The Green And The Gray

26

"That is one hell of a story," Fierenzo said, shaking his head in wonderment. "And in all that time nobody's figured out that you're here?"

"Not as far as I know," Jonah said. "But then, why would they? We became legal citizens threequarters of a century ago, and all we've done since then is try to live our lives quietly and peacefully."

"Until now," Fierenzo said.

"This was hardly our decision," Jonah insisted stiffly. "It was the Greens who pushed us into it."

"And then came up with a plan to murder one of their own," Fierenzo murmured, a cold anger stirring inside him. He'd always had a particularly unforgiving spot in his heart toward people who abused children, and ritual murder of any sort made his skin crawl. As far as his score sheet was concerned, the Greens were going into this with two strikes against them. "But that was seventy-five years ago. Why restart the feud now?"

Jonah snorted under his breath. "Oh, come on. You have ethnic feuds on Earth that have lasted for millennia."

"Sure, but those are usually fought over the same hereditary plot of dirt," Fierenzo pointed out.

"Your private Gotterdammerung happened a dozen light-years away."

"Our private what?"

"Gotterdammerung," Fierenzo repeated. "The Norse version of Armageddon, with everything going up in flames like your valley. My point is that it's hard for people to forget the injustices of the past when someone can point out the exact spot where Uncle Igor got murdered by the Cossacks. But when you transplant those people onto different ground, the arguments tend to become less virulent.

Especially when they all have to live among other people in a new society."

"You don't understand the Greens," Jonah said with a sigh. "They're—well, call it centralized thinking. Their whole lives, from their jobs to the way they think, are locked into this rigid genetic caste structure of theirs, which is guided by the people they've decided are genetically entitled to be their leaders. If those leaders decide to lock themselves into the patterns and prejudices of the past, the rest of the people haven't got much choice but to let themselves be dragged in along with them."

"And the Grays are different?" Fierenzo asked.

"Compared to the Greens, we're the poster boys of anarchy," Jonah said. "We have people who mediate disputes, lay down guidelines for our behavior toward each other and Human society, and sit in judgment when somebody crosses the line. But that's about it."

"Every Gray for himself?"

"Basically, though it's not as bad as it sounds," Jonah said. "A Gray's behavior is also moderated by his or her network of friends. Since we all have our own networks, and since all those networks intertwine, we end up being more or less accountable to the entire group."

"Government by village peer pressure?" Fierenzo suggested.

"Why not?" Jonah said with a shrug. "In effect, that's exactly what we are: a small town spread invisibly throughout New York City."

"So why can't you just pull up stakes and leave?"

Jonah's face hardened. "You can't back down in front of bullies, Detective. A cop should know that better than anyone. If the Greens succeed in pushing us out of New York, we'll never be free of their threats. The only way to end this—the only way—is to convince them that there's no reason we can't live here together in peace. We don't have to be best friends—in fact, they're welcome to ignore us completely if they want. But we have as much right to live here as they do, and we're not going away."

"Mm," Fierenzo said, taking another sip of his water. "Let me see that gun again, will you?"

Jonah's forehead wrinkled, but he set his own water bottle aside and held out his left hand. "Here's what it looks like sheathed," he said, pushing up his jacket sleeve to reveal an elaborately decorated metal wristband. "I twist my wrist so to throw it—"

He turned the wrist sharply over, and Fierenzo watched in fascination as silvery tendrils shot out of the wristband's underside, flowing up along the insides of Jonah's fingers and thumb and then bending and curving around each other like a mutant pretzel before melting together into the now familiar flattened cylinder shape. "And there it is."

"Yes," Fierenzo said, nodding. Now that he had a clear look, he saw something he hadn't noticed before: where the wide wristband had been only a slender loop of wire remained, encircling Jonah's wrist and attached to the grip of the hammergun by an equally thin metal wire. "Is that loop supposed to keep you from dropping it?"

"It does that, too, but it's mostly there to give the hammergun a path to flow back along when you sheathe it," Jonah told him. "Like so."

