Supranendum

- 19 -

Ceder and I dress Rhodes up for the town. Three weeks cooped up in a back room and she's antsy as hell and needs to do something out and about. Says she's also making use of the risk by buying something in-person, though I could have done the dead drop myself.

I got her those tall slacks that reach up to her stomach, and the button-up she found in the garbage, and Ceder fished out some old suspenders to complete her look. I bartered for a guy's beanie the other day and now it fits her pretty well, albeit with a hole for her antenna. Less distinctive with her cybernetic hidden but not completely unremarkable. "Place is for-sure safe?" I ask, since the risk has been itching at me.

"Family-owned," she says, chittering, but then glances off. "...not sure why an automat is family owned."

"Automatically made with love," Ceder laughs. He is crouched at eye level with Rhodes, judging her look. "There are many a pejma who look like you. You'll blend in."

She squints slightly. "Tch, does make me think, should get a fucking mask already, put it in the League's records as a whole different person."

Ceder stands back up. "Easier said than done, friend."

"Working for me so far," I say.

He turns to me. "It wouldn't, if you had to go through a checkpoint. The Guilders have their masks like faces, but yours would not be recognized, or..." Then his deep-set eyes go deep into thought for a second. "...or recognized as a person you are not, perhaps."

"Whose was this originally?"

"Some human-Guilder with ambition." He leaves it at that. "You'll be by for the midnight shift, Nelly?"

I nod. "Or earlier. Place is close."

He steps back into the vacant doorway to his office and droops his head slightly. His gilded robes flutter against a fan he's got set up beside his bed. "Praying for you two, naturally. Take some care."

"'Kay," says Rhodes, and she clambers into the Bug Bag, which I pick up and start to zip up.

"You as well," I say.

He mentioned praying. My eyes go, kind of involuntarily, to his multi-layered shrine, where the candles are still fresh and a little aromatic. Sea and smoke is how I'd describe the smell. Atop the highest rung, beside Maxine and Gabs in effigy, I see myself, or a smaller version of myself, cut of balsa wood and painted. I'm in my fishing outfit save for the mask, which is carefully placed into my hand, alongside a rod slung around my back. Would have taken him hours to get those details right. It took someone a very long time to etch that stock, Nelly, so don't get it too dirty. Broad shoulders and a mean-looking eyeless face. Strange seeing it.

I turn away and take the two of us out to eat.

-

It isn't that close to Laudenberger, but it's quick on the electric moped, which I've now kept stashed a couple blocks away where the road starts to slope down—Salt Row's own Gutters, where the rough sailor types live in stacked concrete blocks that stretch down with basements and sub-basements, and roads evaporate into tiny alleyways like veins. I chatter with Rhodes quietly from her spot in the Bug Bag. "You made any progress on my thing?"

"That's what we're getting," she says. "Ah, ah, but... c'mon, I just mostly wanna eat and hang out."

Hard for me to mind that. "Sure. I'll forget about it for a bit."

"Know it's important to you."

I don't know if it is. I guess it is. The mystery at the heart of all of it. It's as important as anything else that we make up as important. "I'm happy with whatever. Here it is."

I drag out the electric moped from its place upright inside a rotted-out checkpoint booth, and once it's out on the street and folk can see it, I quickly get Rhodes to shim the lock using my hand.

-

It's a short ride north. She hangs tight in the Bag and I do my best to balance the moped, though it's a pretty steady thing. Really, whoever previously owned it should have hidden it better. Miscreants about.

-

We show up out front a place called CANTEEN SYSWAP and I park where we can see the moped from inside. A broad asphalt street with pretty fast traffic, transitory between a couple districts I don't know the names of. The automat is an enormous shop in the bottom floor of an even-more-enormous supercomplex, black metal with tinted windows and a million advertisements climbing up a hundred stories. Busy and the air is loud with commotion, and a light drizzle doesn't stop a couple street food vendors from cooking in the open air. Smells fucking good, and one of them is making pork gyros. But Rhodes was craving automat food so we're heading inside. The doors slide open automatically for me.

I head to one of the single-person bathrooms to de-Bag the Bug and, once Rhodes pats herself down and washes her face, we go on a date.

-

The automat is like others in the city, although decorated to be vaguely rustic with a beige tile floor and faux-wood chairs, and with only one lone security camera that belongs to Rhodes' eyes. Tables everywhere, usually two-seated and spaced evenly, with one wall of the building dedicated entirely to a thousand little chutes, horizontal and thin, with labels in Common, Vasthi, and Yontazzi, which is the old language of the Tasran and their Guilds. Neither Rhodes nor I actually know Yontazzi aside from some swears. Each chute is for a different item of food or drink, and if you slip in some cash or a pay card, it comes to you pretty much instantly.

