Veya stood at the top of the stairs.
She was not tall. Five foot four. Her frame was narrow through the waist and wide through the shoulders and every visible muscle was cut to the bone. No fat anywhere. Her arms were bare under a leather jacket that hung open with iron spikes along the collar and down the sleeves. Underneath it she wore a string bra that held her chest and nothing else above the waist. Her stomach was a grid of hard abs, her forearms roped with tendon. Her hair was red, cut short on the sides and long on top and pushed back from her face.
She was looking down at Sable with her lips pulled back from her teeth. The smile was wide and feral and it reached her eyes. She looked like she had been waiting for this.
The facility guard beside her had a blade in each hand. He was not looking at Sable. He was looking at the bodies on the ground floor. Six of them. His throat moved and he shifted his weight onto his back foot.
Sable stood at the bottom of the stairs. She read Veya's body.
Every signal hit her at once. The density of the muscle. The way the weight sat on the balls of her feet. The tension in the calves that said the legs could move before the brain decided to move them. The steadiness of the breathing. The heart rate — slow, controlled, not elevated. The woman at the top of the stairs was looking at six bodies and a blood-covered child and her heart rate had not changed.
Sable had met one person like this. Fen. Fen had been able to seal his signals entirely. This woman was not sealing anything. She was broadcasting. Her body was loud and open and everything it said was the same thing.
She was the strongest person Sable had seen since Fen.
Sable's grip tightened on the knife , She was on guard.
Veya reached between her breasts and pulled out a knuckle duster. Brass. Heavy. It caught the lamplight as she slid it over the fingers of her right hand. She flexed the hand once and the joints cracked.
The facility guard's eyes moved to Veya's chest and stayed there a beat too long.
Veya's jaw tightened and her eye twitched. The doctor had been looking at her like that all evening — the long stare when she leaned against the wall, the way his eyes dropped when she crossed her arms. She had wanted to cave his face in. She had not done it because the chain above her was short and heavy. Crane answered to Harrow. Harrow would kill her without a blink. The doctor was Voss's man. Killing Voss's surgeon would travel up the chain and come back down on her with a weight she could not survive. She had swallowed it. The taste was still in her mouth.
She looked at the facility guard. He was still looking at her chest.
She hit him.
The knuckle duster connected with his face at full force. Her arm was straight, her shoulder behind it, her hips behind her shoulder. The weight of her body traveled through the bones of her arm and into the brass and into his skull.
His face collapsed. The nose went first, then the orbital bones, then the jaw. The jaw did not break — it powdered. The bones of his face compressed inward and the force continued through the cranial vault and the brain inside it went from solid to liquid in the time it took the sound to reach Sable's ears. His eyes burst from the pressure. The back of his skull hit the back of his spine as his body folded backward, his head touching his own back. His spine had snapped at the cervical junction.
He was very dead.
His body toppled forward and rolled down the stairs. The limbs folded at angles that did not exist in living bodies. It came to rest at Sable's feet with one arm draped across her shoe. She looked down at it. She looked up at Veya.
Her mouth was open gobsmacked. She closed it. The show of strength left her wary.
Veya cracked her neck and rolled her shoulders. She looked down at Sable with the same smile.
"Thanks for taking care of him," she said.
Sable understood. The woman was telling her the facility guard had been useless. That the bodies on the ground floor were not a threat to Veya. They were weight she had shed.
The annoyance hit Sable before the fear did. Her blood pushed faster. The heat spread from her chest into her arms and her neck and her face. Her skin flushed — the pale tone went red. Her eyes darkened. Her hair seemed to darken with them. The veins in her forearms and hands rose to the surface and stood against the skin. She was as ready as she could be.
Veya moved first.
She came down the stairs like a bulldozer. Three steps in one stride. The knuckle duster led. Her right arm drove forward in a straight punch aimed at the centre of Sable's face.
Sable threw herself backward. Her feet left the last step and she hit the ground floor. The fist passed through the space where her head had been. The wind from the punch moved her hair.
