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sidewaysTitle: Recovered
Rating: PG 13+
Series: Red Vs Blue (Washington, York, Wyoming) / His Dark Materials
Wordcount: 3770
Summary: A re-telling of the first episode of Recovery One, as set in the His Dark Materials universe.
Remarks: Every HDM fan has to write a crossover for their other fandoms, right? I actually had a lot of fun doing this. For record's sake: Washington, bat-eared fox; York, northern mockingbird; Wyoming / Gannett, emperor tamarin.
Washington and his dæmon moved quietly along the street, keeping to the shadows cast by the dimmed streetlamps. They had left the automobile parked several blocks down—such a vehicle would only draw unwanted attention in an area like this, where shutters hung loose on their pins and soft naphtha was the only source of light.
It was Seldona who first realised something was wrong. The broad, bat-like ears lifted for a moment and then just as abruptly flattened, and she dropped into a low skulk that had Wash freezing, pressing back against cold brickwork. He waited, both hands wrapped firmly around the grip of his revolver, as his fox-dæmon prowled the last few steps towards the door, nosing at the chilled air. After a moment she glanced back at him. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
The door swung inward with little resistance when he pressed his hand against it, the jagged splinters around the latch standing testament to its last, less gentle opening. It only swung halfway, however, and when he eased himself through the gap, Sel alert and bristling at his heels, he soon found the reason why—the man slumped behind it would not be rising to make himself less of an inconvenience with the neat pair of bullet wounds in his chest.
“Damn,” he said, and then, turning his head to catch sight of another leg crooked around the doorway into the room to their left, “Damn it.”
“Hush,” Sel said. She tilted her head to the side, ears swivelling.
He took a moment to listen as well, pairing his senses with her sharper ones. The house was still now, silent save for the soft sound of their own breathing, but it wouldn’t have been so earlier. Wash trailed his eyes across what he could see from the doorway. His doorstop might have been trying to make a retreat—but no, the way the dead man faced and the way he had fallen said he simply hadn’t made it far into the house to begin with. Their target had been prepared.
Seldona had started moving again, satisfied that they were, in effect, alone and he followed as she made a straight line for the spindly stairs leading to the top floor, pausing only to rub his fingers across a round hole in the wallpaper. With roughshod dwellings jammed so closely together there was no chance the battle had gone unnoticed, but he couldn’t gauge how soon the police would be drawn to the site. It was unlikely the locals would invite them.
Two doors lined a short hallway that ended with another body sprawled facedown upon the floor, presenting them with three equally unwelcome choices, and he nudged the first one open with the barrel of his revolver while Sel slipped towards the second room, a low-slung grey shadow. His was a bathroom, cramped but clean, and untouched by the vicious skirmish that had scarred the rest of the townhouse. Hers—it came to him in quick, clear snapshots, a silent transferral they’d taken pains to perfect—was a bedroom, stale musk overwritten by the fresher scent of blood. The source of both was one final corpse.
This one had a more familiar bearing than all the rest, though, and Washington felt her flinch as a twist in his heart. In two quick strides he was by her side, casting the hallway body a cursory glance that took in dark hair and arm folded awkwardly beneath. The only man, it seemed, to have made it this far, but one had been enough to set the scene awaiting his attention and he stepped through the doorway with his lips pressed together in tired regret.
That York was dead, there was no question. It wasn’t just the wounds, though the faint light from out the half-curtained window made clear the glistening soak that stained his left side. He was motionless, slumped quiet between the nightstand and the wall; no cocked head to angle his good eye, no expansive gestures to accompany a ribald joke, and most of all no sleek feathered form to dart across the room, alighting on other perches only momentarily before returning to her soul-bound place upon his shoulder, long tail flicking in a subtle mockingbird laugh.
“Fatch,” Seldona said; no call of denial, just simple sorrow.
“How long?” he said, ignoring her. “An hour, do you think?”
The look she shot him was reproachful, but she said, “Less. Much less. We’d probably have heard the last of it if we were ten minutes sooner.”
“Damn it,” he muttered. Sel was already moving to take her position at his back, having deemed the bare underside of the bed empty of threats, so he holstered his revolver as he dropped down on one knee. York had been wearing a short-cut coat the night men came to kill him, and Wash carefully lifted the left side away to confirm what he already knew: two shots to the upper chest, not quick enough to be painless but centred enough to be sure.
“This wasn’t the Magisterium,” he said, and Seldona turned an ear back towards him.
