When the Planners built the flying city, they said it was to keep everyone safe. When they loaded it with people, tearing them from their homes, giving them new lives way up in the frigid sky whether they wanted it or not, they said it was so the human race could survive.
And when the virus came, sweeping through the world below, killing everyone just as they said it would, those who remained thanked them.
The Planners were right.
A small fraction of humanity had been saved.
But living in a flying city wasn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounded.
Not after three hundred years.
Not when you couldn’t escape.
Because the virus was still rampant on the surface, roaming through the wilds of the world, and even one small step outside the confines of this floating, flying prison of a city meant instant death.
And anyway, the Planners wouldn’t let you step outside.
At least the topsiders had it good. Megan had dim memories of the sunlit surface of the city—memories from her childhood, from before she was sequestered in the gloom below the streets. They had houses up there. Cars. Wives and kids and baths and dinnertime and all the trappings of a normal life.
Topside was heaven.
Down in the Under, well.
That was where the rest of the city dwelled. The homeless. The jobless. The castaways. The orphans.
Deep in the cement bones beneath the streets, in the undergirding endless night, where sewage and steel fought against the homeless and the rats—that was where Megan and her kind ran. Trashburners rumbled in the distance, underscoring glistening pipes that carried urine, detritus, and—if she was lucky—water. Dim fluorescent lights flickered in the silent halls, leftover spaces that the topsiders had forgotten.
Some of them, anyway.
The darkest of the rich dwellers overhead? The ones dissatisfied with the trappings of their topside life, who yearned for more forbidden pleasures? They remembered. Carnal desires could be met in the turbulent gloom beneath the streets, if you knew where to look.
It was hard, down here. It was dirty. People often starved. People often died.
But down here in the glistening dark, the kids had something no one had expected.
Down here, there was magic.
Welcome to the Under.
Megan stood atop Rafter Two, rubbing a piece of metalwood between two fingers as she looked at the whiproom down below her. The room was large and square and made of rough cement, maybe twenty feet tall, with a series of long steel bars running through the air close enough to the ceiling that Megan could stand on one and look down at everything. The bars looked like rafters, Megan thought. Rafters. Another memory from her prior life. Why they were here was anybody’s guess—the Planners always were mysterious. Whatever the case, they provided a perfect way for killgirls like her to stand above the proceedings, hidden.
Maybe that was exactly what the rafters were for.
She looked below her at the rows and rows of aluminum chairs that were lined up on the floor, filled with sweaty, heaving bodies of fearful women wrapped in chains. She licked her lips, quieting the flicker of her heartbeat.
She’d always hated it here.
The Den was a special section of the Under, where only the richest topsiders came. This room was the worst of them: deep and rotten, filled with the scent of men and fear, of dark blood and anxiety and shame. The sounds were loud in here, echoing off the walls, masking any movement she might make. Sounds of whips, of course, and harder things. Things she had to keep her eyes away from. Things for which a soul might bleed.
Megan had a job down here. Finally, after months of training, Queen had deemed her strong enough.
She could only hope that Queen was right.
The shard of metalwood felt warm between her fingers, almost pulsing with a sickly kind of life. The grains in the wood were visible, striations of power running through it like tiny rings of a tree. But the surface of it shone, reflecting light, looking almost like metal in the eery whiproom chamber. Wood wasn’t meant to look like that.
Not that she saw much wood in this infernal flying city.
Nor did any of it exist down here in the Under. No. Wood was the least of her concern, metal or otherwise. Still, she had to admit there was something very strange about it. No one had ever bothered to explain where it came from or how it worked.
She only knew the power it could give.
She couldn’t help but shiver as she pocketed the piece. She’d use it when the time came. If it came.
Metalwood was where she got her magic. The strange pieces of wood weren’t common, exactly—most people couldn’t even feel the warmth in them. Those that could, well.
They were the ones that got promoted.
That was her, finally. And tonight, she had a job. If everything went well, magic would not be needed here.
But if something went wrong, well.
She’d be glad of the metalwood in her pocket.
