Release

by A. M. Sexton

  It was a sobering thought.

  From Priestess Point, the road turned south once again. The third quadrant was mostly residential. This was where the richest residents of the lower city lived—those who weren’t of noble descent, but somehow still had a great deal of money. But the financial crisis in the city had even begun to reach here. Rumor had it that many a servant and gardener had been dismissed in the last year. Still, this was the one quadrant where I felt like the intruder I was. I walked faster, imagining polished people watching me through their windows, telling their butlers to make sure the doors were locked. Did I look like a thief, or like a whore?

  Which was worse?

  On the other side of the boulevard, there was little space. Buildings were sparse. The mountains rose too quickly. A few people ranged goats in the foothills, but nothing else. Soil here was practically non-existent, having been washed away from the rocky ground long ago, down the hill to the southern half of lower Davlova.

  Whether it’s soil or people, shit always flows downhill.

  I tossed my now-empty brown wrapper into some rich flat’s yard, just to be spiteful. Ten minutes later, as I headed into the second quadrant, I felt guilty about it. What had that spoiled fool ever done to me? Likely nothing. And it wasn’t as if he’d pick it up himself. He’d have some servant do it.

  I sighed and kept walking. Now, I was nearing familiar territory, in the southern half of the city. Here, the opulent white stone of the second quadrant gave way to practicality. Buildings were of grey and brown brick, because it was cheaper and easier to maintain. Yards were smaller, but not without their charm. Here, the honest, hard-working citizens of Davlova thrived. Or, they had at one time. Now they struggled to make ends meet, like everybody else. Dressmakers and tutors, cobblers and tailors. Inns that weren’t extravagant, but were clean and comfortable nonetheless.

  To the southeast, the city ended abruptly at a steep, rocky beach, too shallow and jagged for boats, but too unstable for houses. The only good land was to the southwest, a thin strip of the foothills, but people weren’t allowed to build there. It was used instead as grazing land for the cattle that fed Davlova. Not that those of us in the lower city saw much of it. I thought of the food I’d eaten the night before. How much must a meal like that have cost? Looking around me at the spreading squalor, I suddenly felt guilty for allowing myself to enjoy it. Beef and mutton were in high demand, which meant they went up the hill. On a good day, those in the lower city might get liver, or a bit of tongue, but mostly we lived on fish, duck, and eggs. When those couldn’t be found, there were always pigeons and rats. I hadn’t seen a dog or a cat in Davlova in years.

  Only two gates allowed access through the wall. One in the first quadrant, near the docks, called Fish Gate, and here, at the southernmost point in the wall, through Plaza Gate, which opened into the large courtyard I’d been working during the festival.

  Had it only been three days ago?

  Past the plaza, I was officially back in my territory—the fourth quadrant—the slums of Lower Davlova. Bordered by the wall to the north, the city to the west, and the sea on every other side, there was no room for the rest of us. Here, buildings had started out beautiful and ornate, like Anzhéla’s theatre, deep red brick, topped with broad-winged gargoyles, but as the population of Lower Davlova grew, so did the squalor. Ramshackle huts were crammed between the buildings, built of stick and mud and paper. Every year, the ocean ate a bit more of the southern coast, and yet we struggled to maintain a sense of normalcy even as the wall swallowed the sky, and the reek of the piss and fish and horseshit cut off our air.

  These were the trenches.

  I’d lived my entire life in this part of the city. The first ten years had been at a series of inns where my mom worked as a maid, promising me that someday we’d go home to Aurius, until the day a tenant from overseas dragged her into his room. The next day she was dead, and I was out on the streets. It was Anzhéla who’d taken me in, given me a home and taught me a trade. Not an honest trade, but one that put clothes on my back and food in my mouth. One that helped feed all of Anzhéla’s clan.

  I made my way across the plaza. A few vendors were trying to sell their wares, but nobody was buying. A few whores lingered on street corners, but I saw no customers in sight. I felt the eyes of uncounted wretches watching me from the alleys. On one edge of the plaza, a masked man in a yellow robe held court. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I didn’t need to. He was promoting revolution, and he had a rapt audience. Nobody knew exactly who these men were. Some said they were connected to the priests of the Duo from Deliphine. Other said they were servants of the Guild, the group of surgeons across the sea who specialized in neural implants. Those who believed this theory claimed the men wore their yellow hoods to hide the scars that belied their implants. But Anzhéla scoffed at both notions, and I had a feeling she knew more than most.

  A new batch of yellow leaflets littered the ground. There was a lot of speculation as to who printed the fliers, and how. Clearly they were associated with the preachers in their yellow robes, but how were they doing it? Did they use electricity to print their propaganda, or a simple printing press? Either way, it was a crime worthy of death. I would have bet every coin I owned that Anzhéla was involved, but I kept my suspicions to myself.

  I picked one up. The news was brief but dark. Two young girls from the third quadrant raped on festival day by members of the city guard. One was dead. Two children of the fourth quadrant had been run over by some rich bastard’s carriage. The driver didn’t even stop. There was no accurate count of how many had been arrested during the festival, but it was a safe bet there had been more than the usual number. Whether their crimes were real or imagined, only Donato would ever know.

