Metropolitan Read Online Free PDF Page B

maxims. If only you didn’t have to pay impossible sums for all the plasm consumed during training. If only the heart’s advice were infallible.
    But the system is rigged, and now, with the voices of her Barkazil ancestors chorusing I told you so in her head, she can’t understand how she ever figured it wasn’t. Those who have access, whether to money or plasm, keep it to themselves, and so far as she can tell that’s true everywhere. Maybe the Ascended Ones are different, but they’re outside the Shield. The only way she’ll ever finish her training will be to risk prison by stealing the raw material. The only way she’ll ever find a teacher will be to pay him wads of cash she doesn’t have, or megamehrs of plasma she’d have to steal, or — maybe if she’s lucky — she’ll only have to trade him her body. And the only way she’ll ever meet the son of a Metropolitan will be if he runs over her in his flashy Bolt 79D automobile.
    Maybe she can find the flaming woman’s source. Maybe it’ll get her noticed if she actually does her job well.
    It’s not something anyone seems really to expect of her.
    There’s a blast of air as the pneuma car brakes, then a belly-queasing wrench as it drops out of the system to the designated platform. Humming electromagnets cut velocity further. Bright station lights pour through the windows, gleam from the Pneuma Authority’s blue-tiled walls.
    Time to go to work.
    It’s a four-block walk from the pneuma station to the trackline leading to Rocketman, then another kidney-punching ride to Rocketman Station on a car riding on its metal rims. After a forty-five minute search through the archives, she finds an old piece of paper, one that comes apart along its creases as she unfolds it. It describes an old plastics plant at a site called Terminal, one sold for scrap so that a “mixed neighborhood” could be built on the site.
    Triumph hums in her nerves.
    She may be onto something here.
     
    GARGELIUS ENCHUK SINGS THE MUSIC OF YOUR SOUL
     
    Two trackline stops east from Rocketman is Terminal, a station that isn’t, actually, the line’s terminal. Another one of those names come adrift from its original meaning.
    From street level, Terminal is just like her old neighborhood, the leaning old brick buildings, scaffolding, the throb of music and cry of children and smells of cooking.
    But the food is spiced differently, the music bounces to a different beat, and the faces are pale and Jaspeeri and suspicious. There are Jaspeeri Nation stickers in some of the shop windows. A warning trickles up her spine as the import of all this begins to penetrate her consciousness.
    She concludes that her official yellow jumpsuit will protect her. But still she’s glad for the company of Lastene and Grandshuk as she begins her search over the old factory foundations.
    Success, right away. She checks three buildings in a row and finds gimmicked meters in every single one. A plasm diver has been operating here.
    There’s some contraband coming up from below, clear enough. Maybe not the source for the burning woman, but something .
    The third building she tries is an old office structure converted to residence. The building superintendent, a broad-beamed man in green gabardine pants, agrees to let her into the basement — not that he’s got a lot of choice — and one level below the street she’s surprised to find an old blue-tiled stairway leading down. Blue, the color of the Pneuma Authority, not the yellow of the Trackline Authority. An iron-barred door bars the entrance, closed with chain and a fist-sized padlock. A battered tin sign says TERMINAL, with a fistmark pointing down.
    “What’s that?” Aiah asks. She feels so close the plasm might as well be pulsing through her veins. The superintendent plucks at his suspenders.
    “Entrance to an old pneuma station.”
    Her mind swims as she tries to remember whether or not this was on any of her old overlays. “When did they close it