The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  “Eventually he had this large piece on the war, real deep accusations, especially about Lazacorp. He more than questioned their loyalty; he damn near insinuated that they had offed the old mayor, that they started the war. This was almost too much, we debated for hours, but I eventually let it go to print. Wasn’t sure if anyone read it at the time.

  “I waited for his next article. Never came. A month later I heard he had passed. Wastelung, they said. So I went to his wife to give my condolences. I’d met her before, an affable woman, but she seemed almost fearful of me when I visited. Everything she said fit the official story, but her mannerisms, her speech, it was fucking suspicious to say the least.

  “Then I got a letter, addressed to Nuzhen. The appropriate thing would have been to pass it on to his wife, but, well, I don’t have a proper excuse for it, I opened it. It was from a man, whom I eventually discovered was Kayip, but at the time, it was just some stranger, offering evidence to support Nuzhen’s theory. I met with him out in the Wastes, and eventually I found myself leading him through the Underway to disprove his assertions. Instead I found the truth. I should have told you then Marcel, but I’ll admit it, I was frightened to do so, for among the gaunt mutated faces was Nuzhen’s own. The idea that I might condemn another of my friends… or perhaps I just took on the duty for baser reasons, believing myself the sole hero, the savior.

  “Kayip pushed for action, I attempted a more cautious route. I began to assemble the evidence necessary to bring Lazacorp down, either through City Hall, or from a nearby Resurgence-aligned city, or even Phenia itself if it came to that. I took pictures, and made sketches and conducted interviews, while Kayip left to follow Roache up to Icaria.

  “That’s when they caught me. I’m not sure how. Likely they’d been watching for a while, but one night a pair of cops were at my door.”

  He paused for a moment. “They stuck it into my veins, that slickdust stuff, they pumped me until I screamed, and then kept going. Do you remember, Marcel, when they cut off your leg?”

  Marcel shook his head. “It’s a blur to be honest, I just remember the pain, then waking up.”

  Desct pushed aside a scrap-made wall and gestured them on. “Better that way. I was beside you, so was Alba. There was some debate among the medics whether to try to save the leg. I thought that lunacy looking at the wound, it was mere red mush, but one of them insisted it might be possible to treat. Maybe.”

  He pulled down a ladder hidden behind a cloth wall, and they descended two floors of residential scaffolding.

  “The real concern was the fucking sangleum poison, it welled up in that wound and the easiest way to cut off the flow to your bloodstream was to just sever the damned limb. The surreal thing was that you were the one advocating for that path the most. I didn’t think you were conscious, you didn’t respond to anything, but you kept shouting, ‘Cut it off, cut it off!’”

  Marcel was suddenly aware of the heft of his leg.

  “I felt the same way when they pumped me with slickdust, I shouted for them to cut it off.” Desct continued. “Except I was yelling about my whole body. Isn’t that true insanity? I wanted them to cut my body off. It makes not a single kilogram of sense, but I never wanted anything more in my life.”

  “Demiurge, Desct.”

  “Not sure why I’m wasting our time discussing old wounds,” Desct said. “Maybe there wasn’t anyone I could tell that to before—all the mutants here have already felt it, a thousand times over.

  “Still, I had known many of the workers here before I was captured, Nuzhen especially, who was a respectable fire stoker until the guards took their rifle butts to his head, and disappeared the man. I suppose those connections helped earn me a degree of respect. I never stopped fighting, though now I guess I’m fighting for myself as well.”

  Marcel shook his head. “I’m sorry, Desct. If I had figured it out…”

  “Mistakes were made on every side,” Desct said.

  Kayip nodded. “I attempted to take down the man himself in Icaria. He is slippery. After we cut the power to Blackwood Row, while the mutants free themselves, I will find the man.”

  “Then let me take the evidence to City Hall,” Marcel insisted, “to Phenia. You have the notes, we just need to publish them.”

  “No,” Kayip said, with a quiet tone that still held the force of a shout. “I have tried such methods before.”

