The Fennick Eastern Sidings lay at the bottom of the spoil-heaps, where the slag rail came down off its trestle and met the river.
At night, in the old days, it had been the busiest place in the east of the city.
Lucan remembered it vaguely from his childhood: the clang and roar of the shunting engines, the hiss of steam, the shouting of the loaders, and the long black barges lying low in the water along the wharf, waiting to be filled.
His father had worked here.
He had worked here for nine years, in a little brick office beside the weighbridge, writing down the tonnage of every wagon that came down off the rail.
Observed the night loading.
Now the sidings were dark.
Lady Fennick’s lawyers had shut down everything Varga had touched.
The engines stood cold on their rails.
The cranes stood still against the glowing smog like the skeletons of enormous birds.
The wharf was empty.
The only sounds were the slow lap of the black water against the pilings and, somewhere very far away, a dog barking.
And there was one light.
It was in the weighing-house.
A squat, square building of soot-blackened brick, two storeys tall, beside the great iron plate of the weighbridge.
A single lamp burned behind the shutters on the upper floor, faint and yellow.
Lucan and Rook stood in the shadow of a coal wagon a hundred yards away and looked at it.
“Two men outside,” Rook murmured.
“One at the door.
One on the wharf, watching the water.
Armed.” He sniffed.
“Nervous.
They’re smoking too much.”
Lucan looked.
Above the man at the door, his eyes read: Owes: 40 silver (Varga).
Is owed: nothing.
Above the man on the wharf: Owes: 40 silver (Varga).
Is owed: 1 life.
“They’re loaders,” he said.
“Varga’s night crew.
He owes them wages.
They’re waiting to get paid.”
“Will they fight?”
“The one on the wharf might.”
Rook nodded slowly.
“And you?” He looked sidelong at Lucan.
“Are you going to be all right?
When we get up there?”
Lucan didn’t answer at once.
He was wearing the spider-silk coat.
The iron club hung at his side on a leather loop.
In his inside pocket, next to his heart, were Dez’s poem, Ottilie’s glass eye and Silas Crane’s silver knife.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
Rook looked at him for a moment longer.
Then he grinned, quick and bright in the dark.
“Good,” he said.
“The ones who know are always lying.”
He stepped backward into the shadow of the wagon, and was gone.
Lucan walked across the sidings alone, out in the open, under the glow of the smog.
He didn’t hurry.
He walked the way he’d walked down the corridor in the Cradles: unhurried, hands in his pockets.
His boots crunched on the cinders between the rails.
The man at the door of the weighing-house saw him when he was fifty yards away, and straightened up, and dropped his cigarette.
“Who’s that?” he called.
His voice cracked.
“Who’s there?
We’re closed.
Concern business.
Bugger off.”
Lucan kept walking.
“I said bugger off!” The man pulled a short, ugly pistol from his belt.
It was an old mana-pistol, the cheap kind, with a cracked bone-coal charge in the grip that glowed a dirty blue.
His hands were shaking.
“I’ll shoot.
I swear to the Saint I’ll shoot!”
“Mr.
Varga owes you forty silver,” Lucan said.
The man blinked.
“He owes your friend on the wharf forty silver too.” Lucan stopped ten feet away.
“He’s not going to pay you.
He hasn’t got it.
Lady Fennick has frozen every penny he owns, and tomorrow the Bureau is going to come down here with a warrant, and anyone they find standing outside this door is going to be asked a lot of questions about the night loading.
About eight years of night loading.”
He took a small leather bag out of his coat and held it up.
It clinked.
“There’s a hundred silver in here,” he said.
“Threaded.
Clean.
Enough for both of you.
Take it, take your friend, and walk away, and you were never here.”
The man stared at the bag.
Then at Lucan.
The pistol wavered.
Down on the wharf, the second man had turned around.
He was walking toward them fast, his hand in his coat.
“Don’t listen to him, Jem,” he snapped.
“He’s a Fennick man.
Or a copper.
It’s a trick.” He pulled out a long, thin knife.
“Mr.
Varga said if anyone came—”
He didn’t finish.
A shadow behind him moved.
Rook stepped out of it, put one hand over the man’s mouth, and slid a knife into his kidney, once, quickly, and then again into the side of his neck.
The man went rigid.
Rook held him for a moment, almost gently, while his legs kicked.
