Day 24, 3rd District — Outside the Vitalität Bank, Night
⠀
"Hang up," Gieffrin said.
⠀
His voice crossed the empty street without effort, level and unhurried. Henrique's thumb found the screen, and the voice cut off mid-sentence.
⠀
"Mr. Melisanbeque." Henrique's smile arrived a half-second late, the way it always did when a room turned against him, and it took him another half-second to find where he'd left the rest of his composure. "This is a surprise. The bank is closed for the evening, but if the Null Post has business with the Vitalität, I'm sure it can be filed through the proper channels in the morning."
⠀
"I'm not here on behalf of the Null Post."
⠀
"No. No, I don't imagine you are." Henrique's eyes dropped to the sword and rose again. "You're a participant. Then this is a matter for the Overseer's rules, and I would remind you those rules are quite specific about the penalty for—"
⠀
"I know what they say." Gieffrin crossed the street. He did not hurry, and he did not slow; he walked to the middle of the avenue and stopped there, thirty feet from the revolving door, under the unbroken blue glow of the bank's security lights. "I'm not here for the points, either."
⠀
He reached into his coat with his free hand and drew out a folded sheet of paper. He held it up so the light caught the letterhead: a gold sunburst, a line of engraved script, the crest of the Vitalität Coalition.
⠀
"Do you know what this is?"
⠀
Henrique squinted. "It looks like a collections notice."
⠀
"A notice of delinquency. Account 5-4417-N. Outstanding principal, eight thousand Nanum. Accrued interest at the prevailing rate, eighty-six thousand, four hundred." Gieffrin's voice didn't rise or fall. "Recommended action: enforcement. It went out on the seventeenth to a rented room in the 5th District that had been empty for three days. The man who lived there was already in the ground."
⠀
Henrique's brow furrowed.
⠀
"Newbeck," Gieffrin said.
⠀
"Newbeck." Henrique tested it. "Aristio Newbeck. The player." A flicker of understanding crossed his face, and then, because he was who he was, a flicker of relief. "Ah. I see. You've come about the debt. Mr. Melisanbeque, I assure you that account was flagged by an automated sweep, one of tens of thousands, long before I had any—"
⠀
"You don't remember him?"
⠀
"I'm sorry?"
⠀
"You don't remember the account. You don't remember the name. He was a rounding error to you, one line on one sub-ledger in one sweep of the lower Districts, and you signed the sweep." Gieffrin folded the notice carefully along its original crease. "That's what I came to tell you. Not that it was cruel. I know what cruelty looks like."
⠀
He tucked the notice back inside his coat.
⠀
Six years ago, the Null Post had sent him to the Ashwell Underpass to shut down an unlicensed fighting ring, and he had found a man on an overturned crate with a chalk stick behind his ear and a cigarette burning down to the filter, and he had not shut it down. He'd sat on the next crate instead. He couldn't have said why. Possibly because the man had looked up at a Null Post Fixer with a drawn katana and said, without a trace of alarm, "Well, that's a real nice sword. You gonna use it, or you just here to look at me with it?"
⠀
They had smoked that first night. Gieffrin didn't smoke. He'd smoked anyway.
⠀
"Vitalität's got a hook in me," Aristio had said, sometime in the second hour, in the tone he might have used to mention the weather. "Borrowed eight thousand, the winter the Heart tried to squeeze this whole underpass for protection. Figured I'd have it paid by spring. That was nine years ago. Prevailin' rate, they call it. I've paid 'em back four times over, and I still owe 'em more than I started with." He'd shrugged, tapping ash. "Same as everybody down here. It ain't a loan... It's a damn leash."
⠀
"You could run."
⠀
"Run where? They own the whole address book, friend." He'd grinned, tired and crooked. "Ain't never gonna finish payin' it before I die. So I figure I might as well have some fun in the meantime."
⠀
That was the chalk circle. That was the whole of it. Gieffrin hadn't understood until much later that every fight in the Ashwell was a small, stubborn act of defiance against a number that would never come down.
⠀
He had come back to the underpass eleven times that year, and forty times the year after. He had never once asked what the number was. He'd told himself it was none of his business. It was the single thing he regretted most.
⠀
"Name a figure," Henrique said.
⠀
The sentence dragged Gieffrin back to the avenue. Henrique had taken a step backward without seeming to notice, and another, until his shoulder blades touched the cold glass of the revolving door. He was still smiling, but it had gone thin and frantic, a smile trying very hard to be a negotiating position.
⠀
"Any figure. I can void that account tonight, right now, from the terminal inside. I can void every account in the 5th. I can void the 9th's audit, I can unfreeze forty thousand households before morning, and I will put every last order in writing." His voice climbed with each offer. "I can concede the game. My points, whatever they are, are yours for the asking. Consider it a gesture of good faith."
⠀
"You can't forgive a debt to a dead man," Gieffrin said. "There's nobody left to pardon."
⠀
"Then what do you want?"
⠀
Gieffrin didn't answer. He only looked at him, and Henrique understood, in the slow, sickening way a man understands a bill he has never once read, that nothing on earth was going to be entered on that ledger tonight except the one line.
⠀
His hand went into his jacket.
⠀
On the roof of the pharmacy across the avenue, sitting cross-legged in the shadow of a water tank with a half-peeled peach in his lap, Yisheng Wu watched the banker draw and set the paring knife down.
⠀
He had spent two nights tracing Gieffrin Melisanbeque across the Ring, and he could not have said, with any honesty, whether he was hunting him or following him. The rules were plain. Half of a dead man's Resonance passed to the man who killed him. Gieffrin had fifty-eight points and no one left in the world to defend them, and a man could do worse than spend an evening working out the arithmetic. It was, in any case, the only kind of arithmetic Yisheng still trusted.
