CHAPTER SIXTY - MEMORIES OF SWEAT

When Marana returned, she did so to a quiet mansion. The soldiers were dozing at their posts, their frames only picked out by the shining constellations of gleaming buttons and epaulettes, and of course the gleaming edges of their bayonets. The kitchen was dark and cold, the cook gone to bed, and all her knives locked up securely for fear of killers roaming the halls in the night. Mr. Canima, if he slept at all, was sleeping - or perhaps waiting for the time when his work could reasonably continue, by popular opinion. After all, humans slept, and if he was going to blend in with them properly, he ought to at least pretend, go through the motions and whatnot. As he blended in on trains and streets, at dining tables and committee meetings, so he blended in at night - and stayed put. Yan-Lam had passed out in a chair, and was not to be stirred - vitality was something she gave freely, but alas, possessed fleetingly, and sooner or later she'd have to retreat from the fields of investigation and recover her energies as best she could. And this left only one person still active. Tanner Magg, walking carcass, little traces of old poison still making her cough from time to time, stomach every-so-often rebelling against the rest of her body, growing strange, pale and thin in the dim light of her plundered office. She ate little, and focused so hard on her work, tensed herself up like the wires of a pianoforte, that under no circumstances could she loosen. Under conditions of work of this sort, some people collapsed, softened at the edges, found themselves sagging slightly, particularly around the stomach and legs... but Tanner didn't.

She just grew tighter and tighter. Winching her flesh around her bones, compressing them down, denying the chance for fat to form - there was simply no room for it, and not enough food to supply it. Sometimes, she found that the only thing reminding her to eat was Yan-Lam and her own breath. When it stank, she knew her body was digesting itself to survive, and she probably ought to throw the thing a bone.

Well. Not actually a bone. Though gnawing on one of those would be frightfully convenient, wouldn't it? Sitting down, gnawing away, keeping her jaws in good condition, extracting a few nutrients in the process... bones were probably damn healthy, anything unpleasant to eat was usually pretty damn healthy, it was when food was good that you really had to worry. In her mind, the phenomenon of people eating healthy, vile food and going 'oh, that lamb tendon casserole is splendid, it really is' or 'oh goodness, this watercress and coriander blancmange is really going down a treat' was proof that feeling virtuous was one of the most sublime feelings a person could have. Made the entire world more pleasant, made vulgar food delicious.

Probably explained how she wasn't going completely mad at this precise moment. She was just feeling too virtuous. And the more hungry she felt, the more cooped up, the more sun-starved, well... well, she could bury it under fine, beautiful layers of expectation. She was expected to do this. The thinner and stranger she became, the better - marked on her flesh how she was doing all a judge should do in this situation. A lady couldn't thrive on thoughts alone, a lady needed something physical to anchor herself, like anyone else, and the more she mortified the flesh, the more she felt like she was remaking herself from the inside out. Honing herself into something stripped of personality, or independence, or anything. Just a judge. A mechanical judge, thin as a whip and twice as fierce, wound up with a key and sent off to war. Free of doubt. Free of fear. Free of everything that made Tanner Magg's life stressful and unpleasant. Becoming everything she was ever meant to be, and could ever hope to become.

Something for the Golden Door, for the lodge, for her friends, for her mother, for her father, for everyone to be proud of. I knew her, they'd say. I knew her, and you know what, she really made the grade. Oh, sure, she was a bit on the weird side during her youth, and there's some people who comment on her wavering during the early days in Rekida, but who cares? Immortalise her in stone, set it up in the inner temple, and remember her only at her thinnest, her strangest, her most jackal-eyed, when her breath stank of obligatory autocannibailsm and her smile was warm as a skull. And forget everything which came before - completely forgiven. And let future students look upon the statue, read her story, and think to themselves, 'gosh, she must've been a hell of a woman, to be so brave in the face of death and uncertainty, to power on like lighthouse and ship combined.'

And they'd never, ever know the truth.

Never.

She had thoughts like that, in the long, cold nights. Growing longer.