She returned to her survey of the room. Blue lights flickered overhead, revealing flashing necks, glimmering teeth. She heard cries of pleasure and of pain, the crack of whips, the rattle of thick chains.
She wiped a sheen of sweat from her brow.
She could do this.
She had to do this.
Queen had entrusted her with the job, after all. And pissing off Queen was the last thing she wanted to do. It was her first job. Her first real job.
She’d be damned if she let Queen down.
So she stood, feet perched on a rafter high above the room, checked the pinblade at her side, and launched herself at Gentleman One. She flitted down from the metal rafter, landing silently beside one of the chairs.
He was short, for a Gentleman. Short and portly, with a grimace on his face. And so it was the work of but mere seconds for Megan to draw her pinblade, steel flashing quickly in the dark, and swipe it wide, feeling the thin but supple give of flesh. It took no time for her to see the blood well up inside his newly tattered shirt, to see the expression on his face as he stumbled, clutching at the wound, eyes open as he fell to the cold cement floor.
Megan left him there, bleeding.
First assignment done.
He’d been whipping a woman, who was still strapped into a chair with thick pieces of leather. Her chest heaved in fear as Megan approached, smelling like urine mixed with sweat. Megan wrinkled her nose.
“It’s okay,” she said, taking shallow breaths as she bent to undo the woman’s straps. “You’re free now. The exit’s over there.”
“Who are you?” she asked, but Megan simply shook her head.
“Count yourself lucky. And don’t get yourself caught up in this again.”
“Thank you.”
The woman left, tottering toward Exit Two in the northeast corner of the room.
That was one.
She had two more victims here tonight.
She caught a glimpse of Beam one rafter over, dispatching her first Gentleman. The lights gleamed on her, shining on her arm muscles, on her neck as it curved while she slit the throat of her first victim. Megan watched as she freed the woman in the chair, speaking to her in low tones. Only seconds had passed.
Beam always made it look so easy.
“Hey!” Beam hissed, and Megan realized that the girl was somehow standing next to her, short-cropped hair shining dirty blonde in the flickering fluorescent lights. “We can’t be discovered here. Go!”
Megan obeyed, her mind a bit of fog. She threw her steelstring up, watching as the thick clip at the end connected with the rafter far above her.
She started running.
“Up!” Beam said from a few feet away, and Megan felt herself doing what she loved more than anything.
Flying.
Beam was propelling her with magic. Megan felt herself rise with it, rising upward toward the ceiling, the steelstring taut against her as she did. It was pulling her, the momentum curving her above the metal rafters into the cavernous space at the top of the room. She sailed in an arc, the rafter keeping her steelstring in place, until she was positioned directly over Rafter Three.
Then Beam’s magic ended.
And Megan fell, landing spryly on the metal beam. Easy.
They had practiced that move for a very long time.
Megan unclipped her steelstring, surveying the floor below. Killgirls like her were supposed to stay hidden, to strike from the darkness.
So far, so good.
Her next target was two rows down. Gentleman Two was even fatter than the first, a big fat man dressed in blue, and he had his big hand around someone’s neck beneath him, fat back held still as the body below him jerked and waved, obviously about to die.
And this time it wasn’t a woman being held there in the Gentleman’s hand.
It was a man.
Megan reclipped her steelstring, pulling her right glove tighter. Then she swung down, as silently as possible, angling herself for a quick neck kill. Her feet, clad as they were in simple skintight synthskin, pointed at the man. It would be easy to kill him, positioned as he was, bent over his captive. All she had to do was grab his neck and twist. She could feel her muscles poised, ready to execute the motion she had done so many times.
But then the man looked up at her, white teeth shining.
A knife blade glimmered in his hand.
She let out a shriek, unable to help herself, trying to deflect her motion to the side. But it was no good—she was falling, now that Beam was off doing something else. His knife was thicker than her pinblade, and he had a look of skill about him, as if he had wielded it before. He almost looked happy that a black-clad woman was descending on him from the ceiling above, synthskin dangling, steelstring snapping. His blade was thirsty for blood like hers, and there was nothing she could do.