⠀
Below him, Henrique's gun cleared the lapel. It was a compact six-shot with a pearl grip, the kind a man carries for years and never fires outside a range. He pointed it at Gieffrin's chest with both hands, and both hands were shaking.
⠀
Gieffrin did not so much as look at it.
⠀
"Safety's on," he said.
⠀
Henrique blinked. His thumb scrabbled at the frame, hunting for the catch, and Yisheng, watching from the roof, noticed something small and strange. Gieffrin's right hand, the one not holding the sword, had drifted an inch from his hip and curled, unconsciously, around nothing at all. The trigger hand of a man who had once known exactly where a trigger was.
⠀
Then Gieffrin wasn't standing in the middle of the avenue anymore.
⠀
Yisheng never saw him cross the distance. He saw the lamp, and the empty street, and then the katana, already in the air, a long pale arc of hungry light drawn once through the dark between one heartbeat and the next. The pearl-handled pistol fell to the pavement in two pieces. Henrique stood there, clutching at nothing, with a very surprised expression, and then, quite gently, he sat down against the revolving door.
⠀
"What," he said. His hand went to his chest and came away dark. "What time is it?"
⠀
It was such a small, absurd, deeply human question that Gieffrin actually paused. He drew a silver pocketwatch from his vest, thumbed it open, and read it in the pale glow of his own blade.
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"Twenty-three hours, fifty-two minutes, and nine seconds past midnight." He snapped it shut. "You may want to note it, for the file."
⠀
Henrique laughed. It was a wet, startled little sound. His eyes went very wide, and for one moment he looked exactly like what he had never once been allowed to be in his entire adult life: a man who had run out of things to calculate.
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Then he stopped.
⠀
From the wound, from the still chest, a thread of something pale lifted into the air like breath on a cold morning. It hung there, faintly shaped, faintly frightened, and Yisheng, on the roof, felt the hair rise on his arms as it turned toward the sword. The katana's light swelled, steady and warm and satisfied, and the thread poured itself into the steel in a single long, silent stream. Frost spread across the blade in the shape of a face, screaming without a sound, and then the frost thinned, and the face was gone.
⠀
The hunger stopped. It was a strange thing, how loud it had been until it wasn't.
⠀
Gieffrin wiped the sword once on the hem of his coat, though there was nothing on it to wipe, and slid it home into its sheath.
⠀
"You can come down, Mr. Wu."
⠀
He hadn't raised his voice. He hadn't looked up.
⠀
Yisheng considered remaining where he was. He considered it for perhaps three seconds, which was two more than his pride could comfortably afford. Then he collected his peach, wiped the knife on a napkin, and went down the fire escape one rusted rung at a time, and crossed the empty avenue with his hands in plain view.
⠀
"How long have you known I was here?"
⠀
"Since the second night." Gieffrin was looking at the body. He did not look pleased. He did not look like anything. "You're quiet, but you smell of butter and pastries..."
⠀
"I had a long day in the kitchen." Yisheng stopped at a polite distance, a little more than a sword's length. "I should tell you that I had not made up my mind about you. I was going to decide over a peach."
⠀
"I assumed."
⠀
"Half of fifty-eight points is a great deal of Resonance. I am not a sentimental man. The rules permit it, and the penalty, frankly, is a price I have paid before." He turned the peach over in his fingers. "But that was not a ranged weapon, Mr. Melisanbeque, and your hand went to a holster that isn't there. I should like to know, before I decide anything, what I am actually looking at."
⠀
For a while, Gieffrin didn't answer. A cab rolled past at the far end of the avenue, slowed, took in the man on the ground, and very carefully accelerated away.
⠀
"Have you ever heard of the Gunsmith Office?" he asked at last.
⠀
"I'm afraid not."
⠀
"Nobody seems to know it by name anymore. It isn't a regular Fixer Office. It holds no territory. It has a workshop, about forty thousand square feet, where every barrel in the building is cut by hand and every child is taught to use one." His voice remained perfectly even. "They took in orphans. I was one of them. I learned to load a rifle before I learned to read. By fourteen, I could put a round through a wedding ring at four hundred meters, and they had a name for me that I won't repeat. They would point me in a direction and tell me when to fire."
⠀
"At people...?"
⠀
"At marks. That's how the word was used." Gieffrin's fingers flexed once against his leg. "I never saw their faces. I'd had eleven years of it. I couldn't tell you a single one of their names."
⠀
Yisheng said nothing. He had spent a lifetime among people who preferred not to be looked at while they spoke, and he had learned that the kindest thing a listener could do was become furniture.
⠀
"The man who raised me looked at me properly, once. He'd been at my shoulder for a decade. He saw something at the bottom of it he didn't like, and he was afraid, and he was right to be." Gieffrin's mouth twitched. "So I left. I put the rifles down, I walked out of that district, and I haven't fired a gun since. Not once."
⠀
"And the sword?"
⠀
"She isn't a gift. She's closer to a debt." He put a hand on the hilt, lightly, the way a man rests his palm on the head of an old dog. "I picked her up off of a Fixer a few years back. She... woke when he died. She drank what he was, and she liked it, so I've been feeding her ever since. The ones I kill go into the steel, and they stay there. Every one of them. And she lends me what they knew."
⠀
Yisheng's eyes went to the blade, still faintly warm in its scabbard, and then to the man sitting against the door.
⠀
"What they... knew?"
