Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea Read Online Free PDF

was a long time ago.”
    “What were they like?” she asked, and I shrugged.
    “Different,” I replied, “but not half so different as most of us think. Two eyes, two hands, one mouth, a dick,” and I jabbed a thumb at her skirt. “More like some of us than others.”
    It was a crude comment, one I never would have made if I hadn’t been so nervous, and I half expected her to get pissed or something. But Mikaela only kicked at a loose paving tile and rubbed her hands together a little harder, a little faster.
    “Yeah, well, that was Jun’ko’s idea,” she said. “She even paid the surgeon. Claimed I wasn’t pretty enough, that I needed something special, you know, something exotic, if I was gonna work out of her place. It’s not so bad. Like I said, I’m a pretty good fuck. Better than I was before.”
    “No regrets, then?”
    She made a half-amused, snorting noise, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jacket, and stared at her shoes. “I was born here,” she said. “What the hell would I do with a thing like regret?”
    “When are you going to tell me what’s waiting for me down there, Mickie?” I asked, and she almost smiled.
    “Sailor said you’d be like this.”
    “Like what?”
    “She said you weren’t a very trusting person. She said you had a nasty habit of stabbing people in the back before they could beat you to it.”
    I suppose that was payback for the remark about her penis, nothing I didn’t have coming, but it made me want to slap her. Before I could think of a reply, she was moving again, walking quickly away from me down the side street. I thought about turning around and heading straight back to the station. It was still three long hours until the next zep, but I could try to get a secure uplink and see what there was to learn about the Oryoku Maru. Following the whore seemed like a lazy way to commit suicide.
    I followed her, anyway.
    A couple of minutes later, we ducked through a low archway into what appeared to be an abandoned repair shop. It was dark inside, almost too dark to see, and even colder than it had been out on the street. The air stank of spent engine oil and hydrosol, dust and mildew and rat shit, and the place was crowded with the disassembled, rusting skeletons of harvesters and harrow rigs. They loomed around us and hung from ceiling hoists, broken, forgotten beasts with sickle teeth.
    “Watch your step, Councilor,” Mikaela warned, calling back to me after I tripped over some piece of machinery or another and almost stumbled into an open garage pit. I paused long enough to catch my breath, long enough to whisper a thankful prayer and be sure I hadn’t broken my ankle.
    “We need a fucking torch,” I muttered, my voice much louder than I’d expected, magnified and thrown back at me by the darkness pressing in around us.
    “Well, I don’t have one,” she said, “so you’ll just have to be more careful.”
    She took my hand and guided me out of the repair bay, along a pitch-black corridor that turned left, then right, then left again, before finally ending in a dim pool of light spilling in through a number of ragged, fist-sized holes in the roof. I imagined it was sunlight, though it wasn’t, of course, imagined it was warm against my upturned face, though it wasn’t that, either.
    “Down here,” she said, and I turned towards her voice, blinking back orange and violet afterimages. We were standing at the top of a stairwell.
    “I hid it when Sailor left,” Mikaela said. “Jun’ko has our rooms tossed once or twice a month, regular as clockwork, so I couldn’t leave it in the house. But I figured it’d be safe here. When I was a kid, my sister and I used to play hide-and-seek in this place.”
    “You have a sister?” I asked, and she started down the stairs without me, taking them two at a time despite the dark. I hurried to catch up, more afraid of being left alone in this place than wherever she might be leading me.
    “Yeah,” she called