I retreated back to my office, letting my feet do the walking and my head do the thinking on the way. Chesnes’ body had been moved, and most probably by his killer. Either that, or by a third party that wanted to stay as far away as possible from Drakon’s prying eye. And neither option was random. Someone had found Chesnes knowing exactly who he was and why they wanted him out of the way—and that was a hell of a lot more than I could say.

Usher, Drakon, Itoya, and even Zamir had all given me the runaround. I stuck a cigarette in my mouth—already my third of the morning, not a good sign—and rifled through the stacks of paper on my desk. City bulletins, archive clippings, pages I’d torn from books and left the rest to rot. A detective shouldn’t have to schlep around the city looking for whatever answer eluded them. A detective should have everything here at her fingertips, be so steeped in the workings of her city that there wasn’t a place or person to frustrate her as Chesnes did now.

I’d done well, I thought. When I’d bought these two rooms in a dingy alleyway off Thessal Street, payment in full with a stack of crumpled indigo bills, the store owner had been glad to get rid of them. One room for my office and receiving clients, the few of them that came, and one room for my bed and my closet and the few bottles of blackberry cider I was saving for a special occasion, not that I’d ever found much to celebrate. And now the rain didn’t leak in through the walls anymore, none of the yellow-hued lights were burnt out, and the mismatched bookcases were leaning from the weight. I’d even found some incomplete maps in a pawn shop and nailed them to the wall.

I stared at them without seeing anything for a moment. Then I went and grabbed the hammer from the right bottom shelf, flipped it around, and pulled the map from the wall.

I flattened out the Outscape across my desk. The city was roughly circular, with irregular docks and harbors jutting out into the ocean in all directions. The map had clearly been updated time and time again over the years, with bits of harbor sketched on above others. One joker had drawn in a spider-legged monster in the corner in the zigzagged lines of an alcoholic hand.

On the city landed the small clear bag of Chesnes’ belongings. It rattled.

I palmed his keys, tossing them up and down to test the weight. Made by an experienced locksmith, with the little hemispherical knob near the handle that wouldn’t be copied by someone wax-casting from the lock. But no maker’s marks. Same with the pocket watch and wallet—they were expensive, shiny enough to have been polished recently, but could have come from anywhere. Nice little keepsakes.

Next came Chesnes’ identification card for the Cable Particular. I’d walked past it but never seen the inside—a seedy little casino partially made out of a converted cable car from the Loop, hence the name, who put green filters over all their lights for bigger bets on the roulette tables. I prayed that Chesnes was busy enough to pick a casino close to home and stuck a pin into the map roughly where I remembered it standing.

His cigarettes were nothing special—but that meant something, too. They weren’t the garbage you’d see down in the Delta and they weren’t the high-flying snuff roll-ups that were all you could get in Babel.

And the flower. A cut piece of a blue-green petal, bent and crumpled where it’d wrapped around the pocket watch. I held it up to the light, seeing the angular veiny structure inside, the way the colors faded to white in the sun. It was a strange little thing—I couldn’t think of an explanation for why he’d been carrying it around that fit with the Chesnes I’d thought I’d known. And now nobody would know. I could guess, fumble around in the dark, and maybe if I was lucky I could pick up the outlines of it all. But it was like looking at a painting with all the lights off. You’d lose something.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I placed another pin into the map. A flower like this came from Red’s Park—just blocks from the Cable Particular casino. Maybe Chesnes walked there every day just for the atmosphere. Or maybe it was a little closer to home.

***

The shopkeeper in every store is always the same, no matter what clothes or what face they wear. They are small, even if not in stature, and they stand carefully at a forty-five degree angle to take in as much of the store as possible like a camera on a tripod. The eyes swivel to meet you, the hard grays and browns of peeling paint, with no emotion in it but what you want to imagine. A beggar will grope for kindness in them; a thief will catch out the flashes of attention; a paying customer will get nothing but the same faint money greediness.

I ran through the same rigamarole at what must have been fifteen corner shops, with names like Demersal Kiosk and Ninth S and Marta’s Optiker. I laid the pack of cigarettes down on the counter in one hand and a few copper quarter-talents in the other, letting the clink rise above the faint background. I kept my hand covering the coins as I said, “I’m looking for a man. Tall, broad, short straight light hair. A falling nightmare. Buys these cigarettes from you?”

What did I expect? None of them would answer me. People came and went through the story like the river flowed through the city, they said, and no, the name Kit Chesnes didn’t sound familiar at all. If you’re chasing your man, they said, you won’t find him in here. We sell those cigarettes, they said, like we sell water and wine and whisker-thin wafers, what about it? There was no anger in any of it, no reaching for the guns I knew lurked behind those storefront counters, just a dull and yet almost prideful refusal to give anything away even when they did take the money.

I stood outside the last of the storefronts, somewhere on the clockwise side of the neighborhood. The casino was no good; they knew to protect their gamblers, and if Chesnes didn’t owe them anything I’d be lucky to get a word out.

But there had to be something. I didn’t know what it would be—I didn’t know where to find it, except I hoped that it was somewhere here. I took out the flower petal again, and tucked it into the breast pocket of my jacket, a signal to anyone looking for it. I pulled my hair back into a loose ponytail so that the rain wouldn’t send it into my eyes. And I started walking.

Red’s Park was supposed to be what Babel was now: somebody’d had to build the damn park, after all. He’d built all his apartments in twos and threes, to rent out dozens of rooms at a time, with the underground a maze of connected servant’s quarters. And then he died and no one even remembered if Red had ever been his name.

Now it was a quiet neighborhood, although not particularly by choice. People stayed in their homes and didn’t make trouble because they feared what would come down on them if they did. No one bothered me as I paced my way up and down the streets, looking for something which didn’t feel right. An empty house that shouldn’t have been empty, a set of blue-green flowers in the yard, a lock—if I dared investigate that closely—that matched the key ring in my pocket. I walked until my feet were sore and the night was crawling over the city like a blanket.

The quiet broke, shattered by the rhythmic pounding of someone trying to force their way through a door. I hurried forwards, squinting against the glare from the streetlamp. A man was slamming an open palm against the wooden door of one of the apartments, slurring his words in anger. “Open up! Open up, damn you! You don’t hide like this!”

“Who are you looki-” I began.

He whirled on me, a ballerina’s pivot on one ankle. “None of your business,” he sneered. “Why don’t you-” I saw his eyes glitter in the dark, land on the flower at my jacket, and narrow.

He drew a short ugly knife from his belt and charged at me.