The Clarity of Cold Steel

A RICOCHET SPARKS off the parapet by my face, grit blinding my eye, more bullets whizzing by as an automatic weapon blurts furiously. One bites me in the side, a punch followed by a searing pain that keens so sharp I can’t feel it. Mech armor clanks and clatters as I grab the second harness, embrace it, and roll off into freefall.

It’s the escape artist act in reverse, me plying the white lights, trying to break into the straight jacket instead of out as I plummet towards certain death. I’ve got the plummeting thing down, alright, and in spades. The rest though? Not so much. Showbiz ain’t all roses and song.

It’s the streamlined side of the Bilious March that first surges past me in my descent, amber-lit windows ripping, then the thickness of the Vatican Wheel, the tooth-edged cyclopean edifice of curve and straight. I’ve the harness over one shoulder as the wheel disappears behind, beyond, above. My new companion’s the God Pillar, train track riding its side looking like a drill badgering the earth. My other shoulder’s next as I make out the gridded streets of Tinkertown below. Smokes stacks coming up hard.

I strap my waist in, cinch the shoulders and yank the ripcord, waiting on the clacking sound of the wings springing out. And don’t they just take their sweet bloody time? The spire of Saint John of the Cross lies dead nuts below, racing up at me like the spear thrust of some obsidian giant, a precise strike, unwavering, the needle-sharp weapon aimed right at my left eye. An inch before I’m impaled atop the cathedral spire — just like my father bought it — my wings spring out and I pull up just shy of demise, swerving from the spear-thrust’s path, pulling a parabola down through Clinker Street and scaring the shit out of a late-night straggler, angling so low my teeth nearly scrape cobblestone. Nearly.

An instant later, teeth clamped, whining so high dogs are squealing, I have it mastered, the force, the momentum, and I’m sling-shotting back up out of the morass, above the brick and mortar polygons, riding high, mainlining sky, the whole world as my oyster.

The city’s expanse lies at my fingertips. I could go anywhere. Do anything. I could run. Hide. Survive. Become someone else. I’ve done it before and I’m aces at it. A precocious maestro am I. But I don’t turn rabbit. I don’t skate. Don’t hide. I do the opposite, and though it doesn’t come naturally — I’ll say it — it does come.

Through the three great pillars now, I weave in and out, round and round the God Pillar, the King Pillar, the Iron Pillar, strafing from Tinkertown to Amber Torque, over the Dead River and above Olde Town. Then I’m soaring back east.

Over Tinkertown, I catch a burning thermal off an exhaust port of one of the great machines that turn the Wheel Cities, and I ride it high, ride it long, ride it round and round until I’m high above the Vatican once more.

It’s a beautiful, wondrous glide, cold and clear and soft and silent, and like some somber raptor stalking prey, I circle and circle, descending now by degrees through the cool night ether. It doesn’t take long.

With the adrenaline kicking, I couldn’t feel it, but now as I master this glide and my breath chills out and heart stops hammering, I do. The knife in my side. My liver’s shot. Shot cause it’s a cirrhotic graft from a ninety-five-year-old alcoholic pill popper, shot cause I’ve literally been shot. I can feel a warm zone of dull throb around the hot zone of blinding pain that pierces through me as though an arrow’s stuck through my gut. Or near enough. Don’t know how bad it is, but it is my bloody liver. I know I need it, and I know that poking holes in it sure as shit ain’t going to improve functionality or extend warranties.

My ears come alive in the silence. I realize I can hear fabric flapping above, and so I crane my neck and out of the corner of my eye see pockmarks riddling the wing’s fabric. Bullet holes. One of them tears suddenly as the wind picks up. I panic, drop — gasping — and bear down on the handles, teeth rattling around my skull as I fight to hold her steady. It doesn’t take.

I focus or try to, blotting out the pain as I soar above the walls of the Vatican. The maps from Sweet Sally’s room are in my head, but they’re a jumble now. But one plain rectangle building catches my eye amongst all the gothic opulence. I can make out the power station amidst all those ostentatious old buildings. And the building next to it, a wide-squat affair, all duty in its dour design. There are power cables thicker than my arm spiderwebbing from one edifice to the other. The Purgatorium Daedalaum. My Latin’s a bit rusty, but I recognize the root of the word Purgatory in there. At least it’s a step up from Hell.