You never forgot your first kill. You remembered the way the gun kicked in your hand and the boneless way they fell to the ground. You remembered the lingering smell of cordite. You remembered the fixed, disbelieving look on their face. You remembered their name.

Your second and third kills were easier. The moment of frozen shock passed more quickly, and your training kicked in, the frosty detachment they taught you in the academy. You started to believe the dry words you put in your report – self-defence and resisting arrest and tragic and unavoidable. The faces became blurs. The names drifted from your memory. You could get used to anything, given time, and a little chemical assistance.

This was Jandra’s first. I could tell immediately that it wasn’t going to be easy for her.

Her shot struck the ganger full in the back. Watch-issue pistols were chambered in ten-millimetre hollow-point. Those bullets opened up like blooming flowers inside the body, carving a wide bloody swathe through flesh and bone. One good hit to the torso was usually a guaranteed kill.

The man stopped in mid-stride, as if he’d suddenly changed his mind about running. He didn’t make a sound. Slowly, almost comically, he pitched forward, splashing face-first into a shallow puddle of rainwater. Our torch beams painted him a ghostly white as they followed him down.

“Oh,” Jandra said dully. “Oh. I…” She lowered her gun, the rain dripping off the sleeve of her oilskin. She stared at the fallen ganger with wide, bewildered eyes. The searchlight swept over her as the Inspectorate drone reoriented itself overhead, but she didn’t blink against the glare.

In our three years as partners, I had never seen such a look on her face. I had seen it on other people, though, during the war, and at particularly messy crime scenes. It was an expression fit for a medical textbook. Fig.1 – acute shellshock.

“Fuck, that was a good shot!” Petil enthused. He had a wide, oblivious grin on his pasty face as he picked his way over the rubble. “Perfect centre-of-mass. You got a hell of an eye, Jandra!”

I was tempted to punch the buck teeth right out of his mouth. I could see Movar was thinking along similar lines. It took a great deal of self-control to instead say: “Petil. Shut the fuck up.”

To his credit, the boy winced and duly shut his mouth.

“I was…” Jandra’s voice was a croak. All of her restless stay-awake energy seemed to have drained away, leaving a sudden bleak sobriety. “I was trying to aim low. For the leg. I didn’t mean to...” She trailed off, still staring at the crumpled body.

“It was dark, girl. He was running. It happens,” Movar said softly. “We told him to stop. He should have listened.”

If it hadn’t been for Petil – a tattletale, I was sure – I would have dared to put my arm around Jandra. Instead, I walked up to where the ganger lay, shining my torch nervously into the dark corners ahead, keeping my gun at the ready. “Cover me,” I called to the others over my shoulder. “I’m going to check for weapons. Petil, make yourself useful and call this in.”

Petil nodded, apparently keen to be a good little Royal Pioneer now, and fished out his radio. “Watch-sergeant, Petil here. We have, uh, male suspect down on Kolinu Road…yes, sir, down as in dead. Jandra from Seventh Watch got him.”

I approached the body with care, mindful of losing my footing in the wet and uneven rubble. I saw no sign of a dropped weapon among the strewn fragments of old bricks. The ganger lay motionless in the pooled rainwater. In the torchlight, the back of his jacket was darkly stained with spreading blood.

I’d seen plenty of corpses in my time as a watchman. Gunshot victims, stabbing victims, suicides, overdoses. Drunks who ended a night of revelry by drowning in the Velmiris. Teenage brawlers who hadn’t realised that a punch to the head can kill. Unlucky souls reduced to skinless smears on the tarmac by wayward cargo trucks. Men, women, children. All of them, by accident or design, at the end of their chain of events.

This one, facedown and rain-drenched, seemed no different. Until I got a little closer, and saw the water bubbling weakly around his sunken face. He gave a shudder, his limbs twitching, pale fingers scrabbling at nothing. He tried to raise his head from the puddle, but seemingly didn’t have the strength. It made for a truly pathetic sight.

“He’s still breathing!” I yelled. “Movar, come help me lift him!” I didn’t trust Petil to do anything right, and most of all, I didn’t want Jandra to see her handiwork up close. Amphetamine-frazzled though he was, Movar was experienced, with a good twenty years in the job. He had a few kills under his belt, just like me.

