Kayip walked up to an iron door and knocked seven times, pausing after the third and fifth. The door creaked open to reveal a man’s face—or rather, a face that was vaguely man-like. The eyes were more similar to those of a snake’s, and a tiny curved horn grew from a scab-marked bump on the mutant’s red-tinted forehead. He glanced at Marcel, eyes wide.
“A friend,” Kayip said.
The mutant nodded and squeaked, “I should… I mean, I need to ask… I don’t…”
“It is all right, this is the man I said I would bring.”
The mutant sucked in his panic and nodded, gesturing them inside.
It was a struggle squeezing through the cramped hallways of the building. Machinery took up most of the space, and what few square metres remained were occupied by tiny rag tents. They had to step over several sleeping mutants, whose twisted forms were accentuated by bulging ribs and deep scars. Only one in every three light bulbs could even so much as flicker, and steam that flowed from some hidden heart of the facility damped the remainder of the light. As Marcel twisted through tight corners he took more than a few nicks and bruises from dark pipes that blended with the shadows. The mutant, however, had no trouble slithering through the gaps. Even Kayip, despite his prodigious girth, seemed to manage his way.
They descended several flights of stairs into the depths of the building, stopping at a large storage tank built into the wall. Their silent guard knocked the same code as Kayip. The tank groaned, and a side panel opened, the mutant slipping in. From within Marcel could hear snippets of murmuring and conversation.
“…as we wait, more and more die or are sent away. Is that what you want us to become? A gang of corpses and bloated sacks of nothing?” A woman’s voice.
“And how do you think your fucking hammers and makeshift truncheons will fair against motorguns and Roache’s slickdust commands?” A male voice, hoarse, but strangely familiar.
Marcel made to follow the mutant who, panicked, gestured at him to stop.
“Uh,” their guide said.
“Their project within the monolith is almost done,” the woman continued, “They have engineers working on it every hour of the day. Then they’ll do what they always do when one of their damned construction projects is finished. Pump up half of us till we’re sagging bags of flesh and send us out to our deaths. Are we going to allow that? It’s better to die fighting anyhow than live another day with that man’s voice in our heads and his poison in our veins.”
Marcel snuck his head around to glance in. It was clear this machine was just a façade. Inside was a dark circular room; the roof was a series of pipes and the ground looked as if it had been dug out by hand. He could smell how cramped it was in there. A dozen mutants sat on crates or chairs made of scrap-metal and tape. A mutant woman turned towards the opening.
“Excuse…” their guide tried again.
“What is it?” the speaker snapped.
“It’s uh, the monk, and the man he brought, the other, I mean...”
Marcel could see her pull out a hammer from her rope of a belt. “What are they doing?”
“Sedate your shit, Celina,” came the male voice. “I gave the orders to bring back our eremite friend.”
Kayip lifted himself up, and offered Marcel a hand into that cramped space. As he entered he heard the male mutant gasp, then break into sudden laughter, pointing. “You magnificent purveyor of orthodoxy and decapitation, I honestly didn’t think you’d convince him!”
“Well I did convince you, no?” the monk said.
“Marcel!” the mutant said, smiling. The voice was definitely familiar, but Marcel had conversed with only a couple of the workers here and could not connect that voice to any of them. He squinted in the dark, trying to make out the mutant’s features.
“Who in Inferno is this?” asked the mutant apparently called Celina.
“Marcel Talwar,” the mutant said, “fought with me in the Battle Under Huile.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t…” Marcel began. The mutant walked into the light. His face was all red, a single horn jutting from the side of his head. But his familiar black hair, slightly curled, his smile, a tad higher on the right side, his one unmutated eye, still with the twin glints of the academic and the prankster. It couldn’t be him, and yet it was, as undeniable as impossible.
“Desct?” Marcel asked.
“Marcel, you magnificent shithead,” Heitor Desct said. “A sight for weary fucking eyes that’s for certain.”
“Desct?” Marcel had to ask again. He couldn’t believe it. The man had died, had been cremated and buried and mourned. “I was at your funeral.”
