With a sharp, cracking sound, a fist-sized hole appeared in the rubble opposite. Dust flew into the air. Mateo shook his finger to disperse the thin stream of smoke drifting from the end of it, swearing to himself under his breath. The can of pinto beans he’d chosen for a target sat smugly on the collapsed section of wall, where he’d placed it an hour ago. He swore again.
After an hour of target practice his finger was starting to burn, especially the tip. His arm ached from the effort involved in holding it up while he aimed. His head ached from the feeling that came when he shot; as the strange energy coalesced around his spine and gathered at the nape of his neck, before surging through his body, condensing in the tip of his finger, and finally blasting out. He walked across the street and looked at the series of dents he had left in the collapsed wall and in the rubble behind it. As far as he could tell, there was no projectile involved in his strange new power. Nor was there a visible mark of energy or mass, or any apparent travel time. The power produced a small, extremely powerful impact with whatever he was pointing at, at the exact moment he fired it.
He crossed back over the street, then walked up, looking around to make sure he was still alone. He was back in Niporto Community Stretch, having slept in the temple last night. It had been one of the deepest, most satisfying sleeps of his life, even if it had only lasted a few hours before the small, shaven headed woman had come around waking everyone up and telling them they could leave. The rain had stopped in the night: it was a beautiful, sunny day, with striking blue skies and an overheated, vivid feeling circulating in Zone Six. He’d dropped Lia back off at her place and said goodbye. They hadn’t spoken much, and certainly they hadn’t mentioned anything to do with their conversation last night. A tacit agreement had fallen into place that they would never speak of it.
After feeding himself on fruit and oats and a small plate of bacon at a favourite diner of his, and having subjected his nervous system to four large cups of the mud they called coffee, which was nearly narcotic in its strength, he had driven himself here and settled in to experiment with his new power.
He was not a good shot. Standing fifteen paces across the street, deep in the most treacherous region of Niporto, he had failed to hit the can of pinto beans even once. Now he went to the strange combustion bike and took out a can of spray paint he’d bought on the way here. He went along the far side of the street, spraying large, blue targets of paint every 20 or so paces. Then he jogged back and stood at the end of the street. He could see the blue targets, shrinking into the distance and turning from circles to lines as the distance angled them. He lifted his hand, curled back three fingers to leave the index pointing, and squeezed off a shot at all six targets. He walked back to look, opening his hand and shaking it out.
He’d hit the first target, which was much bigger than the can and not much further away. He had missed the following three. Near the last two he could see no ‘bullet-holes’. He went back and shot at the fifth target a few more times, and indeed—still nothing. The range of his shot must have been around 80 paces, give or take. There wasn’t a chance in hell he could shoot anything smaller than a building from 80 paces, but it was good to know.
His body felt different this morning. Everything felt lighter to him: the handlebars as he turned them, the large doors to the temple as he’d swung them open, Lia as he’d hugged her goodbye. Even his spoon and fork when he had eaten his breakfast. He’d kept swinging them about, missing his bacon, bringing the spoon too quickly to his face and almost chipping a tooth. When he’d tugged open the door to leave, the door handle had felt plastic. Not exactly soft, but slightly malleable, like he would have dented it with his fingers if he’d squeezed any harder.
On the way back from the fifth target, he ran as fast as he could to the bike. It was like there was a treadmill matching his stride, the ground just slipped beneath them. Barely a few seconds and he was skidding to a stop and nearly falling over. He smiled. Mateo wasn’t really sure what the hell he was going to do with his finger-gun. But being stronger, and quicker? That he could use.
Next, Mateo went to the bike and took out Poro’s old journal. He still hadn’t had a chance to look through it—it had been such a long night, and he hadn’t wanted to show it to Lia. The journal was nothing to do with her. It was his.
It was a typical leather journal, quite large and more then a decade old. Mateo couldn’t remember a time before Poro had this journal. He’d always been forbidden to look through it. Not that this would have stopped him, but he could never find it.
He sat down on the bike, side-saddle, and unwrapped the long leather braid which bound the journal. The journal fell open to a page near the middle and Mateo saw something. Nestled between the pages was a black and white photograph. It looked old, but well cared for—more like it had spent a long time in a plastic slip in a folder, rather than in a desk draw.
