Ghost Node: Glitching the City System

The Iron Market Shift

The bypass ran east for a long time, and Jonathan walked it with the lens to his eye and the other hand on the wall.

It was not an empty tunnel. In the blue double-printed glow of the Lens, he could see the marks of the people who had used it before the city forgot it: a line of rivets where a handrail had been, the stub of a signal lamp, a heap of old crates that someone had stacked against the wall and never come back for. Farther on there were newer signs. A scatter of boot-prints in the dust, many of them, all heading the same way. A cigarette end. A cracked cooking pot, rinsed and set upside down on a ledge to dry.

His stomach had been talking to him since he left the Casks. He had last eaten at noon the day before, a heel of bread and a cup of recycled tea, and the hunger had hardened into a flat, stubborn ache. He thought of Mira in Mrs. Odell’s warm room, and then he made himself stop, because thinking of her made him want to go back, and going back would hurt her more than staying away.

The tunnel widened. The sound grew. By the time the lights came into view, he could hear the voices as separate things: a man haggling over the price of boots, a woman singing under her breath, someone hammering sheet metal, an argument about a missing knife.

The old express line ended in a station.

It had been grand once. Its ceiling rose in a long vault of green tile, now streaked and cracked, and its platforms ran wide enough for a crowd. Over the arch in faded letters, a name had been painted and half scraped away: FERROUS JUNCTION. The platforms were full of stalls now, built from tram doors and iron shutters and sheets of corrugated roofing, lit by lamps run off scavenged cells. There were hundreds of people moving between them, and every one of them was talking.

He stood at the mouth of the tunnel and could not make himself walk in.

Two men stood at the entrance to the platform, one on either side of a gap in a chain-link barrier. They were large, bored, and holding hand-scanners. When Jonathan approached, the nearer one swept the scanner across his wrist without much interest, frowned, and swept it again.

“No signal,” he said. “You police bait or a dead man?”

Jonathan hesitated, and the truth came out of him before he could weigh it. “Dead.”

The man grunted. “Fine. Dead men get in. Dead men pay at the stalls like everybody else. If I find you knifing anyone, you get to be dead twice.” He waved him through.

Jonathan went in, a little dazed. A dead man, it turned out, was not a strange thing here. Half the faces in the crowd had the look of people who had also stood in front of a failing meter and made a decision. He saw a woman with a child on her hip and a bandage where her wrist-terminal should have been. He saw a man in a surveyor’s vest like his own, and the man looked at him once, saw the same vest, and looked away.

The smell reached him next, and it almost took his knees out from under him. Frying onions. Hot oil. Something with ginger in it, bubbling in a pot. He turned, and there was a stall on the edge of the platform with a hand-lettered sign: BROTH, 3. He had no idea what the 3 was counted in. He guessed Mana.

He had two fragments in his kit, and the interface’s cool voice at the back of his mind said, Twelve Mana. But the stall took tin chits, small stamped discs cut from scrap, and he had none.

He needed a buyer.

He asked at three stalls. The first man laughed at him. The second, a thin woman who sold bolts of cloth, said only, “Not me,” and pointed with her chin toward the center of the station. “Corvin’s the one who buys stone. Don’t waste her time.”

Madam Corvin kept her stall under the broken clock at the heart of the platform, a counter made from a tram door with a brass scale on it and a stool behind. She was a broad woman in her late fifties with a gray braid down her back and a ring on every finger. As Jonathan approached, she was in the middle of turning down a man who wanted to sell her a stolen lamp, and she did it so pleasantly that the man thanked her on his way out.

She looked up at Jonathan over a pair of reading glasses. Her eyes were small and brown and missed nothing.

“Dead man,” she said. “I can smell it. Hungry too. What are you selling?”

He took out the first fragment and set it on the tram door. It glowed faintly in the lamplight.

Corvin did not touch it at once. She looked at it for a moment, then took a small brass fork from her sleeve, tapped it against the counter, and held it near the stone. The fork rang, a clear, sweet note that went on for a long time.

“Clean,” she said, softly. “Too clean.” She turned the fork toward Jonathan and tapped it again. It rang as before. Then she held it an inch from his chest, and it did not ring at all.

Her eyes narrowed. “Funny. Everybody rings. You hum flat.”

“I’ve had a bad week,” Jonathan said.

“Mm.” She put the fork away. “Stone like this doesn’t come out of the city. The city stamps everything it touches, and it leaves a mark in the grain, a little tax-scar I can feel with my thumb. This one has none. Nothing has touched it.” She looked at him over the glasses. “Where did you find it?”

“A collapse.”

“I heard about a collapse.” She did not say how. “What is it you want for two?”