“Not anymore,” was all she said in response.
Loud and public or soft and deniable; those were the Church’s methods. Not this muddle of stormed entry, scattered bodies, and precision shooting at the very last. He would know.
Wash let the coat fall back closed and glanced around the room, biting down on the brewing frustration with the same cold determination that kept his dæmon motionless in her watchful crouch. To have come within ten minutes of, if not victory, then at least progress…it ached. The censors had looked so closely at him for signs of reluctance or distress when they had given their orders, when they had given him York’s name and the location, and had never thought for a moment that what they should have been looking for was hope.
If only he had locked it away further still, beyond the grasp of whatever force it was that so enjoyed denying him.
“Hush,” Sel said, but gentler.
He let out a slow breath and looked around the room again, but more purposefully, as he should have done on the first sweep. There was little that stood out about the resting place that had become York’s last. Sparse, cold, dirty; he could see only a few personal touches in the shape of a shirt slung over a chair and the porcelain mug that still sat whole upon the nightstand. Wash counted a single window, a single door, and a difficult angle down the hallway.
“He retreated here,” he said. “He had them at the door but he retreated here.”
“Maybe he didn’t have them at the door.”
“Or maybe he only thought he had them at the door,” he countered. “That’s not the point.”
“By all means, make it.”
He pushed himself upright. The single sheet on the bed was tossed back, but it seemed the result of daily living more than the callous carelessness of a search. He hadn’t scoped the house in full, so there could easily be signs he had missed, but here, in this room, he saw nothing to suggest foreign hands had had the chance to turn it over.
Sel followed his movements with her nose and a growing understanding as he flipped the pillow; his sharp word sent her back to her watch, but he could still feel her focus divided. There was little to do but disregard it as he felt along and under the mattress, seeking a bulge, seeking an edge, seeking a slit in the fabric through which something could be slipped—seeking what a man like York had to hide.
The bed yielded nothing, though, and Wash moved to the nightstand without allowing himself time to pause and doubt. The three set drawers bore a few more fragments of the life that had existed within these walls, and he rifled through them with no greater care than he’d taken with the bed, sifting methodically through roughly folded clothing and other oddments. An envelope filled with loose coins and bound with a cauchuc band. A silver lighter. A pair of gilded cufflinks, of all things; perhaps a patient promise for finery deserving of them but more likely an investment.
The drawers themselves were solid wood, and a few quick measurements dashed any anticipation of hidden bottoms or compartments.
“In his coat?” Sel suggested with audible distaste.
He shook his head, though not in refusal—his assessment of the body hadn’t been so thorough as to be final and something may well have been tucked away at his back, but he suspected he’d find little but bank notes and the pouch the man had barely slept without.
A thought sparked.
The bottom drawer was open at his knees and reluctant to go any further due to some in-built catch, but at inspiration’s prompting he pulled at it with sudden rough urgency, twisting it, heedless of the splintering wood at its edges and the noise it made in the quiet house. Under this treatment the catch gave way quickly, and he drew the drawer free entirely—and there, beneath the drawer, between it and the thin wooden bottom of the nightstand’s frame, lay a document case.
Sel was a disbelieving presence at his elbow, broad ears pointed forward. “Really,” she breathed.
He laughed, a soft huff. “Not bad for an old locksmith.”
“A locksmith who wouldn’t even use a safe—”
“He spent too much time proving they weren’t.” Wash set the loose drawer down, pushing it a little out of the way under the bed, and then reached in and took the document case out. It was well-worn but well-made, a faded fawn-brown leather protector for what it held. His gloved fingers didn’t tremble as they unbuckled the flap and slid the top-most paper out just far enough to catch the sliver of light from the window. Bold black lettering marked the top left corner of the page.
DELTA.
Their breathing was the loudest thing in the room.
“He had it,” Seldona whispered. “He really did have it all along. He took it, he kept it…oh God above, they must have known, he and Fatch…”
Wash glanced towards the dead man: dead traitor, dead thief…dead friend. There was no sweet, gentle expression of rest to be found here, with the skin already starting to draw tight and ashen, and the short spread of stubble over the jaw said as much as the dingy surroundings. The casual vanity that the York of old had entertained had sometimes seemed out of balance with the modest grey of his sharp-eyed dæmon, but he had lasted nigh on a year with little to suggest the living conditions during that time had been much better than what the townhouse had to offer. Who could say now which had been the more honest state?
