So she wasn’t surprised when the new door opened onto a shabby stairwell made from warped unfinished wood. Black smears marred the plaster wall.
Maura Varg jutted her chin out and up by way of a nod, and climbed the hidden stairs. The cashier closed the door behind her, removed and pocketed the key, and patted the drywall where the door had been.
Cat clutched her badge again and spoke through it to Blacksuits in and out of uniform. “Varg is upstairs. The key’s in the cashier’s left apron pocket.”
Roger, they responded, and though Cat knew the voice, and used it herself sometimes, still she shivered. It was the voice of wireglass things in nightmares, which never lived and so could never die. A year ago, the voice was simply terrifying, which hadn’t bothered her. These days there was a song beneath the scream, a face to the silver. A goddess was part of her workday now. That was harder to accept. Awaiting your signal.
“It’s time,” she told Raz.
He took his hands from his face. His cheeks were wet with blood tears. “Give them hells.”
She cracked the door and slipped out into the damp, oppressive heat of early afternoon in summer. Alt Coulumb’s founders in their infinite wisdom built their city on a marsh—that was one reason, said the city’s oldest myths, their land came so cheap. Rivers still ran beneath the pavement and underground, but pave a swamp and you’re left with a paved swamp. Two steps out into the sun, and she sweated through her shirt. The city smelled of stone and fish and flesh and thick nose-burning spices. Not every restaurant on this street was a smuggling front, Cat thought. Probably.
She slid a pack of cigarettes from her jacket pocket and tapped them against her palm, spun the box, tapped them again. Fewer people smoked than used to, here in the fire-god’s city. Cat herself never started—reaction to her dad, a shrink would probably say, if she went to one. But stepping out for a cigarette was a good cover.
She faked a cough, pressed her fist against the badge through her shirt. The badge’s corners bit her skin. Okay, she told them. Let’s go.
Silver shadows rose from the surrounding rooftops, and leapt. Soundlessly they flew and soundless fell. Cat remembered a cruise she’d taken once to see whales. When the leviathan breached, the spray rose twice the height of her boat’s mast, and sunlight rainbowed through.
The Blacksuits—not quite black anymore, though the name stuck—landed lighter on the restaurant roof than the spray had on the ship’s deck. Cat barely heard them, and her ears were sharper than most humans’. Three Suits geckoed down the building’s walls, spread-eagled above windows, slick silver skin adhering to the brick.
Metal flashed from the alley behind the restaurant.
That was her cue.
She looked both ways, crossed the street, stepped into the pizza place. The bell above the door jangled. The walls looked as dirty from inside as they had through the window. A devotional calendar hung on the wall. Two months had passed since the last page was turned.
“Hey,” she said, letting her accent thicken to its old richness. A girl can leave Slaughter’s Fell, but the fell never quite leaves her. “Gimme two slices of pepperoni and a cup of coffee to go.”
Apron looked up from the book he was reading behind the cash register. In the rear, the cook—Cat’s uptown-bred coworkers liked to say, “Where they find these guys I’ll never know,” but Cat did know, when she was a kid back in the fell she knew ten guys and their fathers who all looked like this, fake tan, gym, and dank cologne, bad haircuts and bad tattoos and not enough sense to leave a business that grew more dangerous as it grew richer—the cook, call him Sideburns, who Cat figured might actually be able to make a grilled cheese sandwich if you presented him with bread, cheese, butter, a frying pan, a burning stove, and a map, Sideburns whom no one had hired for his culinary acumen approached with a slow, dangerous gait. He wore heavy rings on his right hand and didn’t look sweaty so much as bronzed. In a different age, guys like Sideburns would have followed guys like Apron as they in turn followed purple-robed emperors to glory.
So much for history.
“Oven’s broken,” Apron said.
She tapped her cigarettes. “Just a slice? Don’t need it hot, just my buddy’s hungry, you know. And coffee.”
“No coffee,” Apron said. “No slices. Go to Farrell’s down the road. And there’s no smoking here.”
The restaurant was very quiet. Cat, who knew how to listen, heard a soft metallic click. A drop of sweat rolled down Sideburns’s jaw.
“Look, man, I’m in a hurry, are you sure you don’t have—”
“Listen.” Apron slammed shut his book and loomed over the counter. “We don’t have nothing. Take a hike.”