The road was not perfect, bumpy for the majority of it.
Every imperfection in the backstreet surface communicated itself upward through the chassis and into the seats with the fidelity of something that had never considered suspension a priority. The engine maintained a low, continuous complaint that had stopped being noticeable somewhere around hour three of the first day and had since become simply part of the air, indistinguishable from the general texture of moving forward at forty kilometres an hour through districts that had not been designed with through-traffic in mind.
One hour down. Two more to the next stop.
Two days of this behind them. An indeterminate number ahead.
The bus was not full. It rarely was on the inter-district backstreet lines, which served the category of person who needed to travel significant distances and could not afford the alternatives and had made their peace with the arithmetic of that situation. A few other passengers occupied seats toward the front a man with a large wrapped package across his knees who had not moved since they boarded, two women speaking in low voices three rows ahead, a child asleep across an entire seat with the boneless commitment only children and cats achieved.
At the back row, Kamina was asleep.
He slept completely, without reservation, his head tipped back against the seat and his arms crossed over his chest and his legs extended into the aisle that any passing passenger would need to step over, which no one had yet attempted and which Kamina remained serenely unaware of. His sunglasses had migrated slightly.
Beside him, Imogen had curled into the window seat with her knees drawn up and her head against the glass, her white hair with its red tips fanned against the surface. The rifle case was propped against the seat in front of her, upright, leaning at the angle that she can access it at any moment.
Shmuel was awake.
He had been awake for the full hour and expected to remain so. Sleep on moving vehicles was something he had never been particularly good at, and the bus's particular variety of motion, the lurch at uneven surfaces, the occasional shudder when the engine got inclined, kept pulling him back every time he got close. He had stopped trying forty minutes ago and had been sitting with his thoughts since, which was its own kind of rest if you did it right.
The window beside his seat showed the backstreet passing at its steady forty kilometres an hour. The buildings here were lower than in District 12's core, more space between them, the architecture less dense and more provisional, structures that had been put up quickly and maintained at the minimum necessary to keep them standing. Occasional gaps where something had come down and not been replaced. Stretches of wall painted over so many times the surface had developed a texture of its own.
He looked at his hands.
Both of them resting on his knees, the mechanical joints catching the midday light that came through the window at a low angle. Twelve PM. The sun was directly overhead and the light came through in long flat strips rather than the usual diffuse grey the districts usually offered.
He lifted his left arm and held it up beside his head.
The bullet chambers were in the palm housing. Two per hand. Four total. Small, specialised charges that fed into the acceleration mechanism when triggered, converting the kinetic output of a punch into something that belonged in a different weight class entirely. He had spent most of the journey being extremely careful about those four bullets.
He clicked the trigger mechanism on his left hand.
The sound was small and clean and empty. The chamber cycled through and found nothing, because there was nothing to find. He had not loaded either hand for this journey. The bullets were wrapped separately in the bottom of his bag, packed with some level of care who understood that carrying active charges on a public bus through several districts was the kind of decision that created paperwork.
But that wasn't entirely why.
He clicked it again. The empty cycling sound came back, uninflected.
He thought about the Docent. About the difference between what his hands had been able to do with bullets and what they had been able to do without. The gap was significant and honest and he had no illusions about it. He had used the bullets in the moments when the gap between what he could do and what the situation required was too wide to cross any other way, and each time the gap had been real and the crossing had been necessary.
But Kamina had called him Bro.
Shmuel lowered his left arm back to his knee.
The ideal Bro that Kamina thought he was.
He was not that yet. He knew the distance between what he currently was and what that description implied, and the distance was not something four bullets could close. What Kamina was pointing at when he used that word was something that had to be built from the inside out, and he had been thinking about what that building looked like and what it required, and it required him to be stronger in the places where the bullets currently compensated for him.
So the chambers were empty.
He would not load them again until he thought he had earned them.
He clicked the mechanism one more time. The empty sound. Then he lowered his arm and opened his bag.
The burgers were wrapped in the white paper the vendor at the previous stop had used, a small operation near the district boundary, a counter with a griddle and a man making food for transit passengers for a living and had no interest in conversation. He had wrapped each burger with somewhat careful hands. They had held together well despite two hours in the bag.
Shmuel looked at the two sleeping people at the back of the bus.
He reached over and touched Imogen's shoulder and shook her a little.
She stirred. Blinking at the window and then at him and then at the bus interior reassembling the context of her surroundings.
"Mm." She straightened slightly, pulling her knees down from the seat. "Are we there yet?"
"Two more hours to the stop. I have the food."
She blinked at the wrapped parcels he was holding out with his right hand. Then she sat up properly, pushing her hair back from her face.
"Can't you just…" she started, then stopped, then looked at him with the expression of someone who already knew the answer to the question she was about to ask but was going to ask it anyway because she found the answer unreasonable. "Why are we on this bus?"