He rushed to my side, checking the corners with his torch, then crouched beside the ganger, who was gurgling pitiably and still trying to lift his head. I took one of the man’s arms, Movar took the other, and together we hauled him up. It’s a bad idea to move a wounded man, not if you don’t know the extent of his injuries. It’s a worse idea to leave him to drown in a puddle of cold rainwater.

We rolled the ganger over onto his back and laid him down on a patch of relatively flat ground. He was a dead weight in our grip, his limbs lolling uselessly. I examined his soaked, shock-white face under the hood of his jacket. He was young, like the others Harondt had rounded up, a hollow-cheeked boy of twenty or so. He was spitting up water in spasmodic bursts, gasping for air like a hooked fish. There was blood coming up, too, dripping down his chin, vividly red in the glow of our torches. His eyes were rolled back into his head under his fluttering eyelids. I took a quick look at the ragged exit wound in his chest, then gave Movar a grim, wordless glance.

“Done for,” the Thas-Ralkan muttered, his face blank.

I nodded. Still, there was procedure to be followed. “Petil. This man’s badly wounded. Ask Harondt to call an ambulance.”

“It’ll take the medics ages to find their way here,” Petil protested. He was looking at Jandra, who was still standing there in the open, hunching herself against the rain. Maybe he thought he still had a chance with her. “He’s only a rubble ganger. We don’t usually-”

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I shot him a glare of absolute contempt. “Just call, will you?”

Petil made a sour face, but he reached for his radio again. The drone circled in the rain above us, its searchlight casting long eerie shadows. I turned my attention back to the dying man.

The ganger’s eyes were open. They were very blue, icy, electric. They stared up at me, clear and full of cold hatred. He coughed and spluttered up more water, more blood from his ruined lungs, but his gaze did not falter. I flinched back despite myself, my heart thundering with a sudden, irrational panic.

“Watchman,” the ganger said. His voice was a low, rattling gurgle. A drowned man’s voice.

“I…” I struggled to speak, pierced through by those eyes. My mouth was dry as bone. He’s dying, he can barely move, he’s no threat to you, how can you be afraid of him? “Listen, you’ll be alright. We’ll get you to a hospital.”

His lips curled back in a mocking sneer. His teeth were stained red. “Watchman,” he rasped. “You can’t…stop it.”

“Don’t try to talk, lad,” Movar said. I could tell from his tone he was as unsettled as I was.

The ganger coughed up more blood. He drew in an awful, hissing breath, and then, hideously, he smiled. His dying eyes were still fixed on my face. “It’s…already begun.”

I wanted to look away. I couldn’t. “What? What’s begun?”

His terrible, bloodstained smile widened. “The stars,” he said. “The stars are…coming down. We…will be…free.”

“The stars?” I remembered the unearthly silver shape, the machine-creature that was still out there, somewhere in the ruins. I was certain of one thing tonight. Whatever was happening here, it went far deeper than some feud between rubble gangs. “What are you talking about?”

Movar shook his head. “He’s delirious, Morre. Blood loss, hypoxia. He’s talking nonsense.”

“We…will,” the ganger insisted, straining out the words. His face twitched, rills of blood running from his mouth and nose. One of his hands rose, stiff fingers slowly reaching up towards me. It must have taken him a supreme effort, and it scared the hell out of me, to the point that I nearly brought up my gun.

Then the hand dropped. The hateful eyes glazed over. The gurgling breaths faded to silence.

The chain of events was complete.

Movar and I rose to our feet. Normally, I would at least have closed the corpse’s eyelids. But I couldn’t stand to touch this one. I thanked the Almighty that Jandra hadn’t been close enough to hear her first victim’s last words.

“He’s dead,” Movar announced to the rainswept night.

*

We didn’t find any more gangers in the rubble. The rain and the darkness weighed too heavily against us, even with the Inspectorate drone on hand. The Ninth Watch men knew the ruins well, but not as well as the gangs did. Harondt called a halt to the search effort a few minutes after midnight.

We regrouped in front of the cathedral, as the rain finally began to ease off. Everyone was soaked, sore-footed, exhausted and thoroughly ready to go home. I tried to light up the cigarette Jandra had given me, only to find that water had seeped into my pocket and ruined it. The stay-awake was still pulsing through my blood, keeping the cold at bay and taking the edge off the fatigue, but even the drug had its limits. I was starting to wonder if it was time for a fresh capsule.

