It wasn’t the first dead body Harper Davey had ever seen; not even the thousandth. He had seen too many to remember. But this was not a place where civil war raged, where thousands could be killed at the touch of a button. This was Harrotin Station, Crossroads of the Worlds. This wasn’t supposed to happen here.
Footsteps splashed in the shallow puddles behind him, and he turned to stop her, but her gasp of horror told him he was too late. “My God.” Imogen sagged against him. “No, no,” she moaned, and Harper held her tight.
“Imogen.” He pulled away so he could meet her eyes, dark in the rain-sodden night. He held her face gently between his hands to stop her looking at the figure hanging from the gate behind him. “Imogen. Where’s Lina? What have you done with Lina?”
A drop of rain fell from Imogen’s red hair and down her pale cheek as she blinked at Harper. “Lina? I left her…” she gestured vaguely back down the deserted street, the row of ramshackle houses dark and silent under the incessant rain.
“Left her?” Harper’s voice echoed harshly down the length of the narrow street. “You left her back there? We have to get her.” He looked back at the woman hanging from the gate, her head lolling forward, her chin resting on her chest. Her blood looked black and oily in the night. “We have to move on.”
Imogen looked at him disbelievingly. “You want us to go on? To take Lina past—” She looked again at the mutilated woman. “Past that?”
“We have no choice.” He set off running back down the street without waiting to see if Imogen was following. His footsteps sounded unnaturally loud under the watchful gaze of the surrounding black windows. He saw her blonde hair first, the only light in the darkness. “Lina.” He hurried towards her, the bag he carried across his shoulder swinging painfully against his hip. He swept her into his arms, hugging her tightly and breathing in the smell of her.
“I don’t like it here, Daddy.” Her voice was muffled against his shoulder.
“I know, sweetheart, but Mummy and Daddy are taking you to a beautiful world where they have beaches and sunshine and horses.” Harper struggled to carry Lina and the bag, shifting the weight of his four-year-old daughter in the crook of his arm.
“You mean it? And I can have a horse?”
“I mean it. But first you must do one thing for me, sweetness.”
“Oh?” She sounded distrusting, almost petulant.
“Okay, sweetheart. I want you to screw your eyes up tight and press your face into Daddy’s shoulder here. And promise me, you have to promise you won’t open your eyes until I say you can.”
“And then we can leave here?”
“And then we can leave here. I promise.” Another promise. His promises were beginning to sound hollow even to his own ears.
“Okay, then.” She screwed her eyes up tight so he could see and then rested her head deep in his shoulder.
“Good girl.” He turned around, his breath loud in his ears as he struggled under the weight. Imogen was watching him, her face pale and her eyes dark. He could feel her despising him for his cowardice. “You ready?”
Imogen shook her head. “We can’t just leave that girl there.”
“We have no choice. If we don’t leave now we’ll be stuck on the Station for months.” He kissed Lina’s hair. “Don’t forget, babe—no peeking, okay?”
“Okay, Daddy.”
The body was waiting for them just as they had left her: her long, dark hair hanging limply forward, the strange markings cut deep into her belly and arms and legs, the same cruel wire straps tying her to the gate.
Harper pulled Lina closer against him, as though this would fight off the stench of that poor woman hanging in front of him. “You okay, love?” he asked, trying to break the terrible silence that enveloped them like a shroud.
“Can I look yet?”
“Not yet, love. It won’t be long now.” He reached out, Lina’s arms tight around his neck as he unlatched the gate, desperate not to touch the white, swollen hand that was tied so closely to the latch.
The gate swung open easily. The soft sigh of sorrow that came from the butchered woman Harper put down to his imagination.
The feeling of being watched by baleful eyes from behind that curtain of black hair wasn’t so easy to dismiss as he stepped quickly past the body.
There was no mutilated body at the next gate, only sullen shadows flitting in the shadows. Something called out to them desperately from the darkness, its strange, barking voice sounding urgent and pleading. Harper pretended he hadn’t heard it.
“We must be getting close.” Lina had fallen asleep in his arms and seemed to have doubled in weight.
Imogen stopped to dig a crumpled map out of her pocket. “One more gate to the west.” She pointed to a street which branched off from the one they were on. This far from the majesty of Harrotin City itself the houses were little more than shacks, and litter fluttered through the streets on the soft breeze. This was where the Dispossessed lived: those who had come to Harrotin Station hoping for a better life, for a brighter future unable to find the money or the means to be able to offer the right bribe for passage through one of the fabled twelve Gateways of Harrotin Station.
“She might have had a family, you know.”
Harper blinked. “Who?”
