by Wren Weston
Lila removed her thermal hood and cast about the streets, settling her newsboy cap over her curls once more. She thrust the hood into her pocket, waited for the correct pattern in the search lights, then crossed the street toward a lowborn perfumery. The clash of a hundred floral scents invaded her nose, fighting for control of her stomach.
Holding her breath, Lila walked steadily toward the alleyway next to the shop. From now on, she was nothing more than a citizen of New Bristol out for an early morning stroll.
“Halt!” someone shouted down the street. The group of blackcoats sprinted away from the fire truck in a swirl of confusion. Their boots clomped against the asphalt, disturbing bits of paper and shopping bags that dotted the street.
Lila kept walking despite their presence. A cackling radio struggled against her jammer and called out the location of the perfumery. She slipped her hands inside her pockets and thumbed off the device.
Instantly, the static disappeared.
“Halt, under order of Governor Lecomte!” one of the guards called out again, Weberly revolver drawn and pointed at her chest.
Lila turned slowly, a practiced look of innocence pressed into her features. She did not look directly at the men. Instead, she scanned the streets for Tristan and his people. At any moment, they would appear and provide a distraction so that she could run away.
The guards formed a ring around her, guns swaying in the air. Guards, she couldn’t help but notice, who were unmolested by a roaring swarm of criminals.
“Hands up,” another guard ordered, punching the space between them with the butt of his gun.
Lila was too shocked to comply immediately. Her eyes danced across the rooftops, peered into alleys, and even squinted hard at the guard post. But the man behind the glass was far too young and far too plump to be confused with Tristan.
“The man asked you to put your hands up. I think you should comply, madam.” The leader of the guards marched closer, a swagger heavy in his gait, a gun held tightly at his thigh. He was smaller and leaner than the others. He’d pressed his uniform just a bit sharper, and polished his boots to a brighter shine. The stars pinned to his collar revealed his rank as sergeant, and if Lila had to put money on it, he’d been a sergeant just long enough to become antsy for his next promotion. A deep scar ran across his cheek, marring an otherwise average face. Any doctor could have tended such a wound. Any half-decent plastic surgeon could have corrected the scar it had left behind, and Bullstow contracted with the best plastic surgeons in the world.
“What did I tell you, boys?” the sergeant called out to his brethren as Lila finally raised her hands. He dug into her pockets, ignoring the cigars and beer bottle in favor of the thermal hood and tranq gun. He held them up as trophies, neglecting to pat down her boots.
Sloppy.
“If you turn on the thermal camera on nights like these, you never know what you might find. A bodiless head floating down the street, for instance.” He snickered. “My man behind the thermal camera nearly soiled himself thinking we had some sort of ghost on our hands. Congratulations for that.”
Lila cursed under her breath as he studied her hood. “Using thermal imaging on the streets of New Bristol is against regulations, even for the mighty Bullstow.” She dropped her hands and pitched her voice deeper, the change straining her throat. “Do what you want within your compound but not outside. The city doesn’t take kindly to perverts peeking into their homes and businesses.”
“My unit does not suffer perverts. I would not allow it.” The sergeant’s focus drifted from her hood. “Keep your hands up, madam.”
“There’s always a pervert or two. Perhaps in this unit you’re the pervert, since you wanted to use the thermal cameras so badly.”
“Madam, I’m a sergeant in the government militia. I—”
“Yes. I can see that from all those pretty little stars on your collar.”
Several of the men chuckled.
The sergeant clenched his jaw and shoved Lila’s possessions into the chest of a subordinate. “Hands,” he growled, stepping closer toward her, withdrawing a pair of handcuffs from his belt. “Under the authority of Governor—”
“Yes, I’ll be sure to note your adherence to proper procedure. Of course, I will have to inform Chief Shaw that you only caught me because you used thermal imaging. Illegally, I might add. The bonus will go unclaimed this season. Again.”
The guards around her fidgeted, and the barrels of their guns dipped slightly. Here and there, the men took their eyes off her, too engrossed in silent conversations with one another to watch her carefully.
The sergeant frowned at Lila. “This isn’t a test, madam. We already had one—”
“Yes, this summer. You’ve done little better since my last visit, boy.”
One of the men whistled at the jab.
The sergeant’s lip curled. He clasped her wrists and shoved her back across the street, slamming her into the stone wall around the compound. “I take my reprimands from Chief Shaw, not a hireling thief he may or may not have hired to poke at our defenses.”
Lila wiggled in the sergeant’s grasp.
The man cursed as his handcuffs clattered at his feet. He shoved his body against hers, pressing her into the wall.
The beer bottle in her pocket pressed into her ribs. She worried it might shatter.
“Be still, you filthy workborn, else you might get hurt.”
“I’m—”
“A very good liar,” he finished for her, shoving her into the wall even harder.
The men circled around them, mouths open wide. Lila had riled their sergeant too much for him to keep his anger in check. Only the lowest workborn displayed such violence. It reflected poorly on his men and all of Bullstow that his temper broke now.
