Chapter Thirty-One

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On the walk back, I was interrupted by a booby trap.

I saw the tripwire stretched across the alley in plenty of time. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it, though. It was…different than the other attempts. It had none of the blunt-object aggression of Ekaterina’s approach, but nowhere near the elegance and precision of Cormac’s side of things. And I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think it was even connected to anything. I checked as best I could, which wasn’t very, and I didn’t see anything.

I hadn’t gone close to it. It had occurred to me that it would make some sense to use an obvious trap as bait so that I would miss the actual trigger for another trap. But I wasn’t sure what to do with that fact. I could just as easily say that the actual trap was in the next alley over, and this whole thing was a decoy. Falling into that kind of option paralysis was a terrible idea, too; staying still here was just begging for an ambush to hit.

So once I’d established to the best of my ability that it wasn’t directly hazardous, I just shrugged and continued. I stepped over the tripwire with exaggerated care—I didn’t want to risk breaking it, just in case—and put my foot down on the other side.

Specifically, put my foot down on a pressure plate someone had apparently embedded under the asphalt. I couldn’t exactly feel the plate shifting under my weight, but there was an awareness that something had changed. And after the month I’d had, I wasn’t going to wait and find out if I was right. As soon as I had that feeling I was diving forward, managing a surprisingly clean fall.

This was a good idea. It meant I wasn’t standing there when what appeared to be an actual fucking anvil fell from one of the windows above me and crashed into the ground where I’d just been standing, hitting hard enough to crack the pavement.

Nothing else. No followup, no attacker, no gunfire. Just a literal falling anvil. I sat up and stared at it for a moment. Just…stared. Then, driven by a sort of morbid curiosity, I went over and, while cautiously squatting next to the wall, reached out and cut the wire with a knife.

This time I did hear the trigger mechanism. It was quiet, just a tiny click, but enough. I dove out of the way again, and was thus not there when a heavy steel dart hit the wall hard enough to embed itself in the brick. When I went to look at that more closely, I could see an oily sheen on the metal. I had a hunch I wouldn’t want to test my innate resistance to toxins on this one.

It hadn’t been aimed at where I would have been, if I’d actually tripped on the wire. It was aimed right at where I was when I went and checked after triggering the other trap. If I’d just walked into the wire without noticing it, I would probably have been unscathed by either one.

Deeply disturbed, and even more deeply baffled, I kept walking. I did not see any further assassination attempts on the way, sane or otherwise.

---

Capinera was giving me a look somewhere between what someone gave moldy food and a car crash in process.

“Look,” I said. “It’s not my fault that I’ve picked up a third assassin. I didn’t even do anything for this one.”

“To start with,” she said in a rather dry tone, “I wouldn’t call this an assassin.”

“Oh, no, I already figured that much out,” I assured her. “There’s no way they’re actually trying to kill me. Not with any serious intention.”

It was a pretty obvious conclusion. This person had a scary amount of information and ability. They’d known what path I would take, known where to place the pressure plate to line up with my stride exactly, known I would go back and examine it out of a morbid and neurotic need to understand what was going on, and known where I would be when I did. They had known all these things, and used them to arrange some insane Goldbergian deathtrap.

If they were seriously trying to kill me, it would have been a landmine attached to that pressure plate, and I would be paste. It was that simple.

“Yes,” Capinera said, and there was an odd tone in her voice, something almost like disdain. “This is extremely sloppy work to be any kind of sincere attack. I don’t know what they wanted, but it’s not you dead.”

“I’m not sure what else it would be,” I admitted. “First thought is that Nemesis said something about Kali arranging dangerous lessons for people. But she also said that Kali usually doesn’t do it in silly ways.”

“Which rules this out entirely, since it’s nothing else,” Capinera agreed. The tone was clearer now, and I could recognize it as a sort of professional contempt. She had, I thought absently, never sounded quite so much like an experienced assassin, for all that she wasn’t saying a word about herself.

I frowned. “Doesn’t mean the basic idea is invalid, though,” I observed. “Teaching me something, in a hard enough school that me actually dying is an acceptable risk.”

