by Tim Akers
I looked at the third member of their rain-soaked party. A boy, maybe a little younger than the girl. His eyes were glassy, and he swayed dangerously close to the fire. The girl saw my look of concern and laughed.
"Ricky's birthday today. He's a man now, aren't you Rick?"
Rick didn't answer. The older guy chuckled and passed the bottle to the girl. I took the bottle after her. Bitter and sharp in my mouth, its fire bursting through my chest. A couple shots rang out, far down the street. The girl winced and the man shook his head.
"Don't know what they're on about," he said. "Not like people need a reason to hate the Badge. Getting drunk in the rain shouldn't be a crime."
"Shouldn't it?" the girl asked, with a trill of mischief in her voice. "I'm feeling pretty damn criminal, I'll tell you."
I saw it in her, that childish glee at being in trouble. Being troublesome. I probably went to school with her mother, if the money in her bearing came from Founder stock rather than the industrialists. Did that matter, though? Which side of the Chamber her money came from? I imagined rich parents were just as overbearing, regardless of whether they'd earned their money or inherited it. The kids rebelled in the same predictable ways.
"You don't look like a pretty damn criminal to me," I said.
My two mostly sober new friends turned to me, a little uncomfortable.
"Now just you listen, bud," the man said, snatching the bottle from my hand. "There's no reason to be rude to the lady, just because we gave you a drink."
"Rude to the lady? We're standing in an alleyway, in the rain, drinking from a bottle of rotgut. And I suspect you brought her here, and got her brother drunk, and I suspect you had a good reason for doing that."
The man flushed and busied himself with the bottle. Who was he? An older friend? A servant? It wouldn't matter, in the end.
"What the hell are you talking about?" the girl said. "Jeremy is here at my request, and for my protection. It was Ricky's birthday, and I wanted the three of us to have a night out."
You could almost hear the pout in her voice. Jeremy didn't say anything.
"For your protection. Right." I took the bottle from Jeremy's loose hands and drank up. "Have some sense, girl, and get inside with the other good children. And take Ricky with you."
"Not every girl needs a hero, you know!" she shrilled.
The words hit me. An alley, when I was young and foolish, rushing to the aid of a girl I had only just met. Emily. That's what she said to me, when I thought to rescue her from an attacker, and she stood over his body, knife in hand. Not every girl needed a hero.
My hand was on the fire barrel, the pain barely getting to me through a wall of fuzzy numbness. I looked down at the smoldering cuff of my coat, then to the bottle, and up to the man in the hooded cloak. I was tired, sure, but not this tired. Back to the girl. Her eyes had gone wide, her hand to her face, gasping as she collapsed. Not every girl, no. But this girl does.
"You drugged us," I slurred. "You have no idea how bad that is."
"You should have stopped in a different alley," the man said. He batted the bottle from my hand. It shattered when it hit the cobbles, its tainted contents disappearing into the rain. "Or gotten properly drunk and gone to sleep, like everyone else."
Such a petty criminal. Such a stupid way for this stupid day to end. I backed into the wall, using it to hold me up. The man went to check on Ricky and the girl, both of whom were limp on the ground. Then he turned his attention to me.
"Look, I know what you're thinking," he said. Glanced at the girl, most of her leg exposed and muddy, back to me. "And I'd be lying if I said that didn't play a part. But mostly it's him. The boy's at the age of majority tonight, and that makes him an heir. Bad night to be an heir."
"I agree. Terrible night."My words were thick in my mouth. I blinked away the shadows that were clinging to my eyes, ran my hand across my face.
He gave me a funny look, then shrugged.
"Anyway. Bad luck for you, running into us. I hoped to have this all done before the curfew, but it's hard getting them away from crowds. Turned out that waiting until everyone was safely at home or tucked away in jail worked out. Other than you showing up. And that's your problem more than mine, honestly."