Rhodes walks solidly out with me and leans against me whenever she starts to wobble on her bad legs. There are a good number of people inside and it sounds echoey, and she directs me as to what's good to eat at places like this, starting with a sushi packet, then a cheap energy drink, then some tortilla chips and some hot sauce and sourballs and...

By the end of it we've spent twelve Vicks on a boatload of food and we head to snag a table with our arms full.

She crosses her legs under the table; I have to spread mine just to sit comfortably. The height shift is pretty comical. She lays down our haul and starts picking stuff out. She's gotten a can of Jetsurp for herself and Frucor Blakashi for me—the former is a sugar bomb energy drink, the latter is a lime soda. Lots of brands around. Funny to think most corps are ostensibly something as innocuous as drink-makers. Then an array of hand snacks, sweet-smelling and plastic-tasting sushi bites, onigiri lathered in green sauce, tortilla balls containing rice and meat, a very scarily fatty and juicy cube of synth-beef. Haykays, fried rolls full of lettuce and mixed meats, but perfectly cylindrical and crunchy instead of soft. Everything I try tastes exactly like the ideal of the thing it's supposed to be and every bite is identical.

Then our main dishes of salty ramen in auto-heating bowls, which shift and simmer as they cook again by some chemical means, and which taste divine.

For a while we eat like crazy, like we haven't eaten in weeks, and then eventually I'm sated and happy and smiling and staring at her. She's doing that thing again, with her mandibles splayed wide out and her eyes low and ogling her mostly-eaten ramen. I speak. "Been meaning to ask."

"Uh-huh?"

"Is that, uh... is that thing you're doing..." I reach my arm up over the table to point rudely at her face. "Is that a smile?"

She squints her eyes, and lets out a very solid laugh. "Yeah."

"Okay."

"This a smile too?" And she reaches over the table, which is an ordeal, and forks a finger my way. And I grin.

"Yeah."

We eat a little more. The onigiri bites have some kind of sour and spicy sauce I can't place, and I'm worried I could snack on the tortilla spheres forever. "This a place you ordered at before?" I ask.

"Naw," Rhodes explains, leaning back a bit in her seat. "Reminds me of one, but isn't the one. Was a place near my house close enough I could walk without hurting myself. Way cheaper, too, 'cus it was in the Gutters. Ah, Salt Row."

"Close to where we were, then." I think back to the alley where I stashed the moped.

"Compromised, but yeah, actually, kinda close."

I squint at her a little. "...You, uh, been having trouble walking for forever, or... recent thing?"

She bows her head. "Same as when I got my wings clipped. Was a bad thing when I was a kid, was... was some bad people."

"Shit."

But she immediately perks up again, like a riposte. "You always been like this?" She waves at my whole gist, which I guess is supposed to mean something.

I tilt my head. "Like how."

"Like, ah, beh, a Neriak, I guess?"

"Doubt I'm anything like a Neriak."

Rhodes grins. "Not like Ceder, not like that. I mean big and lumbering and slow talking."

I take offense to that. "I don't talk slow," I say.

"Okay, but you talk little," she responds.

"Just how I talk."

She frames my face between her fingers as she nibbles on the remnants of a long-ripped-apart haykay. "Well, I look at you, and you got complex fucking thoughts, and sometimes you say 'em, but other times, it's just, like, Rhodes, I'm fishing. I'm fishing now. Not hard to see. Blah blah blah."

"Yeah, and why do you..." I have to quickly come up with something to take issue with. "Why do you look at your datapad and laugh about stuff and don't show me, eh?"

Rhodes squints. "What, you want me to? You wouldn't get the intranet stuff, it's stupid."

"I could get it."

"No, no! It's stupid."

"Why, is there a lot of slang?"

She cackles. "Yes! Yeah! It's stupid Velnias jokes and shit! It's why I don't use intranet slang around you, I'm being nice."

I'm looking at her very suspect. "You do say 'beh' a lot. Acronym?"

"That's not slang! I don't say acronyms out loud, I'm not lame! That's just my mouth doing shit."

"Never known a Tasran to do it," I say, although I'm kind of lying, because Tasran tend to make stupid noises as a matter of course. Even Yontazzi sounds very silly. Words like albala.

"Well," she says, pointing at me fiercely, "now you know one."

We go on like this for a little while as we finish off the food. The automat mostly consists of people coming to grab a meal and leaving, and there are very few that stick around, but the ones that do tend to be funny-looking. As we finish eating, Rhodes teaches me the art of people-watching, which is something I thought I knew how to do but she's insistent I'm doing it wrong. Supposed to ascertain intent and backstory by looking at random strangers from a distance.