He opened his hand and the hammergun went into reverse, untwisting itself and flowing back along the fingers to re-create the original wristband. "That is truly amazing," Fierenzo said, shaking his head. "How exactly does it work? It doesn't fire slugs, does it?"

"In a way it does," Jonah said, flipping his wrist and bringing the weapon out into his hand again. "It fires small force bubbles that accelerate away—"

"Wait a second," Fierenzo interrupted. "It fires what?"

"Force bubbles," Jonah repeated. "Little spheres or disks of non-solid force. A bubble accelerates away from the muzzle, growing bigger and gaining speed along the way, until it runs into a solid object. At that point it dissipates, transferring its energy and momentum to the target."

"How many settings are there?"

"Just the two: ball or disk," Jonah said. "The ball is spherical and delivers its energy like a hammer, while the disk has an edge to it and is more suitable for cutting."

"So the ball is what you hit the Greens with yesterday night by the station house," Fierenzo said slowly, trying to sort this out. "While the disk is what that other Gray cut off the tree branch with over in Yorkville?"

"Yes to the first; I don't know to the second," Jonah said. "Depending how far away the tree was, either setting could probably have taken off a branch."

"Wait a minute," Fierenzo said, pressing his fingertips to his forehead. "I thought you said you hadn't killed the two last night."

Jonah sighed. "Watch," he said. Sticking his free hand directly in front of the hammergun muzzle, he squeezed the trigger.

There was a faint pop, but as far as Fierenzo could see nothing else happened. "Like I said, the shot picks up energy and momentum as it travels," Jonah said. "Right up close—" he fired into his palm again "—nothing much happens. A little farther away—"

Taking his hand away, he fired at one of the empty water bottles a foot away from him. The shot sent it skittering across the concrete. "—and you can start to feel it," he said. "Farther away yet—" he lifted the weapon to aim at an imaginary horizon "—and you could theoretically crack off a piece of a mountain."

Fierenzo shook his head. "Sounds pretty damn dangerous. I've never even heard of a weapon that doesn't work up close."

"That's probably because hammerguns aren't technically weapons," Jonah said. "They were designed as mining and stoneworking tools. Low-power at close range for delicate shaping; high-power farther away to give a kick to the ore vein or surface formation you're working."

"Uh-huh," Fierenzo said as something suddenly occurred to him. "Which means that when you shoved that thing in my face on the fire escape it was a hundred-percent bluff."

"Basically," Jonah admitted. "But what else could I do?"

"I suppose," Fierenzo conceded. "And that's why the second Green last night ran toward you instead of away. He was trying to move in to where you couldn't hit him as hard."

"That, plus the fact that the sonic nature of the Shriek means it gets stronger as you get closer to it,"

Jonah said.

"Tell me about it," Fierenzo said ruefully, rubbing his ear gingerly. "Was that Jordan up on the building playing target?"

Jonah nodded. "He was trying to hold their attention so I could get behind them." He grimaced.

"Though if I'd realized how strong the Shriek could be even at that distance, I'd never have let him do it. I guess I've never seen a Warrior in action before."

"So the Greens will always want to fight up close, while the Grays will always want to fight at a distance," Fierenzo concluded. "That'll make for some interesting battlefield tactics. Where exactly do these force bubbles get their energy?"

"They draw heat from the air molecules along their path and convert it into kinetic energy," Jonah explained. "That's why you usually see a white line, at least if the bubble's traveled far enough.

That's frost that forms where the air's suddenly had some of the energy sucked out of it and gone cold. Sometimes you can even get snowflakes drifting off the line."

"Sounds very festive," Fierenzo said. "What do you use to hang onto buildings?"

"Nothing but natural talent," Jonah said. "It has to do with van der Waals forces between our bodies and the metal in the walls, or some such thing. I'm a little vague on the details."

"Close enough," Fierenzo said. Physics had never been his strong suit, either. "Now, what about this tension line thing you mentioned earlier? How does that work?"

