Abbee waited for Whimsy outside by the fountain. She wasn’t allowed inside the precinct, which was new, and Whimsy promised to answer all her questions when she got off her shift at dusk. Abbee sat on the edge of the fountain and listened to the bubbling water. The precinct’s condition was another reason for her hesitation at joining the constables. The wrought-iron fence surrounding the grounds was rusted, and the lawn was dead in places. Abbee looked up at the marble constable standing proud on the fountain. The statue was missing an arm and looked like it had been covered with graffiti at one point. She saw lewd lettering in one armpit that someone had missed.
The dilapidation surprised Abbee. In her short time as the gofer, she’d learned that cleanliness was a guiding star for the constabulary. Captain Barnes had barked aplenty at the slightest whiff of slovenly appearances, and even Captain Orom had demanded orderliness, though he’d demanded little else. If the precinct’s exterior looked like this, Abbee wondered what was going on inside.
The sun was on the horizon when a crowd of constables emerged from the precinct. Shift change. Whimsy appeared and looked around. Spotted Abbee and walked over. She sat down on the fountain’s edge with a grunt. “What a day.” She pulled off her boots, socks, and rolled up her trousers. Whimsy swiveled around and stuck her feet in the fountain. She sighed, conveying her immense satisfaction in a tone that made Abbee’s face heat.
“You, uh, need a minute?” Abbee asked.
“New boots,” Whimsy said. “I’m trying to head off a blister. Turns out the son in Hudson and Sons isn’t as good as his old man.”
“Then why buy the boots?”
“We get a discount. It was a great deal when the boots were better, though.”
Whimsy leaned back and wobbled on the fountain’s edge with a whoop. Abbee raised her arms to steady her, but Whimsy caught herself.
“I’m good. I’m good.”
Abbee kept her hands out at the ready. “I think you’ve gotten worse since I saw you last. You need a padded uniform. Maybe a helmet.”
Whimsy snorted but nodded her agreement. “I put in a missing-person report for Ipsu. If he’s in the city, we’ll find him.”
“Thank you.”
“You going to tell me how you know him?” Whimsy asked. “Along with where you’ve been? You disappeared after the golems.”
Abbee’s stomach growled. “I’ll tell you anything you want if you feed me.”
“When was the last time you ate?”
“Yesterday.”
“What? Wait, you’ve no money?”
“When I said I needed a line on a job,” Abbee said, “I was thinking about something this afternoon.”
“You should’ve said you didn’t have any money.” Whimsy pulled her feet out of the fountain and stood up. Wiggled her soaked toes. “Poe’s going to kill me if she sees me, but … wait here.” She left Abbee next to her boots and socks, padded across the cobblestones to the precinct, and went inside.
A few minutes later, she reemerged carrying a bowl and several pieces of thick bread.
Abbee didn’t wait for Whimsy to reach her. She stood up and half jogged, half ran to the other woman. “Gimme that.”
“Wow, you must be really hungry,” Whimsy said, handing over the food.
“That, and I didn’t want you to drop it coming down the stairs.”
“Fair.”
Abbee held the warm bowl in one hand, balancing the bread atop. Stew, looked like. And the bread was the same as she remembered. She left Whimsy to deal with the steps and hurried over to the fountain. Sat down with her boon. Set the dry bread down on the fountain beside her and lifted the bottom slice of bread out of the stew. It dripped. Abbee took a big bite and sighed. It tasted incredible.
Whimsy chuckled and sat down. “You, uh, need a minute?”
“Stew’s gotten better,” Abbee said, “and Bups is still getting free bread from the same place, I see.”
“Yeah,” Whimsy said. She pulled a spoon out of her pocket and handed it to Abbee. “Poe thinks he should retire, but she doesn’t have the heart to make him. It’d probably kill him.”
“Poe?” Abbee echoed around a mouth full of stew-soaked bread. “Madge Poe?”
“She’s captain now,” Whimsy said. She brushed the dirt off her feet and pulled on her socks. “One of the best we’ve ever had, though don’t tell her I said that. She hates praise for some reason and finds a way to punish you for it.”