Okay, then. "Check the cameras to see how they got here?" I hazard.

"That's cheating," Rhodes says. "Super cheating. You're supposed to, ah, extrapolate!"

"Fine." I begrudgingly laugh, and try to make something up. A couple of human men in the back corner, both with eyeglasses. One's eating and one's not. Neither are talking. "Those two are socially awkward," I say.

"Obviously. More?"

I squint. "...Brothers?"

She shakes her head. "Nah, boyfriends."

"Pshh. Not every couple of people in here is dating, Rhodes."

"Well," and I think she is about to exclaim, we are, but I am uncertain either of us is willing to say that part out loud. Her especially. She's been avoiding it. Why are you so hard to grasp sometimes?

We continue not to talk about each other—to talk about this thing—at all. We eat and clean up, people-watching until we run out of strangers to make up stories about.

-

Our last act in the automat takes place in the tiny parking lot out back, with me standing watch a few meters off. She drops a paper bag she'd been carrying into a knocked-over garbage bin, and pulls out a larger plastic bag from within, and we scurry to get it, and her, into the Bug Bag quickly, and then head back to Laudenberger Station.

- 20 -

It's one of those nights Ceder and I are left alone, and we drink and barely chat. I talk to him about Rhodes sometimes, how I feel about her, but only sometimes. He is proud of his little effigy of her. I've become a bona fide employee now. I picked up some Vasthi words and didn't try to forget off the bat so maybe I'm coming to feel like I belong, but it all still has this feeling like a dream. Still dreaming? Still dreaming about something, Nelly? My sleep is mostly dreamless.

Ceder heads out to do the dark bidding, and I remain in the back when Rhodes returns from her masqueraded trip to the kebab shop.

-

The job starts tonight. Been a couple weeks since our date, and despite me treating her better than ever, I am not very intimate with Rhodes and we are all business. I feel giddy I guess, something making me twitch at the toes. Don't know how I'll sleep like this but maybe I won't need to. Tomorrow they're taking Jean Jacket out across some part of the city to another and we've got til early morning to intercept.

Rhodes is hunched over her datapad, whose keyboard is now all smudgy with her constant clawprints, and I'm tired as hell, but I got a fire in me that's been muted for a long few weeks and I want to see what she's doing, so I loom over her shoulder.

!!!!!!!!!!!D3LUXE SPOOFFER!!!!!!!!!!!

Just a hacked e-mail client of some kind. I didn't use these much back home; Pell handled the buoy uplink and whatever we needed to do. Her own kind of hacker I guess.

"You snooping?" she asks. Some degree of humor missing.

I nod. "I'm snooping."

"Hasn't taken the bait yet." Then, with a lower tone, she says, "Yet."

It's only midnight. "He'll take it," I say. "He will."

Well, we're only hoping. It's all we've got. Marko needs to click on that fucking email or else we need to scrap the whole plan. And fifty Vicks on an outfit.

I try to stick around, but I'm drowsier than I've ever been. Feeling the weight of buckets of fish on my shoulders.

I curl up in our shared nest.

-

Someone is shaking me awake.

Someone is shaking you awake.

Rhodes with a crazed look on her face. "Did it," she cackles. "He clicked it."

I scramble in drowsiness over to her datapad on the table where it's propped up by a plastic flange. Instead of her home screen, or the email client, or anything I'd expect Rhodes to use, it's the computer screen of one Marko Harrigate, Safety Officer of the Free Peoples' Law Enforcement of Bermonde, and he's moving the mouse around and clicking on things.

"Mine," she says. "Fuck I'm tired. Hah." Her voice is more ragged than even the worst times when we first met.

"Cool," I say, and I smile, but my whole face has weights on it. "Game tomorrow, then?"

She pokes me in the chest. "Game tomorrow. Sleep."

"I ought to. You ought to."

And Rhodes makes a little funny face. "Might."

I stumble and then collapse back into our nest and go out into oblivion.

-

We're going to have you shoot when I say 'three'. Hold down the trigger tight and follow your tracer rounds. Recoil will stabilize almost instantly. I know. I can use a gun, Pell. It will surprise you, the sound, but don't let it scare you. Won't surprise me. Watch the target. Don't lose track of it. I won't, Pell. I promise.

I drift out of sleep, from one stupid-as-shit plan into another.

Morning is a mess. Ceder gave me the day off. I eat stale cheese bread and drink a lot of tap water. All my costume bits in the Bug Bag like I'm preparing for war. Kill some partisans. Kill, you shouldn't be afraid to use that word. It's what we're doing, fed.

