Ymir, page 8
“Not what Nocti said.”
“Everybody’s got one masterpiece in them. Nocti is hers.” He tilts his head. “Get in, you’re holding the line.”
Yorick is inside before the last word passes the man’s lips; he can’t let him reconsider. The smell of dust and old metal greets him as he enters the foundry. It hasn’t changed much. The vast dark space is still a labyrinth of derelict machinery. The smelting pit, illuminated from above with surgical bright floodlights, is still the only part that matters. He follows the anticipatory rumbling.
Metal bleachers soldered from old parts are racked around the edge of the pit. Spectators are climbing to empty seats, making the whole structure sway. He sees a few tufts of orange hair in the crowd, but none of them are Fen.
Yorick elbows his way to the edge and checks the pit. The sloped sides have permanently imbibed bloodstains. The metal bottom is hidden by a layer of fresh silicate, hard-packed for ease of movement, bright white for visual contrast and to mimic the snow. Two fighters are already limbering up. The first is a sealie, lithe and balletic as he leaps and stretches. The second is a red with animated tattoos moving along her broad shoulders. Not Fen.
Not Fen, but Yorick is transfixed watching her buckle her shoes. The rasp and click echoes up out of the pit, amplified by speakers, and the sound triggers a cascade of memories in his pounding skull. He remembers him and his brother worming to the front of the crowd to watch through gapped legs, remembers someone stepping on his fingers and breaking the littlest one.
A followcam is circling over the fighters’ heads like a buzzard. That’s new, and so are the screens suspended by metal cables from the ceiling, each one showing a different angle on the pit, the crowd. For the briefest moment, one of them backgrounds a giant in a furred cloak. Yorick blinks, spins, trying to figure out the cam placements.
There. Fen is on the far side of the pit, heading for the back of the stands. Yorick leaves the railing and pushes through a compacting crowd. Down below, the jig is starting. The fighters are moving to a relentless beat, flexing their arms and legs, tiptoeing forward, back, forward again.
Fen knew he was no ordinary company man, right from the start. She recognized him, recognized his telltale half-sealie genes, because Thello had told her about him. And now Yorick wants to know what else Thello told her, wants it badly, desperately. He is halfway around the pit when someone takes his knees out from under him.
He slams into the floor and all the wind leaves his lungs in a single grunt; for an instant he is back on the medibed, inhabiting a dead man’s body. He gasps for air. The mandible makes it into an electronic rattle.
A sealie face looms into view, cheekbones tattooed with stylized cogs. “Hey, company man.”
Yorick keeps gasping.
“Seen you at the wake,” the miner says. “You liked that? Seeing how we send off our dead real proper? Last time the company thugs were here, it was a strike-break.” He’s drinking from a bottle; some of it drips onto Yorick’s forehead. “They killed fourteen snow-eaters. Picture that wake.”
Yorick doesn’t want to picture that wake, or any wake.
“And then you decided to come get some culture,” the miner says. “Come see a show. Right? You almost look like you belong. Thought you could snake in.”
Yorick’s breath is finally back. He tries to sit up; a heavy boot stomps him down again. The sealie’s friends are here, too. He swallows. “I came to see Fen.”
It was the wrong thing to say. The miner’s eyes narrow to slits. “Fen invited you?” he demands. “Fen invited the fucking company man?”
“Just heard she was fighting tonight,” Yorick says, shifting tracks. “I like fights.”
“She was last night. Maybe her last jig ever, now she’s a fucking overseer.” The miner takes another swig from his bottle. He grins across at someone Yorick can’t see. “But you. You like fights, company man?”
Yorick’s heart thuds hard. “As a spectator,” he says. “I’m here for the grendel.”
The miner ignores him. “Tell Koto I’m taking their slot,” he says. “And then get this fuckwit some shoes. Some culture.”
CHAPTER 21
Yorick wraps his feet slowly, methodically, and fortunately nobody is paying him much attention. The miner with the facial tats, whose name he recalls now is Wickam, is arguing with the sealie woman who owns the pit. Twenty years ago it didn’t have an owner, but it didn’t have stands or screens or followcams, either.
