Once they’d got all the girls out and into the cage, ready to be whisked off to wherever, Pasha took pity on me and led me back to his room. I don’t remember much about the trip; my mind was too busy trying to block out the sight of that hole, the smell that seemed rammed into my nostrils, the pitiful efforts of that girl to escape her rescuers. I do remember Pasha buying a bottle of something on the way, because the first thing he did when we got there was open it and pour us a generous measure each.
I sat on the bed, barely aware of my surroundings at first, staring into the green depths of the booze as though it held some sort of answer.
“Takes you pretty bad the first time, doesn’t it?” Pasha asked. “But it gets worse than that.”
I looked up from the drink. Pasha was watching me carefully, with pity in the set of his mouth and a dull fury in the shine of his eyes.
“It gets worse?” I couldn’t, didn’t want to, imagine anything worse.
Pasha stood up and went to the desk. I noticed again the pictures pinned to the wall over it, now closely lit by a lamp. Pasha unpinned one and gave it to me. A forearm, with a mark branded into the wrist. I scanned the others: the same, except some of the marks were different. The one I held showed a swirling pattern, a stylised letter A. Others were spiky, hard shapes, or representations of other letters.
“Part of my employment with Jake. I try to track the girls, make sense of the different brands and what they mean. I record them, each new one I find. Whether the kid is alive or not. I have to, to try to make sense of who does what. Try to make sense of their pattern so we can break it.”
A sick roiling in my stomach was alleviated by a slug of the drink.
“What worries me about your niece is she isn’t in that pattern,” Pasha went on. “Not at all. Why her? Why not take someone who wouldn’t be missed? Why send the Jorrin brothers up that far when they could have found any number of girls closer, easier, less likely to bring trouble? Why her?”
A question I’d asked myself more than once, though not too closely because I was uncomfortable with the answers I’d got. “Maybe… maybe to get at Perak? He invented that damned gun.”
“Or maybe to get you. Odd, that you’re a pain-mage and you’re the one to come down here after her, right to where pain-mages are needed, wanted.”
That was the answer I didn’t like. “No one knows I’m a mage, except Dendal.” And I didn’t see him having anyone shot just to make me use my magic properly. Lastri might, if the person being shot was me.
Pasha raised a suspicious eyebrow. “No one? Your brother, family?”
“He’s the only family I’ve got, and no, he doesn’t know. He just knows I find people, not how I do it. It doesn’t pay to advertise, and we hadn’t spoken in years anyway. Look, I don’t care why, I just want her back. Now, how are we going to do that?”
Pasha frowned, like his question still bothered him, but he left it for now. “I can’t track them like you do. That’s not how my magic works.” His mouth stretched into a predatory smile. “It’s very good for other things though. Yet I can’t ever have the power they do, because I won’t use anyone else’s pain, you see? They can, and will, and it makes them very powerful. That power is what you’re up against, trying to find your niece. You might find her, if you’re good, but can you get her out? Tonight we were lucky, like I said. The girls were ones they’d used up, finished with, and none of the mages was there. Relatively easy to take, once we know where it is. But the main factories, that’s another matter entirely. You ever fought against a pain-mage with almost unlimited power?”
Not only had I not, I really didn’t want to. It would be tricky at best. The more you hurt them, the more power they get, unless you can tip them over into death quick smart. To do that generally means you end up physically weak yourself, because of the power you need to do it. Dendal was fond of telling tales of that sort of thing, before pain magic was banned Upside, when two mages would fight and almost the only thing that determined the outcome wasn’t who was better, but who could hang on to life longer. I’m fairly sure Dendal only told me these stories because he knew what a coward I was for physical pain. Well, he calls it cowardice; I prefer the terms “sensible”, “practical”, “intelligent” or “not-stupidly-masochistic”.
“It doesn’t sound like the best plan,” was what I actually said.
“Not the best plan, indeed. Which is why we haven’t managed to rescue any from the factories. Occasionally the mages get a bit lax when the girls are resting, or the mages are gathering a group to take in, or like tonight when they’ve finished with them, but they’ve tightened up a lot lately. A lot. But first, you need to try to track her. If she’s in a holding-house on her way to the factories, we’ll have a chance, and we can rescue whoever else is there too.”
