“We’ve time enough to talk about that,” she said. “Soon we’ll be leaving here. It’s never safe to stay in one place for long. Get up.”
Finch stood. Holding his shoulder.
“Look,” the Lady in Blue said, pointing out past the ruined hulks of tanks. Toward the dull orange dome.
“What am I looking for?”
“Just wait.”
As she spoke, the dome exploded. A thousand streamers rising in intense shades of red and orange. Like some kind of land-bound sun. The tendrils arched into the sky. Hung there. Then disintegrated into a vast cloud. A roiling mass of particles. Discharging light until a steady humming glow suffused the city in a kind of dawn. There came in reply from the city a hundredfold bestial roar. Strange fractal creatures began to grow at a frenetic pace across every surface. Straining up toward the light. While the orange dome, much reduced, seemed to breathe in and out. Beyond the particle cloud the darkness continued unabated.
“Dawn, Finch,” the Lady in Blue said. “That’s the kind of dawn they have here.”
“Yes, but what is this place?” Finch asked, almost pleading. “Where am I?”
“It’s a place where the echo of the HFZ—just the echo of it—destroyed a city. Subjected it to this perpetual artificial dawn. There’s no one living down there now. No one. Just flesh that serves as fertile soil … for something else. The HFZ is like a wound where the knife cut through more than one layer. And that’s really all you needed to see. No, it hasn’t been fun out here for six years, Finch. Not really.”
She nodded to someone behind him. A man came up and got Finch in a choke hold. He struggled against it. Kicked his legs. Frantic. The woman came around front. Stuck a needle in his arm.
The stars swirled into a circle, then a haze.
The world disappeared all over again.
* * *
James Crossley had been callow, self-absorbed, impatient, a ladies’ man. Finch was none of those things. Finch was direct, brusque, had a dark sense of humor. Crossley had been, for a while, finicky about food. Finch had cured him of the last of that during the worst times, with stew made from leather belts, made from dogs and rats.
Crossley never swore. Finch had trained himself to swear to fit in. To break up the rhythm of his normal speech patterns. Crossley liked the river. Finch kept waiting for something to leap out of it. Both liked cigars and whiskey. Both were as dependable as they could be, indifferent to music, and hated small talk. Although Crossley had had more chances to hate it than Finch.
Crossley had been part of his father’s network as a youth, something he’d only known later. Even if he’d had an inkling.
His father passed information on Frankwrithe to Hoegbotton, and information on Hoegbotton to Frankwrithe. Built things for Hoegbotton only to give Frankwrithe the intel to blow them up. Used the contacts to feed Hoegbotton sensitive information on troop movements from supposed “sources.” Neither side having any sense of the level of betrayal until they came together to fight the gray caps. After which it became clear John Crossley had been given his orders by someone working for the Kalif. Creating chaos while providing the Kalif’s secret service with an inside look at both factions.
And why? Why? Neither James Crossley nor John Finch had any idea. Their father had never told them. Just said once that being a powerful man meant you made enemies. “Too many people get the wrong idea,” he’d said. While he hid out in an abandoned mansion in northern Ambergris. Coughing up blood from the sickness he’d first contracted while on campaign in the Kalif’s territory.
“Look,” he’d said to Finch, showing him, “I never knew my face would be printed on playing cards.” One of fifty most-wanted men and women. On the rebels’ list.
Remembered again the pipe his father had shown him.
Crossley was the past. Finch was the present, waiting for the future. For the air to clear. For all of this to go away.
But two things they agreed on.
Both still trusted in their father, couldn’t bring themselves to shun him. Even knowing what he had done.
Both had loved him.
8
Finch woke with an uneven, sharp surface cutting into his back. Above, a wavery light showed a shelf of rippling black rock. Glittering stalactites pointed down at him.
“We’re in an underground cave system,” a voice said from nearby.
He sat up. The walls of the cavern glowed a deep, dark gold. Traveling across them, in the waves of illumination, Finch saw what looked like strobing starfish. A smell like and unlike brine came to him. Colder, more muted. He still didn’t have his gun. Felt vulnerable, small. She knows I’m Crossley. And she doesn’t care. Which meant she was going to ask him for something big.
The Lady in Blue stood beside him. Wearing the plain uniform of a private or Irregular, all in muted green. Short-sleeved shirt. Tapered pants. Holding a lantern, staring across an underground sea. It stretched out into a horizon of swirling black shadows and glints like newborn stars. A rowboat was tethered to the shore.
“Stop drugging me,” Finch said. He felt sluggish.
“The less you know, the better.”
“How long was I out for?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
“We drug you because there are things we can’t let you know.”
“You mean if I’m interrogated. By someone else.”
She ignored him, indicated the cave with a sweep of her hand. “This is where the gray caps left Samuel Tonsure,” she said. “You know who Tonsure is? Not everyone does.”
He nodded. “The monk Shriek was obsessed with. The one who disappeared.”
“They took his journal from him right here. Left him to make his own way in their world.”
Duncan, in his book: “I became convinced that the journal formed a puzzle, written in a kind of code, the code weakened, diluted, only hinted at, by the uniform color of the ink in the copies, the dull sterility of set type.”
“And where exactly is that?” Finch managed with a thick tongue. His head felt heavy. Whatever they’d drugged him with had quieted the pain in his shoulder.
“You might be better off asking when, but it’s your question. Answer: we’re everywhere. But at this moment, we’re deep beneath the city. Or, at least, a city.”
The Lady in Blue stepped into the boat, hung the lantern on a hook in the prow. “Come on,” she said. “We’re going on a journey.”
Finch hesitated. Suffered from too many journeys. From a shoot-out on an Ambergris street to falling through a door in time and space. Stepping onto the boat felt like a kind of slow drowning. Into yet another dream.
“You don’t have a choice,” the Lady in Blue growled. “I don’t want to have to force you. But I will.”
She was alone. Finch couldn’t see a weapon, though she’d picked up a long pole from the boat. But he didn’t doubt she could hurt him.
Awkwardly, he got to his feet. Stepped into the boat behind the Lady in Blue. It wobbled beneath his weight.
“Sit down,” she said. He sat.
She began to pole them across the little sea, with a strength he hadn’t noticed before. He could see the outline of her triceps as she pushed off with the pole.