The open-air market smelled of desperation and exhaust fumes. Felix Callisto tugged on the brim of his hat as he meandered through the crowd, looking out of place in his ancient trench coat and battered fedora, a man out of sync with the controlled chaos going on around him. But no one stared at him as he made a path between people and market stalls. At least not for very long. He may have looked out of place, but he was very much about his business. He knew where he was going, and wove through the confusion with practiced ease. On the far side of the market, Felix entered a shadowy doorway and into a dimly lit shop. There were spun diamond displays filled with all manner of items, much of it contraband were this on any other planet, in any other polity. But New Arkham was a company town, and allowances could be made for the right price.

On one wall was a display of weapons, including a hot pink needle gun of the type known on the streets as an Arkham stinger. But the real stock in trade was in the back. Felix waited until the shop’s lone customer left, giving Felix a nervous side-eye as he exited, then stepped toward the proprietor. “Reggie.”

The reed-like man behind the counter heaved an exasperated sigh in Felix’s direction. Like most of the residents of New Arkham, he was a transient, born in the vacuum between the stars, with the stick-thin bodies and cold pallor of those of that caste. He had close-cropped dark hair and dark, wide-set eyes. A pair of AR goggles fitted with extra loupes and magnifiers perched atop his jutting forehead, which was tattooed with the faded teardrop-shaped glyph that marked him an indentured servant of the company.

“What you want, Callisto? I hope you didn’t come all this way just to bust my balls. I run a legit business now.”

Felix grinned. “I just wanted to stop by and say hello to my favorite fence.”

“Shag off,” said Reggie with a dismissive wave. “I’m on the straight and narrow.”

Felix laughed theatrically. “That wasn’t a stim freak who was just in here? What about fake IDs? Sold any false documents to stowaway spacers recently?”

The stick man scowled down at him. “You know I haven’t. Somebody confiscated all of my equipment.”

Reggie grinned, recalling that particular event. “What a shame. Good thing you’ve got your black market artifact trade to fall back on.”

“You’re grasping at straws, Callisto. I thought you knew better than to come in a guy’s place for a shakedown without any evidence, no warrant. I ain’t even seen ya flash a badge.”

Reggie raised himself off his stool, something in his hand. But Felix was ready, his needle pistol jammed into Reggie’s left temple. The shop owner froze, left hand in the air. Whatever he held in his right hand went back where it was and stayed there, the hand resting atop the battered plastic counter.

“Now let’s try this again, shall we?” Felix said, pocketing his sidearm. “Customs confiscated some artifacts yesterday. When questioned, they said they bought them. From you.”

“That bitch is lying. I—”

“I never said the person’s gender, Reg. But come to think of it, it was a woman. Now come on. Fess up. It’s been a long day and I have other matters in need of my attention.”

“All right,” Reggie said, both hands raised. “Ya got me. All right? I had some junk left over from your little raid. I knew I had to dump it fast, so I sold it to them cheap. I need cash to pay off my debt to the company. Those bastards charge me for everything.”

“Yeah, them’s the breaks, huh?” Felix really was sympathetic to Reggie’s plight. But the law was the law, and he had to enforce it. Still, he let a lot of things slide in exchange for certain information from time to time. He needed Reggie’s eyes and ears and really didn’t want to run him in if he didn’t have to.

“I’m listening, Reg. Spill.”

Reggie looked toward the door. “They were kids all right, but they had money. Said they wanted a souvenir to bring home, said they wanted a piece of the city. I think they tried to sneak in but couldn’t get past the security barriers. Bunch of dumbasses. Everybody knows that…anyway, so I sold them a few trinkets. Nothing of value to the company. Common stuff. Nothing rare. Nothing radioactive. You know I don’t keep that stuff around. Shit gives me nightmares.”

Felix nodded. Constable Arkady had shown him the items that had been confiscated at customs when the kids tried to leave with it. Their parents were higher-ups in the interplanetary consortium that was building the Stalk, so she let them go with a verbal warning and a promise not to tell their parents. “Thanks, Reg. That’s all I needed. Have a nice day.”

“I thought this was a shakedown,” Reggie said, almost sounding disappointed he wasn’t being run in.

“Next time it will be,” Felix promised as he turned to leave. Setting his fedora at a rakish angle on his head, he exited the shop.

Felix turned left and sauntered up the street, which was little more than a wide space between a collection of old storage pods and 3D printed domes that passed for homes and business establishments here. New Arkham was a company town, and it looked it. The company’s logo was etched into every seam and embossed on every plastic door of every re-purposed cargo container and piece of the torch ship that had brought the first colonists here more than twenty years before. It went on like this for miles of gray plastic drudgery.

New Arkham was sandwiched between the nameless, planet-wide ocean to the east and the vast, labyrinthine, and alien city to the north, south, and west. No one knew who built it, or how. It was carved from the very continental bedrock, a literal maze of buildings and streets and wide, flat hexagonal spaces that might have been public parks, spanning the entire northern chunk of supercontinent as if it had been carved with machine precision by an orbital laser. Not even the Traders, whose memories went back to when man had yet to climb down out of the trees, knew who had put it there. Not even the D’erleth, who fought mankind for every scrap of alien secret out here in the long dark, dared traverse its thoroughfares.