“The woman.” Imogen nodded back the way they had come. “She might have family in the city wondering where she is, wondering why she hasn’t come home. Doesn’t she at least deserve a proper funeral?”
“And what about Lina?” he spat back, trying to keep his voice quiet so he didn’t wake his daughter. “All she has known are wars and misery and disappointments. Are you going to risk her last chance of escaping all that for some stranger who is already dead?”
Imogen sighed, her face pallid under a flickering blue street light. “I’m sorry. I’d forgotten you were the only one to care about our daughter.”
Harper turned away and continued on, Lina’s hair soft against his cheek. As they approached the next gate, more and more figures could be seen shambling through the gloom; dark, shadowy figures, some impossibly tall and some short with many legs and fat, glistening bodies. Harper shivered and wrapped his arms tighter around Lina. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?”
Imogen pointed. “Look.”
A groan of dismay escaped Harper’s lips as he saw the same figure hanging from the gate. Blood leaked from the open belly into the pool of sewage that seeped beneath her feet, and this time the figure raised her head. Her eyes had been gouged away, but she looked directly at Harper, and her swollen lips parted into a grotesque smile.
“Harper, what’s wrong? What is it?”
Harper blinked and looked at Imogen. “Don’t you see?” He pointed at the gate. A gate with no mutilated body hanging from it; only a Nanris standing alone, its black scales glinting in the blinking blue light. “That must be him.” He stumbled through a puddle in his haste to reach the Nanris, the creature’s angular head turning to him at the sound.
“Harper Davey?” The Nanris’ voice was metallic and rasping as it filtered through the Translator wrapped around its neck.
“Yes, yes.” Harper could barely keep the panic from his voice as he struggled one-handed with the clasp on his bag, Lina beginning to stir in his other arm, and he could feel Imogen’s disapproving eyes on him. Finally he retrieved his paper and handed it over to the Nanris.
A thin skin flicked across those black eyes as the Nanris looked briefly at the paper, eyes which soon resumed their long, searching study of Harper. “You understand that one has to wait many of your months before they are able to use one of our Gateways?”
Harper reached again into his bag and produced a thick bundle of notes. Twenty-six thousand credits. He felt a pang in his heart as the black, clawed hand grasped the money. Harper’s entire belongings now consisted of the clothes in his bag.
“Follow me.” The Nanris turned and headed away down a narrow alley with deep puddles and trash cans stacked one on top of the other.
Lina whimpered in his arms and Harper’s words returned unbidden to haunt him: I will take you to a better world, a world with golden beaches and blue seas, words he had said to his daughter the night they had fled from Shelfa Three.
It was said the light of the fabled twelve Gateways of Harrotin Station could be seen from miles above the surface of the planet, though Harper and his family had not seen it, being hidden in a crate in the hold of a ship as they arrived.
As he followed the Nanris through a seemingly endless procession of alleyways and filth-ridden streets, every now and again he could see a golden beam reaching to the Heavens; an-all-too-brief glimpse of the promise of a brighter life waiting for him, so tantalizingly close now.
Something small and black skittered out from a pile of garbage festering in a corner, pattering past Harper’s feet before disappearing into a crumbling wall. Harper shivered and Lina shifted her weight in his arms. Her hair shone in the rain and Harper clutched her tighter to keep her warm. There had been nothing of this on the Holoviewer; no strange black creatures skittering across the floor, no Dispossessed wandering resentfully through the shadows. The Holoviewer had shown only Harrotin City itself, the golden domes, the blue skies, the gleaming spires, and, the one thing which Harper had been unable to shake from his memory: the towering, brilliant, looming Gates, four hundred feet high with silvery, spidery alien language etched along their length. Silvery writing which seemed to move and writhe and breathe even as the Gates pulsed dazzlingly, glistening in a giant circle in the center of Harrotin City.
It was these Gates which the lucky few entered; where after a pause, a brief expression of absolute ecstasy, a golden light, they were gone to a new life. Transported to a new world who knew how many millions or billions of light years away. So many lights in Harrotin City; the whole city seemed to have a golden glow. And yet none could match the brilliant gold, the pure brilliant essence that would spear down from the vertex of that shifting, glimmering monument. When somebody used a Gate, the whole city would know, so brilliant was the flash of golden light that would envelop it. With twelve Gates in operation, the golden flashes became a rhythmic, pulsing beat that Harrotin City had come to live by. So strong that Harper, even hidden under the sloping roof of some hastily erected shack, or under the cover of a ramshackle wall crawling with fat, soft black bodies, even then he could feel the light of the twelve Gates of Harrotin Station—a rhythmic, pulsing movement that his own heart began to beat in tune to so forcefully that he feared the sound of it would wake Lina as she rested her head against his chest.
