For a moment only, there was perfect silence. Sound came back to the world in pieces: creaking wood, rustling sails. Yat exhaled. She forced herself to her feet, and let the tension fall from her shoulders. Ajat poked her head over the gunnel. She looked like she was about to say something, but she pulled her head back out of sight.
Across the canal, she could barely see: the air was thick with spores, mingling with the mist. The creatures were not moving, and it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. Some of them twitched and pulsed, but they did not rise. The one in the water wasn’t moving either, and she wondered for a moment whether the salt had done something: if it had some purifying effect that stopped spore growth. It was a thought out of nowhere, but she was her father’s daughter.
“M’am?” shouted Sen. Yat turned to face him.
“You don’t need to call me—”
Sibbi’s slap wasn’t particularly hard, but the rings gave it a tooth-loosening weight. Yat’s head snapped to the side and she reeled back. Mist danced between them. In a moment of rage, Sibbi was doing nothing to conceal her power, and Yat saw—
—a thousand years and a thousand years and a thousand more and—
—the wind wearing a mountain down—
—frayed threads barely holding together—
—seismic power, measured in magnitude, threatening to tear her body apart—
—powerful—
—fragile—
“We’re done, you and I,” said Sibbi. “Do you know how many people have died today? How many are going to die? That’s on you, hero. Come near my ship, and I’ll have you dragged across the keel.”
She drew back her hand for another slap. Yat cringed away from it, but it never connected; Wajet pushed his not-inconsiderable bulk between them, and let the slap hit his chest. The Kopek’s gangplank came down, and Ajat was the first across it. She put one hand on her wife’s shoulder, and another on her waist.
“Sajti, she didn’t know.”
“When was that ever an excuse?” spat Sibbi. “Ignorance doesn’t raise the dead. How many died today? Do you have any idea? If you started counting now, you’d be grey before you finished. I wanted you to be better than that; I wanted you to be better than—”
Better than me.
The thought floated free, and Yat caught it without meaning to. She stared at Sibbi. She didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” she said. It didn’t even begin to cover it.
“Sorry for what?”
She didn’t have the words. Sibbi took control of her threads and pushed them out into the city. Where there had been life, there was silence. Bottomless, mountainous silence. It was the silence from her father’s bedroom the night he stopped breathing. It was an emptiness that went all the way down—an emptiness that pulled. It was an emptiness she’d courted, in the dead of night, staring at her roof and wondering if things would ever get better. The killing-cold she’d almost let in the night her father died.
“Sorry for—it. It all. This,” she finished lamely.
Sen and his officers came out of the hotel at a brisk trot. Yat didn’t know how much he’d heard, or how much he knew. She didn’t have the strength to reach into his mind: she felt hollow. The pirates on-deck raised their weapons, and the advancing cops stopped dead. Sen raised his hands.
“M’am?” he said. Sibbi glared at him.
He canted his chin down, and lowered his gaze. “M’am,” he said, “we need to talk.”
The whole ugly thing came out. They already had an idea, and between Sen and Wajet they pieced together the rest. The Sparrows were operating out of a mansion in Heron Hill. They’d brought two divisions of the army with them, and taken control of the Watch. The soldiers were on the wall and the gates out of the city; the cops were in the streets. The Sparrows had given strict and clear orders: containment, nothing more. Lock down the infected district, shoot anybody who tries to leave, and wait for the plague to burn itself out. Some had refused to follow orders, and that’s why they were here—in a forsaken district—and nobody else was. They’d be shot if they tried to leave.
Nine officers in all. There had been more to start with. Mostly newer recruits, still holding onto their idealism. Maybe fifty civilians in the hotel, though none in any condition to fight. Yat recognised Mr Ot, who sold soup in Janhekai Street, who she’d nearly run into on an evening that seemed so long ago. He must’ve gotten free from the paddy wagon somehow. She didn’t ask. A little girl peered out from behind his legs—Yat had seen her in the window earlier. Her name was Bykra. She was nine, and very talkative: she thought Yat had pretty hair; she’d stubbed her toe; she could count to 1000. She didn’t say anything about the monsters, but the white-hot thread of her fear was unmissable—it’s not there if you don’t talk about it, if you talk about anything else.
The Kopek was a wreck. It wasn’t going anywhere today, or tomorrow. The water pressure and canal walls had torn open the hull. The bridge had turned the prow into matchsticks. One of the starboard shrouds had got wrapped around a lamppost and brought the whole mizzen down with it. The ship listed hard to the right—the broadside had knocked it off its axis, and managed to get the old girl jammed into the canal like a cork in a bottle. It would take an army of carpenters a year to even get it seaworthy.
