The Wrecker was a monster, from a city of monsters. It belonged down here, with her.
She felt the cold, and grinned.
Ice claimed the Wrecker’s limbs. It thrashed under the broken sky, tentacles recoiling from icy pavement. Zeddig slipped from sluggish arms. Her brain hurt. She saw doubled, tripled.
A carpet of metal spiders boiled from cracks in the pavement and covered the Wrecker, biting, climbing, spinning sharp wire nets.
When a Wrecker screamed, the scream was wet.
Zeddig surfaced, alone, and ran.
* * *
Raymet panted. She felt naked in her cell, and not in a good way. The godsdamn squid had been listening all along. It knew, now, how she felt about Gal, and could use that to use her. “Well?” she said. “I answered your damn question. What the fuck do you have to say?”
Gal smiled. “That,” she said, “changes everything.” She touched the bars, tested them.
“What does it change, precisely? Seems to me we’re just as screwed as we were before, only now I’ve embarrassed myself.”
“Not embarrassed,” Gal said. “Never.” She nodded, satisfied with whatever she’d felt in the bars.
And she looked at Raymet.
Not for the first time. They were partners, colleagues, they knew one another well. Of course she’d looked at her before. But Raymet had never felt this seen.
“We will have to talk,” Gal said. “I have apologies to make. Zeddig told me I should speak with you, but I expected—no, that would be a lie. I thought to spare you entanglement with my condition, with my quest. I was wrong.”
“Gal—”
“There are forms for such an affair, and proper ceremonies. The shortest, for now, is: I share your esteem.”
Raymet blinked. “What.”
Gal looked unshakeable as ever, behind those bars. “I do not understand you. But neither do I understand fire, or starlight, or storms, and I love them. I have no land, I have no title. I come from a world you hate. I did not want to trouble you with my affection. You are fierce and beautiful and clever, and I should have told you all this before. It is cowardice that I have not.”
“Well.” Raymet released the bars of her cell. Without their support, she swayed. “Um. I. That’s. Great?” Stupid, stupid. After all that, after the fucking heart-wrenching confession, to hear this and be unable to speak—but she couldn’t say anything like that, about storms and fire and shit, and—“I’m, I mean, I’m glad.”
Gal tightened her grip on the bars.
Raymet paced. Pressed her hands to her temples. Laughed, and couldn’t stop. She felt the good sort of naked now.
“What’s so funny?”
“This would be a lot more convenient,” Raymet said, “if we weren’t in prison.”
Gal laughed too, but only once, and without the hysterical edge even Raymet could hear in her own voice.
“Same question,” Raymet said. “Back at you.”
“I do not understand.”
“What’s so funny? We’re stuck here, the world’s out there, and I’m glad I told you, and gods, I mean, you have no idea, or maybe you do, what it feels like to hear you say you feel the same way, it’s, I don’t know, I was never good at all this poetry shit, it’s spring, it’s a bath and clean sheets and a journal letter that says ‘accepted without revisions,’ but you are on the other side of two layers of cell bars.”
“Details,” Gal said.
“Are those details? They seem like a critical component of our situation.”
“The critical components of our situation,” Gal said, “have changed.”
“Really.”
She licked her lips once, and took a cell bar in each hand. “My vows forbid escape, once I have been subdued by adversaries in honorable combat.” Golden light seeped from her skin and hardened to a glassy sheen. “But a Knight may rescue her lady from a tower. That is practically what Knights are for.”
She broke the bars of her cell like twigs. Then she stepped over the splintered bones, crossed the hall, and broke the bars of Raymet’s, too.
“Wow,” Raymet said.
“Shall we?”
She hesitated, only for a heartbeat. Then she took her hand.
* * *
Forty minutes. Time.
Zeddig ducked away from an angel’s flailing arm and surfaced on the Boulevard Corrigé, skidding down the centerline. Horses reared, carriages rocked on two wheels, bicycles swerved; she found her footing and ran. Wreckers ringed the rooftops, closing in. She counted ten. Others nearby, no doubt. If Ley kept a good pace, she’d have reached Altus, with plenty of time to sneak through security.