⠀
"Reflexes. Patience. The years they spent getting good at whatever they were good at. They lend it whether they like it or not." He tapped the sheath. "One hundred and forty-three. One hundred and forty-four, as of just now. Some of them still argue. I let them. It's the least bit of closure I can grant them."
⠀
As if on cue, a thin, muffled voice seemed to seep out of the sheath, so faint that Yisheng took it at first for wind through the steel. It said, quite distinctly, "What time is it?"
⠀
Yisheng went very still. He knew that voice. He had heard it, just a few minutes ago, asking the same question through a mouthful of blood.
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Gieffrin didn't flinch. "He'll ask for a while. They all repeat something. The first week is always the loudest." He bent his head toward the scabbard. "Twenty-three fifty-three," he murmured, and the voice trailed off into a sort of grudging silence. "It helps, sometimes, if someone answers."
⠀
"And Mr. Newbeck?"
⠀
"No." It was the only time the voice moved at all, a hard, short syllable, like a door being shut. "She wanted him, but I didn't let her. I couldn't let her... I wouldn't have put him in the steel if she had wept." A beat. "This one, I gave her gladly."
⠀
The avenue was very still. Somewhere inside the bank, an alarm system chirped once, registering a door left open, and went quiet.
⠀
"The Overseer's letter said the game was not about cruelty," Yisheng murmured. "I've often wondered whether he lied."
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"He said he wouldn't lie. That's different." Gieffrin looked at him for the first time. His eyes were dark, dry, and remarkably calm. "You left a rose in the Ashwell. It was still there a few days ago, a little brown."
⠀
Yisheng's mouth opened and closed. It was, for a man who could talk his way through a boardroom full of frightened bankers, a remarkable failure.
⠀
"I did."
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"Thank you."
⠀
Yisheng looked down at the peach in his hand. He looked at it for some time, and when he looked up again, something had gone out of him, the way the heat goes out of a stove when the last coal falls.
⠀
He had stood on a roof for two nights, counting halves. He knew what the man before him was now. One hundred and forty-four men with one hundred and forty-four kinds of skill, behind a face that no longer had the slightest interest in being frightened, and no ambition left on earth to be talked out of. There was no fear in that man to take advantage of, no hunger to feed, no lever to push. To go through Gieffrin Melisanbeque, a man would have to go through all of them. And the man at the bottom of that stair would not even be angry.
⠀
And Yisheng found, with no small surprise, that he had no wish to do it.
⠀
"I withdraw my interest," he said. "I find I've lost my appetite."
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"Sensible."
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"I should tell you the man was quite dead before he asked the time. I don't say it to console you."
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"I know." Gieffrin turned back toward the body. "I'm done with the game, Mr. Wu. Tell the Overseer, if you ever meet him. No more tasks."
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"You will die of the rot."
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"Perhaps. I have fifty-eight points, and I have done the arithmetic. By my count the game ends before it reaches me." Something almost like a smile touched the corner of his mouth. "If I'm wrong, I'll have done the one useful thing I did all month."
⠀
Yisheng bowed, very slightly, with the peach in one hand and the paring knife in the other, and walked away down the middle of the empty avenue without looking back. Halfway to the corner, he stopped, took out the second peach from his coat pocket, looked at it, and put it away again.
⠀
ARCHtype: Unnamed Katana (name withheld by wielder)
Threat Level: N/A
Associated Individual: Gieffrin Melisanbeque (Null - 4th Division)
Ability: A katana that claims the soul of any person its wielder personally kills, sealing it inside the blade. Each soul lends the wielder a measure of what it knew in life: reflexes, patience, technique, whether or not the soul consents. The blade grows hungry near loose ARCH resonance, but cannot claim a soul the wielder did not kill.
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⠀
Day 25, 5th District — The Ashwell Underpass, Dawn
⠀
He didn't sleep. He hadn't slept in a day and a half, and there was a clean, quiet feeling behind his eyes that he decided was probably the rot, and then decided he didn't care.
⠀
The underpass was very still. Someone had swept the concrete since he'd last come, a cleaner, or the wind, and the chalk circle had been smudged into a pale gray ghost of itself. On the ground where Aristio used to sit, beside the overturned crate, lay a small carved rose, brown at the edges and curled at the petals, still holding its shape.
⠀
Gieffrin sat down on the crate beside it. He drew the folded notice out of his coat. He smoothed it flat across his knee, uncapped the pen he kept in his vest, and wrote across the sunburst in small, careful, clerkly letters.
⠀
CLOSED. — G.M.
⠀
He placed it under the rose, weighted with a chip of concrete, where the wind couldn't take it. It was, he was fairly sure, the only piece of paper in the entire Ring that the Vitalität could not enforce.
⠀
His palm had warmed at some point in the night. He turned it over. The number had climbed by seven, half of Henrique's, rounded down, and in the corner of his vision, faint as a watermark, he could feel the other half of the rule settling into him like a stone: the permanent price of a man who has killed another player, the quiet, irreversible dimming of whatever it was inside him that had ever been able to make anyone glad.
⠀
"Fitting," he said aloud, to no one. "I didn't have any left to give."
⠀
He sat there through the first gray light and the first sounds of the district waking, a hawker's cart, a shutter rolling up, a child somewhere shouting for a dog. Nothing in him spoke of triumph. Nothing in him spoke of grief either, not the flat, iron kind he had carried out of this underpass eleven days ago. It was closer to the way a room feels after a long argument has finally, finally ended: not happy, not sad, only quiet.
⠀
At his hip, the katana slept. It was the first time in weeks that it had.
