Just as I had predicted, Jandra and I never resumed our card game. My lucky (or, I increasingly suspected, cursed) hand was lost to history, shuffled back into the infinite possibilities of the deck when the night janitor tidied up the messroom. Neither did we finish the bottle of Cosserey rye. That, at least, could keep until we returned.
After I handed in our reports – Orczin took them with barely a grunt of acknowledgment – I went straight to the locker room to change into my civilian clothes. Jandra was just coming out of one of the curtained cubicles as I got there.
In nondescript slacks and a plain cream blouse, her short auburn hair still mussed and damp from the rain, she was no longer the striking girl in uniform, the pride of Seventh Watch. She was a slim, narrow-faced young woman with tired eyes and trembling hands, strung out on stay-awake and shaken to her core.
To me, she looked as beautiful as ever.
“Are you taking the night bus home?” I asked her, with studied nonchalance. I didn’t even let my gaze linger on her too long. There was nobody else in the locker room to see us, but I was feeling especially paranoid tonight.
“Yeah,” she said, pausing at the door. Even her voice sounded softer out of uniform. Maybe it was just my imagination. “I’ll head to the Weysam Street stop in a little while.”
“Okay. Keep safe.”
I was worried about her. How could I not be? I remembered how I had been after my first kill – playing every second of it through my mind, over and over, like a record on repeat. The guilt and shock had been like hot ash burning in my gut. And Jandra was still riding an amphetamine high into the bargain. I didn’t want her to be alone when she crashed.
But, I’ll admit it, there was some selfishness there too. I didn’t want to be alone tonight, either.
I deliberately waited around after changing out of my uniform, giving Jandra time to walk to her stop. Weysam Street was five minutes away. I gave her fifteen before I headed to the motor pool.
We’d stuck to this routine ever since we started fooling around, more than a year ago. We couldn’t be seen leaving the precinct together, let alone getting into the same car. Whether Orczin knew about us or not, there were plenty of others at the precinct who I was sure did not. Even if we avoided a formal investigation, I didn’t want to get chewed up in the endless rumour mill. I’d seen it happen to others. Remkou had been the precinct’s laughing-stock long before he got kicked out.
Night bus was our code phrase. I would drive a few blocks away, circle back to Weysam Street, and then pick her up around the corner from the bus stop. Well out of sight of the precinct, and both of us in our civilian clothes. This late at night, nobody would see us. That was the theory, anyway.
The best that could be said about my personal car was that it was newer than a ‘94 Continental. I drove a second-hand Senaldt Motors Hawker with close to eighty thousand miles on the clock. Its transmission groaned alarmingly in the higher gears and the paint was flaking off the doors to reveal streaks of rust. The City Watch had its perks, but it didn’t pay well enough for me to drive anything fancier.
Though I suppose some of my more expensive habits were partly to blame.
I drove the Hawker in a lazy loop around the tenements north of the precinct. The moonlight was jarringly bright and clear after the rain. I was still gently buzzing on the stay-awake, although it was tapering off now. I was itching quite badly for another capsule. That familiar hollowness, the bleak foretaste of an impending comedown, was starting to spread through me.
I resisted the urge as best I could. Beyond a certain point, I knew it was pointless to keep chasing the high. I wanted to stay functional tonight, to ride the drug down slow and steady, rather than overdo it and crash hard.
Weysam Street was a bland row of mid-rise apartments and neon-lit grocery stores, quite deserted at this time of night. It was easy to spot Jandra at the bus stop in her pale blouse, a lit cigarette glowing in one hand. I coasted to a stop on the corner, and after a furtive look up and down the street, she walked up to the car and climbed in beside me.
“Night bus late again?” I joked.
She didn’t smile. She took a long drag on her cigarette. Her fingers shook. Her expression was tight, pinched. I knew exactly what she was thinking about.
“Get us home quick,” she said. “Please.”
*
She held herself together pretty well on the journey back to my place. We listened to an all-night station playing classic swing – real music, pre-war, the kind we both liked. When they played ‘The Boatman’s Daughter’ by Soudaen and Maalhel, the great ‘70s Esuloan duet, she hummed along to the chorus.
We were driving through the sleeping suburbs, a quarter of an hour from East Rakadev, when she abruptly asked me to pull over. She stumbled out of the car, bent double and vomited weakly into the gutter.
I got out and went up behind her, stroking her back as she heaved and spat. She had nothing much to bring up – water and a bit of whiskey; stay-awake tended to kill one’s appetite. When she lifted her head, there were tears in her eyes, glimmering in the light of the streetlamps.
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“It’s alright,” I told her softly. “It’s alright, Jand. It’ll pass.”
“I thought…” she croaked. She looked at me wretchedly. The car radio was still playing behind us, a jaunty swing trombone number crackling into the night. “I thought I could make that shot. He would have survived if I’d just got his leg.”
And then the Inspectorate would have dragged him off to their black cells, like the others, I thought. “That ganger had a deathwish. It was only going to end one way. You gave him more of a chance than Petil or Harondt would have.”
“Oh, fucking Petil,” Jandra said, with earnest feeling. “I wish I’d shot him instead.”
I couldn’t suppress a smile. “Waste of a bullet.”
Trembling, Jandra straightened up. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “So, we’ve got two whole days?”
“Yeah. Orczin’s getting more generous in his old age.” Why had he allowed us the time, I wondered? Bribing our silence? Or giving him more time to coordinate with Koniel, and sweep the whole business under the rug?
Best, as ever, not to think about it.
“Can I stay the whole time?” Jandra asked. There was an uncharacteristic hint of a plea in her voice.
“As long as you need,” I told her. “As long as you want.” I leaned forward, and sick breath be damned, kissed her on the lips.