Almost a full week in here. A full week reading, comparing... assembling evidence. Working through the scale of the problem. Every ledger was massive, referred to dozens more. The immigration folders were good, damn helpful, at least the ones referring to current civilians. She was close. When she was done, she fully intended to compile everything together, lock it up, and ensure it fell into the right hands. Then... then the colony would be cleaned up, top to bottom. She'd have done her reconnaissance, oh yes, just like the Lord of Appeal had told her to. And if she could make a start on the process, well, even better. The bouncers were corrupt. The Colonial Office was corrupt, or at least the shadowy figure of Mr. Gulyai was. The governor had (potentially) been corrupt in pursuit of his goals, despite being a perfectly nice person in other respects (vis a vis cats and orphans).

But there was more to it.

She knew there was more.

Her fingers itched to write to Eygi. Missed her dearly. Missed having someone around she could just... talk to. At least in letter form, anyway. Letter-Eygi was perfect, she listened carefully, she made Tanner organise her thoughts but didn't make Tanner feel ashamed of them. If Tanner made a mistake, she just crossed out the offending sentence and moved on. But the risk... writing down, it'd waste time, and if she was dragged away before she could burn the letters, she'd have explicit documentation of her thought processes. Of what she was looking for. Remembered the governor, and how he'd written his safe combination into an address book, presumably alarmed at forgetfulness in his old age. Imagine if someone else had found that. Unlocked the safe. Taken the contents. And she'd still be scrabbling away, trying to build a case when she had no clue of the broader situation, no solid evidence of collusion, nothing. They were that close to losing some of the best evidence she'd found, pinning the right people to the right places and-

...and someone was coming.

She slammed her notes closed, already stacked a ledger over the top, glaring at the door...

And it rattled.

A muffled voice came from outside.

"...Tan-neeeeer."

Ah.

Her... 'agent' had returned. Tanner pulled a warm shawl around herself, and stumped over to the door. No boots, not when she was spending all day in a richly carpeted room, so she barely made a whisper as she moved. Looked a mess, she knew, but that was almost the point. Part of the act of the paranoid, terrified, deeply lonely judge. You know. The act. Ledgers on the floor, on desks, everywhere they could go besides the bookshelves. Hair that was too wild to be called anything approaching reasonable. So wild that her circlet of lenses had almost vanished, only the gleaming glass lingered above the great vague halo of tortoiseshell hair, like exotic antennae on some enormous cockroach. Almost felt embarrassed, but weariness kept her from feeling it too keenly. She opened the door...

And Marana slumped in.

Her front was stained red.

Tanner stared...

Wine.

Just wine.

Could smell it before the door had even finished opening.

Tanner bent down slowly, hauling her up with no real difficulty. Led her inside, and kicked the door shut with her foot. The older woman reeked of alcohol. Reeked of it. And she looked... oh, gods, she looked awful. Hair tangled and knotted, face studded with the tiny broken veins of the terminal alcoholic, tongue swollen and clumsy, lips red with wine and smeared lipstick... she felt delicate to touch, yet strangely tough at the same time. Like a mound of gristle, tightly bound around hollow, bird-like bones. She felt larval. And when she slumped into her chair, Tanner could hear liquid sloshing around in her stomach like a half-empty wineskin. She stared dumbly at the ceiling - her eyes bloodshot - and simply waited for a long, long few moments. And slowly, carefully, Marana began to squirm. Trying to get comfortable. She undulated until her head was back as far as it could go, hanging over the back of the chair, but a gurgle of 'oh gods' was the signal to move somewhere else, to try and curl up... but that only lasted for a few moments, then she was stretching her legs out as far as they could go, joints popping, and she reached to free her feet from their boots, to unbutton her high collar just a little, free her breath... and then she simply stood in a flash, reached down, and removed the whole damn thing at once.

Underneath, she wore thick underclothes, just like Tanner. Thick and concealing.

