Seven

I stood on the bridge. Dawn, midsummer. It was early. I pulled the lace mask down, it fully hooded my head, and turned my collar against the thick breeze. It’d be too hot in an hour. The mosquitoes were out. Frogs and katydids still hollered unseen but larks joined them, and birds that sounded mythic and bizarre, too much like little kids. Something burbled. Something panted. We were in the wetlands down near Tasmudan, and even this early the heat seeped upwards through the soil, warmed the bridge from below, teased the torture that’d be the air once the sun came overhead. The lace didn’t obscure my vision much. Through the swirling dotwork flowers, I saw the trees wigged with gauzy moss, their gnarly naked roots, the standing water blackness on either side of the railroad tracks, matte and dull as tar. Lumps of animal swam through it without ripples.

The rails were pure ichorite. The faintly rainbow luster glinted in two slim slashes through the muck. Ichorite rails are lighter than steel, and aren’t so easily swallowed into the gluttonous swamp mud. The logic doesn’t hold when cargo trains, profoundly heavy, roll over those pretty ichorite rails, but tracks weren’t submerged too regularly, and from what I understood, the hold that Industry had over the papers was considerable, and safety concerns were kept mum.

Hereafterists around Loveday Manor lamented the lack of a free press all the time. They measured each other’s scars and talked about Delphinia. Then they’d hate each other and hate the sky and talk domestically, bicker about how the free press would outline the standstill between the force of Chaunceyco, Yann’s enormously powerful and constantly expanding business empire, against the ancient wall of the surrounding aristocratic class, the only legal landowners in all of Ignavia. The Hereafterists talked about how their free press would decry the hunting of Hereafterists globally, and the aggressions of Royston against Drustlandish disputed territories, which perhaps weren’t disputed at all, rather were properly Drustish. They’d heard about Laith Hall, it was one of six comparable Halls. A free press might even discuss the plight of the lustertouched. More of us had been born to all those scabs after my community was slaughtered on Burn Street. How old would the new lustertouched babies be? Seven, now? Nine?

The actual press mostly discussed Gossamer Dignity Chauncey, young heir and political maverick. She wanted the Senate opened up, wanted citizens without a lick of baron blood to be electable as mouthpiece of a barony’s populace. She wanted a cap of six hours per working day to be the new labor norm. She wanted to build housing for Delphinian refugees and offer them factory jobs. I thought about paper pulp and the waterwheel on that mill where Teriasa zel Cerca’s man used to languish for his daily bread. I thought about Teriasa brushing her long black hair to satin.

Here comes the train.

I stood alone. I had ropes hanging from my belt and my rifle on my back and carefully, already anguished, I peeled off my gloves.

The air stung against my nail beds. I flexed my fingers. Stiff, tingling.

The train screamed under the bridge. No stops around here, but it moved slowly, some theory about weight distribution and the hungry sucking swamp. The wind sucked at my lace mask. The mask was deep red, the likeness of a whip spider painted across it in bird’s-egg blue. It tinged the light. I breathed hard, I forced air down into my belly, and I stepped off the bridge.

The roof slammed against my boots. Vibrations shocked up my shins and I spat and made myself small, flattened my weight down against the curved shell of ichorite alloy. Ugly evil slope. Nearness brought the suffering on before the fit even started. I ground my teeth, slapped my palms down, and jerked my hands backwards. The roof of the train clung to my palms. It peeled back like a blanket. Colors clapped, the world undulated and jellied around me, my tongue swelled, my gums went soft, my guts rigid, the sky was a whirl of orange and magenta molten poisonous candy pressing hard against my face. The world seethed around my body. A horrible delusion took me, and I imagined for a moment, imagined so concretely that my body responded with jitters and gooseflesh and appropriate recoil, that the ichorite roof had squeezed my hands, touched me like hands would touch me, or like how a sea anemone might wriggle around its little prey. Fucking ridiculous.

Mechanically, I got the ropes into my hands, felt along the iron weights woven through the fibers until I got the ends, which I plunged into the slurry wet ichorite train top. Active ripples, not passive. Something pulling, sucking, swallowing. My burning head. I threw the length down over the sides of the train. I could not see or hear but trusted that Candor and Harlow were close by in hot pursuit. I sensed their spectral lurcher below and beside me. It was not intuition, it was insanity and faith. I had done my big part. I breach. I breach, Harlow intimidates, Candor gets us out, and Sisphe, well.

I slumped through the hole I wrought. There was already screaming. Hurt my head. I slung the rifle off my back and fit my hands around it, I filed my action to match my grip exactly, and I brandished as I looked around. My vision sloshed. Passenger carriage. That was the style now, a few passenger carriages before the big cargo stripe, then more passenger carriages behind, so as to maximally segregate the shiny patrons from the dingy ones. Handy organization. Meant we seldom scared the dingy ones. The carpet squelched. It licked at my boots. I rolled my shoulders and tried to focus. My coat fabric bubbled against my skin. Light pulsed. Lots of motion but no running, more like people flattening sideways against the windows. Their edges blurred and mixed. Someone cried out, WHIP SPIDER!

Once there’s one WHIP SPIDER everybody went WHIP SPIDER or DEVILCHILD or MURDERER MURDERER GIRL SNATCHER KILLER THIEFTHIEFTHIEF! Then the whole train fell in shambles. Everyone got loud at once. Their limbs kaleidoscoped in pastel wool and linen. Pleats whirled like notches on a circle saw. I said, I slurred, “Pardon, please,” but I was too quiet, and that’s for the best, I shouldn’t be the one to introduce us.

Then, my guiding star, the perfect scream. It’s clear and high, tremulous, sparkling. I went to the scream and with magnetic compulsion, I thrusted a hand into the fray and I seized the glossy braid of one stunning hysterical Sisphe thu Ecapa, our own Tricksy, whom I dragged from her booth with my off hand and displayed in the center aisle. I looped her braid around the back of my hand. I pulled her taut. Her hair was my rope, none could look upon her and imagine she’d ever escape.

Everyone imagined what might happen to her. Some imagined with lurid detail. I’ve heard there were books about us. Unbound books sold in cartons by the docks. Schlock smut filth deliciousness with chains and hooks and paddles stuck with nails. I hauled her shaking body against my body, lifted her just slightly off the floor, and with great flourish she kicked her little feet. Her satin slippers glittered ecstatically in the haze of my fit. She panted, her ribs fought against her bodice, chest heaving, top curves of her breasts glinting with sweat below her collarbone, and uselessly she writhed against my hands, pink tongue showing, cat teeth flashing behind her wonderful sob-swollen lips. Her year-old lip ring sparkled. It bruised the backs of my eyelids like it was a little band of sun. I walked her forward, to the center of the carriage, and presented her to the passengers. What a lovely girl. She put on such a show.

Sisphe tossed a wrist across her brow and cried out, “Ah! The Whip Spider’s Gang!”