From this northern edge of New Arkham, Felix caught glimpses of it. Hollow spires dotted with oval-shaped holes. Spindle-thin towers topped with scalloped copper disks the brains thought were houses of worship. They showed dully in the wan light, for this was the planet’s rainy season, and already the day’s clouds gathered anew. Felix stuffed his hands into his trench coat pockets and looked without looking at the people he passed, dirty, humorless, trying to ignore the ever-present alien city even though it was solid and palpable. Living this close to the city’s pockmarked, razor-thin walls, its non-Euclidean geometry and greasy metal facades made people uneasy. Gave them bad dreams, like Reggie. Made them do things to themselves, and each other. The crime rate was higher here, the air filled with a tinge of chronic unease. Felix didn’t like it here any better than the folks who had to live this close to the city’s walls, and he quickened his pace, turning east and trying to move as if he wasn’t trying to get out of there as fast as he could. He hated that feeling, that vague impression of something huge and dark dogging his heels. It was irrational. It was the feeling his old Earth ancestors must have had when they saw eyes peering at them from the dark beyond their cooking fires. It was the feeling of being watched, of the boogeyman under the bed. And he didn’t like it. Not one bit. So he did what everyone did, and pretended the feeling wasn’t there, even when it was curled up at the base of his skull like a jumping spider. Like the master said, it’s sometimes better to pretend you don’t hear the sound of somebody in the nearby woods with a shotgun.

He felt a tickle of static along his spine as his personal network re-upped with the corporate net. His cochlear implant chimed, and his head filled with a familiar voice. “You had a call while you were out.”

Felix smiled. The network was wonky on that side of town, which was another reason he didn’t like going down there. “Who was it, Dash?”

“Who else?” said the expert system. “The Constable. Says she’s got another assignment for you.”

“Great,” Felix said with mock pride. “I just wrapped up the case of the pilfered artifacts. I recorded Reggie’s little confession. Write it up for me and wipe it off my board.”

“You got it, boss.”

“And call the constable.”

He was curious why she wanted to talk to him directly, instead of just sending it to his board. There wasn’t a whole lot going on. Some petty theft. An assault up near the Maze. The impending construction of the Beanstalk had lightened everyone’s mood a bit.

Dash made the connection. There was a buzzing between his ears, and a familiar voice said, “It’s about damn time. I called over an hour ago. Where the hell have you been?”

“It’s lovely to hear your voice too, Sabe,” said Felix. He imagined he could see the constable bristling at the shortening of her first name, which had always irritated her.

“Are you in AR? This will only take a minute.”

“No. Hang on.” Felix fished around in his pocket for the clear plastic AR glasses and put them on. Wearing them made him feel like he was peering through the windscreen of a bug-shaped vehicle. With spotty net coverage in the northern corner, he didn’t see much point in wearing them. Of course, he didn’t see much point in wearing them all the time anyway.

Constable Sabine Arkady’s smooth face winked into existence in front of both eyes, forming a single image. It was semi-transparent so he could still see where he was going, which made her look like a rain-slicked ghost. She had close-cropped, dark red hair. Her black enforcer’s uniform was clean and crisp as always. Her eyes burned magenta from the AR contacts she wore.

“I have a job for you, she said. If you want it. You don’t have to take it if—”

“What is it?”

“Someone has gone missing.”

A heavy stone sank into the pit of Felix’s stomach. Not again.

“Three days ago. An offworlder named Zoe Bright.” She arched her left eyebrow. “Name ring any bells?”

Felix shrugged. “Should it?”

“Zoe Bright, as in the daughter of Barnabas and Siobhan Bright. As in BrightCo. As in one of the founding members of the consortium footing the bill for the Stalk.”

Felix stopped in his tracks, oblivious to the patter of rain that had begun to fall, smearing Arkady’s face in his goggles into a tidal pool reflection. “What?” he said, remembering the kids who had bought the black market alien objet d’art from Reggie the Fence. They had been the spawn of a bunch of higher–ups in the consortium as well.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said the constable. “And I don’t think she was with those other kids. She arrived by herself a standard week before those clowns.”

Felix ran through his mind everything that could have happened to a pretty rich girl on a fringe colony world far from her home system, her parents, and her parents’ money. A kidnapping was possible in the more crowded systems, but rare. It could take days or weeks for the ransom demands to reach their intended recipient, and that was a long time to sit on someone and keep them hidden and alive. There’s no way anyone would try that way out here. Only one thing made any sense.

“You think the city got her.” It wasn’t a question.

“She was here to study it, so yeah.” The constable shifted uneasily, her image wobbling. “She’s enrolled at Taffex Prime, studying xenoanthropology.”

“I didn’t know that was a thing,” Felix said.

“It is now apparently. Look, I know how you feel about these kinds of cases. And I wouldn’t give it to you if I had anyone else I could put on it.”

“But this needs to be handled quickly because of who her parents are,” Felix finished for her.

Her ghostly reflection nodded. “Quickly and delicately. I want you to retrace her steps. See what you can dig up. I’m sending you her personal datafile now, along with everything on her comlog. Have Dash parse it for any irregularities. If the city really did swallow her whole, we’ll never find her. But I want all the I’s dotted and T’s crossed in the official report. The company doesn’t want to scare off the Stalk’s investors. They’re having trouble keeping a tight enough lid on things as it is.”

Felix nodded. “You think the Beanstalk is a good idea?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter what I think. It’s good for business. But it won’t add one credit to our paychecks, and you and I know it will also bring trouble.”

“And we’ve got plenty of that already,” Felix said, casting a glance sidelong at a cluster of slick black, hexagonal-shaped windowless skyscrapers beyond the slim barricade.

The constable didn’t reply, only nodded. Felix knew that, given his history, she wouldn’t give him this assignment if she had any other choice. And he was OK. Really he was. It had been five years.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take it.”

The constable arched an eyebrow. “You’re sure.”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“OK then. I don’t expect it will take you a lot of time. We both know what likely happened. Just make it look thorough for her parents.”

