Halcyon The Complete Trilogy (31 page)

“What?” Taziri stared at the leads in her hand. “Why didn’t that work?”

The old man groaned. “It’s a telegraph wire. It uses almost no current. You can’t shock a person with that. It’s the safest thing in the world.”

Taziri frowned at the wire, the youths completely forgotten. “But I cut the…oh, wait a second.” She bent down to the plate in the wall where the wires emerged into the room. “Well, here’s your problem. There’s a resistor on the house current.” She grabbed the small black cylinder soldered to the plate and ripped it off.

Screams filled the room, very brief nonsensical screams. Two men were shaking and spitting and falling to the floor stiff as boards just as a third one learned what it feels like to have a lead pipe swung up between his legs. The last two men still near the windows screamed a few obscenities of their own and leapt back out into the dark street.

Taziri pulled the wires apart and glanced around. “See, that’s what was supposed to happen the first time.”

The clerk managed a wry smile, but kept his pipe at the ready as he backed away from the men on the floor.

 Within a few minutes, the telegraph office was crowded with bleary-eyed neighbors helping to clean up and two police officers grappling with the three stunned youths. Taziri loitered in the back of the room just long enough to jam the resistor back into place where it stuck with only a slight wobble, and then she screwed the wires back into the telegraph with only a slight worry that she might have gotten them reversed in all the excitement. After giving a brief and anonymous statement to the police, she slipped out the front door and plunged into the cool night air.

The city rose around her dark and still, unchanged by the violence at the telegraph office, oblivious to the small pocket of light and life around that one building. Taziri strode along with a charge in her step. She felt sharp and alive, all traces of weariness wiped away. She stared around at the windswept streets and shops and houses with eyes chilled by the night air, seeing everything with uncanny clarity.

But the feeling faded. The longer she walked, the less she wanted to be out walking. She thought of bed, she thought of home, she thought of her little girl smiling her toothless smile. Her long strides grew shorter and slower, and she hunched down in her flight jacket, grateful for the weight and warmth of the leather and metal.

She turned a corner from one empty street onto another and heard a small sound. An animal sound, somewhere just ahead and to one side. The street was empty, but she heard the sound again, nearer and clearer. A sob. A gasp. A whisper. A slap.

Taziri jogged on up the road glancing every which way for the source of the noises, and she found it in a wide alley between two row houses. It was a side lane, half covered in flower pots and little garden statues arranged around the several house doors that opened onto this private space. And a few feet from where Taziri was standing, a man shoved a woman up against the wall, her sleeve torn and hanging on her elbow. He had one hand on her throat and the other wrapped around a dirty brick. Taziri heard her whisper, “Please, don’t.”

In that instant, Taziri felt every shred of muscle in her body burning, her blood roared in her ears, and her brain boiled in adrenaline. She burst into a sprint and smashed her armored forearm into the man’s head. He stumbled back a step and let go of the woman, but not the brick. Taziri slipped her right arm up around the man’s neck and wrenched him farther away from the woman. Then she placed the cold metal of her arm brace against the other side of the man’s neck and squeezed. His right arm was trapped against her body, rendering the brick useless, but his left fist came around and connected with her shoulder, then her ribs, then her temple, but still she held on. With both arms twisted around the man’s throat, Taziri bore down with all her strength until the gasping, whimpering man began to flop about like a dying fish. He shuddered and fell limp.

Taziri hurled him down and planted her boot on the man’s neck. Then she looked over at the woman crouched against the far wall, staring at them. “Are you all right? Can you stand up? Say something, please. What’s your name?” 

For a moment, the woman just stared at her. Then her lip shuddered and she said, “Oni.”

“Oni.” Taziri took a moment to breathe, to think. But she couldn’t think, all she could do was feel, and each passing moment filled her with the desire to reach down and smash the man’s skull open with his own brick. “Oni, come here.”

She shook her head.

“It’s all right. He can’t hurt you anymore. Come here.”

“Why?” She stood up, arms wrapped tightly around her body.

“You know him?”

