Blanks don’t wave blanks don’t wave blanks don’t wave—
—unless they’re told to. Unless they’ve been given orders. They weren’t alone. Her hand sprang to her bell and she rang it.
“Two a-m and all’s not well! Two a-m and all’s not well!”
The tinker’s horns were meant to pick it up and broadcast it, but they weren’t working. She screamed the words, and screamed at the horns, and nothing happened. She screamed until her voice broke away and—
She was alone, except for a blank and a dead body. She dropped her bell and turned to run and—
—two officers appeared from a nearby alleyway. Big guy and a little one, helmets low with their brims covering their eyes. She didn’t recognise either of them. She dropped her body low, into a fighting stance.
—run girl run, he’s a shark he’s a crane he’s a lion—
“Hold on,” said the little guy, “hold on, backup’s here.”
His voice was gentle, almost convivial. Wiry body, telltale acidic scarring on his hands that marked him out as ex-military. Yat’s hand moved away from her cnida as he approached. The panic and exhaustion all hit her at once, and she had to bite down on her lip to stop herself from sobbing. It was too much. It was all just too fucking much. The voices whirled inside her, pushing and pulling.
—no, he seems nice. I trust him—
—I’m just scared and I want somebody to make me not scared—
—RUN—
—I can’t I can’t it’s too much—
“Dead body in the water,” she said. It took all the energy she had left. She felt faint. The voices had never spoken to her before. She didn’t know which voices were hers and which were the kiro. Big guy was hanging back, watching the alleyway, hand on his holster. It was dark and he was too far away for her to make out the details, but it looked wrong. She realised it was dumbtech: no feeder veins, no sac for ammo: just stiff dark leather. The little man—a few feet away, amazing how fast he’d closed the distance—smiled at her, and too late she noticed his teeth: filed down to sharp points. Ladowain officers apparently did that, to strike fear in their enemies. She’d always assumed it was a myth, or propaganda. He took something out of his jacket pocket and time seemed to slow to a crawl as if to say this is important, take in every detail because you won’t get a second chance. Long metal tube, attached to a cylinder. She’d seen one in training: a revolver. A fucking gun. Dumbtech, lion-tech. Little bronze etchings along the barrel and a stink of sulfides as it came up and up—
The barrel’s end emerged from the mouth of a little golden lion. Her dad had told her stories about weapons like this—about high-end Ladowain stuff. Could punch a hole in the thickest sheet of cellulose and now it’s at my neck and now—
—amazing, the strange things the mind chooses to focus on. Amazing how the whole world can move like treacle and yet your arms stay pinned to your sides. Amazing how beautiful and clever and stupid the human mind is. Just, amazing—
—just let him. If you had a problem with this, you never would’ve taken that scalpel from your dad’s lab after he died and—
—RUN GIRL RUN—
—no he seems nice—
The barrel against her forehead now, and of course the blank hadn’t been waving: he was signalling. Blanks were manual labour without memories—the perfect accomplice. Recover the body, wave for help if a stranger sees you. Of course. Far too late for revelations now. The cnida at her side may as well have been at the bottom of the ocean.
The lion roared, and night fell.
Come here, little bird.
Somebody has broken you, but I’ve a story to tell.
I remember a time when all this was ocean. I remember boiling seas, and new land emerging through fire. I remember jungles. I remember a woman who loved, and a woman who died and then loved again. I remember stone, and iron, and cellulose. Above all I remember silence, and I fear I will remember silence again.
I have seen many worlds, but this world is mine. I was born here, deep beneath the ocean, and I rose with the land. I left, and found silence, and returned to find my home in diminuendo. I sing now, against the silence: there is a pool at the roof of the world where the roots drink deep; the water has gone sour, and the tree dreams in darkness; in the shadow of a mad iron god, a child lies dreaming.
Come here, little bird; somebody has broken you, but there is work to be done.
Down and down and down again. More water and darkness than a harbour could reasonably hold; more than the ocean could hold; more than the world could hold. Yat fell, and a cacophony of voices tore through the hole in her head:
—I TOLD YOU TO RUN—
—PLEASE I JUST WANT TO SEE MY DAUGHTER AGAIN—
—THE MONKEY LIES—
—THE LION ROARS—
—THE—
She left sense behind, and her body, and her name. There was no Yat, no woman, no fear or fury —just a soul hurtling down through the endless dark. The dead clung to her, and billowed behind her like a grotesque dress. Their hands were warm, and their breath reeked of formalin. They whispered and shrieked at her, but their voices were lost to the same velocity that was tearing her to pieces.