I hoisted her up a little higher, shook her to prove my cruelty. Sisphe yelped. She swooned against my shoulder, huffing, fluttering her eyelashes against the exposed skin strip of my throat below the lace mask. She tickled. I pushed down the impulses we’d trained so hard against—I didn’t console her, didn’t laugh, didn’t break my immovable posture. Hard not to be a gentleman. Hard not to be kind. I pinned Sisphe against a booth’s edge and tried to keep my balance. They kept putting more ichorite in these fucking trains. Making my job easier made it so much harder.

A clatter up the wall, a thud on the ceiling, then a figure dropped through the hole I’d torn to a fresh round of screams from the increasingly frantic passengers. They looked like a school of fish in colored water. I couldn’t make out distinguishing details of their bodies. The figure, Harlow, my newest dear friend, our Delphinian Hereafterist boxing champion jackass nightmare, proud crawly, prouder than me, with a lace hood obscuring the shit-eating grin she always wore on her stupid handsome dimpled face. The centipede on her mask looked like a snake. I needed to sit down. I needed to get my head back. I bit down on my tongue hard, pain jolted, clean sharp pain and its companion copper taste.

Harlow swept out a hand and barked, “G’morning! Picked the wrong train! Backs to the windows, hands on your faces, yield and everybody gets to go home!”

For how recently I’d met her, I trusted Harlow fast. She’d been a revolutionary in Delphinia whom pirates had smuggled across the Amandine Sea. Here she was, my friend, my rival. I’d know her voice in a cacophony of thousands.

My body moved for me. A bad illusion, me being separate from my body. Spiritual separation of mind from corporeal apparatus had no place in my faith, it was stupid and Stellarine, but notions like these are clingy. I pushed Sisphe to her knees. I walked her along, braid leash pleasantly smooth in my hand, and offered her to Harlow. Sisphe wept at Harlow’s feet. Harlow nudged her toe against Sisphe’s belly, and Sisphe flew back, sputtered as though she’d been winded, like the nudge had been a sternum-snapping kick. Sisphe rocked back on her knees, looked up at me under her long lashes, lashes like a baby deer’s, and she gasped, “Please don’t hurt me with your magic, please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt these people!”

The ripples went around again. Whip Spider, the devilchild bandit who pillaged banks and trains and riverboats and fine establishments that I didn’t properly know the name for but sold armaments and aged brandy, was magic. Pulling the roof off this train was a feat of magic. Plainly so. It was devilry, atavistic and potent, and its function was another mystery of nature’s tantrums. Whip Spider was very famous. She ripped through vaults like candy floss and tied enforcers to the train tracks with the tracks themselves. She melted armored cars into ooze pits with a touch. She summoned fallen bullet shells through the smoke and hurled them through the lawmen who shot them with a flick of her wrist, lightning fast and lethal. She and her crawlies, all of them crawlies, filthy rotten repulsive vile violent wicked depraved little crawlies, menaced upright women and harrowed polite society. Whip Spider’s credited for destroying the nascent Ignavian commercial lurcher and motor carriage market, given that she’d so publicly melted tires into the pavement, vaulting the enforcers who rode them over the horns at great skull-destroying speeds, liquifying engines, sealing armored doors shut and trapping their riders irretrievably inside before shoving the whole machines off cliffs. The Whip Spider was a blight. A parasitic stain on society’s moral fabric, sucking the pigment of good conduct and leaving fray and disillusion in her wake. She was a nightmare drawn from the breath of the new rich and condensed into a dew that became a flesh that became a woman, if such a creature can be called a woman, if any crawly can be considered more than a maimed in-between. Dread sight, the Whip Spider’s lace! Terror! Terror!

“So long as all these people comply in a timely fashion,” Harlow the Centipede sweetly said with a boot stomped on Sisphe’s thigh, “we’ll let you live, my dove.”

Somehow, Sisphe managed to flinch in such a way that she yanked one sleeve over her shoulder. Exposed the precious little freckles there. Valor never had so much fun when she played victim-orchestrator. Sisphe batted her lashes up at Harlow, tears heavy at the tips, and exclaimed, “What will you do to me, Centipede?”

Harlow pulled her gun from her belt and pressed it against Sisphe’s bottom lip.

Sisphe trembled, panted. She gave the dull metal a lick.

Harlow laughed. She made a show of swinging her head around. “Who’s the jeweler? We’ve seen your ticket, best to let us know who you are.”

Sisphe moved against my hand, bumped the gun against her chin. She angled her panting toward a thin man hyperventilating against the back of his seat. Harlow withdrew from her, approached the man, and took his bag from him. She opened it, grunted, shut it. She took it back a few paces and tossed it up through the hole I’d made in the roof. Beautiful morning blueness rushed above. I thought, hold hold hold hold hold, felt a gruesome flush of furnace heat and a squeal of steam through a notched valve, the valve spat white hot between my ears, and I was sure the bag had stuck. The ichorite flecks that’d glued themselves to my palms fizzled and stung. Such a dirty feeling. I widened my stance. I forced my knees not to buckle. Sisphe leaned against my shin and impossibly bore my weight. I’d be so dead without her.

Harlow leaned over the man, purred something harshly in his ear, and he stammered what I assumed was a storage number. This particular train hauled this jeweler’s stock, see. Not so much stock as to warrant an armored car, but armored cars were hardly worth the investment, given that I could pull them in half like taffy if I was willing to spasm for hours afterwards.

Harlow put a hand on the man’s head, a friendly pat, then strode past me, whistled as she unlatched the far door and vanished into a cargo carriage. This was a smallish raid, modest haul, but we’d had a good season in the redwoods and the moors. I shifted through our spoils in my head. Sorted out which share went to the Fingerbluffs’ common wealth, a hearty half, and which would adorn Loveday Mansion. We gave more than was required and boasted about it. What good fathers to our people were we! Took deliberation, distributing riches appropriately. Everybody in the Fingerbluffs should want for nothing. Everybody in the Fingerbluffs should be prosperous and lush, well spoiled. Took deliberation to move all those goods, too, as much as recovering goods demanded, securely moving those goods across all of Ignavia was no small feat. Take what you can carry, they say.

I looked down at Sisphe. Darling Sisphe. Her posture had changed. Under her dress, I saw the ready shape of her stance. Sisphe was crouched, not kneeling. Primed to spring.

Harlow whistled as she came back. Unalone toward dawn we go! She had a lacquered box on her shoulder, cumbersome and double-locked, and she heaved it up through the hole with a groan. I heard it hit the top, I chanted in my head, it didn’t clatter and slide away. I imagined vaguely what’d happen if we passed under a low stone bridge. Our spoils smashed and crumpled like confetti. Funny.

With that, I relinquished Sisphe, and she flung herself through the air. Apples bouncing. My skull ached. Harlow caught her, boosted her up through the hole, her skirts snapped around her like a banner and I watched her boots vanish into the sky. Numbly, I snatched a few satchels, a coat I liked, and a parcel, fit them all under my arm, and went to sweet Harlow, who knelt and put her hands under my heel. She sprung me up, I twisted my body, hooked my free elbow on the edge of the hole. Wind screamed over my hair and pulled the air from my mouth. The twisted ichorite alloy burned. I slammed the goods up and they obediently stuck, and hauled myself up the rest of the way, reached down to assist Harlow up. Her hand pressed the metal flecks against my skin. Felt electric up to my arm sockets.

