Jaeger has a van waiting for me outside. It looks normal enough from the outside; a faded and dirty white vehicle of the type that’re as common as anything on the roads around here. Even the man behind the wheel looks normal enough, with his slightly portly frame and one of those vests made from that blinding yellow-green material that’s so popular among Seattle’s craftspeople for some unknown reason.
It’s the sort of vehicle I’ve started to see as just part of the background of the city, part of what I have come to consider normal. Parked next to Ember’s flashy sports car, with its richly-maintained blue paintjob, it looks utterly miserable, and completely mundane.
At least, until Jaeger pulls open the sliding door on its side. The van’s interior couldn’t look more different from its exterior, perfectly clean and sickeningly well-lit when compared to the grime that covers its sides. Jaeger steps in without waiting to see if I follow, so I swallow down the faint sense of unease that comes as I step under the bright white lights and clamber up behind him.
Once my eyes adjust to the light, the first things I notice are the two heavily-armed men sitting on a bench opposite me. I’m no stranger to being around armed strangers by now, but there’s a world of difference between Ember’s people and these ghoulish figures.
Ember cares a lot about how the world sees her and her district, and her people reflect that. The most people see of her security are the bouncers, whose neatly-ironed suits are about as close to civilian wear as it’s possibly for a beefy security guard to get. The reaction teams wear uniforms, sure, and some of them are as well armed as Jaeger’s men, but there’s always an effort to keep them looking at least a little bit approachable.
With the blotchy earthen tones of their clothing and the full-face masks covering their faces, Jaeger’s men just look like a death squad. It’s made worse by the way they’re looking at me so coldly, without any of the warm fondness I’ve started to see on the eyes of the security here. Wordlessly, one of them stands up and brushes past me to pull the door shut, trapping me in here.
I look away from the pair, over to Jaeger in the back of the van. He’s surrounded by radio equipment and some more of those screens everyone uses. The back doors of the van are completely non-functional, being covered by a map mounted on a pegboard. The city it shows is immediately recognisable to me. I still don’t really know a lot about this city, but I know enough to recognise its shape on a map. I can even point to the Red-Light district; far enough above the University District to maintain a professional distance while being close enough to draw in the district’s students – as both employees and customers, depending on how well-off they are.
Jaeger is standing next to the map, holding onto a handle on the side of the van as it lurches off and we start to make our way through the city streets. I find my eyes drawn to the holster on his thigh, and the pistol inside it. He looks down at me for a moment, his eyes blank and expressionless behind his half-face mask, cast into shadow by the brow of his helmet. He seems to be assessing me, his eyes looking me up and down like an officer might look at a column of marching troops, his gaze hardening with every imperfection he spots in their uniforms or drill.
“I assume Ember hasn’t told you much about where the Triad are strongest?” he asks me, after satisfying his curiosity. I have no way of knowing if I’ve passed or failed his cursory inspection.
He doesn’t wait for me to answer, instead gesturing to the map, his hand sweeping over the upper-half of the city, above the channel that divides Seattle in two.
“We’re going to Ballard, on the other side of Green Lake from the Red-Light district. It’s the Triad’s heartland, and it’s been that way since they first arrived in the city. When they broke away from us, they took about half of our pet gangs in South Seattle with them, and that’s where most of the fighting for this gang war has been taking place. Which means they aren’t going to be keeping anything important there.”
He takes a light-blue marker pen from a clip on the wall and starts to mark out sections of the map, outlining the Triad’s area of influence. Their territory north of the Fremont Cut, the one we’re heading towards, is a thick line that covers a large chunk of the city, with clearly defined borders. Their southern territory is less regular, a crosshatch of random areas of influence stretched between residential areas and the supporting industry around the docks.
I’ve never been that far south – the glowing towers of downtown form a pretty effective wall, and I haven’t yet been able to muster up the courage to creep past them – and, looking at the map, I don’t want to. If that’s where most of the fighting is, I’d much rather stay up here in the dark city, where it’s safe.
“We know where their territory is, but they played their cards pretty close to the chest even when they were our partners,” Jaeger continues. “I’ve pulled you away from your cushy job because I need to get a clear picture of where their assets are within their territory. I’m talking about arms caches, drug labs, storerooms, safehouses and boltholes. Any of the infrastructure they need to keep their gang running.”
