3

Sam wore her black suit, the only one she owned. For the band of mourning, she used one of Lucia’s blindfolds, midnight-black and glittering with tiny diamonds. She did not know what else to bring, so she brought her clipboard and a leather satchel full of form contracts and blank invoices.

The Maestro had said that he would clear his schedule, but he said that about a lot of things, including lunch runs to Ingel’s Patisseries. It was a surprise, then, that he showed up at the lift lobby wearing his best cloak, a high-collared midnight shroud reserved for special occasions. He was also grinning like a little boy.

“You didn’t think I would miss a funeral, did you? I didn’t even know they still had those. Oh, this is going to be fun.”

Lucia wore a larger version of the same cloak, black-on-black with high stiff collars and sweeping tails. Her blindfold was silver with threaded bronze. The waiting apprentices and knaves treated her like a natural obstacle.

They took a direct line from Seventeen to Twelve with no stops in between. The two Floors had a combined population of twenty million, more than all the others combined. Where Seventeen was orderly and gentrified, Twelve was a zoo. Its transport hub extended far beyond the lift cluster into a conglomeration of shops, stalls, low brick houses, concrete towers, and open canals choked with trash. Hawkers plied the crowded street, shouting in a hundred dialects. Ambler couriers spilled out of their lanes and people spilled into it, the living jostling with the dead for space along every road, before every stall, around every corner.

Plastered on every building, every viaduct, across every span of available airspace, orange banners exalted a single headline in bold, white letters:

ECONOMIC MIRACLE: FLOOR OF TWELVE CHEERS FOR FINLEY

On every newsstand, on the front page of every broadsheet, smiled the face of Jack Finley. He was shaking hands with the mayor. He was on the factory floor, directing production. He was in the mushroom fields, directing fungi. There was nowhere to look without coming upon his face performing some economic miracle.

The cathedral of the Guild of Combustion gleamed two miles east from the Pillar, a gothic monstrosity shaped like a frozen flame. Between them was the main thoroughfare, crowded by what looked like a million people. For every person there were five amblers. A skinny one trudged along with ten-foot steel rods bundled over each shoulder; it took up the width of the lane whenever it turned, forcing others to duck. The dead were much nimbler at avoiding obstacles than the living. A woman lay sprawled in the gutter. People and amblers pathed around her.

A curbside stall was roasting mushrooms on an open grill. The cook wore a blacksmith’s apron and nothing else. He brandished a knife at the ragged children gathered around his fire, to minimal effect. A steam engine inched through the crowd, impotently blowing its whistle. Four attendants jogged alongside, each flaunting an iron-headed whip that they liberally employed to clear a path. The children scattered. An ambler with a flatpan atop its head was struck across the back. It reacted much too nimbly, and the flatpan fell, spilling a river of soybeans onto the pavement.

A man gave a shout, and five hundred people rushed to the scene, racing to their knees to snatch up soybeans by the handful. The amblers suddenly found themselves navigating through a pandemonium. The one with the steel rods tripped and fell. Banging metal turned into screams. Brawls ensued. A stall of dried mushrooms toppled over. The hawker, screaming, pulled out a rusty machete and rained blows upon the human mass stealing away her livelihood. Blood and skin flew. An ambler happened to get in the way, and the blade ripped open its gut. Purple infusion spilled out, and the crowd cried out in anger, for the mushrooms were now drenched in poison.

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The steam engine blew its whistle; the attendants looked at each other and shrugged.

A bell rang in the distance. Every ambler on the street froze in their paths. A troop of Finley amblers, armed and armoured, pushed through the crowd. At their head was a single fusilier with a musket. His left hand was bloody from the activation of the Command Rings. He pointed this way and that, and the amblers went, breaking up fights and clearing blockages. The steam engine whistled at him. The fusilier fumed, took one glance into the tinted window, then backed off in a hurry. The clean-up quickened perceptibly.

A huge ambler in a dark cloak was pushing through perimeter. Frowning, the fusilier shook the triangular handbell on his belt. It produced a massive noise disproportional to its size. The ambler did not stop. Cursing under his breath, the fusilier beat back the scurrying crowd only to encounter James Cowen picking his nose. “Apologies, Maestro.” He quickly took in the sunrise crest, the cloak, and the glint of Green in the man’s eyes. “The situation is under control.”

The steam engine inched closer. An attendant looked at Sam, raised his whip, then thought better of it. The tinted window opened by a sliver. “Cowen!”

“Ingel.”

“What are you doing, walking in the street?” The cabin door opened, revealing a very large man with very little hair. The attendants immediately took up positions adjacent, whips at the ready. “Come. Give you a ride.”

Maestro Ingel’s cabin was packed high with pastries, sausages, cheeses, cakes, and shelves of wine. The Maestro himself comfortably took up two seats. James was given a pink-coloured divan, and Sam a cushion in the corner. Lucia followed alongside the engine, too tall to fit inside anyway.

“A funeral!” Ingel laughed. “That’s a good one. Ohh, I’d love to see it, but I’m surveying my stores.” He knocked on the driver’s window. “Stop by the church. Pyros,” he shook his head. “Got their fingers in everything. They sell bonds now, apparently.”

“Any news?”

“Of what? I’m not in your loop, Cowen. Ran the harvest without me.”

“Unfortunate.”

“Always a next time.”

“Is there?”

Ingel gave Sam a look, then shoved two bratwursts into his mouth.

“My apprentice has my full confidence,” said James.

“Finley got the pre-approvals,” Ingel said. Sam could feel the change in James’s posture. It was as if every nerve in his body just lit up. “They will harvest this Floor. Eight million people.”

“Impossible.”

“The board will vote on it. You, me, Mina, Catherine – the four of us need to push for two million, or it’s over.”

“You have assets here?”

“I own every ounce of flour on this Floor. He expects me to pull out by the end of the year.”

“Will you?”

“If I – we – get our two million.”

“If not?”

“Then we’ll have a problem. Ah, here we are.”

The steam engine came upon an Ingel’s Bakery. Rows of stone-baked loaves shone golden behind a curved glass window. A pair of amblers guarded the bakery’s entrance; one held a nailed cudgel, the other a seven-foot long bident. From a third-floor window peeked the barrel of a musket; a sniper’s nest of sorts, Sam supposed, in case bread thieves ranged from afar. Customers were sparse, though many lingered at the display.

Thirty feet from the shopfront was a makeshift camp. Dozens of ramshackle huts leaned against each other for support. An old woman was cooking a single skewer of mushrooms on the firepit. She melded into the dust as the steam engine approached. Though the street was crowded, the camp seemed empty.

“They come out at night,” Ingel said. “Lay siege to my shop.”

“I’m not here for a tour,” said James.

“We always sell out by three o’clock. These people have money. They are just financially conservative.” Ingel examined the camp with clinical interest. “You think it’ll burn?”

“Ingel.”

“Squeamish, are you?”

“We’re running late.”

“Uh-huh.” Ingel tapped the driver’s window, and the steam engine picked up speed. The attendants began to jog along. “Be sure to relay my concerns to our friends. Two million. Any less than that, we might as well start wearing orange.”