I steadied myself on the wall and tried to rub the drugged fatigue from my head. He chuckled, and when I looked up he was holding a knife. The barrel was still between us, and I probably could have gotten into the street. He might not have chased me, not with his two charges unconscious on the ground, but he seemed like the kind of guy who couldn't afford any witnesses. Didn't matter. I had my gun in my hand without really thinking of the consequences.
That surprised him. Maybe he was new to this business, or maybe victims who fought back weren't really his usual thing. He adapted well enough. Ducked behind the barrel, and when he came up it was with the girl's limp body under his arm, knife against her throat. Her head lolled over the blade, already drawing blood.
"How the hell does this happen to me?" I muttered. The damn gun was heavy in my hand. The poison was dragging me down. "What is it that I do to get in these situations?"
"This can still end well," he said. I don't think he knew what he was talking about. "You can just walk away. I promise you the girl isn't going to get hurt."
"Somehow I have trouble taking the word of the guy who drugged her in the first place." My sight was blurry, but I did my best to keep the barrel in the general direction of his head. Best if he thought I could pull off that shot, even if I knew better. "In fact the only way I see this ending is with blood. And it's not going to be mine, so you best start coming up with ways it doesn't have to be yours, either."
"Somehow I have trouble taking a threat from a man who can barely hold his head up." There was snide contempt in his voice. "So maybe you should start coming up with ways you walk out of this alive. Like, maybe if you just put the gun down, turn around and walk out."
"Let's figure that out, right after you stop hiding behind an unconscious girl."
He spat, but didn't move. Man, I love standoffs. Especially when I'm drunk, drugged and haven't slept in twenty hours. Best kind of standoffs. And no Wilson to pull my ass out of the fire.
"How about this," he said. "How about you take the girl, and I take young master Richard, and we just go our separate ways."
"I don't think I'd be a very good friend if I let you take her brother. How about you put that knife in your eye and save me the trouble of having to kill you."
"Whoa, whoa, no one said anything about killing." He pressed the knife more firmly against the girl's lolling head, just to make it clear that this whole conversation was, in fact, about killing. "What the hell do you care, anyway?"
"Well, at first I thought you meant to rape her, and I had it in my mind that I was going to be some kind of hero about it. But then you drugged me, and I take that kind of thing personally. Would have been okay if you'd just dropped the knife when I pulled iron. Instead you hide behind the girl, put your knife to her throat." The darkness in my head was closing in on me fast. Good thing I could talk in my sleep. Or at least, I could threaten in my sleep. "It offends me on a professional level."
"What would have been better is if you had drunk more and fallen asleep with the kids." He was edging around the barrel, putting it firmly between us. He straddled Ricky's unconscious form and hitched the girl further up, so her feet were off the ground. "Then everyone involved could have woken up tomorrow with a bad hangover, and you could have kept out of my business."
"You'd have slit my throat. Unless you're particularly bad at this job which, honestly, I'm beginning to think might be the case. Besides, you didn't put enough juice in that bottle to take down a man my size. You had to drink it, too, or the kids would have gotten suspicious."
"Listen to you, all clear-headed and analytical." He smiled grimly. "You know this kind of work. So why don't you just turn around and walk…"
He stopped talking and I stopped breathi
ng, because we both heard it at the same time. Feet, lots of them, and the idle chatter of bored officers. Badge patrol. They weren't on our street, maybe on one of the cross streets, but certainly not more than a block or two away. They could turn and come this way, or they could wander off somewhere else. Tricky situation.
"Don't do it," he hissed. "Don't make a sound, don't call out, and don't fire that iron. Because if you do, I promise you, I promise, I'm going to cut this girl open and I'm going to run like hell. You think you can explain all this to the cops?"
"You think you can run faster than I can shoot you?" I asked, but I kept my voice down. I knew I couldn't run, and even if I could explain all this, I would still end up in custody and right back in the system. He gave me a sharp look and squeezed the girl for emphasis. I held up my hand.
They went the other way. Voices faded, footsteps became muffled. We stood staring at each other for two minutes after the last hint of their presence went away, then relaxed.