“Are there always so many wanting to use the Station?” Imogen’s question was directed at the Nanris, its curiously halting steps carrying it easily before them.
The Nanris paused as though surprised to be spoken to, its black skull glinting under the still-pouring rain. “There are many who seek a better life amongst the stars.” It jerked its head vaguely upwards and Harper’s eyes followed, blinking rapidly against the rain drops. The sky was a velveteen black, the stars limpid and bright.
“Katrinamal,” he breathed. He had no idea he had spoken aloud until he noticed the Nanris’ impassive eyes flick curiously to him for a moment before turning away. Katrinamal. This time Harper made sure he only mouthed the word. Katrinamal. A world of golden beaches. A world of blue skies. A world of crystalline blue seas.
As he stood in a black puddle in the middle of a dark alley in an endless procession of dark alleys, Harper Davey realized he had no idea where Katrinamal actually was. He smiled to himself as he picked a star at random amongst the millions of stars above. That is Katrinamal, Harper told himself. He gazed longingly at the hovering golden ball of light, the weight of Lina in his arms, the wet cold seeping into his shoes forgotten as his eyes focused upwards at that glimpse of freedom above.
“What are you doing?” Imogen’s face was pinched, her hair dark and clinging to her face as she looked at him.
Would that face be so pallid and wan, those eyes be so dark and mistrusting on Katrinamal? Harper smiled, though it felt forced. He shifted Lina onto the weight of one hand and reached out with the other, affecting not to notice Imogen lean away from the touch. “I was wondering what life will be like on Katrinamal.”
Imogen didn’t answer; instead she turned to watch another beam of light spearing toward the heavens. Another soul had ascended from Harrotin Station to a new life. She turned back to Harper with eyes as flat and black and impassive as the Nanris’ own. “We need to move on,” she said, splashing past him in pursuit of the Nanris’ cruelly spiked spine.
“Are we there yet, Daddy?” Lina leaned back in his arms to look Harper in the eye, her own eyes still bleary with sleep.
Another burst of light speared into the night sky. Harper nodded to the afterglow which still lit the night sky. “See that, Lina?” She nodded, her dark eyes which so resembled Imogen’s turned away from his.
“That’s where we’re going. That’s the light that’s going to take us to our new world, sweetheart.”
Lina frowned, the rain still spattering against her fair hair. “We’re going up there?” Her eyes followed the path of the beam of light before turning back to Harper. “Will you be going up there with me?”
Harper held her tighter against him. “We have to go up one at a time, babe, but Mummy and Daddy will be right behind you.” Harper thought of his small, frail, wide-eyed daughter standing under that enormous, luminous monument. How would she feel when the light fell upon her face? Would she feel fear? Ecstasy? Confusion?
“Daddy, you’re hurting me.” Lina pushed his arm away, her hand felt soft and cold on his. Soft and cold and white. An image flashed before Harper’s eyes as he let her fall to the floor. A small white hand cruelly tied to a metal gate, black empty eyes staring, unseeing from behind a veil of golden hair. “Are you okay, Daddy?”
“Sure, babe. We better catch up with Mummy.” The street was wider here and the rain had ceased, the sky almost a permanent gold; no sooner had the light of one Traveller faded before the next appeared.
The Nanris had paused beside a derelict shack in a row of derelict shacks, the roof of which was nothing but a sloping, rusting corrugated sheet of metal, the walls a ramshackle pile of sodden cardboard, old newspapers, and mud and splintered wood. The Nanris held back the purple sheet that served as a door. “In here,” it rasped, the thin skin flicking across those ever impassive eyes.
Harper kept his hand on the top of Lina’s head as he guided her slowly into the shack, keeping her away from the Nanris and following closely behind just in time to see Imogen disappearing into a trapdoor in the center of the floor. “Come on.”
Harper breathed deeply, his heart still beating in tune to the rhythm of the Gateways, a slow, steady, pulsing beat. He breathed through his nose, each breath in time with the beat of his heart, with the beating of the Station itself. The rhythm of renewed life. Of hope.
A clawed hand rested on his shoulder. “This will lead you to the Gateway.”
Harper answered Lina’s questioning look with a single nod and they moved on to the ladder which led down into a pit of darkness. Imogen was already lost from view, and, as Harper set his first foot down on the ladder and looked up at Lina he saw wide, wide blue eyes and a trembling lip. For once his heart stopped beating in time with the Gateways as he saw how brave she was trying to be. “Do you want to climb down with Daddy?”