  When, the leaflet asked, would the tattooed bastards on the hill be made to answer for their crimes?

  I didn’t know the answer. I didn’t dare wonder if me fucking Donato would somehow help. I dropped the paper and moved on.

  I entered our quarters through the entrance under the gate and was admitted through the trapdoor into the theatre by one of my clanmates. Anzhéla wasn’t in her office, but Frey was.

  “Sit tight,” he said, closing the door behind me. “She’s been waiting for you. Thought you’d be here hours ago.”

  “It was a late night.”

  I opted not to add the part about drinking a stupid amount of wine, but the look Frey gave made me wonder if he knew anyway.

  He sat behind the second desk in the office—his desk—which was actually nothing more than a long wooden table strewn with gears and bits of wire and electronics. Frey was a good twenty-five years older than I was. He remembered the days before the ban. I’d seen him take broken watches apart and reassemble them into a working piece. He’d once made a hand-cranked phonograph work, and had even shown me years before how the projector was supposed to work, although without an electric bulb, the demonstration had been less than thrilling. I’d never seen him use electricity, but I knew he longed for the day when he could use its power to make things function in their proper way again.

  He was equally good at fixing people. I suspected he’d been a doctor before he’d joined Anzhéla’s troop, although I’d never asked. But I’d seen him stitch up more knife wounds than I could count, and he could splint broken bones, too. But he seemed to prefer gears and wires to people, and today he had a new project. It looked like little more than a tangle of wires attached to a few dials, but it must have made sense to him. He poked at it with what to my untrained eye looked suspiciously like an icepick. His normal scowl seemed more poignant than usual.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “At the moment? It’s shit. But if I can get it to work, we’d have a way to communicate with some of our other...” He waved the icepick in circles as he considered his next word. “…associates around the city.”

  “You’d be able to talk through it?”

  “Assuming I can tap into a bi
t of electricity.”

  The thought filled me with dread. What he was talking about was a death sentence. The first ban had been purely economical, designed to curb use of electricity, thereby saving the city money, and preserving what electricity Davlova had for the hill. But several years later, an underground group had been caught using radios to plan a coup. They’d all gone to the gallows, and the mayors had immediately expanded the law to include just about anything that wasn’t powered by hand. Siphoning a bit of electricity for light or heat was a small crime, punished with a fine or a bit of jail time. But this?

  “You could hang for that.”

  “Only if they catch me.”

  “You really think you can make it work?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Never know until I try.” He laughed. “First I have to convince Anzhéla it’s worth the risk. And that’s a hard sell. I’ve been telling her for ages this kind of thing is possible, but she never listens to me.”

  “Honey, I listen to you more than anybody else in the world,” Anzhéla said from behind me. I hadn’t even heard her come in. “I lay awake every night listening to you snore.”

  Frey grunted but didn’t answer, and I tried not to look surprised. It had never occurred to me how intimate their partnership was.

  “I hear you came home in good spirits,” Anzhéla said to me as she took her own seat behind her desk.

  I ducked my head to hide my blush. She was the one who’d sent me to him, who’d told me to fuck Donato, but for some reason, I didn’t want her to guess how much I’d enjoyed my job the night before. “Dinner took a long time.”

  She placed a pair of bright green reading glasses low on her nose. She leaned her elbows on her desk to regard me over their rim. “Tell me everything.”

  “Everything,” I quickly realized, was a relative term. I saw no reason to talk about jacking off in the carriage, or being bent over the dinner table, or the way I’d ridden Donato all the way home, screaming in ecstasy as I did. Those things were none of her business, whether she’d assigned me the job or not. All she really needed to know was who I’d met, so I began to list off names. I’d always had a good memory for that kind of thing. Anzhéla took notes, meticulously writing everything down on a pad of paper, although she didn’t say anything until I got to Benedict. Then she growled.

  “That man and his police! I wish I could tell you to kick him in the stones next time you see him.”

  “I’m just glad Donato turned down his request to bed me.”

  She shook her head. “I hope for your sake this job is over before the shine wears off and Donato decides to share his toys.” She glanced over at Frey. “Did you tell him?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Jabin is gone. Lorenzo, too.”

  “A raid?” Certainly the leaflet would have mentioned that.

  “No raids officially, but nobody’s seen them.”

  “Arrested, then?”

  She took her glasses off, closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “That’s what we figure. It’s Lorenzo’s first offense. He’ll probably show up in a day or two, but Jabin...”

  Jabin had been grabbed twice before. He bore the tattoos of arrest on the back of his neck, which meant this time was his third strike. He’d be facing a trial.

  With Donato.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” Anzhéla put her glasses back on and picked up her stub of pencil. “Don’t you dare mention him to Donato. That man thinks you came from Talia’s, but he can’t know anything else. He can’t suspect you have any real connection to the trenches.”

  How could I face him tonight and not ask? How could I let him fuck me and not try to help my friend?

  “Who else?” she asked pointedly.

  “Who else was arrested?”

  She scowled at me. “Who else was at La Fontaine?”

  “Oh.” It took me a second to collect myself and return to the list of names. “Elias, the harbormaster.”