He had been working out the number all the way from the Casks. He knew what the stall at the municipal exchange would have paid, six apiece, stamped and taxed. He knew the black market ran lower. He set his price, a little high, to leave room to bargain.

“Five each.”

Corvin laughed, not unkindly. “Two.”

“The exchange rate is six,” Jonathan said. “I know the rules. I’ve read the schedule. Even after the fees—”

“The rate you’ve read is the rate for people who exist.” She folded her hands, and the rings clicked. “A stamped six is six because a seal says someone paid for the right to hold it. This isn’t stamped. If an Apex man walks past my counter while I’m holding it, they take the stall, the stone, and me, in that order. I’m not buying a fragment. I’m buying the risk of being caught with one. That is the price.”

He opened his mouth to argue and found that he had nothing to argue with. He had no seal. He had no account, no name, no appeal, and no other buyer within three hundred meters who would even look. The only schedule that had ever mattered to him was written for people who could be found in a registry, and he was not one of them anymore.

His stomach chose that moment to growl. Corvin did not smile.

“Two each,” she said. “Four. And since you hum flat, I’ll throw in a pair of noise-charms. Dampeners. They put a bit of ordinary static back around a body that hasn’t got any. A hound can find a hole in the noise from a kilometer off, and I don’t want one following you to my door.”

“A hound,” Jonathan said.

“Apex Enforcers keep spatial hounds. Vanguard Capital’s dogs.” She said the name flatly. “They’ve been circling Sector 13 since last night. Everybody down here knows. Something went quiet in the Foundation, and when something goes quiet, the hounds come looking for the quiet.”

Jonathan’s hand closed around the strap of his kit.

He thought of the second fragment. He thought of the hunger, and the cold, and the fact that in an hour, a day, a week, he would have to come back here anyway. He thought, with a small hot flare of shame, that two days ago he would have taken the offer for a fraction of what she had said and written down the difference.

“Deal,” he said.

She counted out four tin chits from a pouch at her belt and laid them on the door. Beside them she set two small, grayish discs of braided wire, each the size of a thumbnail.

“Sling them round your wrist,” she said. “They won’t last forever, and they’re not clever. But they’ll make the dogs think you’re noisy.”

Jonathan reached for the chits, and the chip in his pocket shifted against his ribs. Corvin’s eyes followed the movement. “There’s something else you’re carrying. I can hear it.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“I didn’t offer to buy it.” She looked at him a moment longer, and her face did something complicated. “Come back when you’ve got more stone. A dozen, and we’ll talk about price, and about who you are. I do like to know who I’m paying.”

He took the chits and the charms and left.

The broth was three chits. He spent them at the stall on the edge of the platform, standing up, drinking out of a tin cup with a bent rim, and it was the best thing he had ever tasted. It was hot and thin and tasted of ginger and onions and metal, and it went down into his stomach like a fist unclenching. He drank slowly, to make it last, and the old woman who had ladled it looked at him and said nothing, and he understood that she had seen a great many people drink soup this way.

One chit left. He closed it in his fist and thought of Mira’s chip, and kept both.

He wrapped one of Corvin’s charms around his wrist, tying it twice, as she had shown him. The effect was strange. The faint sense of absence that had been hanging around him since the collapse, a quietness he had half believed was his imagination, filled with a low hiss, like a radio left on between stations. It felt dishonest. It felt like putting on someone else’s coat.

He held the other charm in his hand, weighing whether to save it, and he turned back toward the tunnel mouth, and heard a sound.

Click.

It was a small noise, clean and dry, like a fingernail tapped on glass. It came from the west, from the long dark throat of the bypass, from the way he had come.

Click. Click.

He put the Lens to his eye.

In the doubled blue light the tunnel looked the same as before, a long straight tube. Then something moved in the middle distance, and he saw that it was not moving through the space between two points. It was skipping. A shape, low and lean, flickered into being forty meters from the mouth of the tunnel, held still for the space of a breath, and was gone. A second later it appeared twenty meters nearer.

It was a hound. He had never seen one, only heard of them in the dispatch office, in the voice of men telling stories to impress younger men. A long body, jointed in black glass plates, with a back that ran in a smooth arc and legs too thin for the weight they carried. It had no eyes. Where its head should have been there was a ring of slowly rotating bands, like the inside of a clock, and the bands turned and ticked and tasted the air.

It skipped again, and the Market’s noise did not stop, because none of the people on the platform could see it. The Lens showed him a thing the rest of the city had forgotten how to look for.

Click.

It was thirty meters away, and he was standing in the open.

He ran, away from the tunnel, along the edge of the platform, toward a gap between two stalls, and the hound folded space in front of him with a sound like a snapped wire. It was suddenly there, between him and the gap, close enough that he could smell it, hot metal and old ozone. It lowered its head.

The bands in its mouth began to spin.