The Clarity of Cold Steel

A SHEER DROP lies outside the bay window. Five stories of aerocrete construction followed by fifty of ferron-crete wheel, then nothing but dead air all the way down to Mortise Locke city proper below. A thousand feet? Two thousand? I can’t tell, can’t even guess. Long enough for a falling man to have quite a conversation with himself prior to impact, that’s for damn sure.

The digs are prime, though, as far as whorehouses go, and the Bilious March is quite a sight, at least from the inside. Sweet Sally’s suite is stylized in the motif of some Arabian prince’s, with long tresses of pastel curtain lining the walls in fluid furls, curved scimitars mounted crosswise amidst delicate faux-terracotta Saharan frescoes, and it’s lit by a bevy of Arabian-style oil lamps. When no one’s looking, I take a whack at rubbing one to see if a genie might pop out. Sadly, no.

“He’s sleeping,” Sweet Sally whispers, closing a curtain behind her that divides off the room Brooklyn’s in. “I splinted his leg.” She glides over to her dresser, pours herself a glass of whiskey, punches it back, fixes another. “Gave him a sedative.”

“How about one for me?” I look up. I’m at a table, pouring over the most current map of the Vatican Wheel I can find. Trying to get my bearings.

Surrounded by a twenty-five-foot tall wall, Saint Peter’s Basilica dominates the center of the wheel, tucked almost central within the Vatican proper. Other large buildings flank it while small buildings pepper the inner sanctum. There’s even a small lake. Situated outside the walls of the inner sanctum is the ring of churches I saw on my midnight glide. Streets spoke outward from each church, dividing the wheel into slices of pie, each one ending at a church at wheel’s edge.

I shrug my shoulders, stretch my neck. They both creak, threatening to crack, shatter, tear. “He’ll be okay?”

“I’m not a doktor,” Sweet Sally warns.

“But what you’ve got is good for what ails you.”

“He needs to be moved.” She’s immune to my charms. Seems a lot of folks are lately.

“Can we bring a doktor in?”

“You know what a doktor costs up here?”

“Right.”

The pale look on Sweet Sally’s face doesn’t allay my concerns. “I’ll telegram Johnny, see if there’s any way he can smuggle him down.” She places the whiskey on the map, weighing down the corner. “I don’t know. Maybe as cargo?”

“We’ll figure out something.” I smooth out Johnny Shakespeare’s love note and stare at it. XXG-547. What is it? An address? Coordinates? An alias? I stare at it harder, hoping for an epiphany.

“Tight?” she asks, putting her hands on my shoulders.

“Yeah…” I moan as she begins to massage. “Glider killed my back. Used muscles I didn’t know I had. There…” I straighten up as she hits the spot. Nearly melt as her hands knead bunched muscle, loosening knots, untying them, soothing away my fried nerves. I close my eyes. Groan. “I’ll give you an hour to stop that … then I’m calling the cops.”

“Liar.” She digs her thumbs into the muscles along my spine, works her way down.

“Can’t just keep him here, huh?” I grunt. “There are worse places.”

“No sir,” she says, really digging in. “He needs a doktor. And besides, I’m the new girl on the block up here.”

“Everyone’s got to start somewhere.”

She stops her illustrious massage, leans forward, lifting her drink and taking in the room. “You believe this place?” She hazards a sip. “Huh? Any idea what those bloody lamps cost, let alone the rest of the furnishings? Hundreds. Thousands. And for what? Atmosphere. Sakes alive, most of the girls live downstairs in eight-by-eight coffins. And that’s mostly bed. They live there and they work there. Some die there.”

“Thought everyone was rich and fabulous up here.”

“Bunch of squabbling bitches.” She casts a glare at the door. “And anyways, we women of ill repute aren’t people, we’re a convenience.”

“I’d beg to differ.”

She shakes her head. “That’s only cause you think you’re a person, too.”

“Got me there.” I straighten. “You’re here on Johnny’s word, though, won’t they just heel on command?”