“How come I couldn’t come in?”
“The rule was designed to keep the House soldiers out,” Whimsy said, “but Parn made it so vague that it applies to civilians too. Turns out most of us like it that way, so we kept it. The precinct is sort of our own private space now.”
“What’s the deal with the House soldiers? I saw a bunch on my way here. Constables and House soldiers seem to go out of their way to avoid each other.”
Whimsy nodded. “Yeah, that’s another rule. There are a lot of rules around how we interact, mostly to head off incidents. There were some nasty ones early on.” Her faced clouded. “We’re lucky we were able to come back to the precincts at all. We used to be out in the camps.”
“I remember there being three. Camps, I mean.”
“What, you didn’t visit?” Whimsy asked in a hurt voice.
“We didn’t come into the city,” Abbee said. “I would’ve if Ipsu had let—”
“You traveled with him?” Whimsy asked. “Is that where you’ve been all this time?” She waved her hand. “No, no, start at the beginning.”
“Not much to tell,” Abbee said. “He found me in the mover pit and—”
“Mover pit?” Whimsy echoed. Her brows slammed down. “We found your father down there after the—wait, you were down there too?”
“He tried to kill me,” Abbee said in a flat voice. “Would’ve too, had he not slipped and fallen in. I felt sorry for him when the golems were coming through that night. I let him out. Dumb decision.” She dipped another hunk of bread in her stew and took another bite.
“I’m sorry, Abbee,” Whimsy said. “That must’ve been hard.”
“Yes, well, he was a right bastard and got what he deserved.”
Whimsy opened her mouth and closed it. She seemed to struggle for a moment to find something to say. “How did you survive? The pit was twenty meters deep. Did you land on him?”
“Something like that,” Abbee said. “Wait, was twenty meters deep? What do you mean?”
“Yeah, the pit’s not there anymore. We don’t need it.”
“What do you do with movers who misbehave, then?”
“Give ’em snuffer and shove ’em in a cell.”
Abbee remembered what the constables dragging in that torch had said. “Snuffer?”
Whimsy nodded. “Tower used to have it, but I think they didn’t know how to make it. I guess they forgot. It’s some kind of oil. Give it to a talented person, and it suppresses their abilities.”
Abbee didn’t like the sound of that. “How does it work? Is it magical? For how long?”
“Depends how much you take. Not magical, comes from some plant. Not sure which one—it’s a bit of a secret. But the university figured it out a few years ago, and it changed everything around here.” Whimsy nodded at Abbee’s unhappy expression. “Yeah, I don’t like it either, but we don’t have to execute people hardly ever anymore. I’m not sure Graywall’s an improvement, though.”
“Graywall?”
Whimsy turned and gestured up at the escarpment. “See that dark patch up there?”
Abbee looked. The setting sun cast numerous shadows on the cliffs above. “I see lots of dark patches.”
“Where I’m pointing.”
Abbee looked over Whimsy’s shoulder at the escarpment. Squinted. “I don’t—wait.” She saw a pinpoint of flickering light among one particular shadow, two-thirds of the way up the wall. She leaned back. “Are those torches?”
Whimsy put her arm down. “That’s Graywall. The prison.”
“Akken has a prison now? I don’t see any stairs or a road. How do you get to it?”
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“Movers drop a platform down from the top to the entrance,” Whimsy said, “which is a narrow outcropping only a few meters wide. Whole experience is nerve-racking. I don’t advise it.”
“You’ve been up there?”
“No, but I’ve heard about it. Corporal Hamor drives the prison cart from our precinct, and he says he almost fell off one time. Supposedly, it’s perfectly safe, but one of the movers for the platform sneezed. Hamor says the whole platform tilted and he almost slipped off. Said he was hanging from his fingertips. I don’t believe that last part. They use five times more movers than necessary, just in case something like that happens. I’m pretty sure the platform just jiggled a little. Hamor’s the kind of person who’d tell you he almost drowned stepping into a puddle.”