And hope that wasn’t exactly what someone wanted me to do. But who? I shook that thought away. It wasn’t helping. I sat on the bed again, or slumped more like. The pictures swam in front of me, skin and brand blurring together. For a heartbeat they seemed to merge to form a sketch of Amarie’s face, then melted, moulding to the faces of the girls tonight. Today. Whatever. I had no idea what time or even day it was; I only knew that it seemed like weeks since Pasha had woken me.
Pasha took the picture out of my hand. “It’s been just over a day.” He smiled at my startled look, a sad twitch of his lips. “Part of my magic. You can sleep here. You’ll need your strength to find her. Drink the rest, it’ll help. It’s the only thing I’ve found that does.”
His voice sounded muffled and far away but it seemed to make sense, so I drained the glass and didn’t object when he took my coat off and draped it over a chair, pushed me so I lay down on the bed. I don’t even remember my head hitting the pillow.
It seemed like I’d only closed my eyes for a second when someone shook my shoulder.
“Wasft?”
“Rojan, you’ve got to wake up.”
“Snff,” was all I could manage to that. My head was stuffed with something sticky that made my thoughts run like cold treacle.
“Rojan, will you wake up?”
A hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up. I squeezed my eyes even further shut, then opened them. Everything looked fuzzy. I blinked rapidly, and Pasha’s urgent face swam into view.
“At last! Come on, you have to get out of here. There’s Ministry men all over, looking for you.”
“Ministry?”
“Yeah, trying to look like Downsiders. Not doing such a bad job either, but I can smell one a mile away. It’s in their head, see? Anyway, not many people down here have guns, excepting me and one or two others – they’re too expensive unless you steal one like I did. Besides, who else but Ministry would have a picture of you and be showing it around every last bar and shop?”
With one last hard blink and a scrub of my eyes with the heels of my hands, I was awake. Kind of. “How long did I sleep?”
Pasha looked apologetic. “A couple of hours. But it won’t be long before someone says they saw you with me, and then this place will be crawling with Ministry. I don’t want to be here when that happens.”
“Neither do I.” I rubbed a hand up my face and took the glass of water that Pasha proffered. If I concentrated I could barely taste the synth. At least it took the worst of the after-taste of green booze off my tongue and made me feel semi-alive again. “If not here, then where?”
“I know a place or two. Come on.”
We slipped out into streets dim with night, slick with rain and peopled by shadows. Pasha kept a hand on his gun under his coat, and I did the same in my pocket with my pulse pistol. How in heck did the Ministry know someone had come down here, and especially, how did they know it was me? I had to trust that Dendal was all right, that they hadn’t dragged it out of him one way or another, either one of which would be very painful. I had to trust that, because the alternative was too awful to contemplate.
We moved further out, into a neighbourhood that made Pasha’s place look positively plush. More than one building was propped up with huge steel girders – not for the Downsiders’ benefit, I assumed, because the rest of the place was such an unabashed shithole; no, it would be because someone important lived in a building far, far above, supported by this one. A thought that quickly gave rise to other thoughts, like – if I could find which building supported the Archdeacon’s palace in Top of the World, I could change the face of the city with one well-calculated girder destruction. It was a very tempting thought, moderated only by the matching thought of all the people living between the girder down here and the Top of the World up there. Shame.
I shook the persuasive thoughts out of my head and concentrated on where we were, on the towers, surrounded by shanty-shacks and wreck-built houses, on the shadows and dark chasms between buildings, blank-faced windows and eyes that might be watching. Not many, it seemed. Even the rats appeared to have deserted the place, and we walked warily through quiet streets and silent alleys. Every now and again a blurred face would appear at a window or opening, a brief smudge against the darkness before it withdrew. I kept my head down. No knowing if the Ministry men had been this way, or would be here soon, and no sense showing my face to all and sundry.
