Twin Cities

5 September 2020 | R-18 | 36,344 words Jacklyn Whitewood brushes closer to the dealings of the Black Thorns than he can stomach. That same day, Jayden Blackthorne glimpses an underbelly to the Black Thorns that even she fears to touch. Peace is ever a rarity in their city of East Welding, rotten from its very heart out.

IN THE ROOM —semnai circle—

Jayden slammed her fist on the countertop. In the newly established Foreman's Mechanics, between wire racks of recycled engines and dismantled scrap, the tiny screws and valves and pistons all shuddered in their cases. Even so, even faced with an angered Jayden Blackthorne and two of her tag-along thugs, the clean-cut shopkeeper stood shoulders firm, undaunted.

Getting things done clean was how professionals worked, and Jayden did consider herself such. But breaking people, or rather breaking them in, often involved headaches like this.

“Alright! Ain't bothered reading no fucking brochures on your way in, I see you, I get you,” she began. “So here, Jay's foolproof guide to thriving n' surviving in East Welding, published in my head, right now, excerpt, chapter one, Blending in with the Locals. When I say, I get 15%, you say, yes Jay. 15%, yes Jay. 15%, yes Jay. Now here we go, rehearsals're over. You sell a nut. A wire. Whatever that rusted shit lump over there is or fire up that rotisserie and sizzle some chookies. I get 15%.”

“You'll leave my store, is what. Oi! You, put that down!” called the shopkeeper. Her boy Kaelis was fiddling with the merchandise, high chances shoplifting, his movement a blur in her periphery.

Jayden grabbed the shopkeeper by the jaw and yanked him back to her, snarling, “we're talking bitch.” Spittle spattered on his face, his eyes, his wrinkles. It dribbled off the creases of his cheeks, pronounced with his face scrunched into a scowl, as he blinked away the worst of it.

If he was nervous, the defiance hid it well. That resolve could've been respectable, if he hadn't dedicated it all into being a thick fuck. Context clues? Two big guys with crowbars? All the 'I-killed-a-guy' tats? Apparently not a big deal.

Guy was a twig, too, so fuck if she knew where the confidence was coming from. Maybe just ego.

Jayden let her hand slip from his face. Attention secured. Now to get him listening. “The itinerary. Plainest fucking language I can speak it,” she began. “You get a girl, make a kid, seven, eight year old boy with cute curly hair and brown eyes like his Ma. Make cash salvaging machines, shit goes good, real good, so move Welding and sit fourth tier, east quarter, 67th street, bunker 82. Business starts, Jay comes visits, she got a deal. You tell her yes, signing with—” her gaze flicked around for price tags. Shop's location was good, competitors weren't too many, and Kaelis' interest in the guy's parts vouched for their quality. By all indications, place would do well. “—say, five hundred dracht in my pocket before I leave that door, and I ain't pulverising lil Peytn's legs today.”

He unpursed his lips and dabbed his face with his knuckles. “Or you leave my store, the peace don't chase your racket, and you don't spend twenty years shovelling coal.”

Fuck. What a punchline.

From somewhere to her left, Kaelis did snort. “You stupid shit. She's in with them.” Idiot advising out of turn. She'd have to bitch him out later.

The shopkeeper frowned from him, reconsidered, squinted to her. “Labourers make peacekeepers their paychecks... if you think they'll condone this, they've set you up.”

“Nah, say, clear something up for me.” Jayden leaned her elbows onto the counter. “You're here from...?”

He recited, “East Block, Shaft Six, Level Three, Fifth Residential Vault.”

“Oh, that's fucking nowhere!” she cackled. People from places like that almost never reached success. Well, here was the exception. “Small place? Near some sexy veins? Gold, silver?”

“There's emerald.”

“So the lawmen got incentive to give a shit! Following? Cuz they bosses give a shit, and they bosses, and they bosses, all the ways to Seacrest.” Gesticulating along, Jayden pointed up. “Welding here onl—”

“Jay, rusties,” cut in the willowy voice of Yule, the second of Jayden's thugs. He was leaning on a shelf in the back of the store, thoroughly bored, gazing out the shopfront window. Indeed, on the far side of the street, three figures wearing rusty brown bandannas milled in and out of the crowd.

Three fucking rusties just strolling along a main street. “Ballsy,” she muttered, and gestured two quick signs to the boys: 'go on ahead,' and 'I'll catch up'. They filed out of the store while she turned back to the shopkeeper.

“Welding only got iron,” she emphasized. “It's the shit that ain't been governed that's prime commodity here. Black Thorns, get used to that name, governs the shit that ain't been governed. Fuck, boys here just left me to get doing some peacekeeping right now. Fol-low-ing?” on each syllable, she slammed the countertop again. Holy shit hurry up dumb shit hurry up.

“I'm beginning to...” he mumbled, setting his slender hands on the countertop.

“OK, I get fifteen percent.”

For a second, he said nothing. And then another second. And another. And Jayden's fingers twitched. And itched. And—

In a flash of silver, scarlet sprayed across the shopkeeper's shirt. Jayden ripped her knife out of his hand, for another spout of blood to tickle his chin. He screamed. She'd won, though inelegantly.

“Fifteen percent!” she barked.

“Y-Yes!”

“Five hundred dracht!”

“I don't have that!”

“Fucking—”

She'd estimated wrong.

“But—but, I can make it. Easy! Moving here was so much, but just give me a week...”

She'd estimated right.

The shopkeeper, cradling his injured hand, clumsily popped open his till. He scooped coins out of the thing, but the blood pouring into the till made some slip from his loose grasp and tink onto the floor. Red soon streaked the counter. “This is, about, three—”

“I'll get a guy pick it up seven days. Right now you get to a clinic, there one east on this street. That's arterial.” Protect your assets and don't fuck your own income source. If the guy died, whole visit was pointless. But, trusting him primed to cooperate later and capable of getting doctors now, Jayden pushed off from the counter and ran for the door. Gotta help her boys.

Though the anguish, a hopeful call came of, “then, Peytn...”

“The deal there,” Jayden paused at the threshold, catching herself on the doorframe. Over her shoulder, she spat, “was five hundred before I leave this door. I'm outta here, and moneywise I ain't holding shit.”

“But—I'll do what you want! I won't...”

“Yeah, well, that's your fucking penalty! Is why you learn to fucking say yes to me, the first time!” With that, she split from the doorframe. Though weightless and invisible and formless as air, something definite knotted in her stomach as she passed that door. She'd acquired yet another commitment. As with all of them she had accrued in her life, she intended to honour it.

But, priorities. She flit through the crowd to where Yule had spotted the rusties, straining for any glimpse of them or a struggle. Might already be over, she thought, but sure enough, not far from that spot, she caught the noise of havoc resounding from an alleyway.

Stout alley, high walls. Yule – smacking rustie against the wall, handily, spittle, teeth flying, good. Kaelis – deeper inside, going two-aginst-one, mobbed, swarmed, struggling, disoriented. Jayden bounded off an outcropping of pipe, surged off the sill of a high window, soared by momentum to the rooftops. Across the ground: litter – switchblades, crowbar. A prone figure curled on the floor behind the fighting. Non-combatant.

Okay.

She vaulted off the roof into the brawl. Touchdown. A roll dispersed the impact before it could snap her legs, left her scissored between the civilian and the two pummelling Kaelis. There. The discarded crowbar.

Choreography was for dancing. What happened in this alley was murder.

Action, reaction. Bring the crowbar up, swing it down. Bring it up, swing it down. Something moving – Kaelis. Tore away with one of them. He got them. He got it. Crack crack crack.

Jayden found herself standing unreally calm over a crumpled, fallen rustie. She and her boys had each felled one, and she was fine, and Yule was fine, and Kaelis was a little roughed up, which was to say he was fine. Even the rusties were nominally fine, as despite the pooling blood, all three were still breathing. Just unconscious.

Radio static buzzed in her skull. That was guilt, or shame, or fear, a dominating force for most, that her will could squeeze into a pinprick. But more critically, it was a barrier. With hot adrenalin as her blade and the thumping of her heart as the war drum, Jayden let the wall of static break, and shatter, and fall away to unveil an ocean of sun.

It surrounded her. It suspended her. An outline of her floated empty in its depths, until the heat seared through her, into her, injecting her with incandescence, until she, too, glowed white, and her every nerve burned radiantly.

She was a vessel. This was the power.

Exhilarating.

I can do anything, she raised the crowbar.

I am myself, she held it aloft.

I am free.

I am free.

I am free.

The crowbar's hook caught on something. Whatever. Yank.

I am free.

The high faded with her crowbar nestled in a mush that padded backside of the guy's open skull. A slight distance away, Kaelis watched with crossed arms and Yule watched lazily dangled over the wall, both composed, but neither looking straight-on. That was right. Never forget it. Jay Blackthorne was a crazy motherfucker.

Yule chimed, “Jay, you're a mess.” Kaelis nodded.

“Nah fuck that I'm a god.”

“You're a god covered in bits, girl,” said Yule. “Showered all over like confetti.”

Her hands, her arms, her shoes, jacket, torso. Blood had soaked into everything, and something was squelching in her sleeve. What was the pink glop she fished out of there? Who fucking knew.

Once again she found herself grateful that someone else did her laundry. “I can rock this,” she announced. But feeling the gore already starting to dry, and harden like scales over her skin, she would not begrudge a pitstop to the washroom.

Raking a hand through her hair, she tossed the crowbar to Kaelis. “You're up.” He glanced to one of the remaining rusties, then to Jayden. She nodded.

It took him a while to do it. Kaelis was kind of a wimp. But he did it.

The crowbar moved to Yule.

Two eager gazes settled on him. Can you do it? Can you do it? Are you with us?

Yule tilted his head in a way that made it hard to tell if he was hesitating, or just appraising his angle. With a single, clean, blow to the temple, the last rustie fell dead. Good work.

A tacit agreement fell over them: We're living in darkness now, boys. Tighter than any oath or conviction, the shadows that killings cast on the soul bound vice into permanent fellowship. I'm a wolf, you're a wolf, you got knives, well same here. Fucking awoo. You enjoying the afterglow? How sounds a gangbang? More fun with friends? It's kinship or exile, ratbag.

In practical terms, too. Neither Kaelis or Yule had the special protections that Jayden got through her mother. If by whatever whim or reason she decided they were disloyal, or just not valuable enough to defend, the threats the shopkeeper had made upon her would be instant realities for them. Blackmailed or simply devoted, they'd live and die here in Welding.

Jayden squatted down to collect the three souls from the corpses. Neither of the boys played cool for this, with Yule wincing out the alley and Kaelis cupping his hand over his mouth. Stupid, really. It had taken her months to first acclimatize to gore, but the soul stuff never had bothered her.

Souls had no stable form. From second to second they seemed to shift – from a ball, or a thread, or a helix, to a mist, or a sheet, or a spirograph – but really they were always all these things simultaneously. Constant were the indecipherable symbols that composed their length, the silver glow they cast as they twined around her fingers, and the faint emotions that tingled on her skin.

Pain. Envy. Regret. Surprise. Desire. Hunger. Fear. Standard stuff.

Die, she commanded, and closed her fist, hard.

The souls shattered like cheap glass, then disintegrated like sparklers. When she opened her hand, it contained not even dust.

It was fucking nothing. How did people get squeamish from that?

She dusted herself off and stood, looking to the prone figure she'd seen from the rooftop. It was a man – seedy-looking, in a threadbare outfit – with eyes pulled so wide the whites ringed the iris. Jayden nudged him with her shoe. “Ey.”

His stare rolled to her.

“Thems rusties wouldda dragged you to the Warrens and cut you up for dinner supposing us three Stygian angels weren't here to guardian your ass. Nothing to say about that?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but only squeaked like an ungreased valve. Jayden nudged him again, harder.

“Cuz way I sees it, I just bought your life. You gonna make that investment worth?”

“I—,” he stammered, finally pushing himself up, “I have nothing, no money I can give you.”

“Yeah no shit,” she snorted, glancing around the alley. He'd fashioned a bed for himself out of ratty couch cushions, in a nook under a stairway. “Can you work?”

