I sift through the (sparsely populated) contacts list in my internal registry and find someone I kind of wish I didn’t have to talk to. She’s been angry at me for about thirteen years now. I deserve it, and I’d rather not inflict myself upon her, but she knows things and people that could benefit an investigation that recently became very important to me, so I’m not left with a lot of choice.

I could use this opportunity to act like an adult for once. Talk things over and pave the broken earth between us. Have a conversation that’s done nothing but rot unused in my mind for more than a decade now.

But let’s be honest, here. That would be the responsible and decent thing to do, and I’m a little too cowardly to have a good grasp of either concept.

I dial her office number, hoping that it hasn’t changed. I haven’t spoken to her in months. I guess anything can happen in that amount of time, but I hope it hasn’t - a lot of people would be much worse off if this number stopped ringing.

After a few bells, the line crackles to life. Her voice comes through the other end. For a crazy little moment I make note of the fact that she sounds exactly the same, but unless she got punched in the throat recently, I have no idea why she’d sound differently after less than a year. You see how nervous I am? Not even Electrofuck gets under my skin like she does, and I’m pretty sure Electrofuck would literally wear my skin if he got the chance. This is what happens when you leave too much business unfinished, folks. Don’t be like me.

“Candlelight Orphan Home, this is Ms. Summerstone. How can I be of assistance?”

Sitting at my desk, I run a hand down my face, to show the concrete how ashamed I am. I’ve never gotten used to hearing her voice right in my head like this.

“Hi, Em.”

There’s silence on the other end. That silence isn’t a mistake, or an accident. It’s barbed and glowing like a hot fishhook. It’s deliberately calculated, just long enough to cause me pain.

“... Baulric. Have you been put up for adoption? I don’t think we have any beds that would fit you.”

I give a halfhearted attempt at a laugh. “No, uh, you know. I’ll never be homeless as long as this city has drainage pipes, haha.”

“Still living in that old cistern, huh?”

“I think I was always destined to be a cave creature. I’ve embraced it. Like a barnacle embraces the belly of a walrus. Listen, I need your help with something, Em.”

“I don’t have any money for you, Baulric. Our budget is literally hanging by a thread as it is.”

I scoff. “When have I ever asked you for money, Emaphra?”

“You haven’t yet, but you never know. You know taking money from me is taking rice right out of orphans’ mouths, right?”

I groan. “I don’t want any money, Em. I’ve got plenty of money, as it happens.”

“How do you even catch anyone, Baulric? Aren’t manhunters supposed to be good at lying? I can smell your poverty from here.”

Now I huff a sigh. Talking to Emaphra elicits all kinds of noises from me - I’m like a big meaty set of bagpipes.

“I’m only a manhunter sometimes. This is related to that, but a lot closer to your neck of the woods. By that I mean you might be in danger, and I need some information to know how worried you need to be.”

She’s silent for a short moment. “Okay. Is this a conversation you’d rather have in person?”

I said the D word, which is enough to delete all the sarcasm from her speech. Emaphra likes to give me a hard time, for a lot of reasons, but she knows I wouldn’t bring something like this to her if I didn’t feel I had to.

“Yes, I think that’d be for the best.”

“How’s the weather out today?”

This is code. She’s asking me how likely it is that this conversation is being monitored. My internal relay outputs are all encrypted, but I’m a mage on the Watch’s docket who just took a contract the Brotherhood is bound to be very interested in. I’d say some surveillance about as likely as human mortality.

“Partly cloudy, looks like it might even rain.”

“Okay. Meet me where we used to go, double time.”

The cafe we used to inhabit when we were kids, two hours from now.

“Alright. I’ll meet you there.”

She hangs up. The line in my head goes dead.

It’s not a date.

I take my time getting to Sector Twelve. Not because I want to be fashionably late, but because it would look better if I approached her off the street rather than the other way around.

I like Twelve. It’s the closest thing the Outer Sectors have to a Four or a Seven - a reasonably quiet place where someone can go and let off steam. Property values are higher here than anywhere outside the Inner Ring - lots of painted plaster, wrought iron, and real bricks, rather than sheet metal and concrete. Ritzy. Or seems ritzy enough if you haven’t been to Spire Circle, where everything’s dipped in gold and rolled in diamonds.