On the roof I cabled the parcels together. Little rainbow scrap metal mesh. It broke the light into crazy iridescent ripples, made the spoils an enormous freshwater pearl. I worked my hands over the metal so mechanically and only cried a little. My ears dripped, my nose, but it was a thin stream. That ichorite taste was slippery on my bottom lip. I was drooling the stuff. I didn’t know what it was. Serum, Amon called it. It looked like oil on water. It was wet under my ears. I wanted to scrub myself. I wanted to pull off my skin.

Sisphe called down to Candor.

Candor flew beside us on a tandem lurcher. Huge, gloating, sexed-up freak of a ride, with back wheels as tall as my hip, and an exposed engine that coiled around like guts. It was meant to sit three, a driver and two shooters, and carry a thick cache. Sisphe and Harlow took the pearly bundle from me and attached it to the weighted ropes I’d hooked earlier, I chanted slow slow slow slow slow slow at the backs of my front teeth, it glided down the cables, it was caught by handsome Candor, who had pulled her lace mask over her nose and mouth and gnawed a long slim cigarette. She put one boot on the gas, the other on the handle’s central crux to keep it steady, had both hands on the enormous parcel which she lovingly detached and slipped into the back seat before twisting around, easing her hips back down in the seat, sliding her palms over the lurcher’s horns and guiding it closer to the train.

Sisphe slung her body down the ropes. Her skirt rode up, the bullets belted around her garter reflected the sun. Brassy, pretty. Could hardly see the evil iridescence underneath. Harlow put a hand on my shoulder, said something I didn’t hear over the howling wind, and gathered me up, swung me onto her back. I clung to her. She smelled like salt and suede and cedar. I pressed my face into the darkness between her shoulders, and she shimmied down after Sisphe, pulled us both onto the lurcher. I chanted in my head, I yanked the ropes, they oozed off the ichorite roof and flew into my hands in a heavy, stingy knot. I shoved them off my lap. I was sitting now.

Harlow had arranged me in the seat where the parcel had been, the parcel Sisphe now safely secured in the back of the humming lurcher. I scrubbed my hands on my trousers, tried to get the ichorite off. The knife, my special knife, sheathed and not touching me, pulsed through the leather, through the fabric, into the meat of my pelvis. I felt it in my tailbone. My mask itched. I pulled it off, smoothed it over one of my knees. Touched the baby blue whip spider with its careful, nervous fingers.

Sisphe clapped my back. “Drinks on me!”

“How was that for you?” Harlow eased into the seat beside me, pulled Sisphe onto her lap. She slung an arm around Sisphe’s waist, pressed an open-mouthed kiss against her jugular. “Kick alright?”

“Easy crowd,” Sisphe said with a shrug. She shimmed her shoulders once, then leaned forward so far she nearly fell off the lurcher, pawed around Candor’s thighs for her cigarette tin. “No heroism. Pathetic, boring, yawn! That’s that. Oh, you two were dreamy, that was fine. Marney’s dripping everywhere.”

I smudged my nose with the back of my wrist.

Years ago now, before she was Sisphe, we’d followed a widow downstairs. It was late and she’d swayed out of her bedroom like a revenant, the light shone through her flimsy nightgown, we saw the shadows of her shoulders and her thighs moving. She looked half-alive and loose with pain, like the muscles on her body were tense past tension. Beads on a string. Her hair was unbound. I didn’t know her. Her tattoos shifted under the dress like fish in murky water. Tricksy and I had been playing marbles in the hallway, Candor had had a fever that night, we were outside the sickroom listening to her cough, but she’d drifted off to sleep, and the woman had moved through perfect silence, she didn’t even stir the air as she passed us. Underwater glossy movements. A red marble rolled, stopped.

We followed the widow downstairs. We hadn’t discussed it, but we saw her in the dim light of the hallway, how she floated an inch above the carpet runner, and we looked at each other and something prickled between us. We felt a wind that wasn’t there. We plucked up our marbles and tucked them in our pockets, it was such a fearsome secret suddenly that we were awake, I heard Tricksy’s clothes whisper and heard the grandfather clock ticking and my blood fluttered under my skin. We tiptoed after her. We blew kisses at Candor’s door, we’d never done that before and it made me twitchy, I was so vividly awake I could yelp, and we followed the woman down the stairs, hid behind Virtue statues and suits of fish-scale plate armor and hunks of still-gilded Bellonan column, we covered each other’s mouths, Tricksy looked at me with insane rabbit eyes.

The woman drifted soundlessly into the ballroom. She swept across the floor, barely walking, and lifted her eyes. She came before the wall of cast hands, the Veltuni ancestral council, an endless sea of outstretched sculpted fingers reaching down. She untied the front of her dress. It slipped over her shoulders, was caught by her elbows. It draped at the small of her back. I looked at the dimples at either side of the base of her spine. I felt Tricksy looking at me. The widow woman reached for a hand on the wall. With a scrape of brass on marble, she pulled one hand off its stud. She held the hand against her cheek. She traced her jaw with it. She slipped its finger in her mouth, pushed it down to the knuckle. Tricksy looked at me. She reached for my wrist. I looked at my wrist in her hand and felt watery. I tucked myself closer to her in the shadow of our little nook. She lifted my hand up. She put my finger in her mouth.

“I’m a special girl,” Sisphe had told me. No husband of hers could die the way I planned to die. We weren’t lovers anymore. We weren’t getting married. It’d been discussed.

I accepted the bottle that Harlow passed to me. I pulled the cork with my teeth. I spat it to the side. I expected water, which was stupid of me. I swished the liquor around my mouth. It screamed against my raw tongue and swollen gums, but the sting was good. I swallowed, grimaced. Serum slipped down the back of my throat. It was thinner now, just a greasy trickle. I squeezed my eyes hard, then opened them wide. It was fucking hot out. My jacket was wet. I shrugged my shoulders, rid myself of it, shook out my sweat-soaked shirt. I traced the edge of a fish tattoo on my wrist with my eye. The fish was monstrous and toothed; there were myths about them that pirates had told me. Fish that hatched out of the far moon and crashed down like hail in hurricanes. I had an earring made of one’s ivory. I took another sip.

We roared through denser swamp. Moss gauze teeming with humming bugs swept over our heads. Reptiles slithered through brackish sludge. The mud squelched and rippled under the lurcher. If we got stuck, it’d be me and Candor and Harlow up to our knees in muck, shoving, cursing every god in every faith, and Sisphe intently filing her nails until she was sick of waiting, then she’d strip herself naked to spare her dress and plunge into the mud and with impossible and infuriating ease would haul the lurcher into the air one-handed, leave us all to the adders as she swan dove a triple aerial over the tall back tires, landing standing on the horns, laughing and stretching and steering without movement through pure force of will.

We didn’t get stuck.