“Yes,” he said decisively – even eagerly. Jayden grinned.

“Nice nice nice. Here's something you can do, is easy, dead easy,” she said. “You start paying good fucking attention to everything going around you, and anything interesting, anything moving, you get that news to me. Poke your nose in a lil. Got an idea what I'm saying?”

“I—the grocer's wife sees this man...” he flinched, as if she might hit him.

“Nah see there you go.” Jayden clapped his shoulder. “That's a lil interesting. Just a lil, mind. See, when—” Jayden shoved the man aside and drew her knife in one motion. At the end of the alleyway, something clinked. Clink. Clink. Rhythmic. Footsteps.

A silhouette rounded the corner, backlit in a halogen halo. A man. Lean build. Holding something long, and narrow, and sturdy – a prod. Ah.

Jayden relaxed her shoulders and lowered her knife, calling down the alley, “hey, Peace.” Yule and Kaelis, being dumbasses, tensed instead.

Once his silhouette drowned the lamplight behind him, and the corona around him dimmed, indeed, he wore the olive-green threads of a peacekeeper. Instantly she sensed Kaelis fingering his crowbar behind her, but frantically gestured him down. Holy shit. Antsy was one thing but chill the fuck out fucking idiot.

The peacekeeper had the opposite problem – he gawked blank-faced and dumb as a turd in a snowstorm. Okay, she'd break the ice. “Cleaning the streets a lil. Some rusties,” she pointed to them with her knife.

The peacekeeper craned his head as if peering down a telescope. “...Ah. I see. Well thanks for the service.” With that, he leaned back on his prod. “Naturally it won't become anything official, but if you won't be using the bodies, we could handle them for you,” he offered.

“Fuck I don't care. Anybody want em?” she asked the alley. Nobody replied. “Ok, yours then.”

The peacekeeper nodded. Beautiful! How things just fucking worked. She'd call it the magic of being Jayden Blackthorne, but knowing Kaelis was still palming the crowbar behind her like an unhappy dick, no, it wasn't, because Jayden Blackthorne had thorns like him at her side being constant thorns in her side. Har har har har.

With a grunt to announce their departure, Jayden began a procession out of the alley. The peacekeeper stood aside for her to pass – she fell into step between him and Kaelis, because hell fucking help her if Kaelis with his tool banged that sexy, sexy rear. Of the guy's skull, naturally.

“Actually,” the peacekeeper started, “one moment, Jayden, this is opportune. There's an issue we need to run by you.”

“OK, second. This way goes to the square, yeah? With the tram.”

“And the station, yes.”

Naturally she less needed directions than some rapport to chill Kaelis' ass. He still glared with the viciousness of a mutt's dripping maw, and muzzling bitches while making conversation did not interest Jayden. She glimpsed round the corner out the alley, corroborating everything – there was the square, the station, the tram stop, and in a cute little row, the eateries.

She'd only looked away a second, but what if – nah the guy was still fine. “Good boys go get burgers, and if you skip or mess, I skinning you five times worse than anything the Peace couldda done.” She foisted some coins from her pocket at the boys. See, charity.

“Understood,” said Yule, who accepted the money. Kaelis grunted, and after one last pissfit to hack phlegm on the Peace's boots, trudged after Yule. The Peace's grip on his prod tightened, then cooly released.

Thank fuck.

Her next order of business was shooing the homeless eavesdropper, but when she turned, Jayden found him already gone. Good initiative, she supposed. “Alright?”

“Nobody you employ deals proximene, correct?”

“Basilisk? No.” Making it required specific quartzes grown in specific environments and for all that trouble the buzz was liquid shit. Some businesses — because you never made basilisk alone — peddled it as a decadence for naive topsies and the foppish rats looking to be topsies. Those businessmen were idiots whose coin rested on glass castle called novelty, and if their clients lasted two hits without dipping then they were idiots too. Thorns didn't make it, and to Jayden's very respectable very substantial very unquestionable knowledge, nobody in the East Weld did.

The Peace straightened his shoulders. “In a routine check, we found one of yours, Asheman, selling proximene.”

“To who?” Of all her million questions, that one burst out of her mouth as the most pertinent. Came out sounding more dumbfounded than she'd like, too. But buyers for basilisk didn't just appear. They were somebodies, all of them.

“As I gather, to anyone.”

Anyone.

Anyone!

“That ain't right.”

“We found it strange too.”

“You not fucking with me?”

“On my life, I'm not.”

Then what the fuck.

Asheman. A typical wretch from the Warrens who scrounged the East Weld for food, then joined the Thorns for money. He was neither notably high or low ranked, none of his connections were interesting, and what he typically peddled was oxi.

So who the fuck was giving him basilisk? And how hard was he double dealing the Thorns?

“Our chief has the file,” advised the Peace. “But if you're visiting, clean up first. The blood is... it's a lot.”

“Nah, yeah, I'll drop in,” it was already on her list of errands anyway, “But Ash's mine. No touching him.”

“Yours, then.” Shrugging, the Peace set to the corpses, his hand flashing first to their pockets. A muttered, “saves me trouble,” wafted from behind Jayden as she turned into the square.

It bustled with people, people, people. Their stares landed on her and slid away hotly. Some lady gasped, a man shushed her up. Yeah. Fuck are you so scandalized for. A little blood in Welding. Who's not seen that. Get like the others, bitch. Just put your head down.

The distant silhouettes of Kaelis and Yule moved as smudges through the glass of some burger joint. As Jayden had instructed. With a snort, she pivoted to the Peacekeepers' Station.

“Seeing the chief,” Jayden announced to the receptionist. Some rando. Didn't recognize him. He opened his mouth to say some stupid shit probably. Jayden marched across the hall and slammed the bathroom door shut behind her.

For their place as the esteemed boot of Seacrest's authority, the Peace still crapped in a shithole like anyone. Iron walls, iron floors, just the stench of rusty iron and nicotine mixing with the piss puddled in one of the urinals. Jayden banished the stench with a drag from a cigarette.

She braced her hands on the rim of a sink, head low, shoulders locked. She was alone.

She looked up.

“Holy shit.”

In the mirror, she wore red. Like a hooker kept modest by a bra of titty tattoos, ribbons of blood upon blood upon blood upon blood caked her in such bold streaks, the contours of her face disappeared. The mask stuck clammy as leather. Like boiling gum. Like the devil's cumshot. Like his caustic semen on their faces melted off their skin, a mush of faces all together melted screaming into the fire, he loaded them into the fire, melted together melted in semen melted together all into one melted together all in the fire

Hot water gushed from the tap. The plumbing shrieked, rattling, with the flow.

She splashed her face, but the mass had dried too thickly to run and the station lacked any towels to rub it off. She hooked her nails under her chin and scraped the dried blood off her face like a scab, sloughing off so nicely, in chunks, in sheets, she clawed it off her face all in clawing off her face, and in some hollow, some divet, caught her pinky, and something, something crinkled in her skull, something popped, and something went 'tink'.

Her left eye stared helplessly at her, tossing in the froth in the sink. Jayden slammed off the water and grabbed it before it escaped down the drain.

After drying it under the fan, she wedged her glass eye back in its socket, scrutinizing herself in the mirror as she did. The extra care was needed, cause her nerves were all fucked on that side, so if she got the angle wrong she wouldn't feel it. Misalignment worked great for unnerving stares. Not great for keeping her skull shapely. So sayeth doctor.

Blood still cloaked her features, but at least she resembled a person now. Taken by her rattiness in the mirror, she combed her fingers through her hair, only to catch on a fat bloody mat. She yanked harder. It compacted tighter, twisted into a messier knot. Screw it, she decided. Fuck trying to bathe in a station latrine anyway.

Another man had joined the guy at reception, hand on the first guy's shoulder. He nodded Jayden along wordlessly. Interest prickled from many peacekeepers as she passed down the hall, but in the end, nobody spoke.

The chief looked up from the papers on his desk. His office was hardly more luxurious than any other hole, with not much room – just enough for a light, some filing cabinets, that desk, and him. His prim suit and tidy hair disrupted the shithole mood well.

He rounded his desk to receive her, hands clasped over his big stomach. “Jayden, welcome. It's good to see you.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She shut the door.

“I hope nobody gave you trouble.”

“Nah.” Formalities, formalities. A guy tastes some clout then yaps like a politician. She leaned on a filing cabinet and gave its roof a knock. “I need Ash's.”

“Ashes,” the chief echoed.

“Asheman. The proximene.”

The chief knelt as if diving for cock, slid open a cabinet around Jayden's knees. Inside, horizontal stacks of thin metal cases clattered against each other. The chief squeezed one out. Jayden unlatched it.

Every page upon page of thin plastic she flipped through wafted another spike of stinging, chemical inks into her watering eye. Notes, notes, notes. Known associates. Last address. Who fucking cared, where was the juice. “Know who's supplying?”

“No.”

“Know anything?”

With a grunt, the chief unloaded a new case onto his desk. He leaned over it – but did not open it.

“Well?” Jayden snapped. Like a horse with haunches whipped, Chief snapped open the box. As that lid popped off, Jayden immediately wished he hadn't.

Inside was a small packet of pale blue powder that glittered strangely under the light. The image pulsed of rhinestones twinkling on a black curtain – stars, her mind supplied, twinkling as eyes shining from a deep, black hole. Nausea thrummed in her head. Stars – things she'd never seen once in her life – vividly massed in a cold and silent darkness that stretched forever, forever, forever

—Like when they delved the service tunnels. Undisturbed and unlit for decades until they had moved in to transgress them. Then her or Jackie's torch beams caught some reflector in the dark, and something in the darkness would flash.

Then Jackie would yell or cry and drop his light and she'd march into the darkness and laugh, and say, See?, and it'd just be some pole with shiny tape on it, or a faulty pipe making noises, and not a monster, and if it was a monster then, well she'd kill it anyway.

This stupid little packet of powder was that same breed of reflector. But still spiders crept between the threads of her hair, into her sickened stomach, down her heavy arms, all stricken with paralytic rictus. So yes. It was definitely basilisk.

Her body moved like a shitty animatronic, but it moved. She yanked the packet up to her face. Had she more than zero personal experience with basilisk, perhaps she could divine something useful, something about the cut or smell or quality that would squeal on its maker far more effectively than Asheman would.

As it was, she was staring pointlessly at some dust in a doggie bag.

Disgusted, jerkily, she slammed the lid shut. The tautness in her limbs unwound like a loosened wire, both for her and the Chief.

“We—” under the flab of his second chin, his throat bobbed. “Ahem. We are keeping that.” And he rapped his fingers over the case.

Using, selling, gifting. One of those three. Jayden didn't care. She needed Asheman.

“Now Jayden, if that's all—”

“Ain't.”

Hands in his pockets, the Chief tilted his head for her to continue. On his desk laid a dirtied ashtray. Jayden flicked a cigarette out of her pocket, the pressure in her chest easing out with the smoke.

“That movement from house Amracht.” she began. “Is paper. 85 tons of paper gone to a storehouse on 90th, up in East 2-1-2. That where they gonna start printing, start testing this 'fiat' crap.”

On a long, awed breath, whistled the sound: “Oh, Jayden.” The Chief's hands each landed on her shoulders. His grip was heavy – so was the weight of the dagger on her hip. “You don't know what you've just given me.”

Her fingers itched. Don't. Don't... “Our boy getting a promotion, eh.”

“Heavens...” His eyes hazed as if watching fire. But just as quickly, snapped lucid. “No, no, I wouldn't think that much. But I am reminded, just how your contributions to Seacrest are... valuable.” He spread his hands, as if splitting a sea.

The itching stopped. Jayden rolled her neck. “Contribution's to whoever's paying.”

“No, I'd rather think not,” Chief chuckled. The dragon engraved on his lighter breathed when he clicked on the light. He gestured to Jayden for a cigarette – she passed the one she already spent. “They are your landlord, their favour protects you. Let's not pretend they are just another client to hustle.”

Boasts blazed on her tongue. Of course she could hustle Seacrest. Exploit her ties, move the pieces, lay the bait, and with a swift blade fell the empire, though to what goal she was unsure.