Desct walked over through the crowd, which had started to murmur. He grabbed Marcel’s face with a leathery hand, as if to make sure it was real.
“I hope they imported the finest libations for me, the decadent bastards.”
“Desct… Demiurge, Desct… it’s you, it’s… but I….” Marcel felt himself descending into blubbering idiothood, but he couldn’t help it. That Desct lived was a shock greater than any bullet wound, a burst of sudden joy, tempered by a sense of the world being upside down.
“What happened to you?” Marcel asked, touching, softly, the man’s horn.
“The same damned misfortune that befell us all.” Desct shook his head. “Arrested. Mutated. Forced to work.”
“But the mutants are from the Wastes. They…”
Desct’s shot his eyes to Kayip. “You didn’t explain?”
Kayip shrugged. “I thought it better he see. He is, what you would say, a skeptic.”
“Lazacorp’s line is nonsense,” Desct said. “I’ll give you the long and short of it. Roache’s goons waylaid me while I was trying to interview workers on the sly. They injected me with this slickdust shit, some sort of sangleum-infused poison. And well…”
He pointed to his horn.
“…it led to this. Now take my story and multiply it a thousand times. Other snoopers, Roache’s political foes, old Principate sympathizers, petty convicts, anyone Lazacorp wanted gone. Kidnapped, mutated and enslaved.”
Celina snorted.
“And then there were those enslaved first,” said Desct.
“Captured by raiders and sold,” said Celina. “I was a scrap trader. Brought to this miserable town in the back of a sangleum-truck. Better to be a waste-slave than poisoned like this. Better dead than serve this rot of a town.”
“Either way,” said Desct, “they work us hard, feed us only enough to live, and sometimes not even that. Anyone who speaks up, makes a run for it, or annoys a guard gets a bullet in their head.”
“Demiurge, Desct, I had no idea,” Marcel said.
Desct shrugged. “Few people outside Lazacorp do, and fewer still care. Of those there are none I’d trust to do something at this point.”
“Has no one escaped?”
“A few of us tried,” said a mutant in the back. “But Roache’s drugs…”
“The slickdust shit,” Desct said. “What he uses as a mutating agent. Injected directly into our veins. Dominates our psyche. Whatever taurshit escapes Roache’s mouth, we follow like marionettes. You can feel your own fucking blood pulling your limbs, you become helpless.”
“That’s… impossible,” Marcel said, “I mean, I think it is. I… never heard of any engineering that can affect the mind.”
“My order fought demon-worshipers,” Kayip interjected, “some who claimed to have powers over the minds of others.”
Marcel scratched the back of his head. “The situation is insane enough, Kayip. We don’t need to be dragging in demons or ghosts or whatever. It’s not demon magic, that’s superstition, I’m sure it’s just…” Marcel paused and thought, but realized he hadn’t a clue on how such a drug would work.
“I can claim no elucidation on its workings,” Desct said. “All I know is that it does work, can make you move, can make you work, can make you kill, even. The only
thing the drug can’t seem to do is compel you to tell the truth, thank the Demiurge. For that they resort to humble torture.”
“Are you done, Desct?” said Celina, arms crossed, “Or will we waste all night on this? You are distracting us from the issue at hand. We’ve spent far too long in numbing passivity.”
“As long as those dictaphones are live and Roache’s voice is being pumped through we have no chance of victory,” Desct said with the calm of a statement rehearsed and restated a thousand times. “We need to smash the ætheric generators in the monolith, cut the power and blackout Blackwood Row before we make our move.”
“Your move?” Marcel asked.
“Rise up,” one of the mutants said.
“Burn this shithole to the ground,” Celina concurred.
“A riot, Desct? People could die,” Marcel said.
“Yes,” laughed Celina bitterness infecting every tone, “that is the point.”
“I can tell Lambert about Lazacorp’s abuses,” Marcel said. “He can put a stop to this.”
Celina’s laughter turned to pure cackle. “Tell me, Mr. War Hero, Mr. Brute-who-spilled-blood-for-Lazacorp’s-profits, how do you think the whole of Blackwood Row could exist on slave labor without the support of the entire city?”
