Early update as I'll be busy this weekend3
Continuing with Part Deux of the Bloody Sunday hell-fest. Tw: for aftermath of war, mentions of rape, implications of miscarriage, and general unhealthy coping mechanisms related to trauma. Another big tw: for torture, violence and gore.
Secondary cw: for non-consensual biting, and dubious consent.
Overall tw: for this chapter regarding suicide and content related to suicidal ideation. Especially in the second section. Begins after the line "He stands in the center of the suite, eyeing it with an eerie flatness of expression."
This installment and the next one are pretty heavy, angst-wise, so if there's certain upsetting content I've failed to put up a warning for, please drop me a PM.
I remain, forever, super grateful for all the wonderful feedback I've received for this story3
Yeah, it's sick and difficult
But we're not ashamed
Pretty damn mutual
We're not sentimental
~ "Spying Game" - Ingrid Witt
Before Code Blue, Silco is at Drop Street.
Sevika's place—once hers and Nandi's. It is situated at the fringes of a district called Oldtown: a zone stuck in time.
The architectural curiosities of Zaun are many, from spiraling towers to zigzagging pathways. Their Art Noveau façades, a holdover of the mercantile era, are squalid with factory soot and defaced by decades of neglect. The awnings with antique flower patterns mark establishments that no longer exist. The curlicued iron flagstaffs with seashell-style ideograms are barely legible beneath accretions of rust. The hand-painted murals show idyllic scenes of gardens long forgotten by even the history books.
They symbolize an age of flora and fauna when life was more plentiful than death; when nature had not been poisoned by industry. The Undercity has changed since then, rebuilt itself over and over, pushing further into a sky that remains out of reach.
A testament to hope—or the repetitions of futility.
Few districts capture the paradox as perfectly as Oldtown. It is the earliest immigrant enclave in the Undercity. Split between Ionian and Shuriman settlers who migrated during the first ripples of the Void Wars, nothing in Oldtown ever gets torn down. Instead, centuries-old buildings are the crutches on which a crazy jumble of vaulted Shuriman arches and theatrical Ionian balconies are piled together until they resemble a vertiginous cosmorama. The flickering gaslight lends a surrealism to the central street, an effect enhanced in summertime by the Equinox Bazaar, when a tide of colorful merchandise swells and washes up in the courtyards below.
In daylight, it holds the tacky charm of a carnival. At night, it is a smoky jewel-box.
Sevika's flat is far from the riot of the main streets: a somber three-story brick building. It occupies a no-fire zone where gangs keep an uneasy peace, and where residents have learned to keep their heads down. Few windows face the streets. Those that do pretend to take no notice of the gleaming black limousine parked in the shadows of the backstreet.
That limousine has been there before.
The flat is a modest efficiency. One bedroom mostly filled with a queen-sized bed. A bathroom with a sink, a shower and toilet scrubbed to bleached whiteness. Wooden crates piled high against one exposed brick wall in the living-room are filled with boxing gear, tobacco cartons and water bottles. Under the glow of a fluorescent light, a heavybag hangs like a slab of beef. The kitchenette is overhung with the molecular haze of old fry-ups.
Like most brawlers, Sevika coasts on a state of constant appetite. She's a competent cook, but nothing like her sister.
The olfactory dinge dislodges remnants of the old days in Silco's mind. Rallies in crowded taverns and smuggling under a starred sky. Vander's rumbling shouts at dawn and Nandi's lentil soup for dinner. The streets slick with twilight rain and zinging with anxiety, as if perspiring it. Curfews, riots, shootings.
Life at a standstill. Enforcers at large.
Now Zaun is free. And the atmosphere is full of specters.
Fortunately, fucking is a surefire exorcism.
Not that Sevika needs an excuse to fuck. Sex for her is an easy sport. She takes pleasure in the roughness, formality forgone for heat and friction. For Silco, the impetus is different. In his old life, it was about simple contact. Now contact is nothing more than an insinuating means of ownership.
On Bloody Sunday, he can even pretend it's about pleasure.
Behind the half-cracked bedroom door, there is a scrape of mattress springs and syllabic grunts. Sickles of green moonlight pour through the curtained windows, picking up a patina of dust-motes around Sevika's body. She rides him at a gallop, her fingers fanned out across his ribcage. Her hips are a rhythmic roll. Silco's manicured fingernails leave half-moons stamped into their flesh.
Arched over him, her muscle-corded torso is a map of sacrifices to Zaun—and his own cruel predilections. Old scars crisscross one shoulder, the curve of her right bicep, the toned plane of her stomach. The fresh marks of Silco's teeth overlay them.
It's a good look. He may even trace his fingers over them later.
Gripping Sevika's thighs, fingers biting into the taut muscle, Silco spreads her wider open. The right hand slides inwards; meeting where their bodies interlock. His fingertips glide wetly down matted curls to her bared clit. Sevika snarls. No soft coos; she vocalizes the same way she fights, breaths strangled into a teeth-bared ferocity. Her hips circle, chasing the sensation as a tremor spreads under her skin.
Except Silco's generosity is always double-edged.
The tracings of his fingertips become elusive figure-eights. Cursing, Sevika slaps both hands onto his chest, copper and flesh, using the leverage to grind all her body-weight against his groin. Her bed, too old for the bedlam, creaks in protest. The headboard knocks against the wall, a repetitive clack-clack each time she lifts her hips and slams them down.
Silco, permissive of bedlam when it's by his design, kicks his own hips in ruthless counterpoint. One pale hand splays at the base of Sevika's belly, as if tracking the pressure of his cock shoving into her body. The other rests two-fingered against the cleft of her vulva.
Sharply, he pinches her clit.
Sevika's breath tears out on a guttural cry. Her body rears upward and her head tips back until she's a single convulsing shape from her uptilted chin to her bared throat to the swells of breasts and hollowing belly, all the way down to the clamp of her thighs as she jolts to aftershock after aftershock.
So much blood coursing to the surface: arteries, capillaries, tendons. All of it pinioned on his cock.
"Fuck," she gasps, "Fucking Janna—right there."
Silco gives her a moment to breathe. Surging, he tumbles her back. It is like a pair of monsters going for the jugular; a brace of unyielding muscle against a slither of frictionless bone. Hands all over, sliding over skin and scars. Yet Silco's real possessiveness comes out in his languor. His thrusts slow instead of redoubling. Almost withdrawing from the wet wonderment of opened flesh, but teasingly so—inching a cunt's hair out and then back in.
A savoring mockery of a long ago first time.
Sevika growls. Locking her powerful legs around his back, she grasps the bedrails, gyrating against him. Sweat trickles between her breasts. Her short dark hair is a mess. Yet her ferocity has softened into an incoherent delirium. It's a state she instinctually recoils from on her feet: everything bereft exposed to his scrutiny. Yet in bed, it is the state in which Silco likes her best.
His XO is hard-shelled beast: mind, body, attitude. He's always on the hunt for something soft on the inside.
A taste of that old life.
Sevika flexes her inner muscles. Silco's breath jitters in enjoyment. His movements remain seamlessly liquid. Sevika's eyes squeeze shut; eyeballs zipping under the lids. Her cries waver through different registers: full-throated groans giving way to jittery purls.
"Harder. Fuck—go harder."
"Come like this."
"Bastard."
"Come for me."
"No—shit—shit."
"That's it."
"Don't stop. Fuck. Don't stop."
And the rest is an indecipherable stuttering of Please Please Please.
Silco watches her unravel in slow-motion. His mismatched eyes, glinting out of a pale hard-edged face, are unmerciful in their hunger. She destroys like a dutiful tool. She suffers like a live human being.
On Bloody Sunday, he can pretend he's human too.
Then he is sinking in, the deepest possible push sustained for his climax. He's seldom vocal about it. Just rasping breaths that devolve into a chain of sibilating curses. Sevika's body jolts, softens, jolts around him. She might almost be a toy designed for no purpose but to wring him dry.
Yet the aftertaste of her is satisfying as brightleaf.
For a moment, Silco's parted lips nearly meet hers. Sevika shivers, reflexively arching for a kiss. Fear subsumes arousal. Her muscle groups clench.
His bad eye is too close.
Cued, Silco spills away from her. Their bodies disengage with a wet sound. Skinning off the sheath, he flings it trashward. Their neon-lit silhouettes lay parallel: his body a pale sinewy twist, hers bronzed and muscled as a dragon's tail. Hard as they've been working, she is in a lather of sweat. Silco's own skin holds the barest sheen. That part of his circuitry has gone dead after his submersion in the Pilt. A bad sign, according to Singed, but one easily disregarded.
It takes uglier perversions to make him sweat.
"Sweet Janna," Sevika pants. "I nearly popped a fuse."
"In your arm?"
"Or my brain."
"Keep it functional. We still need to eradicate the Firelights."