He slid the paper back in—didn’t want to skim through the rest of them here, didn’t want their details inside his head any more than they already were—and tucked the document case securely inside his coat. There was no further time to waste on memories; he had choices to be make, and fast. The plans he’d made had assumed a living York and finding him, talking to him, had been the crossroads from which everything else would follow.
Those plans had been shot twice through in downtown Bristol and now what he needed most was time.
The massacre could be turned against itself to buy him at least a little, to keep suspicion from his shoulders for a while; he’d been obvious with his search and that was not his usual method. Wash stared at York’s body, gaze distant. Did he risk taking further advantage of the confusion, or keep to safer, subtler paths? His options were both too few and too many.
“Do you think there’s a telegraph here?” he said to Sel, needing set his mind in order, needing that pensive counter to the rapid-fire battle of his thoughts, but his dæmon was distracted, looking away, alarm and remorse sweeping up along her spine to set her fur to bristling and draw his head up in a jerk because there was sound, movement, a long-tailed creeping shadow slipping out from behind the shelter of the half-curtain—
Seldona barked, “David!” and Wash flung himself sideways, crashing painfully against the wall as a shot cracked through where his head had been and shattered the porcelain mug.
He had his revolver out in the next moment, bringing the Python to bear on the figure out the door—the figure who had been there all along, the body in the hallway, shit, why hadn’t he checked for a pulse—and squeezed off two quick rounds that forced them to duck back around the corner.
York had died in this room, fallen almost where Wash lay now with his head against a cold knee and that gave him no confidence about his position, but it was Sel his breath caught for, her snarls a furious insult as she snapped at the small monkey-dæmon clinging to her haunches. God, it had been behind the curtain the entire time, keeping quiet enough to escape even Sel’s ears—heard everything, seen everything the man might have missed as he played dead in a performance to set every theatre to shame.
He snapped off another shot and then shoved himself along the floor, a short flat slide that brought him close enough to swing and land a kick on the open door that slammed it back hard against its frame, startling an oath from gunman in the hall.
It bounced open again, though, the shoddy latch not quite catching, and in the space it took him to lash out a second time the monkey had sprung free from Sel and darted out the gap, tail barely making it past as the door crashed shut again and finally stayed there. It wasn’t a reprieve, barely more than a heartbeat’s span of time, and he threw himself to where Sel was, by the end of the bed, feet finally beneath him in a defensive crouch and revolver up and pointed steady at the door.
But the door didn’t move.
No bullets came crashing through the wood, no boot was laid against it, and in the moment it took him to realise the thumping in his ears was not his heart but footsteps, Seldona said, “He’s running.”
“What?”
It shook him out of focus, left him gawping stupidly for a full few seconds, but his dæmon was already spinning on light paws, making for the window. In a bound she was up on the wide windowsill, a hunchback silhouette staring down at the street with tail held stiff. He wavered, gun still trained at the doorway but hesitating, mind racing, certain of a trick and still unable to see its shape.
“It was Gannett,” she said.
“What?” he said again. He knew the truth of it even as he spoke; could piece the snapshot flashes into a familiar face to go with the name, ever accompanied by the nimble, mottled form of his monkey-dæmon. “What the hell is Reg-”
Her ears snapped forward. “David, he’s out the door!”
That settled it. He was next to her in a flash, shoving the window up and open. The gunman was a blur of motion in the dark, no fearful glances cast over the shoulder as he ran. He considered taking the shot and dismissed it in the next breath: not in this light, not with Gannett pulling away so fast, not with only three bullets left in his revolver.
He holstered the gun and swung himself out the window, for once glad that he ran more towards the lean than the broad, and lowered himself down to his full stretch with his gloved hands digging hard into the sill and a sudden fear of rot or termites rising. It held, though, long enough for Seldona to leap, barely balanced across his shoulders, and he wrapped his arms around her in the moment he let them fall.
The impact stung, even through the thick soles of his boots, but he kept his feet beneath him and Sel was down by his heels in the next moment. There was no time to shake the ache off, no time to do anything but break into a run of their own, sprinting down the street, between rows of close-set narrow houses and their faceless occupants who might never have existed for all the interest they showed. Gannett was visible ahead, still moving, and Wash gritted his teeth, well aware how easy it could be to shake a pursuer in the twisted knot of streets.
He had just passed the fourth set of silent shuttered windows when the townhouse behind him exploded.
