Falling (7 page)

‘Jude DiMortimer,' the voice demanded, ringing from the closed windows and the icy roofs. ‘You gonna shut up your boasting and run the Sidewalk, or not, Drosser?'

Jude lifted her face to the glow of the muddy yellow streetlights, and smiled.

Little East Bankside, still and silent as the grave in a January frost. Weather Control switched off the city's modifier towers a couple of nights a year. Just long enough to drop the temperature a couple of degrees below freezing, covering the city with an icing-sugar frost. It gave them a chance for essential repairs, and the old folks a chance to hold their grandchildren up to the windows and boast, ‘When I was a child, it was like this every night.'

The police always made sure they had pressing paperwork to do on a Frost Night; because motorbikes and black ice don't mix and, let's face it, no sane person was going to go out on a night when the air temperature actually fell below freezing.

Sanity was a commodity in very short supply on Little East Bankside.

Mum, of course, thought Jude was tucked up safe in bed; but vital-signs monitors were designed to monitor sickly babies, not kids old enough to find the ALARM SILENCE switch. And now Mum, like parents up and down the city, was dozing in front of the Self-Education For Wealth channel, secure in the proximity of a child who was actually out on the frozen street, screaming dares and throwing paintbombs in an unofficial Night of Misrule.

Jude shivered, tugged the coat zipper right up to her throat, and took a good look around.

She was sitting on the steps of the SideRide terminal, directly opposite her current abode, the vast grey silhouette of Block 24 of the Prescott Social Housing Development.

Squinting up past the pseudo-Victorian streetlamps, she could just make out blue TV flicker at the window of their main room. Mum was still up, then. Better hope she gave up on Self-Education and went to bed before Jude tried sneaking back inside, or there'd be hell to pay.

Block 24 was an Exemplary Residents block: separate living and sleeping quarters, hot water on tap and wall to wall carpet, an unheard-of luxury. But any serious misdemeanor – like the one she was currently considering committing – would get them transferred back to one of the basic blocks in an instant.

The threat stirred faint resentment in her, and a flush of guilt. Mum had worked hard to get them classified Exemplary Residents, and Jude didn't want to go back to a bare concrete room any more than she did.

Standing up, she pushed the thought aside. Just one answer to that, kiddo. Don't get caught.

She checked the street, registering flickers of movement in the alleys or along the glazed-in fire escapes. Adults came out to play on Frost Night, too. Dangerous games involving knives and strangling cords, thefts, contracts and old scores.

No danger to her, though. Bankside kids knew better than to get involved; Bankside adults knew better than to tangle with cocky streetwise brats who could scream like divas and knew every short cut and escape route for twenty blocks around.

No police. No movement from the automatic cameras that were supposed to monitor the street ‘for your security'. They hadn't worked in years. No ‘copter lights visible between here and the neon-hazed horizon.

It was looking promising.

Sitting right here, she was safe anyway. The steps of the SideRide were neutral territory. If some suicidally dedicated police officer did happen along, Jude could say she'd just disembarked. Slipped on the ice, maybe, and sat down to rest her ankle before limping home. No danger there.

The danger lay in accepting Lazy Jay's challenge.

Lazy Jay, currently leaning out of a third floor window in Block 23, watching the night's events with open disdain.

He was nine, a whole year older than Jude; a scrawny Nigerian boy descended from some long-overthrown tyrant, raised penniless, bitter and utterly convinced of his natural superiority to the ragamuffins of the Bankside. He'd thrashed most of the other aspiring bullies and gang leaders in the Prescott into submission years ago, and established himself as leader of the most unruly and admired pre-teen gang, the Electric Volunteers. Even Jude, who thought him an arrogant racist poseur, had to admire his determination.

‘Well, Jude?'

He was wearing a coat – fake fur, fashionable, if a little camp – but he wasn't coming out to play. In a flash of premonition, his parents had a disabling switch installed in the prosthesis that reinforced his withered leg, and when it was off, he couldn't do much more than hobble around clinging to the furniture.

Jude looked up at him; a tall, taut silhouette against the thin pink light of the standard bedroom fittings. ‘Wassa matter, Lazy Jay? Lost your crutches?'

Even from the other side of the street, she heard him snarl in fury.

Dangerous game she was playing. They'd had a scuffle or two already, the usual schoolyard disagreements. Jay was good with his fists, but Jude was faster on her feet, and her mother's last boyfriend had taught her some unorthodox kick-boxing manoeuvres. By the time the school guard had waded in, the fight had become a stand-off, and an uneasy truce has ensued.

Until tonight.

The rest of the Electric Volunteers had wandered off several minutes ago, bored by the familiar ritual of insults and challenges. They'd gone a few stops down the SideRide, but the sound of it, looking for someone else to harass. She could hear their yells as they competed in some kind of antisocial behaviour; probably jumping high enough to hang off the ceiling girders and hit the EMERGENCY STOP button.

She was alone with Lazy Jay and the night.

‘You still stood there, DiMortimer? What's wrong, you forgot your mace?'

God, she'd forgotten that. Her mother forcing her to take a mace spray to school – the new sort, where they took a blood sample and then engineered your spray so it worked on everyone except you. The Volunteers had thought that was howlingly funny. Mummy's little girl can't take care of herself without a mace spray.

Well, they'd thought it was funny until Kohl grabbed it, tried to spray her with it, and only succeeded in getting hospitalised by breathing in the splashback while Jude, right as rain, laughed her head off.

Oh yeah. Best days of your life, for sure.

‘You should sort your parents out, Jay,' she yelled. ‘The clinics can fix legs now. Legs, arms, faces… Hey, you could have the complete overhaul. You certainly need it.'

‘Pity they can't fix brains, Drosser. We'd book you in double speed.'

