Learning the Ropes

“That’s the thing about this city, see. It takes care of its own.”

Bang.

****************************************************************************

Alyx stands by the sink in the corner. Cool water falls from the tap, just the wrong side of numbing. Slowly, methodically, she cleans her hands under the stream, alternating, finger by finger, than thumb, than wrist.

It’s something of a ritual for her. ‘End the day with clean hands’. ‘Wash away the world and your sins’. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’. Her mother had had a hundred such phrases stocked away, and though spirituality is just one of a long list of traits she didn’t inherit from her, this is one habit she’s never quite managed to break.

It feels nice, to keep just a little bit of home with her, though she tries not to indulge that part of herself too often. Easier to think of it as mere routine. She has her answers, if people ask, quick and glib and utterly shallow. ‘Wiping off the scum’, she’s used a few times. People don’t ask though, for the most part. They all have their quirks, harmless little compulsions that bring a comfort they’d rather not have to explain. They accept it and move on.

Palms are simple, a cursory once over for each. The knuckles she keeps for last, her persistent bruises benefiting from the cold. Tonight, though, they are mostly unbattered, and she turns off the tap with fumbling fingers, and shakes her hands sharply, both to dry them and to coax back in some feeling.

Settling back on the couch in the middle of the room, she picks up her flintlock, turning it over in her hands. The pistol is the most valuable thing she owns, her most prized possession, a symbol of status and trust and awesome, terrifying power, solely hers to command. It’s rare she takes it out with her, and rarer still she finds herself using it, and she looks over the firing mechanism now with a scrutinising eye, checking for the smallest signs of fault.

From the other end of the couch, Kora, the new girl, watches.

“So, what did she do?”

“Hmm?” Satisfied that her pistol is, as always, undamaged, she sets it back on the table and looks over at her. “Oh, her. Does it matter?”

Kora just stares at her. Clearly, she doesn’t think much of that answer, but, Alyx notes, approvingly, nor does she show too much of her hand by pressing.

“That’s the job, kid. You follow orders, and you don’t ask questions.”

It’s a test. Kore seems to know this. She raises an eyebrow, and Alyx relents.

“Turncoat. She was playing both sides, dealing under the table, taking cuts. Got a couple people very hurt. Boss hates traitors.” 

She nods, considering. “City takes care of its own.”

****************************************************************************

In the dim room, the dancing glint of Alyx’s blade looks almost beautiful, horrifying as it should seem. Kora finds she can’t look away. The butterfly knife spins through her fingers, graceful as it’s namesake, with such casual ease that she’d think the action was unconscious, if she couldn’t see that the man sat in front of Alyx is as transfixed by the display as she is.

A clack rings through the room, as Alyx suddenly snaps both halves of the handle together. She sees the man strain at his rope bindings. Alyx shakes her head, tutting.

“Now, now, none of that,” she says, walking round to the side of the chair. The man’s hands are bound behind his back, wrists together and palms facing out; his fists clench futilely. 

Alyx slips her knife in between the ropes and lets it rest there, almost teasing. The point just presses into his skin; Kora sees the man wince. Alyx tugs lightly at the restraints with the blunt edge of the blade, careful not to loosen them. “We’re all friends here, after all. These are just,” she digs the knife a little deeper into his skin, “a precaution.” 

Kora feels goosebumps run down her own arms. 

Alyx pulls back her knife and walks back around the chair. 

“So, as we’re all friends here, you won’t mind telling me why so many of Ax’s, associates, have wound up missing, lately.”

The man gulps, and Kora sees his gaze shift to her. So does Alyx, apparently.

She’s started tossing her knife again, letting it fly between her hands, but as she turns to look at Kora too, the eye not facing the man winks at her.

Kora straightens slightly, rolling back her shoulders. She knows how to make herself look intimidating, and that was all Alyx had asked her to do before they came in.

Alyx turns back to the man. “Ah, I see you’ve caught sight of my silent friend, there.” She lets the blade of her knife trail down the side of his face, and takes a step closer, foot pressing hard onto his instep. 

“Yeah, she’s not really one for talking.” She’s leaned in close, speaking directly into the man’s ear, for all that her voice carries through the room. The point of her knife comes to rest over his windpipe. “I’ll let you in on a little secret of ours, in the spirit of our friendship.” A hint of red beads at his throat. She whispers, “I’m the nice one.”

Kora isn’t quite sure of her role here, but she can take a hint. She thinks menacing thoughts, and on a whim, cracks her knuckles.

Alyx smiles.

She steps back, showing all her teeth.

“Talk.”

****************************************************************************

Kora’s been with them nearly two weeks before she comes and finds Alyx again.

