World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) (8 page)

Night was falling over Calder’s Edge, the illumination clusters gradually dimming. Crepuscular half-light gave way to an almost total blackness, and in that blackness Dev found he could see...

Everything
.

His eyes showed him the world in silvery, pristine definition. There was a sharpness to textures and surfaces that he found disconcerting. The faces of other passengers became agglomerations of smooth planes and creases. The texture of the seat covers was so rough and porous it could have been a lunar landscape.

His own body seemed to glow, unrecognisably. The back of his hand was no longer familiar. He had to wriggle his fingers to remind himself they belonged to him.

He was so distracted by his first true experience of nocturnal vision that he almost failed to notice when Glazkov got off the train. Dev darted out through the doors just as they closed.

“North Three station,” said an automated announcement in a seductive female voice that echoed along the platform. “North Three station. The train is now departing. Please stand clear.”

The station was in one of the city’s seedier areas, judging by its litter-strewn shabbiness and the relatively small number of people alighting there. Just Dev and Glazkov, as it transpired.

Glazkov shambled waywardly to the exit. If he had been in less of a narcotic stupor, he might have noticed that someone was dogging his footsteps. But he didn’t even turn round once, and besides, Dev moved with a practised nonchalant stealth, hugging shadows, maintaining a casual air, as though he were just any old Calder’s Edger on his way somewhere.

Crossing a plaza, Glazkov headed up a ramp leading to the base tier of one of the towering residential columns. Habitats lined a spiral roadway that wound up and around the rockface like a helter-skelter slide. The roadway was fitted with dual, contra-running travelator belts for pedestrians, although there were also mass-transit elevators for quicker access between tiers.

Glazkov didn’t use either. Instead he ducked into an alley between two buildings. At the far end lay a narrow stairwell carved into the core of the column.

Dev, still keeping his distance, tiptoed after him down switchbacking flights of steps, which were slippery underfoot. The air was thick and cloyingly humid.

He detected the thump of a bass beat vibrating up the stairwell. Deeper he went, until he arrived in a kind of vestibule presided over by a doorman built like a stone monolith.

The doorman invited Dev to deposit funds in a specified back account. Shortly afterward, Dev was ushered through into a long low room whose rugged ceiling dripped condensation.

Music roared, all growling low-frequency chord layers and thundering drums. Ultraviolet lamps strobed in darkness, picking out streaks of fluorescent paint on the walls and making them blaze vividly. Bodies cavorted to the rhythm. Hands, also coated in fluorescent paint, flickered to and fro.

Dev recoiled, squinting and flinching. The bass drum boomed like heavy artillery. The flashes of brightly coloured light resembled muon beam weapon discharges. Where the dancers revelled in the sensory overload, he was repulsed by it.

Too many battlefields.

Too many memories.

Too many nightmares.

His gut clenched in fear. His brain was sending out warnings, like flares.
Plussers! Check your six! Prioritise threats! Maintain formation! Move!

He told himself he was not in a firefight; he was in a nightclub. There were no enemy mechs advancing on his position, no comrades beside him, no omnipresent terror of death. That life was in the past. Safely in the past.

“You all right?” a stranger asked. It was hard to sound truly, sincerely concerned when you had to scream at the top of your lungs to be heard.

Dev couldn’t even nod. It was stupid. Pathetic. Crippled by loud music and lights. Get a grip. He was drawing attention to himself.

He looked up to find Franz Glazkov standing a few metres away. Glazkov had been deep in conversation with a smartly dressed man, conducting some kind of transaction. But now both of them were staring at Dev, as were several other people around them.

Recognition dawned in Glazkov’s dulled eyes. He shouted something to the smartly dressed man, gesticulating in alarm. Dev didn’t catch what he said, but it was clear that Glazkov was fingering him as an undercover cop or something similar – the guy who had been interrogating him just now at police headquarters.

The smartly dressed man gave a curt, grim nod. His expression slackened briefly as he thought-sent a message.

Dev struggled to shake off the paralysis and regain control of himself. He straightened up, tuning out the auditory and visual assault, focusing on Glazkov.

He lunged forward. Glazkov turned tail.

Someone grabbed Dev’s collar and spun him round.

He came face to face with the monolithic doorman. The smartly dressed man was, it seemed, the club owner. He had summoned the doorman to deal with an unwelcome guest.

The doorman yanked Dev off his feet and began escorting – more accurately, dragging – him towards the club entrance.

Out in the vestibule, where the music was marginally more muted, he told Dev that cops weren’t welcome at Inferno. It was a private club. All above board, strictly legal, permits paid, paperwork in order. But punters came here to have a good time, to forget their troubles, and that meant, among other things, not having plainclothes law loitering on the dance floor.

“Got it?” he said. “So off you go, nice and quiet, and we’ll pretend this never happened. Okay?”

He was genial about it, as though there had been a misunderstanding, that was all. As though Dev had carelessly crossed a line, transgressed some unwritten rule. Least said, soonest mended.

“I want Franz Glazkov,” Dev said, sounding just as reasonable. “He’s a suspect. Let me back in there to fetch him. I’ll only be a moment.”

The doorman’s massive spherical head oscillated slowly from side to side. “Please don’t be awkward, pal. My boss has asked me to help you leave. There’s room for interpretation in the word ‘help,’ if you catch my drift.”

