Yesterday, I went down to the Bridge to buy groceries.

Old Bridge is more than two miles west of the sun line, but after the sunlight melts off Crown Street and the shadow of the cave roof falls over the ends of the docks, the Bridge is the brightest place in Halk. You can see it from anywhere on the cave floor, even if everything between you and it is muffled by black. No matter how far away you are, every detail is as clear and flat as it’d be if you were looking at it on a workbench, except nothing on the Bridge casts a shadow. Once you’re on it, you can tell that there aren’t any reflections, either. Everyone’s hair looks wrong and you can’t drink water without dumping it down your shirt. When you close your eyes, you can count every vein on the backs of your eyelids. It scared the shit out of me when I first came to Imsaren.

You can use the Bridge to start a fight in any Connect Four parlor in the outer suburbs. If you say there’s no light on Old Bridge, you’ll piss off the kind of people who get pissed off by strangers saying you can see without light. Most of them are behind on their blue brick payments. Someone else will piss them off for you if you say there is light on the Bridge. It might be a philosopher wannabe who’ll claim that light necessarily casts shadows and reflections, but usually it’s just an abercrombie. Either way, some wise guy will say there is light on the Bridge, when someone on the Bridge turns on a light. By the time the really boiled people in the back figure out what that means, some wiser guy will throw in that, what is light, really, if not the ability to see. That’ll piss off the easy marks again, but they won’t be able to explain why, no matter how many questions any of the wise guys ask, and if it’s late and you’re lucky someone will throw a punch. It works better in the Towers than it does in Old Bridge. Old Bridge people are boring. Most Towers people are boring, too, but they don’t have anything better to do than drink white lightning and fight.

I’d still rather be on the Bridge than in the Towers. A couple months from now, I won’t be able to walk a block on the Bridge without tripping over a five-year-old trying to sell me bottled water, but I can ignore them. I won’t be able to ignore all the people passed out from heat exhaustion that I’ll trip over on the stairs up to my apartment in the Towers. The modi are theoretically there so if I ever pass out from heat exhaustion someone will come get me upright again before the ibises eat me, but in practice, I don’t pass out from heat exhaustion. Instead of getting my afternoons derailed by my own bad decisions, I get them derailed by other people’s. 

But for now, it’s still spring and the stairs are still clear. I’m not hunting for excuses to get out of the Towers, so yesterday made it a full week since I’d last been to San Pettru’s. 

San Pettru and Ga Enterprises is on Central, the only street on the Bridge that you can see when you’re not standing on it and the only street that’s clear of fog and bridge static. There’s just the noise of several thousand people and animals, folding doors grinding open and shut, deliverymen trying to force their way through the crowds, and five separate people trying to sell you stuffed bread at the same time. The bridge static starts when you get into the side streets. A couple blocks from Central, your ears start ringing. A couple blocks past that, there’s a hum that you can feel in your sternum like a bass drum. Out on the edge of the suburb, where you can’t see more than a few steps in front of you before the fog takes over, you can’t hear anything else.

I went out there once. The static sounded like every pitch I could hear, all playing over each other at the same time at the same volume. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard, louder than a storm on the ocean, and it felt like it was coming from inside my skull and out through my ears. I didn’t last long before I had to go back. I made it all the way back to San Pettru’s before I realized my hands were shaking.

San Pettru lives in a skinny blue three-tier rowhouse, with rows of spindly columns holding up the wood first-floor awning and barring the balconies on the second and third floors. He folds the first-floor doors all the way back when the store is open. It was hot yesterday, so somebody had also opened up the doors on the second and third floors. Thick teal curtains, embroidered with tiny diamonds, hung limp behind them.

The temperature climbed by another three degrees when I stepped into the store. I stopped to roll up my sleeves. The cloth under the straps that held my vest and cargo pants down to my body were damp, but if I loosened them I’d look like a curtain rod. My neck itched under my scarf and I could feel my makeup starting to run.

I ducked under the shop curtain and picked up a straw basket from the pile next to the door. Wheat flour was still as expensive as it was a week ago. I took the smallest bag in stock. The bottom-shelf instant coffee was buy one get one half off. I threw two bags in my basket and carried it up to the register.

San Pettru sat on a stool behind the counter. He had a square head and short hair. Crow’s feet were starting to spread out from the corners of his eyes. Maha had woven his scarf for him. His brown leather bomber jacket was probably older than she was.

“Morning, Awas.”

“Morning. How’s business?”

“Worse every day. How are you?”

“Terrible.”

He punched the price of the flour into his adding machine and fished my oil bottle out of the bottom of my bag. “Want me to fill this up?”

“Absolutely.”

He set the empty bottle on the scale, spun it around so I could watch him zero it, then filled it up with olive oil from the cheapest tap on the counter behind him. “Your subscription for your polearm is almost up. Want me to renew that now?”