He sets his pen aside, leaning in close as the van lurches around a corner.
“I need you to be like a ghost. A bogeyman hiding under their beds. If they see you near one of their sites, they’ll close it up and move it somewhere else. Leave the fighting to the professionals; your job is reconnaissance and reconnaissance only. Understood?”
I nod, eagerly. As far as I’m concerned, wild horses couldn’t drag me into a fight. I mean, when I’m in the Red-Light district I’ll help the guards take down rowdy customers, but there’s a world of difference between stepping in to defend the people I like and willingly going out to fight a bunch of armed gangsters.
“Good. We’ll be launching the operation from here,” he says, pointing at a spot on the outskirts of Ballard that I quickly work to memorise. “We’re almost there,” he says, his hand drifting over to a switch on the wall, “so I’ll give your eyes some time to adjust.”
The moment he flicks the switch, the harsh white lights cut out, to be replaced a second later by sparse red bulbs that provide just enough light to see by. I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding in, and start to centre myself as I prepare for the task at hand.
A couple of bangs sound out, as the driver raps twice on the sheet of metal dividing him from the rest of us, and one of Jaeger’s men stands up from his seat, moving over to the door. I turn, putting my back to Jaeger and getting ready to spring out.
“Once you find something, report back here and we’ll mark it on the map. Good luck,” Jaeger finishes dispassionately, like he’s aware it’s expected of him but not entirely sure why.
The van lurches as it comes to a sudden stop, the soldier hauling the door open the moment it starts to slow. I pounce out the moment the first red glow illuminates the faded wood-panelled side of an old house. The moment my tail clears the van, the soldier pulls the door closed, leaving me alone in the pitch-black driveway of a derelict suburban neighbourhood.
I slip into the darkness, creeping up the side of the building and onto the roof. Looking around, it’s clear that they’ve parked up in an old suburban neighbourhood that was slated for demolition after Leviathan’s passing. A lot of places in this part of the city look much the same way; derelict or half-demolished houses ringed by old construction sites.
Ember says that, back in the first year or two after Leviathan hit the city, space was at a premium. The people were keen to get out of the refugee camps, and there was a lot more demand for housing than there was space to provide it. So they started tearing down the water-damaged houses in this part of the city and replacing them with four-story blocks of regular apartments.
Construction has slowed since that first mad rush – following a couple of high-profile fires and one building collapse – but I’m sure the construction companies will get around to this place someday. Or maybe it’ll get tied up in red tape, like that old factory I used to sleep in, and stay a ruin forever.
I cast a last glance at the van – its faded paint and utilitarian shape perfectly in keeping with a vehicle that’s been left in the site overnight by some workers who just wanted to get back early – and leap off the rooftop, dipping into the shadows to land safely on the street below.
I duck out of the shadows, sprinting under the street’s one light before slowing my pace as I hit an alleyway between two low-rise apartment buildings, faint chinks of light showing behind some of the curtained windows. A sound up ahead has me ducking into the shadows beneath a dumpster, edging forwards until I can look out at the alleyway while still remaining hidden.
It’s just a man, dressed in hard-worn clothes and moving at a quick – if unsteady – pace to the door to one of the apartment blocks. He fumbles with his jacket for a few moments, muttering to himself all the while, before pulling out a key and stepping into the house.
From the sound of his mutterings and the unsteadiness of his walk, I think he was just a drunk coming home. It’s late; late enough that most people are either already asleep or fast on their way. It narrows down the number of people I need to watch, but even then it’ll be difficult to tell who’s out on Triad business and who’s just out. It’s not like they wear a uniform or anything, just the occasional light-blue armband when they want to tell who’s who in a fight.
I can’t just start following random people – if nothing else, that doesn’t sound very productive – so I need to be a little smarter about this. The moment the man has stepped into the building, I slip out from under the dumpster and practically soar through the shadowed wall of the building, up four stories and onto the roof.
Ember might not think rooftops are all that useful, but that’s because she’s stuck on two legs. When you can move as fast and as far as I can, the rooftops are even faster than the streets. The rooftops in this part of the city are even better; they’re fairly regular in size, and just tall enough that they’re above the height of the streetlights. That means plenty of darkness for me to work with.
