Sandy gave them a lift in her wagon; she still lived, and parked, near the market, though the last decade’s rising rent had forced her and Lil to carry their lives on their backs snail-like from apartment to apartment until they bought their present coffin. Matt did not know if she stayed for the commute, or for her pride. Sandy’s people had lived near the market since they first came from Telomere; so had Matt’s, but he’d got in too many fights over the old ways with his old man back when his old man was the type to fight with fists to care much for history. Bruises and swelling obscured the ways things had “always” been.
Matt’s father claimed the way things had always been went back to the Old Empire, to legions marching in conquest for their blood-cult masters. As far as Matt was concerned, that always ended when the Adornes shipped out from the Old World. Some people in Alt Coulumb had an always of equal age—the families who’d lived here since first light—but growing up, Matt realized that in spite of the stories his dad spun, his always was just the way the world had worked in the twenty years from the day he became a man to the day the city outpaced him. Old Adorne couldn’t understand that the Paupers’ Quarter near the market had become a place where uptown nobs and smart-dressed folk like Ms. Abernathy lived for the cheap rent and what realtors described as the “charming street scene.” Dad once said anyone in a suit who walked west of Sixteenth deserved what was coming to them.
Matt himself was nearing the end of his always. The city his sons knew, he didn’t. Maybe that was why you had kids these days, when you didn’t need them to work the farm: so you could learn from them how to live in peace after your always ended.
He sat next to Claire and across from Ellen and Hannah in the back of Sandy’s cart. Ellen had fallen asleep on Hannah’s shoulder, and Hannah herself slept against a flour sack, and Claire stared behind them into traffic, cross-legged and awake. She rocked with the rhythm of the wheels. Sandy’s left front shock needed work. Ray’s second cousin was a mechanic, did his novitiate with the church before he decided he liked marriage more than metal, and found Mike. Maybe Matt could talk to Ray, ask him to have his cousin give Sandy’s shocks a look some night. While Sandy slept, of course, because he doubted she could pay and he knew she wouldn’t take charity.
Matt let his thoughts run because he had no idea what to say to Claire, and because the silence had wormed between his lips and down his throat into his stomach where it rolled with each rattle of Sandy’s left front wheel.
Matt had never spoken with the girls alone, though he’d worked beside them for years. He knew their father well enough, but the man was a colleague and his daughters were his business.
But the man had hit Matt with a stick, and Sandy, when he wasn’t any drunker than he had been before in Matt’s presence and (gods) even at Matt’s urging. The medic had shined a light in Corbin Rafferty’s eyes, numbed the cut on his scalp and stitched it closed, and the whole time Rafferty hadn’t moved.
“I don’t know what happened,” Matt said. “I’ve never seen your dad act like that before.”
“I have,” Claire said.
“I mean, I’ve seen him drunk.”
“That’s not drunk,” she said. “It’s what happens when he’s sobering. He hits whatever’s near. Breaks furniture.”
“He hits you?”
“He hasn’t,” she said. “Yet. We keep away. Lock ourselves in our rooms.”
“You don’t need to say anything you don’t want to.”
“And you don’t need to hear anything you don’t want to,” she said. “You never have before.”
He thought about blindness, and said nothing.
“Thank you for offering us a place to stay,” Claire continued. “Ellen will be grateful.”
He wasn’t sure how to take that, so he left it.
*
The doom that came to Chez Walsh looked like Cat in leather and denim, with Raz in tow. Raz still wore his whites; Cat had stopped by the temple to change, and left him waiting under the gaze of a goddess who was no longer blind. Cat didn’t go out often these days, but she still kept clothes in her locker.
“Promising,” Raz said when she led him down the Pleasure Quarter alley. Puddles of gray water reflected buzzing rooftop ghostlights and brightly colored billboards bearing images of smiling men, one of whom—a toothpaste ad—had been aftermarket modified with a spray-paint ball gag and the tagger’s circle-trumpet glyph.
“You’ll like this place. I used to come here all the time.” And it felt so good to be back—good and shudderingly transgressive. She’d left this life and these alleys behind, left the joy of fang in vein. But tonight she had fought pirates, saved a hundred people from misery, polished off a protracted operation. Triumph flushed her. She was done running from herself—time to celebrate how far she’d come from the addled addict of a year before.
Raz stepped over a fishnet-stockinged someone enjoying a chemical sleep in the lee of a metal trash bin. The someone had bandages up and down their arm. “Folks don’t clean up after themselves in this part of town?”
“She’s fine,” Cat said.
“The bandages, I mean. Impolite not to close your people up.”