River of Blue Fire (10 page)

“Right. Well, the first thing we need to decide is how much we can afford to lead this little group from within.” Dread frowned, his eyes remote. “If I thought they had any purpose at all, I'd be happy just to sit back, but they have a golden opportunity to find things out and instead they just seem to be . . . drifting.”

“A golden opportunity to find things out for
you
,” Dulcie suggested. He smirked. “Of course.” His smile vanished. “You know who I work for, don't you?”

Dulcie wasn't sure what she was supposed to say. “You've never told me . . .”

“Come on. Don't lower my opinion of you. You're good at what you do, you make great money, you drive that scorching little red sports car way too fast, but you've never had a ticket—you get around, Dulcie. You must have a pretty good idea of who my boss is.”

“Well, yes, I think I know.” In fact, after seeing the Otherland network from the inside, she had known the rumors about Dread working for the almost-mythical Felix Jongleur had to be true. Only Jongleur and a very few other people could afford that kind of technology.

“Then you can guess how serious this is, what we're doing. We're holding back crucial information from one of the meanest, smartest, most powerful men in the world. We're right in the Old Man's backyard here. If he finds out, I'm a dead man. Instantly.” He fixed her with a stare even more intense than the one he had used earlier. “Don't misunderstand this. If you sell me out, even if I don't get to you myself before the Old Man sixes me, he won't let you live. Not someone who's found out as much as you have about this network of his. You won't even be history. In twenty-four hours, there will be no evidence you ever existed.”

Dulcie opened her mouth and then closed it. She had thought about just these possibilities, all of them, but to hear Dread say them so flatly, with such certainty, brought it home to her in a way her own musings hadn't. Suddenly, she knew herself to be in a very high and precarious place.

“Do you want out?”

She shook her head, not trusting her voice at this moment.

“Then do you have any questions before we go on?”

Dulcie hesitated, then swallowed. “Just one. Where did your name come from?”

He raised an eyebrow, then barked a laugh. “You mean ‘Dread'? You sure that's all you want to ask me?”

She nodded. When he laughed like that, his lips pulled away from the corners of his mouth like some kind of animal. Like something that grinned before it bit.

“It was a name I gave myself when I was a kid. This guy in this place I stayed . . . well, that doesn't matter. But he turned me on to this old music from the beginning of the century, Jamaican stuff called ‘ragga.' ‘Dread' is a word they used all the time.”

“That's all? It just seemed . . . I don't know, kind of silly. Not really you.”

For a moment she wondered if she'd gone too far, but his dark face flexed into amusement once more. “It has another meaning, too—something to make the Old Man crazy, him with all his King Arthur bullshit, his Grail and all that. The full version isn't just ‘Dread,' it's ‘More Dread.' Get it?”

Dulcie shrugged. All that Middle Ages stuff had always bored her to tears in school, along with the rest of History. “Not really.”

“Well, don't worry your head about it. We got more serious stuff to do, sweetness.” The curled-lip laugh returned. “We are going to stir it up for the Old Man—stir it up major.”

Recovering her composure a little, Dulcie allowed herself the indulgence of a twinge of contempt. He thought he was so bad, so scary, so dangerous. All the men in this business were either complete psychopaths, ice-blooded technicians, or action-star wannabes, full of pithy lines and menacing glances. She was quite sure Dread would prove to be the last.

“Problem not, Pancho,” she said—Charlie's favorite expression. “Let's get on with it.”

Empty-eyed, self-absorbed . . . yes, she knew his type. She was willing to bet that he went through a lot of women, but that none of the relationships lasted very long at all.

C
HRISTABEL
had slipped and skinned her knee at school the day before, trying to show Portia how to do a special serve in foursquare. Her mother had told her to quit peeling the spray off it to look, so she waited until she was all the way down the street and around the corner before stopping her bike.

