Read Undercity for Free Online Page A

quirks. The stylus created a sphere of light around me, pushing back the gloom. Nothing, however, could push back the shadows this place had left in my memories. I shook my head, turning away those thoughts. I didn’t want to remember.
    My route ran along a wall of the canal. The path, what we called a midwalk, was a ledge set about midway from the floor to the canal roof. The dropoff from here to the bottom of the canal was deeper than most, maybe four meters. This was one of the largest aqueducts; the distance to the midwalk on its other side was about eight meters. Dust crusted the path and piled up in the canal below, a distinctive powder unlike anything I had seen anywhere else.
    Red and blue dust.
    How had Dayj ended up with a box filled with grit from these aqueducts? I couldn’t imagine him just walking out of the palace, yet he had apparently done exactly that three days ago without leaving a trace.
    I was only two levels down from the surface, close enough that Cries had put in a few lampposts to light this area. One glowed a ways up the path, both here and on the midwalk across the canal. A trio of musicians had gathered on the other side. Two were singing, harmonizing in minor tones, and the third played a bone-reed pipe, its notes drifting through air. Their haunting song echoed in the open spaces like an ancient chant. A fourth youth was working in the canal below them, tagging their territory with a dust sculpture fashioned into a flying lizard, its wings spread wide, dark red but veined by blue streaks.
    Up ahead on my side, a dust gang lounged on the midwalk, two girls and two boys in their teens, leanly muscular, dressed in leather and dark muscle shirts, with knives in sheaths on their belts. Two of them gripped broken metal bars. They all had a hieroglyph tooled into their wrist guards, the symbol for “Oey.” The taller girl stood at the front of the group. A cyber-rider stood with her, the silvery tracings of conduits on his arm forming the Oey glyph. They watched me with cold stares, ready to repel my intrusion from their world. No strangers allowed.
    Without thinking, I jerked my chin. The motion was instinctual, an acknowledgment that this was their territory. I didn’t even realize I had done it until I finished. Their reaction was almost invisible, just the barest relaxing of their posture. I didn’t touch my gun. I could draw it faster than any of them could move, but I had no desire to shoot anyone. They watched as I walked by them, no one speaking, their gazes cold—but they let me pass.
    Like knew like.
    I had been born in the ruins beneath a dead sea. We were a sparse population in the undercity. Cyber-riders manipulated tech-mech and the Cries meshes from the shadows. Punkers ran drugs for the cartels, either the Kajadas or Vakaars, the wealthiest undercity bosses. Dust gangs learned to fight, as I had done in my youth. We had trained rigorously to perfect our skills, not only to protect those within our circle of people, but also for fun. Gangs ran in packs of four, usually two girls and two boys. Our fights with other gangs were often a challenge more than a threat. If we were lucky, we grew up. Adults bartered for jobs in the shadowy undercity culture, where the economy worked on trades rather than Imperial credits. They started families, set up ventures to support their circle, or became artisans or tech-mech wizards. Some graduated to hardcore crime.
    Almost no one left the aqueducts. The above-city, the City of Cries, considered us a slum. They had no idea of the depth in our culture. We wanted it that way. We didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother us. Ironically, when I enlisted in the army, the intense training of the dust gangs and our code of loyalty served me well, helping me survive and eventually even thrive in a military culture where at first no had believed I would last even a season.
    What had happened to my parents? My mother died giving me birth and I had never