I didn’t give myself a chance to change my mind. The craving was rapidly getting worse, as it always did a few days after my last hit. My whole body itched for another taste of amphetamine bliss. I knew, given time, my resolve would weaken.

So, before Jandra and I set out on our morning patrol, I took the bottle of stay-awake out of the cruiser’s glove compartment and emptied it into the drainage grate behind the motor pool. I fished the methoxetamine sachets from behind the sun visor and tossed those in for good measure.

Jandra stood beside me and watched me do it. “Good fucking riddance,” she said, as the last sachet tumbled into the dark water. We couldn’t risk a kiss so close to the precinct. She patted my hand instead, stroking my fingers with quiet affection.

“It’ll be tough for the first few days,” I warned her. Maybe for a lot longer. “You’ll want it, a lot.”

“I’ll manage.” She still looked bone-tired, but her voice was level. She sounded calmer than I felt.

We set off into streets that were uncomfortably empty. The coffee shops on Cottar Street, normally in fierce competion for customers, were all shuttered. The emporia parking lots were almost deserted. Even the municipal buses seemed to be running reduced routes. Seventh Watch was in no mood to socialise today.

“Hardly seems any point patrolling,” Jandra remarked, after we’d driven the whole length of Dauman Avenue without seeing a single pedestrian. “Nobody’s going to try and start trouble with half the Interior Ministry bearing down on us.”

“I don’t know about you, but I prefer this to hanging around the precinct, waiting for the next bit of bad news.” That was an understatement. It was damn good to be in the cruiser with Jandra again, and on speaking terms. It was the closest to normal I’d felt in weeks. I could even kid myself that we could make our new resolution stick.

“Yeah. The bullpen feels like a prison yard these days. And I don’t like the way some of the others have been looking at me,” Jandra said. She twisted the radio dials, flicking through the precinct bands. “I think Erkasri knows about us.”

“Maybe,” I conceded. “He’s the eyes and ears, after all. I don’t think he’d report us.” At least, I hoped not. In any case, it was just one more problem to add to my ever-growing stack, and far from the most pressing. If there was an upside to Indeleon’s accelerating downward spiral, it was that Orczin was unlikely to care about fraternisation right now.

We headed into Saldein Heights, a newish residential estate on the line where Seventh Watch brushed against Fifth. I saw nervous faces watching us from the cramped balconies of the tenement blocks, peeking out from behind drawn curtains. Our solitary cruiser must have looked like one more bad omen on a day filled with them.

Halfway through the estate, a C-81 thundered overhead, its belly laden with car-sized cargo pods. Its tooth-rattling noise made us both wince before it vanished behind a high-rise to the south.

“Why’d they have to fly those fucking things so low?” Jandra exclaimed. “They’re just asking for a crash.”

“Intimidation. Making sure everyone in Indeleon knows who’s in charge.”

“As if we could ever forget.” She reached towards the glove compartment, stopping in mid-motion as she realised what she was doing. “Oh, Almighty. Look at me. It’s so automatic.”

I offered her a sympathetic look. “Give yourself time. We only threw it out an hour ago.”

“The first hour of the rest of our lives.” Jandra let out a disconsolate sigh, settling herself back in her seat. “You didn’t really get a call from Fort Amrinn the other day, did you? You always told me the nursing home staff were cheap bastards. They wouldn’t have bothered to phone you halfway across the kingdom unless your mum was on her deathbed.”

There was little point denying it. “I knew that one wouldn’t fool you. I had something I needed to do. Something that couldn’t wait.”

She looked at me with a sort of defiant expectation. “Do I get to hear what it was? Or is it something else you think I need protecting from?”

I hesitated briefly before answering. I was sick of lying to her, but I didn’t want her drawn into the same foolish mess I was already mired in. “I received a message. A potential lead on the…thing we saw in the cathedral ruins. I went to follow it up.”

“Evaris Morre, ace detective.” A tired little smile quirked the corners of Jandra’s mouth. “What did you learn?”

“Nothing useful,” I told her. A half-truth was better than an outright lie. “Waste of an afternoon. All I got was a lecture from Orczin, telling me to drop the whole thing.”

“That machine’s what killed the Inspectorate songbird, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Orczin knows it. The black-bands know it, too. It must be why they’ve called in so much backup. Lokh thinks they’re going to send Interior Ministry troops into the ruins, to wipe out the rubble gangs once for all.”

Jandra’s expression hardened. “They’ll make us go in with them. Us and Ninth Watch. Won’t they?”

I thought of how she’d looked after she shot the ganger; that hollow, haunted stare. Maybe her second kill would be easier. Maybe it wouldn’t. “Yes. Koniel was at the precinct earlier, talking to Orczin. Probably planning out the raid. Aikerl was there, too.”

“Aikerl? That fucking snake we met in South Welynte?” Jandra shook her head in disbelief. “I swear before the Almighty, Evaris, you and me are cursed. This job is a fucking penance.”

