Steel Sky Read Online Free Page B

scent. He unclips his portable monitor from his belt and activates it. The screen flickers to life, still attuned to the camera he was watching last time — the camera he always watches — and he smiles. On the screen, a young man and woman are making love. The woman is lying flat upon a bed, head back and eyes closed, with her long green hair spread out around her like a web, like a halo of fissures in fractured crystal . . . He watches them for a long time, relishing the sickly feeling in his stomach as his excitement curdles and his anger grows, meditating carefully on his father’s advice.
     
    TWO LIFETIMES
    Amarantha Kirton watches Cadell’s backside with approval as he crosses the room to pour her a glass of water. He catches her watching him, and there is a hint of a swagger on his way back. “Now that was something special,” he says as he hands her the cup and slips back into bed.
    Amarantha sips the water and smiles. “You have a high opinion of yourself, don’t you?” she teases.
    “A high opinion of us ,” Cadell says, stretching languidly across the bed, kicking against the sheets that have bunched up at its foot. Like other fashionable young men in the Hypogeum, he shaves the hair above his forehead into a widow’s peak while wearing the rest pulled back in a long ponytail. His face is narrow and handsome, with the untroubled smoothness of youth. He rests his head on Amarantha’s naked stomach.
    She leans back, running her fingers through his hair, and takes a deep breath, enjoying the moment. They have free time ahead of them: two chronons till lights-out, and two lifetimes after that. The future for them is unwritten, limitless, and dizzying in its possibilities. Resting her hand on Cadell’s head, she looks absently at the ceiling. She imagines it peeling away, like a sheet of paper, floating off in the breeze and rising all the way to the Sky, the steel dome roof of the Hypogeum. She sees the Sky crack along its seams and crumble, great chunks of broken metal tumbling and disintegrating into dust. Beyond is the Stone, which according to the tenets of orthodox Geospiritualism extends forever. Amarantha watches as it splits apart, fissures racing through it at the speed of sound until it shatters in a crackle of blinding white energy, revealing . . . what?
    Anything. It could be absolutely anything at all.
    Her attention is drawn back to mundane dimensions by the soft whirring noise of the camera on the ceiling as it refocuses on them. The black hemispheres — each exactly the size of a human eye — are normally silent, but this one has lately developed a personality, as if it were a third person in their lives: an intrusive, dull-witted cousin. Cadell, feeling her body tense, raises his head. She tries to erase the look of anger on her face, but she is too slow.
    “What’s the matter?” he asks.
    “Those things,” she says, gesturing toward the camera. “Watching us every moment of our lives.”
    “Don’t think about it,” he soothes. “You’ll only upset yourself.”
    “I hate them,” she whispers. “I wish we could tear the damn things down.”
    Cadell sits up, pulling the blankets with him and covering their bodies. “They’re just doing their jobs, the same as the rest of us. Besides,” he adds more quietly, “you can’t get anywhere in this world if you make them angry at you.”
    “All right.” She kisses his forehead. “Lay down. I’ll be good.”
    Cadell frowns, not trusting her reassurances but uncertain what else to do. He rests his head on her shoulder and closes his eyes.
    Amarantha knows that Cadell does not understand her anger toward the Scrutators. His confusion is her own fault. She has told him that she once spent time with Second Son, whose family controls the cameras, and she told him that it did not go well, but she never told him, or anyone, just how bad it had been.
    It had happened more than a year before. Amarantha was a beautiful young woman