Toby felt his throat tighten. They knew he was here and were copying Killeens to hunt him down.
“Dealer comes in here with one every week or so.”
“From where?”
“Gets them in the countryside, he says. Brings them here for kindling up to strength. Got a storage place for them.”
“Where?”
“Last I heard, ’bout seven blocks over.”
“Which way?”
“Annunciation and Poydras. Big long shed, tin roof.”
Toby made his way through the rain-slicked streets, getting lost twice in his hurried confusion and slipping on something slimy he did not want to look at. He got to the low building as a figure came out the other end of it and something made him step back into the street and watch the man hurry away. He went inside and there was nobody there except five Zoms who lay on ready-racks, chilled down and with brass amulets covering their faces. A gathering sense of betrayal caught in his mouth and Toby trotted down the empty aisles where Zoms would labor in the day, the slanting gray light making every object ghostly and threatening.
He knew before he reached the end of it that the Zom Raiser had played him for a fool all along. While Toby was finding his way here the man had somehow sent word.
He had hoped that the true Killeen would be here somehow, that perhaps his father was making the copies himself to aid his search. But it was far more likely that mechs had humans working for them. Toby should flee. He did not want to give up but the logic of it was clear and he had halfway turned when something fell out of the dark roof above.
He dove sideways over a Zom without thinking. The thing was like a pale plate of meat spreading in the air like a flightless bird. It struck him smartly in the leg. An electric-blue blaze rose in his eyes. His sensorium crumpled and flashed with sparking pain. The Zom’s flesh was hard and cool as he fell across the body. Agony was climbing up his spine, coming for him. The frying intensity told him this was a high-order mech offensive weapon. He twisted on the slimy cool Zom and his legs cramped up with the shooting sting. That made it hard to roll but he grabbed the Zom’s head. It was a woman and he had to jam his hand into her open mouth to get the leverage. He slithered out from under the weight. The thing held on but he reached back and jabbed it with his gloved hand. Stiff fingers dug into a resistance like molasses. It shied away and he hit the floor. The mech device spread an oozing stain over the Zom.
Maybe it had mistaken the Zom for him. Toby did not wait to find out.
ELEVEN
The Past Is Labyrinth
Three deep, mellow bell notes floated off across the sublime skin of the river and some moments later came wafting back, steepened into treble and shortened in duration.
“Means we’re getting close to the arc,” Mr. Preston said.
Toby narrowed his eyes, searching the gloom before them. “Can’t see a thing.”
“The bell notes get scrunched up by the time-wind, then bounce back to us. Better guide than seeing the arcs, sometimes. They twist the light, give you spaghetti pictures.”
Toby would have preferred to watch the treacherous standing curves of frothy water, for he had seen one smash a flatboat to splinters on his trip down.
A deep hush brooded upon the river. He felt a haunting sense of isolation, remoteness from the bustle of Cairo, though they were only hours upstream from it. He had felt bad about what would happen if mechs pursued him to the ship and so had hid out in a bar until the last moment. With his sensorium damped to zero he sat and brooded and decided never to activate the sensorium again. It was not the risk to himself so much, but the danger to the people he worked with.
They sheltered here in a way he supposed was typical of humanity everywhere, given half the chance. They clung to a past and he passed among them in dangerous disguise. He could not bring mechs down upon his friends.
He crept down to the river. To the ship. When he came aboard there was nothing remarkable, or at least nothing remarked. It had taken a while to get his calm back, to begin thinking again.
To starboard he could make out solid walls of dusky forest softening into somber gray. Mr. Preston sounded the bells again and the steepened echoes came, quicker and sharper this time.
Then the river seemed to open itself, revealing first the foamy feet and then the marvelous high swoop of the arcs. Silently they churned at their thick feet, sending waves to announce their power. Yet as the Natchez came up, holding tight to the opposite shore, the water was glass-smooth, with mercury breaking at mid-river and sending spectral flags of glittering mist into an eerily still air.
This tranquility fractured. A wall of thunder shook the glass windows of the pilot’s nest.
“Whoa!” Mr. Preston called and slammed on the power. The induction motors sent a shock through the decking.
“It look the way you seen it last?” Mr. Preston never took his eyes from the arcs. They were shimmering pink and blue now.
“Yessir, only the tall one, it had a bigger foot.”
“You shoot down through here?”
“Nossir, stayed out by that sand bar.”
“Damn right you were, too.”
Toby had, in the chop and splash of it, been given no choice whatever. But he said nothing, just held on. The deck bucked, popped, complained.
“Eddy running here up the bank to well beyond the point,” Mr. Preston said, betraying some excitement despite himself. “Might get us through without we have to comb our hair afterward.”
They went flying up the shore so close that twigs snapped off on the chimneys. Mist churned the air fever-pink. Drumroll bass notes came up through Toby’s boots. “Hold on for the surge!” Mr. Preston called, as if anyone wasn’t already, and it hit.
The Natchez struck the vortex whorl plunging by near the point. The suck of it stretched clear across the river this time, an enormous mouth of mercury and bromium seething brown and silver together in smeared curves. The ship whirled around, Toby thought as his stomach lurched, like a favorite top his mother had given him, possessing the mysterious ability to stand so long as it spun.
This abstract memory lasted one breath and then water crashed over the pilot’s nest and smashed in the aft window. The ship careened to port. Time-torques whipsawed the groaning timbers. An eddy seized her and crunched one of her chimneys into pathetic torn tin. Concussion clapped Toby’s ears and left his head ringing. Lightning-quick flashes of ruby radiance forked from the river and ran caressing over the upper decks.
Shouts. Screams.
Athwart the current, then with it, the Natchez shot free of the howling whorl. Within a mere moment they brought up hard in the woods at the next bend. Ordinarily this would have been an embarrassment for a pilot, but as it came from passing uptime against the arcs, it was a deliverance, a penalty, as trivial as a stingy tip left after a banquet.
In the lapsed quiet afterward they drummed upstream and Toby watched the shoreline for signs he remembered. Coming back to this place meant he could partly reverse the esty gradient. He figured that would get him back onto a time axis closer to the period shared with the portal cities. Maybe—just maybe, because people here didn’t want to talk about the esty at all—he could get closer to the source of Killeens.