“The Faith should have us declared honourary martyrs,” I said, watching the black silhouette of another tiltrotor transit the cloudy sky ahead. “I’ve always wanted a cathedral named after me.”

*

The north edge of Saldein Heights was demarcated by a metropolitan rail line, part of the rebuilt Velmiris Basin Railway. It followed the north-south route of the original line, which had been mostly destroyed by the atomic. A brick viaduct raised the tracks above the steep hillside that gave the estate its name. It was in the shadow of the viaduct that Jandra spotted movement.

“Evaris, look,” she said, pausing with an unlit cigarette in her fingers. “By the signal box. Are those kids?”

I slowed down, squinting through the driver-side window. Small figures were gathered under one of the tall brick arches, where a graffiti-slashed electrical cabinet was set into the brickwork. A small gaggle of children, all looking to be in their early teens or thereabouts. As I drove closer, I saw that some of them were scrabbling in the dusty soil, digging away with their bare hands and scraps of waste wood.

“Funny place to dig themselves a fort,” I mused.

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“Can’t be much else to do on an estate like this,” Jandra said. “They’re still too young to brew moonshine.”

“One would hope.” I saw a pale gleam amid the disturbed earth and frowned. “They’ve got something there. Something metal.”

“A toy?”

One of the kids, a skinny girl in a grubby checked dress, stood leaning against the signal box, facing the road. She spotted our approaching cruiser and called out to her crouching friends. As one, they stood up from their work and turned to face us.

“A toy they don’t want the City Watch to see,” I said grimly. “We’ve got probable cause. Let’s take a look.”

Jandra read my expression with alarm. “You don’t think…Evaris, are you saying there’s kids caught up in all this?”

“We’re about to find out.”

I parked the Continental on the curb near the viaduct. Jandra and I got out, keeping our weapons holstered, though I peered up nervously at the tenement blocks overlooking the railway. I was sure that we were being watched. Maybe even through the scope of a rifle.

Our approach drew little reaction from the children. I was used to juvenile delinquents scarpering for the alleys or leaping over fences at the sight of a watchcar. These ones stood their ground. I saw contempt in their faces, hostile eyes and sneering mouths, but little sign of fear.

“What have you got there?” I asked them, pointing at the metallic glint in the soil. “Buried treasure?”

They gave no answer. A proper little conspiracy of silence, I thought.

“Didn’t your parents teach you to answer a watchman when he asks you a question?” Jandra snapped. I could tell she was beginning to fray at the edges. Tiredness, fear and stay-awake cravings weren’t a recipe for a glowing good mood.

“You.” I addressed the tallest and oldest-looking of them, a boy in a threadbare sweater with faded pox scars on his cheeks. “What’s your name?”

“King Charos the Second,” he replied. His friends sniggered.

“And I’m Queen Milja,” said the girl in the checked dress.

“Please to meet you, Your Grace,” I said, affecting bored irony to cover up my real unease. “Care to tell me what you and your royal friends have been digging up?”

She smirked. “Not until you bow to your queen, watchman.”

Jandra gripped the handle of her baton, drawing it halfway from its holster. “Any more fucking lip, and you’ll get the kind of smacking your parents apparently forgot to give you.”

“Brave, brave watchman, threatening a little girl,” the girl taunted her. “Go on then. Do it.”

“No need for that,” I cut in hastily. “Just tell us what you’re digging up.”

“Buried treasure,” said another of the children, a gaunt boy with unkempt red hair. He smiled humourlessly, showing several missing teeth. “Like you said. We’re the dread pirates of the Bay of Ralka.”

I had no more patience for their stalling. I stepped closer, beckoning Jandra to follow, and looked into the shallow hole that they’d dug into the earth. Inside, coated by a thin scattering of loose soil, was a row of small metal cases with rounded-off edges, each around the size of a paperback book. Their design was odd, with no visible seams, hinges, locks or identifying markings. They could have been ammunition boxes, electronics modules, pressurised chemicals, anything. One thing was for sure – there was no way these things had ended up here by accident. This was a dead drop, hidden right under our noses.

“Contraband tech,” Jandra muttered. “So the bastards are smuggling it through Seventh Watch now.”

“Who told you to dig these things up?” I asked the children.

“A friend,” the boy with the pox scars replied simply.

A friend named Modvehl, I was willing to bet. Sending instructions across the city through proxies like Helina, expanding the tendrils of the network into the tenements, recruiting couriers and smugglers that nobody would suspect. “Your friend doesn’t seem to mind putting you all in a lot of danger. Do you have any idea what’s inside these cases?”

The girl spread her hands in mock magnanimity. “Why don’t you open one up and find out?”

“You do it. Set off your own booby-trap,” Jandra retorted.

The girl laughed. “They aren’t bombs. They’re much more interesting than that.”

I knelt at the edge of the excavated hole, trusting Jandra to watch my back, and lifted one of the cases out. It was heavier than it looked. I shook and tilted it in my hands, hearing no rattling or vibration, and feeling nothing shift inside it. “Where were you going to take these? Ninth Watch? The river?”

