“How long has he been sitting like that?”

  “Couple of bells now. What do you think we should do?”

  “Fuck knows. I’m not disturbing the Commander to tell her that, first, someone pulled the fire alarm and now the washout is sitting staring into space and crying his eyes out.”

  “Don’t be a dick!”

  “How am I being a dick? You know how the Commander feels about being brought in on her day off”

  “Probably similar to how she feels about investigators crying in their office . . .”

  The voices drifted over from outside his office, low and indistinct.

  Lowe knew he’d heard these guys talking before. Knew their voices well enough that he could match them to a set of faces in the break room if he tried. But their names?

  Right now, though, who they were was gone. Slipped straight through the holes in his mind like water through a sieve.

  Since his reinstatement, he hadn’t bothered to learn the names of any of the new recruits in Cuckoo House. For one, he figured there was a good chance he wouldn’t be around long enough to make it worth the effort. And for another, he suspected most of them were wankers.

  Listening to them whisper to each other just outside his door, pretending they weren’t watching him, he was comfortable that, at least with these two, he’d made the right call.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting at his desk, staring at the file in front of him without actually reading a word. Certainly long enough for his coffee to go ice-cold. And obviously more than long enough for the whispers to start.

  Lowe’s hands moved on their own, reaching for the file again. It felt so much heavier than it should have. But, then again, maybe that was just his imagination. Paper didn’t carry weight like that. Guilt did. Regret did.

  Then, without making any conscious decision to move, Lowe stood up, the sound of his chair scraping against the wooden floor impossibly loud. He heard the guys outside stop talking as he moved and they were gone by the time he reached his door. He looked around the bullpen, seeing heads turned just enough to track him without being too obvious about it. He let them look. It didn’t matter what any of these guys thought.

  Even back before he’d lost everything, other people’s opinions never had.

  He left without a word, crossing the bullpen and pushing open the door to step out into the hallway and towards the stairs to the street.

  Cuckoo House was an old building, and on this overcast afternoon, it absolutely smelled like it. Pausing in the corridor for a moment, Lowe took a deep breath and sucked in the residue of damp paper, burnt-out mana residue, and cheap coffee so strong it could - and, from the look of things, on more than one occasion, had - stripped the paint off the walls.

  Considering the lifespan of most things made of bricks and mortar in Soar, the building had been standing longer than anyone should have had a right to expect. But its fragility showed in the way the floorboards creaked underfoot and in the way the mana lights flickered when someone with a strong enough Class walked by outside.

  The walls down this corridor were lined with old case files stuffed onto mismatched shelves, some so ancient the vellum had started to yellow and curl at the edges. The ceiling above his head was too low and the windows he passed as he walked were opaque with grime. In many ways, the whole place felt like a relic from another time.

  And the irony in that thought wasn’t lost on Lowe for a moment.

  With the arrival of that file, Cuckoo House had gone from being a place where the ghosts of his bad decisions lingered just out of sight, to smacking him right in the face.

  “Lowe?”

  Assistant Commander Unance’s voice called after him as he started down the steps towards the front entrance. He didn’t stop. Didn’t turn around. He wasn’t in the mood for whatever he had to say. He remembered Unance from his first go around on the Cuckoo House carousel. Hadn’t liked him too much that time either.

  “Lowe, you better not be walking out in the middle of your shift! We’re getting reports of a hold up at the Vault. It’s all hands on deck! Staffen wants you to meet her there.”

  Lowe didn’t answer, pushing the heavy door open and stepping out onto the mean streets of Soar, then letting it swing shut behind him to cut off the increasingly angry shouting of the Assistant Commander.

  The sounds and smells of Soar met him like an old friend to whom he owed money.

  The ground was, of course, wet, the cobblestones slick from rain he hadn’t noticed and the smell of damp stone and sewage mixed, challengingly, with the scent of fresh bread from the bakery opposite. It was quite the bouquet. All sorts of people moved around him in that way they always did. Hurried. Preoccupied. Their lives too full of their own concerns to notice the man in the long coat, clutching a file like it might bite him if he let go.

  He was still holding the file. That surprised him. He hadn’t intended to bring it with him. Lowe slipped it inside his jacket and turned to look up at the Celestial Temple. The late afternoon light caught, for a moment, on the polished stone of its roof, throwing a dazzling gleam into his eyes. Almost as if there was a halo surrounding it. He idly wondered which of the gods up there were looking down on him right now . . .

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  An old feeling, one he thought he’d put behind him in the last year, suddenly took hold of him. A restless, reckless instinct to spit in the eye of something so much bigger than himself. Something so powerful the whole world bent its knee and scraped the floor in its presence. Rebellion stirred in his chest - hot and self-destructive - curling up the back of his throat like a swallowed shot of bad bourbon.

  Do it, a voice whispered.

  Stand here, right in the shadow of that fucking place and give the whole lot of them the bird. A slow, deliberate middle finger. He wondered how long it would take one of them noticed? Before some god decided to reduce him down to ash.

  Do it. Then it will be all over.

