Upgraded Read Online Free Page A

reassurances, “Nothing down there will harm you, Nissaea-of-the-Slant. I don’t think there’s even much to trip on.”
    Nissaea opened her mouth to protest, then caught Muhad’s almost-smile and realized she was being teased.
    They left for the lode during nighttime. The city’s cycles were signaled along the major thoroughfares by clocklights that changed color from morning pink to noon gold to alluring evening blue. According to a past circle-sister, the color scheme mimicked that of the original planet’s skies, something that reproductions of very old paintings and photographs suggested might have some basis in fact. Every few years one or another of the high circles petitioned to have the colors reprogrammed to match their livery (undercircles didn’t bother with livery), and the rest of the high circles quashed the notion. Nissaea wouldn’t have minded the variety, but she didn’t get a say. Besides, tonight’s dim blue glow was pretty enough.
    The light faded behind them as they entered the mazeways beneath the statue called Embracing Birds. One of Nissaea’s former circle-kin stood guard in the hollows by the gate, collecting the toll. He was a cadaverous man, each rib emphasized by a pitted metal stripe, and his leg was ribbon-thin all the way up to the joint at his hip. A clear covering exposed the organs of his torso, but Nissaea had seen stranger things than a man’s inner workings.
    “You know the toll,” the man said in a voice like stone scraped thin. The toll would be higher now that she was an independent.
    In answer, Nissaea made an abbreviated gesture of respect and pressed her palm twice against his, once for herself and once for Muhad. There was a tiny beep as the transaction went through. She raised her eyebrows at the man, wondering if he would make trouble for her.
    She was lucky, or in any case, not unluckier than she already had been for the last few days. The man shook his head, although the gleam in his eye suggested that he was thinking of reporting her and Muhad. Well, she could deal with that later. She nodded to Muhad, and they slipped into the mazeways together.
    The transition into the mazeways always caused Nissaea’s breath to stutter in her lungs even after all these years. Great whippy tendrils of fiber and hungry iron-jawed mouths grew from the gate’s throat, slick with the dew of anticipated carrion. They were careful to walk precisely down the middle of the passage, so as not to attract the tendrils’ attention.
    After years of being the one handling the navigation, Nissaea was dismayed to discover how rapidly she got lost following Muhad. If she hadn’t known better, she would have suspected that the mazeways had reshuffled themselves like a cheater’s hand of cards, except she’d never known them to do so with such haste. She paid attention to the scissored shadows, the malevolent gleam of fetal sensors, the grit beneath her feet the way she hadn’t since she was a small child clinging to her sister’s hand.
    She couldn’t help wondering if they would run into another corpse, whether one neatly cracked open like the last one, or smashed into stains. It took an effort to make herself breathe evenly instead of hyperventilating. But the only human reek was her own rank sweat. Even Muhad, perhaps because its modifications were more extensive than her own, smelled only of pale salt.
    Between one passage (paint peeling away like butterflies in transition, the occasional white mass that oozed when you didn’t look at it directly) and the next (a blast of acrid vapor from a hole in a pipe, rattling as of librarian lizards realphabetizing their movements), they arrived in a vast pulsing garden of hands. Nissaea had never seen anything like it before. She bet that even the high circles’ harvesters hadn’t seen anything like it in generations, either.
    A braidweave splendor of limbs made up the walls. Even the floor pulsed with rhythmic lights. Nissaea was tempted