Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

There’s a spider in the corner.

I notice it as soon as I walk into the office, scurrying in my peripheral vision like a floater or a cockroach across the drywall. I always turn my head in its direction to look at it, sometimes hard enough to make my neck hurt. Usually it’s nothing—just some spot in my vision, a pale reflection of the light, something that’s not a bug settling into place. Sometimes it is a cockroach, though. Sometimes it’s a spider in the corner, weaving its web or rolling up its meal in a silken blanket.

“Take a seat,” Chuck says. He’s already sitting at his desk after leading me inside. It takes a moment for my brain to adjust to the situation, looking away from the spider to him and then the chair. Finally, I take my hat from my head to hang off the back of the first chair, sitting down in the second. I hold my messenger bag comfortably on my lap and cross my left ankle over my right knee, polite and demure as can be. Doesn’t matter if pain slices its way across my backside. My comfort is of little relevance here.

The way the Inspectorate General works is you kill someone one too many times, and they send you here for some kind of pep talk to put you back in order before usually sending you on your way. Or you’re racist. Or you’re too sexist for the RCM to turn its back on you because you’ve received too many complaints. It used to be Helen I saw whenever I came here. The Inspectorate General likes giving first offenders to women, probably because they think that women can stroke the sense of morality and ethics that a lot of officers tend to lack. Gentle disappointment, like you’ve upset your own mother. It probably works for some people.

That was way back in the day for me, though. I don’t see Helen anymore—not often—except for sometimes when I come in and she’s chatting with a coworker, or moving around the office to deliver some paperwork to a supervisor. We smile at each other—oh, my god, Helen, I say, it’s been so long. We shake hands and chat, she asks about life, I ask about hers, oh, you got promoted, that’s amazing, I’m so proud of you. We say things we don’t mean like we should get brunch together at some point—both of us are too poor for brunch—and then my handler gets impatient enough to roll his eyes, grabbing my elbow to pull me along. Bye, Helen, I say, tipping my head, can’t stay long, I’m in trouble again.

Now I’ve got a man sitting across the desk from me—a goddamn man, because apparently the rat squad gives their more serious cases to men when it becomes clear that the feminine wiles of a lady don’t do it for people like me, it’s a man’s job to take the load off her hands and put me in my proper place. What they don’t know is I don’t care if the person sitting across the desk from me is a man or a woman. The only thing it means is they took away someone I like for someone who hates me, and that just incentivizes me more to make his life a living hell.

Chuck stares at me, beady eyes watery and sad, having mastered the look of a disappointed father. He’s an old man. Grey hairs, worn-leather skin, his face so attracted to gravity that his cheeks sag with ancient rivers. One of the oldest men that I’ve ever met, and one of his ears is missing from what I can only assume to be the Revolution way back in the day. I always wonder if it was something similar that happened with Damian Latrec, one of my subordinates, though I’ve never asked. There’s a photo of his dead wife facing him on the desk.

I stare back at him until I get bored, turning my head back to the spider in the corner.

“John,” he starts, but I cut him off, turning back to face him.

“Can we just get this over with? I’ve been on my feet all day and I have a report to write at the station.”

It’s a lie, in that it’s an understatement. I’ve barely gotten any sleep since the night before last. Barely had the time to eat anything, either. The most shut-eye I’ve been able to find was about four hours of gentle reprieve at my desk nearly ten hours ago, and that was rudely interrupted somewhere early enough in the second sleep cycle that I woke up feeling worse. But it’s the high point of summer after being freshly transferred back over to criminal investigations, so it’s not like I didn’t expect this.

Chuck sighs and pinches his eyes between ancient fingers. Scars are splattered over his knuckles like the pale shards of a hundred mirrors. If I squint and tilt my head the right way, I might be able to see tiny bits of reflective glass, melded and merged into his skin, shining like glitter. “...Okay. So tell me why you thought it was a good idea to shoot a teenager.”

He had a gun. Pointed it at me when I went to chase after his adult friends. Fired, missed. He would’ve gotten the opportunity to fire again if I hadn’t, and by that point, the Madre cronies got the message that if I wasn’t afraid to shoot a kid, then I wasn’t afraid to kill them, either.

I wasn’t, by the way. Three dead. Two in the hospital, including the kid. They didn’t find a gun on him, because of course they didn’t. Somebody picked it up while I was shooting at an MC a couple streets down.

That was two days ago.

I shrug. “I don’t know,” I say, leaning back in my chair with a crooked little smile. “I felt evil, I guess.”

Chuck’s gaze darkens and he curses, says something like Goddamn it, McCoy, and after a while turns to write down in his paperwork. I look at the spider. It looks almost like one of those giant red ants, so much so you would be forgiven for mistaking it for one at a distance. Except giant red ants don’t hover in the air like that. Eventually Chuck addresses me again, demands to know what really fucking happened, so I tell him.

He doesn’t believe me, of course. Why would he? There’s no gun on file.

So for a long time, I sit there, like a kid in a principal’s office, getting my ass handed to me by a man old enough to be my father who was a father himself before his children died in the People’s Pile. I pretend like I’m listening but don’t have the gall to pretend like I feel guilty about it. After all, I’m just doing my job, and I’m very good at waiting out shit like this. I’ve had a lot of practice in it. A moth flutters into the web, and the ant-spider shuffles over to it. Somewhere in the middle of wrapping it up all nice and cozy for later, Chuck pushes a sheet of paper across the desk.

I turn to blink at it, then at him. Wordlessly, I take it, not even looking away from his smoldering, wet eyes while it’s folded into a rectangle and then a square and then settled neatly into my denim pocket.

“Get the fuck out, John.”

My lips twitch into a smile I neither expect nor want. It’s a nervous tick—I think—that unfortunately has gotten me into trouble many more times than it’s gotten me out. Man like me, I understand why people tend to take it the wrong way. It does seem like I’m making a joke out of everything important. Based on the way Chuck’s expression darkens further, I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m being smug about it, getting away with my bullshit as easily as I have, as easily as I’ve been. Like I’m laughing in his face.

I’m not, really, but I’m not going to tell him that.

I make myself get up slowly, ignoring the cracking in my hip and the ensuing discomfort that trails its way down my thigh and through my muscles, and put my country hat back on my head. It’s deliberate, this slowness. Something that tells him that he hasn’t won over me, and I haven’t quite lost yet. Have a good day, I tell him with a nod. Then I give another nod to the spider-ant, too, up in the corner. Have a good day, Jerry, I think. Enjoy your food.

I must have really pissed him off, I think. When I check my watch, it reveals to me the sneaky truth in the high sun that only about forty-five minutes have passed. Forty-five minutes spent, wasting my time in the same office I do practically every month, hearing the same bullshit so often that I know all the words by heart and know which ones to tune out. Morality and ethics and law. You can’t just kill people for no reason. He says it like I go out of my way to find excuses to do so when the reality is I don’t. If fewer people pulled guns on me, maybe I wouldn’t be so quick to pull my own first.

It was only forty-five minutes, though, which surprises me. Usually these tirades last about two hours, or one and a half. Forty-five minutes, huh. I think either he was having a particularly rotten day or he got sick of me. Or maybe there are so many other cops losing their shit in the summer heat that his schedule’s too full to deal with me proper.

Either way, I take a few minutes in the washroom, splashing water over my face and scratching antsily at several days’ worth of stubble. It itches against my skin, feels wrong on my fingertips. I wash my hands afterwards, scrubbing dirt and grime. I go so far as to peel off my jacket, roll up my sleeves, and lather myself up to my spot-scarred elbows. The water’s lukewarm and then runs hot. Once that’s done, I run it lukewarm again in preparation for the oppressive heat outside.

I look at myself in the mirror and pause. I always look tired, I think. My eyes more often than not have that half-lidded, vague vibe to them, something that makes it seem like I’m rarely, if ever, paying attention to anything around me. ‘Aloof’ isn’t the right word. ‘Disinterested’ fits the bill more. Right now, though, it looks worse—dark and puffy circles form underneath my eyes, and they feel filmy underneath my fingertips. Forget about the developing scruff of a beard. Even without that, I’d look like shit. This is the kind of face that’d make a man want to punch his own reflection in the mirror.

I don’t punch myself, though. Not because I’m a better man than that, but because I don’t want to spend time picking glass out of my hand and dealing with blood for the rest of the day. Instead I rap my knuckle gently against the mirror, lean in, and look myself dead in my tired, grey-blue eyes.

“Dio del santo,” I scoff. “Fuck happened to you.”

I do it all over again—face, neck, hands, arms. It’s the closest thing to a shower that I’ve had all week. When I’m done, I drink straight from the tap, fill up my flask, and leave to grab some lunch.

There’s a Frittte a couple blocks down on the way back to Precinct 41, close to where a bow collector comes to a screeching halt, sparks falling and settling from the connector rail above. Usually after dealing with the Inspectorate General—or after the Inspectorate General is done dealing with me, depending on your perspective, I guess—this is where I go to grab a quick bite to eat on days where I’m going back to hitting the pavement. The tram’s just too convenient, even if I’m generally not a fan of mechanical transportation.

By the time I reach Frittte, my flask is empty again, I’m sweating like the pig that I am, and my brain feels woozy and muggy. I muddle my way through the shelves, mingling here and there and—oh, God, this is exactly the reason why you don’t send a hungry man to the supermarché. There’s just too many options to choose from, and I find myself stuck between a rock and a hard place because some of them, I know, taste good, some of them are filling, and most of them, I don’t actually have the pocket change to afford.

It’s as I’m deciding between a tuna fish sandwich and a meat-stuffed pumpkin bun that I hear him; slick sidewinder voice winding its way toward me after a faint commercial break in the otherwise-empty Frittte. I haven’t heard more than a few words out of him in years, but it’s imprinted in the back of my brain, knowledge awoken like some zombified sleeper agent built to kill when all the memory wants to do is rot in some long-forgotten corner.

“Welcome back to Channel 8, the only radio station in Revachol that gives you the news as it actually is without any beating around the bush. I’m Guillaume Bevy…”

“And I’m Gareth Morrand,” says Gareth Morrand, but I don’t care about him one bit, already tilting my head away, already pressing my fingers against the back of my ear and massaging to ease the staticky ache.

“And today, we’ve got a couple of breaking news stories that I’m sure everyone will be interested in—some of them in the papers, most of them not. As usual, we’ll be taking phone calls at the end of each segment to hear from our listeners. So, if you’re interested in that, keep this number in mind…”

I glance up at the counter, where the Frittte clerk, a teenage girl enjoying her summer vacation slaving away at the register, doesn’t even look up from the magazine she’s surely paid to read. She’s not paying attention to me in the very least.

But I’m hesitant—my hands don’t want to work like I want them to, even though it’d be easy to unclip my bag, slip a packet of food in, then just go up there and buy a pack of cigarettes. Didn’t find anything else? she’d ask, and I’d say no even though I can hear the plastic crinkling against my side. Aren’t you hot? she’d ask, looking at my jacket; Yeah, a little, but. I point at the rectangle stitched on my shoulder and smile. You know. The uniform.

“...heard that McCoy’s in with Internal Affairs again soon,” Bevy continues (I glare at the ingredient list in my hands, squinting through my headache), “because of his most recent shoot-out.”

“What’s the news about that kid, by the way?” Morrand asks after a moment. “Is he still in critical care?”

“Yeah.” I can almost see Bevy nodding along to it now, sunglasses blurred and polluted with the cheapest cigarettes you can get your hands on. Bevy and Morrand, alone in some kind of room, with a window open to let out the smoke. Or maybe not, maybe that’s not good soundproofing practice. “The shot just narrowly missed his femoral artery. According to the medical records, though, just a couple millimeters up, he probably would’ve bled out by the time paramedics came to the scene. He’ll be fine. One less notch under the Archetype’s belt.”

Morrand barks out a laugh while I shake my head. Typical of them to even think that I care about those notches. I never do—never did. I’ve long outgrown them, stopped dotting my ID with the number after I lost it the first time and had to get a replacement. Now the only thing I count is years. Cases. That’s the only thing that matters anymore in any line of work, I think. The only reason to take pride in the number of deaths you’re directly responsible for is to boast about how little blood you have on your hands.

I can’t boast about that. So I don’t really say anything, unless it’s to insinuate that I’m a danger to those around me. Unless I’m asked. Then it’s, oh, sixteen-oh-two, or something, I don’t know. It just feels like a nice number. I like how it forms on my mouth, don’t give a fuck how accurate it actually is. It’s been sixteen-oh-two for a while, according to me.

And then they talk about the Inspectorate General, about how the most I’ll probably get is a slap on the wrist and a send-off, about how the Inspectorate General is really just a stern, parental talking-to that just sends ne’er-do-well cops along their way. They’re kind of right, but it isn’t for lack of trying, I want to correct, some cops don’t care and the rat squad’s just tired of dealing with them. But I don’t because it’s not my place to say. It’s not as if they’d even hear me if I did. It’d just fall on deaf ears.

Besides, I wouldn’t want to give Bevy the privilege of inviting conversation.

They’re talking about donations, now, for one of their programs—the one that’s for people struggling with medical bills caused by the RCM’s weaponized incompetence. The kind of money that goes to people like that gangster kid I shot two days ago. I put down the pumpkin bun and fish out the folded piece of paper, unwrapping it carefully. How much of a slap on the wrist is it this time? Community service, or…

I huff out a laugh, stomach clenching, and shake my head down at it. It’s equal parts shock and dismay and the slow, steady crawl of this-may-as-well-happen. Resignation. With careful fingers, I fold up the paper into a rectangle, and then a neat little square, then slide it back as calmly as I would if I were putting away a grocery list. As calmly as a hungry man can stow a three hundred reál fine away in his pocket.

To help pay for the gang kid’s medical bills. As if it’s my fault the gangster kid had a gun and, magically, it disappeared.

I don’t know what to do.

Leave, I guess. Steal something from the work fridge. Go to sleep for a couple more hours before writing out a report, going home, and scrounging for shit to sell off to pawn shops or neighbors. Three hundred reál. I can’t afford this.

I stare at the shelves for a while like I’m looking for anything in particular, pick up the pumpkin bun again, and glance over at the cashier. She still isn’t looking at me, too busy nodding off to whatever her magazine is. And I could so easily slide this into my bag—again, there’s nothing stopping me—but I can’t because there is. 

It’s G-Bevy, radio-show voice smooth over the sound waves, saying my name and broadcasting my existence for the world to see. And it’s like he’s speaking to me directly, expecting me to respond, like we’re in a recording booth and I’m sitting across from him. Next to him. Whatever. Like he’ll call me out, right here and now, the second I put this food in my bag, and half of Revachol will have another crime to attribute to me. Not just the resident serial killer of the bloody murder station, but a petty thief, too. Call security to see me out. Have you no pride as a cop? And on and on it goes.

I can imagine Bevy saying, and oh, look, the first donation is 300 reál from John McCoy! Guess he felt guilty about it, after all. Guess what, McCoy, it’s not enough. What about the other people you injured? What about the people you killed?

God, that’s the last thing I want to deal with right now.

I put the pumpkin bun back where I got it and limp my way back to the counter, careful not to let my hip roll too badly or else it’ll pop, pop, pop. It might even be painful. I don’t know. I’d like to take some drouamine to numb out the fuzzy edges of it. Numb out the fuzzy edges of my nerves, too. Smooth it all out like uneven beach sand. But I don’t like taking painkillers when I haven’t eaten recently, too concerned about fucking up my liver or my stomach for something like that. So when she asks if there’s anything I need, I point out my cigarettes instead.

These ones? she asks. No, I say, leaning over, the ones next to it. And as I do, I can see that stupid little radio, tinny cheap speaker settled next to where her ankle had been mere moments ago. Distinct voice, the knowledge of what the voices are speaking through—it makes it difficult to drown it out. Shootout outside an abandoned warehouse by the pier, nice, cool, fucking whatever. These? she asks. I nod, leaning back. Yes, those.

I take out a fiver, toss it onto the counter, and it’s just after the loud rattling of a cash register that I hear Bevy’s voice say, “Two thousand guns don’t just go missing along with two officers.”

Oh.

No.

No, I suppose they don’t.

I stare at the space above the radio, static crackling in my brain, trying to listen for more info. But the register closes just as loudly, and Bevy waves it off with a chuckle, like he’s fully aware that he’s got my attention and is teasing me for it. I’m not getting anything else out of him, goddamn it, piece of shit.

“Here’s your change,” she says, then glances over her shoulder; hears the radio and chuckles. “Oh, yeah, Bevy. I like him. Don’t you think he has such a sex-y voice?” She playfully draws out the word with the shuffling of her shoulders, leaning her arms back against the counter. I blink and glance at her. Try for a smile.

“Yeah,” I say, taking my cigarettes. “I guess. Have a nice day.”

I light a cigarette before I round the corner and duck into the shallow part of this Frittte’s neighboring alleyway to take out my gun, making sure that it’s loaded. When it is, I count out the bullets—one, two, three—then slide it back into my shoulder holster, where it’s safe and hidden under my jacket. I don’t realize that I forgot my change until I’m already walking to the tram. Don’t realize how badly my hip hurts until I’ve boarded.

Chapter Text

The building’s smaller than I expect it to be. I’m not sure why—it’s one of those off-to-the-side kinds of places made of red bricks and speckled with dirt. Wild spray paint that the landowner must’ve given up on washing away sometime ago is caked onto the side walls: It feels like it was rented to the local grafitto artists on this side of Boogie Street. Colorful and messy, weirdly nice to look at. The front wall’s almost all windows, heavily tinted, the tiny parking lot half-full. It barely even has a sign. If it weren’t for the tall iron tower climbing up into the sky, the satellite crown sending its waves to thousands of listeners in Jamrock and a quarter of Faubourg, I probably would’ve mistaken the Channel 8 radio station for just another nameless restaurant worthy of inspection.

But this isn’t a restaurant, and I’m not here for a health inspection, so I push my way through the door. The inside is dark, an old ceiling fan rotating slowly to halo a flickering yellow light. All it does is gently stir the stale, hot air, letting it slip through my clothes and itch my skin. I can’t tell if it’s warmer inside than it is outside. The sharp scent of a vanilla-soap candle floats up my nose and cradles me in a sweet, tired embrace.

I ignore it and walk—no, saunter. Like I have some kind of natural purpose and pride to my name—up to the receptionist, who’s a gothy, pretty little thing with a shock of dyed black hair. It either doesn’t agree with the humidity or it’s a bad dye job, so it just frizzes up. She blinks up at me and lifts up her head from the phone, black lips purring out the words “Just a moment, sweetie,” before I even get the chance to lean against the desk.

The breath I let out is impatient, sighing, almost a scoff, but I don’t go out of my way to take out my wallet or point out the rectangles neatly stitched onto my denim jacket. She’s talking on the phone, and it’s rude to interrupt, even if the soles of my feet prickle with the desire to get this done, get it done, get this shit done and move on to something else. Nerves tap out a nascent tune against the wood through the tips of my fingers, long before my leg begins to bounce and shake in an attempt to let out some of this horrible energy.

I don’t even count out the seconds. I’m a patient man like that. Instead I lean against the desk and don’t really listen in, tapping my fingernails, shaking my leg. My other hand thumbs at the strap of my messenger bag, slung securely over my shoulder. I don’t mind waiting, most of the time. I’m a very patient man.

What does get to me is the agony in my hip, the sweat, the sticky denim clinging to my arms. It prickles and rubs against fresh scabs and sensitive skin and my half-buttoned dress shirt. My cuffs have ridden up my forearms inside of the sleeves, and my jacket pulls at the sweat on my back, tucked even closer by this aching strap. It’s claustrophobic, see, makes the dark room feel darker and closer together than it already is. Makes it tight, like it’s not just the oppressive heat and pounding heart that’s making it hard to breathe.

I distract myself by glancing around. There’s chairs against the walls and the window. A small bookshelf in the corner. A neat little fish tank that looks like it’s empty but still filters bubbles that hum in the room, casting a blue light. There’s an aquarium in Grand Couron, I know, that has tanks a million times larger, some a hundred shades darker and many a thousand shades lighter. Corridors of jellyfish in rooms dimmer than this provided most of the light (or maybe the UV made them seem to glow more than they actually did), framing the passageway to a wall of swimming sea creatures like aqua fatuus. Small sharks and discus fish. Insulindic tuna. Manta rays. Oceanic shit.

My brother oohed and ahhed at the petting exhibit, reaching into the shallow pool of water to touch the backs of stingrays and horseshoe crabs. I made him cry once when I said the only reason there were no whales was because all the whales were dead at the bottom of the ocean, and the actual sea creatures were feasting off of their corpses, because I thought oceanic graveyards were cool and wanted to talk about them. Maybe I also felt like being an asshole, I don’t know. Mama had me crying before I could tell him all about it. Papa’s hand probably tingled about as badly as my ass even though I thought I’d outgrown the need to be disciplined by then, all just to wipe that smirk off my face.

This little aquarium, though, it has no life at all. No fish, no shrimp, no algae, just a sanitised tank with fake rainbow gravel and fake pink plants that drift in a manufactured cocoon of sanitation. The kind of place that dreams of whale fall, of the kind of ecosystem that subsists off of rot and death, but mankind is too stupid and obsessed with perfection to allow it to happen. So it’s just blue. Blue water, pink plants, rainbow gravel. Never had the chance to be a little grey graveyard.

I miss it, really. The aquarium, the time with my brother. Not the spanking. I’ll go back there someday, I told myself long ago, even though I hadn’t been able to afford anything similar for years by that point. Maybe now I shouldn’t, because who knows how much has changed, how empty it might be? No, it’s better not to dig up the past. All the better to keep it preserved, my dear, picture-perfect in my memory. It doesn’t matter how bad it was—it could’ve been worse, could be worse now. It doesn’t change if you don’t look at it. Don’t even bother going to the funeral to pay your respects. No one cares.

I look away from it eventually, mind foggy and vague, and find a potted succulent on the counter. As I reach out to touch it, Miss Secretary hangs up the receiver to tell me it’s plastic, sweetie, as if the texture and hollowness and everything about it doesn’t give it away.

“Oh,” I say, my hand lingering. As I pull away from it, I don’t tell her that succulents are easy to take care of, actually, and very hardy, and so why bother with this plastic shit anyway when the real thing could liven the place up so much more? Uncle used to tell me that keeping a couple of plants alive is a lot easier than it seems—people like to overcomplicate it, which is what apparently makes it so impressive.

Instead I tag on at the end, “Cool,” and try not to glance at the potted plants nestled in the corners, wondering whether those are all fake, too.

She perches her cheek against the palm of her hand, her makeup smudged from sweat. I can see a couple of freckles on her cheek. Young wrinkles, pretty little laugh lines. The quiet fan at her desk gently blows her hair in little wisps. Some part of me flutters at sweetie and wants to hear it again, to get close enough to smooth back the strands of hair sticking to her forehead.

The smarter part of me cuts my losses before they can develop, amputating the limb before it can grow ugly, all too eager to make it bleed. I’ve started to learn that it’s easier to do it that way, when it’s too young to even breathe. You don’t even get a chance to develop a real attachment with it. It doesn’t mean that it makes you want it any less. What matters is it’s easier to cauterise, before another monstrous hydra hand can sprout from the stump and reach out for someone to hold without knowing how to hang on. No one gets to bleed but me. That’s a good thing.

“Can I help you?”

“My name’s John McCoy,” I say, finally reaching into the inner pocket of my jacket to produce my badge. My wallet flips open—habit—and I hold it out for her to look, not to take. “I work at the 41st Precinct under the criminal investigations division as a lieutenant.”

She does a double take before she even puts on her glasses and leans in to look. There it is, I think, there goes the dream of lips pressed against my neck, leaving a smudgy tattoo to cradle… a bite, or a kiss? I don’t know. I say farewell to the notion and offer her an apologetic smile, knowing now that she knows who I am, and what I am, and what that means. And I know that she knows that I know. I suppose it’s impossible not to, when one works here. And on and on it goes.

“Okay, sir,” she says, nodding slowly. She drops the sweetie, confirming the dream is dead. “What, uh—what business do you have here, officer?”

“Guillaume Bevy,” I answer, flipping my wallet shut and sliding it back in its proper place. “I need to speak with him.”

“He’s in the recording booth…” Miss Secretary throws an uncertain glance at the door beside the counter, which doubtless leads to a hall that feeds into a neat little row of rooms. Recording booths, or whatever.

For a moment, I wonder what they look like, how effective their soundproofing is, what kinds of fancy little machines they use. It’s probably more complicated than the machine Jules uses to redirect and answer calls, flipping tiny little switches and pushing buttons over flashing lights. They probably have the budget. Microphones, probably; a table. Some way or another to play ads. I don’t know how any of it works: I’ve never been in a place like that. God willing, I never will.

“Could you let him know I’m here?” I’m not impatient when my fingertip taps the counter, no. That’s just the nervous energy, wound up, searching for a place to be grounded into. A listless tap, tap, tap to float my mind on. “At the very least.”

“Is it important, Mr. McCoy?”

I don’t say anything. My answer is in my raised eyebrows and the slight cock of my head, the way my body goes suddenly, deathly still aside from the slow and steady tap, tap, tap of my finger. Tapping out twice a second, every second, yet not counting each one. I stare her in the eye until she swallows thickly, mascara fluttering over hazel eyes, when she reaches hesitant fingers to the phone. “I’ll call them,” she says, and I smile and nod, cradling my chin in my arms while I wait, thanking her softly.

It’s impossible to clearly make out the voice through the static—or maybe it isn’t, but settling down like this, my brain’s too tired and fried from work to parse through much of it. Thirty-eight hours of work straight, with only four of those being dedicated to a pitiful nap at your desk, will do that to a man. So I can’t make out much from the other end, and my brain floats in and out of what she’s saying, fluttering between here and the eighteen cases nestled against my side, the ten at home, but I get the gist of it, I think.

John McCoy is here to see Mr. Bevy, she says.

He says it’s important, she says.

All right, she says, I’ll let him know.

And she hangs up, metal receiver clicking loud. I blink and raise my head from my drowsy half-slumber, stomach clenching, mouth watering. “He says you’ll have to wait until after recording’s done,” she says, apologetic. “You can take a seat or come back later.”

My lungs feel cold. I squint at her, suspicious and weary. “Wait, didn’t you say it’s important?”

“I did, sir.” Miss Secretary nods, avoiding my eyes. “The producer said—”

“The producer?” I press, standing up straight. I know my tone is sharp and tight. I don’t mean it to be. I promise. My pulse is just making me dizzy, or maybe it’s the hunger or the pain, or maybe it’s the exhaustion. Am I dehydrated? When did I last drink water? “Did you tell Bevy himself?”

“He’s already recording for the day,” she explains, reaching across the desk and into some compartment that’s beneath me, some private hidey hole that I’m not allowed to be privy to. The twisting tattoo of a skull trails its way up her arm, lined with bones, with may bells and ribbons that snake around her skin. May bells are typical, boring flowers for tattoos, but it’s far cooler than an empty aquarium tank and fake potted plants.

It’s also mildly alarming. Suddenly ‘sweetie’ isn’t really so nice.

I hear a click underneath me. For a flighty second I think she’s called security. Then the slick voice of Guillaume Bevy winds its way into the air, smooth and boozy with smoke so thick I can already smell its rank stench from the noise alone.

He’s starting on another headline—no, he’s in the middle of another story, something about a riot starting up on the edge of Coal City, be safe, everybody—and Gareth Morrand—Traffic Cop extraordinaire—is talking back at him like he knows anything about being an actual cop. His voice is stuttery and slow at first before it picks up pace. I wonder if they heard the news that I’m here. I don’t know if that’d be good or bad, for Bevy to know that he’s managed to worm his way under my skin.

Miss Secretary looks up at me and gestures to the hidden radio, eyebrows raised, like she’s saying, See? What do you want me to do about it? I click my tongue and pat the counter, lean away, and take off my hat to card my fingers through my sweaty, greasy hair. It hurts to do so, pulling against my scalp. It makes me want to scratch it just to try to work the feeling out even though it’ll only make it worse. God, I miss when I was a child and my hair was soft, healthy, brown. I just don’t know how to get back to that anymore. I don’t know.

For a moment, I scrutinise the tank, waging war with myself and temper and patience (which is a virtue I have, I think).

I already lost the game of pride and power by coming here the moment I heard Bevy’s word on the radio. This alone is an admission of guilt, that there’s something to the story he can hold over me. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have reacted so rashly—I should have waited, maybe a day or two at least, cornered Bevy at the entrance of his workplace before he could get settled in. Give him a physical example of what fucking around will have him finding out.

Instead I’m here, and if I leave, he’s giddy with the knowledge and satisfaction that there’s something deeper to the story, something worth looking into without knowing its danger. If I stay, I’m subservient to his whims, his pretty little bitch sticking around to stroke his ego. I can’t barge in and drag him out, kicking and screaming—not if I want to maintain the peace, not if I want to keep any kind of semblance that his investigation isn’t as serious as it actually is. That’s probably exactly what he wants me to do—bust down the door, cause a ruckus in my desperation to fuck him over for answers at any cost.

Yeah, that’s right, John. Cause mass panic and hysteria over live radio, like the pretty little rabbit you are. Captain would love that.

The other option for that would be I walk in there, into that recording studio. I’m all nice and calm. G-Bevy’s face breaks into a smile, he takes off his headphones or whatever, and suddenly announces my surprise presence to his adoring fans who loathe me. Suddenly I’m there for an interview I’ve been dodging over half my career, and he gets to ask me all the questions that’ve been burning a hole in his back pocket for the past fifteen or whatever years. It lasts hours, however long his show goes on for (he surely has a lot of questions, accusations, shit to pass the time), figures out what buttons to push to get me to erupt anyways. Audiences love reactionary anger, after all, or so I’ve heard.

Or maybe he takes pity on me and sends me off after thirty minutes or so, satisfied that he’s had his fill and thoroughly uninterested with either whatever I need to tell him or need him to tell me. It needs to be—has to be—off the record. He wins the game of cat and mouse; the appeal of the chase is gone. That’s what matters to him.

Fucked. I’m fucked.

I’ve fucked myself.

This is what happens when you’re an RCM officer in the high heat of summer, operating in the busiest section of Revachol during the busiest time of the year, being handed fifteen cases a week and working your ass off to finish two by Saturday. Three, if you’re lucky. More get dropped than they get finished. Tempers flare in summer, ACs stop working, people get murdered or killed or found dead on a nearly daily basis. You’ve got pavement to hit and the pavement’s so hot it burns through the soles of your boots. God forbid you struggle not to get heat stroke, or can barely afford food nowadays, or have to help manage the busiest wing on top of that because you’re the most qualified for the job. Probably. Maybe.

God forbid you’ve got plans for retribution stacked on top of that.

God forbid you’ve had a fucking news reporter breathing down your neck and jacking off every time he gets to harass your career for over a decade. God forbid that reporter find out about the revolutionary plans and fucks everything over, because reporters are always on the hunt for the next big scoop and just love chasing the next big high.

I will never give him the privilege. Not willingly.

But now I have to.

I pinch the bridge of my nose and clench my eyes shut, groaning, fingers squeezing against my tear ducts, but it’s not because I’m about to cry or because I can feel the pressure building up in the back of my throat. It’s because I’m angry and frustrated. Yeah. Yet I lift my nose to take a deep breath—breathe, recollect—and tilt my head back to Miss Secretary, pointing at the fish tank.

“Are there any fish?”

She blinks, follows my finger, and seems confused at the sudden change of subject. “I don’t think so,” she says, slowly. “Not since I’ve started working here, at least.”

“And how long ago would that be?”

“Three years.” Miss Secretary pauses, reconsiders. “...Three and a half.”

“Wow.” I look back at the fish tank, staring at its blue, abyssal artificiality. It’s just an empty husk of a home made for a small community of fish—neon tetras, maybe, or a couple of prawn, or even some snails. I shake my head, putting my boia hat back on. “Okay.”

I don’t mention how, as lonely it’d be, a single betta fish might like to call it home. I don’t even speculate about what kind of fish it was originally installed for, if the installers even had any idea at all. Maybe it was just built to be a flashy cemetery that’d never receive any bodies or love.

She’s watching me.

