She dropped almost a foot to the ground, landing hard. This time the wall was to her left. She stood on a broad sidewalk. Turning, she saw buildings opposite in a variety of unfamiliar styles. It was dizzyingly, achingly close to familiar: street markings that were somehow wrong, signposts bearing old-fashioned traffic directions but in a style nothing like the road signs she had grown up seeing. It was dark, the street lighting dim and the walls stained black with old soot. Half the storefronts were shuttered with metal grilles. The brick and stone of the buildings gave them a curious air of permanence, and they hunched close together. “Okay, I’m round the back of the downtown station,” she whispered into the tiny mike in her lapel. She pulled out the inertial mapper and tapped a waypoint. “Let’s see if I can find the front.”
The station was, in some ways, comfortingly familiar: neoclassical in style, with the same stone columns and arches as many another nineteenth-century railway station. The surrounding buildings were less reassuring, though. There were few people about, although she spotted a man pushing a wheelbarrow slowly along a sidewalk, using long-handled tongs to pick detritus from the pavement. Mouselike, she scurried past behind his back. In front of the station there was a wide-open traffic circle, with many roads radiating away from it, like pictures she’d seen of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. A huge plinth dominated the island in the middle, supporting a statue of a man on a horse. The color of the streetlights was somehow wrong, too orange for her eyes. They flickered slightly, and as she watched, one of them dimmed abruptly to a sullen neon red, then faded to dark.
There were one or two pedestrians out, bundled in long coats against the morning chill. Rita walked up to the front of the station and found metal gates drawn shut. A rattle of chains drew her eyes toward a uniformed man in an odd-shaped hat, the brim pinned up on either side. He was unfastening the gate at the far end, fumbling with a padlock. “Opening time,” she said quietly. “They’re just opening the public entrance now.” She checked her wrist. “Zero six zero nine. Hmm. They’re not early risers in the city.”
She turned and looked across the circle. Picking a street at random—three lanes wide in either direction, with broad sidewalks and four-to six-story buildings on either side—she jaywalked across as fast as she could go without running. On the other side she found herself looking into the darkened windows of storefronts. For some reason they didn’t seem to go in for big expanses of plate glass: the windows consisted of panes a couple of feet wide set in wooden or metal frames. Some things were constants, though. Proprietors’ names were proudly emblazoned across doorways and on signboards hanging in front. Headless dressmakers’ dummies swathed in odd-looking outfits loomed in the twilight. “Downtown shopping district, I think,” she whispered.
Rita heard the unmistakable sound of a truck in the distance and spooked. The recessed vestibule of a shop offered her cover, gilt lettering on the door proclaiming it to be Barrow’s Millinery. She stepped backward. The engine note was growing louder rapidly. Then the truck turned the corner. All she caught was a confused glimpse of a long hood and dark windows behind bright headlights. It pulled over on the far—left—side of the street. Doors opened, male voices called. Several men got out. Doors slammed, and the truck began to move again. She heard boots on the sidewalk, the men talking conversationally as they walked along the far side of the road.
Rita turned her face toward the shop’s interior. Let’s try and look as if I belong here, she decided. They’re probably just clerks arriving to open up shop …
Something metal-cold shoved up hard against the back of her neck. “Dinna move,” said the man behind her. His throat was hoarse, his voice deep. “I said, dinna move, woman. Dinna speak. Dinna even breathe.”
Rita froze from the belly out. She’d been so focused on the carload on the far side of the street that she’d never even heard his approach. Her left arm hung uselessly by her side. Her head-up display could flash a trigger engram if she asked, but the finger wrapped around the trigger of the gun at her head would be faster.
“When I stop talkin’ I want you to slowly turn an’ face the wall. Hands up and brace yerself, lean in. Then go ter yer knees.
“I am placing thee under arrest by authority of the Commonwealth Guard…”
Contact
IRONGATE, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
“I am placing thee under arrest by authority of the Commonwealth Guard. Slowly turn—now.”
Rita did as she was told: turned, raised her hands, braced against the wall in front of her. Please let him take the gun away, she prayed. Her lifelogger was keyed to a single word: bugout. All she needed was a second—
“I said, raise your hands and lean in! Do it now! Kneel!”
Shit. Rita slowly lowered herself to her knees.
“Over here!” her captor shouted, deafening in the confined space. The cold gun barrel at the back of her head wobbled slightly but didn’t withdraw. A handcuff locked around her left wrist. “Wrists together!” The gun barrel ground painfully into her hair. The other cuff closed. The one on the left covered the e-ink tattoo. Her initial terror was subsiding into an adrenaline spike and a sense of gnawing apprehension. They’re cops. They were obviously on some kind of sweep. What happens next? She had a feeling that jaunting was going to be easier said than done.
The gun muzzle withdrew, but before she could react someone yanked a canvas sack down over her head. Panicking anew, Rita tensed and reared up. They kicked her in the ribs, slamming her face into the wall. For a while she lost track of everything but the pain in her face and the difficulty of breathing.
Shattered fragments of memory captured unpleasant sensations. Being lifted and slung, hard, into the back of a vehicle. Motion, bouncing, and alarm bells ringing insistently above and behind her. Being lifted again and dragged through doorways and along corridors. The sack coming off her head in time for the final drop, facedown, onto a fetid, lumpy mattress that smelled of piss and terror.
By the time the cell door opened again, Rita had regained a tiny measure of control. Her head was sore, her ribs ached badly, and she felt nauseous: but she could think and assess her situation. They’d left her bound hand and foot. With the key generator behind her back, she couldn’t jaunt. She was alone in a graffitied jail cell, the walls white and covered in tiles. The only furniture was the filthy mattress she lay on. The door looked to be made of sturdy wood bound in riveted strips of iron. A spy hole completed the dismal ensemble.
I’m fucked, Rita realized. For the short term, anyway. But they’d have to take the manacles off sooner or later, wouldn’t they? And when they did, she’d be ready.