The shockwave slapped him clean off balance, a blow so sharp he thought it was a more tangible assailant who had hit him, and he half-spun even as he staggered to his knees; but there was clattering brick and deadening ears, and as a gout of fire greater still roared into the street he grabbed Seldona and rolled instead, coming up behind the thin shelter of raised stone stairs with his fox-dæmon clutched hard to his chest.
When did he, he thought blindly, and then, ten minutes.
His breath came in rasping gasps he couldn’t hear, and Sel’s ears were laid back hard against her skull, the tip of her nose touching his chin. He thought of York, of a mockingbird pressing close in the few last moments before she shivered apart, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
We’re alright, Sel pressed at him instead. We’re alright, we’re alright, we’re alright. Where is he?
The street was coming alive at last, muffled shrieks and wails managing to penetrate the high whine building in his ears; doors and shutters flung open, people fleeing those townhouses closest to the blast and none of them the one he wanted. He’d taken his eyes off Gannett and lost him in that instant. The brief lead the man had managed might have been enough to keep him out of range, and if that were so he would be well ahead by now.
Wash dropped his head back and mouthed a curse at the sky, breathless and vicious, and then pried himself off the ground, Sel still tucked against him. He leaned his hip against the stairs that had sheltered him, gazing back where they’d come.
York’s resting place—his home for at least some time—still held the approximation of its shape, but it was a mess, its innards spewed across the street and the top storey collapsed partway onto the first. Destruction enough to destroy evidence, confuse the story of what had happened within those walls. Certainly destruction enough to kill an intruder who chose to linger instead of being just reckless enough to jump out a window in determined pursuit.
“He was always better than they knew,” he said bitterly.
“We can’t stay here,” Sel said.
He walked them a short way down the street, away from the gathering crowd. They saw no further sign of Gannett, and perhaps that was a mercy. His shoulder pulsed like a jilted lover’s sulky resentment, and his temple stung where a spun piece of debris had grazed it; by no means his worst injuries, and he couldn’t even claim this to be his most troublesome job, but he had concerns enough that even the slight inconvenience of the pain irritated him.
Seldona shifted in his arms, laying her head down briefly in the crook of his elbow. The noise of the bomb had hurt her sensitive ears worse than his, but she kept her voice low. “They didn’t deserve an end like that.” When he didn’t say anything, she blew out a sigh. “Too many should haves. I’m sorry, David.”
“Don’t,” he said shortly. “It’s not going to take them long to hear about this, you realise.”
“They’ll take it better if they hear it from us. It doesn’t look good, but we can change that. Don’t even need to twist the truth that far—wherever they got their information from, it’s not been an exclusive source. It’s not our fault we were beaten there.”
She was right. It was easy enough to do: go back and tell the censors nine-tenths of an honest tale, where he showed up late to receive the trailing end of an ambush and escaped through sheer luck as much as anything; luck that did not extend to the take him alive component of his orders. Leave out the casual heresy. Store it under the bottom drawer of his nightstand, and carefully forget about it until the evenings where he’d sit with a bottle of brantwijn and stare, feeling the creeping weight of paranoia battle against a coward’s shame. Convince himself it had to be done right or not at all. Convince himself he needed more evidence before he could make a move. Convince himself they were onto him, they had discovered him at last, and feel a strange flicker of relief when proven right.
He pressed a hand to his chest, like a doctor seeking his own heartbeat, and felt the padded shape of the document case.
“I don’t think,” Wash said slowly, “I’m in a story-telling mood.”
He looked down to meet her coal-black eyes; a stark difference from the bright golden-yellow he’d seen so often in his youth, when she had fluttered across his desk as a blackbird or cast sarcastic looks from his shoulder as a horned viper. Now she moved in quick skipping darts, and lay as a solid furred weight at his side.
The crossroads were here, and whichever path he chose, she would walk it with him. As she always had.
“The twins?” she suggested. No argument; no debate; no caution.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He squeezed his own eyes shut briefly. “I need to think.”
“Better to think on four wheels than six tired legs.”
He snorted a half-laugh, setting her down on the ground, and straightened to cast one last look at the broken townhouse.
“He really made a mess,” Sel said, quiet and sad.
“I noticed,” he said. “My turn.”
Both Wash and his dæmon turned away from the rubble-strewn street and the gathering sound of sirens, and with a friend’s last gift towards a stagnant revolution kept close to his heart, slipped away into the dark.