  Desct shook his head, “Unfortunately I have to agree with the warmonk. We don’t know who is trustworthy, or who would overhear. Even if we went as far as Phenia… well to be frank I am unsure I would be able to keep the peace here. Celina pushes every day for quick action, and though I have more authority, I’m close to losing it.”

  They stopped by a back alley. There, Kayip unwound his strange azure blade from his bracelet and cut the fasteners of a sewer grate.

  “So it all relies on the schematics,” Marcel muttered. “If sabotage is to work.”

  “We have manpower, but it’s those words that damn us. Set off a recording and they’ll lull us to peace. For any uprising to succeed, we need to take down the æthericity grid, silence them.” Desct stared at Marcel with a stoic countenance, but Marcel could see the hints of fear hiding in the lines around his mouth. There was no excuse in hiding the truth any longer.

  “I gave the schematics back to Roache,” Marcel admitted.

  Kayip muttered some words in his indecipherable tongue, clutching at something within the layer of his rags. Desct thought a moment. “Well, shit,” he said. “Troll-fucking griffon-ass shit. That puts us in a damnable fucking bind, doesn’t it?”

  “But I can get them back,” Marcel said. “They’re still in City Hall, I can retrieve them,” he grabbed his friend’s shoulder. “I can make this right.”

  He said his words with a confidence he didn’t know he had. For so long he had been taking odd jobs in Huile, feeling hollow as the city grew around him, wondering deep down if he had been meant to stay. Now, it was clear why he was here. Whatever mistakes he had made, whatever betrayals he had suffered, he would now make it right. He was what Huile needed now, and he knew he could save the city.

  Desct smiled, a more melancholy smirk than those he had ever shared on their old treks through the Border States. He looked Marcel up and down, and patted his friend on the shoulder.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I know you will.”

  “Then we must go to prepare,” Kayip said, lifting the heavy sewer grate. He led Marcel down. Marcel moved slowly, hesitant to leave Desct now that he had found him, but aware of the pointlessness of delay. Desct stood above until Marcel had descended deep into the shadows of the Underway, then with a final wave dashed off, the glimmer of pre-sunlight starting to color the buildings above.

  Chapter 22

  Sylvaine’s papers lay before her on the basement floor in an organized sprawl. Her notes, written on yellowing waste-paper, held the sum of her memories, her theories, her re-creations, and her best guesses. She had been struggling to remember, since the night she had taken up with the hieromonk, the exact details of the schematics she had once scratched her head over. The schematics that Desct had helped to pilfer, that Gearswit had ignored, that she had failed to make sense of, those damned schematics that sketched out the exact anatomy of the very heart of Lazacorp.

  It was not just the mutants’ plight that pushed her to her task. If it were, she would have long ago given up. Her memory was too engulfed in haze, and Kayip provided no help, having kept only a few poor imitations scribbled out in his hand, resembling a child’s doodle more than anything technical. Marcel, despite his intransigence, supposedly had a copy of those notes in full, and all the mutants needed was mere patience. No doubt the mutants would hold onto their prize dearly, necessary as it was for the practical goal of blowing Blackwood Row to smithereens. It was an admirable aim, one that Sylvaine supported, but at no point in the mutants’ plans did they seek to answer the question: what in
Inferno was it that they were going to blow up?

  Lazarus Roache had wanted her, had wanted her negative-density generator, or at least, something technologically adjacent to it. For that he had been willing to poison her, to wrap her mind around his finger, and slaughter her professor. It was a simple deduction that her research must have deep, vital relevance to… something.

  It wasn’t so much the idea that her inventions might be used for some atrocity that bothered Sylvaine. The job of an engineer was to create, not to wring their gloves in worry over how those creations would be used. Nor was the fear of Roache’s words exactly that pushed her, rather it was the fear of what his words had unleashed in her. There was something inside Sylvaine that was more powerful than the ætheric bindings of slickdust, something primal, something horrific and beastly. She had escaped Roache’s apartment only by losing touch with everything civilized and sentient, by descending into what she had been always told she really was. She had been in that moment just a savage ferral, a wild animal that belonged in a cage.