But from how she held herself, Tanner knew she was... hurting. The internal injuries of the gas attack, still lingering with her. Even now, her voice was raw. She hunched, placing her head between her knees, squeezing slightly, like she was trying to keep her brain inside her skull by force alone, like if she compressed the universe down to a tiny, dark space, it wouldn't be quite so nauseating. Her breath rattled as she inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled...

Tanner watched.

Unsure of what to do. Guilty of maybe being party to this. Terrified of seeing an adult (even in her twenties, she found it hard to call herself an adult, she knew too little, lacked the qualifications) behave emotionally. Like her.

She knew her. The idea of her being standard, rather than aberrant or temporary, was...

It made her think of her father's friend Clarant, and how frightened she'd been when he'd wept over her father's mindless body on that awful day when he came home. Face all covered in red, like he'd reapplied his caul, trying to be reborn. Like you sent your mind out of this world the same way it came in. Reverse-birth via harpoon malfunction.

And she began to talk.

And Tanner had no choice but to listen.

"...it's like the ending all over again. You know. Krodaw. It's like the end. They're terrified in there, I can feel it. I can smell it on them. I... right, I should be more formal, shouldn't I, darling. More formal. Right."

Her back twitched, like she was trying to remove her head from between her drawn-up knees... failed. Remained precisely where she was.

"Well, darling, I was... the way I did it was simple, I just found the shops where the rich wives would likely be shopping, I made my introductions... I think they wanted distractions, honestly. Maybe they knew I was here to do investigations, but I don't think they cared particularly. Invited to a little get-together... had some wine, terrible stuff, and some dinner. Perfectly ordinary. Should've been. I just kept feeling... it was like insects crawling over my skin, I'd see them laughing away, drinking their wine, eating their food... terrified out of their minds. You want to know what happens to people like that when the world goes to hell? They eat them. The world eats them, one cut at a time. Eats them alive. They know it, too. They know that if this colony is cut off, and if the governor is gone, there's not much to stop people from devouring them and telling the world the snow took them. Sleepless loved people like them. They were fat, they were happy, their children were nice and sheltered... they liked changing that, one bit at a time. Starve them until their skin hung from their bones, beat them until they forgot how to be happy, until they carried the hurt with them for the rest of their lives. Do things to the children."

She let out a long, struggling breath.

"Sorry. I stayed with them. Kept going. Investigated. Found out some things, might interest you, darling dearest delectable. Found out that... yes, yes, they hire bouncers pretty regularly. Way they see it, it's... like a training camp for them. One man, name of Adalug of Hendrone, he runs the smeltery. I asked him about the business with Dyen... he said it was standard. Confessed. Well, not a confession, because he wasn't committing a crime or admitting it. Just... told me. The way they see it, bouncers get trained up, they know how to intimidate people, so they just... hire them. Why not? Easy enough."

Tanner leaned forwards.

"How do they hire people? What's the process?"

"...closed system. Saw them doing it over dinner. Governor tolerated it. See, there's not many of them in the colony. Not many at all. So, yes, they could open applications, try and poach people from each other like normal businessmen and women, could. But that would... goodness, they have dinner together. Would you really trust the soup of the man you just stole a damn good worker from, Tanner? Oh, would you trust the cream of mushroom? I know I wouldn't. Wouldn't risk it, not at all. Wouldn't risk anything."

Tanner's eyes widened very slightly.

"Poison?"

Now the head came up, and Marana's reddened face had contorted into a smile.

"No, Tanner. I don't think the angry businessman would put poison into the cream of mushroom soup of someone who insulted him."

Still didn't get it, but wasn't going to press her on the point. Unsolved mystery she was content to leave undisturbed.

