Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
The passenger seat is empty.
It feels wrong, as though part of me is missing. I know Mina is not dead—or I hope she is not. I have only a dead man’s word, and he might have been deceived.
I shove the thought into the same dark place where I store every other fear.
Panic helps no one.
A detached voice in my head says she is only a dog.
I remember finding her.
A man had attacked a group of women with a knife. The police were overwhelmed, and bounty hunters were called in. I loathe cowards who prey on the innocent, so I hunted him down.
In the house’s overgrown garden, I found a dog chained so tightly that the metal had cut through her coat and begun to embed itself in her skin. She was crawling with fleas, her body raw with sores.
For a moment, I considered putting her out of her misery.
Then she looked at me.
Really looked at me.
Brown eyes fogged with confusion and pain. She did not growl. She only whimpered.
I sheathed the knife, unfastened the chain, and she fell into step beside me.
When she saw the body on the floor, she paused, crouched and urinated on him.
Defiance, perhaps.
Or simple revenge.
In that instant, I knew.
She was my dog, and I was her person.
I used a prepared healing charm on her neck, then washed her with antibacterial and antifungal solutions. Flea treatment followed. I secured it through carefully traded favours with a kennel worker.
She healed.
She learned.
She became exceptional at the job and, in the process, became something I had not expected: backup, a friend, my buddy.
Sometimes, you need something to hold on to.
She has always been mine.
It seems counterintuitive to park at work, yet hunters leave their cars here whenever a job requires a team, so mine will not stand out. Parking on a side street would draw more attention than it is worth.
I tuck the car into the far corner of the Depot car park, beyond the reach of the lights.
Hands buried in my coat pockets, I skirt around to the rear of the building. Maintenance never ventures here; no one bothers with the weeds.
Foolish, really.
If anyone wanted to pick off bounty hunters, this would be the ideal spot.
My boots crunch through the overgrowth—spiky leaves, dandelions long gone to seed and prickly grass that snatches at my laces. The stonework back here matches the frontage: sound sandstone, merely neglected.
The Gilded Drop.
I have not thought about it in years, except for the occasional jolt of memory when some rich idiot boasts about slumming it in the Districts.
Officially, it was Atmospheric Service Lift 7A, part of the old transport system linking the floating Immortal Zone to the city below.
No cables. No gears. No groaning metal. Only magic: a vertical transport gate disguised as infrastructure, keyed to Immortal bloodlines so that no District-born nobody could climb into heaven through a forgotten service door.
Then their children found it. For a few years, the Drop carried bored Immortal teenagers down to the lower Districts for parties, illicit tattoos and stories they could laugh about from above. The adults knew, I am certain. They did not care.
Why would they?
Except I am not District-born.
I was born above, amid all that gold and light, before my family threw me down here and pretended I had never belonged there at all. They kept the other daughter. The government erased my name from the Zone, but it could not rewrite what I was born into.
The old transport infrastructure kept the bathhouse in government hands long after public bathing fell out of fashion. Years later, the upper floors were converted into the Bounty Hunter Depot.
I doubt anyone working there now realises what still lies beneath.
Behind a stack of cracked evidence crates and a broken vending machine, I find the service door.
Its paint peels in long curls. The handle is bitterly cold beneath my glove.
For one heartbeat, I am fifteen again, breathless with laughter, one hand clamped over my mouth while the others dare me to go first.
Now I am forty-eight.
Exhausted, furious and out of better options.
I press my bare palm to the lock.
Nothing happens.
Then something stirs beneath my skin, old and faint, like an ember that never quite died.
Only the lock answering my blood, I tell myself.
The mechanism clicks.
I pull.
The door opens with a long, protesting creak. I use both hands, but it opens only a narrow gap. I brace one boot against the frame and force it wider. It has not moved in years. Decades, perhaps, given how long the Depot has occupied the building.
My friends and I were probably the last people to pass this way. There are other routes into the Districts, other security gaps the Immortals use when they wish to slum it, but those visits dwindled long ago.
Starve people, deny them clean water, treat them like diseased rats and somehow expect them to thrive. Eventually, even thrill-seekers lose interest.
The Immortals stopped coming.
It was no longer fun.
One final huff and heave, and the door swings free.
The space beyond is pitch-black. The sun has almost set, and there is no street lighting behind the building. I pause until my eyes gather what little light remains.
The interior is tiled from floor to ceiling in the same grimy white subway tiles that line the baths and rooms above. Stairs descend into the basement, where pool machinery lies dormant and rusting.
At least I remembered to bring a torch, a solid, heavy piece of kit. It sputters when I switch it on, then steadies. The narrow beam reveals history entombed beneath grime, tile and rust.
In a foolish act of optimism, I slam the door behind me.
The echo rings through the stairwell.
