Gemini City

The fluorite battery weighed about as much as a newborn and complained about being carried in roughly the same way.

Kais felt it through the velvet and the lining of his cloak. A slow blue throb against his ribs, once every few seconds, steady as a sleeper’s pulse. He didn’t like it. In nineteen years of stealing things other people wanted back, nothing he’d lifted had ever tried to keep him company.

Forty minutes ago it had been locked in a vault beneath the stage of the Crimson Paradise, behind a door built by someone who had read a great deal about thieves and never met one. Kais had spent three weeks learning to respect that door and eleven minutes teaching it to open. The thing inside was the size of a loaf of bread, black brass banded in copper, with a fluorite core that glowed cyan hard enough to guide ships. A lighthouse was a poor thing to carry through a building full of men who owned guns, so he had wrapped it in a square of black velvet cut from the stage curtain and slid it into the long inner pocket of his cloak.

Now all he has to do is walk out the front door like a man with somewhere better to be.

Don’t hurry, he tells himself. Hurrying is what thieves do.

The Paradise at one-forty in the morning made the rest of Dragon look sober. Three tiers of balconies climbed toward a ceiling of brass chandeliers wired with fluorite-powered bulbs that burned violet and gold, and lavender steam from the heating pipes drifted across the dance floor. A band on a rotating stage was dragging a trumpet through a song older than the building, and dancers in corsets and feathers spun beneath it all.

Kais passes a mirror as long as a tram car window and gives himself the quick professional once-over: tall, light-skinned, short afro fade, broad shoulders hiding beneath a cloak hanging maybe a thumb too heavy on the left. And the face. Graychain had finished carving that face before he turned twelve. A thin scar splits the left eyebrow, and the jaw is set like a door that has been kicked in once and never opened again. The eyes are the worst of it, dark, flat, and patient, the eyes of a man who has watched the city take everything worth taking and has stopped being surprised. Nothing shows. The velvet holds. No light leaks.

He is almost to the doors when a shoulder finds his.

It is a deliberate shoulder, the kind that comes with a man attached. The man is tall and handsome in the way of someone who has been told so every morning since childhood, in a burgundy coat with a lace cravat and a garnet pin on the lapel, the Garnet Court’s colors. Two more pins lounge against the cloakroom wall behind him, pretending not to watch.

“Mind where you walk, Graychain,” the man said, sniffing theatrically. “You can always tell by the boots. Soot and bad decisions. Somebody ought to string a rope across the door for your sort.”

Kais felt the old heat climb his neck, a Graychain heat, the kind he’d carried since he was six, the kind that came from being told what you were by people who had never been where you were.

There is an exit in his sight, and he will think about it later the way a man thinks about the stairs he has just fallen down. Mutter an apology. Keep the eyes low. Walk.

The vault is empty behind him, the wage is practically in his pocket, and every instinct he owns that has ever kept him alive is shouting the same word. His mouth, however, has never once in his life taken the quiet route.

“Funny,” he said with a deep voice, “I was about to say you smell like a perfume counter that lost a fight with a sewer, but I didn’t want to be rude to a man who’s obviously spent all evening on his hair. Tell me, Lace, does the pin hold up your confidence, or is that the cravat doing the heavy lifting? Because from here you’ve got the posture of a coat rack and the conversation to match, all hanging around and nothing in the pockets. Now move. I’ve got somewhere to be, and it isn’t your funeral, though I’m open to adjusting my schedule.”

The smile on Lace’s handsome face thins to a line. “Say that again.”

“You deaf? Sure. I said—”

Lace’s hand shoots out and seizes the edge of the cloak, and the black velvet, which has survived a vault, a corridor, and three hundred dancing strangers, chooses that instant to slide.

It is a hand’s width of light. That is all. A cyan blade of it falls across the lace cravat and lights the man’s face from below like a boy telling ghost stories. It is not a large light. It doesn’t need to be. Every soul in Dragon knows that shade of cyan, and knows that only the Garnet Court keeps a cell that bright.

Lace looks at the light. He looks at Kais. Behind him, the cloakroom pins are suddenly not leaning on anything.

“Oh,” Lace breathed. “Oh, you stupid, stupid—”

The pistols come out together. Court guns are long and ugly and expensive, each with a small brass tube on the grip, and every tube connects to its owner’s watch, because a Court gun will only fire for the watch it knows. Three barrels, then six, then a dozen, the whole room’s shadow rising up out of the burgundy.

