Chapter Text
“Did you get that girl a dog?”
Sevika flung herself onto the brocade sofa and struck a match off her mechanical arm to relight the foul and ever-present cheroot clasped between her teeth.
Silco raised his eyes from the ledger on his desk and said nothing. Best not to encourage these ridiculous notions of hers.
Last week it was the child’s education. Was he, as rumor had it, going to send her across the river to Madame Montresory’s academy for scientifically-minded youngsters? Or maybe the Jannite Sisters’ school on the Promenade would be more her crowd? Either would be well within his means. His second-in-command just wanted the kid out from under everyone’s feet all day, that’s all she was saying.
The thing he appreciated most about Sevika — at least as much as her ruthlessness, her loyalty, or her titanium-backed uppercut — was how few words needed to pass between them. Was he prepared to send Vander’s little bluebird of a daughter from his side for any reason whatsoever? Was he willing to let some flea-bitten overgrown sump-vole trail along in her wake so she could teach it a few tricks before it inevitably expired in a froth-jawed spasm at the foot of her bed?
On both counts: absolutely the fuck not.
Sevika gave a broad shrug and tapped her cheroot into the artfully-vandalized ashtray on his desk.
“Just smells like wet dog in here,” she said with a last moue of disgust. “Production’s finally back at twenty barrels a day. Doc’s talking about expanding.”
“Ambitious, for a man who barely had any skin left six months ago. Tell him to hire an assistant and show him around the southern warehouses.”
One could spend a lifetime mapping the palimpsest of the Undercity’s odors, most of them vile variations on poison and rot. Cordite, ozone, impending rain, fresh blood — these were the only ones he paid attention to anymore.
She wasn’t wrong, though.
Perhaps Vander had once kept a hound of his own, and now its putrid essence was seeping out of the bones of the Last Drop, summoned forth by some spell of heat, humidity and chemical haze. A sheepdog for Vander's little herd; he could see it now. Some mangy, rheumy-eyed, bow-legged old soldier from the fighting pits, jowls exuding drool into the unvarnished floorboards, growling at passers-by while his gaggle of orphans rattled through the lanes, its bark giving them something to hide behind before the knives came out. It was the sort of thing he’d do.
“And tell Ran to have a word with the laundry across the alley.”
Sevika turned in the doorway, eyebrows raised.
“Wet dog?” He reminded her.
“Right.”