Sevika's face maneuvers around disgruntlement. "Back to business already?"
"You want—what? Poetry?"
She scoffs. "That'll be the day."
Her hands drop to her groin, between her spread thighs. The tendons are straightened, the toes pointed. With her mechanical hand she spreads herself slickly open. The fingers of the human hand strum over the taut peak of her clitoris. She wants more; she always does. The first orgasm seldom leaves her satisfied. It only swings the furnace wide open.
Rolling onto his side, Silco hums in idle interest. "Getting the hang of it?"
"New arm. New rules."
"Like a new lover, hm?"
"Or the old one—can handle his business."
She's already breathing in ragged gasps. All the muscles in her body are pulled taut and trembling. Silco's hand skims past hers. He sinks three fluted fingers into her to the knuckles; thumb riding against her clit. Sevika grunts, her palm covering his. The press is insistent; imperious.
That's another way he likes her best.
Ordinarily, his plaything's pleasure is incidental to his own. He's used to people letting to drive, to the selfish machinations of sex. When his toys come, they come for him—or not at all. Sevika might be the sole exception. She's always had a talent for getting what she wants. Part of it is the lack of artifice; her only angle is her own satisfaction. Part of it is her nature itself—a straightforward bludgeon to his maze of traps.
She makes him work hard, because that is what truly grounds the wild tearing instinct inside him. A completionist's streak not unlike a killer's ethos:
We're not finished until I've finished you off.
Teasing, he lets his fingertip slip inside her and then out, rimming her sex in circles, while his thumb gives a soft flicking to her clit. Sevika makes a noise like something is cracking inside her. Breaths heavy, hips restless, splotches of color on her cheeks.
Silco tips a crooked smile. "Now your fuse is popping."
"Think you're—all that, huh?"
"You tell me."
He meets her hot glare with a cool smile. Growling, Sevika parts her thighs wider, grabs his head and shoves it down. Her pubic hair is wet and ticklishly rough against his chin. The aroma is heavy with the sweat of hard fucking; the pooch of her cunt swollen with it.
Spreading her open with both thumbs, Silco drags his tongue across her entrance, up the fringe of inner-lips before flattening it against her clit. Sevika's body ripples like hot wax. Her arm covers her face in that familiar pose of surrender.
A good sign.
He does what he is doing exactly as he's doing it. Pulling her skin taut to suck her clit into his mouth with a lewd pop, hard, harder, hardest, until she thrashes on a ragged curse. Silco hooks his arms around her sturdy thighs, forcing them wider apart as his mouth fully covers her flesh, working her over until she is calling for him to stop, then calling for more, then calling for Janna, before an entirely different name drags out of her.
That man is as dead as the rest. Someone else has stolen his skin—and marked hers with scars.
Her finish hits in a hot cascade. Her good hand scrabbles at the sheets. Reflexively, Silco reaches under her thighs and finds it. Their fingers twine, squeezing, and for a moment a gorge of need rises like rage in his throat, so everything else is gone, all the months of hardship and horror and war, the world reduced to a moment of incoherent completeness, his teeth whetting themselves to taste blood.
As Sevika reaches her crest, hips snapping, Silco bites her inner-thigh—hard. She screams. Her musculature seizes up, then melts into jelly. Tiny twitches like death-throes.
An oozing red crescent stamps her thigh.
"That. Ain't. Right. Silco," she gasps. "You. Know. That. Ain't. Right."
Silco slices a knuckle across his mouth. "Popped your fuse, didn't it?"
On Bloody Sunday, the only exorcism is through possession.
Or, failing that, bloodshed.
The furor ebbs into silence. In its absence is a beat of calm—stopgap, but enough to catch one's breath. Sitting up, Silco reaches for the earthenware tureen on the nightstand. It is brimful with steaming water; a peeled bergamot bobs inside.
He grabs a cloth and dabs himself off, before laying another rag over Sevika's bitten thigh. It is hot—she hisses. Silco wields the rag methodically over the broken flesh, running a terry-clothed palm between her thighs, laving the sore flesh. Her hum deepens from idle to interested.
Silco's half-smile is a chiaroscuro: black and white. "You're insatiable, aren't you? How many times does it make this week?"
"Who keeps count?"
He shakes his head, and lays the rag aside. "All that patronage at Babette's has spoiled you."
"Just Miguel." Sevika stretches lazily. "Bastard's got a ten-inch dick."
"Why did you stop seeing him?"
"Because he's got a ten-inch dick."
Silco tips his shoulder: Point taken.
He gestures for the silver cigar case on the nightstand. Sevika obeys: sparking a cigarillo, and passing it over. Resting his arms on his drawn-up knee, Silco exhales a spiraling stream of smoke. His bad eye catches the neon glow; bright as the floating cherry. Sevika watches him in that silent, proprietary way of hers.
After a moment, her hand touches his shoulder.
Quietly, she says, "Sleep?"
Silco says nothing. She already knows his answer to the invitation. It's the same every Bloody Sunday.
"Making moves already, huh?"
"I did say this was a detour."
"Right."
The mattress creaks as Sevika sprawls bellydown, her arms wrapping around the pillow. Silco crooks a brow. Always, from this vantage, she resembles something carved from rough rare stone. Her back is a sweat-sheened expanse, the spine flowing down solidly into the sultry delta of backside. Skin scarred in spots; others pigmented with licks of molten metal.
Myth disguised as meat.
"Sulking, are we?" he drawls.
"Don't flatter yourself."
"You did a good enough job of that." He grinds out the cigarillo in the ashtray. "That scream probably scared all the rats out the building."
"I don't have rats."
"Just rat-bastards, hm?"
His fingertips skim, light, up the knobs of her spine. Sevika shivers. Her slitted eyes burn through the tangle of hair, then fall shut when he runs the backs of his folded fingers along her cheekbone. Pleasure—unlike pain—liquifies her steel-trap mind.
She murmurs, "Any chance of pulling another fast one?"
"Is that insult, or invitation?"
"Wouldn't mind one more hook up."
"Running a deficit, Sevika?"
Silco's thumb touches her mouth. She laps it in passing, and says, "You know the rule. Once you've crossed my threshold—"
"—I'm at your disposal."
Silco's hand slithers southward. Humming, she parts her thighs.
"Liked when you went slow back there," she says. "Haven't had that in a while."
"Missed slow, have you?"
"Mmm."
His fingertips never stop stroking. "And how's this feel?"
Sevika's good hand goes adventuring too. Her fingers seize him in a sudden manacling grip. Silco jerks and gasps, the bone risen as if from the dead.
Sevika's smile is a hungry white slash.
"Grab a sheath," she says, "that's how it feels."
And, wrapping her legs around him, she swivels.
Afterward, Silco steps out of the bathroom in a waft of steam, half-lidded and impeccably dressed. Sevika is sitting up in bed, both hands under the quilt. The curtains blot out almost all the city lights. But thin green ribbons pattern the floor and stretch toward the blackness of her untied hair. At the endtable, a lit joint rests on the ashtray, smoke spindling into the air.
Silco eyes it with a muted distaste. "Not that rot again."
Lazily, Sevika tips a shoulder. "My last one for the month."
"Laced with anything?"
"Just hash."
"Too much blunts the edge."
She quirks a brow. "Judging by your performance today, sir, you've got more edge than you need."
"It was a profitable day."
"Any highlights?"
"Crimson sitting in a puddle of his own upchuck. Yours?"
"Scaring the piss out of the generals in the war-room."
"Fine work, that."
"If I do say so myself."
Sevika's hands drift under the covers. Silco traces the secretive stirrings with his eyes.
Turning, he regards his reflection in the mirror. His body-language conveys a louche indifference. Butter-wouldn't-melt. But Sevika can see the half-smile curving up one side of his lip. She draws one hand out. The fingers glisten before she pops them into and out of her mouth.
Reaching for the joint, she says, "How's Jinx?"
Her tone is casual. But her eyes are darkly intent. It is what she always asks lately. Never out of concern. Sevika's focus is predictable in its down-to-earth skew. As is Silco's in its elusive bluntness. A familiar back-and-forth of distance and dissembling that is nauseatingly similar to the dynamics of marriage.
"She's fine," he says.
"Doing what, exactly?"
"Keeping busy."
"What's that mean?"
"Means what it means."
Through the haze, Sevika regards him with a frustration that verges on concern. "You're going to end up a martyr to a lost cause."
"They said the same thing about Zaun."
Her eyes stay leveled on him. "Jinx isn't Zaun. The Zaun part of your brain works on double-time. Cut to the chase. Clear out the clutter. But the other part of your brain, the unpredictable part, malfunctions when it comes to Jinx. With every contingency covered, ten more pop up. You have to address this one before it goes haywire."
"Address it, how?"
