Earthbound (The Reach, Book 1) Read Free

street.  “No.  I’ll manage.”
    “You sure?  Things have changed around here.  I can arrange something for a small fee–”
    “I said no.”
    “Sure, sure,” Fallon said.  “Whatever you like.  But there’s one other thing.”
    Knile stopped and turned again, boots scuffing quietly on the road.  “What now?”
    “Well, there’s a short fuse on this thing,” Fallon said, almost embarrassed.  “Took a while for them to get word to me, then a while for me to get word to you…”
    “Spit it out.”
    “You’ve gotta be at the Stormgates in forty-eight hours.”  He reached down and checked the holophone again.  “Uh, make that forty-six hours, twenty minutes.  If you’re not, your ride’s gone.  Those passkeys are non-refundable and you won’t get another chance–”
    “I know how it works,” Knile said curtly.  “Anything else?”
    Fallon shrugged.  “Maybe a tip?”
    In answer, Knile swivelled and began to walk away.
    “How about a thank you?” Fallon called af ter him.  “A nod of gratitude?”
    Knile waited in the shadows as the door closed.  He heard Fallon engage the locks again, and as the man’s footsteps receded back inside the apartment Knile began to creep along the nearest wall.  With the clock running, he’d need to find a way of getting deeper within the city as soon as possible.
    There was no time to rest.  He had a lot to do in a short amount of time.
    Forgoing stealth for a moment, Knile stepped out from under the eaves and into the middle of the street, looking out across the expanse of the city ahead.  Soaring into the night sky and dwarfing everything around it, a great edifice of curved black steel rose up like a mountain in the distance, stretching kilometres upward into the heavens.  Dotted by a thousand pinpricks of light, it was so vast that it seemed to cast a shadow across the city even in the dark of evening. 
    A thing to evoke both awe and trepidation, it filled Knile with conflicting emotions.  Not only was it his hope and his salvation, but it was the refuge of his darkest memories as well.
    It was the last place he had seen Mianda alive.
    The last way off this dying world.
    They called it the Reach.
     

 
    2
    The outer edges of the city, the area collectively known as the slums, were not unfamiliar to Knile.  Before escaping to the lowlands he’d spent many years living here, scratching out a lowly existence as he dreamed of something more.  Within these streets he’d made a lot of allies, as well as a lot of e nemies, but he doubted there were many of those left on either side.  The slums churned through people fast – inhabitants either died of starvation or from exposure to toxins, were murdered for their possessions, or somehow got past the wall that led to the inner city of Link.  There were only the odd few, like Fallon, who carved out an existence here on a more permanent basis.
    Knile stood for a moment in the street, staring up at the sky.  The Reach was like a giant magnet, he thought, thrusting out from the earth, cold and hard and uncaring.  Dragged toward it from all directions were the detritus of humanity, the few people that still inhabited the planet bunching up against its walls like flotsam from a far- distant tide.  The Reach stood like a beacon of hope, a seductive and mesmerising vision that made promises of freedom to all those who would look upon it.
    For all but a few, those promises were left unfulfilled.
    As Knile watched, a searchlight swept out from the Reach and waved back and forth, falling upon the luminous outline of a dirigible that hung in the sky like a pale, bloated tick.  It lingered there for a few moments before winking out again, and the dirigible was once more lost against the black sky.
    “Idiots,” Knile muttered, shaking his head.
    There was another explosion in the distance, and with that he decided to get moving.  There was no law out here, no sanctuary, and the gangs that had formed