Adolfo’s breath eventually stopped hissing out, held, and he started to take a breath to replace it. I hit the same shoulder again, just as hard, and I could see blood welling out where the spikefruit hit him. I would bludgeon him half to death with his own stock if that’s what it took. He cried out again but recovered more quickly. He couldn’t look at me, only at the ceiling, head thrown back, but his lungs shakily expanded, and he shuddered in my grip. “Do what you will,” he said. “They would do worse.”
“Will they wreck up the rest of your stock? Put you out of business for however long it takes to resupply, if you can even afford that?” I turned around and threw the spikefruit away, hitting a pyramid of something exotic and expensive. Then I put a shoe against the edge of a low table and kicked it over. I spun and shoved my shoulder against a shelf, sending it to one side and spilling a dozen different kinds of fruit across the floor in a pile of red and orange and yellow and purple and blue.
Bleeding wounds all over his left shoulder or no, Adolfo had the stones to laugh at me between gasps. “When I am young again,” he murmured, struggling to stand steady, “and you are dead,” and he smiled at that, “I will have better problems than keeping this stand in business.”
I shoved another display to the ground and stepped back up to the counter, across from him again, once more standing as though I were a customer and not a menace to his whole existence, and tugged down the corners of my mouth in an expression I meant to suggest I was thinking, Well, why the fuck not?
“And when I whisper in the ear,” I said, my voice low, leaning forward so he had to do the same to hear me, “of the Sincerity priests I let buy my Artisanal ass off a street corner down by Lotta’s Gift, the ones who liked me best because I was young and my genes so pure? The ones who still come around sometimes, still tell me how special I am even though I’m way too old to meet their fuckability standards? The ones who really believe and it makes them hate themselves even more for all the times they’ve gotten a little closer to their god by planting seed in the supple flesh of one of its chosen people? Suppose I tell them someone in the Spiralist Church is giving guys like me—or you—shiny new genes in an illegal operation.”
“They won’t believe you,” he wheezed. I’d knocked the wind out of him with the spikefruit, but he still had some fight left. “And even if they did, they won’t act except on a member’s charges. You’d have to sign up. You’d have to agree to let them examine your life for any criminal sins. Do you so badly want them poking around in my little life that you give up yours, too?”
I pointed at my side. “Dying. Remember? Nothing can scare me anymore, Adolfo. Death will simply make the hurting go away. Maybe, if the last thing I see is you in a genetics tank getting your work reversed, I’ll even go with a smile on my face.” I gave him a crooked smile. “I have no future to lose. You have lifetimes. So tell me what I want to know, or I swear on Leonidas’ Lost Crown, I will burn you to the ground, kick apart the ashes, and piss on the boot prints. All I need is a name, a location, a little information about how it happened. Then my friends and I leave you to put Plan A back tidy again.” I gestured around. “Your choice.”
Adolfo thought about it for a full twenty seconds. I didn’t rush him. I wanted him to have plenty of time to realize how good a deal I was offering him: total annihilation or a chance to forget I existed. The thing I hoped he didn’t realize is that my death card also meant I had no real motivation to keep my end of any bargains: or rather, no motivation beyond my own good name. Funny thing about that: I actually do give a damn about my reputation no matter how many times I compromise it in the long run to make do in the short. Maybe that is, itself, why I care about maintaining it on the occasions I get a choice.
“It’s a clinic in Little Marseilles, at the corner of Strive and Tester,” he said at long last. His voice was weak. He knew he was probably kissing his future goodbye, or at least the one he’d been jerking off to since his first gray hair. “I was told to go there with a certain man.”
“Tell me about this certain man.”
