“Harmony is here. Time to go,” Dancer says from the door.
“I want to fight,” I tell him as we ride the gravLift down with Harmony. They’ve doctored my Sigils so that they are brighter to match the highReds. I wear the loose garb of a highRed and carry a pack of street-scrubbing equipment. There’s dye in my hair and contacts in my eyes, all so that I look a brighter shade of red. Less dirty. “I don’t want this mission. Worse, I can’t do it. Who could?”
“You said you would do anything that needed to be done,” Dancer says.
“But this …” The mission he has given me is madness, yet that’s not why I’m frightened. My fear is that I will become something Eo would not recognize. I’ll become a demon from our Octobernacht stories.
“Give me a scorcher or a bomb. Let someone else do this.”
“We brought you out for this,” Harmony sighs. “And only this. It has been Ares’s greatest goal since the Sons were born.”
“How many others have you bro
ught out? How many others have tried what you’re asking me to try?”
Harmony looks over at Dancer. He says nothing, so she answers impatiently on his behalf. “Ninety-seven have failed the Carving … that we know of.”
“Bloodydamn,” I curse. “And what happened to them?”
“They died,” she says blandly. “Or they asked for death.”
“Maybe Narol should have let me hang.” I try to laugh.
“Darrow. Come here. Come.” He grabs my shoulder and pulls me in. “Others may have failed. But you’ll be different, Darrow. I feel it in my bones.”
My legs go shaky when I first look up at the night sky and the buildings stretching around me. I slip into vertigo. I feel like I am falling, like the world is off its axis. Everything is too open, so much so that it seems as though the city should tumble into the sky. I look at my feet, look at the street, and try to imagine that I am in the tunnelroads from the townships to the Common.
The streets of Yorkton, the city, are a strange place at night. Luminescent balls of light line the sidewalks and streets. HC videos run like liquid streams along parts of the avenue in this hi-tech sector of the city, so most walk upon the moving pathways or ride in public transportation with their heads crooked down like cane handles. Garish lights make the night almost as bright as day. I see even more Colors. This sector of the city is clean. Teams of Red sanitation workers scour the streets. Its roads and walking paths stretch in perfect order.
There’s a faint ribbon of red where we are to walk, a narrow ribbon in a broad street. Our path does not move like the others. A Copper woman walks along her wider path; her favorite programs play wherever she walks, unless she strides beside a Gold, in which case all the HCs go quiet. But most Golds do not walk; they are permitted gravBoots and coaches, as are any of the Coppers, Obsidians, Grays, and Silvers with the proper license, though the licensed boots are horribly shoddy things.
An advertisement for a blister cream appears on the ground in front of me. A woman of strangely slender proportions slinks out of a red lace robe. Suitably naked, she then applies the cream to a place on her body where no woman has ever before gotten a blister. I blush and look away in disgust because I’ve only ever seen one woman naked.
“You’ll want to forget your modesty,” Harmony advises. “It’ll mark you worse than your Color.”
“It is disgusting,” I say.
“It’s advertising, darling,” Harmony purrs condescendingly. She shares a chuckle with Dancer.
An elderly Gold soars overhead, older than any human I’ve ever seen. We lower our heads as she passes.
“Reds up here have to get paid,” Dancer explains when we are alone. “Not much. But they’re given money and enough treats to make them dependent. What money they have, they spend on goods they’re made to think they need.”
“Same with all the drones,” Harmony hisses.
“So they’re not slaves,” I say.
“Oh, they’re slaves,” Harmony says. “Enslaved by their suckling on the teats of those bastards.”
Dancer struggles to keep up, so I slow down as he speaks. Harmony makes an irritated noise.
“Golds structure everything to make their own lives easier. They have shows produced to entertain and placate the masses. They give monies and handouts to make generations dependent on the seventh day of each new Earth month. They create goods to grant us a semblance of liberty. If violence is the Gold sport, manipulation is their art form.”
We pass into a lowColor district where there are no designated walking paths. The storefronts are lined with electronic Green ribbons. Some stores peddle a month of alternate reality in an hour’s time for a week’s wages. Two small men with quick green eyes and bald heads studded with metal spikes and tattooed with shifting digital codes suggest for me a trip to someplace called Osgiliath. Other stores offer banking services or biomodifications or simple personal hygiene products. They shout things I don’t understand, speaking in numbers and acronyms. I have never seen such commotion.
Brothels lined with Pink ribbon make me blush, as do the women and men in the windows. Each has a flashing price tag playfully hanging from a thread; it’s a moving number that suits demand. A lusty girl calls to me as Dancer explains the idea of money. In Lykos, we traded only in goods and swill and burners and services.
Some blocks of the city are reserved for the use of high colors. Access to these districts depends on badges of warrant. I cannot simply walk or ride into a Gold or Copper district. But a Copper can always slum in a Red district, frequenting a bar or brothel. Never the other way around, even in the wild, free-for-all that is the Bazaar—a riotous place of commerce and noise and air heavy with the scents of bodies and food and automobile exhaust.