“Don’t get in my way.”

“Don’t make me.”

“You seem like a decent guy. I wouldn’t like to have to hurt you.”

“You?” the doorman scoffed. “How?”

“Induced sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, yes?” said Dev, casting an eye over the doorman’s excessively muscled bulk. “Desensitised pain receptors. Extra epidermal layers.”

“I’ve had the full suite of professional-security modifications,” the doorman confirmed. “Only an idiot would do this job without. Also, I’m –”

Dev’s arm shot out, delivering a throat strike with the outer edge of his hand.

“Still tragically vulnerable to a bruised trachea,” he said.

The doorman sank, wheezing horribly.

“Try to breathe as normal,” Dev advised. “Your windpipe’s swelling up, but I gauged the blow so that it won’t close altogether. You’ll be fine.”

The doorman made a feeble, ineffectual grab for Dev’s leg as he stepped round him. Dev shook him off.

This time, as he re-entered Inferno, he was mentally prepared. The shock and disorientation were minimised, tolerable.

He searched for Glazkov, but couldn’t find him. A hundred or so faces in the club, many of them spaced-out and vacuous, none of them Glazkov’s.

The club owner was loitering in one corner, glugging down water from a two-litre bottle. Even though he wasn’t dancing, his face was slick with perspiration. Inferno was like a sauna, and no Alighierian could afford to lose so much sweat without regular rehydration.

He didn’t even see Dev until he was down on his knees with his head being forced back at a sharp angle.

Dev upended the bottle and tipped water down the man’s throat. The club owner spluttered, gargled and gagged. Water started spilling out of the sides of his mouth and splashing down the front of his silk shirt.

Dev didn’t even ask the question. It was obvious.

The club owner, half drowned, still choking, pointed to a back room.

Dev held up the bottle menacingly.

The club owner made a pleading, exaggeratedly sincere face.

Dev let go of him and tossed the bottle neck-first into his lap, soaking the crotch of his trousers.

The backroom was cramped, the floor covered in tumbled mounds of cushions and throw rugs that were patterned with stains from spilled drinks and other less easily identifiable substances. Womb-pink illumination. Mirrored walls. A chill-out area for when the intensity of the music and dancefloor lights became too much.

A stranger was in here with him, image reflected countless times in the mirrors, receding away in infinite recursion.

It took Dev a moment to realise the stranger was himself.

Otherwise, himself aside, the room was empty. Had the club owner lied?

No. One of the mirrors was angled slightly out of true, attached to a section of hinged false wall. A secret door, which Glazkov had left slightly ajar in his hurry to flee the premises.

Dev pried it all the way open to reveal access to the top of a vertical shaft.

An emergency escape route, known only to a favoured few, the owner’s inner circle. A back exit for patrons who needed to leave in secret, for whatever reason.

Dev climbed down.

9

H
AND OVER HAND
Dev scaled down a crude ladder – metal rungs bolted to raw rock. One hundred metres below, he emerged into a low-ceilinged passageway, a natural tunnel.

Patches of bioluminescent slime mould clung to the walls, shedding a spectral blue glow. To Alighierian eyes, this was equivalent to broad daylight.

Dev sensed movement ahead – a rustle of footfalls. He called out Glazkov’s name and the footfalls sped up. He hurried after them, bent over to give his head clearance.

The tunnel forked, but Glazkov was not so far ahead that Dev couldn’t determine by sound alone which of the two paths he had taken.

“Glazkov! Running’s not the answer. I just want to talk to you some more.”

“Fuck off, pig,” came the reply.

“If you’re not Polis Plus, you’ve nothing to fear.”

“Leave me alone.”

Dev came to another fork. This time, there were three divergent routes to choose from.

Glazkov, in a sudden fit of cunning, had decided to stand still. Whichever of the three tunnels he had taken, he wasn’t going to advertise his position by continuing to run. He was hiding down one of them, just out of sight, staying silent, controlling his breathing.

Dev inspected the entrance to each, looking for a sign, tracks of some sort. The floors were slick with moisture, but solid rock. Not a footprint to be seen.

Guesswork, then. Process of elimination.

He took the left hand tunnel. It descended at a shallow gradient, kinking at an angle every couple of dozen paces. Finally it opened out into a dome-shaped chamber where Dev could once again, to his relief, stand upright.

All around him were encrustations of a fine pale crystal mineral. Some growths were rounded and lumpy, others branched outward in snowflake-like fronds. In the glow cast by patches of slime mould, they sparkled faintly.

This was a giant geode, a cavity formed by a gas bubble rising from Alighieri’s molten core and cooling.

It was no dead-end, since a narrow fissure linked it to another, similar geode. Dev squeezed through the crack on his hands and knees, to find that this geode joined on to two more, and on and on. There was a clustered mass of the things, like geological foam, all interconnected.

In all likelihood this was where Glazkov had taken refuge. He seemed to know the layout of these tunnels intimately. He was sneaking through the geode maze, intending either to elude Dev or lead him astray.

Trouble was, it was working. On both counts.

Dev soon realised, to his dismay, that he had ventured too far into the crystal-lined labyrinth for comfort. He had been doing his best to log his progress, memorising the position of each geode relative to its neighbours. At some point, however, he had got muddled up. All at once, his mental map ceased to make sense and became more or less useless.