Most of the district was clear of infection, for now. There weren’t enough of them to try for another push for the time being, but if a group of them broke the barricades, it would get bad very quickly. The creatures hunted in packs. They’d merge with each other to overcome obstacles, getting larger and larger. The smaller ones followed the bigger ones, sometimes clinging to their bodies and trying to graft themselves on. In the distance, in every direction they could see towering, lumbering forms: some terrifyingly close. The Kopek had gotten them a reprieve, but it wasn’t going to last. Ajat set up sentries—Yat watched, numb, as she ordered pirates to move in fireteams, cover all the entrances into the square. Xidaj was in the hotel window: he’d glued a ring to the sill and put the barrel through it to keep stable. Hestos and Hestas had acquired polearms from somewhere: curved black metal blades of a material from Suta that Yat had only seen in museums. They stood together, blades interlocked, in the middle of the main road into the square. Iacci was unarmed, tending to the civilians. Rikaza and Set-Xor were off somewhere on the rooftops. Wajet sat with Fea in his lap. One of his arms was clearly broken, but he didn’t seem too bothered: he patted the cat, and seemed very much to enjoy still being alive.
Sibbi fidgeted as she listened to Sen’s plan. She took the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, and squeezed each knuckle on the right, one by one, until they clicked. She’d tent her fingers, click them all, then go back to the knuckles. She’d revealed herself earlier, and hadn’t quite managed to regain her full composure. Her threads writhed around her like a halo of snakes. They were so bright, Yat could barely look at them.
She sat down, and spread her consciousness through the city. The emptiness burned, but she was looking for something, and she found it. Varazzo, walking alongside a blank. He was nervous: he’d been assured these blanks were safe, but he wasn’t willing to take that on faith. The nearest blank was a woman, perhaps twenty years-old. She was carrying a crate up a ramp. Mr Źao had assured him the gunpowder was safe, but it didn’t assuage his fears: he’d seen them adding something to it, and they’d been very sure to check the seals. Źao had locked himself in one of the offices, with a fancy ventilation and filter system. They’d given Varazzo a gun, and he liked the weight of it. He had orders to put a bullet in any blank acting strange. He liked the thought of shooting somebody: it felt good to have that power. The woman stumbled, and lost her grip on the crate. It fell, and the lid sprang off. They were meant to be sealed tighter than a virgin asshole but it just came clean off. Glass tubes rolled everywhere, and one tilted off the ramp and fell. Varazzo didn’
t even have time to cry out before it hit the ground and—
something in the powder
—didn’t break. He breathed a sigh of relief, then he noticed the blank. She lay on her face, twitching.
“Aaw hells,” he said. He checked the gun’s cylinder: two chambers empty, five full. He loaded in two more bullets, just be to safe, then got as close to her as he dared. Pity: she was pretty fuckable; she looked good lying on her front. He considered it for a moment, then—shielding his face with one hand—unloaded two bullets into her back. She jerked up, then slumped, and he shot her once more, at the point where her neck met her shoulders. She didn’t move again. He signalled for another blank to drag her away to the incinerator. At this rate, they wouldn’t have any left by sunrise. Not that it mattered.
Yat could feel her grasp slipping—he was too far away, and she was so tired. She tried to pull from the city, but too much of it was empty: the more people there were, the easier it was to move around. As the city fell to pieces, it became harder to hold onto. As she was pulled back into her body, she looked around for anything to go on. She could smell chemicals: potassium nitrate, chlorine, ammonia and … kiro? Not the smell of smoke: the pungent, acrid reek of spent roaches.
She came back to her body to see Sibbi shouting at Sen.
“I can’t ‘just disappear everyone,’” she said, “I don’t have my gods-damned ship; surgeons don’t work with their bare hands. I’d have us raining from the heavens if I tried.”
Cannath and some of the other crew were standing by. Some mingled with the civilians and cops, but Cannath sat with her legs dangling into the canal, just beyond the ruined bridge. She stared down at the water, and hummed something Yat could swear she’d heard before.
Mr Ot raised a hand. He’d been hanging back, and the politeness of it seemed to disrupt the rhythm of the shouting match.
“We’re—we’re not just going to leave, are we? Where are we supposed to go? This is home. This is where my family is.”
“Not mine,” snapped Sibbi. Ajat stepped forward.
“Look,” she said, “we don’t have a plan. We don’t know where our enemies are, we don’t know what they’re doing, and even if we did, we’re surrounded. They’re going to come in here tomorrow morning to clear out the corpses, and what happens when they find us?”
Yat could still smell Varazzo: his sweat, his rancid breath, the chemical reek of the building. She’d smelt those chemicals before, in her father’s lab. Nitrates as fuel and payload, chlorine for an oxidising agent for those nice blues and greens.
“Fireworks,” she said. “They’re in a fireworks factory. But why fireworks?”
Something in the powder.
It hit her. Midnight. A thousand bottle rockets blazing into the night sky, exploding, spreading their payload over the entire city. Each one stuffed with enough spores to bring down an empire. More spores than she had numbers for, spreading on the wind, settling in every crevice, filling lungs, feasting on mucus and tissue and then exploding out again and again. Even if the city survived, it could be decades before it was habitable again: the infection could survive in the houses for decades.
But why would Parliament want that? She’d seen something in Źao, and she reached for the memory.
—wings unfolding—
—a tower of meat, reaching for the sun—
—an onrushing night, stealing names and eating through memory like a worm in an apple—
Hello, little monkey.
