My blue brick seared my eyelids.

I’d been dreaming about wandering through a shopping arcade where everybody but me chittered like bats when they opened their mouths and all the store owners were hiding their merchandise from me. It was somehow next to the Inner Sea, on Old Bridge, and in the place where I grew up at the same time. I had a second to wonder why the Great Eye was on blue fire before I woke up.

I stood up and threw my blanket over my bed. It’s the newest piece of furniture in my apartment, since I couldn’t build it until I found four crates that were all the same size and heavy enough to put my weight on. I nailed them together into a rectangle with four pieces of scrap wood and tied strips of cloth between the long beams until they held my weight. I bleached the cloth in the Inner Sea when I bought it, but less than a week later, it smelled as much like smoke as everything else in the Towers.

I was exhausted when I got back last night, but I still made myself take the water jar down to the well and refill it because I knew how grateful I’d be that it was full now. I poured a couple inches of lukewarm water into a terracotta basin and splashed it over my face. I chewed a pinch of dental herbs while I got dressed and scraped my hair back into a ponytail.

I keep a mixture of ash, mica, and olive oil in a twist of wax paper next to the basin. I unwrapped it, dabbed some of the paste on my fingers, and ran it across my eyelids. I was almost out, but it was pointless to make more when the weather was already this hot. Nittama it wouldn’t start running into my eyes before the end of the day today. I lined my eyes with charcoal and checked my reflection in my polearm blade. The wing on my left eye’s eyeliner was better. I adjusted the right eye’s wing so it matched and rinsed off my hands in the basin. I slicked back the short hairs around my face with olive oil, spat the dental herbs out into the drain, and strapped my polearm across my back. My arms burned.

I stopped outside to stretch. The Tayars had taken down their clotheslines, and it was still early enough to see the sun through the cave mouth. Crown Street glittered like a rainbow. The conservatories on the roofs were too bright to look at. The brand-colored neon lights in the Family estates were starting to switch on again, but the sun still glinted on copper roofs and gleamed on slate. A shaft of sunlight shone through the notch the river cut in the Crown Street bluff and flashed against the cottonwood trees on the Silent House’s island. The House was a black stamp in the horizon.

I could move my arms again. I ran down the stairs.

It was quiet. The longshoremen had left before dawn, and the markets weren’t open yet. Shop owners slung webs of day stores and pushcarts between the towers like spiders. Wheels creaked on the ends of rolled-up tents and the bottoms of pallets as dogs dragged them behind their owners with their tails hooked in the air. Once they were out of their harnesses, they jogged over to huff at the other dogs or curled up in corners with their tails over their noses. Canvas snapped. Stoves sizzled. Restaurant owners’ tallest kids stirred cauldrons of rice with paddles that came up to their shoulders. A lone ibis stood on the peak of a pyramid of garbage bags, staring at me.

Lenna’s see office is a complex out on the edge of the Towers, under a sleek, vaulted arch in the cave ceiling. She thinks the First City built it. The building is mushroom-shaped, about sixty feet tall, and solid concrete except for the ring of windows around the top. It’s at the end of a long strip of asphalt that used to be surrounded by a chain-link fence, but it got cut down for scrap before the Syndicate took over the lot. Nothing is left now except the fence posts and the main gate. It’s still padlocked shut, since no one alive knows the combination and no one ever cared enough to cut the lock off. 

Lenna’s Open sign was tied through the padlock, gently knocking against the fence. Glowing vines of tiny heart-shaped leaves outlined the flattest path to the tower door. The gritty top layer of the asphalt crunched as I walked. A pack of blotchy gray-and-brown dogs was asleep in a pothole. 

I didn’t knock before I swung open the tower door. She already knew I was here. 

Inside, it was as bright as a forest at noon. The glowing vines coated the walls. Long spears of blue buds, fringed at the bottom with dark pink flowers, waved like they were underwater. 

The metal grate stairs clanged under my feet. Round blue leather armchairs were lined up at the top next to the office door. I leaned my polearm against the wall behind one of them.

The door opened before I could sit down. Lenna smiled at me.

She already knew how to inject a century of reassurance into her smile when I met her. She’s been refining her formula ever since. When she turns on the smile now, you feel like she understands you perfectly, like she knows none of your problems are really your fault, and she’s delighted that she’ll be the one to make them all go away. Her eyes are dark brown and her hair is straight. She wears it cut to one length and loose around her shoulders. Tattooed blue dots follow the lines of her face. Her tight, high-necked dress, her loose pants, and her glossy platform heels were all jet black.

“Hey, Awas.” She tilted her head. An arch of black seed pearls across the top of her ear shone through her hair. “It’s so good to see you. Come sit down.”

Plants ringed the room, climbing out of short, diamond-shaped pots or flooding the garden bed next to the workbench. Bleeding-heart flowers reached up from their branches and swayed at the ceiling like snakes smelling the air. Lenna didn’t let the glowing vines grow over the windows, but the room hummed with the constant low rustle of the flowers butting at the edges of the glass. 

The desk across from the door was blanketed in spreadsheets. Receipts, orders, and prescriptions swallowed spindles. Lenna’s black knee-length coat and silk scarf were thrown over the back of the chair. Her Syndicate officer medal and her red CEO ribbon shone on the lapel.

I followed her over to the window overlooking the inner subs. More round chairs and a low black leather couch circled a coffee table. A dark-glazed oval plate ringed with a chain of hooked squares was piled with sandwiches. A matching coffee pot stood on a three-legged stand next to it. It cast a long, crisp shadow across the shag rug.

We sat next to each other on the couch. Lenna flicked her hair back over her shoulders and took a sandwich. “Help yourself.”

“What kind are they?”

“The ones on rye are cured beef. The ones on wheat are spit-sliced pork. They’re both great— I’ve had both this morning. I’ve been here since— what, five? Four forty-five?”

“Murder.”

“Uh-huh.” She poured me a cup of coffee. “Here. I need you to help me drink this, or I’m going to go through the whole thing myself, and that’ll be—” She broke off, shaking her head.

I laughed. “All right.”

“So.” She smiled again. “What’s the story?”