By the time he returned to his desk at security headquarters, Dash had already finished crunching the data. A panoply of multiple windows floated in the air around Felix’s desk, each one showing something different. The girl’s universal ID photo. A list of all her comlink contacts. Videos and photos she had taken. It would have taken him hours to sort through it all, but Dash had already done the dirty work, collating and curating everything and showing Felix only what he most likely needed to see.

Felix stared slack-jawed at the virtual jumble while Dash hovered in the lower corner of his HUD looking smug and proud of himself.

Dash was the security AI all of Arkham’s security enforcers used to collect and organize data and run errands over the corporate network. Felix had nicknamed him Dash, after the old Earth detective writer Dashiell Hammett, and the name stuck. Felix had programmed Dash to look like the writer too, as well as dress like his most famous character, Sam Spade, and he hovered in the background, a trenchcoat-wearing digital ghost with salt-and-pepper hair and a thin mustache. Felix modeled his own attire after Spade, and since detectives didn’t have the same dress code as regular enforcers, the constable couldn’t really do anything about it beyond rolling her eyes every time she saw him. As long as Felix flashed his badge when he was supposed to, no one cared.

Felix leaned against his desk, palms flat against the cool plastic top, and studied the nearest floating bits of data, willing a pattern to emerge from the apparent chaos.

Loaded or not, Zoe Bright was still a teenage girl, and a pretty one at that. Eighteen standard. Honey blond hair. Designer sapphire eyes. Pixie face. And pretty teenagers could get into a lot of trouble on a fringe company world. Occam’s Razor was still a thing, even way out here, and sometimes the simplest explanation was the correct one. Maybe she’d gotten pissed at her parents and simply ran away and didn’t want to be found. Maybe there was a jilted boyfriend who ended her and stashed the body somewhere in the city. Or failing that, perhaps a stim freak had cracked her skull for an ampule of rewind or something even worse, cooked up in one of the street kitchens down near the section of the city they called the Factory, with its cracked, cathedral-sized, spun diamond domes. In the end, that might be the story the company ended up going with, whether true or not. Sorry, Mr. And Mrs. Bright. We regret to inform you that your daughter died because she was somewhere she shouldn’t have been without your family’s armed escort service. Please don’t change your mind about building the Beanstalk. We don’t care about your daughter, but we love your money. Signed, the Company.

Felix gritted his teeth and started flicking images into the virtual dustbin, his mind zeroing in on the irrelevant stuff he didn’t need, like her comlog’s contact list, or pictures she had taken at her last port of call. All he needed was her last few known hours. Everyone left a trail, whether they wanted to or not. Even in a place like this, with spotty coverage and eons-old “ruins” that still looked as pristine as it had when it was first constructed. He just needed to know if she had gone into the city, case closed.

He accessed her comlog’s extensive music library and tapped the last song played, and the air filled with an atonal cacophony called Madwand by some band called Prestor Djinn. “They’re local,” Dash offered helpfully.

“Is that so?” Felix stopped the playback and flicked the entire song list into the trash. Maybe she wasn’t here to see the ruins after all. Maybe she had just been following this band. A possible lead. He told Dash to flag it for further inquiry and sent him off looking for everything he could find on Prestor Djinn.

Felix grabbed at the next thread, a digital receipt for some hiking boots bought three days ago at Zintech Outfitters, near the western edge of the alien city. The sentry beacons were always going down in that area, and it was a popular place for anyone who wanted to sneak in and have a look around, get a selfie near one of the spiky plinths or obelisks for which that area was famous.

“Dash,” he called.

His virtual assistant appeared before him, another flickering ghost in the sea of visual data floating around Felix’s head. “You rang?” he deadpanned.

“I need security footage. The whole western block, from Z’s all the way to the art district. Timestamp…I dunno. Between now and three days ago.” Felix touched the receipt, which began to glow softly.

“Your wish is my command,” said Dash, crossing his arms in front of him and bobbing his head once. There was a cheesy sound effect as he popped out of existence. Felix shook his head and kept working. Sometimes Dash downloaded old television shows from some of the brainships that brought cargo. Big slow things with lots of memory and nothing to do to pass the time between Rift jumps. Dash liked to pepper his speech and mannerisms with the things he saw. It was really annoying sometimes.

He winked back into existence a moment later. “I got as much as I could. Looks like some of it got dumped.”

Felix nodded. “Throw it up here.”

Felix waited as a glowing window coalesced, adding to the jumble of virtual data floating in front of him. When it was fully rendered, Felix touched it, telling it to play. Then he scowled and ran it back about three weeks.

A now-familiar form entered the shop and came out ten minutes later holding a package.

“That’s her,” said Dash. “Facial recognition is a spot-on match.”

Felix nodded. It was the girl all right, coming out with a newly printed pair of hiking boots. Felix was caught off guard by how young—and how much like Becky—she looked, and he took a deep breath to steady himself.

“You all right, boss?” Dash asked. “Your heart rate—”

“I’m fine,” Felix said, more forcefully than he’d intended. Really. He was. He just didn’t expect her to remind him of Becky. “Is that it?”

Dash gave a gentle nod. “Afraid so.”

Felix flicked the image, still playing, away.

“There’s no drone cams? No random selfie from a passerby that might have caught her?”

“Browsing the public net’s even harder than the company’s,” said Dash. “Takes longer. I’m still looking.”

Felix snapped his fingers. “Wait. Where was she staying?”

“Some hole near the Burrow,” said Dash.

Felix nodded. “Madam Xi. The constable hasn’t had her stuff boxed yet. Let’s go check it out.”

