Foxhunt Page 6

  None of the other people passing by on foot or on scooters seemed to see anything out of place in this, so perhaps it really was a very egalitarian place where the elected leaders mingled with the common folk. Perhaps everyone here ate grapes off wide dishes and held secret conferences in the ancient church.

  “I’m leaving,” Orfeus said. She reached over her shoulder to touch her guitar case, reassuring herself it was still there. “As requested.”

  Margaux nodded benevolently. In the light, Orfeus could make her out better. She was beautiful, of course. Fine-boned with a delicate nose and flawless skin, the slight indent of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and a stubborn jut to her chin. Probably far older than she looked. Her hoverchair was panelled in the same manner as stained glass, with gold webbing in between sections of colour, but it still made Orfeus think of a beautiful beetle. “The Archivist shall escort you,” Margaux said, clasping her hands. “It would be a shame for such a unique personage to be lost to the quirks of fate.” Margaux smiled serenely. “We are sure you’ll go far.”

  And some Elder yoked to her would make sure she wouldn’t go too far in the wrong direction, bringing embarrassment to these grand Blooded folk. Orfeus twitched.

  But no. Look at it differently. She could use this. A guard? Smog Sky, Orfeus had just been gifted a free bouncer if she played this right. Her very own begrudging bodyguard.

  Orfeus shrugged and smiled. “The Archivist?” she said cheerfully, adjusting the set of her guitar and cloak. “I have never in my life heard of anyone who sounds so entirely pretentious and stuck-up …” She trailed off. The stern Margaux was outright grinning.

  Orfeus turned. Rivasoa stood behind her, in admittedly beautiful robes of bright yellow and blue, her nails newly painted in similarly bright shades. As Orfeus turned, Rivasoa tucked her small book away into her robes.

  “Never mind,” Orfeus said, “I have.”

  Rivasoa looked past Orfeus’s shoulder at Margaux and the others, and said calmly, “I am ready to serve. I will keep records of anything of note. I’m sure this trip will be of interest.”

  Orfeus took a step closer. “Rivasoa, let me speak frankly for a moment,” she said. “I know you said you don’t choose your assignments, but honestly. Are they making you do this?” She lowered her voice. “Is it blackmail?”

  “It is not blackmail,” Rivasoa said in speaking tones. Orfeus sighed, and lifted her eyes to the heavens and shrugged: out of her hands. Rivasoa said, louder, “It is not. Someone needs to keep an eye on you.”

  Orfeus winked. “Like the view, hey?”

  Rivasoa drew herself up taller, if that was possible. Tall and stately and her collarbones could probably cut glass. “My wife wouldn’t love such talk.”

  Orfeus shifted her guitar strap and smiled disingenuously. “She’s invited too.”

  “Well, good luck, singer,” Margaux spoke hastily from behind her. “Archivist. Safe travels.”

  Orfeus turned to give a sarcastically elaborate salute, but the council of Blooded were already departing from the platform in an orderly line of robed figures. No doubt they had better things to do, like watching paint dry, or lounging on some couches.

  “Someone has to keep an eye on you,” Rivasoa repeated. Her dark eyes with those metallic threads fixed on Orfeus in deep suspicion. As though she would record all of this rather more literally than in her stylus-book. As if she was just waiting for Orfeus to trip over the wrong thing and spill all her secrets.

  There was no train at this time of day, but there was at least a cart headed to the next town to wait for it. They boarded the cart, and it smoothed off, solar-charged cell humming with energy. Rivasoa folded her broad hands across her lap and sat quietly.

  Orfeus sat in front of her, feeling Rivasoa’s eyes digging into her. As if sensing danger, her neck prickled and itched.

  Chapter Four

  Farflung, with its golden fields.

  That’s what they call it. Not true fields, but solar panels, miles of them, drinking in enough power for the city and enough surplus to trade, all over the country and across the seas, trade for all the food and grains required for living that the people of Farflung may work their wonders in their high towers, close to the sun.

  I am meant to observe the world as I see it, and without bias. But Farflung has always made me think of the old story of Icarus.

  - From the journal of Rivasoa

  * * *

  Orfeus opened her eyes to find Rivasoa staring at her, threads of gold in her brown eyes.

