The organisation had no name, at least as far as Helina knew. They had first reached out to her almost a year ago. She was sure they’d been recruiting on campus for a long time before that. “They watch people in the student bars, at the protests and marches,” she told me. “They look for people who align with their beliefs. People who don’t stand out in a crowd, who aren’t known to the City Watch. I guess I fit their bill.”

“You shared their beliefs, then? Are they syndicalists?”

She shook her head. “No. I know they’ve got people in the syndicalist cadres, though. Spies and agitators everywhere. I don’t know how many.” She took a deep, uneasy breath. “Listen, I didn’t go looking for this. I never did anything more than put up flyers and go on a few marches before they came to me. They recruited me in a fucking book club, for the Almighty’s sake.”

“But you were a dissident, weren’t you? They wouldn’t have chosen you otherwise.”

A bright anger surfaced in Helina’s eyes, just for a moment. “Everyone’s a fucking dissident to you people. Anyone who asks questions, who asks why we have to live like this, always afraid, always at war…King Charos wants us all to believe his way is the only way. Well, it isn’t. He’s forced it on us, because he fears any alternative. And more and more people are realising that.”

I said nothing, waiting for her to continue. I was thinking of the look I’d seen on so many faces lately. The anger, the fear, the silent anticipation. The sense of a powder keg awaiting a spark.

“I wanted things to change. I still do. I’m not afraid to tell you that,” she went on. She kept her voice low, but there was real vehemence in it. “I want to have a vote that means something, instead of electing the same gutless sycophant to the Loyal Parliament every time. I want the Air Corps to stop raining incendiaries on Zegiri kids in the name of security. I want to look up at the sky without seeing it full of those fucking drones. I want to be able to-” Her lower lip trembled. “-to kiss a girl without wondering if I’ll end up in a work camp for it.”

“And these people told you they could get you all that?”

“They told me I could make a difference,” she replied. “And I believed them.”

They were always carefully vague about what they actually wanted to achieve. Freedom, they promised her; equality, an end to the Security Act and the occupation of Mar-Ilhande, the abolition of the black-bands. Lofty, impossible stuff, straight out of the wildest syndicalist and anti-monarchist manifestos. “I know it sounds crazy,” she admitted. “But, fuck, I wanted to believe. They told me that they had cells all over the kingdom. In the military, in provincial governments, everything. For the first time in my life, I felt I was part of something that had meaning.”

Little by little, she explained, they brought her into their organisation. After her initial recruitment, she rarely met any of their people in person. Instead, they passed coded notes and letters to her, instructing her to relay messages and deliver black-wrapped packages to drop points. She identified potential new recruits to them, kept tabs on the activity of Fourth Watch, and passed out innocuous-seeming flyers and pamphlets. She made connections for them in liberal circles outside the university, connections who went on to make more connections.

“There was no violence. Not at first,” she said. She’d lit a new cigarette by now, and was nervously smoking it down to a cinder, using a worn coffee mug as a makeshift ashtray. “I thought we were building a political movement. Something nationwide, bigger and subtler than the syndicalist cadres, too widespread for the black-bands to ever stamp out. I thought, when we had enough members, we could enact some kind of, I don’t know, bloodless coup.” She shook her head in chagrin. “Stupid. So fucking stupid. Like the king and all his jackboots would just give up without a fight.”

“Did they promise you there wouldn’t be blood? Or you just assumed it?” I asked. I examined her pale, bookish face, still rounded with puppy-fat. She hadn’t even been born when the war ended. Lucky for some.

“They never told me much. Everything was vague, always vague. I was supposed to trust their plan.” She tapped ash into the mug. Her eyes flicked constantly to the door, as if afraid someone – or something – might burst in on us. “Knowing nothing concrete meant I couldn’t rat them out. And, hell, it made me feel safer. I didn’t question it.”

“But something changed, didn’t it?” I was getting impatient here, and increasingly scared. She was describing an organisation that existed right under the nose of the City Watch, with tendrils spread wider and deeper than I could have imagined. An organisation that now seemed confident enough in itself to kill an Inspectorate agent in the middle of a public street. “You got dragged in deeper.”

She nodded, shifting her feet. “They started ramping things up a few months ago. Testing the waters. Seeing how much trouble they could stir up.” The increased syndicalist agitation in the industrial quarter had been partly their handiwork, she told me, as had a string of sabotages and acts of vandalism across the city. They built up connections among the rubble gangs, who hated the City Watch with a vengeance and made useful cat’s-paws.