"...anyway. Anyway. So, darling, what they do is they talk with one another at these parties, these get-togethers, their socials, and they come to conclusions over problems. Let's say... there are two fellows, by the names of Mr. Boodle and Mr. Doodle. Boodle is in need of a new worker, he's a bit short, finds that his efficiency is down. He doesn't need much, just an extra hand. And so, Mr. Doodle perks up at the party, and says, 'by gum my lad, I so happen to have a fellow who fits that description precisely, I'm sure I can spare him, so long as you return the favour in some form later!' And then Mr. Boodle goes 'that sounds wonderful, my good man, and just for that, I'll stop servicing your wife's needs, no matter how much she asks me to resume'. And then they all have a good chortle. Then, in the morning, Mr. Doodle... no, Bood... no Doodle, he heads out, and he tells this worker to pop off to his new station. Might get a little more cash. Might not. But he's being fired from one job, and sent to another instantaneously."

Tanner blinked.

"Is that... allowed? What about wrongful dismissal? Monopolistic practices?"

Her justice glands were swollen with indignation. Marana shrugged lightly.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Governor tolerated it. Most of the colonists are unskilled labour. Cheap and easy to slip in and out of a company. In the end, not many people want to do... say, city work all the time, it's strenuous, sometimes dangerous. To keep people doing it, he'd have to start forcing them to, or he'd have to give mounds of money to people, money I don't think he had. So, just let them trade around workers. Governor would step in sometimes to say 'now hold on, steady on', and would make a big show of pushing them around... but they soaked up the blame."

Tanner hummed, suppressing her justice glands with the icy juice of pragmatism.

"He said he was more of a headmaster. Headmaster gets to assign people to new duties however he likes. Gets to be arbitrary for the pupils' own good. And is... well... he's in charge, but you'll never see him or interact with him the same way you do your teachers."

"Pre-cise-lee, my darling girl, my rotten sausage, my erstwhile oyster. He gets to be arbitrary. But when it comes down to it... get them to blame Mr. Doodle, or Ms. Toodle, or Sir Zoodle. Because they can come and go. They leave the colony to go to Fidelizh, they have no intention of living here forever, they can be replaced. But the headmaster is immortal. Until he isn't. Goodness, come to think of it - wasn't he more or less caned to death?"

Tanner replied mechanically.

"Potentially. Didn't look like truncheons were used, though... unsure overall."

"No? Shame. Would've been poetically appropriate for a headmaster to be caned to death."

Tanner nodded slowly, thinking. Well. That... raised questions. Tyer's lover, Beldol, had been shifted involuntarily from the city to the cold-house, splitting up their relationship in the process. Now, the question was - had this been decided by the company owners, or by someone else? Say... an overseer, giving negative reports, insinuating that he had no need for Beldol, and she ought to be processed out at the first opportunity. And a cold-house overseer maybe perked up and said 'oh, yes, we can take her, we've got room'. And then, in a lovely dinner party, they resolved what they thought was a straightforward labour problem, and what was, in reality, something faintly more complex. And it confirmed her opinion that the bouncers were... no, no. It wasn't deliberate. It was automatic. The bouncers were highly experienced at commanding people, they cultivated an air of authority in the eyes of the colonists, the company owners just... took them when they had to leave. Hadn't started the river, but they'd been happy to stick a water-wheel in it. Come to think of it... she checked her sheets quickly, particularly employment. Right, there was usually a delay between leaving the door-guards, and entering into service elsewhere. At most a month, typically less. But never shorter than a week. Could be... talent poaching, rather than deliberate insinuation of agents by the governor, creating a rigidly controlled hierarchy of agents throughout the colony. Well, in the right conditions, lichen could look almost like a spiderweb. One was passive, one was carefully designed... didn't matter, the two of them looked similar enough.

Hell, the snow outside, that was a... complex arrangement of crystals, deliriously complex, and also entirely, without a doubt, accidental.

How much of what had happened was accidental processes coming to unpleasant ends? How much was shaped?

Hm.

She glanced at Yan-Lam's sleeping form, before moving to adjust her - she was chewing on one strand of her hair, the thing would be a ratty mess in the morning. Just tugged it away as quietly and quickly as she could, without stirring the girl from her rest. Was she adjusting her opinion because she didn't want to think too... slanderously about the man who... who'd been fairly dedicated to taking care of someone after her father died, who'd invited that father to the colony because he asked nicely and had a daughter who needed the fresh air, the outdoors, healthy living and whatnot... who kept a book of cat passports? Was she just trying to be charitable?

