Up Against It - M. J. Locke [113]
Geoff sat back down and tried not to hyperventilate. He recalled the Viridian woman, Vivian’s, warning. It’s harder to control than you think. Their stunt wasn’t over and forgotten. Which meant the authorities would be more motivated to find the culprit. He could still end up in prison. And so might his friends.
He asked Amaya and Kam to order for him, found a seat at a table, and did a search. Sure enough, people were reporting skeleton parts showing up here and there in the lower levels. Only a few reported sightings so far, but it was bound to get worse.
Amaya and Kam brought the breakfast burritos and coffee over. He pinged their wavefaces—they saw what he saw. “Holy shit,” Kam whispered.
“I know what to do.” Geoff stood.
Amaya asked, “Where are you going?”
And Kam said, “I thought we were going to see Ian.”
“I have something to do first. Go to the hospital. Wait for me there.”
* * *
Little Austin was about a third of the way up the See Spoke from the bottom level that housed the entrance to the Badlands: the Viridians’ territory. Geoff headed down the nearest spokeway to Heavitown and asked a nearby vendor for directions to Portia’s Mess. The woman gave him a strange look, but directed him down the Promenade toward a pastry shop called Tarts.
“Just take a right between Tarts and Tarts, Too,” she said. “But be careful. Some people don’t come back from the Badlands.”
Tarts, Too was a sapient sex shop with a crowd outside even bigger than the crowd outside its sister restaurant and pastry shop across the way, Tarts. Geoff pushed his way through the crowds into a tangle of handwebs and catwalks that wound up through a series of cubbies that served as living quarters for transient miners and unskilled workers.
Geoff tried not to stare but the temptation was strong. He had had no idea that anything like this existed in Zekeston. He had thought his own family’s meager dwelling was pathetic; the four of them had barely enough room to step around one another when they were all in one room. Sitting down to family meals was a careful dance of trading places, avoiding elbows and knees, balancing plates and utensils. But people here did not even have rooms. He saw large clusters of immigrants, drifters, and the working poor all crowded together in a series of open bunks set into the walls—row upon row of them. Drying laundry dangled from rails and webs; children in oversized, tattered hand-me-downs hung from the railings and watched him pass.
Despite the obvious poverty of the inhabitants, the catwalks and webworks were fairly clean and free from trash. Someone sure made an effort to keep things clean and organized around here.
The Badlands had a faint smell of soured nanocrude. The damage from the sapient’s attack had not yet been repaired—or perhaps it was left from before.
Geoff’s knowledge of the Badlands was limited, but he did know that they housed a mishmash of fringe groups most Phocaeans did not want around—mostly squatters and ex-convicts with no usable skills. In the upper levels, you entered true Badlander territory: the realm of the Tonal_Z poets, bioartists, and hackers. Over this, the Viridians reigned.
Geoff sensed that he was being tracked. No one approached him, but several times as he crossed the catwalks and climbed the ramps he caught glimpses of monstrous, multihanded Viridian angels and remotely piloted scrap heaps bristling with makeshift weaponry that watched as he passed. Mists of protective glamour—mote killers and disablers of different sorts—sprayed him from vents placed along corridors and from overhead. He repeatedly found himself awash in faintly odorous sprays. With every wave, more “Stroiders” motes fizzled into ash around him, and the clattering mites