“Anything you want smashed up or graffitied, the gangers will do it for the thrill,” Helina said. “If you can get them to stop fighting each other long enough, at least. I would ride the bus all the way to Blackwater Avenue to pass them instructions. Always felt so ridiculous doing it. But whatever the messages said, they did it. They never once refused.”

“I’ve seen their graffiti,” I told her. “It’s all over the city now. The stars are coming down.” It felt bizarre to say the words out loud, as if I was invoking some witch’s curse.

“I never understood that one,” she replied. “I thought it must be a code phrase. They gangers started picking it up as a slogan. I once asked Modvehl about it, and he batted me away. All in good time, he said.”

“Modvehl. Tell me about him. Is he the leader?”

“No. I don’t know if there even is a single leader. I think he’s some kind of regional coordinator.” Helina’s cigarette had burned almost down to her knuckles now. She kept on smoking it, only sporadically meeting my gaze. “I first met him on one of my Ninth Watch trips. I could tell right away he was no rubble ganger. Too educated, too well-spoken. Maybe even an aristo. I was thrilled he finally trusted me enough to meet me face-to-face. The gangers were wary of him, I could tell, but they obeyed him. And I did the same.”

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“Do you know where he is? Where he lives? Could you lead us to him?” I knew that would be Orczin’s first question for her. It might be the only thing that would convince him to take her in.

“No. I can’t, and even if I could, I wouldn’t.” Helina swallowed hard. “If he saw me leading watchmen to his door, he’d set the venator on me. He wouldn’t hesitate. I’m useful to him, not special.”

Venator. A name for the thing that had been haunting my imagination for so long. “You mean the silver machine?”

“You’ve seen it, then.” She didn’t sound surprised.

“Only for a second,” I told her. It was almost a relief to finally admit it. “Tall and thin and very fast. Contraband technology, isn’t it?”

“It’s more than that. So much more.” Helina let the end of her cigarette fall into the mug. “Don’t ask me how it works, or where it’s from. I only know Modvehl controls it. He first showed it to me one night in the cathedral ruins. I think he keeps it there, buried somewhere deep, until he needs it.”

“Did you know he was using it to kill?”

“I didn’t ask, and he wouldn’t have told me. It was just a new type of drone, he said. A mechanical spy. But…I did start to worry.” She laughed bitterly. “Started to realise we weren’t just passing notes here. Those arms – like knives, so sharp the air would sing every time it moved. Does a spy need something like that? I thought he must have stolen it from an army base.”

“My national service was a long time ago, but I’m pretty sure the army doesn’t have anything like that.” And even if it did, how would a bleeding-edge new drone end up with a dissident cell in the ruins of Indeleon?

“I still knew almost nothing about him. I took so much on faith,” Helina said. Her voice was laced with a fearful self-disgust. “One night, he introduced me to some new people. Out-of-towners from the shires. He told me he had new instructions from higher up the chain, and that it was time to start a new phase of operations. To apply more pressure.”

I remembered the raids at Itan Lake. The Inspectorate might have thought they’d brought down a whole dissident network out there, when really they’d only killed one cell out of many. “Well, congratulations. We’ve definitely been feeling the pressure. I’ve never seen the city on edge like this. The Interior Ministry is breathing down our necks, ramping up our arrest quotas. As if we weren’t stretched thin enough already.”

“Oh, so sorry to have made things hard for you,” Helina replied acidly. “You’re not the one who’ll end up in the black cells for it.”

“No. You are,” I retorted. “So help me keep you out of them. Tell me what Modvehl’s planning.”

“I don’t know. Truly, I don’t. Like I said, he isn’t even the top of the pyramid.”

“You said you killed the informant for him,” I pressed. “Is he going to kill more people?”

“Most definitely. Probably including me.” Helina looked down miserably at the floor. “He told us the Inspectorate were wising up to us. They were paying more attention to Ninth Watch, rounding up rubble gangers for interrogation. Some of the gangs were starting to get cold feet about working with us. He said we needed to send a message.”

She’d been tasked with tailing known Inspectorate informants, she explained. She was good at it – small, quiet, unobstrusive. She noted their movements and routines, passing the information to Modvehl’s team. Even then, she believed the goal was merely intimidation, perhaps blackmail. They would simply scare the songbirds away.