Me and Emaphra used to come here whenever we were able to scrounge up enough savings. We’d slave for a month and barely save up just enough, then blow it all on a trip to Twelve. We probably should have saved long-term, for important things. But when you’re working in a place where life expectancy is thirty years shorter than everywhere else, and you’re spending so many hours in the refinery that the sun is only a distant memory, you need that one day a month just to stop from flying apart. We’d get up early, put on a pair of clothes that wasn’t stained by ashes or caustic powder or soot, and come here. We’d go shopping, drink coffee, buy candy, whatever we wanted, for a whole damn day.

These days I get to do whatever I want all day every day, but it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

Twelve’s Fountain Square is famous all throughout the city. There’s a few dozen of them, of all sizes and designs. Some straightforward, some mathematically precise with their impressively accurate jets of criss-crossing water, some ornate and artistic, with statues of famous historical or literary figures. The air is full of dancing water, reflecting rainbow sparkles across the cobblestones and understated buildings.

I stop in front of one of the fountains, letting the crowd flow around me. It’s one of the larger ones, and my personal favorite. It’s a scene from The Saga of Sir Suldrane. Not everyone has time for the classics these days, but I read as often as I could when I was a kid. The epic quest of the valiant knight Sir Suldrane, who ventured out of his hometown as a farmboy with nothing but a tired old horse and knife to eventually defeat the wicked giants of the Krius Mountains, always captured my imagination.

The scene is the one in the middle of the book, where Sir Suldrane’s already had his ass handed to him once by the giants, so he goes into the Barksea to seek a source of ancient power, guarded by an immortal sage. He thinks it’s going to be a magical weapon, a sword with the power to cut mountains in half or something suitably epic, hidden in the impossibly tall trees of the primordial forest. He reaches the heart of the Barksea and finds out that the sage is a giant. Specifically, a giant that forsook the barbarism of his peers to live a life of peace and contemplation in the groves. Not only that, but the “weapon” turns out to be a single golden flower, which the forest giant watches over.

Suldrane tries to take the magical flower, because at this stage of the story he’s still kind of a jerk. The giant just doesn’t let him pass. Doesn’t fight him, doesn’t insult him, just refuses to let the knight by, because he’s not worthy of entering the garden. Suldrane has to learn lessons about patience, humility, and the value of not always beating the shit out of things to get your way. He spends months with the giant, learning from him and being a petulant little brat for a lot of it, but the giant never loses his patience, never turns him away. Eventually, Suldrane proves that he’s capable of being more than just a dumb warmongerer, and is deemed worthy.

The sage giant gives him the golden flower, and it turns out the flower isn’t even a little magical. It’s just really pretty. The giant says he’s spent hundreds of years cultivating it, that it’s the most beautiful bloom he’s ever tended, and that he knows Suldrane is kind enough to care for it in the same way. The old Suldrane probably would have seen this as a huge ripoff, but the giant’s teachings have broadened his horizons. He realizes that the flower doesn’t have to give him super strength or invisibility to be valuable - its magic comes from the kindness and patience it represents.

This fountain’s two statues are of the giant and Suldrane. The giant lives up to his species’s name - the heroically-built Sir Suldrane only comes up to his knee. He’s a frightening, bearded mountain of pure muscle, with a big belly and limbs wider than tree trunks, strong enough to tear boulders in half. From across a battlefield he’d probably be terrifying to behold. This giant is different, though. He’s wearing an expression of pure compassion, leaning down with titanic grace, his mighty hands gently offering a single bloom to the tiny, armored knight, who is reaching out to accept the most important gift of his life. The knowledge of peace.

The giant’s name is Baulric. Baulric of the Giltgrove, after his forest haven of beautiful flowers. It turns out my father was incredibly prophetic in naming me after a giant, but not at all in the way he’d probably intended.

I move on. The fountain is special to me, but it always leaves me feeling a lot more like young Suldrane than my own namesake.

At the end of the Square and a little ways down a side street is the cafe. It’s one of those places that’s a secret to everyone. Hidden in a cul-de-sac with a few other nearby shops, in a secluded, shady concrete grove of its own, away from the gaze of the desert sun. It has a few iron tables set outside of its brick facade, with a few people drinking peacefully out of little cups.

Sitting at one of these is Emaphra Summerstone, my ex fiancee.

