Edge of Heaven Read online

  EDGE OF HEAVEN

  RB Kelly

  NewCon Press

  England

  This edition first published in April 2020 by NewCon Press,

  41 Wheatsheaf Road, Alconbury Weston, Cambs, PE28 4LF

  NCP218 (limited edition hardback)

  NCP219 (softback)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ‘Edge of Heaven’ copyright © 2020 by RB Kelly

  Cover Art copyright © 2020 by Ian Whates

  All rights reserved, including the right to produce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  ISBN:

  978-1-912950-43-0 (hardback)

  978-1-912950-44-7 (softback)

  Cover by Ian Whates,

  utilising a photograph by Michael Gaida

  Text edited by Ian Whates

  Book interior layout by Storm Constantine

  For Jesse and Rowan,

  with whom the future is an adventure.

  amnisonaut [am-nis-uh-nawt, -not] noun Any robotic unit with a direct processing link to the datastream. From amnis (Latin: stream), also the name of the first commercially available robots to follow the stream-linked model. See also: a-naut, Semi-autonomous Artificial Aide (S3A abbrev.), spark (derog.)

  – From Oxford English Dictionary (2085 edition)

  29 April 2119

  0.1

  It all started to fall apart on a clear, moonlit night in the Auvergne, in a quiet valley where the trees could still be persuaded to grow.

  Héra walked briskly, burrowed into her jacket against the unseasonable chill. The day had been mild and dry, and the cold had only crept out of the shadows as the sun went down, but you weren’t supposed to go out in the sunlight this late in the season, and she didn’t like the day-suits. They irritated her skin. So it was either walk after dark or stay indoors, and she could do plenty of that at home. She missed the green, at home. She always had.

  It was a pleasant night, despite the whisper of frost in the breeze, and she was enjoying the hike. The moon was high in the sky and the dog, who didn’t get out as much as he should, was mad with excitement, tearing off in a cloud of dust after a piece of bleached bone that she pitched into the middle distance. Sometimes she wondered if it was him she really wanted to see when she made these annual visits to an elderly aunt whose primary attraction, in Héra’s opinion, was her residence on the edge of the Réserve Naturelle, where the trees were sheltered by a permanent UV haze-filter and the water table was stringently protected and, rumour had it, some of the bird life was creeping back.

  The path she had chosen followed an old river bed, dammed somewhere upstream and reduced to a shallow brook in the centre of a wide, arid trough. Trees and scrub bushed over the banks, and ahead of her, reaching dark fingers of jagged stone into the night sky, the ruins of an ancient bridge caught the dog’s barks and bounced them back to her in echoes. He was a mobile shadow in the gloom ahead as he worried around the base of an old circular lock on the embankment, long-emptied and left to crumble. The walls had collapsed under the weight of decades of neglect, cascading stonework onto the dusty river floor. These things fascinated Héra: a window onto a long-forgotten past.

  A light breeze stirred the naked branches as she passed, clattering them together like raindrops on a window. Shadows danced on the moon-bleached earth as wood rustled against wood, and the sound reminded her, suddenly, of rattling bones. Héra stopped, clapping a hand to the back of her neck, and glanced back over her shoulder at the empty path. The riverbed stretched out behind her, melting into darkness, still and quiet and undisturbed, a single set of footprints tracking her passage across the dusty scrub. She didn’t know what had unsettled her, only that something felt suddenly… wrong.

  Unease prickled in her belly. Out here, where the tourists went, the authorities were quietly watchful and airily dismissive, but you still heard stories, even now, about the things that hid in the lonely places.

  ‘Sébastien!’ she called. Her voice sounded uncertain and far too loud in the still air. ‘Here! Come here!’

  The dog’s ears twisted towards her, but it was the only sign that he’d heard. He’d caught a scent, ears pricked and tail high, and followed it to the base of one of the struts, where he’d managed to scramble onto one of the unstable lumps of masonry at the bottom of the rubble pile. Héra picked up her pace.

  ‘Hey!’ she called again as he skipped onto a narrow ledge and almost lost his footing. She broke into a jog. ‘Sébastien! Get down! Now!’