⠀
He'd lost Aristio. That would not change. But he had been able to do one thing, one small, ugly, necessary thing, about the man who signed the sweep, and about the sweeps that hadn't yet been signed. The Relief and Resilience Plan would limp on without its father, but the man who had drawn it up in a drawer for years and kept it warm for a disaster was in the steel now, and the steel did not sign anything.
⠀
"I'm finished," Gieffrin said, to whoever might be listening. To the Overseer, wherever he sat behind his lights. To a man on a crate who could no longer hear him. "I'm finished with the game. If that means I go the way he did, then I go. I accept it."
⠀
There was no answer. There never is. But the glow on his palm dimmed, slowly, from a bright rainbow to something softer and steadier, like a lamp turned down for the night, and Gieffrin Melisanbeque leaned back against the cold brick of the Ashwell Underpass and closed his eyes.
⠀
⠀
Day 25, 1st District — Stellaire, Predawn
⠀
Stellaire's kitchen at five in the morning was a cathedral of dark steel and cold burners, and Yisheng moved through it without turning on the overhead lights, lighting the flames one at a time, as if lighting candles. He set a stockpot on the largest ring. He took down bones, and a bundle of leeks, and a bottle of the good sherry he never used for anything but this.
⠀
Consommé, he thought. The fourth attempt. The first three had gone cold outside a closed door.
⠀
While the stock came up to a bare tremble, he turned the night over in his mind. A man who had killed one hundred and forty-four and would not be angry at the hundred and forty-fifth. A man with a dead friend's debt folded in his coat, who had thanked him for a rose. Yisheng had been wrong about the shape of the thing. He'd thought Gieffrin a lock, and locks could be picked. He was a still pond. There was nothing to pick.
⠀
He had stood over Aristio's spot in the Ashwell and told the concrete he intended to win, and he had believed it. Standing here in the dark with the ladle in his hand, he wondered whether he'd said it aloud only because he needed something to pursue, some direction to point the ache. A rose for the dead. A crown for the living. It was a very tidy way to avoid asking what he would do with the rest of the month.
⠀
The stock shivered. He skimmed it patiently, the way you clear an argument. Then he set out a clean pot, a good pot, and ladled the first clear cup through three layers of cloth.
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"Leave it outside his door," he told the dawn runner when the boy shuffled in, yawning. "Do not knock. If he says anything, do not answer. If he says nothing, that is also correct."
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"Yes, chef."
⠀
He watched the boy go, then reached for the sherry and poured himself, quite unexpectedly, a very small glass.
⠀
He decided he wouldn't think about Gieffrin Melisanbeque again. Not as prey, at any rate. The man had earned that. He was going to cook.
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⠀
Day 25, 1st District — Stellaire, Morning
⠀
The letter arrived on a silver tray, delivered by a courier so pale and breathless that Yisheng wondered whether he'd run the whole way from the 3rd District. It was cream stock, heavy, sealed with green wax stamped with a crest of interlocking ivy leaves.
⠀
Yisheng, who had not slept, accepted it standing in the empty dining room in his shirtsleeves.
⠀
Illustrious Yisheng, artisan of the Stomach and bearer of three stars,
Fortune, that most capricious of hostesses, has seated the two of us at the same table, and I find I cannot dine in peace while a rival of such refinement still draws breath. I therefore beseech thee for a duel.
Let us meet upon the ground where the wall fell, in the shadow of the wound that the Ring now calls Breach-9, on the last day of the Overseer's game, as the sun goes down. Come alone. Come armed. Let the dead be our audience, and let the Ring see whose Euphoria is truer.
I remain, with all courtesy and no small regret, thy servant in the contest,
⠀
— Bethuel Mac Findlaech, Pursuer of Euphoria
⠀
He read it twice.
⠀
The crest was real. He had seen it printed on a crate of extremely expensive wine, once, in a stranger's cellar. The hand was fair and rounded and looked, at first pass, precisely like the hand of a man who wrote sonnets to loaves of bread. The rhymes did not come. The bright, ridiculous, boundless kindness that sat on every line Yisheng had ever heard Bethuel speak did not come either.
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Let the dead be our audience.
⠀
Bethuel Mac Findlaech was, by every account, a man who would have died before writing that sentence. He apologized to loaves.
⠀
Yisheng put the letter down on the polished mahogany and stared at it for a long moment, tasting it, the way he might have tasted a sauce someone else had claimed to make. The seasoning was wrong. Somebody had reached for Bethuel's voice with great skill and had used, instead of the man's warmth, the memory of where it sat.
⠀
He knew, quite clearly, that it was a forgery. He knew that the hand that wrote it was not the hand that signed it. And beneath that knowledge, in a place that had gone quiet on a cold avenue the night before, something turned over and stretched, slowly, like a cat waking in a patch of sun.
⠀
"Does the messenger wait?" he asked the empty room.
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The courier, from the doorway: "He said you might wish to reply, sir."
⠀
Yisheng took up a pen. On the back of the cream stock, below the ivy crest, he wrote a single line in his small, fastidious script.
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I shall bring the wine.
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⠀
Day 24, Duncan mac Findlaech's Estate — Night
⠀
The letter was in the sealing tray by the time Bethuel reached the study, and he knew it the moment he saw his father's hand.
⠀
Duncan mac Findlaech sat behind the great oak desk with the candlelight pooled in his silver beard, holding a stick of green wax over a flame. He looked up as the door opened. He was smiling, the smile he wore to weddings and funerals and everything in between.
⠀
"Bethuel! My little fool. Come in, come in. You're just in time."
⠀
"Father." Bethuel had run the whole way from the Sub-Train station, and his lungs still burned. "Father, what is that?"
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"A love letter." Duncan pressed the seal into the wax with a careful thumb and set it aside to dry. "To a man in the 1st District who has been giving us both a great deal of trouble."