At last Pasha stopped, at the entrance to an alley so narrow I might never have noticed it in the dark. A flick of his head indicated I should follow and we squeezed our way through the huge blocks of stone that held up who knew how many floors above us. A door sat at the end, a pathetic wooden thing that was half eaten away and hanging, just barely, by one creaking hinge. It looked like it would fall apart if I breathed too deeply.
“Where—”
Pasha stopped me with a raised hand and rapped on the doorframe, gently of necessity. I barely heard the rap, and I stood right next to him. Even so, a flake of stone above the door that had been hanging on for grim death lost its fight and fluttered to the ground. There was quiet for long moments, only broken by our breathing and the faraway beat of music.
A flash of metal whipped past me and a sword pinned Pasha to the door by his coat. Simultaneously, a boot hit me in the back and sent me face-first into the stone. I managed to get a hand out to avoid breaking my nose, but lost a fair bit of skin on my palm in the process, making me tingle with sudden magic.
“For fuck’s sake, Pasha, what do you think you’re doing? I could have killed you.”
By the time I’d turned, hand on pulse pistol, Pasha was grinning sheepishly, his hands in the air, the gun dangling from a finger by its trigger-guard. Jake was glaring at him.
“Sorry. Only there’s Ministry men after him and—”
“And you thought bringing them right to my door was a good idea?”
“Where else could I take him? Besides, I think I know where the Jorrin brothers are.”
Jake’s mouth twitched with annoyance before she relented. “All right, you’re here now.”
The door opened straight into a room and, though it was much larger than Pasha’s, this place looked like it was about to fall down. There were holes in the wooden floor, the reek of damp and a hint of synth. Green mould made a surreal pattern on one wall and there was a nest of something small and scuttling in one of the holes in the floor. Even fewer things than Pasha had in his room. Just a bed, a chair with a few shreds of linen that might be clothes draped over it, an odd contraption in the corner I couldn’t name, and bare floor.
“I was right in the middle of practice.” Jake moved over to the clothes draped on the chair, rummaged till she found a threadbare towel and began to rub sweat from around her face and neck. Her hair was tied back in a complicated knot, but a few tendrils had come free and were stuck to the back of her bare neck. I tried not to stare there, or at the sweat sticking the undershirt to her. It was quite hard, until she shot me a look that could have curdled milk. “All right, Pasha, what have you got? The Jorrin brothers?”
“Maybe. You know that old place of theirs, up on Ruby Street? Seems there’s been movement the last week or so.”
“Could be anyone. Could be squatters, or they sold it, any number of things.” Jake finished rubbing herself down and walked over with the kind of easy grace that makes my knees go all funny. She wasn’t looking at me though. She and Pasha seemed to be able to talk without talking, if that makes sense. Her eyes softened just so, the corner of his lip lifted a touch and she nodded. Something had been decided, but I hadn’t a clue what.
“Azama is definitely back,” Pasha said finally.
There was no doubt now, there was a heart behind that blank façade. Her hand twitched and she looked down sharply at the floor, but not before I saw a flash of fear. Pasha looked at a loss for words. He put his hand out as though to comfort her, then seemed to remember and snatched it back. And I thought I had a screwed-up love life.
“Mr Dizon.” Jake turned to face me and moved subtly closer to Pasha, just far enough apart that they weren’t touching. Employee–employer relationship, my arse. Disappointing for me, though. I blinked myself back to the subject at hand.
“Please, it’s Rojan. All this ‘mister’ shit gives me a headache.”
“Rojan, then. The best way to find your niece is for you to do your magic, try to track her. Or we can try this lead, which will take time – time your niece may not have – and may end nowhere. Your choice.”
I tried to keep my face blank but a small grimace surfaced anyway. I didn’t want to, Namrat knew I didn’t want to. I’d been brought up to know my magic was wrong, and I did know it. Purposefully giving yourself pain was a stupid, stupid way to do things. Besides, we had a lead, one that didn’t involve me hurting myself. But… But. I wished my conscience would shut up, because it was starting to annoy me.
I took a deep breath, slung my coat over the chair, took out the picture of Amarie with its little singsong voice and got to my knees. It’s always better to be sitting down, because generally I fall down.
