But it would be stupid for the PM to bring the order herself, Euri thinks, again and again, as if repetition will somehow generate truth. It would be reckless.
“Where do you want us?” the photographer asks, and Euri waves him in the general direction of gov’t house’s façade. Hours have passed since she lost Cardea in the ratways; now the rain has subsided, the new colonnades and stained glass and freshly-painted frescos are gleaming in the grey light, but Euri’s mind is still caught in the darkness between walls, trying to fathom where the other woman went.
“Consider all angles,” she says while the photographer’s assistants set up tripods, flash reflectors, and softbox diffusers. Taking her own advice, Euri runs through all the scenarios she can imagine.
– Cardea descended into the tunnels and delivered the orders herself (ridiculous; reckless; probably impossible …)
– Cardea walked out right under my nose, but my eyes were closed, so I missed it (don’t be stupid)
– Cardea is still inside, prolonging her moment of power (??)
– Cardea had trouble rousing the Pigeons from their drunken sleep (here’s hoping)
– The Pigeons have already flown.
A thick wax of dread clogs Euri’s throat at this last point. Her mind wanders, following her gaze over the outdoor amphitheatre Nycene had had constructed on the grounds in anticipation of post-grey festivities. All of Armin’s hard work, she thinks, swallowing hard. Of course his plans will go off without a hitch—and for what? To keep Cardea in office, boxhead of the unbelievers, glorying in his achievements?
“Just get on with it,” she snaps as the photographer waves her over. Shaking the snark from her ’wind, she straightens her jacket, dodging puddles as she crosses the yard.
“Are these to be formal or candid shots?” the man says, fussing with a flashbulb until it sparks.
“They are historical documents, Monsieur Antier,” Euri replies. “Of course they should be temporally accurate and impeccably staged.”
“As I thought.” Antier whistles at his youngest assistant and points at the building, jibbering instructions in their northern tongue. “Please forgive Erec’s stubbornness,” he says, scowling at the boy. “He refuses to treat with evacs or vagrants.”
“What do you mean?”
Pointing at the base of a fluted column with his half-smoked cigarette, Antier says, “I must finish with the test shots. Would you mind?”
Euri follows his gaze and sees a rambling-man slumped at the house’s entrance, ruining the artist’s shot. “Fine,” she says, turning to stride across the flags. From more than two metres away, she smells the drifter’s sour body and hears him mumbling, chewing the ragged ends of his beard. Afraid of startling him—he’s got the glazed stare and blood-stained lips of a glass-chewer, she thinks—Euri stops just out of kicking range.
“Excuse me, sir.”
“I’m official,” he says, slurring and coughing. Words crawl along his hairline like nits, peeking out from under his hood before scuttling back out of sight. Euri shudders and takes a step back. “I have this bit of business to clear up.” The man gurgles and hiccups, waving a small parcel around. “Won’t be long. Won’t be long.”
He hiccups again and holds the package out in red-crusted hands. Euri’s heart leaps. The box is the right size… . The newsprint torn but recognisable… . The twine knotted by Cardea’s manicured fingers …
“Here,” she says, taking in the rambler’s outfit. The satchels, the silvered hood, the sturdy boots. A Pigeon. One of Cardea’s three! If he’s still here, if he hasn’t yet managed to leave the grounds, then the other two can’t be far off either. A smile breaks out across Euri’s face and she wants to run inside, singing It’s not too late! louder than rockets. Reaching into her jacket, she grabs a tipping-purse and scrunches the lot into the Pigeon’s trembling hand. Excited, she pats his balled fist. “Keep it,” she says. “For your trouble.”
“All’s well,” she calls to Antier, waving at him to take a break. “I’ll be right back.”
The Pigeon mutters something about failing as she skips up the steps. She breaks stride long enough to reassure him—“You did just fine, Pigeon,” she says, hushing his complaints with other sweet nothings, “Take as long as you need”—before dashing into the lobby on silent feet. Smiling, she asks Darrio, that stupid, Pigeon-loving guard, “Any deliveries?”
“Nothing come in all day, counsellor,” he says from behind the welcome desk, “but there’s been a few birds hanging about.”
“There have, there have,” she says, clapping him on the arm. “It’s not too late!”
Squinting up at the brass clock above the main entrance, the guard says, “Won’t get late for yonks, counsellor. We got least an hour ’til true-dark …”
“Too right,” Euri says, smiling, floating. And leaving the lout to ponder definitions of time, she skips to the Pigeons’ quarters to see how much more of it she can collect.