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"Show me."
⠀
Duncan slid it across the desk. Bethuel took it in both hands. He read it, and the room began to tilt very slowly around him.
⠀
"You forged my hand??"
⠀
"I have your hand rather well, I should think. I taught you to write." Duncan leaned back in his chair. "You'll notice I kept the archaisms. I know how you love them. I'll admit the verse is beyond me. I never had the ear."
⠀
"But... It has my name on it."
⠀
"It's meant to." Duncan folded his hands. "The Stomach's boy has a hundred and eighteen points, Bethuel. He's the only man left in this game within a hundred of you. Half of a hundred and eighteen is fifty-nine, and the price in your efficiency will be trifling; you've a lead to spare. On the last day, at the wound in the wall, before the Ring, you'll take him. And there will be no more obstacles between you and the ascension."
⠀
"No."
⠀
"I beg your pardon?"
⠀
"No." His own voice sounded strange and thin. "Father, I won't. I can't. Please, don't send it. I'll win it honestly. I have the lead. I'll do every task the Overseer sets and more, and I'll win it on my own, and I'll give you the throne if you want it, all of it. Only please don't make me do this!"
⠀
"Make you?"
⠀
"He's a man, Father! He's a chef! He isn't one of the Qianren's Blades. He has a life, and he has done nothing to me, and I will not... I will not..." His voice cracked all the way through. He found he was crying, and he couldn't stop. Tears ran into his mouth. "Don't. I'm begging you. Please don't send it..."
⠀
Duncan watched him for several long seconds. Something almost like sorrow crossed his broad, handsome face, and passed.
⠀
"It's already gone, my boy," he said gently. "The courier left an hour ago."
⠀
Bethuel's knees gave out.
⠀
"I am proud of what you've done with your gift," Duncan went on, rising. He came around the desk and set a heavy hand on his youngest son's shoulder, warm and patient and terrible. "I want you to understand that. But a gift that flinches is a gift wasted, and I did not raise seven children to waste a single one. You'll be at Breach-9 on the last day, at sunset, and you will be smiling."
⠀
"I can't do this..."
⠀
"You will." He straightened. "Ruruel. Duffuel."
⠀
They had been waiting in the doorway. They must have waited a while. Ruruel came in first, straight-backed and expressionless. Duffuel came a step behind her, jaw tight, eyes fixed on a point just above his brother's head.
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"Father—" Duffuel began.
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"Now."
⠀
Nobody in that household had ever said no to that word. Bethuel had counted, once, as a child, how many times he'd heard it refused, and had arrived at zero.
⠀
He did not fight. He had never once found the courage to fight. Ruruel's first blow drove the air out of his lungs.
⠀
It was not quick. It lasted exactly as long as Duncan wished, and no longer. Duffuel struck with his eyes shut, the blackness creeping cold along his knuckles only when he had to, holding back as much as he could and failing as a man fails who has never been permitted to do anything else. Ruruel struck with the grim, professional care their father had trained into her, without pleasure, without pause. Banquel stood in a corner with his hands over his ears, shaking. Lenuel watched from an armchair, one long leg crossed over the other, her expression a mask of polite disinterest that did not quite reach her eyes.
⠀
Somewhere in the middle of it, a hand settled against the back of Bethuel's neck, cool, dry, and very light. Donuel. The pain dulled and faded. He didn't have to look up to know she had done it, and she didn't look at him, either.
⠀
Then, from the far wall, a small, tired voice: "That's enough, isn't it?" Malcuel had stepped forward, hollow-eyed, one hand pressed flat against his own ribs. He wasn't looking at their father. "I'll take the rest. I-I'm used to it."
⠀
"How generous," Duncan said, mildly. "No."
⠀
But something moved in Malcuel's face, and Bethuel felt a strange, quiet lightening across his chest, as though someone had lifted the heaviest of the blows and carried it away. He would find the bruise on his brother in the morning instead.
⠀
Duncan let it go on a little longer, for form's sake. Then he lifted one hand, and it stopped.
⠀
"There," he said. "Now you understand what obedience costs, rather than simply reading about it in the letters of other men." He stooped and patted Bethuel's cheek. "Get some rest, my fool. You have a wonderful task ahead of you."
⠀
They left him there on the marble floor. Duffuel was the last to go. He hesitated in the doorway, and for a moment it looked as if he meant to say something, something that had nothing to do with grudges. He didn't. The door closed softly behind him.
⠀
Bethuel lay on his side in the cold, with the candle guttering and his own blood pooling warm against his cheek, and stared at the palm of his left hand.
⠀
It was glowing. It was glowing very brightly indeed. That, he thought, was the cruelest joke of all, that the number simply did not care, that it would go on climbing for as long as there was anyone in the Ring who still found him funny.
⠀
⠀
Day 24, Duncan mac Findlaech's Estate — The East Garden, Later
⠀
It was almost three in the morning before Bethuel could stand.
⠀
He went out through the servants' door, because the front hall had a mirror in it he didn't want to meet. The garden was cold and overgrown and smelled of wet stone, and he made it as far as the crumbling urn before his legs quit and he sat down on its lip with one arm pressed against his ribs, breathing in careful, shallow sips.
⠀
"You look like hell, little fool."
⠀
Duffuel sat on the next urn along, in the dark, his knuckles wrapped in a strip of torn shirt. A small sack of ice lay beside him. He picked it up and held it out without looking.
⠀
Bethuel took it. He pressed it to the side of his face and hissed.
⠀
"You closed your eyes."
⠀
"Shut up."
⠀
"You did. The whole time. I watched you do it."
