Alexis Itoya didn’t pick up the phone. After thirty-seven rings I gave up on the white noise and shoved the phone across my desk. It stopped abruptly at the edge, the cord tugging it back. I spun my chair around and pulled out the sheaf of phone numbers Zamir had given me from the archives, because I was the only one fool enough to take them when a storm tore through the stacks. They crackled at the edges and smelled faintly of mold.
Itoya’s phone had been disconnected. Probably because she couldn’t pay for it, not if she hadn’t bought another, if she was still passing out a nonexistent number to avoid the indignity of lacking one. But five years ago, it’d been in use. Five years ago, it’d corresponded to a hole-in-the-wall apartment overlooking the Polis Delta, squeezed in among seventy others like it. An apartment with no streetlights outside it. I shrugged at that, then flipped over the notice Usher had given me and scribbled the address on the back: 47 Reosyme Street.
Mud had piled up around the posts of the Loop station, and the grated stairs were slick enough to glisten. Down here, it hardly mattered whether it was raining, for the wind whipped up the river into a constant spray, an iridescent mist hanging in the air. I pulled the brim of my hat down but it hardly helped at all.
Someone had painted the number 47 over the pegs where the metallic numbers had once been inserted. One of the windows was broken, and whatever blanket had been covering had been torn off, leaving only scraps of cloth nailed to the frame. Two or three empty bottles had been knocked around next to the door, and now shards of glass stuck up through the cracks in the wooden floorboards. I made sure Bella was within easy reach in my pocket before I knocked.
Nothing. I knocked again. Before I could knock a third time, the door jerked open a crack and a thin pop-up knife appeared in the space. “Nobody comes down here. Nobody at all.”
It was entirely dark behind the door. I couldn’t even make out an eye. “Are you Alexis Itoya?”
“Itoya.” The knife vanished for a second, then stabbed out farther at me. I took a step back in order to keep all of my internal organs. “Nobody comes for her. Nobody wants anything from her. Nobody at all.”
“Well, I do.” I laid a hand on the door and shoved it open, and was grimly rewarded with little resistance. The figure behind was sticklike and thin, with watery purple eyes that seemed to have permanent shadows beneath them. The fingers that clutched the knife were plaster white around the knuckles, and I couldn’t tell whether it was mere tension or actual bone there sticking up through the skin. As the weak light trickled in, she winced and backed away from it. “I want to talk to you, Itoya, just to ask a few questions But I’m not going to force you. If you want me to leave or you don’t want to answer, you just have to tell me. One word and I walk away.”
The knife blade glittered in the dark as she folded it up, although she kept the handle tucked into her palm. “Why me?”
“You saw something, Itoya. This morning.” She nodded. “What was it you saw? I want to make sure I’ve got it right.”
“A—a man. But not a full man. He wasn’t moving and he wasn’t going to move. I didn’t call out to him. No one calls out to each other near the river. No one, because who knows what you might be calling to?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Do you know-”
“I am not a fool. I crept up to him until I saw that he could do no harm anymore. Not to Itoya, not to anyone.” She nodded, almost frantically. “I did what I was supposed to. What we are meant to do. I took him to the man who deals in death and I didn’t know anyone would come back to talk to me. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
I held up my hands, palms out, letting her see I was holding no weapon nor badge. Both would be equally frightening here by the delta, where it seemed most of all that the Outscape was sinking into the sea. Between the branching river and the ocean, there was no law except that which guns and blades could enforce. “No,” I said. “No, you didn’t. But Usher doesn’t ask the same kind of questions that I do, and he didn’t know to. So I’ve come back to get those answers.”
“I didn’t know he was important.”
Something about staring into the darkness was beginning to get to me. “Only now that he’s dead. Where exactly did you find him?”
“Where the bend meets the red and green.”
“What?”
“You do not know the river. If this man was important I will show you.” She disappeared into the recesses of the house for a moment, then reemerged with a deep black blindfold over her eyes. “Quickly, quickly. The storm is weak today and the sun is strong.”
Reosyme Street overlooked the delta, fifteen feet above the churning water. There was a gap in the crumbling cement wall that I’d dismissed as an unrepaired accident and Itoya walked right up to it, grabbing hold of a rusty metal ladder that lurked beneath the lip. She scrambled down in the space of seconds and I followed after, wincing every time the frame creaked. No one had replaced the pentagonal bolts in a very, very long time, and I definitely saw one or two that had crumbled to dust in their socket. It’d be a short, rough trip into the Delta if any more broke.
The water flowed through the whole city. Like a blind thief looking for money, it picked up anything and everything that dropped in along the way, giving it a furry grey texture streaked with red. “It was just here,” she said as I dismounted the latter, wiping my hands on my jacket. “The bend of the river before the ocean of memory.”
“Tricky route for it.”
A little green ribbon had been staked into the ground, and it dipped into the water where it eddied, the grey sweeping past and leaving only a velvety red. Itoya stood beside it, a finger pointed clawlike at the ground. “Here,” she repeated. “His feet were in the water and his boots were swept away. A man like that probably had solid boots with buttons on them.”
I frowned at the ground. There were smears of blood there, but they were thin and separated, barely visible even after a few hours. “He wasn’t in the river?” I said. “Just lying next to it?”
“If the man was in the river, the man would be in the ocean by now.”
I nodded. “Simply lying here, cut up and cheese-grated, a thousand cuts all over him. And yet he was kind enough not to bleed into the soil of your lovely neighborhood.” I paced a circle around Itoya, and she shrunk from me no matter which direction I was. “You saw how he was injured, Itoya? But did he look like he’d been—recently injured? Were the wounds still fresh?”
“Maybe?”
“I need you to think. This is important.”
She thought. It was a full-body experience that required tipping her whole head back. “I laid a hand on him,” he said. “To understand if he was dead or merely injured, because if he was injured then I should have killed him. The pain he would have been in.” She held up one of her bone-white hands, turning it over so that I could see there was no blood on them, no brick-red stains that would have formed if his body were slick with blood. “What should it matter how dead a man is? He and I have no reason to care.”
“Lucky him,” I said. “It’s not his problem.” Because Chesnes had been torn apart by his assailant—but he’d already been dead when he reached this horrible little corner of the Polis Delta, I was sure of it. And I didn’t think a wolf would drag him around for the fun of it. “Tell me something else, Itoya. Tell me something that will make it all make sense.”
“You will die like that man. Do you fear ending up here when you do?”
“No.”
I thought that her eyes might have narrowed, somewhere behind the blindfold. “You lie to me. But that doesn’t matter to Itoya. I’m already here.”
That seemed to be the last word on the subject. I paced a few more times around the scuffed dirt and mud, running a few silver pebbles between my fingers, and I left her there, staring out at the river. I don’t know how much of it she saw.