"See, this can still all be okay," he said, resting the girl against his knee and wiping his mouth with the back of the hand holding the knife. "We can work this out, you and me."
It was just enough of an opening, his tired arm resting, the girl folding limply forward, the knife away from her throat. Only opening I was going to get. I pushed the tension and fatigue from my mind and, loosely as I could, raised the revolver and squeezed two shots into his chest.
First one took him in the shoulder. He looked startled, dropped the knife, his eyes wide. He tried to hug the girl back to his body but I was already pulling the trigger on the second shot. Faster than him. Better than him. He dropped, and the girl dropped with him. I stumbled around the barrel, kicked her away from his bloody chest, kicked the knife down the alley, then took his shirt in my hand, knelt, and raised him off the ground.
"This was never a negotiation," I said. Then I punched him once, my hand wrapped around the cylinder of the revolver. Twice, teeth and blood across my knuckles. Three times, but he was already dead. I dropped him and turned to the girl.
She was still out, would be out for a while. A shout went up a couple streets over, then another. Patrol had heard the shot and was looking for the source. I didn't have a lot of time. I turned her so that she was on her side, in case something in the drug made her puke. Then I pulled her coat over her legs, made sure Ricky was comfortable, then turned back to the guy.
A bit of metal caught my eye. It was stuffed in an inner pocket of his coat, torn open by my shot. A familiar shape, stitched to a stiff black wallet. I picked it up.
Seal of the Badge, iron and pewter. My bullet had nicked the leather, biting a circle out of it. Why had he been scared of being found by the patrol, then? I looked down at the girl, at Ricky, at the dead man they trusted. The patrol was getting closer. Running out of time.
I pocketed the emblem, pulled my coat around my shoulders and trotted drunkenly down the alley. Just like a hero.
Chapter Eleven
The Nightmare Bright
Morning came with a backache and a hangover and more blood on my shirt than I expected. I was wrapped in a canvas tarp, stolen from a stack of crates. I remembered breaking into a warehouse the night before, at the end of a long, stumbling retreat through some pretty dodgy parts of Veridon.
It was all I could do to pull myself upright without groaning in pain. And then, I groaned anyway. I sat on the floor, hidden from the main floor of the warehouse by a pallet of barrels, and tried to gather my senses.
Today was the day of the curfew. I saw the start of it last night, the round-ups and the empty streets. Still didn't know why there was a curfew. Just that it meant I wasn't getting out of the city until tomorrow, at the earliest. Probably best to just lie low until the zep dock opened up. I got up and stumbled my way through the warehouse, looking for food. There was a break room for the workers, and some lockers. Wilson would have done a better job of it, but with the warehouse closed and no one coming in today, I had plenty of time to tumble the locks and go through the contents. When I had a suitable hodgepodge of foods and two nearly-empty bottles of wine from the manager's stash, I went back into the warehouse and made a little nest for my meal.
What must this be costing? Hundreds of warehouses like this one closed, no material moving through the city, no manufacturing or commerce of any kind. How do you shut down an entire city without crippling it? Why do you do such a thing?
Too much like work, that sort of thinking. I had resolved to run, and I was sticking to it. I pushed those questions from my mind and settled in to the business of filling my stomach on pilfered goods. Unfortunately, that didn't take long, and soon I was sitting looking out over the warehouse with nothing to hold my attention but a half-bottle of wine that had to last me all day. I sipped slowly, and my mind eventually returned to those questions.
It was the cost I couldn't get over. If this was imposed by the Council, and it had to be if the Badge was enforcing it, then it had the approval of the industrialists. This warehouse was probably run by one of the families on the Council. What was so important that those families were willing to take this kind of loss? I knew that there had been other attacks in the city, other instances of those weird cog-dead monsters sprouting up, but it would have to be really widespread to justify this kind of response. And any attack that was that widespread would have the attention of the public, unless the Badge had done a remarkably good job of covering it up. I hadn't heard anything in my wanderings last night. So it couldn't be that.
