Mr. Stitch

heard there’s sharpsies there.”

Egg shrugged again. He was growing less and less tolerant of Will’s complaints. “We’ll do it. Come on, it won’t take long. Hurry, before we lose her.”

The two men jogged towards the doorway and down the stairs. They followed the sound of her footsteps- after a moment of consideration and heated argument about precisely which direction said footsteps were coming from-down one dark, covered alley, and through a curved connecting tunnel, past a bronze statue that vaguely resembled either a man on horseback, or possibly three women dancing.

“Is she heading towards the river?” Will asked, and Egg shushed him. The soft susurrus of the Lesser Stark, one of the many small tributaries of the greater Stark, could be heard below the roads that had been built above it. Egg listened closely for the telltale sound of echoing footsteps, trying to sort them out from the random, quiet cacophony that was the sound of city life. He heard, some distance away, a sharp, precise rapping sound.

“That way,” Egg muttered, taking them deeper into the Arcadium. He had her now, he was sure. The sound of her shoes, the rustling of her skirts, the tapping of that weird clicking noise the knockers made. He could even see her shadow flickering in the messy whorl of blue light from the phlogiston lamps. Egg slipped his hand inside his coat and took a hold of his knife.

It wasn’t that he liked killing people, women especially. It’s that it was good money, and from an early age, Egg had realized he was good at not feeling bad about things. And since a man has to earn a living, he needs to take advantage of the assets he has available.

“Here, what’s this?” Will said, as the two men rounded the corner. Will knelt down and drew a skirt out from a puddle of petticoats. “She’s walking around in her bloomers?”

Egg’s eyes narrowed and he looked around. They were in a fairly large Close, with side-streets leading off in four more directions. Two of them were pitch dark, their lanterns burned out or broken by vandals.

“She’s left her shoes, too,” Will snickered. “Maybe this won’t be such a bad time after all.”

“Shut up,” Egg snapped. A wave of knocking swept through the close, echoing off the walls, compounding on itself until it began to sound like thunder. Will swung around wildly, imagining that the source was nearby. Egg, by coincidence, looked up at the hanging lamp that cast blue light into the Close. Its metal frame was rattling alarmingly fast; the key that controlled the phlogiston flow was shaking in its socket as the knocking grew louder- and then, abruptly, the key fell out.

Phlogiston poured into the lamp, ignited by the filament, and exploded in a burst of blinding, blue-white light. When their vision cleared, the two men found the close almost impenetrably dark. The knocking continued, softer now, and proceeded down the alley directly ahead of them.

“Shit,” Will muttered. “Did she do that? I didn’t know they could do that.”

“Shut up and follow-wait…” There was a second clicking now, from the other alley. It didn’t sound quite the same…was it an echo? “Wait. We’ll split up. I’ll go down this one, you take that one. She can’t be far, not if she’s running without shoes on. She’ll cut her feet on something soon enough, and we can just follow the blood, then.”

“Yeah,” Will said. “All right.” He muttered something under his breath and took a few steps into the dark, making him practically invisible to Egg.

Egg set his hand along one of the stone walls and slowly made his way down the alley. He could see, at some remove, another lantern, its light a faint pinprick in the dark. A trick of the shadow and the distance made it seem to throb. “All right, miss. We know you know about us. Come along then. We don’t want to do nothing to you, you know? We’re just sent to talk. You’re going to hurt yourself, stumbling around in the dark like this.” Inwardly, he thought, Shit. He knew they’d catch her eventually-she’d stumble into a dead-end, or something. But the Arcadium was huge, and it could easily take all night.

“Ow, fuck!” Will’s voice echoed off the walls.

“What? What is it?” Egg shouted.

Will growled wordlessly, then responded. “She’s. Ow, she fucking stabbed me. She has a knife or something. She’s here.”

“You have her?” Egg turned around and ran back towards the entrance to the alley, heedless of the pitch darkness.