Rating: PG 13+
Series: Red Vs Blue (Washington, York, Wyoming) / His Dark Materials
Wordcount: 3770
Summary: A re-telling of the first episode of Recovery One, as set in the His Dark Materials universe.
Remarks: Every HDM fan has to write a crossover for their other fandoms, right? I actually had a lot of fun doing this. For record's sake: Washington, bat-eared fox; York, northern mockingbird; Wyoming / Gannett, emperor tamarin.
Washington and his dæmon moved quietly along the street, keeping to the shadows cast by the dimmed streetlamps. They had left the automobile parked several blocks down—such a vehicle would only draw unwanted attention in an area like this, where shutters hung loose on their pins and soft naphtha was the only source of light.
It was Seldona who first realised something was wrong. The broad, bat-like ears lifted for a moment and then just as abruptly flattened, and she dropped into a low skulk that had Wash freezing, pressing back against cold brickwork. He waited, both hands wrapped firmly around the grip of his revolver, as his fox-dæmon prowled the last few steps towards the door, nosing at the chilled air. After a moment she glanced back at him. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
The door swung inward with little resistance when he pressed his hand against it, the jagged splinters around the latch standing testament to its last, less gentle opening. It only swung halfway, however, and when he eased himself through the gap, Sel alert and bristling at his heels, he soon found the reason why—the man slumped behind it would not be rising to make himself less of an inconvenience with the neat pair of bullet wounds in his chest.
“Damn,” he said, and then, turning his head to catch sight of another leg crooked around the doorway into the room to their left, “Damn it.”
“Hush,” Sel said. She tilted her head to the side, ears swivelling.
He took a moment to listen as well, pairing his senses with her sharper ones. The house was still now, silent save for the soft sound of their own breathing, but it wouldn’t have been so earlier. Wash trailed his eyes across what he could see from the doorway. His doorstop might have been trying to make a retreat—but no, the way the dead man faced and the way he had fallen said he simply hadn’t made it far into the house to begin with. Their target had been prepared.
Seldona had started moving again, satisfied that they were, in effect, alone and he followed as she made a straight line for the spindly stairs leading to the top floor, pausing only to rub his fingers across a round hole in the wallpaper. With roughshod dwellings jammed so closely together there was no chance the battle had gone unnoticed, but he couldn’t gauge how soon the police would be drawn to the site. It was unlikely the locals would invite them.
Two doors lined a short hallway that ended with another body sprawled facedown upon the floor, presenting them with three equally unwelcome choices, and he nudged the first one open with the barrel of his revolver while Sel slipped towards the second room, a low-slung grey shadow. His was a bathroom, cramped but clean, and untouched by the vicious skirmish that had scarred the rest of the townhouse. Hers—it came to him in quick, clear snapshots, a silent transferral they’d taken pains to perfect—was a bedroom, stale musk overwritten by the fresher scent of blood. The source of both was one final corpse.
This one had a more familiar bearing than all the rest, though, and Washington felt her flinch as a twist in his heart. In two quick strides he was by her side, casting the hallway body a cursory glance that took in dark hair and arm folded awkwardly beneath. The only man, it seemed, to have made it this far, but one had been enough to set the scene awaiting his attention and he stepped through the doorway with his lips pressed together in tired regret.
That York was dead, there was no question. It wasn’t just the wounds, though the faint light from out the half-curtained window made clear the glistening soak that stained his left side. He was motionless, slumped quiet between the nightstand and the wall; no cocked head to angle his good eye, no expansive gestures to accompany a ribald joke, and most of all no sleek feathered form to dart across the room, alighting on other perches only momentarily before returning to her soul-bound place upon his shoulder, long tail flicking in a subtle mockingbird laugh.
“Fatch,” Seldona said; no call of denial, just simple sorrow.
“How long?” he said, ignoring her. “An hour, do you think?”
The look she shot him was reproachful, but she said, “Less. Much less. We’d probably have heard the last of it if we were ten minutes sooner.”
“Damn it,” he muttered. Sel was already moving to take her position at his back, having deemed the bare underside of the bed empty of threats, so he holstered his revolver as he dropped down on one knee. York had been wearing a short-cut coat the night men came to kill him, and Wash carefully lifted the left side away to confirm what he already knew: two shots to the upper chest, not quick enough to be painless but centred enough to be sure.
“This wasn’t the Magisterium,” he said, and Seldona turned an ear back towards him.