  Anzhéla’s eyebrows rose in surprise. She put her glasses on again, but kept them low on her nose to regard me over the green rims. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “A harbormaster is middle-class at best. He shouldn’t even have a gate pass, let alone access to La Fontaine. And why would a man like Donato even bother speaking to him?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. But he was definitely there.”

  Anzhéla looked over at Frey. Frey stared back at her. I had no idea what passed between them in that look, but after a moment, Frey bent back over his desk and Anzhéla indicated that I should continue.

  “You’ve done well,” she said to me after I’d finished reciting my list of names.

  “I wish he’d been more willing to talk to me at dinner.”

  “It was only your second night with him.” She tossed her glasses onto her desk and leaned back in her chair. “Keep it up. Let him get comfortable with you. Establish a rapport. There’s nothing like giving a man a mind-blowing orgasm to loosen his lips.” She winked over at Frey. “Am I right?”

  Frey ducked his head lower, but not before I saw the blush on his cheeks. At any other time, seeing him so disconcerted would have amused me, but I was still thinking of my clanmate.

  “What about Jabin? Donato will know—”

  “Jabin was aware of the risks, like everybody else. You can’t help him now. Asking Donato about him will likely cause him even more trouble. With any luck, they assumed Jabin was a lone street punk. If they have reason to suspect he’s part of a clan or runs with a crew, we’ll all be in danger. The last thing we want is for Donato to look too deep into the trenches. Even worse would be for him to learn of your connections there.”

  She was right, but I hated feeling so helpless. And useless. I would be in Donato’s bed, possibly even enjoying myself, while my friend faced a trial? Jail time? Maybe even hard labor?

  “Nobody ever comes back from the camps,” I said quietly. “You know that.”

  “Jabin knew it, too. Misha, stop thinking you can help him. You can’t. And you have no reason to feel guilty.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “If you’d been snagged, and Jabin was still free, would you expect him to do something crazy? To suddenly turn heroic and try to save you?”

  The thought almost made me laugh. Jabin had never done a heroic thing in his life. He would have scoffed at the idea. “No. Once we’re snagged, we’re on our own.”

  “Exactly. You want to help your clan? Do your job. Fuck Donato silly, then bring him to his knees.”

  “Easy for you to say.” She wasn’t the one who’d have to decide between pride and lust, family or pleasure.

  She reached out and took my hand. Her small fingers were dry as paper, but her touch warmed me. “We have a chance to change everything, Misha. To take the hill by storm. To take men like Donato down. That’s our goal. That’s the one thing you can do for your clan.”

  That was all it took for her to solidify my resolve. “I will.”

  “Good luck, kid.”

  ***

  That night, I had a new role to play. I wasn’t allowed to bathe. I was dressed in torn clothing and left barefoot. My hair was ratted into an artful mess. Instead of black kohl lining my eyes, Lilja used dark, shadowy colors in the hollows under my eyes and along my cheekbone to imitate bruises.

  “Just be glad he’s letting us paint them on,” she whispered to me as she did it. “Sometimes it’s causing the bruises that they get off on.”

  For the first time, the butler seemed embarrassed for me. He couldn’t meet my gaze. That was unfortunate, since I’d decided he might be my best source of information.

  “What’s your name?” I asked as he led me toward the stairs.

  He hesitated a moment before answering. “Butler.”

  “Does anybody else work here?”

  “There’s a woman. She and I handle all the duties inside the house. And there’s a driver. He deals with the horses and t
he upkeep of the lawn.”

  We were climbing the stairs now, him in front of me, which meant I was talking to his ass. “And how long have you worked here?”

  “A while.”

  “And the others?”

  “The same.”

  We reached the landing and turned down the hallway toward the bedroom. I chewed my lip. I was already running out of time, and I’d learned nothing.

  “Was there a whore before me?”

  “Stop.” He turned to face me, halting his forward progress so suddenly, I nearly ran into him. “Do you value your position here?”

  “Uhh...” Only if it allowed me some answers. “Of course.”

  “Then don’t ask questions. Nobody in his service will answer them. He has too much leverage. And if he finds out you’re snooping, you’ll be finished.”

  I swallowed hard, wondering exactly what “finished” meant. That I was no longer Donato’s whore? Or that I was no longer breathing?

  “I was only trying to be friendly.”

  “We’re not allowed the luxury of friendship.”

  He opened the door to the room and stood there, avoiding my eyes. He closed it behind me without a word.

  So much for getting help from the help.

  I sighed, feeling defeated, and lay down on the bed. I stared up at the mirrors above the bed. The stark bruises under my eyes made me look desperate. I looked like a street wretch—more so than when I actually was a street wretch. I was reminded of those few months after my mother’s death, before Anzhéla found me, when I’d slept in alleys and eaten rubbish. When I’d hidden from the bullies and older, slinking men with their predatory eyes.

  Now I was practically handing myself over to one of them.

  I took an ildenaaf and closed my eyes while I waited to be used.

  I stood when I heard him come in. I knew by now that he’d want first to inspect me. I kept my eyes on some spot on the wall, near the ceiling.