Rubber Smoke [Noir Cape Progression Fantasy]

[Donutinwrong]

1. Birthright Magic

The city of Tinjouki sprawls for 500 hundred square kilometers, at which point the earth beneath it becomes fragile, turns to sand, and crumbles into the void. From rim to rim it is urban sprawl, all concrete and metal fighting for the daylight. The roads arc on longs stalks of concrete in the less stagnant air, or otherwise they pass like tunnels through the high rises. Gardens and parks exist on many levels. In the darkest and most desolate regions artificial light is beamed in by way of electricity and mirrors.

In the center of it all is construct named the Wall, and while the sky towers are tall, and the vertical farms taller, it is yet taller still. It meets the clouds. Perhaps it supports them. It appears grayish concrete, but its material is unknown, as it has proven invulnerable to the attacks of the most powerful villains. Behind the Wall lies a secret, referred to in official channels as the National Park.

Nobody knows what goes on in the National Park.

In the city there are four tribes, four people: the kīn. They sing four songs, live four ways of life. It is said once they spoke four languages, but of these only scraps are remembered. Kīn of water, air, earth and fire.

This is their birthright magic, but for each modernity has changed them.

The vadu are kīn of water. It moves as they do. Yet since the invention of hydraulics, they have hidden in their maicha.

The olmet are kīn of the earth. They sing to it, pin us to it. They bolster the buildings against the titanic bickering of the Mantled, and sing always to the sand bellow so that the city does not sag into dereliction. All love them.

The zus are kīn of air. They pass above it all, see the city from above as the stinking sprawl it is, follow high ideals like justice, peace, or simply their own private narcissism.

And then there are rhata, kīn of fire. They are passionate, quick to anger, addicts and thrill seekers. They cannot kill a zus, nor a vadu, nor would they ever harm an olmet. They are vulnerable to impulsive mistakes. Their song is of critical utility in the powering of machines, generating electricity, pumping the great metal organs of a city without end.

Those who sing to fire burn.

= = = = = = =​

Mateo vented fire from his heels, softening into the bike and urging it to go faster. The speed gauge flicked up to ninety, trembled, then drifted up to a hundred. It was getting harder and harder to find an empty spot near the Wall, but at 3:00 AM this part of the city was quiet. That was important. If anyone saw what he was trying to do, they'd bust him without a second thought and chuck him into Moletown for a year or two. Once you'd done a bird underground your papers got stamped and you had to go dark to buy a lot of stuff. He didn't need that.

The flame ran though the channels in his legs and came from his heels hot and liquid. He savoured the soothing, crisp feeling of it and pumped harder, tempting the needle up to 110, then 120, then 125. It always felt better to ride on three digits. Now the pale black road slid smoothly under the bike and he didn't waver. Now he was really cruising. The buildings flashed up besides him and dropped away like they were made out of nothing, like he was imagining them. His front wheel gobbled up the asphalt.

Idly—thinking with that strange clarity of mind that only arrives on the seat of an F-bike—he wondered what the chances were that this would work. Pretty low, he knew. But maybe he'd get lucky. He watched the Wall surging up to meet him. He was going to smash right into it. And then he was there, and he hit the fiberglass ramp at the foot of the Wall hard, his body jerking around as he clung to the bike. He continued to pour fire into the machinery. The ramp buckled but stayed, weighed down by the sandbags he had hauled over here yesterday and hid in a trashcan.

It was critical to keep burning once you hit the Wall. He'd made that mistake the first couple of times, freaking out when the ride went vertical. If you cut your burn at the bottom you'd barely be up ten meters before you started to tip. Instead, you had to speed up, never mind what the nerves in the back of your head might be screaming. His foot slipped from the foot-mount and a jet of fire squirted under the bike, missing the pipes and spraying over the ramp below. The space around him lit up for a moment: nothing but gray, featureless concrete. The bike wavered, tilting. Then he stamped on the mount and it shot up the Wall.

He squinted through his goggles and focused on his breathing; translating breaths into seconds, then meters, and feeling himself rise through the air. Rushing underneath his tires, the concrete of the Wall looked no different to the tarmac of the road. The metal of the bike was hot with the heat of his fire, glowing faintly and shuddering as the thermal coils expanded. This was the only light.

He swore under his breath. The bike had started to slow. It was hard to tell how high he'd made it, but there was plenty of Wall left. It wasn't enough—still, after everything he'd tried. Maybe if he adjusted the back pinion, he might get a little more slip out of the driving wheel. Or perhaps he could-

The sound of the sirens reached him.

