Quit it, Danny. Puking won't get you anywhere. I snapped a glance over my shoulder — the hovertrain had vanished. I wondered if the imps had survived.
I got my feet underneath me, made it up. My right leg ached fiercely, the bone assaulted and unhappy. The scar sent another warm pulse of Power down my skin, and I was suddenly glad Japhrimel's repair work on my shields had held up.
And glad that neither imp nor spider-thing had been able to use Power against me.
McKinley grabbed at my shoulder, and I controlled the twitch that could have buried the Knife in his guts. Twitchy, twitchy, Necromance. Mellow down, easy. I came back fully into myself and felt suddenly… what was it?
Whole. Cleansed, the fire of rage having burned something sticky and viscous away from me. I'd fought them off. I'dwon.
I liked the feeling. I wanted it to last.
I tore myself out from under McKinley's hand. "Watch it."
"We've got to get off this thing." He checked the sky, his black hair lifting on the wind of our passage, cut now because the freight hover was in a downtown holding pattern.
My eyes followed the loops and curves, hovers delicately woven into streams of unsnarled traffic. This one's remote from the realtime AI controller, probably, since it didn't change course when we thumped into it. At least, let's hope so. My eyes stung, whipped by wind and hair. I should have tied it back, but how was I to know I'd go jumping off hovers?
You should have guessed, Danny. Isn't that how these things always go?
"There." McKinley pointed. A residential high-rise, with the hoverlane going directly over it. The fall was bad but not immense, and there was plenty of room for error.
"You want me to break my leg again?" I sounded delighted, the remainder of the chilling little giggles spilling through my voice.
"Better than the alternative," he snapped. Dark circles had bloomed under his eyes, and he was chalk-pale. The violet glow around his left hand had subsided.
"Guess so." The Knife slid back into its sheath. "What about Vann and Lucas?"
"They can take care of themselves. They'll provide a distraction, it's part of the plan."
"Plan? What plan?" There was a plan?
"Standard for bodyguard duty. If we get separated, Vann goes low and fast and loud, drawing everyone away. I get the package and we rendezvous." He coughed, a racking sound, and winced. His ribs didn't look staved-in, as they had before. I wondered just how fast a Hellesvront agent healed.
"Where?" I would have liked to know this, you know.
"Where else? Hegemony Europa. Paradisse, actually. We've got a safe place there. That is, if it hasn't been blown. That town's always crawling with demons." His lips pulled back from his teeth, a sharp delighted grin. "Don't worry, Valentine. We're going to keep you in one piece for our lord, whether you like it or not."
Chapter 27
Paradisse started out as a Roma Taliano colony, back in the mists of time. During the era of the Religions of Submission Franje became a country, and the city grew like a pearl around the muddy banks of a river now running deep underground. Layer upon layer of history added itself to each street, each house, each tower.
During the Awakening the Old Franje government — still not folded into the nascent Hegemony — threw open the city as a sanctuary for the emerging psionic community, sheltering them from the ravages of the Evangelicals of Gilead. Kochba bar Gilead had pronounced psions abominations, and the beginning years of the Awakening were marked by death camps and persecutions, rising to a fever-pitch during the bloodbath that led to the only tactical nuclear strike of the Seventy Days War, the bombing of the Vegas Territory. Paradisse, however, was shelter for any psion who could reach it, and the Awakening accelerated even as the Evangelicals choked to death on their own fanaticism, their vestigial gift to the social fabric the Ludder party and their xenophobic hatred of psions and paranormals — not to mention the lingering distaste of normals for anything psionic or paranormal.
While her daughter Kebec is pearl and shimmer, Paradisse shines. The city throbs with light, glowing spires crisscrossed with moving walkways, hanging gardens, open-air cafes with climate control, each zipping hover gilded and each slicboard leaving a glittering trail in the effervescent air. Paradisse has been built on for centuries, and even though everything is Hegemony Europa now still the Old Franje shines through, in all its aesthetic and chauvinistic splendor. Aboveground, on the Brightside, Paradisse is often used in holovid representations of nirvana, and artists have wandered its upper byways for centuries, sketching and immortalizing.
Underground, under the centuries of accumulated human habitation, is something else.
The Darkside of Paradisse isn't like the Jersey Core. It isn't even like the Tank in Saint City. It's Chill-fed urban blight, true, but down in the Darkside the rule is assassination, stealth, and debauchery. Some parts of the Darkside are mostly safe for regular citizens to go slumming; in those slices the bordellos and hash dens are strictly policed by Hegemony police regulars, Hegemony federal marshals, and a contingent of freelancers known as the Garde Parisen.
The rest of the Darkside isn't somewhere you want to go, even on a bounty. I wondered if the running sore of urban decay would begin to heal now that there was a cure for Clormen-l3 — Chill, the drug that caused so much death and destruction. It would have been nice, but if history has taught us one thing, it's that people want to get high. The pharma companies would come up with more drugs to be abused, and the Mob would sell them. As Old Franje says it, plus ce change…
That's the problem with studying history. It will make even the sunniest optimist a cynic. For someone with my pessimistic bent, it gets downright fucking depressing.
Two days after escaping Caracaz during a bloody sunset — as stowaways on a trans-ocean freight hover, no less — I sat very still on a chair in the middle of a dark little hole of a room, my sword across my knees. There hadn't even been a chance to find a scabbard for the blade, despite the fact that wandering around with naked steel was likely to draw notice.
Outside the curtained window, the Darkside seethed. McKinley twitched the curtain aside, slowly, and peered out into a narrow street lit only by sodium-arc lamps. Down here under the rest of the city, it was always night. The immense press of centuries and dirt overhead threatened to trigger claustrophobia with every breath I took.
I closed my eyes and breathed. The wards I'd put on the walls and window — subtle, gentle wards, meant only to warn me if someone was looking at the room — shivered uneasily. I wished I could shield the room like Japhrimel did, but that would have been like advertising my presence on the local holoboards.
My shoulder was still numb. Now I knew that feeling. It meant Japh was in Hell, somewhere far away from the normal world. If anything could be said to be normal nowadays. The ban on Magi practicing hadn't slowed down the ferment one bit, psions being notoriously edgy when denied the chance to practice their gifts. Magi were still showing up dead or going missing, and the Hegemony had its hands full with the confusion that was causing. Industrial espionage and theft was at an all-time high. The holonews was full of chaos and destruction.
There were other whispers too — of things glimpsed on the street in broad daylight. Things not seen since the Awakening, when psionic and sorcerous talent flowered and the world was turned on its ear again, taking a collective jump into the future and struggling free of the Era of Submission.