Call me paranoid, but I know she is. Glancing up from time to time, keeping tabs on me. Writing down notes to give away—notes with valuable information, cataloguing my movements and my very presence. From time to time, someone comes in or goes out, and every time, I glance up to watch her hands. She says such sweet things as, Hello, sweetie, or Have a good day, cher, or See you next week, love. “Cher” gets to me the most. It hurts my heart and fills me with a nauseous longing. It’s being used, specifically, to hurt me.

Call me paranoid, but I grab a book from the bookshelf after some time of standing there. I don’t know how long. Long enough that I start to worry about whether or not I look awkward, standing there. Long enough that every moment I shift my weight, I feel the sharp pain bubbling in the back of my throat.

I go to the fish tank and scrutinise it closely, because maybe there is some microscopic organism in there—some water bear, or a stray piece of algae—but I can smell the chlorine stench and know from that alone: This truly is a glass box of artificial nothing. I go to the corners and touch the plants, rubbing the leaves between my fingers, running fingertips against their edges. I listen to their plastic rustling, inspecting for flaky brown tips. Smell the hot, stale air.

She watches me, looking for the little signs just like I know they are looking for the little signs outside, making my body itch, making it twitch. She hungers for the contents of my bag—my bag, these cases, mine. She cannot have them. No one can. I hold onto it just a little bit tighter, just to make sure.

Eventually I grab a book from the bookshelf. Don’t pay attention to what it is. I sit down beside the aquarium, swaying and swallowing, and turn it to the first page. I pretend to read it, like I’m not. Thinking. About.

May bells.

I’m an overthinker. I know, I know, and I call it a problem. But the real problem is this: Sometimes overthinking is good. Sometimes it leads me to be cautious when I otherwise wouldn’t be. It saves my life, draws my gun and fires the shot. I run through calculations and hypotheticals minutes at a time—contingencies and caution, plans and preparation. I look into things I normally wouldn’t.

And here’s the real, real problem: May bells are the Moralintern’s flower.

So she could be a spy. That’s the real problem.

It’s irrational. I know, I know, but as it turns out, just knowing that isn’t enough to dismiss the thought. So I sit there, flipping pages and pretending like I’m reading. I pretend like I’m not running through the possibilities in my head. My heart isn’t racing through to my fingertips. My lungs don’t feel tight. This is fine. I just need to pay attention. Figure out how best to kill her.

Or maybe I’m doing that overthinking thing again. Maybe she isn’t a spy.

Maybe. Maybe… may bells, may bells, maybe, may, in May, come May, it’s already past May…

May-be she is a spy.

Do I dare to look up?

I take a breath and hold it as I lift my head, staring toward the desk, where Miss Secretary is still sitting. I can see the top of her head from behind the tall counter, shuffling up and down and around, and—I hear the chewing of some food. Sometimes she hums, grunts, shakes the top of her head and scoffs as she listens to Bevy’s voice on the radio. How long has it been now? How long hasn’t she been watching me?

For the longest time, I stare, waiting for her to look over, book steady and still in my hand. The glass box of water bubbles gently beside me. The radio continues playing, and the steady munch, munch, munch of her teeth is occasionally broken up by her swallowing. At some point, my breathing turns shallow. Meandering through the chlorine, taking a leisurely stroll between the vanilla-soap candle, I fucking swear I smell seafood.

It strokes my stomach in the most unpleasant way. Pain cinches in my stomach, drawing me tight around myself. I hug my belly, licking my lips while saliva wells up in my mouth to chase it down, some kind of attempt to delude my body into thinking there’s something inside of me, after all. It’s not the first time I’ve had hunger pangs today, but I’d hoped that I could speak with fucking Bevy, promptly be on my way and grab something the work fridge before collapsing at work again.

This time it’s bad. Bad enough to make me pant, squint my eyes shut, and make pitiful little whining noises in the back of my throat that I hope the world either chooses to ignore or simply doesn’t hear.

“Mr. McCoy?”

I take a breath to steady myself, look up again. Miss Secretary peers over the counter at me. I can’t easily tell what her expression is at this angle. Despite the spit welling in my mouth, my throat’s dry as a desert when I swallow. “Yeah?”

“It’ll be a couple hours before Mr. Bevy’s done, you know,” she says. “He usually wraps up around five.”

I squint down at my watch. It’s not even two, and I have no idea how long I’ve been here. What I do know is that if I leave, I risk coming back to being too late, and then all of this posturing is for nothing. It means I took a risk and didn’t even stick with it, and it’s going to make him wonder, Why? He’ll look into it deeper. I’d need to kill him. Unfortunately, he feeds good morale to the locals—or maybe it’s fortunate, I don’t know. People generally like what he has to say because at least he’s honest about it. I’ll give him that. He’s honest.

“Okay,” I say. I take another deep breath, using it to flood my lungs and ease my spine. Vertebrae crack as I straighten myself before sinking back into the chair. It’s passed, for now, but my hands feel cold, and when I look down at them, they’re shaking. My blood pressure’s low. I really need to get this shit sorted soon, I realise suddenly—water, food, sleep. “Cool.”

“Are you okay?” I look at her again, blinking, and realise I probably look a lot like a startled owl. On my lap, the book I haven’t been reading is still nestled in my hand. The only reason I haven’t let it go is because it’s been warmed by my body heat. Now it’s cozy and warm in my fingers—it’s the perfect size, and it’s made itself feel at home. “You looked like you were in pain.”

“Oh.” My gaze lists to the side, trying to determine the best course of action. Fuck it, I decide suddenly, I don’t give a shit. I turn back to face her, flashing my best smile. “Yeah, no, I’m good. Just haven’t really eaten since yesterday, you know? You know how it is, officer pay and whatnot.”

“Oh, sweetie.”

She says it with some degree of pity, all soft and gentle on the syllables. The softness of it tingles in my spine with a familiar uncertainty but the pity makes me want to pull my gun on her. She shifts in her seat and glances around, going still for a moment like she’s deciding upon something—then, decision apparently made, she stands to her feet, mutters that she’ll be right back, and goes through the recording booth hallway door.

I look down at her ankles where they clack against the linoleum, eyes incidentally roving down short but thick and sturdy legs. Anyone watching would think that I’m undressing her with my eyes. All I can think in this moment, though, is How the fuck do people walk in two-inch stilletos?

I turn the book over on my lap when she’s gone and grimace. If I’d known that I’d plucked out Bevy’s book of all things, I would’ve tossed it to the side a long time ago. Pretty hair so blond and well-groomed that it pools over his shoulders, sunglasses dark and grisly. I know them to be scuffed up by now, particularly on the left lens. I like to imagine it bothers him. The expression on his face is implacable—his lips a little tight, his brows furrowed.

Behind him is a drug den—or a crack house, or whatever people like to call it nowadays. Papers, pillows, clothes strewn all about in a living room. If it weren’t for the blocks wrapped in tight blue packaging, or the needles on the table, or the illicit, unbranded bottles of speed, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for just another hoarding situation. It isn't staged, I can tell—or if it is staged, then they did so in a way that looks like the dealers were recently arrested. Signs of a struggle. If I squint real hard and lean in even closer, then pull the cover far enough away, there might be some blood on the wall. A bullet hole, even. I don't know.

I try to remember if I've heard of Bevy working with a drug bust and doing a photo shoot but come up empty, likely because the moment I hear about that bastard outside of feeling out where in Jamrock he is on any given day, I just tune him out.

Still can’t see his eyes for the fucking glasses, and that pisses me off the most right now. I want to grab them off his fucking face and snap them like a twig in front of him. I want to see a flicker of humanity, whether that be a trace of despair or anger—something, anything. But instead he hides behind scuffed-up glasses, emotions perfectly anonymous in all the ways he expects his interviewees not to be. I don’t think I even know what color his eyes are. Fuck it, maybe they’re purple. Bitches love purple.

It’s not the book itself or the contents within it. Not what he looks like, because who fucking cares? Not the title, either (When Does A House Become A Den?). It’s not even whatever the fuck Bevy does (or at least, tries to do, to some extent).

It’s the way that he acts when he does it, so holier-than-thou and so confident that he knows so much more than anyone else about pretty much anything. Like all reporters, he’s invasive, clumsy, private about everything that doesn’t concern him, specifically. Doesn’t know when the fuck to stop. Doesn’t know when to stay in his lane. Doesn’t know how to take ‘no’ for an answer. And doesn’t even give you the fucking privilege of being able to look him in the eye while he he makes you ride his dick.

Tries to read your book, essentially, but never lets you read his—not unless it’s published. It’s almost violating. It’s definitely exposing. Imagine being ushered to a stage in front of a judgmental crowd of people who already hate you, then stripped naked by his own two hands, made a fucking joke of—a goddamn mockery. One of those people who—so I’ve heard—does it so subtly and carefully, you don’t even realise he’s unbuttoning your trousers until they’re pooling around your ankles. Harry Du Bois but worse, because once upon a time, Harry was on my side, and Bevy has never once been on mine. At least Harry allowed himself to be vulnerable a lot of the time, gentling the blow.

And Bevy’s been trying to interview me for over a decade—something that I’ve been dodging the second I heard of it and was hoping to take advantage of today, to get this shit over with as soon as possible.

I can’t begin to count how many cases he inadvertently fucked up. But see, I'm polite about it. I keep it to myself. I try not to be a complainer, and maybe that's one of my problems, is that I don't complain enough. But nobody likes a whiner, and John McCoy is renowned for taking the blows as they come. It's too late to change that now. Mama raised me differently than that, anyway. Papa, too, all suck it up, buttercup. Put your big boy pants on and take it like a man.

Like it’s my fault every fucking case I'm on always seems to put me waist-deep in shit. So put this bitch in my shoes for a few days while I hound after his ass instead. See how he feels about that.

Feels good, don’t it? Retribution, that is.

When Miss Secretary comes back, the book’s been tossed unceremoniously two chairs down, narrowly escaping drowning in a tank full of water by sheer lack of energy. It'd be a mercy upon it, though. Promise. She approaches me with something in her hand, and for a terrifying second, I think it’s a gun. Then I hear the crinkling of plastic, and the sudden surge of adrenaline has nowhere to go but down. I ride it out through my leg, bouncing it against the ground, asking “What’s this?” even as I reach out to take it.

I realise it’s a curry bun at the same time she says it. The plastic’s open and it’s warm—almost hot—but before I can even think she might’ve poisoned it, my mouth’s full of vending machine food. It’s mostly sweet dough; a puck of ground meat and curry’s nestled somewhere inside its warm, hollow cavity. I barely taste anything by the time I’m struggling to swallow the final bite down, so grateful I can cry. Not just for myself, but because I didn’t even think for a heartbeat to save it for my little brother at home. I don’t, though. Thankfully. Narrowly.

“Wow, you really were hungry,” she says, amazed, and hands me a bottle of water before I can even think to take out my flask.

Thank you, I say, once the curry’s been washed down by half a bottle of cool, sweet, delectable water. I ask her how much I owe her as I reach for my wallet, and she smiles and waves her hand, says nothing, and we talk for a few minutes longer. It almost feels as though, through hunger and vulnerability, some part of the scary monster John McCoy is has been humanised in her mind—though I know better than to think that for long. She just knows that people who are hungry have shorter tempers. She’s nervous that I’m here to shoot Guillaume Bevy through the empty cavity of his skull. How dare I think otherwise, even for a moment.

As she moves to go back to her desk, though, I have to say to her—nice tattoo. Hope she talks more about it, what it represents to her, what it means. Thanks, she says, stopping. She looks down at it. Looks kind of sad. Gentle as I can, I ask her what it’s for.

“My dad,” she murmurs, frowning. “He was taken away by the Coalition during the Revolution. So…”

She stops, lifting a head to scrutinise me, no small trace of skepticism in her eye. Suddenly it’s as if I am the spy, as if I am the one who’ll rat her out to the squad. Break her legs, pull her teeth, steal her nails one by one before breaking every finger and toe in order. This little piggy went to the market, I’d say, whisper-soft. Singsong. I’d tap her pinky toe with a hammer, one, two. Wait until she stops crying, when she loses the trail of what to expect. Slam—then wait until she stops sobbing, screaming; this little piggy stayed home…

Until she can’t take it anymore. Mentally breaks, that is, or loses her fucking mind, whatever you want to call it. Can’t ever be re-introduced into decent society again. That’s how the game works sometimes.

The RCM works under the Moralintern payroll, after all. We’re all cogs in the great machine.

Allegedly. As far as they know.

“Oh,” I say, dumbfounded. My eyes drift down to the tattoo, then away, toward the windows and the street. It’s hard to say I feel much of anything about this revelation other than relief. It should be sad. I should feel sad for her, but I don’t. I just feel tired. Like, oh, here we go again, one of these old things, I’ve heard this one before. I wish I wasn’t so tired. Still, I try. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

“Thanks.” She looks me up and down and smiles a little, as if by sheer virtue of saying, wow, that fucking sucks, something about her perception of me has changed. Her lips are slow and hesitant, very gentle about it. It’s not what most people would expect of a pretty goth woman like her—she’s not the stereotype, that is.

But then, stereotypes very often aren’t true, except in my unique case. They’re all I am, just a handful of them in a trench coat, walking around and pretending to be human. Maybe I can pretend hard enough. Puff out my chest to seem more threatening, land enough lethal blows. Maybe then no one will ever want to get close enough to touch.

And if they do, I plan to bite before they can, before they tear the trench coat away and find—not a person, not a concept, not a monster, but the utter absence of a human. Nothing at all.

Chapter Text

I’m pushing soft metal being pushed through tiny holes, straight into some kind of yellow, ribbed repair kit, each rib perfectly sized for each spring. Something about the holes winds them up into tightly-coiled springs. It’s difficult to push it through at just the right pace and consistency, but it’s satisfying to do and pleases something deeply in my brain. And yet it seems like once I’ve realised what the actual trick is, I start fucking up—parts of the springs get too long and straight, parts of them break into tiny pieces, it gets all wobbly and blurry. It’s good enough, I think. Surely it’ll be fine.

Sometimes I pick up the springs to use them, shoving it straight into the flesh of some kind of being. I don’t twist it or anything, and there isn’t any blood. It’s like pushing it against a silicone flesh cube, the kind used for practicing sutures. The ones I made properly are driven through with ease like automatic screws. I don’t think about how the bad ones will go until I reach that point, and pieces start to break off inside of it, sticking out like thick splinters. Oh, I think, that’s not good.

I start trying to pull them out, but it proves to be difficult. As it turns out, it’s easier to make mistakes than it is to fix them. I think there’s blood, finally, but I don’t remember. I see the red flesh from the hole that I removed and don’t know if it’s even real. Apologetically, I put a new spring in—a perfect one, to plug in the hole, as if it somehow compensates for butchering the flesh. It isn’t…

There’s still a hole running through the spring, though; the damage has been done. I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do to fix it.

A voice floats through the door to my room, bubbling, interrupting. It isn’t my brother. My brother, he doesn’t talk much, if at all. My brother never calls me Mr. Archetype.

There’s an intruder in my house.

I’m not really a jumpy person. I’ve found over the years that my nerves are volatile, yes, but they aren’t the kind of nerves that easily twitch when startled or squeak when frightened. They’re very quiet, very demure, nestling in every fibre of my body in well-disguised form until they get so restless that they need somewhere to go. Usually, I can’t predict when they need somewhere to go. It tends to cause problems.

So when Guillaume Bevy’s voice reaches my ears and I wake up, my jumping is barely—barely because I’m jumping out of my skin with fright. Truth be told, it’s because I didn’t realise… I blink my eyes open, straightening my creaky spine with a quiet groan. The bubbling softens, just a little. I think—I must have fallen asleep at some point, leaning against the water tank, though I don’t know when exactly it happened.

I rub my hand against my eyes, taking off my hat to run my fingers through my hair (I wince—it’s so uncomfortable that it hurts) before squinting up at my company.

Guillaume fucking Bevy. I know it’s him even before the blurriness in my vision fully clears. White male who can’t be younger than his mid-thirties, blond hair draped neatly over his shoulders, spilled back and tucked behind a pair of headphones slung around his neck. Stance a little wide, hands held in front of him. Looks like he’s trying to casually cosplay Dolores Dei herself if she were a man. What is it the kids call it again—drag, or something?

Gareth Morrand stands beside him, limbs awkward as bananas and tall as a fucking palm tree. Vaguely, I notice that he seems to have gained significant weight since he quit the force about, oh, nine years ago. I’m not sure if it’s because the stress of being a cop was lifted off his shoulders or because a lot of jobs in Revachol stand to pay better than being a volunteer of the Revachol Citizens Militia. Either way, good for him, I guess.

He looks healthier, though, like the kind of man that’d make Harry wrap his arm around my shoulders once upon a time, in another life. He would point Morrand out on the street and pull me in close enough that I could smell the cheap sugary wine on his lips. Pretend to whisper. Instead say, at normal speaking volume, See that, Johnny? That’s good fucking muscle mass, baby, that guy’s got potential to be a real superstar. And all I’d do is go Ooh, cool, cool. I’d stare at the man as he walked down the road, leaning against my partner, then look Harry dead in the eye and say, Don’t call me Johnny.

God, I wish I were Johnny.

“Scusi,” I say, running my fingers through my hair again before I put my hat back on. It fits neatly over my head, brim wide enough to shield my eyes from both the overhead light and from Bevy’s nonexistent gaze. I lift my head to disarm the shield, leaning back to flash a smile at him, throwing my ankle over my knee. Something in my spine cracks and twinges. “What was that again?”

“I said,” Bevy repeats, tilting his head to the side, “if it isn't Mr. Archetype himself, come to grace me with the time taken from his overburdened schedule.”

“I got bored,” I lie, stifling a yawn. Bevy’s eyebrow raises, the corner of his mouth tightening almost microscopically. “So I came here. Then your show put me to sleep.”

“Is that so? I’m sorry that I couldn’t make the interview with the statistician who follows the excessive force utilised by the RCM interesting for you. I’ll be sure to keep it in mind next time.”

His voice is more polite than I’d like it to be. Calm, cool, collected—sanitised, even. Parts of it feel a little melodic and bassy, moreso without the vague static disturbance that permeates the radio. It's a kind of voice that draws attention. Maybe the Frittte clerk was right—it is a little sexy, though I still don't like hearing it. With the hair and glasses and voice and shit, he could’ve been a rock star instead. Disco is out. Rock is in.

I can’t tell if he’s dreading the fact that I’m here at all, excited about it, or if he even cares. If I were a body language expert, I’d probably assume the wider stance indicates a readiness to bolt or to fight, but body language can sometimes be a trap of opinion that officers fall back on as an easy cop-out.

I stopped listening to that shit when I realised people kept mistaking my brother’s tendency to do things while people are talking to him as blatant disregard for what they’re saying. He just likes having something occupy his hands. Doesn’t mean I’m immune to these sorts of things entirely, though. My nerves are too hard-wired to look for signs of danger.

So I try to take methods of composure with a grain of salt, because none of it’s true one hundred percent. I don’t even have an idea of what Bevy’s usual stature’s like, anyway, so I have nothing to go on. That’s another logical fallacy with using body language to convict. That is, if you’re the kind of cop who prefers convicting the right person.

“I hear enough about it from the Inspectorate General,” I murmur, taking a moment to scrutinise the watch on my wrist. The hands read 5:12, which means, oh… how does it translate? 17:12; afternoon. My other hand opens up my bag, nestled on my lap, fingering through the paperwork and files to make sure nothing’s been stolen.

“Pretty much all the numbers and percentages and statistics and everything. They take me into a board room with all the other dirty cops and squeak out all the graphs on a white board. Then we take a test about it, you know. And if we fail, they take away our badges and throw us to the judicial system. Reunion if it’s bad. Chaise électrique if it’s worse.”

At a glance, everything seems fine. I look up at Bevy and smile, nudging the brim of my hat up a few centimetres.

“Their favorite colour, for all the bad numbers, is red. It really doesn’t stand out, though. There’s too much of it.”

This is the most I've ever said to Guillaume Bevy in one sitting.

Bevy hums and nods along, pretending like he’s buying into it. Like he’s not keenly aware that there is no white board, no class of adult cops, no lecture and no tests. Just a slip of paper with all of the numbers and graphs printed from the radiocomputer. Hand it, sign it, look over it, please, and if the Inspectorate General is really concerned, they’ll lecture you uno a uno about every last one of them.

“Right, a room with a white board,” he says, dryly. “So kind of like Le Academie.”

“Mm hmm.”

His brows knit together a touch tighter, though his posture remains about as rigid, his voice as polite. For the life of me, I can’t tell if it’s confusion, I can’t tell if it’s irritation. I don’t know if he’s looking me in the eye or if he’s looking elsewhere. Scanning every last bit of my body. My greasy hair, my unshaven face, my tired eyes. My hands, settled on eighteen files, some more thickly filled than others. It could be concern for all I know, I can’t fucking tell.

I look at Morrand instead. Shrug a shoulder. “Hello, skipper,” I say, pleasantly. Pretending like none of this bothers me at all. “Traffic misses you.”

Morrand scoffs and rolls his eyes, heaving a great, big sigh. “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure they do,” he sighs, starting for the door. “Tell them I said hey, that’s all. See you Friday, Bevy.”

“Yeah, sure, see you then,” is all Bevy says, only really sparing a glance to see him out, while Morrand doesn’t even look over his shoulder. The carelessness of the situation startles me—they’ve been on the air together for years at this point, almost ever since Gareth quit the force. I expected—I don’t know, for him to be here, backing up his friend as some kind of reinforcement, ready to throw down hands. Pack a meaty punch. Not just—leave, like, what, they’re not friends, or whatever? Like they don’t get along at all? I don’t understand. This has to be something they talked about or planned beforehand, I’m sure of it.

As the door closes, I finally stand to my feet, taking a moment to stretch out my sore muscles. My elbows pop, as do my shoulders, a couple of my vertebrae. My hip, much quieter, a secret little pang that only I can keep. I pull my arms over my head, then brace my arms against my backside, roll my shoulders back. Look at me, it says, I’m the perfect image of relaxed and unbothered.

Then I scrutinise Bevy again, look at him looking at me from a metre or so away. His sunglasses are different, I realise mildly—same brand but different colour frame. They’re missing the scuff on the left lens. I want to rip those sunglasses off of his face and throw them in the water tank just to see how he’ll react, maybe give the tank something new to add to its fake little grave. Just give me some of the energy that he always seemed to have—not even that long ago, back when he was working the major crimes unit with Harry last year and his opportunity to hound me for just a word, just ten minutes, just five increased significantly.

I spread my hands out to the side like I’m inviting a hug, smiling like my mama does when she greets guests at her door. “Really?” I say, huffing out a smug little laugh. “After fifteen years of hounding my ass for a face-to-face, this is what I get? You’ve finally monopolised my attention—and nothing? Come on, amico, show me some love. We both know you’re my number one hater.”

Finally—a break.

A smile cracks over the side of his face—no, more of a smirk, though not one accompanied with a chuckle of its own. “Sixteen,” he corrects, voice purring smooth as butter—because apparently, he’s just good with details like that, numbers and shit. No doubt he’s judging me behind that flash of forced friendliness, fucking bastard. You say you know the statistics, he’s thinking, but you don’t even know how long I’ve been following your fuck ups.

I ignore his thoughts and say, “Sixteen, right.” Gently acknowledge the mistake, but don’t bring too much attention to it. It’s good to be modest, acknowledge when you’re wrong, move on.

“I’m surprised you can even remember that, to be honest.” Finally, he unfolds his hand, offering it to shake. “I’ve got a recording booth with your name on it, if you’ll follow me.”

I stop breathing for a moment. There’s that interest I was asking for. Put it back, I want to say, I’ve changed my mind.

For a fidgety second—and I blame sleep deprivation on this one—this reminds me of prom, for some reason. Come, my lady, some teenage boy says, all gel-slick hair and hand-me-down suit, dance with me. And now she’s in this awkward position, see, because she doesn’t want to dance, but she doesn’t want to commit any social faux pas. So she does, after a moment, because how bad can it be, really? I think that’s what prom’s like, anyway. I never went.

My hand is burning like his own no doubt is, hanging in the air like that expectantly. It’s like the handle to a door that I shouldn’t open, a door with writing on the front that asks, Do you want to ruin your life? Every good business deal opens and closes with a handshake, but this isn’t business, and I don’t have any intention of actually meeting him any more on his level than I already am.

How cruel of him, I think, to lace his trap with the expectation of social niceties. Does he know that if I take his hand, I’m agreeing to his proposition, sealing my fate, and if I don’t let him lead me by that hand down the hall into some frightening, little soundproofed room for God knows how long, I’m the one in the wrong? I’ve strung him along for so long, after all—and now that I’m here, I owe him that much, at least, yeah?

Except I don’t owe him anything. I’ve made his career about as much as he’s ruined mine. If anybody owes anybody something, it’s him who owes me.

So I ignore his hand, pretending like I didn’t even see him offer it, busying myself with fishing a cigarette and my lighter. Which I deliberately take my time to light, sucking in a long, slow drag; and somehow, when I look down, his hand’s still there, hovering, questioning. Come dance with me, it says. I know it’s rude to simply say ‘no’.

“No.” I murmur the word soft and sweet, turning my head to the side, polite enough not to blow smoke straight in his face. “I don’t think you do.” And then suddenly I’m sharing more than I want, drops and trickles of frustration spitting out of my mouth before I can stop it:

“I don’t have any interest in having my words taken out of context, or having it cut to make it look like I’m some babbling, insane sociopath the next time you go live on air, or whatever it is you radio hosts do with folks you don’t like. Like people do with documentaries, or biased newspaper articles, or—or cult recruitment schemes.”

I see his brows furrow a little bit more, his mouth part to say something. I wonder if he’s asking himself why I’m here, then. Whether his stomach is twisting itself into knots of uncertainty as much as mine is. If we’re two men, standing here in a dingy-ass lobby, pushing each others' poker face without realising how bad our own might be.

The moment is gone fast and he quickly closes his mouth, brows raising while he lowers his hand to shrug instead. “Okay. That’s fine. I can work with pen ‘n pad instead. Hell, I’ll do it from memory if I have to. You don’t just go knocking for sixteen years and then just drop the ball the moment it’s open, right?”

I huff out a scoff of a laugh, draping my arm against the top corner of the tank full of water—equal parts to come across cool as it is to ease my weight off my left side. “That’s interesting,” I say with a smile that flashes my teeth, jerking my head back: A cocky little challenge, just for him. I take a quick moment to scan his body, just a flicker of the eyes to take stock of the situation. “What makes you think I’m here for an interview?”

For a second, I’m not sure that does anything.

Then it’s all in the deep breath that he takes, the long, almost anguished sigh that spills out of his lungs as his shoulders slump. One of his hands reaches up, passing through thinning hair that I feel confident in saying must feel much, much nicer than my own, catching his shades along the way and riding them up. “Goddamn it, McCoy. You’re killing me, you know that? You know how long I’ve waited to have a one-on-one with you?”

“Sixteen years, apparently,” I mutter, breathless and fascinated. A part of me is so terrified to speak because if I do, it just might break this spell I’ve somehow cast, and I don’t know if I could ever cast it again. Guillaume Bevy, confident man he is, unshakable journalist willing to go to whatever lengths to get his story—sighing, casting his gaze to the ceiling, shoving aside his glasses. Showing something, giving me something. Fucking wonderful sight, really, and it hits my brain with such a rush of dopemine, it makes me dizzy. Or maybe it's just the exhaustion. It's probably just the exhaustion.

It’s like he’s going through the five stages of grief, all at once, like he’s been begging his mistress so fucking hard for five hours—let me cum, let me cum, please, ma’am. Please, I’ll do anything. And she trailed her fingernails against his side, brushed up and down along his inner thigh, and kissed the head of his straining cock, smearing the pre against her lips. Please, because she’s teasing him, torturing him at this point.

But she comes up to his head, kisses his mouth so that he can taste his own desperation, and whispers in his ear, “No.” Not even a ‘not yet’. Not even a promise for release or what to expect. Just a gentle, serene, teasing “No.” And he can’t even use the safeword yet—still, not yet, because he wants it so, so badly. Because it’ll feel so good if—when—if it ever happens. For now, all he can do is cry about it.

Blissful fucking beauty. It almost makes the bullshit he’s put me through all these years worth it.

So I savour this, drinking it all in as he hooks his sunglasses into his shirt and mutters “Shit” somewhere into the air between us. Bevy takes a slow, deep, steady breath, eyes closed. Reeling himself back in. Recentering himself. When he opens them again, hands on his hips, I immediately clock that his eyes are a dark shade of brown, committing it to memory. “All right. So if you’re not here for an interview, what do you want?”

Blink and you’ll miss the way his eyes linger on my bag as he says it. My miserable pile of secrets. So that’s what he’s been looking at, I realise—my files, my documents, my cases. Wondering if I’m here to request his help on a case and dreading that the answer might be yes. Or maybe wondering what kind of tasty morsels I have stashed away in my pouch, delicious nuggets that only the most worthy of eyes can dine upon.

But I’m their guardian, babe, and you know it. Not even getting to your knees right here and now to suck my dick will grant you access, as funny and interesting as I’d find it. You’re not worthy, and if I have it my way, you never will be.

“G-fuckin’-Bevy.” A chuckle rumbles in the base of my chest, tumbling out like slippery, smooth river pebbles. “Ah, Look at you. You’re so desperate for my time and attention, it’s damn near cute.”

“You know, you’re a lot of things, but you never really struck me as the kind of cop who just sits around on his ass for a couple of hours for no good reason.”

“Well, aren’t I just full of surprises.”

“You sure are. Sixteen years, McCoy. Shit.”

We stay like that for a while. Standing across from each other, staring each other down. The more time passes, the more the humour of the situation slips away from me, settling on my shoulders with an uncomfortable air. I can feel the vibrations of the fish tank pressed against my side, the cool glass seeping into my skin. The smell of smoke eventually reminds me of my cigarette. I take a drag and let it out.

Slowly, Bevy shakes his head, reaching behind himself to take something from his back pocket. My hindquarters instinctively tense up, spine stiffening—before I can stop myself, I’m suddenly standing solidly on my own two feet, body tilted to the side, my hand clenched around the grip of my gun. It takes the sound of my thumb unclipping it from my holster for my brain to catch up and stop myself.

By then, of course, Bevy’s taken notice and frozen, too, one hand still behind his back, the other level with his shoulder. My attention’s focused on the hand behind, glancing up only briefly to see him watching me—watching me damn near about to pull a fucking gun, on him, in his workplace.

I don’t mean to react like this. I’m sorry. I’ve been shot like this before, in conversations I thought at first to be friendly banter, forgive me, forgive me, please don’t let me fuck this up.

I don’t know why I’m begging for forgiveness. I haven’t done anything wrong.

“If you ever change your mind…” Very, very slowly, Bevy moves his hand. Slides whatever it is out of his back pocket, holding it up to show me. A notepad.

Because of fucking course it’s a notepad. This is a news reporter, not a gangster kid off the side of the street, bumming me for a smoke or some spare change to lure me in.

The long breath I hadn’t realised I was holding eeks its way out of my nose. My hand loosens its grip around my gun, releases it entirely, and soon I’m standing up straight with my arms crossed, watching Bevy take out a stubby little pencil from his front pocket, lick at it, write. I probably look like I’m pouting, here, like some embarrassed elementary schooler being teased for having a crush when really it’s just embarrassing for people to say you have a crush on somebody at all.

Restless energy comes out of my leg, channeling out through the ground. Without spurs, it takes me longer than usual to notice—but once I realise what it’s doing, I set my heel down firmly to stop it.

Down where the smell of smoke is coming from. My dropped cigarette, my stick of soothing nicotine. I’ve even the good grace to grind it out into the floor, sparing just a moment of mourning for the wasted money.

My heart’s still hammering in my chest when Bevy tears out the small little slip of paper, stepping forward to give it to me. “About the interview,” he clarifies when I don’t immediately take it. “Just leave a message or something. We’d love to have you here.” There’s a whisper of a smile tagged on at the end.

