Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door, more firm than polite. I listened to the way it accompanied the rain and I didn’t get up from my desk. Then there was a cough, a muttering which didn’t sound particularly nice, and the knob turned.

He entered. He didn’t have to open his mouth for me to know he was the owner of the voice on the phone. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with short, straight hair clinging to his face from the rain. He was wearing a dress shirt with the collar bent awkwardly to one side, as if it was pinning in place the suit jacket clearly too small for his frame. As he entered, the clean straight lines of my office seemed to warp around him, as if he were standing at the bottom of a deep well and I, stationary at my desk, were rushing towards him.

He was a nightmare, of course. I didn’t know him, but I knew the type: falling, that pit in the bottom of my stomach and the strange leaden sluggishness which seeped into my limbs when he shut the door. The Outscape was rife with men and women carrying that same aura, their eyes like pits. He grinned a little at my discomfort, which even after twenty-five years I hadn’t figured out how to hide. Nightmares don’t have an effect on one another—can you imagine the strife? But I was only human.

“Starling Hexel,” he drawled. “Somehow, I expected more.”

I stood. The top of my head barely came up to his shoulders. If I tried to shove him, I’d be the one stumbling back. “Have a seat,” I said instead, pulling the other chair away from the desk. “No need for either of us to be discourteous now.”

“That’s good.” He sat on about two inches of the edge, muscles tense, and I did the same. “Because you don’t talk like that to Drakon, not when you’re on his job. He’s particular about that sort of thing, especially if your name isn’t on his payroll. If you can mouth off, then the whole Outscape can mouth off, and that’s a city which needs damn well to be taught a lesson.”

Everyone knew Leonid Drakon. You tried not to know him by name when you could avoid it, but his reputation pervaded every street. He’d already taught the Outscape several blood-spattered lessons, held the city’s black market in his iron grip. He controlled the sale of Dragon, that gritty grey powder with the clever, coincidental name that half the nightmares in the city would kill for. I fumbled below the desk for the drawer where I’d stashed Bella. “Hold on,” I said. “He’s the one asking me?”

“Well, sure.”

“And you’re his…what? Gofer? Bodyguard? All of the above?”

“It’s not your business to know.”

“Certainly helps my business to know, if you’re hiring me. Or are you just shopping around?”

He scowled. “Lots of people claim to be detectives in the listings. So far I’m not impressed.”

“I hung up on you and you showed up all the same. Which implies you don’t have the job security to write me off and slink back to Drakon, because it’s time-sensitive or he asked for me in particular. That’s two strikes,” I said. “The third is that you tried to lie to me. Hardly anyone claims to be an investigator in the Outscape. Nightmares hate asking questions. You’re not supposed to question dreams.” I watched as his eyes flared.

“You talk too much.”

“Yes. I talk too much. Lonely people do—maybe it’s a human thing. But enough about me and enough about you. We have business.”

That seemed to surprise him. Maybe he thought I was building up to refuse the job, even though everyone knows you don’t refuse a Drakon job if you want to see the next sunrise. The next storm at least, I corrected, as the downpour slathered at the window. He cocked his head to the side, then offered me his hand. “Maybe we started on the wrong foot, I think. Kit Chesnes.”

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I leaned forward to shake it—then reflex took me and I leaped back out of my seat, heart pounding. It had felt like I was leaning over the abyss, like whatever precarious balance I’d found had just given way. All just a nightmare. I closed my eyes and took a second to breathe, to let my feet feel like they were on solid ground and to avoid whatever idiotic grin I was sure Chesnes had written all over him. “What does Drakon want from me?” I almost snarled, slamming my hand down on the desk, nerves well and truly frayed.

Fortunately bodyguards and right-hand men are good at recovering their composure. “He wants you to find something of his.”

“What, anything?”

“No.” He took a cigarette and match from his pocket, the paper nearly disappearing between those thick fingers. He struck the match along the edge of my desk, leaving a smear of soot—but he didn’t light the cigarette. Not yet. “There was a nice house up in the Babel District. Stained-glass windows and little brass lanterns, belonged to a guy named Nicholson. You ever had occasion to see it?”

“Do I look like the type of person who pals around Babel for fun?”

He was still holding the tiny flame. “Look, Hexel. We’re both going to be under Drakon’s gaze and I’d really rather that were a friendlier place than it is now. Too many people trying to crack wise every time a guy says anything.”

“Well, keep saying things and I’ll see if I can’t restrain myself.”

“Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter at all. You won’t ever meet Nicholson, you won’t ever see the house. It burned, all of it, three days ago. All that pretty glass twisted and melted on the ground, all the bricks tumbled from one another.” In one motion, he lit the tip of his cigarette and extinguished the match. It looked like a damn expensive cigarette, too, and I would have leaned forward for a breath of it were I not worried about falling again. “Nicholson was inside. He didn’t get out.”

“I always wondered,” I said. “I know nightmares bleed in the Outscape, I know you die. But I’d never got around to testing whether nightmares could burn.”

“Funny. You’re not worrying about Nicholson for this job. He was just a guy that knew some things and ended up in the wrong place. See, he had on him a little red notebook with a plastic cover. We need to know where it went and we need to get it back.”

“A notebook? The kind made of paper? Which burns first and hot?”

“See, now there’s that detective brain working. No,” he said. “We’re sure it didn’t burn. Our boys have already given the house a thorough searching and we didn’t find any red plastic reside. And second, the wrong kind of people have started asking about. The kind of talk they wouldn’t dare unless they knew that notebook was floating around waiting to be picked up.”

“What’s in the notebook?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“I’d like to.”

“And I’d like a year’s supply of Dragon.”

“It’s worth that much?”

“Questions, questions. Humans ask hardly so many questions when they’re sleeping.” All his teeth, including two gold and one silver, appeared in his grin as he stood, stubbing out his cigarette as he did so. “Find who has the notebook. Get it back to us. Babel’s full of the stingy and the rich, there are people watching out every window for the bookers or the talk. They’ll have seen something.”

He wasn’t wrong there. “Sounds too easy.”

“And your pay,” he added. He stepped forward, nearly brushing me aside, and laid out three royal blue bills on the desk. “That should cover three days’ worth.” An indigo bill joined it, laid on top like a holiday ribbon. “And a retainer. A hundred talents, since we haven’t worked together before.”

I picked it up. “I can’t take this,” I said. I didn’t want to tie myself to Drakon, one ribboned end to another. I didn’t say that. “Not if we’re going to be—friends.”

“I insist. Between you and me, detective: Drakon thinks his honor and his reputation are enough. I prefer to stand on firmer ground.” Of course he did. What else would a bodyguard deal in but gunmetal and money? But I was affected all the same, and I took the money, tucking it deep into my jacket pocket.

He paused at the door before he left, letting the rain trickle in around his shoes. “Do you have a card? So that we can reach you.” I took one from the stack I kept on my desk and handed it to him. I’d made the design myself, and I didn’t like the way he looked at it before tucking it into his pocket. “And you know how to reach us. Drakon doesn’t hide.”

The wind pulled the door shut once he was gone, the cheap shutters shaking in their frame. Gravity righted itself in the office, my brain no longer fooled into thinking it was inexorably falling towards that damned nightmare. Common it might be; that didn’t mean I had to like it.

I thought for a moment. Then I got to work.