  No, Sylvaine would take Lazacorp apart the right way, methodically, piece by piece, in full control. Like an engineer.

  She closed her eyes and started to cycle through the backlogs of her mind, trying to remember each moment of her work with Gath. The man had been subtly pushing her towards an end, to develop some technological breakthrough they could use. She could only recall the broad outlines of his advice, her time working now obscured behind the haze of her weeks of euphoria, and her hours of horror.

  Water Treatment Plant: useful, boring, mundane. Mechan-isms: varied. Purpose: to input polluted water and output potable water.

  Negative-Density Generator: expensive, complicated, cutting-edge. Mechanism: manipulation of æther-wave frequency to force matter into a state of density below zero, providing æromantic buoyancy. Purpose: to induce flight.

  Not much overlap.

  Sylvaine put down her notes and leaned back. She had written over or drawn dozens of pages and wasn’t any closer to a workable conclusion. Her only hypothesis so far, “Lazacorp wants to make Huile fly,” had been dismissed for being impractical.

  Unfortunately there wasn’t all that much else to do while she waited for Kayip and Marcel’s return. Their lodging, as it were, consisted of an abandoned cellar the monk had discovered on a previous journey, decorated with two burlap cots, a pile of old scrap, a kitchen pot, a miniature stove, and a puddle.

  It was strange. The warmonk could be surprisingly sensitive at times. As they had traveled Kayip listened with patience as Sylvaine talked at length of her experiences with Roache, though she had been reserved with the precise details. He nodded and spoke softly, and at times he reminded her of an oddly youthful grandfather. He treated her like she was normal, yet did not try to pretend like she had gone through life in a normal way. It was a subtle sort of empathy that somehow cut through his awkwardness, a kindness that she was unused to, but appreciated all the same.

  All of this was in contrast to the fierce violence the man was able to summon when threatened or enraged. Screaming, with blade out, fully prepared to kill. She had watched him go from grandfather to barbarian and back, in a span of under a minute. The man had two personalities it seemed, but unfortunately, if his choice of hideout was evidence, neither personality cared much about basic comfort.

  Sylvaine stared again at the notes in the light of her handtorch, which sat in the middle of the room like a miniature lamp. There was no point smashing her head against the problem again, not when the real schematics would be coming by soon, assuming Kayip was right about this Talwar guy.

  She reached into her bag and pulled out a misshapen ball of wrought iron. Then, slowly, she took out her glove and, finger by finger, put it on.

  Her heart raced as she lifted her hand. She had been hesitant to attempt æthermantics much since they had left Icaria. She had tried, a few times, out in the Wastes, on old bits of rusting machinery or junk like the ball in front of her. It was more difficult than she remembered, more erratic.

  Sylvaine narrowed her eyes and focused inwards. A spark! She pulled it out of her, and the ball started to morph, slowly at first, as she threw her will into it. The ball transformed into a cube, then a cone, then a rough gear shape. The process was labored, her focus slipping off in strange directions, the shapes never quite in perfect symmetry. The power felt strange to her, not an extension of her limbs, of her mind, but a rough and foreign tool that she could barely wield.

  What if it wasn’t part of her anymore, she wondered suddenly. What if it never was hers in the first place?

  The metal mass exploded. She shrieked and covered her mouth with her free hand, the fur at the edge of her leg singed by the metal, which now started to cool into solidity. She cursed and checked herself for burns. Nothing some cool water and a bandage couldn’t fix. She glanced back at the focus of her work, now just a shapeless blob of nothing on the floor. Anger struck her, followed by waves of frustration, despondency, fear, despair. The one emotion she didn’t feel was surprise. This was exactly how her experiments in the Wastes had gone.

  It was said that engineers were judged by their crafts. What a craft then, what an invention: the world’s first immobile paperweight. This hunk of shapeless metal would be an embarrassment to any engineer, she mused, if she still even was an engineer. If she ever had been an engineer.

