Lament for a Lost Soldier #2
“You’re all right,” Mallory says, pulling his handkerchief from her purse. “Put this to your mouth. Breathe, vralen. Not too fast.”
As she blinks away her tears, she makes out the shadows of other bodies, hurriedly trotting in the same direction. Behind them, bells ring out from the Palas towers. “What happened—” she starts.
“Tender Guard,” Mallory rasps. “They’re clearing the streets.”
Air struggles into her lungs, sluggish, burning.
She recognizes her own work, a foul perfume of galvanic honeydew and pepperberry, with enough ecdytoxin to peel off a thin layer of its victims’ skins.
As Mallory drags her down the alley, sharing the handkerchief between them, she curses the perfection with which she formulates the Marshal’s fumes, both in maximum and miniature.
“We need—far—” she wheezes through the fumigants. “We need to go—”
“I know.” The bell of a streetcar approaches from behind, and Mallory grabs her about the waist. “Rebirth far enough?”
She gasps as her feet are pulled from the cobblestones.
He jumps up the steps of the last car and heaves her through the door.
They push through the uneasy crowd, and collapse together on a velvet seat at the car’s end.
The other passengers are equally shaken, and for once, when Aster leans down between her knees to hack up a lung, she is not alone.
“You all right?” Mallory asks. “You were … not there for a second.”
“Only … galvanic,” she answers. “Honeydew. Memory. It fucks with memory.”
“What happened?” someone asks from another seat, pressing her nose against the back window. The car jerks in belches of purple smoke, hesitating at every turn.
“Something at the Opera,” suggests a man with broken glasses. “A fire.”
“Someone’s not happy with the ending of The Lilies,” says another.
“An attack,” sighs a third. “It’s that season again. Better pick a side now.”
The other occupants laugh nervously, but Aster only groans.
“Elspeth,” she mutters.
“She’ll be all right,” Mallory says. “Just breathe.”
He lays a hand on her back and she blinks up at him. Her tears have dislodged a set of her false eyelashes, which now perch on the bridge of his nose. Behind his head, haloed in crystalline spall, the fragmented moon eases toward the cityscape.
Aster lowers her eyes, staring at the mess she’s made of his handkerchief. Its colors have dulled, its threads frayed. His initials, serif by serif, are coming loose. “I’m sorry. I ruined it.”
“Vralen, it’s fine.” He seems nothing less than pleased. “Some things are made to unravel.”
Guy lies on a leather bed in Borisch he struggles and is tranquilized.
For hours, he drifts in and out of consciousness, uncertain he is alive but beyond sure he is fired.
News trickles in from above, droplets of signal in a deluge of noise.
From his nook in the infirmary, he can gather from hearsay an estimation of casualties, of consequences, of costs.
Eir Boris XII is on the telephone with the Bureau of Sanitation, who is on the phone with the Grand Marshal.
Though the details are hazy, it’s clear enough that the Sreckt Brothers are pointing their fingers at Borisch & Sons, Borisch is pointing theirs at a rogue operative from Sanitation, and Three is pointing hers, more or less, at Guy.
“I specifically remember telling you not to break anything,” she says, pacing the row of cots as Dr. Nic prods him for injuries.
She’s one-armed again, having caught the other under the rolling Sreckt lorry (and her good one, she emphasizes by waving her oaken stump in Guy’s face).
“Numbers are still coming in. Some sod from Finance has already gone mad trying to quantify the mess. Thirty million marks’ worth of structural damage.
Countless, priceless works. Or worthless.
We’ll never know—and that’s the real tragedy, they say. ”
Guy cradles his pounding head. Failed by both memory and comprehension, he can muster no explanation. I didn’t mean to seems at once the worst and only correct response.
“Where’s Dawn—” he moans instead, before Dr. Nic pries open his mouth. Her gloves are stained from a recent surgery, and Guy doesn’t know if it’s the smell of the rubber or the blood on them that sickens him more.
“Dawn!” Three spits. “The next time you see that man, you get on your knees and kiss his feet. Carried you out of there like a bride to the altar. Fucking disastrophe, Guylag. The whole place is in chaos. Grand Marshal took the affront to his statue personally. What did you do?”
“Where’s Dawn?” he repeats as soon as Nic removes her hands from his mouth. “Is he okay?”