“Well,” said Kais. “That went great.”

He doesn’t draw. He has six rounds and a nightclub full of dancers, and six rounds in a crowd is luck in disguise. Kais does not trust luck. He trusts arithmetic. Instead, he takes Lace by the lapel, pivots, and uses the man to open the door, shoulders first, glass and brass shrieking, so that the Garnet Court has a clear shot at a thief and no shot whatsoever at their own lieutenant. By the time anyone solves that problem, Kais has left the building in the company of a bad idea.

He drops Lace on the pavement among the glass.

Dragon District at two in the morning wasn’t a street so much as a held breath. The Lantern Mile ran dead straight beneath an elevated rail, a canyon of cabaret signs and Gothic stone, with sleet drifting down through the neon-lit steam and gathering on the tram tracks in thin silver lines. Golden street lamps burned along every curb.

He goes left, against every sensible instinct, because the left has a tram shelter with a cast-iron pillar as thick as an oak, and behind the pillar he finally draws the revolver.

He had built it himself out of forged steel and spite. Ugly as an anvil and nearly as reliable, the hammer filed to fit his thumb, and the cylinder cut for six. No tube. No sensor. No record. It would fire for anyone who held it, which was the only kind of loyalty he had ever found in this city. He’d loaded it that afternoon. Six rounds, no spares, because spares were for people who planned to miss.

The Garnet Court comes out of the Paradise in a spill of burgundy and begins to shoot, and the pillar rings like a church bell. Court men shoot the way rich men tip, generously, and mostly at the wrong person. Kais presses his shoulder blades into the iron, feels the battery pulse against his spine, and tells it to stay out of this.

Lace is the first through the shattered doorway, one hand clamped to his bleeding face, the other raising his pistol. Kais waits until the barrel has climbed to the level of his chest, waits in the middle of everything, like a man waiting for a tram, and puts a round precisely between the garnet pin and the second button.

“Five,” he said, to nobody.

Lace’s pistol hits the pavement, still wearing a dead man’s watch. It will be of no use to anyone ever again.

They come on in a crescent after that, fifteen or twenty men, crossing the avenue in the open under the golden lamps, trusting their numbers the way the foolish trust thin ice. Halfway across stands a substation cabinet, a cast-iron box the size of a wardrobe, where the power from the fluorite plants comes up out of the street to feed every lamp on the Lantern Mile. Kais had rewired a dozen of those boxes as a boy for a copper apiece, and he knows the secret every one of them keeps. Behind the little brass grille on its front sits a single copper busbar, as thick as a thumb, carrying enough current to light a mile of road.

He leans out and puts the second round through the grille.

The cabinet doesn’t explode. It screams. A blue-white arc leaps out of it as bright as a sun being born, and every lamp on the Lantern Mile flares once, pops, and dies. The crescent folds like wet laundry, men clawing at their eyes and stumbling blind into a street that has just gone black. He doesn’t shoot any of them. They are out of the fight for the next ten minutes, and a bullet costs money. Six of them cost a week’s rent.

“Four.”

Flankers pour from an alley on his right, six or eight men with their guns up, and between them and him runs a steam main as thick as a man’s waist. Kais puts the third round through its elbow joint. The pipe lets go with a scream, the alley fills with a wall of hot lavender cloud, and the flankers come back out of it a great deal faster than they went in. He steps into the steam himself and uses it as a curtain across the street.

“Three.”

He is halfway through the cloud when the rooftop rifle speaks.

The round lays a hot line across his left shoulder. The pain arrives a moment late. Court money always buys a rifle on the roof. He knew that, and he has been too busy admiring his own work. That is a mistake, and he intends to be annoyed about it later, preferably in a bar with a bottle of red wine.

He drops behind a parked Belmont tourer, with long black running boards, spoked wheels, and a chrome grille like a church organ. Kais waits, bleeding quietly into his own shirt, for the second flash, which comes, as it always does, out of the man’s impatience. Kais puts the fourth round through the flash. A signboard reading JAZZ HEAVEN takes the rifleman’s weight on the way down and sags.

“Two.”

Then the Court brings out the big toy.

It comes down the Lantern Mile on its own, a carriage-shaped brute of armored garnet lacquer with gunners clinging to the running boards, steered by some watch in some pocket, its fluorite cell burning cyan through the grille like an angry star. Kais has no rounds for the gunners. He has one for the cell. He lets the thing come, lets it grow until he can count the rivets, and then steps out from behind the parked car and fires through the grille.

