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CHAPTER VIII

Izu Yaxlan



Sports complex.

Angel snorted. Sports? Who’d come up with that idea, to turn survival into a game? Still, she approved of contests. Dust gangs did it all the time, besting other gangs when they could. Mostly it involved beating up people, but running faster than your enemy certainly helped. Slicks did contests to win round pieces of metal. No matter. She knew better, that winning kept you alive, and that gave her an edge against her above-city opponents.

She didn’t know what to think of this Izu Yaxlan Sports Complex where the coach wanted to meet. People at the Kyle center claimed the name Izu Yaxlan came from an ancient city in the desert, one that lay in ruins. Strange. Anyone who knew the original Undercity dialect could tell you that city’s real name was Itza Yaxchilan, shortened from Itzanám Yaxchilan. Then again, almost no one spoke the ancient dialect. Angel knew because Bhaaj insisted they do this “schooling” biz. Angel had decided to make it less boring by learning stuff no one else could do, like figuring out how to read the ancient dialect. At first, it seemed impossible, because no one else could read it, either. Then Bhaaj suggested she study ancient Iotic, which turned out to be almost the same, so that took care of that.

The word Yaxchilan felt right. No one used it now except a few Undercity folk-singers. Angel loved those old songs. For her “history class,” she decided to sleuth out the origins of the folk stories. No one remembered the earliest versions, but surprise! Learning to read had a use after all. She could interpret symbols all over the aqueducts, the hieroglyphs everyone else called art instead of writing. Within the Maze, she found plenty of the ancient glyphs.

The oldest songs were delightfully weird, even claiming that whoever kidnapped humans from Earth moved them in time as well as space, shifting them by thousands of years. No one cared about the old stories except Bhaaj, who for some reason felt proud of her even when Angel didn’t do squat, but what the hell. It felt good. Bhaaj told her the research project would’ve earned her “top grades at Uni,” which Angel gathered was a good thing. She even tried to sing the ballads for Bhaaj. Although she could only guess at the melodies, it didn’t matter; she couldn’t carry a tune worth shit, and her voice sounded like metal scraping metal. Bhaaj listened anyway, until Angel took pity on her and stopped singing.

A few times, Angel tried to tell above-city types, speaking rather than singing the stories, but they just gave her that patronizing smile as if she were a barely literate fool. In truth, she wasn’t sure herself if it mattered. Even if no one else cared, though, she got a kick out of knowing that at least some of their ancestors called themselves the Maya and came from a city named Yaxchilan on Earth.

Now here she was, heading for another place with the mangled name Izu Yaxlan. She walked past the largest mansions in Cries, huge places where only a few people lived. She couldn’t fathom what they did with all that territory. The sunlight beat down on her like a fire. Too bright. She needed lotion to shield her skin. Tomorrow the doctors at work planned to give her “health nanomeds” that would help protect her Undercity self from the sun. Angel didn’t want strange things swimming in her body, but Bhaaj kept telling her to get them and her job required it, so what the hell.

The sports complex turned out to be a huge building surrounded by trees, lawns, and great stretches of white stuff that looked like stone but gave when she walked on it. The place was bigger than she expected, enough that she had no idea where to meet the running guy. She walked up a white pathway with plants on either side. So much green. It made her queasy. She went to a white stone bench and sat there, letting her mind adjust to this place.

A hum came from her left. Turning, she discovered a floating white ball about twice the size of her head with a smaller ball on top of it.

“Eh,” Angel said.

“Are you all right?” the smaller ball asked.

“Fine.” She felt like an idiot talking to a ball.

“Can I help you?” it asked.

“Nahya.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” the ball said.

Huh. Even not-alive objects here talked too much.

The ball tried again. “Do you need directions to the Undercity?”

“Nahya.”

“Why are you at the Izu Yaxlan Sports Complex?”

“Got meeting,” Angel said.

“I’m sorry. You can’t meet anyone here.”

Maybe it had problems with its hearing tech. “Meet running coach.”

“You are from the Undercity, yes?”

“Yah.”

“Undercity natives aren’t allowed on the grounds of the complex.”

She blinked. “Why not?”

“The Safety and Security force sets the rules. That is one of them.”

Someone needed to fix this bot so it could handle unexpected stuff. Angel just stood up. “Got meeting,” she clarified, and then headed along the path toward the complex.

“Stop!” The ball whirred next to her, stirring the air with its fans or whatever kept it floating. “You cannot go further.”

