Chapter 1

Phineas was amazed—-he’d been on the same tram for three hours and it was still going in a straight line. He’d been just on the south side of the core when he’d gotten on, using his stolen tram card, and he hadn’t known that it was over a three hour ride to the Northern Rim Line. He thought that the northern rim of the city might be a good place to start—-that was No Town, as he’d known of some folks on the CommNet to refer to it. Not many lived there, and there was something…happening. At least, that’s what he heard. He supposed it was as good a place as any to go, considering there was nowhere else he could think of. He certainly couldn’t go to anywhere he knew—-Julian’s was out, then, and so was his mother’s, assuming she and the other twelve members of her family who lived with her hadn’t moved a long time ago. Those would be too obvious, and they’d be checked immediately. His father had them under surveillance--Phineas knew that without having ever had to confirm it--and would know if he visited one of them the moment he walked through the door.

Phineas was no fool. Quite silly, yes. A bit insane, perhaps. But not foolish.

So he’d known to switch tram cards with one of the maids (but not one from his wing of the estate), to dress like someone else, and to be unpredictable. The latter he was very good at, or so he was told. The second, well, it had been easy enough. He wore gray and black, covered his distinctive hair with a ski cap, and put a pair of round goggles around his neck, just in case he needed to cover his also-distinctive eye color.

Of course, his actions were sure to be misinterpreted. It would be assumed that he was Running Away, not only by his father who, in his opinion, took himself just a little too seriously for anyone’s health, but also by the rest of the household (except, perhaps, for Ashe, who would have been unruffled by the Cataclysm itself) and the rest of the family. Perhaps the rest of the city. Phineas smiled a bit, propping his elbow on the windowsill and his face on his hand. That was just the sort of thing his father would do—-get the public’s sympathy with the sob story of his smart but troubled son, out on his own, unable to protect himself. It would be the best drama on the wires—-within weeks they’d be selling the box set with behind the scenes interviews of the maids and deleted scenes of Ashe looking both ambiguous and amused and refusing comment.

What he was doing would not be something he would have categorized as Running Away. He wasn’t really the type—-his psychological profile (and his IQ) said as much. He had no logical reason to run away, nor was he prepared to survive on his own. Smart enough, yes—-prepared, no.

He was just going on an adventure, really. He hadn’t been out on his own very many times (which he supposed was a little odd, considering how much his father seemed to dislike having to actually deal with him), and he wanted to see what he could see and what he could do on his own. James Maxwell’s son got a certain type of reception; a teenager named Phineas would no doubt get quite a different one. It would be nice to really get to see how it would be and what all he could accomplish on his own.

As for the direction he’d chosen, it was in the same direction as both his brother and his mother; he had no doubt that the automatic reaction to him leaving would be to assume that not only was he too smart to go directly to those he knew, but also that he would head the opposite way. They’d be searching the southern sector, and certainly not as far as the southern rim; he’d engineered this because he didn’t want any interruptions. He’d be home in good time, and he wanted to get his fill before he did, because God only knew what his punishment would be when he returned.

Phineas watched the city flow around him, as though it bent out of the way of the tram and then shifted back into place when it had passed, elastic. The buildings were thinning out, getting shorter. Singing under his breath, he wondered what he should do at the end of the tramline. There were things going on at the northern edge of the city—-all the best sources on the CommNet said something was coming. He supposed he could pick his way out through the abandoned parts of No Town, into the Fringe, and stand, staring out into the gaping desert. He’d never seen it, except in a few pictures; was it as terrible as the subtitles said? Did it really drive people insane to look out into all that dead nothing?

If so, he guessed he had a bit of a buffer, being a little insane himself. Not that he’d ever been diagnosed with anything, but even he had a feeling that there was the potential there for some serious psychoses if the right buttons were pushed. He had a feeling his pseudo-father knew this too and was carefully not pushing those buttons. Yet.

He turned away from the window and slumped down on the seat, which was covered in red faux velvet. A retro-tram, made to look like some pre-Cataclysm vehicle no doubt. Phineas smiled. He liked that—-out with the new and in with the ancient? Yeah, that sounded good. You could learn just as much from before as from now; only problem with that was that there were gaps in the record and things that didn’t make sense.

Maybe after he’d looked into the abyss, he’d check out the sewers. They were one of those things that didn’t make sense, like giant iron ships and lemurs. Monkeys. The next step down from human, but what was the next step up? The other ninety percent of the brain?

He shook his head and tried to remember what the last prime number before his birth year was. That always helped to re-center him, and put him in a place where he could focus his train of thought. It tended to wander if he didn’t watch it closely enough. Kind of like me. He grinned, watching the world go by through the windows on the other side of the tramcar. Of course, this had been the first time he’d wandered out of the compound on his own.

The tram slid to a smooth stop. He rose, thinking about how the older models lurched—-had to do with the hydraulics and the connection to the line. Less used and shorter lines had those older models, and Phineas knew, if given the chance, he could figure out an easy, cost effective way to effect a large-scale upgrade, diverting the transportation funds away from maintenance that wouldn’t be necessary if they would just spend a little extra initially to upgrade everything at once. Phineas sighed and drifted to the door; this was why people suspected he was insane. He made sense.

The tram station was fairly empty; no one but him got off the tram, which would be circling back toward the core. Those who got on drifted over from a grubby coffee shop manned by a pimply teenager who looked like he’d rather be absolutely anywhere else. Phineas sighed again. Coffee would have been nice—-iced, with caramel or chocolate and whipped cream—-but he only had about fifteen untraceable creds on him, and he had to save them for more substantial sustenance than coffee. It was too bad, really. He loved sweet things.

He wasn’t sure that fifteen creds would get him what he considered a full meal, but he also wasn’t very worried about that. Should he be gone long enough for it to matter, he supposed he could always steal. That at least would support the claims his father would make about his troubled son, and anything he stole his father could easily replace without it making even a dent in his accounts.

He smiled at the thought and went to the end of the short line at the coffee shop. Might as well live it up while he had the chance. Chuckling at the idea of a large triple shot iced caramel-white chocolate latte with double whipped cream and an apple cinnamon muffin as living it up, he waited his turn, placed his order, and then munched on his muffin while the teenager, who seemed annoyed at having to do any work at all for his pay, mixed his drink. He didn’t really care how much the other boy hated his job as long as the drink turned out well.

Fortunately for him, it did. His excursion out into No Town would have been cut quite prematurely short if he’d been arrested for gnawing on the boy’s head until his drink was satisfactory.

He sat down at a sticky table to think about what his next move should be. He guessed if he wanted to go out to the rim, he’d have to walk; there was nothing out there that would necessitate a bus line heading in that direction. Private transportation would be the only way around walking, and he didn’t think he wanted to try to hitch a ride out here. Exposure to his father’s business had taught him that, while talking to strangers was okay, being alone in an enclosed space with them and at their mercy was not.

Well, he was a smart boy. He’d come up with something-—or he’d walk. If he walked, at least he’d have time to look around at No Town, see if it was somewhere he wanted to settle down and do research when his father realized that he wasn’t heir material.

He drained his cup and stood. Time to get moving.