"Yeah, around the corner. They even looked back at us as they went."
"Stealthy couple of guys, making eye contact and sporting facial tattoos. I don't know how y'all ever picked up on it."
"Stop being an idiot," I said. "If this is how you're going to be, you and Travers and your damn truck can just pack it up and go back to your station. File a report about your mothers, or something."
Owen chuckled. "Prickly, prickly girl. Come on, folks. The strange men went this way."
"Not like they're still going to be there," I said.
"Hope not," Owen answered, then went around the corner. I followed. None of the other whiteshirts moved.
This road began to ascend gradually as it led up to the elevated boulevard that cut across this part of the city. Another late addition to the city's architecture, the boulevards served as direct routes for the foot and pedigear traffic that most citizens used, especially those who couldn't afford the monotrain service. We followed it up for a while. Eventually the wagon clattered around the corner behind us, the patrol walking carefully behind it in a loose semicircle.
"Brave bunch of boys you've got there, Justicar," I said.
"They do okay. They're good guys. This is just a… kind of strange situation."
"Walking around at night with a woman?" I asked, looking back at the patrol. They were young, holding their weapons tightly in their skinny hands. "Yeah, it looks like it'd be a new thing for most of them."
Owen chuckled. "You're probably not what they think of, when they think like that."
"Likewise," I said. "And this is where we stop."
"Oh, be cool. I'm just-"
"You're still walking when I said stop. So stop." I knelt down and peered at the ground, then looked around. We were at the mouth of a narrow alley that had a thin trickle of water running down a gutter in its middle. The cement at my feet was splattered with something dark. I put a finger to it. It was cold, and gummy.
"Get those lights up here."
The boys obliged, after a few miscues and misunderstandings. I moved out of the way so the wagon could get good light on the street. It was spotted with dark, muddy blood. I looked up at Owen, then nodded down the alleyway.
"Put the wagon here, focus the beams down there," he said, directing the patrol. The wagon turned tightly on the avenue, its tall tires showing a remarkable agility. The whiteshirts mostly stayed behind its bulk. "Get out here, guys. Come on. Stand over here, like we practiced for building entry."
They did, eventually. They really were just kids, and not that well armed. There was a single bullistic and his ammo guy. The rest had thick staves with blades that snapped out of the top, should a riot turn political. I waited until they looked ready, then decided I'd be waiting all night. I pulled Owen close.
"I don't want these guys getting in my way," I said.
"They won't. Unless you decide to run away, of course, and then you might trip over them."
"Be nice. But be out of the way more."
He nodded. I drew my bully and crept into the alley.
You can't sneak up on the dead. I smelled it pretty quick, going down that alleyway. The air was rimed with ice, and stank of dead meat and old blood. Oil, too. I found them in a little alcove off the alley, the entrance boarded up. Someone had kicked the door in. I went back and got Owen and his boys.
The room was filled with about a dozen of the coldmen, all deader than they had started out. Lots of injuries, from severed limbs to ruptured skulls. The wounds were savage. Something an animal might have done, or a madman. Someone had put a blade into their chests and smashed that glass and leather piston. It was that old air I could smell, air that tasted like the breath of tombs.
"Lot of 'em," Owen said. "And well done for. Your tattooed friends might be on our side."
"Or against these guys. Which might be the same thing. Or it might not." I kicked through the corpses and their shattered weapons. "What's this look like to you?" I asked, toeing a complicated metal box.
"Some kind of communications rig," Owen answered. He knelt down next to it and fiddled with a few dials. The top folded out into some kind of array, orbits of metal and wire telescoping open like a mobile. "Not too different from ours. Don't see any input or output jacks, though. Like it's a receiver with no speakers."
He folded the box away and got two of his boys to take it back to the wagon. One of the whiteshirts was in the alley, spinning up the Justicar's rig to call in a team to cart off the bodies, when the ground began to rumble. We all knelt down and looked up.
The makeshift room was open to the sky, hidden only by a collection of pipes and other business from the surrounding buildings. I hadn't given it much of a look when we got there, distracted as I was by the carnage and the stink. Now that rumbling grew into a roar and the sky was blocked out completely as something rushed over our heads.
The monotrain. We were tucked away just under some of the elevated tracks, our teeth rattling as the train went past. When it was gone I looked at Owen and jerked my chin up.
"Which circle was that?"
"Must have been the Hamilton Stone," he answered. "You were on the Pershing when you were attacked."
"They meet up," I said. "Those circles intersect, north of here."
"Yeah."
There was some junk in the alleyway, crates and an old discarded manifold. I dragged those into the room and piled them up, then clambered to the level of the tracks.
"You really shouldn't do that," Owen said.
"You'll make a great mom someday." I pulled myself onto the tracks and squinted around.
As with all buildings in the city, the surrounding structures had an open framework at the level of the train. It wasn't necessary, as the impellor could go right through them, but people didn't like living in the constant surge of those engines, and why build walls if you don't have to? I felt that surge now, my bones vibrating as it pulsed through me. There, between the iron grid of the open buildings, far away at the center of this particular monotrack orbit, I could see the impellor tower, shimmering sickly in the moonlight.
"They were waiting," I said. "Waiting for us to come by."
"How could they know you were coming this way?"
I looked over at Owen. He had clambered up beside me, his hands white on the railing at the edge of the tracks.
I smiled. "You really shouldn't be up here," I said.
"Gods help me if I implied you would make a good mother someday. Gods in heaven help me."
"They couldn't know. Whether they were waiting for us to come by the boulevard, or ride by on these tracks." I shook my head. "They just couldn't know."
"Unless someone told them. Someone who knew where you were going and how best you might get there."
"Someone from the Library? Maybe. But we didn't come this way, even though we planned to. And they still found us."
"Not this batch, though." Owen looked down at the mess of bodies, and his nervous patrolmen trying to organize them. "But another. Which means they could have been watching multiple routes."
"Which means we'll find other groups like this, watching other tracks?"
Owen looked thoughtful, twisting to peer along the track and around at the city. "Maybe. Maybe if we make a map of other paths you could have taken. I've had enough fun up here, for now."
He climbed down, leaving me alone with the periodic pulsing of the distant impellor. The rails began to rumble again, and I sighed and followed him down. The train came by a minute later, but I barely heard the roar.
* * *
This is how I usually spend my nights when I spend them with men. We crawled through alleyways, we rumbled down boulevards, we stopped monotrains so we could walk on the tracks and poke through alcoves and cringe when the impellor's invisible surge washed through our bones. It was filthy.