Power, wealth, liberty? She had those. Not in absolute, but enough.

Too many people tried too fucking hard to always get more than enough.

“Now, I must forward that report.” The Chief tapped his nose, like a signal. From past the doorframe he called, “I trust you can see yourself out.” With her nod, he disappeared.

Overhead, the fluorescent bulbs buzzed.

Damn he was stupid to leave her alone with his files.

The first drawer she tried juddered against her hand, locked. So maybe not stupid, just overconfident. With a swish of her keys and a light clk-clk-clk of turning dials, all the intelligence of the East Welding Peacekeepers bared itself to her.

She withdrew two files: her own, and one immediately beside it, Jacklyn's.

Let's see what knives they had stocked.

She flipped through her file, skimming the pages as quick as she could. Her free hand held poised a pen from the Chief's desk. Thefts and murders disappeared under strokes of ink, though none struck her as very exploitable. Nobodies. Nobodies. Petty change. Speculation. Self defence. Nobodies. They'd kept the serious ones off her record.

Her pen squeaked still.

Assess as Asphodelean agent.

Like what? A spy?

Her father had been exiled. She'd never stepped on that country's soil or met a native in their habitat. And she proudly didn't speak the language. The law of some prissy King or the law of blood and money; she'd take the latter. Because she was Ordish, devoutly.

But a sufficient counter-argument was a mirror: to bare those eyes, skin, and hair of the Kingdom. If Seacrest suspected disloyalty on that basis, no amount of devotion would abolish it.

And if they wanted her to infiltrate on that basis, get fucked. She had her own aspirations and they were purely domestic.

The implication stung either way. Disgusted, she switched files to Jacklyn.

His was shorter. Empty, practically. Her brother's escapades tended more toward salacious than criminal, but the failure to note him even as a witness struck her as incompetent. Either he'd been dismissed as a clueless nancy, or they'd burned out on questioning him after the thousandth “Iunno, sounds more Jay's thing”. Or the thousandth insipid misdirect into his feel-good fairytown brainworld. Well, good.

With nothing to alter, she closed the file and slotted them both back into the cabinet. Cases clanked against each other as she vaguely fingered through the stack.

DESIREE

Jayden's thumb traced the long edge of the file.

Footsteps echoed in the hall behind her. She eased the cabinet shut and confidently departed the office, the hall, the station, until she was crossing the square to the burger joint to pick up her idiot boys.

True to her judgement, she found Yule sitting in a booth feigning obliviousness while Kaelis palmed a waitress's ass. “Ain't a brothel, shitstick,” snapped Jayden as her hello. Then, “told you not to fucking mess,” as the group's goodbye to the place. She instructed them onto the next tram, hopped in herself, and then set to properly shredding him.

“You been a fucking nuisance today Kaelis,” she began. The rickety tram jerked into motion, buildings on the street blurring around them.

“Mm,” Kaelis grunted.

“Fucking 'mm' me. What you saying you don't like your face? Eh? Decided you ain't needing it after all? Eh? Cause I'll take it off if is bothering you.”

“I ain't done shit...”

“Yeah! Yeah, ain't done shit, huh! Just talked over me when'm on a mark, then goes near get his shit beat, then goes ay let's start shit with the Peace, but ain't done shit!”

“It was two on one... yous who told me to go.”

“I done three on ones, four on ones, shut the fuck up. And now here I is and you fondling some bitch cause you such a horndog fuckup you can't get a burger without causing some fucking scene.”

“Bitch liked it... just some fun.”

“Yeah, funny, turns out, I don't care! Get her toes-curled belly-down on the lino, screaming oh Kaelis oh Kaelis you stallion till her thighs's all wrinkled in cum. But I tell you to do one fucking thing—”

“I ain't done shit!”

“—And you don't do it! Just gotta throw in that zesty twist, cause guess is Kaelis hour, just gotta keep Jay guessing what crazy mischief you gonna pull next. Fucking useless.”

Kaelis smacked his lips. Smuck, smuck, smuck.

Smuck, smuck. Nothing to say, huh. Just that stupid fucking sound.

Jayden leaned back against the bars, hands crossed behind her back by her knife. “You do amends now or you're out. Right here. I'm cutting you outta that jacket.”

He sucked in air through his teeth. His eyes rolled to Yule: Can you believe this?

“Now now,” whistled Yule, like a locust singing. “Kaelis, my cousin, these aren't empty threats. The love here is harsh, but did you expect different?”

“...Sorry, Jay.”

Jayden snorted. “Uh-huh. Where's your knife?”

“Got none,” he mumbled.

Of course. She drew her own and passed it to him. He took it, then stared from it to her, baffled as if he'd grown a sixth finger.

“What you gonna do,” Jayden explained, “is draw a line like this,” she traced her finger horizontally over her forearm. “Shallow. And you say, I promise to Jay I stop being a pissant. Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Do it.”

The knife didn't move. Yeah, he said, but the knife didn't move. Big tough Kaelis, Kaelis the killer, freewheeling gangster, does what he wants. But his boss was a girl, who shaped these eidolons.

Yule muttered from his corner, “goodness, cousin, it's only a scratch.” His subdued tone muddied whether Kaelis' weak nerve genuinely bewildered him, or whether he was just a faggot muscling in on her girl games. Envy did drive them to compulsions about that.

And she'd never bothered sharpening her knives. “I promise...” a mumbled mantra began, “...to Jay, I stop being a pssmt.” It took two slow passes before the cut stuck, glowing like a lash on his skin.

Again. Again, again, again, until all of that cheek's in the garbage. Until you're chipping to bone. Bleed! Until you are empty and nothing. She sheathed her demands in her throat, instead held out her hand, accepted her knife. The fire she swallowed settled into warmth when she smiled to him. “Good work.”

Kaelis flicked his tongue over his teeth, but lowered his eyes and fell silent. His wounded arm drifted out of sight behind his back. Like a dog curling its tail, unsure why it had been beaten.

Yeah. Just one was enough. She'd done that correctly.

The square's cheerful logos and bold business signs faded into the flat grey nothing of iron bunkers. Short of the labels that evenly crowned each door in sequence – “1093, 1095, 1097,” – and varying patterns of rust splattered over their fronts, nothing defined the face of any building here from its neighbours. Suburbia.

With a click of the onboard terminal, the car wrenched still and Jayden hopped out. Yule tilted his head as he followed. “Hm? Not the east quarter, this. What are we up to now?”

“Housekeeping,” Jayden replied, turning to him and Kaelis. The tram chugged again along its track shortly after they landed. Jayden crossed her arms and craned her neck. “Anything you boys know about Ash, you gonna tell me now.”

“Whooo-oo's Ash?” Yule whistled.

Kaelis supplied, “Asheman. Guy handles oxi.”

Jayden tilted her head at him. Yeah?

“Rumors he using his stock. They got bets when you was gonna visit him.”

So bubkis on the basilisk. Scowling, she stared at the address emblazoned over one of the doors and flicked the blades of its rotary bell to motion. Even through the thick metal of the door, the shrieking of the bell stabbed at Jayden's ears like a needle. “Don't let him leave.”

An 'mm' of assent chorused behind her. But even as the rotary clack-clack-clacked and the needle shrilled her eardrums raw, nobody answered. He wasn't home.

Between an absence of windows or back doors, and a front door fit for a bomb shelter, most people would here forfeit their ingress. Jayden just unpocketed her keys.

Funny thing about vaults like East Welding: the topsies who built them liked being able to get at your shit. They also often liked cutting corners. Hence for not only the East Weld, but for every vault in the region – Central Fracking, Drill Monitoring, Volcanic Resonance Station #52, East Refinery Commons, everything through designations E851 to E868 – there existed a single common master key that would crack any lock manufactured by Seacrest. So all of them.

Were rats like her meant to have them?

Nah.

But hers slid through the keyslot silky as a pussy down a pole.

The door hissed open. Like musk from an unsealed coffin, two things seeped from the inch between the door and its frame.

The first was a blowfly. Soon joined by another. Another. They dripped into the air like fat ellipses, bound on some procession to whatever they deemed the nearest piece of shit. That happened to be Yule, whose pale, slender hands soon blackened with the fat twitching nubs. He watched them land dispassionately, as if they were butterflies.

The second thing to emerge was the stench. An unwilling aficionado of the human body's more unsavoury smells, Jayden recognized it quickly as shit.

Yule bobbed his thumb up and down, up and down, crowned with a fly on its tip. “I'll watch the door.”

Fine. Hovels like these barely fit one person, much less three. She gestured for Kaelis to follow her up the unveiled stairway, a light fog of flies whirling around them like disturbed dust, thickening by the step.

The fuck was Asheman doing in this house?

“Fucking stinks,” she muttered. A fly pelted her chin like a fat water droplet. She found herself thankful it hadn't hit an inch higher.

“Plumbing musta leaked,” Kaelis muttered, muffled under a wall of buzzing. His something nudged her thigh from behind. Push him down the stairs! But when she turned to comply, she saw his outstretched hand, and the rag he held in it. She gratefully tied it over her mouth like a scarf.

“Or he's a freak,” she continued, yanking the knot secure.

The stairs ended in a platform from which three hallways arced like the arms of a swastika. On the ceiling there protruded a writhing black mass, thick as a gangrenous boil, which upon inspection was an orgy of flies. Only an abrupt case of hunchback kept Kaelis' head out of the cloud. “Ain't fucking normal,” she muttered.

But she had shit to do here and she'd do it. Namely, investigation.

She didn't doubt the Peace, exactly, but if her guy was dealing basilisk she'd at least like her own proof. Any records of odd correspondence, or items he shouldn't have, or a stash of the dust itself. That's what she needed.

That and some fucking insecticide.

She first checked the bathroom – squeezing in past the sink to flip open the lid of the cistern. Dank water stared back at her. Nothing here. And no leaks, either.

Kitchen next. Kaelis squatted in the hall now; the fog of flies had spread lower and thinner. “You feel that?” his whisper wove into the air between her legs as she passed. “Fuck is that?”

“Eh?” was all she dignified that question with. What she felt was flies pattering against her as skin she entered the kitchen. Sure, gross. Whatever.

Grease caked the oven and oil slicked the empty pantries. In the stove's lower compartment she found a stack of coins, quickly rehomed in her pocket. There was her recompense for the burgers, at least.

Speaking of. When she winched the dustbin out of its corner and splayed its insides over the floor, amid the muck of half-eaten meals and refuse, out popped the image of a donkey dipping its snout in a frothing mug, stamped in green ink on bags, on napkins, on styrofoam plates. A lot of them.

It was the logo of the Winston Ass Pub & Games. Not the most popular establishment, and not one too often patronized by Thorns, but Asheman was apparently a regular.

No dust. Two strikes. One left.

To the pitch. Kaelis now cowered on the stairs against the wall. A sallowness had crept in, around his mouth, his eyes, as if sewn taut with a needle. “Hey, Jay...”

“Go fuck off to Yule if you're gonna complain. What?”

“You're like lotsa,” he sluggishly drew his fingers together, apart, together, apart. “...hot, needles.”

“Yeah get outta here. Stink's fucked your brain.” Throw these flowers in a scat club and see how long before they woozed on the miasma. Boy didn't have the constitution for this work.

He squinted at her as if unpuzzling the breed of an unfamiliar animal, then jolted. Jayden flinched, drew her knife, whipped around. Nothing lurked behind her except more flies whirling in space. Kaelis' mystified, almost awed stare was for her.

Alright. Yes. Thank you, thank you. She was pretty awesome. But not now.

“Out.” She pushed him down one step. He didn't resist, but didn't move further. Just craned his head, aghast.

Wasting time on this shit. She'd drag him outside once she was done.

The final hallway waited. Jayden broke through a screen of flies, into a hurricane of the shits. She braced her arm over her eyes against their pelting. Any clear space filled instantly with another spiralling body, persistent as noise on a screen; buzzing static from the radio. Something, hallucinogenic about it all.

Sounds blended into the static. Her footsteps, her breathing, the rustle of her clothes. The buzz of countless wings absorbed these markers of herself, then amplified them, echoed them back. Offbeat breathing. Offbeat motion. Her paces dissolved with the seconds into a deep, blank ocean, treading sound as water. She was airy. She was floating.