He wondered how long they had been blaring. Since he hit the Wall, probably. Fucking olmets and their beloved vibrations. That was the problem when he rode fast: he stopped paying attention. Absently he tilted the bike between his thighs, feeling the speed in it without needing to look at the gauge. He jolted thicker fire into the back wheel and pushed himself through the turn, tucking down over the bars, trying to keep his weight as flat to the Wall as he could. Now they would chase him, screaming justice for all the night to hear out of those squawking alarm boxes, and he would out run them all. The same shit every night. Until the Beetles started to train up fire-kīn and ride F-bikes, they'd never have a chance. But they would never let rhata guard the Wall.

Racists.

This was the scary part. Not the chase. The chase was fun. The scary part was that blood pumping moment when the spinner hit 140, 150, 160, and the bike sped towards the earth, and the earth reared up, getting huger and huger, reminding you of its solidity and its monstrousness, welcoming you home with the perfect inevitability of gravity. He tilted, adjusted slightly, trying to hit his makeshift ramp in the centre where it was best reinforced, and he hit it and it buckled and the bike bounced and his knees ached as the shock of it flattened the suspension and thumped into him and he was down, flying along the street again between the phantom buildings.

High up in the air came a sound, like the firing of a pistol. Mateo swore between his teeth, gunning up the fire and curving left to follow the road. That sound was the sound of a zus, a kīn of air breaking the sound barrier in pursuit of him. It seemed like the Beetles had finally gotten tired of his antics. He wondered idly if they had begged a favour from the Executives, or had gone private. Zus were expensive. Either way, it was clear that this time they wanted to catch him.

Fun.

Nothing is faster than a zus, not even a rhata on an F-bike. In evading the law, this can be used to one's advantage. The recommended strategy, tried and tested uncountable times in the endless history of Tinjouki, is to make regular turns. Zus struggle to decelerate and their eyes are only human. It is a wise precaution to drive a dark bike, or perhaps to smear one's ride with soot or something similar on nights of covert activity. Mateo Soto had not done this. His bike was a beautiful, slick silver that melted into anything and yet screamed its speed in the sun and he refused to stain it. Anyway, he loved the chase, and this was an F-bike. No matter how tight one funnelled fire into the machinery—and no one did it better than Mateo—fire would still leak out beneath the chassis and from above a zus would have an easy job of chasing you through the night.

He was riding through Zone Six, Hosta Ward or 'Hosta Six'. He wasn't familiar with this part of Hosta, which made things more difficult. Behind him he heard the distant putter of the police on their armoured combustion bikes, which were of no concern without the zus. Mateo new the game: the wind-kīn would try to get near him and flick him off his ride with a bolt of wind. He reached between his leg and unlocked the bike's storage locker, driving one handed and glancing around.

He exited the retail park, where he had found his secluded acceleration strip, and now rode between concrete apartment blocks in a residential ghetto. The buildings rose distantly into the air, not high-rises, but still iconic Tinjouki towers, each a lattice of orderly, square windows filled with a uniform yellow-white light and covered with plumbing pipes that leaked steam. The pavement had corner-stores where you could buy liquor and tobacco product and fresh fruit, saloons, brothels, gambling dens, beggars, couples out for a night of it, sly guys in crumpling suits. This was rhata territory, which meant it was poor, and the petty criminals were the top dogs, lighting cigarettes with fire-pores in the tips of their fingers.

Mateo saw none of it as he flew by, but he hardly needed to. There were thousands of residential ghettos in the city—he had grown up in one. They all looked the same. He accelerated, whipping air up the street behind him, weaving between the late night taxis.

Above him he heard the popping sounds made as the zus slowed and turned, creating pillows of air and bouncing off of them, crushing and compacting and expanding the air with the muscles of their intuitive, birth right magic. Zus were the rarest of the kīn, and invariably a smarmy, self-entitled bunch good at escaping things and often reckless in their reliance on this. They were annoying but not a bad sort. Not like the vadu.

From within the bike locker he withdrew a bat-singer, purchased the tool at great expense over at the Toyshop in Cato Six. It had a screen the size of a finger and thumb circled together and, clipping onto the handle bars of his bike, worked by blurting out sound waves at an ultra-high frequency and stitching them into an image of the bends in the street, going about 50 meters forward. A little map blinked into life before him in staticky green. In evading the law, the bat-singer had proven invaluable. Naturally they were illegal.

He glanced up at the street, narrowly avoiding a taxi, and turned left onto an ally full of trash bags and homeless people and cigarette smoke that had probably been loitering around here for days. He squeezed the breaks and burnt rubber, turning the bike to take another left and avoid busting through the window of a breakfast cafe, then ripping fire into the machine and bouncing forward. He winced, thinking of his tires, but nothing can stop and start like an F-bike. Mateo wove through the alleys, underneath the metal boxes of fire escapes. Above him the insomniacs and lovers dangled out of their windows and watched him fly by.