“You bring him here just to jig him?” she demands, hands on her head, exasperated. “You’re drunk, he’s drunk, you say he’s from offworld, it won’t be a fight.”
They’re in a polyresin bubble behind the stands, a bare-bones prep room with a medibed and drug shelf and gelflesh incubator. The roar of the crowd is dulled.
“He’ll have a bit of fight in him.” The miner’s eyes are shiny. “At least a bit. He’s the company man they sent for the grendel.” He reaches for Yorick’s neck; Yorick slaps his hand away the first time but misses the second. The spiderwool peels back. “See?”
The owner’s eyes flicker. “You kill a company man, you bring the shit down on everybody,” she says, but she’s no longer looking at him. It’s a bad sign.
“No kill,” Wickam says. “Blunted shoes.” He takes her hands off her head and laces them into his own, tenderly. “I’m your fucking brother, and I need this. Blunted shoes.”
She looks at him wearily. “Blunted shoes,” she echoes. “Just make it quick.”
“I’m here for the grendel,” Yorick says, but nobody’s listening. He starts flexing his calves and ankles.
CHAPTER 22
They get a shot of phetamine before the fight. Yorick knows he’s risking serious infection by using the same battered injector as Wickam and a hundred other filthy miners, but when they hand him the dose he doesn’t hesitate. The bite of the needle is delicious in its own way, and then the phetamine flash-floods his nervous system, sets it crackling.
If phedrine is sunshine, phetamine is moonlight. No warmth, just a cold blistering rush, stronger than doxy, that sharpens the world into glass and makes his senses sing. He normally avoids phetamine, but at this exact moment he can’t remember why. His whole body is humming.
“I’m not going to make a joke of this,” Wickam says. “The jig shouldn’t be a joke. It’s a beautiful thing. A kind of dancing, a kind of dying.” His eyes are solemn. The phetamine renders his face in flawless geometry; Yorick almost wants to touch it. “Find the dignity.”
“Yeah,” Yorick says. He looks around for chalk, to grit his grip, but doesn’t see any.
“Don’t curl up or beg.”
“I have so much love to give,” Yorick says woodenly.
Wickam seems to understand. He nods. They sit back and listen as his sister announces the new slot. Her amplified voice echoes. Offworld man comes to our wake, comes to our pit, thinks he owns it, thinks he owns us, thinks he wants to fucking jig.
“Alright.” She ducks back into the room. “They’re hot. Get in the pit.”
“I owe you,” Wickam tells her, and she agrees with a twitch of her nostrils.
Yorick lets his opponent lead the way. As soon as they step out of the prep room, the noise goes up a decibel. The crowd has swollen while they were inside, and the owner’s improvised speech was a good one. The people in the stands are baying for blood. He looks around at the blur of angry faces, and for a moment they are all one single organism, multilimbed and ravenous.
The crowd sounds get muted as he follows Wickam down the ladder. The pit is its own world. A little girl is tamping fresh silicate onto the floor, covering over the dark spots. She looks up with keen black eyes. She probably wants to be a fighter when she’s older, the same way Yorick and Thello and other scared children did.
He watches Wickam strap on his shoes. They look well-made, rubbery custom mold with a burnished metal toe guard. The backheel spike is replaced by a dull knob, as promised, and the mount where the main sickle should be attached is empty. Sparring shoes, but they whistle and shriek through the air with each practice swing. Sparring shoes are still enough to crack bones.
His own shoes are too big by half. He starts tearing the spiderwool off his arms, stuffing it into the interstices, hoping to pack it tight enough to keep his feet from sliding. Wickam watches him do it. Yorick lurches upright and takes a few testing steps. The silicate crunches slightly underfoot, well packed. The traction’s decent.
Yorick watches how Wickam warms up and carefully copies the motions, loosening out his arms, swinging his legs. When Wickam bends and stretches, Yorick bends and stretches. When Wickam leaps, Yorick leaps, if more clumsily. His whole body is singing with the phetamine and with its own autobrewed adrenaline. Through the rushing in his ears, he almost doesn’t hear the music start.
Rattling drums. Shrieking strings. For a moment he pictures Nocti sawing furiously, playing the song on his vivisected leg. A synthesized chant fills the background, voices crackly with distortion. Wickam is moving to the music. Creeping forward, rushing back, following the beat. Yorick stands flat-footed, how an offworld company man would.