Veya landed on the ground floor behind her. The stone cracked under her boots. She was already turning.
Sable put distance between them — ten feet, fifteen. She backed toward the centre of the room. The bodies of the large man and the Saltfang and the facility guard were on the floor around her. She stepped over them without looking down. Her eyes were on Veya.
Veya advanced.
She threw the second punch. A jab. Fast. Faster than the first. Sable read the deltoid firing and moved left. The fist passed her right ear. Close. The brass touched the skin behind her ear — a graze, no pain. She was already reading the next movement before the contact registered.
The fist stopped in the air. Full speed to nothing. The momentum that should have carried Veya's arm and shoulder and body forward simply ceased. Her arm reversed. The fist came back along a different line, angled down, aimed at Sable's ribs.
Sable was already moving. She had read it in the twitch of Veya's deltoid again before the arm changed direction — the muscle had fired a fraction before the punch redirected. Sable dropped left. The brass passed over her shoulder.
Her knife came up.
The blade entered the inside of Veya's right wrist. The point found the gap between the radius and the ulna and drove through the flexor tendons and the median nerve. Sable twisted. The tendons separated. The nerve severed.
Veya's fingers opened. The knuckle duster fell and hit the stone floor and rang.
Veya pulled her hand back fast but the damage was done. Her right hand hung loose — the fingers would not close, the wrist would not rotate. The tendons that controlled the grip were cut.
She looked at her hand and then at Sable. The smile was gone. What replaced it was not fear but anger, hot and sudden, visible in the flush that climbed her neck and the way her teeth pressed together until the muscles in her jaw stood out.
She had not expected the knife to find the nerve. She had not expected the child to know where the nerve was. She had just lost a major exchange against a child who had not yet lost her milk teeth.
She stepped back and shifted her weight to her left side. Her left fist came up. She could still fight — she could fight with one hand better than most people could fight with two.
Sable pressed forward. She had seen the opening. The woman's right side was compromised and the balance had shifted. But Sable's body was running out too. The muscles in her legs were tearing — she could feel the fibres separating under the strain. Her arms were heavy. Her grip on the knife was held by will and not by strength. She needed to end this now.
She closed the distance. Eight feet. Six. Four.
Her foot slipped.
It did not respond the way it should have. The signal from her brain arrived late and the muscle fired slow. She caught herself with her left hand on the floor and pushed back up. Her hand was heavy.
She looked at her hand. The fingers were sluggish. She tried to make a fist. The fist closed at half the speed it should have.
Her blood was wrong. She could feel it the way she always felt her body — a thickness between her brain and her limbs, a delay that had not been there ten seconds ago.
She thought back. The second punch. The one she had dodged. The brass had passed her right ear.
The skin behind her ear was warm. A graze. She had not registered it as contact because it had not hurt. It had touched her and moved on and she had been reading the next punch before the first one finished.
The brass had been coated with something.
Her left leg locked. The knee would not bend. She shifted her weight to her right leg. Her right leg held for two seconds and then locked too. Her arms were still moving — her right hand still held the knife, her left hand was at her side. She could not move her legs. She was standing because her locked muscles held her upright. A statue in the middle of the ground floor.
She looked at Veya.
Veya was watching her. The anger had not left her face but underneath it was patience. She was waiting.
The child had killed six people with a knife. She was fast, precise, and she knew where to cut. Veya had watched the last three kills from the top of the stairs — the knee to the face, the thrown knife, the neck snap. The child moved like someone who had been taught by someone good.
Veya needed the child to think this was a contest of strength. If the child thought Veya's weapon was her fists she would keep her distance and use the knife and the speed and the precision that had carried her through six bodies. She would look for openings. She would be careful.
Veya did not need the child to be careful. She needed the child to be close. One graze. One touch of brass on skin. That was all.
Sable's right arm locked. The knife stayed in her grip because her fingers had been closed when the paralytic reached them. The hand was a claw around the handle. She could not open it or move it.