Weird, thought Mateo. It’s just a bunch of plumbing.
The picture depicted a network of pipes and valves of varying sizes. The highest pipes were very large, and they became thinner as they lowered. They were probably different colours, too, judging by the shading, but it was impossible to tell which. Each ‘colour’ of pipe was marked with a code at the start and the end. So for example the second pipe, which turned and had two levels, was marked with [DR.01β2] where it met the larger pipe above it and the smaller pipe beneath. Connecting each pipe level to the pipes above and bellow was a complicated valve with a glass aperture to look through, a turn-wheel, and some kind of dial that measured something. On the back of the photograph was scrawled: Keys match outside DEUS system. It was not in Poro’s handwriting.
Mateo puzzled over the photograph for a while, searching for clues, but didn’t find anything more. He tucked it into the back of the journal and started to flick through it. He blinked. He’d seen Poro writing in this journals many times over the years—always with his back to a wall or, if in public, a quick, furtive scrawl.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
So how could it be that the entire journal was written in code?
No, not a code. An entire language, and not one Mateo recognised. Once upon a time Tinjouki had been made up of many cultures, languages, and races. But that was ancient history. Nowadays, there was only your kīn, and the poor kīnless. Everybody spoke Standard and wrote in Standard. Other languages were fairly regarded as ancient and strange. Languages like Chinese and Russian and English. Mateo had studied them briefly in school during a compulsory history module. He’d taken Spanish. The class had read a book together called Don Quixote, and next year he’d quickly forgotten it all.
The language in Poro’s journal was not Spanish. He was fairly confident it was not written in the Russian, Chinese, or Europa alphabets either. He asked the Poro in his head if he recognised the alphabet and the figment sent back a red X. But when he looked at the page, the figment drew his attention to two symbols used in the code, making them seem brighter. Mateo pulled out the photograph. The code on the pipes all included a β, a symbol also used in Poro’s strange language. The other symbol he would have recognised anywhere: the § on the medical box which held the Orikon Heart. It appeared often.
Mateo slowly looked through the rest of the diary, forcing himself to stop and and look at each page. They may have been written in the same language, but the content of the diary clearly varied. Some sections looked like normal text, perhaps Poro’s personal musings or confessions. Other sections were in orderly paragraphs, like the minutes from a meeting or notes from a book. And the entire back third of the journal was all the same: a complex, alphanumeric title, followed by a long list of alphanumeric data separated by colons and hyphens. It all had a specific pattern and order to it. Maybe he could start here and figure out the meaning of some of the symbols, but that wouldn’t be happening any time soon. Mateo was a lot of things. Cryptographer was not among them.
Eventually he looked at the first page and he almost jumped: it was written in Standard.
The private diary of Poro Soto.
Mateo—keep out!
Mateo looked at the words for a long time. He didn’t notice the tears till one slid down his chin and fell onto the page. He had never looked through Poro’s journal, but the thought of his brother sat somewhere, all that time ago, thinking of what to write on the first page and, then, thinking of him, was almost too much. He wiped away the tears with a shaking thumb and was about to slam the journal shut when he saw a final alphanumeric code on the inside of the front cover. This one was in Standard: BFHES7218T. He didn’t understand this code either, but it was a start.
Mateo shut the journal. He popped open the seat locker and was just putting it away when something fell out—a large, thick paper card, perhaps twice the size of a normal playing card. It fell on the floor and Mateo stared down at it, his heart thumping in his chest. The backside print of the card was a pattern of alternating fire and smoke, in a fractal radiating out from the centre of the card. It was remarkably beautiful. Mateo had never seen a card like it, but that wasn’t why he froze in place, staring.
The pattern on the back of the card was moving.
It was like one of those tv animations. He almost didn’t want to turn the card over, scared about what he might find. But eventually he did.
