Even this late into the evening, the merchants of Ivy Street kept their shops and stands open and bright. Just because the sun had set did not mean the day’s business was at end. The entire street was covered by an arched roof spanning from the buildings on either side, keeping the constant rain at bey and turning the street into a long, winding tunnel. The dust that swam around scarfed faces was illuminated by the sterile glow of neon lights hanging from the ceiling above. People meandered between the loud, brightly advertised shops, only occasionally stopping to peak at the wares that the downtrodden entrepreneurs who sat in the middle of the street peddled. The street was cold, as it wasn’t sealed off from the outside on either end, and mud and trash splashed across the feet of anyone who ventured through.
Ivy Street. Therazine had spent a few years here after the orphanage, eking out a meager existence stealing from the shoppers and rummaging through trash bins. She didn’t dare steal from the shop owners. The proprietors of Ivy Street were not known for tolerating thievery. She recalled one of her childhood friends—a tall boy named Cris who had also been kicked out of the orphanage—going missing shortly after swiping an apple from Kurto’s Produce Emporium. A week later she found him in one of the dumpsters in the back alleys, his throat slit and his bones removed and sold to pharmacists.
Now that she thought about it, returning to the din and bustle of Ivy Street, there weren’t many kids she knew that had lived more than a year outside of the orphanage. They’d all been kidnapped by bandits, or taken in by the constabulary, or murdered for the glit in their pockets. One or two had been devoured by gutter polyps while they plumbed the sewers for food. She had been lucky. Lucky that she was born with the cunning and vigilance to keep her alive on the streets, and lucky that the Society had found her.
Therazine looked at the faces around her. Disheveled, busy, hungry faces. Old, young, and indiscernible. Any of these could be her from a few decades ago. Any of them could just as easily be a Bloodletter.
Vexxer pushed through the crowd and returned to her. He had a kebab in each hand. One was missing three pieces, and he handed the other to her. She took it, smelled it. Hot food.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Man says it’s beef.”
She licked the kebab. It was most certainly not beef. She bit into it anyway.
“So Maddy’s on Ivy Street?” she asked Vexxer through a mouthful. “Not very inconspicuous.”
“She’s selling legally now,” Vexxer said. “It’s been ten years. Things change.”
“Legally?”
“For the most part.”
“And you say she’s not selling to the Society anymore?”
Vexxer shook his head as they continued walking through the market. “No. Cut off her contract a long time ago. Was a big thing, too. Very dramatic.”
“I’d imagine. Maddy was the best gunsmith in West Celedin.”
“The Society wasn’t happy. Hell, I wasn’t happy. She made my Darnull. That thing’s one of a kind now.”
A man beside Therazine coughed. She stepped aside to avoid him and anything he might be carrying, then she looked up. An almost opaque brown cloud hung at the ceiling of Ivy Street, a conglomeration of all the fumes and chemicals and noxious particles that were generated within this confined, crammed space. It was seemingly eternal, having been hanging there since she was a child. Stagnant, persistant. The Ivy Street Ghost, was what they called it. She remembered her fellow children climbing the sides of the buildings on a dare to try and touch it, but it was too high up. They never reached it, which Therazine was thankful for. The Ghost was said to be deadly. All of the top floor rooms on Ivy Street were vacant, their windows boarded up where the Ghost tried to seep in. As far as she knew, there wasn’t a single inhabited top-story room in the entire market.
“She made my rifle,” Therazine said.
Vexxer nodded. “You also shot her with that rifle, if I recall.”
“She deserved that.”
“Didn’t say she didn’t. Just that… she may remember that incident, and you should probably heed that.”
Therazine finished her mystery kebab and tossed the skewer to the mud at her feet. To her right, a merchant shouted loudly about fish, and she wondered what sort of meat his product actually was.
“Up here,” Vexxer said, pointing with his skewer to a door along the eastern side of the street. This shop was not nearly as flamboyant and bright as the others that surrounded it, and there was no constant stream of customers through its door. A simple, stenciled sign hung above the door that read, “Madeline Rhines’ House of Clocks.”