“Heel?” She raises an eyebrow.

“Just going along with your ’bitches’ comment. Heel? Bitches? Female dogs?” I wave a hand in apology. “They can’t all be winners.” I fix her an eye. “But won’t they, though? Go along with it, I mean, on Johnny’s word?”

“Naw,” she says softly. “Hell, Johnny’s word’ll salt the wound.”

“Thought his voice was steel.” I knock back a mouthful of whiskey, enjoy the burn in my mouth, the burn all the way down. “Know I certainly ain’t anxious to wrong him.”

“He’s steel alright, a steel weight tied to my ankles.” She runs her fingers through her hair, closes her eyes as she squeezes. “And we’re in deep water.” She opens her eyes, lets her hair fall. “You don’t know women of ill repute.”

“I beg yet again to differ.”

“No, you only think you do. You’ve visited them during work hours. You’ve seen the façade, up close and personal, but never behind it. You’ve never lived with them. Never broken bread with them. Never jockeyed for room or board. Haggled over laundry costs. Fought over clean water. Probably never spent the night.”

“That costs extra, I understand.”

“There’s an established hierarchy here, just like everywhere.” She sighs, shakes her head, smiles bitterly, takes a sip. “And a penthouse loft allotted to the new girl? The new girl sporting a mech arm who also happens to be old enough to be someone’s voluptuous auntie?” She raises her mech arm, sheathed in iridescent velvet. “There’s a lot of green-eyed glares blaring about already. And these quarters are prime digs for grumbling.” She nods to herself. “And the grumbles started the moment I walked through the front door. So…” She hazards a glance at the door. “You’d best be out of here soon. The sooner the better.”

“I ain’t arguing, but it’ll take me a spell to suss out exactly where to hit.”

“Well, get to it cause word travels fast here, and sometimes they sell it at a premium and, hell, sometimes they give it away for free.”

I take another sip.

“And besides, can’t be having no saucy wogs room-mating with me on the sly.”

“More green-eyed glares?”

“Aye.” She nods. “The most.”

“I could offer to peddle my own wares to the ladies? Soothe some ruffled feathers?”

“Stow it, Romeo.”

Whorehouses are a great place to garner intel. Always have been. Always will be. Some stuffed shirt wants to impress the young lady he’s laying but lacks the requisite prowess? Show how important he is? Can’t help but gab. A good place for finding out secrets but a poor place for keeping them. And it won’t do to be found out up here. Loose lips and sinking ships and I’ve already had my fill of the latter.

Sweet Sally glances over my shoulder at the map. “What are you fixed on doing?”

“Gonna find the kid,” I say, “or what happened to him.”

“You said his parents are dead, though.”

“We gave our word,” I say, thinking about Nikunj, wherever he is. If he even still is. “I’ll see about that masked man after. See if I can’t be what he’s got coming.”

She stares at me long and hard then kills her drink. “How you fixed on finding him?”

“Don’t know.” I hold up the scrap of paper. “This mean anything to you?”

She takes it, reads it, turns it over, shrugs.

“There’s no place up here you’ve heard of?”

“It’s just letters and numbers.”

“An address?”

“Sure. I live at ABG-541.” She shakes the paper in derision. “Places up here don’t have addresses. They got titles. Names. Fabulous, wondrous, whimsical names. Grantham Abbey. Teetering Winds. Alabaster Albacore. Shit like that. This looks like something from a warehouse. Or a filing system? Maybe a postal code?”

I snatch the paper back. “You get the older maps, too?”

“A whole wad of them.” She strolls over to her dresser, pulls out a roll of parchment and comes back. “Johnny had them delivered.” She lays them all down, spreads them out. Flips through the corners. “Each one’s about five years back. He says you owe him doubly for this.”

“’Doubly’ might be a bit strong.” But I nod, set the current map on top of the pile then flip through them one by one, noting differences. Buildings a century old. New construction. Roadways splicing through old neighborhoods. Walls built up, expanding, contracting. It’s like drawing back the layers of an onion to travel back through time, watching the city not so much as shrink but become less and less congested. Space is at a premium in Mortise Locke, especially up here. In the pages, I can also read the visual story of the church and its wane in power.

