Someone had left me mail. Jagged claw marks were stretched across the mailbox and had torn the lid almost clear from its hinges. Even the bricks beyond were scuffed and scratched, with what looked like metal fillings left in the grooves. A bill for the lights that I’d ignored there had been torn into so many shreds that I could successfully keep ignoring it for another month at least.
I stared at them for a minute, willing them to make sense. I hadn’t heard a thing, even though the small office window was levered open for the fresh air—nothing of the spark-dragging, howling beast the head-height swipes seemed to indicate. It’d have been a hell of a nasty surprise to wake up to, but it was worse now that they’d manifested from thin air: the equivalent of a bloody equine head left between the bedsheets, a message to say look at the reach we have, look at our viciousness, couldn’t it be so much worse next time?
And—well, they were claw marks, hauntingly familiar in their width and force. I couldn’t be sure. I knew I couldn’t be sure. But I was pretty damn certain I’d already seen what they did to a body, the way barbed talons shredded flesh.
I stepped back inside and dialed the man who’d be able to tell me: Tze Usher.
I’d known his obsessions for almost as long as I’d inhabited the Outscape. He was even worse with a gun than Robin, and his hands would shake if he had to raise a weapon against another living creature. Yet this man, furthest from dealing out death, worshiped nevertheless at its altar. With Chesnes’ body he’d been presented another instrument of gruesome death, one unknown to him—he’d have been researching it, studying it, every waking moment he could snatch, because for all he’d profess that it was horrible I knew Usher found it beautiful.
It took him less than five minutes to arrive, a briefcase full of tools clattering at his side. “How’d you get here so fast?” I asked after his telltale knock on the door, the excitable stutter-stop that only he could produce. “It’s not five minutes to the morgue.”
“Most of the time, no,” he said. “But the Outscape’s geometry is not quite so strict, hmm?”
“Never works for me.”
“Maybe you should be nicer to the city. Why should it not be as fickle as the rest of us?” He shrugged. “The Loop, the monorail, it is a binding upon a city that does not want to be bound. It is quicker that I avoid it, hmm?”
It was similarly difficult to experience Usher too early in the morning. “That’s not the point. First: still no sign of Bianca or her brother?”
“We go in circles with this question. I tell you no, you ask again.”
“The Outscape is only so large. Nobody just disappears. I owe it to them to keep asking. But if those particular dead are still staying silent,” I said, “I have something else for you to take a look at. Someone or something decided to remodel my office facade last night and I think you and I both have seen these marks before.” Now that the sun had crept higher, their edges glinted icily sharp. “I don’t like that, Usher, and I’d feel much better if you could give me any hint at all of what might be disemboweling people and why it’s got its sights set on me.”
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He frowned. From his case he removed what looked like a set of inch-wide calipers, and rapped them against the brick. “It does suggest a kind of intelligence—that of no mere beast, hmm?”
“I’m not reassured.”
“You shouldn’t be.” He fiddled with the device, twisting a silver dial on one edge of it. The two prongs clicked and he hissed out a breath. “Definitely the same, see? A curved fifteen-degree angle on the inset and a width of five centimeters at the base. I don’t have the tools to analyze the residue but I suspect it to be keratin tipped with lead. That was what we found in the remnants of Chesnes’ bloodstream…” Why, I wondered, did he have to say it like that. “A nastiness that is never left enough time to be deadly on its own.”
I squinted at the metallic lining. “Lead?”
“Perhaps it dragged itself out of the depths of the sea. Chesnes was killed along the Delta, hmm?”
“And what is it?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You’re the guy that’s meant to know.”
“I have some…ideas,” he admitted. The case clicked open again, and he swapped the calipers for a clipboard, several sheets of drafting paper pinned to it. On one he’d sketched the outline of a curved claw, marking its dimensions and showing it from front and side views. I eyed the coloring warily, for I knew from experience that many of the pencils and pens he employed were themselves lead-laden. “Claws are only found in certain kinds of animals: mammalian carnivores, birds of prey, and reptiles, hmm? It is not a leap to assume certain base similarities—except then I realized it is fraught nonetheless, because the Outscape is hardly a natural environment, and any creature is created for its terror instead of evolutionary niche.
“So,” he continued, flipping to the next page, “you remember the nightmare of Bianca Morés? The pursuing beast? Obviously this is different, hmm, but based on written records of what people claimed to hear or see behind them, I was able to model the sort of animal that would emerge in this city.” The inky sketch he showed was more than a little chimera-like, a lion’s mane surrounding a lupine snout. But the rest of it, its muscles and limbs and rippled body, was formless, blurred lines obscuring that Usher was merely guessing.
The office door creaked open again. “What’s that?” Robin asked. “A monster or something?”
“Maybe you should recognize it. Look at these scratches here.” I waved a hand at them, noting as I did the ghosts of a shadow beneath her eyes. She already wasn’t sleeping well, not that I was in any position to comment. “It’s the dog that dragged you here, Robin, that killed Chesnes and kicked off this whole madness.”
She frowned. “Maybe it is, but it doesn’t look like that.”
“What?” I said.
“What?” Usher said, insulted on behalf of his drawing.
“It’s more…lizard-like. Kind of like you’d think a dragon looks like, except that its head is nearly smooth and its eyes are set too far back. The claws aren’t even the worst part, because its teeth are bigger and sharper and really, really close together.”
Usher flipped to a new page and started to scribble. I gave him a backward glance, then towed Robin back inside. “How do you know that?” I hissed. “I thought you didn’t remember a damn thing.”
“I—didn’t.”
“So what changed? Your memories come back, just like that?” I snapped my fingers.
“No. No, not that. I...” She cast about for the words with the franticness of drowning before she found them. “I dreamed it, Starling. I dreamed of that monster.”