“Go away,” Angel told it. Bhaaj hadn’t told her she had to be polite to bots.

The ball kept pace with her. “I am notifying security.”

“Good.” Maybe it would leave then. She doubted it, though.

At the end of the path, Angel found a circular plaza paved in white tiles. Leafy trees bordered the area, bright with blue flowers. An entrance to the sports complex stood across the plaza, two tall glass doors that let her see the interior of the building. Sort of. The bright sunlight made it hard to see much beyond the glass. From a distance, the complex had looked circular, but this close up, the walls seemed straight. The curve of the building showed only if she looked right or left.

“Big place,” she commented to the whirring ball.

“You must leave,” it answered.

“I told you. I got meeting.”

“Security is on their way,” the ball said. “They will escort you off the grounds.”

Angel shook her head, baffled, then crossed the plaza to the double doors. She peered through the glass. It didn’t look like much inside, just a lot of open space. It reminded her of the Concourse, but without all those stalls, cafes, and tourists.

Angel pushed against the door. Nothing happened.

“Can I do something for you?” a male voice asked.

Angel looked around, but saw no one. “Door, you speak to me?” Everything else in Cries seemed to talk.

“Yes. Do you wish me to open? I’m not allowed to admit Undercity natives.”

“Not make sense.” Why would this Mason Qazik person ask her to come here if the building and its batty balls wouldn’t let her inside?

A woman spoke sharply behind her. “You there! Get away from that door.”

Angel turned to see two women in uniforms, though they wore blue instead of the gray used by the Concourse cops. She switched to Cries talk, staying on her best behavior. “My greetings. I’m sorry for the trouble.” That was a lie, since she hadn’t done anything, but never mind. Bhaaj had gone on forever telling her how she should act with any authorities she encountered, all about courtesy and no fights and on and on. It all boiled down to Don’t piss them off.

“I have a meeting this afternoon with Mason Qazik, the track-and-field coach,” Angel said. “However, I don’t seem able to enter the building.”

“A meeting. Yeah, sure.” The guard on Angel’s right pulled a big stick off her belt, what slicks called a truncheon. The guard on the left had already drawn her pulse gun. If one of its bullets hit Angel dead-on, it could explode her body.

The first guard motioned with her truncheon. “Move on now.”

“If I leave,” Angel said. “I’ll miss my meeting.”

The guards advanced on her. “Are you refusing to comply with the law?”

“Uh, no.” Angel tensed, ready to fight.

“Turn around,” one of the women said. “Put your hands behind your back.”

“Why?” Angel asked. Who’d turn their back on a threat? That’d be quite a feat back home, to make her rivals give up just by saying Turn around please so I can smash you more easily.

“I said turn around!” the woman with the truncheon shouted.

What the hell? Angel kept her back to the complex, keeping both guards in sight, but she put up her hands to show that she had no weapons, at least none they could see. “I don’t want trouble.”

The guard with the gun suddenly came at her from the left while the other lunged forward and grabbed her arm. When they swung Angel around and slammed her against the wall, Angel’s head hit the glass so hard, her vision blurred. She reacted on instinct, twisting away to face them. The guard with the gun was raising her weapon, ready to shoot—holy shit, did they mean to kill her? Angel spun in a tykado move and kicked the weapon out of her hand, making it fly through the air. The other guard tried to tackle her, but the woman couldn’t fight worth batcrap. Although Angel easily threw her off, she held back her punches. Damn, she wished she hadn’t promised Bhaaj not to hit anyone.

A man shouted. With her adrenaline surging, Angel couldn’t tell what he said. It made no sense unless the wall had decided to yell. The guard with the big stick swung at her, and Angel easily dodged her clumsy attack. She raised her fist—

“I said stop!” the man shouted. “She’s under the Majda umbrella.”

Ho! Angel froze, her arm raised, her gaze on the big-stick bitch. The woman had also stopped moving, her face twisted with hatred, her club only a handspan from Angel’s head. The other guard was getting to her feet. She glanced around, probably looking for her gun.

A tall man in the black uniform of a Majda cop stood a few paces back from them, his hands raised as if to calm everyone down. He looked familiar.

“What the fuck?” The truncheon guard lowered her weapon, her gaze raking over the Majda newcomer. Angel didn’t need Kyle abilities to figure out that she recognized him, or at least his uniform. She spoke in a harsh voice. “This is a city matter. She’s resisting arrest.”

“She didn’t do anything,” the man said. “I saw the whole thing.”