A cell like that doesn’t die so much as quit all at once. The front half of the car lifts, the rest carries on without it and folds into the tram shelter he left a heartbeat earlier. Kais is a patient man, not a stupid one. The gunners scatter across the street like seeds.

“One.”

The rear door of the wreck swings open, and the Duke of the Garnet Court steps out into the sleet.

He is a heavy man in a garnet greatcoat, with a white-topped cane and a voice built for opera and for ordering other men to die. “Bring me that cloak!” he bellowed at his scattered army. “Bring me the head in it!” He stands in the open forty paces away, perfectly lit by his own burning car.

Kais thinks about it for roughly as long as it takes to say sure.

The last round takes the Duke of the Garnet Court between the eyes, mid-sentence, which Kais figures is how the man would have wanted to go. Talking.

The revolver clicks once on an empty chamber, the way a man clears his throat before an apology he doesn’t intend to make.

He has a gun with nothing in it, a bleeding shoulder, a stolen fortune strapped to his spine, and around ninety men who have just watched their lord die in the road and are now deciding between grief and anger. Grief takes about a second. Anger is cheaper.

Kais smiles and runs.

Down the Lantern Mile, around the shell of the burning car, through a crowd that parts like water around a stone, with the Garnet Court coming after him in a long ragged howl, shooting at his back and mostly at each other. He lets them see the tail of his coat at every corner. Dragon had been built on top of itself so many times that every building had a front door, a back door, and a door nobody admitted to, and Kais had spent six weeks learning all three of each. He goes through the kitchens of the Golden Aces, tossing a tea towel at the cook by way of apology. Down the servants’ stair into the undercroft of the old Dragon Exchange. It had been a stock bourse once. Now it is gutted and flooded with neon, its trading-floor columns still standing in rows like bored witnesses while gambling stalls squat between them. He crosses a pneumatic-post gallery where a hundred brass tubes run the length of a vaulted ceiling, hissing and thumping with sealed letters on their way to people who still have addresses. From there he climbs onto a cast-iron footbridge slung beneath the elevated rail. A night train thunders past six feet over his head and shakes soot and sparks down onto his shoulders. Then he goes down a spiral fire stair coiled around the flank of a clock tower whose great dial has told the wrong time for forty years, and nobody in Dragon has ever complained.

When he drops off the last rung into Ferrywell Lane, they are exactly where he put them.

Ferrywell Lane is a brick throat so narrow two men can’t stand side by side, and the whole Garnet Court has crammed itself into the far end of it, staring down its length at the place where they expect him to be, shouting at each other, guns pointed at nothing. They have their backs to him. All of them.

Kais rolls his shoulders under the weight of the cloak, which hurts, and flexes his fists, which are all he has left. Fighting in a cloak is stupid. He has done stupider.

The first man hears nothing. The second hears a sound like a mallet on a melon. The third turns around to find out what it was.

In a lane that narrow, their numbers work against them. Only two men can turn at once, and their guns are the wrong tool, because you can’t shoot past your friends unless you’re the kind of man who shoots friends.

The Court’s pistols have a flaw, and Kais has been saving the thought for exactly this. The tube on every Court grip runs to the owner’s watch, and if you hit a man’s wrist hard enough, the watch tears loose and the gun goes dead.

The fourth man raises his pistol. Kais chops down on the wrist, hears the watch skitter away across the cobbles, and puts an elbow into the man’s throat. The fifth swings his dead gun like a club. Kais ducks under it, catches the arm, and turns the man face-first into the brick. Ferrywell Lane is barely a shoulder wide, both walls sweating soot, with a cast-iron drainpipe running down the left side like a spine. He fights the way the lane allows, forward, one man at a time, each one shoved back into the man behind him.

Then a hand catches the hem of his cloak, and the battery tears free.

It comes out of the pocket velvet and all and goes spinning down the cobbles in a wheel of cyan light. Every man in Ferrywell Lane forgets about Kais at once.

That is their mistake. Kais has a plan for the battery. They only have an appetite for it. A Court man dives for it, and Kais kicks it out from under his fingers so it skids between three pairs of boots and fetches up against a drain grate. Two men collide reaching for it. Kais vaults the first one’s back, lands knee-first on the second, and scoops the thing up. Then he swings it into the jaw of the next man who reaches for it. It makes a sound like a church bell with a cold. A fist knocks it loose again. It goes up, end over end, rings off the drainpipe, and drops back into his chest. He catches it against his ribs with both arms.