“Clocks?” Therazine said.
“Can’t sell guns legally,” Vexxer said.
Therazine read the sign again. Maddy was a maker of firearms, a dealer in death. Her craftsmanship was legendary among those who lived in Celedin’s underworld. If you needed to do some killing, you went to Madeline Rhines for the tools to do the job. It was a pistol of hers that ended the life of the poacher Niles Gon Rakter. It was a bullet from one of her rifles tore that through the skull of Magistrate Minius Deruk on his inauguration day, terminating his short political career and earning Therazine quite a paycheck. The idea of her constructing timepieces was ludicrous. Mere legality would not hold back an artist such as Maddy Rhines from performing her craft.
But the more Therazine thought about it, the more a certain notion began to creep into her mind. The Bloodletters wouldn’t let her make guns. Not anymore. Not if she wasn’t making weapons for them.
Therazine walked up the three crumbling steps to the door, Vexxer following her. A sign reading “OPEN” hung from a nail. There was a greasy window to the left of the door, made up of dozens of panes and so fogged with oil that only the gleam of a lamp inside could pass through the glass. She lifted her hand to push open the door, but Vexxer stopped her. Therazine turned to him. He hadn’t grabbed her hand, nothing so straightforward and intimate as that. He simply held his own up and blocked hers.
“She is not going to be happy to see you,” Vexxer said.
Therazine frowned. She didn’t need reminding of that. Stepping by him, she pushed open the door, and a small bell rang.
The interior of the shop was tiny. It was inadequately lit, the only illumination coming from a kerosene lamp that sat on a broad wooden desk near the window. Hundreds of clocks covered the shelves in the small space, and Therazine realized she had walked in expecting to hear innumerable devices ticking away. There wasn’t a sound coming from the clocks. She stepped closer to the nearest shelf, making sure that these strange machines that surrounded her were indeed clocks and not something else. They were, undoubtably, upon close inspection. They had faces, and hands that ran in circles over numbers. The clocks looked sturdy; rugged and clearly well-designed. But not a single one of them looked good. No, the author of these devices clearly had no taste for the aesthetic. Their creative genius was all about functionality, performance. Efficiency.
Vexxer stepped in after her and closed the door behind him. He looked around the room, his eyes wide and filled with awe, his lower lip moving slowly as if half-trying to make words. That look made Therazine smile. She remembered that look on his face all the time back when he’d first immigrated to Celedin from his homeworld. Javadoa was a harsh land of tribal societies, and devoid of even the simplest technologies. Therazine imagined that no matter how long he lived on this world, Vexxer Roz would always be at a loss for words when surrounded by machines.
The door at the end of the room opened with a creek, and a woman stepped out. She was clad in black overalls and a black cropped jacket covered in pockets. Her skin was almost as dark as the clothes she wore. Her thick-knuckled hands were up by her shaved head, slipping a leather eyepatch over her left eye.
The woman froze completely upon seeing the two people in her shop.
Therazine held her breath. She’d never been able to predict Madeline Rhines’ behavior. She was just as likely to greet them with a disinterested wave of hand as pull a gun on them. Therazine realized at the last available second that it was going to be the latter.
Maddy Rhines reached into her jacket and pulled a pistol from a shoulder holster. In the same instant, Vexxer shouted “no” and Therazine grabbed the nearest, biggest clock and pulled it in front of her. Maddy fired, blasting the face out of the clock and filling the small room with the ring of gunfire. The clock wasn’t thick enough to stop the bullet, but its robust design through the bullet off course and prevented it from burying itself in Therazine’s chest.
Therazine felt her heart slow, felt her blood cool. Her vision narrowed and her ears began to hum slightly. Time seemed to slow around her as her senses picked up every tiny stimulus around her. The busted clock in her hands was heavy, sharply angled, cool to the touch, vibrating slightly from the bullet that ruined it. The air around her tingled with the reverberations of the gunshot. The light from the kerosene lamp played shadows across the walls: slow-moving shadows that betrayed the exact distance, shape, and dimensions of everything in the room.