Sevika ignores the chill of warning in his voice. "Over six months. Jinx hasn't left the suite. The chem-barons are already sniffing. Folks in the streets are talking too."
"And?"
Her scowl intensifies through the smoke. "If she's not coping, you need to deal."
"Deal?"
Silco echoes the word without inflection. His fingers dip in the pot of pomade on the spartan dresser. Not his brand, but it will suffice. He slicks his palms with it, and smooths it through the dark tangles of his hair, a practiced sweep down over his skull from the nape of his neck, then in reverse.
In the mirror, his greenlit face is half-luminous, his bad eye a sucking darkness.
Sevika doesn't flinch. But her tone downshifts. "Look. I know sending her away isn't an option. But I don't think you realize how dangerous it is having her at headquarters. It puts everyone at risk: the staff, the diplomats. Especially you. If she ever flies off the handle—"
"What's your point, Sevika?"
"I'm just saying... there are places that can take Jinx in. Keep her stable. Comfortable, even."
"You want me to put her in a straightjacket?"
Now she does flinch. "Sir, hear me out—"
"I have." He unfolds a comb from his pocket. Moves it over his skull in a measured repetition. "You think Jinx is a lost cause. You want me to cut my losses."
"I want you to consider the alternatives."
"For Zaun."
"For yourself."
Silco tucks the comb away. The waves on his hairline are groomed into dead sleekness. Dead as the man who'd worn his hair like his heart: softly awry. The man who'd had comrades, a lover, a brother, a dream. The man whose dots were once connected to this little flat, and the two fierce sisters residing inside it. Whose wider orbit was tied to Vander, like a planet to the sun: a stupid, simple, needful love that blinded him to anything else.
He isn't that man anymore. That scope of simplicity is beyond him.
There is only Jinx.
Jinx, whom he loves as a bitter, broken, solitary monster unsuited to love at all. Love in a circle of sharp teeth, protected on all sides.
Ready to kill.
"So many options..."
His expression is calm. But his voice holds a cold-blooded scaliness.
"...If not the asylum, there's always the tomb. Right?"
Defeated, Sevika drops her gaze. "You can't keep a timebomb in a tomb."
"Nobody is keeping Jinx."
His child is stymied by her own self-loathing. Silco refuses to let it reduce her to a scapegoat. He'll sacrifice himself first.
He'll burn everything to the ground.
"Sir—"
"We'll not discuss this further."
"But—"
"Last time, Sevika."
Sevika's silence is heavy. She knows she won't change his No to Yes, any more than she can alter his core alchemy. Jinx is his; he won't dishonor the bond. Won't tolerate disloyalty. And Sevika, whatever else, understands loyalty. Has chosen to stay loyal to him, in a state fitting to both their ends.
Loyalty is different from family, though. Different from love. Love stays a stanchion despite its dips in temperature. Loyalty is the opposite. Its vows demand constant renewal.
Otherwise, like a dragon, it spews fire.
Silco turns. His dark expression shifts; the eyes betray a flicker of light.
"Call up some pickled herring from the Thonxian place down the street."
"Huh?"
"My stomach thinks my throat's cut."
That provokes the predictable response. Sevika sits up, the sheet falling away from her body. On her doubled up leg, the bitemark is dark as a devoted brand. "Herring? There's food in the damn fridge."
"Food you made?"
"Nan's recipe."
"Then what are you waiting for?" He beckons offhand. "Feed me."
Sevika is startled. It isn't often he lingers after they're finished. Get in, get off, get out—as the Undercity saying goes.
On Bloody Sunday, their time is worth lingering over.
A wry grin cuts Sevika's lips. Throwing the sheet aside, she rolls to her feet.
"Aye, sir."
There's a saying in the Undercity: Poverty and pickles go hand-in-hand.
While Piltover wallows in imported steak and fruits, consuming marbled slabs of gourmet beef and sampling piquant exotica as their birthright, the Fissures' polluted climes have cultivated a cuisine based on scarce local ingredients. These are delineated into two parts: leftovers from the land, and leftovers from the sea. The former can be found in brightly-lit stalls fringing the narrow Sumpside catacombs and crumbling commercial Entresol blocks alike: sizzling skewers of grilled sump-vole, baskets of cave-dwelling mushrooms, spirals of earthy grubs. The latter dwell in the depths of the fens or scatter the muddy banks of the river channels. Gelatinous blobs of squid, glistening black curls of eel, plump morsels of shellfish.
To the discerning palate, they taste best when preserved beneath layers of salt. They also happen to be one of the few sources of protein.
Hardship breeds creativity as much as necessity. Pickle vendors compete for business with outlandish flavors and exotic spices, each style soaked in the colorful cultures that pervade the Undercity itself. Buhru's immigrants specialize in herbal preserves and sweet condiments. Shuriman recipes offer hot sauces and chutneys. Ionians favor fiery concoctions spiked with vinegar and sugar. For Vekauran peddlers, it's all about coriander, cardamom, and chili peppers. Their most popular variety is raw mango soaked in thick syrup that tastes somewhere between sweet and sour.
All provide a necessary source of nutrients to those who live in close quarters.
Without pickles, poverty would only breed disease.
In the kitchen, a pot of lentil stew warms on the stove. Silco leans by the counter, arms folded, idly rubbing the skin above his bad eye with a forefinger. Sevika ladles out the meal into two plates. She's not bothered to dress except for a tank top and a pair of shorts. Not showered, either, beyond a desultory wash. Her hair sticks up in spikes; her body holds a musky cloak of sex that she wears like perfume.
Neither she nor Silco have much in the way of modesty. But they differ is terms of mess.
After a fuck, Silco is ritualistically clean. In his teenaged years, Vander used to admonish Silco for leaping up as soon as they were finished, wanting to wash himself and strip the bedding. Older, he'd met Nandi, and she'd been more understanding. She'd keep a sudsy tureen of hot water and a washcloth, ready on the nightstand just for him.
Sevika is the opposite. Always neat and orderly on her feet, there is nonetheless nothing she relishes better than getting down and dirty. On hot days, post-fuck, she likes to lounge around nude in a self-satisfied haze of pheromones.
Once, Silco remembers a break-in at her flat. The ruckus had jerked Sevika from her doze. Silco was already on his feet, fully-dressed and sharply-alert, knife in hand. They'd traded glances. Sevika had put a finger to her lips. Without bothering to dress, she'd picked up a butcher knife and loped out to meet the intruders in the kitchen. They had been entirely unprepared to greet a tall naked woman with a vicious smile.
Sevika, of course, was always prepared.
Silco remembers the sheer gusto she'd displayed in cutting them down. With smooth efficiency, she'd hamstrung the first man, before baring her teeth at the second and paralyzing him with a single blow to the base of his spine. When the third lunged to tackle her, she'd dispatched him with three swift blows to his chest.
Afterward, she'd kept to the background while Silco interrogated them—all soft-spoken words and edged steel, dicing up a few extremities along with good portions of their sanity.
The next day, he'd coaxed Sevika to hold the butcher knife between her teeth while he'd fucked her up against the wall. Her jaw must have tightened to shattering point. The tendons of her neck must have burned like hell. But she'd held his stare the entire time.
The knife never once cut her flesh.
It was a reminder of how well he'd chosen. Any kingpin-on-the-make could hire a XO. It was something else entirely to keep a dragon on a leash.
Now, deceptively domestic, Sevika uncorks the jar of pickled mangoes. Silco's favorite. Her way of subtly showing her appreciation for her new arm. The pungently sweet smell is mouth-watering. Sevika mixes the pickles with the melon he'd cut up for her, wielding the knife with the same practiced skill as when he'd slit the burglars' tendons years ago.
They move around each other with an insouciant grace, and yet keep a measure of distance, like two different breeds of animal habituated to sharing the same space.
The kitchen is striped with flickering late-night neon from the window. The place has always looked homey to Silco, a clean and convenient stopover in a foul river of responsibility. It doesn't thaw the chill that seeps into his bones. But it lends him a moment's steadiness.
On Bloody Sunday, he can even pretend to need it.
Sitting face-to-face at the table, Sevika watches him taste his first spoonful of stew. Her expression holds the same sharp-eyed attentiveness as when he inspects her work reports. He's sparing with praise. But his body-language shows subtle cues of distaste versus appreciation. If he eats the stuff without pause, then helps himself to seconds, then he's happy with the results. If he picks at it, keeps a tight grip on the bowl, and makes no effort to swallow, it's another matter altogether.
Tonight, Silco chews contemplatively. His good eye half-closes. "Hm."
"Good?"
He nods, and swallows.
"That's it? No verdict?"
"Better than last time," he says. "Needs less pepper."
"Thought you could handle spicy."
"Spicy is fine. But I still want to taste the rest."
"Implying you could when Nan was making it?"
"She had her way. You have yours."
A low-key annoyance crosses Sevika's face: Thanks for the diplomacy. Asshole.