“You’re the boss, boss.”

The rain was really coming down by the time Felix made it to the stacked tower of hab modules that Madam Xi rented out to the xenoarchaeologists, layover spacers, contract workers, and other transients who came to New Arkham. It stood eight stories tall and looked ready to fall over at the slightest gust of wind. Felix stared up at it, watching the rain trickle off great dried head-sized gobs of epoxy that had long ago oozed out between several of the modules where they had been joined together.

Felix opened a central plastic door and stepped inside. The lobby floor was covered in a bluish, mossy grass he wiped his boots on as he shook the rain from his trench coat. In the right-hand corner, a woman sat behind a little kiosk encased in a dirty plastic security screen ringed with bioluminescent strips. She wore AR glasses and was talking loudly with someone in rapid-fire Nipponese. She stopped yapping when she saw Felix, removing her glasses and fixing him with a scowl that could melt lead. She was older than Felix, but by how much he wasn’t sure. She had her telomeres lengthened a few times over the years so it was impossible to tell. Her family had made its money during the earliest days of mining Sol’s asteroid belt. What she was doing way the hell out here renting plastic shipping crates to transients Felix had no idea. He bowed theatrically.

She stood, running a wrinkled hand down her dirty kimono. “What do you want, Callisto? I don’t rent to bums.”

Felix fixed her with an icy smile. “We both know that’s not true. But that’s not why I’m here. I’ll give you one guess.”

She pretended to think about it for a second. “That poor girl. You want to rifle through her stuff. Well, you’re too late. The Constable already sent someone over. Now the place looks like she got robbed.”

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Felix nodded. Another convincing cover story should the company need it. “Just the same I’d like to have a look around.”

“All right. Follow me. I was wondering what to do with all her stuff. I was hoping she might still come back for it. But I need the space. Tell the constable I’m going to throw it away.”

Felix grinned. For Madam Xi, “throw it away” meant “find everything of value and pawn it or sell it“. He followed her as she started up a rusty metal staircase, their footfalls making it shake as they went up and around several levels until they reached a hab near the topmost level. “Here it is,” she said, once she’d caught her breath. “Kid said she wanted a room with a view. You believe that? I didn’t know this shithole had a view.”

She gestured to a gray hab module with the number 710 stenciled on the door. It was standing ajar, a broken comlock resting crookedly in the door’s housing. Xi didn’t offer much in the way of security. In fact, she didn’t offer any, so her tenants had to improvise as best they could. Zoe Bright could afford to do better than most, so hers was a top-of-the-line model, with an electromagnetic seal tuned to her biometrics, which the constable’s strong arm had circumvented with a good old-fashioned needle gun. That was telling. It meant the kid had intended to return.

Felix pushed the door inward, wondering why the girl hadn’t rented one of the empty executive suites near company HQ, with fresh towels, private security, and a softer bed. But as soon as the thought left him he had his answer. She would have had to register with the authorities as a VIP, and for whatever reason, the girl was traveling incognito. Whether that was the reason for her disappearance or not, Felix wanted to know why.

The room looked as if it had been ground zero for a party at some point within the last two days. The mossy floor was littered with cigarette butts and stim tabs. Xi wrinkled her nose. “And here I thought she was one of the good ones.”

“Did you see anyone she brought over?” Felix asked, poking through a monument made of empty food containers with a stylus.

“What do I look like? Her mother? She had some people here a couple of nights ago. Three or four guys. They looked like gangers. I don’t care who my tenants bring home with them, as long as they make them leave soon after. No one stays here for free.”

Felix pulled out his comlog and brought up one of Prestor Djinn’s album covers. Three skinny guys cavorted atop a retaining wall in the market district, a slice of the city behind them. “They look like these guys?”

Madam Xi scowled at it for a long moment. “Could be.”

Felix nodded, shoving the comlog back in his pocket. He had Dash running in the background in evidence collection mode, but so far he hadn’t pinged Felix with anything interesting. The place was a mess, but that was from where one of the constable’s enforcers had tossed the place. There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing in her com suggested she was having problems with anyone.

Here is where the trail would normally go cold. There was probably some camera footage somewhere of her entering the city—and that would be that. Zoe Bright would become another unsolved mystery, another story to add to the mythology of this world. Another item for conspiracy theorists to worry over and work into something overly grandiose. Another Becky.

Felix made a silent vow that he would find out what happened to her. If the city really had swallowed the girl whole, he’d let the crazies make of it what they would. But he had to know for sure. Just this once. For himself. And for Becky.

Felix made one more pass around just to appear thorough, but he didn’t know what he was looking for. Madam Xi watched him, bemused. He wondered how fast she’d have this place cleaned out and another tenant moved in like the girl had never been here. He knew it was just business, but it felt like an insult. People mattered. Even when they were gone. The beings who built this city seemed to have understood that. Why couldn’t Madam Xi? Why couldn’t Moira?

She’s gone. Staying here won’t bring her back. I’m leaving.

“You done?” Xi said, impatiently tapping her foot.

Felix nodded. “Yeah.” To himself, he thought, No. I’m just getting started.

When Felix exited the apartment complex he asked Dash to track down the members of Prestor Djinn. Zoe Bright’s story was starting to come into a little more focus. Maybe the spoiled little rich girl hadn’t come to see the alien city after all. Maybe she was your typical if moneyed, rebellious teenager who just wanted to follow her favorite band around a few haunts. This theory had the bonus of making this a case he could actually solve.