Something dwelt in the dark; something so large it defied reason; something she didn’t see until its tectonic movement changed the shape of the world, and then she realised it was everywhere —a monstrous slab of meat and fur so tall it defied her ability to comprehend it. She would scream, but there was nobody and nothing left to scream. The titan stumbled, and put out a hand. Its palm was larger than Hainak; larger than the Ox; larger than the Sea of Teeth and the Eastern Shelf and the entire world. She should’ve been scared but she felt nothing. The new land rose up to meet her and she crashed into it, burning white-hot. The plateau roiled beneath her as it took the impact. She knew it should’ve hurt, should’ve killed her, should’ve torn her in half. She looked up and realised she was sitting in the palm of a, well, monkey? Not quite: too many eyes, too little skin. Not even close, but as close a frame of reference as she had. It stared at her. Its head was the size of a moon, yet she could see something around the curve of it, half-hidden on the reverse side —another set of ears, another mouth split into a wide grin. It did not speak—it changed the world so it had spoken. Though it did not speak, she knew what it said.
you do not belong here
Words punched into the surface of the world like nails going into a coffin. There was no malice in it. It seemed like a thing beyond malice, or indeed beyond any human emotion at all. Typhoons didn’t get mad when they rolled through villages; plagues weren’t personal. Men gave Death a face and they made that face a skull, because it was easy to understand—a familiar frame of reference.
The mouth on the dark side moved, and the entire neck twisted around. This new face was more familiar: it was identical except for the light in its eyes. A mad Death: a wailing, emotional, human Death; the mother at her son’s graveside, the killer in the alleyway, the frightened man who sells peace and order from the barrel of a gun. The voice came from everywhere, and it burned in her ears like sodium hydroxide—NaOH, what’s that? It’s a base used in alchemy. Dad used it in that protein broth. I spilled some on myself once, and he panicked and tried to scrub it off and there’s still a little scar there. Whose memory is this? Who am I? I’m Y—
Another voice cut in, banishing whatever name she’d reached for.
Haha, good to meetcha mate. What a bloody cock-up, aye? What a bloody cock-up indeed. You’re in the Big Barren now, love. You’re in the place between places between—
The beast clicked its neck and its head spun back around in a chain of high-pitched concussions like a salvo of gunfire against a brick wall. She’d heard that sound when she was a child, in the streets below her house; she’d heard it on a day when she wondered whether the world was turning for
the better.
fly now the forward-face made-said. It moved its hand, and the world moved too.
She was up and up and up again, at terminal velocity—haha terminal, nice one mate. She was a shooting star tearing through the fabric of the endless night. She hurtled back towards the world, and as she moved, she picked up little pieces of herself. She found her fear first, then her anger—searing white-hot, unbridled by body or reason. She found her arms and legs, then her head—opened up and spilling grey meat out behind her like the plume of a comet, then stitching itself back together as she screamed. Last, within a breath of the surface, she found her name.
Something glimmered through the surface of the water. It was close enough to touch, yet impossibly far and—
Sen knelt over her, his face red with exertion. His palms were one atop the other, flat against her solar plexus.
“Breathe breathe fucking breathe c’mon,” he panted. She sat up, knocking him back: it wasn’t a particularly violent movement, but he’d thrown his whole body behind his resuscitation attempt. He scraped along the wood of the pier, then sat up. They stared at one another for a moment, then Yat vomited seawater all over the front of her uniform. Sen was babbling something, but she was barely processing it—his words arrived at her ears in pieces.
“Felt guilty … followed you … a fucking gunshot.”
She didn’t feel ready to make words again, but she did her best.
“‘Nother cop,” she said. “W-where?”
She turned around: the puffball was gone. The dock beneath her feet was smeared with blood and flecks of grey matter. Her grey matter? She’d felt the bullet enter the bridge of her nose and shatter both of her eye sockets; she’d felt her head cave in, felt her brains exploding outwards and felt the warm wind come rushing in. She couldn’t think who else’s it could be. Think think thinking—a thing that’s hard to do when your skull is open to the thrice-cursed sky. That thought almost brought up another torrent of vomit. She’d been working on the assumption that large parts of her night were some sort of kiro-induced hallucination. She remembered the bullet, and then—
something. Trying to take hold of the memory was like punching fog—like piecing together a reflection in a broken mirror: darkness, falling, an immense sense of scale. She reached to the back of her head and touched it. Hair, skin, the reassuring hardness of bone beneath it all—a conspicuous lack of an exit wound.
“‘s been a murder,” she said.
“Well yeah, I mean,” said Sen. He pointed to the blood on the ground. Yat didn’t know what to make of it. She’d felt the bullet tear its way through her skull and into her brain and right on through everything that made her human. She’d died—it wasn’t a near-miss or amazing recovery. It was—
“Got shot,” she mumbled. She didn’t have all her pieces yet. “‘m fine though.”
“Where?” he said. He leaned in and inspected her sodden uniform, sniffed, then frowned and glared at her. “Are you high?” he said.
He sniffed again and screwed up his face. “Gods Yat, you’re high again. You got high and fell in the harbour, apparently right on top of a murder scene. I’m not sure I can cover for you here. I gotta report this. What happened?”
Big question. He wasn’t going to believe the truth, but pieces of the truth, now that might work. Her world was in pieces anyway. She was soaking wet, covered in blood and vomit, grasping at memories that were as choking and ephemeral as smoke. She needed to reassert reality. Reality wasn’t making it easy, but dad had taught her to think scientifically: go with the data you’ve got. If something doesn’t make sense, either file it down for later or go deeper. Slow, methodical. Piece by piece. She breathed deeply and felt her heartbeat slow. How she’d survived was not a priority: she was alive, and she could figure out how later. For the first time since she’d left the Kopek, she felt like she was standing on solid ground.
