Sometimes that cost came through over the radio. A mad howling. As if the city were a creature gone insane. Capturing the sounds of warfare. Of demolition. Of fighting with the gray caps or the Partials.
But for the last several months Finch knows there have been no radio broadcasts from the Lady in Blue. From Alessandra Lewden. Little or no organized rebel activity anywhere in the city. Meanwhile, the towers continue to rise in the bay. People grow more and more used to their situation. Becoming cynical about the Lady in Blue. Distrust reborn between former Hoegbottons and former Frankwrithes. Even Wyte’s noticed it.
The fact is she hasn’t saved Wyte, him, or anyone from six years of living under gray cap rule.
5
Home is an apartment in a twelve-story run-down hotel. He’d moved there six years ago, three months after the Rising, two years after his father’s death. In its day, during the worst of the fighting between House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe, it had become famous as a kind of sanctuary. Far enough away from the battles to be neutral. Near enough to the merchant quarter to be profitable. Everybody trying to make money on the war.
But those days are gone. Outside the hotel, a statue of a dead composer stands guard beyond the crumbling steps that lead to the gaping front door. Powder-burned, nose shot off, one raised arm just a stone stump. A raving madman lives near the statue. Finch has no idea how he survives the gray caps’ patrols at night.
Inside, the lobby is dank and dim and molding. An old crooked photograph on the wall captures a few signs of the hotel’s lost luxury in a scene from some long-ago party. A strain of pale green lichen has infiltrated the faded burgundy of the carpet. Gives the floor a spongy feel and sheds a disconcerting, ghostly glow that leads Finch through the entrance after dark.
Elsewhere, bulbs burn fierce or dull, like mismatched cousins. Always, a ghastly yellow haze. A curling faded wallpaper that sometimes isn’t. Smells that change by the hour, dictated by the currents in the basement. Walls knocked out. Old furniture piled high. A courtyard through the middle of the hotel. The basement is awash in water, an intrusion from the River Moth.
Finch knows many of the people in the building by name. A kind of survival strategy. Strangers mean danger. Like a leftover slogan from the old days when Hoegbotton gangs purified their neighborhoods of the “F&L scourge,” and F&L gangs returned the favor. He doesn’t know how safe his presence makes those around him, but he does his best. Tries to notice what’s going on. Likes to believe he is doing what his father would’ve done.
The crumbling sign on the roof still reads “otel Mur t.” Crows nest in it.
Sometimes Finch hides behind the sign.
Peers out across the skyline, toward the bay, from its shelter.
* * *
His apartment was on the seventh floor, but Finch ignored the dirty marble stairs and the stubborn elevator. Followed the wormy carpet into a darkened courtyard instead. A snarl of bushes and long grass along the path. At the center, a ragged vegetable garden of tomatoes, carrots, squash. Didn’t know who tended to it. He turned left, pushed open the first door, took familiar steps down into the dark two at a time.
Bottom of the stairs. Finch turned right, faced a door at the end of a stub of hallway.
Rebecca Rathven lived there. He could hear the sounds of water, the slap of fish surfacing, coming through the air ducts. Mixed, sometimes, with Rathven’s cackling laugh as she read something funny in her books. On a quiet night, the odd sounds traveled as far up as Finch’s floor. Finch liked the sounds. And he liked Rathven. Found her useful. Found her interesting. Sometimes in a sinister way.
Who takes a flooded basement as an apartment in a hotel full of empty rooms?
Finch knocked. Heard footsteps. A pause. An appraisal through the peephole.
She was used to visitors, but still cautious. People came to Rathven for information from the past. They came to her if they’d lost the thread. They came to her to talk. Why? Finch, like most people, had books, but Rathven had a library.
That library changed with every visit. Rathven kept shifting the stacks against the inroads of the river. People who owed her favors helped her create barricades of wooden beams and homemade sandbags. He’d told her to move, to go higher. But the effort, all of those books … she said she would, but she hadn’t yet. Might never.
The door opened wide enough for Finch to smell soggy pulp. Trying to save the unsalvageable. A wavery yellow light crept into the hall. Rathven’s long face appeared, tilted up at him. Startling white skin, almost translucent. Looked at times like something broken. Then like something strong. Dark hair shot through with lighter strands. Thick black eyebrows, hazel eyes, high cheekbones, thin lips curled in a smile. Blue dress and brown sandals. Finch could never tell her age. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. Had never found a way to ask.
“Finch.” The word invested with some secret amusement. “Come in?”
Smiled, shook his head. “But I do have something for you. A list. A long list.”
“A list of what? Laundry list? Shopping list? Enemies? Friends?”
Finch laughed. “You should’ve been a detective.”
“I am a detective,” she said. The ritual refrain.
“List of names,” he said. “People who lived in an apartment where two murders took place. And you’ll love this: it’s more than a century of names.”
Not quite a frown, but a kind of quiver to the lips. A caution entering the eyes. She’d guessed the source. Not hard, really.
Rathven had been in the work camps for three years. Had the brands on the bottoms of her feet, the red-gold marking of fungus she could hide but never forget. There was a pulsing sensation sometimes, she’d told him. A restlessness. He’d never asked what else had happened to her there. Didn’t really want to know.
She helped him because he’d gotten her brother, Blaine, who went by the name “the Photographer,” out of the camps and into the hotel. Dozens of old cameras in the Photographer’s fifth-floor apartment. The man used the cameras to take thousands of photographs of water. Funded that obsession by running a black market for goods. Finch bought or traded with him like everyone else. Using gray cap vouchers, food pods, or salvaged items.
If the Photographer ever cut him off, or Rathven ever stopped helping him, Finch knew it would feel like a punch to the kidneys. Friendship or need?
He leaned over, pulled the list from his satchel. Felt tired suddenly, like he’d stolen something from her but realized it too late. “Could you read it? Tell me if any names are familiar. Maybe from your books.” Would pay her in information and fungal antidotes, like usual.
Rathven took the paper gingerly. Prodded the spongy edges with one finger. “Only if you tell me why.”
“Recent murders.”
The color went out of her face.
“Got a piece of paper?” he asked.
She nodded, reached behind her. Handed him an old envelope. Return address from somewhere in the Southern Isles. Might as well be some imaginary place now.
Drew the symbol. Handed the paper back to her. “Do you know what this is?”
A disdainful glance. “It’s a gray cap symbol, of course. Very poorly drawn.”
“Can you check it out? I’ve seen it before. But I don’t know what it means.”