Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Skills belong to the spirit or semblance, not the body they occupy.
—Florence Marryat,
Spirit and Matter: The Logic of Colocation
The darkness of the stairs into the Strata folded its silky touch around me.
I dug my Zippo out and flicked it alight.
The walls were lined with puke-green tile, the grout brown with mold.
The air hung thick and humid like a pool locker room.
Carefully, we descended the concrete steps as they wound laterally and down.
Soon, the black turned to grey, and the grey to hazy white.
My head began to feel as if someone had taken a bat to my skull. My vision blurred and memory returned . . .
. . . I stare at my brother Dan lying in his casket.
I could reach out and touch him, but I know he’s not really here.
Not the alive part. A rival gang had killed him.
But I need to talk to him. He was the only one who would listen to me .
. . In my shadow, from the large occlusion—the dark, lake-like scar—another wound snaked away like a tributary river. Just now, it was
glowing bright amber and felt raw as an exposed nerve.
I snapped my hair ties. No help.
I hummed a finished line from my song, but it was more aspirins for migraines. A moment later, our footsteps rang against a steel spiral staircase.
I clutched the iron stair railing to steady myself. “Are you all right?” Cassius asked.
I wasn’t, but we needed to hurry. “They have to be close.”
We got moving and soon entered the Modern Stratum inside an octagon at the center of a sewage pumping station.
London had built these elaborate utilities in the nineteenth century to deal with the immense sewage problem known as the Great Stink.
Topside, they were defunct. I’d visited a few of them on a tour sponsored by the British Library.
Around the octagon, several bright sconce lamps shone, lighting up intricate ironwork, brickwork, panels, and columns in red, green, ivory, and gold.
The colors seemed more vibrant than they were in the world above, as if the vestigial memories creating the place lent it some romance.
The stench was gone, leaving a cathedral of detailed Romanesque architecture that stretched up and out in radiant glory.
Unlike the world above, the four hallways that led away from the octagon each flowed with a small canal—two in and two out—running beneath the floor of the octagon itself.
Cobbled walkways lined the canals, which stretched beyond the octagon into a station the size of a school gymnasium before disappearing into brick culverts.
The water smelled surprisingly fresh, nothing like sewage.
Wrought into the ironwork that fronted the four walled sides of the octagon was the Shiguan mark.
Cassius scanned the octagon. “I do not see them.”
We started down one of the four short hallways away from the octagonal platform. Before we reached the end, Cassius stopped short, and I almost walked into him.
He turned, placing a hand on my chest. “It might be best if you let me go on alone. I can search the rest of the station without you.”
“What don’t you want me to see?”
“Even for me, it is an unholy sight.” Cassius lowered his hand. “I do not think you are ready—”
“We’re wasting time.” I pushed past him.
Set into the floors of the broader station were hundreds of tiled rectangular tubs. The canals of river water fed the system of pools through dozens of small tributary channels. And in nearly every pool lay a submerged body.
I could hardly breathe. “Holy . . .”
Beyond the watery graveyard, enormous pumping engines hulked in the gloom, their pistons rising and falling in slow mechanical rhythm, pushing the water across the bodies.
“Suffer the gods,” muttered Cassius.
I finally caught my breath. “Why would anybody be storing so many bodies?” But I had a guess. When you go to war, you need an army.
Cassius bowed his head as if in prayer and said nothing.
I bent over, hands on my knees, to steady myself and take a few deep breaths. “Didn’t plan on looking for a body in a watery graveyard today.”
I lit my Zippo again, and we spread out on opposite sides of the canal.
We wove past dozens of pools, stepping carefully over ice that had formed at their edges.
Following a small tributary channel, I looked into one pale face after another.
A few were familiar—Leinad Ke, founder of Banner music streaming; Morris Williams, London’s ranking minister for creative industries, media, and arts.
There were others, too. Then, in the third row of pools, I found Angela DuFresne.
Feeling sucker punched, I knelt down, needing to catch my breath but also wanting to say something to her. In the flickering light of my Zippo I saw the puffy white scars on her forearms. She’d survived her own demons only to wind up here.
I clung to the side of Angela’s tub, the slick tiles cold against my fingers. She deserved better than this. I tried to think of a good prayer for her. At first nothing came. Then . . .
“When the cold steel pulls, the warm blood feels like an invitation you can’t stop. But don’t give in. Live another day. You’re more than what others thought.”
Her lyric.
A sharp pain stabbed behind my eyes. I pressed at my temples with the balls of my hands, but couldn’t make it stop.
A wave of nausea gripped me. Feeling suddenly weak, my legs buckled, and I fell forward into the tub.
Freezing water engulfed me as I splashed down past Angela’s body.
I didn’t thrash or kick. I just . . . floated down.
Then Cassius’s giant hand shot into the water, grabbed the collar of my jacket, and hauled me out.
He laid me on the tile beside Angela’s pool. “Jack?”
The pain in my head had dialed back by half. “I’m okay.”
I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he helped me to my feet. “Come with me.”
We made our way between several rows of pools and crossed a small footbridge to a tub where fresh water lay splashed all around. Just beneath the surface of the water was Henry’s killer. His bindings had been removed.
“Grab his feet,” I said, reaching in and hooking him by his armpits.
We lifted him out and laid him on the tile. His smeared makeup made him look like a mad clown. I searched his pockets. Nothing.
Then I remembered something Emaline had said about compulsion bindings.
I dug out my Zippo again, lit it, and held it on the other side of his face.
A thin shadow cast down on the wet tiles.
I didn’t know what I was looking for. Nothing I’d read or heard suggested I’d see much from a dead man.
His shadow had the grey cast of a vestige, but frozen as if caught in a moment in time, instead of the flickering of gleam notes.
A number of occlusions still lay scattered inside the grey.
But inside one of them, I saw something—an almost imperceptible pulse like a heart beating at the longest, most painful intervals. It spread from a raw scar torn in the rough shape of supplicating hands holding Brach’s tobacco leaf, encircled by a chain.
I dug the field manual out of my pocket. Water beaded and rolled off the resin-coated pages. But I didn’t need to read it. I knew instinctively that scars resulting from “crimes against the soul” would never fully heal. Not even in death.
And this scar was a combination of Henry’s and Brach’s personal sigils. I sighed with relief. I had the evidence to put Brach away.
Still dizzy and nauseous, I clambered to my feet. “Let’s get him topside.” As we carried the body back into the octagon, two men and a woman, all in dark clothes, stood waiting for us at the stairs.