Not a killing job, though. But I am bringing a holster. I stuff Rhodes in the Bag, and Ceder gives me a solemn little prayer, and we head off.

- 21 -

Back home there was tell of cow riders, or rangers, or cow boys, or something like that, who wore huge mud-striding boots and lived like animals out in the brush of Stromm's wilderness, and shot at whatever things crossed them, riding some members of the wildlife that could manage the rough terrain. Heard of one little compound on a hill with a Confederate who wore skulls and mounted a defense without surrender. Then some folks who just liked to shoot other folks, or took slaves.

Guess I am looking a little bit like a ranger now. I ride the electric moped with a cop hat and a jumpsuit in the Obogaltra red colors, a fake badge, calvary boots from a surplus store, a black utility belt with bells and whistles, a backpack, and the Bug Bag. No mask. Won't need it today. Breath is heavy here and my head is light. We ride on.

From Laudenberger to Bermonde Flat in the early A.M. hours of Velnias in-between the times when the latest partyers and Guilders collapse from exhaustion and the corps wake up, and all the sunlight is a thin band over the Cestabin Sea far from here, just a hint, just an idea. All the streetlights on and the advertisement towers blaring unabated and the cars few and the shadows many. Didn't sleep much. Didn't sleep well. Dreams of something from a long time ago, or not dreams, just thoughts, like I wasn't asleep at all. Head heavy and Bug Bag tight to my stomach. We ride on.

Down from Bermonde Flat around an enormous supercomplex of roads and intersections, thin, with stacked shantytown structures of the Bermonde Gutter every which way. I look like a cop but not the right kind to be around here. Doesn't matter. Through a back alley that turns into a small pedestrian bridge that turns into a ramp into a parking garage, and from here out into a wide-open street of the bottommost and most decrepit layer of the precinct of Bermonde, and only a block from the BERMONDE CIVIL building, but at ground level, where the front entrance looks hewn from some blast mining operation from long ago. From here I de-Bug the Bag and place Rhodes upright beside the moped, and with a faint nod she mounts, scoots away in the opposite direction, and rides on even further beyond that.

-

"Morning," I say, to somebody haggard and shorter by me than a head, exiting BERMONDE CIVIL. Looks like something shitty happened. She pays me no mind. I enter the building.

An enormous old-feeling hall made of concrete and painted to look like marble, with a floor that was once polished but is now strewn with muck and mud and dust. Quiet overall, with some phones going off someplace, and a group of people arguing their case about something to an intern at a desk near the entrance. Not the kind of welcome I would expect from a city police station in a place so big, but then again policing on Velnias is a complicated thing. I catch a couple eyes and that pang in my gut erupts but they don't stare for long. Not notable. I come on up to an enormous front desk reception area with a tired expression. "Obogaltra Precinct," I say, to the first woman at the rightmost spot, "joint escort with one of yours."

She lifts up a gun from the desk—not a gun, a scanner that has a pistol grip. Swings it by my face. It hangs in her hand limply for a second, then emits a 'bleep', and she tilts to look at her computer monitor. "Oh, that one."

"Uh-huh. I know the drill," I say, getting a little confident, "and don't need the whole rundown."

"You're on floor fifteen with the garage exit."

She waves over at a metal doorway that sits in the middle of the hall leading someplace secluded, and I can make out what might be an elevator. Metal detector, with ropes to make it inconvenient not to use. Then as I'm about to walk, the woman speaks again, as if she never stopped talking. "Name."

I tell her, "Alla Coriander."

"Date of birth."

You're getting old, Nelly, and I'm getting older. "First of January, 489."

She nods in approval. "Place of birth?"

Home, with your mama. I pause again and narrow my eyes at her. "It probably says Starlit Point Residence Care in Crater, Stromm's Landing. I was a foster."

Then she squints a little, and then nods. "No, but it's one nearby." She tack-tack-tacks on her keyboard for a sec. "Know who you're working with?"

"Lieutenant..."

"Lieutenant Metts. Taller than you, brown beard."

"Thank you." And I motion like I'm about to go.

"And," she says, "just so you're up to speed, the woman you're transporting is—"

I wave my hand at her face. "I'm aware. I'm aware, very aware. I'd rather not do any of this." Sensing that she's done with questions I need to respond to. I jerk myself away from her view as her mouth opens, hop around the metal detector and over the rope blocking me, and proceed to the elevator.

-

Blend in. Like in the brush. But not like that at all, as I've said. Stay on the move and look like you belong. I stand in the elevator tiredly which I don't have to fake, and a couple young-looking locals in uniform pass by me to stand in the back. I hear one say 'Obogaltra', but under his breath, and not directed to me. Some deep training in me to look completely forward and pay no mind. Or maybe it's a poker instinct. Elevator up to the Bermonde Flat level. I exit.