If this fails, reopening it will be a nightmare, but determination drives me downwards.
The Gilded Drop is exactly where I remember it.
The area surrounding it is spotless. Magic repels the dust, preserving a tiny pocket of order amid the decay.
The Drop predates the current security system. When we used it, it recognised blood, opened its doors and reported to no one.
Whether that remains true, I am about to discover.
The door is made from a dark-gold metal—brass, according to some half-remembered lesson. Whether brass conducts magic or contains it, I cannot recall.
I press my palm against the panel.
Pain flares through my hand.
My friend once said it felt like electrocution, and we mocked her for being dramatic.
She was not wrong.
The nerves in my arm burn all the way to my shoulder. My jaw locks against a cry.
Then the door opens.
I step inside, refusing to dwell on whether the mechanism still functions, whether it can still convey a living body rather than a sealed crate, or whether I am about to be scattered across the sky.
I am doing this for Mina.
That is enough.
The door hisses shut.
One breath—and it opens again.
I stagger out, grip the wall and stand very still while the world rights itself.
The Drop moves upwards and sideways—left, then right—in a manner that defies physics and most standards of Immortal decency.
I swallow hard as the protein bar I ate in the car threatens a return journey.
I was an extraordinarily foolhardy child to ride this for fun.
The exit is immaculate. No dust, moss or mildew stains the stone despite the damp.
Water gurgles around me.
A fountain guards the entrance. The outer door is built into its plinth, indistinguishable from the surrounding stone until it opens.
I ease it forwards.
It sticks.
My heart lurches.
If someone has bolted it from the outside, I am trapped.
I put my shoulder against it, and the door yields with a faint scrape.
Through the narrow gap, I see that Fountain Square is exactly as I remember it.
Shops and restaurants curve around the perimeter. At the centre stands the fountain, its plinth concealing the Gilded Drop. Two intertwined horses rear above the basin, water spilling from their open mouths.
Beside the hidden doorway, however, the water does not fall.
Droplets hang in mid-air, frozen in the act of descending, held by magic that neither strains nor shimmers.
It simply holds.
For all I know, those droplets have remained there for centuries.
I cannot resist poking the nearest one.
It bursts against my fingertip. Cold water splashes across my skin.
The streetlights are ornate, and every surface is maintained to look newly installed. Not a scrap of litter mars the square. The paving tiles are brilliant white, flecked with some glittering substance that catches every light.
After years amid the Districts’ grey concrete and grime, the brightness is almost painful.
Even the grout is immaculate.
I have seen homes less clean.
Shop windows display beautiful things: designer clothes, sculptural furniture, objects created purely to be admired. The nearest restaurant exhales the scent of foreign cuisine—rich, layered and complex—and my stomach cramps as though it has forgotten the concept of food.
The air itself is different.
Fresher.
Magic is palpable here in a way it never is below. It slides across my skin, tingles along my arms and lifts the fine hairs in a wash of goosebumps that has nothing to do with the cold.
It is too much.
I press myself against the wall and breathe.
Then I study the people.
They are astonishing.
Hair glossy and perfectly arranged. Skin polished like labradorite.
They are elegantly dressed in the effortless style of people who never have to think about money.
Their clothes are tailored to the millimetre, and they move as the truly comfortable always do, as though the ground performs a small favour by existing beneath them.
They appear to be an entirely different species.
I have made a mistake.
I forgot how people dress up here.
I look down at myself.
Combat trousers. Battered, road-worn boots. Up here, even my beautiful coat—so prized, so precisely fitted that I can’t wear a thick jumper beneath it, utterly irreplaceable—resembles rags.
If I step into the square now, security will return me to the Districts before I make it halfway across.
So I wait.
I wait for the light to fade, the plaza to empty and the darkness to deepen enough for me to move without immediately giving myself away.
The Zone shifts at nightfall. It always has. Somewhere above the sea, this entire city will slide east to chase the last of the light, and I have no idea whether the lower end of the Drop travels with it or simply stops being anywhere at all.
It did not occur to me to wonder before I stepped in.
Nothing can be done about it now, so I let it wait its turn.
Slumped beside the hidden door and the suspended droplets, I watch people stroll, chat and laugh. Occasionally, they quarrel in hushed tones, as though even anger must be tasteful here.
Gradually, shop shutters descend. Restaurant doors lock. Lights dim one by one.
Voices fade.
At last, only the wind and the fountain’s endless whisper remain.
My breath emerges in slow white clouds. Cold has seeped into my bones and settled into every bruise.
Yet beneath the chill, another sensation thrums.
A low, persistent current I have not felt in years.
My magic.
Not enough to write a sigil.
Not enough to command.
But mine.
Up here, it lies closer to the surface than it has in a very long time.
I rise.