It felt right. Not exactly, there seemed to be other pieces I wasn’t quite seeing yet. But it had the right vibe. I’d already damn well gotten more attentive to where I was walking, for example.

“True.” Capinera shrugged. “And if so, you’d best learn well. Because that anvil would have broken your skull like an eggshell if you hadn’t gotten out of the way. I’d rather you not do that, please.”

“I will do my best not to get my head cracked open by a ridiculous deathtrap, yes,” I said. “But only ’cause you said please.”

She smiled and scritched Raincloud’s ears some more. Raincloud herself was feeling an odd mix of concern, sleepy amusement, and annoyance in response to this incident, and had already directly told me she wished she had been there to see my face, because of course she did.

“Did Saori leave already, incidentally?” The answer was clearly yes, because she wasn’t joining in making fun of my poor life choices, but I wasn’t sure where she’d gone.

“Yes, while you and Nemesis were out walking. She said that since you were presently indisposed, she was going home to ready herself for tomorrow’s activities.”

My lips twitched. “I’m guessing not in exactly those words.”

Capinera tried not to smile, but her eyes were too expressive for that. “No. Her exact phrasing was ‛since she’s busy getting herself Prometheused, I need to go get a bigger gun and a verb for death-by-eagles’.”

I laughed. “Okay, yeah, that sounds more like her.”

“You’re aware she’s lying, yes?”

I just laughed harder. “Yeah? Obviously? That excuse is incoherent, to start with. She already has her guns, and she wouldn’t have to stay out if that were all, anyway. But also, even if it were sane, I could tell you she’s lying.”

Capinera looked quizzical, which was impressive given I had no idea what that looked like. “Why?”

I shrugged. “Because I know her. It’s…hm.” I frowned, trying to think both of how much to say and how to phrase it. I wouldn’t usually be doing this at all, it always felt rude to talk about someone else’s personal life, but in this case? If this little web of social ties was going to be anything like stable, and I did want that, some degree of information had to be available.

“Saori has issues with sincerity,” I said eventually, working out the phrasing as I went. “I don’t exactly know what all happened, the whole point is that she doesn’t like talking about things like that. I do know that she has issues with anything that feels vulnerable, or that feels like she’s admitting to vulnerability.”

“I’m familiar with that pattern.” Capinera’s voice was low, and soft, and sad. I got the impression she had her own share of scars she didn’t like to talk about, in this particular area.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Me too. For Saori, sincerity and expressing her emotions openly is…hard. The idea of caring about someone, or someone caring about her, seems painful for her.” I shrugged. “She had to have some conversations she’s clearly been stressed out about, last night. I kinda figured she would need to have some space to center herself again.”

“But explaining she needed it would, itself, be a stressor,” Capinera said, with a wry half-smile. “Yes, I follow.”

“Figured you would. And so would explaining this to you, hence why I’m saying it for her.” I sighed. It was sweet in a way that the three of us could empathize with each other’s scars, but deeply sad that it was because we all had so many. “She’ll be back tomorrow, I’m guessing.”

“Likely, yes. And, frankly, you still look pretty drained. I think a little more time to rest will be good for you as well.”

“Probably.” I stroked Raincloud’s fur some more. She was dozing, now, almost asleep. “You have anything going on tonight?”

“Yes. Open mic poetry.”

“Cool, sounds like fun.”

---

As Capinera had told me, she saw running the Blackbird Cabaret as a sort of atonement. My personal thoughts on that aside, it did show in her priorities. She wanted to provide freedom and a space in which to express or experience things, and mostly the shows there were doing so in one of two ways.

The first was with things so surreal and bizarre that they weren’t going to happen elsewhere. I was, for example, not expecting to run into a synchronized sleepwalking performance anywhere else. With shows like that, I thought that Capinera was in part letting people put on a show they didn’t have many venues for, and in part letting the audience have experiences that they otherwise wouldn’t have.