“Rojan—” Pasha began but I shook my head. Too much was crystallising in my brain. There was something else, some other reason I was here, I just didn’t know what it was yet. But I didn’t want to think about what Pasha had said, that maybe this wasn’t chance, maybe someone wanted me here. That was secondary.
I let my eyes become unfocused so the cracks in the floor blurred and ran. A deep breath, another, and another, working up my nerve, narrowing it to a point where this – hurting myself – was not only possible, but a sensible thing to do given the alternatives. Lying to myself so I could bring myself to do it, in other words.
I found one big crack shaped like Griswald the tiger, and concentrated on it till I couldn’t see anything else. Somehow I knew that dislocation wasn’t going to be enough, not now, not against other mages who would be hiding her and others. They were bound to take precautions, especially if they knew I was here. Even before I’d done anything except breathe and concentrate on what I was up against, it was there at the back of my mind, what was trying to stop me.
A black wall of magic hovering over the ’Pit, like the sort of raincloud they’d never see down here. Now I could sense it, I knew what that edge was to the place, the one that had been jarring my teeth since I’d got here. The Ministry watched Upside, so you had to be careful where you stepped, but if you knew what you were about, you could step round them. Down here, it was this cloud that kept everyone’s steps in check, whether they knew it or not. Moving round this, round a blackness that hovered over every man, woman and child, was not an option. They were all a part of it, unwitting, unknowing.
Concentration was key. So was the amount of pain I’d need, and it would be a lot to penetrate that cloud. Somebody said something, but all I heard was an insignificant mumble. Nothing mattered but the crack, the rasp of my breath, what I was trying to do. I punched at the floor, at Griswald, with everything I had.
Something snapped in my fist and pain shot through my hand and throbbed up my wrist. I swore out loud, and worse in my head. No fucking wonder people never used pain magic much. With my other hand I raised Amarie’s picture. She seemed to float above it, more real than a child right there.
“Princess, Daddy.” It wasn’t enough. I could feel a tug, a nudge in my mind, the hint of something, something and then it was gone. Buried under a black tide of someone else’s magic. I could feel it, pushing against me, pressing against my forehead and face, squeezing them till I thought my eyes might pop out.
Not enough. I needed to do more. My hand smashed into the floor again and I think I cried out that time. My knuckles were wet. Now I could see her, hear something, the sob of her voice maybe, it was hard to tell. So close, yet that black tide was there, blocking me, pushing me. They had power I could only dream of. I couldn’t tell where she was, I can always tell, I couldn’t tell. Not this time.
My knuckles hit the floor again, and that’s when it came. Along with the hot silver agony came the sudden, brutal realisation that, if I wanted to track her, I’d have to half kill myself to get past whatever was around her. She was due west, that was all I knew, and I should have known exactly where she was long before now. My mangled hand fumbled for the pistol that was in the pocket of a coat I wasn’t wearing. If I used it, properly for once, it might be enough. Or maybe the knife sewn into the coat lining in case of emergencies. Yes, that would do it. I got to my feet and tried to grab at the coat. A hand stopped me, another landing on my other arm.
“Enough, that’s enough.”
I shook them off. It wasn’t enough. I owed Perak, I owed him a lot. For all the times he’d made me laugh when my nature made me want to wallow or spit feathers. For being there when Ma died. For always believing in me. And how had I repaid him? I had to do this, for him, and for a girl I’d never met, whose picture worked its way further into my heart every time I looked at it. A sweet little girl who, if I couldn’t find her, would lose that childhood, for ever. I couldn’t let that happen.
I’d said that aloud.
“Sometimes you have to.” Jake’s voice, full of knowing sympathy. “Sometimes your best isn’t good enough, and you’ll spend days, weeks, months wondering if you could have done better. I know, believe me, I know. But right now, this is enough. If you don’t stop, you won’t use that hand again.”
I shrugged Pasha’s hands off, angry at Jake for understanding. “So?”
