Code Noir Read online

  ‘Go up through the basement and out of the bar. Look for a bald kid with long hair on her arms named Glida-Jam. She’ll be watching out for you. Stay with her until I find you.’

  She nodded, and pulled the boy down after her.

  Daac stared at me fascinated. ‘What is it about you, Parrish? You collect people.’

  ‘No,’ I corrected. ‘They collect me.’

  I wheeled the quad around and heard a clunk. Daac peered under the rim, then reached down. ‘Pretty.’

  The Gurkha! I’d lost it when I’d played gladiators with the Twitcher. Somehow it had lodged under there. ‘That’s mine,’ I said.

  He scraped it clean on the faring and rested it over his knee. ‘Let’s get moving. We’ll negotiate over it later.’

  Negotiate! Who was he kidding? I twisted around, reaching for it, but he held it away with his prosthetic hand.

  Note to self: chop that damn hand off one day.

  We repeated the journey and the hacking three more times, freeing ten shamans. That left another eight, plus the karadji.

  Smoke thickened and the flames plumed as the sample shed collapsed. The smell was putrefying, like burning bodies.

  I gunned the quad back to Ike’s building. Mei waited at the door, hopping from one foot to the next.

  ‘There’s something growing on the roof,’ she said. Her more than usually jaundiced skin was dotted with perspiration.

  ‘They call it crawl. It’s wild-tek,’ I said. ‘We’ve only got one knife that will cut through it.’

  Schaum joined the conflab. I wondered how Ike had mistreated her, and what effect it had. She already carried a galaxy of grudges. The only thing that remained of Daac’s precious lady scientist was the dress that hung loosely on her emaciated body, and the cold eyes harbouring their own-brand sanity.

  Daac shifted impatiently. ‘I’ll make this trip, you stay back this time, then I can fit one more,’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘No. It’s better if you stay with Mei and Schaum.’

  He looked doubtfully between us all. He didn’t trust me not to hurt them. Good!

  ‘All right.’ Reluctantly he passed over the knife.

  As soon as it touched my hand I relaxed. Six of us crammed on board and set off like a circus trapeze act. One thin Indian shaman with a tattooed face clung on to my shoulders. The rest tucked around us. That left four behind with Mei, Schaum and Daac. Too many for one last trip - Daac and I being the equivalent of two bodies each.

  I put that worry aside and forced myself to concentrate on the present trip across the waste. We reached the wall without toppling but the quad motor sounded sick. The cutting was tougher, as if the crawl was resisting.

  Two shamans leant elbow deep into it as I tried to find the hole beneath.

  I got ready to push the Indian through. ‘Reach your hand back, you might have to pull the others through. It’s growing quicker than I can keep it apart.’

  He nodded.

  I repeated the bit about finding Glida-Jam. ‘Wait for me when you do. Mo-Vay’s no place for strangers.’

  ‘We have protectors,’ said the Indian, touching his shoulder as if to stroke an invisible pet.

  ‘So do I. Round here they’ve got their hands full though.’

  He rewarded my weak joke with a smile. Then he slipped through the crawl and out of my sight.

  I sent a quick prayer after him.

  Who to?

  Who knows?

  By the time I got back to the shed, the quad was coughing up smoky phlegm of its own. I didn’t like its chances of one more trip, let alone two.

  ‘The stuff is getting harder to cut through.’

  I glanced up. It was creeping down the wall on the inside.

  ‘The ambient heat from the fire seems to be changing its consistency,’ Schaum observed.

  I couldn’t help it. I gave Daac The Look.

  ‘Can you stop it?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what it is exactly. I lived in this building. He kept me away from his cultures. ’

  Loyl held out his hand. ‘I know there’s another way through the wall. The way they brought me. Give me the dagger. I’ll do this trip and come back for you.’

  ‘No.’ I didn’t want the karadji out of my sight, especially with Loyl Daac. It also meant Mei, Schaum and I alone in shed of creeping crawl. Uhuh. No way.

  ‘You’ll never find the other entrance and we can’t all fit. I heard the motor, Parrish. You’re overloading it.’

  Stubbornness tightened my lips. We glared at each other.