  Orfeus shifted back, automatically defensive, hunching her shoulders. Foolish. She shouldn’t act like she had something to hide. “What?” she said.

  “You were not performing the usual routines of sleep,” Rivasoa said. Her thick brows were hooked together. Apparently she felt personally victimised by Orfeus’s cart sleep habits. “Your eyelid movement is all wrong. Were you asleep, or did you pass out?”

  “What?” Orfeus said.

  “Fall unconscious,” Rivasoa said. “Suffer a fit. Slip briefly into a comatose state.”

  “I know what passing out means,” Orfeus said, bristling. “I’d wager I know near as many words as you, certainly some more interesting ones.” She felt at her forehead as she spoke. She wasn’t at all sure that she’d fallen asleep, not when she slept so well the night before. Passing out seemed just as likely, and more worrying.

  There were costs to overusing Blood, and she’d certainly overused it in her fight with the Wolf. But not that badly, and she’d given it plenty of time to recharge, plenty of time moving and in the sun. Something was wrong. With her Blood or with her.

  “I’m fine,” Orfeus said. “I’m always fine. I know our next stop, though.” She bared her teeth in a grin. “Do you really have to escort me everywhere, or is there some kind of expiration date on this? Three weeks sitting at home watering my plants and you get to go?”

  “No expiry date,” Rivasoa said, and she looked a little frantic at the idea. Ha. “Are you going to be sitting at home?”

  “Certainly I don’t have room in my place for another person, unless you wanted … the bed,” she purred. Rivasoa didn’t chide her this time, but didn’t look happy, either. Orfeus stopped. Certain types of riling weren’t worth it, and weren’t to her credit. “No. We’re going to Farflung.”

  “Oh,” Rivasoa said. “Oh, good.”

  The joy Orfeus got from her companion’s clear dismay didn’t fuel her long. She pinched the base of her nose, hard. No headache had returned, but her head still felt drifty.

  “You are not fine,” Rivasoa remarked. “But I knew you were a liar.”

  “Oh, in all the Honoured Earth… People lie about being fine all the time. Everyone. Not just me.” Orfeus shook her head, immensely irritated. “Feel free to refute any claim I happen to make about being better than you, but you don’t get to say that I’m worse. So I’m a little off-colour. Forgive me for being worried when I’m being hunted down by a—by an extinct canine—”

  “Wolves are in an order of their own,” Rivasoa said.

  “They sure are,” Orfeus snapped. “One that wants me dead!” She’d lost control of her temper. She wriggled back into the cart seat, scowling. “Next time just let me tell soothing lies.”

  “I will choose uncomfortable truths,” Rivasoa said. “Always, every time.”

  Orfeus finger-combed through her hair and, with a shrug, focused on the view outside. It wasn’t as fun to taunt Rivasoa when it was clear she was a good person.

  The cart trucked along. It wouldn’t be long before they reached the next town, one Orfeus thought was called Shornover, a smallish place but one the train passed through. About mid-afternoon they could catch the quartertrain to Tinctora. Normally. Had the Elders been able to shift the usual timetable of the quartertrains enough that one had departed Eldergrove with Rivasoa, reached Tinctora, then returned without heading on to the coast as it was meant to? That was more power than Orfeus had expect
ed from those mumbling cream robes.

  Orfeus leaned forward and tapped her knuckles on the driver’s compartment. He turned to her amicably enough. “Let us off at the next stop, we’ll walk,” she said, and shot him a warm grin to make it seem more personal. She leaned back in the cart as he increased his speed to still not terribly fast. “Do you have provisions?” It was half a day to the outskirts of Farflung from here. Not unmanageable for the inexperienced, but not fun.

  “I’ll manage,” Rivasoa said.

  “We can stop at a wayhouse if we need to.” Orfeus patted her guitar case. “With this, I can get us the good stuff.” She crooned to her guitar, “No breadcrusts and cold soup for us, darling dear. Only bread-middles and hot soup.”

  “I also have plenty to trade,” Rivasoa said, eyeing her.

