Wednesday, October 28, 2099

Lilia’s plan was simple.

1. She would attend the Nuclear Darwinists’ conference in
New Gotham to present the award named in honor of Gid. The
award had been her idea, after all, and was the perfect
cover for what she really wanted to do.

2. She would discover the truth about Gid’s death.

3. She would quit the Society after the new award was
presented, preferably with some panache.

4. She would stay out of trouble.

The last item was the only one Lilia expected to be an
issue: she had only added it to her list to keep her mother
happy.

Her mother didn’t need to know how quickly that item had
been ditched.

Lilia had only been in New Gotham for an hour and she was
wearing Gid’s best pseudoskin, idling a rented Kawasaki and
considering the best way to enter the old city of Gotham
unobserved. Revving the bike and wasting precious canola
were the least of the multiple offenses either committed or
pending.

She didn’t idle the bike because she was worried about
breaking the law. Lilia did that all the time. Old cities
were off-limits, by senatorial decree, which meant those
who ventured into the old cities had to fend for
themselves. Usually Lilia welcomed that edict: it meant
less interference.

What troubled her was that the guys in the bike rental
place had been joking about the wolves in Central Park.

Wolves. Was it true? It was one detail she hadn’t planned
for. Lilia hadn’t given their chatter much credence, not
until there was just the muck of the Hudson between herself
and Gotham.

The sight of the old city made her pause.

Gotham was big, dark and legendary - she’d known that
before. In this moment, though, it crouched on the other
side of the river, a blackened wreck of what had been a
glittering metropolis. It was hard to imagine that once it
had shone with with so many lights that its illumination
had obscured the stars above.

Now the stars had no competition. The steady rain and the
darkness didn’t do the old city any favors - it looked like
hell.

Maybe it was.

Lilia was sure that Gotham wolves would be bigger, more
numerous and more nasty than most.

But rumor wasn’t going to stop her. This was a one-time
shot. She kicked the bike into gear and turned into the
darkness of the Lincoln Tunnel. Her geiger was already
ticking faster than she might have liked, which meant she
was soaking up radiation faster than would have been ideal.

As she drove down the curving ramp, Lilia held her breath,
hoping that the tunnel wasn’t blocked. She turned on to the
straightaway and the bike’s high beam showed that the
snaking length of the tunnel was unobstructed. There was
just a couple of inches of water on the roadway and the
vehicles - there must have been some - were gone.

Pilfered, most likely, and raided for parts.

Her geiger settled to a slow tick.

Lilia grinned. Her legendary good luck was holding.

She accelerated and the roar of the bike’s engine
reverberated in the tunnel. It felt good to ride, as good
as being cut loose from a corset, as good as kicking five
pounds of underskirts aside.

Even better, the Kawasaki had guts.

As the darkness closed behind her, she felt a prickle of
fear. Lilia didn’t like darkness, never had. Logic, though,
had dictated that the tunnel was the best option for
entering the city. The tunnel shielded her from the
radiation on approach, giving her more range once in
Gotham, and it muffled the noise of the motorcycle from
curious ears.

Had Gid, the king of logic, come this way?

The tunnel was long, or seemed longer than it should have
been. It said something about Lilia’s fear of darkness that
she was relieved to emerge into the hot zone of Gotham
itself.

She burst from the tunnel like a bat out of hell and her
geiger went wild. She had a heartbeat to note the wet road,
gleaming like obsidian glass, before the bike tried to skid
from beneath her.

Lilia swore as she corrected the skid.

The wolves chose that moment to howl.

The rumor was true.

Even better, there were a lot of them: their howls echoed
one after the other.

Wolf telegraph. Lilia knew enough about wolves to know that
they were summoning each other as a little welcome
committee.

It made sense to move fast when she looked like lunch. Her
heart was pounding as she turned to race into the valleys
of the old city.

Lilia wasn’t unprepared for this adventure: she carried her
nifty new laze, the one Joachim had bought her as a bonus
for snagging the angel-shades. She’d brought Gid’s old suit
because even his second-string pseudoskin was a better
quality than any of her own. They’d been almost the same
height and if it was a little snug around Lilia’s curves,
well, there wouldn’t be a fashion show in the old city. And
her dark cape would keep the eyes of Sumptuary and Decency
averted when she was in public areas.

Like the bike rental shop.

Since there were multiple hungry carnivores in her
vicinity, Lilia fretted about the extra heavy weight gauge
mesh in the polymer of Gid’s pseudoskin. How much would it
slow her down?

Her calculations had suffered from a small omission - would
it be a fatal one?

Better not to dwell on that.

She’d memorized the map of Gotham from the archives, using
a public reader in the netherzones to access it rather than
her own palm. She’d told no one where she was going. It was
a bit late for Lilia to see the parallels with Gid’s last
fatal trip.

She’d avoided radiation for the past two weeks to allow
herself maximum time in Gotham. Even so, the required
monitoring patch on her sternum was already emanating a
slight glow. There was no question of turning back. The
shade who had contacted her out of the blue had implied
that he knew something about Gid. Lilia didn’t know how to
find the shade again.

It was now or never.

She drove faster. Skeletal hulks of old buildings stretched
like fingers into the night sky, their height cast in
impenetrable shadows. The thrum of the bike’s engine echoed
and was magnified, as if a herd of motorcycles had invaded
the ruin. Audacious young trees pushed their way through
the cracks in the pavement, as opportunistic as the wolves.

