There was something profoundly old-world about Grantval. I mean, all of Bluerose resembled a distorted, mirrored, lesbian version of Victorian England on some level, but at least with New Alderburg or Amrinval I could sort of draw parallels between them and my old home in Chicago; I could pretend for a second that I was still speaking English and that I was just in one of the older districts there. Or, hell, even the newer districts the few times I had voyaged into the spires at the heart of Amrinval. Couldn’t do that in Grantval.
Maybe if I’d ever been to Jerusalem or Rome—not that my family was very religious, especially after what happened to Abby—I would have had a point of reference. Those were the only cities that I could think of that were as densely religious as Grantval was. Apparently, a couple of hundred years ago, Grantval had been home to Miranda God-Vessel, the founder of Bluerose’s main religion, Vesselism, and the city had never fully recovered from that. Every block you’d come across a cluster of pilgrims in plain white dresses, every corner had a shrine where Miranda had eaten lunch once or something to that effect. And, of course, out on the horizon, there was the sight of the Viridian Sepulcher, Vesselism’s holiest structure, huge and looming and obvious.
“Blessings? Coin to feed a poor woman’s stomach for blessings? But a dinar will grant you Miranda’s grace for your generosity.”
I looked up from my cup of tea. The person asking was in her fifties, maybe sixties, rail-thin and bony. She wore a set of tattered clothes and carried, in her hand, a tin cup full of water. Holy water, one assumes. I smirked, slipping a hand in my pocket and pulling out a silver dinar.
“Take the generosity, hold the blessings. I’m not a Vesselist.”
The old woman made a faintly disgusted expression. “Thank you, miss, thank you very much.”
I was sitting out front of one of the few spots in Grantval that I actually remembered from my previous trip, a small cafe near the edge where downtown met the outskirts. It also had the benefit of being far away from any shrines, churches, or other spots of overt religion. I’d been there for well over an hour, slowly sipping away at my tea and nibbling on little pastries, waiting for time to pass. I’d essentially been set loose upon arrival that morning.
The train had pulled into Grantval station at right about nine o’clock, forcing me to undergo the rapid blur of activity that was disembarking while not entirely awake yet. As if that didn’t damage the mood enough already, once Laura and I and everyone else were on the platform, we were met by a swarm of SWAT cops.
I mean, not literal SWAT cops, that sort of thing wouldn’t be invented for another eighty years or so if Selene took the same path as Earth did, but as soon as I looked at them I made the immediate connection. They weren’t the typical city guards that I’d had repeated run-ins with in New Alderburg, their uniforms were much heavier and I’d never seen typical officers of the law armed with rifles and shotguns. The uniforms were too fancy for the army, and they were missing the all-important helmet.
Regardless, they were armed, they were officers of the law, and there were so many of them. At the head of the pack was a woman who went by “Sir Bernadine,” whose uniform was even fancier than those of her troops, and who immediately set to talking strategy with Lady Halflance. It was delegated to her lieutenant to tell the rest of us where we were going to stay and how we were supposed to prepare. Apparently, we had a bunkroom at the local police station with our names on it.
For obvious reasons, I wasn’t going to spend any longer in a police station than was necessary to not have to lug around a bunch of luggage all day. Just because it was the best option for the moment didn’t mean that I wasn’t going to protest. Which left me to wander Grantval until I found a place to sit down and put my legs up.
As the hours continued to pass, and I just about ran out of reasons to stay at that cafe, something changed in the energy of the city. It was the sort of thing that’s almost impossible to describe, because there was no one thing that gave off the feeling that the world had suddenly become more hostile, but a million little things. The people in the street passing me by grew ever more hurried, the beggars and pilgrims grew fewer and further between. Where once a furtive, whispered conversation might have been a rare occurrence worthy of attention, all of a sudden there were five of them happening just within line of sight.
I bought one final pastry from the cafe before, to the serving-woman’s great relief, getting up to go somewhere else. Where else? Somewhere. Maybe I would find a bar or a smoke shop or something and find out if my regeneration did well against poisons. Or more likely I would find somewhere more beautiful to sit down, a garden or a park or something. Maybe I would give in and buy a souvenir just to show that I’d been to Grantval, as stupid as that seemed given the reason for my stay.
I didn’t get to any of those places, because my entire train of thought was completely interrupted by the sight of a newspaper stand. Selene still lived in the age of the newspaper, with urbanism having taken over well enough to establish the need for daily news and radio or “E-rays” or its equivalents still being an experimental technology. Newspaper stands could be found on pretty much every street corner in any city you could name, so much so that they basically faded into the background.
What drew my attention was, at first, just a slight discrepancy out of the corner of my eye, something I didn’t become consciously aware of until it had already caused me to stop, turn away from the street, and look at the stand. There were two different headlines. Every newspaper on Selene had one headline per day, or if there was a second edition that had a separate headline it would be displayed separately. But on that stand, on that day, there were two.