This close, I can make out quite a few more things about Guillaume Bevy that I never thought I’d be able to intuit. He has wrinkles—can’t be younger than thirty-seven, I guess, or somewhere in that ballpark. Might be older. Cops have been wrong before. He uses the same kind of pine-scented aftershave a great deal of folks I know use. It mingles strangely with the clinging stench of cheap cigarettes and the barely-there smell of his shampoo, which I’m pretty fucking certain is some kind of woman’s brand: I can’t think of any shampoo-conditioner combo that smells like oranges and apricots. Maybe that’s the secret behind his pretty hair—women’s shampoo.

Thing about Guillaume is, he’s a tall man. Taller than me in my boia boots, if only by a little. It means if I can see over his shoulder, then it’s only just a little over the top, and even then if Miss Secretary is watching, she won’t be able to read what I’m saying. I look to the left instead, eyes scanning the street for anybody watching on the other side—find nothing. The good news is, from the outside looking in, these tinted windows make it pretty fucking hard to see. I remember noticing that, very vaguely, when I was approaching.

I look away, look at him as I take the paper—lean in and try to be as quiet as I can. “Listen, Bevy,” I start, carefully. “Let’s say, hypothetically, we do this interview, how necessary is it that it be here?”

He shrugs a shoulder nonchalantly, unclipping his sunglasses from his shirt to let them dangle in his hand instead. “Doesn’t have to be,” he gruffs, gesturing over his shoulder to the recording studio hallway. “But the recording booth I mentioned’s sound-dampened. Recording equipment can be brought in for higher-quality audio.”

“Right, right, of course.”

I nod as if I have any idea exactly how that works. Truth be told, the way I’m imagining it? A padded room, or maybe one that’s ceiling-to-floor lined with foam blocks, and nothing else. A lock on the door. Two chairs in it right in the center, one across from the other. A single microphone in between. Always recording—even when the little light is off. Small little peepholes in the wall, where people can spy in on the place, take sneaky photos, record what’s supposed to be conversations made explicitly in private.

Specifically, my brain latches onto a single phrase: Sound-dampened room. Sound-dampened. Sound dampened. Not extinguished, not proofed—dampened. Damp things still have water. Damp things still have that vague, cottony, not-quite-dry but not-quite-wet vibe to them. It’s a cruel in-between that promises both but delivers on neither. Damp means sound can still slip through if you squeeze it hard enough. Damp is fucking hard to breathe through, but it’s doable if you do it slowly enough.

“Like I said, though,” Bevy adds, “I can do pen ‘n pad. Or just do it from memory.”

I shake my head, taking the pad and the stubby little pencil out of his hands unceremoniously. I don’t think he’s exactly a fan of it, me doing that. By the time I’ve finished up, offering the pad back out to him, I see he’s turned his head away from me now, staring at the window, as if wondering what I was searching for. Glasses back on his stupid fucking face.

Don’t worry about it, I think, tapping the notebook against his shoulder. He looks back quickly and takes it, brows furrowing as he reads the address. While he does that, I re-adjust my shoulder strap and slap my hand firmly against his arm—once, twice—starting for the door.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, officer,” Bevy says before I can get very far, “but if you were anyone else, then I might actually trust it. You want quiet, I got quiet. You want alone, I can do alone. But this? This is a no can do—McCoy.”

I can hear his footsteps following me. I stop only when I reach the door, my hand on the metal handle that swings inside while my face dons its best adaptation of tired indifference. He stops shortly before me, holding the notebook in one hand while the other gestures to it, like I’m too fucking stupid to understand what it is he’s talking about. Again, his mouth is tight, eyes completely obscured. It’d be so fucking nice to clench my fist and punch him in the fucking nose, break his nasal cavity, break his glasses even harder.

“This is a no-can-do. You can have alone or you can have this address, but you’re not getting both without a damn good explanation.”

“You know, I can’t even say that I blame you, really. I did damn near pull a gun on you.”

He doesn’t expect that. Look at the way he shifts on his back leg a little, draws his shoulders down, tightens his mouth closed. He's probably surprised that I called it out for what it was, not even bothering to lie or hide from the reality of it. A smile toys at the corners of my own, something that tries not to be as nervous as it is when my brain is scrambling for shit to say to guarantee his attention—something, anything.

“Look. I don’t mind if you tell someone about the location, as long as you keep my name out of it. I don’t even mind if you bring a gun of your own to this little meeting place. Hell, I’ll even come without my own gun and keep however far away from you you’d please at all times. But this—” I tap the notebook several times, nail against spiral “—is where I want it to be. I don’t want any recording devices. I don’t want any cameras. 

“But you’d better keep in mind that after dodging so much as getting within spitting distance of you for sixteen years, I’m here now, and you better ask yourself why. I’m doing you a kindness, m’sieur. It’s here and then or nowhere never. See you then, or maybe not. That’s up to you. Ciao.”

And that’s it. My genius plan, as I pull the door open and turn my collar against the sun reflecting off of the buildings around me and the sidewalk thrumming with heat. I do my damn best not to limp as I sweat through this concrete jungle, making my way to the bow collector, steadying my breathing. Asking myself what the fuck I’m doing. Proposing some kind of shitty ultimatum to an even shittier work rivalry? Pushing Guillaume Bevy into a private little corner of Revachol so he can be murdered?

If he’s smart, he’ll tell someone to tail him at a distance to keep an eye on where we go, so that if he disappears, someone will have seen me last with him. If he’s even smarter, he’ll ignore this proposal entirely. Continue on with his life. Probably get killed by the Moralintern as a result, or else they’ll force him to find dirt on Captain Pryce and decommission him as captain.

I’m getting on the tram, really, heading to the station to write my report and pretend like nothing’s wrong, when all I’m really doing—to be perfectly honest—is trying to play on a simple marketing trick. Exclusive items, massive sales, coupons to products of questionable quality that will expire soon, soon, soon. The fear of missing out.

He’s a reporter, I tell myself, over and over again. Reporters hate missing out on hot details and exclusive interviews. Surely he’s stupid enough to fall for it.

And if not, I might have a few fingers and toes to break.

Chapter Text

The tram takes me to a trolley that escorts my body up the 8/81 motorway, driving along the spine that carves its way through Revachol. West is La Delta, tall skyscrapers with pretty lights far across the bay—the place where rich people live and work. Bankers, interisolary spokespeople, accountants. Though I have a couple of friends in high places, I’ve never been there before. I don’t think I ever will, even after all of this is over.

Far to the east is the Greater Revachol Industrial Harbor, the capital of the working class—I think—where dockworkers work grueling hours day and night to handle import and export. According to Harry’s report of the Martinaise case, the Wild Pines Group claims that “we contribute to 8% of the world’s cargo.” I’m not sure if the woman who told him meant the 8% is just in Revachol or if she was talking about the Wild Pines Group’s global cargo in general; the kind that includes other cities, other isolas, but I’m hoping to see that number drop significantly soon.

8/81 sweeps its way over Faubourg, slicing the largest and most densely populated area of Revachol almost clean in two. I can look out the trolley’s window and stare down at the residentials, seeing streets sparsely crowded with motor carriages most can’t afford, roads only ever really wide enough for two-way traffic. Faubourg’s large, too—wider than it is tall. Almost none of weathered wooden houses are painted, and many are missing entire sections of their roofing from this summer’s hurricanes and thunderstorms.

Multiple families live in the same house. Some of those houses have been patched up with metal roof plating, and the checkerboard of roads and buildings curve into the far-off distance like the massive lonely fields of Wheat Town. There’s an entire, isolated section of Faubourg by the River Esperance, a hole in the world where particles of radioactivity still trickles its way to the ocean. People don’t tend to go there often, and for good reason.

The ghetto’s split into eleven districts, ranging from Precincts 27-38. For the longest time, I failed to understand why Faubourg got so many while Jamrock—which is bad, maybe even a little worse. People shouldn’t live here, but they do—only gets us: Precinct 41. We’re the heart of Revachol, with wider streets and business mainstays, people who’ve lived here since they were born and would plan to stay until they die, were it not for the crime rate. Over the years, though, I learned that this was always the intention. Revachol cannot wage another revolution if the heart of the city’s criminally starved into complacency.

The trolley turns off the 8/81 and starts down the ramp leading toward Boogie Street, the main road that goes straight south through the heart of Jamrock. I look away from the window to pull the bell line and see one or two others do the same—a woman in her patrol officer blues, RCM rectangle shining across her back in the light. A dark-skinned teenager near the front who takes off his headphones afterward to look over his shoulder and behind him, like he’s checking to see if anybody else is stopping. I wonder if he’s here for a station call.

The trolley stops off the side of the road, and the couple of people, including me, get to our feet. I shuffle my way past my riding partner, who tucks her legs in tight against the seat, and make my way to the front. There’s another cop behind me, a poor, fresh-faced fucker that I barely recognize from the stables. He looks at me and recognizes me; waits to follow my cue to copy what I do.

The teenage kid pays and nervously departs, glancing around, giving me time to show my ID to the driver and get off without paying. Technically members of the RCM still have to pay for public transportation, but unless it’s automated, the people running transport usually let it slide. Even then, I know plenty of cops who skip lines and jump the subway turnstiles that get away with it. You can get away with a lot of things when you’re a cop, it turns out. That’s one of the few benefits of the job.

Behind me, the fresh-faced fucker stumbles off close behind. I can assume he followed my lead. Good job. I can indulge in a small sense of pride.

Precinct 41 is a small walk from here, but it’s really just off the side of the motorway, nestled just off of 8/81, where we can quickly dispatch officers to run down the city’s spine and spread out across her central nervous system. The red building’s more or less this massive dome that’s kind of shaped like the back of a lady beetle, only it has a couple of tall chimneys reaching up into the sky. Like antennae, I guess. I used to wonder back in the day what each of them were used for, but now I just limp up the stairs of the once-impressive building without thinking, not even sparing a thought for the repurposed silk mill and what its inner mechanics might have one day been.

The patrol officer holds the door for me like a gentleman—gentlelady, I suppose—and I utter a brief thanks as I step inside the building. I’ve learned to always expect it to be hot in the summer, since the metal dome has a tendency to insulate the heat more than it lets it out. The AC only works a quarter of the time, and even when it does, it’s only ever really used for the hottest couple of hours of the day. That’s why there are some smaller rooms that have window units hanging out of them, though most of them are so shabby that they hardly work.

I linger by the entrance, wrestling off my jacket without removing my bag, and drape it over my arm as I approach the front desk. Don’t even bother worrying about my shoulder holster or my gun—this is cop country, after all. Nobody gives a shit. Don’t even bother taking out my ID for Apricot Pideau, a pretty young woman who looks up at me, signs me in, and says, Hello, Mr. McCoy. Can you pass this to Daddy, please? I tell her, Of course, anything for you, babydoll, jab my thumb at the dark-skinned kid coming up behind me, and tell her to treat him all gentle-like, I don’t think he’s ever been here before.

Then I go through the building, the sound of typewriters and desks chasing me all the way. I navigate through a couple of hallways and rooms of unimpressive drywall haphazardly thrown together, then up the pocket of silence that serves as a grey little stairwell that reminds me of the ones you’d find on the side of hotels.

Third floor I slip out on, ducking into the closest bathroom I can to take a piss and douse my face with water. Fish out a drouamine pill or two—not to kill the pain, because it’s a bit too late for that now, but to soften its blow. I've given up on taking it without an empty stomach, and it’s bothering me enough that I think I’d prefer an ulcer to it getting any worse.

I spend a few minutes experimentally testing my weight on my left side, then pivoting my hip to an audible crack. I tamp my foot against the linoleum a couple of times, grimacing at the pinprick sensation climbing up my soles, my leg, my waist. It’s bubbling in the back of my throat. Back fucking hurts, too. I need to drop my shit off at my desk before anything else.

So I go to do that, leaving the bathroom, walking down the hall a few more doors past, and push open the one that leads to the special branch of C Wing.

Calling it a sea of cubicles wouldn’t exactly be accurate. There’s no walls between the desks. Most of them are abandoned—thanks to Harry, fucking genius, driving the vast majority of good officers away with his wonderful propencity for outrage—and as such, most are pushed together. Some used for random crap like takeout containers and bags and trash and books.

My desk is probably the most neatly disorganised, over in the far corner by the window, where I can see anything and everything. The unfortunate flaw—which I acknowledge, but try not to think too hard about—means that living in corners doesn’t give me many routes of escape.

A total of three officers mingle around the area right now, two of them bitching and moaning about the heat, the other writing up a report, fingers tapping dutifully at the typewriter. She only glances up to see who opens the door, then gets right back to work after I nod my greeting.

I toss my hat onto the hat rack I stole from the juvie office and make my way to my desk. Mack Torson lifts his bald head and tilts it back, letting go of the bitching to give me a smile. “Hey, McCoy.”

“If you’ve got time to whine, you’ve got time to scribe,” I bite, tossing my bag and jacket on my seat. I lean my hip against my desk and frown over at the two, squinting between the bulky gym bro with the word ‘Jamrock’ lovingly tattooed over every square inch of his body and his scrawny, red-headed little friend who’s so dreamy, he doesn’t even have a gun. Just has a fucking sword, because swords are cool. It doesn’t make him smart. It makes him dumb as a sack of rocks. “So why aren’t you scribing?”

“Typewriter broke,” Chester answers. He takes after me, a little, feet kicked up on his desk and crossed at the ankle. I follow where he flicks his pen, frowning at the ancient beast settled on a lonely little table against the wall. “And yes, I did try figuring out how to fix it, but the thing’s so fucking old it could be your bitch.”

We go back and forth about it for a minute—did you try changing the ink cartridge? Yes; what was it, were the keys jammed? Was it typing out uneven letters? Was the roller being a little shit again?—and before I even know it, I’m picking at the typewriter, pulling it apart. I can’t keep doing this, I say, it isn’t my job to sit around on my ass and fix this hunk of junk every week.

Chester mutters something about how I was more fun before I became his boss. I ignore him, much like I ignore the horrible aching in my stooped back. The sharp pangs in my wrists.

A few minutes later, I give up and go back to my desk, where Chester’s examining the little box that Apricot gave me for her papa. He catches my approach and coos, shaking it in the air. It sounds like something metallic—I think I know what it is. “What’s this, McCoy—you got a present from a pretty little lady?”

“I think it’s the part that Jules needs to fix the communications relay.” I snap my fingers a few times, turning my head up to the ceiling, what was it called, what was it called…? “Qu'est-ce que ‘rimbalzo’ en Surense?”

“I don’t fucking know, man.”

“Like a bounce-back unit? I don’t know. A ricochet unit. Something like that.” I reach out to touch it, gently rapping my knuckle against the fragile label, then nod over to the adjacent doorway that leads to Jules’s relay room. The door’s always open, probably to let out the smoke and help with the ventilation. Through the window, I can see him speaking into the microphone; in the air, I can hear his voice, heavy accent soothing but eternally weary. “Pass this over to him. Ask if he’s been able to find anything on that sabotage.”

“You got it, chief.” He flashes me a grin and a short little salute before heading off to do just that.

I go back to my own business, kneeling down behind my desk, running my hand along the bottom drawer. It’s supposed to be locked by a key and a tumbler; two strips of tape, each intersecting the other, cover the keyhole with a flat, ancient security. It’s all well and good to simply leave it locked, but, you know—there’s nothing stopping somebody with some experience in lockpicking from putting their slippery little fingers into my secrets.

That’s what the tape is for—cover the keyhole, so that if somebody does decide to get nosy, I’ll be able to tell. There would be a hole in the tape. And even if there isn’t a hole in the tape, if they peel away the same tape that I put down and put it back on, I’ll probably notice: It wouldn’t be as sticky; the edges might be peeling; tiny little corners might be missing. Fingerprints. If they use new tape entirely, they might not remember the orientation or the order or even how many strips I used, because it changes. I keep notes.

Lockpicking leaves scratches, anyway, but it’s good to have safeguards.

Call me fucking paranoid, or whatever. It’s not perfect. I know. But it’s also not meant to be a permanent security measure.

My fingers rove along the tape and find nothing—no hole over the keyhole, no flaky edges indicating someone’s pulled it back. I take out a pocket knife from my back pocket, unfolding it to carefully dislodge the edge of the tape until my fingernails can pull it off. I’m stooped down to scrutinise for the telltale scratches of lockpicking when I feel footsteps approaching. I lift my head, frowning up at Mack Torson, wide-shouldered mini goliath, who’s leaning against my desk. “What?”

“Captain wanted to talk to you,” he says, nodding to the door. “By the way.”

“Is this about what Bevy said on the radio?”

“You heard that? I thought you didn’t listen to G-Bevy.”

“Oh.” I scoff out a laugh, taking out my desk key with a shake of my head. It slots neatly into the drawer, turns, lets me pull it out easily. The files inside are horribly disorganized—I haven’t been able to find the time to sort them. It doesn’t take long for the ones in my bag to accompany them, including the couple weighing on the secrets of my conscience. “Not willingly. The Frittte by the Inspectorate General happened to be playing it.”

“Wait, you—” He cuts himself off. I let him ruminate on that information as I lock it back up, reaching to my desktop for the tape and humming a little tune. He passes it to me. I thank him. “So you got out of the rat squad pretty early.”

“Yeah.”

“They say anything about anything else? Did they give you the vibe that they know something’s off?”

I pause at that, inclining my head to the window. Rubbing my fingers against my chin, my cheek, hearing and feeling the scratchy prickling that feels wrong, albeit not unfamiliar. The events replay in my brain—not just that talk with Chuck, but everything else; the greeting with Helen, the way her coworkers might have looked at me, the way the receptionist reacted when I signed in.

Eventually I shake my head, jostling the drawer to make sure that it’s locked. “No. No, I don’t think so. But I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Okay. Where’ve you been the past couple hours, then? Something catch you up?” He circles around the side before I can finish bracing my hand against the floor, the other gripping the edge of the desk, and offers his own hand to me. I stare at it dubiously for a moment before heaving a great, big, melodramatic sigh, letting him help pivot me onto my feet. All my weight on my right—and then, tentatively, on my left. My legs feel weak, muscles tingly.

I like Mack, in some abstract way. Wouldn’t accept his hand if I didn’t. Good bulk. Strong. His height might leave something to be desired, but height’s really just a small factor on the scale of attractiveness. He has a good jawline. A strong, reliable grip. He knows his way around knives: Sometimes we sharpen them together in the quieter periods of the day, blades against whetstones and raw leather, shooting the shit.

We’re on good enough terms to hit up the kebab stand for lunch from time to time, but it’s hard to tell if it’s flattering or irritating how much he admires me. It makes it hard to know how much of what he gives is pandering to my ego and how much of it is real.

I take a breath, let out another sigh, and fish out a cigarette from my jacket. Lighter, too. Through the communications officer’s window, I watch as Jules and Chester talk to each other, the latter leaning over his shoulder and nodding along to whatever he’s being told.

“I went to the radio station,” I eventually say, blowing smoke out to the side. The nicotine warms my central nervous system, stroking the ever-ragged edges nice and smooth. Maybe it’s helped by the painkiller. I don’t know.

Mack’s eyebrows shoot up to the sky. One of my nervous smiles slips out, pushing a chuckle in front of it. “No shit.”

“Yeah.” I take another drag, sliding a bakelite ashtray shaped like an upturned UFO closer to me. It’s actually a piece of evidence from a case a few years back I hadn’t the heart to abandon. Conspiracy theorist fella. Nice enough guy. It’s a shame what happened to him.

I tap out my cigarette. Blow out smoke. “We might have a lunch date or something. I don’t know. For someone who’s been bending over backwards to get me alone in a quiet little room, he seemed pretty damn shy once the opportunity presented itself.”

Mack barks out a laugh at that. “That’s gay as shit, man,” he says, then blanches, trying to backpedal even as I snicker into the back of my hand. Because, yeah, the way I phrased it did kinda sound pretty fuckable. “I mean—”

“It’s called a ‘rebound conduit’.” We look over at Chester as he grabs a chair, legs scraping against the floor, and turns it to sit backwards in front of my desk, arms draped over the back. “So here’s the deal. Apparently from what Oldboy just said, it’s the thing that pushes signals and calls or whatever from one precinct to another. Ours haven’t been the best, not really up-to-date, so when the relay station was updated—”

“Bullshit.” I scoff, shaking my head. “38 to 42 also use that relay, and they’re running on the same system we are. I swear to God, if the ‘lintern’s sayin’ that it’s because our systems are overworked—”

“That’s exactly what they said—that the shit’s all shorted out because it was all old-school crap.”

“I think,” Judit says suddenly, “it had to have been an inside job.”

We all look at her then, halfway across the room, staring at us with the quiet intensity of a woman marked with a numb sense of grief and a sharper mind than most would assume. She has a long face about her, which I think is her most distinguishing feature. The second is her body, filled out with musculature, firm and rigid. I shook her hand when I transferred back onto C Wing mid-March and was surprised by the force of her grip. Her husband’d better consider himself one lucky man—it’s right up my alley, personally.

I don’t like her much. She’s a mother, which is fine enough, but it makes her too gentle around the edges and much too forgiving of mental issues. I don’t like how she treats Harry like he’s some fragile creature that needs to be handled gently. I don’t like how she talks about my brother, either, or addresses me like I’m some kind of pitiable caretaker for him. Her kindness feels misplaced, like she’s overcompensating. I prefer parents like Milicia.

Still, we wouldn’t be a team if we didn’t listen to each other. I tilt my head to the side, letting out an inquisitive hum that says, Go on. Judit Minot glances over at the door for a moment before turning back to us.

“It has to be an inside job,” she says again, her voice firm but careful. “It’s too convenient that we were the only station affected by this, isn’t it? I think the Moralintern suspects that we’re working on Le Retour but doesn’t know who our allies are. Maybe the replacement part is even bugged. I think we have a mole.”

Chester and Mack exchange a look. I turn my head to frown out the window. Far off in the distance, mingling with the sky just beginning to turn a soft shade of orange over the horizon, aerostatic ships hang hundreds of feet in the air with all the permanence of a baby mobile over a cradle. I imagine them, sometimes, maybe looking down on us all with spyglasses, their cabins full of bombs ready to drop upon us at any given moment the second they see something they don’t like. I imagine long, wide barrels hanging out of the side, cannons pointed directly at Precinct 41 and ready to fire ballistas that’d tear through the metal shell until there’s nothing left.

Coalition Warship Archer hangs there, too, front and center, the most threatening blight upon the uncaring and disinterested sky. Maybe, right now, in this very moment, their eyes are on us, peering through the window, reading our lips.

I reach to the window beside my desk and pull the shutters closed.

We sit on that in silence, each of us mulling it over in our own separate ways, pregnant with the gravitas of the situation upon our shoulders. As the boss, I’m the one who breaks the silence, my voice splitting through the air conspiratorially: “Nobody told Heidelstam about this, right?”

No, sir, says Judit, and Torson laughs and shakes his head, and Chester scoffs and says, Fuck no, man, that narc? No fuckin’ way.

“Good.” I part ways from my desk, half-stumbling to the corner where my pharmacy-issued walking cane is. I grab it in my hand and I hate the way that it feels. Just one less hand to act with if something horrible happens, severely limiting my options. Nix will have my head if I don’t start using it more regularly. I haven’t used it the past two days because I didn’t expect to be gone this long. I haven’t even had the chance to come back here and grab it until now, and now I’m suffering the consequences of it.

I hate it.

I say goodbye to any hopes that I have of grabbing some food, maybe grabbing a nap, finishing a report, going home to get some other shit taken care of even though I still have so much to do. We’ll have to see what the situation allows, and I’ll just have to go along with whatever that might be. Woozily. Hungrily. Painfully.

“I’ll bring this concern up with Captain Pryce,” I promise, snuffing my cigarette and hobbling my way over to the door, weight uneven and sketchy at best. Don’t bother with grabbing my bag, not now that it’s empty. The cane feels unsteady in my hand, like it’s ready to slip out from between my fingers.

Chester claps his hands behind me, stands to his feet, and declares loudly in the near-empty room, “All right, folks, you heard what the big man said! Let the old geezers duke it out! Back to work we go!” I decide it’s too much effort to tell him to shut the fuck up and just grab my hat on the way out.

“Take a seat, John.”

He tells me to do so and I don’t hesitate. Not even for a second. Not even for a moment. A lot of people don’t seem to know how long a ‘moment’ actually is, deferring it to the equivalent of a second or a couple of seconds. The truth is, the original meaning is ‘a 60th of a second’, just like a second is ‘a 60th of a minute’, like a minute’s ‘a 60th of an hour’. Seems like the definition’s adjusted, then, much like how biweekly can mean, oh, twice a week or every other week, and you’d never know which it is without further explanation.

So I take a seat in one of the chairs in front of Captain Pryce’s desk, heaving a sigh that’s almost a groan, and sink back into it while he closes the door behind himself. I watch him circle around the back of his desk as I put up my feet, grimacing. He peers through the tight window shades behind his seat, flicks them shut, and then—ultimately—pulls the curtains even tighter.

I close my eyes for a moment, listening as he pulls his chair back and settles down. Exhaustion’s creeping up on me like a hunter with a rifle, sniping me through the closed windows. Everything feels distant and foggy. Muscles tired. For a moment, I feel like a spider, floating weightlessly on near-invisible threads of silk in the corner of an office.

Pryce’s voice floats over to me, cottony and soft. “How are you feeling?”

I hum, wordless and breathless for a few seconds before remembering myself—at least in part. Eyes bleary, I blink them back open, rolling my head to the side to lift a sluggish hand to my hat. Take it off, hang it off the corner of the chair to my right. My thumb brushes against the beaded clay band wrapped around it.

“Tired,” I eventually say, my voice cracking halfway through the word. I lick my lips as I turn my attention back to him, squinting across the lamplight. I see him watching me through his glasses, leaning against his desk with his fingers crossed, suit done up as neat as it almost always is.

He's almost in his sixties, ‘round about the same age as Chuck from the rat squad, and it's a fact he wears with stony-faced pride. Crow’s feet and wrinkles slope firm lines that define his face more like a granite sculpture. You can never be too sure exactly what he's thinking when looking in his eyes. All you can do is guess, and guessing wrong stands to get you bitten. A snake in the grass.

Male-patterned baldness that leaves his head smooth, face exposed, naked and unhidden. I can see the sweat beading at his temple. I feel hot, too, a drop of my own sweat slipping down my collarbone. “Hungry.”

Pryce hums and nods, expecting this. He looks me over, considering me just as I’m considering him, lingering on the cane haphazardly leaning against my chair. “And your leg?”

“My hip.” I cock my head to the side, almost as if inviting a challenge. “It’s fine.”

He hums again and nods, lowering his hands and straightening up. I hear him say the word okay, I think, it’s too quiet to tell. I don’t think he believes me. I think he’d believe me more if I weren’t using a cane to get to his office door.

“I expected you back at the station by 13:00. 13:15, at the latest.” He looks me over again, brows furrowing together tightly, like he’s looking for something specific. I’m not sure what he’s getting at until he pushes himself to his feet again, raising his hand like he expects me to do the same.

I do. Like a good little rabbit. It’s not even a question.

Captain Pryce starts from the top. His hands find my shoulders, cold and thin, pressing the fabric firmly against my skin. When he starts to go down to my upper arms, something clicks in my brain and I raise my hands behind my head. Upper arms, forearms, back down, reaching around the backside. He takes my gun and puts it on his desk, and I stare at it with the longing gaze of a horse staring out to pasture. Then it’s my chest, my sides (I try not to flinch—my sides are sensitive), hips (I do flinch, in anticipation of pain more than anything), pockets.

He takes out my cigarettes and lighter, putting them on the desk, too. A pair of small, wooden dice. He removes my pocket knife—both of them. Checks my belt where things can be held snugly in there, firmly enough to rock me on my feet. Pats all the way down my legs, one by one (again, I try not to flinch—the inside of my thighs, you see; and I’m embarrassed to admit it), squeezes through my leather boots tight enough that they hurt. I know he feels the lump hiding in there. Frisks me again from the bottom-up, just in case.

Once he’s done, he turns to my cigarette pack and looks inside—then steals one for himself. By the time he looks back at me, my boots are already off and offered to him, ready to be scrutinised. He does, tipping them upside down and reaching his arm in, all the way down to the toes. Finds what he’s looking for inside—a third pocket knife held in a hand-stitched, haphazard pocket for emergencies. Checks my calves again.

Then, when he’s really done, he makes another gesture. I sit back down to pull my boots back up; the chair squeaks back just enough for my cane to clatter on the floor and break the silence. This time, I do flinch, muttering an embarrassed little apology as I tuck it on the floor against the desk instead, neat and out-of-the-way.

“It’s fine,” the captain says, sitting down. He takes a drag of my smoke and taps it out on his glass ashtray, then lets it sit in there neatly. “Tell me what happened with the Inspectorate General.”

I grab my gun back from the desk and have the good grace to empty out the bullets right in front of him. It’s hard to say if it’s an illegal gun or not—something I stole during some ancient case from the anti-gun museum that the Coalition’s founded, once upon a time, in Couron.

It’s not ancient or anything, just a semi-automatic three-cylinder Iilmaraan revolver, loaded from the breech end. I know that breechloaded rifles, at the very least, were outlawed during times of peace when Revachol was still ruled by the Suzerainty, but the details are hazy to me on whether that extends to smaller firearms. I've almost gotten into trouble with the Moralintern for having this on multiple occasions, but here...

Pryce raises an eyebrow while I do, watching me pocket the bullets and then holster my gun. He never says anything about it.

I don’t have the gall to light a cigarette. As I put away my other crap, I tell him about the Inspectorate General. The usual report, you know, how I pissed Chuck off enough to send me out early, I guess, and it was only about forty-five minutes. Wanted to grab some food, so I went to Frittte for something. Before I can continue, Pryce holds up a hand, asking me if they’ve dealt out my punishment yet.

I clench my jaw and chew against my inner cheek. I tell him grudgingly, the number grinding out from between my teeth.

“And what are you going to do about that?” Pryce's voice slithers silently up my spine, around my neck, makes it difficult to swallow. “Can you pay it?”

I shrug, I don’t know, sir. I’ll figure something out.

“You know.” He unlinks his fingers and leans back in his seat. I imagine he’s probably crossing an ankle over his knee right now, much as I had been in Chuck’s office only a few hours ago. “In times of hardship, it doesn’t hurt to ask your friends for help, John. Officers do it all the time, after all. In many cases, it’s the only way to get by.”

My breath comes out in a sigh, slow, long, and shallow from my mouth. I hold my hands together on my lap, fingers interlacing. “I know, sir.”

“I don’t know that you do. You haven’t exactly gone out of your way to make friends.”

“I know, sir.”

“That’s going to need to change, son.” Pryce nods to himself slowly, folding his fingers over his lap, having mastered the look of a disappointed father. He’s older than me, though not by enough to be my father—not much less than ten years, if memory serves well. Still, it lurches words up in my throat to catch, coiling and tight, boiling with a hot resentment that I wrestle down with pride and an undignified eagerness to please. It isn’t fair, and I think he knows it.

Don't call me son, I want to say.

“If this is going to work, with you heading investigations the way you do your thing, you’re going to need friends who’ll bail you out and have your back. Do you know what I mean?”

I look away and frown at the bookshelf up against the wall next to the window, eyes roving over the covers, not really trying to read anything but just looking for the sake of it. It’s law books, and I know what a good few of them are. Moralintern-issued codes of conduct and legal shit, officer handbooks, Vespertine cop manuals and comparisons to the Vespertine-Revachol cop-culture gap, the history of gang violence in Revachol. Bevy’s book is there, too, nestled on the top shelf. I can’t make out the titles at this distance, but I’ve seen that spine just earlier today, so I now know what it looks like.

The clock on the wall ticks down in seconds. He’s waiting for my answer. Unlike with the Inspectorate General, this will not end unless I comply.

My fingers are squeezing so tightly together that it makes my knuckles hurt.

“...Yes, sir.”

The silence is constricting.

“...You know,” Captain Pryce says, deliberate in his tone, forcing me to draw my eye back to him. He’s watching me, leaning against his desk, chin resting thoughtfully against his interlaced knuckles. “If the problem’s that you don’t know how to make friends, a good way of going about it is just to put yourself out there. Talk to people. Maybe even do some favors for them.

“Then I’m sure that they’ll want to do favors for you, too. After all, friends look out for each other.”