There were no lights anywhere in Gotham, but the moon was
nearly full and the night was surprisingly clear. Silver
light slipped into more than one apartment, creating
snapshots Lilia didn’t want to see. The streets were slick
with water that reflected the moon and stars.

The grey dust was thick and dark over everything beyond the
road, and it was probably mixed with ashes. Lilia didn’t
have to speculate on what those ashes might have been: she
knew. They had studied the hit on Gotham at the Institute
for Radiation Studies - it was, quite literally, textbook
stuff. Ten million people had made their homes in the city
and roughly a quarter of a million had managed to evacuate
before the firestorm started.

Lilia had never thought she’d see the damage live.

Few did.

Maybe more people should see it, she thought. Maybe the
Republic should offer tours. The old city of Gotham was a
poster for disarmament.

Maybe that was the real reason why old cities were off-
limits.

Not that Lilia was cynical about the objectives of central
authority. Nuh uh.

The odd thing about Gotham was that it seemed to be awake.
Everything she could see was destroyed, broken, trashed and
abandoned, yet there was a strange watchfulness. She wasn’t
at all convinced that she was alone, much less unobserved.

Gotham felt sentient. Most old cities didn’t have that kind
of aura. Lilia had visited enough of them to know.

She shivered, although she wasn’t cold.

Maybe it was the wolves. Lilia was sure she saw the yellow
eyes of wolves in every shadow. She was sure she heard the
pad of their footfalls as they tracked her course.

But it would have been weird for wolves to have so much
juju, even if they were starving.

Was someone else watching?

Or was the city haunted?

It shouldn’t have been far from the end of the tunnel to
her destination, but the city didn’t quite look as it had
when the archived map had been made. The debris piled into
the streets wasn’t that easily distinguishable in the dark
from actual buildings in decay. Lilia took a turn, realized
she’d made a mistake, turned back and tried again.

Precious time was slipping away. She accelerated the bike
even more, choosing one risk over another. Broadway and
Seventh had become one cavernous pit, so Lilia made a quick
u-turn. She had to retrace her course and go up Eighth,
across 50th, wasting precious moments.

Two blocks left, then one. She was breathing hard,
perspiring beneath her pseudoskin.

It was 20:59. Was she too late?

Would she get out of Gotham alive?

Or would she die here, just like Gid?

Lilia turned the last corner to her destination, sprayed an
arc of water as she skidded the bike to a halt and stared.
Unlike the rest of the city, Rockefeller Plaza was eerily
similar to the way it looked in the archival photos.

But dark.

Extinguished.

Creepy. Lilia hesitated, revving the bike. The plaza
appeared to be closed box, a sculpture at the far end being
its focal point. There was a black hole in front of the
statue, a pit of shadows that seemed to devour what little
light there was.

“There’s a place in Old Gotham where the shadows are
darker...”

She remembered the shade’s reedy voice all too well and her
mouth went dry. His signal had been bootleg, on an
unauthorized frequency, and the audio had broken up. Most
people couldn’t have received the signal, but Lilia had her
palm tuned to pirate frequencies. Even so, his voice had
sounded as if he was pinging her from another world.

But then, Gotham could have been another world.

Lilia considered the plaza and didn’t like the lack of exit
options. She turned up the audio on her helm and heard only
the pattering of rain on stone. She tried very hard to be
prudent, but being prudent wasn’t one of Lilia’s best
tricks.

Her palm chimed the hour.

It was time for the rendezvous.

She gunned the bike and roared into the plaza.

As she drew closer, she saw that the statue at the far end
still had enough of its gilding to glint in the moonlight.
It depicted Prometheus, bringing fire to mortals and
risking the wrath of the gods by so doing. (Considering
what the human race had done with that bit of technology,
to Lilia’s thinking the gods had good reason to be pissed
off with him.)

Two dark sentinels loomed on either side of the steps that
descended into the darkness before Prometheus, but she
didn’t spare those sculptures more than a glance. Lilia
parked between them at the top of the stairs.

No one was waiting there.

There was, however, something below.

That something was human in form. There had once been a
pool beneath Prometheus, at the base of the stairs, and
that something was on the pool’s lip. He was lying one one
side, but not moving.

Maybe not even breathing.

The moonlight touched the small figure, the spaces on
either side of the stairs left in impenetrable shadows.

Lilia had a very bad feeling, but there was only one way to
be sure. She’d come this far, and she wasn’t coming back.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw a line of yellow eyes
closing into the shadows behind her.

So much for her legendary good luck.

She left the bike running and leapt down the stairs. Under
the weight of Gid’s pseudoskin, she felt as if it took half
of forever to get to the bottom. The wolves, she knew, were
moving faster.

Lilia was sweating furiously when she turned on the
external speaker in her helm. “Y654892?”

Big surprise - he didn’t answer. Lilia glanced back and
found eyes glinting at the top of the steps. The wolves
were drawing closer to the idling bike than she’d expected.

Hunger made them brave.

“Y654892?” Lilia shook his shoulder, because there was an
off-chance that he’d settled for a doze while waiting for
her.

At her touch, he rolled to his back. Even though she’d not
expected anything good, Lilia screamed at what she saw.

The visor on his helm was open, as if to deliberately
display the “third eye” right in the middle of his
forehead. His normal eyes were staring back at Lilia, their
blue irises glassy and lifeless. His skin was already
puffing from the radiation exposure, his face mottled and
red.

Lilia didn’t scream because he was dead.

She screamed because he had been eviscerated.