She sits down next to her as she’s studying a pair of floorplans and makes herself comfortable, none of the measured hesitance she’d had at the beginning. Few people can 

act exactly the same around a person before they watch them cut out a person’s tongue as they can afterwards: that Kora only seems to relax more with each job bodes well, Alyx thinks.

She sits down, and studies Alyx studying the plans, and then, suddenly, speaks up.

“Follow orders, and don’t ask questions.”

“That’s the job,” Alyx answers, although Kora hadn’t asked anything. There’s a discrepancy in the footprints of several rooms on the second floor, and until she knows why she can’t plan out her next move.

“What job?”

“Huh?” The older map must be the truer of the two - the building must have been built to something, and it’s easier to conceal something comparatively than hiding it outright.

“It occurs to me that I never really asked what, ‘the job’ was.”

“That seems like a rather big oversight.” It could just be oversight, is the issue. Some overestimate in the original blueprints - they’re less detailed than the newer sheets, overall. If you disregard the areas of non-existent floor in the latter.

“It also occurs to me, that despite what you say, we seem to have spent an awful amount of time doing nothing but asking people questions.”

“Funny how that works, isn’t it.” There’s no accounting for older architecture, hard-won experience has taught her that. Weird alcoves, nooks and crannies that were never meant to exist, there could be a dozen perfectly innocent explanations.

“So either you’re just being glib, or you’re deliberately lying.”

“Aha. What’s the difference?” She can’t afford to not be suspicious. The plans themselves are only part of the problem - if it isn’t a genuine mistake, then there lies the very likely possibility that someone is trying to mislead her. And if that’s the case, then she’ll have to cease all operations until she can narrow down who it is and what they know.

Kora shrugs. “I suppose there isn’t one, really. The difference lies in intent.” She leans forward, as if preparing to stand up. “For example,” she continues, tapping the older piece of paper, “the intent, of whoever drew this up for you, of misrecording the measurements in that corner to distract you from the fact that these have just been artificially aged and backdated.”

She stands up. Alyx blinks. “Wait, what?”

“It’s a fake,” she says, as she starts to walk away. “Not real, or rather, only mostly real. A cover, if you will. Not a total misrepresentation - I’m sure at least most of that matches the real building - but one that deliberately seeks to obfuscate a vital piece of information: the context in which it was created.”

Alyx simply watches her go.

****************************************************************************

It takes Alyx twelve entire minutes to chase after her.

Kora had been counting. She’d found somewhere comfortable to wait, and with each passing moment she’d amused herself with the thought of certain, steadfast Alyx fluctuating between her need to know, her inability to let even a single thread go, and her reluctance to ever admit to having been wrongfooted. The Alyx in her mind stands and sits and paces wildly, and it’s with a smug, satisfied smile on her face that the real one finally finds her.

She doesn’t sit down. 

“Alright, spill.”

“Pardon?” It feels good, in that petty, slightly embarrassing way, to be the deliberately obtuse one, for once.

Alyx glares, but Kora refuses to back down. Days and days of tense uncertainty - she’s earned this.

“Fine,” says Alyx finally, hands up in surrender. “Fine. You want answers, you’ve got ‘em, but how do you know about the floorplans.”

“Oh, that?” She waves a hand, light and airy, as if her intestines haven’t suddenly lined themselves with lead. “It was dated seventy-odd years back, right? But it had Consten notations, which were only even published a couple decades back, it’s only even more recently that they became popular enough for people to actually start using them. Hell, even your ‘modern’ ‘prints still had traditional entrances.”

Alyx doesn’t seem to doubt her words, much less ask how she knows, which is a relief. She just nods, and closes her eyes, and Kora hasn’t know her very long but she knows that she’s rewinding through her life, working backwards to figure out who gave her the plans, and where they claimed to have found them, and what she’s told them as opposed to what they may already know, and a thousand other minutiae that she may have considered irrelevant at the time, but had stored in her memory nevertheless.

Strange, how she can know that about Alyx, when she truly knows so little.

Her father, had been an architect. Once, long before she was born, before he’d married her mother and she’d moved them away from the city: into suburbs, and then towns, and villages, always in search of the total solitude that only she longed for, and only she could control.

He never spoke much, of his life, before. He never spoke much of anything, of substance, really. It upset him, and she knew he didn’t want her to see him upset, and so it was a policy of avoidance for the most part. They lived in, and spoke of, the now, her, and her father, and her mother whenever she deigned to grace them with her presence.

But, alone in a cottage in the middle of the field, there wasn’t much of a here, or now, to speak of. Not for long, anyway. And her mother had a horse, but it would kick at them whenever they came near, so the two of them had no means of discovering anything new.

Her father had kept all his old books, his designs, records of his works, and so that was how she explored the world. He taught her how to interpret perspective, and abstract beautiful sketches to structured plans and vice versa. He taught her how to build scale models, and to prototype, and to seamlessly switch between thinking in two and three dimensions.

