Before my lenses is a tableau like none I’ve ever seen. And let me tell you, I’ve seen some tableaus before. Damp ones, leaking ones, smelly ones, ones that tried to suck my lungs out of my throat, the works. But this here is something unique.

The alley ends at a concrete wall, covered in running wires and bracketed pipes and all the normal lymphatic detritus that makes the city work. And in the center of this mechanical-arterial nest is a skeleton, stuck about six feet up the wall. Not just any skeleton, mind you. It’s charred completely black, and surrounded by ash and soot in a grim, fragrant wreath all around. Its arms and legs are splayed out, and the jaw is hung open, teeth incinerated, in a permanent shriek of very brief, but very intense, agony.

I just sort of stand there for a moment or two, taking it all in. There’s lots of ways to die in our violent little world. Water, electricity, poison, metal, flesh, germs, and regular ol’ time. But you don’t see a corpse left behind by fire every day. And so picturesque! This looks like something only the angstiest of anti-establishmentarian painters would dream up in the darkest haze of pills and booze, not real life.

I lean to the side a bit, not wanting to take my eyes off it in case it starts telling goofy skeleton jokes. “Looks like someone likes their innocent civilians well-done, huh? Didn’t find any empty bottles of barbecue sauce lying around, did ya?”

Deepwell looks at me with a level of disapproval that I thought you had to be a gray-haired old matron to reach. “Can it and make with the analysis already, we’re burning daylight and I’d prefer you not be here in case the Captain shows up. He hates you almost as much as Sandborn does.”

“It’s amazing how little surprise I feel. Alright, start me off.”

Deepwell reaches into his coat and brings out a little notebook that looks very silly in his meaty paws. He puts on a pair of hilariously tiny reading glasses that are even sillier, flips the pad open, and begins, “Body was found at approximately six in the morning by a sector engineer making a routine check of the power meters and called it in immediately. Vic is an adult male.”

He takes the glasses off and puts them and the notebook back in his pocket.

I scrunch my eyebrows at him. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“What’s the notebook even for? You couldn’t memorize two sentences?”

“I’ve been here less than an hour, cut me some slack. And I wanted your input before starting to put all the pieces together. So go ahead, provide some input.”

I look back up at the torched corpse, and zoom in on some parts. Walk back and forth, up close, my eyes flash white as I take a few snapshots for later. Weird. Very weird. And I’m not sure I’m gonna love what I find at the end of it.

“Well, he wasn’t killed by a guy with a flamethrower. Or not by any flamethrower I’m aware of. Not that I study flamethrowers or anything, or know where you’d even get one or why. Not a bomb either, or you’d see scorch marks and debris in all directions. Something with a single direction of projection, with enough force to pin a guy on a wall. And Sergeant Slimeface out there said there’s no fuel lines here. Sound like any kind of weapon you’re familiar with?”

I look back over my shoulder at him. He frowns and shakes his head, little notebook out again.

“Didn’t think so. You see this around the bones, here?”

“See what?”

I point at a few spots around where the skeleton is affixed to the wall. “Parts of these pipes are glassy, drooping.” I hold my hand up to the concrete. “And still warm. Whatever this was, it was hot enough to melt metal. That means the stream of… whatever fuel was either directed on this spot for a good long time, or it was extremely hot. We’re talking hot enough to soften metal in just a few seconds. But it’s hard to tell which, I’m not a metallurgist.

“And this positioning is something else. Either the perp is huge and somehow held the guy this high up against the wall while frying him, or the weapon was powerful enough to blast him six feet in the air and stick him there. I don’t like the sound of either. No obvious tracks or other signs of a struggle. Did you guys do a spectrochemical already?”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Nothing you wouldn’t find in any other alley like this. We checked.”

“Damn.”

“Featherlight?”

“Yes?”

“You know I’m a detective, yes?”

“Ostensibly. That’s what it says on your badge, I think. And I imagine they wouldn’t give you that very fancy coat for no reason.”

He looks at me very dryly. “Right. That means my job is to detect things. And I’m pretty good at it. I didn’t bring you here to do my job, I brought you here to do your job, which is telling me whether there’s any magic at this crime scene. My team and I have already gone over everything you’re saying. We already eliminated all the normal possibilities, which is why I called you. So cut the redundancies and do the one thing you can do that I can’t, alright?”

I narrow my shutters at him. “Can you fit an entire apple in your mouth?”

“No?”

“Then that’s two things I can do that you can’t, wiseass. Fine then, give me a second.”

I go still. Delicate sensory work like this takes concentration. I close my eyes for a moment. I feel my own vitae, rumbling through my body like a trillion diesel trucks headed down a billion tiny highways inside me. I take hold of a little bit of it and extend it outward, lengthening my senses to things outside of my own skin. Feeling for bright spots, becoming receptive to subtle energies.

And it’s a good thing too, because after being incinerated and left in a dark alley for a few hours, this skeleton has almost no vitae left in it anywhere. It doesn’t have a reason to hang around - the soul that used to be inside this body already left. But there’s still some there, hiding down with the dry and crusted bone marrow, and just a teeny bit inside the skull where some brain juice didn’t get completely boiled out. It’s too faint to make out much shape or color, but there is one thing that is very, very unusual, and very, very bad.

The few dribbles of vitae left here are completely loaded with phlogiston.

It’s unmistakable. I’ve only picked up on phlogiston a scant few times in my life, but once you have, you don’t forget it: it smells like gasoline, crude oil, propane, wood smoke, diesel fumes, ashes, and rage, all at once. It leaves a carbonized, spicy, petroleum-y taste on the tongue. And it’s all over this poor sap’s body. Or what’s left of it.

