Twelve
Malkuth is nearly as filthy as the Heap, but a lot more crowded.
Even now, in the small hours of the morning, every twisting street and alley seems to be jammed to capacity.
We pick our way around food stalls (my stomach growls), dice games, off-duty whores, piles of trash, and people curled up in filthy corners who are either sleeping or dead.
The buildings rise high overhead, ugly slabs of metal with barred windows.
Clotheslines and bridges form a spiderweb above us that gets nearly as much traffic as ground level.
The whole thing is bathed in noxious crimson light.
No work-lights here, so sigwork lamps are ubiquitous, and red lights are the cheapest and easiest to make.
Every surface looks like it’s been coated in blood.
It makes the stray traces of gore on Ky look like brown spots, which probably stand out less.
But nobody around here would care one way or another.
I know not all of Malkuth is like this. There are the workhouses, with their orderly campuses patrolled by armed guards.
And there are the vast sorting-and-smelting operations where the scrap gathered from the Heap is processed and shipped on to its eventual fate, whatever that is.
But this densely packed red mass is the part of the tier where people actually live.
Everybody here is fighting for elbow room, and fighting even harder to avoid losing their grip and falling to the Heap below. A fate worse than death, they say.
Ky strides with confidence, but she seems to be making turns at random. Eventually we stop at a building where the character ROOM is written three stories high and picked out in sigwork lighting. Ky exchanges a few words with a woman in a barred office and comes back to me with a key.
“Third floor,” she says, pointing to an external staircase. “I got us twelve hours, so we can rest for a bit.”
I can feel weariness tugging at me as we climb, the high of our escape starting to fade. The doors we pass emit moans and other sounds of passion, and I can see a slight flush creep up Ky’s cheeks. Our own room is mostly bed, and Ky’s lip twists.
“It’s a bit… sparse,” she says. “Malkuth, I guess.”
“It’s a sex pit,” I tell her. Not that I’ve ever been able to waste money on one, but you hear stories. “A place where people take whores to fuck. Or their dates, but usually whores. That’s why it charges by the hour.”
“Oh.” She eyes the bed suspiciously, then shrugs and flops down. “They didn’t ask for a name. Nobody will find us here. Not for a while, anyway.”
“Thank the skies,” I mutter, stripping off my kneepads and gloves before collapsing beside her.
For a long time we just lie in silence. I wait for my heartbeat to subside and my limbs to stop shaking. There are questions to be answered, but right now all I want to do is close my eyes for a minute and appreciate being alive and intact.
I don’t mean to sleep, but I must have dropped off briefly, because I wake up to the sound of sobbing.
Ky is curled up, turned away from me, her hip against mine because the bed isn’t really big enough for two people who aren’t in intimate proximity.
Her shoulders shake and she makes a sound halfway between a cough and a hiccup.
I freeze, not even a little sure of what to do next.
I settle for rolling on my side to face her.
“Oh,” Ky says, between shudders. “You’re awake.”
“Yeah.” I stare at the back of her head. Wisps of white hair at the nape of her neck have escaped from her cap. “Are you… okay?”
“Trauma response,” she says after another hiccupping sob. “Perfectly natural. Just ignore me for a while.”
“It’s a little hard, under the circumstances.”
“Hic—sorry.”
I haven’t comforted a sobbing person who wasn’t part of my own family before. My instinct is to hold her, but it seems too forward. Instead I just wait while Ky’s sobs gradually subside into steady breathing. I wonder if she’s fallen asleep.
“We’re not going to fuck,” she says abruptly.
“Excuse me?”
“I know it sort of feels like that scenario. And I’m grateful for, you know, saving my life. Or my virtue, or whatever. But I felt like I should get that out there.”
“I honestly hadn’t thought about it,” I lie.
“Really?” She shifts her hips over a fraction so her butt brushes my crotch. “Do you always get a hard-on from watching girls cry?”
“I—”
She rolls over to face me, eyes red from tears but grinning broadly. “Hey, I’m not judging you. I know when I go to see Karvega’s Vilnius Lamenting over the Body of Cazio, I always have to go and change my underwear.”
All I can do is stare.
“That was a joke,” she says, then contemplates. “Mostly. Karvega did give Vilnius a great ass.”
“I only understood about half the words in that sentence.”
“Never mind.” She sits up, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Ah, I feel better. Nothing like a good cry after, you know, narrowly escaping violent rape and possible murder.” Her other hand rubs briefly at her throat, where a bruise is beginning to purple.
“Okay. Okay okay okay. Fuck.” She looks at me. “I think we both have questions.”
“You might say that,” I venture.
“Mind if I go first? I think mine will be quicker.”
I sit up myself and put my back against the headboard. “Go ahead.”
“What’s your name? You know mine.”
I hesitate. But no point in holding back now. “Taj.”
“Good to meet you, Taj.”
“Likewise.”
“What were you doing in my bedroom this time? We’ve established you’re not an assassin. You couldn’t find somewhere better to rob?”
“I wasn’t going to rob you again,” I say. Another pause while I gather my wits. “Last time, you mentioned a… a job. I thought about it and I want to hear more.”
“Really.” Ky blows out a breath. “Interesting. And not a little frustrating. Your timing fucking sucks, Taj.”
“My timing seems pretty stars-damned good from where I’m sitting. You’d prefer I turned up tomorrow?”
She looks thoughtful. “True. You probably wouldn’t get much out of my strangled corpse. But what I mean is, if you’d done your thinking a little faster, then events might have taken a different turn.”
“Hard for me to know that when you haven’t told me anything,” I snap, a little defensive. “Is it my turn yet?”
Ky raises her eyebrows. “Go ahead.”
“Who are you?”
She smiles. “Kycilea Tranto. I told you.”
I grit my teeth. “No, I mean—what the fuck is going on? Who was that guy Star killed? Why do you have a Hod pass? Why do you think there are assassins after you? And—”
Ky holds up a hand, chuckling. “All right. All right. I get it.” She takes a deep breath. “Let me see if I can give you the short version.”