Oh, you wanna know, do ya? You wanna hear a sordid and twisted tale, the likes of which never passed your ears before? Well, step right up. Step right up, friend. And indulge that twisted fuckin’ mind of yours.

You’ve met me already, yeah? You know who I am; Tripe, they call me, but let’s face it, nobody’s under the impression that that’s my real name. Who the fuck would call their kid Tripe? That’s like calling your kid, I dunno… fucking… Sham, or something. Or Riot. That’s a shitty thing to do to your kid and all.

This all took place a long while back. Or started a while back, I should say. It’s gone on for who knows how long. Longer than I would’ve liked. But what’s a man like me—a man who goes by the name of fucking Tripe—gonna do about it? I tried, yeah? I bloody well tried. But I ain’t got the tools for this particular task.

Let’s start… let’s start with the job gone wrong.

‘Where’s Sham?’ Fog asked.

Tripe shrugged. ‘Says he’s sick.’

‘Was sick last time too, weren’t he? Think it’s just that new bird twittering in his ear?’

‘Who knows? His loss. If that fucker don’t turn up then he don’t get his share of the pay, right?’

‘Suppose,’ Fog said. ‘You sure we can do this without him?’

‘Am I sure we can get by without his moaning? Yeah. Yeah, I think we’ll manage.’

It was late in the day. Or early in the morning. Tripe never knew quite where to draw the line between the two. In any case, the shops of the Commercial Zone were long since closed, and the street was cast in darkness under the shadow of the new moon.

It was just Tripe and Fog left now. Vice had disappeared into the night and never returned, Grim had been shot dead a few months back, and now Sham was sick. The old gang was falling apart before Tripe’s eyes, and he could do little to stop it. But while there was still the two of them, there was still the game.

‘What do you think?’ Fog asked. ‘We safe?’

Tripe took another look out of the shadows and down the street. Both ways. He saw nobody. ‘As safe as we’ll ever be. You’re on watch.’ He pulled a thick cloth from his jacket and wrapped it around his right hand. Stepping over to the window at the shopfront, he gave Fog one last glance.

‘We good,’ the other man said.

And so Tripe smashed the window in. Glass plummeted to the ground, echoing around the empty street. Both Fog and Tripe stood in deathly silence, awaiting the sound of movement around them. None came.

‘Yeah,’ Fog said again, ‘We good.’

Tripe plunged into the shop and blinked as his eyes adjusted to the even thicker darkness. Around him, display cases came into focus—glass boxes of jewellery that the likes of those back home wouldn’t have been able to afford even if they’d saved all their income for a lifetime. A representation of grotesque wealth, as Sham would’ve moaned if he was there. Not that the rest of them didn’t agree with him, just that they saw it first and foremost as an opportunity—a chance to gain their own riches, even if they could only fence these pieces on for a fraction of their real value. Fucking fences.

Tripe went for what he thought were the most valuable pieces. The ones that seemed to glow even in such low light. The big and bulky ones, because more material meant more value, surely, right? He snatched them by the handful and stuff them into his knapsack by the dozen. He snatched and he snatched until he could hold no more.

And that was when the trouble began.

An ear-splitting noise erupted from the darkness outside, and Tripe just about made out the ‘Oh fuck’ of his friend through the din. It took him a moment to work out what it was that had created that noise, before realising—it was one of them new automobiles that people had been gossiping about. Another thing that he could never dream of owning in a lifetime.

‘Fog!’ Tripe shouted. ‘They seen you?’

In answer, his friend bolted away from the window, disappearing down a dark alley across the street.

‘Oh. Right,’ Tripe mumbled, and then watched as the automobile screeched to a halt outside the shop. Two police officers spilled from it, one heading down the alley after Fog, the other with her eyes trained on the jewellery store.

Tripe didn’t waste another moment in turning to face the darkness of the shop. There, at the back of the store, was a heavy wooden door. An exterior door. Another exit.

