EIDERDOWN

1560 4D

Shaking my head, I almost run into a pair of bughead gacks, alien gene-transfects, bobbing down the helical steps. I back aside. Shadows above me in their long loose single-suits, they stop, their huge black-facet eyes centered on me. They’ve got no noses, upper jaws cleft in two, hard gray-brown skins gleaming like dimlit shells.

These things can chop me into burg faster than I can blink. One says to me in a bass voice with screechy edges, “Hello, Little Wire Man.” It waves a long-bladed cutter a hair away from my nose. The other one gives a squealing whistle and says, “Rask is not happy with you. She wants her metal.” The other one flicks the cutter’s tip back and forth in my face, one two three, and a tiny welling of blood wets the end of my nose.

“I’m on my way to get it right now.” I back down a step and the blade follows, a precise hair’s distance from my upper lip.

“By midlight tomorrow,” the screechy bass says, the tripartite mouth barely moving. The blade flickers, and pain burns under my eyes, spreads through my whole face. “This is interest on the money.” The gack opens an armored hand, and I see through red haze two ragged patches of skin off my cheeks.

I live in this huge underground cooker we call the City. A long time ago I got topside, where everything is blue and violet overhead — a sky, my vader said in that rumble of his — and no ceiling and no walls, and I got back down the City stairs as fast as I could. Here the arched streets are cut through bedrock, there’s only so many ways something can come at me. I’d rather dodge gacks in the deep City than die on the surface from nothing at all. Even when it hurts this bad.

All the medman can do is poly over the two bloody spots under my cheekbones, while I scream through a rag in my teeth. Thanks to the pyro in me, the anesthetic barely touches it. The medman croons, slaps thinseal on the wounds, and I grip the bedframe so hard my fingerjoints crack. The stone ceiling sweats.

“Here, zagger, some ‘down for the next two days,” he says and pries my fingers loose and slips me some eiderdown pills. “These’ll sop up the pyro in a few hours and cool your face awhile. Nice job the gacks did on your trigems.” His hand rests softly on my arm. He’s a young guy, and his wet brown eyes say he’d like me to do him, and soon.

I shrug away his hand and sit up. “Thanks, lovely. What’s it weigh in metal?” Eiderdown is illegal, and he’s taking a big chance handing it to me, trying to buy me.

His face sours, he looks away. “No charge. Just—" He holds a hand out to me, drops it to his side.

“Sorry, meddie, maybe another life. Thanks for the ‘down.” I pocket the pills and cruise out of the medshop into a darkened understreet to look for Armana, my cheekbones screaming at me. A woman sprints past me — by the Pit, it’s Nadienne — and vanishes around a corner. Bodies in black toughcloth crash into me and knock me on my tail.