Floor fifteen of the precinct is even quieter. I prop my hands up on my belt and holster like cops I've seen in holotape films and exit into thin, flatly-lit halls with linoleum flooring, and try to follow the scant instructions Rhodes managed to dig up. Might have changed which rooms is which, and so far I thought I'd have seen a little break room but it was locked up and called 'MONTGOMERY'. Far as I could tell the building is sprawling and massive and many other floors are shut and abandoned, but this one sees some life now and then, local cops trying to wrest some control over Bermonde. Not my problem. I round a corner and pull at a door and come into the Flat Level Garage Complex.

Playing the part of a regiment boy again, playing the part of a soldier. It isn't necessarily hard but it doesn't come as natural as I thought it would. I ask the nearby patrolmen beside a beat-up car where to go, like a foreign precinct cop might, and I eventually find my way past all the asphalted loading bays into a small holding room.

Flat eggshell walls and with terrible overhead lighting. "Sir," I say, firmly. Tall and broad and kind of fat guy sat at a plastic fold-up table. "Officer Coriander."

He leans back in his chair. He has a wide nose like a spade. "Coriander? Are you with Obogaltra?"

"Yessir," and I tap my badge. It won't hold up against intense scrutiny, but Ceder did a good enough job chipping away at the bronze.

As he opens his mouth to speak, a flimsy white door on the other end of the room comes open, and a handcuffed woman emerges from the bathroom there. Human, with long and mottled hair nearly to her hips, and a dour look on her face. "Hi," she says, mutedly.

"Well, let's go before sun-up," says Metts, and immediately stands up to grab her hand with his. Gloved, and as a whole he looks gussied-up as an officer in the UCC might. I am a sharp contrast. By the way he's yanking her around now I don't get the strong impression she's here fully willingly, but Rhodes does want her course unaltered. Why? Old friend, I guess. Why all this? For me. You think?

We head out, and Metts drags Jean Jacket over to an electric car with a holding cell in back, but no Bermonde colors. There's a small sabretache laying on top of the trunk, and after stuffing her in the cell, he puts the bag in the trunk, too. He gets me into the passenger seat, and we're off.

-

Bermonde Civil doesn't have a shuttle takeoff pad, and it's a known blunder to use the starport for something covert like this, so we're driving over to Obogaltra Station which has its own surface-to-low-orbit pad, which will take Jean Jacket to wherever she's being escorted next. Didn't ask exactly what. Just care about what I came for.

Low light and an old car smell. I am tapping something complicated on my knee.

Velnias is just coming awake now, still with no sunlight but some early-early traffic. I am quiet. In spite of that, Metts is talking a lot. Rhodes told me that the city cops have an infinite amount of gossip, since they can't act on most of it, and this guy is no exception. "Her real name is Jeanie Pitts," he says, as if I hadn't been briefed whatsoever. "She was with this corp, and took every damn cent from their accounts before up and leaving. I think she figured she'd get some of it back by turning herself in and whistle-blowing. Didn't you?" He leans back behind himself as we're turning up an exit ramp—always a bad idea—and whips his head back around right before we go careening into the barrier. "Ahuh. The Pikes are going to the League, and you boys are taking home the bit of cash she took. So Bermonde basically gets squat, aside from the legal fees."

I pipe up quietly. Hadn't spoken much yet and my voice is still rough. "Boys?"

"Obogaltra," he says, with the same awkward tone as when he said it the first time. "Well, you look like a man. Anyway, Greatest Industries Velnias is probably going kaput now, but we still had to keep her in case they were going to try something. Not now, though. And we're pretty low-profile in this thing. We call her the brush tiger, 'cus she looks like any old car on the road. Not that we're lucky enough to have a shuttle pad like you boys. That'd make this so much easier."

I try to make something up. "Shuttle pad's a target," I say. "Has its drawbacks."

"Ah, well. Anyway, we taking her through the Gutters or the top roads?"

"Gutters. No entrance at top level." It's a lie but it's necessary, here. Or maybe I could have just said, top level is too risky. Be smarter, not quicker, Nelly.

Jeanie Pitts, or Jean Jacket, speaks from the back. "Wait, but there is." Her voice is haggard and has a lisp. Might have been a rough couple of weeks waiting for her trial, might have been pleading her case a lot. Rhodes didn't mention a lawyer.

"I was instructed not to use it," I clarify. "It's a chokepoint. Sorry, Lieutenant."