⠀
"I said shut up." Duffuel's jaw worked. He looked at the dark bulk of the house for a long time, at the one lit window in the north wing where their father had gone back to his papers. "It's the only mercy I know how to make. Before you ask, it doesn't work."
⠀
"It worked a little."
⠀
Duffuel said nothing. A moth blundered against the cold glass of a garden lantern and fell away.
⠀
"I can't do this, Duffuel."
⠀
"You can." He said it flatly, without cruelty. "You can do anything he asks. You've got more power in that hand of yours than the rest of us put together, and the only thing standing between you and it is that you don't want to. Father knows exactly how much that's worth." He rubbed his wrapped knuckles. "Nothing. It's worth nothing."
⠀
"Then what would you do?"
⠀
"Me?" A dry, humorless breath. "I'd hate him. I'd hate the chef. I'd hate whoever showed up first. I'm good at it." He turned at last and looked at his brother, and something in his scowling, unhappy face was very nearly gentle. "But I'm not you."
⠀
Bethuel shifted the ice. "The letter says a duel."
⠀
"It does."
⠀
"It doesn't say how a duel ends."
⠀
Duffuel was quiet for a long moment. Very slowly, he stood, tucked his hands under his arms against the cold, and started toward the house.
⠀
"Whatever you're planning," he said, without turning, "keep it to yourself. The walls have ears in this place, and they're all Father's."
⠀
"I'm not planning anything."
⠀
"Then start. Silently."
⠀
⠀
Day 26, Rotary Eleven Epicenter — King "Smoke Shot" McGee's Office
⠀
The floor plan of New Jerusalem covered the whole surface of the desk, and King had run out of desk.
⠀
He'd started with the six checkpoints. He'd marked each one in red pencil, and then the guard rotations of the Heart Footmen, gleaned from three separate favors and one very awkward dinner. He'd sketched the outer wall, the inner wall, the black spires, the narrow slots of windows, and the whole length of that dull gray alloy engineers had spent decades perfecting for a single purpose. Down the margin ran his notes, in a hand that grew less legible toward the bottom of the page.
⠀
Threnite. Eats ARCH energy. Nothing gets in or out.
⠀
~ Threnite can't be countered, McGee, ~ Circle of Fire said, from somewhere behind his ribs. ~ It doesn't matter how much ARCH energy you use against it. ~
⠀
"Yeah." King stared at the page, chewing an unlit cigar. "Yeah, I got that part."
⠀
He needed a hammer. He did not have a hammer. He had a fire in his chest that couldn't so much as light a match inside those walls, a riot somewhere in the next few weeks with a date on it he didn't know, and seventy-four points on his left palm that had not moved in ten days. On the corner of the blotter, propped against a stack of Footmen rosters, sat a photograph of two young idiots on a bench. Beside it, a little bird folded from the skin of a peach.
⠀
He'd eaten something that morning. A spoonful of consommé, stone cold, straight out of the pot Yisheng had left outside the door. It had been the best thing he'd tasted in his life, and he had felt nothing at all.
⠀
The office door banged open without a knock.
⠀
"Yo, Smoke!"
⠀
It took a certain kind of man to fill a doorway that way. Rikolai "R." Reichelt was tall, dark-skinned, and broad enough that the frame seemed to hold him in on sufferance. Blue tattoos pulsed faintly along his forearms and up his throat, and silver chains coiled around his frame in loops that clinked every time he moved. He wore a nice suit with blue accents, dark sunglasses despite the hour, and a cinnamon toothpick jammed in the corner of his mouth, which he chewed with the ferocity of a man in recovery.
⠀
"Chillax, chillax," he said, holding up both hands. "I know the look. I'm not here to make noise."
⠀
"R." King managed the ghost of a grin. "Been a while."
⠀
"Geh-heh-heh-heh! I'd say. You've been a hermit, big man." Rikolai crossed the office, took in the maps, the pencil, the photograph, and pushed his sunglasses down his nose so that two cold, focused green eyes met King's over the frames. The grin faded, just slightly. "Heard about Bertillon. On the highway. I'm real sorry, Smoke. I got nothin' funny for that one."
⠀
"Thanks."
⠀
"He was a stand-up guy. Talked a lot, but stand-up." Rikolai slid the glasses back into place. "Anyway. I ain't here to make it worse."
⠀
"Then why are you here?"
⠀
"'Cause I'm throwin' a party." Rikolai dropped into the chair across the desk and immediately kicked his boots up onto the map of New Jerusalem, and King, out of long habit, slid it out from under them without comment. "You know how the Spine has that thing, every couple years? The Brawl? Every Fist, every Thoracic, every hard-boned son of a gun the Viscera's got, one arena, one night, no rules worth namin'. Last man standin' gets a trophy and a hangover. Well. I'm hostin' it."
⠀
"You?"
⠀
"Me. Rikolai 'R.' Reichelt." He flexed, and the chains clinked in agreement. "Family comes from a long line of big shots, and I intend to make it a long line of bigger ones. And I got a guest of honor lined up, Smoke. That's the real reason I'm here. I figured you'd wanna hear it first."
⠀
"Who?"
⠀
"The kid." The toothpick swung to the other side of Rikolai's mouth. "The Gun kid. The one who signed with the KKA. Ryunosuke."
⠀
King went very still.
⠀
It was a small stillness. He'd spent his whole life learning to hide those, and he did it now without thinking, reaching for the cigar and snapping his fingers so that a tiny flame bloomed off his thumb. Behind his ribs, Circle of Fire went silent and alert.
⠀
"The Argus kid?" King asked.
