I drove us west through the night rain, following the wide and almost empty boulevards along the snaking bank of the Velmiris. I went fast, siren off but pedal almost to the floor, cutting around the occasional slow-moving civilian. I liked the weighty sound of the Continental’s throttle opening up. I rarely had a chance to put the car through its paces on patrol.
Jandra fiddled around with the radio, her fingers spiderish and restless from the drug. She cycled through a couple of those awful screech-guitar stations, a state channel playing classical music interspersed with motivational prayers, and some comedian with a smoker’s cough running through his rather pedestrian routine. Every now and then, she would dutifully tune into the watch bands, and we’d listen to a few minutes of chatter and operator checks from the other precincts. There was nothing from Ninth Watch, which surprised me.
We crossed the river at the King Ethras Bridge. There was an Inspectorate checkpoint midway along, a recent addition that was playing merry hell with the daytime traffic. Like the precinct, it was barely staffed at this time of night. The acne-faced officer lounging in the inspection booth waved us through after an uninterested glance at our badges. Watchmen and black-bands were never the closest of friends, but we normally kept out of each other’s business, and that suited both parties just fine.
They had a drone circling high over the checkpoint, its rotors whickering and its searchlight illuminating bright needles of falling rain. The Inspectorate got to play with all the newest toys, of course. Only a handful of watch precincts were even allowed to rent flight hours on those drones, let alone have one of their own. I had no idea what the odd little machine was looking for on a quiet night like this. Contraband runners on the river, perhaps. Maybe it was simply, as Orczin liked to say, a show of force.
“Those gangers picked a great night for a prizefight,” Jandra said, as we left the Velmiris in the rear-view. The rain was really coming down now, rattling rather than pattering on the windows, and forming swirls of spray in our wake. “They’ll be grateful to be dragged in out of this weather.”
I overtook a heavy transhauler on the west bank, a little faster and closer than I should have. There was a brief blare of annoyed horn, before the driver realised we were watchmen, and wisely stopped hooting for his own good. “If we’re lucky, they’ve all scarpered for the night. Found somewhere that still has a roof to hide under.”
“We’re never that lucky,” she groused. “Koniel will have us hunting through the rain. Probably while his boys sit in their nice warm cruiser sharing a bottle of Javohn’s Best.”
“You’re the one who said we should hurry to them,” I reminded her.
“You’re the one driving so fast.”
Western Indeleon was an ugly place at night. Most of it was scarcely prettier by day. Tenement blocks, slab-fronted and massive, loomed over the shuttered shopfronts and rain-puddled pavements. Huge illuminated hoardings of the king’s serenely expressionless face overlooked the major junctions, adding some brash light and colour but very little cheer. Occasionally, we passed a pre-war building amid all the stained concrete – miraculously intact or heavily rebuilt, it was hard to tell. The streets were all but deserted, given the hour and the weather, though our headlights gleamed off a couple of rainjacketed figures trudging outside the locked gates of Estyr Park. The quiet had an uneasy quality to it, like the tosses and turns of a troubled sleeper.
The on-ramp near the old General Hospital took us up onto the R-36, an elevated carriageway that curved between the mouldering high-rises and disused factory halls on the outer edge of Ninth Watch. Jandra’s instincts had been correct – there was almost no traffic up there. Our cruiser sliced a fast path through the slanting rain, spray scything out from the wheels in an expansive fan. The lampposts whipping past on either side craned over us like spindly gallows. Beyond their glow, the city seemed utterly dark.
As we raced towards Ninth, Jandra started giving me a look. It was a sly look, sharpened into something almost defiant by the stay-awake coursing through her bloodstream. A smile that was very familiar to me; sometimes exciting, sometimes unsettling. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it tonight.
“We’re making good time,” she drawled. “Do you wanna pull over, somewhere?”
I grinned at her in bemusement. “Now? Really?”
“I could do with some cheering up, if we’re gonna be mucking around in the rain all night.” She put her hand on my leg, lightly enough that it almost seem innocent. Her fingers began to drum out a little nonsense rhythm on my thigh.
“We’re on duty, Jand.”