Jude grinned. ‘I can't afford it. But you, you've got the ancestral millions at your disposal. Creamed off – no, I mean gratefully donated by the old country, isn't that right?'

The ancestral millions had ended up in the pockets of the faithful retainer who'd been smuggling them out of the country, and none of the family liked to be reminded of it. Particularly not the one who needed it most.

A flash of white teeth, the glitter of narrowed eyes. ‘Don't jeer me, Drosser. You said you was gonna Sidewalk. Gotta big mouth, kid. Got the balls to go with it?'

‘Got more'n you have, cripple boy!' She was on her feet now, screaming, consumed by the childish fury that springs from inner fear. ‘I'll show you. You wanna display, I'll give you a display.'

And she was down the steps and heading along the pavement.

Little East Bankside had been quick to take the anti-pollution laws to heart. No more private cars meant no more drive-by shootings, no more kerb crawlers, no more mass ram raids. And those deserted roads would make a perfect track for the Mass Person Conveyors the Euro-Fund had just authorised.

FORGET THE SIDEWALK, the strangely Americanised adverts had screamed; TAKE THE SIDERIDE. Simple, easy to police, and totally pollution free.

The fact that people might not want to travel everywhere on a endless loop of slow-motion conveyor belt didn't seem to have occurred to anyone.

There were improvements. They glassed in the tracks, protecting travellers against wind and weather. Allowed entrepreneurs to fill a section with seats and rent them out, even set up refreshment areas or grocery stalls. After all, the journey out to the Municipal Quarter, home of most of the menial jobs that Bankside residents were best qualified for, could take up to two hours.

Strangely enough, no one seemed too impressed.

Then, in a flash of divine inspiration, a minor council functionary hit upon the perfect solution. Simply place an official entrance/exit every hundred yards – and make it illegal to travel more than 125 yards on foot.

Pavements were solely for getting you from your front door to the nearest entrance/exit and back. Anyone found actually walking down them was obviously up to no good, and once the Bankside police pulled you in, they always found some charge or other that would stick. Their productivity bonuses depended on it.

But on Frost Nights, there wasn't a police officer in sight.

In theory.

She was drawing close to the next entrance point: a couple of concrete steps down from the raised conveyor belt, a simple archway in the glass shelter. One hundred yards, entrance to entrance. About forty paces beyond that, she'd be breaking the law.

Driving her frozen hands deep into her pockets, Jude drew a long, tremulous breath.

She remembered this night very well. Remembered going eight paces beyond the entrance point, then ten. And hesitating. Thinking about the cameras staring down from the lampposts. Her mother's proud grin as they accepted the lease on the apartment in Block 24. The empty grey box that had been their last home.

Another step. And another –

And then, she'd turned and fled. Running like a maniac, ignoring Lazy Jay's screams of triumph and promised retribution; bolting up the stairwell and fumbling the entry code at the apartment door, tiptoeing past her mother, asleep in the chair, to hurl herself into bed and sob shamefully into her pillow.

The next day, four of the Electric Volunteers had caught her alone in a school corridor and broken her nose with a monkey-wrench. And that was only the beginning.

She didn't know what all this had to do with her present time dilemma, but it was pretty obvious what she'd come back here to do.

Shadows danced in the arc of light cast by the SideRide entrance, startling her. But it was only the Volunteers. She recognised Kohl, the dumpy Austrian boy with the full, feminine mouth and a rumoured fascination with women's underwear. And Kali Peitrino, shipped off to Juvenile Detention last year for an almost fatal cyanide-bomb attack during Advanced Chemistry. She'd been back in the Bankside for a few weeks now, thought not in school. Run away from Juvie, probably. People said the guards turned a blind eye to escape attempts, if it was someone they'd be glad to see the back of, and she could well imagine that applying to Peitrino.

They, and the younger, shyer members hovering at their backs, were just here to watch tonight. Ranged on the outer steps, muffled up, blocky and unreal against the light.

‘Where you going, Jude?'

Drawing level with the entrance, Jude paused to try out that raffish curl of the lip she'd copied from some monochrome movie star last weekend.

Only ancient films were available on Free-TV, real museum pieces with fuzzy soundtracks and edit marks. She resented that for a long time. But eventually, she'd grown to like the sharp, shadowy black and white Daily Classics – and even the evening diet of tearjerkers and transparently obvious murder mysteries. They gave her a whole new repertoire of heroes, an endless private world of quotes and allusions and knowing smiles that none of the other children could understand.

They gave her a window on the past, and, though no one at school seemed to understand, she knew that was important for some reason.

‘Gonna phone your mam, Drosser. Tell her you're outside, playing bad games.'

‘Phone your own while you're at it,' Jude responded. ‘Maybe they'll let her out of prison to come fetch you.'

Peitrino spat at her, though she was too far off to make much of a target, and began rattling something metallic in her pocket.

There didn't seem to be any point hanging around.

Ignoring the hoots and yells of derision from the Volunteers, Jude strolled off down the pavement.

It was familiar enough territory. She knew kids in Blocks 22 and 21, though she'd normally have obviously taken the SideRide to visit them. The police were always around, and seizing an eight-year-old for sidewalk violations was an easy way for them to get back to the station and waste an afternoon on the paperwork, indoors, where they were slightly less likely to get shot at.

In the bleached starlight, the mock-stone edifices of Block 22 took on a disturbingly Gothic air. Huddled pigeons, or illegal windowboxes decimated by acid rain, served as gargoyles, and the blue shimmer of unseen TV screens animated the interiors of the rooms, creating strobing patterns of movement and shadow.

There was movement on the other side of the street, and noise. She slowed; but, even through the grubby glass of the SideRide tunnel, she could see what the couple in the alley were up to, and they were having far too much fun to worry about a traffic violation.