But every part of him is spring-loaded. He knows the pit better than anyone fighting on the ninth night—all the good jigs are on the eighth—and his body knows exactly what to do.
He’ll just have to ignore it.
Yorick flails forward and the miner’s first strike sends him reeling; a toe guard finds his floating rib and seems to detonate there. He staggers to one side of the pit, clutching himself. Overhead, the crowd howls. He dives in again, swinging one foot in an ugly arc. Wickam knocks it aside, metal jarring metal, and comes around with his backheel.
The knob connects with Yorick’s thigh. Nerves flare. Muscles seize. He drops to one knee, screaming. All he has to do is get the shit beat out of him, and he’ll be allowed to limp back to Southern Urbanite Memory as a Chastised Warm-Blood Company Man. He’s only half acting. The jig is not something you forget, but it’s also not something you can leave for ten years and come back to easy.
He gets upright, taking the space Wickam gives him. He flexes his fingers, readies his arms, because any offworld fighter will have given up on the shoes by now and try to grapple instead. The miner dances at him. Yorick grabs for his swinging leg, misses. The next blow hits his stomach and folds him in two.
Purple blots bloom in his peripherals. The crowd makes a savage and joyful noise, because Ymir hates him. Ymir has always hated him. When the miner comes at him again it feels, in the air, like Thello’s little feint-and-go. He answers it the same way he always did, and the muscle memory takes his opponent’s legs out from under him.
Wickam lands harder than he ought to. Too surprised, maybe, to break the fall properly. His face is transmuting shock to suspicion, but in the rush of adrenaline Yorick suddenly doesn’t care. If Nocti knows, if Fen knows, then the whole Cut might as well know.
He scuffs the floor with his toe, sending up a tiny spray of silicate. It’s the oldest taunt on the world, and it brings Wickam surging to his feet.
Yorick swarms him: high knees, kicks mixed with jabs, elbows, all the patterns he burned into his nerves in another life. He is not here for the grendel. He is here for the pit. His knee finds a gap and snaps Wickam’s head back. His backheel hits and tears Wickam’s lip open, sending a spurt of blood skyward. He has so much hate to give.
A riposte slips through. The impact nearly takes his shoulder out of its socket, and the pain wipes his head clear. Wickam the miner is eyeing him, bobbing on his toes, blood dripping down his chin. Yorick sees the same disgust he saw on Fen’s face in the mine. The star-collapsing hate.
“Mendacious means lying,” Wickam says. “Some people, they floated the idea. They said you looked like one of us. Not full sealie, but some kind of mix. Some kind of half-blood.”
Up above him, the crowd has stopped roaring. It’s a buzzing now, insectile, ominous. They’re busy realizing the company man in the pit is the very worst kind of company man. The people at the railing start to clamor.
Wickam wipes at the blood, smearing it sideways across his face. “Me, I said the company wouldn’t be stupid enough to send a traitor back here. But they did, didn’t they?”
Half-blood. The word filters down from the bleachers. He hasn’t heard it in so long. He remembers whispering it to himself at night, over and over, until it finally turned into meaningless syllables. Half-blood. Company grub.
Wickam grins a leaky red grin. “I’m going to do you like the old days.” He goes to the side of the pit and slams his hand against it. “Real shoes!” he shouts. “Real shoes!”
Yorick’s mouth is bone-dry. His limbs are trembly. The phetamine crash is coming soon. He knows the only way he will survive this is if someone stops it. If he loses, he’s dead. If he wins, he’s dead. Voices are raised against each other in the crowd, debating his identity, debating repercussions. Killing a company man will bring more company men, they say. Probably even maiming one, they say.
It doesn’t matter. Someone is already lowering new shoes into the pit. Wickam inspects them, tosses them over, reaches for his own blades coming down in a black box. Yorick pulls his numb feet out of the sparring shoes. One of his toenails is battered blue.
Even though he is about to die on the world he swore he’d never come back to, he has to admire the craft of the new shoes. They have adjustable ribbing, to make sure they fit right, and the sleek toe guard ends in its own little spike to supplement the main sickle. The blade curves up from the top of the shoe like a beckoning finger, razor-sharp, agleam with oil.