Jake turned away, her mouth tight with feeling, and Pasha answered for her. “So with one hand you’re going to be crapall use to anyone. So that’s enough. It was always going to be a long shot, the way they protect the factories.”
“I thought you said it might be useful, tracking them like this?”
“Yes, when a girl’s only just gone missing, or they’ve done with her. I was hoping that’s where your niece was, at a holding-house while they collect more, but if that’s the kind of resistance you’re getting, either she’s at a factory or they know she’s your niece. Neither of those things will help her, so if you can’t track her your way, we’ll have to try ours.”
I stared down at my knuckles, at the blood dripping through my fingers on to the floor. It didn’t look out of place there; I had the feeling this room had seen a fair bit of Jake’s blood, one way or another. “West. She’s west somewhere, that’s all I could make out. And – and it’s dark, and, and there was something there with her.”
Pasha’s fingers gripped my arm. “I know. We’ll find her, I promise. Come on, let’s get that hand wrapped up.”
It was a better class of neighbourhood. Which down here meant the buildings didn’t look like they were about to collapse and there were awnings across the streets so that I was at least saved from worrying whether I was catching a fatal dose of synth with every drop of “rain”. It was an education watching people move out of Jake’s way. She didn’t say or do anything that you might class as threatening, just walked along as though she owned the place, and people melted away. They whispered among themselves after she had passed and one or two called out her name. She nodded in their direction, coolly cordial but no more.
Pasha, on the other hand, was more jittery than ever. He kept fingering the gun in his pocket and his face was taut and twitching as he muttered under his breath. We reached a corner that looked like any other and paused for a moment. “You got a weapon?” Pasha asked.
“Do you think I’ll need one?”
He smiled but it had a nasty edge to it. “Maybe, maybe not. But you might want one.”
I thought of the girls in that hole. He was right, I might want to use one, and that was enough to give me pause. For all my faults, seriously hurting other people is never something I’ve done and I didn’t know if I had it in me. I did know that I didn’t want to find out. Only now, if we found anything like that hole again I wasn’t sure I could keep to it, to not hurting someone as hard as I could. I’d want to take it out on them, give them back every inch of pain. I pulled the pulse pistol from my pocket. “I’ve got this.”
Pasha frowned at it. “What is it? It doesn’t look like mine.”
“It isn’t.” I told him what it did and he smiled grimly.
“That might come in very handy. We want them alive, or we won’t find out a thing. Your hand up to it?”
I shrugged, more offhand than I felt. “I’ve got another one.”
Jake leaned up against the corner of a building and looked round, eyes taking in every detail, checking every window. Finally she seemed satisfied and pushed away from the wall. “They’ll know I’m here. Can’t go anyplace without being recognised. So we might as well shake them up a little. Which one’s theirs?”
Pasha pointed towards a door daubed with red paint that was slowly being etched away by synth. “Fifth floor. There’s a handy little back entrance too, but no other real ways out. I scoped it out last night.”
She smiled, but it wasn’t pleasant. “Good. You get round the back, make sure they don’t rat it out of there. I’ll give you ten minutes before I announce myself. And Pasha?”
Another one of those moments, when words seemed to be spinning in the air around me, only I couldn’t hear them. They were just for Jake and Pasha. She smiled up at him, and Namrat’s balls, I wished she was smiling like that at me.
“It’s not worth it, Pasha, OK? It won’t help, won’t make it any better or make it never have happened. Remember that, and take care.” Without another word, Jake walked softly over to the door and slid into the shadows, waiting.
Pasha watched her go, his mouth twisted with something, then led the way round the back. I followed, not entirely convinced of the course of action but following their lead, hoping they knew these places as well as I knew Upside. At least we were doing something, anything.
We slipped down a tiny alley and Pasha eased open a door that looked like it was held together by splinters. I took a deep breath and followed him in, my stomach in knots at the thought of what we might find. What these two might do once we found the men we were after.
The corridor beyond was black as night and all I could see in the light from the door was a muted flash of metal as Pasha pulled his gun from his pocket. We made our careful way up splintered back stairs to the fifth floor. The stench was indescribable, for all this was the upmarket end of the ’Pit. Unwashed bodies, stale cooking oil and, above it all, the unmistakable, sharp smell of ground-in fear.
