There’s a lot to be said for routine. Those simple and reliable rhythms, worn into comfortable smoothness by repetition, can hold your life together when everything else becomes tenuous and frayed. You can shelter inside the structure of a working day, take comfort in seeing the same faces, hearing the same idle conversations. You can anchor yourself against the world, safe in the knowledge that tomorrow will take the same shape as today.

That routine was waiting for Jandra and I when we returned from our leave. And for a little while, it worked as intended. We busied ourselves with casework and street patrols, witness interviews and liaison calls. We filled in our forms, updated our rosters, jumped when Orczin said jump. We put in our required hours at the firing range and talked shop with the Icebox techs. We joined in the usual bullpen chatter – the tall tales, the marital grumbles, the inter-precinct gossip. I let Erkasri convince me to put a few silvers into the Seventh Watch football draw. My team, the reliably hopeless Rakadev Workingmen, ensured that I never saw that money again.

Thankfully, nobody showed much interest in what we’d gotten up to on our rest-days. I never needed to trot out the plausible cover story I’d rehearsed. Orczin behaved as if our little talk after the cathedral sweep had never happened. There was only a brief, sanitised mention in the newspapers of the Inspectorate raids at Itan Lake. The weather stayed fine and clear as the Month of Blooms wore on, and I found myself looking forward to the weeks ahead. There were even moments when I forgot about the ganger’s final sneer and the words he’d spat at me, the words echoed by the condemned Forester.

But whenever I was alone with Jandra, I saw that fragile gleam in her eyes, the tremor in her fingers, and I knew that she had forgotten nothing.

The late shifts were the worst. When we sat together in the Continental, patrolling the empty streets of Seventh Watch, the air between us almost crackled with things unsaid. Attempts at normal conversation stumbled and died. The radio became empty noise, the precinct bands and swing stations bleeding discordantly together. The stay-awake filled us with energy that had nowhere to go. Sometimes, we pulled over in shadowy lots on the edge of the industrial quarter and fucked in the darkness, barely speaking, barely even looking at each other. When I drove myself home on those nights, every gleam of metal in the headlights made me tense up. I thought of glittering, razor-edged limbs unfolding, whickering into life with inhuman speed.

I told myself that it would pass. We’d both had a series of nasty shocks, Jandra especially, and it was natural for us to be shaken up. I’d come through worse. I would again.

Routine kept us functional, just about. We met our arrest quotas for the month (helped by a spot of creative accounting). Orczin threw the occasional mutter of praise in our direction, and we pretended to believe him when he told us we were on track for commendations. We had no further run-ins with the Inspectorate, even though their checkpoints across the city seemed to multiply by the day. We kept our heads down, stayed well away from the cathedral ruins, and gave due thanks to the Almighty.

Secretly, I think we were both waiting for the next shock to hit us.

*

I started noticing things early in the Month of Banners, a few weeks after our ill-fated trip to Itan Lake.

I couldn’t claim to know every square inch of Indeleon. After a decade in the city, there were still whole districts that were unfamiliar to me, mazes of streets and back-alleys that I’d never had cause to explore. Even in Seventh Watch, I sometimes spotted a corner shop or a neon-lit drinking hole that I was sure I hadn’t seen before.

But I knew my beat well enough to sense the change in atmosphere. There was a new and palpable tension in the streets, in the busy aisles of the emporia, in the picture-house queues and the suburban diners. I saw it in the faces of salarymen and traffic wardens, schoolkids and trash collectors. I heard it in grumbling crowds and the unguarded blather of drunks and junkies. There was anger there, and fear, and a simmering kind of anticipation. I didn’t know what they were waiting for. I doubted they knew it themselves.

I was used to seeing people afraid. I was a watchman – getting glared at, or cowered away from, was part of the job. This was something different. Something new.

I could tell the others at the precinct could also feel it. Like so much else in Indeleon, it was rarely acknowledged out loud. It came through in our nervous jokes before setting out on patrol, in Erkasri’s reminders to call in our status regularly. We sensed it in the weekly review sessions, as Orczin lectured us about the need to make some harsh examples to deter petty crime. We heard it in the radio chatter from the other precincts. Ninth Watch was seeing a steady uptick in clashes between the rubble gangs. Fourth Watch was monitoring ever more student agitators at the Metropolitan University. Twelfth Watch had to arrest a whole floor’s worth of striking workers at the Senaldt automobile plant.

