by Kin S. Law
The first of them took her unawares, and Lewis felt the blow drive across her back—the attacker had been too short to get her head. She cried out, painfully, but felt her lungs catch. She had run too hard, and now she was winded by a second blow, somebody punching her in the dark. The third hit hamstrung her, and it felt like there was something sharp in the attacker’s hand. Not a knife—a point, like a needle. Hopping Hare Lewis fell, and as she did she felt the needle drive deep into her shoulder. Then another, in her thigh, and another at her arm, in the crook of her elbow. People held her down now, and she tried to flail, but only felt the needles tearing at her inside her arms. Lewis took a deep, ragged breath, and with the fullness of a voice that could carry over the prairie, gave a piercing scream that was swallowed up by the bodies piling over her.
“This woman… I have seen her before,” said Hargreaves as she watched what passed for the barge’s constables inspect the crime scene. She sipped her tea, trying to remember where she had seen the striking face lying on the floor of the open-air cargo lift. The woman’s skirt billowed around her, stained a bright red, and her rich brown skin was gray. It looked like she had bled to death.
Hargreaves had spoken with a few shady characters in the decks of the market barge. As it turned out, the Verdurous dwellers were more concerned about African and European trade than American. When she asked about American steamcraft, the local fauna simply laughed. There was no steamcraft trading from America, they said.
“They might as well have installed a blockade,” said one man, a merchant on one of the machine shop levels. “We hear a lot of propaganda but nobody buys American anymore. Plenty of Ubique universal parts for tractors or cranes, just nothing for new automata. Their steel was really hot on the market just after the war, though.”
There didn’t seem much point in investigation until she reached America, so Hargreaves had decided to rejoin Vera and Zampano, only for this unpleasantness to begin unfolding beneath her. The inspector sat at a high platform jutting out from what had once been the barge’s auxiliary bridges. One of the levels had been claimed by a respectable teashop that made actual cucumber sandwiches. The observation deck had been made into an outdoor garden full of small bonsai. It would have been pleasant if it hadn’t overlooked the cargo lift, which had been called to service from the depths of the barge in the middle of high tea and inspired several workmen to cry out as the body rose to the top deck.
“I have it,” said Vanessa Hargreaves. “This woman rushed past me as I ventured into the barge’s lower levels.”
“Are you sure?” said Vera Jasper, who seemed very comfortable at the tea table, out of sight of the view below.
“Yes. For an inspector of Scotland Yard, recalling small details is an occupational boon. Clearly she did not run fast enough….”
“If you are wondering why she is dead,” said Zampano as his enormous sausage fingers closed around a delicate cup, “it is no mystery. She was—” And he said a word that sounded like ‘napitok.’
“Pardon?”
“Drank. Drained. Ah, in the English… like the vampir, da?” continued Zampano. “But there are no monsters in the dark. It is called ‘Chasing the Rabbit.’ But I have never seen so many marks. Usually the rabbit lives.”
“I know of this,” said Vera Jasper. “You mean to say the murderer was Going to Wonderland.”
Vanessa Hargreaves looked back and forth at the pair, until Zampano relented and explained.
“It is an opiate. A drug,” said Zampano. “I am not sure how it works. But you can always tell who is a user. They have a far-off look in their eyes, like they are living another life elsewhere.”
“If they are coming after you, they will have it in hand. The drug comes in an ampoule,” said Vera. “Like a doorknob. Round, with a glass portion, and a needle that pops out of the thin end.”
“You should not know such things,” said Zampano. He seemed paternal, and for an instant Vera seemed annoyed. She was older than she looked, thought Hargreaves.
“The user needs to get a small amount of blood,” said Vera, hardly pausing. “It is mixed with the drug inside the ampoule. Then it can be injected into a vein or slowly infused through a gravitator.”
“You are very knowledgeable,” said Hargreaves, with a touch of the unsavory.
“I have worked with Wonderland fiends before,” said Vera, and fell silent.
