It wasn’t pretty.

It never was, course, but sometimes the dead managed to keep at least a shred of dignity, of poise and purpose. Not here. This was abstract art, form and substance splattered up against the walls in unknown and untraceable shapes, colors bleeding out into one another. Bile rose up into my throat, acidic and fiery, and I put a hand behind me to stay Robin from getting any closer. “You don’t want to see this,” I whispered, and my voice was rough. “And I mean that. Hell, I don’t even know if I want to be seeing it any longer.”

She didn’t protest that. I picked my way forward along the cleanest patches of ground, knowing even as I did that my shoes would be stained in the unfortunate man’s blood by the time we were done here—and, despite all that, they’d already seen worse. Its scarlet hue was beginning to fade to brown, so this wasn’t an immediately fresh kill, but the sheer quantities of pooling red on the ground obscured any easy way to tell how long he’d been dead.

Studying the blood on the ground helped distract me from looking at the corpse itself. I didn’t need to know what a nightmare looked like from the inside out, except that they were evidently flesh and bone all the way through… “Talk to me, Usher,” I said. “Why is this so much worse than what happened to Chesnes? Why—why is the goddamned monster killing again?”

“Was it intentional, hmm?”

“What? How—you want to call this an accident?”

“You recall what I told you about teeth? About carnivores? The subject here has been torn apart, but he is…fully present,” Usher said. “Without knowing his identity I cannot speculate, but it seems he is unconnected to the haunts or the killings we know of this creature, hmm? No, no, it is no accident, but it may be purposeless all the same, and the more brutal for it.”

I dragged my gaze up to his ruined jacket, long shreds torn into it like ribbons. “Maybe he has papers,” I said distantly. “Something to identify him, because I don’t know if even your dental records can be salvaged from this. If this was random like you say, the monster couldn’t have bothered destroying them—maybe it wouldn’t have even thought he had them.”

There was movement at my side. Before I could stop her, Robin had pushed around me and stood, staring, at the body on the ground. Her face paled, and I saw the bob in her throat that meant she was struggling not to retch. Her hands clenched and unclenched into fists at her side. She’d seen death before, she had to. It was death which had brought her to the Outscape, and Fletcher had brought her far too close to crossing that threshold herself. This was different. This was too much, too quickly, too visceral, and why-

She found her voice—low and barbed. “I had to see,” she said to me, catching my question in the air. “I had to know. I had to…”

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“But you don’t have to keep looking,” I said. “Doesn’t help anybody anymore.”

A muscle twitched beneath her eye. She might have been ready to scream in anger or cry in despair, I wasn’t sure, before she turned away and laid her head against the wall. “You’re still standing there, Starling. Is this just what it’s like? I thought maybe I could handle the nightmares in the city, but the monsters too…How are you doing it? How can you do it?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. I never got much of a choice, either. If I had this wouldn’t have been it.”

“What would it have been?”

“What’s the point in asking?”

“You…fit so easily into who you are, Starling. You can see the blood and the footprints and the clues. I know what I want—wanted—to be,” she said. “I think I was going to be a dancer, up on the stage…but dancers don’t have to deal with the city. With the nightmares and the blood.” I watched her squeeze her eyes shut and open them, even as they remained resolutely dry.

I put a hand to my nose to clear the smell of blood. It didn’t help much. “I don’t remember, really,” I admitted. “It’s hard to pick out anything in particular from before the Outscape. I think, though…I remember I really liked telephones. I thought I’d want to be a telephone operator sometime and hear all the conversations people were having. I wanted the switchboard that was in their offices and I never got it. I might still like that job, if I could get it. But that’s the thing. You never stop wanting something else. Something better. But for all that wanting you’re still inured to the worst of the city and that warps you, just a little bit.”

And all the nightmares came pre-warped. Usher had rolled up his sleeves and was crouched next to the body, fishing a bloodstained leather wallet from what remained of one of the pockets. Beside him, a scrawny, brown-grey rat had alighted on the ground and was sniffing curiously at one of the sleeves. Usher waved it away as he stood, and it scattered back into the shadows of the alleyway. “These are the best records we can get,” he said. “Appears it was a nightmare going by name of Daleland, hmm? Not much on him…”

“He’s nobody you know, right?” Robin said. “I mean-”

“No,” I said. No idea who he is.”

“We have not much chance to know him, hmm?” Usher said. “And this is a sorry state to make our introductions in.”

“It’s worse that it’s random,” I said. “The best way to find answers is looking at someone’s history, who has reason to want them dead. Chesnes led to Jabberwock because he was naturally on their bad side, a first casualty in an ill-defined war. But if that same creature is killing at random, now, then there’s no leads we can find except the very physical.”

Usher shrugged. “The blood trails do not lead far. As though it does not stick to the creature’s fur.”

“And even if you found it, you couldn’t fight it,” Robin said. “You couldn’t kill it. You couldn’t stop it. I don’t think a gun would do very much and I don’t even know if you’d get the chance to use it.”

“Great positive outlooks, both of you.”

“It is truth,” Usher said. “What I say and what she says. What more would you have us do?”

“It doesn’t change anything,” I said after a moment. “Just makes it more urgent. We’re going to get out of here and call the city to do something about this. Then, Robin, we’re going to do what we’ve gotta do to figure out what this thing is. It’s not just us in danger anymore, from it or from Jabberwock. It’s apparently the whole damn city.”