Image Credit: Self Portrait: Victor Ribas--a good friend and full-time artistic muse. All other modifications, doohickies and doodads are my own. **** The Red Lion is three underground levels of industrial-nightmare: a freezone bar in the heart of Fyodorov’s Black City district. It is a place Aleo knows. They’ve come here in accordance to last night’s plan, fueled by Dorianna’s gnawing and voracious need. It burns more intensely in her now and Ilya feels it like some strange and energetic plasma, hissing and crackling around her. “Is it safe for her there?” he had asked the night before, drifting through cloying waves of vodka-intoxication and exhaustion. He’d lain motionless beside Aleo, staring up at the ceiling, and then toward the bedroom window, as if to see the Black City between the pale brackets of his naked feet. He thought, inanely, that his toenails needed trimming. “It’s safe enough…I might know someone there who can help us. Dashenka can get what she wants, and it should keep her out of our hair for a bit,” Aleo said. The note of defeat in his voice was tinged, Ilya remembers now, with quiet desperation. “Taking her to see a pilot,” Aleo said later. “It’s a stupid idea, and I caved in…gave her hints of an easy way through this.” Ilya closed his eyes. He drew a deep breath and squeezed closer to Aleo. “You like her,” Ilya said. “You care about her comfort.” Silence... Now, three levels beneath the streets of Fyodorov, Ilya listens to the noise of conversation and the jagged blast of slar from the music system. It is hard music, all thunderous percussion and screeching, bowed guitars woven through the slow drone of graveled male vocals in the sustained key of tainted longing. The air is heavy with the redolence of tabak, and more than a doodle of hif, but there are other smells--cloying scents like ambergris and sweat, like ozone and the salt-smack of raw, animal fear. The mood, Ilya thinks, is harder than normal. Every city in the Nemaean territories has a Black City at its core, and every Black City smells the same. Here, tonight, however, the smell is different, and Ilya nearly gags on it. This smell, he thinks, is universal to Nemaea. Some grim, protean thing has infected the ideosphere, and the pilot-swimmers all sense it. They are, most likely, the ones who have brought it here: some strange contamination from…out there. He tries to key into snippets of conversation in an attempt to tweeze some meaning out of the jumbled fear-sense he feels pressing in around him, but the conversations are too indistinct, too ill-focused, and that is proof that there is, indeed, something very, very wrong. He sits in a shadowed booth, with Dorianna, while Aleo searches for the one half-time friend who may be able to help them. “You’re angry with me, aren’t you?” Dorianna asks. “No,” Ilya says. “Just a bit nervous.” “About…?” “You. Aleo. Me. You‘re becoming Nemaean, and that‘s not an easy thing. Bringing you here isn‘t something either of us wanted to do.” “I noticed. Why?” “You’re jumping into this head-first and blind, Dashenka…I understand how you must feel, which is why I’m here now…why Aleo is here. It’s hard for you…we both understand this. We‘ll help you find a pilot-swimmer. You can at least feel more of the web through him. But that‘s going to take prolonged contact, he‘s going to go in deep and read every single nerve, every single synapse. There‘s a chance he‘d do some subtle damage to you…that he‘d monkey wrench your whole node realignment and maybe leave you crippled. Aleo said it…there is too much that can go wrong.” Dorianna smiles softly. She sits in a neat cone of halogen light; it is seemingly swallowed by the dark cascade of her hair. “And Aleo is afraid of what can go wrong…more afraid than you are.” “You’re not a child, Dorianna, but your web-ware is in the process of replacing itself. Your old ’ware doesn’t function as well here…different protocols. This is why it’s being replaced. But as far as your ‘ware is concerned, you are a child, and there are certain dangers to exposing children to pilot-swimmers.” “Why didn’t you say anything last night?” “Would you have heard us if we did? Would we have done something other than argue?” She fingers the rim of her drink and considers the bubbles of carbonation skating up the side of her glass. Ilya can see the play of thoughts behind her eyes. “I don’t know.” For a while, there is silence between them, and Ilya sits back, raking his fingers through his hair. He steals a nip of his beer. “Bes was nothing like this“ she says absently “Not even the under streets.” She glances around, taking in the crowd. Most are spacers: station riggers, dock crew, technicians. There are pilot-swimmers here as well--black-clad and barefooted; they wear the goggles and head-wrapping muffs that blind and deafen them in accordance to their most arcane needs. They touch one another in the manner of private, electrical speech. “Bes is a