Half the newspapers had, as their headline, LADY DELIBERATION ARCTRACER DEAD OF UNKNOWN CAUSES AT AGE 75; a fairly common headline, one or two rungs of the ladder above gossip. The other half, presumably those printed later in the day, had a very different headline, one that forced me to snap up a copy and start reading just to make sure that I understood properly.
CASSANDRAN FORCES ENGAGE FANGGARD FORTRESS IN SURPRISE ATTACK: IS THIS WAR? 5:44 AM, Hexaday the 32nd of Falling Snow, 2786. A night watchwoman was the first to spot the approaching ships at approximately 2 AM this morning. The entirety of the fortress and the neighboring town, also named Fanggard, was immediately awoken by a piercing alarm and sent into a rush of activity. So great was the range of the Cassandran artillery that the first shell came crashing down some twenty minutes later, though that first strike went wide and damaged nothing but an empty hillside. By 3 AM, the battle had begun in earnest, and the flashing lights of Blueroser return fire could be seen all across the fortress’s battlements. As the two fleets take up siege positions, it remains an open question for how long any sort of travel into or out of the area will remain possible; as such, the civilian population is…
“Oi! This isn’t a lending library, miss!”
I had been so caught up in reading, so horrified by the implications of the printed letters before me, that I had failed to notice the tiny, adorable twelve-year-old operating the newspaper stand, her blonde hair tied up in a bun. She was dressed almost like Anna, in the same prim black dress, just smaller.
“Oh, I’m sorry. How much is it?”
“An eighter,” she said. “Hand it over or I scream.”
I produced the coin in question, flicked it over to her, and continued reading. The rest of the article was basically an elaboration on the opening, describing the opening salvoes of the battle in greater detail before delving into the wider geopolitical context. Suddenly, the changing mood of Grantval as a city had made perfect sense. A Cassandran attack against Bluerose meant that a Third Secession War was almost certainly imminent, and as the news spread it couldn’t help but bring the vibes down. I mean, it had me frightened enough for the future that I started actively using the word “vibes” in my inner monologue. There was, however, one part near the very end of the article that gave me yet further pause.
As of yet, it is unclear the degree to which our government was aware of the impending nature of the attack, and similarly, how prepared they are for the conflict that is certain to ensue. Some here in Grantval believe that the increased presence of heavily armed police in the city over the last few days are signs that Parliament was aware of something. Others, including MP Lady Julia Earnprice, have lambasted the government for insufficient distribution of intelligence sources.
That was the phrase used: “an increased presence of heavily armed police.” Obviously that was referring to the force gathering in preparation for the raid on the salt mine and Tersine’s lair within, the same proto-SWAT people I’d seen on the train platform. Except this was supposed to be a secret operation. The entire plan, the entire reason we’d even allowed Halflance to take the lead on all of this, had been that this was supposed to be a secret. Tersine wasn’t supposed to know. But apparently, in preparing for this secret operation, Halflance and the rest of the fucking cops had been acting so obviously that even the newspapers were aware of it!
That properly pissed me off. All that I’d done, all the compromising of my own beliefs, all the time I’d spent tolerating the presence of officers who would rather beat me into the dirt than know my name, and it had come to nothing! Goddamnit, at least the Blackbird knew how to keep a secret.
I crumpled up the newspaper and tossed it away. What was I even supposed to do next? Go back to the station and complain? Find Laura and fuck her until I stopped giving a shit about any of this? None of those seemed like good options, and it wasn’t like I had any good options anyway. So I took my “never stop moving forward” motto to the literal extreme, and just started running. I picked a direction, one that would take me towards the edge of the city without sending me directly into Tersine’s salt mine, and just ran.
A side effect of my immortality and other regenerative abilities is that I don’t get tired, at least not very quickly. That hadn’t always been the case; when I’d first arrived on Selene, I was just about as fit as my physics-grad-student lifestyle would have suggested. But any amount of training—and I’d had plenty, courtesy of Rook—built up many times faster than it would for a normal human. Within a few months, I was easily fast and tough enough to be running marathons. I wasn’t going to push myself that hard just because I was annoyed, but I didn’t need to push myself particularly hard to go faster than just about anybody I’d met. As I raced down street after street, I got more than my fair share of looks and sudden shouts of alarm from the people I dashed past. More than once I only avoided running into someone by the skin of my teeth.
And thankfully, the run worked as intended. My rapidly hammering heartbeat quickly drowned out all the anger and fear, the challenge of taking down Tersine replaced with the challenge of navigating Grantval’s winding streets. Any abstract thoughts were jostled entirely out of my brain by the steady thumping of my shoes against the cobblestones, and memories of prior failures by the sweat on my skin and the pumping bellows of my lungs.
But where that long, exhausting run quickly drove out any sort of abstract thinking, it made me more attuned with my surroundings than I had been in a very, very long time. I had to be; if I zoned out much at all, I was moving fast enough that inevitably I’d run into something. It was for that reason, that shifting of my mind from abstract to concrete, that I first noticed what sounded like someone running with me.
