Past a certain point in size, all cities have the same night sky. Mexico City, Memphis, Dallas, Cartagena and Carthage, on past Uruk to Enoch: a sky like worried bronze. Tonight it's the colour of water, not too clean, collected in a smoked-glass beer bottle. Planes and satellites swim up there. Earth's orbit is a landfill, deep and deepening. Other than that, out past that, the stars stay hidden. (Of course they do. Wouldn't you?) A curtain gone restless in the wind, the horizon ripples along its whole length till the Heights cut it off. No sea, no stars, no smoke in that quarter of the sky — the city looms up, solid black and birdshot full of lights.
Upturned eyes and pupils gaping, lips a little parted, top front teeth not quite flush, Silk sprawls beneath it all. From the flaking roof of a traincar, warmth seeps up and into them: bare skin, thin cloth, rust, remembering the sun. Perhaps that’s it – that, or some wrongness particular to Silk – but their body makes a shape like a bird broken against a closed kitchen window, and makes it look like perfect comfort.
Half the state's on fire. For now, from here, it's just a tang the wind carries when it blows from the north. Otherwise the city smells the same. (Salt rises off the ocean. Fruit goes to garbage, devilled with flies. Weeds hustle in the dry dirt; their roots pry through the railyard clinker, spreading in hope of a summer storm.) Second week since the wildfires started; tonight, you could almost forget it.
The railyard is ancient. Like bougainvillea it starts as a tangle, clotted here on the city's side, sending creepers out south and east; like a relic, it shows both the past and the slow rot of its erasure. (José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori united Mexico behind the rallying cry, No Reelection, then remained president for seven terms. President-General. Great friend to America. Order and Progress. Under his orders, Mexican water progressed along new systems of irrigation to feed cashcrops, which progressed north with Mexican minerals on railroads built with American dollars, so the fruit and tobacco, sugar and silver, copper and crude black oil could be bought in America for American cents, in places like this.) Even in the times that built it, the railyard was a disappointment: finished too late to be useful enough for long enough to make the dollars and years spent pay their way. The tracks go nowhere, carrying nothing, out into the almost-desert beyond Las Alturas.
Other uses have found it since.
Muffled by metal, resonating in the steel overheads and the long-silent signal towers, voices swarm in the night. Awake in their tape-patched sleepingbags, the quiet homeless share this place with teenagers in workwear and fishnets, glitter and nonchalance and slouched cotton, breathless polyester, sweat that Silk can't read. (This year, the really cool ones affect glycerin teartracks: lines of shine that corner their eyes and partition their cheeks.)
In the bright busy space of Silk's inattention, they talk over each other. Two lovers chase each other round the whispering circle of a quarrel; a circle of mumbling boys pass round what's, apparently, a badly made blunt. Neither group knows the other's there. They come here to be their secret selves. (Secret, but not entirely.) Music seeps from a half-dozen different sets of phonespeakers; the songs overlap like a panic attack, building itself to break.
It's been this way for years, long before Silk's time or theirs.
Graffiti marks time like the rings in a tree. BADman Hours / KAYLEE'S HEAD / everymorning i wake up witha pain inmy THROAT / CREECH-A™ / Kino+Paul / FUCK beastmode i dOnt wanna be this type animal anymore. Paintpens, permanent marker, greasy lipstick, spraypaint, the railyard's secret history is written on its walls: a second city of obituaries, the lost and found, the come and gone, promises, pride, and shame. Kids who grew up, kids who didn't. The names of the missing blaze bright, then fade. There are more than seems right if you don't know why.
Redrook has laid claim to this place as long as anyone remembers. (Deals have been cut with those that remember different. Those that wouldn't deal were dealt with.) There are rules that come with that – a second secret history, for a third secret city – and if Redrook had an ivory tower up her ass, those rules would have numbers, names, marbleclad precedent, and believe in them or not, they'd be harder to break. But she doesn't. (Gives it a suck sometimes, sure, but she works hard not to let it fuck her.) This isn't Chicago or Seattle, or even reclaimed and retamed turf like New York, Atlanta — or Mexico City. Lights fly south out of LAX, thrown like a fistful of change. This is Las Alturas: there are no rules here, only results.
There's a space – improbably large, impossibly small; unhere and everywhere, like Hell – between the ceiling of Silk’s stomach and the floor of their ribcage. That's where it lives: the thing that is and isn't Silk. It digs and scrabbles, but not to escape. It roots itself deeper, warmer; wants safety, and to be sated; will beg, scream, and bite for it. Sometimes, wanting what it wants, wanting what's best, it claws its way to the surface of Silk, till they feel its throat in their throat and taste its tongue on their tongue. Sometimes, Silk lets it.
