Kit Chesnes was dead.

“We found him this morning,” Usher explained at what felt like a great remove, the other end of a long and echoing hallway. I was standing halfway in and halfway out of the cold medical room, staring at the body on the table. One foot in death and one foot outside it—wasn’t that how I always operated? Right up against the edge? But why were so many others caught up in its wake? First Morés, both of them, and now Chesnes. “Half submerged in the Polis Delta. Not literally, hmm? There are some cases of the dead where half is in reference-”

“I get the point, Usher.” My breath hissed out in front of me like cigarette smoke. Well—screw it. I lit another cigarette, tactfully ignoring Usher’s stricken face as I did so. He thought it messed with the chemical balance and stained the sterile walls, which it did. “The Polis Delta? What the hell was he doing down there? No one lives there and no one works there. Not even Drakon.”

He bustled around the room, closing cabinets before the smoke could reach them and pulling a clipboard from the wall, paper fluttering. Anatomy diagrams were pinned up all around, some, I noted, with actual bones clipped in place. And there hadn’t been as many of them last time. “We don’t know,” he answered tetchily. “After all, hmm, it’s rather hard to ask the deceased once they attain that state. Will you put that cigarette away?”

“The sun’s barely risen and I’ve already seen two dead bodies. One of them I was talking to just days ago. I need the edge off it all.”

“So you did know him. He had your business card in his pocket.”

“Yeah, I gave it to him. He was a client. He…” I still had his retainer money. A hundred talents that he’d insisted upon so that I’d trust him, so that we might work together in Drakon’s shadow. Chesnes gave it to me so that he would be better than his superior, that he didn’t take it on blind faith and power differential that I’d do what he asked, when he asked. “What happened to him, Usher? What killed him? Maybe I just don’t understand what being frozen and chemically treated does to the skin, but these don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.”

I hadn’t dared look at his wounds too closely. Chesnes’ throat had been torn open, the skin split around it as though by some barbed instrument. Long gashes crisscrossed their way up his arms and the back of his hands, in some places deep enough to scrape bone. “Like an animal attack, or at least the recorded descriptions we have, hmm,” Usher said, jabbing a small sharp tool experimentally into Chesnes’ side. “Something clawed—a wolf, perhaps.”

“There aren’t wolves here. Only nightmares who act like wolves.”

“But they take human form, hmm? They cannot do this.”

“Usher, you understand that I’m trying to figure out what happened. Not what didn’t happen.”

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

“Mm-hmm.” He adjusted his goggles, then proceeded to solemnly place another pair of goggles on top. I wondered if I should have been standing farther away. “But aren’t they the same thing, just presented two different ways, hmm? If probability must all add to one, then what we can subtract from it is just as useful as what we can add to it, philosophically speaking-”

“I’m not speaking philosophically,” I said. “You’re telling me we don’t know.”

Usher caught whatever edge was beginning to grow in my voice, much like the ones that had dissected Chesnes like so much wire, and shook his head. “These wounds are novel to me as well, hmm. So—yes, Starling. We don’t know.”

That was a starting point. No one ever knew anything at the beginning. Next I needed to start asking the right questions to the right people—or I would, I amended, if this were one of my jobs. But Chesnes sure as hell hadn’t paid me to investigate his death. He, like most everybody, hadn’t seen it coming until it was too late. And somehow I suspected Drakon wouldn’t bring the job to me. It was intriguing, certainly. Maybe a little worrying that he’d been mauled to death only a few dozen hours after walking around my office.

It wasn’t my job. “He was found by the Polis Delta. Nobody’s there. Who found him?”

Damn! I couldn’t get away from it. I had Chesnes’ money that I didn’t feel I’d earned, and his surprisingly earnest hope that maybe, if we worked together long enough, we’d have been friends. He’d never see it happen now. But now I knew I wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep until I figured out what happened to him and why. I pinched my nose and wondered when I’d see the end of it. “I asked you a question, Usher.”

“Ah, mm-hmm. A nightmare by the name of Alexis Itoya. A fascinating nightmare, too, and one who agreed to donate her brainstem upon the event of her death, hmm?” Meaning Usher had badgered her into it. “She embodies the cloying darkness, which seeps like liquids around windows and under doors, hmm? Fascinating. Lights actually flicker around her when she’s agitated.”

“What’d she say?”

“Well, that she’d found a corpse. Rather self-evident.”

“Does she live by the Delta?”

“She didn’t mention her residence, hmm.”

No solid ground to land on yet. “Where did Chesnes live?”

“I don’t know. We identified him through a membership card belonging to the Cable Particular.” A casino. “Normally they are held by the city, hmm, but I was cataloguing the contents of his pockets just over here? As you are the frighteningly rare detective.”

Spread out on a small dusty shelf were the aforementioned casino membership card, glossy and silver-edged; a cheap pack of cigarettes; a ring of keys; a brass pocket watch with spiderwebbed cracks in its face; a pressed yellow flower; and an empty leather wallet. I shuffled them around, trying to puzzle out how they all fit together, or why one of Drakon’s senior enforcers would be carrying all of it around. “And this was all?”

“Unless it dissolved into the water, hmm.”

I thought for a second. “Okay.” I swept Chesnes’ former belongings into one of the many transparent bags Usher had laying around, then stuffed the bundle into my jacket. “You’ve been a great help, Usher, but somebody must know where he lived. Can I borrow your phone?”

He waved a distracted hand. “Do pay for it, hmm. Wait—who exactly are you calling-?”

I stepped out into the lobby. On the secretary’s desk there was a nice red phone, a nod to reality by the fact it was bolted to that same desk. I ignored Usher’s protests as I spun the dial once, twice, four times. I could hardly blame him for wanting to keep his head down, but, evidently, this wasn’t the first time. The dial was already grooved in all the right places—the morgue, after all, had a lot of reasons to be in contact with Drakon.