I’d made it a little ritual. Every morning I went down to the morgue, that stark white building near the boundary between the upper and lower Outscape that no one dared damage nor deface. Maybe we all knew, deep down, that we’d end up there eventually. It was the only place to go, unless you expected to slip down into the ocean and never surface again, let the current carry you farther and farther out. Nobody knew if there was another shore to wash up upon, or if the dark water continued indefinitely, reaching all the way to the stars which glittered atop it.

The philosophers—and the drunks—said that this is only natural. Dreams don’t end anywhere. They may blur and fade, they may drift in and out of memory, but there is no fencing, no wall, no opposite shore, no boundary to encircle them. But what did they know? In the Outscape, nightmares were close to human—walking, bleeding, dying. Only when they slept could they cross that porous barrier between the city and the real world, tear their way across people’s dreams. Only when they slept were they truly nightmares, reigning over slumbering human terror. And every waking moment in the Outscape, with Dragon and drink, they spent chasing that high.

I didn’t dream at all anymore.

I lit a cigarette, flicking the match onto the sidewalk outside, before I stepped through the heavy double doors. The lobby was deserted, although there was the impression of footsteps in the thick blue carpet and the goldfaced clock on the wall had been wound up. I left my card on the desk, tucking it beneath the bell, and walked into the backrooms.

The morgue was the only place that reeked of alcohol that I hated. It was like walking through a desert at night: bitterly cold and empty, without any traces of another living thing. Usher had pinned up a cheery calendar on the wall, with hand-painted pictures of flowers and forestry, but it was so out of place it felt like a mockery, a taste of color to make the white walls crueler. And he was late. I tore yesterday’s page from the calendar and placed it neatly on the closest table, so that he could reuse the same page next year.

The noise must have startled him, for I heard his footsteps up the stairs a moment later. “Starling!” he said. “I’m—well, I’m not surprised to see you again. Have you given any more thought to the offer I made you yesterday? I was thinking about it, and I believe it’s the best offer you’re likely to get-”

“I’m not selling you my teeth when I die,” I told him.

“Oh. Hmm. Are you quite sure?” Only a strange little man like Tze Usher could have worked in the morgue for as long as he had. He was short, with a thick pair of goggles that made his eyes look twice as large, and a purple silk vest that should by all rights have belonged to a train conductor. He was fascinated with human death and human aging, and I had the misfortune to be his only test subject. “After all, the enamel degradation is unique in its physicality, and well, you should have no further use for them unless you have a particular wish to preserve your image.”

“No.”

He sighed. “Your fingernails, perhaps?”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“No.”

“I know what you’re here for, Starling. We don’t have it.”

“I want to see for myself. I might be the only one who knows.”

He gestured with one hand. “Follow me. Downstairs—you know the way.” I did indeed. It was where Usher spent the majority of his time, the color slowly draining from his complexion to leave him almost as ashen and grey-faced as the corpses he dealt with. The stairs were steep and the railing was stained with a dark liquid that I’d never asked its origin. Usher would tell me, I knew, and in so much detail that I’d never put my hand near it again. “Did you know, by the way, the concentration of 2-DCL in the water has risen by forty-three parts per million over the past week, hmm? Entirely consistent with previous seasonal spikes but three days ahead of schedule compared to two cycles ago.”

Living in the Outscape was a delicate business, and it turned every one of my conversations into a kind of dance, a tango recognizing the guns at one another’s waists and the questions we could rightfully ask. But dying was the simplest business there was, and Usher had correspondingly more straightforward conversations. I had to retool my brain to keep pace with it. “So is that important?”

“Not at all! Well, especially not for you. You could drink 100% concentrated 2- or 3-DCL and you wouldn’t feel any ill effects. Probably, hmm.” He frowned, then produced a vial of bubbling clear liquid from somewhere. Small red and orange flakes floated inside. “We could experiment-”

“I’m not drunk enough for that and I never will be. Why do you care, then? If it’s not affecting anybody.”

“Because nobody knows, Starling. Nobody knows why there’s a seasonal flux or what might produce it.” He grinned with a fervor that seemed to extend beyond his slight frame and fill the space. “Isn’t that thrilling?”

He stopped at a heavy freezer door. He produced two different keys and inserted them into the top and bottom locks, waiting until there was a heavy, satisfying clunk from somewhere inside to start spinning the wheeled handle. Frost had crept in around the hinges, and he struggled to wrench it free of its frame. “There’s only one unidentified body that’s come in overnight—but I mean, hmm, I think it’s not what you are here for. Really, instead-”

I grabbed the door and pulled it open, the cold beginning to burn at my fingers. “I’ll decide that, Usher.”

She wouldn’t be here. I knew that. Drakon had wanted to make sure she disappeared for good, and no doubt the body of Bianca Morés was halfway to infinity already, winning her flight from the Outscape only in death. But some strange compulsion kept me coming back to the morgue, day after day, just to ensure I hadn’t missed her. Maybe it was guilt, trying to make sure I didn’t abandon her again to her lonely fate. Maybe I just had to be sure. Death is a far easier finality than disappearance, one I sought without finding for Morés.

But it was a red-haired man who lay sightlessly on the stretcher, a gash in his neck streaked with dried blood. I wondered who he’d been, what kind of nightmare he’d lived and died as, who killed him. His clothes were old and torn, but the high orange collar was that of a construction worker, a thankless job to keep the Outscape from collapsing into that ocean. Nobody would remember him for it. Nobody would come to claim his body. Usher would go over it with a rough-heeled brush, pocket any personal effects, and burn it, and there would end the red-haired man.

I stared at his face, trying to commit it to memory. I knew it wouldn’t work. Come tomorrow, it’d be gone.

I left. As soon as the door slammed shut, Usher looked up and I shook my head. “Nothing. Still nothing.”

“Starling, I really must tell you-”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Not—about her.” He wrung his hands. “I really can’t help you with that, and I think—well, I think it’s unhealthy to so closely pursue-”

I put my foot on the first step. “If it’s not about her, then spit it out, Usher. I have places to be.”

“Starling, one of the identified bodies. He had your name in his pocket.”