“Not just anybody’s blood will do,” said Zampano. He seemed eager to ease Vera’s discomfort. “Some say travelers are best. That is why you will hardly find it in Whitechapel or Dover, where trade is mostly local, or London, where travelers are under your queen’s protection. But it is common in Istanbul or Glasgow, under the large airship routes, and a cancer in wandering waystations like the Verdurous. Perhaps the chasers are seeing what the travelers see. That is the rumor, da?”
“Da, Ivanov,” said Hargreaves. She thought about the places she had already been, and the sights she had seen. Experiences that she had paid for in pain, and the people she had connected with because she had chosen to go with them, parley with them, fight with them. Suddenly the opiate called Wonderland disgusted her.
“You are thinking of something, Inspector,” said Zampano Ivanov. “You want to catch the person who did this horrible thing. Do not. You will only draw attention, and you will draw your pursuers to us.”
“Investigations are best done unseen anyway,” said Hargreaves. Judging from the various strongmen and gunmen putting the woman’s body into a covered stretcher with stoic indifference, the Verdurous did not have a single detective to serve them. Blast it, even if she had become a traitor to Queen and Country, she was still a police inspector. Overhead, a dull gray cloud cover slowly blanketed the barge with a light mist. Perfect—overcast, wet, and dreary. Just like home.
“I’ll see you later,” said Hargreaves, darting up from her seat. She dashed past the grasping hand of the airship captain, which, full of scones, was quite ineffective at detaining her.
“We leave at fourteen hundred hours!” called Zampano, a little helplessly. Vera sipped at her tea.
“Our Steam Age,” said the man with the hookah pipe, as the smooth, Hellenic shapes of a dancer’s legs pirouetted in the vicinity of his turbaned head, “is fairly decadent, isn’t it?”
They were seated in front of a stage at one of the many pleasure palaces in the warrens of the Verdurous. Hargreaves had stuck out her chest a little at a couple of bars and storefronts, and within minutes gathered that someone who wanted to chase the rabbit need only find a Kamala Singh in the Dusky Forest club. It was reputable, a bare-ankle spot and not a bare-everything spot, which everybody seemed eager to mention to a beautiful woman like Hargreaves. Was it for her protection or some moral standard? Either way the mildly accented quips felt insulting. Hargreaves did not fear dark alleys or the rogues. Rogues usually had reason to fear her.
She certainly had no moral guff with exotic dancers either—they were not so far removed from her own undercover work. She was happy to see a young girl working in a place where inappropriate behavior made large bouncers appear, their muscles rippling under fashionable silk vests.
A redheaded lass was working the dance floor and a lowly moor was enjoying the show. For a moment Hargreaves wanted to protest that the moor ought to be serving, not the girl. The imperial racism instilled in Vanessa Hargreaves by decades of propaganda reared its ugly head, daring to suggest the superiority of whites over the whole world. It was inevitable, the product of being trained by Tory sergeants and a private English education. “This is an English world. We allow you to live in it.” It was a phrase slowly being picked to pieces by progressivism, but its ghosts were persistent.
Hargreaves shrugged it off. Besides, she wanted Singh for something legitimately bad: dealing in this so-called Wonderland, and indirectly causing a woman to die. He was her lead, but therein lay a problem. She had no doubt the strong bouncer men would come if anyone threatened Kamala Singh.
<
br /> It was likely her golden beauty that made Kamala Singh wave her to the seat beside his. Singh himself was a man of indeterminate age, anywhere from thirty to fifty, but he behaved like a lecherous old man. His gray beard came to a point, and gold rings shimmered at one eyebrow—a sure sign of an untouchable fixture of the Verdurous, that Singh could wear valuables where anybody might yank them from his face.
“Decadence comes in many forms,” said Hargreaves, as the tinkling of bells masked their conversation. “Mr. Singh… I hear if one wanted to purchase a little decadence, you are the man to come to.”
“I carry many things,” said Singh. “At a very reasonable rate.”
“Even if one were, ah, to want to chase the rabbit?”