Let me explain for those of you in the audience not familiar with the felonious science of magic. Phlogiston is to pyromancers what vitae is to biomancers - it’s the critical medium through which they work their will on the world. The spiritual energy goop... stuff that they tap into and mold, to do what we call “magic”. It’s exclusive, though. A biomancer can’t work with or influence phlogiston, and vice-versa. But in this case, someone stepped in my sandbox and left a footprint - they got some phlogiston in my vitae, and that I can detect.

I don’t know a whole lot about it, what with it not being my element and all (and considering that doing even the slightest amount of research on it is a crime punishable by death), but I do know some things. Phlogiston is kind of like the absolute purest essence of the element of fire, and it occurs naturally in a lot of things. A candle flame has a pretty good amount. A barrel of gasoline has a whole lot more. A human body has more or less, depending on how angry or well-fed it is, an ice cube has almost none, and the sun is the only thing made of one-hundred percent pure phlogiston.

If this skeleton’s residual vitae has so much phlogiston in it that I can smell it, then this guy either was a pyromancer, or he was killed by one. A firebug naturally has a lot of high-pressure phlogiston in their bodies at all times, and they perform their magic by letting it out and channeling it. This leaves some behind, like a snail leaves a trail of slime.

So. Either this was a firebug that lost control of his own juice in a way that I’ve never heard of, or one that’s taken up murder as his latest hobby. Wonderful.

Of course that leaves me with the decision of whether to tell anyone about it. I’ve got information control here. They haven’t yet come up with a technological way to sniff out the various kinds of magical droppings, so the only way to tell is to hire someone like me. If I tell the Lieutenant the truth, that’s going to make life very hard for every single pyromancer in the city, and what’s bad for some of us always ends up being bad for the rest of us. But I might get paid. If I lie, then whoever did this remains at large, and it’s basically up to me to decide whether to find him or not. A bounty will go up, but I won’t be able to collect on it without outing myself as a liar and burning my relationship with the Watch, which is already smoldering as it is.

“Well?”

I open my shutters and turn around. Deepwell’s giving me a very expectant look, pen at the ready.

Sorry, greater magical community. I can’t cover for you this time. Solidarity is great, but it just doesn’t pay the bills.

“Time to call the Neutralizers and put on your crusading pants. There’s phlogiston all over this.”

“There’s flow-what now?”

“Uh… magical fire energy, basically. As much as I wish it weren’t the case. Either a firebug blew himself up somehow, or a firebug turned this poor bastard into crunchy charcoal.”

Deepwell scribbles something, then puts the notebook back in his coat. “Great news for justice, bad news for you and all your buddies. How many pyromancers are there in the registry?”

“About four hundred.”

“Makes my job easier, then. Are you willing to sign an affidavit?”

“Not that I have much choice.”

“Sure you do. It’s just that if you don’t, I’ll have to put you in the cooler until you do. Huh. Yeah, I guess when you put it like that, it’s not really a choice at all. Well, either way, I’ll have your fee wired to your account.”

“Thanks. I’m so happy I could puke.”

He gives me a different kind of look. “This is murder, not attempted robbery and destruction of property, like last time. Big bounty. Are you gonna try to race the Neutralizers again? I won’t lie, it always puts a smile on my face when you beat them at their own game.”

I really don’t want to, honestly. Magecatching isn’t just hard, dirty, dangerous work - every one I nab feels a little like a betrayal, and makes every arcanist in the city trust me less than they already do. But God take me where I stand, does it pay well. And I need the damn money.

At least this one’s a murderer. Maybe the Consortium will see things my way this time.

“I might as well. I do love making them look bad. And taking a murderer off the streets will surely cleanse my filthy arcanist heart of at least some small amount of sin.”

He shrugs. “Ah, I’m sure you’ll find a way to fit some more sin in there and make up for it. Let’s head back. Get your paperwork face on.”

Ugh. What a day this is turning into. I’m probably going to get a paper cut on my jugular and die. That’d make the precinct happy at least - they’d get to throw a party on top of my draining corpse.

A little while later, I'm in Sector Seven, home of fancy restaurants, galleries, theaters, casinos, and the kinds of whorehouses that get called “social clubs”. I’m already in the general area, and I’m hungry after being harassed with forms for an hour and a half. There’s a place I like here.

It's colorful, clean, and loud in Sector Seven, with a wide-open circular plaza in the middle. Music always in the air, and all kinds of signs begging you to come look, come see what we've got going on tonight. The funhouse of the single-digit folk. You can come to Sector Seven, but remember - you gotta pay if you wanna play.

Being in the Inner Ring, you generally don't see many of my kind in Sector Seven. Most people milling around here are those with heavy purses, and the kind of leaky generosity that for some reason only reaches the hands of politicians and others of their kind rather than hospitals or schools. These kinds of people generally don't like looking at slabs, because we track mud all over the carpet and sometimes accidentally eat their dogs, so we tend not to be welcome in the establishments here. However, the unavoidable fact is that while slabs are definitely ugly and gross, the rich skinnies up here sure as sugar aren't going to be cleaning, fixing, or lifting anything heavy anytime soon, so even here you'll see some of us mixed in with some other poor skinnies that come in from the Outer Ring to do the dirty work.

But of course, everyone's gotta eat. So, if us grunts can't come and spill beer all over the nice white tablecloths, we'll just have to take our credits somewhere else, thanks. And that's where Gulder's Grub enters the picture.

In an alley off the side of Circle Seven, there's a shadowy little spot for people like me. It's not big, but it's an oasis in the middle of a desert of glitzy places that ask an entire month's rent just to come in. A little corner for the ones that actually do all the work. A couple little shops with everyday necessaries, a dingy bar or two, and some diners, all in the shadow of the great towering monuments to that goddess of Sector Seven: Pleasure.

