The Two Fangs

Chapter 3

He disembarked at the vert station with a swimming head and a bad need to move his legs. Though he could have rid himself or another few dozen globals taking a bus or a hangshaw, he chose instead to walk the several miles between the vert and Atlantis stations. He and hundreds of others, who picked their way slowly across the suspended bridge.

Up here, the city consisted of a number of separate platforms, connected by rail tubes and sprouting buildings both above and below. The complex network of cables and beams holding them up was a feat of mathematical precision. Probably. This was the old city, built centuries ago, long before Atlantis spread both up and down from the original station. It all still shook when the titanic intercontinental trains blasted through it several times an hour.

Atlantis Station was a city unto itself, an enclosed agglutination of shops and motels and services and the homes of all their operators, clustered tightly around the enormous junction where trains met on the way from one continent to the other. From the outside it was like a fat disc, studded with varying shape and size, and hung with a number of gyroscopic balances. Inside it was a scarcely navigable mess of hallways connecting old plazas and courts. It was loud, it was crowded, and it was dirty. And by not having decided upon a destination, Valle had bought himself a longer wait within it.

He felt eyes on him constantly as he trudged through foul-smelling concrete corridors to find an open space in which to consider his destination. Stranded travelers begging for transferable seats on a train; others trying to sell seats they had for money to send home. Street hawkers whose wares would do him no good and who weren't equipped to deal in cash anyway. Valle knew their plight; he had spent many hours hawking fruitlessly as a small pup when he'd been assigned to it. That was, in fact, where Mr. Walter him found him and his brother.

Ah, he didn't like to think about Mr. Walter.

There were Aequitas sentinels posted in every corridor, and patrolling the plazas. Valle gave them wide berth, though they couldn't touch him. Veritas, maybe. But they could detain him, inconvenience him. And when they released him, it would mean that they had learned his secret.

In a wide, white-walled chamber with a digital sea for a ceiling, he shoved his way into a crowd filtering to an array of holographic station attendants selling rail passage. The press was tight, shouting broke out more than once in the time it took for enough hopeful travelers to secure their reservations that the crowd advanced any distance.

He considered destinations, as much as the din allowed for any focused thought. He had lived on both continents, both near to and very far from Crucis's masters. His brother was never more than a few days' travel away, should Valle lose in his game.

Valle was a good six feet tall, and his ears another several inches after that; he stood high over most of the people here, both human and zoan. He felt very visible: was there anywhere on earth where he wouldn't? Somewhere with a large and dense chiropter population, or at least majority zoan. Would the holograph at the kiosk be able to answer questions?

Something pressed into his side. He ignored it at first, assuming it was someone in the crowd trying to press closer. And if ir was someone trying to get into his rucksack, he wasn't worried; it was padlocked at the top and lined with an electric mesh that would shock a hand that tried to cut it open. But the object jabbed at his ribs didn't pull away, and a heel stomped on his foot. When his knee reflexively buckled, a hand grasped his shoulder and pulled him downward.

"Don't try anything," a raspy voice said straight into his ear, just barely audible.

The owner of the voice, hand, and heel pressed the object harder against his body, and began to pull him away. It didn't take much to conceal the abduction, the weapon being hidden in the crush. Nor would it have taken much for Valle to twist away and hopefully put several bodies between himself and his assailant - but that depended upon what kind of weapon it was. And he didn't want to create a big enough altercation that an Aequitas soldier stepped in. He only gritted his teeth and hoped the robber would take a look at the useless contents of his rucksack once they were in private and turn him loose.