Silco almost smiles.
But the fragrant saffron-colored broth really is good. He ends up competing with Sevika to finish it off. Afterward, they clear away the remnants from the table. Silco, ever the precisionist, was taught to clean up at Hölle Correctional Facility: he tackles the dishes like a military tactics table. Sevika, meanwhile, learned from between her sister's knees: she dries the dishes with a careless flourish, her mechanical fingers clinking almost musically against the glass.
The old building resonates with sound and sensation around them: ceiling vibrating with footsteps, walls rumbling with generators. It's the ambient soundtrack, not of a cage but a cote. The residents are familiar with each other's rhythms. Enough to know who belongs and who is the intruder.
On cue, Sevika's stairwall creaks. A complicated knock—the tattoo of query—is rapped against the window.
Threat or guest?
Sevika raps her knuckles back on the glass.
The Boss.
At once, a pair of sumpsnipes scurry to the window. They are barely into adolescence, in identical grubby gray paletots that resemble straitjackets. One sports a ridging of Shuriman tattoos across his cheeks, and the other a swirl of beaded braids that fall in a colorful jangle around her shoulders.
Bright eyes peer through the gap in the blinds. Their stares meets Silco's. His bad eye bleeds a red glow in the gloom.
Silco tips them a two-fingered salute.
Gasping, the sumpsnipes duck under the windowsill. Peeping again, they wave. One flashes the gang sign taught by family or friends.
In this neighborhood, everyone is affiliated with a gangbanger.
Under Piltover, the Undercity had contended for decades with the absence of a stable community and strong commerce. It engendered a criminal subculture that soon became entrenched. The first generations who immigrated to Oldtown were honest tradesmen. Low wages, unemployment, and the parochial corruption of Topside's institutions drove them to petty grift. By the second generation, gangs had festered in the blind spots. Oldtown's topography—all sinuous streets and dead ends—connived at the outcome. By Silco's heyday, crime syndicates were endemic: burkers, brothel keepers, procurers, pickpockets, all vying for territory.
All on Silco's payroll.
His drug empire had nourished itself on civil strife. The street-dealers were soldiers in his asymmetric war. Their blood disseminated Shimmer through the city's arteries. The gang leaders were his lieutenants. Their bodies fell, only to be replaced by others, like rows of teeth in a shark's mouth. The chem-barons were his generals. He rewarded them with rank; they built immunity by routing out the disease of rival cartels.
It was a brutal means to a radical end. Yet Silco held on to that end, not as a tyrant gorging on atrocity, but as the expectant father of a child threatening to unmoor itself from the womb.
Hold on. It was a mantra passed down nightly. Hold on as tight as you can.
Now the child—Zaun—is alive. Born starving in gouts of blood.
Silco will fill its belly with gold.
Last month, he'd strongarmed an initiative to clean up the ugly graffiti, establish rehabilitation centers, and create community outreach zones. It's cost a fortune, mostly from his own pocket. But it's also the first step in paying the dividends forward. The second is to pare down the drug trade in stages, first by turning off the faucet to the Shimmer supply, next by weaning addicts onto substitutes with fewer side effects. A tall order, but necessary for the most vital step of all: rebranding neighborhoods as viable communities where investors will come to roost.
The only way Zaun will prosper is through trade and opportunity. And the only way to attain those is to restore stability. To make the streets safe.
Give the city a new shape.
Silco unlatches the window. The night air bites with smoky teeth. The sumpsnipes creep closer.
Formally, he greets them, "Awis, Zoya."
"Merhaba."
"How are the streets tonight?"
"Quiet."
"And your father?"
"Still in bed. His leg is healing."
"He'll be better soon."
"Na'am. There are no more ulcers on his wound."
"Your Standard is improving, Zoya."
"I take classes at the new learning center." Keen to demonstrate, Zoya pulls a book from her knapsack. "This is my homework. I fill in the blanks for each Standard word. We get clues, see?"
Silco leans in to see pages of crossword. Most have been industriously jotted out. Zoya aims a skinny finger at the empty spaces.
"Do you know this one, sir? Blank pro quo. Four letters."
"Quid pro quo."
"What's that?"
"Something given in exchange for something else." He taps another. "And that one. Twenty-two down. What does that mean, hm?"
Zoya scrunches her face, thinking. "A small earthquake...seven letters? Shaker? Rumble? La'aerif..."
"Temblor. T-E-M-B-L-O-R. We have them often."
"What about—?"
Sevika raps her knuckles on the window; the sharp bang makes the two sumpsnipes jump.
"What is this?" she says. "Remedial class? Pack it up!"
Silco tells the pair he will call on their gang by the month's end. The sumpsnipes nod. Silco passes over a handful of coins: five Hexes each. That is their tip. For a child who survives on half the amount monthly, it is a kingly sum. In exchange, they will play his eyes and ears—like hundreds of others. Boot-boys, loiterers, louts: it takes all sorts. People speak freely about the most intimate things in their presence.
The sumpsnipes scamper like roaches. Sevika deadbolts the window behind them.
"Everytime I see 'em," she mutters, "I want to wash their grubby mitts in bleach."
"A misplaced maternal instinct."
"Try allergy to anklebiters." Sevika re-sparks her spliff and sets it in the crook of her mouth. Smoke billows through her nose. "Want one of your own?"
The scarred skin above Silco's left eye twinges. He disguises the wince with a scoff. "Not bloody likely."
"I meant a joint." Her tone turns guardedly offhand. "Explain this to me. You said the Doc's prognosis...?"
"It is what it is."
"So, still swimmers, right? Not floaters."
"The mutation is sky-high. Bad seed puts down crooked roots."
"Or two-headed ones."
"Exactly."
Sevika stares through the veil of smoke, trying to read the unreadable. Deliberately, she shrugs, "Damn shame. Nan always said you'd make a good dad."
"A charitable soul, your sister."
"Don't disagree. Something to be said about having nothing on the slate but your own blood. A clean start." She blows a quivering smoke-ring. "It's not like that with adopted kids. Already in the bassinet they're sucking up their parents' fuck-ups."
Silco's mood is reabsorbed into stillness. "No child comes preloaded with baggage."
"Just a few extra screws loose."
The silence is a cold weight. Sighing, Sevika relents, "I'm just saying—"
"Want one of your own?"
"What?"
Sevika would hate to be told so, but in that moment, openmouthed in disgust, she looks impossibly girlish: a ghost resurfacing from the burial ground of her old self.
"Something to be said about a clean start," Silco says, turning the tables with a perverse relish. "In fertile soil, even bad seed survives. We could do it together. You and I. You're savvy to the secrets of midwives. Your sister taught you all the tricks of her trade. And you're a healthy specimen. Your family come from strong stock. Even if we have to get creative with the timing and angles—"
"Janna, stop."
"—we'd have the best chance of pulling off a clean start. Imagine it. A son. Your son. A brawler through and through. Or a daughter. Your fine looks and my intellect. The child would be a walking terror. I'd teach it all I know about the world. Raise it to be an engine of change. You'd show it how to throw a good right-hook. How to make a halfway decent fishbone curry. The three of us would be a perfect trinity."
Sevika backs into the sink. She braces a palm on its edge, looking for all the world like a cornered animal. "Ain't no way you're putting a baby in me."
"Why not? Think of the benefits. Delay your climacteric. Pass on a lineage. Make yourself an invaluable asset in my hierarchy. You're always asking for more time off."
"More time with my goddamn self!"
"We both have our own careers; our own positions. But we need someone to fill the gaps. A child, especially a healthy one, is the perfect solution. Jinx will have a brother or a sister. Someone to share her burdens. It will keep her lucid—and keep us limber. And once I go, the child will be good for you in your dotage."
"My what?"
"You're old age. Comes for us all. I can picture you with silver hair and crow's feet. A mighty oak, you'd be. But assuming you don't raise an ingrate, the child wouldn't chop you down. Or leave you on a hillside to die. They've done away with that Vekauran tradition, correct?"
Sevika's fist slams against the metal sink. The sound ricochets off the walls.
"You," she growls, "are absolutely crazy."
"Nonsense. I am planning for tomorrow." There is a tiny bite of humor on Silco's lips. But his stare is coldly measuring. "Now's the time."
Recognizing the look, Sevika sobers. Banter is never simply banter with Silco. Everything is a prelude to a plot.
Wordlessly, he extends a hand. Sevika passes over her joint. Chancing it, Silco takes a full drag. Potent stuff: iridescent bubbles blossom inside his skull. He supposes that's why Sevika favors it for darker nights. It softens the rage cutting under the skin.
Silco prefers his own rage sharply-honed.
"It's time," he says, smoke seeping between the words, "for the next step. What would you say to a condominium in the Promenade?"
"With chem-barons for neighbors? Rather be homeless."