“All around the city,” the red-haired boy answered. “We’ve got a lot of friends. We like to bring them presents.”

“You’re smuggling contraband, you little idiots,” Jandra snarled. “This isn’t a fucking game. Haven’t you seen the tiltrotors? The Interior Ministry just flew five thousand troops into the city. They’re hunting for your friends right now. They’ll string them all up, one by one.”

The pox-scarred boy shrugged. “They’ll try.”

“If the Inspectorate catches you,” I told them all, “your age won’t be a defence. Do you understand? They will haul you in, and you may never come back. Their black cells are no place for children. No place for anyone.”

“We know,” the girl said. Her expression was wry, almost amused.

“Not everyone’s as scared of them as you are, watchman,” the red-haired boy said flatly. “They can’t catch all of us.”

“Are you sure about that?” Jandra interjected. She glanced between them in angry incredulity. “Almighty’s sake, are you going to bet your lives on it? How do you think your mothers will feel, when you all vanish into the cells?”

The red-haired boy gave her a hard, level stare. I’d seldom seen a kid with such cold eyes, even during the war. “My mother’s already in a cell,” he replied. “Three years now. She’s probably dead already.”

“They shot my Da,” the girl said simply. She might have been talking about the weather, for all the emotion in her voice. “They said he was a syndicalist. They wouldn’t even tell Ma where they buried him.”

“They took my sister,” the pox-scarred boy said, toying with the loose strands of his sweater sleeve. “They caught her putting up posters in the docklands. When they brought her back, she was blind in one eye. I know they did other stuff to her in the cells, too. She doesn’t talk any more. Hasn’t said a word in months.”

We stared at them, these hard-eyed, sunken-cheeked children. Jandra opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.

The girl’s flinty gaze bored into us. “You’re afraid of them because of what they might do to you. But it’s already happened to us. So there’s nothing left to be scared of.” She nodded at the metal cases. “And now we know how to hurt them back.”

“There’s more of us on the estate. A lot more,” the pox-scarred boy said. There was a quiet pride in his voice. This was a boy who had purpose, for the first time in his beaten-down life. “And more all over the city. There’s hiding places the black-bands will never find. We know how to fool their drones. They think they see everything, but really, they see nothing.”

“Take us in, if you want,” the red-haired boy dared us. “It won’t make any difference, when the stars come down.”

Modvehl’s sold you the same lie he sold Helina, I wanted to yell. You’re being used. Expendable meat for his fantasy of a revolution. You’ll die for nothing.

But I could see from their faces it would be a wasted warning. When your life is already meaningless, death holds little terror. The world was full of children like them. I’d been one myself.

“We’re confiscating this stuff,” I told them firmly. I wasn’t going to hand them over to the Inspectorate. That didn’t mean I was going to leave contraband technology in their hands. “We’ll tell our precinct that we found it hidden under the viaduct. The Interior Ministry will probably send men to search this place. If you’re still here when they arrive…it’s your choice.”

“Do you want us to thank you?” the pox-scarred boy said, with an adolescent sneer.

“No. I don’t want your deaths on my conscience, that’s all.” I gestured at the sealed cases. “Your friends will have to do without these.”

“They won’t care. There’s a lot more where those came from,” the red-haired boy replied.

The children didn’t make any attempt to stop us from loading the soil-flecked cases into the cruiser. All the same, I made sure not to let them out of my sight. In Zegir-Kuya and Tletora, the insurgents were notorious for using child snipers and suicide bombers. I didn’t put it past Modvehl to be similarly ruthless.

If one of them pulled a gun on us, I wondered, could I bring myself to shoot them? Could Jandra?

“If Orczin ever finds out we let them go, he’ll flay us alive,” Jandra said to me as we stashed the cases in the cruiser’s trunk.

“You think we should arrest them, then?”

“Almighty, no.” She glanced nervously at the children, who stood around the vandalised signal box, watching us in contemptuous silence. “Let’s just get these things back to the precinct and make them someone else’s problem. Maybe the Icebox boys can figure out what’s inside.”

I shook my head, slamming the trunk closed. “They’ll get sent straight to Queen Haara Square. Contraband tech is Inspectorate business.”

“Even better, then.” Jandra waved her arm at the children in dismissal, raising her voice in exasperation. “Get out of here, will you? Don’t make us change our minds!”

Slowly, the kids wandered deeper into the worn arch beneath the viaduct, leaving behind the hole in the ground where they’d unearthed the cases. They became dim silhouettes against the overgrown slope on the other side of the railway. Off to run another errand for their cause, a few anonymous links in the great chain of events.

The girl in the checked dress paused and turned back to face us. She was too far away to make our her expression, but I thought I could feel her unnerving stare on us.

“Watchmen,” she called out. Her thin, piping voice echoed through the brick tunnel of the archway. “You don’t have to be like them. Remember that.”