⠀
"Yeah! Kid was supposed to meet me at the Vitalität bank a while back for a duel. I sent word through a girl. Never showed. Chillax, I ain't mad, I figured, hey, he's busy. So I thought, why not go bigger? Every Spine in the Ring watchin' him fight, bones cracklin', the whole show! He'll love it!!"
⠀
"When's the Brawl?" King asked, a shade too quickly.
⠀
Rikolai's grin widened. "That's the thing. That part's kinda up to him."
⠀
"What?"
⠀
"Hang on." He stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled, a shrill, ear-splitting note that made the blinds shiver against the window and a pencil roll off the desk.
⠀
The door opened. Two Spine Fists in matching suits backed in, gripping something between them, and it took King a second to understand that the something was a person. A girl in a torn Argus Directorate uniform, her katana politely removed and stacked to one side. It was Kotone Furue. Her whole face was screwed up. Tears streamed down her cheeks in wide, glistening rivers. A long silver thread of mucus hung from her nose and swung gently with every sob.
⠀
"WAAAAAAAAAAH!"
⠀
She collapsed to the floor as the Fists released her.
⠀
"H-He c-c-came into our k-kitchen!" the girl wailed. "H-He came in a-and said 'Hey, chick,' and I-I-I—"
⠀
"See?" Rikolai spread his hands. "Didn't lay a finger on her. Ask the Fists. Ask 'em!"
⠀
The two Fists nodded gravely in perfect unison.
⠀
"She's been cryin' the whole time," Rikolai went on. "Since I picked her up from the Argus Post. The whole way here. I got her a soda... I got her a napkin... I asked her real nice if she'd come along, and she just kept, y'know." He mimed a sob. "She asked if I was gonna kill her. I said 'no!' Real friendly, and she cried harder! I don't get it! Anyway... This is Kotone. She's the one I told you about the duel."
⠀
"I-I-I d-did t-try to t-tell M-Mori!" Kotone shrieked. "B-B-But he w-w-was gone!"
⠀
King looked at her for a moment. Then he did something that, three days earlier, he could not have imagined doing. He rose from his chair, crossed the office, took a box of tissues from the top of a filing cabinet, and held it out.
⠀
"Miss Furue. Kotone, right? I'm King McGee." His voice was the gentlest thing in the room. "I'm really sorry about all the fuss. My friend here gets a little enthusiastic. Would you like a tissue?"
⠀
She stared at the box. She took three, and blew her nose with a honk that rattled the window.
⠀
"Thank you," King said when she'd finished. He crouched a little, so their eyes were level, the way he might have spoken to a child on a hospital floor. "Now, I got a real polite question, if you don't mind. When do you reckon Mori could stop by for the Brawl? We're all real excited to see his strength."
⠀
"H-H-He c-can't!"
⠀
"Why not?"
⠀
"B-Because M-M-Mori and the o-others j-just g-g-got b-back from a-an important m-mission in the 9th!" The words came out in an anguished torrent, tangled up with hiccups and stops. "S-Some kind of D-DaeSyndicate ad-adjunct! The th-thirteenth, I th-think! They were g-gone so long, and wh-when they c-c-came back, M-Mori had a n-new ARCHtype, a s-scarf or s-something, and Y-Yuhuan s-signed a c-contract with an ARCH, some s-snake... A-And... nobody would t-tell me anything else, and n-now they're in the h-hospital, and I've b-been all a-alone at the P-Post for d-days and d-days!"
⠀
She took a breath that seemed to go on forever.
⠀
"The d-doctors s-said they'd be f-free by the s-start of n-next month."
⠀
For a while, King said nothing.
⠀
The 9th. A DaeSyndicate adjunct. He'd read the intel a few days ago, in the middle of everything else, and put it in a drawer, because he'd had a friend to bury: an Eye of Argus, one of the Hundred, had surfaced out of a sealed facility beneath the 9th and gone straight into Antollio Da Galinozi's coat. He had read it twice and still didn't understand why the words wouldn't stay put.
⠀
Now they lay across his desk like cards. A boy who had walked up to the KKA-level ARCH called Gun and made it kneel. A director with an Eye in his pocket, one wish, no strings. A Post that had just come back from the bottom of the world with a new ARCHtype, a new contract, and a story nobody would tell.
⠀
~ McGee, ~ Circle of Fire said softly. ~ Do you see it? ~
⠀
He saw it.
⠀
"Told ya," Rikolai said, grinning around the toothpick. "Kid's a monster."
⠀
"Yeah." King rose slowly. "Yeah, R. I believe he might be."
⠀
"So you're comin' to the Brawl?"
⠀
"I'll think about it."
⠀
"Geh-heh-heh! That's a yes." Rikolai jerked his chin at the Fists, who took Kotone by the elbows. She was still sniffling, still bawling, and her face looked as if it had been left out in the rain.
⠀
King stopped them with a raised hand. He crossed to his desk, opened the bottom drawer, and took out a sheet of stickers. He'd bought them for the children's home weeks ago and forgotten. Gold stars, little rockets, and a whole row of yellow smiley faces. He peeled one off.
⠀
He pressed it gently to Kotone's wet, blotchy cheek.
⠀
"There," he said. "Best I got."
⠀
Kotone stopped crying. It was less a matter of composure than simple astonishment, her whole face frozen in a huge, dripping, uncomprehending O, a little yellow smile sitting on her cheekbone.
⠀
"R.," King said, without looking round. "Take her home. And get her some ice cream on the way. On me."
⠀
"On you?" Rikolai whooped. "Smoke, you're a saint, you know that? A goddamn saint! Geh-heh-heh-heh! Come on, chick, we're gettin' ice cream!"