It wakes to a muffled rattling. The sound is light and plastic, loose and confined – a handful of dice, ready to roll; shotgun shells in a pants pocket – set against running feet. Awareness lights like a mosquito on the lip of Silk's mind. The pattern breaks open. The thing that lives in their stomach swells and stretches, throws itself against their diaphragm, pummels their lungs: an almost-cough, a ragged sigh, a gasp that flips Silk onto their side, their knees, their fingers and palms and feet. A spiderlike scrabble, then they remember how to run. An all-out sprint, lurching and low, then they remember they can't take their prey yet, only find and follow — they settle into a loping jog.
Silk doesn't look unlike the kids who play here, at least at a glance, in the dark. Short bomber the colours of an ice cream sundae, and a texture that shimmers like oil ready to fry in; under that, a buttermilk hooded sweater is cropped to the start of their ribcage. Workout tights in mistreated black; danger-yellow cargo shorts, with panniers laid over the pockets, like something an electrician might wear. Boots. Silk smells like them too: scrubbed clean, then fumigated in spray-on deodorant, acrid with teen spirit and mouthwash fumes. (A trick of Hawk’s, learnt years ago. A kind of camouflage.) It’s easier to trick a predator's senses than hide from them; easier to hunt a predator if they think they're surrounded by prey.
Listening, running, a guess takes shape. Whoever it is, their gait is heavy, steady – running like a man – beating the concrete, then the clinker. He crosses the depot at the railyard's heart, snakes into the maze of cars. (Raised voices: Hey! What the fuck, man? / Run, Forrest, run!) Whoever it is, his footsteps quicken, brute but cushioned like fists striking a weighted bag: thicksoled sneakers? Sound like a spray of water, but stony and sharper, as he corners hard.
Silk, by now, is just a body in motion. (It’s good not to think just for a while.) Their senses hunt ahead of them, a pack of coyotes alongside the running man. (So good.) Letting themself fall, letting the edge of the traincar roof be caught on the way down, Silk slips into a corridor between two hollow freight carriages. It's barely shoulderwide; it forces Silk almost sideways. Even running at a slant, with jumpingjack legs, Silk moves fast and careless as a child playing — a bad dog chasing a rabbit.
Nights run short this time of year. Silk brushes their teeth in a hurry. The cheap plastic brush, sawing like the backleg of a dog with a wound it can't lick but will settle for scratching, is a blur in baby-blue. Letting it in, their mouth snarls around it.
The mirror is polished stainless steel, grimed and watermarked, riveted to the wall. With a key, or a knife, or a three-inch nail, someone has etched a word in its top-right corner: ᴛᴀɴᴛʀᴜᴍ, scratched deep, viciously thorough. (Is this what they did, whoever they were, realising they couldn't smash it? A painstaking and meticulous violence, more like revenge than retaliation.) Below it, the sink wasn't so lucky. Its jaw is broken, sagging from the green-tiled wall. Run the faucet and it would flow like a waterfeature, turn the dirty floor to mud.
Hunched over it, all high sharp shoulders and deep slumped neck, Silk doesn't spit. They open their mouth – an expectant shape now, welcoming, but it stretches their lips thin – and let the whitening, brightening, three-in-one-action, Hard Mint™ foam spill free to wetly coat the drain. Even with the cheap plastic bristles, the cheap plastic brush, the rub-till-it-bleeds fierceness, there's more red in the white than seems normal, possible: pink whorls like peppermint candy. Silk's tongue rubs itself along the roof of their mouth; reaches out, curls, uncurls — the last drops drool from its point.
(You never think about this part until you have to. Lugosi and Lee and Robles, with rust caked between their teeth? You don't consider it. And then they're your teeth. It's good at first. A gushing bliss coating tongue and throat, filling your sobbing belly like it's never been fed. Warm, warmth. It lingers: coats your mouth and gums like honey, like fury, like the pleasure of someone you'd swallow for, every time by choice, like knowing you weren't a mistake, like knowing you're loved by the only God that ever mattered. It remembers, and is itself a memory. A new house, and you like the shade you chose for the walls so much you can't stop looking, can't stop almost-touching — at least while it's wet and the house is empty. Then it dries. You realise you have to live here, not liking what you chose anymore. Then you realise you can't. It cloys between your teeth, tastes of nothing, then tastes bitter, cirrhotic, old. Stuck. A searching, suffering tongue. Silk's met creatures who didn't care. Silk isn't there yet. Shreds of torn skin, strands of shed hair? A retching disgust arches their back.)