"If they don't respect you—"
"'Make them fear you,'" Sevika quotes. "Don't need to tell me twice."
"Fear is worth more than respect." Silco idles back against the counter. "It's how we won the Lanes. Now you're Head of War and Treasury. That means switching up the game."
"Meaning?"
"There's a private and a pubic façade. A dark and a light. It's time you transitioned to the latter. What do Zaunites see when they look at you?"
Sevika shrugs. "Someone tough as nails, capable as fuck, and willing to kill anyone who gets in her way."
Silco nods. Her reply holds no pride; only plainspoken fact. That pleases him. Proximity may be the death of perspective, but Sevika's own rarely falters. And she knows it, too.
"And what," he goes on, "does the public think of the chem-barons?"
"Peacocks masquerading as predators. They rule the roost. They think the city's their bitch."
"Exactly. Now we terraform their territory into Zaun's." Behind the spindling smoke, his two-toned eyes are darkly sheened. "The chem-barons have a fundamental misunderstanding of power. They think it means money. They believe the city will be run the way we ran the Shimmer game. They don't yet realize that we've crossed into a de facto state. Now their sinecures will become shackles."
"And you want me to do the shackling?"
"Not just you. A brand-new system in place. Think of it as a profound restructuring of Zaun's composition. Or, put another way, a sloughing off Piltover's leftovers." He passes back the joint. "Like a snake shedding skin."
Sevika's expression holds the old lip-curl of warning. "Sounds messy."
"That's the hazard of resurrection. But we'll start small. Begin with both the Council and the chem-barons' stranglehold on certain arenas. Then work our way outward until the whole city shakes itself free." He withdraws his handkerchief, a pickpocketable square of black cambric silk, and wipes his mouth bare of anything but a half-smile. "Over the next three years, I'll pass a series of decrees in the Cabinet. The first will replace the chem-barons' appointed officials at each district with popularly-elected ones. No grafts; only Guilds. That will force the chem-barons to loosen their grip or risk losing control over the zones entirely. We'll give them leeway, naturally. An illusion of control—while chipping away at their real influence by starving the local Shimmer trade."
"And Uppside?"
"Same strategy, different target. Once the Peace Treaty goes into effect, we want the Council to believe Zaun remains theirs to hold. As their piggybank, playground and brothel. The second decree will fill the Cabinet's economic arm with corruptible chem-barons. We'll use them to lull the Council through backroom deals and joint ventures. Except the decree's fine print will make plain that their businesses can be seized on mere suspicion of foul-play—without court intervention."
His voice drops and yet gains resonance.
"Once the Council and the chem-barons are complacent, we'll pass the third decree. Zaun will offer tax incentives to entice foreign investors. Give corporate charters carte blanche access to the city's resources. Offer generous loans at benevolent rates to smalltime businesses. Piltover has the highest statutory corporate tax rate in the region; Zaun will have one of the lowest. We'll lure Topside's trade across the river with promises of cheap labor and easy credit. In exchange, they'll help us rebuild our city. All we ask in exchange is a levy on revenue. That gives us leverage to begin regulating business practices and ensure fair competition. We'll make plain, in fine print, that any deviation from this agreement will result in the seizure of all assets on Zaun's soil."
Sevika issues smoke through a dry snort. "The chem-barons would never sign on."
"They'll have no choice. With new businesses taking center stage, they lose their monopoly on the city's trade. Their ability to bribe and intimidate falls apart. They'll swim with the current—or drown. As a bonus, the influx of cash and goods will drive the price of raw materials down. In time, the chem-barons will find themselves edged out of the picture altogether. Meanwhile, local players will float to the top. The little fish will be fed."
"And the biggest fish?"
A sly glint of teeth. "The fourth decree goes for the jugular. It taxes the shareholders with the same vigor as the companies. We will exempt small businesses from capital gains. But the heavyweights will pay triple. The tax will not be imposed in stages—but all at once. So sudden that even the most ruthless corporate titans will find themselves unable to weather its impact. There will be mass panic among the chem-barons. But the real blow comes to Topside. By then, the Council will have invested considerably in Zaun's commercial milieu. Now their holdings will be taken, and their names dragged publicly through the mud. Once the shock wears off, they'll be begging to renegotiate. Many will liquidate their estates to cover losses. Others will retire from public life entirely. Meanwhile we will consolidate their wealth. Clean house—and clear the board."
"Sweet Janna."
Sevika's jaw unhinges itself. A dragon readying to fit its fangs into a juicy carcass.
Silco takes her interrupted joint, sucking a mouthful of smoke. He emits a slender cord that hangs like a noose between them.
"Consider these decrees," he murmurs, "the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
"Ours?"
"Theirs, Sevika. Theirs."
Sevika's lips part; her pupils dilate. Her features have lost all pretense of resistance.
Like when they're fucking—only better.
"Four Horsemen," he repeats, deathly calm. "Three years. But to pull this off, we must keep a public façade and a private. A dark and a light. I need you to take the dark road—in plain sight. As the Head of Treasury, you'll be in the limelight. You'll have the chem-barons' trust and the Zaunites' goodwill. As Head of War, you'll be under the radar. You and the crew will work behind the scenes. Do whatever needs doing."
Bluntly, she says, "Kill whoever needs killing."
"That, too."
Sevika slouches back provocatively. "So this is—what? A promotion? Or a proposal?"
"An upgrade. Like your arm."
Sevika's gaze is nine parts wonderment and one part unease, as if she's come face-to-face, not with a persona, but the depthless hunger behind it. A deepsea entity that asks her to give up a piece or else be swallowed whole.
"Will it be enough?" she says. "Taking what's theirs?"
Silco's upper lip twitches, a predatory rage seeping briefly through his features. In the next beat, his expression smooths out.
"We won't take what's theirs," he corrects. "We'll take everything."
For Zaun.
For the past. For the future.
(And for you, Jinx.)
Something creeps into Sevika's eyes. A steely sense of grimness. "And until we do, you're not free. I'm not free. Our city's not free."
Silco cants his head. But she is gazing out the window, not even looking at him, but out into an inner-space. The joint, twigged between her fingers, seeps smoke in an olfactory dirge. Difficult to tell whether she is brooding. A sullenness always radiates off Sevika, like the brightleaf in the weave of her cloak.
But when she is truly troubled, it is unmistakable. Beautiful in its own way. The forbidding scowl fades into a peculiar softness. He'd recognize the signs even without the context.
On Bloody Sunday, it is all context.
Sevika's tone drops an octave above tiredness. "Is there a timeline?"
"For what?"
"When we're safe from doomsday. Safe... from our damned ghosts."
He says nothing.
"Twelve fuckin' years. Zaun's gone from nothing to everything. But still—" She is whispering to herself more than him. "Some days, I feel like I've swapped places with Nandi."
"Meaning what?"
"She died in blood and dirt. I've spent twelve years rolling in it."
Silco's tongue touches the tip of one eyetooth. He can hear the harshness of grief in her words. Six months new. Twelve years old. And yet its measure cannot be taken.
His ambitions for Zaun grow bolder by the day. Sevika works with stolid dedication to support each step. But off-duty, little engages her interest. At the Grindstone, she prowls for sparring partners to sharpen her skills. Most are intimidated by her speed and ferocity. Others seek to best her. All are left absolutely demolished, and grateful they didn't end up dead. At the bars, she prowls for playmates of a different stripe. Men who want to prove themselves worthy. Women who enjoy feeling conquered. She's gentler with these playthings, but still works them within an inch of their lives.
But when she's not working up a sweat, she spends her time solitary. Her private life is almost on standby.
Since Nandi's death, she has no private life.
"There is no timeline." This truth, Silco owes her. Nandi too, in her way. "There doesn't have to be."
"No?"
"Everyone grieves differently."
"I skipped the grief and went straight to rage. Got too much of my old man in me." Her eyes go flat as obsidian. "That's all he was good for after our mother passed. Raging and drinking. We were left to fend for ourselves. Me and Nandi. My brothers. After the Warden took us into custody, we were all split up. But I was damned lucky to stay with Nan. She worked in the mines so we'd stay out of the system. She worked in the factories so we'd have a place to sleep. She worked at Janna's Temple so we'd have food. She always looked out for me. Made sure I wouldn't steal, or sell myself."
Silco nods solemnly. "She was a good girl."
"Best of the best." The hard edge of Sevika's stare softens. "I remember the first time she took me to Oldtown. We walked together down the Equinox Bazaar and stared at the apartments near the shops. This apartment. I felt like I was in an amusement park. I promised myself I'd be on their level someday. Now I know they had nothing. None of us did. We were all thieves of different kinds. But stealing from us was how Uppside got rich."
"They've made their wealth on our bones."