Then the big one comes.

He comes down the lane sideways because he doesn’t fit any other way. He is twice Kais’s weight, with a garnet sash stretched across a chest like a coal scuttle and brass knuckles on both hands. He doesn’t bother with a gun. He swats two of his own men into the walls to make room.

The first punch Kais sees coming, and he slips it. It takes a fist-sized bite out of the brick where his head had been. The second punch he doesn’t see. It buries itself in his ribs, the same side as the bleeding shoulder. The battery falls out of his arms, and the big man kicks it behind him.

“Come get it, Graychain.”

Kais spat red onto the cobbles. “Aw. Look at you. Your mama’d be proud, if she knew who you were.”

The big man lunges, and this time he gets an arm around Kais’s neck and lifts. Kais’s boots leave the ground. The lane narrows to a grey tunnel and the drumbeat of his own pulse. He gets one heel against the drainpipe, then the other, and walks himself up the wall until his whole weight hangs off the big man’s arm. Then he kicks off the brick with both legs. The lane is barely a shoulder wide, there is nowhere for three hundred pounds to go but sideways, and the back of the big man’s skull meets the opposite wall with a sound like a dropped anvil. The arm goes slack. Kais’s boots find the cobbles. He catches the big man’s wrist, turns his own back into the man’s chest, drops his hips, and heaves him over his shoulder the way the Vulture dock crews swing a grain sack onto a cart. Three hundred pounds of Garnet Court go over end to end and land on the cobbles like a felled chimney.

Kais picks up the battery while catching his breath. It is still pulsing, slow and blue and insultingly calm, as though none of this has anything to do with it. He tucks it under his arm and turns to the men who are still standing.

The rest was not a fast fight, and it was not a clean one. By the fortieth man his knuckles had stopped being knuckles and become a rumor. He lost track of the sleet. He lost track of the cold. He did not lose track of the battery, and some stubborn corner of his mind kept time to its pulse the way you keep time to a song you hate.

When the Court finally breaks, when the last dozen understand that this is not one thief in a lane but something with no intention of stopping, they run. Kais lets them run. There is no profit in the chase.

On a fire escape above the lane, a cabaret girl with feathers in her hair watches the last man fall. She says nothing, because West Island has taught her what becomes of witnesses who talk. But she will remember the shape of him against the sleet, a man in a long coat standing in a lane full of people who aren’t getting up. By dawn she will have told three friends. By noon it will be a hundred men. By the end of the week it will be a legend.

Legends need a witness, and Dragon District always has one.

It takes him a quarter of an hour to limp to the park, and another to find a telephone box. Dragon still has a few, brass-and-glass cabinets on the corners of the empty streets, each with a hand-lettered sign hung on its door: COIN ONLY. NO WATCHES. It is the city’s one concession to people whose watches it no longer trusts. Kais steps inside, pulls the door shut against the sleet, feeds a heavy copper coin into the slot, and dials a number he has memorized and never once written down.

It rings once.

“Tell me you are calling about the delivery,” said the Deacon. He has the dry, quiet voice of a man who has never needed to raise it.

“I’m calling because I’m standing in a phone box with your damn delivery strapped to my spine, humming like an annoying cat. So, yes.”

A pause. “There has been gunfire near the Crimson Paradise. A great deal of it.”

“There might have been some gunfire. Six rounds’ worth, mostly.”

“And the Court?”

“Doesn’t need a mailing address anymore.”

Another pause, longer. When the Deacon speaks again, something in the dryness has changed, like a man looking at a ledger and finding a number that has never been in it. “Rook Street. The tea cellar. Two hours.”

“Have the money counted,” Kais said. “Cash, not a check, and spare me the speech about the Saints being a family. I’ve heard the speech. It’s a good speech. It still ends at somebody’s funeral.”

He hangs up before the Deacon can answer, and stands a moment in the cabinet with his forehead against the cold glass, listening to the sleet.

The motorbike is where he left it, under a tarp in the yard behind a laundry two streets away from Ferrywell Lane, which in Dragon qualifies as a miracle.