“We had big lizards like these in the Bitters, that’s south Delphinia, deep south, blue and fat and lazy, we’d tame ’em to lie around in the boxing rings, but of course they weren’t ever tame, just too tired to get you. Beasts are good luck. They’re a thousand years old,” Harlow said. She combed her hair, mussed from the mask, and re-sculpted her pompadour in the mirror adjoined to Sisphe’s clamshell powder puff. Her hair was jet black, stiff with pomade. She swept it back from her temple and pressed the little hairs in a curve beside her ear. “There was a Hereafterist guerilla band a bit before my time who called themselves after the lizards, they hunted them for cash beforehand see, and wore their skin on their hands. They were so smart, real sharp girls the lot of them, and brazen too. They’d sabotage supply lines by blowing up bridges, made a big show of their work. They slowed occupation a full few months just the five of them. Shame about the drowning. Bring your little ass back here, where are you going?”

“Candor,” Sisphe sang, halfway off Harlow’s lap again. “You’re pouting. How come you’re pouting?”

“They drowned?” Candor worried her lip with her teeth. She still wore her mask half-on. Her cigarette was all ash and filter. She wasn’t supposed to do stunts with us. Being baby Loveday was too important. Not so impor­tant that the Choir would forbid a bandit their work, but enough that everyone would be mad at her if she put herself in the line of fire. Being driver was all she did. If it was me, I would’ve hated it. She didn’t. Not a shred of resentment in her golden boozy heart.

“They did,” said Harlow, a little quieter. “I was young then. Tough when it’s an accident. Martyrdom’s an honor. It was just a mistake. They mistimed an explosion and two of them were gone in an instant, two more got caught under debris, sank to the bottom of the river, got caught up in rebar and concrete. Bobbed just under the surface. Last one just swept away. Swept far, down into town, that’s where I saw her. Didn’t get to see the brief Hereafter. Bad luck, huh?”

Candor prayed. Not a Stellarine prayer, not even a prayer to the Oneness, the faith that held all of Tasmudan, the Crimson Archipelago (which was and wasn’t Tasmudan) and the far continent (which also was and wasn’t Tasmudan). She added the Hereafterist flip of that prayer, which made Oneness not an authority innately alive in and in command of all things, but a liveliness that came from togetherness that was immortal and unconquerable. Solidarity as god. Candor’s accent was a little funny, but it made Harlow smile.

Sisphe shook a hand through her hair. It held so much sunlight. If she wrung it out, it’d drench the seats with gold. She leaned close to me now, put her chin on my shoulder, pressed her nose against my cheek. Held my arm above my elbow, fit her thumb in the ditch. “Marney.”

“Yes’m?”

She fluttered her eyelashes against my cheek. “Speak. You look dead. Prove me wrong.”

“I’m not dead.”

“You could be rotting over here and we wouldn’t know.” She kissed my cheekbone. “Blooming mushrooms under your shirt.”

“You can check if you’d like,” I said.

“When they dangle the four of us, Marney won’t rot. They’ll put her bloodless body in the ground and she’ll burrow out like a worm and walk barefoot to Ignavia City to put Industry’s throat in her teeth.” Harlow beamed.

“Not good luck to talk about us dead,” said Candor softly. She held her palm under her lip and snuffed her cigarette against the base of her thumb, then pulled the filter from her lips, slipped it in her breast pocket. She was soft about throwing down smoke trash. Said she’d seen a bird eat a butt once and had nightmares about it choking for weeks.

I took another swig and shut my eyes.

I opened them on a porch of some gambling house in a town too small to call a town. Fishing shanties and grayish slats of wood over still water, lurching music, Harlow and Candor boozing and boxing to great applause on the roof, other bandits whose names I halfway knew playing cards, I dealt for them earlier, but not now. Now I watched the dirty mirror water. Shapes moved underneath it. I watched one that watched me back. Through the propped-wide door, out of the corner of my eye, I watched the scene with Sisphe, who was hunting people alive. Strictly speaking Sisphe sat on the bar with a bar worker’s hands in her hair, chatting idly, paying for nothing, and the bar worker was just enthralled with her, worshipped her breath in the air, had an expression I recognized because I’d worn it. Jaw slack, eyes on fire, tongue pressed between the teeth. Tight little nods, mhms. The politeness behind which one dulls a desire to rip her in half. Sisphe swayed as she spoke, pretending drunkenness. She looked at the worker with her eyes half-shut. Cooed something that looked like, you’d love that, wouldn’t you?

A big ugly fish breached the water. It was all mouth.

I tossed a knob of bread at it. There was bread beside me. I’d eaten. Had I eaten?

It swallowed with a flop and was gone. I watched the fish turn into nothing in the algae.

“Are you the Whip Spider?” A woman leaned on the wall behind where I sat. She had a thin face and bobbed hair, the long feathery eyelashes of a working girl. She smiled at me. “When I asked upstairs, they said it was you.”

“Yes ma’am.” My gut felt watery.

She came and sat on the arm of my chair. Wrapped an arm around the back, touched my shoulder, then my hair. Her perfume rolled over me. “Could you show me the magic?”

My belly said no. I leaned my cheek against her hip, took another glance over the marbled black-green murk, then looked up at her. I looked at her looking at me. She wasn’t wearing any ichorite. It was fashionable now, from what I understand. They make fabric out of it. Hands numb, I reached around to my waistband, felt around to the small of my back, where the knife lived. I winced when I touched it. The bones in my hand hurt. I fought down the nausea and laid the knife on my lap, blade away from her. Its shape was getting long. I added the bullets from all the enforcers we felled. Not so many, but more than most bandits. I saw that man who killed Edna in all of them. I snuffed down all the echoed thoughts inside the metal. I tried to swallow. Took my thumb along the edge and minutely, enough to show her, pulled the tip a little longer, a little thinner. It shimmered in the evening air.

“Oh, it’s lovely,” she said. She reached down, traipsed her fingers up the knife’s edge. Her nails were bitten down. She tested the new tip I’d pulled, gasped when it pricked her finger. Blood welled up there, a little bead.

I took her hand and brought it to my lips. Put the finger between my lips, kissed her first knuckle.

She dragged her skirts over her knees. The underlayers were the same lace as my mask. Frothy burgundy, blood on milk. She pulled my mouth closer, her finger hooked behind my teeth, beneath my tongue, then slipped the finger out, reached for my hair. She closed her fist against my scalp. The pain was good. It brought me back to myself. She brought me close to her body, under her skirts, and I leaned my cheek against her thigh, let myself relax in the darkness inside her dress. I loved the smell of her. I pressed a kiss against her curls, then her clit. She sighed above me. Rocked against my mouth. I lapped at her wetness, soft and lazy, reached a hand around her hips, held the small of her back, pulled her against my mouth. I don’t know how much time passed. She was soft and slick and dripped down my chin and when she came she vised her thighs around my neck. I did my best to hold her upright, I kept going past the point where she couldn’t stand it, just a second, just three, then eased off her. I kissed her thigh, then her knee. I swayed out from under her skirts. It was darker now, the sky was dusty. I smoothed the lace. I put away the knife. It hadn’t fallen, somehow. Touching it hurt.