I had more money than I’d had in weeks, and God knew what’d happen to it by the next billing date. “Yeah.”

He typed it into the adding machine blind, then capped the olive oil bottle, wiped it off, and carefully nestled it in my bag.

“Anything I can help you out with?” I asked.

“I was wondering when you’d ask.” He pulled two folded-up pieces of paper out from under the counter and lined them up parallel to each other. One was yellow and one was blue. “I’ll give you a discount if you deliver these.”

“How much of a discount?”

He smiled. “What do you think is reasonable?”

“Ninety-five percent.”

“Fifty.”

“Seventy.”

“Done.” 

I paid. “Where are they going?”

He pointed to the blue one. “That’s a work order. The air filter in the warehouse is broken again.”

“Murder. Already?”

“Uh-huh. There’s a list of the parts they’ll need and when they can come by, so they shouldn’t have any questions.”

I slid the paper into the inside pocket of my vest. “Swell.”

“And if they could send somebody to check the air filter, that’d be great.”

“Is something wrong with it?”

“It sounds like a bunch of mice having their tails ripped off.”

“Huh.”

“I hope I won’t have to replace it, but it’s almost thirteen years old. My hopes aren’t high.”

“Nittama.”

“Thanks. Anyway, try to get that delivered to the usual people by tonight, if you can.” He pointed to the yellow paper. “That’s Rozarya’s prescription. She won’t need it until Wednesday, but God knows the next time any of us will be able to make it to Lenna’s.”

“Why?”

He sighed. “Massive BayaCorp brodie. Rozarya’s been at the branch office for three straight days. I’ve been here alone and Maha’s been running stock back and forth to the warehouse.”

“She must be having fun.”

“She’s getting evil.”

“You don’t say.” I dropped the prescription into my bag. “How’s Rozarya doing?”

“Surprisingly well. Usually she has flare-ups this time of year, but Lenna adjusted her medication and she’s been fine so far.”

“Masallah.”

“But I haven’t seen you all week— what’ve you been doing?”

“Tunnel crawl.”

“Oh, no.”

I shrugged. “Could have been worse, but Indri got his arm sliced open by a tumbleweed and he’s been soaking it in enough alcohol to embalm it.”

“Did you get hurt?”

“Physically, no. Psychologically, yes. We didn’t find shit— we tried the rabbit tunnels, but all we found was some kind of glow-in-the-dark lichen. Indri took some anyway, but that’s because he thinks he can grow it and use it to light his lot.”

“You’re sure it’s not worth anything?”

“Why would anyone pay for blue bricks if you could just use lichen?”

“Why does he think it’ll work?”

“Because he hasn’t tried it yet.”

San Pettru laughed.

“He says it’s because it’s from a new tunnel system, and he’s never seen it before. Nobody else seemed to want it, but maybe they just like blue bricks. Who knows?”

“Well, maybe it’ll work.”

“He’ll find out.”

San Pettru leaned against the counter and squinted into the middle distance. “How’d he get cut up by a tumbleweed in the rabbit tunnels? Are they getting smaller?”

“No, thank God. The tunnel we were in led out onto a ledge on the side of a canyon. The tumbleweed was on the wall above us. Masallah it was too dumb to stay up there— it crawled down on the ledge after it noticed us— so it was pretty easy to just push it over the edge.”

“Masallah.”

“I think it popped when it hit the ground.”

San Pettru winced. 

“Maybe it didn’t.”

“Thanks.”

“It might not have. You couldn’t hear shit in there, the echo was so bad. That’s how it got the drop on us in the first place.”

San Pettru’s eyes snapped into focus over my shoulder. He frowned. 

I turned around. South of us, Central’s flat roar had set into a steady rhythm, like waves hitting the shore. 

It was only eleven in the morning. San Pettru and I listened hard.

“Thief. Thief. Thief.”

“Huh,” San Pettru said.

I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had raised a posse on Old Bridge. Only a special kind of genius would cross the modi here. 

The chant was coming closer. People were starting to look around. A few of them started mumbling along, but everybody was hoping someone else would catch the thief before they got here except for some kids piling up on the third-floor balcony across the street.

I strapped my bag across my back. “Thanks, San Pettru.”

“No worries. Thank you for doing business.”

“Abyssinia.”

He nodded and raised a hand. I stepped out into the street.

I saw the thief right away. He was youngish, maybe sixteen. The Bridge wasn’t busy enough for him to disappear into the crowd, so he was headed for North Bank. He dodged around the knots and trickles of people with practiced grace, and he looked determined, not panicked. This wasn’t the first time he’d gotten caught stealing. 

But he was unmasked, he wasn’t wearing any army symbols, and he thought he could steal on the Bridge. He was fresh off the boat, broke, and either he had nobody to tell him how things worked here or he’d been set up.

I ran after him.