Now, Zeddig’s job was to escape—if she could.
She scrambled to a manhole cover and lifted it, though muscles in her back and legs screamed. She slipped down, landed in muck, and dove.
The storm drains and sewers of Agdel Lex were grotesque, but the sewers of the dead city . . . She looked around as little as possible, found her footing, and fled. On the plus side, the cold reduced the stench. On the minus side, these tunnels were even more full of things that wanted to kill her.
A razor-edged serpent fell from the tunnel roof to wrap around her neck, but she tore it off her and threw it down to the ice. Her shoes crunched things like bugs that vented poison gas—she stopped breathing and ran. (Another advantage of the cold: gas diffused slowly.) She skidded through frozen shit between the legs of a scorpion tank, and bluffed her way past a killing curse.
She’d delved more tonight than she’d ever delved before. If this had been another, better era, someone would have made a ballad of her exploits, something with good scansion even. She’d settle for a few stories whispered at the graduate department meetings, the kind that started, I know you won’t believe this, but I heard . . .
Of course, the department meetings would stress the wrong part of the story: Zeddig’s previous delves had been peripheral affairs, lasting a few seconds at the outside. This run, near the core, through sewers toward the Wreckers’ tower and the Anaxmander Stacks, toward the Wound where Gerhardt hovered, always dying, never dead—this was a fucking masterwork. This was record-book.
Ice spread up her leg from the cut in the suit. She lost sensation, slowing. Some of that skin was probably frozen solid by now. Might lose the leg. If she survived, she could get a Craftswoman to make her a spare. If any of them survived. If Ley saved them.
Forget all that. You’re running uphill into terror and cold, through sewer tunnels that don’t exist anymore, skidding past monsters, and tracking all the while, on the map inside your mind, the points where the dead city’s sewers overlap Alikand’s.
The nearer Zeddig drew to the tower, the less the Wreckers could smell her when she emerged. If she came out close enough, she could escape through the Agdel Lex steam tunnels. She’d used this path before, once. She could make it.
Left, straight a hundred meters, through the sewer arch with the grapevine decoration, into a side tunnel that, halfway down its length, in another world, was a half-built subway station, abandoned when the Wreckers decided underground transit was too hard to oversee.
Her leg felt leaden beneath the knee. She could not breathe. The suit’s heat was gone. Seconds left. Almost there.
Spots danced on the edges of her vision.
Her numb foot struck—something. She stumbled. Fell. This would have to do.
She tried to surface. Couldn’t. Too tired to panic. There was something in Agdel Lex where she stood. Roll left, or roll right?
She chose right, and surfaced, panting, against a ticket stand. Her suit lights cast bright circles on the subway station’s mosaic wall: on Dame Progress wreathed in the halo of her arms.
Her leg hurt. Breathing hurt. Everything hurt.
She commanded her arms to do the work of legs. Reached her knees, easy, planted on all fours. Focus on the ground. Don’t throw up. One more push after this, use the ticket stand to force yourself upright, get
blood into that frozen leg.
Up. Go.
On the bright side, she came up easier than she expected.
Of course, she had help.
She stared up into the face of Lieutenant Bescond.
“Hi there,” the Lieutenant said, and hit her.
Chapter Seventy
KAI SHELTERED IN PLACE when the sirens came, and when they stopped she spent an hour hunting for a cab. When she finally tracked one down the horse informed her, with a whinny, that the fare would be twice normal. Fine. She expensed it, locked the carriage doors from inside, and watched life leak back into the city as her carriage bounced down streets emptier than she’d ever seen in Agdel Lex. She passed a melting patch of frost, which a sidewalk vendor covered with her cart.
Kai’s heart ran fast. She thought of incursions, and the Wastes, and Ley, and tomorrow’s launch. Had the dead city tried to break through one last time, sensing the Iskari plot? Where was Ley in all this mess?
Bescond waited for her in the lobby of the Arms, seated, hat pushed low to shade her eyes against the light of the chandelier. She held a newspaper open, unread; when she stood, she moved stiffly. She must have been waiting for Kai longer than she would prefer. A bandage wrapped the knuckles of her right hand, and she favored her right leg.