Huh. Angel decided she liked this guy.

The other guard picked up her gun and spoke to the Majda dude. “You have no jurisdiction here.” She gestured at Angel. “She attacked. Went after my weapon. This is a matter for the Cries police.”

“For flaming sake.” The man looked ready to punch the guards himself. “My EI recorded the entire incident. You two grabbed her with no provocation and slammed her head against the door. And you activated that pulse revolver, ma’am. If you had fired it, you would have killed her.”

Neither guard responded to his accusation. Angel could feel their anger. They’d expected this new clinker to support them.

The woman with the gun spoke more carefully. “You’re Majda police.”

He tapped a glinting disk on his belt, where all the Majda cops wore their badges. “Captain Duane Ebersole.”

“A man as a captain?” The truncheon bitch snorted. “On the Majda force? You expect us to believe that?” She raised her bat. “Are you working with this dust rat?”

“Dust Knight,” Angel muttered, though not loud enough for anyone to hear.

“Uh, Trey, wait.” The other woman was reading a screen on her gauntlet. “He’s who he claims.” She glanced at the truncheon guard, Trey apparently. “I verified his badge ID with our Majda database.”

Trey looked thoroughly pissed. Her anger came on so strong that it hit Angel like a body slam. This Trey person wanted to beat her into a flat, bloody mess. She wanted Angel to pay a price for daring to come here, for daring to come aboveground, for daring to fucking exist.

Although the other guard didn’t like Angel, she didn’t hate her, either. Angel was breaking the rules, so she tried to deal with it. If that included shooting her, the guard didn’t like it, but she would do whatever necessary to protect her territory. Seeing Duane, though, changed matters. She felt confused, stupid even. As much as she didn’t like anything Undercity, she feared Majda even more.

Trey just stood, with no outward response. She probably had no idea Angel could sense the battle going on within her as she resisted accepting that a Majda guard wasn’t supporting her story about what had happened.

Trey spoke curtly to Duane. “You claim this woman is sponsored by Majda?”

“That’s right,” Duane said. “She has a meeting with the track-and-field coach. He set it up.”

The other guard frowned. “He should have notified security for the complex. We could have warned him that they’d have to meet elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere?” Duane’s forehead furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“She can’t come here,” the guard said. “It’s against the law.”

“What law?” Duane sounded more baffled than anything else.

Angel scowled, pissed that they were talking about her as if she wasn’t right here. Then again, the talking she wanted to do involved telling these bitches what she thought about them. She’d promised Bhaaj to be polite no matter what, and this definitely qualified as a “what,” so maybe she ought to let Duane do the speechifying.

“The law for the, um—the complex—just a moment.” The guard with the gun tapped her gauntlet few times, squinted at its tiny screen, then tapped more. Finally she looked up. “It’s a policy instituted by the sports arena.”

Duane didn’t try to hide his annoyance. “This is a public facility supported by city funds. Forbidding someone access based on where they live is illegal.”

“Screw that.” Trey’s voice got louder. “We’re doing the job we were hired to do. Period.”

“Like I said,” Duane told them. “Forbidding entry is illegal.” He spoke with that tone the Majda queens got when they wanted to assert dominance. “Legally, a citizen of the Undercity has as much right to come here as anyone else.” His voice hardened. “Are you asking me to break the law by telling a future member of the Raylicon Olympic Track and Field team she can’t train with the team?”

“Actually,” Angel said. “I haven’t agreed to join the team yet.” If she had to put up with this shit every time she came here, why would she bother?

“Train with the Olympic team?” The guards regarded him blankly, as if he’d just suggested Angel planned on growing wings and flying. “She can’t.”

“Why not?” Angel asked. Whether or not she decided to join this “team” was her decision, not theirs.

The guard with the gun turned to her and spoke awkwardly. “You have to, uh, well—you need preparation. Discipline. Access. The right background. You don’t have any of that.”

Angel had no idea what she meant. “I run fine,” she told them. “Better than you, I’d bet.”

“I’ll escort Angel to her meeting,” Duane said quickly, before they could respond.

Trey scowled like she needed to hit someone with her stick. She started to speak, stopped, started, then stopped again. Finally she said, “You’re claiming Majda takes responsibility for her presence here?”

“Yes.” Duane’s voice could have chilled ice. “If you object, you can register a complaint with the House of Majda.”

The other guard spoke fast. “That won’t be necessary.” She gave Trey a warning glance, then turned back to Duane. “We have no quarrel with Majda.”