“Not anymore,” was all she said in response.
Loud and public or soft and deniable; those were the Church’s methods. Not this muddle of stormed entry, scattered bodies, and precision shooting at the very last. He would know.
Wash let the coat fall back closed and glanced around the room, biting down on the brewing frustration with the same cold determination that kept his dæmon motionless in her watchful crouch. To have come within ten minutes of, if not victory, then at least progress…it ached. The censors had looked so closely at him for signs of reluctance or distress when they had given their orders, when they had given him York’s name and the location, and had never thought for a moment that what they should have been looking for was hope.
If only he had locked it away further still, beyond the grasp of whatever force it was that so enjoyed denying him.
“Hush,” Sel said, but gentler.
He let out a slow breath and looked around the room again, but more purposefully, as he should have done on the first sweep. There was little that stood out about the resting place that had become York’s last. Sparse, cold, dirty; he could see only a few personal touches in the shape of a shirt slung over a chair and the porcelain mug that still sat whole upon the nightstand. Wash counted a single window, a single door, and a difficult angle down the hallway.
“He retreated here,” he said. “He had them at the door but he retreated here.”
“Maybe he didn’t have them at the door.”
“Or maybe he only thought he had them at the door,” he countered. “That’s not the point.”
“By all means, make it.”
He pushed himself upright. The single sheet on the bed was tossed back, but it seemed the result of daily living more than the callous carelessness of a search. He hadn’t scoped the house in full, so there could easily be signs he had missed, but here, in this room, he saw nothing to suggest foreign hands had had the chance to turn it over.
Sel followed his movements with her nose and a growing understanding as he flipped the pillow; his sharp word sent her back to her watch, but he could still feel her focus divided. There was little to do but disregard it as he felt along and under the mattress, seeking a bulge, seeking an edge, seeking a slit in the fabric through which something could be slipped—seeking what a man like York had to hide.
The bed yielded nothing, though, and Wash moved to the nightstand without allowing himself time to pause and doubt. The three set drawers bore a few more fragments of the life that had existed within these walls, and he rifled through them with no greater care than he’d taken with the bed, sifting methodically through roughly folded clothing and other oddments. An envelope filled with loose coins and bound with a cauchuc band. A silver lighter. A pair of gilded cufflinks, of all things; perhaps a patient promise for finery deserving of them but more likely an investment.
The drawers themselves were solid wood, and a few quick measurements dashed any anticipation of hidden bottoms or compartments.
“In his coat?” Sel suggested with audible distaste.
He shook his head, though not in refusal—his assessment of the body hadn’t been so thorough as to be final and something may well have been tucked away at his back, but he suspected he’d find little but bank notes and the pouch the man had barely slept without.
A thought sparked.
The bottom drawer was open at his knees and reluctant to go any further due to some in-built catch, but at inspiration’s prompting he pulled at it with sudden rough urgency, twisting it, heedless of the splintering wood at its edges and the noise it made in the quiet house. Under this treatment the catch gave way quickly, and he drew the drawer free entirely—and there, beneath the drawer, between it and the thin wooden bottom of the nightstand’s frame, lay a document case.
Sel was a disbelieving presence at his elbow, broad ears pointed forward. “Really,” she breathed.
He laughed, a soft huff. “Not bad for an old locksmith.”
“A locksmith who wouldn’t even use a safe—”
“He spent too much time proving they weren’t.” Wash set the loose drawer down, pushing it a little out of the way under the bed, and then reached in and took the document case out. It was well-worn but well-made, a faded fawn-brown leather protector for what it held. His gloved fingers didn’t tremble as they unbuckled the flap and slid the top-most paper out just far enough to catch the sliver of light from the window. Bold black lettering marked the top left corner of the page.
DELTA.
Their breathing was the loudest thing in the room.
“He had it,” Seldona whispered. “He really did have it all along. He took it, he kept it…oh God above, they must have known, he and Fatch…”
Wash glanced towards the dead man: dead traitor, dead thief…dead friend. There was no sweet, gentle expression of rest to be found here, with the skin already starting to draw tight and ashen, and the short spread of stubble over the jaw said as much as the dingy surroundings. The casual vanity that the York of old had entertained had sometimes seemed out of balance with the modest grey of his sharp-eyed dæmon, but he had lasted nigh on a year with little to suggest the living conditions during that time had been much better than what the townhouse had to offer. Who could say now which had been the more honest state?