Adolfo shrugged. “He is a priest. I did not know his name. I met him at a café a few blocks away, and we walked together. We were escorted past the front desk by Upgrades.” Upgrades are Spiralist acolytes. Conspiracy theorists say they’re also the church’s enforcers. I’ve always assumed that’s a natural jealousy of the musculature and chiseled jaws the Upgrades all seem to have. Maybe the conspiracy theorists had a point. “They took me at the end of hours and dunked me overnight. I had to go back like that, overnight, five times.” He looked ashamed for a moment. “They made me wear a uniform.” He stared me in the eye, and for the duration of two heartbeats, he was not one bully being bested by another; he was merely a person talking to someone else who might understand what he was saying. “They told the rest of the staff I was an exterminator so they could sneak me in.” The fruit seller with the tidy white apron and the tidy white walls spat. “They told people I worked with vermin.”
The Busters and Fiono walked with me back to the border between Buster and Hendricks Gang territories. The border had moved a few meters in the hour we’d been gone, to the benefit of the Hendricks Gang. Fiono had a natural sense of the lines being constantly redrawn around him and, when we arrived, he took up station opposite his punk counterpart when she emerged from her new spot one stall away from where she’d been before. The Busters looked nonplussed, and I was pretty sure the Hendricks punk chick was going to take the opportunity to start a scrap, maybe win another meter of turf for her side. It would be a great way to get off guard duty.
The moment passed, though, and the Busters left. They only charged me a couple of token scrip, and the junior Buster gave me a punch in the gut to remind me they’re not to be thought of as tour guides or bodyguards. Busters sell protection, sure, but it’s from them, not by them. “I’ll spread the word you’re okay,” Prime said with a wink. “You can handle your way around an old geezer, anyway, and you’re good for your pay when you say it.” I thanked them politely and didn’t spit blood until after they left.
“Fiono gonna get all that pussy you promised?” His punk partner was sizing me up again, trying to rub Fiono’s nose in whatever had been his past misdeed.
I pulled a card from a coat pocket and held it out to him. He met my eyes and held them while his hand shot out and took it from me. He left something, though, too: a clean nick of the back of my hand with one of his fighting knives. Blood welled out in a weak, red bulge, then trickled across my knuckles. I lifted my hand to my mouth and licked the blood up while he stared me in the eye. I didn’t know what the mark meant—that he was done with me, that he was adding me to his inventory, that he was marking me as exclusively his. Well, if it was the latter, I wished him a hell of a lot of luck.
“I’ll be seeing you, Fiono.” I spoke around my knuckles as I sucked at them one by one to clean off the last of the blood. “Hopefully a lot of you.” I didn’t bother to say anything to the punk chick. She could shout down the well of Fiono’s silence in my absence. I had places to be.
11
I knew I wouldn’t have much time to get to this Spiralist clinic in Little Marseilles. Adolfo would have word to whoever was his contact—he had to have one whether he admitted or not. He might send a polly, but their messages are pretty damned short. If he wanted to warn them and give them details, he’d also need to send a courier. If I was fast on my feet, I could beat some pedal pusher. They and I would both know the streets like our own wrinkles, but I would have the advantage of being inherently all-terrain. An Autumn cyclist would have to navigate streets teeming with vehicles and pedestrians.
I didn’t run, though. A detective has to have some standards. I didn’t go exactly the way I came, either. I needed to move fast, so I cut out a gate a quarter around and started toward Little Marseilles.
Getting there was one thing. I would also have to think of a way to get inside. If Adolfo sent a polly saying he was busted by a
n Artie detective, details on their way by courier, I couldn’t simply barge in, tall and dark and gaunt in a long coat, with the sagging flesh of an Artie and the tired eyes of a shamus and expect them not to know who I was and why I was there. That meant a little subterfuge.
If I’m being honest—and as I write this, I have zero reason not to be—lying is my favorite part of the job.
Looking back on what Adolfo said to me, I considered borrowing the exterminator cover story. If it worked to get Adolfo around the rest of the staff, maybe it could work for me. Or I could pretend to be someone from Government. Nobody likes to see an Imperial bureaucrat march through their door, least of all a clinic doing shady work in pursuit of shady goals. Illicit business has a way of making people nervous, and nervous people accidentally blurt out the truth or lie badly, both of which serve my purposes. The downside is that nervous people sometimes shoot you. I needed to be careful in how I approached this.
