THE REFORGED TRILOGY: BOOK 2 — SWORD OF DREAMS
Chapter 16: Pylos
“When criminals are as driven as the detectives who hunt them, we’re all in a lot of trouble.”
– Amana Drex, Axis police officer (165 PA)
A red light blinked in the Raptor’s cockpit. There was no positioning signal from any of the Pylos landing fields. The skypads were out of commission in the wake of some ubiquitous local catastrophe. Coldhand circled over the city once, switching between different frequencies, but picked up only the local police signals. He turned east and flew away from Pylos. He couldn’t land in a police field and did not want to linger in a stolen Raptor.
Logan’s fighter pierced the heavy, thick gray clouds and then he was soaring over the mountains. The Kayton range was one of the largest on Prianus, rising ever higher each year as the tectonic plates that formed the mountains pushed together and thrust the peaks starward.
The mountain slopes were streaked in pale blue glaciers and deep, dark ravines. The same forces that built the mountains were tearing ever-widening cracks in Prianus’ stone skin.
As wrinkled and fragile as an old man. It’s like the whole planet is getting too old.
Logan wove between the peaks, searching for a place to land. He flew over a broad, flat stretch of stone, an ice-carved depression more than wide enough to hold the Raptor. But someone else had found it first. A half-dozen domed tents circled up in the center of the moraine, just to the south of another dark crack in the mountain. Even if the campers below were discreet and would be willing to quietly share their campsite, it was too far away from Pylos for Coldhand’s purposes.
He skimmed his fighter lower over the slopes until he found a wide lip of stone jutting out from the side of the mountain, only half visible through the surrounding trees. Coldhand cut his engines to minimum and set the Raptor gently down on the outcropping. Between the surrounding forest, the clouds and fog, it was unlikely that anyone would find his ship. It would be a long hike into Pylos, but once within range of mainstream access, he could rent or hire a vehicle.
Coldhand unbuckled his safety harness and then pulled back the Raptor’s canopy. Rain and sleet sprayed down into the cockpit, carried on an icy wind. Thunder rumbled in the distance, but the worst of the storm was still far off.
Logan climbed out of the Raptor. His entire body was sore and bruised from Vorus’ beating. It wasn’t enough to hinder him, but it hurt with every movement — a dozen reminders of how much he could still feel. Logan sealed and locked his ship, then set off down the mountain, toward Pylos.
It was an eight-hour hike through the cold Prian forest. The rain was lighter beneath the trees, at least. They creaked in the wind and birds called from the branches. A pair of soft brown doves watched Coldhand walk under their perch, blinking round black eyes. They huddled together, two fluffy balls of feathers shielding each other against the chill.
The ground was muddy under Coldhand’s feet. His toes ached. The feeling was so strange… Why did it hurt? Logan had suffered much worse injuries without difficulty.
Vorus was a master. He knew how to inflict the most pain with the least damage. This was Vorus’ fault, not Logan’s.
But the excuse sounded hollow, even to him.
The rain turned into hail and then back to rain as Logan made his way down the mountain. Somewhere around noon, he found a narrow road winding through the thinning trees. Logan checked his bearing and followed the road west. An hour passed before any of the vehicles pulled over to offer him a ride. It was a primer-gray truck driven by a pair of tattooed young Prian men. A short exchange and brief display of Coldhand’s Talon-9 convinced them to drive on.
Logan kept walking. Passing cars — most moving on wheels and spherical bearings instead of the more expensive null-inertia fields — kicked up sprays of muddy water. The trees and boulders were eventually replaced by apartments and stores, all with the same dull, colorless spray-on finish. But the anti-frosting microbes had long since died and left the gray city covered in a fragile skin of ice.
Why had he lost to Vorus? Logan was younger, faster, and far more ruthless than the old cop. He didn’t feel, did not tire. How could Coldhand lose? But winning would have meant hurting his teacher, the man who had saved young Logan Centra from a life as a street thug.
He didn’t care, Coldhand told himself. He didn’t feel shame. If he felt anything, he would have felt it when he left Highwind, when he left the police. When he left Jess, when he stole his Talon and his Raptor. A good man couldn’t live with the things he had done.