He slid the paper back in—didn’t want to skim through the rest of them here, didn’t want their details inside his head any more than they already were—and tucked the document case securely inside his coat. There was no further time to waste on memories; he had choices to be make, and fast. The plans he’d made had assumed a living York and finding him, talking to him, had been the crossroads from which everything else would follow.
Those plans had been shot twice through in downtown Bristol and now what he needed most was time.
The massacre could be turned against itself to buy him at least a little, to keep suspicion from his shoulders for a while; he’d been obvious with his search and that was not his usual method. Wash stared at York’s body, gaze distant. Did he risk taking further advantage of the confusion, or keep to safer, subtler paths? His options were both too few and too many.
“Do you think there’s a telegraph here?” he said to Sel, needing set his mind in order, needing that pensive counter to the rapid-fire battle of his thoughts, but his dæmon was distracted, looking away, alarm and remorse sweeping up along her spine to set her fur to bristling and draw his head up in a jerk because there was sound, movement, a long-tailed creeping shadow slipping out from behind the shelter of the half-curtain—
Seldona barked, “David!” and Wash flung himself sideways, crashing painfully against the wall as a shot cracked through where his head had been and shattered the porcelain mug.
He had his revolver out in the next moment, bringing the Python to bear on the figure out the door—the figure who had been there all along, the body in the hallway, shit, why hadn’t he checked for a pulse—and squeezed off two quick rounds that forced them to duck back around the corner.
York had died in this room, fallen almost where Wash lay now with his head against a cold knee and that gave him no confidence about his position, but it was Sel his breath caught for, her snarls a furious insult as she snapped at the small monkey-dæmon clinging to her haunches. God, it had been behind the curtain the entire time, keeping quiet enough to escape even Sel’s ears—heard everything, seen everything the man might have missed as he played dead in a performance to set every theatre to shame.
He snapped off another shot and then shoved himself along the floor, a short flat slide that brought him close enough to swing and land a kick on the open door that slammed it back hard against its frame, startling an oath from gunman in the hall.
It bounced open again, though, the shoddy latch not quite catching, and in the space it took him to lash out a second time the monkey had sprung free from Sel and darted out the gap, tail barely making it past as the door crashed shut again and finally stayed there. It wasn’t a reprieve, barely more than a heartbeat’s span of time, and he threw himself to where Sel was, by the end of the bed, feet finally beneath him in a defensive crouch and revolver up and pointed steady at the door.
But the door didn’t move.
No bullets came crashing through the wood, no boot was laid against it, and in the moment it took him to realise the thumping in his ears was not his heart but footsteps, Seldona said, “He’s running.”
“What?”
It shook him out of focus, left him gawping stupidly for a full few seconds, but his dæmon was already spinning on light paws, making for the window. In a bound she was up on the wide windowsill, a hunchback silhouette staring down at the street with tail held stiff. He wavered, gun still trained at the doorway but hesitating, mind racing, certain of a trick and still unable to see its shape.
“It was Gannett,” she said.
“What?” he said again. He knew the truth of it even as he spoke; could piece the snapshot flashes into a familiar face to go with the name, ever accompanied by the nimble, mottled form of his monkey-dæmon. “What the hell is Reg-”
Her ears snapped forward. “David, he’s out the door!”
That settled it. He was next to her in a flash, shoving the window up and open. The gunman was a blur of motion in the dark, no fearful glances cast over the shoulder as he ran. He considered taking the shot and dismissed it in the next breath: not in this light, not with Gannett pulling away so fast, not with only three bullets left in his revolver.
He holstered the gun and swung himself out the window, for once glad that he ran more towards the lean than the broad, and lowered himself down to his full stretch with his gloved hands digging hard into the sill and a sudden fear of rot or termites rising. It held, though, long enough for Seldona to leap, barely balanced across his shoulders, and he wrapped his arms around her in the moment he let them fall.
The impact stung, even through the thick soles of his boots, but he kept his feet beneath him and Sel was down by his heels in the next moment. There was no time to shake the ache off, no time to do anything but break into a run of their own, sprinting down the street, between rows of close-set narrow houses and their faceless occupants who might never have existed for all the interest they showed. Gannett was visible ahead, still moving, and Wash gritted his teeth, well aware how easy it could be to shake a pursuer in the twisted knot of streets.
He had just passed the fourth set of silent shuttered windows when the townhouse behind him exploded.