Once upon a time, Jean used to tell them on rainy days like this, there was a city made of sand. Ancient, it was, and incredibly strong—even though its kings wore eye make-up. Thigh-length skirts. Jewelled necklaces. Even though slaves oiled the men’s skin with perfumes and curled their long hair like a girl’s. Hours a day, the lords would waste, with their ointments and waxes and sweet-smelling unguents. Preparing their pansy-soft bodies in life, she’d say, to be pieces of tough leather after death.
Still, Jean would say. All in all. They obviously knew a thing or two about preservation. When not chained in their boudoirs, the kings’ serfs greased the city’s pyramids and parapets and fortified walls. Smearing lard, maybe, some sort of god-spelled pig fat, to save antique golden sands from the monsoons.
Each year the deluge started off slow, a few fingers of rain tap-tapping on baked tiles and mudstone. But soon fingers swelled into fists and fists into feet that pounded while they ran and ran and ran. Racing down turrets and domes and awnings, the waters thumped and skidded across that magical gunk, leaving the city slimy but whole behind it. Beyond the gate, several miles to the east, the river drank and drank—just like your Nan used to, Ma always laughed. Remember?—it drank until it threw up.
Sloshing away from his apartment complex, brown water eddying up to the knee, Peytr’s now pretty sure Jean made the whole thing up. A flood that licks but doesn’t bite, he thinks with a snort that grows into a full-blown cough. Sandbags line the street on both sides, hessian sacks already soaked to splitting, drooling their guts into the stream. Row houses tilt forward inch by inch as the current nibbles at rotting foundations. Scaffold planks girding nearby spires and ’scrapers bloat like Ma’s cardboard biscuits, thwapping as they fall into the soup below.
Even the greys are running for cover, Peyt thinks. Their boots clomping across rooftops. Their slippery fingerprints condensing on shop windows. Their breath steaming up bogged twice-a-days. Their laughter howling over flues and through doorless tenements and along alleys only skingirls and soldiers dare travel.
Real soldiers, that is.
He should’ve taken an umbrella like Mireille offered, but Young soldiers have more to worry about in the field than getting a bit damp, Mimi, he’d said. Now the words cascade overhead, lies diluted by the rain. soldiers … worry … get… . Now Peyt’s muddled, sogged. fiel … Mi… . Now the downpour’s set into his chest and sinuses. A flood that gives more than it takes? The storm wreaking havoc on his ’wind.
Shaking his head, Peyt lifts his collar, squinting against cold needles of rain. In Jean’s tale, the river spewed for weeks but somehow always transformed into a wonderland for water buffalo and flamingos. Feathery reeds swayed in the shallows, tossed by carp and 8crocodile breezes. Dragonflies skimmed the glistening surface—and, depending on Jean’s mood, sometimes there were dragons. When the deluge finally retreated, she’d say, crops blanketed the fields almost instantly. A bristling gold delta of wheat.
What a fuckin’ crock.
Trash drifts past as Peyt trudges down the road. Shreds of plastic and foil wrappers. Grog bottles. Limbless floaters. No amount of pig-goop will save them, he thinks, smearing snot on his drenched sleeve. Coughing up clots of phlegm. He horks a gob into the slow-moving current, wipes the backsplash off his left satchel. The canvas squelches under his shrivelled fingers—and for a second, Peyt’s back at base camp after lights-out. Showers pattering on the tarp overhead, on the dirt outside, stirring up shit that puts a wheeze in Cap’s lungs, a thin whistle in Jepp Rhysson’s nose. Cloudfever, the guys call it. Bomb-lung. And while Dake’s snoring on the cot beside him, a deep-barrelled thundering, Peyt reaches out and presses his palm against the tent wall. The canvas squelches, billows, vibrates against the wind and Peytr pretends it’s a strong chest rumbling.
Fuckin’ rain, he thinks, splashing back to the present. So hard to think, so hard to function, with a double-squalled head. After a few deliveries, I’m going to find a flophouse somewhere. Wring out. Finally get some sleep.
It’s not really lying, Peyt reminds himself, crossing an intersection against the lights. On the best of days, traffic is sparse in this neighbourhood; today it’s mostly sidewalk-sloshers like him. Three or four velos wheel on the median, failing to keep chain and pedals above water. Cabbies whip their mules along the sidewalks. A raft bobs in the Good As New’s parking lot, knocked together out of barrel drums and a thick sheet of ply. Peyt stops in to see if Nashani’s got any inventory needs to-or-froing, and when the old lady sends him back into the storm with only a knitted blanket for his new baby, Peyt still doesn’t feel like a liar.
