Railhead Read Online Free Page A

corner of his field of vision when he was finished. He blinked on the “Audio Only” tag. The “connecting” icon flashed for ages.
    At last Flex’s voice said, “Hey?”
    “It’s Myka’s brother,” said Zen, afraid to say his name in case anyone was watching for him on Cleave’s communication nets. “I need help.”
    “What sort of help?”
    “I need to get on a train, but I can’t go through the station.”
    “Okay.” Flex didn’t seem to need any explanation. “Meet me here.”
    Coordinates pinged into Zen’s headset. Battery Bridge. He thanked her, took off the headset, dropped it down a storm drain as he hurried on.
    *
----
    All the way to the bridge he kept wondering if the drone had intercepted his messages, but Flex was the only person waiting for him when he got there. A short, stocky figure, rain hat shining like a wet toadstool. Under the hat was another, with trailing earflaps, and under that a kludged-together headset with a big viewing lens that hid Flex’s right eye.
    Zen had never really been sure if Flex was a boy or a girl, but he mostly chose to think of her as “her.” Her plain brown face and shapeless clothes gave no clues, but there was a gruff gentleness about her that reminded him of Myka. She lived rough somewhere in the Stacks, but sometimes the factories called her in to paint their vehicles and the murals over their gates. That was how Myka had met her.
    The rest of the time, Flex was a tagger, one of those feral artists who liked sneaking into the rail yards to paint their designs on waiting freight containers, passenger carriages, even on the locos themselves. The trains’ maintenance spiders would usually clean the graffiti off before the paint was dry, but if the work was good enough, some locos let it stay, and wore it with pride as they went on their way through the K-gates. Flex’s stuff was more than good enough. Zen didn’t know much about art, but when he looked at the things Flex painted he could tell that she loved the trains. She never rode the K-bahn herself, but her quick, bright paintings did. Her leaping animals and strange dancing figures were seen by people in all the stations of the Network, mobile murals traveling the galaxy on the flanks of the grateful trains.
    More importantly for Zen, the long game of cat and mouse she’d played with the trackside security systems meant that she knew of ways to get to the trains that didn’t involve passing through the station.
    “Where are you going?” she asked.
    “Anywhere,” Zen said. “Away.”
    Flex grunted. “Myka always said you’d end up in bad trouble.”
    “I live for trouble,” said Zen. “Anyway, you paint trains. Does Myka ever lecture you about that?”
    “That’s different. And I’m not her little brother.”
    “Will you help me?” Zen asked.
    Flex nodded. “ ’Course. Myka saved my life once. I owe her.”
    They climbed a stepped alleyway that led up beside the plummeting foam of a waterfall. The rumble of passing freight trains came down at them from above. Zen wondered what his sister had done to save Flex’s life, and why she’d never men-tioned it. But the industrial districts were dangerous, everyone knew that. People were probably saving each other’s lives down there all the time…
    Halfway up the staircase, Flex stopped. She must have sent a signal from her headset, because a rusty hatch cover slid open in the alley wall. She ushered Zen through it and came after him, switching on a flashlight as the hatch slid shut behind them.
    “Used to be a power station round here,” she said. “It served some old rail line that got closed down. This is one of the access passages. It comes out in the freight yards behind Cleave Station.”
    It was only a short way, but the passage was narrow and airless. Dark side-passages opened off it, full of the fury of the cascade being squeezed through the sluiceways under the K-bahn. At its end, rungs stuck out of the wall of a vertical