“No, idiot. Fuck. Fucking-if I had her, wouldn’t I say I had her? She’s near here-”

“What-” Egg began, when his ankles struck something hard. He tumbled forward, knife skittering from his hand, cracking his elbows against the stone. He slid a few paces, not quite fast enough to crack his head open on the wall opposite. “Shit! What was…” Footsteps. Bare feet slapped on the stone, just for an instant, back the way he’d come. They were obscured almost at once by another wave of sourceless knocking. “Bitch. Crafty little bitch. Will, are you all right?”

“Yeah.” Will’s voice was close enough to startle Egg. He squinted, and could just make out the other man’s shape in the dark. “She got me good, though, right in the arm. She’s got a knife-”

“Never mind,” Egg got to his feet. “Never mind that, we know where she is. Just follow me, all right?”

“Right,” Will put his hand on Egg’s shoulder as they started down the alley again.

“Here, now,” Egg called out. “That was clever. That was very clever. You could have hurt someone pretty bad with a trick like that. We aren’t mad though, are we, Will?”

“No, we aren’t mad,” said Will. “Just come on out and we can talk about how mad we aren’t. No troub-”

Egg felt Will’s hand disappear from his shoulder. “Will?”

“Hrrkggk,” Will said, and the sound of a body collapsing onto cobblestones was unmistakable.

“Will, shit,” Egg knelt down and groped for the body of his partner. He felt the man who was now very still, and very limp. “Now you’ve done it,” Egg said. “Now-agh!” White-hot pain lanced through his shoulder as something sharp broke his skin, and something horribly foreign entered into his body. “Fuck!” He screamed and twisted, taking the blade with him, slapping at it with his free hand.

It was definitely a sword, a slender sword jammed nearly to its hilt in the muscle underneath his armpit. He swung his good arm out and, by what could have only been blind luck, struck human flesh. “Got you!” He shouted grabbing the thrashing body and finally getting a hold of a wrist. It was the woman, he was sure of it. “Got you, you fucking cunt bitch. I’m going to break your god-damn-” sharp pain in his cheek; Egg let go instinctively and clapped his hand to his face. He tasted blood, trickling into his mouth. “Fuck, did you just fucking bite me?”

Another wave of knocking echoes obscured the sound of her movements. Egg, blinded by rage now as well as darkness, stumbled to his feet and took off down the alley, where he imagined his quarry must have fled. He ignored the pain in his face, ignored even the distractingly-uncanny sense of the sword embedded under his arm. His calm unflappability gone, Egg barreled into the dark, towards that blue light, surrounded by the haze of knocking.

Egg skidded to a halt beneath the blue phlogiston lantern, which illuminated only a frustratingly small circle in the otherwise pitch black Arcadium. “Where the shit are you?” He shouted.

“Here, idiot,” a woman’s voice called from some distance way. He could just distinguish her silhouette. “Are you coming, then? Or did you prefer to stay here and bleed?”

The wounded man roared again and charged towards her like an angry bull, his imagination momentarily flush with images of the tortures that he’d inflict on the stupid, skinny little knocker when he got his hands on her. He was so angry, in fact, that he did not notice that the shape he was charging towards, which did indeed seem to be resolving into the shape of a woman, didn’t seem to be moving in the face of his advance. He also didn’t notice that she seemed to be illuminated not by phlogiston at all, but by the vague, watery yellow light from a full moon half- eclipsed by clouds.

He didn’t notice any of those things; all he noticed was that the woman was nearly in reach, and that his desire to crush her neck with her bare hands was irresistibly strong. Consequently, he was surprised when, at the very last moment, she spun away from him, and he staggered out into the moonlight. He slipped and nearly fell, caught himself at the last second with a hand on the stone wall.

Egg looked out to see that he was standing on a ledge, ten feet above the Stark, which roiled cold and swift beneath him. She was leading us back to the river, he thought, just as a heavy weight crashed into his back. He lost his balance and fell, face-first, towards the dark water. Bitch, he thought again, as the cold water hit him and the current dragged him along to