  * * *

  Some time later the sound of footsteps awoke Sylvaine from a confused sleep that she hadn’t realized she’d fallen into. Dim morning light filtered in through a slit of a filthy, twice-boarded window that pressed up against the ceiling.

  She stretched and listened. Yes, there were definitely footsteps, two sets, echoing through the Underway paths just outside the rust-worn doorway. She grabbed her glove and a small shotgun that Kayip had bought from a wasteland trader, though she wasn’t keen on the idea of using either. Not that she could likely talk her way out of trouble if it were some strange scavengers wandering about, or worse, the police. Even if they had no notion of her past in Icaria, out here in this nowhere city her presence as a ferral would be enough to rouse suspicion.

  She tiptoed up to the door and placed her ear by it. The footsteps stopped, half a metre away. Then a whisper: “Sylvaine. It is I.”

  Kayip’s voice. The relief was instant, she could feel her fur unbristle. Wasting no more time, she undid the several rows of locks and opened the door.

  The large man entered, followed by Marcel who staggered sweat-covered and bleary eyed.

  “Did it go well?” Sylvaine asked, setting down her shotgun. “I mean, did you, uh…”

  Kayip nodded, Marcel looked around, and then sat, slumped, on one of the cots.

  “The schematics?” Sylvaine asked. The private investigator rubbed his forehead.

  “I gave them back to Roache.”

  “You gave them back…” Sylvaine stuttered. “Just now?”

  “What?” The man shook his head. “No, when I first got them. I didn’t know… I mean…” He lay deeper in the cot. “Demiurge, I’m tired.”

  Sylvaine followed his lead, leaning back on the wall, shaking her head. “Mucked cogs, we’re screwed,” she mumbled. All this travel, hiding in sewerways, and now what? Roache had a whole city on his side, what idiocy had made her think she could actually do anything to stop him?

  “We can still get them,” Marcel said. “Gall’s notes are kept in City Hall.”

  Sylvaine glanced at the monk.

  “I believe him,” Kayip said. “If Roache wishes to keep those notes out of the hands of his foreman, that is where he might keep them.”

  “It is where,” Marcel said.

  “So we just ask for them?” Sylvaine said. “Or are we talking about breaking and entering? Robbery wasn’t exactly in the Academy’s curriculum.”

  Marcel forced himself to sit upright with a groan. “I know how to sneak into the places. We go from below, at night.”
<
br />   “I am familiar with the Underway beneath City Hall,” Kayip said. “Whatever paths I once used have most surely been blocked, but I imagine I can find some route where your engineering could cut us in.”

  “And when we’re up there?” Sylvaine asked. “Do we know where these documents are?”

  “I have little idea,” Kayip admitted.

  “Let me have a go at it,” Marcel said. “You have paper?”

  Sylvaine grabbed a notebook from the mess on the floor and gave it to Marcel. The man sketched out a very rough floor plan.

  “Most likely they will be kept in the main records room here,” Marcel said tapping the pen.

  Kayip kneeled down to the map. “How well guarded would you say the building is?”

  Marcel laughed. “Barely. I mean, who would they be watching for? There might be a skeleton crew near the front, a policeman or two for emergencies. I’ve gone there plenty of times late at night. It’s a ghost house; sometimes I have to bang at the door for several minutes, or find a vocaphone to call in, just to wake them up. I’ve picked locks, so I should be able to break us in without too much trouble.”

  Sylvaine raised her glove.

  “Oh,” Marcel said. “Right. I suppose that works.”

  Kayip scratched at the side of his mask. “I would not be so foolhardy in this. There may be more than we expect. If need be, I can take on several men in these close quarters.”

  “What?” Marcel said. “No, no, these are U-double-CR cops and officials, good men. We’re not… going to fight them, kill them. Demiurge, Kayip, I know we’ve seen some horrible things, but let’s be reasonable. You should stay below, it’ll only make things worse with more people.”