I shrug, my shoulders stiff as a board. I look away again, staring at the Dalson’s Cradle sitting on the edge of Captain Pryce’s desk. If I wanted to, I could lean forward and pull back one of the balls, let it go, and let the laws of physics do its work. I do want to, actually. But I feel like if I move much more, surely, my muscles would snap. My bones. Fragile and edible.

“I guess.”

Captain Pryce chuckles warmly. When I look, he has a smile that’s crinkling his nose a little, drawing out laugh lines at the edges of his mouth and crows feet around the corners of his eyes. He reaches for his mug of—coffee, I’m pretty sure? Beneath the smoke, there’s the trace of a bitter aroma, and when I glance at his coffee pot, it’s half full—but he pauses halfway. Leans further to take the cradle’s hanging ball at the end, pull it back, and let it go. He gives me something to watch other than him.

It taps back and forth, louder than the clock on the wall. It’s so loud that after a few seconds, it makes me dizzy. Heaving a sigh that tries for nonchalance, I reach forward to stop it, muscles so tight and body so stiff that I'm amazed when nothing in me breaks.

The insane clicking ends almost immediately, and Captain Pryce takes a thoughtful drink of his coffee, satisfied. This was a test, and I've failed it. I’m not sure whether or not my stomach or my lungs or any part of my nerves has properly settled down by the time he tells me to continue.

I keep smaller things a secret. Hide things. The way that I was planning on shoplifting food to eat. The panic that I felt in the immediate moment upon hearing Bevy’s words on the radio, and the panic that I felt throughout. The tattoo. The fake plants and the empty fish tank that I don’t think ever had any fish in it to begin with. The food that Miss Secretary gave me. The fact that I fell asleep. That I almost pulled my gun. The color of Guillaume Bevy’s eyes.

Because—maybe—there’s a reason Bevy works so hard to keep them a secret. And I’m not a man who likes to gossip so much as a man who likes to listen. I’m not a man who digs up secrets just to tell them—not unless I have to. That’s why Pryce likes me so much. Guillaume Bevy’s eyes are brown, and that’s for me to know.

Pryce doesn’t say a lot. He sips on his coffee, takes drags of my cigarette, and gets up to refill his coffee from his own little private coffee corner once. I think it means he trusts me to tell him all of the important stuff without being prompted. The thought probably shouldn’t flood my head with the same boozy rush of dopamine I felt when I’d shattered Bevy’s composure so utterly—or something similar to that, at least, I don’t know. I don’t understand it.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” Captain Pryce says after a long, thoughtful minute of silence. For a second, I shuffle in my chair. Then I lean back to recline, draping my elbow over the side. My feet find Captain Pryce’s desk again, and I cross my ankles laxly, feeling an uncomfortable pull of pain right around the muscles hugging my sacroiliac joint. I ignore it: My comfort isn’t of any relevance here, either.

“I think I do.”

He raises his eyebrows, watching me over the rim of his glasses. Hunting for symptoms of pain, or waiting for me to speak?

“It means that I’ve taken responsibility for amending this mistake. It’s my job to take care of this now.”

“That’s right.”

A shiver trickles its way down my spine when he nods, a cold and sharp sensation that promises goosebumps. Not sure if that’s a good thing, I nod back like the tame little rabbit I am. Fight, flight, freeze. Fawn. “I’ll take care of it, sir.”

“I know you will. You always do.”

And it’s just that easy. A couple of words of acknowledgement, a nod to the fact that I work so fucking hard to keep this place afloat, and I do so much to keep this dream of Revachol’s freedom alive as the left hand man of Ptolemaios Pryce.

A warmth in my chest, spreading to my aching stomach, fills my head with a sense of relieved accomplishment the likes of which I’ve known deep within my lungs yet is rarely ever stoked. Good job, it says, smoothing over my eyelids. I have faith in you. You can do this. It makes me scoff out a laugh and smile, sinking back against the chair and relaxing wholly, luxurious as a cat.

It's stupid. Vain. Asinine. Captain Pryce could kick me to the curb and I’d come crawling back just to hear him say that the kind of person I’ve become hasn’t gone to waste and that it’s not for nothing, after all. Everything I’ve done is worth something. I haven’t yet expired my use.

I know, I know. I’ve known this for a while, now. I shouldn’t be as warm with pride or relief as I am. I can’t help it. As it turns out, you can’t simply logic yourself out of the way you feel as easily as people would like to assume. Psychology’s… much more complicated than that, as it turns out.

There’s a second where Captain Pryce looks off to the side, expanding into two seconds, then five, leaving him briefly painted in statuesque profile. It’s a quiet affair when he stands to his feet and moves over to the bookshelf, fingers tracing over the top shelf until he picks out Bevy’s book. He turns to its back to examine the cover, probably reading the summary or some shit, I don’t know.

Though I try to give off an air of unbothered relaxation, I can't help but to watch him intently while I lounge, brain blinking in that horrid middle ground between brain wired; eyes tired and eyes wired; brain tired. I feel the air still in my lungs, slow and shallow and tight, hugging my still-thudding heart as it shivers in my ribcage.

“You can tell a lot about a person from the way he writes.” The captain nods to himself sullenly, then turns slowly to cross the distance to me. I don’t look away from the book until Pryce is standing right next to the chair, a towering, oppressive presence urging me to lift my head and observe his face.

“Here,” he says, and I take it with steady hands—steady hands, I said—the same book I held just earlier today, but different. One that never felt at home in my hand or has been warmed by my body.

I turn it around to inspect the front, finger pressing into Bevy’s throat. It’s a hardcover. Those are hard to come by here when books are published independently. How interesting.

“Read this. Maybe it’ll help him become a friend of the RCM.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath.” I scoff and roll my eyes, adjusting my apprehension into something like a snarl instead. “Bitch fucking hates me, that’s no secret.”

“John.” I feel his hand settle on my shoulder and squeeze, shockingly firm and almost painful. It pulls me back instantly from whatever bitter place my mind just slipped to, drawing my head back to the present. It grounds me to this room, this chair, this book. My fingers. My boss. The coils constrict just enough to remind me of who I am, of who he is, of just whose lair this is. Remember yourself, it says.

Pryce loosens his grip when he has my attention again but doesn’t leave entirely, holding me frozen with no pressure at all but the weight of his hand. I wouldn't be surprised to see cold, boney bruises there soon, imprinted like a tourniquet contusion.

“‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’—that can go both ways. He’d be good to be friends with. But if, for some reason, he doesn’t… well.” Pryce heaves a heavy sigh, rolling his head to the side and tossing his other hand vaguely in the air. It’s an echo of what I do, sometimes. Often. “You know.”

The heaviness is back in my body. This… oppressive weight of expectation. I feel it prickling in my fingernails, my toes, but I can’t move to let it out. Not while Pryce is holding me down like this.

I roll my eyes and scoff, pretending like it isn’t there, and force myself to tilt my head into a careless shrug. “Of course I do,” I say with a smile, because it’s true.

Pryce smiles back with a pleased little nod, eyes crinkling, and lets go of my shoulder with a firm pat, pat that leaves my bones rattled. Good boy, it says. You’re doing good.

Beneath it all, the pride wells up again, warm and boozy. And that is that.

Chapter Text

The rest of the talk goes about as follows: I tell Pryce about Judit’s suspicions. He nods along to it, taking it as seriously as I think he should, and then he says, It’s a good thing we don’t use those relays to communicate with our allies. But be sure to let the others know to be a little more careful on the shortwave, yeah? I nod and say, yeah, I’ll let them know, and before long, I’m limping my way out of the captain’s door, grateful for the open air.

Lieutenant Berdyayeva inclines her head to me and uncrosses her arms. I incline my head to her, too, in greeting, and we trade roles, where I spend the time standing guard outside the door, doing my best job at looking like I’m waiting to talk to Pryce. My leg shakes, my hands sweat. I pace.

I like Milicia well enough. Back in the olden days, we used to be partners, on and off and on again like a couple that can't seem to commit one way or the other. It's still that way, sometimes. Our way of handling things, see, is markedly different. She's a lot colder than I am, the stern right-hand woman of Pryce—no nonsense, no bullshit. She has to be, as one of the few women of the 41st Precinct. Millie simply can't afford my level of ease.

So Pryce is centre—no nonsense himself, though he's likable enough. He has that charm, that guile, that bite. Millie operates over the table, keeps shit in line. I'm the left-hand man who dips under it to get my hands dirty. The left-hand man to King Pryce. The prince and the princess of Precinct 41, most trusted and favoured.

It's debatable how much that favour actually helps.

I stand outside of Pryce's office, keeping watch. It's now my job to make sure nobody approaches to try to listen, and if they do, it's my job to keep them distracted enough that they can't. I light a cigarette while I wait, leaning on the wall beside the door. Sweat prickles at my brow; exhaustion weighs on my eyes. Hunger's cinching in my stomach again, making me nauseous.

A few people pass by, say hello, ask me how I'm doing. They look at my cane as they do, my hip, my feet. Doubting. Pitying. Dreading the day that something similar will happen to them. I dismiss them quickly but not unkindly, even though the temptation to smack them with my cane grows bit by bit. I want to make one of them need one of these to lean on instead.

I do my best not to make it obvious just how much I'm favouring my left side all the while.

It isn't shame. I'm not ashamed. Stop lying about it.

Then I hear another set of footsteps, and I look that-a way to see who dares approach my lair. It's no one but Harry Du Bois, who limps toward me, too, a Frittte bag dangling from his wrist.

Funny thing that's an ill-kept secret in the precinct: Harry Du Bois' mere continued existence is the exact reason why Milicia and I traded commands. She fucking hates this man and what he's become over the years. Her no-nonsense attitude just doesn't mesh well with Harry, who—though beneath her in terms of how the hierarchy tree is organised—still technically ranks above her as a double-yefreitor.

I can understand her frustration. It's not that she'd accept the promotion if it were offered, moreso that she's never been given the consideration for it in the first place. Typical workplace sexism, just like in Inspectorate.

So when Harry came back from Martinaise, apparently missing a great deal of his memories, I did the charitable thing and offered a trade over the summer. I've been missing C Wing, anyway, and there've been growing concerns about folks catching onto my involvement with what we've been having les petit rats doing in Le Royaume.

"Hey," he says, lifting a hand in greeting. I don't miss the way his attention lingers on my hip, nor my cane. "How's your hip?"

"Ciao," I say, lighting a third. I say it with a smile, can't really bring myself to be angry with him for asking. After all, up until recently, this cane was his. He gets it. "Pretty miserable, to be honest."

"Oh?"

"Yes. It feels as though every miniscule twitch is twisting my muscles around my bones. One moment it's a sharp, centralised throb. The next, it cuts its way along my spine and coils itself beneath one side of my ribcage, or around my back and to the other side. Right here..." I tap my bottom rib, left side, beneath which my flesh itches with discomfort. "...and right here." My right hip, around the front, where the sharpness permeates in my bones.

"Oh." Harry blinks like he hadn't expected honesty, following my hands. "That sucks."

I hum and nod, taking a drag. Glancing up and down the hallway, I'm met with a pleasant surprise: Nobody's around to interfere. What, is this the first opportunity we've had to talk to each other, uno a uno, face to face? Despite how much Harry's been trying to do so? It probably helps that he's been showing his new partner around the precinct, helping him get acquainted to the place. I still have yet to meet him.

"Ciao, bella. How's your leg?"

"Fine, I guess." He sticks it out, touching his thigh, where the raw, pink scar of a bullet wound is still developing nicely. Not that I can see it, even though his shorts come about midway to his knee. Sweat clings his wifebeater to his skin, stained and lovely. He must have just gotten out of the station gym, a habit he's been dedicating himself to when the alcohol cravings get really bad and he needs some kind of distraction.

"Kinda achey," he admits, shuffling from one thin, hairy leg to the other. Gorilla arms crook at his side, settling on his hips at either side of his beer belly. All his bulk is topside, through no fault of his own: According to Gottlieb, the station's resident doctor, the muscle development of his legs have been atrophied thanks to childhood polio. It's the same reason a part of his jaw's paralysed, why his voice slurs a little south-side when he says words like "law" or "jaw", and why he wears his facial hair as a mutton chopped--moustache combo to hide it.

Harry smells like sweat, men's deodorant, and protein shake. Everything about it makes my brain purr with appreciation. Of course, I can't exactly suckle on some eye candy like this, not without being obvious.

A spiteful part of me notes that I could look all I want if I'd just put on some sunglasses. No one would have to know.

Still, if my gaze does happen to linger in certain places—the abundance of body hair on his skin, the way his belly pokes out of the bottom of his wifebeater, the warm muscles of his arms—no one has to know, anyway. Men are just so pretty.

Yeah. I'm so fucking normal.

"At least now, you finally have a good excuse to skip leg day for once," I snark, gesturing to his arms. "Look at you. You can barely stand up straight with those skinny-ass legs, with everything above so bloated as it is. Your balance is all off."

"Hey. This is the pin-ack-le of peak male performance, baby." Something about the way he says 'pinnacle' sounds like an inside joke I don't get. He says it with a click, too, and shoots me an awkward fingergun. Under normal circumstances, I'd probably return it, but pain and fatigue just has me shake my head with a mirthless chuckle, staring down at my cigarette. "You should hit the gym, too. I think you'd benefit from it."

Yeah, with this hip? And this work schedule? Absolutely not.

"What do you want, M'sieur Million?"

Harry's hands drop with a sigh, caught out, and I know I'm right. Ever since Harry came back from Martinaise, memory apparently eviscerated into little more than vague afterimages, things have changed. For Harry, it's for the better: Though he struggled a lot with learning the ropes again, he's always been a fast learner, and he's doing his best with what he's got. To his credit, he's also been trying to take advantage of the fact that he doesn't remember much of his own history anymore for the sake of self-improvement.

But he's still wary of me—as he should be—albeit much less than before. I've enjoyed being able to talk to him on more friendly terms lately, and I'd like to think that me being the one to reteach him upon my transfer helped with that.

Jean, well—he'd been in a mood of upset about Harry's amnesia, which is understandable. He still is, sometimes, to the point where all I can do is sigh and try to help the mood pass easier. I don't think it'd be inaccurate to call it mourning. I don't blame him for mourning. It's just exhausting.

As it is, though, I'm just counting the days until Harry remembers why he hates me, and this good thing we've got going on gets eviscerated into chaos again.

Now, he only approaches me when he wants something. A question about work. A question about my field of expertise to help him on a case. A question about his past, usually. Unlike a lot of people, I present his past honestly but gently, unless that something he wants is in direct relation to me.

Then I just lie, because he doesn't have to know.

"Okay," Harry finally says, reaching into the bag. He takes out a sandwich, holds it out to me. I stare at it, dubious. "I'm gonna bribe you with this."

"Charming," I reply, though he has my attention.

"I have two," Harry answers—and now he has my attention even more, because two is even better. "You get one if you answer and both if I'm satisfied with it."

"O-kay...." The word crawls out, frowning as Harry puts it back in the bag. After a few moments too long, I blink, looking up at his face once I remember myself. Leaning back, I snap my fingers, throwing off a noncommittal fingergun. "Shoot, caro mio."

"Do you know anything about my mom?"

I lower my hand, slowly. Take a moment to process. "Why?" I ask, snuffing my cigarette on the wall. "Where is this coming from?"

"I just—" Harry hesitates, carding a hand through his hair. He watches me. Tries to get a read on me, eyes flitting about my face for any little microexpressions that might help him out. I see him glance over my posture, eyes lingering on the cane he let me keep. Doubtless wondering if any shifting of my posture is an admission to secrecy or a symptom of pain. He doesn't know, and that's just another example of why body language can't be taken for gospel. If I were to have it my way, he never will know how I really feel about anything.

I raise my brows, tell him: Go on. Watch him take a deep breath before scratching at his scalp, ruffling his brunet hair.

"...It's the riots," he admits, looking at me again. "I don't really remember a lot about my childhood, but I think—I get the feeling I had a good mom. That she loved me, a lot. I don't think my dad's in the picture, maybe he died or something, but I'm worried about her. I just want to make sure she's all right."

I take another cigarette and light it. See how Harry stares at it all of a sudden, like it's something he's got a hankering for. I offer it to him; he takes it, and it's already halfway gone by the time I light my fourth. "No one's told you anything?"

Harry shakes his head and leans back against the wall, sighing out smoke. I lean next to him. "Jean keeps saying it's before his time. I don't know what that fucking means, like, what? Before his time? Like I never talked about her, but I talked about Dora?"

He spits her name out like he's afraid what'll happen if he doesn't, leaving it locked away in his throat to fester unsaid. Like he's afraid that name is going to make itself at home there, rearrange the furniture, settle itself deep in his lungs in some place he can never breathe it out. I get it, I think—I know it's not hate, at least, just the trauma of hurt he still doesn't remember or understand. It's another way psychology's odd. You can't talk yourself out of feeling one way, but you can't get rid of that feeling by making yourself forget, either.

I nod along, breathing in our smoke, his scent. His warmth prickles near me, but he's not touching my jacket. It'd be fucking easy to shift and close the distance so that we are, or at the very least, so that his arm brushes against my fabric. Close enough to almost feel warmth directly against mine. It's tempting. My skin itches for it, yearning.

I refrain. Partly mindful, mostly selfish.

"It doesn't make fucking sense," he continues, scowling at the captain's office door. "I know I would've talked about her. It just fits my MO. So why isn't anyone telling me anything?"

I hum a portion of a church hymn, knowing what to say but mulling over how best to phrase it. "She's a sensitive topic," I eventually decide, sucking in the heady warmth of nicotine beneath layers of warmth and warmth and warmth, because this is the most warmth I've earned, anyhow. "I don't think Jean's doing this to spite you. Your mama's one of those topics that can send you down the same kind of spiral that happened in Martinaise. I feel that's important context for you to know first and foremost."

"Okay," Harry says, looking at me expectantly. "Yeah. Yeah, I know. I mean, I kind of figured when nobody wanted to tell me anything."

I nod, give him another minute to think it over. When Harry doesn't back down, well. Okay.

"Across the crater lake around where you used to live, behind the church, through the woods. In a pine box made of local trees, unpolished and scarcely decorated, beneath a stone roof with faded engraving, one among a neighborhood of many identical homes. Her neighbors are as quiet as she is, content to live with wild lawns and grass so untrimmed it obscures their addresses. Someone ought to hire a groundskeeper to maintain it, but nobody can afford the service, and the neighbors are too demure to ever make a fuss."

Harry purses his lips, frowning. "This feels like a riddle."

I shrug. "Così é la vita. I could show you, someday."

"Really?" Now that's got his attention, like a sweet little puppy running up to me after I've shaken a bag of food. He's a stray, poor thing, but not really. He's not mine to pick up off of the streets, though, and anyway, I don't have the resources to give him the right amount of love. I'm not a smitten kinda guy. I ought not get attached. I'm sorry, you sweet little terrier.

Still, I nod, giving him a treat. Because, God, there's something sweet about people who care in all the places that I don't. "Sure. When work slows down a little, and I can find a bit of time... you should bring some flowers when we do. Decorate the place."

"What kind of flowers does she like?"

"Peonies," I say, waving at the smoke. "The bright pink ones. She always liked growing them on her windowsill."

Milicia relieves me of work for today. Says she'll take care of it, or she'll have my partner take care of it in my stead. I don't really care. I'm just glad to have an excuse to go home and sort some shit out.

Home is a thirty-minute trolley ride to a poor apartment complex with places that have a fair amount of room for cheap only because the facilities are shit and the tenants are all expected to take care of it. Good luck if the plumbing goes out. Hope for more luck if it's the electricity. It’s three flights of stairs up with an elevator that hasn’t worked in years (nobody knows how to fix it) and a communal bathroom for each floor. Ours has been cordoned off due to someone replacing the caulking. If I want to take a shower, I’ll need to use the second floor’s instead for now.

It’s the third door on the right, where the even numbers are—because even numbers are on the right, apparently, and that just feels right—labeled C6 because whoever designed this apartment thought it’d be cool to use letters instead of numbers for the floors. Maybe it’s because 106 Rue de le Monde doesn’t have an official building name or something, I don’t know. I take out my key and fumble with the lock, turning first the deadbolt, and then the doorknob. My cane tumbles onto the carpet on the way in.

“Sorry,” I mumble to the floor, kneeling down to pick it up. When I’m at some approximation of standing again, I take a deep breath and look around the apartment, following the quiet sound of a low-volume radio. See my brother staring at me over the back of the couch like I’m a weird fucking bug on the wall he doesn’t recognise or something, eyes wide and body stiff with the uncertainty of what to do. A colorful pink hand towel's draped over his neck, half-frozen. The inside of the apartment feels a few degrees warmer than the hallway, stiflingly, frustratingly so.

I grimace, waving a hand vaguely. “Sorry,” I say, easing the door shut behind me, “I should’ve called, I guess.”

The shock eases out of him slowly while he re-settles himself back on the couch. He still glances at me occasionally from over the top of it, watching me hang up my hat, hang up my belt, my jacket, my gun holster. Take off my boots. I do my usual rounds after locking up the door and making sure it’s secure—making sure the windows are, too, and that they’re locked; that the blinds are drawn; the curtains closed. When I’m satisfied, I go back to my holster and take my gun out, setting it on my bed to put away later.

When I’m back in the living area, Lance is squinting at the kitchen stove’s electric clock. “Sorry,” I say again, wincing as I hobble—fucking hobble my way over to the small kitchen bar, half-full of work documents. Not to sit at so much as to just—drop my bag on the seat, I guess?

It’s getting kind of overwhelming, really, and there’s eight files on the bar counter soon to meet the company of three from today. God only knows when some of them will make it back home to the precinct, I don’t know, I don’t even know how I mustered the nerve to go back and fetch them.

For a while I stand there, leaning against the countertop, panting in the heat and waiting to ride the pain out. It’s drawing from… I don’t know. Something awful. Something awful, and I’d really like to take more painkiller right about now, but truth be told, I already took two within the last four hours and the packet says not to take more than that within eight. I stand there and deal with it, my breath tight and prickly, until it’s more manageable. Then I move to open my bag, fingers muddling around the couple of files I brought. Set it on next to the others to be looked through later.

Lance comes up behind me, barefoot and quiet as can be, and oh so gently pats his fingers against my back. “Hey,” I say, half-turning to face him. He snakes his arms under my own, presses against me, and buries his forehead up against my shoulder. And he just kind of. Holds on like that, arms tightening around my spine, sending a dim rush of hot pressure all the way along my body. Kind of like the nerves are being squeezed out of me, the apprehension wrung out of my muscles, nice and tight.

“Hey,” I say again, softer. “It’s a bit warm for hugs, isn’t it?” I don’t push him off of me, though, settling for patting my hand against the space between his shoulder blades. Then my fingers rub at the ends of his hair, which isn’t much shorter than Bevy’s, to be honest, but—I think—is much more unkempt and less taken care of. We cut our own hair in this household, I mean—and Lance likes to have his hair tied back most days, so it can stay out of his eyes while he exists here.

It’s a shame he doesn’t have the energy to take care of it, I think he could wear it pretty well if he wants to. Instead, it’s so dark with oil and grease that it looks almost black, peppered with several strands of grey here and there that makes me not think about the ones I have in return. My fingers compulsively fiddle with the dead ends, finding a grey symptom of age, and pluck it, as if doing so could retroactively forego several days' worth of living.

“You need to wash your hair," I say, half to him, half to myself.

Lance groans with a whine of complaint. There's a damp towel draped around his neck, moistening the front of his shirt. I must be so hot that I hadn't noticed the extra moisture until now, pressing coolly against my body.

I chuckle and pat his shoulder, making sure that there’s some force behind it. It tells him, I’m good now, thanks, even if I’m not.

Lance, my little brother of the ripe, young age of thirty-two, is shorter than me. Longer hair, though—moles speckled haphazardly over his face, like on his cheek and against his neck, which is a trait I distinctly lack where they'd be most visible. The same kind of tired eyes that I have, eyes we got from our papa, which for some reason people find creepy. Me, I get, with my associations and reputations. Lance, though, I never could. Tired eyes just amplify his depression.

He’s also got more mass to his body that I partly envy and partly pity, not for the sheer virtue of the weight itself but more because I often wonder how much he’d actually have if he were able to live a more normal life. He doesn’t leave the apartment much, at least to my knowledge, so he doesn’t have a lot of opportunity or reason to build up much muscle or exercise. It worries me, in the way older brothers get worried, that the world’s decided it doesn’t like strange people like him.

He lets me go, pats at the other kitchen counter seat to sit, and I do so without question. It’s the third time today that I’ve been told to sit down—fourth, if you count waiting at the radio station, and five if you count Bevy trying to get that interview with me, which I don’t—and the only time that I’ve felt truly comfortable doing so.

I nestle my head in my arms, peeking up to watch Lance go into the kitchen. He tosses the rag around his neck in the freezer and takes out another one, half-frozen, so cool when he leans it against my neck that I shiver. Quiet footsteps step around a large lump beneath the floorboards where some kind of water damage has been fermenting for months. He opens cabinets and closes them, opens the fridge—closes that. His bare feet tamp gently against the floor as he searches for something to make.

Eventually he just grabs a can of soup or something, tosses it in a bowl, and heats it up in the microwave I ‘confiscated’ from a pawn shop and did my best to fix up. I listen to the sink, the gentle clattering of dishes Lance has neglected until now as he finally washes them (I should get up and dry the dishes, I should wipe down the windows, I should vacuum the carpet, all the things I should've done more before that might've been enough to make Juno stay), the gentle hum in the back of his throat—

And behind all that, the still-playing radio that almost always serves as background noise. He’s listening to a Dick Mullen book, the kind of fiction that absolutely butchers actual police procedures the most; I recognise the music. It’s what he’s humming to.

He taps my shoulder again, then gently shakes me. I lift my head a little, blinking, surprised at just how close I’d come to falling asleep. Lance sets a bowl of minestrone in front of me, and I sit up to stir while he heats up a stale dinner roll. “Wow,” I say, a touch sarcastic, “you’re such a talented cook.”

He fishes out two drouamine from a pill bottle, sets it on the counter, and taps it firmly. The message is clear: Eat. Which I do, without much more complaining or bitching, pills included because suddenly I can’t be fucked to care. Meanwhile he makes his own food—a scoop of rice and canned chili, I think—as I start to tell him about my day.

A man shot himself in the foot, I say. Bad gun safety, didn’t holster it as carefully as he should’ve. That was a fun situation to take care of, dealing with a group of people who could’ve sworn that someone was dying because of how loud his screams were.

I got some updates about that very important case I’ve been working on. I can’t tell you much about it, though. I’m sorry. I know you’re so interested. And you’re so jealous and impressed that your cool big brother has such important things going on.

I went to the Inspectorate General. They gave me a 300 reál fine for that teenage kid I shot. I don’t know how we’re going to afford it. (He’s distracted by this the most, I think, once it’s mentioned. It’s what gets him to start biting at his nails and cuticles, glancing to-and-fro all concerned-like.)

A lady gave me a curry bun. I’m sorry. I wish I’d saved it for you. But Harry gave me two sandwiches. Here, this one's for you. (He puts his in the fridge, though I keep mine.)

I met with Bevy. Might be doing an interview with him or something, I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Lance taps on the counter to get my attention when I mention that. When I look, he holds up his hand, rubbing his index and middle finger against his thumb, like gangsters and dipshits on the street do when talking about cash. I frown at him for a moment, furrowing my brow, and decide I don’t like the implication.

“I don’t like it,” I admit, picking up the bowl. Nothing’s left in it now but lukewarm broth, mildly salty, that regardless serves to help fill out the contents of my stomach. It tastes nice when I dip Harry's sandwich in it, though, softening the bread and making the spongy texture a little more tolerable. The pantry’s more empty than I’d like it to be. There’s only so many cans of soup and vegetables and shit snatched from the RCM’s food donation bin that a guy can live off of.

I don't like it.

But. It’s a thought.

Besides. It isn’t like, well. What I mean is—Bevy isn’t gang-affiliated, I think, or if he is affiliated with any, it’s just by proxy. He’s critical of crime in Revachol, not just in regards to how the RCM goes about handling it, but crime in its entirety. Not everything he has to say about the RCM is necessarily a negative thing, he really does just call it as he sees it. That’s why he worked with Harry as a volunteer, giving us good press while getting into shit that the RCM couldn’t touch anywhere near as easily. That’s why the cover of his book is a drug den.

It’s not… doing a favor, necessarily? It’s transactional. I need something out of him. He desperately wants that interview out of me. I just happen to… to also need some money. It’s not like I’d owe him afterward, or that he’d hire a bullet to my brain if I do and fail to deliver. He’s just a reporter. Some guy. It's business.

How funny it is, that I’m perfectly fine with shooting people dead where they stand if I feel the need to, but taking bribes and doing favours for crime rings sketches me out too much. Seems my priorities are more fucked up than most come to realise. I wonder what Bevy’ll say, when I ask. If I ask.

I have his little note, right here in my pocket. If he doesn’t come to this meeting, and I need to—need to…

“...You’re right, though. I might have to.”

Lance nods, pleased that I’m at least smart enough to consider it regardless of my thoughts on the matter. He trades my empty bowl for a plate of rice topped with canned chili and shredded cheese, sliding it closer to me. I take a bite and tell him that I was told to stay at home the rest of today—tomorrow, too. Lance appraises carefully before giving me a slow, dutiful nod, apparently relieved with this news.

Lance is a good kid. I call him a kid even though he’s an adult because—regardless of how old he is—I was, like, twelve when he was born, or something, so he’ll always be my baby brother in my mind’s eye. He’s the only thing I think of when I say the word “home” anymore. Any other definition, well, that’s perished a long, long time ago.

He’s not stupid. I can’t stand it when people call him stupid.

I sleep for a long time, work hours and physical and mental fatigue catching up to me with the force of a fucking freight train, completely wiping out every last faculty I can take. It’s one of those sleeps where I drift in and out intermittently, turn on my light to check the time, and turn it back off to roll over, sinking back into it.

Sometimes they're broken up with the phantom sensation of a cold hand on my shoulder, squeezing tight enough that it's bound to leave bruises in the shape of fingerbones. Mostly it’s my fingers that wake me up instead. Or some kind of noise.

I don’t even get up to take any drouamine until, say, noon the following day, where I emerge from my bedroom shirtless and in boxers, sweaty and sticky, leaning against the wall to remain stable. My head’s so groggy that it’s a miracle I don’t just fall over my own two feet.

When I blink my eyes open, the living area is… I wouldn’t necessarily say in shambles, exactly, but it’s not exactly pretty. Several boxes of yarn and crafting crap’s been tossed onto the floor and the table, some vague attempt made to sort them that currently escapes my brain. There’s a couple of animals made by them. Some random pile of ripped fabric's been folded next to the couch, most of them some kind of off-white but with some scraps of color speckled throughout.

I blink, scrutinising the room and then just staring as Lance steps in another, clear storage container of polyfill. Kind of like he’s stepping on grapes, making wine. Most of it's discolored and yellowed.

I stare at the scene before me and squint until the haze of fatigue clears from my vision. “...What’s going on in here?”

My brother’s head snaps to me. He claps his hands together once and straightens up, holding his arms widely to his sides. There’s a bright smile on his face, one most might call childish but is really the kind that’s hard for him to come by and that he really only tends to give when he thinks he’s helping. So surely there’s something to this, and Lance isn’t just making a mess out of everything for the sake of it.

I meander my way into the room, leaning heavily against the couch once I reach it. From this vantage point, one can really appreciate the amount of disorganised chaos in abundant display before me. Most of the yarn is chenille; soft, fluffy polyester strands poke out from a single core thread to hide it.

I reach down to touch a dark blue skein speckled with orange, my eyes drifting to the stuffed critters on the coffee table. I recognise them, of course—the ice cream cat with the waffle cone ears, the waffle ridges stitched in dark brown after the fact; the strawberry whale that’s small enough to fit in my hand. A couple of small turtles, stacked on top of each other. A mama and papa chicken with a little baby nestled lovingly in between. A notebook with chicken scratch writing in it.

I let out a heavy breath and cradle my chin in my arms. “Lance,” I say, watching his smile drop abruptly, arms flopping to his side, “are you sure this is a good idea? You stopped this little venture before ‘cause it was fucking with your wrists too much.”