Then he lowered him to the cinders and stepped back, wiping his blade on the dead man’s sleeve.
Jem looked at his friend’s body.
He looked at Rook.
He looked at Lucan.
His face had gone the colour of chalk.
“You,” Lucan said quietly, “were never here.”
Jem dropped the pistol, snatched the bag of coins out of Lucan’s hand and ran.
He ran across the sidings in a stumbling, frantic sprint, out over the rails, between the cold dead engines, and into the dark.
They heard his feet for a long time, getting fainter.
Rook looked down at the man he had killed.
“His one life,” he said.
“Do you know whose it was?”
“No.”
“Hm.” Rook shrugged.
“Well.
Now it’s on my tally, I suppose.” He looked up at the lit window above them.
“Shall we?”
The stairs inside the weighing-house were narrow and steep and creaked under every step.
At the top was a single door, half-open, with lamplight leaking around its edges.
Lucan pushed it open.
The room on the other side was small, low and cluttered.
It was an office: a desk, a stool, a cast-iron stove, shelves of ledgers and dockets and rolled-up shipping charts.
A small round window looked out over the black water of the wharf.
Edmund Varga sat behind the desk.
He had changed.
In five days, he had become someone else.
The expensive black coat was gone.
He was wearing a loader’s canvas jacket, too big for him, with the sleeves rolled up.
His thin moustache had grown out into a ragged shadow of stubble.
His hair was uncombed.
His rings were gone.
There were dark circles under his eyes, and his pale grey gaze had lost its calm.
It moved constantly, jumping from the door to the window to the stove and back again.
In front of him, on the desk, was an open strongbox.
It was full of coin.
Beside it was a thick ledger bound in plain brown canvas.
The barge book.
The real numbers.
And in his right hand, pointed at the doorway, was a small silver pistol with an ivory grip and a little glowing bone-coal charge set into the hammer.
It was a gentleman’s weapon.
Expensive.
The kind of thing a rich man might keep in a drawer.
“Stop there,” Varga said.
Lucan stopped in the doorway.
Varga stared at him.
For a long moment, his face didn’t change.
Then something moved in it.
Something cracked.
“I know you,” he whispered.
“I know your face.
I’ve seen your face.”
“You have.”
“Where?
Where have I—” Varga’s eyes went wide.
“No.
No, that’s impossible.
You’re dead.
I wrote you down.
I wrote you down myself.
Mining accident.
I had you put in the—”
“In the spoil chute,” Lucan said.
“Yes.
With the others.”
Varga’s hand shook.
The silver pistol shook with it.
“Marr,” he breathed.
“Lucan Marr.”
“Overseer.”
“How?”
Lucan didn’t answer.
Varga looked at him, and Lucan watched the man’s mind working.
He could see it happen behind those pale grey eyes, the way he’d seen it happen behind Varney’s spectacles and Ottilie’s glass eye.
The calculation.
The adding and subtracting.
Varga was a man who had spent his whole life reading situations, finding the advantage, finding the lever.
He was looking for one now.
“The parcel,” Varga said slowly.
“Lady Fennick’s parcel.
That was you.”
“Yes.”
“And the Bureau.
The bodies.
That was you, too.”
“Yes.”
“And my notes.
My debts.
Someone bought them all up.
I heard it yesterday.
A young apothecary, they said.
Thorne.” Varga laughed.
It was a cracked, high, unpleasant sound.
“Thorne.
That was you, too.
You own my bond.
Section Nine.” He shook his head.
“Saints.
Saints in their hollow heaven.
A miner.
A bondsman.
A nothing.
I’ve been destroyed by a nothing.” He laughed again.
“How did you even read the black book?
You can barely read your own contract.”
“I read it the way you read mine,” Lucan said.
“Very carefully.
Looking for the lie.”
He took a step into the room.
“Stop!” Varga’s voice cracked.
He jerked the pistol up, pointing it at Lucan’s chest.
“Stop right there.
I’ll shoot.
I’m a very good shot.”
“I believe you.”
“Listen to me.
Listen.
You want money?
There’s money here.” He gestured wildly at the strongbox with his free hand.
“Three thousand silver.
Threaded.
Clean.
My last three thousand.
Take it.
Take all of it.
Let me go.
I’ll leave the city.
I’ll leave the Crown.
You’ll never see me again.
You can tell everyone I’m dead.