The spray was funny, a round white place on her knee that looked like spiderwebs. She sat down on the grass and scraped at the edge of the white stuff with her fingernails until it began to come loose. Underneath, the red sore spot was beginning to turn a funny yellow color and get all gummy. She wondered if that was what happened when parts of the Minglepig fell off, like on Uncle Jingle's Jungle last week, when all the Minglepig's noses came off at the same time after he sneezed. She decided that if that happened it would be very, very gross.

There were no people on the athletic field when she rode past, but she could see a few of them on the far side, wearing their army uniforms and marching back and forth, back and forth, on the dirt track. There was no music today, so the sound of her pedals was loud, sort of like music itself, going
squeak-a, squeak-a
.

She rolled down street after street, hardly even looking at the signs because she knew the way now, until she came to the part of the base with the raggedy grass and the little cement houses. She parked her bike beside a tree, pushed hard with her foot until the kickstand went down, and then took the paper bag out of the bike basket that her daddy had fixed so it wouldn't be all wobbly any more.

“Hey, weenit.
Que haces
?”

Christabel jumped and made a squeaking noise louder than the bike pedals. When she turned, someone was coming down out of the tree, and for a moment she thought it was a monkey in clothes, a scary killer monkey like that show her mother hadn't wanted her to watch but that Christabel had promised wouldn't give her nightmares. She wanted to scream, but it was like in a bad dream and she couldn't do anything but watch.

It wasn't a monkey, it was a boy with a dirty face and a missing tooth. It was the same boy who had helped her cut the fence when she was helping Mister Sellars, except he was even dirtier and he looked smaller than before. But he was inside the fence! Inside the fence, where she was! She knew that was wrong.

“Don't talk much, you.” The boy was smiling, but it looked like it hurt him. Christabel took a few steps backward. “Hey,
mu'chita
, not gonna do nothin' to you. What you got in the bag?”

“It's n-not for you.” Christabel held it tight against her shirt. “It's f-f-for someone else.”

“
Verdad
, weenit?” The boy took a step closer, but slow, like he hardly even knew he was doing it himself. “Some food, huh? Feedin' someone, you? I saw. I been watchin.”'

“Watching?” She still couldn't understand what this dirty boy was doing here. There were inside-the-fence people, and there were outside-the-fence people, and he was not an inside person.

“Yeah,
claro
, I been watchin'. Ever since you got me to cut that fence, I been watchin'. Fence goes off, I climbed over. Get some good stuff, me, what I thought. But the fence go back on. Both of ‘em. Threw a stick at it, just to see, people came running—soldier boys. I go'd up a tree, but they almost saw me.”

“You can't get out.” She said it as she realized it. “You can't get back over the fence, ‘cause . . .” she stopped, scared. She had almost said Mister Sellars' name. “'Cause it's turned on. ‘Cause it's ‘lectric.”

“Got that right,
mu'chita
. I found some food, too—they throw lotta stuff away in here, man, they
locos
—major scanny, seen? But they don't throw out food always. And I'm pretty hungry, me.” He took another step nearer, and suddenly Christabel was terrified he would kill her and eat her, like in the monster stories Ophelia told at sleep-overs, grab her and then bite her with that dirty mouth and the hole where his front tooth was supposed to be. She turned and began to run.

“Hey, weenit, come back!”

She ran looking down at the ground flying underneath her, at her legs going up and down. It felt like something was jumping in her chest, thumping her from the inside, trying to get out. She could hear the boy's voice coming closer, then something shoved her in the back and she was running too fast for her feet. She stumbled and fell onto the grass. The boy stood over her. Her leg was hurting from where she fell down at school, and now on the other leg, too. When her breath came back, Christabel began to cry, so scared she was hiccuping, too.

“Crazy little bitch.” He sounded almost as unhappy as she was. “What you do that for?”

“If you hurt m-m-me, I'll . . . I'll tell my daddy!”

He laughed, but he looked angry. “Yeah? Chizz, weenit, you tell. And then I'll tell about what you hiding out here.”

Christabel kept hiccuping, but she stopped crying because she was now too busy being even more afraid. “H-hiding?”