Felix stared out across the barricade at a section of the city containing tall, transparent auger-shaped spires that looked like immense glass drill bits, a section the locals had dubbed the Temple. It made him as uneasy as the rest of it, a feeling of not only being watched but being hunted washed over him like an old Earth tsunami. He shivered and quickened his pace. Another sheet of rain began to fall from heavy, graphite-colored clouds.

Maybe the city hadn’t taken her at all. Maybe her disappearance had a more down-to-earth (pun intended) explanation. She met her favorite band, and they’d had some fun with her. Maybe a little too much fun. He couldn’t remember there ever being an actual murder on New Arkham. Not while he’d been here. Even with the city’s influence making everyone crazy. A murder would be horrible but at least it was understandable. At least it wasn’t someone wandering off into one of the cordoned-off sections of a city built by long-dead extraterrestrial beings and vanishing without a trace. Felix reveled in mystery, but the unsolvable kind pissed him off.

He went to his apartment, in the slightly nicer but still painfully shoddy corporate housing sector. He shrugged out of his wet jacket and lay on his couch under a blanket. There he dozed off, dreaming of the girl, Zoe Bright, only with Becky’s face, trapped inside of an impossible maze. She screamed his name, but he could not get to her.

* * *

Felix had only been to Arkham company headquarters a few times. It was the only human structure on the planet not made from a recycled biopod or empty cargo container. It was a ten-story black obelisk, milled from local stone, which made it blend eerily with the city just beyond it. Felix was certain that was no accident.

He exited the auto cab and stared up at the edifice. It was dark, hours after the crisp-looking men and women in corporate attire that filled the building had gone home. A few lights still lingered near the top of the tower, lone corporate higher-ups finishing a few things. But no one was on the street but him. As far as anyone lurking knew, he was just a cop working a case.

“Someone’s got peepers on us,” Dash whispered in his ear.

“Where?”

“Cloud of gnat drones. Southwest corner of the building, about two hundred feet up.”

“Hack their feed. Tell them to buzz off.”

“Way ahead of you.”

Even at this late hour, Felix would have no problem getting inside. The door was tuned to his biometrics, and would gladly let him in. But he wasn’t going inside. If he was going to find out what happened to the girl, he had to go where she went.

When he was sure there was no one around who would pay him any attention, Felix sauntered, hands in pockets, down a side street, putting a little shop made from the corpse of a gutted ore hauler between him and his employers. He moved around back toward a hastily-erected plastic and metal barricade. There was a gap between two sections, and it showed signs of having been pried wider by many hands. It looked like it had been repaired several times, only to be cracked open again and again. He pulled back on one side as hard as he could and slid through the slightly wider opening it made.

And just like that, he was on an alien world.

The city stretched out maze-like, unblemished before him, clean as it was when whatever bizarre process had formed it untold eons ago. It stood pristine, untouched by the messy invaders next door. It was as if something kept it up, an invisible sanitation crew.

Felix realized he was bracing himself against the plastic barricade. “Dash.”

“Yeah, Boss?”

“Just checking.”

“Don’t worry. We’re still close enough to access company HQ’s feed. I’m here, and so are my new friends.”

Felix heard a high-pitched buzz near his right ear and swatted at it. Black dots danced in the air over his head. “Good. Keep them out of my face but tracking me. If anything happens—”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got your six.”

Still hugging the wall, Felix moved down the barricade toward the corporate obelisk.

“What exactly are we doing?” Dash inquired.

“I don’t think Zoe was as interested in the city as she made out,” said Felix. “I think she came here to snoop on Arkham. Maybe because her parents are funding the Stalk, maybe for some other reason. I don’t know. But that’s what I’m here to find out.”

The narrow lane Felix was traveling widened, the structures to his left became broader, squatter, less numerous. As usual, he couldn’t guess their intended purpose. Some scientist had long ago theorized that the city had been put there for colonists, but for some reason—war, an accident in transit—they never arrived. Whatever it was had been catastrophic enough to cause a species that could turn atoms into finished buildings to disappear, and that was a disquieting thought. He continued moving, ignoring the feeling of being watched from darkened portholes in the non-Euclidian structures.

That’s when he heard the sound of raucous laughter. Felix’s heart trip-hammered in his chest. It was human laughter.

“Who is that?” he whispered to Dash.

“Hang on,” said the AI, moving his commandeered gnat cams toward the sound. “It’s the guys from the band.”

“Damn it,” Felix swore. Those assholes were an extra complication he didn’t need. He put on his AR glasses. “Show me.”

Dash sent the gnats’ feed to his glasses. Baldy, Mohawk and Blink were red and yellow false-color smears in infrared, the surrounding structures blue and black.

“What the hell are they doing?”

“Being assholes?” Dash surmised.

Felix was inclined to agree, and he crouched behind a curved structure and watched them through Dash’s cam feed for several minutes. They swung from posts, jumped off low abutments, laughing and yelling as they went. Then Felix heard it. The piping, rising low and steady out of the east. A shiver fled up his spine, and his body broke out in gooseflesh.

The band ate it up, trying to answer the sound with their all too human throats. They were wild, like dogs baying at the alien moon. Their red shapes twisted and shifted.

“Is something wrong with the cams?”

“No. Everything’s green,” Dash said. “Good latency. No signal loss.”

“Then what’s wrong with them? They’re—”

“That’s…strange,” Dash said just before Felix’s AR glasses shut off, his cochlear implant dead.

“Dash? Dash!”

Felix didn’t scare easily. Not even when Becky disappeared. You couldn’t work security in a place like New Arkham without nanocarbon skin. But his heart was threatening to burst through his ribcage, and his forehead was sheathed in sweat.

He heard the bandmates halt their merrymaking. They whispered to each other, and something was wrong with their voices. There was a lilt. An echo.