Jonah made a face. "What do you want, Fierenzo, a short course in Gray tech?"

"Humor me," Fierenzo said. "You're trying to convince me to keep my mouth shut, remember?"

"And there's no point in keeping quiet about one secret when you can have a hundred secrets to keep quiet about instead?"

"Exactly," Fierenzo said. "Come on, give."

With an exasperated sigh, Jonah reached beneath his coat to the side of his belt and pulled out a device about the size of a cigarette pack but flatter. "Fine," he said, tossing it into Fierenzo's lap.

"There it is. Go ahead—figure it out."

He leaned back against the wall, folding his arms across his chest. Picking up the device, Fierenzo gave it a quick study. It looked something like a tailless manta ray, with one side flat and the other smoothly curved, and seemed to be made of the same metal as Jonah's wristband. In the front, where the manta's mouth would have been, there was a finger-sized ring connected to a slender thread that disappeared inside the metal. Set into the concave top was a small round glass-like disk with a knurled bezel around it.

And that was it. No switches, no buttons, no controls of any sort that he could see. For all he could tell, it might have been the inner workings of one of the pull-ring talking dolls his sisters had played with when he was a boy.

He looked up. Jonah was watching him like a dog trainer with a new student. "You don't really want me to just start playing with it, do you?" Fierenzo asked him.

"Why not?" Jonah asked. "You can't hurt it."

"Come on, Jonah, I'm too tired for puzzle box games," Fierenzo said. "Give."

"Okay," Jonah said agreeably. "But if I do, show-and-tell is over. Deal?"

"I don't know," Fierenzo hedged. "There's still those radios of yours, and that invisibility trick—"

"Deal?" Jonah repeated.

Fierenzo sighed. "Deal."

"All right," Jonah said, uncrossing his arms. "Put the flat side against the wall, with the ring hanging downward."

Fierenzo set the device against the wall as instructed about a foot above the rooftop. "Now rotate the bezel around the eye a quarter-turn counterclockwise to loosen it," Jonah instructed.

Fierenzo did so, and found the glass disk now floating freely in its socket. "Aim it downward at an angle to the roof and tighten the bezel again," Jonah continued. "Now hold the projector against the wall so that your hand is away from the eye, pull the ring out an inch or so, and let go of the projector."

Carefully, Fierenzo got a two-fingered grip on the top of the device. Leaning as far back out of the way as he could without looking obvious about it, he took hold of the ring and pulled.

Nothing happened. Frowning, he let go of the projector. To his amazement, it remained firmly in place against the wall.

He looked at Jonah. The other had a faint smile on his face, the kind Fierenzo had often seen on amateur magicians. "Now what?"

Jonah gestured. "Wave your hand between the eye and the roof."

Frowning, Fierenzo eased a single finger downward—

And twitched it reflexively away as it hit something solid. "What the hell?"

"There's your tension line," Jonah said. "A thin line of force running between the projector eye and whatever solid object you've got it aimed at."

Carefully, Fierenzo eased his finger around the invisible line. The shape and feel were like a very tight, very slick rope. "How much weight can it handle?" he asked.

"You could hang a dozen guys from it without making the projector work very hard," Jonah said.

"We use them sometimes to travel between skyscrapers."

"Very impressive," Fierenzo said, sliding a finger up and down the line. "What kind of range does it have?"

"Like a hammergun shot, the line runs outward until it hits something solid," Jonah said. "I'm told it was once considered the quick and easy way to travel between mountains."

"And then, what, you just leave the projector behind?" Fierenzo asked, the discomfiting image of a thousand invisible wires crisscrossing Manhattan flashing to mind. "Or can you climb back up it?"

"Not a chance," Jonah said. "The coefficient of friction is way too low." He pointed to the ring Fierenzo was still holding. "That's what the ring's for. You slide it on over one of your fingers before you set off, and it feeds out thread until you reach the other end. Then you just give it couple of backand- pulls, and it shuts the line off and brings the projector back to you." He gestured. "Try it."