It looked like it had been assembled by a boiler and a bicycle with a grudge. A copper-banded steam cylinder slung low between two spoked wheels. Brass pipework curling over the tank like ivy. A fluorite cell the size of a fist glowing dim cyan in a glass housing at its heart, a tram conductor’s seat bolted on top, and nothing else. No plate, no watch socket. He had built it over two years of nights in a rented garage in Graychain, out of a scrapped boiler shell, the front fork of a tram handcart, and a pressure governor that was the second-best thing he had ever designed. The best one was in half the steam cars in Hutzborg, stamped GREYHALL INDUSTRIES, and nowhere on it was there a single letter of his name.

It was the one machine in the whole city that had never asked his watch for permission.

“Don’t you dare quit on me tonight,” he said to it. He kicks the starter. The boiler coughs, catches, and settles into a low contented hiss. “Thank you,” Kais said to it. He was rude to every person he had ever met, and polite to every machine he had ever built.

He rides north through the last of the sleet. Half the city called itself Hutzborg and the other half called it Gemini City. At four o’clock in the morning, it is both. A hundred thousand lights burning violet, blue, and red in the dark, brass and stone and steam, beautiful but hurtful, and not one window in it lit for him.

Dragon District wore its repairs like stitches, new brass over old scars, neon grafted onto a city that had been broken once and put back together by people who ran out of patience before they ran out of money. In the north of Dragon lay a microdistrict called Graychain, where Kais had been born with no one waiting, raised until he was six by someone he could no longer remember, and after that by nobody at all.

The Cinder Saints kept their books in the cellar of a dead tea importer on Rook Street, under a century of leaves that no one had ever sold. The smell of it, dust and bergamot, was why the Saints loved the place. Nobody searches a room that smells like somebody’s grandmother.

Pelle is waiting at a table lit by a single golden lamp. The Deacon’s bookkeeper is slim as a candle, in sleeve garters, coughing into a handkerchief embroidered with a small flame. Two Saints with shotguns stand in the shadows being decorative.

Kais unbuckles the cloak, draws out the black bundle, and sets it on the table. The velvet falls away. The crystal throws cyan light across the beams, across the stacked chests, across Pelle’s astonished face, and Pelle whistles low through his teeth.

“The Court has been waving this around in a vault for a year,” he said, “and you just walked out with it.”

“I wore a coat.”

Pelle slides an envelope across the table. It is thick as a hymnal, all of it physical. Kais wore a watch like everyone else in Hutzborg, it was just that his came with a record. Six convictions from his teens meant that any digital Ticks landing in his name got flagged, docked, or frozen before he could spend a single one. So he took his wages in papers, and the Saints, to their credit, had never once made him ask. Kais counts it once, thumb flicking through the sleek papers of Hutzborg cash.

“Aren’t you curious?” Pelle said. “What the battery does? What the Deacon wants it for?”

“Does knowing change the number in the envelope?”

“No.”

“Then it can stay a mystery. I don’t give a damn.”

Pelle coughs into the little flame. “The Deacon asked me to extend an invitation.”

“No.”

“You haven’t heard it.”

“A seat at the table, steady work, a roof, people who’ll have your back. I know the speech, Pelle. I told your boss I’d heard it. Tell him thanks, but I don’t do tables. The last time somebody gave me a seat at one, it came with a family, and the family came with funerals, and I’ve been to enough of those for one lifetime.”

Pelle studies him for a moment, then shrugs. “The street is already saying a hundred, you know. A hundred men and six bullets. They’ve given it a name.”

“Ninety-four,” said Kais. “I’m not rounding up for the poets.”

“You could be famous.”

“Famous doesn’t pay rent, Pelle. The same crowd that chants your name on Friday sells your address for a drink on Saturday. Let ’em tell stories. Stories are free. I’m not.”

He climbs the cellar stairs with the envelope under his arm. Outside, Dragon is waking the color of weak tea. He slides the envelope into the inner pocket where the battery had been and finds it still warm, a faint, stubborn heat, like a bed somebody has only just left. He frowns at it, says something rude to nobody in particular, and goes to find his bike.

In Hutzborg, everybody belonged to somewhere. The Court had its colors, the Saints had their Deacon, the watches had their owners. Kais belonged to nothing. He had paid for that in ways the city would never write down, and he did not intend to give the receipt back. Loyalty was a leash with a nicer collar. Friends were debts that hadn’t come due yet. The only truths the city had ever told him were the ones he could hold in his own two hands: a gun he’d built, a bike he’d built, and money with no name on it. He meant to live on those for as long as West Island let him, and not one day longer than he had to.