younger city,” Ilya says. “Also smaller.” “A lot quieter,” Dorianna comments. “If the EM-fields here are any indication.” “You can sense them more clearly?” “Sensing them is all I can do...just barely. I still can’t tell one from another.” “That’s a good sign.” “I’m EM-buffered, and illiterate and you say that’s a good sign…? Please, Ilychka…tell me you’re joking?” “It’s a good sign,” Ilya says. “Two days ago, you were unable to sense any fields at all…now you at least know that you’re wading through a sea of them.” --And missing out on too much, as reckoned in last night’s conversation. But, for as slowly as it happens, her modifications are taking hold, weaving new pathways through her somatosensory cortex. This, Ilya thinks, will be an even more frustrating time for her. The EM-fields that she can sense are the normal ID tags of the various pilot-swimmers, Guards, and others here. He knows Dorianna well enough to imagine her growing frustrated; it’s what happens when new somatosensory pathways weave themselves through the meat of the brain. It’s that nagging, hint of an itch that braids itself through your conscious thoughts: that non-verbal whisper continually telling you that you’re missing something, that you’re the mythic Tantalus at swim in a feast of sensations, but you can take none of them in. He has been among Centralists with buffered nodes before, and the more paranoid among them always sense whispers and hints of whispers like gossip, always, always, and always centered on them. Dorianna, he knows, is different. --Not some stupid Centralnik under buffer lock. He glances away from her and discovers Aleo, materializing out of the depths of the crowd. A sensory-muffled pilot keeps pace with him, eyes and ears blocked by sense-depriving headgear. Aleo picks his way to the booth with swift, insect precision. An expression of cold dread has sketched itself across the lean, pecan cast of his features and Ilya feels the slap of a sudden chill. There is an implication of catastrophe in the pilot’s stiff posture, and though Ilya cannot see the pilot-swimmer’s eyes for the blinders he wears, he imagines an expression of wild-animal dread. “This is Téomir,” Aleo says, sidling into the booth beside Ilya. “He and his triad have just swam in from Shesk.” Téomir smells of metals and pepper, his hair is a mass of ropy dreads, the color of sand. A faint thatch of hair centers his chin, but the rest of his face is clean-shaven. He is young. Ilya takes him for a junior pilot. “There’s trouble,” Aleo says. “The pilot-swimmers are all aware of it.” “Something’s just happened?” Ilya asks. It is Téomir who answers. Seated beside Dorianna, he leans forward in an oddly serpentine manner. His opaque, black goggles are rimmed with strands of copper. “We hear reports. We hear news. We know of a dead ship. The Persephone. Lost at the end of its return voyage to Sol-System system. Computational error. Navigational malfunction.” Under Centralist registry, the Persephone is one of the few such vessels allowed into the Nemaean Territories. It is the ship that carried Dorianna to New Ruthenia. Dorianna knits her brow. “The Persephone. You’re sure?” “Destroyed,” Téomir says. “All crew lost. All passengers lost. Remains have been recovered and identified, and Dorianna Eiker is among the dead.” “There’s a mistake--” “--No mistake,” Ilya says, suddenly cold. The pattern of what he’s just heard snaps into jarring, sharp focus, and he sees himself at the heart of it. He sees Aleo there. “Well, there’s no way you two are sitting here talking to a ghost.” “You are not a ghost,” Téomir says. “Thank you for that keen observation.” Ilya shrugs. “But you are, Dashanka…at least as far as your Centralnik friends are concerned. You’re the scandal of the year, an embarrassment to the corporate governments. Fabricating your death is the easiest way to sweep you under the carpet. Embarrassing attention is no longer focused on you.” Aleo nods. “And there’s more Téomir--still leaning forward--half swivels, half nods his head toward Dorianna like some cold blooded animal. “Someone follows you. Just arrived in the Territories today. We don’t know who. We know there is only one. Here. On Nemaea. In this city.” Stunned silence from Dorianna. “You are dangerous to us here, Dorianna Eiker.” Téomir’s voice is all smoke and silk with a low, rumbling burn. “You must leave. Now. You must place yourself under the protection of the Frontier Guard or the Cloistered Brothers. Go to either. But you must not be here.” Not in a freezone bar. Not in the Black City. It comes back to Ilya: his first impression of the bar. The smell. The boy-stink tags of epinephrine and adrenaline tinged with testosterone are a result of what the pilots know, what Téomir has just revealed. “So,” Dorianna begins. “Aside from getting out of here, what do we do?” Aleo shrugs. “We put you under lock and key and find out who’s tailing you.” **** ...more to come.