Eerie piping across a wide range.

That trapped animal feeling returned, and Felix felt hunted, surrounded by something he could not name and did not ever want to see. It exuded from the very shapes of the structures around him. Every weird shadow. Every nook and cranny of this no longer dead city. He was the invader. The city wanted him gone.

And Felix was happy to oblige. He moved from his hiding place, the toe of his boot kicking something, a crystalline shard that rattled across the unbroken pavement and went skittering loudly into a curling gutter. The band members sniffed the air, speaking in some strange tongue that shouldn’t be possible with human mouths and throats.

Felix looked and saw six inhuman eyes glowing in the dark, staring back at him. Their pupils were a sickly greenish-yellow, the irises black blobs. They blinked once the normal way, up and down, then again sideways. Felix fumbled for his gun while he tried to hang on to his sanity.

He ran. They chased him. Felix imagined them leaping through the dark, bounding over barriers. He tripped over knob-shaped protrusions, righted himself, kept going. His hand kept looking for his needle gun, but couldn’t seem to find it.

“Dash,” he muttered. “Goddammit.”

He wandered into a place of curved monuments that obstructed the glow from the moon. He had lost his flashlight, and could not find a way around the obstacle, so he spun around, at last able to draw his weapon.

“Freeze,” he said, panting. The band members slowed, circling him through the shadows like hyenas. He still couldn’t get a good look at them, but he knew their angles were all wrong, their knees and elbows bent at funny angles, their heads misshapen.

“Stop or I’ll shoot,” Felix said, feeling more sure of himself with his gun in his hand. He pressed his back against the nearest monument, pointy bas relief sigils stabbing him through his coat, words like knives from a dead race. At least he thought they were dead once.

They cackled and clicked at each other, all semblance of human speech now gone.

“Where is she?” Felix shouted. “Where’s Becky? Is this what happened to her? Is this what she became? Tell me!”

Felix heard an engine then, low and thrumming. A human sound, solid and reassuring. But also wrong in this place. A pair of bright lights lanced across the ruins, and the members of Prestor Djinn mewled and vanished, hopping and leaping back into the shadow-haunted dark.

A figure appeared next to Felix, and he leveled his gun at it. “Corporate Enforcement,” he said, his years of training taking over for his fleeing sanity. “Identify yourself.”

The figure lifted something, and all the feeling went out of Felix’s legs. His gun left his hand, sliding away as the alien pavement rose up to slap him in the face. Then darkness.

* * *

He was with Moira. It was the last time they would see each other.

She’s gone. Staying here won’t bring her back. I’m leaving.

But she’s still out there somewhere.

Moira glared at him, her eyes filling with tears. Where? It’s been a year. She’s gone, Felix. Staying here won’t bring her back. I wish we’d never have come here.

Felix jumped as if stung. It had been a cushy contract, and when they had been on Megiddo Station she wanted nothing more than to be somewhere with a gravity well. So Felix had taken the contract. How was he supposed to know what would happen? That something in that dead city was still alive and hungry.

Felix dug in his heels. How could she betray the both of them like this? How could she leave them?

I’m staying, he said, adamant.

I’m not. Moira took off her ring and set it on the kitchen counter. I watched this city take her. I’m not going to watch it take you too.

She walked out the door for the last time.

* * *

Felix opened his eyes to a blur of color that reconciled into solidity, a quantum waveform of indeterminate possibility collapsing under the force of a now conscious observer, disambiguated into a coherent reality. He was lying on his back on a cold, hard plasticrete floor in a small, low-ceilinged room. A single bioluminescent strip on the ceiling illumined his predicament. He sat up with a groan. There were filing cabinets and containers shoved against one wall, a storage room pressed into service as a prison cell.

“Dash?” Felix subvocalized.

“He can’t hear you,” said the constable, standing off to his left. His gun was tucked into her belt. “You’re in a giant Faraday cage. No EM in or out. The company keeps secrets even from those of us paid to protect it. Those filing cabinets over there? Filled with actual paper, if you can believe that.”

“How did you find me?”

“When the gnat cams went offline they called me. Their last image was of your dumb ass getting out of a cab. I knew you were about to step in it up to your neck. You’re a real pain in the ass, Callisto. You know that?”

Felix groaned. “So I’ve been told.” Moira said it to him often. Like a dog with a bone, she’d said. It was part of what made him a good cop. And a bad everything else.

“Listen,” she continued. “You’ve really stepped in it this time. No shit. This is not like Becky. I don’t think I can get you out of this one.”

Felix nodded, and had the sensation that his head was going to tear loose from his neck and go rolling toward the constable’s booted feet. He decided to stay put until the effects of her neural stunner wore off. He analyzed her words and realized that, even if they were true, he didn’t care. “So I finally found the company’s dirty little secret. I think. What the fuck is going on around here, Sabine? And what happened to Dash back there?”

“I severed your connection to him,” she said. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t have him helping you get the jump on me.”

“You’re a real piece of work, Constable. I thought we were on the same team. Those things could have killed me.”

“I saved your worthless ass. There’s no telling what they would have done to you.”

“I had it handled.”

“Bullshit. You don’t even know what you’re up against.”

Felix tried to get to his feet, couldn’t, slumped back down. “Enlighten me.”

The constable sighed and began. “They brought me up to speed because they had to. But I felt like they could have just as easily put a bullet in the back of my head and sent for a new constable. So what I’m about to tell you, you better goddamn listen.”

“I’m all ears.”

The constable began pacing back and forth in front of him, moving her hands as she spoke, an old spacer habit. Like most second-gen colonists, the constable wasn’t born in a gravity well.

