China Mieville - Railsea

He was gabbling an apology before he even saw who he had hit. It was a woman, tall & broad enough that despite Sham being a heavy boy, impact with him had moved her not at all. She was staring at him with concern. She put her hands on his arms.

“Hey,” she said. “You alright?” She saw his backwards glance. “Is that man giving you trouble?”

“No, I, yes, no, I don’t know,” Sham said. “I don’t know what he wants, he was watching—”

“Watching?” said the woman. The man had stopped. Appeared suddenly interested in a wall. The woman narrowed her eyes. “You came from in there?” she said, indicating the Shroakes’. Sham nodded.

“Don’t worry, son,” she said. She put an arm around his shoulder. “Whatever it is he wants, we’ll keep you out of his hands.”

“Thanks,” Sham muttered.

“Don’t you worry. We take care of visitors in Manihiki.” She led him away, towards better-lit parts of town. “As, I’m sure, did the Shroakes. What was it you were talking to them about?” The question came out of her mouth without the slightest change of tone. Still, though, it made Sham look up. To see that she was staring, in that instant, not at him, but at the man behind them, & that she was looking at him not in suspicion but unspoken communication.

Sham’s very throat began to pulse, so fast did his heart slam at that sight. His rescuer who was not his rescuer looked at him, her face hardened & her hand closed tight on Sham’s shoulder. Options for subtlety & subterfuge removed from him, Sham took the only other path he could see. He stamped on the woman’s foot.

She howled & swore & hopped & bellowed, & the dark, shadow-faced man behind them started sprinting after Sham. He was fast. His coat gusted around him.

Sham ran. Opened his shirt & released Daybe. The bat dive-bombed the man, but unlike the young bullies, this enemy was not so easily cowed. He swatted at Daybe & continued running, closing in on Sham.

“Up!” shouted Sham. “Get away!” He flapped his arms & the bat rose.

Had it been decided on speed alone, Sham would have been in custody within seconds. But he felt possessed by the souls of generations of young people chased through neighbourhoods by adults for reasons unclear or unfair. He channelled their techniques of righteous evasion. None-too-fast as he was, still he veered with the zigzags of justice, scrambled low walls with the vigour & rigour of unfairness-avoidance, reached a street still full of catcalls & the noise of late-afternoon commerce & traffic & rolled in the waning light below low-chassised vehicles with valorous discretion. To lie very still. He held his breath.

Daybe , he thought, ferociously attempting to project his mind, stay away .

Among the percussion of urban footfall, the disembodied steps tramping by him, the grind of wheels & the curious noses of cats & dogs, Sham saw two black leather boots pound down the middle of the street. Stop. Turn. Run a few steps in this direction, a few in that, take off finally in a third. When they were out of sight, Sham burst out, wheezing, hauled himself out from under the cart.

Muddied, shaking & bloodied. He looked up, raised his arms & here came Daybe, out of the sky & back into his shirt. Sham swayed. Stood mostly ignored by Manihiki locals, until he croaked a question to one of them, got directions back to the docks & skulked, by as roundabout routes as he could manage, back to the Medes .

THE WAY TO THE DOCKS took Sham under disorganised streetlamps, electricity, gas, glowing sepia. Through places where those lights were salvage from humanity’s past, bright, historically misplaced colours; & even some alt-salvage, for show, turning footprint-like shapes, or unfolding swirls within containment fields.

His bruises were puffing up. A jollycart, its lamp swaying, shedding shadows as it rolled between snoozing trains, took him to the Medes .

“Late night, was it?” shouted Kiragabo. Sham cringed & stumbled over deck stuff.

“I’m late,” he said. “Captain’ll flay me.”

“She will not. She’s got other stuff on her mind.”

& indeed, when he made his way belowdecks, he didn’t just creep his way to Naphi’s cabin to drop the texts into her lockbox, but was distracted by & went to investigate the noises he heard from the officers’ mess. Oohs, ahs, goshes of impressedness.

The captain & her officers were crowded around something. “Sham,” someone said. “Get on in here, look at this.” Even the captain beckoned him. The officers made space around the table. On which were artefacts.

Sham thought his appearance, the muck & fight-residue on him, would necessitate an explanation. But no one cared. Sham had never heard the captain so voluble. Clickety-glimmer went her arm, the lights on it, the tripping of her fingers faster than flesh fingers could go.

“& look, this. You see here.” She was fiddling with a receiver. It winked & made henlike sounds. It showed lights in combinations. So she’d found the receiver-seller, then.

“Range of—well, miles, they tell me. Perhaps as many as a hundred. & it can pass through feet of earth.”

“They go deeper’n that, Captain,” someone said.

“Yes & they come up again. No one’s suggested it’ll take us to the moldywarpe’s door, Mr. Quex. No one claims the receiver will let us in & make us tea. We will still have a job to do. You’ll still be a hunter. We still even have to learn how to read this thing. But.” She looked around. “Get this—” She held up a little transmitter. “Get this in its skin—it will change things.”

Bozlateen Quex shifted his dandy clothes &, with Naphi’s permission, picked up the receiver. It was cobbled together. More cobbled than together, really—a mess poised at the point of collapse. Made from arche-salvage & alt-salvage. It whispered like a live thing. Odd little circuit. Antiquity & alien expertise mashed into one ugly astonishing machinelette.

Sham moved for a better look. Quex twirled dials & the lights changed. Changed colour, position, velocity. Sham stopped moving a moment, then continued, & as he did so, so did those lights. Everyone looked at him. He blinked & moved again. The lights’ shenanigans continued with his motion.

“What the hell?” said Quex. He prodded a button, the glow grew in his hand. The instrument was paying attention to Sham. Daybe poked its head up from his shirt.

“Ah. It’s the animal,” said the captain. “It has the thing still on its leg. This one is picking up something from that, some backwash signal. Quex, you’ll have to adjust it. Make sure it’s looking for these ones, instead.” She shook her handful of receivers. As they rattled, the receiver barked like a duck & its light changed again.

“As I say,” the captain said, “there is some learning to do. But still. This changes things, does it not? So so so.” She rubbed her hands. She looked at Sham, the source of this idea, to seek out this mechanism. She did not smile—she was Captain Naphi!—but nod at him she did. Which was enough to fluster him. “Check what details we have, work out where last there was sign. Where we might find good molegrounds. That is where we’re heading.”

I KNOW, BUT WE CAN’T JUST LEAVE HIM,” DERO SAID.

“We ain’t just leaving him,” Caldera said. “It ain’t like we haven’t got people coming to take care of him. You think I won’t miss him, too? You know he’d want us to go.”

“I know, but I don’t want us to go. Not with him here. He needs us.”

The siblings Shroake had retired to another room to have this argument, but if they’d thought it removed them from Sham’s earshot they were mistaken.