The Clarity of Cold Steel

EIGHT… NINE… TEN… I finish counting, stand, tear my burka off, don my tricorne hat, and you’d think I’d tail the bastards, my gumshoes padding silent in the artificial night as I slink along after. But you’d be wrong.

Tailing six twitchy lads strapped to stage a revolution’s not on my bucket list. Instead, I kick open Father Menon’s coffin door and stride in. I don’t give a shit about the noise or the clamor or anything of his. What I want is a window, and I want one fast.

Grunting, I shoulder open the bedroom window and stare out. Vertigo rocks me solid as a gale wind rips past, and all I see is cityscape. Plague walls rising in the distance, the iron risers beyond and geared cities atop them turning infinitesimally, crowned by dirigibles floating above, moored on long chains. I swallow. Take a moment. Reprioritize my life. Voices hocking wares from the bazaar miles below somehow reach my ear.

I’m fifty-seven stories high and the wind is kicking like a jilted mare, but I need to be down and I need to be down fast. Whole. Out the window, I sling a monofilament with a weight soldered to the end. It pings like piano wire as it goes taut an epoch after the drop. Then I jam a spite-hook into the plaster wall and wedge it in firm with a few stinging blows from my open palm.

At the window again, looking down as the monofilament yaws with the wind. I hate these things. I never trust them. A couple deep breaths and regrets remembered, then I’m out the window, hat held between my teeth, rappelling down, down, down, concentrated gales taking me for a winding ride as I’m bounding out and in, side to side, hopping windows and ledges and stone gargoyles shaped like bat-eared garuda. My left hand’s glued to the rig fixed to my belt and the other, fitted with a ceramic spooler so I don’t cut my fingers off, I hold out and down, raising only when I need to slow my descent. And that doesn’t happen.

I drop like a stone.

My knees buckle and groan as I hit pay dirt, practically shooting my spine out of the top of my head when my ass hits the cobblestones. I take a moment to count my teeth. A herd of sari-wrapped washerwomen gives the evil eye as they slide around me like a herd of cows negotiating a busted-down wagon in the road. They’ve better things to do than get involved.

I know the feeling.

With a twist of my magician’s wrist, I’m free of the line, and I light the end of it with my cig lighter. The line sparks and sizzles in a slash of smoke all the way up, fifty-seven stories, gone in a protracted flash.

“You alright, my man?” Brooklyn materializes at my elbow an instant later, looking spooked.

“No.”

“Well, hightail it anyways.” He drags me off the roadside, down an alley. We weave through a congregation of dalit muck-rakers. At the alley’s end, Brooklyn yanks me to a halt. Points. “That’s it.” Facing east on Elamkulam Row, a jacked-up Mitsubishi crashwagon’s stationed on the corner, all black iron rumbling and chuffing hard, scaled in steel and exhaling smoke like some master dragon, eager for conflagration. The Masked man’s ride. It does not disappoint.

“They out yet?” I rub my tailbone.

Brooklyn eyes me balefully. “You okay, my man?”

“Just broke my ass,” I say, craning my neck. “They out?”

“Naw, man.” He shakes a hand. “The ace in the crashwagon seat’s raring to go, though.” As if to punctuate that statement, the crashwagon’s engine revs, its chassis rattling, sending tremors rippling beneath my feet. “They nab him?”

I nod. “We ready?”

Brooklyn nods, takes a hit of ghost.

Across the street, a Kalighat punk all tatted up in blue-inked demons sidles up to the crashwagon, eyeing it with low-lidded interest. From out of a porthole, an arm sporting a Le Mat hand-cannon emerges, aimed the punk’s way. Hand reaching for the sky, the punk tips an imaginary cap, spits, then takes off running.

“This could get ugly.”

“Could…?” Brooklyn asks in wonderment.

“Why they headed east?” I wonder aloud. I figured they’d head west. Malabar’s on the coast. And though the church has its fingers in many pies, all of them are west.

Down the street, the masked man and his crew storm out the side door of the Razor Tower with Father Menon, two dragging him gagged and trussed like a Thanksgiving mongrel toward the crashwagon. Thick iron doors squeal open at its rear, and the mercs pile in, Father Menon’s feet kicking feebly as he’s hauled into darkness. The masked man enters last, the doors groaning shut, and the final glimpse I have is that of a silver face as cold and distant as a dying star.

“That’s our man,” Brooklyn says, watching on.

I say nothing.

The crashwagon starts rolling forward, smoke pouring out its angled roof-pipes in greasy black chuffs. As it nears an intersection, a loud clang reverberates, followed by another. Then shouting.

The Kalighat punk’s back, hurling rocks, and he brought some friends. From the windows above, missiles begin to rain down to a steel-drum beat. The street punks hurl insults as well, grabbing at their crotches and standing in the way of the wagon until it rolls over one. He’s left broken behind, still alive, his leg bent at an impossible angle, flailing around all haphazard. The others dive out of the way and give chase, terror and glee riveted to their adolescent faces.

Brooklyn and I tail the crashwagon at arm’s length, trotting along, keeping well out of hurling range. Tailing a crashwagon through Malabar’s cake. Cause crashwagons ain’t built for speed or handling, they’re built for not stopping. Under any circumstances.

As the crashwagon comes to an intersection, just to prove me wrong, it stops. A hastily constructed barrier of refuse and cans and old shopwagons has been spilled out across its path east. The crashwagon could muscle through that junk in short shrift, but it doesn’t. It strikes me then what is east. The ocean. They aim to dump Father Menon’s body. Quick. Neat. Simple. Not so simple now, though, with half a borough stomping your knockers.

At the intersection, the crashwagon stands chuffing for an instant. Then it begins to turn. Like a troop of insane monkeys, the Kalighat punks continue raining down rock and insult, a peal of triumph exhorting from their collective soul as the crashwagon begins its retreat. I wonder if they know the fucker abducted is a child rapist? Brooklyn and I give it its space, hanging back like hyenas hounding a wounded buffalo, just loping along, watching from afar, waiting.

Hoofing it for near half an hour, we tail it south through Malabar, through a hail of brick and insult and excrement, through the plague gates and into Seaside where it finally picks up some speed on Salt Spray Main and pulls away.

My dear brother’s waiting on the far side of the gate, though, a pair of engine-bikes stutter-thundering in neutral, ready for us. Mounted, the three of us hold pace with the crashwagon, sidling up alleys and rumbling down the main row, catching glimpses through alleyways and side streets. We’re headed southwest now, consistently, burning through Seaside and Firedamp and finally into Tinkertown, still at a respectful distance.

Back in Tinkertown, riding along the high roads, factories and sweatshops churning out the misery of human toil below, it ain’t long before Saint John of the Cross is ahead of us, the great geared city hovering above like the mother ship. The crashwagon docks at the train station, but we can’t get close enough as of right now. I pull out my monoscope and hone in, but we already know where they’re going, and it sure as shit ain’t down.