He drags his thumbnail lightly, lightly, along the inner edge. It leaves a furrow; any more pressure would cleave through. The flat of the blade is warm. Someone sharpened these shoes only minutes ago. Someone wants him to win.
Yorick looks across the pit at his opponent. Wickam’s main sickles are barbed, made to hook and drag. They glint in the floodlights as he stalks closer. The music is off. The crowd is still divided; there’s a scrap at the railing, people shoving and shouting. He can tell from the look on Wickam’s face that the miner doesn’t care about any of that. This is not a normal jig, where second bloodshed forces a stop, where the loser can signal surrender.
He gets his shoes buckled on the instant before Wickam flies at him. The barbed sickles slice the air and make it hum. He hurls himself backward, dodging one kick, blocking another. Metal gnashes metal, tangles. Wickam pushes down on him. Yorick can feel the man’s elastic strength, the muscle hewed by years in the mine. It’s folding his leg back on itself.
He twists free just before his knee joint gives out. The sickle shrieks, spitting yellow sparks. He staggers to his feet and runs for space. There’s not much of it. Wickam follows, chasing him around the wall of the pit. Yorick hears him dragging the tip of his toe guard along the base—scrape, scrape, the second-oldest taunt.
The followcam dips and swerves and nearly hits Yorick in the head. He’s at the ladder now. He grips the highest rung he can reach, jerks himself into the air just as Wickam catches up to him. A barbed sickle clangs against the spot where his legs were a moment earlier. He tries to climb higher, but his shoes scrabble and slip.
Wickam curses; his sickle is trapped, hooked under a rung. Yorick misses it by micrometers when he falls, slamming into Wickam’s shin instead. He hears a pop and Wickam howls as they crash to the sand in a tangle. Yorick rolls away coated in blood. He thinks it might be his; he can feel an oozing hot pulse on his calf.
They clamber to their feet. The followcam is revolving over their heads. Wickam circles right, hobbled, favoring his left leg. Yorick mirrors him, dripping a red track through the silicate. The noise of the crowd pitches up at the sight.
Wickam feints, retreats. Yorick barely registers either. The phetamine clarity is leaking away. His limbs shake. His stomach is churning on the coppery smell of his own blood.
Their jig ends with no tactic. No pattern. No art. They both have tired legs and sweat-stung eyes, so Wickam trips on one of Yorick’s discarded sparring shoes, and as he stumbles forward Yorick kicks three times. The first carves a furrow across the miner’s chest. The second misses. The third is nearly caught, caged for a crystalline moment between Wickam’s hands, but the blood makes things slippery.
Yorick forces his foot through, and his sickle gashes Wickam’s throat open. It sprays a wild pressurized arc, splattering the followcam. One of the hanging screens turns red. Yorick and the miner look at each other as Wickam sinks, silently, to a crouch. Slitting the carotid is not like slitting wrists. He knows Wickam will only be conscious for another ten, twelve seconds.
He needs to say something reassuring. Tell him they’ll patch it with gelflesh, brew him a transfusion. Tell him his sister probably loves him, loves him a lot, or she wouldn’t have given him the slot to jig a company man. Tell him they’re all on the same skid departing into the dark.
The bleachers are silent. The followcam scrubs its lens, and Wickam reappears on the screen between streaks of scarlet.
Yorick doesn’t say anything. He unbuckles his shoes, pulling them off his bloody feet. The pit smells like a butchery. He goes to the ladder and starts to climb, focusing all his attention on one rung at a time, clinging with crash-weak fingers.
It takes an eternity to get to the top. He staggers for the exit. He feels people moving behind him in a pack, feels the collective gaze like a needle between his shoulder blades. They let him step outside, into the cold Cut air, before the beating starts.
CHAPTER 23
One of them has a hand wrench, and the first swing obliterates his mandible, pulping the bioplastic, powdering the circuitry. The shock wave rattles through his skull and he goes blind watching explosions behind his eyes. His legs give out of their own accord, like a puppet getting its strings cut, and he’s dimly glad. It means he doesn’t have to feel guilty about going to ground.