“We could lose five minutes. That’s all you usually need,” she teased.
I looked ahead at the rain-lashed carriageway, trying not to make eye contact. Jandra could be very convincing when she wanted to be. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why not? There’s plenty of quiet alleys in Ninth. Nobody’ll be looking out their windows this late at night.” She squeezed my thigh, more insistently this time. “What’s the matter? Have you got whiskey dick?”
I actually did, a little. More from the stay-awake than the whiskey, though. The drug was a two-faced friend. It made you randy, while taking away your ability. “Not gonna be firing on all cylinders right now,” I admitted.
Her smile turned wicked. “Don’t worry. I can work with it.”
That was when the radio crackled – the Seventh Watch override band, cutting through the background chatter from the other precincts. Erkasri’s nasal voice filled the car, fuzzed with static. “Cruiser One-Three, this is dispatch. Confirm status.”
Jandra rolled her eyes with annoyance and mouthed a curse, but she unhooked the mic and answered with commendable calm. She didn’t even sound wired, which was quite an achievement on stay-awake. “Dispatch, One-Three here. We’re on the R-36, westbound. On our way to respond to Ninth’s request for assistance.”
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“Acknowledged, One-Three. Koniel’s been calling in, asking for your ETA.”
“Of course he has.” Jandra glanced at me, holding up the mic in my direction.
“Should be at Blackwater Avenue by eleventh hour,” I told Erkasri. I could see the lights of the off-ramp coming up in the rainy gloom, half a mile ahead. “Coming up to the Chantry Street exit.”
“Acknowledged. Report in once you’ve liaised with Ninth. Drive safe out there, One-Three. Weather’s getting rough.”
“Yeah, we’d noticed, dispatch,” Jandra replied archly. “One-Three, out.” She replaced the mic and gave a disconsolate sigh. “He always picks his moments, doesn’t he?”
“Let’s just get to Blackwater, and get it over with,” I said. “Quicker there, quicker back, like you said.” Secretly, I wasn’t too sorry we’d been interrupted. Even on stay-awake, I just wasn’t in the mood to rut in the cruiser in some miserable Ninth Watch sidestreet. And if we turned up to the scene all sweaty and rumple-clothed, Koniel’s men might notice. The last thing we needed was some nosy bastard making a fraternisation report to Orczin.
Jandra affected a slightly hurt pout. She kept her hand on my thigh a moment longer, as if giving me a last chance to change my mind. “Suit yourself, Evaris.”
*
Most of the roads in Ninth Watch still had their pre-war names. Some were named for flowers – Purslane Street, Foxglove Street, Celandine Avenue. There weren’t any flowers to be seen on them, though. All raw concrete from junction to junction, yawning potholes everywhere, and pitch black in places where the street lights were out. The Municipality was always damnably slow arranging repairs.
I knew this side of the city well enough to navigate. Jandra knew it better; she always had a knack for shortcuts. You wouldn’t find either of us here in our own time. The closer you got to the hypocentre, the more dilapidated the place got, and that was before you even started seeing actual ruins. The only thing Ninth really had going for it was that the rents were dirt-cheap. That was a double-edged sword in itself, since it meant all the drunks and drifters in Indeleon gravitated to it.
I wondered if we would see Remkou stumbling about in the rain, poor fallen sod that he was. I said as much to Jandra, who still seemed a little sulky that I hadn’t been up for a roadside fuck.
“I saw him on Locsen Row, a month back,” she replied. She squinted at the darkened alley mouths that passed us by. “I think it was him, anyway. I was driving to Fifth, and I saw him rooting through a dumpster, no word of a lie. Only using one hand for it, too. There was something wrong with his other hand. It was all, like...” She made a twisted claw with the fingers of one hand to illustrate.
I nodded. There’d been signs of that even before Remkou was kicked out of Seventh Watch. “That’ll be the nerve damage. Remkou used to love his dreamcane.” I’d tried that stuff myself, once or twice. It had scared me, being so utterly helpless in my own body, mute and paralytic, like a puppet with broken strings. Not like the comfortable simplicity of stay-awake, or the happy detachment of a methoxetamine trip.