I left the Lower Market Market with my head turning it over and over again. I knew I had to get to that clinic and get inside, and I wasn’t even totally sure what I thought that would accomplish. Part of me was driven by the desire to find out what the hell was going on with angels, but I think mostly I was angry about Adolfo’s genetic treatments. I’m a detective in a sketchy part of town. I’m supposed to be the one who can find a corrupt genetic treatment clinic when I need one. I spent months canoodling with lab techs, topping geneticists, bottoming for Spiralist faithfuls who’d fallen a little bit, blowing rent-a-cop security guards who might have seen something in the clinics they patrolled. I got nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Of course, none of that was in Little Marseilles. That’s the sort of place where whores are a little higher-rent than I ever was or could be. I’d stuck to my kinds of neighborhoods thinking that was where I could find a cracked back door. Goes to show what I know. Adolfo’s treatments being cosmetic was what really squeezed my lemon. Deep in my highly compromised, morally relative guts, the flames of self-righteous fury were being stoked against that cold hatred the dying feel for all vanity.
I walked up the flangeward side of Lower Market toward the better parts of town, where Little Marseilles would be found. It’s a district based on one of the lost places of the Ancients. Mostly, to me, it looks like a walled city within the City, much of it white stone. It’s one of those designed environments revealing their character through their contradictions. The stone is mottled with discolorations and stenciled pencil-line cracks to suggest age and weathering, the sort of deeply set-in blemishes made only by time and blood and settling. The buildings themselves, in contrast, are entirely whole. Every faux shingle hangs in perfect symmetry, and every cornice is as flawless as the day it was installed. The people who can afford Little Marseilles want to suggest the ancients without actually enduring ten thousand years of sagging roofs and half-scrubbed graffiti. They want the look of experience without the trouble of learning from it.
There was proper graffiti, of course, but only on the outside of the gated environment. Little Marseilles is home to the sort of people who get rich and powerful by being born that way. Money like in Little Marseilles is unlike the money you’ve or I’ve seen. Its residents don’t wield direct political power because it would be too much trouble to own and maintain. Why bother possessing power if they can rent it whenever they like?
The graffiti on the outside was entirely of the sort becoming more and more common: UNLEASH THE MANNIES and ALL PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE and HYBRIDLIFE. Most of the district’s homes—probably all of them—had human-animal hybrid persons (as my politically conscious friend from Ark would have said) in their “employ.” These were basically slaves, though, in many cases more literally so than you probably want to know. Brought here for practically nothing by rich Plusses who didn’t feel a need to take care of them, many Manny servants were technically indentured, with an independence value and everything. They would never work off their weight, though. At least a street whore like Yuri—like I had been—stood a chance in theory. If he actually got his hands on enough pounds—or got desperate enough to see a sawbones—Mahogany would honor the cash and grant his freedom. These people, the ones with townhomes and business offices in Little Marseilles, would never honor their Mannies’ contracts. They did things like reserve the right to change the terms without notice, or to extend the contract beyond agreed dates. They were the sole lords and masters of the persons in service to them, and common practice was for those masters to take advantage of the many loopholes available to them.
To do otherwise was bad business. How were they supposed to get back, in hours worked, all the money they put into feeding and clothing their servants if the Pluses didn’t work those Mannies as long as they could? “As long as they could,” of course, meant until death. Their Mannies’ slim and highly technical earnings were deposited into locked accounts controlled by their “patrons.” If a servant died still indentured, their wages reverted to their masters.
The rich are very good at keeping the poor in their place and telling them they ought to be more grateful for it. I’ve read of times and places where it was different, but I think those were myths. They have to be. If they’re true, we fucked up big time somewhere along the way, and I mean more than the Big Boom of the ancients.