He bolted through it.

Tripe awaited word from Fog in the following days, but nothing came. He became nervous, his mind lingering on the mountains of jewellery under his bed, as though any minute a police officer would burst through the door and find it. He’d need to move it, fast, but Fog had always been the once with the connections. Fog was the one who knew the fence, and fences being the paranoid creatures that they were meant that only he had ever met them. So he was stuck with his stolen goods until Fog turned up.

News of Fog turned up on the day that his namesake rolled into town. An old friend—a woman who owned one of the bars down on Dead Street—had had news of him. Him in jail. Him having been caught by the police officer that had chased after him. The friend, knowing that Fog hung around with Tripe and co, had made the trip over to warn him. ‘Just in case any of you are up to your old tricks.’ Tripe had denied it, of course, but the friend saw straight through it. As she always did.

Tripe closed his apartment door and stared back at his bed, and the goods lurking underneath. It was only a matter of time before Fog spilled the beans. Only a matter of time before the police were knocking on his door. He needed to get out of this line of work, and fast. And needed to get rid of the evidence while he was at it.

The answer to all his problems had come to him over a pint of bitter. They often did, he found. Whether it was the alcohol itself or the fact that he was in the White Hag amongst a load of equally rotten patrons, the answers often came. This time, it came in the form of a chat with Glug, the barman and owner of this seedy fucking pub.

Tripe—and Sham, for that matter—had known Glug since they were kids. They’d often hang around in here, beg Glug for work. That was back when they thought they were gonna be on the straight and narrow, of course. And Glug would pay them in food and whisky. In the absence of any real father, Glug did the trick. Though neither Tripe nor Sham would have ever admitted that.

‘Don’t suppose you know anyone, do ya?’

Tripe looked up from the pint, caught by surprise, and managed to mumble, ‘What?’ to the ageing man.

‘To buy the basement. You ain’t been listening, have you?’

‘Sorry, Glug. Lots on my plate, init.’

‘I said I was bloody poor, yeah?’ Glug continued. ‘Pub not pulling in the customers like they used to. People disappearing left, right and center.’

‘Most of them being arrested,’ Tripe mumbled.

‘Yeah, I heard about Fog. A shame. He seemed like a good kid.’

‘He weren’t.’

Glug shrugged. ‘Yeah, well… Anyway, look. I need to sell off the basement. Just the part we used as storage, not where we keep the kegs. Raise some cash, yeah? You know anyone who might be interested?’

The cogs turned slowly in Tripe’s brain. He knew this. Wore it even like a badge of honour sometimes; that he’d survived the Harbour District even without the brains. But this time, he put it all together quickly.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know someone. Long as you can keep their name off the books and don’t mind them paying in a shit ton of stolen necklaces and shit.’

Glug replied with a smile.

So that was how Tripe came to shift into another line of work: medicine. It was what he’d studied as a kid, back when he’d thought he might actually escape this hellhole of a district. And he knew enough to patch up the kinds of wounds that criminals and the like would suffer. He charged for his service, of course, which the public facilities didn’t—but his business had a fucking USP: Tripe guaranteed privacy.

He treated them with bandages, and he treated them with boono. Antiseptic for the wounds, impure Strength vials to help them recover. There was a little cost to the boono, but far less than people were willing to pay for their to be no record of his treating them.

It didn’t take long for word of his practice to spread amongst the criminal underworld. Soon he had more business than he really knew what to do with, began being able to pick and choose his customers. Not that he often did, really. Didn’t matter to him how people got their wounds; you had to do what you had to do to survive the Harbour District.

Business suited him just fine until Miss Packer walked in.

She rapped on the door abruptly, her knocks inconsistent, as though struggling to do so. When Tripe, a little confused, opened the door, he saw the reason why: the woman he’d come to know as Miss Packer was grasping a limp body in her arms. Tripe rushed her in, taking the body from her, and placed her on his new medical bed. He breathed a sigh of relief when he managed to find a pulse.