You’re good at that, aren’t you?
Being dead?”
Lucan took another step.
“Wait.
Wait.
I’ve got more.
I’ve got things in the country.
Hidden things.
I’ll tell you where.” Varga’s voice was rising, faster and faster.
“And information.
I know things about Lady Fennick.
Terrible things.
Things that would destroy her.
I know about the Holloways.
I know about the Chamber of Commerce, about half the Registry, about the Bureau, the Commissioner, I know where all of them keep their—”
“My father,” Lucan said.
Varga stopped.
“Tobias Marr,” Lucan said.
“A clerk.
He sat in a little brick office down there, by the weighbridge, writing down tonnage.
He saw the night loading.
He saw your secret barges.” He took the black book out of his coat and laid it, very gently, on the desk beside the strongbox.
“Debt engineered via Holloway.
Four hundred and eighty.
Accident arranged.
Son bonded to Pit Nine.” He turned to the last page and put his finger on the word.
“Settled.”
Varga looked at the book.
He looked at the word.
And for a long moment, his face was perfectly, utterly blank, the face of a man who couldn’t remember.
That was the worst thing.
Worse than anything else.
Varga didn’t remember.
Lucan’s father had been one name among dozens, among hundreds.
A small problem, quickly solved, neatly underlined and then forgotten.
Then the pistol went off.
The shot hit Lucan high in the chest, just under the collarbone.
It felt like being kicked by a horse.
The spider-silk mail in his coat caught the round.
He felt it catch, felt the fibres lock tight and hard as iron, but the force of it went straight through, and his ribs cracked like kindling and he was thrown backward into the doorframe.
Blue fire burst across his chest.
The smell of scorched cloth filled the room.
He stayed on his feet.
He didn’t know how.
He stood in the doorway with his back against the frame and his chest on fire, and pain pouring through him in great white waves, and he stayed on his feet.
The Second Form.
He could feel it in his bones, heavy and dense and cold, holding him up like an iron frame.
Varga stared at him in horror.
He pulled the trigger again.
The pistol clicked.
The little charge in the hammer had burned out, dull and grey.
It held one shot.
It was a gentleman’s weapon.
Gentlemen didn’t expect to need two.
Varga threw it at him and lunged for the window.
Rook stepped out of the shadow beside the stove and caught him by the collar.
He swung Varga around, almost lazily, and slammed him face-first down onto the desk.
The strongbox jumped.
Coins spilled across the boards in a bright silver rain.
Varga screamed and struggled, and Rook held him down with one hand on the back of his neck, as easily as a man holding down a kitten, and looked at Lucan.
“You’re hit,” he said.
“I’m fine.” Lucan’s voice came out thin.
He pulled one of the Draughts from his coat and drank it standing in the doorway, and felt his ribs grind and scrape and knit themselves back together in his chest.
He bit down on the pain until it was gone.
When he could breathe again, he straightened up and came forward into the room.
He looked down at Varga, pinned to his own desk, his cheek pressed into the canvas cover of his own barge ledger.
“Section Nine,” Lucan said.
“The bondholder may employ the bondsman in any lawful labour, within the terms of the bond.”
Varga’s eyes rolled up to look at him.
They were wet with tears.
“Please,” he whispered.
“Mining,” Lucan said, “is lawful labour.”
They took him to Pit Nine.
It was very late by then, the dead hour, long after midnight.
The pit-head was dark and silent.
The Bureau had sealed off the east gallery with ropes and paper notices and posted a single young Constable to guard the lift, and he was asleep in a chair by the brazier with his helmet tipped down over his eyes.
Rook took them through the shadows.
They came out in the old east gallery, in the dark, on the bone-white floor beside the grate.
The Bureau had been here.
There were ladders, ropes, a winch they’d set up over the chute to bring up the bodies.
There were canvas sheets laid out on the floor in rows, with shapes under them.
Lucan counted.
Nineteen.
Nineteen of the forty-three.
The rest were still at the bottom.
There were lamps hanging from hooks on the walls.
Lucan lit one.
Its yellow light spread along the gallery and up the walls, over the thousands of names carved into the bone.
He put a pick in Varga’s hands.
Varga stared at it.
“What—”
“Read them,” Lucan said.
“What?”
“The names.
On the walls.” Lucan pointed.
“Every man who ever worked this gallery and died here.
