Cities and Thrones

by Carrie Patel

  “Come on,” Parsons said. “Let’s just run for it.”

  “Easy,” Malone said. “We’re not rushing anything.” Yet caught between two long rows of offices in the wide and straight hall, it was tempting.

  Farrah disappeared into the entry lobby several dozen yards away. As they continued, their brisk footsteps seemed to echo all the way down the passage ahead of them, an unwelcome but inevitable herald.

  They were just passing Farrah’s and Malone’s conjoined offices when the wooden double doors swung open. It was impossible to say who looked more startled – Gupta or the Revisionists.

  Gupta, however, had fixed his guilty, wide-eyed stare on her, seemingly ignoring the four strangers in long coats. “Chief Malone. Have you, uh, seen Miss Sullivan?”

  “She’s not in her office.”

  “Right. I was just looking for her.” Gupta kneaded his hands together and turned his shame-stricken face to the floor.

  “With the door closed?” Malone asked.

  He laughed awkwardly. “A habit, Chief. I didn’t even realize I’d done it.”

  She searched his reddening face, his sweat-slick hands squirming against one another, the unbuttoned overcoat that swayed as he shifted. He looked mortified rather than panicked – enough, thankfully, that he’d only given the Revisionists a passing glance. Still, she would have to ask Farrah to keep a closer eye on him. “I suggest you continue your search elsewhere.”

  Gupta was already edging away from Malone with quick, shuffling steps and furtive glances. “Of course, Chief.” But his gaze shifted, and he did a quick double take at the four strangers.

  “I’ll be sure to tell Miss Sullivan you were looking for her.”

  His eyes snapped back to her. “I greatly appreciate it.” When they wandered again, it was to eye the broad clearing of the hall. He looked like a cornered animal ready to bolt.

  “Don’t let me keep you,” Malone said.

  He laughed nervously. “On my way, Chief.” Turning, he cast a final confused glance at Malone and her four guests.

  As Gupta disappeared down the hall and around a corner, Malone turned back to the Revisionists. All of them heaved deep sighs of relief except for Dalton, who looked wickedly amused. “Glad to see you’ve got things under control, Chief.”

  They reached the rotunda where winding flights of stairs and an elevator rose to the surface. They didn’t see Farrah, but they didn’t see any guards, either. Malone prodded the Revisionists up the stairs. Dalton looked longingly at the elevator, but even he didn’t say anything. When they reached the surface exit at the top, they could hear Farrah’s voice as she spoke to the guards.

  “I was sure I saw someone leave this way,” she said. “You haven’t seen anyone?”

  “It’s been quiet, ma’am. Anyone who’s out to cause trouble is doing it somewhere more interesting,” one of the guards said.

  Malone peeked out of the stairway and saw Farrah holding the attention of two guards. They were clear enough in the abundant lamplight. Farrah had their backs to the stairs where Malone waited, but she could see the undefended exit between their broad shoulders. She gave Malone the slightest of nods.

  Malone had chased her share of criminals through the nooks and alleys between the verandas that jutted to the surface. Now, she had to look for her own escape route through the jumble of aboveground structures.

  The Revisionists were huddled in the stairway, awaiting Malone’s directions. She beckoned them up and pointed them around a corner, one that would get them out of sight as quickly as possible. Farrah didn’t react, but Malone knew she had seen them.

  She sent Parsons and Macmillan first. They were clear of the station’s veranda and halfway across the open street when the two guards began to turn. The cuffed men froze in a patch of moonlight.

  “We should be getting back, miss,” one of the guards said.

  “Not yet!” Farrah said it with such quick authority that both guards paused mid-turn. “Something else I need to discuss with you two.”

  Parsons and Macmillan glanced back at her, and Malone urged them forward with rapid buffeting motions, her jaw rigid with silent fury. She grabbed Cabral’s wrist and guided her onward as the other two resumed their cautious progress.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Malone saw Farrah making wild, attention-grabbing hand gestures as she spoke. “...people coming and going at odd hours? Chief’s been especially concerned about it lately. She wants to make sure the station’s secure, especially in this climate.” Farrah spoke slowly and deliberately, and Malone had almost gotten her last two charges to the safety of the corner as Farrah finished.