“So you’re a pervert, after all? Do you have mommy issues? Is that why you took offense when I called you boy?”
The sergeant trapped her wrists with his right hand. With his left, he removed a pen from his lapel. He dug the tip into her neck, and she felt a needle pierce her skin.
Lila yipped at the bite. With that one little prick, she knew that everything was over. In less than ten minutes, the pen would transmit her DNA profile across the Bullstow network, directly into Chief Shaw’s office. Within the hour, the sample would be run against the public database, matched, and saved to her government file. She might have altered the shape of her nose and chin with a bit of rubber prosthetics, she might have changed the color of her eyes with contacts and modified the sound of her voice, but she couldn’t change the truth in her blood.
Given the sergeant’s disposition, he might not even wait until she was arrested before he dosed her with truth serum and began an interrogation. She would confess everything and break the encryption on her star drive, and she would do it with a drunken smile on her face.
The media vans would line up outside Bullstow, the journalists frothing at the faintest whisper of a treason charge, long before Chief Shaw even stumbled into work. She’d be on the news and plastered all over the net before the citizens of New Bristol sat down to breakfast.
Why hadn’t Tristan come to her aid?
Had he set her up?
“My cuffs.” The sergeant snapped his fingers.
The guard holding her possessions retrieved the handcuffs from the sidewalk and handed them over, sliding back before the sergeant’s temper could pass to him.
Lila stopped struggling against the officer’s body. There was really no point anymore. She leaned her forehead against the cool stone of the wall. Things were about to get complicated enough without her panicking or wasting her energy.
That was the last thought Lila had before the ground shook under her feet. The sergeant slammed into her once more, pinning her against the stone, crushing her ribs into the bottle of Saveur. But it wasn’t just her chest this time tha
t threatened to break. Her fingers and toes and forehead all pressed into the wall as well.
A terrible boom erupted behind her, slapping against her eardrums as though the sergeant had driven a DNA pen into both her ears.
The world muted. She no longer heard the blackcoats’ radios, the fire truck’s wailing siren, the still-screaming alarm. Even the crickets and frogs on the other side of the wall went silent.
The night erupted into yellow and orange flames behind her. The air smelled of gasoline and smoke. The worst of it retreated so quickly that nothing caught fire, like a welder who turned his blowtorch on and off for a lark. Lila slid her fingers to her side as chunks of stone and wood and plaster hurtled through space, battering the wall around her in one last, rumbling barrage.
Dust and soot covered the wall, her clothes, and even her tongue.
Through the grit, Lila tasted blood.
Chapter 2
The sergeant’s body shielded her from the worst of it, from the shock wave, from the blazing chunks of rock that peppered the street and skittered along the asphalt with sharp little hisses. Lila squeezed her eyes closed and turned her face away from the heat. The floodlights on the street had shattered, and shards of glass rained from the sky.
The sergeant moaned behind her and collapsed, finally relieving the pressure on her chest. She stumbled slightly and lurched against the wall for support.
The handcuffs clattered impotently on the pavement once more.
“Shit,” she grumbled, too late in realizing that she had bitten her tongue.
Lila turned and stared at the mushrooming black spire behind her. It climbed higher and higher toward the stars, as if it might swallow them up like it swallowed up the building beside the perfumery. Tendrils of fire lashed out at the businesses next door, threatening the structures, the flames providing the only light for several square blocks.
Even Bullstow had gone dark.
Lila struggled to remember what the business had been only seconds before. A restaurant? A coffee shop? Some sort of office?
Whatever it was, someone had cut it out of New Bristol, right under the nose of Bullstow. She recalled the last attack against the city, the charred and twisted train cars stopped only by a flattened row of houses. The faces of the dead. The faces of the living.
Blood. Bones. The smell.
Lila squeezed her eyes shut. If the Almstakers had become active in America, then she would likely be executed just for standing near the explosion, regardless of whether she had anything to do with it.
It was better to be safe than to be just.
The wind changed, deepening the smell of gasoline, igniting the perfumery’s peppermint-dressed awning. At least all the businesses on the block belonged to highborn families. No one slept above the shops in this neighborhood. The only thing lost would be profits.
A muffled siren caught Lila’s attention as though oil covered the sound. The fire truck inside Bullstow had changed directions. She rubbed at her ears, still aching from the explosion, and tried to judge how long she had left until it reached the gate. All she could see over the wall was a blur of red and white flashing lights near the High Senate Office Building.
The chubby guard stepped out from the guard post, glancing through the gate into Bullstow.
“Orders, sergeant?” he shouted helplessly at his superior. “Can you hear me, sarge? Do I wait here until the truck rolls through? Do you need me? Is everyone all right?”
Lila squinted at the men sprawled on the sidewalk. Several had not stirred since the blast, though she could see their chests rising in the dim light of the fire. The few who could move were sluggish, as though they might have been infants surfacing from a heavy, sweat-filled fever. The blast had disoriented them, and none were in any condition to stand up, much less give chase, should she decide to bolt.