  He circled, tail thumping against an overhang at his flank and releasing a tumbling river of dust and scree that rattled down the slope. A whine and a tentative step forwards, followed by a shuffling retreat. He was stuck. Héra rolled her eyes.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she snapped. ‘All right, I’m coming, I’m coming.’

  The footing was easier close to the bank, where the rubble was bedded in against the earth, and she heaved herself onto an uneven ledge near the bottom, snagging her trousers against the rough lip of the rock, feeling skin tear. Héra muttered a curse as she scrambled to her feet and bent down to see what the stupid dog had made her do. Pale skin peeked through a fresh rip in a pair of trousers that were already well-patched, and she saw, half-hidden beneath the fabric, a crescent-shaped hollow, dotted with pinpricks of red where the blood was starting to flow. The cut was ragged but clean; it felt worse than it looked. She’d live.

  Reassured, she straightened. And then she smelled it.

  A sweet-foul smell, faint but unmistakable. A smell of mould, of decay, of meat left too long in the sun.

  A dead smell.

  A low growl from the dog crept through the shadows above her, and she realised that this was the scent he’d followed.

  Her first instinct was to turn and run. Héra was neither delicate nor superstitious, but there was a lot of evolution behind the urge to get away from something that smelled like that. Her hand rose to cover her mouth as her stomach rolled; her thighs tensed, ready to make the drop to the earth below and tear off in the direction of civilisation. But she caught herself on the edge of balance: no.

  She was a forty-seven-year old woman. She needed to do better than that.

  So she made herself drop to a crouch instead, fall back against the cool stone behind her. She was an adult, a grown woman, a sensible woman. The smell was unmistakable, creeping in around the sleeve of her coat that she’d raised to her face, but death was common in the wilderness. It was what happened to foxes who wandered too far in the midday sun in search of food; birds without water; dogs that clambered up unsteady slabs of masonry after an interesting odour. Tourist calls police over dead rabbit. Héra could just imagine her aunt’s face if that hit the papers. She needed to be sure.

  So she tested her weight against a likely slab of rock, finding her balance against the angle of the stone, inching forward with cautious feet. Trapped on his perch, Sébastien circled and whined and watched her with unhappy eyes.

  ‘Stay,’ she told him, as though he was likely to listen, even as he tensed his back legs for a jump that he reconsidered at the last moment. ‘Sébastien – stay!’

  The lock wall had fallen in on itself at the weakest point, where the old gate used to open out onto the river. Héra shuffled across jagged stone to the lip of the overhang, clinging to the rock face for support. The basin was deeper than she expected, opening up into a sucking blackness that almost unbalanced her as she found her footing and peered in, squinting into the darkness. Uncontained by the walls, the stench seared her nose, and she retched, burying her face in the collar of her coat. It was an effort to keep her eyes open and focused on the gloom while they adjusted. They picked out the glint of moonlight on the detritus of decades, the shadow of ancient machin
ery, great beams of wood rotted to collapse in the uneven shadows cast by the crumbling walls… and a bright flash of white against black that drew her eye downwards against its will, to a hollow beneath the arm of some kind of metal structure set into the centre of the well, where she could just see a figure in a pale shirt curled in on itself beside the ruins of a recent firepit.

  Not a fox, or a bird, nor a daredevil dog, but that was all she could say for sure. Half-hidden by darkness, there was no way to tell if it was male or female, even adult or child. It was only the sense of absolute stillness, the depth and the consistency of the silence, that made her certain that this was the source of the odour.

  Enough. Whoever it was, whatever their story was, now she knew. She knew, and she needed to leave, right this second, and preferably sooner. Maybe the person in the white shirt had someone, somewhere, who was missing them. Maybe tonight’s discovery ended somebody else’s nightmare. She hoped so. It wasn’t as though…

  Something moved.

  Something moved. At the bottom of the pit, where the dead thing was. Where nothing ought to be moving.

  Héra’s paralysed heart skipped painfully back into rhythm, drawing her breath back into her lungs in a ragged gulp, and she tasted death at the back of her throat.

