Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

back. “I’ve got a little sister. She’s out there somewhere. Sheba’d up with a guild mason down in Arsia Mons, last I heard. But we don’t talk much these days. She got sick on Allah and doesn’t approve of whoring anymore.”
    We reached the bottom of the stairs, and I glanced back up at the patch of imitation daylight we’d left at the top. “How much farther, Mickie?” I asked, trying hard to sound calm, trying to sound confident, trying desperately to bury my anxiety in a pantomime of equipoise. But the darkness was quickly becoming more than I could handle, so much darkness crammed into the gap between the walls and floor and ceiling. It was becoming inconceivable that this place might somehow simultaneously contain so much darkness and ourselves. I’m a little claustrophobic, I pretended to have said, so that the mechanic’s girl would understand and get this the hell over and done with. Past the bottom of the stairs, the air was damp and smelled of mold and stagnant water, mushrooms and rotting cardboard. I was sweating now, despite the cold.
    “She made me promise that I’d keep it safe,” Mikaela said, as if she hadn’t heard my question or had simply chosen to ignore it. “I’m not really used to people trusting me with things. Not with things that matter to – ”
    “How much farther ?” I asked again, more insistent than before. “We need to hurry this up, or I’ll miss my flight.”
    “Here,” she said. “Right there, on your left,” and when I turned my head that way, there was the faintest chartreuse glow, like some natural fungal phosphorescence, a glow that I could have sworn hadn’t been there only a few seconds before. “Just inside the doorway, on the table,” Mikaela said.
    I took a deep breath of the fetid air and stepped past her through an opening leading into what might once have been a storeroom or maintenance locker. The glow became much brighter than it had been out in the corridor, illuminating the bare concrete walls, an M5 proctor droid that had been stripped raw and left for dead, and the intestine tangle of sagging pipes above my head. The yellow-green light was coming from a five- or six-liter translucent plastic catch cylinder, something that had probably been manufactured as part of a dew-farm’s cistern. And I stood staring at the pale thing floating inside the cylinder – not precisely dead because it had probably never been precisely alive – a wad of hair and mottled flesh, bone and the scabby shell of a half-formed exoskeleton.
    “She said it was yours, Dorry,” Mikaela whispered from somewhere behind me. “She said she didn’t know, when she took the mark, didn’t know she was pregnant.”
    I said something. I honestly can’t remember what.
    It hardly matters.
    The thing in the cylinder twitched and opened what I hadn’t realized was an eye. It was all pupil, that eye, and blacker than space.
    “She lost it before she even got here,” the whore said, “when she was working up in Sytinskakya. She couldn’t have taken it with her to the temples, and I promised her that I’d keep it safe. She thought you might want to take it back with you.”
    I turned away from the unborn thing, which might or might not have seen my face, pushing my way roughly past Mikaela and back out into the corridor. The darkness there seemed almost kind after the light from the catch cylinder, and I let it swallow me whole as I ran. I only fell twice or maybe three times, tripping over my own feet and sprawling hard on sand-tile or steel, then right back up in an instant, blindly making my way to the stairwell and the cluttered repair shop above, and, finally, to the perpetually shadowed street. I stopped and looked back then, breathless and faint and sick to my belly, pausing only long enough to see that Jun’ko’s girl hadn’t followed me. By the time I reached the transfer station at the lower end of Avenue South Eight, the morning was fading towards noon, and