She nodded.

“Did he hurt you?”

She swallowed. “No, not yet. Not really.”

Taziri didn’t know whether to believe her. “You’re sure?”

She nodded vigorously.

“All right then, let’s just get you home.” She took her boot off the man’s neck and gently herded the woman back to the end of the alleyway. Oni jerked out of her hands, but did not try to move away. She just stood there, staring over Taziri’s shoulder, her face strangely calm.

Feeling nothing but cold and uncertain, Taziri glanced back just long enough to be sure the man was still breathing. Then she moved in front of the woman. “Oni? Oni, look at me. It’s over. All right? Come on, I’ll walk you home, let’s go.” Taziri escorted the woman out into the street and then followed her two blocks to her house. They walked in silence and Oni stayed at arm’s length beside her, where she could see her. Taziri wondered if she should say something, but she couldn’t think of anything that felt helpful. So she watched Oni go inside and shut the door, and she hurried away, her mind racing.

I’m sleeping. I’m asleep. This is a dream. A nightmare. This can’t be Marrakesh. This can’t be the country Grandfather fought for, that Mother worked for, that I live in. This can’t be real.

The engineer sniffed the air and smelled City: people, machines, exhaust, food, animals, and a thousand other things. It almost smelled like home, like a great mass of living things and dying things and things that were neither, all resting beneath the stars, huddled in a great heap of brick and wood and iron. The walk home back to the inn was too long, but she didn’t remember any of it. She padded back to bed and lay on top of the sheets, imagining her husband’s arm across her belly, and her daughter’s voice babbling from her crib in the corner as she stubbornly refused to go to sleep. Instead, she heard the faint, distant echoes of young people shouting and glass breaking, and her dreams were plagued with fire and blood.

Chapter 29. Kella

The detective awoke with a groan and a hacking cough that filled her head with dizzy little pains that chased one another around her skull. Her chest and stomach and arms and legs all ached as well, and none were eager to move. The cold stones of the floor stung her bare hands and a wooden thumping beat on her ears.

Thumping.

She opened her eyes and saw the exposed planks of the basement ceiling in the failing light of the lamp still sputtering in the corner. Shadows moved beyond those planks, thin bits of darkness barely seen through the gaps and cracks in the floorboards. Kella sat up slowly, one hand pressed against her head, eyes blinking hard and long to clear her vision. She saw Jedira lying by the cellar door. The blood spattered across her body lay heavy and stiff on her clothing.

How much time have I lost? Who is that upstairs?

The detective stood up, still moving only as fast as her battered flesh would allow. The people walking around the house overhead were talking about something.
Names. Addresses
. She thought she recognized one of the voices as an officer from the police station. Wincing, she pulled off her blood-hardened jacket and trousers and threw them back into a dark corner, and then pawed through two boxes of old clothes to find replacements. The new pants and shirt hung large and loose on her, but she lashed them tight to her waist with a belt, took a deep breath, and pounded up the stairs just as one of the officers placed a boot on the top step.

“You’ll need a light and you may want a mask.” She patted the young man on the shoulder as she passed him. “It’s not pretty down there.”

“Detective Massi?” He froze, his eyebrows contorting into an expression of extreme confusion.

“Yeah, I got a tip that someone was looking for this girl. Someone slipped a note under my door, knocked until I woke up, and then ran off. You?”

“Uh, the same, sort of. Well, a tip, I mean. At the station. An old man saw a fight in the street outside here, and came all the way down to complain about the noise.”

“Well, it looks like we were all a bit late getting here. I found Usem in the street. Knife work, and lots of it. Is this your first murder scene?”

He nodded.

She sighed. “Hell of a way to spend the day, kid. Sure you’re up to it?”

He nodded again.

“Good man. All right, well, get everyone down here. It’s going to be a long day. I’m going to go rattle some cages and see if I can shake loose some answers. I’ll come by later this morning to see what you’ve found.”

“Yes, ma’am. Uh, ma’am?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just, your clothes?”