Maybe.

"...hold on."

She leaned towards Marana.

"When people were complaining... gods, it feels like years ago, but when people were complaining about their issues to me, when that was my only job, our only job, they talked about... barbers, little petty things. No-one complained about... company owners. Honestly, no-one even mentioned them. They'd, well, not appeared until the governor's death, at least for me. Might as well not have existed. And you say they keep to themselves, seem to be afraid of what their workers could do, and... how do they know when there's a problem employee they want moved?"

"Overseers tell them."

"Overseers."

A pause.

"The people who used to be bouncers. Who get hired as overseers because they were bouncers. They tell the company leaders who's a problem, who's not... and that means..."

Marana blinked at her very, very slowly. Tanner could almost see steam rising from her reddened flesh, her internals boiling up, and... no, no, wrong. Her internals were shedding heat, she remembered reading that during her paranoid spell over hypothermia. Alcohol forced blood to the surface of the skin, expelled heat faster than ever. You felt warm, but you were freezing to death. Right now, her skin was a hot grill, but her innards were a cold-house. Again, she remembered the cast-iron decorations, what they apparently meant. Organisations. The thing was... she had the pieces of the puzzle, most of them at least, but she lacked something to drag it all together, convinced there was something missing from the overall pattern. Some... basic thing. The governor might not be connected to this as some sort of mastermind, might not be, but there was definitely some kind of collusion occurring between... she stood suddenly, pacing as she thought. The issue was that everything was too... entangled, that was it. There was evidence to suggest one line of conspiratorial thinking, but then a spot of evidence would undermine it, but the original line was still basically true up to a point. How could she say that the governor hadn't originally started doing this bouncer-laundering business, but that it went out of control much, much earlier than his death? How much agency did the bouncers have? Why were they involved in so many deaths and departures, what was the overall goal? How was it all achieved?

Why did Tyer need to die? Why did Lam? Why, after so long doing things slowly and carefully, arranging careful intimidation and stealthy executions in the snow, had things suddenly taken a turn for the ultra-violent? Stuck in the middle of a haze of conflicting agendas, plans, motives... where did a person's motive end, and an organisation's motive take precedence? When did an organisation emerge, because it couldn't just... happen, passively and automatically. What had incited things to move to their current state?

Who?

She flicked through the migrations ledger. Once more, she confronted the missing pages. The chunk which likely detailed the quiet little war the governor had waged on his arrival. The period when the concept of door-guards as a socially regulating force probably emerged. The employment ledger for the bouncers was... complete, yes, but the names were all given as numbers, and the key for translating those numbers back into names could only be found in those missing pages - if someone arrived and left during the period those pages covered, they were invisible, bureaucratically speaking. Nameless and voiceless. Might as well not exist at all.

She needed more.

She needed much more. Some crucial key, some important fact that thus far eluded her. Something provable, something she could write down and call more than a hunch.

And Marana slowly spoke, drawing Tanner's attention back to the wine-stained woman, her eyes hidden by the convolutions of firelight.

"...I still think... I mean... I know you have your own investigation, darling, and that's yours, let it never be stolen or corroded, but... I still think the company owners are involved in this. You said it yourself. The colony is a closed system. Everything is implicated in everything else, nothing exists in total, sterile isolation. Nothing and no-one. There's the common Fidelizhi citizens. There's the locals. There's the company owners. There's the soldiers and the governor's loyalists. And there's us. Everything is connected to everything else. The company owners... maybe they didn't do the deed themselves, but they killed the governor just as surely as anyone else did. Here's a question - how long do you think they were going to tolerate a governor like that? What happens when the wealth in this place swells, when they start mining gold out of the hills, when the furs can be shipped back by the thousand? There's country up here that no man's been in for over a generation. Lands that people won't step foot in for generations more. There's wealth in that sort of absence. There's wealth that grows back when people leave for long enough. How long do you think they'd tolerate the governor's policies once their wallets were bulging and their ledgers swelled with black ink? How long until their wealth bought influential friends in the Golden Parliament? Even if they didn't kill him, they wanted him gone, and once they had a chance, they'd get rid of him. And for someone like him... that's a kind of murder. Taking his designs, crushing them for a hint of gold, tainting his legacy, ruining any good work he did..."