  Mei forced her way in between us and thumped me in the ribs. ‘Quit stalling, you’re gonna get us all killed,’ she said.

  She was right for once. I handed the dagger to Daac. Whoever possessed it had the best chance to get out of here and I didn’t trust him.

  While he settled himself on the seat I turned to the old, half-blind karadji who’d spoken to me before.

  ‘Your people sent me to bring you home. Wait for me once you’re through the wall. I’ll come as quickly as I can,’ I whispered.

  ‘I know.’ He placed a hand on my shoulder. It was like a boss-shot of tranq.

  ‘What did . . .?’

  ‘A gift,’ he said quietly.

  Daac hauled the karadji on board and set off in a different direction. The old one twisted backwards, eyes trained unseeingly in my direction as the quad moved away.

  Creation . . . was that what he’d said?

  The calm lasted even after I lost sight of them past the dim shoulder of the building.

  ‘Boy, you rolled over easy for a tough grrl, Parrish.’

  I should have wanted to bury her face first in the crawl but I remained blissfully indifferent to her jibe. I’d been given a fragment of peace, a gift from a half-blind man. I couldn’t remember having felt like this before.

  Ever.

  Eventually the crawl grew across the door, sealing the shed. It left the three of us huddling together like kids on the concrete lip. Schaum hugged the flat drive like it was her baby. Her shoulders drooped, the adrenalin and the glucose starting to wear thin.

  I strained for the sound of the quad and began to wonder if Daac had left us behind. That thought shifted to anxiety, and then to straight-up paranoia.

  My calm started to slip away. I mourned it like a death.

  It didn’t help that Mei’s mouth got looser by the heartbeat. ‘He’ll never be yours, Parrish.’

  At that remark my indifference deserted all together. ‘Tell someone who’s interested,’ I blazed. ‘Anyway, I thought you were Stolowski’s one true love. Or is that just more of your cheating?’

  She wasn’t fazed. ‘Loyl is our dominant. He has first rights. Isn’t that right, Doc?’

  Schaum had the grace to blush at the crass notion.

  I choked on it. ‘Dominant? You’ve got tired case of boss infatuation, Mei. Wake up to yourself,’ I said.

  ‘The problem with you, Parrish, is you’re too much of a competitor. You can’t get on with anyone. There’s no room for people like you in our new place.’

  Curiosity got me to respond. ‘New place?’

  ‘We got plans. This’ll all be ours again. Clean the migrants out of Torley’s, Shado, The Slag. Plastique as well. Ours.’

  Ours?

  Daac’s timing was flawless. Just as I decided to toss Mei out on to the poisoned dirt and watch it eat away her skin, the quad lights spilled past the corner of the building.

  He looked like he’d been wrestling inside a wild pig; clumps of wet stuff stuck to all sorts of places.

  ‘It’s sealing the wall off. Hurry.’

  He sat Schaum between his thighs and Mei scrambled up on the pillion before I could think sly bitch. That left me the choice of hanging off Daac’s leg, or Mei’s waist. Both equally distasteful, especially in the light of her most recent commentary.

  I really might catch something.

  I chose his leg and felt the warm tingle of
body contact shoot to all parts of me like a shot of whisky after a week without food.

  Maybe not so distasteful . . .

  The quad moped along, spitting and coughing like emphysema. Daac steered it more east of where I’d come in. As we closed the gap toward the villa perimeter we could see the shining spread of the crawl as if someone had pasted a luminous paint across the wall with a giant brush.

  ‘Did all the different factories get their fuels here?’ I shouted over the noise.

  Daac nodded. ‘Was gonna cost the developers too much to clean it up and then no one wanted to live here anyway.’

  Only Ike. I thought of his geek glasses and neural webbing. I’d seen weird before, but there was something about Ike . . . ‘unwholesome’ is what my mum, Irene, would have said. But then Irene lived in a world where wholesome and unwholesome had their very own icons, and a definition in the help menu.

  In The Tert, shades of grey was a code you lived by - you couldn’t afford to divide right and wrong into neat boxes. Take Loyl-me-Daac. Gorgeous, ’zine pixel-fold and carer of his own in a care-less world. Flip the coin and you get racial fanatic.

