“What’s eating Jacob Burn, at this hour? Unless this is a social call?” he asked, tipping the bottle my way. I shook my head.
“What are you into these days, Cal?”
“Debt,” he said with a smile. “And loose women. Less often than I’d like.”
“I mean professionally. Last we talked about work, you were overseeing requisitions for the downfalls campaign.”
“So, not a social call at all,” he said. He looked a little glum. “You never come around anymore, just to chat.”
“It’s because I no longer love you, Calvin. I’m in a very satisfying relationship with a signpost. Now, will you focus for a second and listen. What are you doing these days?”
“Why do you want to know?” he asked.
“There’s someone I need to find. A marine by the name of Wellons. Need to know his last assignment, maybe where he is.”
“Not a lot to go on. But,” he stood up, finished the bottle and tossed it on his bed, then started looking for some pants. “I know where to look. What do you know about him?”
I produced the ID card. He peered at it, frowned, then distractedly put on his pants with one hand while holding the card up to his face with the other.
“This should say, shouldn’t it? How’d you get his ID if you’re looking for him? What’d he do, lose it?”
“Left it behind,” I said. “At a girl’s house. And now the father wants a word, you understand.”
“Oh, well then, I don’t think I could help you, Jacob. Got to protect my brothers from the angry fathers of the world.”
“Just put on your pants, Cal. You can help me find him?”
“If he’s on assignment, sure. I’m in the Registers now. Signing checks, balancing books.”
“You know a guy named Prescott?” I asked.
“He’s a twat.”
“Well.” I looked uncomfortably around the room. “He couldn’t have been that bad.”
“Says you. Now come on.”
We went out his hall and down the road a bit. The Registers office was a diminutive brick building with uneven walls and tiny windows. Everyone seemed surprised to see Calvin so early. We went back to his tiny office and huddled around the desk while he flipped through ledgers and frowned nervously at balance sheets. Eventually, he pulled out a sheaf of loose assignment rosters and began shuffling through them.
“You know, Jacob, I think it’s very odd that you’re doing this sort of thing. Was she a friend of yours?”
“Who?”
“The girl. Wellons’s little honey.”
“Oh. No. I mean, her father and my father. Anyway. It’s just a job.”
“So you’re getting paid for this? Well. I don’t feel so bad, then.”
“About what?”
He shrugged, rolled his eyes around the room. “Anyway. I just didn’t think you were the type to hunt down lost lovers and such. I always thought you were doing, you know. More interesting stuff.”
I sighed. “I have bills, too.”
“Hm. Well, if you ever want a job with the Registers…”
“I’ll let you know.”
He chuckled, then plucked a sheet out and lay it on the desk. It was an oil stained parchment, a copy of the original document.
“I suppose this is it, then. Tell your father’s friend hard luck.”
“What?”
“He’s dead.” He ran his finger across a line on the sheet. Wellons’s name, ID number, rank. Deceased, two years ago. I looked over the rest of the sheet.
“These people all died at once?” I asked.
“Yeah. Special assignment, whole team lost. Let’s see… nothing about where or how. Just dead.”
There were fifteen names on the list. Marcus was one of them.
“This guy, Marcus Pitts,” I said, gesturing at the paper. “He wasn’t a military guy.”
“You knew him, too?”
“Yeah. I don’t think he was in the service.”
Calvin shrugged, looked over the paper. “Well, he died in the service.”
“And there’s nothing about what these guys were doing?”
“Nope. Special assignment. Probably running drugs or something morally negligible like that.”
“Can I get a copy of this?” I asked.
“Absolutely not.” Calvin took a pen and clean paper out of his desk, set it next to the deceased notice, and pushed them both towards me. “It is against regulations for any official document of this service to fall into the hands of civilians. Especially criminals like you, Jacob Burn.”
“Thanks.”
“Of course.”
I started copying names, starting at the bottom, to see if there was anyone else in this special detachment that I recognized. I noticed the death notice was authenticated by good old Angela Tomb. None of the other names struck a bell. They were all sergeants, even Marcus. I stopped at the last name on the list. Coordinating officer. Captain Malcom Sloane.
The foyer to my building was quiet. The entryway was draped in layers of threadbare carpets, each one thinner and older and moldier than the one beneath. The paint on the walls cracked. Weather up on the Torch’ was hard on architecture. It was hard on everything. The building creaked in the wind that would blow up the crags and howled into the too-close sky. Hard to sleep in this wind. People in my building came to bed drunk, or so tired that hell itself wouldn’t keep them up.
Mostly zepdock folks lived here, managers or protocol officers who could afford the luxury of sleeping near work. This place was about as cheap as this district got, unless you were wearing the gray and had a barracks to flop.
The Torchlight had started as a tiny fort on the spit of rock just downriver of the city proper, a sentry post to watch the river. Time and market forces, along with the sudden dominance of the zepliner in the course of Veridon’s ascendance, had made this real estate valuable. The Torch’ had been absorbed into the city, connected by the wide avenue of the Bridge District. Space was at a premium, and expensive. This whole building was strapped precariously to the sheer cliffs of the Torchlight. The walls creaked in the wind, but the views were spectacular.
I stayed here for business. My money was in the docks, in the people I knew from my time in the Academy, people who hadn’t washed out, people who were now officers and gentlemen of the line. For every Commodore who hated me, every instructor who wouldn’t care if I washed up dead on the Reine, there were three old friends. That was my money; old friends and the tolerance that came with a Founder’s name and a father on the Council. Even a father I hadn’t spoken to in five years.
Hadn’t been enough to keep me safe last night, I thought as I eased into the foyer and checked my box. The carpet here smelled like river water had soaked it into mold. It smelled especially rank this morning, or maybe that was me. I walked up the creaky old staircase to my room on the third floor, near the end. I bolted it once I was inside, stripped and lay on the bed. That smell was definitely me. I wanted to sleep, but here wasn’t safe. I probably shouldn’t have even come here, now that I stopped to think. I’d just been running away from whatever had taken the Summer Girl, away from the Tomb Estate on the Heights and its complications. Whatever was going on up there, I was out of my league. All the way down the mountain I had thought about it, about the gun and the photo and that… thing. The Girl. I didn’t know which one I had killed, the girl or the thing she had become. What the difference was, for that matter. And what any of it had to do with the Glory of Day and the artifact-cog. The Cog that I had left…
In Emily’s apartment. I sat up sharply, remembered where I should have gone first. I stood up and started to pull on clothes. I must have slept, because I didn’t hear the man outside my door until he was picking the lock.