A pause.

"...they didn't hold the knife, I believe they didn't, but the contours of his murder were already gestating in their minds. Could feel it at the dinners. They're murderers. Someone just got there first. But they're still murderers, you can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices. Krodaw... a man there ran farms, before the nasty days came ambling along over the hilltops. Quite a few farms. I saw... the ruins of one, the conditions he used... he was a murderer, he had all the signs. Hadn't reached the point, been interrupted, but there was iron on his breath. I looked at him, and I knew that man would've killed the people on his farms, would've pulped them down if it made him a little more money. It was in him. The will. But then the Sleepless came, and he lost the chance. And now he sits around, murderer, iron-breathed murderer, chinless idiot with a dead-eyed wife and fat daughters who amble around and don't think about how daddy dearest looks when he touches the carving knives. Murder isn't an act, Tanner, it's a state of mind. And it's in them. Burrowed into their teeth like dentist drills..."

She shivered, and her head fell between her knees again, and her arms moved to squeeze at her hair, almost kneading it. The grey undergarment underneath slipped slightly, and for a second, Tanner saw her bare flesh. No attention paid to its paleness, or to the raised blue veins that wound around and around and made Tanner think of... garden lattices, thin and creaking, enmeshed in vines from top to bottom, coiling loose-yet-tight around the wood... she paid no attention to that.

She saw little marks around the wrist. Little puckers, like tiny lips ready to kiss. Scarred, but still with a little redness.

Marks where things had been injected in the past.

And one of them was weeping very, very slightly.

Like a tiny tongue had come out of the track mark, licked the scarred lips, moistened them for a fresh affair.

Tanner started to knead her skirt nervously, fingers twisting around the innumerable buttons until they were at risk of breaking. Stress infiltrated her spine, made it seize up very slightly.

"Have you... I... Marana, if you're..."

Marana looked up at her oddly... then realised what Tanner was looking at.

"Oh. Oh, yes. That. Well, rather, those."

A pause. She tugged the sleeve down, hiding the scars.

"No, not cocaine. Don't worry. Gave that rot up a while ago, a while ago. Just after Krodaw, actually... well, I slipped back and forth, but I haven't used cocaine in some time. Liquor only, when it comes to recreation. Liquor and tobacco. This is... no, this is just laudanum. Stomach... well, you must know what it's like, you were in that room too, inhaled the pale. Stomach's all twisted, digestion's slightly peculiar, lungs strain, throat's flayed, body feels stiff as a board..."

"I imagine you have it worse than I do."

"Hm, most likely, yes. The pity is appreciated. Well. One has to make appearances, and going 'sorry, was poisoned not long ago, finding it hard to get out of bed, hard to sit here and eat and talk and drink and talk for hours and hours'. A lady needs a little something to feel slightly numbed, just to power on."

"Is that..."

"Tanner, have you ever used laudanum?"

"No."

"Well, good. It's medicine. Pure and simple. The human body is a theurgic engine - it needs specialist maintenance that's chronically unavailable, it's perpetually declining, if it declines too far it might explode, the more it does the faster it decays, and sometimes it needs a little oiling. Don't worry, give it a few decades of hard living, you'll be feeling it."

"...oh."