‘What happened to her?’ he asked of the woman who’d carried her.

‘My… She’s my fiancée,’ the woman mumbled. ‘I’m… Trudy Packer. She’s… she’s my fiancée.’

‘Yes,’ Tripe said, inspecting the body for wounds and finding nothing. ‘I heard that bit. What happened to her.’

The woman began to sob, fought herself to control it, tried to speak through them. ‘Went missing. I… I don’t know why. Or how. Found her on the street. Not me… A friend. A friend found her… like this.’

‘She’s not hurt,’ Tripe said, his brow furrowed, checking the parts of the woman’s body least likely—but still possible—to hold an injury.

‘Then why…’

‘Don’t know. Do you know anything? Who took her? Where she was—’

The woman nodded frantically, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘Dumped. An… an unmarked… what do you call them? An automobile. Dumped her in the streets. Like… like this.’

The dying woman stirred, her eyes opening, focusing on Tripe. She mumbled something incoherent. Her partner began to sob harder.

‘What’s that?’ Tripe asked, putting his ear to her mouth. He felt only the wetness of her breath in his ear canal, and then…

‘Vigour…’ the woman breathed.

Tripe looked to her partner. To Miss Packer. ‘She said “Vigour.” Any idea what that means?’

‘I…’ she started, breathing deeply, exaggeratedly, as if to control the sobs. ‘She was strong. Had vigour to a… a… rare grade, I think?’

Tripe raised the dying woman’s arm slightly, then released. It landed on the table with a thunk. ‘Don’t seem that strong to me. You sure?’

‘Yes! Yes, I’m sure. She’s my fiancée, I think I know—’

Tripe held his hand in the air to beg for the woman’s patience. ‘Alright! Alright, I just had to check. Cos whatever strength she once had…’

‘What?’ the woman asked.

The physician shook his head. ‘It’s not possible. I shouldn’t…’

‘What?’ Miss Packer demanded again. ‘What is it?’

‘Either you’re lying, or mistaken, or whatever the fuck, and this woman never had Vigour as a skill, or…’

‘She bloody well had Vigour! I’d know. I’d know.’

‘Then…’ Tripe retreated from the dying woman, pulled his hand over his mouth as though he was really about to say this. As though he was really about to say that a fundamental rule of physics had been broken. ‘Then it’s been taken from her.’

‘That’s not possible,’ Miss Packer said.

‘Yes, I know, I just said that.’

‘Then… how?’

Tripe shook his head, looked at Miss Packer blankly. ‘I… don’t know.’

‘You can help her?’

‘I dunno that either.’

Miss Packer stood from her seat, her face twisting with fury. ‘They said you’d help. They said you were the one who would—’

‘I treat breaks and wounds, Miss Packer. Not… not whatever the fuck this is.’

‘Then—’

‘But, Miss Packer, I promise I’ll try.’ He hurried over to his medicine cabinet, his eyes lingering on the brown bottle of whisky—was drinking all that there was left to do in this situation? Was it all they could do to toast the dying woman as she faded from the world? At the sound of sobbing from Miss Packer, he grabbed at a red vial of boono. At a vial of Strength.

‘What’s…’

‘Boono, Miss Packer. If she’s dying cos her skills have been stripped from her, then… all I can do is try to replace ‘em. As quickly as I can.’

Tripe gently pried open the mumbling woman’s mouth, then poured the vial inside. She only screamed.

‘What’s happening?’ Miss Packer cried out as she rushed to her fiancée’s side, clutching her. She didn’t wait for an answer before crying, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. We’re gonna get you better.’

Tripe had little doubt that this was a lie.

‘The skill isn’t sticking, miss. It’s not…’

He was cut off by the woman screaming once more, and the strength fading from her body before their eyes. As the skill-stripped woman died, Miss Packer wailed, and all Tripe could do was assure her he’d find out who’d done this.

He hadn’t known then how long it would take.