“Seems a little extreme to put a prison inside the cliff wall,” Abbee said.
“They argued about where to put it for months,” Whimsy said. “The trouble with building a new prison is it’s always next to something, and that something doesn’t want to be next to a prison. Some idiot suggested putting it in the escarpment as a joke within earshot of Ekon Togrim, who apparently thought that would be really funny. A year and a lot of excavation later, we now have a prison in a cliff wall. Nobody really knows how big it is in there.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah, that platform is moving all day long, pulling dirt and rock out. Probably a few tons a day.”
“What are they digging for?” Abbee asked.
“The prison carts are active every day, so I think they run out of room on a regular basis. That’s just my guess, though. The theory changes depending on who you talk to.”
“Like what?”
“Like all sorts of crazy. There’s nothing up there. The closest thing is hundreds of meters away. It’s a toss-up whether it’s the train tunnel through the escarpment or where High Street used to be.”
Abbee twisted around on the fountain and looked up. “What, Overlook’s not there anymore?”
“Well, it is, but not that street with all the big houses on it. Everything had to be torn down. You’ve really not been here since that night, have you?”
“I haven’t. I came in from the West Gate. The North Bend looks completely different with straight roads.”
“That was Abol Togrim’s doing,” Whimsy said. “He has an obsession with straight things. I hear he would’ve straightened the river if Imara hadn’t intervened.”
“Imara?”
“Sister,” Whimsy said. “It goes Abol, Sera, Imara, and Ekon. There are three more brothers between Abol and Ekon, but I can’t remember their names. They never leave Veronna, whoever they are. The Togrims are a big group and have their fingers in everything. Imara runs the university here in Akken.”
“The what?”
Whimsy waved west. “It’s one of the first things she did after Veronna took over. It’s up in the Civic District. What used to be the Red District. They renamed it. Anyway, the Council’s three people and takes up a lot less space, so they replaced the Council House, the precinct, the repeater headquarters, and a few other things with a new campus. It’s called the University of Akken. I have mixed feelings about the place. They’re too secretive for my tastes, but they did figure out how to rig indoor plumbing.”
“I’m just lucky that your precinct is in the same spot.” Abbee pointed at the intersection with a hunk of bread. “What do you call Three Points now, with that park?”
“We still call it Three Points,” Whimsy said. She spread her hands toward the fence. “Everyone still calls this place Akken, but if anyone said New Akken, they wouldn’t be wrong. The first year of reconstruction was more like a year of demolition. The golems destroyed everything. We had to remove blocks and blocks of wreckage. Buildings, basements, and the top two meters of dead soil. Not to mention all the golems all over the place. There’s a whole story just in that. Everything in the North Bend, the River District, Overlook, Civic, and most of the Yards is new. I look around at everything, and I can’t believe how fast it came back. Four and a half districts rebuilt literally from the ground up. There are several hills south of here that aren’t there anymore. We needed the dirt.”
“Where did they get all the laborers?”
“Everywhere,” Whimsy said. “You must have noticed how empty the other cities are.”
Abbee shook her head. “Ipsu avoided populated areas. We visited the other cities once, maybe twice, and didn’t stay long. Though now that you mention it, the one time we were in Kiva, a year after, it did seem a little sparse. The mover boards there were fuller than I’d ever seen them.”
Whimsy nodded. “Akken’s the mover capital of the world now. We needed so many, and lots of them came and just stayed. For the first five years after the Tower fell, you’d be hurting if you needed a mover anywhere else. Cost three times as much, because they were all here, making five times the previous rate.”
“Five times?”
“The Council spent a fortune rebuilding the city.”
“Where’d they get the money?” Abbee asked.
Whimsy frowned. “Changes depending on who you ask. I think it was a combination of things, but there was a lot of it lying around in the wreckage of the old city.”
“They just stole people’s money?” Abbee asked.