Read them.
Out loud.”
Varga looked at the wall.
Then at Lucan.
Then at Rook, who was standing behind him in the shadows with his sword drawn and resting across his shoulder.
He began to read.
His voice was thin and shaking at first.
He stumbled over the names.
They were carved crookedly, in a dozen different hands, some of them very old and worn almost smooth.
Abel Marsh.
T.
Gethin.
Big Will.
Harry Fenn.
Jos.
Cardew.
M.
O’Dare.
Stephen, son of Stephen.
Lucan made him read every one.
When he stopped, Lucan said Go on, quietly, and he went on.
It took a long time.
The lamp burned down.
Varga’s voice grew hoarse.
He was crying openly now, the tears running down into his ragged stubble, but he didn’t stop.
He read them all.
At the very end, near the grate, low down, there was a newer name.
It had been carved only a few days ago, by someone who had come down here with the Bureau, one of the miners pressed into service to bring up the bodies.
It was crooked and uneven, scratched with a nail.
Lucan hadn’t seen it before.
DEZ HARLOW.
MOTIVATIONAL FIGURE.
Varga read it aloud.
Lucan looked at it for a long moment.
He couldn’t speak.
“Lucan,” Rook said softly.
Lucan turned to Varga.
“There are twenty-four more people at the bottom of that chute,” he said.
“The Bureau will bring them up in the morning.
They’ll lay them out here in rows under canvas, with the others.
Then they’ll take them up into the light and try to put names to them, and try to find their families, and tell them their sons and husbands and fathers didn’t desert.
Didn’t run.
Were murdered.
By you.”
He stepped closer.
Varga shrank back against the wall of names.
“I thought about taking you to Shaft Thirty,” Lucan said.
“I thought about making you dig.
Making you work the Throat until your veins went blue and your gums bled and you coughed your lungs up, a piece at a time.
I thought about making you work off your debt.
Seven thousand silver.
With interest.
Compound.
With fees and surcharges and lamp rental, and lashes for insolence.
I thought it would be funny.” He shook his head slowly.
“But you’d find a way.
You’re clever.
You’d bribe a guard.
You’d fake a ledger.
You’d pull a lever somewhere.
Men like you always do.”
He reached into his pocket.
He took out the silver knife.
Silas Crane’s knife.
The one that had cut two hundred and twelve lines.
Varga’s eyes fixed on it, and went wide.
“So here’s what we’re going to do,” Lucan said.
“You owe me three lives.
One for Dez.
One for my father.
One for me.” He turned the knife in the lamplight.
“I’m not going to take three.
I’m only going to take one.
I’m going to let you choose which.”
“What?” Varga whispered.
“Choose.
Whose life are you paying for?”
Varga stared at him.
His mouth opened and closed.
His face worked through a dozen expressions, fear and confusion and hatred and desperate calculation, looking for the lever, looking for the way out.
“Your father’s,” he said at last, hoarsely.
“I’ll pay for your father’s.”
Lucan nodded slowly.
“His name was Tobias,” he said.
“Say it.”
“Tobias.
Tobias Marr.”
Lucan put the knife in his hand.
Varga looked at it.
Then he looked up at Lucan, and for a moment, just a moment, something like understanding moved behind his pale grey eyes.
“You want me to do it myself,” he said.
“I want it written down,” said Lucan, “in your own hand.” This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
It was nearly dawn when they came back out through the shadows, onto the cinders of the Eastern Sidings, under a sky just starting to turn from black to brown.
Lucan sat down on the edge of the wharf with his feet hanging over the black water.
Rook sat beside him.
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Behind them, in the dark of the east gallery, four hundred feet underground, a man lay on the bone-white floor beside the grate, in a spreading dark pool, with a little silver knife in his hand.
When the Bureau came down at the seventh bell, they would find him there among the rows of canvas sheets, and they would find the black book beside him, open to the last page.
And on the last page, under the name Marr, Tobias, they would find a few lines in his own neat handwriting, shaky but perfectly readable.
I arranged the death of Tobias Marr.
I arranged the deaths of forty-three bondsmen of Pit Nine and recorded them as deserters, and defrauded the Crown of their fines.
I alone am responsible.
I cannot live with what I have done.
— E.
Varga.
Every word of it was true.
Wren had taught Lucan that.
The best lies weren’t lies at all.
