Chapter Text
I bought the same sandwich twice.
The man at the counter knew. I knew the man at the counter knew. He wrapped it the same way, same paper, same fold at the corner, and he said "back again?" and I said "different sandwich" and he didn't push it and I didn't explain it and the sandwich was pork and pickled cabbage and a sauce I still don't know the name of and I licked my fingers after and then looked at my hand like — why did I do that. In public. Like some Rat with no manners.
I put my hand in my pocket. Nobody saw. Probably.
That was noon. It's not noon anymore. I've been here — wherever here is, some residential stretch of District 13 I don't have any reason to be in — I've been here for a while. The sun moved. The shops closed. The laundry came in from the lines between the windows. I walked past the sandwich place eleven more times after that and the man stopped looking up after the fifth.
I don't live here. My contract is in District 22. I should be in District 22.
I'm sitting on a bench looking at a tree that is not a good tree. It's in a concrete pot and it's lopsided and its leaves are doing the wrong color and I've been looking at it for — long enough that my cigarette went out and I didn't notice the cigarette going out, which has never happened. I always notice. Smoking is the one thing I do right every time. The reach, the flick, the drag. The only ritual I have that works the same way every time without anyone ruining it.
I take the dead cigarette out of my mouth. I look at it. I put it back. I don't light it.
Something is wrong with today.
Not bad-wrong. The other kind. The kind where you wake up and the noise that's always in your jaw — the hum, the one that says *something is coming, be ready, something is always coming* — the noise is quiet. Not off. Quiet. Like someone found the dial and turned it down and I don't know who has their hand on the dial because it's not my hand.
The sword is warm on my back.
It's always warm. It's a living thing, it has a temperature, this is not new information. But today warm means something different from what warm usually means. Usually warm means: operational, ready, alive. Today warm means —
I reach behind me and touch the flat of it through my coat. The flesh gives slightly under my fingers. The eyes — I can't see them from this angle but I can feel them — the eyes do something. A shift. Like when a dog puts its chin down on your leg and closes its eyes. Not sleeping. Just — settled.
The sword is settled.
We are in a district full of strangers and the sword is settled. This does not happen. Not outside the apartment. Not anywhere that isn't locked and checked and confirmed empty. The sword is settled and my jaw is quiet and I bought the same sandwich twice and I am looking at a bad tree and I don't want to leave.
I should want to leave. The contract. District 22. The thing I'm supposed to be doing.
I don't get up.
---
At 4 PM I eat rice and egg from a street vendor. There's a man on the other end of the bench. He sees the sword and leaves. He leaves his food. I eat it. It's still warm. The vendor gives me a look. I give the vendor a look. The vendor goes back inside.
At 5:30 I find an alley that's empty enough and I feed the sword.
I hold it out in front of me and take the second sandwich out of my bag — the one I bought for this, I bought it for this, that's the reason, that's the only reason I bought a second one — and I hold it near the largest mouth and the mouth opens. Small teeth. Dense. Efficient. The bread and the pork and the pickled cabbage go in and the flesh ripples as it works and the eyes — all of them, the scattered wet lenses — the eyes half-close.
If you didn't know what you were looking at you would say the sword looks content.
I know what I'm looking at and I would still say the sword looks content.
Someone walks past the alley. Glances in. Sees me holding a red, fleshy, many-mouthed weapon that is eating a sandwich. Walks faster. I don't care.
"Good?" I ask.
The sword doesn't talk. It has never talked. But the eyes do a thing — a slow blink, a re-focusing, the wet lenses catching the light and giving it back warmer than it went in. I have carried this sword since I was six years old and this blink means: yes. Good. More.
I don't have more. I ate the other one.
I put the sword back. It settles into the groove it's made in my spine over — however long. All of it. My whole life. The warmth spreads through the muscle along my back and into my ribs and I stand in the alley and I think:
*I don't want to leave yet.*
I don't examine this. You don't take apart an engine that runs.
---
It's dark now.
The residential streets at night sound like: televisions through thin walls, plumbing, a dog three blocks over doing its last bark of the evening. I am the only thing on the street making noise and the noise is my boots on cracked pavement, left, right, left, right, and I like this sound. I don't usually like sounds. Sounds are usually information — footsteps behind me, weapons being drawn, the particular exhale someone makes before they attack. Sounds are data. I process them and respond.
These sounds are not data. These sounds are just a neighborhood putting itself to bed and I am walking through it and nobody is trying to kill me and nobody needs me to kill anything and the sword is warm and my boots are making a sound I like and the cigarette is in my mouth and it is not lit and I have stopped caring that it is not lit.
I pass a window. Through the gap in the curtain a man is eating noodles from a pot. Alone. Not watching anything. Not talking to anyone. Just eating. His face is the face of a person doing something they have done a thousand times and will do a thousand more times and the doing is neither good nor bad it is just — his. His noodles. His pot. His window. His night.
I watch him for a few seconds. I keep walking.
I have eaten every meal of my life alone. This is — I don't think about this. This is like the foundation of a building. You don't look at it. It's under everything. It holds everything up. If you looked at it you would have to think about what happens if it cracks and I don't think about what happens if it cracks.
The sword shifts on my back. Warm.
---
Midnight.
I'm on the bench again. The bad tree is still there. The lopsided leaves are moving slightly in a wind I can barely feel. I am watching the leaves move and I am not thinking about anything and the not-thinking-about-anything is so unfamiliar that it is itself a sensation. Like putting your hand in water that is exactly body temperature — you can't tell where your skin ends and the water starts and the ambiguity is —
Is —
I take out the cigarette. The filter is damp and compressed. I've been chewing it for hours.
*Get up. Go to District 22. Do the contract.*
I don't get up.
