the alley, spinning up the Justicar's rig to call in a team to cart off the bodies, when the ground began to rumble. We all knelt down and looked up.
The makeshift room was open to the sky, hidden only by a collection of pipes and other business from the surrounding buildings. I hadn't given it much of a look when we got there, distracted as I was by the carnage and the stink. Now that rumbling grew into a roar and the sky was blocked out completely as something rushed over our heads.
The monotrain. We were tucked away just under some of the elevated tracks, our teeth rattling as the train went past. When it was gone I looked at Owen and jerked my chin up.
'Which circle was that?'
'Must have been the Hamilton Stone,' he answered. 'You were on the Pershing when you were attacked.'
'They meet up,' I said. 'Those circles intersect, north of here.'
'Yeah.'
There was some junk in the alleyway, crates and an old discarded manifold. I dragged those into the room and piled them up, then clambered to the level of the tracks.
'You really shouldn't do that,' Owen said.
'You'll make a great mom someday.' I pulled myself onto the tracks and squinted around.
As with all buildings in the city, the surrounding structures had an open framework at the level of the train. It wasn't necessary, as the impellor could go right through them, but people didn't like living in the constant surge of those engines, and why build walls if you don't have to? I felt that surge now, my bones vibrating as it pulsed through me. There, between the iron grid of the open buildings, far away at the center of this particular monotrack orbit, I could see the impellor tower, shimmering sickly in the moonlight.
'They were waiting,' I said. 'Waiting for us to come by.'
'How could they know you were coming this way?'
I looked over at Owen. He had clambered up beside me, his hands white on the railing at the edge of the tracks.
I smiled. 'You really shouldn't be up here,' I said.
'Gods help me if I implied you would make a good mother someday. Gods in heaven help me.'
'They couldn't know. Whether they were waiting for us to come by the boulevard, or ride by on these tracks.' I shook my head. 'They just couldn't know.'
'Unless someone told them. Someone who knew where you were going and how best you might get there.'
'Someone from the Library? Maybe. But we didn't come this way, even though we planned to. And they still found us.'
'Not this batch, though.' Owen looked down at the mess of bodies, and his nervous patrolmen trying to organize them. 'But another. Which means they could have been watching multiple routes.'
'Which means we'll find other groups like this, watching other tracks?'
Owen looked thoughtful, twisting to peer along the track and around at the city. 'Maybe. Maybe if we make a map of other paths you could have taken. I've had enough fun up here, for now.'
He climbed down, leaving me alone with the periodic pulsing of the distant impellor. The rails began to rumble again, and I sighed and followed him down. The train came by a minute later, but I barely heard the roar.
* * *
This is how I usually spend my nights when I spend them with men. We crawled through alleyways, we rumbled down boulevards, we stopped monotrains so we could walk on the tracks and poke through alcoves and cringe when the impellor's invisible surge washed through our bones. It was filthy.
We found two more places where we'd been watched, where someone had sat and waited for the Fratriarch to come by. Mostly they were improvised rooms, cobbled together from driftwood or old crates, hidden in alleys and under tracks. We found another of those communication rigs, this one still active. We shut it down and took it. I felt something when I was close to it, like a voice in my blood, but then it faded. There were signs these guys had been there for days. At one place we found a body, some old guy who must have stumbled on their hideout and paid with his life. He'd been dead almost a week, wrapped in some kind of sheeting that masked the smell. We even found a lookout on the closest waterway, accessible only by depthship or a really good set of lungs. The last place we looked was along the Pershing circle, trying to find where the guys who had actually attacked us were hiding. It was almost dawn.
It was an easy place to find. Just had to figure out where we were when they had attacked the rails, and then backtrack a little bit. It was a nest, built into the open gridwork at the level of the train, shielded from view by barrels taken from a local distillery. There was no communications rig here, just some kind of tube that was charred at both ends and smelled of gunpowder. From here I had a clear view of the crash site, and the surrounding square. Patrols milled about, whiteshirts circling nervously and black-robed Amonites working on the track. I sat down on the little platform and swung my legs over the edge.
'So,' Owen said, sitting beside me, 'what do we know?'
'We know where they waited. That there were a lot of them, spread out all over the city. They knew we were coming, and how.'
'Not necessarily. We've only looked in places we knew you could have gone. There might be other sites like this, all over the city.'
'That's a cheery thought.'
'Yeah,' he said. 'Means there could be a lot of those guys.'
'We also know that someone killed some of them. Either because they were following us, or knew we were being followed.' I rubbed my face and looked down at the street, far below. 'That's something.'
'Really, we still don't know much of anything,' Owen said.
'We know the Fratriarch is missing.'
There was a shout, far away, and we both looked up. In the distance, there was a commotion around the crash site. Amonites were rushing away, all of them running toward a white-robed man who held one hand high in the air. They threw themselves at his feet. The other Alexians at the site were milling about. The tracks and other buildings blocked much of our view.
'They've found something,' I said.
Owen stood and spun up his rig, the swirling orbits of the helmet closing around his head and eyes as it tapped into the communications grid.
I didn't wait. I jumped to my feet and, invoking a little trick from the book of Morgan, leapt the distance to the track. I ran along the rails, toward the crash site, bully out, heart pounding.
5
hey were gathered around a crater in the ground. The Amonites were fully leashed, lurking unhappily behind their Alexian master on the far side of the square. There was a yellow tape barrier around the crash site, lined with a handful of curious passersby, though more were gathering as the search team became increasingly agitated. It didn't help when I boomed down the tracks, glory wicking off my boots as I leapt to the ground in full combat gear. I'm a crowd pleaser.
The investigator in charge, a bald-headed, frail, middle-aged man in an impeccable Alexian robe, waved me to a stop. Then he put a hand on my shoulder as I passed him and, eventually, hurried after me as I closed on the crater. He was sputtering.
'We don't know the full extent of its power, my lady, and think caution is best.'
'Full extent of what's power?' I asked. There were a number of craters in the ground, all of them from my