He’d had a genuine, first printing of The Consten Guide, 2E. He’d given it to her for her tenth birthday, and they’d read through it so many times that could quiz each other down to the contents of exact pages.

Her father never made her feel like he regretted his life, in a cottage with just her, an absent wife and a savage horse. But the older she got, the more she knew, bone-deep, that he wasn’t happy.

Four months ago, her father disappeared. She doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead, but she likes to think that he’s out there somewhere, finally content, starting to live out the years stolen from him.

She’d decided to stay in that cottage for as long as she could stand it, just in case he returned. She never dared check on his belongings, for fear that they were all still there and he had simply died somewhere after all. They’re still there now, for all she knows, in wait of people who may never return.

As long as she could stand, was less than a month, as it happened. Architecture still doesn’t quite hold her heart like it does her father’s, but if nothing else she thought she could visit the city full of buildings that her father had loved. So she’d packed her bags and set off, armed with nothing but her wits, half-formed plans she’d stolen from her father’s much smaller pile of fiction, and determination. 

Never underestimate how far good stamina and being able to recognise the north star can get you. Still, it was weeks of walking, theft, and relying on the kindness of strangers for shelter, before she finally made it to Qwyn.

Where she had then found herself utterly overwhelmed. She stood out in villages, but so long as she was careful, and could spin a good story, she could translate that foreignness into pity, and food and rest.

In a city, in a crowd, she stood out as nothing more than a target. She’d found herself in more than one fight, before Xi had stumbled upon her, and taken her to Alyx, and the rest is, well, history.

Very, very, murky history, that she very much hopes is about to be somewhat clarified.

Alyx nods, decisively. “Spies. That’s the job. A decentralised network of spies, who work to keep the city, safer, than it would otherwise be.”

It hardly comes as a surprise, even if the specifics are a little murky. “I knew it.”

Alyx snorts. “You’d hardly be much of a prospect if you didn’t.”

****************************************************************************

It’s like a dam burst somewhere within Kora. Once she’d confronted Alyx, the questions had started flowing and they still haven’t stopped. 

“You know, you’re not all that good at pitching this to me. Most people should at least have a solid answer to whether or not they’re the good guys.”

“Would you trust me if I’d said we were?” It’s a conversation held in whispers, as they wait outside the side door of the inn. “We’re the better guys, than the ones we’re currently fighting, isn’t that enough?”

Kora shrugs. Her improvised club hangs loosely at her side. 

“Anyone who tells you they’re the good guys are selling something,” Alyx grumbles, and then makes a hurried ‘get ready’ motion at Kora, who tightens her grip.

The door opens, and a woman walks out, takes two steps and collapses to the ground, a bump forming on her head. Kora stands over her. She bends down to hoist her up.

Alyx looks at her, for a moment, the ease with which she maneuvers the limp body. “How about you take point this time?”

Kora looks up. “Seriously?” Alyx just looks at her. She blinks, then blinks again, and then slowly the corner of her mouth upturns. “Alright.”

They start to walk down the dark alley. 

“So. Do you actually know who you work for?”

“What? Of course we do. Contacts in the city council, though that’s more just protection, we mostly work freelance - I explained all this.”

“How do you know? How do you prove this isn’t just an elaborate ruse set up by the very people you swore to not protect.”

“I swear to God…”

****************************************************************************

Kora used to wonder how long she’d survive on her own.

Turns out, she doesn’t make it to six months.

She’s bleeding out, she can feel it. And while she doesn’t think the wound itself is unsurvivable, the broken leg surely isn’t helping. And the debris around her, and the debris on her, well. It’s hardly a pleasant, healing environment.

This wasn’t the plan. The plan was to blow up the building once they were safe outside it, but then Alyx had discovered prisoners on the second floor, and they had to take priority.

Alyx had told her, before they left, that their priority should always be the people involved without choice. The innocents, the bystanders.

She won’t be coming back for her.

Kora is going to die. Here, alone and god knows how many miles away from everything she’s ever known, bleeding into the wood panels of the basement she’s trapped in, because she wasn’t fast enough to leave the room before the gunpowder caught, and there hadn’t been the time to set a long fuse.

She is going to die, and no one who knows will care, and these past few weeks she’d thought that maybe she could finally do something, that might make a difference to someone somewhere, but no, she’s going to die in a basement and leave this world as inconsequentially as she entered it.

There had been screams when the building had first gone up, but they’ve all long since subsided. She can’t hear much of anything now, though that may have more to do with how fast she’s losing consciousness.

She does imagine she hears someone call her name, though, just as her vision fades to black.

****************************************************************************

“Why did you come back for me?”

Alyx sighs, though not from any particular emotion. “It’s like I told you, kid. The city takes care of its own.”