Metts hasn't noticed my slip-up or doesn't care. "Gutters it is. Hey, look, you can see the Supranendum." He points off in the horizon, at first I think maybe at some kind of notable skyscraper or one of the advert helicopters, or maybe even one of the stars in the morning sky, although there are very few. Then as we crest over a rise in the highway I see more clearly what he'd been seeing. A blimp—or something like it, I don't know—a gigantic floating structure hanging on enormous outstretched arms in the air, drifting gently between two of the tallest buildings in the north of the city.

"Yeah?"

We trail down the highway into a large collection of cars parked in a traffic jam. "Yeah," he says, "been ages since I've seen it out. Think that's Okamoto Park." Metts slows down the car to a halt eventually, right along the spot on the freeway that I was hoping. No visibility behind us, lots of people stopped in front. Someplace, very far ahead, an auto-taxi is trying to make a U-turn in the worst possible spot. It'll free itself eventually. Gives us a few minutes to do our thing.

I try to make out what it is. No big adverts, no big logos. A big compartment on the bottom, a blinking light on its nose. "Why's it there, you think?" I ask.

"Probably an event," he says. "OMI stuff. Maybe they got a new CEO."

"Guess it's not really our business," I say. About the most conversation-killer thing I could imagine.

I have my head tilted down, and so I don't see the first explosion.

-

When I was prisoner on Stromm's, the person named Pelleratz was my jailor. She wasn't good at it and not familiar with it but she did keep me in a room with a locked door which was enough at the time. Couldn't pick locks like Rhodes can, couldn't break the door with one arm. There was a barred window put in when it started getting used as a cell, and practically the only thing I could do was look out the window most nights. Stromm's, like other places, doesn't have a luminous night sky. Just a few stars that haven't been blotted out by the Blackpatch. It was sight enough to keep me occupied.

One night there was a crash like this one, though I guess louder, which woke me up and got me to staring out the barred window again.

The story goes like this: the UCC was making another push, one of the last ones before the War finally ended, to try to take Stromm's, and they were going to bombard the outlands where myself and Pell now both resided. By now the Feds had gotten pretty ineffectual here, lots of dead rookies and captured men like myself, and they blamed the people in the swamp. They had a ship up there in atmosphere called the Rossberg, the UCN Rossberg, and it was going to drop bombs like nobody had ever seen before. Glass it, is what people were saying at the time.

There was a bigger gun, a great ship-killing Gun somewhere in the jungles—one which nobody knows the fate of, not even now—which was used to shoot the Rossberg that night, and it hit, and six hundred separate compartments were breached at the same time. Fuel lines and tanks got compromised a couple seconds later. Then the reactor, which I hear was state of the art at the time, stopped being able to power the enormous thrusters which kept the Rossberg aloft, and then it blew.

I remember seeing the ship fall from orbit to ground. I saw most of it and I can't get it out of my head. The shrieking sounds of sub-explosions and counter-explosions and radio glitter in my eyes and the colors, so many colors of every shade, falling from the firmament to the shadowed swamp of Black Hook. I think it was the prettiest thing I ever saw happen in my life.

This is a little like that.

-

At first I can't tell that it's falling, but it is falling. The Supranendum is falling. One of its gigantic lofty arms with a turbo-thruster is missing when I look up and I can catch glimpse of that same thruster flying wildly to the base of Okamoto Park, faster than gravity would take it, and there's a quieter and more sudden 'boom' when it lands. Smoke pluming out of the hole where the arm should attach, smoke and flame. Then the perfect levelness of the craft fails like every error is compounding all at once, and within a matter of a few seconds it's sideways, then it's spinning—

Metts has his jaw open and is silent. I hear Jean Jacket say, "What the fuck," like this is something we're doing for her viewing pleasure. The Supranendum falls below the fiftieth floor of one of the towers and by that point I think all three of us have realized it's not going to right itself, it's not going to stay aloft, it's a goner.

Then the biggest boom of all as it collapses, and in every direction from the site there's a rapid and enormous burst of technicolor—some extremely expensive thing going up in a little explosion among bigger explosions—and the white and black smoke starts billowing out almost instantly after the flash.

I'm about to try to say something, anything, when I see Rhodes in the rear-view mirror.

- 22 -

She's quick to it, and wearing a balaclava that must be making it hard to breathe or see, and neither Metts nor Jean Jacket are paying the back of the car even half of a mind. I turn away from the mirror and speak. "What was that," I say.

"It broke up," says Metts. "I-I saw the arm go." He retrieves his walkie-talkie from his belt and doesn't seem to notice that I'm not doing the same, and he starts to bark his version of a check in on Bermonde radio. "All units, this is Lieutenant Louie Metts, I'm on the highway and we just saw the Supranendum—we saw—we have a six-forty emergency!"