⠀
"I-I-I-Ice c-cream?" Kotone hiccupped, being towed toward the door.
⠀
"Chocolate, vanilla, whatever you want. I'll get you the big cone." At the threshold, Rikolai turned and flexed one last time, the blue tattoos swelling along his arms, the chains chiming. "Save me a seat at the Brawl, big man. And bring somethin' loud."
⠀
"I'll save you the good one," King said.
⠀
"Peace out!"
⠀
The door closed. The footsteps faded. From the corridor, very faint, came the sound of Kotone asking whether the ice cream was going to be strawberry, and King McGee stood alone in the middle of his office for a full minute, listening, before he realized he was smiling.
⠀
It was small, and crooked, and it hurt a little. But it was his.
⠀
~ A sticker, McGee? ~ Circle of Fire said. ~ You gave a sobbing girl a sticker? ~
⠀
"Yeah." He sat back down. "Guy'd have somethin' to say about that."
⠀
He could hear it, plain as anything. A sticker, King? You handed that weeping girl a sticker?? He could hear the dry, precise, faintly wounded way Guy would have said it, and the thin, awful pleasure underneath, and the way he'd have reached across the desk to steal the sheet and put a gold star on King's own forehead.
⠀
King laughed, once, out loud. It cracked in the middle. He put his hand over his mouth and waited until it stopped.
⠀
Then he turned to the map.
⠀
A boy with a gun with the raw destructive power of a KKA, a director with an Eye in his coat, and Threnite that swallowed every ounce of ARCH energy. It was a long shot. He knew that. It was the longest of shots. Even if the boy would come, even if the boy could be reached... Would he really do a favor for a stranger? One working for the Viscera?
⠀
...But Montserrat had a riot coming, and King had no better idea.
⠀
~ The game, ~ Circle of Fire said quietly. ~ McGee. You're giving it up. ~
⠀
"Yeah."
⠀
~ If the rot comes... ~
⠀
"Then it comes." He closed his hand around the number, and the glow slipped out between his fingers like a candle guttering low. "I got seventy-four points, and I got a friend in a hole. Ain't hard to figure out which one's bigger."
⠀
She didn't argue. After a while, the warmth behind his ribs moved and settled, and the hum of her went quiet in a way that felt very much like assent.
⠀
King pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer. He uncapped his pen, and at the top of the page, in his big, sprawling hand, wrote a name.
⠀
Mori Ryunosuke.
⠀
He underlined it twice. Beneath it, smaller, after a moment's thought, he added three more words.
⠀
Ask him nicely.
⠀
⠀
Day 26, 5th District — A Sticky Little Ice Cream Parlor
⠀
The ice cream parlor on the corner of Quill Street had been open for thirty years and had never once served a customer who needed as many napkins as the two currently occupying its corner booth.
⠀
Kotone sat with both hands wrapped around a strawberry cone the size of her own head, licking it in short, nervous, methodical strokes, the way a person eats when she is fairly sure the food is a trap. The smiley face sticker was still stuck to her cheek. She had not tried to remove it. She had, in fact, touched it twice.
⠀
Across from her, Rikolai "R." Reichelt sat with a scoop of vanilla balanced on a cone that looked absurdly small in his fist, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, the chains at his neck clicking against the table whenever he moved. Two Fists stood by the door with their arms crossed, looking at nothing with great professionalism.
⠀
"See?" Rikolai said. "Ice cream. Told ya."
⠀
"I-It's v-very g-g-good," Kotone whispered.
⠀
"Geh-heh-heh. Told ya twice."
⠀
She ate in silence for a while. Outside the window, the 5th District went about its evening: a knife-grinder, a woman with a laundry basket, a stray dog with one ear. Rikolai chewed his toothpick, in the absence of a cigar, and watched her with the slightly baffled air of a man who has accidentally adopted a very small, very wet cat. He finished the vanilla in two bites and stood, flexing once for the benefit of the room, the chains chiming like a wind chime in a storm.
⠀
"C'mon. Let's get you home before the Fists get bored and start tellin' the whole Ring about it."
⠀
"I-I-I w-will still k-kill you," Kotone said, very quietly, "if you d-do a-anything w-weird."
⠀
Rikolai threw back his head and laughed until the whole parlor rattled. "Geh-heh-heh-heh-HEH! Chillax, chick! Wouldn't dream of it!"
⠀
"...Good."
⠀
"—?!"
⠀
"Wh...Wh-What?!" Kotone shrieked.
⠀
Rikolai stared at her for a moment, still smiling. "Nothin'. You just stopped stuttering for a second is all."
⠀
Kotone's face flushed red, and she turned away from Rikolai.
⠀
She was still holding her cone when they left. It was, though she would never have admitted it to anyone, the nicest afternoon she'd had in a long time.
⠀
⠀
Day 27, Midnight
⠀
King "Smoke Shot" McGee — 74 Points (Withdrawn)
Guy Bertillon — Deceased
Henrique D'Souza — Deceased
Bethuel Mac Findlaech — 247 Points
Gieffrin Melisanbeque — 65 Points (Withdrawn)
Aristio Newbeck — Deceased
Yisheng Wu — 118 Points
⠀
Five gone. Two remained. Somewhere in the 1st District, a man in a white apron laid two glasses out on a table and took a bottle down from a shelf. Somewhere in the Highlands, in a candlelit room, another man lay awake and stared at the ceiling and searched, without much hope, for a rhyme for the word sunset that did not also rhyme with the word goodbye.
⠀
And beneath the Ring, in the dark, patient and unhurried, something that had been keeping its own score began, very quietly, to count down the days.
⠀
END OF PART FOUR