Chapter Text
Wulf and Reese are nice, the kid thinks. They sing in rich voices, they finish each other's jokes and crack wise with the old bartender who keeps the Sole Regret half-functional. They're boisterous, lively. It makes him feel warm inside. They don't get many like these two on the Walls.
Reese passes the kid a bottle, smiles right at him. "Werewhiskey!" he shouts. "Old man here told me it brings the dead back to life!" The kid sniffs at it experimentally, and Wulf slaps him heartily on the back.
"Keep it for the trip, kid, we all got to keep our spirits up."
The kid's the one who goes out to the Wild, Yaksha's the one who comes back.
It's an old tradition; everyone on the Walls who serves long enough -- or hard enough -- gets a nickname. Sometimes that nickname's their only name. Sometimes it's a warning, like Red Gouge and his troupe of vicious Brushers who stick heads on their pikes, display them on the walls for the 'fugees to see.
Sometimes it's just a name -- Toubron, the Giant. Mayer, the Millstone.
Yaksha gets his name from the Marshal who has to retrieve him, alone, from South Gate and sit him down for a debrief. Tell him in short order why what he did still mattered, even if both the Breakers he was with were long dead by now.
The name's a High Ura word, he later finds out -- it's a name, the first name on the Walls maybe, that came from the Ura themselves.
Ten days ago, Wulf and Reese were sent out to find the Ura Scouts sneaking rail blueprints back to the Terminals.
Nonviolent confrontation, the mission parameters emphasized. Pack light. Council just wants the plans back. Soon as possible.
The only one who'd come somewhat properly armed was the kid with his carbine and the hammer, and he was meant to be the bait for the Wild's pests more than anything. Clear paths of debris, blast through giant pecker nests and patches of stabweed, the sort of work that would be distracting to veteran Breakers looking for Ura spies hidden in the swamp and the shadow.
Unimportant work, really.
Until the Wild, and the Ura, fought back.
The kid never speaks of what happened when they hit Point Lemaign, not even to his debriefing Marshal -- it isn't until some of Jina's Breaker troop goes to retreive Wulf and Reese's bodies for their families that they can begin to piece together what happened at all.
Snow demon! the Ura scout screamed, seeing the white fluff of a Breaker's winter cap. Some fine bow-work from Jina's second and the scout was crippled, trembling, still alive.
Jina repeats his words back to him. "Snow demon?" she asks, sharply. All that's left of Wulf and Reese are their bones, which her troop reverently collect into a black sack. Lungblossom acid and the fetid swamp ate through the rest of them.
"Two weeks ago," the scout says in heavily accented Caelondian, mesmerized by the stained white fur of her regulation winter headgear. "Breakers like you. And one other. Yuru yaksha, the snow demon. At Karakash. You call it Point Lemaign."
Something cold passes through Jina, seeing the fear that lingers in the scout's eyes. "We won't hurt you. But you are under arrest, and you will be taken back to Caelondia. Tell me more about the demon."
White hair, snow-white, bone-white, the scout says, and stained with blood. We thought we could break him.
He smelled of alcohol and soot. He smelled of death. He smelled of our death.
The other Breakers, we killed them. Took their weapons. The demon had nothing. Nothing but an old pike, some old Slinger's he pulled from the swamp we ambushed them in.
He wouldn't go down, though. We shot him with our crossbows. He stumbled, lay there, nothing but a bottle in his hand. Bottle and that half-rotted pike, all he had.
Pike was enough. Snarled like a beast, bit and stabbed and tore my comrade apart like one of the Wild Pack. Finally smashed that bottle into his head. Onma fell, he staggered like an old drunk man. He didn't get up again.
The demon looked at me, then. I...I have not seen eyes like that. Not for a long time.
He asked me who had the plans. I didn't. Onma was always so self-righteous. He took Onma's belongings. He left me alive. He didn't even think to touch me, so beneath him was I.
My superiors told me the things that are to be feared most in Point Lemaign are the ghosts of our ancestors and the bows of the Breakers.
Of that, I am not so sure anymore. I have seen the eyes of the yuru yaksha. Surely, surely, my end is near.
Jina exhales when the Ura scout falls silent. Tells one of her Breakers to split off and head for the Walls, they need to ask about the Yaksha. Proper scouts were getting rarer by the day.
She suppresses the shudder in her hands at the glazed look in the Ura scout's eyes as they tie him up and frogmarch him between two of their own. She tries to remind herself. For the city, for the eternal city, always.
Across the city, in Central's Third District far from the Rippling Walls, Venn scratches out more calculations on his sheet, closes his eyes. He's close, he can tell, to figuring out the mix of stabilizing fluids that will keep the newfangled alloy the Mancers handed him from exploding on contact. Build a weapon, they said. And here he is. Building instruments of death, again.
In the other room, he can hear Zia's light snores. She was more like her mother than him, quiet, more inclined to music than to microscope. But her skill with the old Ura harp was undeniable.
He wished he could find her better teachers, but for that they would have to request travel permits for the Terminals, and that, he knew, would never end in his favor.
He did what he could, because he loved her so much. Left her the old Ura books of song the Mancers had locked away in their archives, for no good reason that he could discern. He took as many as he could stuff into his satchel, flashing his Mancer badge carelessly to the overworked clerk, rushing to catch the steam-tram back to his den before the Mancer librarian came back from break.
He had left the books at her bedroom door, couldn't even bring himself to go in.
He could never figure out what to say to his own flesh and blood. I'm sorry, he thought, more than once. He tried the words on his tongue, and it felt choking. He never apologized to Zia.
Zia never asked him to.
He pressed the pen harder into the paper as he worked through the last set of fluid dynamics equations. I'm a coward, he rues, listening to Zia breathe.
Zulf is typing out an address to the District Council -- a meeting has been called about the 'fugee situation, to check up on the Ura pass-holders. Again.
Reports from the Walls are worrying people again, Talia tells him one night. Worrying my folks too. Zulf looks at her sadly. He's never felt like he had to ask, but...
"Do you trust me?" He doesn't know if he can bear the answer.
Talia looks at him sternly, and frowns. His heart is in his mouth.
"Zulf." Her voice is sharp. He meets her eyes, sharp and searching.
"Of course I trust you. More than I trust myself, some days." She wrings her hands, and it's only then that Zulf sees she's still in her staff uniform. Too tired to change out.
"The situation down in the camps is bad, Zulf. They're dying down there, because people up here are too scared to let them live in their midst."
She continues, sadly. "Just...I know Cael pride. I know we're a bitter bunch who can't let go of the War. But believe in us, Zulf. Believe in us to do the right thing, eventually."
Zulf hugs her to him, lets her burrow her face into his silks while he keeps writing. I believe in you, he thinks. In you, and in the city both.