“Then decadence carries a high price,” said Singh, without pausing. He was suddenly all business, accustomed to this. His voice felt oily, disgusting. “Eighty for a trip down the rabbit hole. Rental is free on the first trip. Four hundred English sterling for your own gear.”
Hargreaves held down her gorge and shifted in her seat. She had taken the precaution of taking off her duster and undoing two buttons on her blouse. She’d worn a lighter corset beneath, in beige, just high enough to hold her front up. Her .22 Tranter was stowed in her boot, and her belt became a loose hoop accenting the swell of her hips. Between the just-visible edge of her underthings and the tightly fitted sable tights, she wanted Singh not to know which part of her to look at. It would blind him to the deceit in her eyes.
“And pray, what manner of coin does a man of means and measure like yourself prefer?” Hargreaves said quietly. She uncrossed and re-crossed her legs, letting the heels drift in the air. The dancer jingled furiously, giving her a dirty look—not on my turf, you tart.
“Ahhh,” said Singh. His mustaches quivered. “Perhaps we can conduct business in private? The proprietor lets me use his office.” There was only one lush at the nearby bar, and he was so deep in a bottle he had come out the other side.
“Do let’s,” said Hargreaves. Singh took the lead, then Hargreaves got up with leisurely slowness, letting the tension build. Singh gestured towards a curtain of beads. Hargreaves walked through into a dim hallway, more of an alley created by the meeting of two shipping containers. The top was open to the bulkhead of the Verdurous. The ends were blocked off with planks, and crudely soundproofed with layers of rugs. She could feel the eyes crawling up and down her backside as she crossed to the other container door.
Singh didn’t wait until she got there before he slammed her to the wall. His hands crept over her blouse like questing fish. One shot inside, popping a button. Hargreaves felt the difference in their height as a tickle of mustaches at her back and a bump just over her knee. She heard a fumble of fabrics. Disgusting.
“You’re a tall drink of water… you’ll have to kneel so I can choke you properly,” said Singh. His hand shot to her throat, but couldn’t get much purchase. “Not to worry; you’ll only pass out at the end… because you like it so much.”
“Haven’t you been doing this trade awhile?” said Hargreaves, letting the hands roam. She put her arms on the shipping container wall and slid them up, out of the way, as if Singh’s passions were hard to curtail. She shifted slightly to her side. “You always pass… to the left!”
In a flash, Hargreaves stuck out her rear and twisted back, letting her arm lead her body. Momentarily, she saw Singh’s expression; eyes wide, open in pleasure as her curves brushed across his hips. Then her elbow found his larynx, not a hard blow but a stunning one, and he gasped, voiceless. Seizing the moment and his arm, Hargreaves flipped him around and put her heel to his knee, forcing Singh to the ground. Singh squeaked, harshly, in pain. The whole thing had taken two seconds, but it left Hargreaves standing over a panting, wheezing man completely in private.
“Now then,” said Hargreaves as she pivoted away from Singh’s flailing arm. She hiked the other one up, and elicited a painful squeal. She tried not to enjoy it too much—this man had been instrumental in the death of a woman not an hour ago. He had sold something that made people attack travelers. Hargreaves gave a heroic effort to resist, but in the end she gave in to temptation and yanked Singh’s arm to a point just before it would break. Singh eventually gave up and planted his free hand on the painted steel of the floor, where she fought the urge to stomp on it. Submission was good, and she needed to reward that.
“Mr. Singh, you’ll get your voice back in a moment,” said Hargreaves. “I need for you not to scream when you do, or else I shall break your arm, and I daresay it will be a low point in your day. I don’t have much fondness for hurting people, but then again you seem to be a man of little conscience and this disgusting hand was just stroking my fine French underthings. So if I were you, I would answer my questions succinctly, briefly, and with all speed.”
Singh didn’t say anything, so Hargreaves did take the chance to stomp her heel on his hand.
“Yes!” croaked Singh. “Yes, bloody bitch, I’ll talk! Mother promise, Father promish, Brahma bloody promish!”
Hargreaves had no idea what that meant, but he was slurring and had dropped the subtle Indian accent for aitches. She took that to mean her coercion was working.