I start to leap from building to building, accelerating through the shadows of the rooftop before using that momentum to fling my physical body across the gaps. At the speeds I’m moving, there’s not much of a chance of anyone spotting me and anyone who does manage to catch a glimpse might just dismiss me as a trick of the light.
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As I soar through the air, feeling the wind rushing along my sides and whipping my tail behind me before plunging into the darkness of the next rooftop like a diver, I almost feel like laughing. It feels so good to be here again. In the distance, maybe a mile and half away, sits the abandoned factory I first met Mike in. I still can’t think of that place without feeling a swell of painful memories, but the rest of the streets around here bring out an entirely different sort of emotions.
When I was only just starting to understand this city, these streets were the only world I knew. It’s easy to remember the fascination, the wonder, with which I looked at every little thing. Everything was so new back then, from the people to the buildings to the endless lines of traffic. That fascination has faded as I start to understand Seattle more and more, but I’m starting to realise that I’ve only been picking at the surface of a much deeper mystery.
This neighbourhood is the heart of the Seattle Triad, but I never noticed the gangs before. Not until I pushed further south or east. They were so… visible in those places, so present.
But why would they need to be visible here? This is their heart, their safest place. All the enemies they need to dissuade are nipping at the surroundings of their territory, so they’re most visible there as a way of deterring them.
But here? This is where they keep their most valuable resources; the stuff they can’t risk in more volatile neighbourhoods. If they start hanging up the light-blue streamers, all they’d be doing is painting a massive target for the heroes to follow.
I slink over to the edge of the rooftop, lying down and resting my head on my forearms as I look out on the street below. There are about a dozen people on this little stretch of road alone, any one of whom could be on Triad business.
So I have to narrow it down a little. The couple staggering down the road as they paw at each other clearly aren’t anything suspect, the same with the man in a suit who’s currently throwing up behind the bins. The trio of young men sitting on the steps of a building could be guards, except the building itself is a liquor store and they’re all far too liberal with their drinks for anyone who’s supposed to be a guard.
In fact, this late on a Friday night, it’s easier to pick out the ones who aren’t drunk.
The young woman furtively rushing down the street with her head buried in her hoodie could be a courier, but I don’t think so. If she were, she’d at least be wearing a backpack to carry things in. The same applies to the elderly gentleman who’s looking at the vomiter and shaking his head in clear disgust.
Most of the twelve don’t seem suspicious at all – or, at least, they aren’t the right kind of suspicious. Most, but not all. There are two men walking down the street side by side, one of them a thin wiry figure with a backpack worn over one shoulder and the other a giant of a man with a big bulky coat that could conceal all sorts of weapons.
A courier and his escort.
Of course, I can’t be certain, but it’s better than nothing.
I creep along the rooftop, looking down at them and watching the way they move. They’re both confident, but the giant is looking around with the practiced eye I’ve seen on Ember’s people. It’s not nerves; he’s simply paid to look out for trouble.
He looks up, too, forcing me to duck down behind the lip of the roof. Most people don’t bother looking up – it’s one of the reasons I can move so freely over the rooftops – but when you’re in a certain line of work it pays to keep one eye on the sky in case a hero swoops down from above.
Once I hit the edge of the roof, I leap down into the alley with a graceful dive into the shadows behind a garbage can. I’m as confident as I can be that these are the men I’m looking for, so I edge as close to the end of the alley as I can get.
A quick glance up and down the street shows that none of the people are looking my way, so I wait until the two men have just passed my hiding spot before leaping out under the streetlights and brushing a hand under the base off the man’s heavy coat, slipping into the shadows between the layers of his clothing.
If I had any doubts about my hunch, they quickly scatter as I curl around the unmistakable shape of a shotgun tucked into the space beneath the man’s armpit, the barrel only barely hidden by the end of the coat and bouncing slightly against his thigh as he walks.
He doesn’t talk to the wiry man – which is another sign that these men are professionals. The only sound is the rhythmic pounding of his boots on the pavement, the softer sounds of the other man’s trainers, and whatever street noise happens to filter in.
Unlike Ember’s coat, the giant’s jacket doesn’t have a deep hood for me to look out of. Instead I position myself near the tail and look out at the occasional flashes of pavement as the jacket shifts with every step. With only those brief glimpses and the regular sound of my host’s footsteps, I quickly lose track of time as we cross what feels like the length of Ballard.