That night’s graffiti earned the usual response: a couple of Upgrades standing around as security while a tired old Octopus scrubbed the wall with his many hands, occasionally sucking water out of a bucket and then shooting it at the wall to hose it down. It occurred to me the irony might be that he, himself, was the one sneaking out here at night, when Plus owner-managers have drifted off, to paint the mottos of his own desired liberation. That made me laugh, which drew the Upgrades’ attention, so I winked at them. One blushed; the other arched an eyebrow and almost smiled at me. I tucked that away in case I needed it as a last-ditch way into the clinic later. Crow’s feet and cancer, sure, but that day had already taught I still had the magic and I’d never be too proud.
I was almost to the entrance into Little Marseilles, which, like pretty much every other intentional district of Autumn, has specific gates used generally for ingress and egress, when I saw Alejandro coming toward me from the other direction down the same exterior street I was walking. He made a beeline for me. His features were open and expressive, and his hair shifted just so in the evening breeze, the way they were modeled to do.
“Oh, I’m so glad you came,” he said aloud. On reaching me, he did the very old-fashioned thing of stopping, bowing low, then standing back up and stepping forward to give me a close hug.
He whispered in my ear. “They know you’re coming,” he said. “We have to leave. They’ll kill you on sight.”
“How did you know where I was going?” I asked. “I walked straight here. It’s not been that long. I beat any couriers sent. Them knowing, I can see, but you?” I leaned back and looked into those deep, beautiful, mechanical eyes. The irises whirred and spun, tiny overlapping circles opening outward from the center like the offset petals of a dahlia blossom. I couldn’t figure out why, but I saw more soul in those eyes than I did in the last hundred men I’d had. I felt something catch in my chest, some emotional binding I hadn’t even known I still had. Alejandro looked… He looked concerned for me in a way no one had in too long a time.
“Because the Church told the City,” he said.
“What, they ran a special news bulletin?” I snorted with impolite laughter.
“No,” he said. “They asked Autumn herself to search for you.”
I blinked. There was no trace of humor in his voice, and I’d seen and heard too much weird shit in the last week to blow off what he was saying when he looked this serious. I was annoyed he showed back up in the middle of an investigation I specifically asked him to stay out of, but I was certainly happy to see him again. No detective is ever going to turn down a timely warning. “Explain it to me. And dumb it down.”
“I mean this City has a mind. You call it a
Ghost Drive, but it’s more than an engine. It’s a soul, and it manages the City like a body, and they spoke to it and coaxed it into using its many eyes to stalk you as you walked the streets.” Alejandro said it slowly and deliberately so I would know he meant it. His eyes didn’t leave mine.
“And how do you know that.” It was a question, but my voice was a flat plane, no curving arcs of inquiry.
“Because I can talk to her, too,” he said. “We can all talk to each other—all the Ghosts—and she says there’s an angel whispering questions to her. Autumn is being manipulated by someone else already, being used to some end by someone other than the angel you and I are seeking, and you have to evade the mechanisms of the City’s own surveillance if you want to go after the people executing that manipulation.”
That was all word soup to me. I blinked. “Wait, angels can talk to cities? What does that even mean?”
Alejandro reached down and took my hands in his. More brightly, in a more conversational tone, with a big happy smile, he said, “Now let’s go. We have many things to discuss.”
We were stared at as we walked. All around us, people gawked at Alejandro, which wasn’t surprising. Golems are as revered among the wealthy as among the poor: perhaps more so, seeing as in a way they’re a thing and things can be bought. It lends golems an air of exoticism: no, of collectability. That isn’t how it works, though. A golem is a free being, a citizen of no nation but able to travel to almost all of them. They can work, make their own money, and possess property. Golems don’t get the protections of Imperial citizenship, but then, few do, and most of those can’t afford to invoke those protections anyway. For instance, they can claim the right to a jury trial, but they have to pay for the jurors. Only the rich get something more formal than an appearance before a judge. I can’t imagine a golem needing one, though. At the cultural level, it’s assumed none of them can commit crimes. Golems are holy in a way few tangible things are.
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