“Lieutenant.” Kai forced herself calm: relaxed her shoulders, breathed deep into her belly. There were too many ways this could go wrong. “Sounds like you’ve had a long day.”
Bescond folded the newspaper, and folded it again. “Ms. Pohala. You’re home late yourself.”
“Meetings,” she said, which was not false.
Bescond rolled the newspaper into a cylinder. A bit of dried blood stuck to her fingers. Her lips curved. Kai could not tell whether her smile was real. “I’d like to show you something.”
Am I under arrest, would be an imprudent response—signaling she had something to hide, forcing Bescond to make the conversation formal. “Are you here in your professional capacity?”
Bescond gripped the newspaper roll in both hands, and her forearms tensed, but the paper, tightly wound, did not crumple. “I was not fair, in my office. Family matters are difficult to square with affairs of state. I deal with the latter. You are torn between them. But you have split the difference well.”
What did Bescond know? “Thank you.” She did not add: I think.
“I have a peace offering,” she said. “Come to the tower.”
“I’ve had bad luck in that tower before.”
“I promise, on my Lord, you will leave tonight unharmed, in full possession of your faculties.” She frowned. Her shoulder pads could not disguise her disappointment. “I’m sorry we’ve reached the point you feel you need those assurances. I appreciate the help you’ve given us.”
In a better world, Kai often thought, one would have a sort of scale with which to weigh the voices in one’s head. Others—Izza, for example—seemed to hear fewer voices, or at least tended to have one clear conscious favorite. Such minds must be easier to navigate. In Kai’s head, there tended to be many voices, all deafening.
Should she give herself to Bescond, and trust the promise? Beg off and play it safe, so Bescond would not deduce Kai’s plans? But if she refused, would Bescond, olive branch rejected, turn a more suspicious gaze on Kai? Or, and or, and or, and here the particular skills Kai’s profession, of addressing each new idol with utter conviction, cut against her: she argued each option against herself, and the next, in strobe succession while Bescond waited.
She was tired, and scared, and when she was tired and scared she erred on the side of curiosity. Things you knew couldn’t surprise you later.
“Show me,” she said.
“Thank you.” Bescond clapped Kai wincingly hard on the shoulder. “You won’t regret this.” She marched from the lobby, newspaper tucked under her arm like a marshal’s baton.
Bescond’s carriage, Wrecker-escorted, led them to the tower. Kai was used, by now, to the certainty she felt in the Wreckers’ presence: how permanent the world seemed, how perfect and how calm. She thought she knew what to expect on entering the tower itself, but there she found herself surprised.
“What happened?”
“Hm?” Bescond raised one eyebrow.
“That big white scar in the tower’s side.”
“Oh.” She waved the newspaper dismissively. “Prison break. Rare, but we’ll track the fugitives down. They can’t run forever.”
“That,” Kai said, “looks pretty bad.”
“We have difficult prisoners at times.” They entered the garage, and the carriage stopped. Kai followed Bescond to the lift. “Though I can’t remember a surprise on this scale. Fortunately the tower, being biological, can heal itself—in time. You see, the process has already begun. In a month there will be no trace the breach. Meanwhile, scar tissue will suffice.”
The doors rolled back on the twenty-first floor. The halls were a color Kai had never seen. Not a color she had never seen in the building—a color she had never seen, period. “Did the escape cause the alarm?”
Bescond counted doors. Kai felt the tower’s heartbeat through the soles of her shoes. They must be close. “Hardly,” Bescond said. “The alarm prompted the escape, rather than the other way around. Tonight, we experienced our most complex incursion in years; the Wreckers were spread thin containing the damage. Our system worked, as ever.”
“Was the dead city trying to break in?”
Bescond arrived at a door larger than the rest, emblazoned with a seven-pointed star. “That’s what we thought at first, but no. It was a delver breach—a noteworthy event for a few reasons. First, for its scale: a dozen punctures in twenty minutes, in five different districts. Second, for the size of the delver crew.”
“How many?”
Bescond touched the star, and the door irised open.