Her left arm went last. Her hand froze at her side. Her body was rigid, upright. Her eyes were open. She could see the room, Veya, the blood on the floor, the bodies, the lamplight.
She could not move.
A sound came from behind Veya. From the stairs. Small. Metal on metal. A click.
Veya's head turned. Her eyes went wide.
The gunshot was louder than anything Sable had heard in her life. It filled the ground floor and bounced off the stone walls and hit her eardrums from every direction at once.
The bullet entered her chest. Left side. Between the third and fourth ribs. It passed through the intercostal muscle and the pericardium and into the her heart.
She felt it. She felt every millimetre of it — the entry, the tearing, the wet heat that spread from the centre of her chest outward. Her heart beat once around the hole. It beat again. The second beat was wrong. The third beat did not come.
"I had it handled you fucking bastard."
Veya's voice. Behind her now. Above her. Sable was falling. Her locked body tipped backward like a cut tree, rigid, straight. She hit the stone floor with the back of her head. The impact was dull. She could not brace for it or turn or close her eyes.
She was looking at the ceiling. The stone was dark. The lamplight made it orange at the edges.
Her vision narrowed. The ceiling went grey, then dark at the edges. The blood in her chest was warm. The cold was coming from somewhere else — from inside her, from the place where her heart had been beating and was not beating anymore.
She could hear footsteps coming down the stairs. Steady. Unhurried. A man's weight. He crossed the ground floor and stopped beside her. She could see his face above her. Brown hair. Flat expression. He looked down at her.
A hand pressed against the side of her neck. Two fingers. Checking for a pulse.
She could not feel her pulse. She could not feel anything. The paralytic had taken her body. The bullet had taken her heart.
Her eyes were still open, looking at the ceiling. The grey was almost black now. The edges had closed in until there was only a small circle of light left. The circle had the colour of lamplight in it, and stone, and the flat face of a man she had never seen before.
The circle closed.
Sable's eyes went empty.
-x-
Pelt held two fingers against the side of her neck for ten seconds. He counted. There was nothing under his fingertips. No pulse. No movement. The skin was hotter than it should have been but he ignored it.
He stood. He picked her up by the scruff of her neck. Her body hung from his grip. Her arms dangled. The knife was still locked in her right hand. Her head lolled forward. Blood dripped from her chest onto the stone floor in a thin line as he carried her toward the stairs.
Veya was standing at the base of the staircase. Her teeth were together. Her jaw muscles stood out under the skin. A grinding sound came from her mouth. Her left fist was clenched. Her right hand hung at her side. Useless. Blood ran from the wrist down her fingers and dripped from the tips.
Pelt walked past her. He did not look at her. He did not slow down. He carried the dead child up the stairs the way a man carried a sack of grain. By the neck. At arm's length. The blood left a trail on the stone steps and then stoped.
The grinding in Veya's jaw got louder. She watched him go. She did not follow.
-x-
The corridor on the second floor was dark. One lamp. The door to the second room was closed. Pelt knocked once.
"Is the nuisance taken care of," Draem said from inside. He did not open the door or look up from what he was doing.
"Yes," Pelt said. "I brought her up. She may be worth something."
A pause. The latch slid. The door opened. Draem stood in the doorway with his sleeves rolled to his elbows and his hands clean. He looked at the child hanging from Pelt's fist.
He looked at her for a long time.
Renn was behind him. Still in the corner with his knees drawn up and his arms around his knees. His eyes were open. He had not moved since the scream.
He saw her.
His body went rigid. His mouth opened. His eyes locked on the dark hair and the blood-covered face and the arms that hung loose and the chest that was not moving. He knew her. He knew her before his mind had time to form the name — from the shape of her in the air, from the way her hair fell, from the size of her.
The sound that came out of him was not a scream. It was smaller than that. A sound that came from a place below the screaming, below the words, below everything he had built in seven years of being good and being strong and being the boy his mother had asked him to be. The sound was the floor giving way.
