Asylum, the Bloodless City

A scarf of thick, marble-colored fur tickled the soft part of his neck, where his stubble had not yet grown coarse enough to ward off the biting cold that encased Asylum like a shell. The heat of Naoki’s drink sank through the fur-lined skin of his clawed glove and went down like liquid fire. He knew better than to complain in this place.

It was not Oasis with its unending heat wave, nor Harbor with its onslaught of storms; Asylum had its own charm. When snowflakes weren’t raking flesh from raw pink cheeks - and one wore their snow goggles - it shone like a star, near every inch of it coated in glittering white.

And the drinks were fantastic when they didn’t hurt. Even through the throb of his mouth, the smooth blend of amaretto and chocolate warmed him as well as any hearth could, from the inside-out. How did the Sun Spot flavor their drinks so well? Nearly a century after the Rupture and most cities had only just gotten a hold of salt and pepper. 

“You heard, then?” A man at the next table was saying with hushed fervor. Not hushed enough that Naoki could not hear. “About that builder?”

“I heard,” said his dining partner with a sniffle. They were not uncommon in Asylum. “Heard that he fell off the Blizzard Wall. Big tragedy, that, and a shame, too. He was, what? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?”

“Twenty-five,” the first man confirmed. “It wasn’t an accident, though. I have a friend that was there, he saw the whole thing: one minute the dead guy was getting ready to patch a hole in the ice layer and the next a pick was shoved through his eye.”

“No, that’s bull. In Asylum? You know the rules: no crime, no bloodshed. You certain it wasn’t his own pick? Slip of the hand? Sometimes that happens. The wall is slippery, that’s kinda the nature of it.”

“Positive,” said the first man, slapping his work-taloned hand on the table. “My friend saw it!”

“And didn’t say who’d throw their head on the axe like that? It’s nonsense, man. Nobody’s gonna kill somebody in Asylum,” the second man argued, firmer and firmer by the syllable. Naoki sipped at his drink, steam fogging the goggles glinting dimly on his forehead.

“You don’t believe me. Fine. Go to the Gray Quarter and check for yourself. They dumped his body at his place ‘til they figure out what to do with it,” the first man said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Naoki stood, long frame buffered by the weight and bulk of his furs. He tugged his scarf over his mouth and his goggles over his eyes as he went, leaving in his wake the sceptic’s final argument: 

“Then why on earth hasn’t the Bloodlet told us anything about it? It was an accident. That’s all it can be!”

The Gray Quarter was aptly named. Where most of Asylum boasted fine black-and-brown buildings and walks clear of stained snow, the Gray Quarter looked like a painting stripped of color. The walls were grey, the doors were grey, the half-churned slush at the curbs were grey, even the ever-slate sky was infinitely duller here.

Naoki had left without an address under the assumption that he would have to go door-to-door marking down those that failed to answer. He was pleasantly surprised by the whispers that followed the people of the Quarter. He caught a name, Petey Suhrer, and the wisps of a personality. Petey was quiet, borderline mute, but he would not back down from a fight. He’d had a temper as a child that had abandoned him when he’d taken up work on the Blizzard Wall. Despite this dual-face of his, the people liked Petey and Petey liked the people, too.

He lived on Granite Lane, house numbered twenty-two, the one behind the frozen skeleton of an ancient evergreen with a faded sign nailed beneath its branches: 

Mind the Skies!

When the flares are lit, don’t throw a fit!

Retreat indoors and let the Blizzards pass us by!

Naoki found the entrance with some help from a thin trail of blood droplets dotting the road to the home’s entrance, where they expanded into a frozen pool and left a dark red streak on the grey door.

He was surprised to find that it was not fully shut. One pull and it swung open as if ice had never touched its hinges. Naoki closed the door in his wake.

Little of Asylum’s natural white light made it into Petey’s home, all of it a ladder of thin bars cast onto the far wall, every rung washed out by the faint, flickering glow of an old lamp on an even older wooden table. The shade was askew, and one of the table leg’s hooves was missing. Naoki carefully avoided this corner. He did not want to make a bigger mess.

The Sun Spot’s own gossip had not spun a yarn. A thin white fur concealed a large lump on the floor, the far hem dotted with black blood and tucked under something round. This, Naoki thought, was what he had come for.

In his youth, Naoki Lennox Irving had been called the Leviathan after his tendency to tear into mysteries with the abandon of a feral dog and devour the truth as if it were the last edible meat on the bone. That’s what they all said, anyway, as if the lies could hide Naoki from himself.

He traced water to its source. He unearthed the buried hideout of a gang of bloodthirsty bandits. He had neutralized a Rupture Beast that haunted the border of Harbor torn apart by a tornado. Naoki was more than an investigator - he fed off of the mystery, and the thanks that followed its conclusion.

He crouched at Petey’s head and hauled the fur from the tatters of his skull with the crackle of twice-hot blood. It had dried since the body had been dumped here, frozen and melted then crusted like spilled stew. Naoki noted how clean the wound was. Ice picks did not do that, certainly not in the blunt, calloused hands of the Blizzard Wall’s builders.

It was not an accident, and it was not a crime of passion.

Naoki covered Petey Suhrer’s face with a soft I’m sorry, and when he rose it was with more weight than he’d had going down. He searched the dark room, first with his eyes then his hands, opening drawers and cabinets and shoving aside their contents for anything of note. Heavy coats and furs filled the wardrobe so tightly that the doors did not close all the way.

Strange, he thought. Petey Suhrer had been a handyman. He yanked the coats from the wardrobe, tossed them in an unprofessional heap on the floor, and when the wardrobe had become a cavity he hummed a victorious tune.

A fat, wrinkled envelope freckled with blood and an ice pick drenched with it leaned against the far wall. The envelope had been there longer, if the frayed corners and beige tint suggested anything like the truth; but the ice pick was recent. If it was blood - and Naoki thought by the tang of iron radiating off of it that it was - it was fresher than Petey could have provided.

Pop! Pop! Red light bathed the walls. The flares; a Blizzard. Crack! That was something new, closer.

Cold washed over Naoki’s exposed lips, drying them in barely a second. He yanked his scarf over his face without a moment’s wait and spun on a thick black heel to face the intruders, tall men dressed in thick silver cloth and dark, hooded helmets masking their individual faces. A bright red droplet struck through with a white bolt winked on each of their chests.

The Bloodlet.

“Trouble in paradise,” Naoki said dryly, closing the wardrobe door behind him. “I’ve learned not to let organizations like you surprise me. You’ll forgive my lack of enthusiasm.”

“Naoki Lennox,” said the Bloodlet. “You are under arrest.”

“For what?” Naoki asked, fiddling with a strap on the back of his gloves. “What possible crime could I have committed in Asylum, the Bloodless City? I was only investigating what you would not, for reasons I’m beginning to understand. Are you familiar with the concept of a patsy?”

Two of the men shifted to fighting stances, raising their padded fists in front of their helmets.

“You are under arrest for spilling blood in Asylum,”

The clasp slipped, and great black claws sprung from the backs of Naoki’s gloves, tipping his fingers in the same way Petey Suhrer’s would have been when he was murdered on the wall.

“So be it.”