Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.

– Inscription on the cenotaph of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

Jandra and I were playing cards in the precinct messroom when the chief-of-watch knocked on the door.

The damn thing was, I had a good hand. A great hand, even. The kind that comes along once in a hundred games, if you’re lucky. A full brace of crowns, a half of swords, and both of the belltowers. I was about to sweep Jandra off the table. I felt like a professional sharp playing the high tables in Cosserey. I hid it well, but I couldn’t keep the beginnings of a smirk off my face.

That unborn smirk was smothered the moment Orczin rapped on the messroom door. His fuzzed outline hovered behind the frosted glass. “Morre? Jandra?”

We exchanged a dark look. “Yes, sir?” Jandra called, placing her cards carefully facedown. I crushed the smouldering end of my Stevedore Blue into the almost-full ashtray.

The door swung open. The chief-of-watch was a heavyset man, not quite bald, craggy and slope-shouldered in the backlight of the corridor flourescents. His eyes flicked between us, took in the cards, the cigarettes, the bottle of rye on the scratched steel tabletop. Drinking on duty was a level-three reprimand. Everybody still did it, Orczin included.

“You both fit to drive?” he asked.

I thought about that. “Depends how far, sir.”

“Crosstown. To Blackwater Avenue,”

Jandra’s frown mirrored my own. Blackwater was Ninth Watch’s beat. Our patrols overlapped sometimes, on the edge of Estyr Park and the industrial quarter, but never that far west. “Why?” I asked.

“Ninth is calling for backup. They’re shorthanded tonight, and Koniel’s been pestering half the precincts in town. I told him I can spare a watchcar. Shall I tell him you’re too drunk?”

I formed a retort, then thought better of it and shook my head. “Only had the one glass apiece, sir,” I lied. I knew Orczin wouldn’t be fooled, and also that he wouldn’t care. “We’ll be fine.”

“Good. Don’t dawdle. Make a good accounting of yourselves, and there might be a commendation in it for you.”

I’d heard that one before. I think Orczin just said it out of habit. Almighty knew when was the last time he actually handed out a commendation.

“What do they need help with?” Jandra asked bluntly. Then she added a hasty “Sir,” when she saw Orczin’s displeased expression.

“Rubble gangs fighting near the cathedral. Ninth put a few of them in cuffs, but the ones that got away are still skulking around. The buggers are getting more brazen. We need to give them a show of force.”

I suppressed a grimace. “How much force are we talking?”

Orczin shrugged. “Shake them down, crack some heads together. Confiscate anything dodgy. No shooting, unless someone shoots first. The usual treatment.”

“Yes, sir.” I got up out of my chair, and Jandra followed suit a second later. My head throbbed a little from the whiskey.

“Radio in when you get there. With luck, you can be back by midnight.” Orczin turned on his heel without another word. The fluorescents gleamed off the dome of his balding head.

Jandra and I exchanged another look. This time, we were trying to see whose eyes were more unfocused. I’d had more of the bottle, but she was smaller, and – no question about it – tipsier.

“I’ll drive,” I said, with resignation.

I left my Almighty-blessed hand spread on the table. I wondered when I might see its like again.

*

We both popped a capsule of stay-awake on our way to the motor pool. Like drinking on duty, it was strictly forbidden, and nearly everybody did it. Nothing like a little amphetamine buzz to clear the head and sharpen the senses. Everything immediately felt brighter, more in focus. Jandra started to tap her fingers on her thighs in an idle little rhythm as she walked. She always did that on stay-awake.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Koniel’s boys can’t handle a couple of rubble gangers?” she said, after we’d fetched our pistols and batons from the locker room. She didn’t sound smug, exactly, but I had the sense she was feeling somewhat vindicated.

“Apparently not.”

“And just when I was about to take home my winnings.”

“No, you weren’t,” I told her flatly. We’d only been playing for cigarettes. My real reward would have been the look on her face when she saw those cards.

She smiled, or rather, bared her teeth at me. The drug always gave her a slightly feral air. “There you go again. Always overconfident.”

“You call it overconfidence, I call it clarity.”

The Seventh Watch precinct wasn’t so bad, as doghouses go. It had been a goods depot before the war, so it was fairly spacious, and it was a long way from the hypocentre, so most of the original brickwork had survived intact. The messroom opened into a big open-plan bullpen of sorts, full of office cubicles with wood-and-glass partitions beneath a high sawtoothed ceiling. Louvered skylights let in plenty of sunshine on clear days. The only real problem was that it got ball-shrinkingly cold in midwinter. But we were well into the Month of Blooms now, and it was a mild night.