  One of the guards coughed and spoke up again, his voice slow and cautious. “Now, I wouldn’t know anything about that. You and the chief are here as long as anybody. If there’s anything to notice, I’m sure you two would have picked up on it.”

  Malone had just made it to shadows and safety when he finished.

  “I guess you’re right. Keep up the good work,” Farrah said. The guards’ heavy footsteps crunched in the grit as they retreated to their posts. Malone waved the Revisionists up the next street, and Farrah met them at the intersection.

  “Took you long enough,” Farrah murmured.

  “We ran into Gupta.”

  Her brow creased. “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. He was too busy explaining what he was doing in your office. Keep an eye on that one.”

  Farrah shook her red mane but said nothing.

  The six of them continued through the surface streets, gradually leaving the radius of Callum Station and, with it, the chances of being seen by anyone who might recognize them.

  “These roads are a mess,” Dalton said, picking his way over drifts of litter and ridges of broken and uneven cobblestones. “Any chance of taking a railcar?”

  “Not with those bracelets,” Farrah said.

  It was several minutes more before they began to hear signs of life. A rumbling din of voices and feet came from somewhere ahead, rising over the tops of verandas like the slow swell of an avalanche.

  Farrah cocked an ear. “Sounds like a big crowd.”

  “They going to cross our path?” Malone asked.

  “I’ll check it out.” Farrah raced ahead with long, agile strides.

  Dalton and Cabral had stopped ahead, and Macmillan and Parsons waited behind them. “We’re still moving,” Malone said, laying a firm hand on Macmillan’s shoulder. The four Revisionists continued toward the noise, Malone following behind.

  The sound rose to a growling, grating cacophony. Shuffling, stomping boots echoed along the streets, and Malone found herself doubling her initial estimate of the size of the crowd. By the time Farrah jogged back, the crowd had grown loud enough that it couldn’t be more than a couple of streets away.

  “Hard to say if it’s a party or a protest, but whatever it is, it’s headed toward the factory districts,” Farrah said. “We’ll have to go right through them.”

  The warm night air prickled Malone’s scalp. “What about going around them?”

  “No use. We’d have to double back to Callum Station. That, or swing wide enough to cross Sato’s neighborhood.”

  Parsons was rubbing at his wrist. Macmillan spoke up, his voice high but even. “There’s a passage back to the underground not far from here.”

  Farrah shook her head. “The tunnels are packed even tighter. We’d never get through.”

  The front line of the horde appeared, flickering between verandas like flames between logs.

  Malone leaned toward Farrah, raising her voice over the crowd’s low thunder. “Hostile?”

  Farrah shrugged. “Mostly drunk.”

  The Revisionists huddled together, following the conversation and the advancing multitude with wide, haunted eyes. Parsons shot Malone a pleading gaze.

  “Lead the way,” she said to Farrah.

  They pressed on, and the throng oozed into their street from various alleys
and cross-streets. Farrah took Cabral’s hand and guided her forward, and they knifed through the crowd, Dalton trailing behind. Parsons and Macmillan tightened their grips on one another and followed, pulling one another through the crowd. Malone urged them on, keeping Farrah and her two charges just in her line of sight.

  Farrah’s bright red hair made an easy visual target, but Malone’s eyes kept darting to Cabral and Dalton. He wasn’t walking any faster than he had to, but Malone couldn’t get close enough to prod him forward without passing Parsons and Macmillan. It wouldn’t take more than a quick surge in the crowd to push the two of them off course or under a procession of trampling feet. Still, she glanced ahead to make sure that Dalton and Cabral were still moving forward.

  Dividing her attention between the two pairs, it took a few angry whispers and a bony shoulder sideswiping hers before she realized that she was attracting unfriendly looks from the crowd. She kept her head down and angled her body forward.