“Oh, I see you’re a cockney underneath? What happened to the exotic opiate dealer nonsense?”
“Just ask your blasted questions!” hissed Singh.
“I want to know about the girl,” said Hargreaves.
“What girl?”
“The girl who got killed today.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” said Singh. Hargreaves gave him the old Yard enticement, pushing his arm down lower until it creaked.
“Arghhh—Okay! Okay!” said Singh. “You know the dancer inside? She’s the donor for Wonderland. You buy from me and you buy from her. She gives a great high, lady, I ought to tell you—Arghh!”
“So it’s different from person to person,” said Hargreaves.
“Right, would you let go of me arm?” cried Singh. He seemed much younger, probably in his twenties. The mustaches were peeling off his face with the sweat dripping from his chin. “Meredith’s been everywhere; she’s my go-to. The stuff takes you wherever she’s been, yea? I tell all my customers, you go off-script, it’s your own head you’re mucking about.”
“Off-script,” repeated Hargreaves. “You mean….”
“Yea. Anybody who’s been through the veil.”
The Gray Veil. The gateway to the Lands Beyond. Hargreaves knew it was real, but sometimes the place sounded like a myth. Rumor had it there were many worlds behind the veil, gardens of Earthly delight and palaces of perennial pain. This was something she didn’t know enough about. Did Wonderland truly take someone beyond the veil without moving from an opium den couch? If so she was beginning to understand why some would go to such lengths as bleeding a girl dry.
“You’re saying you have people here who buy from you and attack travelers?” said Hargreaves. “Who? Tell me!”
“Bad for business and such, yea? It would do me good if whoever did such a thing should disappear,” said Singh. He was beginning to recover, just a bit, becoming accustomed to his new lot in life. “Hey, from here your legs look jolly good. Arghh, all right, all right, come off it!”
“You think I am here to sell you a contract?” said Hargreaves.
“You’re no rozzer,” said Singh. “You’re a killer. Stone cold.”
Hargreaves was now honestly taken aback, and she nearly released Singh. She had killed, before, but only once in the line of duty and to save an innocent. She certainly didn’t believe herself to be a simple cutthroat.
“I am not going to kill anyone,” said Hargreaves. “But someone needs to find out what happened to the girl and—”
“We know what happened to the girl,” said Singh, almost pleadingly. His arm looked like a wet brown noodle. “A few of my misguided clients took to her with too much gusto. Does it matter who? The barge captain will hire cutlasses to clear out the bottom leve
ls, regardless of whether those vagrants did it. I don’t give a damn about them. Vagrants don’t buy much.”
“I just want to know why,” said Hargreaves, a little guarded. Her bottom was tensing in a way that meant she didn’t really have a leg to stand on. She felt a little foolish, even though she was the one in control.
“Why?” said Singh, nearly in tears. “Why do we do anything? For pleasure, of course. For need.”
That made her let the man go. Singh immediately toppled to the floor, scrabbling and holding his arm. He lay there for a moment, obviously in pain, staring hatefully at Hargreaves. He reached into his robes, but the inspector caught the motion and stepped on his elbow before Singh could finish pulling out a weapon. Hargreaves reached into her boot for her .22, leveling it at Singh.
“Slowly. Use the bad hand,” said Hargreaves.
When Singh’s shivering hand emerged, it held a small glass globe with filigree all over it, and a small screw on one side. Hargreaves plucked it from his fingers, like a date, and nearly pricked the man with the needle that shot out of the screw. When she turned the screw, the needle came in and out. The globe looked empty, but a second later she realized there was a thick, bluish liquid inside. If she squinted, she could make out the words spelled out by the filigree: “Drink Me.”
“For the pain,” said Singh, but he had already seen her disquiet, so Hargreaves let him go. He disappeared through a hidden panel in the passageway, back to the warrens of the market barge. No use for a dealer when the violence was happening en masse. How many other dealers worked in the shadows? Singh was probably only the most visible one. Who would she bring Singh to anyway?