The main (and only) attraction here is Gulder's. It doesn't look like much, just a metal shack with a clapboard menu and a window, but the nosh that Gulder slings is so good that there's always a line, and sometimes you'll even see people in fancy clothes standing in it. You can get a slab-sized sandwich so tasty it'll make you cry, and you can get it without having to take out a third mortgage.

I’ve built up a grave appetite, of a magnitude that only Gulder's is mighty enough to slay. I'm standing in line, behind a skinny in oil-stained overalls. It's nearly lunch, so I've got a while to wait before I get to the front.

The people here are either too tired or too depressed to pay me any mind, which suits me just fine. It’s one of the reasons I like coming here. It’s a misfit shelter. I even know a few arcanists that are willing to come out of the woodwork for one of Gulder’s sandwiches. Believe me, you’d be willing to risk your skin too, if you knew what this alley smelled like. The heavenly aromas bring out all kinds of hungry crazies.

Speaking of which, here's a squirrely-looking slab boy over by some tables that's decided to take his face out of his sandwich and aim it toward my face. I lock eyes with him. Or try to, at least. He can't keep his straight. He's a sizable bit of product, somewhere between six and a half and seven feet, maybe around five hundred fifty pounds. Average enough by our standards. Judging by his lack of clank, jittery eyes, hairless head, and general air of frothy paranoia, I'm guessing he was kind of a shrimpy fella before his procedures.

Those are the dangerous ones. These cats are why every Watchman carries a canister of slabkiller gas when they're out on patrol.

Take a little guy who, let's be honest here, was never destined for great feats of academic achievement. Now put him in a desperate situation. Traumatize him. Make him grow up poor. Give him a tiny dick, make sure he gets plenty of bullies to deal with, both in school and out. Kill his parents, or make them hate and abuse him. Tell all the girls, or boys in some cases, not to look at him. Fire him from his job. Maybe give him a terminal illness, or fill him up with so much unprocessed rage that fire comes out of his nose every time he sneezes. Box him into a corner, put him in a cage so nasty that the only way out is to get slabbed.

It'll work, the cutters at the slab lab say. You're prime material, just what we needed, they say. But he isn't. He's scrawny, malnourished, unintelligent. A sad mess in the shape of a young man. But hey, slabbers need meat. And here it is, direct off the streets. It's not like actual people would ever volunteer for something like this, so we'll make do with the kind of guy that needs the money. So they'll give him some cash, put him on the table, and chop him up anyway, knowing full well that his unimpressive body and sub-average brain won't be able to take it. And he'll come out the other side a twitching, confused, angry kid, with hormones leaking out of his ears and more mental and emotional scars than physical ones, living inside the body of a giant.

You haven't taken him out of that cage. You've just made him strong enough to drag other people in with him.

I zoom in on him and sure as sunrise, he's got an aggression inhibitor bolted to the side of his head, wire running down to meet up with the back of his neck. It's a big one, too. This kid must have some bad habits. Without it, the hot sludge running in his veins would send him into a psychosexual meltdown of nightmarish proportions. Within fifteen minutes he'd either collapse and start seizing until he swallowed his own tongue, or cave to the voices in his head and start raping people to death until someone shot him.

He's still trying to look at me. Hard to maintain an intimidating glare when your eyeballs keep slipping off whatever you're trying to stare down. I think he's jealous of my own eyes. My implants, that is. My old pair are probably fertilizing some grandma's apple tree somewhere.

I never got nystagmus like a lot of these kids do. Years after my change I could see as well as I did when I was a teenager. That’s the main freebie biomancy gets you - an unnaturally healthy body, even after enough experimental surgeries to make the most puritanical Brotherhood zealot sweat. My body just mutates around additions and edits, keeping me extremely alive whether I have any say in it or not. Pyromancers get to shoot fire out of their nose, hydromancers get to make the fountains dance, heiromancers get to write laws that reality itself has to obey. My only trick is being too alive to kill, among a couple of other fun things. But hey, if you’re gonna have one trick, not dying is a pretty good one to have, I think.

This kid has no clank at all other than his inhibitor, fitting with my observation that his vitae is weak as fuck, despite all his implants and injections. Red, and very low, like a lonely coal. His brain was barely holding itself together after basic slabbing, so there's no way he'd be able to tolerate any kind of optional features. Probably doesn't even have bone reinforcements. He's got maybe five years before he's a twisted-up pile of slime. If he doesn't kill himself or get executed first.

I smile and give him a little wave. He scowls at me, still trying to meet my eyes. Defiant. Cute.

From here, there's only two options, depending on his personality and how well that inhibitor is working. He'll either burn one of his last synapses to realize that I'm bigger and smarter than him by a pretty significant margin and go back to eating his sandwich like a nice little porkbrain, or decide against all logic that I'm a bit too uppity for his liking and I need to be taught a lesson. I'm about halfway through the line, so I figure I've got enough time to share some of my wisdom before lunch. I keep smiling at him.

Yep. That did it. The sandwich, which right now should be the most important thing in this guy's short little life, has been laid down. I am now his entire universe, and I couldn't be happier. He stands up from his table and starts stomping his way over to me. He's doing the thing all these gutter slabs do when they want to look extra scary and impressive. Squaring his shoulders, pushing his chest out, holding his chin slightly up, and flexing all his muscles at once, so his veins stand out under his skin like bridge cables. Personally, I always thought this pose made a guy look like an erection throwing a temper tantrum, but hey, what do I know? Maybe that's the point. I know I probably wouldn't try to tussle with a giant, throbbing, foul-tempered penis in work boots and coveralls. Who knows what kind of fluids you'd get on you?