*You've been sitting on benches and feeding your sword sandwiches and looking at a bad tree all day. What are you doing.*
I don't get up.
There's something here. In this district. Something I can't — I don't know what it is. It's not a threat. Threats feel like the hum in my jaw and the jaw is quiet. It's not a contract. Contracts feel like obligation and I feel no obligation. It's the thing that made me buy the same sandwich twice and sit on a bench for twenty minutes looking at a tree that isn't even a good tree and feed my sword in an alley and walk past the same shop eleven times and refuse to leave.
It's the thing that turned the dial down on the hum.
I get up. I keep walking. The sword is warm. The cigarette is not lit.
I will find it or it will find me. One of those. Both of those. Same thing.
---
2:47 AM.
Voices in an alley. Male. Three. The particular pitch that means: men who think they are the biggest thing in the room. I have heard this pitch every day of my life since I learned what it meant and it was never true then and it is not true now and it will never be true in any room I am standing in.
I walk into the alley. Lean against the wall. Cross my arms. The men are at the far end, facing away from me, facing someone I can't see. I could handle this without uncrossing my arms.
I don't.
Because there are footsteps from the other end.
Someone else walking in. My head turns before I decide to turn it.
Short. Much shorter than me. Carrying a sword that sits wrong on his hip — too long, balanced for someone taller, tapping with each step at a rhythm that belongs to a different body. He is walking toward the voices and his hand is already on the hilt and his walk is —
I tilt my head.
His walk doesn't match. The walk is bigger than the body. Older. More certain. Like he's wearing someone else's confidence and it fits everywhere except the shoulders.
He opens his mouth.
"Hey, guys, I dunno if the woman said no, but I think you should quit it either way."
His voice is — lighter than the walk. The walk says: I have done this before and I will do it again and it doesn't bother me. The voice says: this is kind of funny actually. The two of them are coming from the same person and they shouldn't work together and they do and they don't and I —
He moves.
Two of them. Four seconds. Fast, precise, and the technique is — I lean forward slightly off the wall — the technique is translated. That's the word. He learned this from someone else. Someone taller, someone with a wider stance, and he is running their movement through his body and the translation has artifacts, little stutters where his proportions don't match the original, and the artifacts make him —
The third one turns toward me. I handle it. Quick. Nothing. My hands are wet after. I wipe them on my coat.
I step into the light.
He's looking at me. Up — he has to look up — and his eyes go wide for less than a second. Less than a second. And then they don't.
That's —
I have walked into rooms and had people look at me and their eyes go wide and STAY wide. Soldiers. Fixers. Grade 1s who have killed things I haven't. Their eyes go wide and they keep looking and the wideness is fear and the fear is correct because I am the thing that makes the fear correct. Everyone's eyes go wide and stay wide.
His went wide and then went normal. Not forced-normal. Not performing-calm. Just — normal. Like his face got the memo and then immediately filed it and moved on.
He is standing over two bodies he just made and his face is the face of a man who has been asked what time it is.
I grin. The grin is what I do when I don't know what my face should be doing. It's the default. The screensaver. "Not unless I can handle myself, right?"
He looks at me. My height. My sword. My everything. He takes all of it in and his face processes all of it and I watch his face process all of it and the processing takes about one second and then his face is done processing and the result is:
"Well, with all due respect... You'd be a dragon in shining armor, miss."
I laugh.
I —
I don't — this isn't —
It comes out of somewhere behind my ribs. Not my throat — deeper, lower, from the place where the hum lives, except the hum isn't there right now, and the empty space where the hum was has apparently been storing something else, and the something else just — came out. As a laugh. An ugly, short, startled sound that tips my head back and opens my throat and for the duration of the sound I am not the Red Mist. I am not a Color Fixer. I am not the thing that makes other things afraid. I am just a woman in an alley who got called a dragon by a man who is a foot shorter than her and who meant it the way you mean things you say before you think about whether to say them.
The laugh stops. I am looking at him. He is looking at me.
He is not afraid of me.
I have met every kind of person the City makes. I have met people who hate me and people who worship me and people who want to use me and people who want to fuck me and people who want to kill me. All of them were afraid of me. Every single one. The ones who hated me were afraid. The ones who worshipped me were afraid. The ones who wanted to fuck me were the most afraid of all.
He is not afraid of me.
The sword is so warm it's almost vibrating.
I tell him my name. I hold it out the way I held the sandwich out to the sword. Here. I have this. It's mine. Take it if you want.
He tells me his. Vicrul. Grade 7. He tells me the name of his office.
I nod. I file the information somewhere that isn't where I usually file things. Not threat data. Not contract data. A new drawer. I don't know what the drawer is for yet. I put his name in it and his Grade in it and his office name in it and the sound of his voice saying "dragon" in it and the way his eyes went wide and then went normal in it.
I say goodnight. I turn around. I walk to the end of the alley.
My feet stop.
I am standing at the mouth of the alley and my feet will not take the next step. District 22 is west. My feet are facing west. My feet are not moving west.
I stand here for — I don't count. I am aware of: the cigarette that is not lit. The sword that is warm. The alley behind me where a man named Vicrul is standing among bodies with a face that won't do what faces are supposed to do. The specific, heavy, physical fact that I do not want to leave this district.
I move. Not west. I turn and walk three blocks in the wrong direction and find the bench and sit down and take out a new cigarette and light it. This one I light. This one I smoke all the way to the filter.
The sword is warm. My heart is slow. The district is quiet.
I sit on the bench until the sky starts changing color. I don't sleep. I'm not tired. I'm waiting for morning so I can find out where Ren's Office is and walk in with a reason that isn't the real reason and the real reason will stay in the new drawer where I put his name. Unnamed. Warm.
I take out another cigarette.
I light this one too.
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