She slipped off the chair and stood, ruffled my hair. She wandered inside.

I rubbed the edge of my mouth.

I wanted her to come back.

I stood up. I walked to the edge of the porch, leaned my hip bones against the rickety railing. It buckled but bore my weight. I sniffed. My rib hurt, I noticed now. I lifted my shirt and looked down at my chest, past MARNEY HONEYCUTT and the sea serpent and the azurine sprigs and the railroad spikes, above my navel to the left, where a welt bloomed so dark that it showed through the evening gloom. Pine green and furious. I watched my ribs press against the bruise when I sucked in. Wasn’t sure how I got it. Climbing through the hole in the roof maybe. It looked like it was moving. I put my shirt down and went inside.

Tension by the bar. Taut and itchy, nobody killing each other, everybody yearning. The flavor made me think everyone was going on about global Hereafterist revolution and our chances after Delphinia had been lost. Hope and futility and bloodshed talk. Child soldier talk. Good way to split a room of even the proudest in the Choir. Me, I believed the Hereafter would dawn, beyond which tyranny would be over and humans would stand shoulder to shoulder, in steadfast togetherness, ungoverned, beyond domination, in the age of play and trust. Not in my lifetime, but eventually. It was either that or the same and the same was unbearable. But, cried the nervous and desolate, Delphinia was the most successful Hereafterist revolution there’d ever been. Similar actions had failed five times in Cisra and twice in Royston. The martyrs were endless. How young had Harlow been when she took up her gun? Younger than I’d been when you were shot. Or they were talking about the coming war against the Drustish, who had committed the crime of having land that Royston wanted as a remedy to its national identity’s autocannibalism, or they were talking about baby Chauncey the reformist, who made the factories safer, who made the work days shorter, who made the process seem salvageable, who couldn’t be trusted because she was young, because she was a slut, because she was a crawly who besmirched the reputation of good aristocratic girls, because the rich could not be trusted, but she was a woman, but she was an advocate for the workers in her employ, but she was a trailblazer, we need freaks like her. But compromise, but progress! But tomorrow by any means possible!

It wasn’t work talk.

When I crossed the threshold, I saw Candor. Candor saw me, that is. She saw me and touched Sisphe’s arm, and Sisphe, speaking animatedly without blinking, a horrible smile on her face, stopped smiling. Harlow threw a dart at the wall. It sprung there, little feathers twitching. She threw another. They thunked in a canary yellow line. A woman across the bar, facing Sisphe, drummed her nails on the side of her glass. Her jacket was buttoned to her jaw, her hair pulled tightly back, and each tap displaced the condensation. Drops fell and pooled like quicksilver on the bar.

I stood beside Candor. Put my hands on the back of a scuzzy blond chair. To the woman I said, “You alright, ma’am?”

“Just fine,” the stranger said. She shook off her hand. “Seem to have ruffled some feathers is all. You’ve got sensitive friends.”

It just wasn’t so.

“Perhaps I could be helpful,” I said.

“I want her to roll up her sleeve,” Sisphe said brightly. “Easy as that!”

“I’m not showing my skin to nobody,” the woman said. She had a peculiar diction. Precise, all upright. Like she’d wanted to say anybody instead. “I’m just trying to be friendly. Haven’t been around these parts much.”

I rubbed my thumb around a swirl in the woodwork. Fit my nail in a groove. “What’s your name?”

“Casey Courtesy Miller.”

“Courtesy,” Candor repeated. “Where are you from, Courtesy?”

“Montrose,” she said.

“Here I thought Montrose houses the Virtue Lady Righteousness. Heard plenty of the names Honor and Integrity and Steadfast and Probity out of Montrose, even a Solidarity out of Montrose, never a Courtesy.” Candor carefully buttoned and unbuttoned Sisphe’s sleeve, kept her eyes down, her voice soft. I was enormously proud of her. Boldness didn’t come easy. “Lord Propriety’s housed out in Glitslough and Geistmouth. Did your parents carry you all those miles coastward? Long trip for a baby.”

“Aren’t we clever. I was born in Geistmouth. Moved to Montrose with my folks for work. What’s it to you? Where are you from?” She took a small sip of her full stein. Mouthed the foam. “Around here?” To me, “Where’s the Whip Spider sleep?”

“We’re from home,” Candor said.

“That’s quaint. Where’s that?”

Sisphe reached for her gun.

She drew and Candor drew and Harlow spun, hurled a yellow dart into the back of Casey’s hand just as Casey shoved the table hard, rammed the corner into Sisphe’s solar plexus. Sisphe gasped. Her gun went off, smashed a hole through the ceiling with a rain of splinters and dust. The sound clapped. Casey Courtesy drew her gun. I knew the make. Only issued to enforcers. The yellow dart in her hand bobbed with gravity. Red flecked the feather fluff. I didn’t have my gun on me. I dove across the table, and the yellow dart bounced, and in the emerging allergic haze I saw the enforcer turn her gaze on me. Move her gun toward me. My lips mashed, I mouthed jam jam jam jam jam as one smeared sound, I slammed my boot on her sternum and shoved her chest backwards hard and she tumbled as the gun went off, a pop of nothing, the oozy ichorite insides blobbed out from what was once buckshot and had not been expelled, then she fired again, and the gun tore. It was a pop of sound and sulfur. A long twist of metal jutted from a nearby stool. Through the smoke I saw bandits ebb and flow, rise up on counters and dive for cover, because it was enforcers, not just Casey, a third of the room stood and brandished, and I dropped under the table, scrambled for my knife, cringed as I found the throbbing handle.

Around me got loud.

Someone fell. An enforcer or a stranger, I wasn’t sure, but they crashed to the floor and spilled blood from a hole in their shoulder, and I dragged them under the table, clapped my hands around them, hunted for a gun. The bloody mucky denim bore nothing. Nothing down their thighs or under their armpits, nothing at the small of their back. I saw the edge of a tattoo on their chest but it wasn’t a name. With mechanical numbness I squinted through the horrible pink whirring that wasn’t real at the blood that was, and I touched it, I balked at its texture, I swiped my thumbs over my eyelids, prayed wordlessly, and darted out from under the table. Someone else had fallen there, I took a gun from their hand, I loaded it. My pulse in my tongue, in my scalp, was sludgy and loud. The air cloyed. A floorboard beside me exploded into powder like a kiss from a cosmetic puff and got on my trousers, got in between my teeth. Someone came over me, a stranger, I saw the swish of their coat and a long yellow baton at their belt and their advancing light brown boots and I shot them. They didn’t make a sound. They spun and fell. I scrambled back, got my legs under me, hopped a counter, into another room. It was identical, different reddish curtains. A long billiards table and fewer people. It was so loud but it wasn’t as hot. The bodies in the other room had been sweltering. A fucking sting. Where was my band?

I thought of Burn Street and the thought engulfed me. I saw the pattern seething in the air.