Lina nodded unhappily and Harper leaned backwards, leaving a space between his chest and the ladder for Lina to climb into. The slow pace made the ladder seem impossibly long. Was Imogen really waiting for them below? Or was it the woman from the gate, her blood black and oily, her eyes empty and accusing? Or was it the Dispossessed wanting to know why they waited and suffered in the slums while Harper led his family to the golden promise of a new life?
He started as a cold hand grasped his ankle. Imogen’s dark eyes shone brightly in the dim light of the tunnel. The strange black rock had been cut sheer, the ceiling and the walls set at right angles to each other, cut with the same precision that had created the Gateways so long ago.
The Nanris followed unhurriedly behind, its claws clacking with a hollow ring against each rung. When it reached the bottom, it pointed with a claw of deepest jade the way to go.
Harper looked at his three companions: his disapproving, frustrated wife; the impassive Nanris; his daughter so brave and determined. All of them seemed unaffected by the constant, raging beat that seemed to shake the very walls of the tunnel themselves, seemed to beat against his ribs with enough force to take his breath away.
Imogen fell into step with Harper as they followed the Nanris down the tunnel which was lit by some hidden light as green as the creatures’ claws. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?” Her face looked narrow and tired in the green light.
“Can’t you feel it?” He stroked Lina’s hand with his thumb, his best attempt to reassure her, “can’t you feel the beat of the Gateways? It’s like the whole planet is breathing.” He wanted to say more, but stopped when he saw the Nanris had slowed its pace, looking back at them from a bright bright black eye.
“I feel nothing.” Her voice was flat and lifeless in the tunnel. “Nothing but eagerness to get away from this place.”
Nobody spoke for some long moments. The only sounds were the beating surrounding them and Lina’s loud and stressed breathing. The Nanris seemed about to say something to break the silence, but then jerked around and continued on down the tunnel. Its feet made a hollow, slapping sound on the stone floor.
“Here, love.” He stooped and swept Lina once more into his arms. But it wasn’t for his daughter’s benefit that he held her so close, breathing in the smell of her hair, breathing in the faint hint of rose soap that she had used in her last bath three days before.
“In here.” Everybody knew that the Translator was a device that drained all feeling, all inflection from speech; but Harper couldn’t shake the feeling that the Nanris was not suffering from mistranslation.
The creature had stopped outside a door, its black, scaled hide undulated and rippled in a sickening imitation of the Gateways of Harrotin as it waited for Imogen to pull the door open. She waited for Harper to reach her before she did just that, though what comfort she could derive from him being by her side he had long since failed to understand.
Once she did pull the door open, Harper saw families, perhaps five of them, huddled together in a sparsely-furnished room. Disinterested, blank gazes dolefully regarded them as they waited in the doorway. “The waiting room,” the Nanris informed them redundantly. “You will be called for when your time comes.”
Harper led his little family into the waiting room, Lina still clinging tightly to his hand. The golden light he had noticed spilling out into the tunnel was from the Gateways themselves, the milky, plastic ceiling granting a teasing glimpse of the immense red Gateway.
His footsteps sounded loud in his own ears as he made his way to a stained bench in a corner of the room, but when he glanced apologetically at the other five families, none of them would meet his eyes. A father with his wife and three young children studied his feet, while another brushed at a speck of dust on his pants. In a dark corner, the amber eyes of a skeletal Hashker gazed longingly upwards at that constant stream of gold lighting the night sky. One of the Hashker’s children pointed at them with a bony, many-knuckled finger, but it was quickly pulled back to its parent.
Harper sat on the bench, Lina on his knee and Imogen by his side. He knew the reason for the sullen silence in the room as well as he knew the reason for the pinched lines at the corner of Imogen’s mouth and the dark rings under her eyes.
He kissed Lina’s hair. Lina, who had been born into a time of war and misery. An innocent who deserved none of this.
An image flashed before him, strong enough to take his breath away. A metal gate, bright and glinting in the rain, silver against a sky of deepest black. A child, no older than Lina hanging from the gate, the straps so tight that her hands and feet are the purest white. And she is shivering, the rain is so cold, and the pain.
Had she been a child? Every time he thought of her she seemed to become younger. Harper looked around the room once more, had she come to Harrotin Station to search for a new life? Had her father promised her golden beaches and blue skies? What horror had she been running from, only to find a worse fate beneath the fabled lights of Harrotin Station?
And he knew. He knew that wherever he went, whether he was on Katrinamal watching Lina ride along a beach, whether Imogen was laying in his arms while golden sunlight and the sound of Lina’s laughter drifted through the open window, she would always be there.
“Daddy?” Lina twisted in his arms as he gently passed her to Imogen and rose to his feet.