  They got off the cart and Orfeus stretched, sniffing the air. Fresh and clean. There were only a few roads here for carts and the like, but there would be frequent signposts: settlements, even of only a few hundred people, were never far away. She saw a few houses here and there, farmers or just folk that liked solitude.

  A sign by the road said Shornover, pointing after the cart, Eldergrove back behind them, Farflung pointing into a field of wheat. Orfeus strode forth.

  Rivasoa kept pace better than she expected, striding serenely through the field and the oak forest that followed without looking remotely out of place, even with her perfect grooming and stature and flower-bright robes. Like some old god of the woods. Orfeus rummaged in her bag for apples and passed her one.

  Rivasoa took it and looked at it, wrinkly and small from wintering in the larder. Orfeus brindled joyfully in anticipation of parrying any insult, but Rivasoa took a careful bite and made no insult at all.

  “You’re prepared,” she said. “Did you bring water?”

  Orfeus jostled her bag on her shoulders, so the water bottle swooshed. “This is hardly my first trek,” she said. She looked out ahead of them. The terrain wasn’t perfectly smooth, dipping into hills and hummocks and buttressed by roots, but not too difficult. “Nowadays I get sent transportation more often than not, I’ve even been on flyers, but back when I started out?” She smiled at the memory. “It was all by foot, wandering from town to town and playing there, seeing who’d have me.”

  “Significance warned me you would be charming,” Rivasoa said, as if to herself. “That it would be wise to be on my guard.”

  Interesting. “I’m really not being charming, though,” Orfeus said. “You’d know, right? If I tried to play you false, you’d see right through it with that honest eye of yours. I wouldn’t try. Not actively trying to vex you every second we spend together doesn’t mean I’m out to be charming. This is just me.”

  Rivasoa stopped for a moment, holding out her hand to a passing butterfly, but it paid her no mind. She resumed walking. “That’s what worries me.”

  “Hm.” Orfeus kicked at some dead leaves. “Significance is looking out for you, or there’s more to xyr agenda than I’d guessed at, or maybe xe just knows that we’re … fairly similar people,” she said. “Trust me about as much as you’d trust Significance, how’s that?”

  “But you aren’t Significance,” Rivasoa stated. Orfeus trembled in joy. Oh, how she loved a straight man.

  “Aren’t significant?” she said, crossing her arms across her chest. “Now, how dare you?”

  Rivasoa stopped and looked at her, as intently as she had the butterfly though with less interest. At length she said, “I don’t think xe knew what xe was talking about.” She kept walking.

  Orfeus followed her with a shrug and a grin. She hadn’t set out for this outcome, but she wasn’t about to complain. Easier when people underestimated you.

  The walk passed without incident, through forests and fields and small working towns. Rivasoa insisted they stop at one point so she could sketch a deer.

  By mid-afternoon the fields and forests were thinning, and the tall needle-like spires of Farflung could be seen in the distance. After a few more minutes, the trees gave way to reveal ground gilded in solar panels, black and gold and shining back the sun. Shining the sun in, mostly, drinking up the energy to be used later. Native grasses and wildflowers nestled between and under the panels, the fields bordered with hedges to form a green corridor that connected the pollinator habitat to the treeline.

  Broad paved paths ran between the panels to allow foot traffic and maintenance, lined with thyme and yarrow, clover and lucerne. Orfeus strode down one with renewed energy, going from a steady lope to something hastier so even Rivasoa with her longer legs had to hurry to keep pace.

  It seemed a short way from the outskirts of the fields to the squared bases of the towers, narrower than one would expect from such tall buildings. Orfeus walked up to one and danced her fingers across the interface. The lift doors hissed open, and Orfeus gestured.

  Rivasoa stepped in and craned her head upwards. “There is nothing on these lower levels?”

  “Maintenance and so on, and storage,” Orfeus said, following her. The doors closed, and Orfeus braced herself against one wall, grinning. “Everything worth happening happens near the sky.” And they lurched upwards, up and up and on into the towering pillar, until the lift capsule came to a stop, some twenty seconds and three hundred metres later.

  Orfeus slammed her hand cheerfully on the console, and the doors opened once more. Rivasoa, to her credit, looked only faintly sick.

