It was a different secretary this time. She sounded young. Did she even know all of what Drakon was? Or was it such a sprawlingly vast machine, that those who worked at its cogs and its bends might never know the whole of it? She knew enough to let the silence stretch on, to let me be the one to state what I wanted from Drakon—before she got fed up with it. “Hello?” she demanded. “What do you want?”

“I want to know,” I said, “about Kit Chesnes.”

The sneer was red-hot even through the receiver, and didn’t match what I heard. “I’m sorry,” she said, entirely level, reading from a script. “Do you have a name to give him?”

“A curse,” I said. It didn’t seem as funny anymore. “But you can’t give that name to him, because he’s dead. It doesn’t matter what you tell me about him, because he’s dead and can’t stop you. Everything that’s supposed to matter in this little interaction, it doesn’t, because Chesnes is sleeping the big sleep now that all nightmares seek and he doesn’t have to worry about this bullshit anymore.”

There was a long pause. Chesnes wouldn’t have reported in this morning—but then again, I doubted Drakon worked on a punch-clock system. Most likely they were just finding out where he was, or more accurately that they didn’t know. The problem was, confusion so often gets mixed up with obstinateness. “I’m afraid we can’t help you at the moment. Maybe you can try the city instead, or calling back in a couple hours.” She was so polite about it that I almost didn’t catch the undertones of or never that suffused it.

But I did catch it, at about the same time that the morning and the macabre scene caught up to me. “Quit being so goddamn bureaucratic! He’s dead! I know that for goddamn sure even if you can’t prove it in your stuffy little room-”

Usher deftly lifted the phone from my fingers, and held it out a little in front of him. “What my…colleague means to say is, hmm, this particular fact about Chesnes which should have been communicated earlier, hmm. Mr. Chesnes occupies the starless sea that shines under the sunless shore.” He said it very carefully, pausing on each word to be sure it crept across the static-lined cable. “Perhaps you would like to fetch someone now, hmm? Chesnes certainly has the time to wait for it.”

She held. “The hell was that?” I said.

“Information is valuable, hmm? We act and fall entirely based upon it. But Drakon is understandably paranoid about the information he receives, hmm, because there are a lot of people who might like to lie to him.”

“I can’t imagine why,” I said, thinking of three torn pages.

“But even he must have reason to trust someone, hmm? Me in my little corner of the city, Mar Low and the rats she keeps. We are useful when Drakon enters our spheres, when one of his own dies, hmm?” He frowned. “Drakon will ask me to change the statement, now that you have heard it. He does not want us to lie to him even at gunpoint, hmm, because he can do worse than one bullet.”

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“Are you helping me?”

“Starling, hmm? You were making a fool of yourself.”

“Better than being bought and sold.” I heard crackling on the receiver and took it from him. “Hello? Is there someone there who can actually say anything useful?”

It was that silver-toothed bastard Koshmar. “The hound dog is back. Only I didn’t know you were Chesnes’ dog. Hired you once, paid you well, and here you are howling after him. Well, he ain’t coming home no matter how you chase.”

“He worked side-by-side with you, Koshmar. Hand in glove, and now some rabid beast’s gone and torn him apart. Something that, if I’m anybody’s dog, must have been a goddamn dire wolf. Doesn’t that scare you? Doesn’t it make you wonder how safe you are, walking home with only a shiny grin and a six-shot revolver? I’m not asking much here.”

“Sure you aren’t. Sounds like it scares you right good.”

“Chesnes’ home address—or where he slept, at least. What he might be doing by the Polis Delta.”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

I bit back a snarl and let it ferment on my tongue instead. “Drakon will be wondering. He might kill off his own, but I don’t think he likes other people doing it.”

“And what do you think you know?”

“No,” I said, thinking aloud now. Koshmar, I thought, was the kind of idiot who’d snidely correct me if I got something wrong just for the pleasure of it. All the better if I chanced on being right. “But why would anyone kill Chesnes? He carries a gun and no one in the whole Outscape’s fool enough to target one of Drakon’s. By now it’s almost an instinct to fear him. Unless-”

“What Drakon doesn’t want is the little human investigator sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. And I’m saying it to you nicely. If you start asking around…”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ve had threats from worse than you and I’m still standing.” Usher winced next to me. “I’m not going to ask again. Where did Chesnes live? Why was he by Polis Delta?” I thought. “And why would someone kill him?”

He couldn’t resist it. “Bianca Morés. You’re heading down her path, detective.”

I slammed the phone down. Why couldn’t Koshmar have been the one to get ripped apart instead? I wouldn’t be playing out this song-and-dance for him. At least I’d gotten him to tell me something. “What set him off?” I muttered. “Not the ordinary questions, but the idea that someone might have wanted Chesnes dead. That somebody would dare defy Drakon. Maybe he’s just covering his boss for the job security. Maybe he’s really as dumb as he looks and knows nothing.” But Koshmar was certainly acting like it was trouble, the kind Drakon wanted to pretend didn’t exist. Koshmar just wasn’t very good at pretending.

“Please don’t involve me any more in this, hmm?” Usher said. “I like you, Starling, but you draw enemies like moths.”

“I just need one more contact,” I said. “Itoya. The one that found the body. I know you’ve got a callback for her.” He looked suspicious. “I’ll call from my office.” Still suspicious. “And you can have my front left molar once I die.”

“Not the others?”

“When I need something else from you.”

The answer sated him. And with thirty-one teeth still left to sell, I walked out of the morgue five minutes later with a name and a dial-up number scrawled across what had formerly been a time-of-death label. Maybe now I could finally get a goddamned lead on what’d killed Chesnes.