My biggest worry was Jandra. She’d barely spoken since the shooting. There was a hollow, faraway look in her eyes, as if she was somewhere else, her body present but her mind AWOL. Even her movements seemed off, slow and slack, without her usual fidgety quickness. I hadn’t expected her first kill to affect her this badly. I needed to get her away from here, and soon.

“We’re going to head back to Seventh,” I told Harondt, after he’d gotten off a call with his chief-of-watch. “Unless you still need us here.”

I could see he registered the quiet urgency in my voice. He glanced from me to Jandra and back, and gave a tired nod. “No, I think we’re about done. Anyone still out there will have gone to ground by now. You did good work tonight. I’ll let Koniel know. Maybe you’ll get your commendations.”

“I’ll settle for Orczin letting us go home,” I replied. Jandra stood beside me, silent and slump-shouldered in her drenched oilskin, looking a lot younger than her twenty-eight years. I badly wanted to reach over and squeeze her hand.

I said my goodbyes to Movar – I didn’t waste my breath speaking to Petil – and ushered Jandra to our car. We took off our oilskins, finding our uniforms soaked in irregular patches beneath them. The rain was now little more than a scattered drizzle, mocking us.

Two more vehicles pulled up outside the cathedral as we were packing up to leave. An ambulance with its sirens off; that would be the paramedics, come to collect the dead ganger’s body. And another Inspectorate rig, this time with no hovering drone in tow.

“More of them,” I muttered to Jandra. She said nothing, and got into the passenger seat without looking at me.

I watched Harondt walk up to the second rig, flanked by two of his men. He began to speak into one of those slit-like windows. He was too far away for me to hear his words. After a moment, he nodded at something the Inspectorate men said, and motioned to his squad.

The four handcuffed suspects, who’d been shivering on the cathedral steps through our whole sweep of the ruins, were led over to the Inspectorate vehicle. I saw their reactions as the armoured rear doors clicked open, their moroseness turning to sudden cringing fear. One of them tried to struggle, straining uselessly against his cuffs, and Harondt flicked out his telescoping baton and smacked him offhandedly in the belly. The boy doubled over, wheezing. Harondt hit him again, for good measure.

Two Inspectorate officers hopped out of the rig, all crisp and clean in their pristine dry uniforms, with submachine-guns slung over their shoulders and black armbands bearing the king’s colours. They grabbed the suspects with rough, wordless efficiency, and hustled them into the rig, one by one.

“No – why-” I heard one of the gangers, the young woman, cry out. The rig’s doors slammed shut, cutting her off. And then, as quickly as they had appeared, the Inspectorate men drove away, reversing back onto Blackwater Avenue and roaring off into the darkness. Eastbound, I knew, to the security complex in Queen Haara Square. I stared at the rig’s taillights as they faded from sight.

I’d handed a few suspects over to the black-bands before. There was a fairly short list of people they were interested in. Syndicalists, anti-monarchists, Nilenists, industrial saboteurs, weapons smugglers. The papers sometimes reported on them breaking up organised crime rings on the east coast. They left the thieves, the delinquents and the killers for us watchmen. I’d never heard of them bringing in rubble gangers, not over some minor brawl in the ruins.

I remembered that flash of silver in the torchlight, vanishing with impossible speed. Harondt had said the Inspectorate were on site before Ninth Watch even arrived. What had they seen, with their whirring eye in the sky? What had we stumbled into tonight?

These were questions you learned not to ask in Indeleon. There were always things happening far above our heads, chains of events stretching out of sight. Most of the time, they didn’t intersect with our routine little lives. And I certainly didn’t intend to get snared in them.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about the dying ganger, his staring blue eyes so full of hate. The words he’d choked out with such vehemence, even as the life bled out of him in the cold rain.

The stars are coming down.

I started up the cruiser. The Continental’s old engine was almost soothing to hear, growling to life. I didn’t glance back as I turned out onto the deserted avenue. The last thing I wanted to look at was the looming shell of the cathedral, or the blackened ruins scattered around it like strewn bones.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” Jandra said. Her voice was flat, lifeless, barely more than a whisper. She stared straight ahead, at the darkened road stretching ahead of us.

“I know,” I replied.