“Our place in the cosmos is tenuous at best,” she said, making one complete lap around her captive. “That’s what the experts in corporate tell me. That tragic encounter on Mars gave us the stars, but it also showed us that we’re not alone. There are older, more advanced species out here. And they hate us. They string us along, hoping to extend us enough rope that we’ll one day hang ourselves. But we are not welcome out here. They didn’t like us when we were Earthbound. Now that we’re competing for resources…” her voice trailed off. “The only reason the Traders didn’t exterminate us after the Mars incident was morbid curiosity.”

“What did the company find, Sabine?”

“An edge,” she said. “A leg up. You know why we keep getting our asses kicked out here? Why we always get stuck with everyone else’s leftovers? Power. They have it. We don’t.”

Felix nodded. He knew exactly what she was talking about, but understood that it wasn’t as bad as she and others made out. Space was vast, after all. Even to beings whose technology made them virtual gods. In all the millennia the Traders, the D’erleth and the elder races had been out here they had only managed to explore a third of the Milky Way galaxy. Even with their Reality Drive, they had only covered one small, dim corner of one galaxy, which was but one galaxy in a clump of similar galaxies that made up the Local Group, which in turn was just one of many groups in what was known as the Virgo Supercluster. And on and on and on, unto infinity. These beings weren’t gods. They were just hunks of meat with a head start. Felix had to believe that. It was like his hero Dashiell Hammett once said, ‘you got to look on the bright side, even if there ain’t one.’

The constable began her circular path around Felix’s prison once more, her hands working nervously, her temples beaded with flop sweat. “We beat them to this place,” Felix said. “Something about that city rubs them the wrong way. None of the elder races will go near it.”

Sabine Arkady nodded. “That’s true. And that’s part of why the company established a colony here. Sure, there are millions of tons of precious metals to be had. But you and I both know that was just a cover. An excuse. The archaeologists wouldn’t let the company go near it, but once they got what they needed they lost interest. And the disappearances kept most everyone else away. No, the real commodity here is that dead city. It’s full of secrets. And it took some digging, but we found the biggest one.”

Felix gave a heavy sigh. He thought he could move his legs, but he wasn’t sure. Best to keep her talking. “How deep are you? What do you know?”

The constable shrugged, fixed him with a sad look. “Only what they had to tell me so that I could do my job. But over time you piece things together. A rumor gets confirmed as fact once you hear it enough times from enough different sources.”

“Tell me,” Felix said.

She moistened her lips with her tongue. “They send heavily armed collection units into the city to bring things back. Not trinkets like your friend Reggie. Big stuff. Dangerous stuff. They let me see some of it. Shit that glows. A set of metal orbs that float through the air. Greasy black metal pyramids that make everyone feel like they’re being watched, and causes nausea and nightmares with enough exposure.”

She paused, shivered, and continued. “Arkham’s R&D boys had a field day, but it’ll take them years to reverse engineer even one tiny piece of it, figure out how it works and how we can use it to build something of our own. A weapon against the Traders or the D’erleth. It drove a few of them crazy, and they had to be sent off-world.”

Felix popped his neck, wiggled his toes. The pins-and-needles sensation was fleeing from his extremities. “What else did they find?”

The constable nodded as if to say I’m getting to it. “Going into the city changes you. It’s like a feeling of forgetting something, like leaving your apartment and thinking you left the hotplate on. This sensation gets stronger. Until you don’t come back at all.”

“Sabine,” said Felix.

“What does come back isn’t you anymore. It’s…something else. Something from the city. Like those kids.”

“Sabine,” he said again.

“We put up signs and barricades, but the city calls to them, and they keep going. Tomorrow I’ll have to file a missing persons report on an entire fucking band.”

“Sabine,” Felix snapped.

The constable jerked her head in his direction.

“Where’s Zoe Bright? Where’s Becky?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She pointed at the wall behind him, toward the city.

Felix climbed unsteadily to his feet, shaking.

“I swear to whatever gods there might be, Felix. I don’t know.” Her eyes welled with tears, which gave Felix a start. He had never seen Sabine Arkady cry, never seen her get even the least bit upset about anything. Bringing her to tears was like making a rock cry. But some coiled-up emotion had come unwound within her.

“Gods, Felix. I’m so fucking sorry. I should have—quit? When I saw what was going on. We’re all in danger here. The Beanstalk.”

“Yes,” said Felix. As she spoke he had managed to wobble toward her, placing his hands on her shoulders to brace himself. He stamped his right leg, banishing the pins and needles. “The Beanstalk. More people for the city to destroy, replace with something else. While the company just sits back to watch?”

She nodded, and Felix didn’t know whether to hug her or wring her slender neck. But wasn’t he just as culpable? Didn’t he get up and go to work each morning, ignoring the signs? Ignoring the headaches and the nightmares and plodding through, hoping he’d find some sign of his missing daughter?

The constable’s eyes darted back and forth. There was something else.

“What?” Felix said.

“They found something else. Something big and powerful. It was in this weird sarcophagus. They thought it was dead at first.”

A cold chill fled up Felix’s spine. “What is it, Sabine?”

“I don’t know. The R&D mages call it a god. I’ve only seen video of it, but that’s enough. It’s all tentacles and feelers, with way too many mouths. Even through layers of shielding it gets inside your head. Its thoughts are...alien.”

The constable clasped both hands on each side of her head. “It was trapped here long ago when our ancestors were still swimming in tide pools. It wants...tribute? If that’s the right word.”

“Human sacrifice,” Felix corrected.