"The more I understood, the angrier it made me. I told myself if Piltover was gonna take from us, I had to get stronger. If life was one big grift, then I needed to get smarter at the game." She takes a hit; a hot plume of smoke unfurls from her mouth like dragonfire. "Fighting was the easy part. I was born fighting. So were the rest on my old man's clan. Brawling runs in our blood. So does rage. Maybe …too much." She shuts her eyes. "The Day of Ash just made it worse. I fought anyone who put their hands on me. I would've fought the entire world. When fighting wasn't enough, there was fucking. But I couldn't stand the regular kind with squares. It had to be on my dime. On my rules."
"You were out of control. You needed to regain it."
"Needed structure and drive. Needed a fucking purpose." She opens her eyes to study him through the haze of smoke. "Then I heard scuttlebutt you were alive. Didn't credit it at first. Thought you were in an unmarked grave. In the dirt, like Nandi. Then came more word confirming the first. Vander had fucked you up good. Your eye. Your… everything. Then he'd lied about it. For six years, he'd smile in my face, share whiskey and talk about the good old days. But for six years he never mentioned you were still kicking."
"He was deluded. There were no good old days."
A wan flicker of a smile. "I remember a handful."
"Oh?"
"Back when you were just Sil from the Lanes. You stayed in that crappy one-bedroom by the Pump Station. Seemed like every other week Enforcers would kick your door down and blacken your eye. Later you'd sit here fuming about the latest crackdown or failed labor policy. Nan would put an icepack on your bruises and fix you a meal. By dawn you'd go out in the dark to inventory the black-market haul with Vander. I'd tag along, and soak up all that crazy shit you'd both swap between poker games."
"I won yours and Nandi's bed with a lucky hand of cards."
"Straight royal flush," Sevika recalls, her voice warmed by nostalgia and husked by hash. It is kissing-kin to a different voice Silco likes on her. "Not that I got much chance to sleep in it. What with you and Nan going at each other hammer and tongs every damn night."
"Never stopped you from barging in right when the going got good."
"That was by accident."
"By accident every week?"
Sevika's hair falls into her face. She pushes a smile out through its heavy veil, the way Nandi used to. Except Sevika's expression holds no shyness. "You knew."
"Hard to miss. You didn't exactly pussyfoot." The barest ripples of memory express themselves on Silco's face. "We were different then. All of us."
Sevika takes a wavering breath. "We were different after Nan passed too. All of us busting out butts to survive. Felt like we were all going off to parts unknown. From death to rebirth. But I remember a few good days. You spent time with me after the funeral. You didn't have to. But you did anyway. It was like we were—not grieving. Growing strong. Like you weren't treating me as Nan's kid sister but an equal. A fighter for Zaun." A tiny twitch of a smile. "If I close my eyes, I can still see you at The Sprout, thumping the table and riling the miners up. Seize the factories. Don't beg for Topside's by-your-leave. Don't ask them to let you free. Take your freedom."
"Was I so strident?"
"Word I'd use is feisty. You trashed the Council. You trashed the Wardens. You trashed the Enforcers. Nobody was too high above us in your eyes. If Uppside was violent, we had to speak their language. And you weren't afraid to put your money where your mouth was." A rueful headshake. "I still remember the sit-in where you got your nose broken. You were such a damn twig. Looked like you ought to be scaring off crows in some Ionian wheat field. Then the Enforcer tried hauling you off the pulpit and you mule-kicked him square in the teeth."
Silco's grin is an incremental twitch of lips. "I'd be mincemeat if Vander hadn't interceded."
"Yeah. He whupped that Enforcer's ass good. I was supposed to play lookout. Except I was too busy cheering. So were the rest of the squad. The two of you always did what the rest of us were thinking. Better still. You made us all think we deserved more."
"Because we do."
Sevika takes a contemplative toke, a twisty ribbon pouring from her nostrils. "After you and Vander got carted off to jail, I remember everyone was looking to Vander. The Hound who'd mouthed off the Sheriff. I was looking too. But after we scattered to dodge the tear-gas, it was your words that stuck with me." Her stare holds a secretive irony. "I was only seventeen. But I think that was my first taste of religion."
"Zaun."
"Something worth fighting for. And someone who could take our rage and give us something back in return." She darts a look at Silco, whose face in set implacably smooth lines. Her jaw flexes. "Nan saw the angry sumpsnipe in you. She wanted to heal him. I saw someone else. Someone who was smart, and not afraid to go after what he wanted. Because he wanted what we all did."
"Is that why you let me fuck you after Nandi passed?"
"Let you?" She scoffs. "My mind was made up way before that. Like you said. I don't pussyfoot."
"I'm flattered."
"You should be. It was my personal bet that I'd screw that uppity Uppside accent inside out." A lascivious glint of pride. "I sure did. You had a real mouth on you. More ways than one."
"So did you."
"You brought out something in me that was competitive. Or just plain nasty. Whatever. It felt right." Her tone slows in remembrance. "Seems like we barely left the room that night. Neighbors banging on the walls. But we didn't let up. That was a good day. After the place went back from hot to cold, I made two cups of tea, because it seemed like the thing to do. It's what Nandi used to do. You asked me not to be Nandi. Kitchenwork isn't for you, love—and not because you can't make a decent brew on pain of death. I cracked up for the first time in weeks. Damn good day."
For a second Silco's good eye holds a flicker of humor. Then it fades. "That day is done."
"Doesn't mean it didn't happen."
"You didn't join the cause for good days."
She nods, the haze sharpening into hatred. "When I heard you were alive, I thought—finally. My sister wasn't defiled by dogs who'd never pay the price. She didn't die for nothing. We didn't fight just to lose it all. This time, we might actually get something back. Get even."
"She'd be proud of you."
"I've done shit I'm not proud of. No way Nandi would be." Her sigh is subdued. "Leastwise rolling in the dirt with you."
"Regrets?"
The sigh becomes a low-pitched laugh. "Dirt at least makes things grow. Regret's as useful as tits on a rifle."
"Loyalty is more useful than either."
"Wasn't exactly a choice, was it? I had to decide between loyalty to freedom, or loyalty to suffering. I chose freedom. Screw the rest." The joint is almost smoked down to the quick. The tip glows between Sevika's prosthetic hand as she takes a pull, singeing the copper plating. She either doesn't notice—or care. "You don't get a prize for surviving, right?"
"Surviving is the prize."
"What's that make the dead? Losers?"
Leaning against the counter, Silco works his spine in a measured roll of shoulders. Ordinarily, he has no tolerance for such talk. Neither he nor Sevika are dwellers-after-the-fact. They look ahead. But Bloody Sunday is different. The memory can't be squared in a box. It bleeds out everywhere.
Like Nandi at the Temple.
Silco's voice comes quiet as the hour. "Dead is dead. It holds no currency."
"Except for those who remember."
He nods, "We move forward—"
"—but never forget," Sevika finishes.
The words ebb into a funereal silence. Their eyes meet. Silco muses that in a different world, there would be no forward or backward. Only the miracle of the moment. But for such a thing, Nandi would need to be alive. For such a thing, sylphs would've come down from the smoggy sky and scooped Nandi's body out of harm's way. She was one of them in all but fact: their silent sister. Hidden somewhere beyond the unforgiving gloom of the Undercity, there might be an exotic sanctuary of dancing and riverbirds and hashish, laid out ready for Nandi.
Perhaps it's only the iron and concrete that kept the sylphs from getting in.
That—and nobody giving a fuck.
Nobody except those who dug out the corpses. Who picked themselves up and marched on.
Silco extends a hand for Sevika's disintegrating joint. She passes it over like a tribute: hot in the hand, and hard to hold without burning lips or fingers. He sucks a final burning lungful anyway, the aftertaste of Sevika's mouth on the paper.
On a rippling smoke-ring: "Take the day off tomorrow to pay your respects. Same as always."
"Appreciate it, sir."
"The funds will be in your account. Give three-fifths to Janna's Temple. Do as you please with the rest."
"Blood money for the living?"
"A sweetener for the dead." Silco grinds the dead joint out in the ashtray, a full stop signaled by a smooth turn of wrist. "It's nearly eleven. I'm due back at headquarters."
Resigned, Sevika purses her lips. "Back to Jinx."
"Hm."
"You ever think about…?"
He tilts his head.
Sevika's words come with a degree of caution; she is feeling him out. "Making this place a bolthole? Time-off from the clock."
"You mean Zaun—or Jinx?"
"What do you think?"
Silco's expression closes like a door. "There's no time-off from that."
"No, but…" Her sensuous lips pull inward. "Jinx's life can't always be yours. Janna's sake, she's going to grow up. You could use breaks. Especially now that you're in the public eye."
"This would be...what? A promotion? A proposal?"
She refuses to let him sucker her into defensiveness. "Consider it an upgrade."
"Like an arm?"
"Like an extra set of keys."