Megan saw all this in a moment, and she knew that death was rising up to meet her.
She managed to swing her steelstring to the side just barely, her body moving a foot off to the right of the man and his captive in the chair. But the gentleman was ready for her: he sliced and met her foot, sending searing pain through the synthskin to her real skin underneath. Megan screamed, landing heavily on the floor and twisting her ankle hard as she tried to keep her balance. Her foot felt like it was on fire. It hurt, as if the undersun had flipped the city in the sky, blazing down and piercing into her with all its horrible glory.
Dammit. She wasn’t strong enough. She was failing Queen.
And failing Queen meant losing the only place she had left in this city. The only life she had.
She wasn’t a child anymore.
She wasn’t a topsider anymore.
She was strong.
She had to be. It was the only way to survive.
So she came back up, balancing weakly on her other ankle, pinblade out and ready to strike. Then she darted forward, ducking under a wide swipe from the Gentleman and his blade, slicing inside his reach, feeling the slight resistance of flesh and cloth as her sharp pinblade dealt its damage.
The man staggered back, eyes wide, skin white. His blue shirt was sliced cleanly from left to right, the opening revealing skin and blood. The man lurched, grasping at his stomach, dropping his knife. Then he fell, gurgling something in the whip-loud room. The rest of the people in the room were too busy, making too much noise themselves to even notice.
Megan had managed to stay unseen.
She wiped her pinblade on her pants and clipped it to her belt. Then she stood for a moment, trying to quiet her quickly beating heart, careful not to put weight on her damaged foot. It hurt, but she could manage it. She’d had worse before. Then she turned, moving her attention to the captive man in the chair.
He was pretty, she realized in a detached sort of way. He had dark, curly hair, and eyes she couldn’t see. The room was dark, and she was in a hurry, and she didn’t usually go in for men anyway. Her gaze flicked across his well-defined pectoral muscles and abdomen, then back up to his eyes. He didn’t seem nervous. He didn’t seem afraid at all. It almost seemed like he’d been enjoying this.
Megan felt her stomach turn.
She stepped closer, reaching under him to unlatch his chains, trying to avoid looking in too many places at once. His breath was hot as he turned to her.
The chains fell away.
“Th—” the man said, his voice coming out entirely as a choke. He coughed, and Megan finished undoing him. Then she stood, watching his veiled eyes in the dim room.
“How did you end up here?” she asked.
The man sat up, abdominal muscles taut. “I made a bad bet.” His voice was raw.
“I’m sorry.” She helped him up. When he stood, he was taller than her by at least a foot. And there was something in his eyes, now that she could see them in the flickering light from the ceiling.
Was it curiosity?
“The door is that way,” she said, pointing to Exit Two.
“Thank you,” he said. “Who are you?”
Everyone asked that. They always wanted to know who had saved them. But Her Majesty’s Navy had a rule: you couldn’t say you were in Her Majesty’s Navy. And you couldn’t give them your undername, either, or you’d be excommunicated. You’d be dropped from the Crew.
But she had to give him something. And anyway, he was kind of cute.
There wasn’t any rule about telling him her real name. No one ever uttered it down here.
“Megan,” she said.
“Thank you, Megan,” the man replied. “I’m Eric.”
“What are you doing?” Beam hissed at her from somewhere nearby.
“Go!” Megan said, pushing Eric toward Exit Two.
“Thank you,” Eric said. “I’ll find you.”
“Just leave,” Megan said, already turning away, “and never come down here again.”
Beam was still hissing at her, and Megan turned to see what the problem was. Had she dispatched her Gentleman? Had they completed their mission? Could they leave? Megan turned and scanned her eyes across the whiproom, trying to take stock of what was going on.
Everyone had stopped what they were doing. Every Gentleman was standing, leather whips in hand. The blue fluorescent lights flickered as they gleamed off skin and metal, everything sharpness and slickness and steel. She’d finally drawn their attention. She’d been too loud. She’d been too slow.
Everyone was looking at her.
And they were all smiling.