Sights blended into the static. Black blots smudged every silhouette into incoherent spectres. Even the span of walls and curves of corners undulated and pulsed. Whenever the identity of some object, some plane, or some edge decoded itself into concrete form, the spots swiftly shifted to shatter it. Images arose and dissolved in her periphery, fleeting as ghosts when she turned to grasp them. She was spinning. She was blind.

And the stench. Fuck, the stench. All the shit she'd given Kaelis she could promptly forgive. She'd seen bodies in a septic tank, she'd smelled bodies in a septic tank, she'd put bodies in a septic tank. Still she'd rather crawl back to the sods and marinate with them in raw shit, than drink any more of the reek oozing from these walls. Sour, rank, fragrant. Eu de necrotized colon. Breathe enough of this and her windpipe'd holding enough shit to be a second colon. Then punch her in the gut and she'd be shitting from both ends. Har har har ha

Her knife plunged forward. Resistance.

The sinking of the blade anchored her to land. The static hazed into the background and noise burbled behind her. The smell, though, thickened oppressively.

She had entered the bedroom.

Quite literally, a bed room. It was only as long and as wide as the bed, with no space for furnishings. At her back was the wall.

At the end of her knife was a figure.

The slender shape knelt upon the bed like an altar with its arms raised joyously in prayer. It had a head, and a torso, and arms and legs and hands and feet and all the parts that made a human being, appropriately silhouetted and full. But its shining black skin – was not skin. It was latex. A bodysuit.

Its face was smooth as polished obsidian, without airholes, and without any suggestion of eyes, or a nose, or any other feature. Linked through her blade to this thing's heart she thought, there isn't a human under there.

So he'd stuffed his bodysuit with something. No need to freak out. So he'd stuffed his bodysuit, with something. He'd stuffed. Posed and stuffed...

Insects crept down her neck. She wanted to hiss, but couldn't. To swat them, but couldn't. Her arm had locked still as rebar. She wasn't moving. Wasn't even breathing. Any twitch would expose her.

At the thought, the ice in her veins burned to fire. She thrust the knife in deeper – but partway into its guts, not even halfway to the hilt, something solid blocked the point of the knife. As quickly as it came, that energizing flash of heat ebbed back into a smoulder.

Her spine dribbled with bugs, neck dribbled with bugs, her outstretched arm dribbled with – sweat. They were not bugs. It was sweat.

She needed a smoke. She was freaking out.

But every instinct inside her head screamed. What are you! A fucking idiot!? A fucking smoke!? Just next to this thing!? With no weapon!? You're dead!

Slowly, she winched out her dagger. The viscous insides of the effigy fought her, sucking greedily at her knife with a force that grew stronger the harder she yanked. Her effort rewarded her with only an inch of blade: alongside it, a battering of stench fouler than the reek of week-old offal.

Witless, reflexive, her hands peeled from the knife as she recoiled to retch.

She had barely the mind to think: Shit.

Next was the pounce, the screech, the frenzy, the shredding of fingers through her gut, the strewing of her heart and lungs and liver over the walls, her hands and feet plucked and dumped to stumps by a chimpanzee, and like that, the human being called Jayden Blackthorne would be ravaged into a mound of viscera, indistinguishable from butcher cuttings, as if she'd never existed.

Seconds passed.

Jayden squeezed open her good eye, slowly uncurling her arms from her face. Before her would be – the hall. The street. Hell, even the Peace's station. Anything to confirm she had been hallucinating everything, accorded by her survival. But there, hands aloft, was the effigy.

It was gregarious. It was refraining.

So declared the poised curve of its neck, the statuesque ess of its torso. Inspection, nervously belated or not, of these specifics further revealed – how its missing face was angled, loftily, down upon her.

Jayden tested a step backward, forwards. An unmistakable thread of pressure had snagged on her intently as a dragon's eye. Even as her gut twisted together, a grin quivered onto her face, not quite as fearless as she wished to feel.

She would not be harmed here. She recognized the promise as the same ineffable breed she often made, same as what she'd made earlier today. She recognized her relief, not exactly tense, but still wary, as the same she often felt around her mother.

Because she wasn't so naive to think that her being safe around someone made them a safe person. Often the opposite, really.

The effigy knelt, hands raised to heaven.

A silence crept into the room.

Not the stillborn silence of solitude, but the awkward silence of arrested conversation. She wet her lips quickly. Nothing flashed to her tongue. Blitheness under adversity was Jackie's talent. Not hers. The thief.

She exhaled long out her nose, rolled her rigid shoulders.

Look at that thing.

How reverent. How joyous. How stupid. Fuck are you so happy for? she chided in her mind, There's nothing to pray to here.

Her knife then oozed from its chest and thunked softly onto the bed, as if prompted. From the wound there dribbled a yellowish, tarlike fluid, spattered all down its front, staining the bed, emanating that horrible stink. Vomit bubbled to the back of her tongue, the acidic aftertaste burning still when she swallowed it down.

Even breathing through her mouth, the stench clung to her tongue like a film, inescapable.

Her eye clouded with tears. Only the slight protection of the rag kept her from puking on the spot. Was she supposed to go over to that shit and pick up her fucking knife? Thanks no thanks it's a blunt piece of shit anyway, keep it.

Like a baby crowning, something bulged in the effigy's chest, jammed at the narrow slit. Jayden reluctantly balled her fist and clicked her knuckles, preparing to caesarean the thing, when the object tore the gash wider of its own accord and slumped free in a rotten stream of afterbirth.

Black knots already danced in the corners of her vision. If she approached that thing to retrieve the dubious gift – delved deeper into its fog of undistilled faeces, its aura of purest, mephitic shit, well, staying conscious would be near a miracle.

From the junction to the hall, she sipped as deep a breath as she could manage. The tangible miasma pressed her onto her knees, filled her head with loopy visions: haha bitch crawling at dick-height, gonna suck off a monolith, offerings at the base of an obelisk.

Her lungs already prickled. She had barely reached the foot of the bed.

The newborn was a small, metal, ovaloid box, whose hinges had popped open upon landing.

It contained a silver locket, untouched by the yellowy filth.

Its shimmering chain noosed an oval of blue gemstone, plated with the image of a silver swan: the sigil of house Amracht. Jayden folded over the rag from her face and reached with it for the box.

Her fingers dipped into the effigy's shadow. The hammering of her heart pounded against her lungs, little kick, kick, kicks that screamed: breathe! Run! Jayden squeezed her hand in further, as if feeding it between heavy metal rollers.

The air about the necklace shifted like flying shrapnel. Apropos of nothing, rage exploded in her chest as if an internal furnace had burst. Her mind roared: Piss off!

The lid of the box snapped meekly shut in her hand. She glared at it, so baffled at the abruptness of her own fury, and the disproportionate scale of it, she couldn't help but reel. What the fuck? What the fuck? Lava sizzled down her chest. She closed her eye and squeezed her grip tighter.

What the fuck had she stumbled on? Sure as shit, not drugs.

Fucking Asheman. She'd interrogate the little prick's dick off. Steam eased from her blood at the thought of it, into the return of the miasma, pulsing at her skull like a vice.

Withdraw, she thought bitterly to herself, wishing she had the breath to sigh. She slid back.

Something nudged the back of her head.

She froze.

Eased herself forward, a glacier running down her spine. Slowly, timidly, she peeked up.

The effigy hooked itself over her, hands planted on the bed, looped around her shoulders. Its smooth face met hers, drawn close enough, that had it a nose, its rank breath would have tousled her bangs.

Jayden's heart jolted. Her stressed lungs buckled, violent as a punctured balloon. Without thinking, she gasped for air.

A brownout shuddered over East Welding. Strobes of black seized over the world, futzing shapes, lingering as fat fuzzy worms that tangled together into a drifting, gross hydra. Horrid retching sounded off the walls, acid burned her throat ragged. A burning rack stretched her chest tighter and tighter insistently: BREATHE! But every parcel of oxygen choked at her throat, rotten, gagging, ushering another bolt of darkness. Delirium battered in waves. Only the sinking sensation of fainting jolted her back into anything bordering lucid. Bedroom – get back – shrink – no – don't freeze don't freeze don't freeze don't don't don't dont dont

Through everything, one image burned clearly.

How, like shrink wrap constricting, a face formed on the effigy. Even with the thing pressed against her, Jayden could define nothing about it – whether it was male or female or old or young or ugly or beautiful – except for the fact its mouth moved as if speaking.

She wasn't a lipreader. Again, Jackie's thing.

But with how slow, how exaggerated, how precisely the words were formed, inches from her face – she didn't need to be.

Vivid as anything, its plea and command:

LOVE.

US.

Kaelis was holding open the front door when Jayden came sprinting down the stairs. She careened down, down, tripping, tumbling, her chest ablaze all the way out the doorframe. The bunker across the street raced at her – Jayden's foot rebounded off its wall, sprang her into a somersault, then midair her instincts retired and mind reconnected. The new pilot floundered, lagged, touchdown!? Stumbled backwards sucked by momentum past an onlooking Yule and crashed-landed her onto her back.

Whether he was staring or not, right now she didn't give a damn toss. Standing up whisked her brain about in her skull, magnifying into tectonic rumbles the lingering echoes of buzzing from the house – no, rather, from the one last blowfly skittering tight loops on Yule's finger. He flicked it away like a fat sticky booger to join its missing companions: all mulched across the walls flanking the door in a grisly green splatter.

Another acid bubble popped in the back of her throat. Guy had terrible hobbies.

“What happened in there?” Yule wiped his hand off on his shirt.

“Ba—ghh, bad,” she wheezed, “shit,” hands braced on her knees. BANG! Slammed the door a little ways behind her. She glanced over long enough to see Kaelis lumber over with a nod.

Yule's gaze flicked from him, to her with a helpless smile. “I'm curious, Jay.”

Her heart jerked. “So be curious.” Or as he inevitably would, squeeze it from Kaelis. Whatever.

Yule surrendered with a light shrug as Jayden guzzled breaths of the vault's stale but mercifully clean air. Every exhale shat another curd of the house's filth from her lungs, dissolved the writhing black knots, eased her whirling brain stable, and exorcised the brownout strobes into the normal, sterilized white bath of East Weldling's worktime lamplights.

Once abolished of every fingerprint of that muck, and grounded again in her skin, Jayden straightened herself and looked to the box in her hands.

“You two,” she snapped.

The humor drained from Yule's face. Kaelis grunted to attention. Good.

“Grab Asheman. Get him to the sink.”

Yule's brows peaked without condescension. Kaelis planted his hand over his jaw. Yup. They knew the sink.

“He got a few places,” addresses danced off her tongue with each recollected page of the Peace's files. She paused, instead, at a different memory, “but first you try Winston's.”

Yule said nothing. Jayden quietly dried the muck off the box. When she discarded the rag, some seconds later, Kaelis prompted, “And then?”

“And then you're good. You fuck off. Just get him secured, I hack him later.” She clapped the box against her palm as if it were a baton. Thack. Without the film of god-knows-what soiling it, it shone a convincing shade of silver. Halogen glinted off its shell as she held it aloft, squinted, inspected it. “That's all happening, I'm taking this to Ma.”

One of them snorted.

“What?” She lowered the box.

They both looked amused, but only Kaelis replied. “We kidnapping a guy and you just seeing your mom.”

“Yeah. Wanna swap?”

They shut up, like children.

She laughed, “You'd shit your pants if you had to see my Ma.” But prefaced with that offer, it wasn't quite the joke she intended. You better not be getting into trouble doing that gang shit again, when you gonna clean yourself up and start working, breaks my heart when you with those thugs. Yeah. No. Not quite the same tenor.

She smiled. “Meet you up there after.”

“Got it,” Kaelis grunted, then did nothing. Just when Jayden opened her mouth to tell him to get a fucking move on, then, Yule tugged him aside to start walking. Holy hell Kaelis was a slow sack of shit. A slow sack of shit – but since being bitched out, one that was trying.

“Don't fuck up!” She called to their shrunken backs, some seconds later. “You got this.”