“Well, most of them were dead,” Whimsy said. “Whole families wiped out overnight.” Her face fell. “I don’t think you understand how—” She stopped and looked at the ground. “It was really, really bad. I can still remember the stink of the pyres. Every once in a while, the wind shifts, and you catch a whiff of something, and you remember. Even now. Happens to everyone here who lived through reconstruction.” She sighed. “Anyway. We’ve less movers now than before. The volume of work has dropped here, so lots of people are moving back home. It got so bad that the continentals had a hard time hiring drovers.”
Abbee grunted. “And the ones they have now are real pieces of work.”
“Oh?” Whimsy asked, sounding curious.
“Never mind,” Abbee said. She ran out of bread and picked up her spoon. “You’d have needed all the movers for the golems. Must’ve taken an army to relocate them.”
Whimsy shook her head. “Didn’t take any. Alize Trei figured it out. Trei is a High House, in case—”
“I know who they are,” Abbee said.
“Oh.” Whimsy grinned. “I thought that since you’ve been living under a rock for—”
“Ha ha, very funny. I know they were all deposed after the city fell. Not really high anything anymore. I lived in the woods, Whimsy, not under a rock.”
Whimsy’s smile widened. “I see that you’re sensitive about your rock-dwelling days.”
Abbee frowned at her. “You were talking about the golems?”
“Yes. Alize figured out that they can run on water.”
“I’m sorry. Did you say water?”
Whimsy nodded. “She noticed that all of the golems that had walked across the North Bend had stopped in the river. She somehow knew about the driver’s seat in the head.”
“The what?”
“I guess they were originally built to have pilots, and the wizards changed them.”
“I had no idea.”
“Nobody did. Well, I think the wizards knew but didn’t tell anybody. After what happened to Alize, I think it was for the best.”
“What do you mean?”
Whimsy grimaced. “The golems can run on water, but if there isn’t any, they steal life from the pilot. Everything living within ten meters too. Alize drove a golem out of the river and out of the city. She stopped near the slate quarry. It took some doing to figure out what she was doing there. Turns out she was dead. She went in a spry twenty-three and came out a corpse. They say she looked over a hundred.”
“She didn’t notice she was aging?”
Whimsy shook her head. “Apparently not. They’ve restricted who gets to drive them to refractors only, and they’re all in the slate quarry. It’s northeast of New Bend. You might have felt the ground vibrating over there.”
Abbee shook her head. “I didn’t, but I wasn’t really sticking around in that place. Gave me the creeps.”
Whimsy nodded. “New Bend will do that. Anyway, give the golem access to a water supply; stick a refractor in the cockpit in case that supply runs dry; and you’ve got a twenty-meter crane, pile driver, and hauler. Perfect for quarry work.”
“I’d have thought that they’d used the golems to help with the demolition.”
Whimsy shook her head. “Too dangerous. They tried a couple of times, but the golems always ran out of water and killed somebody. Parn put his foot down. He got the Council to restrict the golems to the quarry. One of the few good things he’s managed to do.”
Abbee scraped the bottom of her bowl and wished she had more stew. “You, uh, seem to have some strong opinions about him. What’s the story there?”
Whimsy folded her arms. “I’ll need some strong alcohol if we’re getting into that. How about you tell me why Ipsu took you out of Akken?”
Abbee opened her mouth to say she had no idea. Stopped. Thought about their fight. Ipsu’s conversation with the gray wizard. Joor. She remembered what the gray wizard had said about people presenting the night of the golems. There were others. Other talented. Maybe Ipsu finding her in the mover pit hadn’t been so random. “That’s why I need to find him.”
Whimsy searched Abbee’s face. “He never told you?”
“No. He spent all his time training me.”
“For what?”
“To fight and survive,” Abbee said. “But mostly running.”
“Running?”
“We ran a lot.”
“You’re being evasive,” Whimsy said.
Abbee sighed. “It’s hard, okay? He—”
“What did he do to you?” Whimsy demanded, her voice rising. “Did he … did—”
“No,” Abbee said, shaking her head. “Never.”