There were signs of the recent groundquakes all through Pylos. The streets and sidewalks were broken, some places so wide that the gaps had to be bridged with planks of wood. Some were filled with gravel or rubble from shattered buildings so that the cars could drive over them, but these were temporary measures at best. Vehicles jolted over the cracks and creaked on worn-out shocks.
Logan was going to be in Pylos longer than he had in Highwind. He waved down a striped cab, made sure the driver knew that he was carrying a weapon, and bought a ride to the nearest rental lot.
All of the closed vehicles were already sold out — they were too valuable during the rainy seasons. Even the deposit on a small, fast streetcycle was almost more than Coldhand was willing to pay. They always were on Prianus. Chances were all too high that the drivers would never return their rentals.
Logan cinched his coat tightly closed around him and drove the rest of the way into Pylos. The city was considerably larger than Highwind. It filled and overflowed the valley, crawling up into the mountains like a spreading mold. The gray sky was full of birds, both wild and tamed. The larger winged shapes of Arcadians flew through the driving rain, more than Logan had ever seen in a single city.
It made sense. A hundred years ago, this was where the fairies first appeared on Prianus, by the hundreds of thousands in the mountains above Pylos as they fled the destruction of their homeworlds. Most of the Arcadians had never left the city.
Coldhand pulled to a stop at a traffic signal and leaned against the weight of the bike, steadying it. The muscles in his leg protested sharply and the knee threatened to buckle. He had been trying to feel anything for so long. Shouldn’t he be… pleased?
The colored light changed and Coldhand kicked the bike back into motion. He had to swerve around a street-train hauling a long line of trailers that sat low on their null-fields. A truck cut so close to the streetcycle that Logan banged his elbow and scraped the edge of his cybernetics on the driver’s door. The illonium peeled a strip of paint from the truck and the impact jarred Logan’s already bruised arm. The other driver yelled at him through the closed window, then raised his thumb and smallest finger. Fly off.
Coldhand didn’t bother returning the gesture. Instead, he eased his weight opposite the dangerously tipping bike. The tires hydroplaned uselessly for a moment before they caught. Rebalanced, Logan drove on through Pylos. Rain splattered against the visor of his helmet and the cold water seeped in through his sleeve, torn where he had hit the truck.
When was the last time Logan had really tried to feel anything? Sex? A chem? Was it the cedrophin on the Temptation?
He had made no more attempts, not since Gharib and Stray. Not since Maeve. Coldhand was so used to being numb that he didn’t even try anymore.
Then what am I doing on Prianus? I came here to hunt the Nihilists, didn’t I? Because I thought it would be exciting.
But Logan didn’t feel excited.
Coldhand rented a room. Not much of a room — just a coffin, as they were commonly called. The tiny, padded cell was just large enough to lie down. Coldhand showered in the common bathroom and traded out his torn shirt for a fresh one. He had only brought a single change of clothes from the Raptor. If he ruined any more, he would have to take time out of his hunt to buy new clothes. It would be a small but annoying waste of time and cenmarks, but Logan couldn’t bring himself to care very much.
He climbed up a ladder and slid into his coffin. Logan lay in the darkness, staring at nothing. He was tired, but couldn’t sleep. In the sound-sealed box, the only thing he could hear was his own breath sawing away, unaccountably as ragged and frayed as the torn sleeve of his shirt.
Logan held his breath, but that was even worse. The only sound then was the dull thud of his mechanical heart, ticking away the seconds.
Twenty percent.
Zero percent.
Coldhand unlocked the coffin door and climbed back down the rusted rungs into the lobby. The Lyran receptionist watched Coldhand cautiously as he left, safe behind her thick window of reinforced glassteel.
It was the middle of the night and the already low temperatures had plummeted. Still damp from his shower, Coldhand’s hair felt like icicles against the back of his neck. A low, thick fog filled the streets and turned the coffin motel into a dim, ghostly apparition. There was very little light and no warmth outside, but Pylos was far from empty.