  How would he describe me?

  Impulsive and irrational on the one hand, and on the other . . . impulsive and irrational!

  I quickly dropped that debate, and tried to ignore Mei’s busy hands wandering all over Daac’s body. If I didn’t want to throttle her so much, I’d be tempted to admire how well she pushed my buttons.

  The quad died a few body lengths from the villa. We sat in silence for seconds, disbelieving.

  ‘Where is it?’ I asked finally, scanning the wall in front of me. A layer of crawl covered it. No openings in sight.

  He pointed. ‘Up there, where the wall dips, a window has been chiselled in.’

  ‘How did you get them through?’

  He stretched his arms above his head, miming a push. ‘With difficulty. I s’pose you thought I’d left you behind.’

  ‘Never crossed my mind.’

  He grinned at me for the first time in a while. Genuine and warm.

  I fended off a swell of pleasure by poking at the body of the quad. ‘Let’s strip the faring. Use it to walk on.’

  I broke off enough for him to stand on.

  ‘Parrish, give me your tee.’

  I had my crop underneath. Better mine than his, I decided, and for once didn’t argue.

  He dismounted and tore off the mudguards using the shirt to protect his hands. I ripped the handlebar faring, salvaging only one piece intact, large enough to use as a body board.

  Lucky Teece wasn’t here. He wouldn’t have trashed it, even if it had four wheels and might save our lives.

  Teece! I suddenly ached to be back in Torley’s, drinking tequila at Hein’s, listening to Teece and Ibis bicker and looking forward to a great whack of noodles from Lu Chow’s.

  Daac placed two mudguards on the dirt. ‘Parrish, you pull Anna. I’ll pull Mei.’

  It might have been fun. If it hadn’t been poisonous dirt, if Mei, Anna and Daac weren’t my playmates and if we didn’t have a wall of thickening crawl to hack through.

  Last time Daac and I’d done something this foolish, he’d made me swim up an underwater pipe infested with icy, paralysing bacteria.

  I guess this was an improvement.

  We set off across the last, short distance like parents taking their kids for an evening sled ride. I reached the wall first, poison-dirt free, feeling as tired as the clothes I’d had on for the last few days. Daac moved slowly trying not to upend himself or Mei. Mei crouched on the faring, on all fours, like she might spring at me again.

  My throat constricted at the thought.

  They pulled up hard against the wall. ‘Mei, hop on my shoulders,’ said Daac. She shimmied up him like it was something she practised regularly.

  ‘Now what?’ she called.

  Balancing on his mudguards he passed her the dagger. ‘Start carving. Careful. It’s sharper than anything you’ve ever used.’

  He stood rock steady as she hacked.

  ‘It closes over as soon as I cut it.’

  I grunted with impatience.

  Daac looked at Anna and sighed. The glucose had totally worn off now and she was trembling, weeping quietly into her fingers.

  ‘Parrish?’

  ‘Can you hold me?’ I asked doubtfully.

  He looked as tired as I felt and was holding his injured side. None of us had had any food. ‘I can try.’

  Reluctantly, Mei climbed down. Daac decided her faring was more stable than his mudguards and they jiggled around each other. Then he braced against the wall, hands gripping the layer of crawl, while I tried to emulate Mei.

  Two missed attempts before I managed to climb on to his shoulders. He staggered under my weight, and I held my breath while we steadied.

  A face full of toxic dirt wouldn’t do much for my looks - nor my life expectancy. I knew he wouldn’t be able to hold me for long. That thought, coupled with his ears brushing my inner thighs, sent me hacking like a demon. I found that turning the blade flat and dragging it downwards made incisions that lasted longer, as if the crawl shrank from the touch of it.

  When I had a hole big enough to fit my shoulders, I leant through and felt around. My hands touched something solid. A rough ledge.

  ‘Found it. Give me a push.’

  I locked on to the ledge and launched through the hole, falling straight on to the floor on the other side of the window.

  I bounded up and checked for Twitchers.

  No sign. Only a few broken chairs and food foils outlined in the dim, ambient light.

  And then . . . OK, OK, it crossed my mind.

  A fleeting impulse to leave them behind.