“One,” she said, louder, over the beating of the enormous heart.
Thigh-thick vessels of cobalt blood snaked along the walls of the chamber beyond, pulsing with the heartbeat. No—the chamber was the heart, an enormous hollow heart at the city’s core: its walls vibrated, channeling the tower’s phosphorescent blood. Blood lit the chamber with a light deeper than blue; Bescond’s teeth glittered, and the whites of her eyes, and her cufflinks.
An enormous twisted column of gray flesh descended from the dome’s apex to its floor, or rose from floor to apex, the spongy trunk of an immense tree whose branches wept down like a baobab’s to become roots again. Sparks and rainbow colors danced through the gray in domino cascade. Kai tried to trace the light’s path, but it moved too fast. She imagined dominos that, falling, knocked other dominos upright again, to be struck in turn by still other dominos, ripples adding to ripples, waves adding to waves.
She did not tremble. She did not kneel.
She entered the tower core, warily.
The heartbeat receded, or the parts of her that could register such a low pervasive sound grew numb.
As the horror and size of the space sank in, Kai’s mind made room for details.
Like: a human figure bound to the trunk of the nerve tree.
Zeddig.
“I cannot prove that your sister lives,” Bescond said. “If I could, I would have caught her already, to remand into your custody.”
The room was larger than it looked, or else geometry behaved wrong here. It took a long time for Bescond to walk Kai toward Zeddig, and the tree.
“But I can prove the next best thing: she did escape the Wastes. Her death is not on your hand, or mine.”
Kai controlled her breath, her stomach, her stride, and remembered the woman bound to the brain, in a different time. Remembered her warning Kai away, in the hallway of her grandmother’s house; remembered her imperious on the train, remembered how she held Ley close and held her up at the foot of the tower in the Wastes, remembered her trapped animal glare, her body thrust forward by instinct to protect Kai’s sister from Kai herself.
Half Z
eddig’s face swelled purple with a bruise. Bonds of flesh grew over her arms and legs and mouth. She breathed heavily through her nose. Her eyes were blank.
“Trust me, Ms. Pohala. You don’t know Hala’Zeddig like I do. If she came out of the Wastes, your sister did as well. She would have died out there rather than let your sister perish. So, Ley’s in the city. We haven’t yet forced out of Zeddig her reasons for tonight’s mad delve—that will come once the tower has had time to make her comfortable. She lacks faith in our Lords, so we must build it within her. She’s long been an outsider in Agdel Lex.”
At that name, Zeddig’s eyes narrowed, and Kai retreated a step at the hatred that burned there. Zeddig’s bonds tightened; her body shook, and she sagged again.
“Your sister,” Bescond said, “is alive. Zeddig may have hidden her with her family. Likely, Ley resides in a part of the city our agents cannot reach—a part I will not name, which will face extreme sanction after tomorrow’s launch.” Bescond peeled back the strip of flesh over Zeddig’s lips. The woman panted through her teeth. “Kai wants to save her sister, Zeddig. Can you tell her where she is?”
Zeddig forced her head up. She glared into Kai’s eyes. They watched one another for a time that could not have been longer than seconds.
Don’t say anything, Kai thought. Don’t tell me. If I know, she knows.
“I want to help,” she said, to give Bescond the impression she was playing along. “If you can give me anything.” She didn’t dare stress the “me.” “Please.”
Zeddig’s eyes rolled up into her skull. Her lips moved. The tower’s heartbeat echoed. Kai moved forward to catch the whisper. Bescond leaned close too.
Zeddig’s teeth flashed brilliant blue, and snapped shut just shy of Kai’s ear. Kai fell back. Dimly, she saw Bescond bind Zeddig again. The Lieutenant took Kai’s arm, helped her to her feet. “My apologies, Ms. Pohala. I hoped we could get something out of her.”
“No.” Kai brushed mucus off her skirt, tried to ignore the wet warmth of the floor beneath her hands. “That’s fine. I—I didn’t expect.”
Bescond escorted her from the room. “The launch will be at dawn tomorrow,” Bescond said, when the door closed. “That’s all the time I can offer Ley, I’m afraid.”
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