“Okayer than you. He’s at headquarters taking the heat. Quality Improvement is probably trying to beat something intelligible out of him.”
“You’ll live,” Nic says, disappointed she can find no injury to fix (or worsen).
“Don’t get comfortable, Moulène,” Three continues.
“They’re coming for you next. Management still doesn’t know what charges’ll be brought against us.
Negligence, vandalism, treason—” She turns on her heel and kicks the next bed.
“The whole place is still peeling apart. It’s malignant.
No one has any idea how we’d begin to clean up—or how we’re gonna catch those things that crawled outta that fucking mess.
” She shoves the table next to his bed and kneels in its place, finding the best angle to cut him with her glare.
“Tell me what you did. I can’t talk our way out of this if you don’t give me something to talk about. ”
“I tried to kill it,” he says quietly.
“Kill what?”
“That thing. The same thing—as Abrupt Ends.”
“Your dragon.”
“I couldn’t—it just—” The word bred hangs unsaid in his mouth. It seems both insufficient and too ominous. “It molted.”
“Molted.” Three starts pacing again. She buzzes to herself for a while, muttering about leaks in gas lines, explosive reactions between fumigants and volatile pigments, the instability of the ancient power grids that germinate from the midcity.
“God. The mess it left behind. No bug could do that. This was something else entirely.”
“Three.”
“Must have been the wiring. Ancient, the kind that breaks all alchemical laws. Real arcane shit.”
“Three.”
“What?”
“Ninety-eight.”
“Fine. It was three ninety-eight. You think I don’t know that?
” She folds her arm and a half. “A new breed of termite with a new breed of toxin—sure. Borisch & Sons has been dealing with that shit for hundreds of years. It doesn’t pull us out of the frying pan.
Only proves we left a job unfinished.” She dismisses his pleading look.
“You’re trying to give me an explanation when I need an excuse.
Don’t say anything about Abrupt Ends. Hell, don’t say anything about Conundrum.
We had no idea. Never saw any bugs. Fired no canisters.
And we definitely didn’t break out any phlogiston. ”
“Three, it killed that Srecktman.”
“Good. Teach him to fuck with our call. Far as we know, this is his fault. You stayed right by me, in the lorry.”
“Don’t think we’ll get away with that,” Guy says miserably.
“Oh, fuck off! You spend your entire life lying through your teeth and now you go straight? Look, if Sreckt pins this on us, they’re gonna feed me to the tulips.
Dawn might get out, being legally dead and all, but you—best case, the Twelfth will sell your contract to some broker in Strangleroot and you’ll be working off the damage till the moon rises whole. ”
His stomach turns. “Tyro—”
“Yeah,” she sighs. “Tyro. What to do with that one?”
“I can’t do it,” Guy mutters. “Been through four names, four roots already. I can’t go back there. Can’t take her to the beggars’ troughs again.”
“No, you can’t.” Three’s voice softens. “Call someone. Send her to Orphanwell before this gets messier.”
“No,” he croaks.
“Textile Crack, then. Fresh beds there. And they’re always looking for small fingers.”
“No.”
“Then what? You’re gonna try to run away? All the way to the countryside?”
Guy drives the heels of his palms into his eyes, commanding himself not to cry. His head throbs, spinning like the wheels and blades of the meatpacking plants. He can still smell the misted blood.
“I need the phone,” he says eventually.
“You got change?”
“You think I’ve got change?” he snaps.
“Fine. Pay it back.” She stands. “You still owe me a favor, so do me this one: Don’t make a break for it. I mean it. You’ll get yourself killed, and Quality Improvement will be furious if you die before they see you hanged.”
The south end of Rebirth, like many other zones ravaged by Revivalist warfare, is a jungle of hazards.
Most of the streetlamps have blown out, and those that remain bleed the barest of light.
The pavement has been reduced to silver gravel, lily-padded by the open mouths of some monstrous sort of fly trap, a species that Aster can’t recognize but probably lies somewhere in the middle of the Borisch Manual, among the deluge of pests that emerged during the Revival.
Deformed corpses of restaurants and shops lie strewn across intersections.
Occasionally an intact wall or walkway or perfectly set living room will jut from the rubble, survivors of the battle or the neighborhood’s spontaneous attempts to regrow from it.
The whole avenue is a dizzying, unnavigable mess, and a surprisingly pleasant one.