Now he's within smelling distance. The delightful melange of grease, sweat, and testosterone wafts over me, and suddenly I'm reconsidering lunch. The rest of the line has done a curious thing, bending away from me to form a comfortable and distant semicircle. People around here know the drill - they're pretty much on autopilot. Once you see two trains crash head-on multiple times a day for a few years, you learn to just step calmly out of the shrapnel zone.

He lines up on me, about ten feet away. Close, but not so close that I could grab him. Smart. Not the first time this guy's taken exception to someone's behavior. His vitae is flaring, but it’s still sort of pitiful - just a kind of weak reddish glow, like a spoon accidentally left on a stove.

The palooka does his best to get me in his wiggly sights and grunts, “Got a problem, fuck?” His voice is hoarse, like sandpaper rasping over gravel. Probably smokes a lot of scrub to dampen the pain in his joints.

Most skinnies he does this to are probably wetting themselves by this point, so, considering he has somehow mistaken me for one, he probably expects me to do the same. Instead, I do what any respectful predator does when he meets one of his own kind, and show him my teeth. All fifty-eight of them.

I opt to leave the eloquence at the door, guessing this meat pie probably wouldn't appreciate it anyway. “Yeah. You're really, really ugly. You look like a butt. And you smell like what comes out of a butt. You should take a shower. Smelly.”

Okay, not exactly award-winning trash talk. But you try making your insults dashing and stylish using only words with two or less syllables. It's hard!

His pink face screws up in an expression of both pain and skull-popping fury, making his hairless head look like a wad of used chewing gum. His inhibitor is shocking him, telling him to cut it out. But he doesn't. He's angry enough to push through the pain.

I can understand that.

He lets the rage out of his chest with a roar, then puts his head down and charges me, very plainly trying to tackle me to the ground so he can turn my face into mince. I do what a slab almost never does.

Dodge.

This probably wouldn’t work in most other situations, because I’m huge and not very maneuverable, but so is this guy. I step around him as cool as you please, and he steams past me. He keeps going for a bit, but then catches on to the fact that he hasn't hit anything for a suspiciously long time, so he skids to a stop and whips around.

He's way past words at this point. He's getting shocked so bad I can see smoke coming from his implant. It'll blow if I don't tuck him into bed quick.

I don’t even need any magic for this. He’s making it way too easy.

Chunky charges again, but this time I don't move out of the way. I plant my back foot, then thrust my hand out right as he reaches me, mashing my palm right into his nose. He stops cold in his tracks with a sad little whimper, arms stretching toward me pitifully.

Fortunately the kid's got a weird tiny head, so I'm able to get a good grip on it. Thumb on his right ear, fingers wrapped nicely across his jawbone and temple. I lift him up a bit for leverage, then throw his head into the pavement like a bouncy ball. Being connected by a neck, the rest of his body follows suit. His chin makes a fun crack when it hits, and his neck bends at an angle that four out of five physicians probably don't recommend. He stops moving.

I bend down and wipe the sweat and spit off on the back of his shirt, then check his breathing. Feel around his neck vertebrae. His vitae is still there, but even dimmer. He's fine. Way sleepier than he was a minute ago, but alive. He'll wake up in half an hour wondering why everything above his shoulders feels like it got run over by a cargo train. And if he's lucky, he'll find he's gained some perspective on pointless violence, especially when aimed at one of the only guys in the city that outweighs him. If I'd been a Watchman, he'd have been sprayed with slabkiller and packed off to Sector Seventeen for recycling so fast he wouldn't even have time to notice how dead he was.

I stand up and give the line a coy smile and a wave. A couple nod at me in respect. I saunter slyly back over, and the guy I'd been ahead of lets me back in my spot.

Most gutter slabs are like a bottle of fizz in the back of a truck on a bumpy road. Over time, the pressure builds. The drugs, hormones, and supplemental brain tissue needed to integrate and coordinate the extra muscle result in a boiling pot of blind, directionless rage. For most, working hard all day doesn't let enough steam off. The extra starts to collect. With society saying that other ways of release aren't acceptable, while telling them they have to stay in line and put up with all the looks and comments, they reach a point where they pop. Usually all they do is smash up their own apartment, or fight it out with another slab in the same predicament.

But sometimes, when they're right on the edge, and another little kid screams at them like they're some kind of monster... they become one, for one horrible moment. And once you're a monster, you can never be anything else, ever again.

So, out of a sense of obligation to my dumb, angry brothers, I keep an eye out for the ones that look like they need a hard, thorough bit of percussive recalibration. I throw some goofy words at 'em, they fall for it, then I give 'em a nice whack on the head. They go to sleep for a bit, wake up with a few bruises, feel stupid, and remember what it is they need to be focusing on. Or at the very least they remember my fist in their face, which is enough to take the hot out of anyone's sauce, in my opinion. And then they stay out of trouble. Better for them to get a couple ouchies from a real monster than to cross that line themselves, I think.

I’m a mage, but I’m a slab too. It’s hard work being this distinctive and altruistic.

After about nine hundred years, I'm at the front of the line. I check the time. Almost noon. Yippee. I'm almost starting to feel it, too. The thought of quietly enjoying my meal at home and then taking a nap after the day I've had is almost enough to bring a tear to my eye. Metaphorically, that is. My tear ducts are cauterized shut.

The guy in front of me gets his order. It's a slab-sized sandwich, which I find strange, because it's almost the size of his thigh. But then I remember that skinnies can just slice a slab's sandwich like a cake and feed an entire family of four for a day or so. He's probably got kids at home. Pretty economical, when you think about it.

He tucks his monster meal under his arm and goes away, and I step up. I've got to take a knee in order to give my order, on account of how the shack's window only comes up to somewhere around the middle of my chest.