Yule's silhouette raised his arm in a thumbs up. They soon turned a corner – and were gone.

Jayden's shoulders untensed. Hugging her arms, she looked to the door.

It was still.

Of course it was still. What was she fucking expecting? Ooga booga booga. I'm the scary monster, gonna pop out and scare you. The kind of vapid shit Jackie would dream about.

Fuck. If Jackie were here.

Her fingers clenched, as claws biting into her skin. Then as fists, trembling around the box. Throw it, some instinct commanded. Sharp as a trebuchet. Throw it!

A rat skittered by, just a fraction too close. Jayden stomped hard on its tail, pinned the bitch down, reached for its neck as it screamed. However it jerked, and bent, and contorted itself in her hand, she offered no angle for it to bite her. She only squeezed. Tighter. Tighter!

Sharp as a trebuchet.

One red splotch, fatter than the others, joined the graffiti of guts on the wall with a crunch. The rat oozed down. From its wiry black coat emerged its paws, twitching. Like a fly on its back, with its legs all tweezed off, it struggled on the ground.

Fortunately for the thing, its injury wasn't that dire. Once it figured out how to flip itself over, it scampered away quite adeptly.

Drips of blood lined its path down the sidewalk. Jayden flexed her empty palm. Unflexed. Flexed.

When she stopped, like the door, her hand, was still.

–-If Jackie were here, she wouldn't need to feel so damn pathetic.

The mural of the snake glared down from the elevator's ceiling.

Never liked the thing. Too much detail on the eyes.

She let cigarette smoke fog the car as she stared at the blurred skyscrapers outside. Lights, steel, lights, steel, strobes with the passing of the levels. It would be mesmerizing, or dreamlike in the haze, if the press of the silver box in her hand weren't so fucking solid.

Already she was beginning to wonder. That whole episode was probably her brain being stupid.

So Asheman stuffed and posed his fetishwear. Fine. Weird. There was this box inside it. Again, weird. But effective as a place to hide something. Then she stabbed it, and gravity pulled out her knife. That displaced the fluid enough, and opened enough of a hole, that the box pressed against the cut and fell out. Same for the bodysuit itself. Its weight had been displaced, so much it fell over when she leaned in. There was no 'giving' or 'gregariousness' or 'promises'. She had made all of that up.

And its face. She had probably just hallucinated after taking a whiff of sepsis point blank.

But even as perfectly mundane, perfectly sensible explanations slotted together like iron bricks in her mind, her thumb tapped, tapped, tapped the box. Because here she was anyway. Taking it to mommy.

The elevator jolted to a stop. Jayden let its kick bounce her into an easy stride down the corridor to the Rose Room, which soon rumbled and turned. She leaned against one of the sofas, watching how the wall murals bled under the ruby strobes. The bar and poker table waited, prepared but unattended. Too early for visitors, she supposed.

The rumbling ebbed. Jayden took one long, nasal breath as she stepped into the stark hall. Her footsteps echoed over the hum of the fluorescent panels overhead, ushering her soon to the end of the hall and to the stairway upwards.

Turning the bend of the spiral staircase, Jayden fell under a curtain of shadow. Without lamps, the only light flowed from the exit above like water, puddling by each step more broadly and more incandescently. Her eye soon pulsed with pain and burst with purple fireworks when she blinked, burning under a sheer white glare that encompassed everything around her.

She breached the stairway's exit into a bath of raw halogen. Her eyelids no longer cast the world in black, but in searing crimson. With her arm shielding her from blindness, she squinted through the white; forms emerged like smudged charcoal drawings, soon resolving sharply into black-and-white ink.

She had exited onto a large, circular platform. Not far above was the ceiling of the tier, upon which its primary floodlights were installed. The heads of two colossal iron serpents hissed at each other from opposite ends of the platform, in the centre of which was an ascending pyramid of hollow discs, which formed a stairway to a massive spherical structure at their peak.

Her Ma's place.

Jayden ascended the stairs and unlocked the structure's door. As it slid open with a pneumatic hiss, a whirring of blades sang from behind her, below her, beside her, above her, as the discs she'd just climbed began whirling up and down around the central sphere like rings of a gyroscope. Sharp enough to cut, strong enough to crush, and certainly fast enough to butcher the human body.

Something wet sprayed across her cheek. She wiped her hand over it. The harsh lights bleached it to nothing in her palm.

She brought it to her nose. Blood.

After dropping her hand limp by her hip, she quietly entered the sphere.

A wall of frigid air sheared her skin, as if to move was to run against blades. She gasped at the ferocity of it – the breath stabbed a knife through her lungs. But as the pain eased out, in came refreshment.

Some people walked on barbed mats or poked themselves with needles to flush out the grot of sedentary living. Standing in this room, and breathing, did much the same thing.

Half was the cold, half was the plants, which phased into view as her eye adjusted. Housed in beds and pots of dirt; the flowers, trees, and shrubs, some hanging from the ceiling or draped over trellises, others sprouting from small squares of grass. Some smelled sweet, others pungent. Some looked fancy, others boring. Some were colourful, others subdued. Jayden only knew the rosebushes.

She walked alongside them down the gravel path to the living room, striding over the gaps where the stream interrupted. The water was clear and cold, such that only the thin layer of ice overtop it distorted the lacquered tiles underneath, faintly blue as they reflected the ceiling. At another crossing, her image flashed over the water.

“H-hey,” she murmured to herself. “Hey M-Ma...”

Fucking cold always made her stutter. She rubbed her hand over her arm. Rough with goosebumps.

“H-hey. Hey. H-hey...” she practised.

Warm up. Hurry up.

The crunch of her shoes on the gravel fell mute. In its place, a fuzz of radio static drifted from the adjacent, open doorway to the living room.

Yeah, Kaelis said. But the knife didn't move.

Snivelling shit. Like magic, her lungs filled with strength and fire.

“Hey, Ma!”

In the living room, reclined on the sofa, was Desiree Blackthorne.

She was a muse carved in ivory. The kind of beauty that nations warred for, that any soldier would die for, until they shot and loathed defectors as madmen, not for cowardice, but for implying their lives mattered more than her splendour. Sonnets spilled from the curve of her neck. Odes wove in the gaps between her fingers. She was inspiration; and for some, she surely was life.

She wore a heavy fur coat, draped open despite the cold, but was otherwise naked. Outfits did tend to degrade more than accentuate her form, though lounging around in her room in the nude was a habit of convenience, not vanity. More profane was the lattice of gang tattoos, thorns across her heart, down her tits, round her puss, obscene as spraypaint on marble. But in that obscenity was temptation. Refined, trashy, maiden, whore, angel, demon, she teetered tantalizingly between both extremes.

If you loved her, you could fuck her. If you fucked her, you'd soon love her. Desiree's success, in a nutshell.

It overwhelmed Jayden to think herself related to Desiree, much less her firstborn and direct blood descendant. Her father's genes had well shat the resemblance. But in the little places, in the set of her brow or width of her face, a charitable person might concede some shadow of Desiree's looks in her.

Smoke wisped lazily from her cigarette holder as she snuffed its tip on the coffee table's ashtray. Out from the sleeve of her coat peeked her wrist – on its underside, a bold red tattoo, this one of a four-petaled flower.

Jayden had never liked it, nor knew what it meant, but reasoned it the insignia for the leader of the Thorns. It would seem to flash, or glow when she glanced away, then be tauntingly plain when she looked. Which instead pressed an ache on her eyes – both of them, even the missing one.

Despite that, she struggled not to stare. Her gaze broke only when the tattoo slipped back up Desiree's sleeve, when she shuffled on the couch to address her. The radio she'd been listening to hushed.

“Jade. My girl,” Desiree drawled in a voice that itched. “So busy today.”

Jayden didn't bother to ask how Desiree knew. Sure. She was covered in blood still and looked like shit. But more often Desiree just knew.

There were a lot of things Desiree just knew.

Jayden cleared her throat, swallowed ice, and wrung the locket-box idly. “Yeah. I—”

“I don't want to talk about that yet. How has Jackie been?”

“He... good. Fine,” she stumbled as she entered the room. “Iunno, getting up to his things, washing dishes for people and shit. I been good too,” she added.

“That's so sweet,” Desiree laughed. “That he does that. All the things in this city and he does that. It's sweet.”

“Is fucked up, really...”

Desiree tilted her head, smiled nicely, and heaved herself up in her seat. After moving her cane aside so as not to block the cushion, she patted for Jayden to sit. When she did, Desiree linked them gaze to gaze, hand to shoulder.

“Has everyone been nice to him?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Jayden glanced aside. “Everyone 'cept me, I fucking guess.”

Desiree released her shoulder with a firm shake. “That's fine. You're his sister. You're allowed to be a little rough when he's,” she waved her hand fancifully, “wandering off.”

Jayden's mouth soured. Implications, flashes of secrets. Or maybe nothing at all, and she'd be a fool for asking.

“But you shouldn't whine like that.” Desiree eased Jayden to lie on her breast. Though she was too old for the position, the heartbeat that pulsed warm, and familiar, and comforting into her cheek asked that she melt into it anyway. “It's disgusting. You know that.”

“Yeah. Whiners's annoying.”

A knot gently untwined in her bloodsoaked hair under the care of Desiree's fingers. This side of her mother, which fussed and held and preened on her like a dove, was the worse side. Because if Jayden made people cut themselves to stay with her – Desiree just drugged them with this.

But knowing about the needle didn't stop its effects. Soothing ambiance swelled into the silence, like some impelled meditation – the fuzz of the radio, the beat of Desiree's heart, the uneven catch of Desiree's breathing, and the sliding of hair between Desiree's fingernails, all more present than Jayden's thoughts.

It wasn't even fake. Was the worst thing.

If Jayden ever, in her life, felt the temptation to feel safe, it wasn't at home or with Jackie. It was here, in this room, with this woman.

“Do you want me to love you?”

Jayden glanced up. Over the peak of her mother's chin, her eyes gazed down dispassionately.

“You should be honest with me. Jayden.”

Be honest, be honest, it didn't have to be hard. But would she be scolded for sentiment, or...

“Yeah. I do,” Jayden confessed. “I think you're amazing.”

“You love me?” she sounded surprised.

“I do.”

“Do you love all of me?”

Jayden scraped her tongue on her teeth. “No.”

Desiree tilted her head with an appeased nod, then reached for the box Jayden still held. “So, what have you got for me?”

While Jayden recounted her misadventure at Asheman's, Desiree popped open the box and laced the locket around her neck. The swan of Amracht fit well between her collarbones, bouncing slightly to her thumb's fiddling. But even when Jayden finished her story, Desiree failed to react much. Only hummed, as if it had all been quaint, and glanced up from the pendant to Jayden.

“What do you think a good name would be? If you had another brother,” she asked.

“...What, you got pregnant?”

“No. That shouldn't happen again.”

“Then I don't give a crap. Shitface.”

“Shitface,” she laughed. “I like that.”

Desiree heaved herself off the couch and reached for her cane. Even with it, the first step landed heavy – a deep limp, a cringe of pain through her body like a firecracker. But she waved it off easily when Jayden asked if she was alright, and unclipped the necklace, and staggered to one of the room's two other doors.

One went to Desiree's bedroom. The one she entered, though, Jayden wasn't sure. Some kind of storeroom. Where she kept god-knows-what.

Jayden rolled her shoulders and kicked her feet. Drafts from the ceiling fan prickled like needles. Opposite the couch where she sat, dominating the wall above the mantel, was a portrait of a hundred-winged angel standing over a pit of snakes. Always with the snakes. The radio buzzed.

When Desiree returned, Jayden unballed her fists from her knees. “Hey, this thing with Asheman...”

“Is over. Don't worry,” Desiree finished. She bent over her cane, reached for a lock of Jayden's hair, pinched her nails around a fat clot of blood. Red speckled her fingers, like flea bites, and she smiled, like sun. “God. Jade, look. You're beautiful today.”

“Yeah? You say that to Jackie when he's dressed in guts?” Jayden drew back her head. Her hair slipped loose, the clot stayed with Desiree.

