HER FAVORITE COCANDIES

1563 4D

At home after his visit to Arlen‘s chamber, Frei dug through the drawer pouches in his cell wall to find his street gear. A sour aftertaste from the katschild liquor lay on his tongue. Now he had to find Parthren and give her this strange little ball from Arlen. Not long ago, he had stolen her pet canizard, and she wouldn’t be at all happy to see him. How should he be armed?

He hefted a palm-held jector, capable of placing a fingertip-sized object precisely and instantly one foot from its opening, regardless of what lay in the way. That would do. He found a variety of pellets for it and dumped them in a small loader which clacked and chattered as it sorted the pellets by type: hypno, sodium-metal incendiary, paralytic, bioinvasive. Down in Sobi he would need them all.

No longer than his hand, Parthren‘s canizard had had blue-gray scales darkening to cobalt at the end of its tail, little smiling jaws with needle teeth and a flickering violet trifork tongue, and a voice that sang coloratura improvisations.

He had sold it to a genethief to buy Indrio her favorite cocandies, crystals of furred rose, that bit through the drugs Arlen used as her prison, freeing her, letting her lift her face and smile at him. How he loved her.

He pulled his old carapiece from one large pouch, the raised metal symbol for Darko Hejji brotherhood shining clean above its scratched and gouged orange surface. Any time Indrio smiled at him, he would do whatever she wanted.

What fools they were. He wondered if Arlen knew about them; he thought of Tariall, the boxed brain and face, and shuddered. Would Arlen cut off his prick, like Tariall‘s head, and mount it on the wall and hang Indrio on it every day?

He shrugged into the carapiece, clasping its belly to his body. It clicked shut; his gut muscles relaxed slightly. On his back, the Darko Hejji coll sign served as his ward. A surge washed his bloodstream; he smiled.

He stuffed the jector in a side compartment of the carapiece. At least Arlen didn’t know about his visit from the Agency. At least… a wavering fear ran through Frei. What could Arlen know?

He riffled through his pouches for his poniard in its dented scabbard. Best to take a plain knife too. When EMPulse guns blew out microcircuits, metal wouldn’t forget. He found the scabbard and examined it closely, the hilts and handle and pommel of the poniard showing dead gray, harder to see and counter when thrusts flew in dim light. “Keep the flash in one hand, the death in the other,” his friend Jaeg had said before he’d died.

Jaeg had been his protector, his teacher, and for a time his lover, when Frei left his family and hit the streets. With three girls and another boy, they took a strip of Teshill Slope for their own, stealing from visitors, selling contraband, running errands for the Darko Hejj men and the chopperbugs the Hejji hired. Teshill Slope, a stretch of one of the great helical spiral ways that led down and in to the City‘s axis, drew thousands of vendors and customers for food, biosupplies, and entertainment.

Of these five of Frei‘s companions, Jaeg had been the last to die, sucked dry by a chopper when he tried to cheat the Darko Hejj of four hundred and fifty-three in cash.

Now Frei stroked the scabbard of the knife that had been Jaeg‘s, and tucked it under his carapiece in back, where it would stay. Time to go. Frei covered his street gear with a cloak and slipped out into the quiet of his new upper level.