They were the truth, arranged in exactly the right order.
[ LEDGER: Varga, Edmund — 1 life (Tobias Marr) — COLLECTED.
]
[ LEDGER: Varga, Edmund — 1 life (Dez Harlow) — COLLECTED (debtor deceased; debt extinguished by Account Holder’s judgement).
]
[ LEDGER: Varga, Edmund — 1 life (Lucan Marr, pending) — FORGIVEN.
]
[ Rank 2 progress — 2 / 3 blood-debts.
5,380 / 10,000 Clean Silver laundered.
]
[ Bond of Obligation: Varga, Edmund — Debtor deceased.
Next of kin may inherit.
]
[ Pursue next of kin?
YES / NO ]
Lucan looked at that last question for a long time.
Varga had a sister.
Wren had found her name in the Registry.
She was married to a clockmaker in the Lamplighters’ Quarter and had two little girls.
Seven thousand silver of her brother’s debts would pass to her, under the law, if Lucan said yes.
That was the machine.
That was how it worked.
“No,” he said.
[ Bond of Obligation: Varga, Edmund — EXTINGUISHED.
]
Rook glanced at him.
He didn’t ask.
He took an apple out of his coat, polished it on his sleeve and offered it to Lucan.
Lucan looked at it.
Then he took it.
They sat on the edge of the wharf and ate their apples and watched the brown dawn come up over the Grise.
The newspapers had it by noon the next day.
DISGRACED OVERSEER’S SUICIDE AT SCENE OF CRIMES.
FORTY-THREE MURDERED MINERS RECOVERED FROM PIT.
FENNICK CONCERN “SHOCKED AND APPALLED.”
Lady Isolde Fennick gave a statement on the steps of the Fennick mansion, dressed in black, with a lock of white hair falling over her pale brow.
She said she had been betrayed by a monster in her own house.
She said she would personally pay compensation to every one of the forty-three families.
She said there would be a new memorial at the pit-head, in white marble, with every one of their names on it.
She said Pit Nine would be closed for a month in mourning and every bondsman’s contract there would be reviewed by an independent board.
She did not mention Shaft Thirty.
She did not mention the amendment to Section Four.
She did not mention anything at all about how a single overseer had managed to murder forty-three people over eight years without anyone at the Concern ever noticing.
The crowd outside the mansion applauded her.
Lucan read it at the counter of Greaves & Son, with a cup of Wren’s tea going cold at his elbow.
▸ Fennick Mining Concern — 43 lives — UNCOLLECTED.
He folded the paper and put it down.
She had taken his blow and turned it into a gift for herself.
Fennick would come out of this stronger.
More respected.
The grieving widow who had rooted out the monster in her own house.
Fine, Lucan thought.
That’s fine.
I’m patient.
The bell over the door of Greaves & Son rang that afternoon at a quarter past four.
Lucan looked up from the counter.
A woman stood in the doorway.
She was tall and lean, all angles, with a long, sharp, unlovely face and dark hair scraped back in a severe knot.
She wore a dark blue overcoat too big for her in the shoulders.
She smelled of clove cigarettes.
Her left hand, resting on the doorframe, was made of brass.
She looked around the shop slowly: the hundreds of little labelled drawers, the great glass carboys glowing red and green and blue in the window, the old bottles on the shelves.
Then she looked at Lucan.
“Good afternoon,” she said.
“Are you the proprietor?
Mr.
Thorne?”
“I am.”
“I’ve heard good things about your restoratives.” She came to the counter.
She was carrying something in her right hand.
She set it down on the wood between them.
It was a small empty glass vial, thick-walled, with a faint golden residue in the bottom.
“This one, for instance.
One of Madame Orlov’s girls on Velvet Row had her face broken by a client last month.
Jaw shattered in three places.
Teeth knocked out.
She was healed overnight, without a mark.
Not even a scar.” She looked at him.
“New teeth grew in.
Did you know that?
The doctors said it was impossible.”
“We pride ourselves,” Lucan said, “on the quality of our medicines.”
“I’m sure you do.”
He looked at her.
Above her head, faint and gold, his eyes read the words.
Owes: 3 silver (tobacconist).
1 favour (Penhallow, Aldous).
Is owed: 43 lives (on behalf of the dead).
1 life (Voss, Arden — brother).
1 truth.
Forty-three lives.
On behalf of the dead.