I skidded to a stop. That didn’t make any sense; it was weird enough to have one person sprinting madly through Grantval’s busy streets, but two? As I spun around, I couldn’t see anybody, or hear the vague and distant shuffle of fast-moving feet that had drawn my attention in the first place. I assumed that it was some other noise, a bird scratching on a window pane, or my own footsteps echoing oddly. Except that, when I resumed, it wasn’t even a full minute before I heard the sound again. Once was an odd sound. Twice? Twice was a pattern.
The most obvious possibility, the one my mind immediately jumped to, was that someone was following me. Someone really fast, apparently, given that they could keep up with me for as long as I’d been going. But that was far from impossible, especially when Tersine was involved. She, after all, had her wolves, creations of the same process that she had used to create me, and therefore gifted with a similar array of capabilities. If it was that obvious that the authorities were making a move in Grantval, how possible was it that Tersine already knew about it and had her people following me?
I didn’t want to jump to assumptions. Jumping to assumptions had gotten me in trouble before, even to the point of getting people killed. The one advantage I had was that, if it really was one of the wolves chasing me, it would be easy to tell it apart from your average woman in the street, what with the long lupine ears, hunched posture, patchy fur and visible fangs and claws. The fact that my visual sweep of the street didn’t reveal anything like that suggested I was going to have to get more clever with it.
So I turned around and started running again. This time, my attention was split, half looking forward to make sure I didn’t stumble over anything and half focused firmly behind me. It wasn’t long at all before I started to hear that sound again, that strange rattling, tapping, shuffling that didn’t quite sound like footsteps, but which I couldn’t imagine being anything else. I kept moving, even with the itch of paranoia in the back of my head, even making a couple of sharp turns in quick succession to make sure that it was consistent.
Then I finally found the perfect opportunity, in the form of a construction site. I remembered back to Urcos, the time I’d been forced to fight an out of control chargerthing, a species of giant bird. As its name suggested, the bird was fast. But I was both fast and light, which meant that for as good as I was on a straightaway, I was even better on the corners. The heavy wood beams of the construction site leaned out into the sidewalk, not enough to be an obstruction but just enough to give me something to work with. So as I approached, I measured the angles, half consciously and half on instinct; then, at the right moment, I jumped.
I twisted in the air, bringing up my legs in front of me so that when I hit the nearest beam, it was foot-first and ready to spring back. There’s no real science to figuring out the correct way to redirect your momentum like that without falling over, but I did it, turning and twisting in the air to face right back at my pursuer. She must have been already going for a hiding spot, maybe able to guess what I was doing. But nonetheless as I turned I saw a dark blur vanish behind the corner of a nearby building.
Then I stumbled, nearly falling flat onto my face. That cost me a crucial fraction of a second while I caught myself, but as soon as that fraction of a second was over, I broke out once more into a run. I couldn’t imagine what the other women on that street were thinking as they saw all of this, but I didn’t particularly care: I was going to find out who was following me. It was only a short distance to the alleyway I’d seen the dark blur vanish behind, so I could hear rapid movement coming from within it as I approached, something scrabbling on hard brick and stone.
But when I turned the corner, there was nothing there. Briefly, I panicked. Had she climbed the wall somehow? I looked up, scanning the edges of the neighboring roofs, and saw nothing. Of course I saw nothing; the alleyway was too wide and the walls too tall for even one of the wolves to make the climb in that little time. Obviously the stalker had run the length of the alley and turned the corner to the next street.
But by the time I made it across the alley and onto the next sidewalk over, my neck on a swivel, it was already too late. Whatever or whoever it was that I’d seen, they had already vanished into the crowd. I gave the area a thorough search, even asked around if anybody had seen someone suspicious, but I got nowhere. There was absolutely no way that there hadn’t been someone following me, that much was certain, but I had no idea who or why.
One thing was clear: I had to go back to Lady Halflance and the other planners. Between this and the newspaper openly speculating about what we were doing, it was obvious that the stealth quotient of this whole mission was infinitely below par. We needed to fix this, change up the plan, and we needed to do it right away or there was zero chance that Tersine wouldn’t have some kind of counter for us.
Despite all of the running, I was still hardly more than lightly winded, so I made quick time jogging back to the police precinct. Once I was there, it was like pulling teeth to get anyone to tell me where Lady Halflance even was; in the end, I had to pull rank, make some threats, and heavily emphasize my role as one of the few people in the building who had ever dealt with the threat at hand before anybody told me where Lady Halflance had set herself up. I raced in that direction, to a barracks room that had been partially sectioned off and had some office supplies moved into it, and shoved through.
To my shock, Lady Halflance wasn’t at work. She hardly even seemed to notice that I was there. Instead, she was slumped forward over her desk, barely able to hold herself up as she stared at the tiny portrait held in her hands.
“Lady Halflance?”
She looked up at me. Her eyes were red and watery. “What?"