The other basic type was letting people who simply weren’t skilled or practiced or charismatic enough to perform most places do so. This was one of the latter, and it showed. Open mic poetry nights were always a mixed bag at best, and while this one was a hell of a lot weirder than most in terms of both audience and performance, the quality was still marginal at best. I sometimes liked poetry, and in particular spoken word formats; the emphasis on rhythm worked well for me. A really good performance could be enjoyable to listen to even disregarding the actual content, because the rhythm and sound hit pleasant synesthesia notes. It was like a concert, but less overstimulating.

But that didn’t make mediocre performances less so. And I tried to be polite about it, applauding at the right times and showing attention. Doing this at all was probably somewhat intimidating, and they didn’t need my lukewarm reaction to add more stress to that. A few had promise, and would probably be pretty good given several years’ more practice. But the actual poetry on display tonight was…lacklustre.

I was just about ready to give up and go read or something when someone…different went on stage.

It was hard at first to say what it was about them that grabbed my attention. They looked odd, but no more so than most of the other people here. They looked like a very goth teenager, and at first glance there was nothing that readily explained why they felt like more than that.

And then they opened their mouth, and I was almost immediately captivated. There was no opening comment, just went directly into the poem. “The blossoms are still scarlet even when you close your eyes,” they said, and while their voice was not itself particularly impressive, the rhythm and inflection was very smooth. “And something in you knows that when your mind says you can trust your sight, every bit of it is lies. Does it matter that what you see is rotting, when melting flowers still smell sweet?”

That was as far as I heard clearly. They kept going, and I kept listening. But as they continued, I felt something…else. There was magic moving around, dragging across my skin like a harsh wind. It was moving in time with their voice, so it seemed almost certain to be their doing.

I thought for about two seconds, and then carefully, delicately lowered the filters I normally maintained to mitigate perceptual overload. Not all the way; I didn’t want or need that degree of clarity right now. But I wanted to get a better sense of this.

It was strangely difficult. It felt for a few moments like I couldn’t quite get a sense of their signature; I could feel it, but it felt like I wasn’t perceiving it clearly, couldn’t quite tell what I was looking at.

Then I realized that it was quite a bit like Lacuna’s signature, and similarly difficult to parse. It wasn’t that I couldn’t tell what I was seeing. It was that I was seeing it perfectly well, but their signature incorporated a strong element of not-quite-seen. Their power was a shape half-glimpsed that wasn’t there when I tried to focus on it, like an image being lost in a saccade or the afterimage after a lightning strike. I got a taste like salt and ashes, a shivering sensation down the back of my neck like I was being watched, and through it all the wind, a constant, howling wind.

They kept reciting. I kept observing, and noted how the magic moving through the room was ebbing and flowing in time with the cadence of the poem. I could feel the emotional resonance in that energy, and it was exactly that of the poem itself, a sort of creeping dread with no clear impression of what was dangerous, apathy and turning away from what you didn’t want to see, uncertainty and doubt in one’s own perceptions and thoughts. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was enjoyable, a sort of delicately creepy frisson that made the recitation significantly more intense for me than it would otherwise have been.

And that power didn’t seem to be aggressive. Creepy, and I didn’t know what it was supposed to do, why they were doing this. But I didn’t notice any harm, and while I was guessing it would be amplifying the mood even for people who didn’t have my direct perception, it wasn’t forceful enough about that to feel hostile or damaging. It was just…captivating, and I was listening with rapt fascination as the mood kept building.

I wasn’t the only one, either. People were captivated. Not enough that I felt like it was a magical compulsion or anything. But enough to be very apparent. I kept watching and listening as the feeling of almost-threat got clearer without it being any more clear what the threat was, until finally they concluded with another repetition of the opening line.

“The blossoms are still scarlet even when you close your eyes,” they said again, and then fell silent. There was no applause; people mostly seemed to still be gathering their wits together, and hadn’t quite figured out what they felt enough to respond.

It wasn’t like the poet responsible was waiting to hear it, anyway. They didn’t say any more in conclusion than they had in preamble, hadn’t said a single word except for the poem itself. The just walked off stage and started towards the front door.

I considered for about three seconds before I got up and followed them out into the night. It was probably stupid and definitely rash, but I was curious, and I had always been great at getting myself into trouble because I was curious how something would go.

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