The shockwave slapped him clean off balance, a blow so sharp he thought it was a more tangible assailant who had hit him, and he half-spun even as he staggered to his knees; but there was clattering brick and deadening ears, and as a gout of fire greater still roared into the street he grabbed Seldona and rolled instead, coming up behind the thin shelter of raised stone stairs with his fox-dæmon clutched hard to his chest.
When did he, he thought blindly, and then, ten minutes.
His breath came in rasping gasps he couldn’t hear, and Sel’s ears were laid back hard against her skull, the tip of her nose touching his chin. He thought of York, of a mockingbird pressing close in the few last moments before she shivered apart, and immediately wished he hadn’t.
We’re alright, Sel pressed at him instead. We’re alright, we’re alright, we’re alright. Where is he?
The street was coming alive at last, muffled shrieks and wails managing to penetrate the high whine building in his ears; doors and shutters flung open, people fleeing those townhouses closest to the blast and none of them the one he wanted. He’d taken his eyes off Gannett and lost him in that instant. The brief lead the man had managed might have been enough to keep him out of range, and if that were so he would be well ahead by now.
Wash dropped his head back and mouthed a curse at the sky, breathless and vicious, and then pried himself off the ground, Sel still tucked against him. He leaned his hip against the stairs that had sheltered him, gazing back where they’d come.
York’s resting place—his home for at least some time—still held the approximation of its shape, but it was a mess, its innards spewed across the street and the top storey collapsed partway onto the first. Destruction enough to destroy evidence, confuse the story of what had happened within those walls. Certainly destruction enough to kill an intruder who chose to linger instead of being just reckless enough to jump out a window in determined pursuit.
“He was always better than they knew,” he said bitterly.
“We can’t stay here,” Sel said.
He walked them a short way down the street, away from the gathering crowd. They saw no further sign of Gannett, and perhaps that was a mercy. His shoulder pulsed like a jilted lover’s sulky resentment, and his temple stung where a spun piece of debris had grazed it; by no means his worst injuries, and he couldn’t even claim this to be his most troublesome job, but he had concerns enough that even the slight inconvenience of the pain irritated him.
Seldona shifted in his arms, laying her head down briefly in the crook of his elbow. The noise of the bomb had hurt her sensitive ears worse than his, but she kept her voice low. “They didn’t deserve an end like that.” When he didn’t say anything, she blew out a sigh. “Too many should haves. I’m sorry, David.”
“Don’t,” he said shortly. “It’s not going to take them long to hear about this, you realise.”
“They’ll take it better if they hear it from us. It doesn’t look good, but we can change that. Don’t even need to twist the truth that far—wherever they got their information from, it’s not been an exclusive source. It’s not our fault we were beaten there.”
She was right. It was easy enough to do: go back and tell the censors nine-tenths of an honest tale, where he showed up late to receive the trailing end of an ambush and escaped through sheer luck as much as anything; luck that did not extend to the take him alive component of his orders. Leave out the casual heresy. Store it under the bottom drawer of his nightstand, and carefully forget about it until the evenings where he’d sit with a bottle of brantwijn and stare, feeling the creeping weight of paranoia battle against a coward’s shame. Convince himself it had to be done right or not at all. Convince himself he needed more evidence before he could make a move. Convince himself they were onto him, they had discovered him at last, and feel a strange flicker of relief when proven right.
He pressed a hand to his chest, like a doctor seeking his own heartbeat, and felt the padded shape of the document case.
“I don’t think,” Wash said slowly, “I’m in a story-telling mood.”
He looked down to meet her coal-black eyes; a stark difference from the bright golden-yellow he’d seen so often in his youth, when she had fluttered across his desk as a blackbird or cast sarcastic looks from his shoulder as a horned viper. Now she moved in quick skipping darts, and lay as a solid furred weight at his side.
The crossroads were here, and whichever path he chose, she would walk it with him. As she always had.
“The twins?” she suggested. No argument; no debate; no caution.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He squeezed his own eyes shut briefly. “I need to think.”
“Better to think on four wheels than six tired legs.”
He snorted a half-laugh, setting her down on the ground, and straightened to cast one last look at the broken townhouse.
“He really made a mess,” Sel said, quiet and sad.
“I noticed,” he said. “My turn.”
Both Wash and his dæmon turned away from the rubble-strewn street and the gathering sound of sirens, and with a friend’s last gift towards a stagnant revolution kept close to his heart, slipped away into the dark.