“I just have to do something, sweetness. I won’t be long.” His heart thundered in sympathy with the flashing lights overhead, and his throat felt thick. “I love you, Lina.” He kissed her on her cheek before raising his eyes to Imogen.
“Now? You’re going now?” Despite the bitterness and anger in her voice, she looked at him openly for the first time he could remember.
“I’ll be as quick as I can. I love you.”
She didn’t answer, though she didn’t pull away as he bent to kiss her cheek. Without another glance he strode to the door before he could change his mind. Lina shouted something as stepped into the tunnel, but the door was already falling closed behind him, snapping shut, his wife and daughter lost from sight in the waiting room of Harrotin Station.
It wasn’t difficult to remember the way they had come. Each step he took along this darkened path he felt resentful eyes upon him. A Risorin called out beseechingly in a foreign voice, its fat, wheezing body looking somehow dry and withered; a Jerout stooped over a bundle lying in the middle of a poorly lit street called out a single word over and over: help.
He sunk his neck deeper into his collar and hurried on.
When he did reach the girl, she was exactly as he had left her. The sky was a somber black, as though mourning her suffering. Approaching her from this side, Harper had to reach out and swing the gate towards him; he winced as the girl moved with the gate, her hair brushing against his chest. He resisted a sudden impulse to brush that hair away so he could see her face. Instead he stepped through the gate and pulled it gently back into place.
He took a single step back to look at the girl. She looked smaller and more slender than he had first thought. Her arms, stretched out as they were, had the scrawniness of adolescence; her knees were scuffed, and her small breasts had only just begun to develop.
Harper gasped aloud, “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” He stepped forward, his hand outstretched to move her hair away from her face.
It didn’t hurt when the needle slid smoothly into the base of his neck, filling his spine with a warm, suffocating glow.
It was only as he saw the black concrete hurtling toward his face, the rain drops and puddles lit with a startling clarity, that he realized he could no longer move. Even as his face landed with a splash on the glistening black floor, he felt nothing.
He was rolled onto his back, his arms and legs splashing uselessly in the shallow puddles. The Nanris stared down at him, its clawed hands already working away at his jacket. Or, it looked like a Nanris; only this one was different from the Nanris which had led them to the waiting room. Where there was the glimmer of cunning in their guide, the Nanris who clawed and stripped at the buttons of Harper’s jacket had wild, staring eyes, and it clicked and screeched and chatted to itself all the time it tore his clothes away.
Harper knew he should be cold and shivering as the creature finished tearing his clothes away, but felt nothing; he tried to plead, but even his tongue was incapable of movement, and the only sound was the softest exhalation of breath.
The Nanris ceased its chitinous chattering, regarding Harper for a long moment from a bright black eye. Harper could only blink black at it, the rain bright against the black sky.
Finally, the Nanris resumed its chatter and dragged Harper by a wrist over to the fence. The straps didn’t hurt, though Harper knew how tightly they must be fastened around his wrists and ankles. Was there some comfort in that? He felt as though there should be, though the reason why lingered agonizingly out of reach.
The Nanris stood before him, and as it continued to chatter its gibberish, something curved and cruel glinted in the golden light of a Traveller ascending to the stars.
Bright, animated eyes held his own as the Nanris cut open his belly. If he strained his eyes, Harper could see his life’s blood spilling over the Nanris’ clawed hand as it worked, his blood so thick and warm that it steamed in the cold air of the night.
Harper’s heart beat in response to the pulse of the light behind him, and his blood gushed all the more quickly onto the hands of the Nanris. It nodded in encouragement, its inane chittering becoming more and more insistent.
Harper suddenly felt weary, so weary, and his chin fell slackly onto his chest. He was vaguely aware of the Nanris concentrating on his arm, but he felt nothing.
And then a bright golden beam of light erupted from a distant Gateway and lit the heavens above in a brilliant, all-consuming gold.
Lina. He remembered. Lina travelling to a distant star called Katrinamal. A world of sunlight and seas and golden sands.
The Nanris’ chittering became louder and louder as it moved to his other arm. It bent closely over its knife, its spine sharp and cruel.
Harper’s head lolled forward. He watched his blood drip thickly from his arms and his belly. The pool at his feet was thick and black.
And then, as his arms, his hands, his heart pulsed and bled onto the floor, he saw. He saw his Imogen, an Imogen whose eyes hadn’t always been so full of bitterness, of condemnation. She was smiling, and her face was turned upwards and bathed in gold. And then she was gone to follow Lina to a new world.
And Harper, the last of his life’s blood spilling onto the floor, smiled one final time, his face bathed in the golden glow of Harrotin Station.