“No, well, I haven't seen him in guts.” She rolled the clot. “He might be quite pretty.” Then looked up, as if watching shadow-puppets fuck on the ceiling. “Quite pretty...” her brain ticked.

If Jayden had her knife—

Her body moved.

But if she had her knife—

And her palm cracked across Desiree's cheek,

But if she only had her fucking knife—

and Desiree squealed, and raised her cane,

—she wouldn't need to be reaching for the ashtray.

and rammed it into Jayden's side.

Something, somewhere, whizzed whorled span, impact, her head, the coffee table, throbbing, her chest, her ribs, throbbing, all throbbing, weapon?, hands grasping, only air, the ceiling fan, above, how it churned, a whirlpool spinning. Get up!

Get up! And the next blow burst across her shoulderblades. Curl up! And the next blow burst across her collarbone. Laid bare on her back like a bug. The foot of the cane.

Jayden grabbed it, wrenched it aside – but it pulled back like a piston. Before she could get up, sit up, dart, roll out of the gap between the couch and the coffee table, the cane plunged down, into the flat of her stomach.

The pressure could rip through her flesh, stomp her guts to her spine. Only her straining arms fought the weight welled in the narrow point of the cane – but even then she only stayed unpierced, not unpinned.

Bide. Bide this.

Spittle flew down.

“Nobody's gonna help you. Get that? I ain't, your Da ain't, Jackie ain't, the Thorns ain't. Nobody gonna lift a finger for you. Oh they gonna lift fingers for your money, your shit, but they ain't give a fuck about you Jay. Even them peoples who pretend to give a shit about peoples, they ain't gonna pretend for you. You gonna drag 'em all down to hell. 'Cause you're a fucking monster!”

Desiree's heel landed in Jayden's neck, just under her slight adam's apple. But even as she gagged, she focused. Weight redirected here meant less on the cane, so—

—Desiree heaved. The cane squeezed down. Jayden barely caught the new weight, strained her biceps, rolled it out though her shoulders to the floor. But her arms burned. Her back burned. Her guts burned. Her chest burned.

A slight chuckle sounded from above.

“And yaknnow what? That's correct. That's the correct way to be. Pare anyone down, you see they're all fucking disgusting. Do this for love, do that for love, else's love, own love, tell you what, all love's is a fat greasy schlong. Feels all nice and kisses you better when you're dripping out your stupid cunt. Says you can be a self-righteous cunt, you can be a stupid cunt, lazy cunt, any fucking flavour of cunt the world got 'long as you still fitting that dick. That's what everyone wanna be. A big, dumb, fuzzy, fat and soppy little cunt that don't gotta think 'bout being a cunt.

“Then you, you don't let 'em be cunts. Just bleed 'em out, then don't even jack off to it! Who wants that? Who fucking wants that? Won't take a fuck, won't give a fuck, nobody. Only cunts you gonna lap up is me and Jackie's, 'cept even then you fuck up halfway. Can't help yourself, you fuck up halfway. So what the fuck are you? Just a fucking monster. Just a fucking savant. Figured out the world and you're only eighteen. Fuck me. My amazing girl. Gonna figure out everything. Gonna put a knife in me someday, gonna push Jackie off a high-rise someday, coz you see it's all shit, they're all shit, nobody's safe around you.

“So better not hear more of that fucking whining from you. Any more of that needling from you. You got no idea where I was 'fore all this love crap fucked me up. Made me a cunt. Well, I didn't get shit for it. Pretend if you want, but you ain't gonna get shit for it. Cause even me and Jackie, we'd get rid of you the second we could.”

The pressure from the cane had been lifting, but now it finally abated to give her a perfunctory whack across the head.

“Listening?”

“Listening, Ma.” But all her insides were air. All the hot blood in her scooped out for air. She couldn't move. The ceiling fan turned. “Fuck you keep me around for then.”

Money, she'd laugh. Labour, perhaps.

“'Cause you'll at least want me before Jackie.” Desiree withdrew to the couch. Retrieved her cigarette holder. “And then, least you're gonna make it.”

Hard to quickly resolve, those words, and Desiree, on the couch, smoke wafting from a new cigarette, her expression not exactly warm, rather in fact bitter, but—

—proud.

Warmth flushed again through Jayden's skin. Embarrassing. So fucking embarrassing. But wasn't that the truth of things.

Doting, affection, attention, her mother's own weaknesses reserved first for Jackie. Because he was a weakling. That was how he survived. By accommodation and illusions of value.

Meanwhile Jayden got the shit that actually mattered. Real influence. Real capacities. Someone whose strength would always be hated, because it offended the impotence of weaklings.

Jealous of a needy cunt. What a pointless thing to feel.

Pointless. But even as the blood rumbled through her body, the vertigo when she stood up sank like a yolk from her throat to her stomach.

Desiree offered, or requested, “I have drinks in the fridge.”

“Uh-huh. And I got shit to do,” Jayden snapped, more as smoke than fire.

Cigarette kissed ashtray. “Oh?”

“Gotta break some kid's legs.”

“How young?”

“Fucking cares. Seven odd. Some shit.”

Desiree laughed. “Fun. Go get 'em.”

Oh sure thing sounds great Ma will do! She could roll her eyes at herself, because yes, actually, she would do. Something as tame as a dusting barely measured on her record. She was only whining now because it was her mom.

That's horrible, Jade. You don't have to do that.

—Pretend if you want. But you ain't gonna get shit for it.

With her eyes narrowed, she skulked to the doorway.

“Oh. Jade,” called Desiree. “It doesn't need to be today... but would you find me a new Skinslipper?”

And she glanced back, cheek wet, over her shoulder.

The bruises had numbed by the time she arrived at the Cutting Sink.

Its auditorium housed the Thorns' main equipment for torturing, and though Jayden was not the Thorns' main torturer, she knew the place well enough to feel comforted inside it.

Along the wall, in cells partitioned by collapsible screens, rested familiar instruments: the iron and the copper chairs, the first to distend and the second to burn, the nailboards, the wrinkler vat, the girdle of thorns, then a rack of breast-snippers, barrow-shears, neck-forks, and vices, then in stoic modesty the drug cupboard, then upon small wall-hooks the syringes and plastic tubes for slurry and enemas. Perforations dotted the entire floor evenly. Through them were glimpses of a second floor underneath, which sloped in an inverse pyramid to the centre of the room, where laid the waiting black mouth of a pipe, through which the blood and other fluids would drain.

It often clogged, stank, groaned, and needed flushing. The redness to the floors hinted brutality so profuse, blood had soaked into the iron like a ruddy tourniquet; but really, it was just rust from the washing.

It did not stink today, and neither were there any noisy clients, which was to say any clients in general. Without people to make the place gruesome, the sink was only a nest to intimate, effective, and well-loved machinery, more functional contributors to the Thorns than about half of its members.

Crossing the floor to the breakroom opposite, her gaze flicking over each contraption, Jayden confirmed Asheman absent. Aftertastes of tar stained her tongue as she stared at the final empty device, the skeleton frame. Ain't hardly so punctual to be fancying myself early, eh? she thought at it, but it didn't reply.

Inside the breakroom she indeed found Yule, draped over the bar with his cheek in his hand, and Kaelis, picking through the drinks fridge. The door shut behind her. Two cans of skog clanked in Kaelis' hand as he turned, Yule flinched, and Jayden still saw no Asheman.

“What happened,” she greeted.

Yule shrugged to Kaelis, who set himself and the booze to the table with a grin. “We got 'em.”

“He invisible, eh.”

“Nah, nah, he dead—”

“—It's like this,” Yule interrupted. From the pocket of his Thorns jacket he presented a soul. He twirled his finger through it vaguely, silver wisps trailing him like fog from smokestacks, or soft tendrils arose to hug the intrusion, or ripples broke across its surface, but regardless of its form, with a single flick from Yule, it landed firmly before Jayden.

“Ta-daaah,” Yule announced miserably, then, cringing, wiped his hands on his thighs. Kaelis grunted himself into a seat and leaned in, fist in palm, one finger pointed out, to stare at the soul.

Asheman's, plainly.

“Yule, you carried that?” Jayden laughed.

His face scrunched. “It wasn't great.”

“Figures not. Makes most peoples sick.”

“But you can hack 'em still, them deaders,” Kaelis asked.

“Fucking convenient that'd be. No business left for the sink.”

“Doubt that,” piped Yule with a smirk. Jayden waved the comment away, smirking also.

Kaelis repeated, “but you can hack 'em still? See, there's him, we—”

Jayden rolled her shoulders and clutched the core of the mist. Trepidation – resignation – preparation – flooded to the back of her brain – resolve – spite – eagerness – excitement – but for the fidelity of each emotion's identity, she felt the tenor of none. For all his soul told her, Asheman was just a bullet-point list on a clipboard.

Anything else – dates, events, associations – needed extrapolation from those scraps. So that was where posthumous interrogations ended, with the despondent torturer licking whatever residues of the person trickled out, and the deceased farting happily away in their own world.

Satisfaction. Triumph.

Smugness. Bolded, underlined, capitalized: SMUG.

“Boy's sure pleased. That a suicide.”

“Oh, there you go. Not your first, I suppose.”

“He was that scared of you, Jay,” Kaelis bragged. “Ran right aways when we showed up, knew he was getting it bad.”

Yule shot Kaelis a withering look, but rather than speak, shifted his gaze to watch Jayden contemplatively. Waiting for instruction, she sensed.

Asheman's soul pulsed in her hand.

Her first suicide had been a tailor who, despite the success of his business, failed to consistently cover the interest of his loan. Halfway through a consultation he marched, beaming like a sweepstakes millionaire, out of the Thorns' office and straight down the elevator shaft. The second was a girl from Honeyheart, who, after thriving for years in captivity, bit out her tongue and bled to death in front of the buyer who would finally home her. Her third was an ex-girlfriend. If she was to typify them, then it would be by despair, resolve, and vindictiveness in order. Asheman had a lot of the last two, and not very much of the first.

A fresh death explained that, perhaps. Escaping the retributions, outsmarting the pursuers, liberating the debts, sealing the secrets. In the moment, there could be relief, delusions of valour even, in committing against her.

Panicked and impotent idiots, who forgot there were pits deeper than Ordanz. Their self-satisfaction faded quickly once the rot got its dick in them.

And the rot pumped quick. The first pains broke watersheds of spiralling pain, fear, pain, fear, fear pain fear fear pain fear pain etcetera, until those bullet-point caricatures of even the most distinct individuals degenerated into the same droning mantra: “I am scared,” “I am hurt,” “I'm in hell.” Pages of that, whole anthologies. Jayden didn't doubt the testimony, but more than the pain or fear of dying, had to dread the knowledge that when it happened to her, she'd inevitably join the books as another goddamn whiny deader.

Pain beat mutely around her fingers. There they were, the first pains, the herald pains, rot pains.

Unlike any dead she had handled before in her life, in Asheman, the counterpoint to that pain was pure glee. Wide-eyed, Jayden leaned in. I am hurt, but I'm welcome! I am free, I'm in love, I am home. How joyously am I dissolved into flakes, may each speck of me shrink smaller and smaller. To sleep inside a baby's pores or to drown in the sheen of an eyeball, to stand in the caverns between clenched teeth, or to crawl in a nail's groove and behold its bed as cliffs above me; none of these are enough. I wish to be so small I am nothing. Then I am free, I have won; bleed me harder!

Jayden snapped her fist shut. A crackle of sparks, and Asheman was over.

He'd been over since Desiree had declared so. He'd in fact probably been dead by then.

Kaelis rose to retch into the sink while Yule smiled at Jayden precariously, as if balancing a pin on his tongue. “How doesn't this bother you?” his eyes asked, but the comment he actually made, more whimsically, was “pop”. Then he cracked the seal on a can of skog, chugged it, held, choked, and spewed the whole thing out to drain through the floor.

“Fucking hell, you peonies,” she cackled between gargles of Kaelis dry-heaving. “Shitting out your faces—” (ghhhorkkk) “—over some snipe in a dead-end caper. Ash wasn't even—” (gghhhurk) “—fucking nothing!”