The was a feeling that she was immensely familiar with, but that she hadn’t felt in years. It was a kind of anti-adrenaline, a force that allowed her to slow down and assess a situation tactically and intelligently. It was a talent that had been invaluable to her as an assassin, and she’d learned to induce it whenever she needed it. Vexxer called it the Calm. It was as apt a name as any.
This feeling had not overcome her at her home when she’d killed the MonDozers. There was no calmness then.
But right now the Calm was strong and real. She heard the chamber on Maddy’s revolver turn. She saw the smoking barrel move a few degrees downward to account for the recoil from the first shot. She heard the hammer draw back to fire again.
Therazine hurled the broken clock forward, not hitting Maddy but causing her to lock up in defense for an instant. Therazine used that moment of hesitation to rush forward and grab the hot barrel of Maddy’s gun. The revolver went off again, this time into the ceiling as Therazine pushed the gun up. Maddy struck at her, but Therazine grabbed her by the wrist and twisted her arm back. She threw a knee into Maddy’s stomach and brought the two of them to the ground. In the blink of an eye, Therazine had pulled the gun from Maddy’s hand and was sitting on top of her, aiming it into Maddy’s face.
Maddy bared her teeth, narrowed her single eye, and moved like she was going to roll Therazine off of her. Therazine pulled the hammer back on the revolver. It was a pointless maneuver, as it was a double-action weapon. Both women knew that manually pulling the hammer back did nothing more than make an ominous click, but Therazine hoped that the sound would be enough to force Maddy into inaction. “Do you want me to shoot out the other one?” Therazine said.
“Get off me, you bitch,” Maddy said through clenched teeth.
“Do I have your assurance that you won’t try to shoot me if I do?”
“No.”
Therazine frowned, and then looked up at Vexxer. He hadn’t moved since Maddy had pulled her gun. He looked remarkably calm, in fact. This didn’t surprise Therazine. Vexxer never acted out of turn. If he believed Thera could handle a situation, he waited for her to do it. Maddy was no fighter; it was obvious to both of them that Thera was never in any danger.
Therazine tossed Maddy’s gun to Vexxer and then stood up. She reached a hand down to help Maddy up, but she only looked at her crossly. Maddy stood up. She looked at Vexxer, and then back at Therazine. If she had more guns hidden around the shop, she wasn’t going for them.
“What do you want from me?” Maddy said. Her voice was rough, quiet. Like she didn’t use it very often.
“Hello, Ms. Rhines,” Vexxer said from across the room. He waved to her with the hand that wasn’t holding her gun.
“Aren’t you surprised to see me?” Therazine said.
Maddy said nothing.
Therazine shrugged. “Maybe curious where I’ve been for the last ten years?”
“No,” Maddy said. “What do you want?”
Therazine sighed. “I see you haven’t changed. Fine, we’ll talk your way. Do you still make weapons, Maddy?”
Maddy laughed, or seemed to laugh. Therazine never could tell. She made a sort of exasperated grunt through her thinly opened mouth. Maddy looked again at Vexxer, and then back to Therazine, that faint almost-smile on her lips.
“Are you serious?” she said. “You want me to sell you a gun? You?”
“I had a hope, yes.”
“After you everything you did to me… you come crawling out of the Aether and ask for my help?”
Therazine looked away. The silence built between them, saying quiet words into Therazine’s mind without any need for actual sound. The silence spoke volumes. It always did whenever anyone tried to talk to Maddy Rhines.
“I’m… desperate,” Therazine said. “And I’m hoping you can look past whatever differences we have and try to see this as a professional arrangement—”
“Professional?” This time Maddy did laugh, a guttural, grating sound that was devoid of joy. “As if you’ve ever carried yourself with any semblance of professionalism. As if any of you ever have. I’ve never been so condescended to in my life.”