I was behind a bar somehow, there were bottles behind me in rainbow-colored glass, infinite bottles stacked past the far moon on a shelf that accordioned upwards forever, and my knees were underneath my chin. I crouched with my hands inside of Candor’s jacket. I was holding Candor’s belly in my hands. Sweet Candor. Don’t you soften her now. Ah, but she was soft, she was a perpetual drunk and self-pitying and forever tense and loved us, she was kind, she was such a kind girl. Quiet and thoughtful girl. I touched her harshly. I was holding her belly together, the skin was open underneath. We were sopping wet with sweat and the red of her body. I pressed down hard but I didn’t weigh anything at all. I was hollow and made out of air. With such devotion I pushed down on Candor, pushed harder, so hard I was afraid I’d hurt her, but I couldn’t hurt her. I brought my body low over her body. She looked at the ceiling. Her eyes were a clear cold blue. She had all these spots on her face that she picked at, right now they looked like embroidery stitches. Little red dashes where her fingernails had been.

“Whip Spider,” someone said.

I whirled around and fired a shot at whoever had spoken because anyone who loved me would’ve called me Marney, then had a glacial terror that I’d killed the working girl who’d sat on the arm of my chair earlier, which became nothing, because it was Casey Courtesy the enforcer standing above me, and my gun had not fired. There was nothing inside it. I threw it at her, she grunted and batted it aside. I pawed behind me for my knife. My hand was slippery with Candor’s blood. Candor was bleeding. What the fuck could she possibly want? My fit swirled, electricity pulsed through the inside seams of my skin, and Courtesy kicked me in the jaw.

Pain clapped up the side of my head. Drool spilled, I raised my hands without my knife somehow, I threw my hands over my face. I was on my back. She’d kicked me onto my back. She took my ankles and dragged me away from Candor, pulled me around a corner into a stock closet, there were infinite bottles in deep blue and pine green and bluish misty white on shelves. The elixirs inside them swished when she kicked me again, this time in my ribs. The glasses clinked. She held my chest down, stomped on my free wrist, and I kicked my feet and tried to twist but she strained and something in my wrist popped. I screamed. It rattled through my jaw.

“Your band,” Courtesy sneered, “will never kill another enforcer again. You will never disrespect us again. Your stain on the force and the industry is over.” She shifted her weight, I felt like my fingers might burst. “I’m scraping you off this floor and dragging you behind my lurcher to IC, and you’ll be strung by the ankles, and everyone will look upon your little girl corpse and rejoice the end of superstition. Whatever is wrong with you won’t be wrong with you anymore. I’ll fix it. You killed my partner, you bitch.”

Could’ve been any of a good few. A glimpse of the uniform stripped me of my mercy. I didn’t think about it much. A spasmic laugh fluttered in my gut but couldn’t come out. I turned my cheek and spat blood. “Good riddance.”

“You’re a blight,” she said. “You’re a smear.” She unbuttoned her long coat with her dart-stabbed hand, showed her untattooed throat to me, her clean tailored shirt, the baton at her hip. She took it. She cranked it back, and slammed down on my chest. I heard the rib break. It was a funny sound. I thrashed again and a screaming, hysterical pain overtook me, a roiling pain in the back of my throat, in my palms, in the arches of my feet.

I opened my mouth to say something. To curse her. To scream so that someone might hear me.

She pressed the baton against my mouth. Into my mouth. Nudged it against my bottom teeth. My jaw pulsed, something was wrong with it. She pushed the baton deeper, over my tongue, jammed it against my hard palate. It had a greasy, laminated taste. My gut turned to jelly. She forced it deeper, skimmed my gag reflex, I convulsed but she kept her hand steady. She pressed the back of my throat. I couldn’t get in air. She twisted her wrist, something vile scraped off the baton and onto my teeth. I thought she’d break through the membrane of my throat to bludgeon my spine. There were tears in the twists of my ear. I looked up at her, I saw the expression on her face, the venomous gloat, and I tore my eyes away. Such a fuzzy ugly molded feeling. I wouldn’t fucking look up at her. I knew how this worked.

She straightened up abruptly, yanked the baton and one of my teeth from my mouth, and about-faced. My stomach flipped but nothing came. She took a step away from me. Gunshot. I rolled, pressed myself into bottles and bottles and bottles, and she collapsed beside me, moaning, very much alive. I saw her face in ballooned distortion across a bottle’s neck. Thousands of her warped face moaning.

I coughed, spat blood, there was so much blood in my mouth, and rolled on top of her. I didn’t reach for my knife, it appeared in my hand. Off hand, my good one felt stiff and wrong. I cut her. One long sawing cut from her hip bone up toward her clavicle. Then I stood up, panting. The woman was alive. I turned my back on her and collapsed against Harlow, who half carried me away from the room. I didn’t feel my feet move across the floor. I could see Sisphe over Candor in the stance that I’d taken and I looked at Harlow’s earrings, she wore so many golden hoops, fourteen in this ear. They looked like beams of light through a cloud, immaterial somehow in their brightness. They swayed as she carried me. I tried to apologize for the drool on her shirt. No sound came out at all.

Opium’s a bad habit. I mostly avoided it. The jaw healed fine but it took two months in which time I spoke little and ate scarcely anything at all. My body wasted and became nothing. I stretched and cringed at the hollows in my shirt where my strength should be. I cringed at my hands, at the way the lurcher’s handles felt, then retreated into feeling little. I recoiled from my own lividity. I prayed more. I planned a route with Sisphe. Sisphe talked through stops and I worked out the general shape, what’d be safest, most efficient, least likely to get us followed. We needed to be clean and purposeful. No dalliance. No wandering. Lurchers were a liability because we clearly weren’t their intended riders but they were expensive to replace, which is to say, a pain to steal, and we had our haul to bring back home. A haul. How wretched of me.

We hid the lurcher on a boxcar, and slept in that boxcar, and undisturbed except by rain we rode north, nearly toward Montrose beside the border to the Drustlands. While the pines spun by and the earth broke and rose in jagged snowcaps, I thought about war, and the smoldering ruins of Laith Hall, and I thought about Mors Brandegor the Rancid, and I thought about you. Remembered, or tried to remember, your face. The exact proportions of your face down to the pore and follicle. I remembered your hair, it was hard to forget your hair. I remembered your smile. You smiled like you knew something about me that I didn’t. I remembered us making a game when we were very small where we fashioned marbles out of smelt scraps and dropped them down a slanting surface, it was the belly of some device whose exact function I never learned, and they’d clink between the bolts in the device and smash, or fail to smash, little piles of rubble we’d stacked diligently on the floor. I remembered your determination that if you got bored, you’d die. I always found it wrong to rib you about it. You were dying, at least that’s what Poesy said.

You were, I heard in Brandegor’s voice, blodfagra. It made you pale and bruise in mad blue splashes. Your legs were always a mess. Like peacock feathers, you bragged to anyone who’d listen. When had you ever seen a peacock feather? I’d kissed you. You were my best friend, it wasn’t meant to mean nothing. I know now what I am. It’s straightforwardly clear that I’d loved you in that warm and easy way kids love, but it’d been love for real. I adored you.