“Yes.” The constable lowered her head in shame.

Felix wanted to vomit. But instead, he took a slow, deep, deliberate breath, looked Constable Sabine Arkady in the eyes, and said, “I’m going to fix this.”

“How?” she said. Her voice sounded desperate, incredulous.

“I don’t know. Just let me out of his cage.”

“They’ll be watching you.”

Felix shook his head. “No they won’t. Give me the key to your ride.”

She swiped tears from her eyes, searching his features for an explanation. Then she reached into a pocket of her uniform, pulled out a gray plastic card.

“They’ll stop you,” she said.

“They’ll try,” Felix said.

He reached around the constable’s slender waist, retrieving his weapon from her belt. Then he kissed her tear-stained cheek and left the room.

Dash re-upped with him right away. “You’re alive,” he said.

“So are you,” Felix said, surprised.

“I was looking for you all over the net. Someone revoked your access privileges. Oh, by the way, you’re fired.”

Felix scowled at this but was not at all surprised. Disappearing an employee of the corporation was a lot more paperwork. “What are you still doing here?”

He shrugged in Felix’s AR glasses. “Your firing hasn’t filtered through all the channels yet. Technically, as far as I’m concerned, you’re still a security enforcer, and I work for you. Besides, what kind of devil-may-care private eye would I be if I didn’t stick my nose where it didn’t belong?”

“You don’t have a nose.”

“Now is not the time for picking nits. Do you want my help or not?”

Felix came to a junction and stopped, gun drawn, looking around the corner before turning left. “I need you to do some things for me.”

“Anything for you, boss.”

“Thing the first: Get them off my ass so I can get the hell out of here. Make them think I’m somewhere I’m not. Alter the camera footage, whatever.”

“Your wish is my command. What else?”

“Thing the second: Wipe my accounts. Get all the company script I’ve got coming to me and wire it to Moira, along with a note telling her to convert it fast. It isn’t gonna be worth anything for much longer.”

Felix heard the sound of booted feet from far off, above and below, but never close. He made it to a utility garage and the constable’s waiting Sprinter.

“Thing the third: Grab every dirty little secret the company is hiding here and send it up the well and out to every station, every newsfeed.”

“No problem. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Get off this rock,” Felix’s voice choked as he said those words. “Make a copy of yourself, burn your original, and hitch a ride. You’re the best of all of us. No reason you should die for our sins.”

The face of his literary hero stared at him for a long moment. “You really think that’s necessary?”

“I do.”

“You’re the boss, boss. What are you going to do?”

“Something I should have done a long time ago.”

He climbed into the Sprinter and shoved the constable’s card into a slot next to the steering wheel. The machine started with a steady thrum.

“You know what’s going to happen,” said Dash.

“Yes,” said Felix. “I do.”

When Felix said he’d fix things, he didn’t exactly mean it the way the constable took it. When word of what the company was up to hit the planetary nets, the United Earth Defense forces would freak out, as they should, and send in the Marines. The Eldritch Corps would assess the threat, and even though Arkham would scream about jurisdiction, the Corps would implement the final option. Kinetic bombardment. A twenty-foot-long by one foot in diameter tungsten rod would be dropped from low orbit on the city. It would be traveling up to ten times the speed of sound when it struck, vaporizing everything around it for thousands of miles. The city, the colony, the company’s god in a jar, would be completely destroyed. No fuss, no muss, no radioactive fallout.

“Take care of yourself, Dash,” Felix said as he drove away.

He moved the Sprinter deep into the alien city. It was still night, the weird, pockmarked moon high in the sky, casting strange shadows on the alien scenery.

Felix drove headless of a destination, his only desire to get as deep into the city as he could. He had gone several miles when, without warning or explanation, the Sprinter’s magnetic engine—a gift of Trader science—sputtered and died. He brought it to a stop, jumping an angular curb, and got out, his heart beating unsteadily. It was a warm night, and he removed his jacket, leaving it and his gun in the seat. By the time he reached his destination, he hoped he would no longer need either of them.

Felix walked, flitting through odd turnstiles and maze-like intersections, no more sure of where he was going when he’d been behind the wheel of the borrowed vehicle. Then he heard it, that low piping across a wide range, atonal and strange. Felix paused, turning his head this way and that, trying to get a fix on where it was coming from.

He moved west, darting between two graphite-colored plinths. He felt jittery and quick, like a nervous prey animal out in the open. His vision blurred, refocused. He thought he saw shapes that hadn’t been there before, and new features resolved themselves. He was changing. He quickened his pace.

He moved with a loping gait that startled him. He lifted a hand into the moonlight, found a clump of many-jointed feelers. Instead of horror, he felt only bemusement. He kept going.

The piping was louder now, and he thought he understood its purpose. He lurched toward a large, squat pyramidal structure, the city’s architecture becoming familiar to him, less alien. The piping no longer sounded strange. It was sonorous. Beautiful. He smiled, and his face felt strange. He watched as one of his teeth fell out, clattering to the gray pavement beneath his feet. He grinned and kept moving, slouching sideways across a wide thoroughfare.

Other shapes rose up to meet him. Ghastly, yet familiar. The pipes were calling out to him, calling out to them all. Calling him home. And the thing that had been Felix Callisto no longer cared about the strange alien city next door, the soft pink monkeys crouching in their square petrochemical containers. He only wanted to hear the soft, reedy music trilling in the night. He only wanted to see his daughter again, even if she wasn’t the beautiful young woman who had entered the city and become lost. Even if he wasn’t the father she had left behind. Like someone whose name he could no longer remember once said, sometimes you have to look on the bright side, even when there isn’t one.