He looks around at the mess he’s working on organising in his own special way, scratching his cheek with furrowed brows, really considering. And I know he is, I know that he hasn’t just decided to throw open the door to the tiny, compact little closet at the end of our tiny little hallway, where our bedroom doors face each other, to pull this out on a whim. He didn’t just up and decide to throw this shit onto the floor, either. None of this is entirely unplanned.

That’s the thing about Lance a lot of people don’t understand—just because he does things eagerly, it doesn’t mean he does it rashly. When he’s getting into something, he likes to know what the fuck he’s getting into first. Matter of fact, I can safely assume that’s what the notebook is for: Taking inventory of his materials.

But nobody really pays much for crafts. I don’t have to tell him this—we both know well enough already. People don’t have the money for things like little crochet toys or handmade items, and those who have plenty of cash to spare—the folks in Couron—often underestimate or refuse to acknowledge the value, work, and time put into it. Or they find it novel and spend a bit too much, still calling it a deal. The issue is you can't predict which one will happen in the market. What a miserable little state of existence it is. That's not even considering the cost of materials, either.

What makes it worse is when you do it enough that it fucks up your wrists; when you can’t afford anything more than a brace or two and end up spending weeks in anguish, doing nothing. Lance likes to craft. He likes to do things with his hands. And he gets stir-crazy and depressed when he simply can't because doing so hurts so much. Forgive me for having a touch of concern.

Eventually, he looks at me and nods. He steps out of the fluff—I guess while I was sleeping, he might’ve gone door to door for a bunch of old pillows, or something?—and picks up one of the turtles, bringing it close. I hold it cupped in my hands and it fits there snugly, little button eyes smiling back at me. Its head is floppy, its colors cute. The yarn feels soft in my hands, and I can tell that it was modeled after, like, a kiwi, or something; the bottom has that seeded kind of pattern stitched around the center.

“...It is kinda cute,” I admit, cracking a smile. “Follow summer themes, maybe. Just be sure to, like… you know.” I gesture vaguely, waving my hand in the air, trying to chase the words. “Don’t push yourself too hard, yeah? And try not to be a slob—at least make some effort to clean up the fuckin’ place when you’re done with whatever this is this time.”

Lance scowls, clicking his tongue, and goes back to stomping the air out of the polyfill. I crack a smile and kiss the turtle on the head while his back is turned. Then I turn to stumble my way to the kitchen, reaching to slip the turtle in my bag like a secret, daring good luck charm.

On the way, a spot dances in the corner of my eye.

I freeze and turn my head to stare at the pile of discarded pillow casings, most of them stained and disfigured. Stray fibres dangle from where they were torn. Eventually I decide it must’ve been that, trembling in the still air and casting awkward shadows. Or maybe my hair. A stray spot in my vision, if I blink too hard.

But I still walk slower into the kitchen, glancing over my shoulder to it occasionally as I make myself a pan-seared cheese sandwich, with some canned chowder, taking some drouamine while it cooks.

I only relax when I ask Lance if he washed the pillows and put them through the drying cycle. He gives me an offended scowl, grimacing, and then nods. Of course, it says, how could you think I wouldn’t? I nod back—Of course, I say—and smile, feigning satisfaction, even though it still feels like my skin is crawling with tiny phantoms on the way to the shower.

Chapter Text

I don’t read Bevy’s book, both because I don’t want to and because I simply don’t have the time.

Too much of the rest of the day’s focused both on helping my brother organise his crap and helping him get sorted on what projects to focus his attention on. I stumble my way around my apartment to find things to sell, in the meantime. And later in the evening, after the sun’s set over the horizon, I collapse on the couch and curl up in the corner, mood mildly smoothed over with drouamine. The sharpness in my hip is mellowed out to a tolerable throb. I have to curl on top of it to keep it from hurting too badly again, even though Nix recommends against it.

Lance works by my feet with fuzzy skeins of yarn, often squinting and frowning at the printed pattern he’s trying to follow. I work on dismissing another missing officer case, writing ‘Madre’ in the margins, then turn my attention to filling out C Wing’s payroll slips for Pryce’s approval.

Both of us get distracted by the voice on the radio reading Dick Mullen and the Corrupted Canvas, some kind of murder mystery book with a supra-natural twist. Paperwork in these books is always skimmed over and referred to vaguely, like it’s the least interesting job that detectives have to do. Dick Mullen hates paperwork, because obviously every cop hates the abstract concept of paperwork.

Never mind the fact that paperwork’s a hefty majority of the job. It's kind of funny that every time Dick Mullen is playing on the radio at home, I'm almost always doing paperwork myself.

At some point, I somehow fall asleep, wake up to a blanket tossed over me, fall asleep again. I drink coffee at 4:50—a rarity, since I’m usually a chronic night owl—and prepare to leave for work at 5:20. The goal is to stay awake. I have no intention of missing my tentative appointment tomorrow.

Today is an office day. I write up four reports, follow up on those incident reports, read over and approve twelve requests to access old records, and review nine written case reports before confirming them good enough for archival. For lunch, Jean’s charitable enough to give me a kebab from the cart down the street before heading back out again. I apologise for leaving him in charge of the wing the past two days; he says it's fine, he's had plenty of practice when he was partnered with Harry. Frankly, I refuse to let him hold the guilt over me.

I finally fix the typewriter and practice my aim and reloading speed in the shooting range until my arms are trembling and my shoulders hurt. The rest of the day, I alternate between tossing a few cases back and forth with Jean and going to check in on D Wing: Milicia kicks me out a total of three times. Chester invites me to grab some drinks with him and a couple other fellas from the wing tonight. I decline like I always do.

Before Captain Pryce leaves for the day, I intercept him at the stables, using the excuse to see to my horse to do so. I catch him in the tack room and let him know that I won’t be able to come in tomorrow. When he asks why, I tell him that I’ve got a friend visiting town.

“I see,” he says, looking me over. A goddamn x-ray machine, he is, I swear, hunting for any cracks or signs of weakness that I can’t afford to let him see. Even here. “Before you do, could you get next week’s schedule figured out? You’ll be back on patrol starting the day after tomorrow.”

Ignoring the fact that the reason I’ve been doing paperwork today’s because my hip’s been killing me, I let slip my nervous smile and an even more nervous giggle. “Yes, sir,” I say, nodding, “of course.” Pleased, Captain Pryce smiles back and pats my shoulder where it still hurts.

Tuesday, 6:12. The detective arrives on the scene, before the sun even fully crests the horizon. The sky is still dark with a dusky blue. It’s cool enough that I’m not sweating horribly, though the humidity alone’s bad enough to make me want to pant. My fingers toy with an old balisong as I sit down on a small set of stairs, opening yesterday’s Revachol Today, hunting for any sketchy indication or mention of shit other reporters ought not be saying.

Not spying anything at glance, nor through a slightly more thorough read shortly thereafter, I turn to the horoscope for a minute. Today, Sagittarius who work hard will be rewarded with good news. You’re likely to have success with people in matters of business. Not that I believe in horoscopes, necessarily, but sometimes it freaks me out how relevant they can be.

Even if I don't believe it, I look at Scorpio's. The moment I read the line "Fortune is about to turn in your favour", I click my tongue in disbelief, turning to the obituary.

I hear him long before I see him, the rumbling engine of some nascent beast perking my ears and drawing my eye to the window. I roll up the newspaper and shove it and the knife away in my bag. There’s no need to look at the time—I only got here fairly recently myself, and my plan was to allow a three hour grace window on either side of the listed appointment time. It basically gives an entire workday to come here that way. Plenty of time to catch somebody before they get here and chicken out, or find them just after jumping in at the last possible moment.

I think it’s a good thing that Bevy’s the former. It means I’ve got his attention.

I cross the wide and empty antechamber to look out the stained glass window, not having to look terribly hard to find him in the overgrown parking lot, shutting off the throttle of his motorbike. He takes off his helmet, shaking out his hair and pulling his fingers through while he looks up at the building. I’m certain that he recognises it, probably about as much as I do—I’d be more surprised if he didn’t. Upon glancing up and down the dirt road from my vantage point, there's no apparent sign of further company.

Before he has a chance to make out my silhouette, I move away, closing my eyes and turning my face to the sky. In the name of Dolores Dei—Mother of Insulinde, the Son, Perikarnassis, Father of God—I pray for luck, crossing my lungs. Then, with a deep breath, I grab my cane and open the church doors.

Bevy looks down from the cross atop the steeple and frowns at me instead, setting his helmet on one of the handles and standing. He doesn’t approach, allowing the privilege of closing the distance to me. I think his eyebrows raise a little at some point, though. Maybe he’s noticed the cane—I pray he says nothing on it—or that I’m pretty much completely out of my normal getup. No RCM uniform, no boiadeiro hat or leather riding boots—just a Vesper-Vacholiere, wearing the cap of a sport I don’t pay mind to, in cheap-ass sneakers and a graphic tee I usually only reserve for lazy days or pajamas. It exposes the multitude of pinprick scars on my forearms, as well as a couple others that are more impressive. The only thing that feels like me are my jeans. I think I look fucking stupid.

Shocker, isn’t it? Seeing a cop in actual civies.

“This had better be good,” Bevy says, almost as soon as I’m in speaking range.

My mouth twitches. I turn my attention to the motorbike again, tilting my head to squint at it. It’s kind of cool, I guess. Motorbikes aren’t horribly common at all in Revachol. Most often, they’re used for stunts and races, or else they’re owned by people who don’t have the patience to deal with MC traffic and don’t mind breaking a few traffic laws along the way. The design suggests a preference for horse-sized transport, even having the same fundamental concept of ‘saddling up’, which I like. It also has a massive propensity for accidents and recklessness, which I don’t like.

I incline my head slightly. “Nice ride,” I say mildly. Bevy glances back at it after a moment. “I’m sure Morrand gives you an earful about it.”

“He does.”

My mouth twitches again, asking me permission to crack a smile. I grant it and lean my cane carefully against the machine. I’m sure Bevy’s watching me closely out of the corner of his eye—or, at least, keeping me in mind. He takes out a cigarette, lights it, and blows out a column of smoke, staring up at the tall infrastructure.

“So. The Polycarpeum Church of Humanity.”

I hum an affirmative, shoes scraping against the asphalt as I get on my knees, fingers running along the metallic surface. I don’t really know all that much about the anatomy of motorbikes, truth be told. There are footrests for when you’re driving, kind of like the stirrups of a saddle. A stopper to keep it from falling over, which is not like a saddle at all. Wheels; handlebars; headlights. The motor in the back’s still hot but I check it out anyway, fishing out a leather glove to protect my hand while the other slides along the underside of its body.

“What’re you doing?”

I grunt, pushing myself up to my feet just as Bevy stoops down to examine his machine, one hand holding his hair away from his face. “Nothing,” I say, pocketing my glove. “I thought I saw a leak or something. You can’t be too safe. Speaking of.”

Bevy huffs and stands to his feet while I grab my cane, frowning at me. I get the impression he doesn’t exactly believe me. I can’t say I blame him.

“You’re going to want to bring your bike inside.” I nod to the church behind me. “Or at least put it somewhere out of sight of the main road.”

It’s hardly even a road, if we’re being honest here: The Polycarpeum Church of Humanity’s stood vacant at the end of a long stretch of driveway a hundred metres from the River Esperance for, oh, say, the last seven years or so. Nobody’s ever really bothered to try renovating it after the failed raid, so only the homeless or otherwise desperate ever came here after. You can imagine my surprise when I found suspects and kids hiding in this building, claiming sanctuary. At some point, the building was taken over by a black market group that took to selling organs, packs of blood, and bones that were dismantled in-house: We found out about their existence from the discard they let float down the river.

No one comes here anymore, needless to say. Locals in this part of Jamrock say it’s cursed. But the reason I'm skeptical about keeping the bike out in the open resides in the air—spyglasses peering down, orders being barked, a sniper rifle prepared and loaded.

I’m sure Bevy’s been here a couple of times since the raid. It’s no wonder he’s hesitant about being back.

He doesn’t follow immediately when I limp my way toward the church, kicking up leaf litter and detritus. Instead, he stands there, surveying the scene while I open the door, doubtlessly looking for anything or anyone hiding in the early morning shadows.

“I did tell someone I’m here,” he calls over, watching me.

“Okay. Did you mention my name?”

From this distance, it’s hard to make out the few details of his face that are visible. I don’t believe him when he says No, and I think he knows it when I say Okay. But it is what it is, and given that I’d probably do the same thing if I were in his shoes, I must offer some form of grace.

When he finally steps inside, I let the weighted door shut behind, leaning my cane against the wall. He only gets a moment to glance around before that happens, after which he directs all of his attention to me.

“Put your hands up,” I say before he can open his mouth. “Back of your head.”

This close, I can see the way he works his jaw, imagine the way he’s considering me. I don’t doubt there’s terror. Something that draws his posture stiff and has him ready to bolt—but I like to think he’s more curious than he is frightened. Curious about my sudden proposal, and why the remote location, and why the overabundance of caution. And it makes him stay.

He puts his cigarette in his mouth and takes a drag, hands moving slowly until they’re where I want them to be. I can respect that. If it were me, I don’t know if I’d have ever come at all.

I pat him down, head to toe, saying nothing even when he asks, “So is there a reason you chose this place in particular?” Wallet, keys, smokes. I find a gun, which is fine. I find a dictaphone stuffed in his boot, recording onto an empty cassette tape, which is significantly less fine.

I hold it up to him as it rolls, saying nothing. He doesn’t even have the gall to apologize. Just shrugs and says, “Can’t blame a guy for trying.” I stop the recording and keep the device, though to his surprise, I do return his pistol.

Then I walk away from him, taking my cane to do so, winding back to the start of the tape and listening. Bevy’s voice clicks on, a little breathy, like just moments before, it’d been maybe a little hard to breathe. This is Gullaume Bevy, 41, crime show host of Channel 8; at the end of the driveway of the Polycarpeum Church of Humanity; I am here to meet Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor John McCoy from the 41st Precinct; it is June 8th, ‘51. If my body is found, you know who is responsible.

There’s a long, pregnant pause. I can imagine him staring down the driveway, second-guessing himself, debating whether dying this morning is a particularly wise affair. He knows it isn’t. There’s a loud rustling; the rumble of an engine. And I know what happens from that point on.

So he’s not that stupid, coming here. I don’t know what this is supposed to achieve in the event of his death or whether he actually expects that I wouldn’t have searched his body thoroughly if I did kill him. Then I imagine him, sitting in his room, recording a very similar message onto this very same device. He takes out the tape and hides it deep within his mattress, or under the floorboard, or somewhere else only he would know. If I don’t see you tomorrow, he says to Morrand from Traffic, or if I don’t come into work, I need you to look in this specific place. There’s something there that’ll explain everything.

I turn it off, removing the tape. Pocket both. The dictophone’ll probably sell well.

“So.” I grunt as I collapse on the edge of the chancel, lifting my leg to lean against it like some kind of shitty, unsexy calendar boy. I don’t say anything more. It’s an invitation: He need only come as close to me as he’d like.

He does so slowly, only offering the environment the occasional glance around. Pews, long removed, leave the vast majority of the place empty. Climbing vines worm their way through broken stained glass windows like chlorophyll miasma. Cigarette butts and bloodstains are scattered on the floor. The wooden floor’s cracked with Mother Nature worming her green, feathery fingers in. Behind me, one of the stained glass windows is broken, too, having been shattered by an overeager RCM sniper from the top of an apartment building across the river. Past the ceiling above us is the belfry, where a single brass bell hangs with no clapper.

Bevy’s cigarette butt joins the ones on the ground. He stops a couple of metres in front of me, breathing out a smoky sigh. “I’m beginning to think that we’re not here for an interview.”

“Really?” I tilt my head, nonchalant. “That’s interesting. What makes you say that?”

“All of this discretion. This caution.” I stiffen as he reaches into his pocket; relax when it’s just another cigarette. He uses it to gesture around the empty sanctum, drawing my eye to the windows and walls; mushrooms growing in a particularly dank corner. “Checking my ride for bugs, and even just the fact that you picked here, of all places…”

“It could’ve been worse.” I shrug, reaching into my bag to light one for myself. “I almost picked Le Royaume instead. You’re welcome.”

“That you’re here at all.” He lights up, taking a drag. “Offering a fucking interview, of all things. As if you’d ever give me the time of day.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I chuckle into my nicotine, tickled by the way the warmth smooths over my craggy edges. “Maybe if I like what I hear, appreciate what you have to offer, I’ll consider it more seriously. You are my number one hater, after all. But for now—no. This isn’t an interview.”

“Is this about one of your cases? Are you looking to recruit me for some help with one? Because if so—I’m sorry, but I’m walking out. I know damn well what it means to be involved in a McCoy case.”

A flash of annoyance flares up in my stomach. I swallow it down.

“I really do wish it were that simple. If it were, I would’ve just been at Channel 8 to tell you not to get involved with my case. But no—you have to have talkers. You have to stick your fingers and toes into every other mousetrap you find in the house. I don’t know how to tell you that you’re about to land face-first into a bear trap instead. Reporters are so fucking insufferable, I swear to God.”

And I don’t know what else to say at all. I don’t expect, once he knows why exactly I’m here, that he’s going to be complacent and simply give me the information I need. Three days have passed, and all the while, I’ve been all wound up and tight with an anxious energy, bad enough that I shot at a woman I thought was jacking an MC. Three days I’ve spent fretting about what to say to get what I need out of this piece of shit human being without revealing too much information. I still have yet to fully settle into the fact that I’ll have to give him some info in order to get something in return.

At the same time, I can’t simply let him stand there and just sit on it: That’d be inviting disaster.

Guillaume nods his head slowly, nursing his cigarette. Eventually, he says, “Well, that is kind of part of my job, McCoy. Stepping into bear traps and talking about it.”

“Okay, maybe a bear trap is comparatively gentle. A landmine.” I can’t help but pause to think over that comparison. Hidden until you step onto it, maybe there’s a warning noise, maybe not—I don’t know how that shit works, but what I do know is that landmines are explosives. Explosives, by sheer nature of exploding, damage everything around them. Blasting people into bits and pieces. I’m sure it could even be seen from some distance, too, like an early warning sign of danger or disruption approaching. And there are people floating around in the sky, looking for any excuse to rain hell upon Revachol.

“Yeah. A landmine.”

“Okay, Mister Landmine. You’re really doing a lot of talking without saying anything at all. I don’t think you brought me all the way out here to be all cagey as hell for the fun of it. It doesn’t quite fit in with your MO, making people suspicious on purpose.”

“Okay, fine. Fuck it. I don’t think you’re going to be forthcoming with anything regarding this, but there’s no better way of putting it. The two thousand guns, the two missing cops—I was one of the cops.”

Bevy snorts out a short laugh and shakes his head, examining his shallow cigarette. “Yeah, no shit. I kind of figured pretty much the minute I heard you were at the radio station.” I click my tongue and scowl, a hot surge of irritation slicing its way across my skin—if he knew, or at least suspected, why not fucking say it? “Doesn’t really take a genius to figure that out, to be honest, but thanks for the confirmation. With that in mind, let me hazard a guess: You’re here because you hope I’ll be willing to rat out my friends in high places.”

“And that’s not gonna happen. For fuck’s sake, Guillaume, when have I ever asked anything of you? You’ve already fucked my career over—don’t you owe me a debt of apology or something? When did the modern Vacholiere take chivalry ‘round back to shoot?”

“Sure, I owe a fucking debt to the Merry Mass Murderer of Jamrock for calling out his bullshit. You know how this sounds to me? It sounds like you’re doing an awful lot of preaching about how big and important this whole situation is, but not really talking about what it is at all. It also sounds like someone talked and you’re trying to force them to be quiet.

"I can tell you what I heard, but I’m not gonna tell you where I got that info from. That’s where I draw the line. I’m not going to compromise the trust people have in me just because Mr. Archetype came knocking on my door blue balling me for an interview.”

I clench my jaw and look away, fingernails itching, coming up to scrape shallow lines against my forearms. Dead skin flakes off beneath them. I can feel bumps, and scabs, raw, microscopic pieces of flesh that’ve practically been abused through the years. My fingernails dig around one of those little bumps until a satisfactory little worm of pus comes out, and then another. Then another. The fourth one is stubborn. When I look at it after some time of thought, the skin around it’s red and inflamed, the bump puffy and pale; the other three are bleeding. I rub at my arm and frown at Bevy, who's smoking and watching, because of course he fucking is.

“Fine. Tell me about your gossip, then.”

“On April 23rd, two thousand guns were being prepared for local transit using some abandoned oceanside warehouse as an illegal transitional center. It got ambushed by two officers of the RCM, you and someone else. What's weird is that two officers were able to ambush a shipment of two thousand guns when usually it’d take half of the damn station working together for something like that.

“In the end, somebody shot a gun and caused a shootout. Three hundred guns were confiscated, leaving seventeen hundred unaccounted for—and on top of that, two horses showed up at the 41st Precinct’s stable afterwards without their riders. There was also a tunnel collapse that resulted in two Madre members killed and one of them with an amputated leg, which might’ve been related to that shootout.”

Yeah. Yeah, that is pretty weird, I suppose—how two officers intercepted that shipment in the first place and didn’t get shot at immediately.

I take my time to ruminate over this information, nodding along to it slowly, finishing off my cigarette and tossing it to the side, lighting another. Bevy follows suit, too, lighting his third. There’s a solid minute of silence hanging heavily in the air as I try to formulate a response, find some way to twist this into a story that he wouldn’t be interested in reporting or following up on. Fail to do so. Another couple of seconds where I try to sort through this info, trying to attribute it to areas and sections in Jamrock—obviously the horses are a dead giveaway that someone at the station is a talker. Could’ve just been casual gossip, though. Probably the Madre survivor would be worth looking into.

“...Okay.” I shrug, leaning back. “If that’s it, then, I guess that’s it.”

“You got follow-up questions for me or anything?” Bevy asks, gesturing between us. It strikes me as a little awkward, somehow: I imagine it’s because this is the question he wants me to ask him. I shrug and turn my attention skyward, squinting up at the ceiling, remembering how spine-chilling the acoustics of a gun in a church turned out to be. “Do you mind if I collect your statement for the record?”

There it is. “I already told you, this isn’t an interview.” I scowl when I glance back at him and see him taking out a pad and pen. “I don’t have any interest in my words being molded into some crude approximation of what it’s supposed to represent.”

“Are you—? I’m not some sensationalist journalist who neglects the facts just for news attention.” He scoffs, frowning at me. “I try to give it as it’s given to me. Have you never actually sat down and listened to any of my broadcasts?”

My brother does, sometimes, in some attempt to keep himself mindful of the dangers of the RCM and refrain from deluding himself into thinking that they’re much more than a semi-militaristic force for the status quo. It’s not the excuse he gives me, though. He claims he listens during the longer stretches of time when I’m gone from home, looking for breaking news about me in particular to make sure I’m still alive. Sweet if true, but I don't believe him.

I don’t mention this—not that I’m sure Bevy doesn’t know I have a brother, but because I’d rather not imply I care when it can easily be used against me.

“I don’t exactly go out of my way to listen to people who hate me.” I take out my flask, popping it open and drinking from it, something that makes Bevy raise an eyebrow. He wouldn’t know that it’s water: It’s natural to assume it’s some flavour of liqueur. I don’t bother correcting him. “You already have your own opinion of me. And that’s fine, that’s cool, that’s whatever. You talk about it like everyone else does—your voice just happens to be elevated to a whole ‘nother level.”

“Your side’s the only one I haven't seen, McCoy, what do you expect me to do with that? All you’re giving me to work with are second-hand statements—witnesses, fellow officers, public reports from Inspectorate—and none of them exactly paint you favorably. If you won’t even give me the time of day, what else do you expect me to believe?”

Like an evangelical preacher, preaching his gospel in the church, Bevy offers his hands to the side without any indication he’s aware of the potential of being a false prophet. It’s funny, really. He’s so desperate, it makes him look stupid.

I may be desperate enough to take it. Lance and I, we’ve been scraping by for years at this point. Rent’s been climbing steadily for years: What once was affordable years ago has evolved into financial strain. It used to be 125 reál about two decades ago, but now it's somehow mutated into 415 reál a month; 415 is looking to be raised to 450 by ‘52.

None of that considers groceries, repairs, medicine, entertainment, hobbies; Inspectorate fines, in my case, and their late fees; emergencies. We're single-income, practically, two people, on a firm salary of 5,500 with a semi-monthly pension of 300, thanks, Mama. Math doesn't agree with my brain in much the same way letters don't agree with Lance’s, but I've crunched the numbers regardless and the conclusion is firm:

This can’t go on much longer. We need some kind of excess funding to fall back on.

Outside, the early morning tittering of birds slip in through the windows. It serves as a cruel but appreciated reminder that we aren’t entirely alone here.

“I need those names, Bevy,” I murmur, shaking my head. “I can’t do anything about any of this without those names.”

“No can do. My hands are tied, McCoy.”

“Then mine are, too.” I grab my cane, moving to slide off of the edge of the chancel. The wooden floor creaks and sags just so underneath my weight; as I straighten up and stretch, I can feel my bones pop and crack. Muscles pull against each other in a way that’s so relieving, it’s almost a little painful. “I can't do shit for nothing, Bevy. You’ve gotta give me something to work with.”

“What do you want, then—other than names?” Bevy exclaims, following close at my heels on the way to the door. Oh, he's desperate, it's funny. “Information? Do you want info for something else, maybe? One or two of your cases you might be struggling with?”

I can’t help but scoff out a laugh at that, shaking my head. “I thought you wouldn’t even consider something like that, so no,” I say, pressing my hand against the door, “vaffanculo.”

“Money? Do you want money, McCoy?”

That gets me.

And he knows it, too. I know he does. He has to when I come to a screeching halt, the door outside cracked open, turning back around to face him. He’s less than a metre behind me, which is surprising—and he’s surprised, too. I catch him throwing his hands up in the air on reflex, skidding back a step, two. Then he hides the gesture by twisting his palms to the sky, brows arched, as if it was his plan all along.

“I can do money, you know. Money’s easy—within reason, of course. Just don’t go asking for like 100,000 reál or something ridiculous like that.”

“Oh, is that where all of those donations go?” I snark, leaning against my cane. “To bribing people who don’t want to be interviewed into complacency? So you can become their pretty little sugar daddy?”

If he has the money, he’d probably be an attractive sugar daddy, actually, maybe, if you squint, I think. The hair kind of makes it work.

“I’m fucking insulted you would think that.”

Oh. That was probably a step too far.

I don’t really mean it, necessarily, even if a small little fraction of me suspects that it’s the case. Truly, I was just aiming to bite back, at the very least to make him think that money isn’t a large part of what I need right now in my life before saying, fuck it, maybe I’ll consider it.

Instead I’m suddenly stuck without knowing what to say except sorry (I’m not), and Bevy’s just kinda looking some kind of angry and upset with the way he glances around and moves his arms. Jaw set. Like he doesn’t even know the first thing he wants to say about this, either.

The silence is long and awkward. Nerves tickle at my face, twitching at my mouth more and more insistently. I try to smother it behind my hand, but I’m not fully able to muffle the uncomfortable chuckle that follows, so I just fucking turn back around and leave before I can see Bevy’s reaction.

“We’ll just say I’ll keep that in mind and maybe touch base later,” I toss over my shoulder, waving a dismissive hand. “Bye, Bevy. It’s been nice.”

He doesn’t say much when he goes to his motorbike, just revs it up and leaves. I wait for him to do so. Then, once he’s gone, I walk the perimeter of the church, first outside, then in; all of the rooms that aren’t boarded up or locked, like I did when I first got here.

Before I leave, I pray to God to ask: What the fuck was that flash of genius? And then I apologise, for this isn’t Dolores Dei’s church but Polycarp’s, the Lost Innocence, and I should have known better than to show such blatant disrespect as to pray to the wrong Innocence here in the first place. It was inevitable that this would happen. I am a bad man. Forgive me. I do it out of love.

I do the rounds again, picking up random bits and bobs of trash for thirty minutes until my hip doth deigns to protest too much. So I quietly take the plastic bag a hundred metres downhill to the rowboat I stole from the upstream pier, to properly dispose of later. At least I feel vindicated in knowing that astrology is kinda bullshit.

Chapter Text

After I go home, I spend the rest of Tuesday trying to relax but end up pacing the apartment back and forth. Lance and I pick out some things to take to the pawn shop on Sunday (it isn’t much). He picks out some patterns and works on small, repetitive summer projects, like cotton-yarned bucket hats and chenille fruit-themed turtles.

Denise, the owner and bartender of a place I frequent, is kind enough to offer trying to sell some of them at her dive bar—we’ll bring it Sunday, too. I spend the rest of the day trying to do research, trudging my way through three chapters of Bevy’s book but unable to focus for how his contact info burns a hungry hole in my pocket. So I do what I always do when I'm trying to relax—I write reports instead.

Around 16:00 or so, I take a 'break' by hitching a tram towards Channel 8 and stake out from the shadows until 17:02, when Guillaume Bevy drives his motorbike from around back and peals the loud piece of shit to 8/81, like he can't get out of there fast enough. I make a mental note to look into how to cut brakelines. I make a mental note that he might live closer to Jamrock than he does to Faubourg, then consult a map of Revachol West when I get home to find a better vantage point.

Wednesday, I’m back on patrol. My temporary morning schedule is already fading. For the first time since we got back, Jean and I do our patrol together, partners-in-arms. While I’ve been busy with paperwork, he’s been busy gathering information.

We’ve got an impossible case on our hands—not Mills’s stupid hookah bar, where a film director passed out from oxygen deprivation and banged his head against a table. No, this is a steady stream of people disappearing into thin air, the kind that should be under Searchlight Division but was given to us instead. Puréed human materials seeping out of biohazard barrels. Has us chasing ghosts. But the trail smells strongly like blood to me, even though Jean has doubts about its legitimacy.

We have an argument about it, then deal with a robbery that results in three people dead, but none of them are us and you're welcome.

Thursday, we still turn up nothing. I sleep in an extra hour and come into work late, promising to compensate with an extra hour of work instead. My partner asks me how I’m holding up and I lie, saying Fine.

We catch a shoplifter. There’s a kid with a gun. There’s a riot in Faubourg that burns down seven blocks in the process: The smoke can be seen all the way from Couron. Jean’s upset about it to some extent or another, but it’s not in our district, so I don’t fucking care.

That is until Station 38, the fucking circus freaks, get permission from Pryce to use our systems as long as they offer a few extra hands on patrol. I almost shoot one of them in the foot for being a by-the-books little shit but end up missing—I swear I miss on purpose. You just have to scare them a little bit.

It causes a fight between me and Jean that I tactfully duck out of: I spend the second half of the day doing paperwork at the precinct. I'm finally introduced to Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi, freshly transferred from the 57th after going through a mountain of paperwork.

It's an honour, he says, with respect; with respect, I say that the whole Martinaise case should have earned him a yefreitor rank. Harry wholeheartedly agrees. Kim takes it in stride, humbly attributing the work Harry did even though pride straightens his spine when I say I'd be interested in reading his report on the Martinaise case. I immediately take a liking to the man.

It rains and thunders that night, but it's no typhoon, and it doesn't last long. It promises worse will come, soon, soon.

Friday, I stick to the office, still offended but also needing to catch up on paperwork. Pain and discomfort flares up and down my wrist when I write or type for too long, forcing me to take breaks and nurse them with compression bandages. Jean apologises for the week with an iced coffee hidden in a cardboard cup, something sweet and secretive to smooth the palette. I don’t apologise because I didn’t instigate any of it, but the bribery does its job to soften my irritation.

Harry gives us a Look that reads as concerned but doesn’t have any time to approach us about it before he and Kim head out for his first patrol: I return it with an earnest smile and a wave, a little too eager. I’d like to talk to him more, but it is what it is. Have a good day, I think, and when he’s gone, I wonder what his copgeist told him.

At 16:24, I leave the station for a ‘late lunch’ to settle down on my favorite bridge, loathing the summer heat and wishing it were autumn once again, or at least a rosy sunset that paints the thickening clouds a pretty, wooly pink. Instead of enjoying the view, I eat a kebab and lean against the railing, periodically checking the distant Faubourg exit with a pair of binoculars.