“Well. The man knew how to party,” Jandra said. She started cycling through the radio stations again. Like everything else, the reception was poorer on this side of town.
I turned out of Viburnum Street – which I was sure did not boast a single viburnum – and onto the east end of Blackwater Avenue. Up ahead, through the grey curtain of falling rain, I could see the shell of the cathedral rising over the surrounding ruins.
I’d never visited Indeleon before the war. From the old photos and newsreels I’ve seen, it was a lot nicer back then. It was still industrial, with huge coking plants sprawled on the outskirts, but they made more of an effort to pretty the place up. They lined the boulevards with neat rows of overhanging flowerpots and elegant wrought-iron lampposts. The parks were full of spreading chestnut and linden trees, and in the summertime the river was thronged with pleasureboats in gaudy colours. The Cathedral of the Blessed Martyrs was one of the largest and finest in the kingdom, properly postcard-worthy. Its marble spires, capped in gold, were supposed to have been visible twenty miles away on a clear day.
Not as visible as the mushroom cloud was, though, I’ll bet.
The cathedral was less than a mile from the hypocentre, and it held up pretty well, all told. The blast toppled its spires and caved in its dome and scattered its fine carvings across half the city, but its foundations were laid deep and strong, and the gutted shell kept much of its shape. Twenty years of rain and wind had chipped away at it since then, but the outline of the great nave survived, windowless and hollow. Its soot-blackened immensity towered above the slumped remnants of buildings which hadn’t proved so resilient, a skeletal king presiding over a court of rubble.
Jandra murmured a quick prayer at the sight of it, a snippet from the Sacramental Texts I half-recognised. That wasn’t like her – she was more religious than me, but certainly no holy roller, unlike some of the others at the precinct. Perhaps it was just a reflex, accentuated by the drug, just like her earlier horniness.
Sudden light washed across the face of the cathedral, illuminating the crumbling windowframes and picking out the shattered ribs that once supported its grand vaulted ceiling. The harsh white beam swept back and forth in the rain, then moved on over the shattered rooftops beneath the cathedral’s south side. Long shadows leaped and danced across the cracked tarmac of the avenue.
“That’s an Inspectorate drone,” Jandra said, frowning. “Why are the black-bands here? This isn’t a fucking terror incident. It’s just some rubble gangers.”
“Maybe Koniel begged it off them, like he begged us off Orczin,” I replied. I was as surprised as she was. There had been no mention of Inspectorate involvement on the radio. No details of the situation at all, come to think of it, beyond what Orczin had told us back at the precinct.
The cathedral ruins always made me uncomfortable. Tonight, as they grew and grew ahead of us under the darting searchlight of the drone, I found they were genuinely making my skin crawl.
There were a handful of civilian cars straggling along Blackwater Avenue. I wove past them at speed, not bothering with the siren, towards the intermittent red flickers that I knew must be Ninth Watch’s strobes. I counted the lights of three watchcars clustered in front of the cathedral, and another couple deeper in the ruins to the southwest.
“They don’t look so shorthanded,” Jandra remarked.
“There’s a lot of ground to cover.” I finally eased off the accelerator, almost coasting the last stretch of Blackwater Avenue. The rain was still coming down with a vengeance, putting the Continental’s windshield wipers through their paces. “Do you want another cap of stay-awake?” I knew I did.
“Fuck, yes.” She laughed, sounding almost relieved, and clicked open the glove compartment to fish out the little bottle of capsules. She slipped one under her tongue, then, with a playful gentleness, fed one to me, while I kept both hands on the steering wheel. I gave her a smile of thanks. For all her flaws, she could be thoughtful, my Jandra.
We pulled up to where the Ninth Watch cruisers were parked, their strobes casting a fitful red glare on the shattered face of the cathedral. Despite the rain, I craned my neck to look up at the massive ruin as I got out of the car. It soared up into the moonless dark, the jagged remains of its spires scratching blindly at the sky. A piece of the old world, lodged in the fabric of the city like a rotten tooth. A reminder of the day the Almighty withheld His mercy.
It was hard to tear my eyes away.