  Well, no. It wouldn’t, would it? Because Blood of he Phoenix would kick in and he’d be put back into shape straight away. He could always then repeat the insult, but - somehow - it felt like that would somewhat undermine the overall, you know, impact of the gesture

  With an effort, Lowe shook off that old self-destructive impulse. It had been just a flicker of the ‘him’ that he had thought he had managed to lock away, and if he hadn’t given in to that voice during the year of his Classtration, he sure as shit wasn’t going to listen to it now he was pulling himself back together.

  He was pulling himself back together, wasn’t he? The press against his side of that file suggested otherwise.

  Lowe took on more look up at the Temple - did something at the very top glint back? - then turned away, feet carrying him down the street before his thoughts could follow.

  He didn’t take in much of the world around him as he moved. It was like his feet stepped on their own, taking him to his destination without needing any conscious input. The sounds of Soar blurred into the background—a carriage rattling over the cobblestones, a vendor shouting about Stamina potions, the distant clatter of steel from a forge tucked away in one of the alleyways.

  None of it really registered.

  Lowe’s brain was roiling trapped somewhere between memory and nightmare, and it took him a few blocks before he even thought to wonder where his feet were taking him.

  But once he did take notice, it felt more than appropriate to his mood.

  And then, in seemingly no time at all, the entrance to a graveyard was before him, its gates not so much rusted by time as aggressively themed that way. The stone archway above bore the name in ostentatious, freshly repainted gold letters—The Grand Necropolitan Rest of Our Lady of the Lingering Glance ..

  Despite its appearance of possessing great age, it was one of Soar’s newer cemeteries - by Lowe’s reckoning, it had only been open for just over a year . . .

  And even in that time, it appeared to have undergone somewhat of a transformation. The last time he’d stood here, it had been Soar Memorial Cemetery. He assumed that the Mayor, that ever enterprising twat, had sold off its sponsorship rights to one of the minor gods of the Underworld. Now, thanks to Her Opulent and Eternal Benevolence, Mictavros of the Lingering Glance - it was funny that the weaker the deity, the more ostentatious its name, Lowe thought - the place looked less like a solemn resting place for the Security Service’s fallen and more like a fairground that had lost its way and accidentally turned into a mausoleum.

  Even the most distracted of observers - and Lowe was certainly that right now - could see that someone with far too much enthusiasm and absolutely no taste had been let loose on the graveyard with a budget normally reserved for royal weddings and last-day-of-the-dictator military parades.

  Grinning skeletons—and far too many of them—lined the walkways, all cast in bone-white marble and frozen in poses that suggested they’d been halfway through an extremely cheerful jig before death had so rudely interrupted them. Draped over their shoulders, through their bony fingers, and around their ribs were banners of violently coloured silk, fluttering in the breeze with all the solemn dignity of an enthusiastic whore that had taken a wrong turn and set up shop in a morgue.

  A somewhat fitting metaphor for Mictavros, Lowe thought.

  And for the first time since he’d had that file delivered, he smiled.

  Every tombstone—no matter how modest it might have been originally—had been lovingly desecrated with a little enchanted lantern that flickered in a slow-burning mana glow, as if the dearly departed had requested some subtle mood lighting for their eternal rest. The lantern’s colours shifted unpredictably: snot green one moment, garish pink the next, before settling on a shade of blue that Lowe thought could best be described as aggressively whimsical.

  And, because the universe appeared to have a particular hatred for Lowe today, there was also music.

  Soft, twanging guitar notes drifted through the air, slow and sorrowful—except when they weren’t, abruptly switching into something that sounded suspiciously like an advertisement jingle, complete with a voice over and some rather jaunty tambourines. Lowe picked out the source, an enchanted skull, bolted onto the top of a mausoleum, which was letting out a tinny “The dead are never truly gone when they are cherished in memory!” before adding, in a more conspiratorial whisper, “Special blessings available at the gift shop!”

  Lowe sighed. It wasn’t that he objected to honouring the dead—far from it, that was why he was here after all. He just would have preferred not to be upsold will he did so.

  Suddenly, he stumbled and looking down, he saw that the gravel path was segueing into a mosaic of skulls made of mother-of-pearl, their eyes twinkling with embedded sapphires. He stepped slightly more heavily down on them out of spite.

  "Remember, dear visitor—love’s last gift is remembrance," the Skull suddenly said and, for a moment, Lowe almost let himself appreciate it. It was a nice sentiment, really—poetic, even. A rare bit of grace in a place which was treating sentimentality like a disease.

  But then, inevitably—

  "Brought to you by the faithful of Lady Mictavros—contributions welcomed at every exit! Ask about our premium afterlife assurance plans for preferred placement in the underworld!"

  Lowe closed his eyes. Breathed in. Breathed out.

  Gods save him from the rampant, unrelenting capitalism of Soar. Or, he supposed, not. They didn’t have much percentage in doing that, did they?

  Why had he come here? He hated this place. Not because of the dead. The dead had never been his problem. It was the living, the ones who had turned a graveyard into a goddamn tourist attraction, who pissed him off.

  Turning, he made his way towards the section of the graveyard that his feet had brought him, pushing his way through a gate that let out a dramatic, entirely artificial creak.

  Because, of course it did.