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.