Glancing at Angel, Duane tilted his head toward the building. Enough said. As soon as he came over, a glass portal in the wall slid open. Apparently this door could listen as well as speak. The moment they stepped inside, it closed behind them, leaving the guards outside.

“That sucked,” Angel said.

“Sorry.” Duane had the good sense to leave it at that. Instead, he lifted his hand, inviting her to walk along the wide corridor that curved around the sports complex.

Angel went with him, giving her battle-ready body time to settle down. The hallway reminded her of a large canal in the Undercity, though it boasted neither midwalks nor dust. The floor was smoother, too, and tiled by gray squares. The ceiling rose high over their heads, far enough to hold two canals stacked up, but no walkways showed up there, either. They just wasted all that space. Stuff bordered the hall, banners with pictures of animals or bands of color. Places labeled “water station” stood at regular intervals, with glasses, fountains, and ice. Angel avoided them like the carnelian rash. More cops would probably show up if she dared drink their precious water.

They passed a few people striding along or gathered in groups. Everyone looked fit, more so than most of the other slicks she’d met. It felt right.

After a while, when her urge to punch people eased, Angel spoke, using above-city speech to show Duane respect. “That guard might have shot me.”

“I’d certainly hope not.” He spoke tightly. “Killing someone for coming here is beyond the pale even in Cries.”

Even in Cries. Great. This running biz sounded less appealing by the second. “She didn’t want to fire, but she thought she might have to.” Her fist clenched at her side. “The other one wanted to smash me to a pulp.”

“You picked all that up from them?”

“Yah.” Anyone could have felt reactions that strong, at least the people she knew. “It’s good you came. But why were you here?”

“I was waiting for you.” He gave her an apologetic look. “At the track entrance. It wasn’t until notification of an ‘incident’ came over my police channel that I realized you’d gone to the wrong door.”

That made sense. A smart duster always had extra ways to enter places. “But how’d you know to wait for me?”

“Bhaaj asked me to.”

“Eh.” A new thought came to Angel. “Duane—about Bhaaj.”

“Yes?”

“She enlisted at sixteen.”

“Well, yes.” He paused. “You can’t ship out until you’re eighteen. They’ll take you at sixteen, but you have to spend two years in school. They sent her out with the ground troops then.”

Ground troops. After reading through her work orientation, Angel better understood how things worked, maybe even more than whoever wrote that boring introduction had meant to reveal. “Ground troops are lowest of the low, yah?”

Duane spoke tightly. “Never let anyone tell you that. In my book, any soldier who puts their life on the line to defend the Imperialate is the highest of the high.”

“Yah.” Angel agreed with him. But still. “People think it’s lowest, though.”

After a moment, he said, “Yes, most do.”

“So Bhaaj enlists as a kid.” An adult in the Undercity, sure, but not according to these slicks. “She has no help. No Majda. No education. No mentor. No circle. No protector. She doesn’t speak your language. Doesn’t know your ways. She has no one to tell her shit. Nothing.

“Yes.” He sounded subdued.

Angel’s voice hardened. “Those guards would’ve arrested me, maybe even shot me. Security at that tower where I work wanted to throw me out. Only one thing stopped them. I got the highest of the high looking out for me. Majda. Because Majda wants something from me.” She shook her head. “Bhaaj had nothing. And she survived. Hell, more than survived. She rose up to the high ranks herself.”

Duane met her gaze. “Yes. She did.”

Yes. Angel heard the respect he added to that word, felt it in his mind, honoring Bhaaj. Another thought came to her. “You got Majda support too. But Majdas—they don’t usually do that for men. Not for fighting.”

He shrugged. “I’m good at what I do.”

Good answer. He neither boasted nor showed false modesty, just stated the obvious. “Majda give you grief, too?”

He laughed dryly. “Sometimes. I manage.”

Angel considered him. “Maybe I’ll join this running team of theirs after all.”

“Really? Even after what happened today?”

“Yah. I’ll smash these arrogant slicks.” Quickly she added, “By running, I mean. Not beating them up.” Well, probably not.

He seemed pleased by the idea. “You’d be a good addition to the team.”

Thoughts swirled in her mind. For one, she wasn’t the best runner in the Undercity. “I can bring them a lot of fast dusters.” She smirked. “We could overrun their pretty sports palace.”

Duane gave a hearty laugh. “I’d love to see it.”

“Eh.” Angel played it cool, but inside she grinned.

Yah, her people were coming. They’d get dust everywhere.


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