With its gradual descent, the civil war against the Protestants a few years back and the recent scandals, it’s been forced to sell off the wheel piecemeal, from the outside in. Land speculators from the New London Wheel have moved in, converting old church grounds to businesses and, in the case of the Bilious March, pleasure. I flip back fifteen years and see that it used to be the rectory of Saint Mary’s Church, which lies adjacent.

“Maybe it’s a building site?” Sweet Sally offers. “A grid, y’know, before someone built it up and gave it a pretentious name?”

“Maybe…” I run a finger along the edge of the wheel. “New construction.” I flip forward five years. Flip back. Looking for empty spaces now filled. Along the edge, about forty yards inward from the Bilious March, I find just such a space. But I find no letters, no numbers, no coordinates. Nothing. “Shit.”

I keep looking, burning Arabian oil and flipping through years and decades and development, working my way back to the present, getting a feel for the ebb and flow of civilization. Eventually, I look up to find Sweet Sally snoring across the table. “How long did you spend up here?”

“Hmm…?” she murmurs. “What?”

“How long were you up here?”

“Oh, about five years.” She cracks an eyelid, sits back, draws a strand of hair from her mouth. “But that was near ten years ago. Things change. Even up here.”

“So,” I begin again, getting my bearings on the current map by rotating it about forty degrees, trying in my mind’s eye to see what I saw on my glide and compare it to the map, “the pope’s sick, terminal.” I thump my chest. “And only a transplant’ll do it.”

“He is? I hadn’t heard.”

“Sure well, that’s what I’m guessing,” I say. “And if so, he’ll be kept inside the Vatican walls.”

“So will your boy, then, I’d imagine.” Sweet Sally yawns, rubs her eyes.

I nod. “They’d keep him close.” He’d be too valuable to just trash. His other organs would fetch top dollar. If they could keep him alive. Piecemeal him out. “He’ll need life support.” I trace the wall surrounding the Vatican proper. “Somewhere in here.”

“Couldn’t they just do the surgery anywhere?”

“No. Arboghast said they’d need a proper surgical outfit for this kinda gig.” I finger my jaw. “And I asked him what the overhead is for one. Doesn’t have to be a big joint. But it has to be clean. Has to have someone who knows what they’re doing. And equipment. Expensive shit. And it needs power to run it. So, I’m thinking no. Gotta be new construction. Can’t be any of this sacred old shit. They’d need to retrofit it. Punch holes in walls. Frescos. Muck the place up. Defile it.”

“Where then?”

“They have a hospital up here?” I peer at building outlines.

“The New London Wheel has one.”

I shake my head. “Somewhere here. Any medical facilities on this wheel?”

“There are doktors.” She shrugs.

“How about inside the walls of the Vatican?” I point inside the map. “Here?”

“No.” She points at one building. “But I’ve never been inside the walls. I’ve heard they have an asylum, though. Saint Edna’s.”

I shake my head. “It’s old, right?”

She nods. “I think so.”

“Sure.” I lean forward, studying the current map, my eyes continuously drawn back to one building inside the Vatican walls. I peel back layers, find out that it’s less than five-years-old. “How long’s the slough been going on?”

“Two, maybe three years?” Sweet Sally says.

“Longer up here, or so I’ve heard.” I drop a finger on two buildings inside the Vatican walls. Nikunj had said he’d heard the slough started up here. “Now, these two are both new construction. Here and here. I saw them on my glide. This one’s some new-fangled paramagnetic power station. Strange for it to be situated in the Luddite capital of the world.”

“I suppose.”

“Any idea what this one is?” I lean in, squinting, trying to decipher the tight script written on the rectangular building that looked so out of place in the Vatican. “Purgatorium Daedalaum?”

Sweet Sally shakes her head. “After my time.”

I glance up. “Think you could ask around?”