It’s a matter of duty, he thinks. Pure and simple. The way Mireille admires the shell of him—wearing his faded multicams, hauling rucks everywhere, refilling his grenades every night before he lies down beside her. The way she looks at him without looking too close… . The way she’s always just assumed … soldier … and she’s trusted … young … and she’s never felt safer … worry… . Because he saved her ruined her life.
He owes it to Mimi to get deployed every once in a while, even if it’s only to the outskirts of town. Soldiers, unlike Pigeons, are expected to be away. For days. Weeks, even. Regardless of new live-ins. New couplings. Newborns.
And he’s so tired.
And the baby hasn’t stopped screeching in days.
No matter how many times Mimi plugs its hole with nipples or rubber. No matter how strong the grog she uses to baste its raw gums. No matter how Tantie May coos or lullabies. No matter how soothing the rain sounds on their shared apartment’s tin roof. No matter how many flamingos or water buffalo Peyt adds to Jean’s story. The sweaty little thing grizzles and cries and Tantie May warbles and Mireille weeps and clings and kisses and Peyt drowns in tears and smothers under sodden lips and he picks up his bags and says the platoon’s been restationed and he invents a location and it’s never close and he goes out into the rain and onto his same old route and stops at the Good As New and passes the consulate and passes gov’t buildings and passes parliament and passes the gallows and passes the daymarkets and passes the warehouses and passes the repat hospital and passes the dead factories and passes the Wheels ‘n’ Heels and ducks into the grogger just to escape all the wet.
It’s warm inside the pub, but far from dry. Peyt sucks in a fug of moist heat that stinks of scalp and ’pits and fermented breath. Beneath pine trestle tables, the concrete’s puddled and spattered with muck. In an alcove of mirrors and boarded-up windows, a woeful little tiled floor is bogged; a thin yellow streamer cordons it off, in case anyone gets jolly enough to try dancing.
Eight days into a rainstorm, no one so much as taps their feet to the golden oldies crackling from ceiling amps. Around the bar, drips in business suits slouch over brews, a steam of letters rising from their uncovered heads. A pair of scar-faced stumpeys swig from tall pints tucked in the crook of their elbows; at the next booth over, another slurps a chunky white soup by holding the bowl with his dirty bare feet. Peyt quick-scans the cluster of coveralls slumped in steel chairs beside the woodstove—and heaves a sad sigh when Borys isn’t among them. It’s too late in the morning for most factory workers; nightshift ended a few hours ago, dayshift is well under way. Euri beckons Peytr over to his regular booth, on the far right beneath a double-arched window. She’s wearing a flannel nightie with frilled hems, a clear plastic rain-hat and rubber boots that reach up to her knees. Letting the door swing shut behind him, he quick-waves at his little sister then descends the short stair, wending around puddles and chipped melamine tables on the way to meet her. Hoad’s playing solitaire on an inverted cask nearby, so Peyt tilts his head at him before sliding onto the wall-side pew. The other Pigeon lifts an eyebrow. Deals another card.
So much for professional courtesy, Peyt thinks, inwardly flipping Hoad the bird.
“Got fifteen minutes ’til next shift. Mind if I join ye?”
Peyt looks up. The voice’s owner is backlit, her wild dreads jewelled with sarcastic quips, all limned pink in the lantern light. Not so pink as before, he realises; age and rain are getting the best of Gerte’s dye. “Plenty of room,” he says, nodding at the stool beside Euri. Changing his mind, he slides further down the bench and pats the spot he’s just emptied. “Especially if you’re buying.”
“Always the charmer,” Gerte says.
He shimmies a few more inches down, but stops well short of backing into the shrouded woman sitting at the seat’s far end. Wrapped in scarves and long black veils, she’s talking to a Pigeon Peytr’s never seen before—a muscular kid who looks like he’s got more beef than brains. Two cups of weak tea are going cold on the table in front of them.
“Here for a bit of the ol’ truth serum?” Gerte says, taking one look at Peyt’s girdle of luggage and hooking herself a stool. She tosses her balled-up apron onto the table in front of Euri, then signals at the barkeep for two pints.
Peyt almost smiles. “Something like that. What’s on tap?”