Yule's wrist scrubbed froth from his chin. (GHOoo. “Nothing, nothing, oh Jay,” ooork) “for the amount of nothing that happens in Welding, you'd wonder how there's dracht enough here to run anything.”

“What, cousin, saying I'm holding out? Eh?”

“No. No, just noticing.”

“Well do less of that, brainiac. Got those clever-clogs lookey-eyed marbles jangling round in your head, oo what's this, oo what's that, here's what's what, needles up your eyes. Wiggle 'em bout like soups stirrers, yeah, you squelch it all up, viola, ding, there's your brains now, dish of macaroni soups, then boy's gogging about like granny 'yes-sir' 'no-sir' or shitting pissing fighting like a monkey. You seen thems, the monkeys?”

“Heard of them.”

“Fucking what's the use of brains anyway. Could be a good boy, like Kaelis.”

A collective snort pealed through the room. While Yule and Jayden smirked, Kaelis grinned as though it were a compliment.

Case in point, huh.

But, Yule was right. Asheman did do noticeably odd business, rather conspicuously odd business, rather obnoxiously odd business, rather the kind of business that dropped its pants and slapped its asscheeks merrily red, singing 'ho-hee-hoo-hee-hooo!'. It protruded like a hearty pink cock from a snow field. You saw it. You hated it. You didn't touch it because why the fuck would you? You just covered it with an upturned bucket and pretended that was normal, maybe put more buckets in more fields until it really was normal.

The don of that bucketing was prudence, the somewhat neglected cousin of wisdom. A virtue that nonetheless thrived in Desiree's orbit.

Seeing no more chores for the boys, Jayden retrieved a crowbar from Kaelis and dismissed the pair with a haughty “fuck off.” For seconds after Jayden heard the rattle of sink's door closing, her thumb squeaked back and forth on the metal rim of the chair-back where Kaelis had been sitting, until an odd quiver wetted her breathing, and she dumped herself into the seat.

Her head pounded. A knot of pain sloshed in her skull whenever she moved, biting against the surrounding bone like the nail of a jackhammer, leaving cracks wherever it touched. Bent over, with her elbows set on the table and hair draped over her face, Jayden squeezed her head to crack her skull faster. But no matter what spot she pressed, with how many fingers, at whatever angle, the pain did not spurt out.

She jammed her thumb into her eye and fished out her prosthetic. While one hand knuckled through the roots of her hair, the other fiddled with her eye, rotating it, pressing her thumb on its dull edges – though doing so eased none of her energy, and its absence eased none of the pressure. With the butt of her palm, she pounded her eye socket, to jostle the pain out of her skull, into her face, out of her face. It didn't move. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” she hissed, on each beat.

A can of skog watched her from the table. She eyed it in return, lobbed the fucker at the wall, and flicked on her lighter instead.

BANG, thundered the door.

“Fuck!” she squawked. Her lighter and cigarette whirled to the floor, bouncing off her clawed, wheeling hands. Between her third and fourth finger she did snag her lighter; the cigarette slipped down a hole.“What! Piss.”

bang ba-bang bang bang, bang bang, the door continued.

“Ooh Mizz Jay I gots to go to the shitter, cans I go out ma'am or does I shit myselfs here in me seat, ooh? Just open the door, dipshit.” She hurried to slot her eye in, but without a mirror or steady fingers, slipped it into her pocket instead and rolled her shoulders back casually.

From behind the door emerged willowy, reedy, sneaky Yule. He seemed to reel the second her saw her, since his grin dropped off his face unprompted for once. “Good hells, rocketship,” he draped himself whorishly across the doorframe. “Sneak out for five come back and you're pulped. Who got you? Some ghost you sunk?”

“Ey ey ey piss off.” She retreated to the bar, shooing away his questions like gnats. The pain of her headache diffused into a smoke seething under her skin, trapped and billowing. She glanced away from Yule, saw the wall, saw the fridge, saw the floor. Her hand jabbed towards it sharp as a bolt from a crossbow, an invisible torrent of that volcanic smoke venting our her fingertips. “I'm out a ciggie cause of you doing antics. Dropped under there. Yeah?”

“Well my apologies, ma'am.”

“My apologies,” she mocked, heaving herself up to sit on the bar. “You want me to melt your face? I gotta condition, real bad one, where when people gets too irrevenent 'round me, I turn into a dragon and gobble their heads. Fuck, Yule, you'd know.”

“Oh course, course, spitfire, seen all the carnage.” He knelt to retrieve the fallen can, threw it smoothly from one hand to the other, and set it on the table. “But I'm not retarded and don't muck the business so give me grace enough to think myself left of that line. Need to gut more rusties?”

“Fucking eel.”

“Here.” He offered her a cigarette, hung lightly between his fingers.

“You mucked Asheman,” she groused, and tucked the cigarette away in her fist behind her.

Yule lit himself another. Wafts of warm smoke massaged her skin, her throat, the taste of tar on her tongue bursting in her temples like firebolts. At the end of his drag, Yule asked, “who?”

A long puff eased out her lungs. Weird taste. Not her brand. She frowned at the thing and flicked it away.

“So, what. Ditched Kaelis, snook back. For the fridge, eh.”

“Nope. Was thinking to catch you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And talk.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But the tsarevna looks a notch wired. So lemme rebook that proposal.”

“How says cancel it. All the touching I got for your rancid dick's with shears.”

“Hell! No, it wasn't that...” he trailed off, leaning against the wall. He again peered at her with that strange, contemplative look, and tapped under his eye. She wiped. A sheen of watery pus clung to the back of her hand, which she wiped clean on her shorts. Seepage. It happened sometimes.

Sighing, she slid the crowbar into her beltloops, eased herself off the bar, and announced, “Fuck all to be talking of, then. Just don't go hollowing the booze, people need it.”

“Hey, jailbird,” he called after her. “One thing before you fly off.”

She peered into a smudge of herself, reflected in the door of drug cabinet. Though her hands had steadied somewhat, she doubted her doctor would praise how she slotted her eye. “Mhm? What.”

“Catch.”

A yellow blot flew down in the reflection. Jayden snapped up the object midair: a small, thin plastic envelope, the disposable kind from the postie's. Her thumb brushed its buttoned seal as she glanced back to Yule.

“A pick-me-up, from the deceased.”

Through the crinkling plastic, she thumbed several lumps of grainy material that split and compacted like sand to her fondling. However her disaffection tried to cool the coals of her anxiety, the questions churned through her mind unabating.

Kaelis would've bounded up to me like a puppy to yap about this. So you didn't tell him? Were you thinking to keep this? There's something about this you find interesting? If I don't tell you, are you gonna poke your nose in anyway? Is that what you wanted to talk about?

“There any more?” she asked.

Yule shrugged. “All that was on him.”

His nonchalant attitude grated on her brain. Oh yeah? So you're not holding out? You're not showing me this to throw me off, convince me you ain't hiding nothing? Think my knife to your neck ain't gonna prove—Jayden pinched her brows, hard.

Every question she dignified pushed her a step deeper into an unlit tunnel. Eventually, if she turned around, she would meet nothing but a deep, black void.

Yule was just being Yule. Kaelis ought know as little as possible. He'd judged correctly.

She was the one making a thing of it. Consoling herself with that thought, she let the envelope fall from her hand and, with her heel, stomped it through the floor's holes. It soon slid, squeaking against the metal, into the dark pit of the central pipe – and disappeared, swallowed by darkness.

By the simple removal of that stupid baggie, Jayden's internal engine kicked confidently back to life. Jayden Blackthorne, invincible. Jayden Blackthorne, untouchable. She snorted a ha to Yule and set her hands akimbo. He just raised his brows and airily spread his palms at his shoulders, as if to say, well, if that's your choice.

Sure was. Fucking bullshit of some bullshit box bullshit house bullshit locket bullshit drugs bullshit Asheman wouldn't nag her any longer. So what if someone else made it their business?

Wasn't hers.

As she'd already determined, knowing served her nothing.

But ignorance served something that, once she found it, Jayden claimed.

Victory.

At even intervals in bold white paint, the number “67” beamed from the street floor. Faceless bunkers walled this path, along which Jayden stalked. Alleys crammed with rattling pipes and fans wheezed whenever she passed them, then shushed aside the bunkers, loud, muted, loud, muted, as though the neighbourhood were breathing. Certainly, unlike Asheman's haunt, the Fourth Tier East Quarter had some life to it. Principally in its people.

Gaggles of children tussled and tossed rebar sticks around, supervised vaguely by adults who bounced gossip across the street from their doorways. Others loitered or eavesdropped, others still sat on outcroppings of ventilation duct, red-eyed and hunched over glue pots. For every stranger was a recognizable face from town, and the granny in the knitted shawl playing checkers with the old bums was Grace, who roped Jacklyn into games every Thursday.

“That's Jay Blackthorne,” a voice said.

106, 104, 102, descended the painted labels over each bunker's door.

“Jay Blackthorne?”

“What's going on?”

“Rotten dealings, somebody's gone done.”

“It's that man from 82. I heard—”

“Children, come in, hurry.”

“—Oh, god!”

Sticks stopped ringing off the walls. Hands snagged yelping children indoors like flopping salmon. Doors screeched closed or stuck halfway, hissed cusses from puffed red faces streaming out the gap.

“Mooom! I was winning.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“You nuh-uh!”

“—Move, damnit.”

“Ello Mizz Jay!”

“Oh shush, don't bother her.”

“See that, some fucking bint ain't gone paid.”

“Bad graces we didn't need—”

Soon the chatter faded into whispers beneath the ambient hum of machinery, hush broken only by phlegmy snorts and the clacking of checkers. Every other yell and squeal and footstep fell mute. A balding man smiled at her with a big stupid grin. Grace stared and returned to her game. Clack. Clack.

Clack.

96, 94, 92.

Clack.

Clack.

Everyone gone or huddled to the walls. Like a nitrogen wash had frozen the whole street to crystal.

And wasn't that a good thing, Jay Blackthorne.

Wasn't that the point, Jay Blackthorne.

Doesn't your heart blaze for the infamy! If ditching her boys was enough to make her ponder this trash, she should've kept someone around. Better to be mad at their bullshit than to snivel at her own.

So noggin up something decent. Here. You grab lunch somewhere after this – or rather dinner – since you haven't ate shit since breakfast. Then you head home, wind down, get Jackie to make something light. And have a shower. Beautiful! A plan and goodbye to this tiresome day.

Tomorrow's shit would be tomorrow's shit. The Skinslipper, that blood-peddling scum from the Commons. Possibly the guy from Foreman's Mechanics. If he hadn't gone to the clinic, as instructed, that could be another headache. Though Jayden hoped him intelligent enough to recognize the severity of a pissing artery, and the hopelessness of intervening, prospects of crying children often turned people stupid.

Crowned over the next door was the number 82. Jayden drew her crowbar from her beltloop.

“Hey you! Interloper! Get off our nice street! I'm the sentinel of 67, a-and... um,” squeaked a voice from her left.

There stood a boy of at most thirteen years, braced wide like a bulwark in the centre of the street, brandishing a short prod at her. At least Thorns hoods charged civil defence work to teenagers. Here, it'd fallen on a child.

Naturally. Without the incentive of money, only kids had the free mind to give a shit.

Clutching the shirt of that boy, huddled behind him, was an even younger boy with curly brown hair who whined, “Renay.”

“A-and, get off our street, or I'll zap you.” The kid's small thumb squeezed the button, and electricity sprang over the tongs of the prod.

Though panicked faces peeked from doorways, nobody stepped out to claim them. Hands on her knees, Jayden bent down to him. “Renay, eh.”

“Remember it. J-Jayden. Blackthorne.”

She grabbed the upper end of the hilt of his prod, tilted it about, inspected it. Similar to the one she had at his age. “Cool. Where'd you get this?”

He tugged the prod. Thing didn't even jiggle, stuck like an old ungreased lever. “I found it... u-up your ass.”

A grin cracked on her face. “You look like one of them peace.”

“I-I'm not a peace. The peace suck.”

“Yeah? Why they suck?” She eased the prod down, released it.

“They take people away.”

“Renaaay,” whined the younger kid again.

