The fire ultimately didn’t spread beyond the big hall it started in. The five-person group had more or less brought it under control with some pots and access to two sinks by the time the fire department arrived.

The force of people that gathered in front of the building was not all that big; not in these times and not in this part of the city. Three autos worth of uniformed officers and a single fire truck, and maybe four dozen onlookers gathered in a loose semicircle. There was no real excitement or shock in the modest crowd. Black Bend didn’t hold such energy, or unfamiliarity with such scenes. The locals, late night workers, wastrels and a handful who had bothered getting up, simply stood and observed with an air of boredom.

Myra was tired. She was angry, without having anything to be angry at. And she was confused. But she had a job to do, and the steps were quite familiar.

“Ana, was it?” she asked the blue-clad woman she’d first seen facing the Bomber. She nodded wearily. “So what did I miss up there?”

“Nothing useful I fear, Inspector,” Ana replied. “The man simply strode through the door and started ranting. And blowing holes.”

The woman’s demeanour wasn’t as shaky as one might have expected after what had just happened. It seemed more marked by restrained anger, although at whom Myra couldn’t be sure.

“Did you speak to him?” Myra asked.

“I tried,” Ana said. “Aside from the blasts none of this was that unfamiliar to me.”

Myra took the face before her, tilting her head a bit to peek beneath the woman’s worn, unremarkable hat. She looked unremarkable herself, with a frail-looking body rattling around in that blue dress and the equally worn brown jacket she’d put on over it. The shadows under her eyes spoke of strain and insufficient sleep, symptoms quite familiar to Myra. But there was more familiarity to be found.

“You manage that shelter, don’t you?” Myra asked. “The homeless shelter.”

“We take in anyone who needs a roof, a meal, social contact or simply the basic dignity of humanity,” Ana recited, and that controlled anger seemed to intensify.

She took off her hat, closed her eyes, and stroked a head of somewhat unruly dirty blonde hair.

“That loft... it was meant to be a new outpost. A new battle line in the war against the state this city is in. Meant to take some of the pressure off us, and find people a place where your superiors will not have them driven out for squatting. Arranging it all was a long and hard battle, Inspector. And now it is, at best, delayed severely.”

“I am sorry,” Myra said, while quietly hoping it didn’t sound like she was taking responsibility for any of that.

The social worker put her hat back on with an air of resignation.

“I do not think I can be of any use to you, I am afraid.”

“Small details can make a great difference, given a bit of luck,” Myra told her. “He may have let something slip that might help us catch him. Please think hard, and maybe we can bring that lunatic to justice.”

“I hope you are aware, Inspector, that the Green Bomber is an aberration,” Myra said. “I encounter mental illness all the time, and they are far more likely to receive violence. Quite often from your colleagues. Often this miserable society is a bigger problem than the illness itself.”

“Yes, thank you,” Myra said, doing her best to rein in her temper.

“I do not have time to scold every one of you brutes, so I take my shots when I can, Inspector,” Ana went on, and that controlled anger was now sharpened into a needle-point of a stare. “This city is sinking, and the law concerns itself with keeping the well-to-do comfortable and at ease.”

“I am currently concerning myself with preventing more murders,” Myra retorted, feeling her professional front crack just a bit. “As I think I did just earlier.”

“It was only two days ago that one of my subjects was beaten with truncheons for yelling,” Ana said. “He is fifteen years old. A measured response, wouldn’t you say?”

Myra hated all kinds of things in that moment. More than anything she hated her own lack of a response.

“Please just tell me what the Bomber said,” she opted for, quietly conceding. “Names or places he mentioned, the details of what he was wearing. Did he have a particular scent?”

Ana shook her head softly.

“I wasn’t paying attention to those kinds of details,” the woman admitted.

“I was.”

The large man from the loft stepped over, moving with a hint of a limp.

“I was paying attention.”

Quick impressions earlier hadn’t been misleading. He really was powerfully built, with a rough-hewn face and a remarkable calm in the face of what had just gone down.

“You did more than that, though,” Myra said. “That was a brave move on your part.”

“I am a perennial busybody,” he remarked.

Myra nodded.

“You’re that journalist, aren’t you?”

“That journalist, yes,” he said with a small smile. “Petyr.”

He touched the brim of his flat cap with one finger.

“I was here for an interview. And since I have you here, Inspector, I don’t suppose you have anything to say about the events at the Woodforth Building?”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“I do not,” she replied firmly.

“I trust that the mayor and your chief both realise that this is a mere delaying tactic?” the man said. “As long as there are busybodies, the facts will come out eventually. And until then we have wild rumou-”

“Let’s focus on this incident, please,” Myra insisted. “I do not have influence over either of those people you mentioned.”

“Fair enough. The Green Bomber certainly is news as well.”

“That he is, and you got closer to him than anyone I know of,” Myra said. “By the way, were you hurt?” she added, and pointed at his leg.

“During the war,” Petyr replied. “He just gave me a little reminder.”

“I can look at it,” Ana interjected him. “Once this is done.”

“You were right up against him when he blew that hole in the roof,” Myra said. “This is important: Did you see how he actually does it? Does he carry bombs, or use some kind of special gun?”

The man looked up, at the top floor where all of this had happened. A bit of water dribbled out of the big hole in the side of the wall, a mark of the fire department’s efforts to make sure no embers remained.

“I think... it might have had something to do with that staff he was carrying. Or whatever it was. But I didn’t see any kind of mechanism. It just looked like a lacquered stick. But I had my face right in his when that blast went off. It was really all I saw in that moment, I’m afraid.”