A pause.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Gods... odd, to think that I'd be back in a colony, and right when I arrive... all seems to go downhill. Have you ever felt that, Tanner? Like you never arrive at the zenith of things, or the period when things are going up, up, up... you only arrive when the decline begins. When it's improving, it's smaller, lesser-known, obscure. And when you learn about it... that means it's old. And anything old begins to decay. Krodaw, never saw that in its heyday. Rekida, same. The surrealists, never saw them when they were bold, challenging, strange, young, ambitious, reckless... only met them when the old luminaries had dimmed or flickered away, and the new ones... and all we can do is try to scrape against what people whose golden age passed us by achieved flawlessly. Trying. Just trying to recover some spark of their flame. When you live long enough, you see your revolution die, and you see the next one come, and you wonder if yours was as shallow as theirs, as hollow, as mockable, as contradictory, as self-obsessed, as doomed to die."

A pause.

"...no, I suppose you wouldn't know."

"Hm."

"Judge. Must be soothing."

"It has its moments. There are more judges now than there once were. We do what we do, and we do it without changing. We're mechanical - we don't need our revolution to happen. We just need to be content that each day we're doing our jobs a little better than we did yesterday. If everyone does that, then the machine improves, expands... the gyre widens, but the centre holds, and..."

She shrugged.

"Sorry. You should sleep."

"...'the gyre widens, but the centre holds'. Did you invent that?"

Tanner flushed slightly.

"I think so."

She liked the image. Sometimes she thought of her mind as a widening gyre. Whirling around and around... destabilising, reaching strange conclusions, being more and more erratic as time went on. But only if she lacked a centre. Only if she lacked some... ability to restrain herself, something to die on. When her thoughts were allowed to run wild, they moved to strange notions, strange obsessions. Dangerous. Better to bring it all under control. Confine the ranges of thought. Maybe that was what she needed now. Maybe that was what she was already doing. Stop pondering the greater mysteries, just... focus on the interlocking of evidence with evidence. Think like the Erlize did. They seemed sane.

Marana said nothing. Just looked at her blearily for a minute or two... then returned to her old position, curled up and silent. Not sleeping, she was too drunk to sleep, but... just waiting peacefully for the churning in her stomach to stop, so she could maybe manage to drift off.

And Tanner remained in the flickering dark.

Thinking.

She knew where she needed to go.

Just had to find the right moment. The right opportunity to avoid attention.

She had to talk to the man Yan-Lam had mentioned. The one who'd apparently known her father. Was odd, too. At least, by Yan-Lam's standards.

Tal-Sar. Another local. Remembered... remembered, all that time ago, the march of the hunters and the trappers through the streets. Like old priests, swathed in animal skins, heads concealed by surreal gas masks, silent and solemn and ornamented with the mystique of the wilderness. She'd barely glimpsed them at the time, and when the day was out, their furs were gone, their beards were shaved, their hair was trimmed, their guns were stowed, and they were ready to become humans all over again. Like Lyur, cracking a man's skull open, then just... heading back to work the next day, right as rain. Like the iron-breath people that Marana described, with all the will to murder, all the mind of a murderer, but... currently holding back, no reason to step over that line. But internally, the barrier had been crossed. Were they the same? Was she just stumbling into another... another syndicate of murderers, the yearning for violence brewing behind their eyes, growing stronger and stronger as they spent time cooped up, unable to run down animals, to plant bullets into hard skulls and watch tonnes of meat and fur and hooves and horns collapse into the snow like a puppet with its strings cut... was she just finding another group of bouncers? Another retirement home for them?

Gods, she was feeling grim today.

Needed to find him. Might even have seen him, when she arrived. Was he the man with the bundle of enormous rats held by their tails, the pinkish ends looking like a tangle of strange flowers? Was he the man with the plume of red hair poking through the back of his mask? Or someone else entirely?

She had to ask him about cages. About hammers and eyes. About patronymics.

About the wall-statues, guarding their city of the dead.