Overhead, a caged bulb buzzes, crowded with night insects. Set to a shade and brightness dialled to make things impossible – finding veins, finding sleep – its light is like the bottom of a swimming pool. Its shadows are a cage too. In winged and frantic motion, a moth beats itself to death to get at light it wouldn't know what to do with.
Silk pulls back their lip with a fishhook finger, stretching their cheek to fit it. If they pulled just a little harder they could tear their own face open — their own, or anyone's. In the mirror, two rows of imperfect teeth, imperfectly white, and a gap between the topmost frontmost ones – thin as a disposable razorblade – that once made someone call them conejita. (Sometimes, whoever it was, they'd virgulillate the n to make it suggestive, or make Silk roll their eyes. Silk doesn't remember who. Doesn't recall their face, or the place, or how they felt at the time. It lasted a few months. Did you bear it for money or love, Lalo? Did you like it? While it lasted, did you like it? The past is more than a foreign country; the past is another person whose body they lived in a while.) Silk smiles wide and joyless for the mirror: clean at least, small teeth and wetly glistening between the flushed red, the satisfied gums.
The toothbrush looks bad by comparison: gnawed body, head splayed open.
Leaning liquid-heavy against one wall, Silk lifts a leg, uses the toe of a boot to nudge the toiletseat lid. It shuts with a snap, and one foot perched on its edge. (They're old boots. Older than Silk. The rubber soles are heavy-lugged for purchase on thick sucking mud, or slick floors; a military style, surplus from Vietnam, or some other big-stick tropical mistake. The heavy cotton upper half is flexible and well-fitted – broken in with use, like used to be the point with bluejeans – and acid-washed to a ripple of white and ochre. The leather lower half is buttercup yellow. Through scuffs and gouges in the paint, the brutalised heelcups and steelcap toes, the old off-black leers through.)
The lining of Silk's jacket flashes dull red in the dim bathroom; they pull it off, hard and careless, throw it balled in the cracked sink. Under it, the throat and chest of their hooded sweater are dog-brown with blood. (Stupid. Wear white? Tonight? Stupid!) Silk's arms are violent in its body a moment, pushing and grabbing at the fabric from the inside, someone trying to escape a bodybag. A sharp bend at the waist, head hanging down, and they fight the sweater off, long back, bare now. Their shoulderblades move like something threatening to breach the surface of the water it swims in. Silk lets go the breath they’ve held for too long, and straightens up. The joints of their spine rearticulate: a slick, switchblade sound only they can hear.
Fishing a plastic grocery bag from one pocket, Silk thrashes it open on a catch of air. The stained sweater ends up inside. (Wash it maybe, dye it maybe, fuck it maybe, pinche thing, fuck.) The jacket ends up back on. The shape of Silk's mouth ends up cruel and half-open, all bare lower teeth and upper lip thinned to nothing.
Silk sits down hard on the closed toilet. Their pockets rattle, light and plastic, loose and confined, and they open out their contents: black plastic cannisters, the kind that used to carry film. The seals between their lids and bodies are tamperproofed with a layer of nail polish, precisely magenta, thick enough that it looks like epoxy. It cracks conspicuously when, even with a careful fingernail (mid-length, oval-tipped), Silk pries them open. Each of them is spooled full of data, typewritten onto tickertape: curt phrasing, vigorously precise.
Parslow is moving investment out of the boardwalk. The right to new domain has been suspended; no new territory will be granted or recognised, red or white, de facto or de jure, by the praxis while this edict stands. Chaplain and Verdi have been talking. The CS is opening a lemonade stand, whatever that means. The brood of Harrison Peace have begun to file back into Las Alturas – rats boarding a shipwreck, uncovered by the tide – to pay their respects and choose a successor.
Predators and parasites, on the night's skin and under it, this is how they talk now: analogue and ancient, in ink and paper, calling cards, index cards left in library books and DDC references texted from burner phone to burner phone in the hours between dusk and dawn, ciphers and encryption, and heralds with speeches rote-burnt into their minds. (Silk remembers Reno saying it was all running-dog shit. Reno was mistaken. A year on and every pack in North America was doing the same, but late and imperfectly, while feds in unmarked tactical gear used powers leftover from the War on Drugs and enhanced by the War on Terror to no-knock raid and surveil them into the shadows, the woodwork, scurrying to catch up with what the Tower had already perfected.)