Myra hid her disappointment. Or at least tried to. It was the big mystery behind the man’s bizarre reign of terror: How in the world was he earning his name?

“You said you’d paid attention to his words?” she said.

He brought out a small notebook, much like her own, and tore a page out of it.

“It’s all here,” he said. “If you can decipher my handwriting. But like Ana said, there wasn’t much sense to any of it. He really does seem to believe he’s dreaming, or some such. Which of course means that nothing he does has any consequences. Unnerving thought, isn’t it?”

It was, but Myra closed her thumb and index finger around the page without comment. He didn’t let go of it.

“Please look in the direction of that abandoned auto, Inspector.”

Myra was annoyed but did as asked, peeking to the side. The vehicle in question had clearly been left at the mercy of the elements and bored locals for quite a while now. But more notable were the three men standing by it. They occupied a significant break in the semicircle of people. Clearly no one wanted to stand near them, and their rather predatory demeanour made it clear why.

“Do you have anything to say about the dramatic rise in street crime?” he asked.

“Those are the Hounds,” Ana interjected before Myra could respond. “They’ve been getting more aggressive, more bold, and living up their name. My people don’t have much of anything to steal, but we still have to watch out for them.”

Myra took a breath.

“The department now has inspectors on street patrols,” she then said. “That is how the city is doing these days. Be as upset as you like, but don’t act like we aren’t doing what we can. As for street gangs: Be vigilant, be careful, and call in when you have actual evidence of crimes being committed.”

“People try,” Ana said wearily. “At most it invites retaliation. Trust me, I have had to stitch the wounds.“

The woman drew in a deep breath and seemed to make something of an effort to compose herself.

“Look... you helped tonight, I’ll admit. I don’t know what would have happened. Perhaps another Parlour Slaughter. But the mayor’s energies are focused on keeping High Town safe and comfortable, and it leaves the rest of his people out in the rain. The most vulnerable, above all else.”

“I know,” Myra admitted. “But all I can do is to try to catch criminals.”

She tugged harder on the slip of paper and Petyr relinquished it.

“So I can either go whine at the mayor or try to stop this monster from killing any more people.”

Myra looked at Brown. He seemed near to finishing with the last of the other witnesses.

“If either of you think of anything later on, then contact the precinct and ask for me.”

“There was a sour smell on his clothes,” Petyr said. “Not sweat. More like... chemical, I would say. But that might have something to do with his explosives. Or whatever they are.”

“Can you think of a ready comparison?” Myra asked.

“Not really. But I’ll think about it.”

“See that you do.”

She pointed to Brown and their service auto.

“I need to-”

“You need to pull up your pants leg, Inspector,” Ana said and opened her own jacket. “You’ve skinned your shin. I can tell. And you are no good at all with an infection.”

She had a small vial of alcohol and a pack of band aids, and while Myra wasn’t quite limping anymore her leg did still ache dully after that little fumble in the stairs.

“Sure,” she said.

The social worker cleaned and bound the wound with quick, skilled hands, and Myra said her farewells. All things considered this was a very short briefing, but there was more to do than there were law officers to do it. Brown was finished and they walked to the auto together.

“How about I drive?” he suggested. “So far you’ve been doing everything.”

“It doesn’t feel like I did much,” she admitted. “But sure; drive.”

This somehow felt like the wrong time for self-pity and the right one at the same time, and a solution to the dichotomy wasn’t forthcoming as Brown drove the auto through Black Bend. Maybe it had something to do with the depressing surroundings; all the blank spots where no one bothered to repair street lamps, or simply hadn’t bothered to set any up in the first place. All the boarded-up doors and windows, and the pocked, rubbish-strewn streets.

“What do you think of all this?” she asked her partner after a little while of useless moping.

“I think you do a little too much thinking,” he responded. She looked to the side and caught a glimpse of that little facial twitch that was his version of a grin.

“Maybe,” she admitted.

“Did you get anything out of those two?”

“Sour, chemical smell. Confused ranting.”

She looked at Petyr’s note again.

“That staff or stick may have something to do with the green blasts. Nothing... terribly concrete yet. Yourself? What do you think?”

“I think we hit him between one and three times,” Brown said. “With a bit of luck he’ll bleed out in some hiding spot and someone will discover the body. Failing that, he’ll seek medical attention, and that will give us a big lead. Failing that, he’ll lay low until he recovers a bit, and we’ll have more time to dig around before some fresh disaster. And if he’s too crazy for even that, then he’ll be weak and hobbling during his next big performance piece. And then he’ll go down.”

“Maybe,” she said, going over events in her head, trying to estimate just how injured the man was. If only they had bloodhounds. “But... that leap? That impossible leap? It wasn’t the act of a dying cripple. Wasn’t it... ten metres, or some such, that he cleared?”

She could tell that Brown glanced her way, but she didn’t look back, absorbed as she was in thought.

“Wasn’t it more like six?” he said. “I think you might be exaggerating the memory. People will do that, when stressed.”

“I don’t stress easily,” she replied, although his suggestion made more sense than a madman simply defying gravity somehow.

“And people have done incredible things when frightened enough,” he added. “We live in the real world, Myra.”

He turned the automobile out of Black Bend and onto the Long Road, taking them along the river. Across it in the distance shone the brighter lights and finer buildings of High Town, elevated both by society and landscape alike.

“Yeah,” she said, turning away from that sight and the gloomier ones on her right. “It’s a shame.”