I remember us in one of our hiding spots, a sweltering damp dark monster mouth of a nook behind a machine that’d burn us if we touched it, and I’d take down my braids and let you play with my hair. You plaited differently than my mother did. She always noticed and the tongue lashings she could give! But you touched my hair with such attention. It was wonderful to have your attention. I would’ve broken any rule you’d asked me to break. How long had it been since I thought of my mother?

Once we’d gone sufficiently north we went coastward, on lurchers, but without raiding. We moved light. We slept in Hereafterist safe houses, brothels and salons and the odd radical Shrine, and boardinghouses above crawly bars. Crawly bars were easy to spot for those who sought them. They put flowers in the signs. Odd flowers, not the sort that anyone might use to decorate a border. Big hollyhocks and foxgloves, blue chicory and fleabane, thorn apple, creeping thistles, dandelions.

I sat at the bar sipping brown liquor with great care while an older girlcrawly, of the generation who said girlcrawly and boycrawly, of which I’d be a boycrawly, cut my hair. Gorgeous woman with snow-white braids swept back, her makeup done like illustrations that we hung on the walls of our rooms in the Mansion now. Big sweeps of green or blue eyeshadow, thin brows and drawn-on bottom eyelashes, high blush, black or purple painted little lips. She razored the fluff at the nape of my neck. With a kindness I didn’t deserve, she gently bent down the gauze looped around my head that held my jaw shut, so as to clip the sweaty curls there accordingly. She cut it shorter than I usually wore it. Each ringlet was only one twist around. She ruffled it and offered me snuff from a porcelain clutch.

Across from me in a curved leather booth, Sisphe and Harlow grieved in each other’s arms. Harlow, righteous and braggadocious, the most religious of our band, told Sisphe about dying for Hereafter and what martyrdom can bring. When a body is destroyed something else replaces it, an afterimage of that vitality that becomes part of the total, absolute, essential and incalculable Oneness; the collective projected specter of a hundred thousand human beings crying up to the sky for more. Unalone toward dawn we go, etc. But of course, to be a martyr you needed a purpose. Why did Candor die?

Sisphe looked younger when she wept. She looked like Tricksy again. The girl who built a slingshot out of her stocking to wage war on a boy who’d taken the fruit she wanted at breakfast and in the barrage broke a trophy stag somehow, just smashed its taxidermized head and flattened its broad boneless nose. The girl who was uninvited from needlepoint circles as soon as she joined because she’d sew FUCK ME! FUCK ME MORE! FUCK ME MOST! in baby blue loops across the hems of her skirts. The girl I thought I’d marry for years. I thought about her head in my lap. Her mapping out the bank we were soon to rob with her nail across my kneecap. She sat on Harlow’s lap at the bar, her hair unbound, a dark curtain over Harlow’s white shirt, and Harlow rocked her, looped a lock of hair around her trigger finger, told her about the future that did not yet exist.

Candor being dead would be ruinous for our plans. We needed sweet Candor to be baby Loveday. We needed our heir to pretend like tyranny still existed in the Fingerbluffs. Need wouldn’t make her come back.

I drank slowly. Itchy little twists of my hair floated around like feathers. I kept to myself and thought about Edna. What would Edna think of Harlow? I thought about what you’d look like now. You were slightly older than me, though it hadn’t shown. I had been tall for my age, you were built like a baby bird. Splinters for bones. I wasn’t tall anymore, my height was nondescript, and maybe you’d have grown tremendously once adolescence hit you. I smiled at a woman who approached me. I nodded at her and answered her questions with all due politeness. No ma’am, I wasn’t here alone. Yes ma’am, I’d buy her a drink. Yes ma’am. I closed my eyes and counted backwards in my head.

We passed through Beauty’s. Strange feeling. That treasure box still held all my hope and love. Its perfume and perpetual saltsour sweat smell came over me and my resolve was gone. I saw Beauty, I hadn’t last time. She had silver in her hair. She embraced me and I felt small again, I collapsed against her and wept. She didn’t call me little fawn. I wanted her to call me little fawn, but the thought of such a ridiculous kiddish vulnerability frightened me, it was a hot coal dropped in my stomach, it blistered and burned its way out through my pelvis. Where was Prumathe? Out. Pouring sugar in the wet concrete foundations of a prison being built in Geistmouth. Putting the word union in the mouths of rural mill workers, who had the will and the might, but not always the script, to bargain collectively toward their mutual betterment. She was gone. Where was Brandegor? Where were Valor and Uthste? Far off. I knew that. I wept until I was heaving.

I rented a room, I didn’t share the one split by Sisphe and Harlow, I paid for the companionship of a worker called Sincerity. I didn’t let her touch me and she didn’t talk back about it. When she stopped shaking, I pulled my hand out of her, I cleaned her up, and I lay beside her, one arm loose around her, the two of us breathing and looking at the mirrored ceiling. I licked my fingers, I looked at Marney Honeycutt, my crop of curls, not funny with gauze anymore, my hollow crooked babydoll face, bruisy eyelids and upturned nose, my mouth ichorite fit forever swollen red and beestung, jaw finally unfractured, gone tooth replaced with a hunk of silver, the pink indentations where my harness had rubbed against my skin and the map of tattoos from my jaw to my ankles, my needled-on tapestry, and the places where the tattoos were broken by cuts that’d healed wrong. I had stopped bothering to count the marks. They didn’t matter individually. They were little patches in a quilt that would tell whoever’d find my body exactly what I was. A bad crawly. A Torn-given Choir wraith. An overgrown baby rabbit. The wrong one to have survived the strikebreaking massacre, no doubt. I looked at Sincerity, who was looking at me, and tried to smile for her. Marney in the mirror didn’t move. Sincerity pulled herself upright. She slipped off the bed, I watched her walk across the ceiling and pull a shawl across her shoulders. Its fringe kissed the backs of her speckled thighs.

“Is Sunny here?”

She pulled her hair out from beneath the shawl, shook it out. It fell in dark waves to her navel. She had a scar there, pink and raised, maybe as long as my thumb. I wanted my hands back inside her. Her voice was low, had that smoker’s honeyed sound. “Who?”

“Teriasa zel Cerca, pardon. Prumathe’s little sister,” I said. “She’s a friend of mine.”

“Teriasa zel Cerca,” Sincerity said, “isn’t here.”

Promising. They could be established up north by now. They could have a little screaming suckling baby. For assurance’s sake, “Does she still work here?”

“No. D’you want a smoke?”

I watched her roll her pipe at the ends of her fingers. Graceful. I bet she’d be a fantastic pickpocket. I accepted a puff. I wanted to pull off my skin. I wanted to strip it in streamers and hang my skin up on a clothesline and let the breeze get at my insides. The muscle pulp needed some light. Something in this room was ichorite but I didn’t know what it was. I itched down to the bone. I was wet, I felt it against my thigh, but I couldn’t bear to touch myself, let alone let her touch me. I scarcely even let Sisphe touch me. My own pleasure horrified me. I couldn’t afford to feel soft.