It was an image, the image of a hand coiled up to point a single finger at the sky. The skin of the single finger was patterned in a coil, like a fingerprint that went all the way down, and the tip of the finger leaked smoke. Behind the finger was pale, barren field of sand. The nails of the fingers were gnawn to tatters. Something was hidden, clasped in the hand, but Mateo couldn’t quite tell what it was. Leaking out of the closed hand were grains of sand, falling into the great field bellow. This side was not animated.
It didn’t make any sense. How had it gotten here? Clearly, this card was related to his Mantle somehow. The image was clear enough. But the Journal had been hidden away for more than two years in a box of old stuff. Mateo couldn’t explain it.
He stared at the card and he thought about it. He had no explanation for this, and eventually figured he better get moving. He slipped the card into the pocket of his jeans, pushing it all the way down so it wouldn’t fall out. Then he stowed the diary and swung his leg over the bike, glancing at the can of pinto beans. He shook his head, thinking still about the card. Then he threw up his arm and, without really trying, fired off a shot. There was a crack and a loud ping and the can of beans flew off the wall. Mateo smiled. Perhaps he had been trying too hard.
He started the bike and drove out of Niporto, again looking around him and making sure no one had been watching. In the middle of the day it was quiet, and all he saw were a few vagrants sleeping in the shadows as he drove out, too incurious and beaten up to explore what the strange sound had been a few streets over. The bike grumbled beneath him. He checked the dial and switched gears with the click of a heal, curving onto a main road as he left the industrial yard which bordered Niporto. He needed gas. He was sick of this stupid bike.
At the gas station he filled the tank and checked the time. It was almost 1pm, lunch time. He swung through a sushi place and picked up three large boxes, alongside fresh wasabi, little plastic soy fish, pickled daikon and two bottles of Johny Sure. He put these in the seat locker. The Heart was still at Lia's. There was no telling when one of Dandelion’s guys might walk past the bike and drive off with it.
Giggler’s joint was in a network of concrete shantys beneath the vast, porcelain hide of the Zone Six FR Post. It said a lot about the city that this place could exist beneath such an indulgent, conspicuous emblem of virtue. All FR really cared about were the Lumin—that and the occasional E-level threat or muster called by one of the other cape factions in the city. When it came to criminal activity, or indeed justice of any kind, they rarely became involved. Their curiosity did not stretch to the dirt of the streets. They probably had no idea what went on down here.
Mateo drove along between the white wall and the gray concrete, then turned down a kind of corridor into an internal courtyard in the apartment block. He parked up and asked a rhata kid which one was Giggler’s, receiving a blank stare for his trouble. Mateo shot a bit of fire from the tip of his finger at the kid, and she dodged, smiled and pointed. “What you doin on the oil-bike, mister?” she asked.
Mateo ignored her. As he crossed the courtyard, he ignored a lot of people: sat out wooden fruit crates smoking, lounging in pairs, reading supple, yellow paperbacks, playing cards, tipping back fluorescent glass bottles of processed alcohol or soda and draining them dry. Children digging plants up out of the cracks in the paving stones, holding trash and exchanging it, leaning against each other on the cusp of violence or affection. In each of them blossomed a dim curiosity as Mateo arrived on his bike and walked to the steps at the far side of the courtyard, eyes ticking horizontally to track him. Then, as he slipped up the steps and into the darkness, they lost interest and went back to doing nothing.
The stairs opened out onto a reception, decorated with cheap, bamboo pattern matts, plastic house plants, a chipped, wood-veneer office desk and spinning chair. There were a few fold up plastic chairs for visitors, and a coffee table stacked with old magazines. A window on the far side permitted a thin, watery light. There was a door at each corners, all of which hung open apart from the one to his immediate right. The receptionist sat at the desk, legs crossed, stockinged foot dangling, reading a magazine. She lowered it as Mateo came in, taking off her glasses.
“Hi angel,” she said. “Can I help you?”
“Sure. I’ve got a buddy staying here at the moment, come in two nights ago. I wanna go say hi.”
“Who you looking for?” Her eyes slid up and down him. “You looking for the f-boy?”
“Sure,” said Mateo. “That’s him.”
The woman tilted back in her chair, arching her torso and point behind her with a flabby arm. “Bikey-boy’s in there. You can go right through, if you like.”