“Sure's right they do. Betting they took some of them huffers. Eh? Know where they go when they take them?”

“The mines...”

“And worse!” Grinning, she straightened herself, whereas Renay's prod drifted to his side obediently. “They got my Da in the gassery, scraping oil out the pipes and cutting lard outta deaders. Load it all up in the vats and the drink machines press it into diesel, yeah? One barrel is twenty-five deaders, fifty barrels runs the drills for a month. That enough deaders to fill all houses from here to there corner to corner so ain't no air when you open em, just deaders. The place's a hotbox what's poaches you in a slime of your sweat, cooks you in the stink of the fat. Makes your whole skin a boil, all red, soft, swollen.”

“You're making things up. That's too many deaders.”

“If you wanna find out where they get 'em, keep waving Peace toys at grown-ups.” Halfway to voicing his objection, one hard tap from Jayden's crowbar vaulted the butt of the prod from Renay's grip, in a perfect arc for Jayden to snatch.

“Go!” screamed the squirt, heaving against Renay's back. Renay stumbled into Jayden with his arms swinging, stupid, reflexive.

Jayden lightly gripped the boy's shoulder and pivoted him to a stop. It took several seconds of silence before Renay realised he had both fought, and lost, with the grandeur of a small fart.

“Lost?” she laughed.

“I—”

“Here spitfire, you get a favour. That's real opportunity, rarer than rubies, 'cause there a lot I got and ain't much I give. See now, that's called a principles. Give shit and soon y'ain't have shit. Simple, huh! Like rules for life, you follow the right ones, you win. And I win a lot, follows, I got fucking good principles.” Jayden offered him the prod hilt-first. Though he hesitated, it only took a smile and a tilt of the head for him to concede and holster it quietly. “Now you and squirt go sit with those checker-grannies and pay fat fucking attention on me. If your eyes and ears ain't perking, yain't taking good notes. And yain't taking good notes, yain't backwards-strapolating what I got right. Then you just fucking up forever, eh?”

“Renay, she's bad,” moaned the squirt. “You have to stop her. Renay!”

“You're just bigger. It's not fair. If I was bigger—”

“Smarter too, changes nothing. Renay, Renay!” Jayden crowed. “If you gonna be a sennytel – whatever that means to your noggin – watching's your gain kid. It'll be wild.”

Though the squirt tugged at his arm and squealed, Renay did limp himself into a seat beside Grace, who grunted lightly, patted his shoulder, and returned to her checkers. Squirt struggled and bucked like an unruly cat in Renay's lap.

The tiller of 82 span, clacked, shrilled.

“Why didn't you zap her?! Lemme go!”

“Shush, Peytn.”

“No!”

Just as the thought struck, Oh shit, that's him, her arm flashed to cover her eyes. The tingling on her skin registered before the slap of the liquid, or the dripping down her front, or the acrid stench of chemicals. Retreating some steps, she lowered her arm and saw in the doorway of 82 the shopkeeper from Foreman's Mechanics. Red-speckled bandages cocooned his right hand, his jaw jerked out in a scowl down at her, and in his left hand he held, tilted down and out, a small canister of lighter fluid.

On a small shelf aside the door was perched a can of hairspray. A scrap of metal jutted from under its sprayer, upon which there flickered a candle.

Jayden bolted. Flame roared out of the door behind her – a purple smudge danced in her vision as she looked up to the roofs. But there were none. Every bunker's flat, slablike face stretched straight to the ceiling.

Drawing her crowbar, she whipped back around. The shopkeeper lagged far down the street, hunched just outside his door, arm outstretched with spraycan pointed at the ground. Fat beads of lighter fluid dripped from Jayden's chin, to her chest, to a puddle at her feet. A dark trail of liquid ran from that puddle back to the doorway, like the string of a kite.

Fast as a pitcher, Jayden threw the crowbar.

It careened through the air, spiralling like blades of a combine. Its hook crunched into the spraycan and flung it skyward, where the crowbar itself clattered and bounced round the floor. Screams rose from onlooking doorways even before the mangled can exploded, like a phoenix, into a fireball half-wide as the street.

“Oh!”

“Fuck, Gracie!”

“You stay back, kids.”

Scampering feet poured from the houses. The shopkeeper, undeterred, fetched the crowbar. He gripped the thing with the same elegance that a gorilla fisted a paintbrush.

Jayden relaxed her shoulders, let her hands fall to her sides, waited, and watched.

“I'm all right, you worriers.”

Waited for him to come. Watched him raise the crowbar. High, clumsy, a telegraphed swipe.

At its apex, she darted around his right flank and swept a kick into the back of his knees. The man fell like tower, undone at its foundations, and the crowbar bounced out of his hand as he toppled. Jayden straddled his back, slid her belt out of its loops, and garotted it around the man's neck.

His hands scrambled to tear hers off the buckle, which she pressed taut against his throat. Underneath her he thrashed like a mechanical bull, but being distracted by suffocation unlike such a machine, riding him took only some strong thighs and focus.

Focus. Ride it. Focus. Focus—

—she flinched. A surge of force kicked her off the man's back, to the floor, sprawled aside the crowbar. Above her stood Peytn, with his half-stretched arm wielding the electrical prod. Its prongs danced with hot sparks in the air inches from where Jayden's head had been, only seconds before.

What stopped that 'inches' from being 'exactly' was Renay, who had yanked Peytn's forearm back in and now gripped hard on his shoulder. Peytn squealed, marching against the hold, but went nowhere.

“Let me go!” he cried. His dad coughed and blearily whipped the belt off his throat – but already before he could speak, a tide of onlookers grabbed him, folded his hands behind his back, held him equally steady.

“What—what are you doing? Let me—” he choked and bucked, but the crowd only roared and bucked back against him, as if he'd stubbed his toe kicking a wall.

“Renay!” squealed Peytn, as Renay confiscated and holstered the prod. Jayden retrieved the crowbar as she stood, wiped a run of lighter-juice off her chin. Renay looked to her.

With a single sharp crook of the finger, she beckoned him. Renay stared at the floor, head bowed for seconds, before he shoved Peytn to her.

“You rat,” the shopkeeper barked, hitching left and right like a lassoed donkey. Peytn squeaked for Renay as he tumbled into Jayden's grip, but already Renay stood back like a ghost in the ring of onlookers. Nearby him was Grace, whose vague irritation as she rubbed her face – cheek a ruddy magenta peel, the tip of her nose bubbling with pus – suggested she'd rather be back with her checkers. A stranger fussed to bandage her with a sweat-stained cloth through her refusals. Opposite them, Smiles the Idiot huffed like a bull as he yanked back against Peytn's father.

“Not me, her! Stop her! Idiots,” the man shouted. “She's going to attack that child. My son!”

He might as well have campaigned them to go and rescue a maggot.

“Somebody... any of you! You—” he pleaded to a man loitering outside 82, slightly abreast from the crowd. “You—get in there!” But the guy just stared with eyes like marble.

Simply readjusting her grip on the crowbar drew every gaze to it like a conductor's baton. Rubberneckers, audience, streetlength, dais. An unspoken cordon fell around Jayden with the sanctity of a priest giving sermon.

The air shifted minutely behind her. She looked – a slight woman with curly brown hair had stepped a small way out of the ring, but as soon as she knew herself visible, froze as a thief under torchlight.

Peytn squealed, “Mom! Mom!”

The woman's hand curled slowly over her heart. Tailed on a heavy breath, she said, “oh sweet dove, be strong.”

“Sina!” screeched the shopkeeper, skin blazing scarlet from his face to his hands, veined and clawed enough to shovel the woman into a furnace. Jayden glanced down to Peytn.

“Don't hit me!”

She raised the crowbar.

“Don't hit me! Don't hit me! Don't—”

Kids had supple bones. They snapped well and healed better, a month or two on the mend, then not even a hobble for Precious if he played nice and sat still. See, that was good work. Clean work. But hell did the little shit howl, as if she'd minced him with hatchets.

The noise of it bristled in the roots of her teeth. “I'll do your fucking neck,” she hissed to him, but his keening and the whoop of the crowd strangled her threat into burbling noise. Cheers droned from onlooking mouths like praise for a stone-carved idol, arms swaying like reeds, feet stomping like drumbeats.

“Keeyow! Keeyow!” shriekers crowed. Jayden ducked under the sound, into the crowd, the burn in her chest well extinguished and the acid long spewed from her tongue. Even stupid promises rarely let her rescind them. For this one, she just thought: Thank fuck.

Renay's sedate face flashed in her periphery. As she darted by she followed his gaze over her shoulder, between the jostling bodies, to glimpse the father falling, while the mother scooped her son to her chest.

Only after she cleared the neighbourhood, and the cacophony biting her heels fell mute, did Jayden slow to a walk, soon to a trudge. The buildings around her tangled silently into each other, as the roofs of bunkers spread over the roofs of their neighbours, walls jutted onto the street, and angular doorways slit open habitations too confused for even squatters to claim. This cancer of conjoined iron sprawled together tightly, spewing wiry bundles, gobbling glimpses of chain-link, to altogether form a cul-de-sac curved like the inside of a closed mouth, Jayden atop its tongue.

Dead end, it announced.

An emaciated ladder grew from an outcropping of the metallic clot. Jayden yanked herself up it, arms arcing to each rung with the puppetlike rictus of basilisk. She sighed at the top, down to the bare street, over the dry rattling of the ventilating fans underfoot. Then by a short squeeze through a choke of stout pipes opposite, in filtered the noise of human bustle and out popped the panorama of the main street, with its eateries, a cliff's-drop below.

That was East Welding, where mess loomed behind modernity. Jayden spiralled brainlessly down a roof, a windowsill, a signpost, a wall, foothold to foothold, the route too rehearsed for adrenaline to fire. Her mind reconnected at touchdown, as did those of onlookers, whose gazes slid away with abrupt recognition, either of her or her jacket.

Above the doorway of a nearby establishment, a pudgy cartoon rat cut from thin metal sheets waved his fork over the words:

THE FAT RAT
DINER & EATERY

Why not. Jayden rolled her shoulders, strode in with hands in pockets, and lowered her gaze to the anti-slip slashes on the floor, as if by acknowledging no one, no one would acknowledge her. No matter how brief or benign, uniformed visits to civilian businesses always provoked stupid trouble. People noticed, rumours drifted, reputations stuck. And that was after the hurdle of explaining, nah nobody getting a shake-down, just me getting a milkshake.

But by the chatter still wafting from the nearby tables, today in this little eatery all pants remained yet unshat. Hell, maybe she could even dine in.

“Alright, nah, I'm just glad I could help finish up. Cheers, Marinne.”

Jayden quirked her gaze up, juddered still halfway to the counter.

Out from the kitchen's scrap-bead curtain emerged Jacklyn, his step and smile as-ever jocular. He pivoted around to the entrance, and in spotless tempo, as if it were a perfectly natural thing she'd be standing there, “well heee—ell Jay, someone sure banged you up.”

“That fucker Tuesday, iunno how he keeps getting me.”

“Looking he ran the whole posse on you eh. Monday, Sunday.”

“Yeah yeah all thems too. Gotem though.” She cricked her neck aside. “Mister walkabout.”

He raised his hands in mock surrender. “Just wandering where the heart roams, ehr, well...” He glanced over the sparse field of patrons, then discreetly withdrew from his pocket a portable recorder, its wire in the wiped position. The longer he presented it, the further his smile waned, into flatness, into a wince. “Sorry Jay. Might be adding another day on the week you had,” he muttered.

She rotated it about for a perfunctory inspection. Same as all the recorders she gave prospects on courier jobs – the most recent of which, to that bald freak Lizard. “All good. I got it,” she palmed the recorder away. “Talk it over lunch.”

“Lights're turning in ten Jay that ain't no gods-be-damned lunch,” he scoffed. Yeah, you got me, confessed the smile that glowed from inside her. She jerked her chin to the counter.

He gazed over, hand on his hip. The ease in his step beside her defanged her scars, tats, bruises, bloodstains, all those ratty bits into benign decoration. She could've been anyone in the world, when he called, “hey, Marinne.”