“Saw a body floating in the water,” she said. “Called for help. Somebody in a police uniform came up. Shot at me and uh, missed. We fought, he punched me in the head, I fell in the water. Had a revolver. Lion gun: unmistakable. Like one of the forty-fives we saw in training.”
She couldn’t manage more than short sentences, and each word fell out of her like stones into a deep pool.
“You get his face?” said Sen. She shook her head.
“Teeth,” she said. “Teeth like a shark. Little guy, but he looked strong. He moved fast.”
Sen’s mouth hung open and he went pale. “That sounds like a Praetorian,” he said. “I saw a few during the war. They’re vanguard troops: they’d send ‘em through first in a little squad, with grenades and shotguns, to make as much mess as possible, then the rest of the army shows up while you’re still bandaging your wounds. Real Lion shit: ‘mercy is for the weak’ and all that. Gods Yat, this just got political. Are you absolutely sure of what you saw? Tell me you’re seeing things, Constable. Once this news hits Parliament, it could mean war. Real war, you know: not this sitting around twiddling our thumbs and occasionally sailing close to their waters.”
“I’m sure,” she said. She wasn’t, though. It was all too obvious. What sort of spy would carry a weapon that said Why hello, yes I’m a spy and here’s my nationality? What sort of assassin would let their target know who sent them? What sort of shock trooper snuck around in alleyways in the dead of night? Go deeper; it was overconfident, sloppy, or a dangerous mix of the two. Who did she know who fit the profile, who’d been involved in covering up a murder, who had reason to need her silence? The realisation crept up on her. Her limbs were cold from the water, but something filled them now— made them light and warm. Her rage was waking her up, and she’d been sleeping a long time.
“Wajet,” she breathed. She could barely believe it. He must’ve panicked when he realised she was actually going to report him, and sent a friend to do the dirty work. Why bring her along in the first place? She glared at Sen.
“You let me leave with Wajet,” she said. His brow furrowed.
“What about him?” said Sen. “He’s out on patrol.”
“He tried to have me killed,” she said. “Must’ve found a Ladowain veteran somewhere, armed him, send him out to find me.”
“Wajet’s not a killer,” he said. “He’s—”
“Somebody tried to kill me,” she spat. Somebody did kill her. She was still putting that together with the reality of still being alive, but that part she was sure about. “You were all concerned, now you’re saying he’s a harmless little bean cake. You felt guilty and followed me. Why?”
Sen reeled back. “Look,” he said, “you’re in a vulnerable spot. You used to be a street kid. No, don’t interrupt me —you used to be a roof rat and you need money. He’s the dirtiest cop in the force; the man pretty much has a monopoly on bribes at this point. He’s always looking for amoral or desperate officers to join his little posse. I thought he was going to try turn you bad, not kill you. Dead people can’t pay him.”
A bell rang out in the distance, and the whole trumpet network sprang to life. Officer down, officer down. 4 a.m. and all’s not well. Footfalls in heavy boots, approaching their position. Maybe three men, maybe four. Yat wasn’t going to wait to see their teeth. She turned to run, but Sen grabbed her around the wrist.
“It’s backup,” he said. She tried to twist out of his grip, but he was strong and she hadn’t eaten properly in days. She didn’t know how to tell him how terrified she was: how an electric anxiety was charging down from her head, into her hands and heart, and shaking her to pieces. Men were coming to kill her, and her friend was going to help them out of the goodness of his heart. He hadn’t been there or seen it and she didn’t have the words to explain it: the words crowded her throat, and choked her. She could barely stand, and every movement made her head spin. Her hand slipped to her cnida, and she squeezed. The vine shot out, hit the ground, unrolled and then, in
a programmed spasm of artificial muscle, wrapped around Sen’s leg. He screamed and let go—she twisted out of his grip, then yanked at the whip and send him sprawling to the ground. She heard the dull thud of skull against wood and turned to see him lying on the harbour boards, screaming.
“I’m sorry I’m sorry, fuck I’m sorry,” she said. She retracted the vine, but it had already done its work: he writhed on the dock. There was that awful telltale discolouration of the veins around his neck that let her know the toxin had reached his brain. The footfalls were closer now—close enough that she could hear voices. She recognised at least one, with its characteristic volume issues: Wajet. She took one last look at Sen. He shrieked in pain as the venom ravaged his nervous system. His face was red, and his eyes wild. Yat ran for her life.
She knew the rooftops. Every Hainak street kid did. You learnt to climb, or you starved. In a city divided by high walls, climbing meant everything. With the right set of skills, you could go anywhere: over walls, in through windows. She could barely stand up straight, and the wind rolling through the streets nearly knocked her over more than once. With the hounds at her tail, Yat turned to her old skillset—she went up.
The Dawnhounds Page 6