“That’s not yours!” he shouted. “That doesn’t belong to you! Where did you get it?”
His knife was serrated, with chipped notches all along the back and streaked with cobalt-blue flecks. Even though he was stumbling drunk, his first swipe would have opened up my collarbone to the air if I hadn’t jerked back in time. As it was, a flailing backswipe caught my arm and I cursed in pain, dark blood immediately starting to stain through my jacket. And that didn’t come out easy, either.
I caught him by the forearm and twisted his elbow backwards, feeling a vicious pleasure as he yelped, the knife falling involuntarily from his fingers. He tried to jerk away from me and pick it up, and I kicked him in the back of the knee. He staggered; I kicked him again in the same spot, letting go of his arm so that he could sprawl to the pavement and bury his face in it. Still he kept trying to scrabble for the knife, so I picked it up by the blade and flung it off into the darkness. It skittered and bounced until I couldn’t hear it anymore. “Alright,” I said. “Let’s try that again, but civilized.”
He groaned. I wasn’t in any mood for it and I stomped on his wrist. “Stop muttering.”
“You—you’re wearing-”
“The flower, yes? Does the name Kit Chesnes mean anything to you?”
“Where’s he gone?” he demanded. “Did you kill him?”
“Someone else did that first,” I said. “Swear it on my heart and whatever gods you want. I’m just the poor sod trying to figure out what happened to him cause no one else wants to. Get up.”
“You’re wearing it like a trophy!”
I prodded him with my foot. Now that he was disarmed he seemed to have deflated like a limp balloon. “Yeah. I was hoping to run into someone like you, someone who knew Chesnes. But see, I wanted them to talk to me before they tried to kill me and now we’ve really got off to a bad start. Get up and tell me your name.”
He wiped a trickle of blood from his mouth as he got up. I could smell the tang of cheap alcohol rising off him. “Vallas,” he sneered. He had a long scar running from one eye all the way down to his lip and he was missing part of his right sleeve. Mud was smeared across his shirt where I’d kicked him. “Paighten Vallas. I’m not going to shake your hand.”
“Fine by me.” Something in the lean of his face caught me. “Oh, hell. It’s one of you.”
“One of what?”
“I can take falling. Falling makes sense that we’d fear it. And it’s over in a second.” I placed my fingers against my temple. “But rising? What kind of a nightmare is that of rising? Why would people ever have any reason to experience it to fear it?” And there was Vallas, whose eyes were too big for his head and whose pupils were too small for the eyes, like a world stretched and shrunken far beneath your feet. “Makes me sick, Vallas. I can’t get my inner ear to accept it no matter what I do.”
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“You here just to insult me? I don’t have to take this from you.”
I nodded at the apartment he’d been trying to break into my force of will. “Is that Chesnes’ house? Why don’t we go in and we can tell each other what we know.” I produced the keys from my pocket and let him see them. “You’ll tell me how he lived and why someone would kill him, and I’ll tell you how he died.”
He paced back to it, sulking. “It’s our apartment,” he said. “Or it was. Half those keys on the ring are mine and I’ll damn well want them back.” Anyone could say that, of course—but once the door was open, I started to believe him. He knew where the light switches were and how to reach for them in the dark, and slumped down on a battered green couch that’d clearly been chosen over long hours. He waved a hand towards a room that must have been the kitchen. “He keeps the strong stuff in the bottom shelf.”
“You lived here with Chesnes?” I asked, finding a thin bottle of something that looked like yellow paint and smelled like it could rot a tree from the inside out. “Why would anyone want to-”
“Tell me what happened first,” he said flatly.
Those wounds… I took a long drink of the paint and gasped at the burn. Strong enough to be desperately illegal. “Something killed him,” I said. “I don’t know what—they looked like animal wounds, like claws he couldn’t defend against. Just tore him apart.” Another drink. “And someone moved him after. They found him in the Delta but he wasn’t killed there. And I still don’t know why anyone would dare kill him and go against Drakon and I don’t know if he had any enemies that’d dare.” I gave him the same plea I’d given Itoya. “Tell me something, Vallas. Tell me something that makes it make sense.”
He took the bottle from me when I brought it back into the room. “Why are you helping him? Why are you doing this for him? I don’t even know who you are—what’ve you got over Chesnes?”
“I—I owe him,” I said. “He paid me and I didn’t pay it back.”
“That’s it?”
“And someone’s gotta do it,” I said. “It won’t be Drakon. It won’t be you, sitting here drinking. I don’t want it to be me, not if that runs me up against people who’re trying to knife me and gut me just for trying to find out what’s true. But it’s damn well got to be somebody.”
He raised the bottle in mock salute. “Cheers to—cheers to…”
“Starling.”
“Starling,” he muttered. “A little star. Where’d you get the name?”
“Picked it out myself,” I said. “I’d always loved the look of them. Up there and far away, in their clusters and societies that no one on the ground could ever hope to reach. Maybe you understand, you and your nightmare.” What kind of moonshine was that? And where had Chesnes gotten it? That was stronger than even the stuff Dumal used to make, and kicked in a lot faster. “But—no, that’s not the point.”
“And what is the point of all this?” Vallas leaned forward, and took from his pocket a carbon copy of the same flower I had on my jacket. “No matter who does it he won’t come back. And maybe he doesn’t deserve to. Why should any of us get more than one chance?”
I shrugged. “Maybe we don’t. But I’m not wasting mine either.” I held up the flower. “Tell me who Chesnes was.”