I peer into the greasy dollhouse and there's Gulder, the man himself, right in my face. I like Gulder. He serves enough slabs and weirdos every day that my awful mug suddenly appearing in his line of sight doesn't give him a heart attack. Everyone he sees, no matter what shape or sort, is just a receptacle to place a sandwich into, and I can't help but respect him for that. He's kind of a funny-looking fellow. On the short side, but borderline spherical from sampling the fruits of his labor, with no hair and a big black mustache like a push broom. From a distance he looks like two pink circles with a wide black line drawn through the top one.

He catches the green glint of my eyes and his caterpillar eyebrows go up. “Hey! This guy! Long time no see, Tiny! How you been? Keepin' outta trouble?”

See, the joke here is, Gulder calls me Tiny because I am, actually, a remarkably large person. An appellation that unexpectedly juxtaposes against the reality of the situation, in an example of what is sometimes referred to as “irony”. This is technically humor, but it's difficult to recognize after it's had its skull caved in with a lead pipe, wallet stolen, and left for dead in an alley somewhere. I'm so sorry, Humor. You deserved better.

I reply, “Oh, you know. I try to keep outta trouble, but trouble just can't keep outta me. It's 'cause I'm so handsome, y'see. Trouble just can't resist.”

He laughs. “Oh for sure. Pretty boy like you probably has more than his share of attention.” His smile melts off. “Hey look, thanks for cleaning up that mess over there. That one comes by pretty often, but he was starting to make me nervous. Times is hard enough without a puffed-up bully harassing my customers. Now he knows you come by here sometimes, maybe he'll cool it. I'm buying your lunch today.”

I wave a paw and scoff, because that's what you do in situations like this. “C'mon, it was all the work of twenty seconds. You probably could’ve given him a firm poke with a spatula and he would’ve fallen over, guy was as stable as a castle made out of cookies. It wasn't nothin'.”

He shakes his head and holds his hands up insistently. “It wasn't not nothin', champ. You went outta your way when you didn't have to. You spend twenty seconds showing a creep the inside of his own face for me, I spend twenty seconds making you lunch. Fair's fair, I insist.”

There's no point trying to shout him down. He's a Sector Seven man with a business that prints its own money, but I can tell he's not from here. Probably grew up in one of those Outer Ring slums where generosity is as rare as rain and being paid a favor is something that simply cannot be tolerated without swift, righteous vengeance. These cats are trained from childhood to treat an act of kindness like a declaration of war. Try to out-nice one of these slum knights and you'll both end up bankrupt.

“Alright, pal, I'll let you foot the bill this time. But only because I know you'll beat me up if I don't.”

He brandishes his spatula at me very seriously. “You bet your stitched-up ass I will. You want the deluxe with the works and extra mustard, right?”

“Yes I do, and you might as well throw in a basket of fried squash too, seeing as how you're paying and all.”

“You got it, champ. Be just a minute.”

About a minute later, I've got my bag, and I say my goodbye. I'm glad I stopped by. Not just because it's the best sandwich someone else's money can buy, but I also got to box a disaster waiting to happen. Can't have the riff-raff messing around and giving one of my favorite joints extra headache. And the whole possible prevention of senseless death thing, et cetera.

Now I gotta get back on the train. Hopefully I can get home before this bag gets cold, but who am I kidding, you could leave Gulder's stuff in a gutter for a week and it'd still be tastier than half the food in the city.

I step on the ostentatiously ornate Sector Seven platform, scan my ID, the alarm goes off, people give me dirty looks and clear out of the way, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t even care. I’ve got a greasy brown bag of heaven and they don’t, so there. This sandwich means I win today, citizens.

Interestingly, one person doesn’t clear off of the platform. He’s an old, old man, standing on the steel plates a distance from me. He’s a little bent, and holds a simple wooden cane. Very weathered, browned skin, like he’s worked in the sun his entire life. White beard, wild wispy hair like snow being blown off a mountaintop. I can’t get anything from his facial expression, he almost looks half asleep. I didn’t hear the system go off before me, so he’s not an arcanist. Maybe he didn’t hear the buzzer?

His vitae is… weird. You ever see diagrams of magnetic field lines? The two fields of concentric loops wrapping out and back from the poles? It looks like that, kind of. Long, lazy loops of gray energy, radiating out in steady pulses from the center of his chest and dissipating once they get a good ten or so feet away. There’s something else there, too. The lines closest to him have this sort of yellow shimmer that fades as they go out. The whole web smells… almost like ozone, or electrically charged metal.

Like I said, weird. Gray is a really rare color in vitae, like silver, gold, white, or black. And he can’t be an arcanist, even though that’s what this kind of weird pattern usually suggests. Unless he just didn’t scan his ID? He’s playing with fire, if that’s the case.

The train arrives, and I get on. The old man steps on too. He sits down gently on a seat toward the front of the car, and I stand a respectful distance away in the back. He crosses his spindly arms around his cane, leans his head forward, and falls asleep, apparently. Just like that, his long robe/coat thing wrapped about him like a blanket.

This isn’t totally unheard of. Most people get off the platform when an arcanist scans in, but a very few just ignore it and get on anyway. Something tells me this dusty tomcat isn’t exactly late for anything, so he must be too old to care. It’s the first time I’ve had any company on the train in months.

I’d like to talk to him, but I’ll let him sleep. Far be it from me to wreck up an old-timer’s rest. He’s probably earned it.

I get off the train about thirty minutes later, back in Sector Eighteen. The old man stays on, still fast asleep. I’m almost worried that he missed his stop, but I just didn’t have the heart to wake him.