Taken in isolation, none of this was unheard-of. Altogether, though, I was getting a nasty feeling that a chain of events was locking into place.

So I was already very much on edge when I first spotted the graffiti.

Again, even in sleepy Seventh Watch, dissident graffiti was nothing new. Jandra and I had seen those bright slashes of still-wet paint in a thousand alleyways – THE KING IS NILEN CROWNED and SHOOT THE BLACK-BANDS and WHERE DO YOU TAKE OUR CHILDREN? We only bothered to report it in when it was impossible to ignore, like the time some wags spraypainted an enormous cock on a hoarding of the king’s face near the Jurendh Street emporium. The Municipality had a dedicated cleanup team for that kind of thing. If only they took the potholes half as seriously.

One night, as I was beginning my drive home, I happened to glance into the alley between two low-rise office blocks. I caught a momentary glimpse of fresh white paint on the grimy brickwork, lit by the weak glow of a fire exit sign. Half of the slogan was hidden in the shadows, and I was driving fairly fast in the light evening traffic. I only had time to make out the words THE STARS ARE.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

My heart immediately began to thunder. I saw my face turn pale in the rear-view. I had to fight the urge to slam on the brakes.

I sped around the corner, immediately feeling foolish, and glad that I was alone in the car. It’s some fucking rubble ganger’s motto, not the words of the Almighty Himself, I scolded myself. Then I thought of the Forester in South Welynte, seventy miles from any rubble gang. He’d known those words. He’d shouted them through broken teeth, even as Aikerl’s men dragged him away to the black cells.

The words rang in my ears all the way home, and even though I hadn’t taken any stay-awake that day, it took me hours to fall asleep.

I saw the slogan again a few days later, this time daubed on the underside of a rail bridge near Estyr Park. Jandra was with me that time. If she saw the words, she didn’t say anything. Nor did I point them out to her. Noticing something is bad enough. Acknowledging it is like opening a door, one that cannot be closed. And Jandra had enough to worry about as it was.

The more I saw the words, the more they preyed on me. I spent my shifts in a permanent state of low-level unease. Every time I saw a darkened alley mouth coming up ahead, I tensed up as if anticipating a blow. Every time I saw the message afresh, the drowned man whispered inside my head.

Other words soon started showing up, too, ones I hadn’t seen before. It didn’t take a master of forensics to see that they shared the same pedigree. LOOK TO THE STARS, screamed the jagged white letters on the walls of pedestrian tunnels and electricity substations. THE MACHINE IS IN MOTION. THERE WILL COME A BURNING.

I considered reporting the graffiti to Orczin. I could have cast it as a potential lead on a contraband smuggling network. Dragnet operations had been launched on thinner pretexts. But I remembered how firmly he had shut me down when I told him about the thing in the ruins. He’d been adamant that we avoid pulling on that thread. It will be beyond my ability to protect you.

I wanted to know what it all meant. I was terrified of finding out.

Routine propped me up, but even routine has its limits. Driving through a city that was growing stranger to me by the day, I felt myself brush perilously close against those limits. On the other side, I knew, lay Remkou and all his ruined ilk. Men and women who crashed through into the black, never to resurface.

*

Jandra and I were on a late patrol in Upper Enszhan, a largely inoffensive corner of Seventh Watch, when the call came in on the override band. I recognised the gravelly voice of Lokh, the precinct’s sole Hannevara.

“All cruisers, this is Cruiser Oh-Eight, requesting assistance. We’re in Martyr Ostande Street. Please respond.”

It was a clear, balmy night, with the moons high and bright over the city. Both of us were mildly abuzz on stay-awake. Jandra seldom went without it on patrol now; she popped a capsule as soon as the light began to fade. I’d tried to resist the temptation this time. For all of five minutes.

Jandra glanced at me, silently asking my permission. The stub of a Stevedore Blue glowed between her fingers. I nodded after only a brief hesitation. Martyr Ostande Street was an easy drive from Upper Enszhan, and Lokh didn’t sound too panicked. No screams or gunfire in the background, at least.

“Oh-Eight, this is One-Three. We’re nearby. Moving to assist,” Jandra said into the mic. “What’s the problem?”

“We’ve got a Code Sundown. Area is secure, no civilians about, but it’s quite a mess. We’d appreciate your eyes on the scene.”