“Ms. Rhines,” Vexxer said, taking a few steps forward. “Thera’s not with the Society anymore. She’s coming her entirely of her—”
“Who the fuck are you?” Maddy screeched. She stormed over to Vexxer, stopping him in his tracks and staring straight up into his bearded, wide-eyed face. Maddy strode like an enraged beast, headless of the fact that its claws had been removed and the animal that it charged was twice its weight. “You have no privilege, no right to take what is mine, let alone speak to me!”
Therazine’s heart raced. Vexxer’s bronze skin had gone white as a sheet, his eyes as big as dinner plates. She knew Vexxer could easily handle Maddy if it came down to it, but what surprised her was the Vexxer had interjected at all. During all their years together, he always let her do the talking. Even when negotiations were going south rapidly, he always held his tongue, having faith in her to do mold the confrontation to their benefit. For the first time Therazine saw that Vexxer was not the same man he was ten years ago. He was more independent now. Had to rely on himself more. It dawned on her that there was probably much that had changed within him over the years.
Maddy tried to retrieve her gun, but Vexxer—even in his shocked, dazed state—reacted with the speed of a warrior and kept it from her. His training and instincts outmatched whatever momentary surprise Maddy had over him.
“Maddy,” Therazine said, calmly. “I’m here on my own business. Very important, very personal business, unassociated with the Bloodletters.”
Maddy turned slowly. “Do you think that means anything to me? I don’t care if you aren’t with them. You’re worse than them. I wouldn’t help you if my life was on the line.”
“I know you,” Therazine said. “Even if you don’t believe me, I know you, Maddy Rhines. And I have a job that I think you would be very interested in seeing completed.”
“A job?” Maddy said. Her tone was distressed, exhausted. “Who could you possibly be hired to murder that I would give a shit about?”
Therazine looked around at the walls of clocks. Many of them had collected a considerable amount of dust on their sharp edges and flat tops. The shelves themselves were covered in a thin carpet of grey. She saw that the desk by the front wall was aslant, pushed away from the window some time ago and never corrected. She imagined that the keys on the register had not been pressed in a long time.
“I know why you sell clocks now. You used to sell guns to the Bloodletters because no one else could buy them. Not because you fancied us, not because liked our glit. You—and your father—couldn’t sell to anyone else. The Commonwealth’s laws wouldn’t let you. We may have our differences, Maddy, but I remember when we used to be almost friends. Your father was…” Therazine paused, knowing how careful she must be about saying this next part. “He tried selling elsewhere. Tried expanding beyond the protection that being exclusive to the Society offered. It was the Commonwealth that—”
“I know how my father died, damn you.” Maddy said. “It’s not exactly a secret that I hate the government. So what? You have a contract on a magistrate? A governor or something? It changes nothing. They’re just men. Cogs in a larger machine that can’t be undone. Get out of here, Husk, and don’t bore me with your petty life of murder.”
A bolt of anger drove itself into Therazine’s brain as she heard Maddy say the name “Husk.” Therazine had never been popular in the Bloodletters Society, even when she was Archblade. Those who did not support her had taken to calling her Husk behind her back. It was a quick and easy way for them to say what they thought of her: that she was the fatherless daughter of a whore with no family, no attachments, and possessed of an unbridled, cold, methodical way of dealing with every situation. In essence they were saying that she had no humanity, no emotions, no soul. She was merely a shell of a person, a Husk.
It angered Therazine, even hurt her slightly, but she was calm. She was rational. She addressed Maddy in a soft voice.
“I don’t have a contract on a magistrate. This isn’t some… political feud. What I do will not be forgotten during the next election cycle.”
Maddy charged Therazine now, stopping right in front of her and glaring at her with one animalistic eye. “I told you I don’t care about your jobs, or your Society, or you. Now leave, Husk, unless you tell me you plan on assassinating the entire fucking Commonwealth.”
Therazine looked into Maddy’s eye and saw nothing but rage. She understood that fury, she realized. Now more than ever, untold leagues away from her broken, impoverished family. She glanced over at Vexxer and saw him biting his lower lip beneath his beard. He was nervous, anxious, and curious.
“Maddy,” Therazine said. “Hear me out.”
