Mirror Space - Marianne de Pierres [74]
He tried to concentrate on her narrative but his thoughts rebounded between Aleta and Bethany and her, and the man who’d just tried to kill him – how his legs had gone into spasm when Fariss strangled him. She was a murderer. The kind of person his beliefs and upbringing would have prevented him from knowing in the past.
Fariss tapped his arm. ‘You listening to me? I don’t do the tourist guide thing for everyone.’ Then she grinned. ‘Hey, I don’t even know your name.’
‘Thales,’ he mumbled through the breather mask.
‘Well, Thales, I’m called Fariss O’Dea. Now, listen and learn. Ampere isn’t officially independent from the rest of Edo but we might as well be. We run our own rules here and Lasper Farr doesn’t interfere.’ She lifted her jaw. ‘He doesn’t dare. Sam provides him with all his little rust-eaters. Edo would disintegrate without them and he knows it. So you’ll be safe enough while you’re here with us.’
‘How can you breathe without assistance?’
‘Oxygen’s lighter on Ampere but it’s enough. I’m used to it. Better in the city than out here though. I find it hardest going down to Edo proper now. I get dizzy from the extra.’
‘But how does your city do this?’ He rotated a finger.
‘You mean float out here? The outer levels of Edo aren’t as compacted as the lower levels. Gravity’s doing its thing but not enough to jam us up against something. We’re like a satellite kept in place by all the other stuff around us. Farr lives even further out than Ampere; right on Edo’s rim where the atmosphere’s zero and the detrivores rove.’ She sang the last few words to a tune he didn’t recognise.
Thales raised his eyebrows above the mask.
She laughed.
Randall used to laugh a lot, but with a hard edge that seemed like it was meant to cut you. Rene and Bethany, the women Thales’d known intimately, hadn’t laughed readily. And then there was Mira Fedor. The tragedy that dogged the Baronessa had insinuated itself into her face. She seldom smiled.
Thales felt himself further drawn to Fariss as if she gave off the vigour and light that he desperately lacked.
‘I’ll take you to meet Samuelle and then get cleaned up. We’ll sort out something for you.’
Thales wasn’t sure that was what he wanted to do at all but Fariss had just saved his life and he still felt too shaken to object. He leaned back into the hard bench seat and watched as the tug hovered down onto its matching berth; a much wider platform than the one they’d left behind. This one jutted out from the large end of Ampere’s honeycomb of windows. They could, Thales thought, be arriving at an exotic and luxurious hotel if not for the plethora of ugly, twisted stanchions, broken satellite towers and discarded metal structures that sufficed as Ampere’s horizon on all sides.
It was unnerving to feel like you were floating free in space and yet be hemmed in by a circumference of rubbish.
Fariss didn’t speak to him again, save to tell him to remove his mask as they walked through the corridors. She did, however, shorten her stride and speed to accommodate his flagging energy, and occasionally took his elbow to guide him into a different passageway. Her every touch seemed to make his body feel better.
They received the same curious glances from other pedestrians as in the central lift, but here the faces seemed friendlier, less guarded.
Thales opened his mouth to tell her he couldn’t walk any further without rest or food when she halted abruptly before a door and turned to look down at him. ‘Don’t lie to Sammy. It’s the one thing she won’t stand.’
She wanted him to make a good impression. The idea warmed Thales.
She opened the door and pushed him inside.
The room appeared to him as a once-grand suite that had been transformed into a bizarre kind of laboratory. It was brilliantly lit and dominated by a huge oval-shaped bed on a raised dais. Objects that could have been in any medi-lab, even the biozoon’s, surrounded