"Because it's the route between District 12 and…"
"Why are we on this bus. Specifically. When W Corp's WARP trains exist." She gestured at the window, at the slow-moving backstreet outside it. "Ten seconds. You step on, you step off, you're there. The entire journey in the time it takes to blink."
"The economy class ticket costs…"
"I have money."
"We've talked about this."
"We've talked about it and you've been wrong about it every time." She accepted the burger from his hand but pointed it at him immediately, which seemed to be becoming a communicative habit. "I have the money. It's not a burden. It doesn't affect me. You are making both of you ride a bus for two weeks because you have decided, without consulting anyone's actual financial situation, that it's more principled to arrive at our commission exhausted and stiff…"
"We've talked about this," Shmuel said again, with the patient repetition of someone who had made a decision and was not revisiting it regardless of how many times the argument was reintroduced.
Imogen looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone who was registering an objection for the record.
Then she unwrapped her burger and ate.
The bus moved. Outside, the backstreet continued in its particular way.
They ate in companionable silence for a few seconds.
Shmuel looked at her halfway through his burger.
"Why the blue dress," he said.
Imogen looked down at herself. The dress was pale blue, the fabric light enough for the weather, which was cooperative, the sun through the window was warm in a genuine way rather than the conditional warmth of light filtered through too many layers of smog. She had no coat. The rifle case leaned against the seat in front of her as it had since boarding.
"It's a nice dress," she said.
"You were wearing black yesterday. At the hotel."
"I was."
"You're on a commission. We're travelling through several districts. You're carrying what appears to be only a rifle case." He looked at the case. "How many changes of clothes are in there?"
Imogen looked at her burger. Then she ate the rest of it faster, rushing it in a few more bites, because she needed both hands free for the next part of the conversation. She chewed, swallowed, folded the wrapper, and set it on the seat beside her.
Then she picked up the rifle case and set it on the floor of the bus.
She unlatched the clasps.
It opened.
The interior was black. Not the black of foam padding cut to fit a weapon, It's just black, depth without definition, the kind of dark that didn't resolve into a bottom no matter how long you looked at it. Like looking into a white room with no walls.
Shmuel looked at it.
Imogen reached her hand in.
She brought out a handful of small wrapped candies, individually twisted at both ends, the kind sold from street carts in assorted flavours. She held them out in her palm with the mildly triumphant expression of someone presenting evidence.
"I bought these at the last stop," she said. "Very cheap."
Shmuel looked at the candies. Then at the case. Then at Imogen.
"Very cheap," he said.
"Very cheap," she confirmed.
Shmuel thought about what he knew about space-expansion technology. About the cost of having it installed in a personal case. About the engineering required to make the interior depth functionally unlimited while keeping the external dimensions manageable. About the fact that the candy she was describing as very cheap had been purchased from a backstreet vendor, and that the average price of a backstreet candy from the carts near the district boundary stop was roughly three hundred Ahn per unit.
He thought about what three hundred Ahn meant to the average person. To a middle-income family. To someone with a comfortable nest salary putting money away carefully across a full year.
He looked at the handful of candies she was holding, counted them, did the arithmetic, and set the result aside because the alternative was having a conversation about money that he had already had versions of multiple times and that neither of them found productive.
"The Devyat Association fixers have something similar," he said instead. "Courier Trunks. Space expansion technology in the interior. Theirs also function as weapons, which yours presumably doesn't."
"Mine is for carrying things," Imogen agreed pleasantly, and put her hand back into the impossible depth and withdrew a folded dress, which she placed on the seat beside her, and then a second one, and then a compact toiletries bag, and then a pair of shoes that had no business fitting in a rifle case by any conventional understanding of volume.
She looked at him with the patient expression of someone waiting for him to finish being surprised.
"How much," Shmuel said, meaning the case, meaning the installation, meaning all of it.
"Very cheap," Imogen said again, with exactly the same inflection as before.
Shmuel looked at the open case. At the bottomless interior that held what appeared to be a fully curated travel wardrobe and a meaningful quantity of street candy.
"At some point," he said, "we need to have a genuine conversation about your definition of that word."
"Mm," said Imogen, and offered him a candy.
From the back row, Kamina slept on, undisturbed, sunglasses migrated, legs in the aisle, entirely at peace with the distance still ahead of them.
Two more hours to the next stop.
The footsteps woke Kamina.
Not the sound of them, the bus was loud enough to bury footsteps, the engine and the road providing continuous cover for smaller noises. What woke him was the quality of them. Something in the weight communicated itself through the vibrations in the seat, up through the frame of the bus and into the part of him that had learned, through a life of being the person standing between things and other things, to notice the difference between ordinary movement and the approach of something significant.
He opened his eyes.
The bus interior was the same as it had been. The midday light through the windows. The few other passengers. Imogen and Shmuel sitting with the remains of lunch, a conversation apparently in progress about something involving a rifle case.