Crane did not speak—it changed the world so it had already spoken. A shadow of two great wings fell over Yat and she saw—
the rumble before an avalanche; a hiss of carbon monoxide and a blocked tailpipe. A single spark moving with purpose – the overture to an inferno. A long night falling across the world and the world and the world and the world.
She was standing in the snow, her ragged breaths ejecting white plumes into the air. Her fingertips ached with cold, and she didn’t know what to do with them. She had never been this cold before, but she knew that this place would kill her if she stayed. The city around her was silent: huge plate-glass domes emerging from the ground, lit from the inside but with no promise of warmth—she could see ice forming on the insides, frozen figures wrapped up in blankets, holding each other, staring sightless outward. A tree stood in front of her, in the ruins of what might’ve once been a town square. Its bark was tooth-pale. It was barren of leaves, and its branches twisted at sudden odd angles like a snatching of broken arms. It did not reach the sun: it unsettled her, but it looked very much like any other tree.
Then the voice moved across the world, and shook her. It wasn’t using the words she understood: it communicated in ideas, and her mind painted over the rest. It was like seeing her reflection in a fast-flowing river. The ice water carved through her, channeled and given form by her memories, her anxieties, her loves. The pirate crew behind her still quarreled, ten feet away, a thousand miles away, as though they couldn’t feel the eternal emptiness of the void pulling at them like fish-hooks in their very marrow. They were there, not here.
Hello, little monkey, the God made-said. I have a lesson. Know this:
your father died because he thought that—if he thought hard enough—he could logic his lungs back together. If he just found the right combination of elements, he could do it painlessly, and he could save himself and everybody else. He kept working while his work ate him, piece by piece. He did the responsible thing, and it killed him. You don’t argue with sickness: you burn it. You seal your head in ice, you drink molten steel and pray it fills the holes. You cleanse your body in fire and you pray that it burns the sickness before you burn with it. This world is sick, child. I will burn every soul on it, if I can stop the sickness spreading. Know this:
you cannot fight me. I have seen the end of this, and you are not in it. You are a bit part in the song of the world, and you will be forgotten. You knew this long before you saw my face, but it seems I must make it clear: you will die by my hand or you will die by your own and either way you have no choice. This ends with you empty, and I have seen through you and seen a job half-done. If you try to stop me, I will finish it. I will make dust of you, and you will thank me for the kindness. You will be empty, and at last the pain will stop. The only reason I have not is because you do not matter, and will change nothing. You were nobody, you are nobody, you will be nobody: know this.
A powerful vertigo filled Yat. She stumbled, and her hands hit stone. The snow was gone, but she could still feel the chill in her bones. The quarreling stopped, and somebody put a hand on her shoulder. When she looked up, the shadow was gone, but she could still feel its darkness hanging over her. And, in the silence, she found the missing piece. She reached for the thought, but it recoiled. There was emptiness in place of a memory, and she touched at it like the space left by a missing tooth. It didn’t make sense: Crane hated the fungus. Unless the Brothers didn’t work for Crane any more. Unless they worked for somebody else.
She didn’t know what to do. She could still feel the cold biting her, feel the emptiness hollowing her out. She had never been that cold before but she knew the emptiness well. She knew it would be back eventually, pulling her down through the earth, flattening her. Focus. 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.
“Fireworks factory,” she muttered, “near a kiro refinery, one that puts out a lot of ash.”
“Anyasz Fireworks,” said Wajet. He had a certain medicated faraway grin. “They make the best damned Ahwari Reapers on the continent. What about ‘em?”
Everybody looked at him, and he shrugged. “Can’t a man enjoy a few explosions in the comfort of his own back yard?” he said.
Yat stood up, again. She stared down Sibbi, who stood with her arms c
rossed.
“Mr Źao is there,” she said. “With guards, and blackpowder, and enough spores to make today’s whole mess look like a sunny afternoon at sea. Reach out, if you don’t believe me: you’ll find him.”
Sibbi stared her down, then her shoulders slumped. “I can’t,” she said. Her hands were shaking. She took a step back, into Ajat’s arms, and tilted her head upwards. Their threads ran together—Sibbi’s were pale, and lifeless. Life and energy moved between them, but it was going to be a slow recovery. The jump must have cost her almost everything.
“She’s telling the truth,” said Cannath. Her eyes were glassy, and the fingers on her left hand were stiff, pushed down hard against the wood on the side of the canal. She cocked her head to the side.
“Ten men, not including Źao,” she said. “Maybe fifty condemned.”
Yat saw the word blank played across her mind, but she seemed to push it away. The word held too much pain for her. There was a memory there, burning like coal, but Yat couldn’t bring herself to reach for it—she didn’t want to deal with Cannath’s wrath, but she could see the outline of the memory itself and somehow it was even worse.
Sen paced back and forth. “There’s guards on every route out of this district,” he said. “Nice open streets here: big sightlines. You’ll never even get close to the barricade.”
Yat looked up at the drainpipes, and awnings, and rooftops. Despite everything, she smiled.
“Don’t need to,” she said. She turned to Cannath.
“You know how to climb?” she said.
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