The backseat of the limo is even bigger than she remembers, seemingly too spacious for the outside of the vehicle to contain. Perhaps it’s just because she’s occupying it alone this time. Swanny looks out the window, that changeful tinted glass, as the streets of Torchtown scroll along beside her. No one walks the sidewalks near the Chaw Shop, but as the car rounds the corner to another block, a rising tide of foot traffic floods into view.
The first thing Swanny notices is how young everyone is. At eighteen and a half, she’s never met a single person her junior—excepting the little urchins outside her window this morning, and those twins seemed a different species entirely, otherworldly guttersprites, not simply “kids.” But the pedestrians she’s glimpsing now are adolescents and even pre-adolescents, without doubt or exception. She can see it in the way they move: their provocative displays of affection and anarchic patterns of foot traffic disrupt the very air.
A bored shirtless boy trawls a vacant lot strewn with rubble and still-warm embers, gathering rat bones in a coffee can. A filthy matchgirl chases a scrawny, half-plucked chicken. Delinquents too young to shave beat the sides of a dumpster with bats and broom handles. A teen mom and her hip-slung infant shriek expletives at a cutpurse scaling a fire escape; another pregnant, underage waif looks on glassily, skeletal except for her protuberant middle. A seedy hotel bares its rooms like a dollhouse, its fa?ade eaten away by late-quenched flames; inside, young lovers make use of the mattresses. A scuttling prepubescent hefts a chain saw half his size on a crabbed sciatic back. He glances at the limo, then dodges into the throng. Swanny slides around the banquette and opens the privacy divider to speak to Duluth.
“Stop the car! That boy is armed with a chain saw, just like the perpetrators. I must question him immediately.”
Duluth shakes his head. “It ain’t him you’re looking for.”
“How could you possibly know?”
“Trust me, sparker like that ain’t never gonna get Outside. You’ve gotta show promise to get hired on a raid.”
“Hired by whom?”
“That’s what we’re looking to find out, innit?”
Torchtown. This is the place Swanny didn’t know she was searching for, the dead city’s telltale heart. These children are clad in rags and bandages, their skeletons visible through temporary flesh, their souls through haunted eyes. A hand reaches out from a sewer grate. A bottle falls off a roof. A funeral procession tromps past, the small cardboard coffin drawn along in a rickshaw by a lone pallbearer, while mourners clear the way by banging cymbals made of garbage can lids. For the first time since she saw the X-rays, Swanny feels less alone. At least she isn’t the only one here dying young.
The limo parks at the curb by a storefront that appears no different from any of the others they’ve just passed. Duluth opens her door as a gentleman or a servant might. She follows him inside.
From the outside, the building appears intact, but once Swanny crosses the threshold, she sees that it is in fact a hollowed-out shell, with floors, staircases, insulation all burnt away inside. The building’s scorched brickwork rises all around her like the inside of a chimney, open to the air above. As she looks up, a dragon glides high across the starless sky, eclipsing the night’s sliver of moon. The yellow one this time: she can tell by its snub-nosed profile. It’s too far up to do any damage now, but Swanny understands. She’ll find no protection here.
It’s as though she’s wandered backstage in a vaudeville house at the end of the world. This saloon attracts a mature clientele compared to the streets outside. Most of the patrons appear to have reached their early twenties, but the years have come at some apparent cost. At one table, a bored ingenue clad in feathers looks on as her companion plays five-finger filet with a straight razor. At the next, a shirtless ogre with an eye patch breathes louder than seems strictly necessary. Two broad-shouldered young women, sporting chain mail and chonmages, stand like statues in the back, flanking a curtained alcove beyond whence exotic music drifts. Other surly characters mill about, personifications of all the major sins and vices. Swanny glances to Duluth for reassurance—he offers none—then affects nonchalance as she saunters to the bar.
“I’ll have a vodka martini with two olives,” she tells the mixologist. He’s a splinter of a fellow, and there’s something odd about his face. She realizes after a moment that his eyelashes are missing, and most of his eyebrows too—singed away in a phenomenon so common, she’ll later learn, it’s nicknamed the Close Shave.
The mixologist looks at Duluth.
“She’s with Sharkey,” Duluth says.
The mixologist looks back to Swanny. “What’d you say you want again?”
“A vodka martini with two olives. Very dry.”
“Tonight we got Rotgut, Embalming Fluid, and Rubbing Alcohol.”
“Which do you recommend?”
“They all taste the same.”
“Surprise me.”
The mixologist pours a cloudy, pale liquid into a jelly jar and hands it to her. It’s room temperature and tastes like turpentine smells.
“I’m looking for someone,” Swanny tells him, forcing down a second sip. “Someone who’d have information about a raiding party.”
The mixologist and Duluth exchange a complicated series of facial expressions so quickly it seems paranoid to notice.
“I don’t know nobody,” says the mixologist. Then, unsettlingly, he mimes walking down steps until he completely disappears. Swanny cranes her neck over the bar and sees that he’s actually descended into a cellar through an open hatch. Torchtown’s defining architectural feature must be the trapdoor.
“Didn’t like talking to you, I guess,” Duluth offers placidly.
“How extremely rude.”
“You wanna go now?”
Swanny scowls. “You must think I’m easily discouraged. I haven’t even finished my drink.”
Duluth sighs and pulls up a stool next to her. Swanny swigs with revulsed determination.
“How long have you worked for Mr. Sharkey?” she asks.
“Almost eight years.”
“That’s a very long time.”
“Yeah.”
“Were you always his driver?”
“Nah. I got promoted.”
“From what?”
“Running errands.”
The trouble with inferior liquor is that it makes one inferiorly drunk—not less drunk, just less pleasantly. “You must like him a great deal. To work there for so long.”
“It’s dangerous, but he treats me all right.”
“Dangerous how?”
Duluth shrugs. “Killing offenses.”
“But he isn’t serious about that.”
“Mmm.”
“No.” Swanny’s ventricles stutter. “Has he really?”
Another shrug. “That’s what it means to be a boss around here.”
Swanny considers. She touches the EAT SHIT & DIE pin on her chinchilla lapel. Her secret muscles still. “In my world, I suppose it means more or less the same.”
“Times are tough all over.”
“Yet I feel there’s something else about Sharkey. Some other mystery. Something you’re afraid to reveal”—a moue—“even to me.”
Duluth looks at her guiltily, and she feels a surge of pride for following up on her hunch with empty flirtation. She isn’t so bad at detective work after all. When Duluth speaks again, his voice is low and serious.
“I ain’t supposed to talk shop to outsiders.”