“I told you, I been watchin'. What you got? What you hiding out here? Some kinda dog or something?” He stuck out his hand. “
Fen
, I don't care if it dog food. Gimme that bag.” When she did not move, he bent over and took it from her curled fingers. He didn't pull hard, and Christabel felt more than ever like this was a bad dream. She let it go.

“
Que
 . . . ?” He stared at the wrappers. “This soap! What are you, play some game with me?' With his quick, dirty fingers, he unpeeled one of the bars and held it to his nose to take a hard sniff. “
Fen
! Soap!
Mu'chita local
” He threw it down. The soap bounced away. Christabel could see it sitting on top of the grass where it stopped, like an Easter egg. She didn't want to look at the boy, who was very angry.

“Right,” he said after a minute, “then you gonna bring me food, bitch. Right here, every day,
m'entiendes
? Otherwise, you daddy gonna know you come here. Don't know what you doin' with that soap, but I bet you washin' something you ain't s'posed to have. You got me, little
vata local
I know where you live, you in your Mammapapa house. I see you through the window. I come through that window some night if you don't bring me nothing to eat.”

Anything would be better than having him yell at her. She nodded her head.

“Chizz.” He swung his arms from side to side, so he looked like a monkey again. “And you better not forget, ‘cause Cho-Cho be
un mal hombre
. You hear? Don't mess with Cho-Cho, or you wake up dead.”

He went on saying things like that for a while. At last, Christabel figured out that Cho-Cho was him, the boy. It wasn't a name she had ever heard. She wondered if it meant something outside the fence.

He let her keep the rest of the soap, but even after he had climbed up into the nearest of the thick trees and scrambled away to some secret hiding place, she did not dare leave the bag for Mister Sellars. She put it back into the basket of her bicycle and rode home. Halfway there, she began to cry again. By the time she reached her street, she could hardly see the sidewalk.

And now both her knees were skinned.

D
READ
rang off and settled back, extending his long legs. He called up the Otherland sim and opened its eyes briefly. All the others were still sleeping, and watching them brought a sympathetic heaviness to his own eyelids. He shook his head, then reached into his pocket for a stimulant tab—Adrenax, the real stuff from the South American black bazaars—and dry-swallowed it. He followed it up with a little drum music on his internal system, a counterpulse to make everything seem a little more exciting. When the rhythm was pumping at what seemed the proper level, cascading from one side of his head to the other, he returned his attention to business. He left the Otherland window open, but shut the sim's eyes most of the way so as not to attract undue attention should any of the others wake, then leaned back in his chair to think.

His hand stole to his t-jack; callused fingertips traced the smooth circumference of the shunt. There were so many puzzles, and so little time to spend on them. Maybe Dulcie's idea was a good one, after all. He himself couldn't keep spending nine or ten hours a day under simulation even if he had nothing else to do, and the Old Man certainly wouldn't leave him alone forever.

And what about Dulcie herself? His good opinion of her, bolstered by the unhesitating speed with which she had dispatched that idiot Celestino, had been diminished more than a little by her insistence on going back to New York. And all because of a cat—a cat! The most amazing technological advance conceivable, this Otherland network, a simulation more real than RL itself, and she was worried about leaving her cat with that pale blonde slut of a downstairs neighbor another week or two. The stupidity of it was almost enough to warrant taking Ms. Anwin off the protected species list.

What was even more irritating was that he had just sunk many thousands of his own personal credits, stringently shielded from the Old Man's notice, into building a new office to share with her in Cartagena, and now he had to worry instead whether her home system could competently carry this kind of bandwidth. When she had said she was going home, he had seriously considered just killing her and doing the whole Otherland surveillance by himself. But that would not have been practical, of course—not under current circumstances.

A pleasure deferred, then.

It was particularly galling, however, to be dependent on a woman. As a rule he never trusted anyone with more than a small piece of a job, and held all the connectors in his own hands. When you delegated, you always suffered some signal degradation. Just look at the way that pusbag of a gear man had almost blown the whole thing to bits.