Jean Jacket says, "What the fuck," again, but with feeling.

I peer back in the mirror just a second. The trunk is popped up—lockpicked, or maybe Metts didn't even remember to lock it. Security through obscurity. But not like that at all. Not if she always knows where I'm going. Sound of the car rattling as Rhodes slams the trunk shut, with the sabretache over her shoulder.

She's quick on her feet. Hops. It'll come back to bite her later, it's going to hurt like shit for a week, but it's her plan and I'm sticking to it. By now Metts has tilted his head, and he's trying to open the driver-side door, but not before Rhodes has run past it and danced on her feet between all the traffic, heading forward, heading away. "Fuck," says Metts, tossing his radio down, and then louder: "Fuck!"

I get out just as he does, and I tell him, "Don't bother."

"No," he erupts. "That's the cargo. Wait here, watch her." And he scurries off after Rhodes, with long strides but worse agility. Please. Please make it.

I hang out beside the passenger side door, watching the smoke of the Supranendum billow out into the sky between the two Okamoto towers, and try to catch my breath.

-

A couple minutes later, after what must have been one hell of a foot-race for her, I see Rhodes jetting back through all the traffic, and this time she's on the moped. I don't get a second to process it before she shoots me a smile with her eyes and throws the sabretache at me. I catch it with the brunt of my chest, which takes the wind out of me, and when I look up she's speeding off behind us, darting between cars going in the opposite direction that are settling to park behind us.

Not here to waste time. I click open the back door lock using a little fob Rhodes fashioned for me and pull it open to see Jean Jacket.

She is baffled. I can see bafflement in her face. I exacerbate the baffling by pulling the gun from my holster and pointing it at her. "Kachow," I say, which I decided I was gonna say a while ago, but now seems inappropriate given the felling of the Supranendum.

"What?!" she says, her voice cracking. She retracts into the other corner of the car. "Did you do that shit?!"

"No, look," I tell her, and knock on my gun. It's a wooden prop. Doesn't even look like a gun. "I'm here 'cus of your old friend Rhodes."

That changes her expression. "The fuck," she says, but now it's smoother and relieved.

"I got some questions about Greenview Solutions I need you to look up answers to." As I say this I'm pulling open the main flap of the sabretache. Inside is a pretty large wad of hundred-Vick bills lumped together, which I slip in the innermost pocket of my pack, alongside a small flash drive, which I take in hand. "Got a datapad here," and I retrieve the one in the wide pocket of my bag. "Do your thing." I offer Jean Jacket both the datapad and flash drive, after tossing the sabretache on top of the car.

The whole time she's squinting at me in dazzlement. "Look up?"

"From this," I tell her, and I waggle the drive.

"Ba, saik," she murmurs, and starts to un-scrunch from the corner of the car. I notice that traffic is moving a ways ahead of us—we don't have long.

I thrust both things further in her direction. "I got to know some shit. Aren't you a hacker?"

"I didn't think Rhodes was serious!"

I am baffled now, too. She didn't mention talking to Jean Jacket. Stay anonymous, she said. Stay quiet. Son of a bitch. Now I'm gritting my teeth. "Use your encrypted drive on this and search—"

"—I don't know whose that is! That isn't mine!"

"What?"

Now the car a couple places ahead of us is moving. Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch. "It's just not," she screeches. "I can't fucking help you. She did a favor for me once so I said I'd do a favor for her, but I can't help you. That cop is coming."

My body moves for me. Cold air running through me. I put the datapad back in my bag, and the drive back in the sabretache. Just like we agreed. Did we agree on anything? Why won't she help me? Why did they talk to each other? Favor? Favor?

I am trembling. I slam the back door shut and stand up, and just a second later, Lieutenant Metts is on us, panting, hands on his knees. Now the car behind us lets out a rough beep, and I weakly motion the sabretache in the air. "Got this, uh, from him," I say.

"Good," he says. "Good. Fuck. Good. Shit, good, I guess." He stumbles over to the driver-side door, and I get into the passenger side like a robot.

Why wouldn't she help me? What favor? I look back and Jean Jacket putting on a face like nothing is wrong. We drive off.

-

I show Metts the inside of the sabretache. "Took the money," I say, flatly, "think he took the money."

He grunts and puts his radio down again. "You better be the one to explain that to your boys. I'm not sticking around."

"The flash drive is still in here, though."

"What?" He glances back over. His knuckles are popped out and his face is sweaty, and he's jetting through traffic at a reckless pace. Heading northeast now. Not a long way yet. Empty in my stomach like a knife is sitting there. "What? Don't touch it."