17:10, I see him, one of the rare few motorbikes carving down the road, driving like Hell's hot on his heels. My vantage point's generous enough to let me track the roads he's traveling even when buildings obstruct him and eventually figure out that he's going toward the park. I make a note of this in my head before I hitch a ride back to the station, planning to scope out the apartment buildings later.

And then there’s Saturday.

On patrol, Jean-Heron Vicquemare forces me to take a lunch break by dragging me into a café, insisting on paying. He barely touches his food. I barely touch mine, either, already knowing by now that food is a kind of bribe I can’t say no to. It'll be in my stomach soon enough, cold or not.

“So,” Jean eventually says. He settles back in his chair, arms crossed over his broad chest. I don’t look at how his muscles subtly strain against the fabric. Honest. I’ve had enough time to do so before. “What’s going on with you?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” I drink my boba tea, chewing on the tapioca pearls. It’s a pleasant treat I haven’t had in the longest time—brown sugar, half sweet, best when there’s still warm parts at the bottom for flavour.

At the station I’m known as someone who guzzles down coffee black and bitter. It’s part of the fucking rep, man, because typical Vespertine cops in films and books and shit, they drink it straight. You can’t be having sweeteners or cream in your coffee because that somehow makes you less of a man (completely discounting the fact that raw sugar’s fucking expensive and should be treated as a status symbol). You can’t be having fancy drinks at bars, either, because that shit’s too womanly.

That one I’m fine with, though. I actually do like neat whiskeys.

This is a guilty pleasure, a little secret. I know, I know, I shouldn’t. Jean knows, too; he’s one of the rare few that do.

“Cut the crap, John,” he scoffs, a scowl pulling over his handsomely scarred face. “I’m not in the mood to pull out your teeth, you know? We’re partners. Be fucking straight with me.”

The joke dances on my tongue only for me to bite it down, because saying it aloud would be inviting discussions about us that I don’t want to deal with right now. Instead, I stare out the window, watching people pass by under the clouds of a gathering typhoon. The wind wrenches someone’s umbrella away in an oddly comical, oddly sad twist of fate. On the other side of the street, a woman gives a sad-looking man her number, says see you later or something, and they part ways. He's wearing a yellow raincoat.

“...Well,” I eventually say, heaving a long, quiet sigh. “Where to begin. You know Bevy, sì?”

“Oh, yeah, the Bevy shit.” Jean sighs, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “Fuck. I forgot about the Bevy shit. Okay, so what’s going on with that? Did you have any luck?”

“No-pe.” I pop the p like how a ta-pi-oca pearl pops into my mouth. The sound cracks a smile out of me, making me a little giddy as I take the straw in my teeth. “Wouldn’t give me the fuckin’ names. Not without knowing what happened, at least—I think that was the implication. He really wants to interview me.”

“Big surprise. He’s been wanting to do that for years.”

“It’s not my fault he’s, like, obsessed with me, or whatever.”

“I mean—well.” Jean leans back and frowns, narrowing his eyes at me, brows furrowed tightly to his forehead. I frown back and straighten up, lowering my cup to the table.

“...Well?” I press, sharp, poised to bite if I must.

“...Okay, don’t take this the wrong way... it kind of is, though. I mean, think about it. What exactly does he have to go on, other than what he’s heard from second-hand accounts? There’s always at least two sides to the story and he’s never had the chance to get yours about it.”

“He did say something very similar,” I relent, looking away. Just outside, two people walk fast past the window, man and woman, arms heavy with groceries. Their hair whips around their shoulders, red and blue. A distant spark of thunder briefly illuminates this world in a momentary flash of brilliance.

“He’s kind of like a detective, except instead of writing reports for a precinct to be thrown in the archives and forgotten, his report is like. The fucking radio, you know? You want to get to the bottom of a case, you need to get both sides if you can.”

“Of course, I know that.” Thunder hits hard enough that it rocks my soul. The power flickers, cutting me off; for a couple of seconds, the rest of the café goes quiet, too. Jean and I stare up at the ceiling, looking between the lights, until they come back on again.

After a moment, the other customers start mumbling again. I join them tentatively: “But you know how some cops are, with their biases and preconceived ideas of who should be guilty and who shouldn’t be. Fuck, you know I sometimes twist shit around and lie in my reports. I just don’t trust that Bevy’s not the same, you know? He fucking hates me.”

“I mean…” Jean hesitates, looking down at the table, where his coffee and as-of-yet untouched food still remains. Slowly uncrossing his arms, he picks up his cup, looking outside to take a drink. I focus my attention on my plate, chewing down mediocre cheese curds with beef and gravy on a bed of rice. Allegedly, they’re from Wheat Town. Considering how dry and bland it is, I have my doubts.

I try not to think too hard about the food. How I'm not even buying my own fucking food. Because then that makes me think about the 300 reál I owe, which makes me think about the hiking rent prices, which makes me think about how it's not unlikely in the future that I'll be fined for more shit that's just a part of my job, and I can't afford that, so I just don't think about that right now, and this is fine, and I am fine for now, cross that bridge later or never and preferably never. I'll take care of it, somehow. I have to.

How much does this cost? How much do I owe? This doesn't seem fair.

“...Take this with a grain of salt, John, but Bevy? He was fucking great to work with, a goddamn dream. He knew his shit. Sure, it was annoying to have him reporting on all of the bad shit—but take it from someone who’s dealt with him before: He really does tell it like it is, good or bad. Like, seriously. He’s blunt as shit about it. It might do you good to actually listen to some of his coverages.”

“It sounds like a problem.” For him, I mean. “You trust him, then?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I’d rather have him in my corner than not. Do you trust me?”

I don’t know. I’m still on the fence about that. Do you trust me?

It’s a two-way fucking street, Jean, and you’ve never bothered to meet me in the middle when I’m there. I want to. God, I want to. But, Dei help me, I don’t understand what you want from me, and you give me just enough for me to keep assuming wrong. Every time. Every time.

He's not doing it on purpose. Probably. Maybe. But—and maybe I’m paranoid—what if he is? What then? Stringing John McCoy along on a leash like it's some kind of fucking game. Like it’s something to laugh about, a cruel joke that he and Chester and Harry cackle about when I'm not around.

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

“Of course I do,” I lie. It’s meant to be reassuring, the smile I give, though I don't feel like the message is being delivered. To lean into this narrative, I reach over the table, patting my hand against Jean’s shoulder, rubbing up and down his bicep. He flinches under the contact—or, rather, cringes: I’m not sure if it’s because it still hurts, or if he’s just remembering how badly it hurts, or if he’s experiencing yet another wave of guilt about what happened.

If it’s the latter—good. He should die guilty about it. I don’t tend to hold grudges easily, but I’m fucking confident that I’m going to go to my grave with some part of me never forgiving him. I'm just so tired of rolling with the punches and being fine with it.

“I wouldn’t have saved your life if I didn’t.”

It comes out so smooth and easy, I almost believe it.

Somehow, Jean buys into it. He's such an idealist, this one, willing to overlook the years of Harry's shit, willing even to overlook what Harry told him about me, all for the sake of wanting to believe in the best of people. Jean gives a relieved little smile, a little nod. Starts eating like the hungry, sacrificial lamb he is.

And then it’s my turn to ask, all gentle-like and saintly patient, how are you doing, amico? And push and prod a little for answers, be the load-bearing wall to his bleeding heart like he once was for Harry because I had the fucking gall to request him as my partner, give Harry a break from his temper, and oh, what a surprise, he’s sad about Harry, among other sad and depressing things. Come here, amico, let me be your shoulder to cry on. I got you.

I do so with the knowledge that—just like I’m hiding the debt I owe to the Inspectorate General, or the fact that I’m quietly mulling over ways to kill Bevy, or just Pryce in general—he’s still hiding something from me, too.

But it’s how you keep the peace, you know, so. Fucking, whatever. I don’t care. I can pretend like I do, though. Let me feed you, little lamb, prepare you for the inevitable slaughter. I can make it quick and painless when it comes down to it. Just for you.

Outside, the rain hits, sudden and hard.

I’m not really asleep when the phone rings that drizzly Saturday night, drifting in and out in utter agony. No matter how I lay down, my back hurts like a motherfucker, and it honestly feels worse than my hip does right now. The wrist brace I got for Lance is wrapped around mine instead, though I can't decide if it helps more to keep it on or leave it off.

Drouamine's done nothing so far—or maybe it hasn't done enough. The typewriter this past week, coupled with my posture, and then the typhoon, almost has me in tears about it. It’s my fault I feel like this.

I half-stumble into the kitchen with my back stooped and a sniffle in the back of my throat, limping so heavily the furniture may as well be glorified crutches. The red, glittery plastic receiver comes up to my ear, quieting the rattly ring; I sink down into my fingers, massaging my eyes.

“‘Ron’o,” I mumble, a sleepy yawn catching the back of my voice. I clear my throat and try again, expecting Pryce on the other end. “Hello?”

“I think I’m dying.”

It isn’t Pryce, which has me blinking. The voice, boozily slurred and mangled from cigarettes, tar, and nicotine, rattles like gravel’s been stuck scraping the back of his throat for the past, oh, ten or so years. I can safely assume he’s been smoking since he was at least ten or twelve: Kids who grew up on this side of Revachol often did in the years of poverty following the Revolution.

“Hello? Who is this?” I say, even though I already know. The silence on the other end crackles with static and something moist as he, maybe, licks his lips. “...Harry? Why are you calling me?”

“Um. I don’t… I don’t know. My fingers just…” There are long pauses in his slow, slurred speech. It feels like hanging on the edge of a door, swinging back and forth, indecisive and never really getting anywhere. “I think I’m dying,” he finally sobs, and there’s a rattle on the other end, clattering and clanking, the rustling of fabric. “You have to help me. Do you know me? Please…”

By now I’ve grabbed the phone line and started to pace carefully in the small, tiled space of the kitchen area, doing so in the dark. The only thing lighting the space is a nightlight we have plugged above the rotary phone, so Lance and I can orient ourselves when we happen to wake up in the dead of night. Often I worry that someone’s snuck in, though, ducking just out of range, waiting to pounce on me from the safety of the dark. I can’t see them, but they can see me.

I flick on the kitchen light and look around. Find nothing; relax a little.

“Are you drunk?”

Somewhere in Jamrock, a man sobs so hard over the phone that it briefly breaks the line in two. I wince, pulling the phone from my ear. I can still hear him, though, crackly but clear as day.

“Don’t tell Kim,” he begs, broken-lunged and heaving. “Please do–don’t call Kim!”

“I’m not going to tell Kim,” I say, cradling the phone against my shoulder. “I’m not going to call him, either. I don’t even have his number.”

“Don’t tell Jean,” he bemoans, quieter. “He’s gonna be so mad… I’m gonna… I’m so sorry…”

“It’s okay, Harry. I forgive you. I won’t tell Jean,” I promise, setting the phone line back down. The coil tangles around my finger, looping and unraveling the curly rubber line as my nails pick at the edges. “But they’re both going to find out tomorrow, you know? They’re going to be able to tell that you’ve been drinking. They won’t be the only ones, either. I want you to be prepared for that. But I don’t think Jean will be mad—just, I don’t know… concerned, or whatever.”

Harry’s broken sobbing cracks through the static. I imagine him—at home, in a phone box, at a payphone, I don’t know—collapsed on the floor, curled up tightly against himself. If he’s surrounded by four walls, he’d be tucked away in a corner, seeking some kind of broken facsimile of safety. It almost hurts my soul, but at this point, it's kind of the same shit, kind of a different day. It's a concentrated effort to make myself care beyond a surface level.

I let him cry for a while, squinting at the digits on the stovetop, reading 21-something. While waiting, I rummage the pantry, grabbing a granola from a box to accompany two drouamine, washing it down with sharp tap water. The phone beeps at some point, indicating a minute left; he must have put in some change somewhere in there, hands and fingers trembling something awful.

“Jean?” he finally hiccups, a little quieter now. “Are you… are you still there? Jean?”

“I’m not—oh.” Oh, he said John. Right. It’s annoying how similar our names are, sometimes. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m here, caro mio.”

“Why do I know your phone number?”

I pinch the bridge of my nose and cradle my elbows against the countertop, sighing as I stretch out my body. The muscles stretch out and pull against my bones in creaky protest, and it almost makes me feel like it just makes it worse. When I shift my weight from one leg to the other, a dull crack goes off painlessly in my hip, firm enough to feel in the back of my throat. The menagerie of agonies really makes me fucking enjoy life.

“I don’t know... I haven’t exactly moved in twenty years, so maybe that has something to do with it.” I say it with a smile, intending it to be a joke.

“Are you mad at me? For—” He’s crying again, sobbing into the receiver, words so blotted with tears that it's impossible to distinguish one word from another. Now that I’m a little more awake, I realise how echoey it sounds, how hollow, condensed. He’s probably in a phone box.

The line beeps again, one minute left, and I haven't been able to decipher what he's said for the past little while, but I get the gist of it, I think.

“No, Harry, I’m not mad at you. I don’t think you understand how dangerous going cold turkey on alcohol is, like you’ve been trying to do. Alcohol’s one of the harder addictions to kick because if you’re really dependent on it, like you are, you can actually die from suddenly cutting it off all at once. Relapsing isn’t good but it’s better than dying. You’re a work in progress. You’re okay.”

He sniffles. I’m not sure if he was able to catch the rambling soup I was trying to push out before the thirty second beep, but maybe the sheer number of words was enough of a reassurance in itself. Maybe even my tone—I’ve been trying to keep it quiet, calm, and level, exercising my patience. It’s a nice thought, but I'm not hopeful any of it will stick.

“Can you pick me up?” he asks, voice small, whiney, and pitiful. Like a sad little puppy begging me to take him home.

“I can’t,” I say apologetically, rubbing at my eyes. “My body hurts. Don’t think I could manage the walk or support you wherever you need to go. I think you should call Kim.”

“I can’t!” Harry sobs again, heaving and practically choking on his tears, the kind that I’m sure is leaving his face a snotty and blotted mess. It’s probably disgusting, getting stuck in his moustache. I don’t want to imagine how uncomfortable it’ll feel when it’s dry. “I can’t...”

“He’s got transport, and I’m sure he’d understand. I get the feeling that he’d be more upset that you didn’t trust him to help you with this, don’t you?”

I wait for his response on the other end, leaning against the counter, my finger twisting around the coil, my leg shaking, but it never comes. He just sniffles, cries, coughs until the line goes dead, droning on with the voice of a cut call.

I hang up the receiver and wait by it a while, just in case, then look at the time. Instead of going to bed, I carefully push myself off of the counter to navigate my way to the living area, collapsing supine on the floor. My back welcomes my weight upon it, but my hip cries out in uncomfortable protest. Can’t fucking win.

I lay on the carpet for a while until it gets too painful for my hip to take, then roll over onto my stomach for a few minutes until it gets too hard to breathe and doing so cuts into my spine, then climb onto the couch to press my back against it. A warm bath would fix me, I think longingly, soaking into all the hurt and aching muscles to ease the pain away. At least for a while. Unfortunately there is no bathtub in this building, at least that I’m aware of.

When I check the time and see that an hour or something has passed, I pull myself back to my feet and make my way over to the phone, turning the clanky black dial to input the recall number. The chiming of the rotary is so loud it makes me wince halfway through, pausing to make sure I haven’t somehow woken Lance up.

On the fifth ring, the phone picks up, a handsome, willowy voice made for music settling into my skin. “Hello?”

I rub the warmth from my face and get a fucking grip. “Ciao,” I say. “I like your voice.”

“Who is this?” the stranger asks, understandably guarded. I clear my throat and glance around, like I’m sure he is, somewhere else in Jamrock, standing in a windowed phone box.

“Scusi." I say, leaning into the accent I try to ignore. "No one. I mean—I have this friend, see, and he called me drunk from that payphone somewhere around, oh, an hour ago? And I couldn’t pick him up—I’m too far, I’m sure you understand—surely—so I told him to call another one of his friends.”

“Oh. Punch drunk or drunk drunk?”

“Drunk drunk. Relapse kind. And I was just calling to see if he’d pick up, or if he’s still around there. I’m not sure if he called his other friend.”

“He your boyfriend, or something?”

The question comes out of nowhere, blindsiding me with the sheer bluntness of it. I look around the kitchen again, then across the kitchen island—no, it’s a tiny little kitchen bar, that’s the phrase that keeps escaping me—across the kitchen bar and into the living room beyond. Lance is still asleep, I think. This feels awkward.

“...Uh. No, er. M’sieur?” He hums a note of affirmation on the other end, soft and musical. I sigh, smothering my face in my hand. “M’sieur. No, it’s more of a coworker kind of deal.”

“O-kay,” Willow Tone says, a smile in his voice, “okay. Is his other friend his boyfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your boyfriend?”

“I don’t know. I’d be surprised. Probably not. It’d be mildly unprofessional. We’re all coworkers—m’sieur, this is getting wildly off track.”

“Right.” The man with the willowy, musical voice somewhere in a phonebox clears his throat and shuffles around. I hear the drop of change in the coin slot. “What’s your friend look like?”

“Like a fatter Guillaume le Million,” I supply immediately. “Chicken legs, gorilla biceps, overhanging beer gut. His hair’s brown, though—he’s Occidental—and he’s got this gap between his two front teeth. He might be wearing something disco. Man likes his disco.”

“Your friend’s got good taste.”

“I suppose.”

“You don’t like disco?”

“Disco’s fine, I guess,” I say, glancing around warily again, as if anything might have changed. “I like the style and the aesthetic, but just—kind of at a distance, you know? It’s not something I’d put on personally. Some of the music’s okay but it gives me a headache.”

“Oh, I see. That’s fair. Probably doesn't vibe with Vesper's music very well, I guess.”

“It’s very canary culture,” I supply quickly, as if I need to prove to him I’m on his side and that I understand him, as well. “But it’s really fucking sad, too, you know? Disco’s a really sad party era, and my friend’s a really fucking sad man. It’s kind of complicated.”

Willow Tone chuckles at that, slipping in another coin. “Yeah, I hear you on that one.”

What follows is a brief period of silence intermittently interrupted by shuffling footsteps and the occasional whoosh of traffic somewhere in the far distance. In that silence, I have plenty of time to think, and it’s more than enough time to revel in the embarrassment of realisation: This conversation, I’ve been doing way too much talking.

And it’s a stupid realisation to hit because of course I’d be doing all of the talking—I’m describing Harry, explaining vaguely the situation surrounding him, and asking a stranger for help. But there’s no need for me to talk about, like, disco, or whatever, or fucking canary culture, or indulge him at all when he asks if Harry or Kim are my boyfriend.

He’s probably scoping out if I’m single, actually.

Ah. Oh, fuck. Shit. Fuck.

I thought I was fucking boring him with it—he wasn’t supplying much to the conversation, after all, what am I supposed to assume?—but, uh. That’s probably worse.

Willow Tone comes back to me with a sigh, stepping in from the sidewalk. “I couldn’t see your disco dude around,” he says, stifling a cough. “Do you think that’s a good thing?”

“Non so. Could be someone dragged him aside and mugged him, or something. I’ll know if it’s good or not if he comes into work tomorrow. If he isn’t, I’ll just report it to the RCM.”

Willow Tone chuckles. “Sounds good.”

“Thanks for your help, though. I appreciate it.”

“Hey,” he says, before I can hang up, “can I, like, have your number or something?” When I don’t answer immediately, he presses on: “I mean, you seem pretty on the level, and this is, like… how often do you just walk down the street and answer a payphone, have this kind of conversation, you know?”

“No,” I murmur, tapping my finger against the countertop. The silence is deafening.

“...No?”

“No.”

“But—why?”

“Just no,” I say, nodding to myself, every moment feeling a little less flattered and a little more assured. “That’s all. Grazie per l'offerta, though, I guess.”

“You guess?” he asks. “You guess? I help you out with this and you won’t even give me the time of day? Me answering the phone like this is just—it doesn’t read like fate to you, or something?”

“Like fate?” I press my hand against my mouth but not enough to smother my laughter. It slips out before I can stop it, a quiet chuckle at first, then one that I can feel from the top of my lungs. I can’t—it’s fucking funny, I think, so this is how women feel. This is the fucking ‘nice guy’ shtick. I never thought I’d live to see the day where I’d experience it first-hand.

"Fate isn't fucking real, amico. Chill out. You sound insane."

“It’s that guy, isn’t it?” Willow Tone presses, striking another chord of laughter from me. “The one you’re calling for. He is your boyfriend, isn’t he? Well, I hope you know that that friend you told him to call—I bet they’re fucking nasty right now! That friend is raping your drunk little disco bitch as we speak, and they’re getting high as balls and he’s fucking loving it.”

My laughter dies quickly. He says something else. I don’t know what. "Quoi?"

“Yeah, you like that, cunt? Your disco bitch is choking on his dick right now, I fucking bet, being throat fucked so hard his teeth are falling out. Better than your tiny dick, I’d bet a million fucking reál. And tomorrow your sad little bitch is going to be in the obituary, because he was so fucking sad he cheated on you that he killed himself! Then you’re going to be so fucking depressed, you’re gonna jump off a bank in La Delta and kill yourself, too. And then I’m going to see your fucking face, know what your name is, find where you were buried and watch the dogs fuck your mangled corpse in your grave! ‘Cause apparently you’re a worthless, stupid bitch, and dogs love that.”

I chuckle, uncertain and uncomfortable, not sure what else to do. This is fucking unreal. There’s no fucking way that this actually happens in real life. “Dei and God in Heaven, what is wrong with you? I just said no. You need to, like, go to church and pray or something, or get some kind of help.”

“Oh, you’re religious, bitch? I should’ve fucking known.”

Yeah, no, this isn’t funny. It stopped being funny the second he said Harry was being raped, and now he’s going on about something else that I’m not even listening to, the shock of what he said sticking out ugly in my mind. This is fucking unreal. Is this what women have to worry about dealing with?

I tap my finger on the counter, wondering, considering what would happen if I just said, You know what? Sure. You’re such a stand-up guy. Let’s meet up in like an hour, around the south side of Jamrock or whatever, have a nice little fuck about it before we part ways forever.

I bring my gun. I shoot him in the skull. I hide the body, because God only knows what kind of damage Willow Tone’s already done and how much more he’s yet to do. Or maybe I just don’t and I take the hit from Inspectorate. What's another couple hundred on top of what I'm dealing with, after all? Who fucking cares?

That’s the difference, though, between me and a criminal. A criminal who sets out to commit a murder like this would give a time and place, bring their gun or a knife, and do just that. They’d call themself a vigilante for justice.

I'm too busy and tired to deal with this shit, anyway, even though if he were right in front of me, a suspect or a witness pulling this kind of shit, I probably wouldn't even think twice before pulling my gun and shooting him in the chest.

What I do instead is, I leave the receiver on the counter and walk away, letting him believe I’m still listening in silence on my end. I gather towels and a change of clothes, close and lock the door behind me, and go upstairs to take a shower with the rattly-ass pipes. Despite what Guillaume Bevy and all of Revachol would like to believe, I really, honestly don’t tend to go out of my way to kill people.

When I eventually come back and check on the phone, the droning tone is dead, and so is Willow Tone, as far as I’m concerned. I hang up the receiver and start for my room.

The phone rings almost immediately. Maybe not dead, then, not yet. God only knows how long he’s been trying to recall.

I heave a sigh and throw my towel over my shoulder, drying my hair as I answer the phone. “Ciao, bella,” I say, prepared for the worst.

“The Dipping Bowl.”

Pryce’s tone snaps at my ankle like a snake in the grass, an unseen, venomous danger lurking in the undergrowth, waiting to ambush. Even though I expected the worst, this is somehow… worse. I don’t know what I did wrong, but whatever it is, Pryce isn’t happy about it.

I open my mouth and close it, turning around to examine my apartment. Every awkward movement makes my back twinge with pain, crying for the heating pad as much as my hips are crying for the sweet relief of bed. The plastic receiver creaks a little in my hand, fingers squeezing so tightly that they ache.

As far as I can tell, I'm still alone; I can breathe.

“...Well, hello to you, too.”

“This is the fourth time that I’ve tried to call you tonight, McCoy,” Pryce says, stone-cold and sharp. I wince, wrapping my arms around myself.

“I’m sorry, sir. I was away from the phone.”

“Your line was busy.”

“What, you expect me to babysit the phone or something? A telemarketer called me. I was leaving it off the hook to waste their time. It was funny.” I hesitate before adding, “I took a shower in the meantime, sir. I just got back.”

“I don’t care,” Pryce sighs, though—I think—the hard, sharp edges of his voice might’ve softened a little, or maybe I’m imagining it, I don’t know. I hope I’m not imagining it. “There’s a dead body in the Dipping Bowl. He’s got a Moralintern ID on him. The scene’s been compromised by the typhoon—water, debris, you know the drill. I want you there as soon as possible. Do you understand?”

I look at the time and frown. “Can’t someone else do this?”

“Neither Minot nor Viquemare are picking up the phone, and Du Bois is already managing C Wing tomorrow. You’re a lieutenant—you have the credentials to do whatever you need to do.”

“It’s midnight,” I try, pacing the floor.

“And?”

Captain Pryce says it like a challenge, daring me to go on—go on, say what we both know. I swallow, biting down on the cord, being careful to avoid where it frays. “You know I try not to work on Sundays, sir.”

“Good—then this will be the only case that has your focus until Monday. Get to it.”

The hollow tone hits against my forehead a couple of times until it hurts enough to make me stop. I clench the receiver in both of my hands and press it against my chest, eyes closed tightly, breathing, breathing, easy. There isn’t any need to wake up Lance with this when doing so will accomplish nothing.

Instead I pick out my voltas, take a couple of minutes to sing them quietly to myself, and move on, leaving a deliberately neat note on the kitchen bar that says, “PRYCE CALLED. SORRY”; the capilisation and neatness makes it much easier for him to read.

I change my clothes and grab my shit. The phone rings again, but I’m in a hurry and don’t want Lance to wake up, so I take it off the hook, hang up immediately, and leave the receiver on the counter so no more calls can come in. For the life of me, I can't remember if I took any recently, so on the way out, I swallow down some drouamine.

Chapter Text

A common misconception people have between Couron and Grand Couron, even if they've lived in Revachol their whole lives, is assuming that they're different places. They aren't—there's no mythical degree of separation where the middle-glass suburbs spike into uniform, seven-story buildings that trail off like concrete agriculture. You just call it Couron if you hate it, like most people should; Grand Couron if you still, for some reason, believe in delusions of grandeur. There will always be people who use them interchangably.

What most people think of Couron proper are the hollow husks of grand, towering structures. Originally designed to be this massive housing project for the lower-middle class, the buildings are still empty nearly two decades later. Hardly anybody lives in the apartment buildings because if you rent an apartment, you cannot ever own it. But if you own a house in the suburbs, someday, you're going to pay it off, get it in your name. When the economy tanked after the '30s, hardly anyone could actually afford to move into Couron unless they were already living in neat little suburban rows.

It's such a waste. Couron is just a place where people go to die nowadays.

I'm not supposed to be riding Cashmere at the pace that I am—not with my hip, and, actually, not at all—but I've been doing it anyway because, well, what else am I supposed to do? Cashmere goes at his steady pace, each jostle of the saddle shooting pain through my bones. He picks his way down the road, but the mist following the typhoon proves a challenge. It doesn't take long for him to refuse to go faster than a walk, and eventually I have to admit that he's right—with how treacherous Couron's ground is, going any faster in such low visibility conditions is too dangerous.

He hems and haws and paws at the ground when I climb off of him, pass my hand over his forehead and over his snout, say Easy, easy, there, there, darlin'. Cashmere shakes his head as I take his reins, shrugging off some of the moisture like a big ol’ dog.

I kiss the bridge of his nose and guide him along, making sure that both of my feet and all of his are going where I want as we avoid the little holes in the road and sidewalk. One bad misstep, and my foot will slip into a gap in the road, I might twist my ankle, or else Cashmere's hoof will slip through the pavement. He might break his leg, or think that the ground is trying to swallow him up, and then I'd have a panicking horse to wrangle that I physically cannot deal with right now, and that'd make this worse.

Sinkholes are everywhere in Couron, seven-story buildings jutting over the holes, some of them half-toppled into pits, some leaning against each other. There’d be more holes in the streets if people actually lived here, and it’s honestly such a good thing that nobody does because it’s so dangerous.

The aerial photographs I’ve seen in surveys are a tryphobic nightmare, pointing out all of the little spots and holes in Revachol and where—one day, in the far, distant future—a massive cavity might one day be, crumbled down to fill in the catacombs. It's fucking insane how much work and effort went into this mess just to go to waste.

Thankfully, we don’t have to continue walking for horribly long—faded grafitto on the pavement marks where the general area is supposed to be. I sniff at the air and know which way to turn; and then I find it—the place where the shattered ground tilts gently downward, almost slippery against my soles, and a thick pool of fog covers the bottom of it like an airy pond.

I step back and move Cashmere to the side where I feel he’s safe, loosely tying his reins to a street light. In the shadows, his wet fur seems to shine black instead of his handsome red-toned brown. His skin ripples from the drizzle and shivers under my hand as I tell him, Good job, good boy. I’ll be back in a little bit, love, and I’m sorry to bring you out here so late.

Then I continue down, until the gentle slope and graffito transforms abruptly into a pit in the ground, leading me to Jamrock Shuffle around its perimeter. The stench of damp death hangs in the air.

I look for the body around the edge, where I assume it to be, but find nothing; then, once I’m confident I’ve done my rounds circling the edge of the hole, I slowly turn my gaze to the centre, fog muffling the light’s decline. Shuffling forward, I sniff at the air again, tracking the pungent stench somewhere straight ahead.

A smile cracks its way across my face. Chuckling, I lean back, glancing around, holding my arms out to the side. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I ask, grabbing my hat and tossing it onto the ground. “Fuck you, Pryce. I’m not doing this.”

I turn sharp on my heel, pace painfully away, retrace my steps to the edge, pick up my hat, pace back and forth along a small section of the perimeter, because apparently I am doing this, aren’t I? It’s really just kind of a matter of figuring out how. That’ll have to come later, though, first thing to do is start taking notes.

It takes me a few to find Cashmere, but that’s part of why I put him under an uphill streetlight. I huff and pant a little as I rummage in his saddle bag, knuckles brushing against something soft that doesn't belong. It takes a moment of blind fumbling, wrapping my hand around the thing, before I realise it's just the turtle I kidnapped... when, exactly, this month? Time is a blur. Nonetheless, I take out Tiberius and kiss his floppy little forehead for good luck. I put him away—rummage some more.

The dictaphone, as it turns out, is in an easily-forgotten side pocket. I don’t normally use these things, but as it turns out, it’s pretty fucking hard to write on paper when it’s sprinkling, and there aren’t exactly any awnings for me to stand under.

Lance did a little bit of searching for some empty tapes we had lying around for the one that broke three years ago, and he had a little fun recording the noises of the birds on the fire escape. Seemed impressed with the audio quality, too, so this dictaphone that's now mine probably is quite expensive. And after the many, many years of a blond bitch dragging my name through the mud... well, I feel like I deserve to keep one of his precious little toys. As a treat.

As for Bevy’s tape—well. It turns out, audio ribbons are pretty damn flammable. Good fuel for keeping the poor homeless folk warm for a couple seconds longer. Who knew?

“Can you believe this, Cashie?” I ask as I slide an empty tape in. “He mentioned a ‘Moralintern ID’, but the guy’s not even reachable. What d’you think’s up with that, darlin’? How's he know the guy's there? What d’you think’s goin’ on?”

Cashmere huffs, shaking out his head and his mane, scattering droplets. He's taken to laying on the ground, back to the pole. I wish I were him right now, able to rest my aching bones.

“I know, right? Unbelievable. God. I’ll be back in a bit, cher. Testing, testing,” I say, pressing play as I leave.

“Testing, testing,” I hear myself say when I rewind.

I check my watch before I continue, wiping away the water and double-checking that it’s still working. “This is Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor John McCoy reporting from the 41st Precinct, Jamrock District. The date is 13-06-51. The location is the Dipping Bowl, a sinkhole located seven blocks off of McFalinster Avenue in Couron.