Sincerity took a long drag. She wasn’t putting on a show, she’d dropped the posture. I felt a rush of fondness about her precision and its release. I watched her shoulder blades move inside her back, the shawl slipped, her hair parted, I could see the links of her back down to her waist. The flare of her hips, the dimples at either side of her tailbone, her smattering of tattoos, only enough to mark Choir affiliation, no further ornaments. She hung her head and the top vertebra showed. I wanted to lick it. I chewed a strip of skin off my thumb. I wanted my resin, the solid perfume we filled hollowed-out pocket watches and lockets with that made our bodies slip away when we huffed it. My resin watch was in my trousers, far from me, over in a pile with my harness and my cock.

“What would you like to do, Daddy?”

I skimmed my tongue over my teeth. Rubbed at the silver one. “I want to kill Yann Industry Chauncey.”

“I want to be the queen of Cisra,” she said. “I meant, do you want my tongue on that little slit of yours?”

“I mean it. I’m gonna kill him.”

“Sure,” she said. “How do you figure?”

“I’m going to case his house for weeks. I’ll stalk his guards and staff. Anticipate their shifts. I’ll kill the guards quick and quiet, then I’ll go inside. I’ll go to the room where he sleeps, and I’ll drag him from his bed. I’ll beat him awake then let him go, I’ll pursue him to the stairs, I imagine he’s got a sweeping staircase, and I’ll cut his throat with this knife and push him over the banister. Watch the blood go up like ribbons. Watch him crack on the floor.” I gestured to the knife. I still wore it. I rolled to show her. “It’s why I’m alive. I’m going to kill him. I’m not being crass. I’m going to murder Industry.”

“That’s elaborate,” she said. “Why not just slit his throat?”

“It can’t be quick, like livestock.” I gnawed my bottom lip. “I want it to matter.”

“What he’d do to you?”

“Killed my parents.”

“Personally?”

“No. He hired enforcers. A sniper team.”

“Why not kill the enforcers then?”

“I do often.” I reached toward her, she gave me her pipe, I felt gracious that I didn’t need to ask for it, but thanking her felt clumsy. I closed my eyes, I took a drag. I pushed the smoke to the bottom of my lungs, inflated my belly. Itchy, noxious. I liked the prickling. I sighed, the smoke left me, and I passed the pipe back to her. “They acted on his command. I’ll kill him extravagantly for it.”

“They’ll arrest you. That is, if they don’t shoot you on the spot. He owns the force. They’re his property defenders. Not like the barons have sway anymore, at least not in IC. There won’t be a trial. You won’t have the chance to run. They’ll kill you. They’ll make a show of you.” Sincerity sat on the bed and dropped the shawl. I watched her cross and uncross her legs. “You’re stupid, Marney Honeycutt.”

“So long as I get my turn.” I got up. Slithered into my trousers but didn’t bother with my shirt, pulled my suspenders over my shoulders, held onto the straps. I felt skittery. “Thank you, Sincerity.”

“Mhm,” she said.

I wandered out of her room. We were at the bottom of the dark pink stairway, and I climbed and despite myself I listened for Sunny’s—Teriasa’s—voice. She used a special voice for Velma, the doll. I remembered the melodrama of the rabbit and the doll. So much heartbreak. Heartbreak at the time had been so light and gushy. I’d seen so much. I wanted froth and peril without injury. Funny to think of myself as having been young enough that I hadn’t understood heartbreak as injury yet. I hadn’t felt it, I hadn’t known it, I hadn’t seen it put welts on paradise. Not that welts were always wrong. Often I liked mine. Still it wasn’t quite slaughter. I stood outside Teriasa’s door. I cleared my throat. My voice still felt small after disuse. I knocked. I said, “Sunny?”

Nothing. There was no light under the door.

I went outside. I stepped into the night air, it was freezing, snow fell in bolts. A porcelain layer broke underfoot. I wore no boots, hadn’t thought to put them back on, and the cold slipped between my tarsals and up my ankles and hurt. There were still ribbons on the bulls, none sleeping but silent, only swishing their tails. Different bulls, different ribbons, and little seashell bells, but I found the continuity a comfort. I went to our lurcher, Candor’s lurcher, thrust my hands under the tarp that held the ichorite mesh bundle. I pulled the mesh apart. It stung against the grooves of my hands. The snow reflected the burning magenta that floated through the air, and clearly, more clearly than the hallucinations usually came, was the image of the ground opening above me. Darkness cracked, and I was lifted, and it was agony. The drills made such a dull percussion. It was too arrhythmic to find beautiful. I was so tired. I was still raw. I pawed over the bags, we hadn’t touched them in months, only I could break the mesh and neither Sisphe nor Harlow had asked it of me. These spoils were drenched with Candor’s blood. Or her breath, the stuff her ghost is made of. I hope she rested. I hope she didn’t walk. Fuck. Poor baby. I opened a bag, thumbed through clothes, shut it. I opened another, then a third. Third bag had slim cedar boxes, the painted kinds that hold a single cigar, wrapped in a bundle with ribbon like dynamite. I pulled a box from the bundle and opened it. Evil green beads glinted inside it. A malachite string. The lurid stripes of dark green rippled through the light green and spun off into wood-grain loops. Shiny and faintly reflective, though I wasn’t sure of what light. I closed the box, swept a hand back over the mesh, and put my tongue between my teeth to stop the chattering.

I went back upstairs. I knocked on Teriasa’s door again. Sunny still wasn’t there. I didn’t write well, besides which, I had no idea where I’d find a scrap of paper lying around. I knelt and slipped the box under the crack in the door. It fit just barely. I thought about looking for Beauty, asking her to pass along that I’d been here, that I’d been eager to see her, but I couldn’t bear the thought of waking her. If she wasn’t working, she was sleeping, and I had a hunch Beauty seldom slept. My toes were blue. Sincerity was so smart. I was stupid. I was tired. I went and found the room where Sisphe and Harlow slept tangled, Harlow snoring gently, her face in Sisphe’s chest, lips by the mole under Sisphe’s left breast, her arm around Sisphe’s waist, Sisphe’s hands in Harlow’s for once fucked-up hair, a scene of perfect repose. The room looked like an intaglio bedroom pressed from a beetle shell. Everything was the same silky iridescent, iridescent in some way that I could touch. It wasn’t ichorite. A better, baser kind of lustrous. The fabric over everything had a stunning red-green shift. I laid on the floor by the foot of their bed. It was hot in here, it smelled like sex and smoke and sweat plus Sisphe’s too-sweet perfume. I shut my eyes. I said my prayers. I waited for you. I thought about killing Industry for you. I thought about you standing beside me in the snow outside, snowflakes in your lank red hair. I thought about you standing at the bottom of a staircase. I thought about what Industry’d look like, throat cut, face abstracted and made fleshy from the stained glass portraiture that haunted my working childhood now struck vivid with pain, his arms windmilling backwards when I shoved him, then falling so slowly. Like how a feather falls. Him collapsing into a pile of laundry at your feet and you cupping your hands around your mouth and yelling up to me, what’s taken you so long? You’ve been out adventuring. What about your dear old friend? You love me, Marney, don’t you?