  Nothing moved, she told herself fiercely. She was a grown woman, a sensible woman. She was too old for ghost stories. Nothing moved.

  ‘Hello?’ she called softly, almost a whisper. ‘Hello? Is someone down there?’

  Behind her, the dog let out another growl, soft with menace, and she turned her head to glare at him. ‘Sébastien!’

  He shrank at the tone, flattening himself in submission, but his hackles were up and his eyes were fixed, not on her, but somewhere past her shoulder, in the depths of the ruined lock.

  Behind her.

  She couldn’t look. She had to look. The dog growled again, head low, lips curling over his front teeth. She’d never seen him like this. Héra opened her mouth to snap at him, but terror had stolen her breath and her throat closed around the words. Panic whined in her ears as she made her head turn away from the moon-drenched scree, twisted her gaze back towards the silent shadows. But she had to look.

  ‘Hello?’ she whispered, soft words disintegrating in the sound-vacuum. ‘Hello? Is there someone down there?’

  It came sliding out of the blackness like a nightmare: two piercing eyes and a high, keening growl that sliced through the still air and the last vestiges of her self-control. Héra heard herself make some sort of noise – not words, but not solid enough to be a scream – and her knees buckled, loosening her footing on the ledge. The world refocused, narrowed to a point, and there was only the stench and the liquid darkness and the thing unfolding itself from the shadows, claws scrabbling against the dusty basin, fangs bared around a snakelike, predatory hiss…

  It was a cat. For a second her brain couldn’t process it, and then she started to laugh. It was a cat. It was a fucking wildcat, lips pulled back and snarling a warning through viscera-coated, broken teeth. It was a cat pulled from the vale of horrors, true: skin hanging loosely off its bones, mange poking through the matted fur; muzzle bloody and putrid where it had been buried in rotting flesh, feeding. But it was a cat. It wasn’t a denizen of the underworld, rising like Death out of the black air and reaching for her with bony fingers; it was a starving animal protecting its dinner. And it just wanted Héra to go away.

  She raised a hand in surrender and found it was shaking. The cat keened a warning note, body arched in rage, and Héra leaned back a little in her foothold, peering down the slope in search of a path.

  ‘I’m going, I’m going,’ she said unsteadily. Nervous laughter churned her stomach. ‘Yes, all right, I’m going.’

  But the cat’s warning wasn’t directed at her. Half a second too late she noticed, in time to snap, ‘Sébastien! No, stay! Stay!’ But he couldn’t hear her. It wasn’t his fault, he just knew his place in the universe, and part of it was to give cats a hard time. He was a big dog, his back legs were strong, and it was a good leap. It wasn’t quite enough to clear the gap that separated them, but it was enough to unbalance her as he glanced off her foothold and tumbled down the slope in a torrent of shale and protest. For a second Héra hung, suspended in the air, hands scrabbling at nothing. And then she fell, pitching backwards, and she knew even as the sky moved above her that there was nothing she could do to stop it, that there was nothing to cling to, nothing to catch her or to soften her impact. She landed heavily on her back and for a moment the air was knocked out of her and all she could do was lie, helplessly, prostrated on damp earth that was thick with putrefying fluids. As the breath rushed back into her lungs, her mouth filled with stench and she gagged, rolling instinctively onto her side on aching ribs. The cat aimed a furious swipe at her cheek and disappeared into the shadows, and Héra was face to face with a week-old corpse, bloated skin mottled purple, bulging eyes staring blankly into hers.

  The dark walls pillowed her screams and sucked them into blackness.

  1 May 2119

  1.1

  Dawn in a bilevel city was not the kind of breathless wash of amber and coral that might send a poet spiralling into fits of literary greatness, even if Creo were the sort of place that had poets. On a good day, from the suburbs of the upper city, it might be a watery yellow smear across the haze where the horizon ought to be. The lower city, shrouded from the sky by a thick blanket of aluminoconcrete and a honeycomb network of supporting walls, was where the sun never shone at all.