Sliding the ring onto his middle finger, Fierenzo pulled it out a couple of feet from the box. He paused, then backed it up and pulled it out; backed it up and pulled it out—

Without warning, the box detached itself from the wall and shot over to Fierenzo's hand, reeling itself in along the thread like a carpenter's tape measure. "And you're ready for your next trip," Jonah concluded, holding out his hand. "I'd offer you a ride, but you really need to be able to hold onto the side of your destination building for it to be a properly enjoyable experience."

"I'm more than happy to pass, thank you," Fierenzo assured him, handing back the projector. "I'd probably twitch my arm the wrong way and shut the thing off in midair."

"You can't," Jonah said. "As long as there's any significant weight on the line it won't shut off. Safety feature."

"And this is what you used to pull Melantha out of the frying pan Wednesday night?"

Jonah nodded. "The tricky part was coming up with a way to keep them from realizing it was somebody outside their group who'd snatched her," he said. "The only way to get over the trees was to set up the tension line several stories up on one of the buildings east of Riverside Park. The problem was that if I'd just slid down to the ground at that angle, I'd have been going so fast I'd have bowled over half the circle when I landed."

"So how did you do it?"

"I set the line nearly horizontal, running it to a building across the Hudson in New Jersey," Jonah said. "Then instead of just hanging on as usual, I hooked an elastic rope onto it and held onto that.

When I got over the circle, I bungeed down into the middle, grabbed Melantha, and ran."

"Clever," Fierenzo said. "But why didn't they find the bungee afterwards?"

"Because it wasn't there," Jonah said. "I didn't use the projector's retrieval ring myself, but left Jordan back at the jump-off building to handle that. He waited until the bungee was over the middle of the river before shutting it down. The bungee sank, and there was nothing left to tell anyone how it was done."

"And so they spent the next few days throwing suspicious glares at each other instead of looking for an outsider," Fierenzo said. "I suppose it was you who blew out all the lights on Riverside Drive, too?"

"Yeah, and I'm sorry about that," Jonah said. "But we had to make sure they couldn't see what was happening."

"So how did the Whittiers come into the picture?"

"The original plan was for me to get Melantha across Manhattan and offshore to Roosevelt Island,"

Jonah said. "Neither side was occupying it, so we figured it would be a safe place to hide her for awhile. But you need both arms to carry someone on a tension line, and one of the Warriors had managed to get me with a knife before I flattened him. At the same time, Melantha wasn't in any shape for a long walk."

"Why didn't you just hop a cab or the subway?"

"What, with me bleeding all over my shirt?" Jonah countered. "Besides, a fair number of Green Laborers drive cabs these days. All I could think to do was take us northeast toward Nikolos's stronghold in Morningside Park, hoping it would be the last direction anyone would expect us to go, while I tried to come up with a new plan. But Melantha wasn't even up to that, so I found an alley to hide her in and went scouting."

"Having blown the padlock off the gate with your hammergun?"

Jonah nodded. "Anyway, I'd just about decided we were going to have to risk that cab after all when I heard the Whittiers talking about the trees on their balcony. It was the perfect solution: being inside a tree would protect Melantha from prying Gray eyes, while being off the ground would keep inquisitive Greens from probing around and finding her. So I called Jordan and had him pop the lights on Broadway. Well, to try, anyway; the gadget we'd rigged up didn't work as well there as it had earlier on Riverside Drive. But it worked well enough. Melantha was awake by then, so I had her turn her trassk into something I could scare the Whittiers with long enough to hand her over to them."

"You were taking a pretty big chance," Fierenzo pointed out. "Picking a pair of New Yorkers at random doesn't necessarily get you the cream of the crop."

"I know," Jonah said. "But like I said, I was out of options. Anyway, I figured we could always get her back from them if we had to. We just couldn't afford to get caught with her ourselves. As long as the Greens didn't know who'd snatched her, even if they got her back, we'd be free to try again. But if we got caught, Halfdan would make sure we never got another chance."