Emaphra always had striking looks, and entering her early thirties hadn’t changed that. Long hair as dark as the inside of a smokestack, but with an abrupt, proudly-displayed streak of early-onset white to indicate that she’s not as young as she might appear. Sharp features that always reminded me of a bird of prey - a strong nose and eyes as amber and clear as any falcon’s. Fair skin that never sees much sun because of her work schedule. She has an imposing frame - six feet tall, and curvy, but with enough muscle to suggest that undue advances would earn you a dislocated jaw and little else. All natural, too - no implants, no augmetics. Her elegant, smoky intensity forms a great contrast to my goofy technologically-enhanced hugeness.

Her vitae is an inferno. I don’t really need to get into detail with a word like “inferno”, do I? It’s a howling, raging blaze of reds, oranges, yellows and whites, and it’s enormous, one of the largest vitae auras I’ve ever seen. It’s completely uncontained, spilling over everything around her like a wildfire, and so bright that I almost expect everyone else sitting near her to go up in cinders.

Legs and arms crossed in her chair, she meets my eyes as I walk up, but doesn’t make any expression. Emaphra smiles about as often as I pay taxes. She’s one of the only people I’ve never really been able to read, which is one of the reasons why we have such a history. Even her vitae rarely gives me any information - it’s always a churning firestorm, regardless of her external mood.

I squeeze myself sideways through the tiny gate into the patio (I could just step over the fence but that would probably be rude) and weave my way expertly through the tables of people who are completely convinced I’m going to knock something over. I fail to meet their expectations, because my grace is as bottomless as my charm and good looks.

Blocking out the sun above her, I wave a hand like an idiot and say, “Hi, Em. You look nice.”

She does look nice. Em was never one to buy into other people’s expectations either, and makes a habit of wearing sensible trousers, boots, and jackets rather than dresses and heels. This has a way of making her look very impressive, or as other people might say when she’s not around, “meaner than a hung-over rattlesnake in a bag full of hornets”.

Em replies, “You do too. I think.”

I pick up the other chair and set it by the fence, then grab a reinforced slab-sized one from a stack by the wall. I sit, grateful to be off my legs. I’ve been doing a lot of walking around lately. Maybe I should steal a car. Nah, I never learned how to drive - I’d look pretty suspicious carrying it back to my apartment.

“Did you already order?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get me anything?”

“No.”

“Aw, c’mon, Em. Not even for old time’s sake?”

She doesn’t change her level of glare. Em’s neutral expression is powerful enough to fry the wings off a butterfly at a hundred yards.

“Rice from the mouths of orphans, Baulric.”

I frown as pitifully as I can, which isn’t much, because I just end up looking like a crocodile with a toothache.

She rolls her eyes exasperatedly. When the waitress comes back to bring her coffee (black, one sugar), she says, “The overgrown baby will have a vatbeer, on me.” She smiles as warmly as an ice cream cone in a blizzard. I smile at the waitress too, like a very proud baby, but the sun glinting off my implants and two dozen extra teeth probably don’t make her feel very reassured.

After a minute I get my vatbeer (yellow, sudsy, tastes like dirty bread and hydroponics), and the two of us just kind of sip our drinks without looking at one another for a bit. Her composure is infinite, but so is my cowardice. Talking to Em puts me off-kilter. No matter what we talk about, there’s always going to be this pressure behind it. Until I do what I need to do. She probably doesn’t feel it at all, but that’s because she’s accessed one of the supreme secrets of adulthood - moving on from things without the need for closure. I’m not that mature. She scabbed over, but I still bleed, and I’m the only one to blame for it.

I take a second to think like a man for once, then say, “Yesterday I got called to a crime scene.”

She says from over the lip of her cup, “Mhm? Anything good?”

I scratch my head nervously. “You could say that. Well. Okay, really, no, nothing that I’d call good. Interesting maybe, but honestly pretty bad.”

“Take all the time you need, Baulric, it’s not as if I have a home to go to or anything.”

I huff exasperatedly and lean forward on my elbows so I can make some very emphatic gestures with my hands. The table groans threateningly. “Carbonized skeleton. Male, adult. Torched to a wall, six feet up, in a utility alley, Sector Ten. We’re talking charcoal here, not a bit of flesh left. There was barely enough to get a reading at all.”

Em does her best statue impression, which is honestly pretty close to perfect. “Is this relevant to me in the way that I’m starting to think it is?”

I nod gravely. “Completely saturated in phlogiston.”

She takes a deep breath, then lets it out slowly, staring into the darkness of her coffee cup. Without looking at me, she says the only word she needs.

“Shit.”