Another possibility was that the Council had lost control of the Badge. Or that a very small portion of the Council had seized control of the Badge and this was some kind of power grab. I could see Angela doing that. Something similar happened two years ago. The Council had put some controls in place to prevent that from happening again, but since they were the ones who wrote the rules, I imagined they knew how to get around them. If it came to force of arms, though, each of the Families had personal guards that wouldn't give up without a fight. It might be a day of small, violent battles fought behind the walls of the great manors of Veridon. That would be interesting.
Interesting, but unlikely. The Council had plenty of tools at its disposal. The Families didn't need to shoot each other to gain or lose control in the city. That was probably the only thing that kept them from open war, honestly. Of course, the Founders had been on the wane for years now, and a lot of the tools of the Council translated into money and political influence.
And Crane. How did Crane fit into all this? That purge mask, that might have something to do with the curfew. If the Council decided they were going to wipe one of the Families from the history books, now was the perfect time to do it.
I had been wandering the warehouse floor while I thought, taking careful sips from the bottle. Now I was standing by the window I had broken to get in, last night. The clouds were dark and low, the whole city vibrating with the threat of truly heavy weather. The air had that smell of electricity and rain that preceded the worst storms of the season. I rubbed my head and looked down at the empty bottle. What was going on out there? What was happening in the city, while the rest of us hid inside and waited for the rain to pass?
"Who am I kidding?" I muttered, tossing the bottle aside. I emptied the two shells I had put into Jeremy the Badge last night, reloaded, and stretched the stiffness out of my back. "I'm just no good at running."
I hoisted myself up to the window and hopped down to the street. Thunder echoed down the delta, rolling through the empty avenues of Veridon like a bell tolling the last man's funeral in an empty city. Let it rain. Let the storm fall. I was ready.
Everything was wrong. It wasn't just that I had never seen Veridon like this: quiet, dead, the streets empty and the factories shuttered. I couldn't imagine what kind of political pressure had to be applied to turn the madness of my city into this still, empty thing. That was wrong, of course, but there was something more. Deeper.
Because of the curfew, I ha
d to travel on side streets and in the underground passages that no honest citizen even knew about. Veridon had been built over the bones of a river delta, marbled with tributaries and creeks that fed into the three larger rivers that defined the boundaries of the city. Bridges and streets had been built over these bodies, and sometimes the water was diverted, either intentionally or by some architectural blunder. There were a lot of dry rivers under the city of Veridon, and a lot of flooded cisterns, too. Lots of ways to get from place to place, as long as you didn't mind walking through darkness. I was used to it.
I hadn't really expected to be alone, either. Curfew or no, the underground markets were going to keep moving. Especially with the legitimate harbors cut off, I thought that the dark passages would be alive with contraband smugglers and the kind of underhanded merchants I had spent most of the last six years doing business with. There was nothing. The passages were empty, the cisterns echoed my footsteps, no matter how quietly I stepped, and the dry rivers were mine to wander alone. There was more going on here than a curfew. The city had been paralyzed, like a patient on a table. Still and cold, as good as dead.
I started my expedition with no real purpose in mind. Just wanted to get back among the criminals. Someone who might know something about what was going on and be willing to talk about it directly, rather than as part of some political game. An hour of dreary wandering made it clear that there wasn't anyone down here to talk to. And an hour after that, I saw why.
Veridon lies at the foot of the river Reine, by far the largest of the three rivers that border the city. Both the Edb and Dunje flow into it, bringing trade down from the high plains to the east of Veridon. The Reine itself flows to the south, until it tumbles over the enormous waterfall that once marked the edge of the known world. It was the discovery of the zepliner that opened up the market downfalls, and gave Veridon a certain amount of political power, power that it eventually translated into absolute dominance. The Reine itself is a deep and mysterious river. Its waters hold the strange wreckage that the Church of the Algorithm treat as found revelation, as well as the underwater dwellings of the Fehn.