  The crowd thickened and spread. Malone could no longer see the end of it, and its glacial pace made it an even worse mess to get through. The air grew sour with the heavy stench of mingled breath and alcohol.

  People became bolder as more of them clogged the street. A man passing by Malone muttered about corruption and Callum Station. Another gave her a glare that dared her to try something, anything, worthy of a fight.

  Malone’s uniform had once been enough to part crowds, but here she felt the group constrict around her, emboldening and emboldened by their mutual audacity. Malone avoided eye contact and fixed her gaze on Farrah and the other two with her.

  The crowd converged and parted again, and when Malone caught her next glimpse of Cabral, the woman was rigid with shock. A gasping shriek escaped her lips that Malone could hear even above the din of the crowd. Dalton was pushing through a knot of people, and he was now too far and moving too fast to be cuffed to Cabral anymore.

  Farrah looked back at Malone, the whites of her eyes flashing. “Go!” She gripped Cabral’s arm in one hand and was already reaching for Parsons with her other. He seemed only too happy to comply, especially as the people around them stirred and growled in response to the commotion.

  Malone took off, shoving past people and moving upstream against the throng. Some cried out in anger, others in confusion, but Malone was focused on the ripple moving through the crowd ahead of her as Dalton pushed ahead. Between Malone’s cloak and fitted black clothes and the two lines moving through the crowd, some of the spectators got the gist of what was happening. Shouts and jeers surrounded her.

  “Arrest me, good Inspector!”

  “Two days past my rent!”

  Malone ignored them, but as she elbowed her way further into the mass, the taunts grew angry and aggressive. Dalton was making headway, but the onlookers were squeezing in around Malone.

  A voice rose over the turned heads. “Watch where you’re going! That uniform means nothing here.”

  As Malone’s progress slowed, she got a better look at the men and women around her. They were ragged with that look of people who have grated and rubbed against one another all night, exposing the rough burs of temper and raw, long-nursed grievances.

  But there was something else about them that didn’t match her previous experiences with disorderly crowds and riots. Malone felt it in the smooth fabrics that brushed up against her and saw it in the wrinkles and rips marring silk blouses and woolen jackets. She heard it, too, in the crisp diction and unimpeachable grammar of the mob’s insults and catcalls.

  “You can’t lock us in here!”

  “We won’t be left to drown in the dregs, understand?”

  Suddenly, Farrah’s comment about the horde’s march toward the factory districts surfaced in her mind. As did Sato’s announcement of his plans to ration the food stores and lock down the border. He must have gone public while she’d been enmeshed in matters at the station.

  Watching the way the angry throng eyed her – looking down their noses and curling their lips in distaste – Malone thought of the one person that a crowd of aggrieved whitenails would hate even more.

  “Looter! Thief!” she shouted, pointing toward Dalton.

  Uncertainty flickered in the eyes nearest her. But the crowd began to shift, as steadily and inexorably as a turning tide. The heat of the whitenails’ combined attention and anger shifted to Dalton.

  The only people worse than the cops, soldiers, and politicians who’d stripped them of their privilege and locked them in this decaying city were the looters and opportunists who had robbed them of their dignity and wealth in the midst of the chaos.

  Sure enough, Dalton’s tumbling progress slowed and finally stopped as the murmurs, growls, and shouts caught up with him. The mob relinquished its grip on Malone, and she shoved her way to the front.

  Dalton squared off with a broad-shouldered man in a patched and faded tuxedo jacket. Other whitenails formed a ring around the pair.

  “A rather fine shirt under your ratty old coat,” Dalton’s challenger said. “Where’d a louse like you get it?”

  “It’s mine, you idiot,” Dalton said.

  “Don’t take that tone with me, boy.” The man in the tuxedo clenched his long-nailed fingers into a capable-looking fist. “Around here, we enforce certain standards of decency and dignity.”

  Either Dalton hadn’t heard the accusations or he didn’t care. “Clean out your ears. I don’t repeat myself.”

  Malone pushed her way to the front just in time to see the man in the tuxedo coat deck Dalton.

