Artemis turned his attention to the city suburbs bouncing past his window. The desert highway was suddenly thick with traffic as they neared the city center. Giant trucks thundered past, tires taller than a grown man, their flatbeds stuffed with sullen human cargo. Harried donkey hooves clicked on the broken asphalt, their backs piled high with sticks, laundry, or even furniture. Thousands of dusty mopeds slalomed through the lanes, often bearing entire families on their rusting frames. The roadside buildings shimmered in the late-afternoon sun like mirages. Ghost houses with tea-drinking specters seated out at the front.
Closer to the town center the buildings were denser with no tracts of desert in between. Dwellings were interspersed with garages and video stores, tea shops and pizza parlors. All were the same sandblasted orange color, with patches of original paint poking through below the lintels.
Artemis felt, as he always did when visiting developing nations, mild surprise at the coexistence of ancient and modern. Goat herders toted iPods on spangled chains and wore Manchester United shirts. Shacks had satellite dishes bolted to their corrugated roofs.
Until recent times, Fez had been a place of real importance, being the depot for the caravan trade from the south and east. It was known as a center of Arab wisdom, a holy city, and a place of pilgrimage when the route to Mecca was closed by weather conditions or overrun with bandits.
Now it had become a place where outlawed Extinctionists did deals with desperate Irish criminals.
The world is changing more rapidly now than it ever has before, thought Artemis. And I am helping to change it for the worse.
Not a comforting thought, but comfort was not a luxury he expected to enjoy in the near future.
Artemis’s cell phone buzzed as an incoming text message arrived, having made its way from Fez to Ireland and back to Morocco.
He checked the screen, and a mirthless smile exposed his incisors.
The leather souk. Two hours, read the message.
Kronski wished to make the exchange in a public place.
Apparently the doctor trusts me about as much as I trust him.
Smart man.
Holly piloted the shuttle as though she were angry with it, slamming the mining craft around bends until its air brakes screamed and its readout needles shot into the red. She wore a flight helmet hardwired directly into the shuttle’s cameras, so a wraparound view of the shuttle was available to her at all times; she could even choose a remote view beamed to the shuttle from the tunnel’s various cameras. This particular stretch of tunnel saw little traffic, and so the motion-sensitive lights would pop on barely ten yards before the shuttle entered a stretch.
Holly tried hard to enjoy the experience of flying and forget everything else. Being a pilot for the LEP was what she had dreamed of since childhood. As she cut yet another corner with inches to spare, and she felt the shuttle strain to its limits in her hands, the tension drained from her body as though absorbed by the craft.
Artemis lied to me and blackmailed me, but he did it for his mother. A good reason. Who’s to say that Iwould not have done the same thing myself? If I could have saved my mother, I would have done whatever I needed to do, including manipulate my friends.
She could understand what Artemis had done—even though she felt it was unnecessary—but that did not mean she could forgive him just yet.
And how could she forget it? It felt as though she had completely misjudged their friendship.
That won’t happen again.
One thing that Holly was certain of—the most she and Artemis could ever have now was what they had always had: grudging respect.
Holly patched into the passenger-seat bubble-cam on the shuttle ceiling and was gratified to see Artemis clutching the armrests on his seat. Perhaps it was the camera feed, perhaps his face was actually green.
You blew it, Mud Boy, thought Holly, and then: I hope it’s your face and not the feed.
There was a natural vent in the Moroccan desert south of Agadir, where tunnel gas filtered up through a foot of sand. The only evidence of this was a slight coloration of the sand above the vent, which was quickly dispersed by the winds as soon as the sand reached the surface. Nevertheless, a thousand years of the process had left the dunes with curious red streaks, which the local villagers swore was blood from the victims of Raisuli, a famous twentieth-century bandit. It was highly unlikely that anyone swallowed these claims, least of all the villagers themselves, but it made good reading in the guidebooks and drew visitors to the otherwise unremarkable area.
Holly drilled the craft through the vent, sealing the shuttle’s own air filters against the tiny sand particles. She was flying virtually blind with only a three-dimensional model of the vent to navigate by. Luckily it was a short leg of the trip and it took mere seconds for the shuttle to punch through to the African sky. In spite of the craft’s insulated skin, its passengers soon began to feel the heat. Especially Mulch Diggums. Unlike the other fairy families, dwarfs were not surface creatures and did not dream of golden sun on their upturned faces. Anything higher than sea level gave them vertigo.
Mulch burped wetly. “This is too high. I don’t like this. Hot, too darned hot. I need to go to the bathroom. For what, I’m not sure exactly. Just don’t follow me in there. Whatever you hear, don’t come in.”