“They can’t all... I mean maybe a few.” Marcel turned to Desct.
Desct avoided his gaze and shook his head. “I don’t know, Marcel. I don’t know how I was discovered, who we can trust.”
“No one,” Celina said simply. “And we aren’t just going to wait to die. Revolt!”
This got more than just murmurs, even a cheer or two, followed by a quick shh.
“When we have the proper moment,” Desct said.
“Which is now,” the woman hissed. “You drag your legs so hard they’re leaving marks on the cements. They’ll do a purge when they finish their next project, as they did last year and the years before. And we haven’t a clue when they’ll finish.”
“Anseluary fifth,” cut in Marcel.
They glanced at him.
“Roache announced the completion of the water treatment plant,” Marcel said. “If that’s what you mean. Anseluary fifth is when he announced they’d be complete.”
“Then we have a week,” Desct said, starting to walk in as dignified a manner as was possible in the cramped space. “Let us not waste our opportunity by preemptively engaging in some taurshit confrontation before the conditions are optimal. This will not be the first attempted uprising, but it must be the final one.”
The mutants nodded along. Celina thrust out her hand. “The man just admitted to talking friendly with Roache. You promised us the schematics, the schematics we helped you steal, Desct, and instead your monk has brought in a collaborator. We can’t trust anything he says. He could report this all back to Lazacorp as soon as he leaves.” She stared Marcel down, yellowed eyes striking. “If we let him go, which at this point seems like suicidal madness.”
Desct stamped his foot. “You know me, friends, I’ve been fighting for liberation since before I was enslaved to our shared terror and drudgery. I know who on the outside is credible, who can be turned to our cause, and I am, if anything, fucking conservative on this account. Marcel can be trusted completely, one of the few we can depend upon as an ally. If you wish to lay a finger on him, you must first thrust a dagger through my back.”
“I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that,” one of the mutants, an old, or perhaps just deeply mutated and scarred, man, said. “But you did promise us the schematics.”
“Schematics?” Marcel whispered.
“I had Kayip send them to you for safekeeping,” Desct explained. Marcel glanced at the monk, who simply nodded. “Notes on their recent endeavor with the water treatment plant. It’s something peculiar, most machinery are near entirely mutant-built, sweat and blood pouring over every taur-fucking metre of iron. Only a handful of who those bastards facetiously believe are the most ‘loyal’ of our brother and sisters have been sent to work on this enterprise. Most of the labor is done by actual Lazacorp employees, but what our chosen few have seen, well, it is not a water treatment plant, at least, not only. Why else would it take so long to finish, why else would they keep it hidden in the same walled complex they keep their generators and other essential organs?”
“What is it?” Marcel asked.
Desct shrugged. “That’s why I sent the notes to you. You’d get them to an expert out of town, figure out what’s up, and bring the prying eye needed to root out this rotting abscess. Perhaps I should have been explicit, but I held to subtlety and implication, lest the wrong gaze fall upon them. I didn’t need anyone else implicated, another friend pumped full of slickdust.”
“Show To An Engineer,” Desct’s words, no doubt, written in Kayip’s scribble. Marcel felt the fool he was. Desct had tried to thread the needle, throw him a clue that was not incriminating, yet still gave Marcel a path to the truth. If he had found an engineer, maybe the irregularities there would have led him back to Desct. Instead he had misread the clue completely.
“Cowardice,” Celina spat. “Why should he not have to risk his life, when hundreds of us do?”
“It was a miscalculation,” Desct admitted. “But all is in order now. Marcel has the schematics, he can bring them here. Then we shall find the arteries to Lazacorp’s heart and rip them to fucking shreds!” He raised his arms with flair, and glanced towards Marcel.
“Of course!” Marcel said. “Next time you see me, you’ll have the guide to your salvation.” He shot his eye quickly to Desct, who caught his meaning, the uncertainty he couldn’t afford to speak of here. The man’s smile faded for a moment, but he quickly recovered his confident airs.