“McFalinster leads to a suburban development where… where adolescents live. You know the ones. Kind that sneak out at night and do whatever the fuck they want. Rephrase this in post. Note: Important context for caller; motive for disposal. The Dipping Bowl became a local phenomena among the youth when it collapsed in ‘38, since the way it collapsed coupled with its indented location disincentivises water from draining effectively. The water tends to be funneled into it from the surrounding area, kinda like a shitty drain. Adolescents—children and teenagers—congregate here during the summer after heavy rain to use it as a pool. There’s a bit of a turf war going on between les petit rats and les souris de banlieue. A part of it’s—”

What's that?

I pause, turning around to squint through the fog and the rain, straining to listen but finding nothing. Whatever footsteps I think I just heard dies in the dampness. It very well could've just been crumbling rocks. The road giving way somewhere in the distance. I don't know. I don't come out here often enough to know.

I take a breath and let it out, trying to visualise the area around me. How many other sinkholes are in the immediate area, and how many of those actually run deep enough to slip into Le Royaume? Enough, I eventually decide, staring into the fog. As a matter of fact, there might be les petit rats out there, right now, approaching my light with rocks in one hand and broken swords in the other. Some of them, I might even recognise.

I swallow, glancing toward the streetlight where Cashmere is waiting—a faintly distant, hazy figure that I can barely make out the shadow of—before resolving myself to turning my back on the ghosts. I keep a hand over my gun, lowering my voice.

“...A part of it’s because les rats find their way up from Le Royaume, if they can find passages that haven’t been caved in by these sinkholes. Alternatively, Couron is also a notorious hot spot for dead bodies to be dropped due to these... tentative escape routes and remote nature. Task: See if there’s information about the drainage patterns of the Dipping Bowl.

“All of this aside,” I continue, not even realising when exactly I started pacing, “at 00:02 this morning, I received a notification from the 41st Precinct about an anonymous caller claiming to have seen a corpse in or around the Dipping Bowl.

“Off the record: I fail to understand why somebody would purposefully dispose of a body in a high traffic location such as this. There’s a nonzero possibility that, if this isn’t a prank call, it was disposed of by a nonlocal, or the murder could’ve been committed on-scene and the killer not able to relocate the body before being noticed. Tag speculation. Alternatively the death could’ve been circumstantial and caused by a combination of low-visibility conditions and temperate weather. Tag speculation. It could also be a suicide. Tag speculation.

“On the record: Detective arrived on-scene at 02:34. Visibility is low. I estimate I can see about one metre ahead of me with no light source and three metres ahead of me with a torch.”

I shine the light on a spot of graffito on the ground and lower my head, squinting at it, then whip it around.

“Three and a quarter. The trip beyond Couron suburbia was slow and methodical due to low visibility. I noticed no commotion or strange going-ons en route, and the same translated into the alleged crime scene. On circling the perimeter of the sinkhole, I was unable to find any signs of a body or suspicious activity. However, I do smell decay somewhere nearby, which I suspect to be in the centre of the sinkhole. It should also be noted that the weather conditions and time of day severely compromises the scene via obscuring and washing away evidence.”

I hesitate, stopping in my tracks and looking around. The fog is deep, a pale and shapeless form that clings to my clothes and seeps down under my skin. It seems fucking unnatural, to be honest—it isn’t supposed to be like this.

But if I think about rolling hills after cool, drizzing summer mornings, I do remember the pockets of mist sinking in the cradles between the hills. I don’t expect that fog’s any different than that, sinking.

Despite how little exertion I’m actually giving, I can already feel myself sweating. When I breathe in nice and deep, it prickles sharply in my spine and tickles the back of my throat, trying to make me cough. The fog is heavy on my eyes, forcing me to squint and strain them—it’s hard to zero in and focus on anything. I'm left with an impression that the fog is trying to smother me of my breath and coax my eyes shut, both somehow at the same time.

I find myself shivering.

“So.” I clear my throat, shaking my head, no, no. “To ensure that the scene’s clear post-haste, I’ll need to locate a way to safely enter and exit the Dipping Bowl. I suspect that there will be some kind of water level after yesterday’s typhoon, though I’m unable to say for certain exactly how high it will be. If I’m unable to find a safe means to enter and exit, I’ll…”

Just die, then, I guess.

“...have to wait until the weather conditions have improved.”

I click the recorder off.

Heaving a sigh, I take off my hat and toss it gently to the side to run my fingers through my hair. Smoke four cigarettes over the course of three minutes. It’s ‘round about the time I like to go to sleep, isn’t it—isn’t it? Pryce is doing this on purpose. He’s doing it on fucking purpose, just to see how much he can push me until I bite back. Until I—well. Hah.

After a while, I grab my hat again and put it right back on my head where it belongs, adjusting the rim as I start to work.

If Harry were here, I think he might be able to pull some kind of stunt. I can imagine it now as I’m limping around the edge, searching for the gentlest slope I can find—how many centimetres of rain fell yesterday? And how many square metres would you estimate the Dipping Bowl to be again? He’d be able to come up with percentages, even going so far as to visualise how it looks. Unfortunately, I don’t know the numbers. The only answers I’d be able to give is “A lot”, and “Deep”.

What’d Jean do? I don’t know him as well as Harry even now, but I imagine he’d go all fuck it mode, strip himself damn near naked, and just go for it. I don’t think it’d matter to him if he found a surefire way to climb out—not if I were here with him, offering a hand and my voice and some level of ingenuity. My belt, for example, and his belt looped together, and this slope right here, specifically. If I ended up falling in because he weighs so fucking much, he’d probably be able to pull himself out somehow, then pull me out. Be concerned, then chuckle about it when I’m fine. The dream is that I’d chuckle back at him once we’re both out.

Hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. That’d be nice.

And what would Ahriman do if he were out of the hospital? How long has it even been since he's been on the beat? (A while.) We'd probably throw shit at each other, egg the other on, then flip a coin to see who the unfortunate sap would be. I'd probably win because mine is double-sided. It's an inside joke. If he were here right now, I'd think distantly: Thank God we weren't partners when Pryce shipped me out to Wheat Town. He would probably have killed me himself.

I still hope he wakes up soon. At least Ahriman knows how to fucking listen to his superior officer.

But the sad, unfortunate reality is that right now, I’m alone, and now that I think about it, I remember Pryce mentioning that he’d also tried to contact Jean and Judit on top of myself. Judit's got a family to take care of and might've just ignored it in favour of sleeping, but I don’t know what exactly Jean might be doing tonight. He’s already paid his dues in full.

I wonder if he meant for them to be here as some kind of fun, team-building exercise for the Le Retour fanclub, because that’d be funny if true. Then I wonder if he would’ve asked either of them instead to come here alone and handle this. In which case, less cool, less disco, less fun, boo, get off the stage. Nobody wants to see that shit.

Or maybe he never actually called either of them at all. What then?

Here.

I come down to my knees, taking off my hat and setting down the dictaphone. I take everything off, from my boots to my coat, everything down to my revolver even if the thought disquiets me. The only thing that reassures me as I lay the my weapon down is that, with how thick the fog is, I wouldn't even be able to hit the broad side of a barn even if it were pointed out to me. The only thing I take with me is my belt, which I clench between my teeth, my torch, and my trousers.

I crabwalk my way down, inch by steady, bare inch, scavenging ahead for the barest trace of water. When I reach the edge, I get to my hands and knees to peer over it. The fog is a pale, milky nothing, so thick that it blurs my eyes, making me doubt my sense of perception.

Squeezing my eyelids shut as tightly as I can helps, but not much. Fatigue possesses the world for a horrifying moment, swaying and unsteady. Taking a deep breath, I set the square torch down, light angled down, careful that I won't knock into it or cause it to roll. Belt in hand, I lean over and hang it off the edge, keeping my fingers right where the edge rolls over. When I slide it back through, damp water greets me quickly; the torch estimates roughly ten centimetres.

I frown and squint, directing the light down once again. Dei in heaven, I cannot see it. Not until I reach over the edge to touch it, feeling the cool water shocking against my fingertips. It’s not even the inky black of clear night water like I expected, it just melts into the fog like pale. When I rub my fingers together, there’s some kind of grit in its texture, and the smell is pregnant with a thick, earthy tang. The only reason I don’t taste it is because there’s probably—likely, almost definitely, knowing the captain—a corpse in the centre of it all.

Goddamn it. Not only did I just take a shower, but the universe seems determined to grant my wish in the worst, most roundabout way possible. This isn't the kind of bath I was hoping for.

I reach my hand to scratch at my scalp, catching dandruff under my fingernails and humming. The dizzying incline's obscured by the fog when I look over my shoulder, leaving me relatively uncertain of just how far it goes, even though I just came from there.

As I do, an awful pang slices its way along my back, carved from my shoulder blade to my spine and all the way down my hip. After clenching my teeth and managing a few slow, painful breaths, I shuffle away a little and lay my back against the damp asphalt, wet, cool road, feeling tiny pebbles press against my skin. The fog smothers my lungs as I breathe, pulling out a series of strangled coughs that ease after a bit.

I just. Want at least some of the pain to subside first. That’s all.

I close my eyes and rub at them with a mixture between a yawn and a groan, wishing away the pale unreality surrounding my little isola, my little world. My little pocket in this state of existence. Hunger clenches in my stomach, making my mouth water and doubly making it difficult to relax. As it turns out, a single granola bar doesn’t really get you very far in terms of satiation.

I’ll eat in a little bit, I tell myself—once I get the body out of the water.

Pale floats in, around, in lungs, in souls. Breathing like Dolores Dei did not, for up to ten minutes at a time, over the course of twenty-two years, and I know this for I have counted. How could a woman who loved the world as much as the texts claim refrain from drawing in the world's breath for so long at a time? That isn't love.

I catch her out at night within her quarters, firing a deafening shot directly into her chest. You were never supposed to be, I say, bang, blood splatters, tissue tears, the holes knit themselves tight in her golden lungs. You are not human, you are some thing wearing the mask of a human, bang, bang, interceding the course of our history, bang, our history, we were supposed to come up with it ourselves, how dare you, bang, how fucking dare you defy our right to humanity.

Reload, scream, bang, bang, bang, then a bang that blossoms in my head, but the deed is done, the creature slain, bleeding like the human she pretended to be. And her lungs, defiled by my bullets, have long stopped glowing with the false idol of her love. I die with no regret, the taste of satisfaction and glory on my tongue: I have killed a monster.

I open my eyes, staring up at the church's stained glass windows, whispering gently, I know what you are, I know what you've seen. Sun glimmers through Dolores Dei and her serene glass face, lungs full of love, bleeding and martyred. I pass the goblet down and sit in the pew; I lie about what I saw.

I say I was Irene instead, laying flowers for her grave; I pretend like I know the language of love and grief at the age of seven. Mama calls me a gentle child.

How does my body feel now?

Aching hip that twinges a little, but at this point, that’s nothing new. My back aches, too, twinging now and again, but it’s monumentally better now than it was when Harry called or even when I left.

Fucking Willow Tone. If I'd gone through with the notion to lure him into a trap, I wouldn't be here. I should have sweettalked him to a meeting place. I should have shot him eight times in the chest and thrown him into the river. I should have erected his disemboweled and bloated corpse before the Inspectorate General's office and pointed—"This is the kind of monster I kill," I'd scream, "vile, wretched beings wearing the skin of humans! These are the bastards you protect when you interfere with me! This is what I will do to you if you keep getting in my way!" In a perfect world, I wouldn't be shot dead where I stand. My words would be revolutionary and echo throughout history.

I hope he gets run over by an MC in the middle of the road. I hope he can’t foot the medical bill and dies a slow, agonising death over the next ten or twenty years. I hope his execution is delicious.

“Okay,” I say to no one in particular, clapping my hands together and grunting as I sit up. “Let’s get this shit done.”

I take off my jeans, wrestling them off to set to the side, and angle the torch just so that its light faces the approximate centre. This way, if I ever get lost or disoriented, I can look around and swim back to the ledge to try again. It’s my anchor point, my muse. If someone else were here to help me, we’d probably have two flashlights, or something, and we’d be able to coordinate my location with each other.

But I don’t, so when I take off my socks and slip my feet into the water, I know I have to be careful. Imagine the headline if I’m not.

John “The Archetype” McCoy Found By Shocked Couron Youths: Drowned To Death.

“He was never really the most social person at the station,” said Patrol Officer Joe Doe, 28, about his deceased boss. “Of all the things I thought of him, I never would’ve thought he didn’t know how to swim.”

“This is just another example of the RCM’s stunning incompetence,” Channel 8 broadcaster Guillaume Bevy said to the Times. “I don’t know what exactly he was hoping to achieve in the Dipping Bowl, but you’d think that somebody with 20 years of experience would’ve known to wait at least until conditions improved. At least Jamrock won’t have to worry about him terrorising the streets anymore.”

When asked about his personal thoughts on the matter, Bevy continued: “I’m not surprised that he’s dead, I’m just surprised that it didn’t happen sooner. But I think, just like everybody else, I expected it to be caused by a gun fight gone wrong or some other brutal means.”

Ptolemaios Pryce, captain of the 41st Precinct, is now campaigning to include swimming lessons in Le Academie to mitigate the risk of drowning officers happening in the future. “Losing Lieutenant McCoy is an unexpected, crushing blow to the RCM,” he stated in a press conference. “His methods were controversial but he always pulled through with results. It’ll be difficult to find someone to replace him.”

Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor John McCoy was 44 years old and, blah, blah, blah, who cares.

Something like that, I don’t know.

But yeah, don’t worry, Bevs, babydoll, I’ll be careful. You still owe me those names. I might owe you that interview. I don’t know. We’ll see where fate leads.

The water is surprisingly cool around my feet and legs. I don’t jump in quite yet, letting them dangle there, feeling the way it may or may not be moving: It takes some time for me to distinguish what is the current and what’s just the subtle movements of my legs, but there is—I think—something there, a very gentle pull moving counterclockwise. So that means there is some natural drainage to the Dipping Bowl, explaining where the water goes and how it gets emptied out.

There’s a few seconds where I take stock of myself, making sure that I don’t have anything that’d be affected by water damage. Once I’m satisfied, I take a deep breath and slip into the liquefied pale.

The water takes me more eagerly than I anticipate. I have to quickly tread water if I don’t want my head to go under at all, and my legs are kicking steadily with the memory of how to do so. I remember that if I fill my lungs with air and keep them full, I’ll remain buoyant enough to stay afloat. That’s how physics works, baby. Maybe I ought to look into going to the beach at some point. I haven’t actually spent a day there to relax since I was, like, twenty-eight or something. Which means Lance would’ve been about sixteen: It was his birthday.

Yeah. Beach. Sounds fun.

As it turns out, though, swimming blind—in murky water, in fog so thick you can barely see ahead of yourself in the dark—is not fucking fun, and a part of me wonders if this is what it’s like sailing through the pale. Blind, deaf, and dumb—the only sounds are the disturbance of the water around me and the dripping water slipping down the edges of what once upon a time was a paved road. I swim in the water with one arm always extended, groping in the pale void for my charge.

My ankle hits something hard and textured, making me wince. I take a moment to find it again, reaching down to run the tips of my fingers against the material; at first I think it’s an exposed sewage pipe or something, but then I realise it’s too smooth and cold for something like that. Has to be something else. No matter how much I rummage through my encyclopedia of knowledge, nothing distinctly comes to mind—other than it’s some kind of metal.

I think: It's necessary to dive beneath there to figure out what it is.

I think: Absolutely not.

Once, when I was eight, that first summer, I jumped off the pier of my uncle's little pond because I was too impatient to wait; I nearly drowned, didn't know yet how to swim at that point, though I can't remember it for the life of me except for the image of his multi-story house going under and how sweet the water tasted once I was in. I probably should've been scared, but it never inspired a fear of water in me.

Even when I grew older, a stupid fucking teenager, I took great sport in diving off of that very same pier to reach the bottom, just me and the breath in my lungs and the pressure of the water going cold all around me. I remember diving down into the cold so many times my ears hurt, and still deciding to do it again and again just because I could. The sand slipped between my fingers and I found stones and shells and trinkets and brought them up, presenting them like treasures for a lover. Thrice I emerged with a fishing hook caught in my hand; the third time, Shepherd helped me coax it out and tried to help me hide the bleeding from Mama.

The dream is that he's kept the treasures I've found for him, though I hold little hope that he has. There are far more important things in life than clinging to such stupid sentimentalities.

I'm still not afraid of the water—not as long as my head is above it. I could say I don't know why this hesitation is a more recent development. It would be a lie.

Technically I should dive beneath, feel whatever this thing is, and catalogue it for later, but the most I can bring myself to do is perch upon it, resting on the highest point and running my hand along it from here.

Can't get rid of the thought of finding myself lost in the murky water, you know. Can't get rid of the thought of diving down beneath, getting my leg tangled around some kind of seaweed (hah) or beneath some falling rubble. I left my knives above, so I'd have a harder time wedging myself out. I'd run out of air, and water would flood my lungs and my mouth with it, screaming in equal parts terror and frustration. It'd be dark. I wouldn't be able to breathe, and no amount of flailing would help.

Worst of all, no one is here to have my back. My legacy would be just another ignoramus cop in the newspaper.

So no. I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna run my hand along its surface instead, do everything I can to keep my head all above board in the process. I feel ridges against my fingertips, cool metal, divots. Some kind of canvas. An MC? It might be. I can come back later, once the water's drained, and confirm this hypothesis for myself—

Pain slices open my palm.

I pull back and wrench my hand above water, hissing and shaking it out. When I press it to my face and smell it, iron slices its way through my brain; when I press it to my mouth and taste it, the distinct, familiar taste of dirty blood floods thinly into my mouth.

“Shit,” I say, holding out my hand. Through the thick fog, I can see darkness slipping down my wrist in black, watery lines. It shouldn’t be too serious—I’ll survive—but it’s going to be annoying to deal with, and now I’ve got to worry about infections and whatever might be in that corpse slipping inside my bloodstream just to taint it further.

Whatever. Whatever, I don’t fucking care anymore. That’s not actually as important. It's not like I can get any more filthy.

“Shit,” I say again anyway, splashing water on my mouth and then spitting it out. “God fucking damnit.”

I wipe at my eyes, coughing, and glance around; move on and speculate. Maybe our mysterious corpse was just another drunk driver down on his luck, wanted to leave some kids traumatised before he left this plane of existence on his own terms: Tag speculation.

See? Look. You’re fine, Johnny boy. Grow the fuck up. Easy.

Some amount of time later, at some point giving up on going blind and just settling for exhaustively Jamrock Shuffling my way all along the inside of the pit—but swimming, how novel is that—my knuckles brush against wet fabric, and on instinct, I grab at it. Whoever it’s attached to tries to duck out of the way but instead floats there uselessly as my other hand grapples at them, struggling to make sense of what’s an arm and what’s a leg, which way they’re facing—up or down. But I’ve found it. My charge, my prize: I ought to get some kind of merchandise going. I went bobbing for apples, it would say, and all I got was this stupid fucking corpse.

There it is. Arms. I crane my head to search for my lighthouse, squinting at it in the hazy darkness, and loop my arms underneath their pits; hug them close to my chest while I ease back and kick at the water to close the distance. It’s dead weight and it’s exhausting: The selfish bastard doesn’t even bother to offer any kind of help for their lifeguard, just lays there in my arms like the lazy shit they are.

I reach the edge and push them underneath the overhang, so they don’t drift away anywhere near as easily—and, sure, fuck it, maybe so I can be a selfish prick and use them as a stepping stone. It works, though. But then the hard part, once I get them unstuck, is to loop my arms under theirs again and drag them back up, break my fucking back and my hip doing so, cursing all the while. The process takes much longer than I’d like to admit. It's horribly painful and exhausting.

Finally, at the lip—I don’t stop there, except to take a solid ten minutes splayed out on the ground, every breath slicing pain against my back and swelling against my hip. When I finally push myself to my feet, I wring out my boxers of as much water as I can, re-equip myself with my shit and fetch my torch ‘n belt—I drag the corpse out of the thickest bits of the fog and then go further, until ‘downhill’ is no longer ‘downhill’ but more ‘level ground’.

While taking breaks in the process of doing this, I look up from time to time and distantly notice that the light in the sky is softening the fog a gentle, muted blue. I’m swimming in exhaustion by the time I pull them out of the fog enough to be comfortable, panting as it starts to thin with the steady approach of the sun.

When I stumble my way over to Cashmere to lead him to a nearby distributary from which he can drink, I kneel down beside him, slipping my hand into the water and panting as my blood continues to seep into the steady stream. My blood's smeared against my clothes from where I've pulled them off, fucking wonderful.

Stumbling to my feet, I scavenge Cashmere’s saddlebag for my medical kit, collapse back go the ground, and take my time to tend to it. Within minutes, it’s disinfected and wrapped up, and I’ve patted Cashmere’s neck with another granola in my belly to leave him be.

Back to the body.

This motherfucker.

First thing I do is get the Stations of Breath over with, kneeling over him with my hand against his chest to breathe in deeply, let it all out; allow him his final precious few seconds to come to terms with what’s happened to him, using me as a vessel. Once that’s done, I frown down at him for a moment, eyes roving over his clothes, before reaching forward to rummage in his pockets. There’s his smokes; there’s his wallet. I don’t look away from him as I open it and take the cash that’s inside, sliding it into my back pocket. He fucking owes me.

I stand up straight again, hand against my sore hip, torch pointed down at him unenthusiastically. He’s definitely Moralintern, I don’t need to see his identification to know that for certain. The suit’s wool—I can just tell from the texture alone—and he’s got these fancy golden cufflinks studded with rubies that I also stoop down to steal.

He’s Occidental and has grey hair; wrinkles. Nothing about him indicates strange going-ons aside from the fact that his fucking skull’s been caved in, grey brain matter exposed between bits of bone. His mouth is agape, making him look like he either died shocked or screaming. The sallowness of his face and his brittle bone structure tells me he’s an old man, and he must’ve been a dumb one at that.

“Porca puttana,” I snap, kicking him as hard as I can against the side, “you fucking piece of shit—” I do it again, stomping my heel down on his chest. Something snaps under the force of my body weight. I ignore it. “—dragging me here on my fucking Sunday? Fuck you, you ‘lintern bitch. Chi cazzo credi di essere?”

My foot hits his sternum, the fragile old bone cracking, giving. Water trickles from his mouth. I pant, shoulders slumped, glowering down at the man laying beneath me, staring up with wide, gobsmacked eyes.

I fill my lungs with air and lean back with a sigh, tilting my hat back. Soon, my boot finds his neck, pressing down gently, less gently, firmer, observing the liquid as it bubbles out of his mouth and dribbles down his cheek.

If it weren’t for the damage to his skull or how pale he is, I could imagine his hands grappling at my boots, fisting the fabric of my jeans. His legs, scrambling at the ground uselessly. Through the water in his lungs and my weight against his neck, I hear his wrung-out voice begging, mercy, or maybe merci. I don’t know. They sound the same.

“You’re dead,” I mutter, easing my weight. “That’s right. Good job. You should’ve died tomorrow instead, or later on today. Maybe then I wouldn’t be so pissed.”

I take out a cigarette, turn my head to spit to the side, light it. The smoke floods my lungs with a warmth that makes me sway to the side, applying more pressure to his poor, mutilated throat. There's such a sense of grim satisfaction that comes out of having a Moralintern bitch smothered beneath my boot that's ruined only by the knowledge that I wasn't the direct cause of it. Give me the chance and I'd snuff out his life just like this while he quakes uselessly beneath my boot. Give me a political würm who's wandered too far from his lair and his security detail, and I'll do this right beneath Coalition Warship Archer, and I'll make him like it.

I am not a good person. I'm barely even a person at all, just a shallow husk masquerading as a human and hoping I'll never get caught out for it. But these pieces of shit aren't people, either. They are the real monsters hunting the streets of Revachol, and if I have to be a monster to hunt them back, then so be it. I refuse to be anyone's prey.

Smoke slips from my mouth as I sigh, a peculiar sense of calmness seeping into my lungs and humming in my soul. Or maybe that's the volta of the therrier, the joy of his hunt echoing through me. Were I only the one to find this carcass before his death and do the deed myself instead of play the part of scavenger, maybe I'd know for certain.

“So here’s what’s gonna happen.” I take another drag, panting out the words in breathless floods of smoke. “Methinks that’s your MC down there, sì? Didn’t see the sinkhole. Crashed. Managed to crawl out. Old man like you, couldn’t climb your way out. Opportunistic rat climbed down. Robbed you. Beat your skull in and left you to die. And maybe you did. Then the typhoon struck, eh… oh, who knows how many days later? Processing will figure it out. Or they won’t, you know how Processing is.”

I smile at my joke; he doesn’t smile back. A bit of a tough crowd. Maybe he doesn’t know how Processing is.

“They’ll figure it out. It’ll be an easy case. Open-and-shut. I have shit to do today. You owe me that. Capiche?”

The corpse says nothing, just gurgles. I nod and stand, easing my foot off of his neck. Capiche.

Chapter Text

So here’s what happens.

I throw a tarp over the body to keep it hidden. I do some breaking-and-entering into some nearby abandoned buildings to drag shit, like, chairs or cobweb-infested lamps or whatever outside. I secure the lamps with some heavy-as-shit rocks that have me sitting on the ground with pain for minutes at a time, then twine a fresh roll of police tape around the furniture to secure the perimeter. It’s exhaustive work that takes far longer than it should. It’s also more thorough than it needs to be. I wish Ahriman were here to remind me it doesn't have to be this fucking thorough, do some of the work for me so my palm can stop fucking bleeding.

As I expect, after the typhoon, groups of suburban families make their approach as I wrap up. Most of the kids in swimming gear stop stumbling ahead of their parents when they see the tape, though some of them scamper ahead anyways to surround the Dipping Bowl. I imagine their logic is that if they can find some kind of gap in the tape, it means they can slip on in and not get into trouble for it. A loophole, if you will. Kids being kids, I'd do the same if I were their age.

I’m fully prepared to intercept them, but first is the parents, a few of whom step up to me first, thank goodness. It spares me the embarrassment of hobbling my way over toward them instead.

“What’s going on here?” a woman’s asking, and I’m already pulling out my ID.

“Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor John McCoy,” I say, holding it out for her to see. I let the other three have the same privilege, holding it out to each of them in turn: See the recognition tightening in their faces, the way a ten-year-old holds onto his papa’s hand to hide away. Smiling, I tuck it away in my pocket, gesturing to the Dipping Bowl.

“There’s been a dead body found in the sink hole. Until further notice, the Dipping Bowl will be cordoned off from public access due to potential biohazard risks.”

“That’s…” She furrows her brow and looks around, lifting a pale hand to shield her eyes from the sun. I can see the moment she notices the curtain covering the body. Late-thirties, pretty blonde hair, boney frame, the kind of person that looks like she'd start shit just for the sake of starting shit. She covers her mouth, eyes widening; somehow, her complexion seems to grow paler. “Oh,” is all I get out of her, proving my first impression incorrect.

One of the adults looks behind him, turning around to go back to the group. I look over at them, estimating a rough head count: Thirty or so, not including the eight younger kids kind of milling about, touching the police tape behind me and mumbling indistinctly among each other. At a cursory glance, I see varying amounts of confusion, concern, sparks of horror—some of them are just kinda exasperated by this situation, already turning to their own family groups to discuss. Can’t really see anybody freaking out about having murdered a guy—not obviously, at least.

I gesture to the corpse anyway, jabbing a thumb over my shoulder. A couple of the other adults move over to the Dipping Bowl, calling out to the kids to come along, now, we should be leaving. Their plaintive whines are rife with complaint. "Is that a dead body?" one of them asks, urging a half-frantic shriek from another.

“Yeah, actually," I tell Daddy Dearest, "the body’s right over there. I can show you if you want, if you don’t believe me. Have you ever seen a dead body before?” Now I’m looking at the little boy, peeking around his daddy’s hip, leaning in to make it clear just who it is I’m talking to for anybody watching. “Truly gruesome stuff, let me tell you. His skull’s been bashed in so badly, you can see his brains. How gnarly is that?”

I loan a lilt to the word—brains—drawing it out, all dark and mysterious. Daddy Dearest grabs the boy’s shoulder and pulls him behind, but I think, under the fear of it all, there’s a spark of morbid curiosity behind the kid’s glasses as he glances over to the body.

“You don’t get to talk to my kid that way,” Daddy Dearest spits, stepping forward. Wavy black hair, thick beard, massive frame, mid-or-late twenties, more bodybuilder than construction worker. Though shorter than me, he gets all up in my space and doesn't seem to comprehend my reputation. Not like the woman did, not when he jabs a finger in my chest. "Knowing what I know about you, you're probably the one who shot him in the first place."

This man is confusing. Who is he, for him to express this level of familiarity? I don't recognise him, nor do I care to. He's too young to be this kid's birth father. Step-father, perhaps? Legal guardian? I lean away but don't step back, because to do so would be an admission of intimidation. "Your kid old enough for that?" I ask, as gently admonishing as I can. "For you to be throwing out curses and what-have-you?"

"You're—"

"—Really setting a good example for him, aren't you?"

"—not in any position to suggest that he—"

"Talking back to figures of authority like this..."

"Arnold," admonishes the first woman, grabbing his arm. And, no, I don't know an Arnold. His partner, probably (no one gets married in Revachol), who throws me an apologetic, almost pleading look. Yes, she knows who I am, good, good. Makes this easier for me. "It's fine. Let's just go."

"No! It's not fine!" Daddy Dearest snaps, briefly turning to her, then back to me. "You're not a figure of authority, John, you're a murderer! The only reason you can get away with it is because of that shitty strip of plastic you call a badge!"

Oh, so we're on a first-name basis now. Have I done something to wrong him? Killed someone he loved or cared about? Or does he just listen to Channel 8 religiously? I wouldn't be surprised.

"It's laminated, actually. Would be nice if it were plastic, though."

Stifling a yawn, I turn to my wrist to consult my watch. The hour is six, the sun is warming, the Dipping Bowl's pool of fog is filtering out bit by bit. Kids don't go past the tape, but they've been experimenting with how deep it goes, reaching over to drape towels and toss stones into the murk. Daddy Dearest's yelling, though, that gets them concerned, looking over at us, then to their parents to take cues from them, the woman who's trying to shepherd them away like reticent lambs to no avail.

"Listen, I'm just trying to do my job. Guy like you, I don't think you'd like the idea of letting some kids swim around in the same water a dead body's been sitting in. Who knows what kind of diseases can be found in there?"

The cut on my hand burns, tingles suddenly, like it can already feel the phantom pangs of infection setting in. I set it on my hip, trying to measure out how warm it is through the bandages as subtly as I can. Feel nothing instead, just a palm on my hip and cramping, aching fingers.

"What did they do, huh?" Daddy Dearest jabs a finger at the dead body, the tone of his voice rising above his pleading partner's. "What did that person do to deserve this?"

I squint at him in disbelief, furrowing my brows, trying to pick through the puzzle he's presented me. "How should I know?"

Revelation strikes—a bang in the distance that could be either firework or gunshot, a crack of thunder that answers the question of why your body's been hurting so much today. A smile splits across my face, catching me so off-guard that I can't help but laugh. "Oh-ho—I see. You think I killed him? Cool, cool."

In a single fluid movement, I slide my hand under my jacket, taking out my gun to aim it at the man’s head.

The first woman screams and runs away. The sound of the meandering kids dies down quickly, too; a few of them squeak out little screams of their own. Most of them run back to their parents, who scream out their names in turn; the woman who went to fetch them grabs two or so by the hand and pulls them past the police tape, hiding behind the top of the incline. Shh, she tells them as they whimper, shh, shh.

I’m sure to them it’s like the scene before a shoot out in one of those reels, you know, kids calling the names of their parents, parents calling for their kids, loved ones and confessions, breaking news as the gunshots start, blah, blah, blah.

I’m sure it’s so dramatic for them, like the world’s running fast and everything’s running faster, but the truth is that nothing is happening. I just have a gun to a guy’s head, that’s it, my finger isn’t even on the trigger. Kids are running to their parents, which is whatever. It gets them away from the Dipping Bowl, which is what I want. If I lean into The Archetype hard enough, they’re gonna leave because they think I’m gonna shoot them if I don’t.