“I need the money, Em. And I need the good-boy points. I spilled. I’m taking the bounty, but I’m going to have to move fast. If this guy isn’t found quick, they’re going to start rounding you up. And they’re not going to let any of you go without an execution or four.”

Em pins me to the back of my chair with her eyes. I can feel my lenses start to heat up. I’m not being cutesy or metaphorical this time - I can literally feel the metal of my ocular implants start to warm inside the flesh of my head.

“You couldn’t have lied? You’re the one human in this city with ability to sniff out more than one kind of magic, and you immediately used it to sell us out to the Watch? You couldn’t have just fed them some shit and let us take care of this in-house?”

My temperature readout is starting to blink. “Dammit, Em, these investigations can go on for years. You know as well as I do that the Consortium would just bury this to prevent an inquest, even though any excuse I could have given about some bullshit experimental flamethrower or whatever would just end up bringing suspicion onto me and the rest of you and start an inquest anyway. You didn’t see this corpse. Special Investigations were already on it, my signoff was nothing but a formality.”

She doesn’t say anything, so I continue, “Whoever this is, they’re dangerous. They’ve already proven that once. They need to be taken off the street, and I might as well get paid for it at the same time.”

Em rumbles, “Don’t try to paint your selfishness with a coat of altruism, Baulric.”

“Emaphra, I have no illusions about my motivations for getting involved in this. I’m in the hole with Electrofuck for a million credits, and if he doesn’t get it, I’m gonna be riding the lightning down Deep two weeks from now. I’m in it for the cash first, but I don’t see why that has to be mutually exclusive with a good deed. I don’t have a lot of choices, here. I want to get out ahead of this and catch this guy before I get fried and before anyone else gets the same treatment from a different element. I’m here giving you the early warning that the Neutralizers never will and risking my neck about three different ways to do it, so forgive me if I don’t appreciate you trying to cast me as the villain in this show.”

Without taking her scorching eyes off mine, she reaches for her coffee again. She holds it in her palm like a wine glass, and within a moment the black liquid is boiling like it’s been placed on a stovetop. She brings it to her lips and sips the rolling drink anyway, without so much as a wince.

The cup finds the table again, and it stops boiling. Emaphra’s eyes soften a little as the phlogiston drains out of them. The temperature readout in the corner of my vision stops howling at me.

She says, “We live in a miserable shithole of a world, Baulric.”

I sigh. “Yeah. But I’d rather grab a shovel than hang onto my pride and drown in it.”

Em breaks eye contact with me for the first time since I sat down, and pinches the bridge of her nose. Then she looks at me with a more exhausted expression and says, “What do you need me to do?”

“Spread the word. A scumbird told you, not me. The rest of the firebugs aren’t going to want to get pinched for this, so hopefully if word gets out, something useful will bubble to the surface. Other than that, lay low. If we’re lucky, this can all go away before the Brotherhood comes a-knockin’. I don’t suppose you know anyone of your stripe that’s shown any signs of homicidal rage lately, have you?”

She shakes her head. “I haven’t been to a meeting in about a month, but I keep in touch with some, and I haven’t heard anything at all. I guess I’ll keep an ear to the ground and let you know what I hear. What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“File for the bounty, then… start digging. Go down the list, one by one. Without an ID on the vic or anything more illuminating at the crime scene, I’m just going to have to do this brute force style. Knock on doors, spy on people, et cetera. Until something more conclusive comes to light, that’s all I’ve got. At least it’s only… you know, a few hundred people to look into. In less than two weeks.”

Em sets her jaw. “Manhunting isn’t all chases and fights, I guess.”

“That’s about five percent. The other ninety-five is reading databases until my eyes malfunction, long stakeouts, and luck.”

She scoffs. “Better you than me.”

“You can say that again.”

We finish our drinks in what is mostly silence, of a kind that’s tenser than either of us want, then get ready to go away from one another. Before I walk away toward the train platform, she stops me, her hand on my arm. I look down. It’s so much smaller than I remember.

Emaphra looks me square in the eyes again, looking as determined as a glowing fire poker hissing its way through an ice block.

“Before Electrofuck makes a lamp filament out of your spine, call me.”

I frown. “Why?”

She gives me a are you kidding look. “Because I said so, idiot. Don’t worry about it, just do it. I’ll call you in a couple days or when I find something out, whichever comes first. Good hunting.”

I blink my shutters. “Thanks, Em.”

She walks off down the street, her vitae carving a molten swath across the cobblestones as she goes.