The precinct was almost deserted. Our footsteps echoed on the bullpen’s scuffed linoleum floor. I could hear the faint crackle of the radio in the dispatch office, where Erkasri was working the late shift, no doubt with some stay-awake stirred into his tea. And another radio somewhere among the cubicles, a portable one playing tinny music that rose and fell in squawks of static. That was probably Cherdane, our newest freshman, who loved that cacophonous electric-guitar shit the kids were all into these days. I knew there were a couple of technicians on duty in the forensics room, which we all called the Icebox. Other than that, it was just me, Jandra and Orczin, rattling around like dice in a gambler’s can.

We’d never needed more than a skeleton crew at this time of night. Seventh Watch was one of Indeleon’s quieter districts. Not like Ninth, who were stretched thin across all the worst bits of the west side. I sometimes felt sorry for them, but not tonight. They didn’t need to make me share in their rotten luck.

The motor pool was in its own fenced-off lot to the rear of the main precinct building. The concrete was cast a moonlike grey-white by the exterior floodlights. There was a light rain, halfway between mist and fine drizzle, hanging in the air and dappling the bodywork of the waiting cruisers. When I stepped through the doorway into the open, I felt tiny cool droplets tingling on my face.

Seventh Watch hadn’t gotten new motors in all the time I’d worked there. Our cruisers were ‘94 Tylamran Continentals, coming up on fifteen years old. Iconic, some would say – the archetypal Kauln watchcar. Every kid on Aede could recognise those smooth, swept-back lines, that convex chrome grille, those outsized headlamps like bulbous eyes. If you saw a hoodlum running from the law on TV, odds are it was a ‘94 Continental chasing him.

Mine was parked on the far edge of the lot, so we had to stroll through the rain with our service caps on. Jandra kept drumming her fingers on her thighs; I almost expected her to start humming a tune. From the main road beyond the tall razorwire fence came the faint whoosh of unseen traffic. The high-rise tenement blocks arrayed to the north were like great square tombstones, with a few lighted windows glimmering out of their darkened upper floors.

After one last, almost unconscious pat-check of my inventory – gun, badge, baton, precinct keys – I unlocked the Continental and swung myself inside. The interior smelled of leatherette and days-old cigarette smoke. The upholstery was dotted with the tiny shadows of the raindrops beading on the windows, illuminated by the floodlights across the lot.

I kept the car tidy, not like some of the younger watchmen. There were no discarded food wrappers or crumpled civvie clothes in the footwell. Everything was exactly where I meant it to be, from the evidence forms in the glove compartment to the little sachets of methoxetamine tucked into the sun visor. Jandra knew not to leave anything out of place when she drove it. She and I had been partnered for three years now, and I liked to think my better habits were rubbing off on her. She’d certainly picked up enough of my bad ones.

“Let’s take the R-36,” she told me airily as she got into the passenger seat beside me. “It’s quieter than the R-201 this time of night. It’ll be faster westbound.”

“What are you, a traffic warden?” It was the stay-awake making her bossy, I knew. Like the booze, she had a lower tolerance for the stuff. “I know the way to Ninth’s beat, Jand. I’ve been a watchman in this city for nine years.”

“I’m just saying. Quicker there, quicker back. We can finish our game.”

We wouldn’t, though. We both knew it. Tomorrow was my rest-day, and I didn’t plan to stay at the precinct after the midnight shift clocked on. I lived in East Rakadev, way out in the suburbs. It was a long drive home, and not one I wanted to do while crashing down from an amphetamine high.

I keyed the ignition and steered us out of the motor pool. Old though it was, the Continental’s engine still had a nice purr to it. The ridges of the steering wheel in my hands felt as comfortable and familiar as a well-worn glove. I wasn’t the sort to give my cruiser a nickname, Thunderbolt or Old Reliable or some other cowboy shit. It was my car, it did its job well, and that was good enough for me.

Leaving the precinct behind, I slotted us into the sparse late-night traffic heading west. The road surface gleamed like black glass under the flickering streetlamps. The rain was now getting slowly but perceptibly heavier, pattering steadily on the windshield. I really wasn’t looking forward to rounding up rubble gangers in this weather. Just as well I kept a couple of oilskins in the trunk.

“Koniel better be buying our drinks,” I muttered to Jandra.

“No chance. Ninth Watch are all tight-arses,” she replied. Tap, tap, tap went her hands on her thighs. “Maybe we can lean on Orczin for a round, when he gives us our commendations.”

Again, that feral stay-awake smile. Jandra was a pretty woman, in a hard, angular, crew-cut sort of way. But that smile did her no favours.

Looking back, it’s funny to think that when we left the precinct, she had never yet killed a person. I wonder if she would have gotten into the cruiser if she’d known. Her first kill lay less than an hour into the future, a possibility waiting to become a certainty, hidden trajectories converging in the rainy dark. Us watchmen call it the chain of events. The road that has a million beginnings, but only one end.

By dawn, my Jandra would be a murderer, just like me.