From a brass shell casing, rifle calibre and sealed with a neat twist of blue electrical tape, Silk unravels another length of tape. Squatting up for long enough to lift the toilet lid, they post one of the original messages into the toiletbowl. (They choose at random. It doesn't pay more to second-guess someone else's machinations.) The new message curls identically into the empty cannister like it belongs.
Earlier that night, with a cornered struggle still sweet in the back of their throat, so hot and so right, unhollow at last, Silk took a detour, sideslipping across town. The Greenbox Pharmacy was open like always. Three low aisles of white steel shelves, pills and suppositories for health and wellness, tampons and pads, exfoliating mittens the colour of wet sand, painkillers and cough medicine behind locked glass — tube fixtures lighting it like a hospital drama, bleakly fluorescent, almost blue. Silk leaned against Travel & Men's Grooming, looking at Cosmetics & Women's Health, jacket closed and arms folded over the bloody hooded sweater, and tried to pick out the right shade.
(Will that be all, please? Benjy the nightclerk, never knowing whether to sir Silk or ma'am them, had long ago decided just to end every other sentence on a plea. / That's everything. Silk, smiling. Silk, tongue curling forward, leaning against their lower teeth. Quiet night, no? / Night shift. Benjy, shrugging, apologetic. Benjy, readjusting his cardigan. I like it better this way. / Silk, the small strange piece of occasional custom, buying off-brand cosmetics, buying cheap toothbrushes and once – laughing all the way home – sunscreen, long ago decided to call 'Benjy' by the name he pulled from him once, and not the name on his tag. Amir, you should get out there… Silk, purring. Silk, turning to leave. Silk, with blood between their teeth. Still hasn't stopped surprising them, what people will ignore and overlook from someone they think they know, and might have to see again.)
Something's wrong. The shade is wrong. Silk, with small and steady hands, pinched and pinching fingers, applies a layer of magenta nailpolish to the first cannister's lid, resealing it, and the colour is wrong. The colours clash. Even in the underwater anti-junkie light, they can tell. Silk's eyes close hard. Behind the lids, for a long moment, something teems and twitches. (Anxious fury. Frustration like wasps building a nest in them.) Silk grabs one leg, folds it under themself, ankle tucked under its opposite knee. Unclear what part of Silk hits what part of the bathroom, but something, somewhere, slams: a high, tight strike. Their whole body slouches over the next cannister, face inches from the glistening paint, like attention could change it. (The press, the crook of Silk's regard… Special eyes? Qué chafa.)
When they blow on the paint to dry it faster – short nights this time of year – their breath is fast: in-hiss, out-hissing. It doesn't know when to stop. Their lungs beat, turned to handmade paper by disuse, against the inside of their ribcage, till exhaustion kills the struggle. The taste of smoke lingers, sucked in and stuck.
Out in the shrinking night, the public restroom falls behind them. (Land of the free, Silk thinks. Home of the brave, but not, it seems, of public bathroom facilities. Still hasn't stopped surprising Silk, how rare they are here, outside of coin-operated cubicles shoved up the afterthought ass of a filling station. This one's something rare, worth the detour: a rank miracle, secluded, dug in like a burial tumulus beneath the turf of an artificial hill.) The botanical gardens climb in faint city darkness from midtown halfway to the Heights. Cool air, cool ground; the summer-blonde grass tries to breathe. The dark nave of a long greenhouse drags its steepled back uphill, belly full of orchids, bodhi trees, roots that drink mist and leaves that hang like soaked wet hair. Silk slopes downhill. Pounding a stick of gum between their backteeth, their wake smells redly, sweetly of cinnamon.
Earlier that night, somewhere between railyard and boardwalk, where what used to be factories have metastasised into fulfilment centers and server farms, Silk lost their prey. It wasn't by design. (The animal behind their eyes doesn't make plans, doesn't play tricks. Only wants what it wants. Never learnt to wait.) It wasn't for long. Just long enough that, in the maze of alleys and loading bays, thick cinderblock walls housing darkness and blinking lights, steel roofs hot from within, the courier stopped running. Hid instead. Silk heard his panting breath…
(Taste of a strobe light, a bruising brightness behind your eyes, black glare inside your skull. Acetone taste of adrenaline, a hot steel shape in the mind. Black pepper and battery acid, cats arguing in the night, and under that something slower and headier…)
Just a thrall, maybe, but the courier had been fed recently enough that his heart's last throbs tasted different: a borrowed sweet-stale something, near-black chocolate and potpourri. That faint first taste of Redrook lingered in him, and lingers in Silk's body now: a secret, a first hit.
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