Silco's expression doesn't alter. But the unspoken offer hits a raw spot behind his ribs. Every iota of adult solitude that is so indescribable in its ordinariness. Everything he turns his back on, his thoughts consumed by the future and what must be done next, because to look back is to confront Nandi's brutal erasure, and Vander's betrayal, and the blackened debris of his own heart.
Lives unlived; stories stillborn.
Specters.
Sevika isn't a specter. She is flesh-and-blood. Yet despite their professional understanding, despite their personal chemistry, he cannot trust her completely. She is a local player, after all, with her own agenda. Her own needs too, and on any given day, those are at cross-purposes with his own as often as they intersect.
On Bloody Sunday, the tether of needs pulls too tight. He can't trust it not to become a stranglehold.
(You parting gift, eh, Vander?)
Silco's head shakes, a fractional shift from side to side.
Quietly, he says, "It's getting late."
Sevika's jaw hardens as if chewing words of her own. Swallowing, she says, "Give me five minutes."
Silco watches her pad barefoot to the bath. The space left behind is warmed from her body. The scent of sandalwood curls delicately through the fug of cooking and hash. For a moment there is a disorienting sense of slippage; want and need bleeding together. When Silco closes his eyes, he sees Nandi and a graveyard of grenade rubble. He sees the bloodied sprawl of corpses on the Bridge at the Day of Ash. He sees Vander looming through a red murk of riverwater. He sees Jinx, a smudged bullseye ringed in Enforcers' corpses.
In the bathroom, the shower starts. Sevika hums. Devil's got the Blues. Memory dispels into blackness.
Silco takes a steadying breath.
The temblor goes off with a pressurized thunder. No—not a temblor. An explosion. The detonation is powerful. Its latent force resonates citywide. At the lower-levels, it rocks the streets in an earthquake that nearly jellifies the streets. In the middle-zone, it judders the space like a giant box of cereal shaken up. At the top-level, the vibrations rattle the windows and unbalance Silco off his feet.
Instinctively, he catches himself against the door-frame. The subterranean roar recedes. In its place is the vertiginous ongoing silence punctuated by shouts in the streets and the thudding of Sevika's racing footsteps out the bathroom and the throb of his pulse in his eardrums.
He thinks: Jinx.
In the distance, the blackguards' distress signal goes off.
Code Blue.
The blast had spiraled out of Oshra Va' Zaun's tunnels.
Dust clouds plumed as if from the tip of a massive cigarette. A superheated confetti of debris sprayed outward in all directions. The blast rocked the city from tip to toes. Traffic at the Promenade screeched to a standstill. Shopkeepers at Entresol were riveted behind their storefronts. In the Black Lanes, the radiance cooked off the cobblestones like inside a Piltovan mansion with heated tiles. All of Zaun swayed against the fireball bursting from its filthy fundament.
Jinx's hideout.
On some levels, the explosion took its toll: cracked pavements, shattered glass, broken bones. On others, the consequences were barely felt: a hiccup in the city's rhythm. Altogether a hundred-and-sixty were injured across the breadth and height of Zaun. Six dead; a small number, though the ideal would be zero.
In the aftermath, the night sky hung purpled like bruises. The streets were deserted, blackguards patrolling every corner. Closed signs hung from shopfronts and traffic was temporarily suspended. Rumors were already being circulated of Firelight interference. All eyes were on the disruption; might as well make use of the attention.
The art of politics is timing. Slowing it, speeding it, seizing it.
In the suite, Silco's mind isn't on politics.
His mind isn't there at all. Just a black sucking hole. His steady footsteps make no sound across the threshold. Yet treading the carpet is like walking across an enormous wet sponge. The fabric runs red with blood. Five blackguards are propped dead in the dining room chairs. Each one has a bullethole in his skull. The shots are so neat they resemble thumb-daubs of paint in the center of each guard's forehead.
Their final thoughts are splattered across the walls behind them.
The sixth blackguard survived the attack. He stands rigidly in the corner. Half his face is smeared with dried blood. The other half is the stricken pallor of a man facing a firing squad.
At Silco's shoulder, Sevika says, "How'd this happen, soldier?"
The blackguard swallows. "Sir—ma'am—I wasn't expecting such a severe escalation."
"Expecting? You've seen the state of the city?"
He winces.
"How'd you lose your charge? Explain."
"My post is south-facing, ma'am. It overlooks the balcony and the pool. S-Sometimes I sneak to the parapet. I like to look at the water."
Sevika darts a cautious glance at Silco, then says, "You left your post to spy on Jinx in her swimsuit."
The guard's wince deepens.
"What happened next?"
"Jinx came for her swim. Like usual. Later, I was, um, smoking a cigarette when I heard a ruckus. She—she'd gone berserk. She broke out of the suite and started attacking the squad across the perimeter. I've never seen anything move that fast. One sec she was whipping a gun out, the next there was blood all over the place. I should've stayed. But it was like—like fucking trying to catch fire. Just pink blurs in her path. The shrapnel hit my shoulder, and I went down. It was all I could do to crawl somewhere and hide."
"You left your comrades to die."
"I'm sorry for doing it, ma'am. But—"
"You fucked up. Own it."
"Yes, ma'am." The blackguard steals a look at Silco and falters. "S-Sir."
Silco says nothing.
He stands in the center of the suite, eyeing it with an eerie flatness of expression. The place is empty. Silco already knew it was empty without the benefit of the emergency missive—or the blackguard's babble. He always knows when his child is near: a familiar rhythm of footsteps, a familiar set of lungs. Both are absent. For a whole hour, she's been absent, and during that hour she's swung Zaun into mayhem. Turned Silco's world into a crime-scene—and yet her absence is the real crime.
A crime he'd anticipated since his day began.
Or since Zaun's birth.
(You warned me, didn't you Jinx?)
His instincts have already accepted her absence as fact. Yet his body moves swiftly through the suite. She is nowhere in her room. Not at the balcony. Not in the pool. No trace anywhere—except his bedroom. On the nightstand, Jinx's drawings are messily piled. They vie for space with a hand-tooled leather holster encasing a pistol of identical design to Puff-Puff, but in jet black with red highlights.
Puff-Puff 2.0.
A parting gift.
Silco's fingertips trace the bright finish of the pistol's handle. It is well-crafted, like all of Jinx's gadgets. When it comes to close quarters, he usually prefers the simplicity of a blade. Guns have too many working parts. Too much risk of something jamming, or backfiring, or hitting the wrong target entirely. A knife is failsafe.
If Silco ever goes down fighting, a blade at hand is better than a misfired bullet.
Jinx has already dealt him the killing-blow.
On the table, coiled in lustrous blue, lays a sacrifice. At first Silco mistakes it for a silken rope, the same color as Jinx's hair. Then he understands it is hair. Knotted into a single glossy noose, and folded round and round the gun.
Jinx's braids.
He remembers reading The Princess and the Dragon to her last night. The passage with the princess lopping off her hair and uncaging herself from her tower. Remembers Jinx mumbling as a child how she'd never ever cut her own hair because it would be worse than nakedness. Like a part of her body was missing. Even after she'd begun bundling herself in dark shades of make-up, edgy modes of fashion, she'd kept those precious locks fairytale-long.
Now her hair is unmoored from her skull.
A mark of self-desecration.
Silco's fingertips trace the amputated braid. Of its own accord, his pinkie finger twines around the strands. They are soft as candyfloss. His nose practically peels away the layers of dust, candied cherry and gunpowder caught in them. All the base-notes of Jinx. Except wherever Jinx is, she isn't here. And wherever she's gone now, there can only be one destination.
"Fucking Janna."
A shadow falls across Silco. He is aware of Sevika in the doorway. Her voice drags like a rusted nail.
Silco says nothing. He can't focus anywhere but on the blueness of Jinx's braids, a farewell so profound and monstrous. His eyes fall on the drawings. They are the same ones he'd observed earlier in the morning. The girl at the bottom of the lake. The body in the black box. The wheelbarrow plunging into darkness.
Now he sees them for what they are. Disembodied screams for help.
A rill of sweat—sweat—breaks across Silco's body. His heart wallops on triple-time.
Sevika is speaking to him. His rational brain isn't fractured with panic. It understands her words—"Already dispatched blackguards in a citywide search"—"Keeping her disappearance on the down-low in interests of public tranquility"—"Called in reinforcements to cordon off the tunnels."
Beneath the words sits the message: She might be dead.
Dead.
A pinhole opens into Silco's numbness, calling him to look through. He stares back at it. Logic, a tiny shriveled thing, begs to be heard. He listens. On autopilot, his hand goes into his coat to withdraw his cigar case. The silver finish glints in a cold lamina. He snaps it open; the hidden compartment clicks into view.
The Hex-gem is gone.
Memory strobes:
"I was only testin' your lighter!"
"You damnwell were not."