I probably will. It’s a fucking win-win right now. While it’s so fucking dramatic for them, the truth of my reality is that it’s not. It’s just fucking boring, like an overplayed scene I’ve seen a million times before. I’m not a tourist being exposed to the new sights: I’m the monotone tourist guide tired of the routine.

Daddy Dearest leans back, staring down the barrel of a loaded gun. I’m sure he sees the bullet nestled in there, his life flashing before his wide, green eyes. A voice from the crowd cries out, Arnold!, all shrieky and terrified and sobbing. I ignore her.

“If you think I killed him, I can play along,” I tell him, nodding over to the group. “If you don't want me to play along, go back to your family. Take the kids to the fucking beach or something instead. Don’t kids love the beach? Go do that, yeah, pick up litter and shit, do nice things for the community. The water’s nicer over there, anyway.”

Moments before I lower my gun, a flash. I glance over. Someone lowers a quaint little box and sees me looking at them, opting to duck down in the hopes I haven’t seen them. Typical, so now my name’s gonna be in the papers or something by tomorrow. What fun.

I stare at the man. His chest is heaving, son trembling and shaking behind him. “Go,” I repeat, gesturing to the suburbian mice before holstering my gun. “Get out of my face. I have work to do.”

I only hear him leave when I turn around, his retreating footsteps superseded by his kid’s. Minutes later, everyone's scurried away, including the photographer. Including the woman and the two kids, when I go to fetch them, kind enough to offer my hand like the gentleman I am even if none of them take it. Once they're gone I take a seat and rest, redoing my bandages.

Two blocks down the road is an old phone box that I almost think doesn’t work, until the tone drones in my ear and I beat the shit out of its misused side with the palm of my good hand. Oldboy picks up the call, relay codes habitually wisping in the air. I tell him to send some JOs to the Dipping Bowl, bring an extra horse or call a hearse, because I’m not going to be transporting this body all the way to Faubourg on a fucking Sunday. Not when I’ve got more important shit to do. When I hear Trant Heidelstam’s voice chiming in on some unrelated topic on the other end, I hang up the line, go back to sit down, and wait, pulling out my portfolio.

Here’s the deal: The ID belongs to a man named Charlie Sharp. Charlie Sharp was 81 years old, born in October, and came from the Vesper side of the Vesper-Messinia divide, if his dual citizenship passport is anything to go off of. The name is strange but not a priority. What’s important is I have his name and some loose association that I could go off of to find whoever murdered him. Family and coworkers, Moralintern records. If I want to.

I don’t think I do.

But if I did: An examination of his now-naked body beneath the fabric has told me that he died at least three days ago. I say at least because being submerged in water disrupted the process somewhere in the second day. The size of the maggots told the secrets behind the timeline. Found a healthy clutch tucked away deep within his brain and crawling out his nose. It wasn’t hard to make them out, I mean—what was even harder were the little black bits of asphalt rock embedded in his skull, something I had to feel out before I saw.

As far as the records go to show, it’s just as I told him. Charlie Sharp, 81, 168 centimetres, was driving, fell in a sink hole, got beaten to death by a hunk of asphalt, robbed, and left behind. The Dipping Bowl flooded, as it always does in heavy rain. An anonymous caller—certainly not the captain, don’t be silly—reported the body, probably feeling some kind of guilt for what they’d done.

I did what Pryce wanted. I’m fucking done. Once I get Cashie in the stables, I’m going home.

And I do, once I hear the MC approaching from the distance. Now that the sun is out in a cloudless sky and warming the air, the fog’s left in its entirety, leaving the air heavy with the morning heat. Hunger aches in my stomach as I stand to my feet and stumble, blinking from under my hand.

I don’t even wait for them to get out and approach the Dipping Bowl. Already I’m on Cashmere’s back, clicking him over and climbing on. Hoisting myself up on my bad side is fucking miserable. He goes at a steady trot over to the officers—one particular Tillbrooke and Mollins.

Tillbrooke flashes a tired smile and offers me a wave as I stop beside the vehicle, some kind of Hey. He's the kind of guy I'd probably be attracted to if he were either twenty years older or I were twenty years younger. There's a long face about him—short, close-cut blond hair, but I've come to realise the attractive thing about people lies more in bold and unapologetic personalities. And, you know, there's something fucking sexy about people who refuse to shy away from their own sexuality.

“Classic robbery-turned-murder situation,” I say, jerking my head in Charlie’s direction. “Old son of a bitch over there. Bag ‘im up and throw him in Processing for me.”

I hear Mollins’s voice distantly through the rumbling engine from passenger-side: “Any special requests for Processing? Toxicology, serology, histology?” Tillbrooke turns his head inside and then back to me, opening his mouth to share right as I open my mouth to answer.

“No.” I take a moment to reach into my saddlebag, pulling out my quaint little portfolio. Listen, Harry’s got a clipboard kinda deal and Kim’s got this little blue notebook—this is better than both because I just pop it open, hold it in my hand, and write on it. I don’t even have to climb down from Cashmere’s back. It’s fucking great.

I pick through the paperwork for a moment before ripping out a couple of pages and forms, passing it over. Tillbrooke takes it and starts flipping through them, not that I blame him. I check the time and frown, dizzy fatigue washing over my body as I register the little hand past the 8. It’s all catching up.

“Give that to Processing so they can have it on record and throw it on my desk when you get back to the station. I’m fucking done.”

Clicking my tongue, I urge Cashmere forward into a canter, almost as eager to get him back to the station and fed as I am to get back to my apartment and crash. Or maybe I’ll just crash on the couch in the breakroom for a couple of hours first, if someone hasn’t already staked a claim to it.

The good news is it doesn’t take two hours to get back, now that the fog’s cleared: The bad news is every fast, thundering footstep of my steed leaves my body racing with pain.

I get back, I sign Cashmere in, I take off his tack and give him his food and make sure he’s got plenty of water; then I grab my crap to trudge my broken ass through the door, stomach full of painkillers. Head filled with sleep. Limbs full of heavy nerves and agitation. I push my way through without looking both ways before crossing the street and my reward is barreling shoulder-first through an orange jacket.

“Move,” I say, putting my hand on his shoulder to push him aside. He tenses momentarily but obliges. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

“Good morning to you, too, Lieutenant,” Kim Kitsuragi says dryly, and nothing else, because that’s the polite thing to do.

Three hours later, somebody shakes me awake on the breakroom couch. My first instinct is to lash out with a dizzy punch, but a solid hand catches my wrist and holds it there, keeping it secure. “Hey,” Mack says as I blink myself awake, rubbing my eyes: He lets me go when I've got my senses about me. “Captain wants a word before you go.”

“Of course he does,” I think I mumble, but the words are lead in my mouth and I think only half of it's legible. Mack pats my shoulder firmly and gives me a warm cup of burnt coffee. I drink it down without any hesitation, take a minute or two to recalibrate, then push myself to my feet.

Ten minutes later, I'm sitting in Captain Pryce’s office, back stiff and room quiet. He hasn't searched me this time, and instead of Milicia, who's handling an arson report at a Faubourg schoolhouse, Torson’s keeping guard outside, probably listening in. He was kind enough to offer me a shoulder on the way when walking proved a little difficult, a gesture that's broadly appreciated but utterly unnecessary.

He hasn't searched me, and so there is trust, and who am I to squander it?

“So,” Pryce says, fingers steepled over his mouth.

“So,” I echo, ankle over knee.

“Tell me what happened.”

I do. I tell him about the journey and the fog, the corpse in the water, pulling it out, examining the body, the conclusion I came up with on paper. I don't tell him about how I butchered the corpse in a fit of anger. I do tell him about the suburban mice that were going to the Dipping Bowl.

“Suburban mice?” Pryce asks, furrowing his brow. It strikes me that this is a relatively new slang, one he more likely than not isn’t familiar with.

“Les petit rats call them that. Les souris de banlieue, you know. Because mice are much smaller, more domestic, less dangerous. People see mice and they think they're cute. They look at rats and think they're ugly. Cousins by trade." I wave a hand. "You know."

Pryce nods slowly. Then he lowers his hands and says, “Do you know why I had you take care of it today, John?”

Here we go. I clench my fingers over my lap, breathing in and out a sigh. “No, sir.”

“Go on—guess.”

“I'm assuming it's because you wanted to remove the body from the premises quickly, sir. Perhaps even discreetly.”

“So tell me why a little bird has told me that you're going in tomorrow’s morning paper?”

Oh dear, the photographer. I’m not even surprised. The ramifications of where the photo would go have been lurking in the back of my brain since it happened. The only thing I can take solace in is the fact I didn’t actually shoot that man—I mean, Inspectorate would probably slap me with another fine I can’t pay.

It'd be bigger, too. 500 reál for the price of a man's life. Honorary husband and parent. It only seems fair, apparently.

I scoff, lips twitching in a smile. “Which one?”

“Périphérique.”

“Charming.”

“Do you know how that'll make the RCM look, John? Pulling a gun on a man—a father, at that—and causing a surge of panic in a middle class neighborhood?”

“I don't care, sir. I was just trying to scare them off anyway. It worked.”

“It makes it look like we favour the middle class, John. How are we supposed to bring the masses to our side with that kind of behaviour?”

I blink and stare as Pryce gets to his feet, not quite sure what he's getting at but already filled with the anticipation that it's not something I like. He circles slowly around his desk to reach me, fingers trailing over his paperwork. The stale, ever-present scent of bloody danger thrums in my nose, prompting me to shift in my seat, ready to stand and meet him. All it takes is for the captain to hold up a hand to keep me in place.

Once he's next to me, he reaches out, coiling his cold, boney hands around my wrists. There's just a moment of resistance before I give in, staring as he kneels before me.

“How many people are these hands responsible for?” Pryce asks quietly, turning my hands over. His thumbs press tightly against the base of my palms, perhaps a touch more gentle on my injured hand. I'm not sure what it is he's searching for—my pulse or a reaction, or if he's trying to make some kind of point. If it's my pulse, he's getting it: It's not as easy to mask the functions of a body as it is to posture the persona and depict a particular face.

I hesitate. “I don't understand what you're asking me, sir.”

“How many people have you killed?”

“I don't know. Sixteen-oh-two's sounded good for a while. I don't keep track of those statistics anymore, Captain.”

“How many of them are the middle class, John? The ones who benefit from this hostile takeover of Revachol fifty years ago? The ones that put the aerostatics in the sky?”

The image of a long-barreled gun flashes in my brain—a skull, a bullet, a bang. A corpse. A scream. The scream is not mine, even though it should be. The rifle is in my hands, still trembling from the recoil.

"I don't know, sir.”

“How many of them are the desperate lower class? The workers, the many? The victims of the Moralintern’s careless inaction?”

“I don't know, sir,” I repeat, quieter. “Probably more.”

“Probably. Likely. Statistically, most certainly. Many more people are poor than they are comfortable. Look at me, son.”

I do. It's not because he lets go of one of my wrists to turn my head, cold hands heavy with the smell of horse musk and cigarettes and decades-old blood, soaked so deep into his skin that it's inextricably linked to his genetic makeup. He stares back at me, dark eyes cold and searching, as strangely earnest as they are an impossible puzzle to solve.

“I’m not mad at you, John,” he finally says, reaching to slide a hand through my hair. I flinch—God, why do I flinch, why?—but if he notices (and I'm certain he does), he shows no indication of it at all. “I'm concerned. You haven't been yourself recently.”

Each time he cards his fingers through, I shy back just a little more, until eventually it solidifies in my consciousness that nothing else will come of it and I hold myself still. Despite the warning signs blaring right in front of me, God forgive me the sin of slipping into this comfort like a too-tight second skin that doesn't quite fit anymore. It might be the lack of sleep. That might be the intention.

Still.

“You're a good man, John,” he continues. “I just don't want you losing sight of the greater picture.”

“‘M not a good man,” I mutter drowsily. “None of us are great men. We're all caught up in history.”

“If that's what helps you sleep at night, then yes.”

Fingers tighten and tangle in my scalp, not pulling or tugging but holding me firm. The comfort and ease of the moment slips away into nerves that beg me to tear myself away from Pryce’s hands, the one in my hair, the one squeezing my wrist.

I don't move. Not even when the captain smiles at me. And God only knows what he sees because I don't—but I imagine, in the worst circumstances, a flash of sheer terror slipping through the cracks.

“But it's too late to back out of this now, son, and you know it. Don't you?”

Don't call me son. “Yes, sir.”

“The next time you've got an audience and a gun pointed at a middle-class bastard’s head, you shoot."

“Yes, sir.”

“You fucking commit to the action. We don't want people thinking that John McCoy has grown soft, do we? We want the commonwealth on our side, and the bourgeoisie will not ever help us achieve this. Do you know why?”

There’s a million different answers and I’m not sure which one of them is the right one. So I don’t say anything, searching his eyes in the hopes that uncover it myself, yet finding nothing. My mouth twitches. I can’t move to smother it.

“Because the bourgeoisie are not people.”

He echoes the sentiment I had in my rage against Charlie Sharp, but in sane mind, I know it's not true. It doesn't take being bourgeoisie to not be human, it just takes the right set of circumstances. Having money just affords more avenues of cruelty and second chances.

Yes. Of course. Because them being monsters somehow makes perfect sense. It’s not any of the answers I had floating in my head, either. Mine, I think, are more logical.

But I nod my head as much as I can, and I say, “Yes, sir, of course,” even if I don't entirely believe it. Because sometimes to get out of a sticky situation, all you can do is nod your head and agree with whatever’s being said, holding your little argumentative secrets close to your chest. The movement pulls at my scalp, tangled in cold fingers. It’d be easy to pull me around by it, keep me humbled and heeling.

“But you already know that.” Pryce smiles and lets go of my hair, smoothing his fingers through the locks again. “Don't you?”

I nod along, tame and agreeable. He turns his attention away for a moment, fingering at the ends of my hair and rubbing the strands together. My spine prickles, on edge with this physicality, this display of his impatience.

“Why don't you hit the showers before heading back home?” Pryce suggests, releasing my wrist to pat my knee firmly enough to ache before squeezing. He uses me to push himself up, the weight heavy and painful. The most I can do about it is put a hand on his arm, though I don't know if it's in protest or aid. “You've got a long day ahead of you tomorrow. And you’ve still got the situation with Guillaume Bevy to figure out.”

“I will, sir,” I say with a nod.

“We need those fucking names, John. We don't like talkers around here.”

“I’m trying, sir. I've just been so busy with work, I haven't had the time. I’m trying to convince him to cooperate. I know what to do if he doesn’t.”

“Good.”

Pryce turns his back to me, picking through a couple sheets of paper on his desk, and it strikes me that I could just as easily take out my gun and shoot him in the back of the head, right here and now. He wouldn’t have the time to react. He’d be none the wiser.

I do nothing, in awe of this trust.

“Terminal B has a little issue,” Pryce notes, coming back to me. “A little rat problem that they’ve been trying to get rid of for the longest time. I happen to owe the Union a favour. So why don’t you head over there in a couple of days and see if you can’t become a friend of Mr. Claire.”

A favour? How interesting. One would think that allowing the Dockworkers' Union to get away with importing drug ingredients would be enough to pay the favour back. "How many days?"

"Give it three."

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Understood.

“What’d he like me to do?” I ask, taking the envelope he offers me. My fingers desperately want to rip it open right here and now. I refrain, pocketing it instead. “Is there a reason you’re asking this of me instead of Harry or Kim?”

“Mr. Claire requires your particular field of expertise.” Captain Pryce smiles and nods to himself, moving back around his desk to settle down. “You are a health inspector, after all. Take out the trash for him.”

Some kind of code? I raise my brow and nod. “Yes, sir.”

“That’s all. Go home now, son. Get plenty of rest. Remember—Wednesday at eleven.”

My field of expertise ranges between three particular options.

The first: Detective work. Mr. Claire requires me to dig my hands into business. Mr. Claire requires me to find a rat of some sort. Mr. Claire requires my services, like some shitty private eye for hire, to corroborate news about some competitor. Someone's been nosing about Terminal B who ought not be; someone's been dealing in information dangerous to the deal the Claires and the captain have going on.

The second: Assassination. Someone's been nosing about Terminal B who ought not be; someone's been dealing in information. There is a rat in the harbour and I am the exterminator. There are flies on the wall and ears in the halls. Somebody gave Mr. Claire a look he didn't like. They must be made an example out of.

The third: Torture.

I'm not a stranger to torture. We have a room dedicated to it in the precinct. People go in thinking they're hot shit and come out, bloodied, bruised, fucking what-have-you, missing fingers and nails and choked by water. They're dragged out crazed and cackling like mad or otherwise some hollow husk of who they used to be. It gets that bad, if you let it. It's the kind of thing that makes people jump at their own shadows, problems that the RCM creates and then throws out for the world to deal with. You don't have to like that it's there. You just have to accept that it's part of how the RCM operates.

It's one of those things that Ahriman was better at than me. I never really thought much of it. Captain says jump, and I say, yes, sir. Captain says jump, and Ahriman says, I'll jump ten times as high as you think I will and like it. Millie but more violent.

I rub my fingertips together, looking away from the amber tumbler of whiskey presented to me. Above me and around me: The indistinct sound of chattering. It's a woozy, tired sort of evening, the kind where the air of quaint little bars such as this feels stifled by warmth and smells more of sweat than it does of food. Conversation passes over me, maybe directed at me, maybe not. My body is here, but my brain is elsewhere.

Just to make sure, I glance up and around, and no, no conversation my way. Denise is talking with my brother, or at him, I'm not sure, gushing about the little toys he's made this past week and finished from last year. Nothing about me.

Back to my fingers.

I'm being loaned out to Mr. Claire. I do not know which Claire. I do not know why. All that I know is I'm expected to perform my job adequately, though the job itself escapes me. I can assume it's assassination. It might be torture. To the vaguest extent, it might just be the favour of a little private detective work.

If I fail to perform to expectation, what's to stop the Claires from returning damaged goods? Would the captain even care?

Of course he would. I think, I hope. Captain Pryce has already laid claim to me. Silly little rabbit who knows what'll happen if he doesn't roll over and take it. But that doesn't stop people from making stupid decisions just to make a point. Just to prove they can establish some kind of control they don't have over the situation, much like Jean-Heron did.

Like I'm doing now, making the executive decision to stop being so lackadaisical with my fingers. I lift them to my mouth and start to bite. The nails come off with practical ease, swallowed down so they can't be re-attached. Teeth clip the little white bits in a habit that'd been forgotten long ago and then re-acquainted in the years hence. I try not to think of my teeth as pliers, clenching and pulling at the nailbed until they come loose and are wrenched free. Instead I file them down, hoping to make such a thing too inconvenient for my imaginary nemesis to even consider.

No one tells you how much it hurts. It isn't too dissimilar from getting shot.

They'll have to cut off my knuckles instead, or else break them. At least this, I can decide on my own. It's much harder to hide.

"John."

My name in a rugged voice, movement in front of my face. I'm not a jumpy person, so I just blink a couple of times, coming to terms with the world as it refocuses around me. Denise stares back at me from the other side of the bar, brow furrowed and the corner of her mouth drawn back and tight. "John," she says again, waving a hand. "Earth to John. Are you alive?"

"Yeah, I'm alive," I mumble-speak, biting. "Why?"

"You're being awfully quiet. Has work really been that bad?"

I take the opportunity as it's presented and nod, humming an indistinct tune that I don't think exists quite yet as I take the tumbler in hand and sip on the whiskey. "Scusi. My brain's been elsewhere."

"No shit, Mullen."

"I got a call from a canary," I mention suddenly, unprompted, examining my nails and running the pad of my thumb over the ragged, pointed edges. Much better. Blood specks beneath the bandages. Just in case something happens tonight, I work on my other hand, too, letting Denise make her own conclusion about this paranoid tick and trying not to think about how I can't reach my toenails right now.

Denise raises her brows, mouth parted in a silent gasp. The conclusion she reaches is the one I intend. "Holy shit, really? How did it go?"

"Bad."

I explain it as it happened, glossing over one or two details for lack of interest to elaborate any further. Most pointedly, I don't elaborate on why the rape comment directed at Harry felt so pointed and deliberate. The fact that the threat was made at all should be enough. Thankfully it is, if the expression on her face is anything to go off of.

“That sounds kind of like Marvin," she eventually says once I finish. Reality settles in, grounded and extant. I remember where I am, distant and hazy.

Seven blocks down from my apartment building, three rights down and one left further, or a left and then a right at some point, I don’t know, there is a block. At the first building of the block is an indentation in the earth, sloping down a flight of stairs. At the bottom of those stairs is a door with the pale sign of a yellow bird flying out of a cage, fluttering out to freedom.

Canary Corner is a homo-sexual dive bar. It’s where me and Lance are right now.

It’s a quaint little place that’s always slow on Sundays because men and women are stuck with their wives and their husbands after church. Off to lunch or even dinner, but never at a place like this. This isn’t designed with their sensitive culture in mind. Not really.

This is it: My social life. Four corners and sometimes a bathroom. A bar. Karaoke. Good food. Dishes in the back that pay for dinner now and again, or dirty tables that need bussing, the only good, consistent company found in the owner that operates the bar. It's a dangerous game, coming here with my kind of reputation, so everybody who frequents here knows better than to grab my ass or play bullshit games. Like a dog, I tend to bite. Thankfully, people understand the importance of anonymity here and tend not to ask questions. Not that I ever indulge them anyway. I don't understand how people can sleep with strangers.

This isn't much, but it's my place. Nobody tries to take my place away from me. Thus, the tentative understanding that me and Denise has.

“Who the fuck is Marvin?” It’s my turn to scowl, turning my head to glance around the place and wondering whether or not the piece of shit is in the room with us right now. “Fucking Marvin? What a stand-up name for a stand-up guy.”

“I mean, I don’t know,” Denise corrects quickly. “There’s a lot of guys who’re like that. Marvin’s just one of my exes, so he was the first guy that came to mind.”

I like Denise. She's a Seolite bartender who’s about my age and carries an intricate web of tattoos. They climb up her wrists and along her toned arms, all feathers, clouds, canaries and stars. Seolite symbols on her shoulder leave no doubt about her ethnicity, even though it's pretty damn obvious looking at her. I have no fucking idea what they say even though the question kills me: When I asked years ago, she said, Fucking Live, Laugh, Love, dumbass, though I don’t think that was the truth. I never asked again.

She says she's a woman but sounds like a man, is short for a man but average for a woman, works out like a man but dates men like women do. Denise says that she can't afford speech therapy or estrogen and she doesn't care enough to anyway at this point. She's the only trans-sexual I associate with any frequency and it's taken me longer than I'd like to admit to even begin wrapping my head around the concept. I still don't think I understand it fully.

When I mentioned years ago that La Puta Madre deals in hormones, too—a little-known fact that grants them unexpected supporters and good will in their community—Denise damn near kicked me out. Because, what, she's expected to owe the fucking Madre? Do I think she wants her bar to become another cesspool or gathering place for the Madre to get shot up in? Go fuck yourself with a cactus.

“Fuckin’ aces,” I scoff, downing a shot of whiskey. “Tell me why I didn’t know about this Marvin prick. I would’ve done somethin’ about him if you’d just say the word.”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you. Stay out of my business.”

“Come on, babe,” I press, holding my hands out with a bemused chuckle. “Look at me. In your business. You love me. It’s okay, you can say it.”

Either the joke falls flat or she completely ignores it. I'll never know which, so I decide right then and there to never make that joke again: It's better not to push my luck when I don't get a reaction.

It doesn't mean I can't get in my own head about it, though—does she think I was trying to flirt with her? (I wasn't.) Did she not understand it was a joke about business patronage? Did she take it another way entirely?

For probably the hundredth time this night, she boops the little black nose of her new little toy, a creative amalgamation made by Lance that’s equal parts fuzzy as it is confusing. God only knows where he got the idea to make a mottled, soft yellow dog and sew in bits of salt-and-pepper into it. Red dribbles down its head and over its ear like blood. It's supposed to be ketchup, but instead makes it look like it's been shot in the head. The little smile it wears reminisces the blank-stared acceptance of death. The thing is nowhere near as cute or appealing as the turtle tucked away safely in my bag.

It’s one of a shopping bag full of the little beasties my brother made, each fashioned into cute little pairs. For marketability, I think, or to convince couples to buy them out two at a time. Denise was humoured enough by the creatures to pick out a favorite for herself.

“What’s this little guy’s name again?” she asks instead.

“Scramble Dog,” I supply, glancing at Lance. He's been pulling a face as I’ve shared my story of Willow Tone, each time looking more and more disgusted and disgruntled. But look at him now, so fuckin’ proud of himself. He got us a free drink each and some dinner with it, using a years-defined acquaintanceship as leverage. I’m not complaining about that, though. It’s a win in my book.

“You know. Like scrambled egg. Only a dog, for some reason? I don’t fuckin’ know.”

“You should make a few more of these and sell them. They’re adorable.”

I see Lance grimace out of the corner of his eye, lowering his hand from his glass of beer to flex and curl his fingers. I light a cigarette and take a drag of before setting it in the ashtray, steeping in pangs of my own.

“It took him like a whole day to make,” I explain, sipping my water. “And he’s still having wrist problems. I’ve been telling him he should take more breaks and stretch more.”

Lance clicks his tongue and gives me a disdainful scowl, rolling his eyes. Pot to kettle, it says, before returning to his beer—Pilsner Prime, just a step up from the basic-ass Pilsner Piss. I still don’t get what’s so appealing about beer. It certainly doesn’t taste good, at least to me. Maybe it's the texture.

Denise cringes a little, probably more at the idea of the pain and the time wasted rather than from any true sympathy. “That fucking sucks. Something this big should be worth at least forty reál.”

“Try twenty,” I counter, “if you’re lucky. How much did the skein cost?" Lance, frowning thoughtfully down at his glass, grudgingly lifts four fingers. "Four réal, maybe five? Buttons, stuffing..."

“Dei and fucking God.” She drums her fingers on the counter for a minute before deciding she's too uncomfortable and changing the subject. “So was your boyfriend okay in the end?”

Her sincerity behind the question puts me off. “Harry’s not my boyfriend,” I say for the thousandth time, picking up the menu. “And I don’t know. I didn’t look to see if he was at work today.”

“Did you ask his boyfriend?”

“I don’t know if they’re boyfriends or not. ‘S none of my business. Besides, I don’t even have his number.”

“But Harry had yours,” she notes astutely. There's something about people who obsess over other peoples' sexuality that makes my fingers itch for violence. Unfortunately, my own obsessing over others' sexuality years ago has given her permission to do the same to mine. I dug my own grave with that one. Just gotta lie in it.

“Yeah?” I eye Denise over the top of the menu, raising a brow and daring her to continue down this line of thinking. “It’s common practice for RCM partners to exchange numbers. You know, in case of emergencies, and the like.”

“Did you ask him?”

“No.” I had an opportunity to, though, I realise. That’s the sad part. But then again, I did tell Harry that I wouldn’t inform Kim about the call last night. It’s not my prerogative. “Too fucking tired.”

“You're fucking hopeless. Place your order then and go home,” she huffs, grabbing my empty shot glass. “Both of you. But you especially, John. Especially after spending the first thirty minutes here bitching and moaning about how fucking miserable the week’s going to be.”

“I will,” I sigh, turning to the seasonal menu instead. “Thanks for this. This’ll be the first full belly I’d be falling asleep on all month."

"I got Scramble Dog out of it," she points out, shaking the stuffed animal before setting it down on the end of the bar. "This is my new favorite thing. You're good."

“Hey, Lance, look at this. This is a Waffle Wrap. It’s got, like, this long sheet of pressed waffle fries wrapped around a beef brisket. Looks like they let the meat marinate in syrup and honey to give it a strong flavour. Bell peppers, onions, some kind of pâté drizzle…”

Lance shuffles in his seat closer to me, and I shift to hold the menu between us, pointing out the selections as I go. Like we did when we were much younger, sitting next to each other at a restaurant, while my mama said, John, stop that. Let your little brother pick out his own food. I wasn't picking out his food for him, though, just helping him navigate the menu.

Good memories.

There’s three different cones—beef, pork, crab; a tasty snack in onigiri, with a couple of different fillings; goulash on a bed of rice. Among other things.

I was really tempted to get the Beef Waffle Wrap just moments before, but I distinctly remember the goulash here tasting divine. Eventually Lance points out what he wants, some kind of grilled meat pâté wrapped up in vegetables, rice, and seasonings. I pick the goulash because it reheats better and the servings are fucking massive.

Somebody sings karaoke while we wait: Denise dares me to sing it better than him, and while I know that I can, I decline, not really in the mood.

Four onigiri, too. Two bonito, two plum; two for each of us. We walk down the streets to our apartment building, eating an onigiri each as we go, each of us with a bag dangling from our arm. Lance's arm is looped around my left elbow, insistent about helping support my weight. The only reason I allow it's because no one from the station, as far as I know, is here to see. And it really does hurt to walk.

Three and a half blocks from home, a particular scent catches in the air, making me stop. I incline my head, smelling the sharp sting of blood and fresh decay. It floods my stomach with a faint lick of nausea, meandering from somewhere across the street. Lance makes a confused sound as I turn to cross after looking both ways, mindful of carriages.

"I smell something," I say. When he gives me a grimace, I add, "Hopefully it's a dog." Because if it's not and my intuition is correct, I don't expect that I'd get much sleep tonight, after all. Cops are never really off-duty.

But across the street, down a dim alley behind a dumpster, an oddly-shaped figure slumps against the corner. Small. Runt-like. Too small. When I take out my keychain torch and cast the dim light over the figure, I immediately know exactly why the shape looks so odd.

"Che schiffo," I exclaim, covering my mouth and stepping back. Behind me, around the corner of the dumpster, Lance moves—I quickly move in turn to grab his arm, turn him around, push him to the entrance of the alley. "No, no, you don't want to—you don't want to see this, Lance, trust me. It's not a dog. Let's go home. I'll take care of this."

Even though he doesn't like it, keeps looking over his shoulder with a grim sort of curiosity, he doesn't fight against the urgency. We close the distance to the apartment; I send Lance on upstairs, leave the building again, limp down the street to the nearest Frittte with pain shooting up my back. It's the very same one that I've been avoiding so adamantly, except for when—on the exceptionally rare occasion—I need to. Even now, I loiter outside for a solid two minutes, looking in through the windows and glancing down the alleyway first before stepping into the air-conditioned hell of history.

I badger a couple of people for a few centims to make a call at the phone box outside. Thankfully, it only takes showing my badge to the Frittte clerk and explaining that it's an urgent situation. I ask her if Juno still works here; she says, Yes, she does, she's on break. If you need something, I can let you know once she gets back.

"No," I say, too quick, "don't tell her I was here. Thank you."

Then I leave, find the phone box, close the door behind me; slip a few centims in. It takes three and a half rings for the line to pick up. A voice yawns on the other end, low and thick with exhaustion, says Bonsoir? with a little lilt. I stop chewing at my thumb, wiping the spit on my jeans.

"Jean, I'm sorry about calling you so late." I look down at my watch and tilt it into the streetlight outside; grimace. "It's McCoy. I found a dead body a couple blocks down from where I live. Found a dead body, I must elaborate—I didn't do shit to cause it."

"I wasn't thinking you did." I hear him yawn, move around. The signal pops with some static. Bless his heart, he doesn't ask questions, just grumbles in the background about being woken up so rudely. "Where do you need me? What happened?"

I explain: I was walking home with Lance. I smelled something off and went to check it out. It was in the alleyway behind the closed-down Frittte Marché three and a half blocks from home. My words are quick and efficient, not beating around the bush, not providing superfluous details.

"I couldn't make out much," I say when Jean asks about the body, finger twisting around the knotted cord. "Not at first. It was small. Tucked away behind the dumpster, sat up against the wall. It looked off. It wasn't until I shone a weak torch that I have on my keychain that I realised why."

I hesitate. Just for a second, not sure about the most tactful way to put this. Quickly I decide that there is no way to say it without sounding callous, just like there is no tactful way to tell a mother of three that her husband is dead, and push it out of my throat.

"It was a child. Somebody decapitated them and left them there."

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