  Creo, as its residents would cheerfully agree, was a shitty place to live. Creo Haute was bad enough, with its permanent veil of smog and its disturbing tendency towards unpredictable pockets of subsidence that were liable to open up a road-swallowing crater in a vigorous rainstorm. The city was sixty years old, which was twice as old as it was ever supposed to be, and it was showing its age, in the manner of a functional human settlement that was built on top of another functional human settlement, with a four-thousand-foot gap between the foundations and the desert floor. Fissures and sub-surface collapse closed off a block or two every few months, and some of the older buildings were so structurally unsound that you wouldn’t want to sneeze on the same street, let alone try and set up home. There was barely room up top for the people who lived there by the time the city fathers closed the doors to immigration, almost two decades ago. These days, when the transports arrived, new citizens found themselves ushered perfunctorily into Creo Basse, where the roof might be getting closer but the ground at least was solid.

  For most of them, when the great northwestern gates closed behind them, it was the last time they saw the sky.

  As the sun crept softly across the dusty scrubland of central France, a billion tiny sensors buried in the heavy aluminoconcrete skin flipped the city’s circadian routines to day, and the dawn cycles kicked in across the dark streets. Scattered across the districts, peppered along the district walls, chasing the shadows up towards the high city roof, the light-bands that striped the paintwork of the upper storeys began the slow rumble up the colour wheel from syrupy blue-black to sunrise coppers, and daylight broke quietly across the sunless city. It crept over the street stalls of downtown Delphi, the seventh district, huddled in tight against the southeastern perimeter wall, and over the constant wash of freight trains through The Wharf in district eight. It climbed the high towers of Victoria’s financial sector and the casinos of South District and Parnasse. It made its way lazily across the mobile city streets, across the permanent tide of human traffic that ebbed and flowed and never quite dried up – heads turned up into the holoscreen pergola that flashed a kaleidoscope of news and commerce above every thoroughfare, heads turned down towards the streets because you never quite knew what might be lying abandoned on the sidewalks of the lower city. It glanced off the teeming rain of Dog Island, poured through the south west wall of the twentieth district into Mère de Martyrs, where a scattering of burnt-out cars testified
to an interesting evening’s entertainment. It flowed north along smoke-dusted streets, through a set of aged gates that reached up past the light-bands and into the darkness, and into the nineteenth district, which was known to the locals, somewhat Byronically, as Limbe do Cielo. The edge of heaven.

  Limbe do Cielo was not the worst place in the world to live. Granted, an objective observer might suggest that it would be possible to number the worse places using the fingers of one hand; two, if they were feeling generous. Some of those places were also in Creo. A charitable assessment might call it ‘colourful,’ and it would be difficult to tell, from context, whether that was colourful like an explosion or a bloodbath is colourful, or colourful like a chimeric cultural melting-pot. Certainly, it was possible to walk the streets of Limbe and hear a different language every time you turned a corner. It was the sort of place where casual insults were traded as terms of endearment, where outsiders were met with a black wall of hostility and resentment, and insiders wore their belonging with the kind of pride that could start a war.

  And it was raining. It was raining with the sort of slow, focused concentration that spoke of a backed-up precipitation cycle that had threatened to empty for days: the kind of determined, persistent vertical wall of water that soaks through coat and clothes and skin and settles into the bones. It was raining hard. And it was currently falling on Danae Grant, who was glaring up at the ceiling as though sheer force of hatred could stop a downpour.

  ‘Crap,’ she hissed. ‘Crappy crappy shitty crap.’

  Creo Basse was an all-weather operation, and its rush hour was pretty much all of the time. Danae, folding herself into a point, made her way out of the back streets and onto the main thoroughfare, burrowing through a heaving wall of humanity, elbowing where possible, and cursing as appropriate. Through the tumbling wall of water, colours streamed in every shade of the gaseous spectrum. She passed by the sixteen-storey sex shops, the virulent yellows and pinks of the street barrows punting everything from fried tomatoes to contact lenses, the holo-pane advertising boards that bisected the street and scattered like a mirage as she worried her way through them. Through it all, the light-bands, perched high on the walls and pretending to be sunshine, continued their battle against pigment, sucking the subtleties of hue and tone from the air and washing the streets with a uniform greenish-yellow glow.