The silver case passed from her hands to his. The haze of cigarette smoke a literal smokescreen. A sleight of hand; a theft in plain sight.
Something snaps inside Silco. It happens silently, as it has before in his past. An impossible splitting deep inside, a fork of redness splicing through the dark of his mind.
His hand curls around the pistol.
(So that's your game, Jinx?)
Silco swivels, no longer hiding it, that black burn of monstrosity in his bloodstream. Sevika takes one glimpse and sidesteps with efficiency.
In the parlor, the surviving blackguard barely manages a yelp before a bullet hole bites through his thigh—pow! Silco's aim is no longer 20/20. His vision always bleeds scarlet on the left side—literally. But old reflexes never fail, and his shots are clean as whistles if not as swift.
The blackguard falls like a toy.
Silco is on him in an eyeblink, knee against his ribcage. With his free hand, he digs two wedged fingers into the seeping hole, knuckle-deep into the obliging softness like the world's nastiest frigging. The blackguard howls. Silco gives no quarter.
His eyes are remorseless in their sockets. The bad one is a red bullseye. The blue one is crystalized into ice.
"You," he whispers, "are lying."
"S-Sir—"
"If Jinx went truly berserk, you'd be dead." His fingers sink deeper. "No matter how well you hid."
"P-P-Please—"
"What did she say? Where has she gone?"
"Please—please—"
"Shall I add another finger?"
The guard's flesh is the shade of a fish belly. "She—she said n-not to look for her."
"Look for her where?"
"She talked—about going deep."
"Deep?"
"Into the Fissures. Sir—she's probably d-d-dead—"
The pistol kicks as a second bullet embeds itself point-blank in the guard's skull. He twitches in death throes. No fluid pools around his splayed body. There is only a tiny dribble from the hole in his forehead.
The rounds Jinx outfitted into Silco's pistol are different from what she'd used on the other blackguards—blowing in spectacular splatters out the backs of their skulls. He spares a moment of ironic admiration. Such a clever girl. She'd built this gun with his tastes in mind. Streamline the accuracy; minimize the cleanup.
No fuss, no muss.
Rising, Silco wipes the sticky pinkness of blood off his fingers with a handkerchief. Then, with his thumb, he wads it into the guard's forehead, stanching the oozing hole. No reason to spoil his carpeting. Decocking the pistol, he sets it with care on the bureau. His expression in the mirror, unmoving and unmoved, is camouflage for the deep-buried instinct surfacing.
His skin burns all over; his mind is a pocket of ice.
(I won't lose my child again.)
He has been outmaneuvered. But he refuses to take a passive role in the game. He has to use what he knows. He and Jinx aren't that different. He is usually able to think like her. What would he do if he wanted to stage a disappearance—not as a farewell, but as cry from the stygian depths?
He has an inkling.
Crossing past his escritoire, a glint catches his eye. Vander's bone-handled knife. Silco reaches out. The silver finish remains untarnished; the weight feels true as ever. He spins it between his fingers and tucks it into his boot.
(Going to help me find our wayward girl, Vander?)
Of course not.
Silco will have to do this alone. Same way he's done everything else.
Sevika stands at a distance. When Silco meets her eyes, he sees the change in her face. He always recognizes when Sevika goes on-guard. Her jaw squares; her eyes go opaque. It's the same look she'd worn when escorting Finn on his last visit to Silco's office.
"Sir," she says. "I'd advise standing down."
"I'm going to find Jinx."
"The blackguards are combing the city for her."
"She's too clever for them."
"So this is—what? A tantrum?"
"A cry for help."
She scoffs. "She blew up her hideout to get your attention?"
"She's in trouble and needs me."
Silco goes to the door. Sevika shifts with him, shadowing him in a mirror-dance. It is a small movement. But Silco reads paragraphs in her body-language. Her stare persists but there is something at its corners now. Not predacious so much as territorial. He's not going to war on her turf. He is her turf—like Zaun.
Jinx's unpredictability blurs its demarcations. A black hole in motion.
"Sir," she says evenly. "Stand down."
"You think she's dead."
"She's been dead since Zaun was born."
No vitriol, but Silco's stare is a dark one. Sevika meets it steadily. A challenge.
"Jinx played her part in the war," she says. "She did what she was born to do. Blew up everything in sight. Zaun was freed in the bargain. But you can't wave a wand and put her right again. She wasn't made to be right. She was made for war."
"She's just a child."
Her fists clench. "That's exactly the problem. She acts like a child. She destroys like a fucking natural disaster. You worked it in your favor for Zaun. But you can't free Jinx from her demons. It's kinder to—"
"Cut her loose?"
A swallow. "It'd be easier. Less messy."
"Family comes with a measure of mess."
"Jinx ain't family."
"She's mine."
The menace in his voice is a massing undertow. Once it breaks loose, it will be black enough to swallow the city whole. Sevika knows this. She swallows again. Then the switch flips inside her. Her eyes glow hot as coals. The stubbornness of dragonfire forging into steel.
"Sell it walking, Silco," she says. "I'm not letting you leave headquarters."
"You're imprisoning me."
"I'm protecting you. Protecting Zaun."
"Sevika—"
"This is not negotiable. You walk out of here, you'll get killed by that beast you're hellbent on saving. You'll leave me vulnerable. Leave the whole city vulnerable. Right now, you're all that's keeping Zaun from swandiving back into Piltover's pocket. You must be shielded above everything else."
"Including my own choices?"
"Make a different choice."
Silco scrutinizes her for the smallest crack. There is none. She won't let him leave. The fact is as certain as the sun rising in the east—and as unfortunate, because if the sun fails to rise Silco will still find Jinx in the dark. It won't serve him to keep counterpunching; it's better to change the game.
The feral coldness fades from his eyes. His scarred features hold a mordantly human mockery.
"You've never forgiven me," he says, "have you?"
"Forgiven you?"
"For choosing her. A child who reminded you of all the things you'd rather forget. A leader you admired but couldn't be loyal to. A family you helped me destroy, against your better nature, because it's what our cause demanded. A mind at its own mercy, because I refused to be merciful and put her out of her misery. All that, on its own, you'd have forgiven. You'd even have forgiven her for taking your arm. If not for—"
She glowers. "Don't."
"Own it, Sevika. You couldn't take it out on me. She was easier." He tilts his head. "I don't blame you. But it's time to lay the blame where it belongs."
"On you?"
"You can't pretend I didn't set the madness into motion. Despite knowing Jinx was a risky investment."
"You never saw her as an investment." Sevika's voice vibrates with undisguised fury. They are in dark territory now; old resentments bubbling up. "You used her as a replacement."
"For?"
She flinches, but holds steady.
"Say it, Sevika," Silco whispers.
She refuses.
Silco holds his hands out as if presenting her with a tiny carcass.
"She'll always be a burden," he says, "because she'll never be the child Nandi would have given me."
Sevika's mouth spasms; shock, chagrin. The words have hit their mark.
On Bloody Sunday, the wound sits in plain sight.
A capsule drops from Silco's sleeve, rolling toward Sevika. Smoke pours out, diffusing through the air. Sevika's face contorts. Then there is nothing but hoarse gasps as she struggles against the effects of the knockout-gas. She lurches toward him—and stumbles to her knees. The sharpness of her eyes is subsumed by fog.
Silco has already slipped on the gas-mask from the bureau.
"What—" Sevika slurs. "What are—you doing?"
"Protecting Zaun. What else?"
"Sil—"
"At ease, love. You've had a long day."
He leaves her sprawled the way he had in her bed: on her back, breathing softly. Two fingertips at her throat show a regular pulse. She'll be awake in an hour—and on the war-path. He'll not elude her a second time.
Best get moving.
In his closet, the trunk is where he'd left it, traced in a thin coat of dust. He's not gazed upon it in years. Yet it holds his old life. The chapter after Vander's betrayal, before he'd met Jinx. He pops it open; the insides still smell of old blood despite repeated washings. He retrieves the simple garments inside: an asymmetrical workman's suit, well-worn and much-patched. A pair of rawhide boots. A threadbare overcoat.
Clothing best suited for navigating Zaun's jagged bowls. The suits hanging neatly in his closet are wrong for the terrain—too starched, too stuffy.
(I've lost touch.)
(With Zaun. And you, Jinx.)
Tonight is ample proof.
Jinx's disappearance caught him off-guard, but he hadn't truly understood the extent of his disconnect until the moment she'd blown her hideout to smithereens. Hadn't understood the depth of Jinx's anguish, or his own monumental deafness and blindness.
Now the city's center of gravity has shifted. His world has gone dark.
But even in the dark, he knows his way around.
(I won't lose my child again.)
Once, on Bloody Sunday, was enough for a lifetime.
We end on a cliffhanger again :')
Next installment is all about Silco and Jinx: the good, the bad, the despicably ugly. Prepare yourselves for Act III to end with a boom.
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