Whimsy looked unconvinced.
“He never touched me, Whimsy. Not like that.”
Whimsy nodded. “But he did something, didn’t he?”
Abbee shied away from her memories of Joor. It was a struggle to speak. She felt an itch on her back, between her shoulder blades. For a brief, terrifying instant, she was back in her mental prison, trapped behind a wall of silence. She forced herself to speak. Forced out a word. “Yeah.” A few more. “We had a fight.”
“When was this?”
“Four days ago. A bad one. He—” Abbee broke off, remembering what she’d done to the clearing. Killing all the plants and launching herself at Ipsu. Remembered his surprise. His hurt. Something had changed then, and Abbee couldn’t ever go back to the way it was. Couldn’t return to a time when she hadn’t murdered people in a basement. The itch on her back intensified. Abbee tried to scratch it but couldn’t reach. Suddenly she was back in that dark room, strapped to a table, sitting in filth, and waking up to dead children.
“Are you okay?” Whimsy asked. She laid her hand on Abbee’s arm.
Abbee flinched away at her touch. Whimsy pulled her hand back with a frown.
Abbee hated that she reacted to comfort with fear. She was broken, and she didn’t know how to fix it. She’d be broken forever. She was scared and small, and everywhere she went people died. Her breath seized in her chest, and she blinked back tears. The world collapsed to a single point, and it was all Abbee could do to sit upright and hold on to her empty bowl.
“Oh, Abbee,” Whimsy said in a soft voice. “I’m sorry.”
Tears leaked down Abbee’s face. Her grip on her bowl tightened until she was afraid she’d break it. She couldn’t loosen her fingers. She knew if she lost the bowl, she’d be lost in a torrent of pain. She’d break down in front of Whimsy. The other woman scooted closer to Abbee and wrapped her arms around her. Abbee tried to flinch away again, but Whimsy didn’t let go. She put her hands on Whimsy’s arms, ready to fling her away.
“It’s okay,” Whimsy said. “It’s okay.”
Abbee froze. She didn’t push. The wall around Abbee’s anguish crumbled, and she held on to Whimsy as if clinging to tufts of grass on the side of a cliff. She held on. She held on for dear life. Abbee buried her face in Whimsy’s shoulder and wept. Heavy sobs racked her frame as Whimsy told her it was okay, over and over. Her words were a soothing calm washing over Abbee even as her hurt threatened to yank her under.
Abbee lost track of time, and when her tears finally subsided, the sun was almost gone below the horizon, and long shadows covered the lawn. Abbee registered that her face was wet and sticky. She leaned back a little. Whimsy loosened her arms. Abbee pulled away and wiped her face with her sleeve. “I, uh, made a mess of you.”
Whimsy watched Abbee with a faint smile. “It’s okay. Tears and snot are better than some of the other bodily fluids that get on me here.”
Abbee sniffed.
Whimsy pulled out a handkerchief. “Blow your nose.”
“What for?” Abbee asked, sniffing again.
Whimsy rolled her eyes. “Civilized people blow their noses, Abbee.”
“I don’t see the need.” Abbee hawked up phlegm and spat it onto the ground. “I’m good now. What? I thought you said snot wasn’t a big deal compared to other fluids.”
Whimsy sighed. “I see you’ve got a long way to go. Ipsu did a number on you.”
Ipsu. Abbee’s breath seized in her chest again. She looked at the ground and focused on her breathing. The pain was right there. So close. It was as if her sobbing hadn’t done anything at all, and she was right on the edge of losing it again. Abbee was afraid she was going to be stuck like this, always on the edge of a breakdown. She didn’t know what to do. Didn’t want to move.
Whimsy regarded Abbee for a moment. She stood up. “Come with me. I know someone who can help.”
“I don’t think anyone can help,” Abbee said.
“That’s because you’ve been living in the woods with a lunatic. You’re in Akken now. Lots more options.” She held out her hand. “C’mon. Leave the bowl. I’ll pick it up if it’s still here in the morning.”