  “Wearing it doesn’t make it yours,” the tuxedo man said. “I asked where you got it.”

  Dalton spat blood upon the cobblestones and looked at the tuxedo man with disgust. “From someone I duly compensated.”

  The man in the tuxedo kicked Dalton in the stomach with expensive but scuffed leather shoes. “You’ve got a lot of nerve for a man on his knees. I know a lot of families who were duly compensated by people like you. Maybe it’s time to pay you back.”

  A sinister murmur of agreement rose from the crowd, and Malone shoved through the final barrier of people.

  She shared a tight circle with a coughing, grimacing Dalton and his seething assailant. Dalton hadn’t caught his breath yet, but Malone didn’t want to give him the chance to bait his attacker further or explain who he really was. Of course, at this point, it was just as likely that none in the mob would believe him.

  Malone stepped between Dalton and the tuxedoed man. “You’ve made your point,” she said. “It’s time for me to make mine.” She hoisted Dalton up by one arm and pulled him to the edge of the circle.

  None of the onlookers budged, and the man in the tuxedo folded his arms over his broad chest. “We’re not finished yet. Maybe you should leave this one with us.”

  Malone knew better than to reach for her gun, but she glanced at the waists and hands of the men and women around her. Few of them were armed with anything more than their bare fists, meaning that they hadn’t come looking for a fight. She saw a few pistol-shaped bulges, but they were all tucked in belts and pockets for now. “I can’t question a bloody pulp.”

  “For all the questioning you Municipals are doing, there are a lot of these types still running around with impunity. I’m not letting this one get away.”

  “Neither am I,” Malone said.

  For once, Dalton had the sense to keep quiet.

  “That’s peculiar,” the man in the tuxedo said, “because you’re headed away from the station.” He nodded once, pointing his chiseled nose toward Malone’s rough trajectory. “The only establishments of note in that direction are the Barracks and Sato’s headquarters.” Sato’s motley army and Cabinet had not endeared him to the aggrieved whitenails, and his failure to punish the looting and violence that had ensued on the eve of his invasion had not improved his standing.

  Malone tightened her grip on Dalton’s arm. Suddenly, she also wondered about Farrah and the three other Revisionists. As far as she could
see and hear, the crowd was a churning, roiling sea of humanity, and she couldn’t distinguish anything else beyond the contracting knot of people around her. She had to hope that the others were making their way through the distracted mass.

  “You’re wasting my time,” Malone said. “You can march on the factory districts if you’ve got nothing better to do, but I’m finding the rest of this guy’s accomplices.”

  The tuxedoed man took a step closer. “I’ve seen the kind of justice you Municipals mete out to them. This one won’t get off so easily.”

  Blood surged in Malone’s head. She’d see to him all right. “No, he won’t. But you’ll leave that to me.”

  “According to whom, Madam Inspector? We have you at a disadvantage, and you know it.” His eyes flickered toward her holstered gun.

  He was right. She had no chance of overcoming their numbers. And, as the snarling, scowling faces closed, she wondered if it wasn’t already too late. Even if she left Dalton to the mob – and the temptation to do just that grew by the second – mobs maintained a narrow, binary delineation of loyalty, and she’d already put herself on Dalton’s side.

  Besides, these people wanted blood. Even Dalton’s might not be enough.

  Dalton found his voice. “This is absurd. I’m–”

  Malone brought her elbow down on the small of his back, dropping him to his knees again and sending a ripple of surprise through the whitenails. They were still glancing and muttering among themselves when she drew her gun and leveled it at Dalton’s head. “I will make him pay,” Malone said, “after I’ve gotten what I need from him. But if anyone gets any closer, I’m executing him right here. Then everyone loses. Except him.”

  The whitenails began to back away, holding out their open palms. They didn’t look any happier with Malone, but they seemed grimly convinced that she might be capable of the kind of violence she was promising.

  Again, the man in the tuxedo spoke for the others. “It’s a shame there weren’t more brave fools like you in the Vineyard when scum like him came for us.” The sudden gleam in his eye jolted realization into Malone.