Then she and one of the out-of-towners, a young man named Artheym, were sent to Martyr Ostande Street. They hid out in a sympathiser’s apartment and kept watch for one of the targeted informants. They were told to send a specific coded signal when the man was spotted. They waited by that upper-floor window for hours, as night fell and the streets emptied.

“It was just us and a radio. No gun. I never imagined we were going to kill him. Honestly, I was excited that we were going to scare him,” Helina admitted. “I wanted to put some fear in one of the bastards who’ve been spying on us all our lives.”

I certainly didn’t begrudge her that, though I didn’t tell her so. I glanced out the window, through the leaves of the catalpa, looking for any hint of suspicious movement in the windows on the opposite side of the quad. “So, you saw him. You sent the signal. And then…?”

Helina sat down shakily on her bed. She glanced again at the closed door. A long moment passed before she spoke again. “It was so fast. There and gone in a flash. Can’t have been more than a few seconds after we signalled. It must have been waiting nearby. One second he was there, walking along the pavement in front of that diner, and then…He Above, the blood. So much blood. It cut him like paper. He didn’t even scream, it was so quick.”

My jaw tightened. I could feel the chain of events locking into place around me, vast and merciless. I was caught up in something I no longer had any hope of escaping. “So you realised Modvehl was a killer. And that his venator is a murder weapon.”

Ashen-faced, Helina nodded. “It obeys him. How, or why, I don’t know. But he said kill, and it killed. He just let me pull the trigger.” She wrung her hands together helplessly. “I don’t know how many others he’s already killed. I know that informant wasn’t the first. After we left Martyr Ostande Street, Artheym said something about how he was getting used to it.”

“The Inspectorate wouldn’t exactly broadcast the deaths of their songbirds. He might have been quietly picking them off for weeks, using the intel you fed him. No wonder the Interior Ministry is tightening the screws.” I didn’t try to keep the accusatory edge out of my voice. This sheltered little student needed to realise just how deeply she’d dug her own grave, since she was now digging me in with her.

She didn’t dispute it. Her lips trembled, and I thought I saw tears glimmer at the corners of her eyes, before she blinked them away. “I thought I was helping. I thought we were doing something good. Something right.”

“You wouldn’t be the first kid who got suckered into some lunatic’s cause because you thought you were doing the right thing.” Nilen pulled that trick with a whole generation, I added silently. “You can help us put an end to it. I’ll get back to the precinct and speak to my chief-of-watch. Once he gives the all-clear, you can make your way to Seventh Watch. You already know where to find us. We’ll arrange some sort of protective custody for you, off the books. With luck, Modvehl will think you were simply arrested, fair and square.”

Helina’s expression grew surprised, then desperate and wheedling. “Can’t you bring me in now? I don’t want to stay here any longer. Someone might inform on me. The…the Inspectorate might come.”

“No. Not until I call.” And that day may never come. “I’ve been here too long already. You musn’t draw any attention to yourself. Keep working with Modvehl in the meantime. We’ll need names, addresses, everything you know about the organisation.”

“I…I don’t want to be a snitch,” she protested feebly.

“Do you really think you have a choice any more?” I snapped. Almighty, educated truly wasn’t the same thing as intelligent. “You want City Watch protection. I’m offering it to you. I’m putting myself at risk even being here, so don’t fuck me around.” I paused, trying to cool my temper. “Now, listen, I need a safe way of contacting you. I can have a telegram sent to the university mailroom, but we need a code that won’t catch the eye of the Inspectorate censors. Or your friends, if they’re monitoring you.”

Helina seemed about to argue. She opened her mouth, then hesitated. She wouldn’t get another lifeline like this, and she knew it. “I get telegrams from a book subscription service,” she said, in a voice dull and meek with defeat. “Special offers on new Ralkovak authors. You could code it as one those.”

I nodded dismissively. I just wanted to be out of her room, off the campus, and as far away as I could be. My own idiotic curiosity had brought me here, and now I was paying the price for it. I might yet pay with my life.

“Keep an eye out for my message,” I told her. “If it doesn’t come in the next couple days, you’ll have to assume you’re on your own. I’ll do what I can for you. That’s all I can promise.”

She gave me a broken, entreating look. I could see she was fighting back tears. I was decidedly short on sympathy, but that look still stung. She really was just a kid, after all.

I left her there without a goodbye, among all her textbooks and foreign novels, her posters promising bloodless liberty.