She was smiling as we got back into the car. A weak, tired, weary smile, but a smile all the same. She was still smiling when we passed the Martyr Iphenija Chantry School and headed into the dark streets of East Rakadev. Her hand was on my thigh, fingertips stroking slowly forward and back. By now, the stay-awake was loosening its grip at last, and my cock was starting to stir.
Jandra’s smile grew wider when we got to my apartment block. Wider still, in the creaky old elevator with its broken concertina-grille doors, as we held each other and kissed all the way to the seventh floor. Her fingers ran through my hair and she pressed herself up against me, slim and warm and wonderfully alive, wonderfully there.
We got to my front door and fumbled inside, barely pausing to click on the lights. Our clothes came off in stages, shoes and socks strewn on the patchy living room carpet, my shirt and her blouse cast aside in the narrow hallway. We didn’t pop any more stay-awake on the way to my bedroom. I didn’t snort a pinch of methoxetamine, or take the vasodilators I’d bought from one of the Icebox techs. Some nights, Jandra and I worked our way through my stash while we fucked, chasing our powders down with whiskey and Comaghiri lager. We sometimes spent hours lost in breathless, sweaty, hallucinogenic exploration, and remembered not one second of it in the morning.
Not tonight. Tonight, all we wanted was each other.
We collapsed into bed together, kissing wordlessly. The first time was fast and hot and intense, almost forceful, her breath coming in quick gasps as she raked her fingernails down my upper back. We expended the last of the drug’s feverish energy, using each other and being used, as if we could simply fuck away everything we’d seen tonight. When Jandra climaxed, she hissed my name through her clenched teeth. I couldn’t quite finish, myself, though I was infuriatingly close.
The second time was gentler. I was slow, considerate, my hands roving carefully over her trembling body. We whispered to each other in the dark before sunrise, fingers and tongues moving in near-silence. Finally, I rolled onto my back, letting her ease herself on top of me, and she rode me in a gentle rhythm. Her naked body was just a slender suggestion in the dim light, pale skin and delicate shadows.
That time, I came.
She slipped off me and snuggled up beside me, draping one long leg across my thigh. It was hot up here on the seventh floor, and the duvet could get stifling, but I drew it over us anyway. I knew Jandra got cold.
There was no pillow talk tonight. She turned to me briefly, as if to speak. Then she seemed to think better of the idea, and simply relaxed her head onto my shoulder. I kissed her auburn hair and stroked her arm, listening to her breathing grow slower and calmer as she sank into sleep.
My Jandra, the one good thing in my silly little life.
*
It took me a long time to drift off. Jandra was curled up in my arms, mumbling something indistinct in her sleep, her flexing fingers and toes telling of troubled dreams. The sun was starting to rise in the west, bloody rays slanting through the blinds and patterning the rumpled sheets. I lay there with the chemical debt of the stay-awake settling over my tired body. No matter how hard I tried, my eyes wouldn’t stay shut.
I desperately wanted sleep. I was also afraid of it. The comedown dreams had been getting worse over the past few months. Uglier, bloodier, more visceral. They were the kind of dreams you don’t sink into so much as drown in. I would find myself revisiting my nastier crime scenes, the gory car wrecks, the family annihilations. The way Danry ir-Kobha convulsed after I shot him.
And tonight, I had something new to fear. Even with Jandra’s sleeping warmth beside me, the softness of her hair on my shoulder, I kept coming back to the staring blue eyes of the ganger in the cathedral ruins. I had a dark sense that, when sleep took me, I would hear that dying gurgle once more. You can’t stop it. It’s already begun.
But, in the end, it wasn’t the rubble ganger I dreamed of that night. Nor was it Danry ir-Kobha, or the knife-edged silver creature, or any of my old cases. It was my father.
I saw him as I had last seen him, when I was thirteen years old.
He was on the smoke-shrouded platform of Harranthaen train station, trying to battle his way through the screaming, clawing mob. The Salvator tanks were only a few miles from the town, bombs were whistling down on every side, and everyone knew it was the last train that would ever leave Harranthaen. The carriages were so packed you couldn’t even turn yourself around. People were clinging to the top and sides of the train, crawling over each other, kicking and cursing, beating each other bloody over a handhold or foothold. Parents were trying to pass their screaming, sobbing children through the smashed windows, entrusting them to the care of complete strangers. Me and my mother managed to get aboard, after bribing a conductor with every silver we had left. Dad got separated from us in the chaos, and that, with the brutal, indifferent simplicity of such things, was that.
We never found out what happened to him. He was a pure-blood, blue-eyed Kauln, and they probably wouldn’t have sent him to the liquidation camps. But he was a true loyalist, as well, the kind who saluted portraits of the king and spat when he heard Nilen’s name. That would have been enough to earn him a bullet to the head. I heard that people in the occupied cities were denouncing one another left and right in those early days. Friends and neighbours, even family members, selling each other out to the Salv to save their own skins.
He might have been conscripted into a mine or a munitions factory, worked to the bone by some sneering Incorruptible until he dropped dead of exhaustion. He could have starved in the black winter of ‘85, or died of typhus or cholera, or been lost in the bombing when the king’s men took Harranthaen back in ‘87. He could be lying in one of the mass graves that they’re still finding all over the western provinces. One more skeleton in a seam of bones thick enough to form its own geological layer.
In my dream, he reached out to me through the heaving crowd, his eyes wide and crazed with terror and grief. I saw his lips form my name, drowned out by the screams and the thunder of falling bombs. And I reached back, out of the broken train window, and cried out for him, though no sound escaped my lips.
Then the smoke swirled in like an ocean wave, and there was only darkness.