I found my way back to consciousness like a rat in a maze, which is to say slowly, with a lot of detours, and under someone else’s dispassionate gaze. I was sitting upright in a small, hard chair, and the pain in my neck indicated that I’d been sitting here for quite a while. A headache had invited itself into the space behind my eyes, pounding hard enough on the inside of my skull that I couldn’t see straight. Get it together, Starling, you’ve had worse. Usually it comes from hangovers and your own poor decisions, but still.

I swung my legs around to the floor and nearly overbalanced the other way. “Do be careful,” a voice to my right said. “I don’t pay damages.”

Turning my head was an effort of will. Everything bad sloshed around inside. When my eyes focused again, I saw a pale man, neither tall nor short, with too-long arms folded behind him. He wore perfectly circular dark glasses, and his blood-red tie slotted into his dark jacket like an inverted exclamation mark. A gold fountain pen was nestled into one pocket. Everything about him gleamed, so much so that I felt a hundred times grimier by comparison. A miserable bitter little detective, sitting in the shadow of the most powerful man in the city.

Leonid Drakon lit a cigar. “Do you recall why I hired you?”

I stared straight ahead, watching that ember flicker in the very corners of my vision. “I’d be a fool if I didn’t,” I said slowly. “Though the concussion is, admittedly, making it a little harder.”

“Oh, dear. Are you not tougher than that?”

“My regular clients send me letters,” I said. “Sometimes they call me on the phone. Sometimes they even drop by and have a little chat—I keep my office doors unlocked while I’m there. What they don’t do is…” Drakon turned a languid eye on me and I was reminded of my position. “Um. You didn’t have to whack me on the head. I know who I’m working for and I keep my appointments.”

“So you say. But I have found in my recent dealings that it is better to be…certain about these things. Come with me, Hexel.” It wasn’t a request. It was as close to an order as my battered—but still intact—pride would allow me to take. I wrenched myself to my feet and waited for the world to stop spinning, the strip lights on the ceiling glowing harsh and hot. I shield my eyes as I followed him, noting the bulky men in black suits standing nearby. All of them dragged local gravity with them; Drakon had a type in his bodyguards, it seemed, of which Chesnes was just one example.

I couldn’t place Drakon himself. A cadre of rumors swirled around him like bats, but none matched the serene man in front of me. He moved like he was playing a chess game, one with eleven thousand moves mapped out in advance. A useful skill indeed in the retrofitted casino we walked through, the hallways carpeted in rich purple and the lamps caged in steel. He stopped at a bay window, through which the silky dark waters of the ocean were visible, and gestured out of it. “Tell me what you see.”

I glanced out at the docks. “Ships at the harbor,” I said. “People working.”

“That is what you see of it.” He frowned. “I see people working for me. Tens all working in concert under my direction. The lifeblood of the city—something which should not be bought, traded, threatened, or disrupted. It cannot be allowed to.”

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“No. There’s not much life there. Just slow death.”

“You take issue with the work we do here? The work I do?”

“I think you’re not stupid, Drakon. You know what you’re selling because you know what the Outscape is buying. A taste of power, nothing more, because you know how intoxicating it is, don’t you?”

“You have lived here long enough that you should understand. We are all of us nightmares, all of us made to occupy human heads like yours.” I caught a flicker of golden light beneath the glasses, which seemed to rake me over limb to limb. I locked my muscles in place to prevent myself cringing away on instinct. “All I offer is the chance for many to occupy their own heads for a change.”

“It doesn’t stay an offer for long, though? Not one people can refuse.”

“Careful how you go.”

Right. Because Morés talked like that too, and she’d already been paying for it. Speaking of which… “What happened to them, Drakon? They’re nothing to you without the notebook, not a washed-up kid like that and his sister.”

He sighed, producing the notebook from his breast pocket. Must have pulled it off me sometime while I was unconscious. “This little thing? You’re correct—it is the cause of far too much trouble to be worth its cost. All for a solution which should have been reached days ago.” He flicked a match along the windowsill and held the flame under one corner of the paper. Red plastic curled away into black and ink dissolved into smoke and illegible ash. Only when it was all but consumed, the flames licking at his fingers, did he drop its remains onto the floor.

Not once had his face changed. I stared at the smear of ash and soot along the floor. “What—what was the point of that whole damned exercise, then?”

“I know what that notebook contained,” he said. “Now no one else has the chance to. So much simpler that way. So many fewer chances for there to be…disruption along the line.”

“Bianca had read it.”

The light outside dimmed as evening gave way to heavy night. Drakon frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t know who you’re referring to,” he said. “There was never anyone named Bianca Morés, either within my employ or outside of it. Because that would mean trouble, don’t you agree? Trouble that my organization does not experience.” He said it so smoothly I could almost believe it. “Ah, yes—that reminds me. One of my men recently found something that belongs to you.”

A glance across the hall, and one of the dark-suited men shoved Bella into my hands. Rusting blood was smeared across the barrel, and there were grimy fingerprints on the trigger, the imprints of someone clutching it for dear life. And losing. They could have cleaned it, I knew. They could have delivered me Bella spick and span and scrubbed of all its implications. “Where-?” I started.

“You are no longer on the clock, Hexel. There is no need to ask further questions about things which do not concern you.”

“Didn’t Chesnes tell you? I’ve got a detective’s brain. Can’t just turn that off.”

“Then I shall hope it’s smart enough to redirect its focus,” he said. “You are dismissed from my presence.”

“But-”

“Must I repeat myself?”

“No, I got it the first time.” I looked around. “I can find my own way out."

He gestured to one of the men. “Koshmar, escort our friend, will you. And sort out her pay.”

“Chesnes already paid me for three days of work,” I snapped. “I don’t know whether you’re doling out hush money or blood money, but either way I don’t want it. Not worth the stain.”

The glasses tilted to one side. “Then you won’t get it. Goodbye.”

Koshmar was bigger than Chesnes and with a quarter of the friendliness to fill the volume. I couldn’t get a word out of him as he guided me down myriad interminable hallways, gradually growing dingier. Finally we stopped at a black-plastered door, the tiny square window covered with tape. He yanked open the door. “We’ll know if you wanna ask the wrong questions,” he sneered around a silver tooth. “And the boss knows where you live. You won’t even get a chance to run, a chance to make trouble, not like-”

Something snapped, some fatigued thread holding on too long. “Not like who?” I demanded. “Go on! Say her name! How dare you try and threaten me like that! How dare-”

He slammed the door and left me standing out in the storm.