Pasha stopped, his ear to a door that appeared out of the gloom. After a moment he opened it and slipped through, leaving it wide for me. A short scream greeted me, soon silenced, and when I got through the door a family cowered on the floor. The father shielded the children behind him, a knife in his hand. The mother moaned in fear. Pasha’s pistol was pointed at the man’s head while he checked their wrists. There were no brands and he lowered the gun without a word of apology.
“Which way through to the next apartment?” Pasha asked in a soft voice. The man’s eyes never left his face as he stuttered an answer.
“That’s Jake’s friend isn’t it, Mummy?” one of the children whispered, and the mother clapped a hand over the girl’s mouth.
Pasha nodded shortly. “I am. I’d suggest a trip out somewhere. Just for a while.”
The father trembled his thanks. “Those men next door, been some funny noises past week or so. Nothing I could put my finger on, but… odd.”
“Other people in there with them, you reckon?”
“I – I don’t know. Whenever the noises start they turn their music up real loud.”
“OK. Now out. Quick.”
All four of them leapt to their feet and made for the door, the woman herding the children in front of her. They didn’t even stop for coats. Pasha waited till they’d gone and made for the doorway the man had indicated. There was a flimsy bolt on this side that didn’t look any stronger than the door. If needs be I could force it without breaking a sweat. Pasha beckoned me over and put his ear to the wood.
I followed his lead, but all I could hear was a faint rumble. I kept my voice low. “What are we listening for?”
Pasha grinned. “You’ll know it when you hear it. Get ready to break through this door when you do. You’re bigger than me.”
All was quiet for a minute or two, but Pasha was right, I knew it when it happened. A crash reverberated through the door as though a platoon of troopers had battered a wall down, and then a scream hit me. Not a scream of shock or surprise, or children afraid or someone in pain. The sort of angry scream that could easily contain the word “fuck”.
I launched my shoulder at the door and it was even flimsier than it had looked. I almost fell through the doorway into bloody murder. Jake stood over two prone men, her face a study of angry frustration. One of the men lay naked over the other on the bare boards of the floor, and both had deep cuts to their throat, almost through to the spine. The whole room was splattered with blood: on the rumpled, fetid beds, over a chair that lay in splinters, on the table that looked like a hasty hand had swiped everything into a ripe mess of food on the floor. The dingy walls, once whitewashed but now a grimy grey, had splashes of crimson all over. There’d been one heck of a struggle, that was plain. Namrat’s balls, had she… I hadn’t thought she would, at most I thought they’d be like the other men, wounded but not dead. As Pasha had told me, taken away to some hellhole to live in pain and remorse for as long as possible.
Yet no blood stained her swords, and she hadn’t had time for the mayhem in the room. The frustration was because the Jorrin brothers were dead, that became clear. Because they could no longer tell us where Azama was, or Amarie. Pasha swore violently behind me and walked over to the corpses. The gun shook in his hands, pointed at the head of the closest body. He swore again, a quiet steady stream of words, with a flat force that made chill bumps run up my back.
Then Jake was in front of him, between him and the bodies, talking softly so I couldn’t hear the words. I recognised the rhythm though, the singsong tone of soothing, the melody of a mother gentling a child or one lover trying to comfort another. She put out a hesitant hand that didn’t quite touch his shoulder. Finally he lowered his arm in jerky increments before he screwed up his face and threw the gun to the floor. He seemed to realise I was there, turned his head away so I couldn’t see his face and leaned against a wall. His whole body trembled and jerked and his fist thumped into the wall in a staccato rhythm of anger. Jake looked after him, her hands fluttering as though she didn’t know what to do with them. Then she took a sharp breath and turned to me, cool and collected on the instant. “Check everywhere, see what you can find.”
What we found was a brace of fearful, hollow-eyed boys, shaking and filthy in a locked closet, branded on the wrist. And a scrap of paper, with a hectic spot of blood on the corner, with Perak’s address and Amarie’s name on it.