Ah, home. The smells of steam, chemicals, and industry wash over me all anew. All the rusty rivets, cargo docks, and bustling wage-earners are right where I left them. It’s great to be back. I think. I swim my way down the foggy main thoroughfares and back into the slick side streets, to the steps leading down into my little tunnel.

I’m looking forward to lunch. I think most people look forward to lunch, but I haven’t eaten in… five days? I think? So as you can imagine, my appetite is well and truly stoked. The only reason I’m not slumped over like a wilting geranium is because of my magic. Like I mentioned earlier, being a biomancer confers a few little advantages, and one of them is being able to go a long time without food, even if you’re an eight-hundred pound monstrosity like me. That said, it’s just a stopgap - the biomancer’s cache of extra vitae in my body will keep me running for a while, but it’s not a replacement for real nutrients. After too long, my body really will start to starve to death, no matter how energized I might feel. Thank you, sandwich, for saving me from such a gruesome fate. You’ve always been such a great friend to me, these past forty minutes or so. It’s almost a shame I have to eat you.

Affording food is kind of hard for me. Well, alright, affording anything is hard for me. Fate might have given us arcanists powers beyond the ken of mere mortals, but the mortals kind of stopped being mere a while back, and now it’s hard for us to walk down the street without getting arrested for something, much less find reliable employment. My body is kind of huge, if the “eight hundred pounds” didn’t tip you off, and I have to eat as much as four people. This stresses my finances, as you can imagine, even after factoring in the slab’s discount most places are legally required to offer. If I didn’t have my magic to lean on, I’m pretty sure I’d have starved to death years ago.

Most of us have to resort to risky or illegal mercenary work, or just banal mundanities, because magic frees up a lot of business overhead. I know one hydromancer that works almost exclusively as a plumber. Imagine that for me real quick. This guy was born with the power to tap into and control some of the most awe-inspiring natural forces in existence. A man whose spirit is infused with the inexorable might of glaciers, the fury of the coursing river, the pounding strength of a breaking wave, the fathomless majesty of the oceans themselves, and he’s using them to blow shit out of people’s toilets. Welcome to Wellspring City.

Down in my quiet concrete antechamber, I’m standing in front of my sliding hatch, fumbling in my pocket for my keys. I squish my vitae through the door, making sure no one decided to break in while I was gone, but there’s no one in there. No one alive, anyway - it’s always possible someone could have broken in to dump a few corpses on my floor as a fun prank again. Here’s a homemaking tip - club soda and vinegar are really useful for getting corpse juice out of your rugs. Y’know, just in case it ever happens to you, dear reader. You never know!

Then, a little bit too late, I feel a pair of vitae clouds to my right. I turn my head.

Standing there about thirty feet away on the upper walkway with me are two individuals that I would probably describe as “hoodlums” if I were way older than I am. A couple of meaty, muscly boys wearing colorful tanktops and spiked boots. One has no hair, the other appears to be making up for his friend’s deficiency by maintaining a majestic array of bleach-white spiked-up hair antennae, radiating from his skull like he’s wearing the ghost of a sea urchin on his head.

Cueball has a curved subdermal lightshow screen implanted across his left bicep - kind of like a tattoo, but for people that want to look like the display counter at a deli. Its scrolling red pixel marquee reads “GET FUCKED” in rapidly blinking capital letters. So we’ve got at least one poet on our hands. His vitae is red-orange and juddering, like coals in a hard wind.

Spike Top is grinning, to show me his extremely sharp aquamarine-colored dental implants. I always thought those were ridiculous. Yes, they do make you look like a scary shark man, I guess, but they’ve got to make eating a huge chore. And if you accidentally bite your tongue, you’ll probably saw right through it. He’s also got jet-black contact lenses, to complete the “I’m totally a shark, guys, seriously” look. His vitae is steady and mostly piss yellow, which I think would make him feel a lot less confident about himself if he knew about it.

Both of these guys have a simple black tattoo of a lightning bolt on the left side of their necks, like the ones you see on high voltage warning signs. This allows myself, rival gangs, and the Watch to determine what little club they’re a part of. These boys are with the Thunderbolts, and their name should tell you at least a little about these cats’ capacity for imagination.

Spike Top looks me in the ocular (with an amount of smugness that you usually only see in people rich enough to own their own museums) and says, “Nighty night, shitfuck.”

He pulls something off his belt and points it at me. Before I can move, there’s a little thwp noise, and two thin spiraled cables fire from it like striking snakes. The darts pierce my shirt sleeve and canvas coat and sink into my right bicep. I should really start wearing body armor or something when I go outside these days.

Have you ever had 500,000 volts of electricity running through your body all at once? Let me try to paint a picture for you. Imagine all the muscles in your body are little pulleys that tighten with a crank. This much electricity cranks all of them to maximum tension at the same time, causing your entire body to clench up uncontrollably. And uh, also imagine that it sets all the pulley wires on fire, too. So there’s that. It’s not exactly how I wanted to spend my early afternoon.

My knees buckle, and I fall forward. My arms seize up, bringing my useless clawed hands up somewhere around my neck. I think I can smell smoke - I watch as the brown paper bag I was holding falls to the ground, the grease smoldering a little. My keys are still in my other fist, and that’s bad - the metal bits are forming a fun little short circuit that I can’t let go of.

These guys brought an anti-slab stunner, probably stolen from one Watch depot or another. These are powerful enough to kill a skinny outright, and reduce a five-hundred pound raging bull slab to a quivering heap of piss and drool within half a second. That’s pretty much where I’m headed.

Or I would be, if these goobers hadn’t made a couple of tactical errors.

One, I’m about forty percent bigger than your average gutter slab. Two, I’m a fucking arcanist. It says so right on the sign by my door here, but I guess these clowns didn’t see it, or forgot how all the little letters work.