It almost comes as a shock when my host abruptly changes direction, stepping off the pavement and up a set of concrete stairs. I listen intently at the sound of the wiry man knocking on a door, followed by a muffled conversation that’s too faint for me to make out. Whatever was said, it seems to have worked; the door creaks open, and my unwitting host leads me inside the building.
Looking out the bottom of the man’s jacket, the pair seem to be walking down a long, pitch-black corridor. Whether that’s to make the building less noticeable from the outside, or just because they only want to pay off electricity in the places they need it, makes no difference to me. I take the opportunity I’ve been presented with, and slip like a ghost out the bottom of the man’s jacket.
The moment I touch the floor, I creep around the walls and up onto the ceiling. I can see a faint chink of light in a door at the end of the hall – a door that’s about to be opened, filling the hall with light – so I quickly rush under the gap of a different door, emerging into what looks like a storefront that’s been shuttered up for the night.
I creep around racks of second-hand clothes, looking around for a way through the backwall before forming a hand to push against the ceiling tiles and slipping up into the crawlspace. From there, it’s a simple matter of slinking around the gaps in the building’s wiring and ducking through tiny mouseholes until I can hear some sort of sound below me.
I look around, judging whether I can fit my body up here and whether the metal lattice holding up the tiles will be able to support my weight, before emerging from the darkness with my legs resting on the ceiling and my arms taking the weight off them by gripping tightly to a set of water pipes.
Using my other arms, I pry up one of the ceiling tiles and push it aside just enough to see the floor below. When I’m not immediately blinded by a flash of light, I merge most of my body with the shadows again, leaving just enough of my head in the light to look through the gap.
Below me, the courier has his backpack open on a table while the guard looms just behind his shoulder. They’re talking to a well-dressed man who’s in the process of unloading wads of bills from the backpack, running each of them through some sort of little machine before someone else adds them to a neat stack.
Once he’s apparently satisfied, he waves over someone from behind him and, moments later, a third man starts piling up see-through packets of a brown powder. It doesn’t take me long to realise I’m watching the sale of the same sort of poison that killed Mike.
The Triad are more like a coalition of dozens of gangs that have all agreed to follow the Triad in exchange for access to the protection and services they offer. The courier and the guard must be from one of those affiliate gangs, buying poison from an actual Triad operation that’s responsible for bringing the poison into the city.
I form a hand to pull the ceiling tile back a little further, and see the dozen people hard at work at the other end of the room. With the exception of a pair of bored-looking armed guards, they’re all dressed in concealing plastic suits with a mask over their face and their hair in nets.
There’s a stack of boxes on one side of the room, filled with what looks like hundreds of plastic bottles of some sort or another. The workers are taking the bottles and cutting them open, revealing small wrapped packages suspended in a token amount of liquid. The packages are washed, dried, then opened and the power inside is weighed before being wrapped in new packages, ready for sale.
The scale of it is terrifying; each package of powder is easily capable of filling a hundred of the needles that killed Mike, even if I don’t quite understand how one becomes the other. I don’t want to know. In fact, this whole place makes me sick to my core.
I slide the ceiling tile back into place as quickly as I dare before creeping out the building through a window that overlooks a dark alley. Once I’m up on the roof, I look around until I can make sense of where exactly my journey has taken me. I’m less than five hundred feet from the old factory; only five hundred feet from the place where Mike died, and I’ve just found the distribution centre for the drug that killed him.
I shake my head, banishing the unpleasant thoughts, and slink off over the rooftops as I move back to where the van is still parked up and silent. The door opens the moment I knock, leaving me looking down the barrel of a gun for a terrifying instant before Jaeger’s soldier points it away from me and steps back to let me in.
Ignoring him, his colleague, and Jaeger standing next to the board, I reach into a plastic tub sitting next to the map and pull out a light-blue pin, sticking it in the map on the exact spot of the distribution centre.
It feels good to have it up there; knowing that, at some point down the line, our people will storm that place, and that I’ll have made it happen. And yet, I’m even more aware that I’ve only scratched the surface of Ballard. There are more secrets hiding out there, more pins to put on the map.
I've got a long way to go, but this is a good start.