  Orfeus bounced out into the hall of the complex. “There are slower lifts, for those with need,” she said a little apologetically. “We can take one of those down if you like.”

  Rivasoa clasped her hands together as she strode, so her draping sleeves made one connected triangle. “I do not have need.”

  “No needs at all?” Orfeus said. “Are you fully an android? What do you dream of?”

  “I’m not an android,” Rivasoa said, and then paused. “Not exactly.”

  Orfeus didn’t stop, but did cast a stare over her shoulder. “Are you joking? Because I can’t tell.”

  Rivasoa did not smile.

  At the eleventh door along, Orfeus stopped and held her hand up to the panel. It beeped as it recognised her handprint, informing the occupants of the visitor.

  Rivasoa produced her book. “Is this a place of business?” she said. “Or residential?”

  “Yes,” Orfeus said. “Both. You need to be efficient with space to live in such narrow buildings.” She didn’t mention that most of those who wanted to work and live in Farflung weren’t the sort to sleep separated from their passions, however healthier that might be.

  The door opened to show a tall white woman with long, sleek chestnut hair and pristine overalls. “She’s working,” Em said with a look of slight exasperation. “But it’s good to see you.”

  “And you,” Orfeus said, and looked over her shoulder. This part of the room was less cluttered than it could be. A few of the chairs weren’t covered with the devices, loose wires and mysterious small humming things that otherwise coated every surface. A little behind Em sat the person she’d come to see, a Vietnamese woman built more solidly than Em, short and fat, wholly focused on directing a beeping wand at some mechanism. Same old Bright, her face studded with piercings, hair dyed violently red and a grin like a lightning bolt. Symmetrical designs were tattooed all up her arms and legs, reminiscent of circuitry. In her black shirt and cutoff shorts, she was the most brilliant person Orfeus knew. “Hey, Bright. Any new breakthroughs?”

  “Hey, Orf,” the woman said without looking up. Bright was thankfully the only person who called her that. “Who’s your friend?”

  “Rivasoa, she and her, the albatross around my neck,” Orfeus said.

  Bright nodded, her attention fixed. She twisted the wand and it flickered its lights a bit. Whatever the mechanism was flickered its lights too, and then spluttered out. Bright sat back in her chair with a huff.

  She laid the wand down on what looked like it had once been a nicely arranged din
ing table and looked at Rivasoa curiously. “Is that an Elder? Here? How did you wrangle that one?”

  “Reverse psychology,” Orfeus said. “I did my very best to convince them it was the last thing I wanted, and unfortunately they believed me.” She waved between the tall grave Elder and the two residents of Farflung. “Rivasoa, this is Em and Bright, both she and her, both very brilliant. Bright is… my contact.”

  “And your friend, right?” Bright said. She turned in her chair and picked up a cloth, dusting it carefully between the grooves of the mechanism. “I think we’re friends.”

  “And my friend,” Orfeus agreed. “Em, meanwhile, is just my friend.”

  “There goes that famous silver tongue,” Em said dryly. She walked past her girlfriend, patting absentmindedly at Bright’s shoulder along the way, and picked up a cup of something steaming and fragrant.

  Orfeus had very carefully never tried to bed either of them, and she thought the friendship had prospered from it. Em looked like a more traditional sort, someone who’d fit in at any of the small farming or growing or dyeing towns down below, but not when she was riding one of her excellent bikes, bodysuit and helmet gleaming. Bright, with her tattoos, piercings, and her dyed hair stark against her tan skin, was also quite moderate by Farflung standards. Nearly everyone here had modifications that ranged to the extreme, piercings and lengthened fingers and tapered ears or no ears or four ears, horns, four arms—name every possible extension to the human body and someone here had tried it. Orfeus felt at home. If there had been space for her to grow a proper garden in Farflung, she would’ve moved here years ago.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” Rivasoa said. “What is it that you … do?”

  Bright lit up, shifting to look at her. She wriggled her fingers. “I’m a Blooooooodwitch!” she said in a spooky voice.

  A pause. “I see,” Rivasoa said in a neutral voice.

  Orfeus shook her head. “Don’t bait her,” she said to Bright, admonishing. “They know plenty in that grove of theirs. You can just say nanites.”