I push through the cage the electricity’s put me in, and force a deep breath into my lungs. The creaking, buzzing, writhing nest of power in my chest comes to life.

I force myself to exhale, and as I do, the white-gold-green glow of pure vitae runs out of my chest and all through my torso, stretching along the inside of my limbs like vines. The light fills each one of my veins, and they shine through my skin. If I still had eyes, they’d be glowing too.

The vitae grabs hold of the electricity like a gorilla grabbing a tree branch and shoves it out toward the ground, through the soles of my feet and into the accepting concrete. My muscles shudder and creak their way to being limber again, and I stand up off my knees. My arms disengage, and I drop my damn keys. The burns in my palm immediately begin to squirm shut, the flesh knitting like two slime molds getting married.

Pure, undistilled Life energy can have a number of effects on the body, but I know how to wrangle it. Every single bit of fatigue in my muscles drains away. My fear and doubt disappear, leaving behind only rage - the kind of rage that the forest brings against a hurricane or wildfire. The rage that defies death and grows, against all adversity. The rage of Life itself.

You have to imagine how this looks from these two knuckleheads’ perspective. To them I was always a half-ton monster of a man with green metal eyes, but now I’m an angry monster with steaming skin and glowing veins, standing from a lethal electric shock to loom over them with a very irritated look on my face. I tear the crackling darts out of my arm. They stop smiling.

To illustrate how disappointed I am with these two boys, I reach to my left and tear the nearby iron safety railing clear out of its sunken concrete supports. Fragments of gray rock fly in all directions. It groans and screeches as I crumple it under my grip like paper and mash it into a pitiful little ball of twisted metal the size of a melon. I hold it up, to show them what I’m about to do to their skeletons, and drop it. It falls to the concrete with a sad little clank.

Not to brag, but I’m already a pretty strong guy. If I really huff and puff, I can lift a small car, which is really helpful if you need to change a tire and forgot your jack. But pure vitae causes living things to go into absolute overdrive, and that includes muscles in particular. Until I run out or stop channeling, I’m more than powerful enough to pluck these idiots’ arms out of their sockets like petals from a daisy.

I take a single step forward. Cueball and Spike Top, their eyes wide and faces slicked with terror sweat, twitch like they’re going to try to run, but I preempt them by reminding them who the real predator here is. I charge my entire vitae cloud at them. It smashes into theirs and snuffs them out almost entirely, like two candles set in front of a stampede. They crumple to the ground on their butts, too overcome with fear to even move. Their brainstems are telling them that the jig is up - time to lie down and be eaten.

My feet stomp toward them and I kneel down, to make good and sure they’ll never forget my face.

I rumble quietly, “Did you two have something to tell me?”

After a little bit of sputtering, Spike Top finds the last scrap of courage he has left and replies, “E-Electrofuck wants his m-money. He s-says you have two w-weeks, or he’s gonna c-come down and f… f-fry your ass personally. S-sir.”

See, I’m not “shitfuck” anymore, I’m “sir”. Amazing how people find their politeness only after you make their pants suddenly heavier with a little show of force. Speaking of which, it’s gotten a lot smellier right here all of a sudden, and I think it’s time for these two to hit the showers.

“Message received. Now. It’s lunchtime,” their eyes get even wider and Cueball makes a funny strangled sobbing noise, “so run, before I decide to have your crunchy little skulls as an appetizer.”

Okay, that’s a bit of an embellishment on my part. I wouldn’t do that. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely could - when you’ve got as much bite force as I do there’s not much difference between a cranium and a candy apple. But have you ever bitten into raw brains? They’re really squishy and unpleasant. No thanks.

The two dandies just kind of shiver and stare up at me. They’re gridlocked - too afraid to move.

I lift a foot and stomp, rattling the ground a bit. “Go!”

They scramble to their feet and scamper out of my tunnel like cockroaches, waddling a little bit and trailing some seriously unpleasant smells behind them.

I sigh, and let go of the vitae. The light fades from my veins, and I suddenly feel a lot more exhausted than I did a few minutes ago. I’m not well fed and more than a little weary - that was pretty much the bottom of my reserves. But it was either spend them or fall to the ground right where the Thunderbolts wanted me.

And now I’m absolutely starving. Where’d I drop my-

Oh no.

Over by the sad wadded-up ball of railing is something even sadder - my lunch. It’s nothing more than a brown, greasy streak on the ground. I must have accidentally stomped on it. It looks like it was run through a hydraulic press.

Those two are lucky I hadn’t noticed before I let them go. I might have followed through with my threat and made a big batch of Thug Salad. But this is what happens when you use magic without proper planning - unforeseen, tragic consequences. Goodbye, sandwich. If only you’d made it into my belly like you deserved.

I want to punch a wall. I want to sit here and cry. But like my dad was fond of saying, “There’s no better way to be miserable than trying to change what’s done and gone.” Of course, my dad was perfectly miserable and he died trying exactly that, but it’s the sentiment that counts, here. I step inside, and leave the flattened corpse of my sandwich to the scumbirds.

Home. Everything’s where I left it. Rug, bed, desk, datascreen. All wonderfully shabby, all wrapped in cold gray-green concrete, all I have.

Okay. First things first. I’m starting to see darkness at the edges of my vision and I’m going to lose consciousness if I don’t put some kind of thing into my body. I was hanging by a thread before that little run-in and now that thread is fraying fast. My pantry is full of cobwebs instead of food, so we’re going to have to dip into the emergency stores.

I hobble precariously over to the far wall and barely make it without collapsing. I’m sweating, and probably pretty pale. I get a grip on a metal handle, my arm shaking like the last leaf on an autumn branch, and pull a sliding panel to the right.

