He stared ahead into space. His fingers drummed on the edge of the couch, a quick arrhythmic pattern mimicking the light rain outside. It wasn’t a large apartment for the sound to echo through. There was the living room where we sat now; the kitchen, whose peeling paint was indicative that the pungent smell was from the moonshine and not a fresh coat, and the narrow corridor with two bedrooms at one end. “I think Chesnes liked you,” Vallas said. “He didn’t mention you but I see why he went to you. You’re too similar.”

I shook my head. I found the least badly-stained glass on the low shelf beneath the table and poured myself a full glass of the moonshine. “And I keep making enemies, Vallas. Who did Chesnes have gunning for him?”

“He worked for Drakon. And when Drakon was cruel it was Kit who carried it out.”

“I know that one,” I said. “That’s easy. Everyone tells me that but no one tells me of the legendarily bold swinger who’d take on Drakon’s chief guy and expect to keep seeing the sunrise. And, sure.” I waved the drink at him, my movements already a little jerky. “You’re drunk, you’re drugged, you take a swipe at someone that you shouldn’t and you get real sober again when Drakon comes after you. But this wasn’t careless. I need to know, Vallas, I need you to tell me. What did Chesnes bring down upon himself?”

“Nothing.”

“That can’t be true,” I said. “I don’t believe it. Everyone has something.”

“You wouldn’t.” He laughed like a cyanide pill, a small hard ball of bitterness. “I don’t need you to believe me. You come over and kick me in the street to talk to me—and you don’t believe what I have to say?”

“Alright then, enlighten me.”

He leaned forward, pressing his hand on the table like he was laying out a hand of cards. “Try this one on for size,” he said. “You think of us all the same, don’t you? One nightmare, one facet. But that’s dead wrong.” It took a second for the unfortunate word choice to sink in, and he winced. “Kit was a bruiser for Drakon, yeah, but only when he was punched in on the job. It was what he did to buy an apartment and keep from being turned out in the streets. He wasn’t beating down doors on his off hours and he didn’t offend anybody except when they knew it was Drakon behind him. He drank cheap whiskey and he watched out for the mail and he walked in the park because that’s why he chose to live here.”

“This is the cheap stuff?” I took another swill and choked on it. That same burn was spreading up from my stomach into my throat and cheeks. “No. You’re—you’re not looking at it the right way. He’s already dead. Why?”

“I don’t know a damn thing about his death except what you’ve told me. Figure it out.”

I stood up, placing my hand on the back of the chair to steady myself. A nasty idea was shouting for attention at the back of my skull, an idea that said maybe Usher hadn’t been so wrong. If Chesnes hadn’t been killed for anything else, if Koshmar was trying to keep it quiet, well, then…I shook my head. Best that it stay there for now. “I will,” I said. “Even if he never let it slip to you, he lived here. Let me look around…”

Vallas waved a dismissive hand. “Look all you want, detective. Kit won’t stop you—but I’m sure you won’t find a damn thing.”

His head dropped back to the couch. He pressed the glass onto his wrist where I’d stomped on it. I made my way through the kitchen to the bedrooms, opening both doors to guess which one had been Chesnes’. He hadn’t been so good as to leave his name emblazoned on the door, but I recognized the pitch-black suit jacket hanging on the closet door as the one he’d worn to my office. A half-empty glass of something orange stood on the nightstand, and the bedsheets were so neatly arranged that I couldn’t tell they’d ever been slept in.

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I turned on all the lights, which didn’t amount to much. I opened every drawer and every door in the room, pawing through them for a weapon, a letter, a piece of jewelry, a list of phone numbers and addresses. Anything that anyone would have wanted or feared. I found that he kept an itemized list of store receipts clipped together and that he had a tongue-in-cheek ink-on-paper print of a man falling from a cliff rolled up behind the trash can. The undersides of his furniture were coated with dust but empty of anything incriminating, and none of his clothes contained a telltale bulge or crinkle of paper that might have indicated something hidden inside the weave. I turned the room upside down until I was the only thing standing upright and I still didn’t find a damn thing.