The same debt.
The same entry, word for word, that was in his own Ledger.
“Inspector Maren Voss,” she said.
She didn’t offer her hand.
“Crown Detective Bureau.
I’m investigating the deaths at Pit Nine.
Overseer Varga’s death.
A night-watchman named Tobin Marsh.
A mill-master’s two bodyguards in the Cradles.
A pawnbroker in Tallowgate, a woman named Ottilie Brask, found dead in her shop with the number two hundred and twelve written on her wall in her own blood.
And a blood-mage named Silas Crane, who isn’t dead, as far as I know.
He’s just disappeared.”
“That sounds like a great many deaths, Inspector.”
“It is.” She watched his face.
Her eyes were dark and tired and very steady.
“I’m also looking for a young man named Lucan Marr.
He’s officially dead.
A mining accident.
But somebody climbed out of that spoil chute on the night he died, and I don’t think it was a ghost.” She tapped the vial with one brass finger.
Click.
“A mill-master named Gorse told me the man who killed his bodyguards had grey eyes.
Very unusual grey eyes.
Like the eyes of something waiting.”
Lucan said nothing.
“Your eyes are grey, Mr.
Thorne.”
“So are a great many people’s.”
“That’s true.” She smiled faintly.
It changed her whole face for a moment.
Made it younger.
“That’s very true.”
She picked up the empty vial and put it back in her pocket.
Then she reached into her coat and took out a small white card.
She laid it on the counter, face down, and slid it across to him.
“If you ever meet Mr.
Marr,” she said, “you might give him this.
Tell him that I’ve read the black book.
All of it.
I know what was done to his father.
And I know that everything in it was true.
Every word.” She paused.
“Tell him I’m not interested in the men who killed Varga.
Varga deserved to die.
Tell him I’m interested in the people who built the machine Varga worked.
The people who wrote the laws he used.
The people who sat in rooms in the Spire and made sure nobody ever looked down that chute.” Her eyes held his.
“Tell him I can’t touch them.
Not with what I’ve got.
But he might.”
She turned and walked to the door.
The bell jangled.
On the threshold she stopped, and looked back.
“And tell him,” she said, “that if he kills anyone else in my city who doesn’t deserve it, I’ll hang him myself.”
The door closed behind her.
Lucan stood at the counter for a long time.
Then he turned the card over.
There was an address on it, in a plain, angular hand.
A room in a boarding house in the Lamplighters’ Quarter.
And under the address, a single line.
They are all at the bottom.
— M.V.
That night, Lucan sat at the window of his room above the apothecary and looked out over the rooftops of Grisholt, at the smog glowing orange and gold and rust-red, and at the white needle of the Spire rising out of it, with its circle of clean sky and its few cold, faraway stars.
Behind him, Rook was snoring on the floor.
Wren was asleep at her desk with her face in a pile of paper.
Down the hall, Nell was asleep in her new room, with Dez’s poem pinned to the wall above her bed.
He opened the panel and looked at his Ledger.
▸ Fennick Mining Concern — 43 lives — UNCOLLECTED.
▸ Gorse, Jebediah — (Recognised on behalf of the Cradles) — 6 lives.
9 lives pending.
— UNCOLLECTED.
[ Rank 2 progress — 2 / 3 blood-debts.
5,380 / 10,000 Clean Silver laundered.
]
[ Roster Slots: 2 of 2 filled.
(Rank 2 required for additional slots.) ]
He was about to close it when the panel flared red.
Not gold.
Not bronze.
Red.
A deep, angry, pulsing red, like a warning lamp, like blood held up to the light.
The whole room filled with it.
Lucan sat up very straight.
[ ALERT.
]
[ A new ACCOUNT has been opened within three miles of the Account Holder.
]
[ Account Holder: UNKNOWN.
]
[ System: UNKNOWN.
]
[ Note: The new Account’s LEDGER contains one entry matching your registry.
]
▸ Debt owed TO Unknown Account Holder: Lucan Marr.
Amount: One life.
Status: UNCOLLECTED.
The red light pulsed once, twice, slow as a heartbeat.
Then it went out, and the room was dark.
Lucan sat in the dark by the window and didn’t move for a very long time.
Somewhere out there, under the same smog, in the same city, someone else had just died in debt twice and asked for an audit.
And the first thing their new ledger had told them was his name.