Chapter 48 - The Price of Lead

The floor of the valve chamber was submerged under three inches of muddy water, mottled with oil slicks that reflected the gray light bleeding down from the access hatch above.

Dante remained motionless on the bottom rung of the iron ladder, arms raised to his chest, palms open and empty. He made no sudden moves toward his belt pouch or the chalk kit at his hip.

Ten feet away, Miro's sharpened rebar stayed leveled dead at his throat.

The youth's hand trembled with fever, setting the rusted iron tip wavering in small circles through the cellar's humid air. Beneath the crooked bandages wrapping his face, his breath hitched short, hot, and thick with the rattling wheeze of someone whose lungs were inflamed from breathing cold ditch water.

"You take me for an idiot?" Miro's voice came out in a shredded hiss, his chitin mandibles grinding against the soiled gauze. "Nobody pays back a debt for a rifle shot. Nobody climbs down a rathole like this to hand coin to the guy who tried to blow his head off."

"I am not nobody, Miro," Dante said with his usual detached calm, keeping his hands raised. "I'm the guy you shot at. And I balance my accounts."

He took half a step forward, clearing the bottom rung to plant his rubber soles in the shallow water.

The iron bar jabbed forward four inches.

"Hold right there!"

Dante halted. Reaching out with his right arm in an unhurried, deliberate motion, he set the thick manila envelope across the curve of a cold steam pipe running between them, two feet off the flooded deck.

Beside the envelope, he used his left hand to draw the yellowed Legion patrol chart from his pocket, laying it flat atop the rusted metal.

"Sixty ten-scrip notes bearing the Central Bank's purple seal," Dante said, gesturing toward the envelope with his chin. "Six hundred scrip in total. That's the exact sum Krell paid me for your three tins of fifty-caliber cartridges back on alley four in Low Ember. The munitions have already been melted down or sold off, so you get the clean cash value of the haul."

Miro didn't reach for the paper. His four dark, multifaceted eyes remained locked onto Dante's face, flicking between the youth's gray irises and the circular hatch framed in the ceiling above.

"Where's the big girl with the cleaver?" he rasped, bone clicking against bone in his fractured jaw. "She crouching up there waiting for me to lower the iron so she can drop on my skull?"

"Maria is holding the hatch, watching the street," Dante answered evenly. "If we wanted your neck, she would have cleaved your spine in two with that forty-pound slab back on Crane Four while you were out cold on the grating. She took you down with a bare left cross pulled short of Mana specifically to knock you out without caving in your cranium."

Miro swallowed dry, the friction searing the raw flesh inside his mouth.

"Why leave me breathing, then?"

"Because you aren't Legion infantry, and you carry no guild contract on our heads," Dante took half a step sideways, resting his hip against the iron manifold to take the weight off his legs. "And because you know who the men in the white jackets are."

The title struck the damp silence of the cellar like an electric arc.

The chitin mandibles beneath Miro's bandages clamped shut in an instant. The gloved hand holding the sharpened bar lost its rigid grip for a beat, the iron point dipping toward the standing water.

The fever and exhaustion finally demanded their price from the youth's battered frame.

His knees buckled, and Miro slid down the casing of the steam pipe until he collapsed onto the heap of greasy burlap in the shadowed corner, venting a long groan that collapsed into a violent, hacking cough.

The iron bar slipped from his fingers, splashing flat into the shallow pool with a dull clatter.

Dante did not close in on him.

Reaching into his canvas duster with slow, telegraphed movements, he retrieved a small amber glass jar with a threaded brass lid, along with two paper-wrapped parcels he had taken from the townhouse pantry before setting out.

He set the jar and the food parcels onto the pipe, right beside the envelope of scrip.

"Use that salve," Dante said, nodding toward the jar. "Pure salamander tallow, sourced from hunter supply. That rancid grease the blind apothecary sold you on the corner is packed with iron sulfate, it'll only fester the lacerations and pool pus into your cartilage."

Miro stayed pinned against the brick corner, head hanging low, all four dark lenses fixed on the rations and medicine laid out across the iron line.

"Why are you doing this?" his voice came out thin, stripped of its earlier venom. "You carry official Legion medallions around your necks. You wield custom-forged steel and carry heavy purses. People with coin in this empire spit on the trash crawling through Canal Five."

"Those lead medallions are forged," Dante answered bluntly. "Bought them off Goran in the back of a Low Ember tavern for three thousand scrip apiece. We aren't Legion, and we don't belong to this continent."

He took a step closer, stopping three feet from the fallen youth.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"And we wear a leash around our necks as well, Miro."

The marksman lifted his dark eyes slowly, staring at Dante through the gaps in his bandages.

"What?"

"The man in the white jacket," Dante murmured, ensuring his words stayed beneath the acoustics of the vertical shaft. "The same one you saw in that bunker when you were seven. He stepped into Maria's room when she was nine years old and bound the Sentinel class to her soul with a snap of his fingers. He tracks us. Issues quests with multi-month deadlines, drops skill points onto our interfaces, and herds us into active forges to see if our husks crack under the pressure."

Miro reached a gloved hand to his left temple, fingers tracing the circular surgical scar beneath his leather cowl.

"He isn't tracking you..." Miro let out a harsh, dry chuckle that tasted of ash. "...he's fattening livestock for slaughter. That's what they do."