A flock of sex workers — representing a wide variety of genders — stood on the street corner, all dressed in layered clothes of transparent plastic that showed off their wares but kept the killing cold barely at bay. Their scarred pimp lurked just outside of the lamplight with a dangerous bulge beneath her long navy coat that had nothing to do with the attractive merchandise under his protection.
An Arcadian prostitute blew a kiss to Coldhand and he turned away. If he was going to be awake, then he may as well get some work done. A stray thought nagged at Logan, asking why he bothered at all. If he didn’t think that the Nihilist hunt would bring him some kind of excitement, why not leave Prianus? Why not forget this whole thing?
Logan made his way down to the underground parking lot and swung his leg over the plastihide seat of his rental streetcycle and a thin crust of ice crackled under his weight. Coldhand pulled out into the light midnight traffic. He had no idea where he was going.
As the bounty hunter drove through Pylos — ostensibly familiarizing himself with the city — Logan found his thoughts lingering on the Arcadian girl back on the street corner. Her wings and the slim, dancer lines of her body. Her black hair and stormy gray eyes…
Black hair? Gray eyes? That wasn’t what he had seen back there.
I’m thinking of Maeve Cavainna.
Logan didn’t know why, but knew that he didn’t want to. Regrets were bad color, as his mother used to say. They burned a hole in your pocket, but you couldn’t buy anything with them.
Regrets? Do I have regrets?
Pylos was no lovelier by night. Logan was a child of Highwind, a town that not even the most affectionate residents would call pleasant. But many of those living in his own hometown had come from Pylos in search of greener pastures.
A century ago, Pylos had been little different than any other Prian city — no better and no worse. But then the Arcadians had appeared. Hundreds, thousands, and then hundreds of thousands of fairies flooded into the city from apparently empty air. Many of them were injured. They filled the Pylos hospitals and then the streets, even the surrounding forest.
The police did their best to keep order, but those early Arcadians were still frightened by the sudden, unprovoked Devourer attacks. None of them spoke Aver and there was simply no place for them. Not enough food, not enough shelter, certainly not enough jobs. There weren’t many people on Prianus who hated the fairies, but most of those who did lived in Pylos.
Coldhand would have liked to ask the police about Vorus’ information. If Arcadians were going missing, then the Prian police were surely trying to find out how and why. Were the fairies attempting to do anything about their losses? If the ones Logan had met so far were any indication, probably not. They were a hopeless, broken people.
Maeve fought. She was one of the rare ones… but even she was just trying to die.
Coldhand drove through a particularly thick bank of fog — so heavy that it even blotted out the flickering yellow streetlamps — and skidded to a stop. The roads were steep here, where Pylos grew up against the side of the deep mountain valley.
The buildings that lined the dark, empty road were laced with cracks, jagged reminders of Pylos’ unstable bedrock. The broken windows were all patched, but quickly and cheaply, with parkboard planks and strips of plastic sheeting nailed into place.
The leaning building across the street from Coldhand was one of many apartment tower-slabs, built cheap and tall to make the best use of minimal ground space. A lone staircase was bolted to the front, but it was crooked and half hanging from the concrete. Logan doubted it would support his weight and probably hadn’t been used in years. The slab had to be an Arcadian tenement. What use were stairs to those with wings?
Coldhand couldn’t see into any of the boarded-over windows, but suspected the same was not true for those inside. Someone was watching him. He could feel it.
Logan looked up and caught a glimpse of a white-winged shape on the cornice. It stepped back and out of sight. He briefly considered giving chase, but the watchful fairy would be long gone by the time he could climb up there.
What did that Arcadian think of the hunter down below? Just a midnight driver with nothing better to do? Maybe a new chem seller looking to expand his business? A thief casing his next hit? Or something worse, something more dangerous?
Like a Nihilist, hunting down his Arcadian prey?
Even if he could track down that vanished rooftop fairy, Coldhand doubted that he was interested in talking. The Arcadians were closed-mouthed and clannish.
Going door to door and canvassing like a rookie beat cop wasn’t going to yield much, Coldhand decided. If he wanted to catch the Cult of Nihil, he would have to think like the predator, not the prey.