She dragged out the ledgers. Started hunting. Tal-Sar... Tal-Sar... migrated around the same time as Yan-Lam, and Yan-Lam had already told her when she arrived, so... there he was. Cross-reference that. The night was here, her stomach was empty, her mind was buzzing feverishly... and she kept working. Criminal record - none she could find. Harmless chap. Well. Harmless as a hunter could be, at least. Not a bouncer, not now, not beforehand. Couldn't find him in other employment ledgers, but... there were a lot of them, and it was hard to find a single person, even with all her experience with these damn things. Even narrowing it down by date - when he was most likely to need other forms of work, when the hunting was poor, the weather cold... even then, she couldn't find him. Might well be unemployed, living on the proceeds of the pelts and nothing besides. Hm.

Yan-Lam's voice eased its way through the quiet. Marana didn't stir, but Tanner knew she was listening. Had the stillness about her. The girl's oddly triangular green eyes were fixed on the ledgers, reading upside down... aware of what Tanner was looking for.

Tanner didn't flinch when she spoke. Too used to her presence.

"Tal-Sar lives in a small house, I can tell you which one."

"Thank you. Appreciated."

"...they say he got a bear."

Tanner blinked.

Set her pen down.

Raised her lenses, slowly diminishing her eyes - when they were behind lenses, they were enormous, vague things, like massive protoplasmic jellyfish. Had to diminish them down to a human scale, hide the weariness that was clawing at their edges.

"A bear?"

"Mangy one. Off for hibernation, but... slow, wounded in one leg. Man was happy. Drank, drank, drank, last I heard, when he got it back home. Said it meant the world was healing. He talked about... how when the bears came back, that meant everything else was in place below them. The plants to feed some animals, and the predators to eat those animals in turn. Slowly rebuilding. Mounted the skull over his door, I think. Father said... Tal-Sar knew the days when there were buffalo as far as the eye could see. Buffalo on the plains, beavers damming up the streams... cranes circling overhead in the summer... and these owls, these tiny owls, with these delicate purple feathers around their eyes, which lived in the Ina trees... apparently, they used to keep little farms in the cages of those trees. Rodents, polecats... they'd come into the cages, the owls would then protect them, and in exchange, the owls sometimes killed one or two."

Tanner stared.

Yan-Lam sighed.

"He's old. I think he remembers... a great deal."

"I see."

"...father said we ought to come out here for our health. Fresh air. Lots of good food. Cold, yes, but... fresh. But... I don't think there are any more of those little owls. Bad winters. Too many mutants. Maybe somewhere else, but..."

A shrug.

"I don't think they migrate. Not like the cranes. So... when the mutants came, they weren't ready to run."

Tanner hummed, not sure how to respond.

Yan-Lam sank back into her chair, eyes slipping closed involuntarily, and her voice turned to a low mumble.

"...wondering if any of those polecats went back to those trees, wondering where all the owls were."

"Might be happy, knowing there's no more owls to eat them."

"...suppose…"

A pause, and Tanner thought Yan-Lam had fallen asleep... until her voice came out once more, muffled and bleary, quickly subsiding into nothingness.

"...might be nice, knowing for sure, though. You'll be safe. Then the owl kills you. And that's that."

Tanner looked down at her page again, and replied softly.

"No more fear of the unknown. Just something else you need to factor into your life."

There was no response.

Yan-Lam was asleep.

And tomorrow... tomorrow Tanner made her plans. To visit, without raising alarm, the house of the man with the bear skull over his door. The first bear to be seen after his return to his homeland, proof that the world was healing, that it was scarring over and rejuvenating, all life returning... and he'd shot it, hauled it home, and drank himself blind. Nailed the skull over his door.

Maybe he'd done it on instinct. Maybe the bear was coming for him.

Maybe he just thought the land should stay dead a little longer. Keep nature at bay. Let the ruins remain sterile, let the dead of the city keep in silence .

Maybe.

Two sleeping forms.

And one giantess labouring away until the sun kissed the horizon, and the snow began to dance with rainbow shades as the rays skimmed across, and the expressions of the wall-statues slowly shifted with the light, shadows twisting until they seemed almost...

Melancholy.

Only for a moment. And then they were cruel and hard and unyielding once more. Snow-packed eyes flat and dead, gleaming like a wildcat's eyes at night.