“Same shite as always.” When Gerte talks, a pea-sized hole yawns in the hollow at the base of her throat, where a spiked stud once bristled. As always, Peyt resists the urge to shove a finger in it. Euri has no such self-control; she kneels on her chair, bends close for a good look, prods with the end of her pinkie. Metal rings have dragged dark lines down Gerte’s nostrils, the powdered skin too loose now to hold them firm. While Peyt chain-sneezes, the waitress sifts through change in her hip-pack, extra tips she’s made helping Brandt behind the bar. Her forehead wrinkles as she counts coins onto the table. Empty piercings line her brows and lips, seams of black dots that stand out against her pale complexion. She looks, Peytr thinks, like a doll with its stitches plucked.
Snickering, Euri agrees.
“Got a nickel?” Gerte says.
“Probably.” He digs one out of his ruck, manoeuvring around the other bags’ straps without slipping them off his shoulders. Gerte makes a joke about Peyt’s being into bondage—all those leashes and buckles, all that leather—but he doesn’t let her tease the packs off him.
“All right, Borysson,” she says after Brandt’s clunked a couple of jars on the table, and told Gerte her break’s up in five. “Get one of these into ye.” Peyt reaches for the nearest pint, but she slaps his hand away. With a coy expression, she dips into her vest’s inside pocket and pulls out a pair of glass marbles. They’re not perfect spheres, more oval than round, but the lamplight catches nicely on their milk-and-nacre swirls as she rolls them around on her palm.
“What do you think?” Peyt asks and Euri shrugs. Why not?
“Loosen ye up,” Gerte says. “Knock the cold out ye.”
Outside, rain sloshes down the gutters, hisses against storm boards, smacks the flooded street. Shit weather for travelling now, but if it lets up any time soon, Peyt could still make a few pickups before true-dark. He could earn enough to stay in a flop …
“I shouldn’t,” he says.
“Suit yerself.” Bracing the translucent balls between
fingertips and table, Gerte crushes them with a delicate pop. Glass glints on the worn pine. Lacerates, then frosts Gerte’s fingerprints. Sucking and licking, she laps up the mess, nibbling under nails until they bleed. Digit by digit, she dunks into the jagged piles. Cuts and collects. Swirls the sticky red remnants into her drink and chugs the whole thing down. Immediately, her smile widens. Her eyes fix on wonders Peyt can’t hope to see.
After Gerte goes back to work, Peytr turns to Euri and says, “What now?”
Look, she replies. Stifling a giggle, she points at a small shard Gerte overlooked. A perfect little petal. Smaller than my front tooth …
Peyt hesitates until Brandt starts heading over with a cloth to wipe the table clean.
Quick! Quick!
The glass hooks into Peytr’s fingertip before Brandt gets past two tables. It slices Peyt’s lip, gouges the soft flesh inside his cheek. A long, glorious cut. Tonguing it deeper, he exhales ten years of pent breath. Euri claps, louder and louder, and Peyt—
Blinks.
Gerte’s tending the bar and Blink: wiping tables and Blink: tending bar, arms a-blur, multiplying, pouring and reaching and clearing bottles and Blink: four arms, eight, whirling and Blink Blink: fog shimmers, a blind pulled down from the ceiling—No, Peyt says, it’s not coming down… . I’m rising. I’m through the roof. Hear the engines?—fog roils from puddles and cat-slinks around ankles and Blink: fog obscures barstools and lanterns and benches and the toilet door’s coin slot and Blink: fog covers stumpies and suits and coveralls and Hoad, even Hoad, is glistening with dew.
Blink.
Blink.
Peytr drops down to the rafters, perches, kicks his heels and Blink: his body sways on the bench below. Yes, this, he says and his limbs are syrup, so sweet, so calm, and he’s laughing and Blink: relaxed, his many gazes swimming left right left and Blink: the young Pigeon is laughing, mouth wide and red and wet and Blink: mouth velvet, vulvar, a codpiece lined with ivory daggers and Blink: the kid’s blubbering, tea shining down his face and Blink: crying like the baby and Blink: he’s laughing and Blink: he’s hanging with Peyt in the skybunker and Blink: he’s biting gold sovereigns and Blink: he’s at the bar and Blink: he’s tossing the parcel to Brandt? Trading the box for a pint? and Blink: What happened to professionalism? and Blink: kid’s chugging down the foamy black and Blink: he’s shirking his delivery? and Blink: he’s launching rockets from his razored teeth.
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