His face crumpled and his body folded. He pressed his forehead to his knees and something broke in his chest and blood came from his nose and ran down his lips and dripped onto his shirt. Not from a wound. From the pressure. The grief had pushed so hard against the inside of his body that something in his sinuses had ruptured.
He could not take any more. He had nothing left to take it with.
Draem glanced at him and turned back to the doorway.
"Give him the sedative," he said to Pelt. "He will make himself sick."
Pelt set the dead child on the floor. He went to Draem's bag and took out a vial and a cloth and pressed it over Renn's nose and mouth. Renn did not fight it. His eyes stayed on Sable's body as the cloth covered his face. His hand reached toward her and his fingers opened. The sedative took him before his arm finished extending. His hand dropped, his eyes closed, and his body went slack against the wall.
Draem stepped over Pelt and crouched beside the dead child.
He looked at her.
The skin was unmarked except for the bullet wound and a cut on her cheekbone where she had hit the stairs. No scarring, no disease marks, no malnutrition damage. The skin was smooth, pale with an undertone that looked like porcelain in the lamplight. Her hair was black and fine — even matted with blood it had a sheen to it. He pushed it back from her face. The bone structure underneath was clean and symmetrical. The jaw, the cheekbones, the brow. Her eyes were open and dark and empty and even empty they were striking.
He had seen thousands of bodies. He had opened most of them. He had never paused at the outside of one.
If this child had been born outside Meteor City she would have been dressed in clean clothes and fed three meals a day and someone would have brushed this hair every morning. She would have been photographed. She would have been loved for the shape of her face alone. Here she was on a stone floor with a bullet in her heart and blood drying on her skin and she was a commodity.
He hoped her blood was not valuable.
He took the kit from his bag — the pin, the strip. He pricked her finger. The blood came slow with no heartbeat to push it. He squeezed the fingertip until a drop welled and pressed the strip to it.
The colour rose. He watched it and held the strip to the lamp.
Common. One of the most common types on the chart. No value in the blood, no value in the organs. A dead child with common blood was worth nothing to the standing demand list.
He looked at her again. The face, the hair, the skin. The body was small and perfectly proportioned. The muscle under the skin was dense and clean. Even in death it had a form to it that drew the eye.
He stood and checked his watch and looked at Pelt.
"How long has she been dead."
Pelt thought. "Six to eight minutes."
Draem nodded. He looked at the dead child on the floor — the face that did not belong in this city, the body that was worth nothing to him and everything to someone else.
"Take her to the Dollmaker," he said. "In the Pale."
Pelt looked at him and his face twisted with disgust.
"I know, I know Pelt. But that sicko collects beautiful things and sells them to other sickos," Draem said. His mouth curved into the same smile he had given Renn. "This one will sell for a lot. He has never seen anything like her. Nobody has."
Pelt crouched beside the body. He closed her eyes with his thumb and forefinger — they had been staring at him and he did not like it. He pulled the knife from her clawed grip and set it aside.
"Take the knife," Draem said. "Give it to him with the body. He likes to keep things from their past. Calls it provenance."
Pelt shrugs and put it back in her waistband.
Draem put the strip in his pocket and wiped his hands on the cloth from his bag. He looked at the boy unconscious against the wall and the dead girl on the floor and the blood on the stone.
"Today has been a gold mine," he said.
Pelt picked up Sable's body and left.
Draem watched him go. He closed the door and turned to the boy.
Renn was slumped against the wall. His breathing was slow and deep, the sedative having taken him fully. His face was slack. The blood from his nose had dried in two lines down his upper lip. His hand was still extended, fingers open, reaching for something that was no longer there.
Draem crouched beside him and looked at the boy's face for a moment. Then he reached out and placed his hand on the top of Renn's head and smoothed the hair back from the boy's forehead. Gently. The way a father touched a sleeping child.
"Rest," he said. "We have a long road ahead of us."
He patted the boy's head twice, then stood and went to his bag and began arranging his instruments for the morning.