Kamina sat up.
He looked at the window.
"Get ready," he said.
Both of them looked at him.
"Something's here," he said.
Shmuel was already shifting his weight. Imogen straightened, her hand moving toward the rifle case by reflex.
The windows broke inward.
Not all of them. Not violently in the way of an explosion. Five of the left-side windows and four of the right simply ceased to be intact, the glass dropping away, and through each opening came a sphere, matte black, roughly the size of a human head..
They entered from both sides simultaneously. The interior of the bus became a closed space full of moving objects that did not behave like objects.
The first sphere struck the overhead luggage rack and rebounded at an angle which should have carried it into the floor but didn't, it caught the side of a seat and redirected, velocity unchanged, now moving toward the cluster of passengers near the front. The others were already bouncing.
Kamina was in the aisle before the second bounce.
He moved to the middle of the bus, positioning himself between the spheres and the largest concentration of passengers, and drew his katana in the same motion. The blade caught the light as it cleared the sheath and he swung immediately, catching the nearest sphere on the flat of the blade.
The impact rang up his arms and the sphere went nowhere. It rebounded off the steel like the steel wasn't there, the deflection carrying it sideways into the window frame, off the window frame, back across the aisle.
He caught the next one. Same result.
"They don't cut," he said.
"I see that." Shmuel was up, tracking the pattern of the rebounds. One sphere came directly at his section, he met it with a closed fist, the mechanical arm absorbing the impact and redirecting it hard back toward the window it had come from. The sphere went through the opening and was gone.
"That works," Imogen said, from behind Kamina's shoulder. She was watching all of them simultaneously, her voice doing the work of a spotter, calm, directional, positioned slightly back where she could see the whole space. "The one above the driver. Left. Coming down."
Kamina swung the flat of his blade as a redirect rather than a cut. The sphere angled toward the floor. Shmuel caught it low and sent it back out the window.
"Two behind you," Imogen said. "Right side."
Kamina moved without turning, trusting her read, and the spheres passed through where he had been. Shmuel caught one. The other struck the seat back and redirected toward the front of the bus.
It hit the driver.
The man's shoulder took it, a grunt, a reflexive movement, his hands pulling on the wheel. But his foot found the brake. The bus decelerated with the grinding insistence of hydraulics, the whole vehicle shuddering, and then it was still, sideways across the road, engine still running, and nobody had gone anywhere they couldn't come back from.
The driver stayed in his seat. Breathing hard. Shoulder pressed against the door.
The remaining spheres gathered.
The four that were still moving inside the bus simply began converging, each one angling toward the others across the rebounds until they were together in a mass at the front of the aisle, and then they moved as one through the door, against it, and the door came off its track and out of the bus frame and onto the road outside and the afternoon light came in through the opening.
Then the figure stepped up.
He was not large. Narrow-shouldered, precise in his movements. The black formal attire was immaculate despite whatever had just happened outside. The white cloak over it was long, gold accents at the collar and the hem catching the light as he stepped into the bus's interior.
In his right hand, a piece of paper.
He did not look at Kamina, Shmuel or Imogen.
He looked at the driver.
The driver, whose shoulder was pressed against his door and whose breathing had mostly steadied, looked back at him with the expression of a man who had recognised something and wished he hadn't.
"You received a Prescript yesterday," the figure said. His voice was even. "The content was specific. No vehicle operation for the duration of the week."
The driver said nothing.
"You are currently," the figure said, "at the wheel of a vehicle."
He reached into the interior of his jacket with his left hand and withdrew a second piece of paper, smaller, which he held beside the first. He looked at both of them briefly.
"Your protection status with the Index," he said, "is revoked as of this moment. The Prescript accounts for the variance." He folded the smaller paper again and returned it to his jacket. "I'll finish reading that after."
The driver closed his eyes. Just for a moment. Then opened them and looked at the window.
The figure finally turned toward the interior of the bus.
Shmuel was already close to Kamina, his voice low. "Index," he said. "Proxy, based on the cloak length."
Kamina looked at the cloak. The gold accents. The piece of paper still held in the man's right hand.
Kamina looked at the man's face. There was something in it that was harder to categorise than the rank markers, an energy that lived behind the eyes and had been living there for a long time. Not aggression exactly. More like the particular intensity of someone who had found the thing that made them feel necessary and had organised their entire existence around defending its continued relevance.
Behind Kamina, Imogen had not moved from her position. The rifle case was on the floor beside her. Her posture was ready to make a continuous decision, ready to within a fraction of a second.
Kamina stepped forward into the aisle.
Forward, into the space between the Index Proxy and the rest of the bus, which was where he stood when there was something to stand between.
He looked at the man with the Prescript.
The man looked back.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Outside, the road was empty in both directions. The bus engine ticked over. The midday sun came through the open doorway and lay across the floor of the aisle in a clean, unhurried rectangle of light.