This was his happy place. This was life at its best and somehow, also its simplest. There was nothing to it. The bike was like another limb to him, jumping forward and slowing in response to the fire that sung through his legs. It was such an all consuming act, he could hardly think. He almost became the bike, plotting a way randomly though the alleys of the city while the zus above stopped and started, trying to keep track of him.

Eventually he left the ghetto behind and doubled back in the direction he had come, bursting into an empty industrial estate which bordered the retail park. There was a hole in the fence he had cut here weeks ago, hidden by a bush. He killed his fire and let the bike drift forward on its momentum. The popping sound of the zus had faded into the distance. Finally it stopped. He listened out. They were much harder to track when they dropped below the sound barrier, but you could still hear them shoving air around. He didn't trust the quiet, kept the bike gliding forward at 40, feeding fire into the machine with the pores in his heels, careful not to spill a drop of it. Darkness fell around him as the bike cooled and he slowed even more, navigating by the bat-singer. Slowly his eyes adjusted. He looked around and realised something surprising.

He was lost.

Surely he had been here before. He thought he'd cased out the whole retail park, and anyway Mateo was something of an expert when it came to the geography of Zone Six. Wherever he was, it was eerily quiet. That was strange. He was in a large courtyard of industrial hangers filled with broken down machines. In the centre a large reservoir of water glimmered in the half light. These industrial yards were important centres of manufacturing, and usually there would be a graveyard shift, looking out for malcontents like him and keeping the engines alive so they could carry on their industry.

He looked up at the sky. It was a cloudless night. The stars seemed brighter than usual, needlepoints of light jabbed right into the air and glimmering suggestively. The zus was nowhere to be seen but in black they'd be invisible. He guided the bike under a hanger and killed the fire. Then he took off the bat-singer and stowed it and locked the locker, finally jumping down from the bike and stretching his legs. His thighs hurt from clinging so damn tight.

"Fuck." He muttered.

No one replied. Mateo marched forward, shoving his hands into his pockets. From above, had the zus found him, the sight would be of a young man with thick black hair just above his ears, unwashed for days. Thick eyebrows, thick lips, round cheeks still showing a bit of his childhood. Dark eyes, liquid invisible eyes full of intentions and secrets and other, more sinister things. He wore a dark biker jacket, jeans, and leather rhata riding boots, reinforced with much steel. The boots left a hole clear through the heel showing the pink foot. He could feel the cold air against his heels with each step, stamping his heavy boots into the dirt of the industrial estate. This figure appeared and disappeared, marching in and out of the hanger. He was holding something in his hand, some kind of pendent, and he seemed to be muttering to it.

"The tires were good. Really stuck." He paused, thinking. Then he went to his bike and knelt down, feeling the rubber.

Again he muttered, "Fuck." He held his hand there for a moment, then stood. Then he kicked the front wheel of his bike.

It wobbled slightly in place, standing buglike, sleek, angular and euphemistic in the half light of the hanger. He looked away from it and sat in a rush, resting his back against the front wheel. In the dead of night, he spoke to himself.

"We have to get up there. Why the fuck doesn't anybody else care? The 'Park', they say." He spat. "Hard to believe it's a park. All that space, just for rich Holders to play around in and feel special? Fat chance."

He held up the pendant in his hand. It was a small finger bone, tied at both ends to a worn leather strap. "You wouldn't have gone sniffing over some dumb park, would you? But how am I supposed to figure it out?" He shook his head. "No-one gets into the National Park."

He sighed and dropped back against the bike. Then he squirmed, shook off his riding jacket and rolled it up behind his neck. It was a hot, muggy night, and behind him the bike was like a furnace. None of this bothered Mateo. He was born of fire, lived life hotter than most. He pulled out his notebook and jotted down his notes from the attempt, finished and looked up. Clouds were rolling in from the east. He raised the bone pendant again and spoke to it, tilting his neck to the side.

"We need money. Well, I need money. You are dead, brother. I need fresh tires. We gotta pay Leitz his interest on the bike or he'll do funky stuff to my kneecaps. Gotta eat. Should really send Raia some cash, I know she's struggling." He sighed. There was a sound, a crack in the sky, and he darted for his bike, looking around for the zus. He stopped. A strange light had fallen everywhere. The wind-kīn was nowhere to be seen. The light grew brighter and brighter, eerily so.

A star was falling from the sky.