The Claim

1-9-2015

CHAPTER 3

There was no edge to Souktown that Esker could discern, only a slow decay; the crumbling foundations were less and less overbuilt, the lights weaker and less dense, the bright polyglot signs fading more and more into the ruined indecipherable glyphs of the ancients. With the dark came quiet, but not a calm quiet. Coiled was the word, he thought. He slowed to a walk, not because his legs or lungs were failing, but because his breathing was too loud. He would hear Boss John Dream or his men from a distance, of that he was sure enough. He had been lucky on the high ice, never been engaged one-on-one by a psionic—oh, he had been scratched by broadband offensives, limbic bombs and ictal fields and the like, but never directly confronted an opposing imago in a shared reality. What little he had been taught about mind-on-mind combat, he had used against Dream, for what little good it had done. But he remembered enough of his instruction to know that such engagements led to cross-contamination of personality when both combatants survived. He could feel the shape of Dream in the phantom bite-marks on his shoulder, the persistent sense of filth where the mind-worm’s coils had wrapped.

He reached a crossing where the path ahead was decorated by a line of pebbles, each glowing with a different color: White, yellow, blue, white, yellow, blue. He walked up to the edge of the claim and stood for a moment, contemplating whether he ought to cross the line of lights. After several seconds, a gun barked; a few stone chips flew off the corner of a building, rather farther from Esker than a proper warning shot ought to have been. Nonetheless, he raised his hands and turned left, walking away from the crossing and the claim-edge. Two more streets to his right were so demarcated; the next was empty, and he turned, continuing toward yellow, green, white.

Esker sensed things moving in the dark around him, caught flashes of shambling silhouettes in windows and alleyways. He walked past another claim-edge, this one red, red, violet, green. Out of instinct, he looked into the claim to see if he could lay eye on another ciudor. He saw a Jaidari man prone on the black street—upper body visible, legs concealed in an alley, battered slouch laying shapeless a foot or so from his head. As he watched, the body jerked and disappeared into the alley, leaving the slouch orphaned. Wet noises began as he backed away from the claim-edge.

After that, the quiet of Jagaag viejo no longer felt like the absence of sound. It felt full of sound—of noises that were low, deliberately muffled, or far away. 

A figure stepped from an alley a block down. With the moon behind it, he could not see its face; but he could see the line of cooked flesh where its neck ended, see the moon shine through the burnt ribs below. He knew whose face he would see there. The figure took a step toward him, and another.

“Hello, stranger,” it said. “How do you like my voice?”

He looked again. There was no neck-stump ending in pebbled black meat, no rib cage slicing the moonlight up like paper. The voice was not Ximena’s; it spoke with the near-native accent of the Jaidari Rooks, not the thick late-learned accent of the Rooks in Tenoc. It—she—wore leather under the black feather cloak; her skin was light, of course, her hair the shades of sand, and her limbs moved in patterns he had seen before, high on a web of steel.

“It’s a serious question,” she said as she approached. “I need to know if you can handle talking to a woman. Most of you foreigners get really jammed up about it, but I’ve been told you might be a different beast.”

“You’re the woman from the bridge,” he said.

“Ruth,” she said. “You’re Esker Sepherene. You’ve got a claim in the viejo. You’re looking for something rather specific, are you not?”

“I’m just here for the money,” said Esker. “Lots of money in eld Art. All the boys back on the farm say so.”

Ruth pinned him with her stare. “I’m not here to help some foreigner make money,” she said. “You say what you need to say to keep your dogs and your friends happy. With me, you tell the truth.”