The youth reached out a trembling arm, snatched one of the paper parcels from the pipe, and tore the wrapping open with his teeth.

The scent of fresh malt bread and cold roasted meat cut through the damp cellar air.

Miro did not bother chewing carefully. He crammed half the roll into his mouth at once, working the food strictly on the right side where his jaw wasn't dislocated, swallowing with the savage desperation of someone who hadn't touched solid rations in three days.

He washed it down with a pull of water from a cracked glass jug on the floor, coughed twice to clear his throat, and looked up at Dante with a cold lucidity returning to his multifaceted pupils.

"They don't operate out in the open wards," Miro said, his voice gaining gravelly strength from the food. "You won't find them riding streetcars or buying ale in the Third Ring."

"Where are they based?" Dante asked.

"Containment Sector Zero," Miro pointed a thumb upward, indicating the center of the city. "Six hundred feet beneath the foundations of the Military Citadel, right under the Palace of the Council of Forges. There's a reinforced subterranean rail spur running straight out of the South Classification Yard, but nobody breaches that portal without the white metal seal."

"What kind of seal?"

"A matte silver hexagon with a blind eye etched into the center," Miro wiped breadcrumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. "Even Legion generals snap to attention when a steam carriage bearing that crest clears the central sally port. They run the soul furnaces. They control the energy conduits that keep this entire metropolis from collapsing."

He looked toward the manila envelope holding six hundred scrip still resting on the pipe.

Reaching out slowly, he pulled the packet to his chest and slid it into the torn lining of his leather duster, feeling the bulk of the notes settle against his ribs.

"I came to the Capital because rumor said other discards had carved out dens inside the drainage conduits of Canal Five," Miro went on, unthreading the brass cap of the salamander salve with trembling fingers. "Survivors who lived through the old trials and crawled out of the scrap pits before getting burned down to slag. I thought I might find something to strip these plates off my jaw."

He looked down at his own knuckles, where his chitin talons rested sheathed beneath the skin.

"There's no cure for it, though. What they brand into your soul stays there."

Dante watched as the youth worked a generous layer of green ointment over the lacerated cheek and around the inflamed joints of his broken mandible. The compound began to sizzle on contact with the raw tissue, venting a thin vapor that visibly drew the swelling from the flesh within seconds.

"We have a safehouse," Dante said, straightening his duster. "Townhouse forty-two in the Boilermakers' Village. Dark basalt masonry, walled courtyard, workshop on the ground floor."

Miro paused with his fingertips coated in salve, eyeing Dante with fresh suspicion.

"Offering me a bunk, smoke boy?"

"I'm offering a tactical option," Dante answered with the detachment of an actuary presenting terms. "Stay sleeping in this sewage with a fever in your blood, and you die of a lung infection before the week is out. Let the Legion catch you with your face torn open like that, and you end up dumped into a salvage furnace."

He stepped back, resting his boot on the first rung of the iron ladder.

"If you need dry timber to let that jaw knit, or if you log any movement of steam carriages bearing the blind eye leaving the Military Citadel, strike the workshop gate after eight at night. Three short raps, two long. Maria won't take your head off if you walk in through the front."

Miro sat in silence for five full seconds, staring at the pale youth beginning his ascent toward the opening above.

He did not say thank you. He pledged no loyalty, and he didn't smile.

He simply slid the patrol map into his pocket, took up the second parcel of bread and meat in his gloved hand, and hauled his legs onto the pile of dry burlap to keep his boots clear of the standing water.

"If I spot movement out of that sector..." Miro muttered from behind his freshly dressed bandages, his tone carrying the cold finality of an unspoken mutual pact. "...I'll leave four scratches on the iron gate down your lane. Don't come looking for me down here again, though. I don't like people sniffing my trail."

"Deal."

Dante climbed the remaining iron rungs, shoved the heavy cast-iron maintenance hatch aside, and emerged into the gray daylight of the overgrown substation lot.

The street air was brisk, the soot drizzle falling steady across the collapsed roof tiles of the brick building.

Maria stood beside the masonry collar, greatsword sheathed across her back, hands shoved into her leather jacket pockets, scanning the alley of Canal Five with relentless vigilance.

She watched Dante clear the opening, noting that his duster was unmarred and his hands bore no fresh blood.

"Well?" she asked in a low murmur.

"He took the coin and the rations," Dante replied, kicking the heavy cast-iron lid halfway back over the collar with his heel. "And he's applying the salamander salve to his jaw."

"Did he give us anything useful?"

"He did," Dante began walking down the black dirt lane toward the main thoroughfare. "Their facility sits six hundred feet beneath the Military Citadel. The sector is designated Containment Zero, and their sigil is a blind eye set within a silver hexagon."

Maria matched his stride, her heavy boots crunching rhythmically into the ballast gravel.

The girl let out a long breath, pulling her collar snug against the damp morning wind.

"At least now we know where the bastards nest," she said, her brown eyes tracking the colossal smokestacks ruling the center of the Capital. "Let's head back to the house, Dante. We have plenty of levels to grind before we go knocking on the door to that pit."

They left the mud of Canal Five behind, walking side by side toward the basalt walls of the Boilermakers' Village, as the map of this subterranean empire began to shed the shadows that had kept it buried for so long.