Vallas’ room was messier. I didn’t poke around in it and I didn’t plan to unless he got killed. I went back out into the hallway and went to the third door, made of dark wood and set back into the wall. I started to open it, letting the flickering lights fall on the steep stairs, before Vallas called me. “I’ll pay you,” he said.

“What?”

“Come here,” he said. “Let me lay it out.” I did. “You told me you’re doing this cause you feel like you owe Kit something. But hell, don’t I too? I don’t know what your rates are-”

“Thirty a day,” I said, almost on autopilot. “Plus expenses.”

“What expenses?”

“Loop fare. Cigarettes.” I rotated my injured arm and glared at him. “Bandages if someone comes after me.”

He sighed. “Boy, someone’s got a high opinion of themselves. But what else can I do? There’s nothing here to tell you about Kit and I don’t trust your goodwill to carry you far enough.” His hands fumbled in his pockets and he pulled out a crumpled blue bill. He had to unfold it just to read the number printed in bold text across it. “Fifty,” he said, flattening it on the table. “The man was worth more than that but it’s all I have.”

“You’re giving it to me?” I said.

“Sure. But not just like that,” he said. “Fifty’s only good a couple of days. I want you to take it and I want you to get out out of here and find something, understand? And if you don’t…”

“I’m sure you’ll have found your knife by then,” I said diplomatically. I scooped up the bill and held it up against the light to check that he wasn’t buying me out with a badly-painted rental notice. Vallas watched me examine it with beady eyes, and I got the sense that I’d overstayed my welcome. I nodded at him and I left, making sure as I did the door was all the way shut.

Hah! What a scheme that had been! He’d been so desperate to get me away from those basement steps that he was willing to pay fifty talents for it if it’d shepherd me from the house quicker. And well—I grimaced—I’d take it.

That was how this whole damn thing worked—people refused to tell me things, and all the while the little dark outlines of what they didn’t tell me formed its own kind of picture. Koshmar and Itoya and Vallas, all orbiting the dead star named Chesnes, and here I was hoping to pick up a bit of reflected light to speed me along and hope I wasn’t dancing along the abyss.

Like everywhere else in the Outscape, the apartments here were jammed up against one another, bricks and wood cut off in jagged lines where the property changed hands. Red’s Park wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t rich either. I made my way fifteen feet along the pavement until I came to the next door and knocked on it, turning that same bill between my hands so that whoever answered could see it. I heard the hinges creak and I started talking: “Hey,” I said. “You’ve got a basement room. You renting?”

The bill was tantalizing. “Not cheap,” the voice said.

“That’s alright. Just need it for the one night.”

“Twenty, then. You bringing anything?”

“Only what I’ve got in my pockets.” I swapped the fifty for its smaller cousin and handed it over. In return I was given a battered key ring and a pointed finger towards the stairs that indicated, if preferable, I was to be no bother until the sun was up and I was gone.

It was a small-minded pettiness that served my interests perfectly well, for it was the same pettiness that had subdivided the buildings into their present fractured state: fifteen years ago I might have negotiated a whole apartment, but now I was lucky to eke out a room. I didn’t hold some grand notion that the Outscape had ever been anything other than the way I’d found it, that Drakon was an aberration and not the rule—but somehow, his vision of a nightmare was taking hold and here we were all shrinking from it.

And I hoped it was the same pettiness that wouldn’t have paid for renovations. The rich man had built the servant’s tunnels, but the poor one wouldn’t have bricked them up. Luna had used them as bolt-holes sometimes, and, when I shoved aside the wardrobe, I found that short squat door with the lock painted over, and I earned my deposit by chipping it off.

With a cigarette’s dull flame to guide me, I stepped into the tunnel to find out what I could.