Twenty years of civil war. Six years of the gray caps.
To Finch’s left, southwest: smudges of smoke, greasy and gray, above the distant mottled spectacle of the Spit, an island made of lashed-together boats. A den for spies. A sanctuary for the desperate and the lawless.
Beyond the Spit, the silhouette of the two living domes covering the detention camps. Broken by the smoke, hidden by debris. Built over a valley of homes. Built atop the remains of the military factories that had allowed the two great mercantile companies, House Hoegbotton and the invading House Frankwrithe & Lewden, to dream of empire, to destroy each other. And the city with them. Finch had fought for Hoegbotton. Once upon a time.
Between the domes, the fiery green glitter and minarets of the Religious Quarter, occupied by the remnants of native tribes. Adapting. Struggling. Destined someday to be wiped out. He can see the exposed crater at the top of the Truffidian Cathedral. Cracked. All the prayers let out. Nothing left.
To Finch’s right, on the north shore: the Hoegbotton & Frankwrithe Zone. Huge tendrils of reddish-orange fungus vein into the rocks lining the water. A green haze obscures any view of what might be left on the north shore. Six years ago, the HFZ had just been northern Ambergris: wild, yes, but not infected. Then, under sustained attack by the gray caps, the rebel army had retreated there. So much heavy armor, munitions, and ordnance had gone in, along with twenty thousand soldiers, that it is hard for Finch to believe all of it could just vanish or molder. Yet, apparently, it had. They’d gone in and the gray caps had created the Zone around them. Only the rebel commander they called the Lady in Blue and some of her soldiers had escaped the trap.
Once, the HFZ had grown in size every day. Now, it has stopped, covers about ten square miles. Almost every citizen can see it. For all the good that did. Will the rebels return? is the question everyone asks, even now. When the wind is strange—gusting this way and that without purpose—great glittering particles from the north drift orange and purple and blue across the bay into Ambergris. Even the gray caps don’t enter the HFZ except by proxy. Content to let the remnants of the rebels wander through a toxic fungal stew, goes the theory. Almost like another camp, without fences or guards.
Except, no one comes out of the HFZ.
Beyond the towers, beyond the bay, the far shore of the River Moth. Distant. Unattainable. Beyond that, although Finch can’t see it, just feels it: the easternmost edge of the Kalif’s empire, the Stockton Commonwealth to the south, the Morrow Protectorate to the north. Between them and Finch: security zones. Blockades. Set up by the surrounding countries. All three as determined as the gray caps that no one gets out of Ambergris. Even as they send in their spies to steal the city’s secrets.
Finch turns away from the window. It leaves him sad and cold and frightened. The towers especially. What will happen when the gray caps have finished them?
A view like that could drive a person mad.
3
“When the time comes, right, Finch?”
Back at the station, which used to be Hoegbotton & Sons’ headquarters. High ceilings. Hints of gold leaf and mosaic. Dull light from tiny round windows set in rows across both side walls. A tortured light that never gave any hint of the weather outside. Sometimes in the early morning and late afternoon they had to use old lanterns. The chandeliers had been ripped out long ago.
Back at his desk with the other detectives. The must of fungal rot from the green strip of carpet running from the front door down the middle. The whole back of the room hidden by a curtain. Smell of bad coffee from the table that also housed their only typewriter. Shoved up against the far wall. Next to the holding cell.
Ten desks. Seven detectives. Skinner, Gustat, Blakely, Dapple, Albin, and Wyte furiously scritching away on their notepads with sharp pencils. Some on the phone. All of them like schoolboys in an incomprehensible class. None of them likely to ask questions of the teacher.
Only a weak hello when Finch had walked in. Too much effort. Not yet over the paranoid morning jitters. Ever more difficult to know what to say. How to act. They all assumed the gray caps spied on them. Difficult to remember all day long. Especially when strange things happened with just enough irregularity to make them think that was the last time. The air pungent with old and new sweat. Laced with some underlying funk that was almost sweet.
Albin, just off the phone, out of the corner of his mouth: “I’m not risking my life for a lost dog. Too many Partials there. Besides, it’s an old Hoegbotton neighborhood.” Albin, the Frankwrithe & Lewden man. Finch might’ve shot at him back during the war. Former scientist. One of the few not killed by the gray caps or snatched by foreign powers in the chaos of the Rising.
Finch’s mood had soured on the way back to the station. A tortuous route. The gray caps had banned bicycles and motored vehicles four years ago. Too many suicide bombings by rebel sympathizers. Not much fuel anyway, and no one outside the city willing to resupply, even on the black market. Too dangerous. And few alternatives since the horses had been eaten long ago.
Instead, makeshift bridges over the canals. Through a sector where a lot of gray cap buildings had gone up, scrambling the landscape. Changes didn’t correspond to any map. Sliced through existing apartment complexes, divided or blocked streets. Displayed an arrogance about the way things had been and were now that angered Finch.
Then a mob to avoid at the corner of Albumuth and Lake, when he’d almost made it back. One of the huge blood-red drug mushrooms hadn’t yet released the morning ration. Not Finch’s problem. But the addicts were mad. They wanted their fix. Wanted out. They stood beneath the slow-breathing dead-white gills waiting for the purple nodules that also fed them. Wanted oblivion. A nice trip into waves of light and a past that didn’t include dead bodies and nightmares.
Maybe someday he’d join them. Instead, another rickety bridge over another canal. Had looked down at his frowning reflection in the silver-gray water and hadn’t recognized it. Broad shoulders. Still muscular but losing some of it. Too much alcohol. Not enough nutrients in the gray caps’ food. The man lingering in the water seemed at least forty-five, not forty. The hooded eyes. The paleness of the face. Wavery. Indistinct. Never in focus.
“When the time comes, right, Finch?”
“Sure, Wyte,” Finch said. “When the time comes.”
“You’ll know what to do.” The voice, once so deep and gravelly, had changed since Finch had first met Wyte. Become soft and liquid, lighter yet thicker.
“I’ll know what to do.”
The ritual conversation.
Ritual had a purpose. Ritual cordoned off fear. Ritual made the abnormal ordinary. The memory hole beside each of the desks. The deep green vein running the length of Wyte’s arm. Pushing up ridgelike against the fabric of Wyte’s long sleeve. Like the green carpet leading back to the curtains and what lay beyond.
Finch took his gun from its holster. Recoiled from the touch of the grip.
“For Truff’s sake,” Finch said. Laid it on his desk with a squelch.
The gun had been issued by the gray caps. Dark green exoskeleton, soft interior. Its guts stained his hand. Reloading didn’t seem like an option. It had been seeping a lot lately.
“I wonder if it’s dying on me,” Finch said. To Wyte, who sat at the desk to his left.