"Halfdan being the head of your peace faction?"

"Halfdan being the one ready and willing to sacrifice Melantha to maintain the status quo," Jonah corrected bluntly. "You can call that peace if you want to. Anyway, I made the handoff, then hid on the wall until they'd taken Melantha away. I called Jordan, told him to get ready to cover for me when the you-know-what hit the fan and all adult Grays got scrambled into search or sentry duty, then climbed up to the fire escape to hide and heal. You know the rest."

"Except what exactly was going on in the Whittiers' apartment when I got dragged into this mess,"

Fierenzo said. "What do you know about that?"

"Not much, but I can connect the dots," Jonah said. "Jordan had wanted to follow the Whittiers home, but the search got under way faster than he'd expected and he had to get clear of the area. The next night, after most of the commotion had moved elsewhere, he went back to the neighborhood to try and find her. My guess is that some people from both sides spotted him climbing around the Whittiers' building and got curious."

"So the next day we get two separate groups converging on the place," Fierenzo concluded. "The Grays went up the outside and tried to get Melantha to come out of the trees by shooting at them.

When that didn't work, they started trying to break the door glass enough to get in, only they were interrupted by a set of Greens who'd gotten the building super to open the door for them."

"You've got it," Jonah agreed. "We were just lucky that Mrs. Whittier and Melantha had already left."

Fierenzo nodded. "I think that brings me up to date," he said. "Except for two questions. One, where is Melantha now? And two—" he cocked an eyebrow at Jonah "—just whose side are you on in this?"

"To answer the second: I'm on Melantha's side," Jonah said.

"And which side is that?"

"Like I said: Melantha's," Jonah repeated. "As to the first—" He shook his head. "I wish I knew.

Somebody's got her—that much I'm sure of. If she were free we would have heard from her by now.

But as to who or where, I have no idea."

"Sounds like Number One on our things-to-do-list," Fierenzo decided, unzipping his coat and fishing inside. "You'd probably better take charge of these, too," he added, pulling out the folded sketches.

"All I really wanted them for was to force the truth out of—"

He broke off in mid-word, staring at the pages in his hands. Back at the precinct house, he'd put four sheets of paper in his pocket: two pictures each of Jordan and the adult Gray.

Now, two of the sheets were missing.

He snapped open the remaining pages, tearing one of them in his haste. To his complete lack of surprise, they were both of the adult.

Jordan's pictures were gone.

"What is it?" Jonah demanded.

"We've been robbed," Fierenzo said tightly, crumpling the sheets and shoving them into his side pocket. "Somehow, while they were hauling me down the sidewalk, the Greens managed to grab Jordan's pictures."

For a split second, Jonah just stared at him. Then, abruptly, he jerked his left hand up to his cheek.

"Jordan, we're blown," he snapped. "Get out of here—go to Meeting One. And call Mom and Dad and tell them to join us."

He waited for an acknowledgment and dropped his hand. "We'd better get out of here," he added to Fierenzo, closing the supply box lids and refastening them.

"You think they'll give Halfdan the sketches?" Fierenzo asked, starting to fold up the blanket and wincing as twinges of pain shot through his shoulders.

"They probably showed them around to their own people first," Jonah said, folding the pad Fierenzo had been lying on and tucking it under one arm. "If none of them recognized him, yes, they'd certainly give them to Halfdan."

"Who will probably not be very happy with you," Fierenzo said, finishing with the blanket. "What's this Meeting One?"

"It's a place where we've met before," Jonah said, picking up the food box and getting up into a crouch. "We should be safe there, at least for awhile." He opened the lean-to flap and picked up the water box.

And froze. "What is it?" Fierenzo asked.

Jonah took a deep breath. "We've got company," he said, setting down the food box and pushing the flap all the way open. Across the roof, striding purposefully toward the lean-to, were a half-dozen short, squat men.

The Grays had found them.