“This?” Kella gave herself a bored glance. “I don’t sleep in uniform, and I don’t change before going to stop a killer. Priorities, officer.”

“Right. Yes, ma’am.” He nodded curtly and turned his attention to the basement.

Kella strode back down the hall and out the front door without seeing the other officers, and then she moved as quickly as she could down the street without running. With many roads and rows of houses and shops behind her, Kella slowed to a walk with her hands shoved deep in the cavernous pockets of her borrowed trousers.

How long before someone puts the pieces together and comes up with me as the killer? Hours? Minutes?
Should I have stayed back there and taken my chances with the flatfoots? No, there’ll be time for the question-and-answer game later.

The detective took a deep breath and peered up at the shop signs around her. Books, paintings, flowers. All sorts of pretty things for sale. Kella frowned, then turned and hurried up the road. Half a dozen turns later she was wrestling with the old lock at her own apartment. Inside, she cast aside the oversized clothes and scrubbed the flecks of dried blood from her face and hands over a sink full of cold water.

What’s the plan, detective? If you don’t get that Samaritan woman in irons soon, they’ll have you in a cell and what’s left of your career on a pyre.

She dressed in bland grays and browns, and pulled her mother’s old duster on over it all. Into the coat’s inner pockets she shoved fistfuls of fruit, rolls, and nuts from the little bowl on her coffee table. In the back room, she knelt beside her bed, reached underneath the thin metal frame, and yanked an old box from between the squeaking bedsprings. She stared down at the brass knuckles, knives of all sizes and shapes for all manners of work, caltrops for unfriendly feet, a little box full of tools for opening locked things, and several small vials of white powder. After a moment’s hesitation, everything was pawed up and shoved into the duster’s pockets, inside and out, all but the bottles, which she poured into the sink.

No one needs to find those.

Back out on the street, she smelled a strange emptiness in the cold and the dark. It was no longer late in the night but early in the morning. No last traces of suppers or parties lingered in the air, no distant voices echoed in faraway alleys or squares. The faint menace of the darkness itself was gone, as though even the killers and demons had at last gone to sleep, leaving the city streets truly and utterly empty but for the cold and the shadows to await the coming dawn. Kella knew better. She wrapped her cold fingers around the deadly things in her pockets and hurried away. By the time she reached her destination, the aches and stiffness from lying on the basement floor had faded.

Well
, she thought,
if I can’t catch one criminal, at least I can get some evidence against another one.

The back door of the prosthetics shop appeared undisturbed, though she heard the distant huffing of an engine. Kella knelt at the lock with her little box of tools and began picking away with a pair of bent needles. The tumblers inside the lock clicked up into position one by one and the door swung open. Inside, she found the room of metal arms and legs piled in boxes and on shelves, and the detective wound her way silently around them to the far side of the room and the door to the main corridor. From there she crept, slower with each step, down the stairs and down the hall toward the door to the lab, but long before she reached it she heard voices, many voices, arguing in sharp and angry tones, somewhere just around the corner. Kella backtracked toward the bottom of the stairs and found a closet. She slipped inside behind the leather curtain and tried not to breathe.

After a few minutes, she counted three distinct voices but also guessed at least two other people coughing, sneezing, and shuffling their feet. Two of the speakers were clearly Lady Sade and the Samaritan. While they argued at length about the terms of a certain contract and the precise definitions of certain words, most prominently
dead
, the others seemed to be hard at work moving heavy metal objects. Kella heard the hollow and metallic ringing when the objects banged into each other.
The cages?

The detective strained to hear more clearly. People were moving, cages were thumping, animals were grunting and huffing, people were talking, and it was all muffled by the thick rock and iron-bound wood panels of the walls and floors of the basement.

Seconds ticked by and still the muffled noises continued. The argument in the hallway grew softer and finally fell apart with the sounds of laughter. Several people laughing together, some more genuinely than others. And they were closer now, no longer around the corner but just a few yards from the closet, coming closer to the stairs. Kella squeezed her face up to a tiny crack along the edge of the door and doorframe, straining to see the people in the hall.