almost intimate glow, which seemed to promise far more fascinating secrets in its hidden depths.
The ship was not gaudy, but rather a declaration of skill, of engineering and artistic mastery that was beyond the glittering dreams of the middling Shine who thought that all diamonds were the same and therefore the best diamonds were lots of them. I knew it was a ship for Executives even before the first Corpsec team began to descend, and then I was certain. The way the bodyguards moved, the slight pop-jump of their motion as their displacement fields carried them – now a single pace, now five at a go, so that they seemed to lurch like images across a broken screen before settling, not quite of this earth, not quite on it. The damage a displacement field causes to a body that wears one for too long is always fatal, but the Shine promised great rewards for your descendants, and what other paths were there? What else was a parent to do?
When members of the Antekeda Board began to descend from the warm interior of the ship, I thought I recognised some of them from the more sycophantic talk shows – Senior Management, members perhaps of the Executorium itself. Even in the debtor’s collar, even waiting to be banished to another world and workuntil we died, the collective mass of condemned turned to look, to wonder, to be awed.
Then hé emerged, and though hé was then merely Junior Management, hé was hypnotic. Physically, hé was taller than any man I had ever seen, generations of genetic selection and extensive, costly postnatal enhancements woven through his strong bones, flawless, untouched-snowdrift skin. Though fashions of physicality have always fluctuated a little across the Shine, the male archetype of taller, stronger, tougher – this has been in style since the first crop grew in the dust of Ko-mdo. I do not entirely trust my own memory, but in pictures of that day hé was wearing a grey suit with a high collar and the small silver badge of hís Venture directly above the heart. The long curved scar of Management ran across hís face from left to right, chin to forehead, cutting through hís nose and denting it where it had ruptured bone. Hís left eye, as the scar passed through it, had its famous golden iris, and hís head was shaved at the top to reveal the little ridges of other career scars – scars of entrepreneurship, of leadership, of creative endeavour, of maximum profit, of advanced learning. More scars would be added down the years as hís prestige grew, burned into hís body with honour in pain.
From the back of hís head, a long tail of metallic-silver hair ran down hís spine, bound up with simple leather ties, and as hé stood on the landing pad, talking with other Executives, hís hands were clasped neatly behind hís back, slightly arcing hís spine and tilting hís chin upwards, so that hé seemed to gaze down from even loftier heights upon those hé spoke with.
Then, without warning, hé looked at us.
Seemed to note our presence.
Said a few words, then turned.
Came towards us.