  Who am I kidding? Mei would probably find a way to haunt me for the rest of my life. And Daac . . .

  Well, never let it be said that Parrish Plessis was an opportunist.

  I grabbed the frame of a broken chair and plunged it, and my head and shoulders, back into the closing gap.

  I couldn’t see them but I shouted, ‘Use this to stand on. I’ll pull you the rest of the way. Wait while—’

  My mouth filled with crawl, so I choked and pulled back. Soon as I’d spat it out, I began the hacking procedure again, forcing the stuff aside with the sweep of the Cabal blade. Minutes later I came within a micrometre of chopping off Mei’s nose.

  Pity.

  Her face appeared. She dribbled goo down her chin and held out her hand. ‘Loyl said to hurry up.’

  Hurry up! What the fok did he think I was doing?

  I yanked her so hard she popped through like a cork.

  I repeated the pattern and managed to fish Schaum through. She collapsed into Mei’s arms more bedraggled than before.

  While Mei scraped goo off her, I started widening the hole once more. But it had grown thicker and the pressure of it closing forced me back out. I tried again, slashing fiercely and the dagger slipped from my hand.

  No! I plunged my hands in after it and found the blade-tip with my fingers. The handle was out of reach. Taking a deep breath I grasped it. The dagger cut straight to the bone and I felt light-headed with pain.

  Inside me, the Eskaalim howled at the thought of blood. The world started to dim. Realising I might pass out and lose Daac, I took a risk. I accepted the blood lust sensation a little instead of fighting it. It filled me, lent me energy and dulled the pain. In seconds the Eskaalim presence coursed through my veins.

  I pulled the dagger clear and used it to scrape a hole. Then I burrowed through it like a fiend, arms burning with the pain of exertion. Somewhere in the suffocating entrails of the tissue I encountered Daac’s hand. I hauled him in like I was starving and he was the last fish left in the last ocean, dimly aware that Mei had me around the waist and was pulling too.

  All I could think was blood. Warm, metallic and necessary.

  The three of us ended stacked stickily on each other like canned sardines.

 
I slipped out from between them, seized by the blood desire, and raised the dagger. Daac’s throat looked so pale coated in shining crawl. One stab and I could wash myself in it.

  The parasite agreed.

  Kill him! It will make you stronger!

  I heard Schaum’s scream.

  That was all.

  Daac’s punch only knocked me out for a few seconds. But it left me with a muzzy Eskaalim hangover and a really nasty snipe on. It was the second time the guy had punched me in a matter of hours.

  My nose and my crutch felt like someone had set fire to them. I touched my nose. Swelling already, but surprisingly straighter than normal. If Daac had improved my appearance by punching me, I’d kill him. Surreptitiously as I could, with them peering at me, I felt my crutch. Bruise on bruise. The exact same spot Daac had kicked me.

  ‘I did that,’ Mei pronounced. ‘One good kick there slows most people down. Even the grrls.’

  What about two good kicks?

  Daac held up the dagger. ‘You were going to kill me, Parrish,’ he said by way of explanation for the nose.

  He’s right. For one reason or another I am going to kill him!

  He ripped material from his teeshirt and held it out to Mei and me, careful not to make contact. Then he began meticulously wiping himself with the rest. ‘Wrap your fingers before you bleed to death.’

  I stared at my hand and remembered everything in a rush. Flesh gaped from the bone. My arm was covered in blood. And my clothes. Come to think of it, so were Mei and Loyl. We looked like bad torture on a good day.

  I glanced around at the empty room. ‘Where are the karadji?’

  ‘I told the Clever Men to go. The Cabal will find them.’

  ‘YOU WHAT?’ My desire to murder him spiked to new heights. ‘They’ll never survive this place. Tulu and Ike aren’t playing by our rules, Loyl.’

  He sent me an odd look. ‘What rules would they be, Parrish?’

  ‘There are some things you just don’t do. Ike might be messing with bodies but Tulu’s messing with bodies and souls.’

  Mei shuddered. ‘That crazy shaman thinks she can suck our spirit into herself and then Marinette will ride her permanently. Marinette’s got other ideas. She wants Parrish. And she’s one bitchy loa. Something about getting even with Oya.’