“Soon, my brothers and sisters, soon!” Desct said. And we won’t wait a minute longer than we need, we will take our freedom and again taste liberty.” The crowd seemed enchanted by a sudden air of hope. Celina scowled, but nodded. Desct beckoned. “The sun is rising. We have a new ally, and he will be back, I promise. Until then, patience, keep your heads low, and prepare for our future assault. Lazacorp will bleed, I promise you that.”
* * *
Desct led Marcel out of the room, and as soon as they were all free, embraced Marcel. His skin was rough, and he smelled a hint rancid, but Marcel eagerly returned his embrace.
“Desct…” Marcel began, unsure of what to say now that he had the space to talk freely.
A groan and a scuffle, and the mutant who had guided them dropped to the floor, falling halfway onto the two for support, nearly knocking them down with him.
“Sorry! Sorry!” the mutant squeaked.
Marcel gathered his balance, while Desct helped up the prone mutant.
“Gil, it’s aright,” Desct said. “Go check upstairs, see if Edwige has seen any guards meandering about early. Then make sure our assembly disperses before morning, and that Celina doesn’t attempt a riot before I get back.”
The mutant nodded and dashed off.
“I recently worked a case with a Gileon,” Marcel said, realization dawning on him.
“Gileon Fareau.” Desct nodded. “Yeah, I am aware. Well that’s him.”
“He wasn’t murdered?”
Desct shook his head. “Apparently he started to get indignant when he recognized one of the workers as some old buddy out from in the Wastes. So Roache ghosted him away and added him to the workforce. Not very popular, being ex-Lazacorp, but he makes himself useful.”
“Then Gall…” Marcel had been set up, had put an innocent man behind bars. Or maybe sent to a worse fate. No, almost certainly sent to a worse fate. Part of him wanted to go through the list of past cases with Desct, hear if any other names rang a bell, but a larger part of him feared what that might uncover.
A grunt, and Kayip lifted himself down from the storage tank’s opening. “We can’t spend much more time here,” he said.
Desct nodded. “We’re lucky the guards
spend not a pittance of thought on us during the night, but when work starts right before dawn, they will be out in fucking force.”
Desct—it was still strange for Marcel to think of him as alive—led them up a winding path through the growth of dense slums. Cramped walls were constructed out of sheet metal and rough, often soiled, fabrics. Scaffolding poles held up cracked floors of wooden planks. The mutants, who had ignored them before, smiled at Desct’s passing, glancing up from their meager meals or just from the floor. Some pressed their fist to their chest in some manner of salute.
“Forgive our anfractuous dwelling. We keep our quarters labyrinthine shitholes for a reason,” Desct said. “We’ve… well, those who came before me, managed to win a modicum of privacy through the density and filth. As long as we work and make no clear sign of resistance, the guards rarely care to cut through here, and it adds some good hiding spots when the need arises. It isn’t pleasant, but it’s how we survive.”
He led them on a circuitous route that went up and down makeshift ladders, over resting mutants, down narrow, nonsensical pathways through what looked like solid piles of junk.
“Demiurge, Desct,” Marcel asked, “how did it get so bad?”
“Blackwood Row has always been this way. For me, it was the monk who opened my eyes to the perfidy and repugnance of Lazacorp. So I suppose it’s him I need to thank for how I am now.”
Kayip’s face sank.
“A joke!” Desct said, as he led them down a stairwell made of fused tin cans. “In truth it started with my Gazette. Had a man working for me, old fellow, Alfred Nuzhen. He had lived in Huile before the fucking war. Strode in one day, demanded a job, was a damn sharp writer, so I hired him. Was instantly critical of the Resurgence government, from day one. Our discussions descended into shit-shouting matches, more than once, over some of the articles he wanted me to print. Would always end with him saying, ‘I thought the U-double-CR stood for a Free Press.’ Smug sentiment, but you know what? He was correct. So I printed them in the editorial section every few weeks. Got some friction from City Hall, there were still fears of Principate sympathizers, turncoats, apostates, and all that. Who knows, maybe he was one, maybe he’d had some family killed in the battle, a tight-lipped man, but I defended him well enough, even had Lambert sit me down for one of his tea parties, trying to talk me around to the idea of letting him go.
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