“They’re all still breathing,” Lila shouted back, her voice sounding dim and faraway to her own ears. “Call for medical, then see to the gate. The truck needs to get through.”
“You shut up!” The blackcoat glanced at the approaching fire truck and back again. He pulled his tranq gun from his belt, took aim carefully, and fired.
The heavy dart fell to the ground halfway between them.
“You better stay put.” The man gestured with his gun. “It’ll go worse on you if you run. I swear to the oracle, I’ll track you down myself!”
“Of course you will,” Lila muttered.
She ignored the shouting blackcoat and stepped over the sergeant, kneeling at his side. “At least your temper was good for something, Sergeant Perv.” She rifled through his coat pockets as the man batted weakly at her prying fingers. A dart in the neck would have stopped it, but perhaps his condition was worse than it looked. “I doubt I’d be able to walk away so easily if I didn’t have such a fine officer of Bullstow shielding me from the blast. Imagine how happy Chief Shaw will be when you tell him. He might even give you another one of those pretty little stars you’re so proud of.”
Lila snatched up the DNA pen, which she then dropped and crushed underneath the heel of her boot, stopping it before it could finish its work. The little red light blinked out, and she yanked the brains of the device from the pen. She could only hope that nothing had been transmitted across the network before the blast knocked out the power.
Her thermal hood, tranq gun, and spent darts were strewn on the ground, covered with a thin layer of ash. Lila quickly retrieved them, hoping her gun would work if she needed it.
She stuffed the remains of the DNA pen and the rest of her possessions into her coat pockets, then sprinted into the alley near the charred perfumery. The smoke and fog covered her escape while a strange blizzard of flyers fell around her, offering even more cover. She snatched one of the drifting papers from the air as she ran. American Abolitionist Society had been printed in large black letters, along with a column of red print she hardly had the time, the energy, or the interest to read.
At least it hadn’t been the Almstakers this time. As a citizen of the commonwealth, Lila bore no love for the Holy Roman Empire, but she almost felt sorry that they had to deal with the extremist nutjobs.
She tossed the flyer away as soon as she reached the alley and shielded her eyes, finally following the paper trail up into the sky. Several figures in plainclothes watched the scene from the roof of a three-story apartment building nearby, craning their necks toward the fire. They held radios to their ears and counted down the seconds until militia reinforcements would arrive, their voices far too loud for the thick silence that hovered in the air, a silence free from the hum of electricity and the buzzing of lights. A few children leaned over the side, dwarfed by oversized coats and gloves, tossing fistfuls of the AAS papers from worn satchels slung around their chests. A ginger-headed boy laughed and laughed in their midst, flinging the papers from his grasp like Frisbees.
One man stood apart from the group, perched on the corner of the building. Shaved head. Long brown coat. Black trousers. Black sweater. Purple scarf swinging in the wind. The toes of his blood-red boots hung over the side, so red they were almost black. Dixon would leap from rooftop to rooftop to follow her if Tristan demanded it.
Lila hoped he had not.
She retreated back into the shadows and skirted the perfumery, emerging on Leclerc Street moments later. She passed law office after law office, each geared for a specific sort of client. Highborn, lowborn, workborn. All would find representation on Leclerc.
Shoving her newsboy cap atop her head, Lila considered her options. Tristan had come through, all right, but this stunt had not been for her. It had not been improvised. It had been planned. It had been why she needed rescuing in the first place. He had used her as a diversion. If Dixon was on the roof, overseeing the operation, it meant that Tristan was elsewhere.
Lila turned east on Leclerc.
Dixon follow
ed.
Gritting her teeth, Lila kept to the shadows, avoiding the occasional soul who stumbled into her path. The bystanders stared, each one entranced by the blast and the smoke and the fire, not content merely to pull back their curtains like the rest of polite society.
Most people who lived near Leclerc Street were lowborn professionals, that class of citizens who owned at least one business. They had either been born into their lowborn status or had beaten the consequences of a poor birthright as slaves or contracted servants, capitalizing on every educational opportunity and business loan they could find. These were the rare success, these few who had burst through the workborn ceiling, and they all strived for more. Some even held positions in Low House, the lesser, lowborn chamber of the senate.
They had been asleep like proper ladies and gentlemen, that much was certain, for their dresses sat askew, their breeches had not been properly tucked into their boots, and the collars of their elegant matching coats were twisted at the neck. Though their attire might have been made of fine wool and tailored elegantly, all of it was wrinkled.
Thankfully, they kept to their stations. None of them stopped to chat with the poor workborn servant. They sidestepped her completely and tried the doors of the nearest apartment building, ready to rush upstairs for a better view.
One enterprising child—she could swear it was the ginger boy from the roof—even held open his building’s door and charged admission. Given the twinkle in his eye, Lila was hard-pressed to believe that he lived there at all.
She scanned the roof line. Dixon stared down at her from across the street.
Lila slid into the darkness and walked on.
She avoided everyone she saw, brushing away the ash and grass on her coat whenever someone new came into view. She hid whenever she heard a siren. The highborn militias had either sent a few patrols to assist Bullstow or to spy.