I clear my throat to try and fix the dark feeling in my mouth, but it doesn't take. "Thought it was hers," I murmur.

"No," he says. "The cargo was just cash. The biker's probably trying to phish you. Destroy it at your station."

So he drives to Obogaltra Station.

-

Metts turns on the public radio out of sheer nervousness. Every channel blares the same thing. The Supranendum is down, they say, the city's prominent festival airship is down, the death toll, the injuries, the holograph projector that cost some millions of Vicks to construct. People on the ground. People crushed. Parade. I am empty. I am empty. I don't understand what's happening. I tap on my knee. Check in. No response. Check in. Rhodes? Rhodes, what's happening?

-

We get to the station in the Obogaltra Gutters and park. A similar installment as in Bermonde, but in old-looking bricks made of stone, enormous and cut finely and reflective and I am empty. I am just going through the motions. I mumble some stupid excuse to Metts about car-sickness and slip out of the car before he can even speak back at me and stumble to the nearby alleyway, and once I'm out of view I run, and I run, and I run.

What did you do? I need to get to a subway, I need to meet her back at Laudenberger Station, or Corundum Town, I need to tell Ceder. I am tapping on my knee. Check in. Check in. What did you do?

My mind is blank and my boots feel cheap and I throw my hat and badge in a trashcan and I don't know where I'm going or what I'm doing until I'm already in Obogaltra Golden Trainway Station aboard a free ride southeast to Salt Row.

-

I'm crying. I'm too hot in this stupid fucking outfit. I still have the fake gun in my holster. Quiet morning train with a muddy floor and rusty handholds. Then it gets filled with people trying to get to work. It starts to rain outside as we poke above the Gutters, and I hear people murmuring about the Supranendum. It's fucked up, they say. A tragedy. Mechanical fault. Failed inspections. Safety checks ignored. They think a screw was loose somewhere. A screw is loose in you. A screw is loose in her. I tap my leg. Check in. I tap my leg. Check in.

-

I get to Laudenberger Square. I run to the spot a couple blocks off where we last hid the moped. No sign. I go back to the station.

-

Corundum Town is quiet. No lunches or dinners. No kids in the old playground. A big bulky television playing silent video footage of the Supranendum going down; some compounding force making that external arm wobble and wobble until the joint explodes and it flies off. Cast-off. Casting off. Long quiet walk and my head hurts bad. I go to the Hang'd Knight.

Cup is sweeping the front and waves hello to me once he recognizes me. I don't recognize me. I nod at him and push back to the kitchen.

Maxine is heating up the oven and chopping greens and waves. I nod at her and push back to the back room.

Ceder is on the phone with somebody, and looks at me with confusion. There is no Rhodes here.

I collapse in the corner and I'm empty.

I tap my leg. Check in. I tap my leg. Check in.

-

Eventually having nothing else I pick through my backpack. She had me buy a new datapad for this—still has hers on her. I could message her if I knew what she was using, if I could find her new alias somehow, somewhere. I could. I tap my leg. Check in. I don't even boot the datapad on.

I pull out the money and count it. Idle thing I guess. Just to verify it's here, just to verify any of this happened. We agreed to try to get info from the hacker named Jean Jacket as to the identity of the person who killed Jericho Arborist. We agreed. That is the plan. That's what we're going to do.

Hundred-Vick bills, and at least a hundred of those. More money than I've ever held in my life. Hands sweaty. I pull the roll apart and a small, folded piece of paper falls in my lap.

I unfold it and read it. Handwriting is ragged but neat.

-

'NELLY

SORRY. WAS HARD TO DECIDE TO DO

THIS. I KILLED JERICHO ARBORIST

AND I'M SORRY WHAT HAPPENED AFTER.

YOU ARE NICE. I DON'T WANT TO BOG

YOU DOWN. GO SOMEWHERE ELSE, THEY

ARE AFTER ME, NOT YOU, AND I'LL ERASE

THE FACE YOU USE FOR THIS JOB. THIS

IS A BUNCH OF CASH AND SHOULD HELP

YOU. PAY CEDER BACK OR WHATEVER

YOU NEED TO DO. DON'T WORRY ABOUT

ME, I CAN HANDLE MYSELF NOW

THANKS TO YOU.

- YOU KNOW WHO'

-

I sink in my seat until I'm a puddle. The knife in my gut goes further in. Twists. I scrunch up into a ball against the wall and cry and then wail, and my body fails me, and I want someone to tell me it'll be okay.

I don't know what to do.

Please. Please don't. She'll die without me. She'll die without you. I'll die without you.

Please.

I tap my leg.

Check in.

Check in.

Check in.