This reveals a kind of metallic rack thing set into a little cubbyhole in the concrete. It’s made of metal arms with a few magnetic actuators and a control unit. In the middle of the hanging assembly are some straps and two cylindrical tanks, kind of like fire extinguishers or compressed air canisters, with hoses running out of their bottoms.

I grab one of the lines, pull down the collar of my shirt to expose one of my two implanted injection ports, and plunge the evil-looking hose connector into my body. It slots into the metal and meat of my upper chest with a satisfying click. I reach over and turn the regulator valve on the right tank. There’s a hiss.

And sweet, sweet vitae runs down the line and into my thorax, wiping the darkness from my vision and pouring new strength back into my flagging muscles. My breath returns and I stand up straight. After about twenty seconds, right at the moment where I feel close to normal, I shut the valve and take the injector hose out.

Not exactly a five-course white tablecloth meal or anything, but it’ll have to do.

I check the regulator pressure. The little green readout says “17%”. That’s… less than great. I used up almost 4% just to stop myself from passing out. Maybe I should have wadded up the flattened sandwich and shoved it in my face anyway.

At least I feel a little better. I take out a lollipop. Grape. A contemplative, moody purple flavor. The color of bad bruises. Is this a sign, candy gods? Are you trying to tell me something?

Candy in tow, I thud my way over to my desk and sit down. The chair groans under my weight, and I have to stifle a groan of my own. The ecstasy of sitting down after a morning of hauling my ludicrous carcass across the city and back is almost too much for my poor mind to take. No one should be this happy.

It might not last, though. Apparently I’ve got about two weeks left.

I would really rather show you the man that the Brothers Goon were representing. He’s the sort of guy that defies description. And social norms. And all notions of civil law and order. And sanity. But I’ll do my damnedest to explain.

I mentioned that I have more-or-less continual money issues. Partially because of prejudice, partially because I’m just really bad at marketing myself. So, sometimes I have to borrow in order to get by when times are tight. The tightness of my times vacillates somewhere between “cinch belt a few notches to prevent hunger pains” and “noose”, so as you can imagine, I’ve had to borrow my unfair share. The problem is that no one wants to give me any credit. Literally. There isn’t a single bank in Wellspring City that will loan money to someone like me. Some of the less fussy ones will lend to slabs with halfway decent standing and biometrics, but none are fool enough to let a thing like me get his mitts in their vault, even temporarily and with an interest rate that would make the most coldhearted extortionist blush.

So I’ve had to borrow from less than reputable sources, and Electrofuck is possibly the least reputable being in all of existence.

Picture in your mind’s eye, for a moment, the kind of man that would willingly, gleefully, walk around with a name like Electrofuck. Okay, good job. You’re about 60% there already. Now give that bloodthirsty, stim-addled, crazy-eyed maniac magical powers, of the soothing, healing variety. Nah, I’m just messing with you - his body is loaded with enough electricity to knock out an entire city block just by touching the wrong transformer. Okay, now make him just clever and enterprising enough to compensate for his several dozen flavors of psychosis, to the point where he’s managed to “recruit” (i.e. forcibly indenture) a few hundred frightened meatheads into a gang, avoid incarceration, and bring a full quarter of the city’s illegal drug trade under his short-circuiting, maniacal wing.

The only thing that Electrofuck loves more than money is drugs, the only thing he loves more than drugs is murder, and the only thing he loves more than murder is kittens. I really have no idea why. He just… he just really likes kittens. This is Electrofuck we’re talking about here, so when I first heard about this I assumed they were his favorite food, but one time he carbonized twenty of his own guys because one of them accidentally stepped on one of his cats’ tails. He is very protective of them.

And this is the essence of Electrofuck’s growing stranglehold on the city underground. He’s completely insane, and kind of an idiot, but his total lack of reason combined with a massive amount of high-voltage magical power result in everyone being too afraid to do anything about him. Even the Watch mostly ignore him, because 1) he’s terrifying, and 2) has actually had something of a regulating effect on the expansion of organized crime in the city, because he’s terrifying.

I owe him something around a million credits. That might not sound like very much, but for me, it’s a little much. At first, things between him and me seemed fairly ducky - I learned through some unsavory channels that Electrofuck was breaking into the loan sharking business, and I thought to myself, what the heck, sharks can’t be that scary - we’re on land! And Electrofuck took an instant shine to me. He thinks I’m funny, and I suspect that he sees a kind of kindred spirit in me, somewhere deep in the haywire folds of his acid-soaked brain. I capitalized on his good humor for a while, kind of hoping that he would probably forget about my debt to him altogether, what with him being a very wealthy maniac, but… nope. Like I said, money is where Electrofuck’s insanity ends, and it seems that my rapport with him has soured. I’d intended to pay all along, but… I just can’t.

I’ve mentioned that I’m hard to kill. I’m big and strong, I don’t get sick, I can survive on nothing for a long time, and I can close my own wounds with a thought. But you can’t punch electromagnetism, and I’m not going to be regenerating back from being blasted into hot plasma by a ten-billion watt lightning bolt. If I don’t get his money, Electrofuck will vaporize me, both to maintain his reputation and for the fun of it. No matter how funny he thinks my jokes are.

He’s one of the only things in this city that I’m legitimately afraid of, and I had to go and piss him off. I’ll never be sure of my own intelligence ever again.

So… two weeks. I... guess I’ve got no choice but to run the bounty on this rogue pyromancer. I have to catch him before the Watch or the Neutralizers do, and pray that the payout is enough to settle my debt. If not... I’m gonna be crispy delicious a fortnight from now.

To be fair, though, I’d probably be really delicious.