I grimaced. Sundown was the radio code for a murder with no obvious suspects. “Ten minutes away, Lokh,” I said. “Hold tight.”

“Thanks, One-Three. Dispatch, are you hearing this?” Lokh asked.

The line crackled as Erkasri chimed in. He sounded drowsy, maybe even a little drunk. “Code Sundown on Martyr Ostande, noted and logged, Oh-Eight. Keep us informed. You too, One-Three.”

Jandra signed off the call and took a final drag on her cigarette before tossing it out of the window. “Just our luck, isn’t it.”

“Haven’t had a Code Sundown in our beat since the Month of Frost,” I replied. “Cherdane and Rosbry handled the last one.”

“Lokh can handle this one. Don’t let him pass it on to us.”

I shook my head. “That’s not Lokh’s style. He’s a bloodhound. Likes to follow his cases through.”

“A role model for the rest of us.” Jandra lit herself a fresh cigarette. Her fingers shook, and it took her a few tries to get the lighter going. The neon sign of a shuttered videograph store lit her a pallid blue as we drove past it. Shadows flowed across her gaunt features. She was always slim, my Jandra, but now she was beginning to look malnourished.

“Have you eaten anything today?” I asked her. I meant to say it gently, but amphetamines have a way of making you sound blunt.

She waved a dismissive hand. “I had lunch.”

“Coffee and cigarettes aren’t lunch, Jand. You need to use your meal stamps.”

“Mother, I didn’t know you were visiting Indeleon!” she exclaimed, with frosty irony.

I fought to hold down my rising irritation. “I’m being serious. I can’t remember the last time I saw you eat on duty. You’re all skin and bone.”

“Am I? You didn’t complain the last time you fucked me,” she snapped. Real anger flashed in her eyes.

“I’m not saying…” If I hadn’t been driving, I would have thrown up my hands. “He Above, Jand, I’m worried about you. That’s all. Since the cathedral, you’ve been…”

“What? Not the happy little chorus girl you want me to be? Should I smile more, is that what you’re saying? Sing you some Year’s Turn hymns?” Her voice dripped with cold contempt. “Everything is fucked, Evaris. You know it, I know it. I’m trying to keep my head above water. That’s all I can do right now.”

“Maybe if you eased off the stay-awake-”

Jandra’s voice rose abruptly to a shout, making me flinch in my seat. “Oh, Almighty, don’t you fucking lecture me about stay-awake when you’re on the same fucking dose as me! It’s your stash, you sanctimonious bastard, not mine. I never even knew what it was before I joined the bloody precinct.”

The implied accusation stung, mostly because it was true. I remembered the first time we took it together, just weeks after she became my partner. She’d been nervous. I’d encouraged her, enjoying the chance to play the wise, worldly older watchman. Don’t worry, everyone does it. It used to be standard-issue in the army. Just puts some spring in your stride.

“We both need to cut down,” I said hastily, trying to salvage the situation. “I’ll pour the capsules out when we get back to the precinct. How about that? No more dosing up on duty. We can keep each other honest.”

That elicited a harsh, incredulous laugh. “Really? Will you pour out all your bottles at home, too? And the coke, and the methoxetamine? When was the last time you had a sober week, Watchman Morre?”

I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice any more. “Jandra. You need to get a fucking hold of yourself. You can’t handle the stuff like I can.”

“Oh, yeah, you’ve got real form there, haven’t you, old man? You’ve been medicating yourself to the moons and back since before I was fucking born!”

“I’m still keeping myself together. You aren’t, not any more,” I snarled at her. “It only ends one way, Jandra. You’re gonna wind up like fucking Remkou.”

“We both are!” she hissed. Tears shimmered in her eyes.

A wretched silence descended between us. The Continental hummed through the dark, quiet streets of Upper Enszhan. We said nothing more until we turned the corner into Martyr Ostande Street, to see the dimmed strobes of Lokh’s parked cruiser.

I spotted him and his partner, Geisden, standing on the pavement in front of a small greasy-spoon diner. The strobes gave them a host of transient shadows, flickering in and out of existence across the diner’s front wall. Other than them, the street was deserted, with hardly a light on in the upper floors. No gawkers, no witnesses.

Lokh and Geisden waved us over, and I pulled up to the curb behind their car. Jandra gave a sudden, sharp gasp. I frowned, following her gaze.

Then I saw the blood.