[LEGACY VERSION] The Emperor of Time (Book 1 - The Kaireyeh Chronicles)

Chapter 16 - Iuri

Iuri stepped down from the rusted metal stairs, his boots touching cracked pavement. He hesitated with his finger on the stairs' retract button. He could descend to the ground streets of Aijas, but he could not easily go up again.

The air was thick with waste heat from the city towers, and sour with the stench of too much trash. He looked up and squinted, just making out the lit walkways that ran between the towers. Light from upper windows and streaks of aircar traffic made a glow that filtered down as a dull yellow light. It reminded him of the worst parts of a space station.

There were no doors into the towers from the ground streets. Meter-thick metal plating lined the tower walls up twenty meters or more. The plating itself was covered in holographic graffiti with cheap, flickering emitters.

It was night here. Iuri had been walking the accessways between government towers for hours and he'd lost his sense of time. One of the first thing's he'd done after leaving Wycliffe's apartment was to disable his comm implant. A personal comm termination protocol was one of the privileges of command. He had thrown his backup hand comm into a trash receptacle before he'd left Wycliffe's building. It was likely halfway across the city by now.

Regian had told him to go to the streets, find Franca. It was a horrible plan. But Iuri didn't have a better one.

Iuri pressed the stair retract, and metal screeched as the stairs jerked upward. There went his only way out, unless he wanted to risk arrest by showing his face.

Iuri shuddered and pulled down the hood of his coat--stolen from a peg in Wycliffe's service cafeteria. He hadn't, at least, come out on a street where there were government buildings. The Ground Force always kept a perimeter around those buildings, lest some overzealous streeters working with the Resistance planted a bomb, or cut inside.

He thought he knew where he was--the building that Franca lived beneath shouldn't be far. He set out in the direction he remembered, and hoped to the Goddess that his memories were true. He wished he'd been able to steal a pulse pistol, or even a knife.

He passed huge stinking bins of trash that drones from city maintenance occasionally collected. Drones were often captured by the streeters and used for their own purposes, or sold for parts. The problem had been debated among the city bureaucrats for years; keep losing drones, or stop sending them altogether? Most were in favor of the latter. Let the filthy streeters drown in their own waste, they said.

Iuri passed a young, heavily-bulked man leaning against one tower wall, despite the heat emanating from it. He smoked a rolled paper cigarette and watched Iuri pass. Then he fell into step behind Iuri, just distant enough to be menacing but not an immediate threat.

Iuri's spine crawled, but he kept walking. He hoped the man was just a perimeter guard for the nearest streeter settlement, though he wasn't sure if that made him more or less dangerous than a petty thug.

The transition to the pocket residential area was abrupt. Shanties squatted against the tower walls to either side of the street, carving a narrow corridor down their center. They were made of sheet metal, or bricked from bits of discarded plastic, or thrown together from any number of other scavenged materials. Light fell in pools from cold lights bolted to the buildings.

Iuri heard voices ahead, most male, a few female. One man laughed, and it didn't sound ugly, but Iuri tensed anyway. Somewhere, he heard the strains of what sounded like an out-of-tune harp.

He kept his head down as people stopped what they were doing to watch him, creating a temporary bubble of silence. His coat was plain, but it was not the rags these people wore. The man behind him continued to keep pace.