Page 37 of Green City Wars

“I’m sorry, Lulu,” Skotch says. It’s hard, and not just from the way his mind is fogging up.

One of her eyes swivels and blinks until it’s on him. “Hurts,” she gasps. All those words in her, put them under sufficient pressure and that’s what they bake down to.

“You came for me,” he said. “You shouldn’t have. I’m not worth it.”

“Owe me a story,” she forces out of her beak, eyes bulging at the strain.

He’s about to tell her, then. Tell her all of what even the threat of the separator hadn’t scared out of him. Because he owes her. Because the concept of owing and paying, of doing your duty, is part of the neural engineering they’re all blessed and cursed with. That humans gave them so they’d want to do their jobs, and that ran on to generate the tangled emergent world of Gehirner society that most humans can’t even guess at. He owes, and so he opens his mouth to tell what might be the most valuable secret in the whole of Neuwien-Grunstadt. Then the squirrels come in.

Not a medic. The self-important mustachioed officer with the shirt of button mail, along with a handful of regulars with popguns. One of them sets down a tiny stool and the lead squirrel hops up onto it and crouches there, just about at eye level with Skotch sitting on the ground.

“They tell me you’re Skotch, eh?” he says. “The name’s Hansard, but the fellows round here call me Brass-Shirt. Can’t imagine why.”

“Let me guess,” Skotch tells him. “You’ve got a few questions.”

“Just a couple,” the squirrel agrees. He has a laid-back, humorous manner, quite unlike the run of squirrels who end up a bit frantic by default. Under other circumstances Skotch feels he might get on with this bravo, but right now he has priorities.

“I will answer anything you’ve got, but first she needs help.”

Brass-Shirt narrows his eyes. “Now, son, one might observe that we’ve got you, and we’re in a position to be quite encouraging, as far as answers are concerned. I don’t want you labouring under any false pretences regarding your position here. You’re an enemy combatant and you’re a prisoner.”

“I’m not with the Grays,” Skotch says. “Not even with Uzco. Just me, on my own.” Finding the concepts hard to put into words. Complicated things, belonging, factions.

“You’re a New-worlder, though. Means you’re on their side often as not,” Brass-Shirt says philosophically.

“Please,” Skotch gets out.

Hansard Brass-Shirt stares up at the low ceiling, bares his big incisors, looks around at his escort. “One of you fellows go fetch some pain meds. And disinfectant, too. Looks like someone got their teeth into you, friend.”

Skotch can only nod. Feels like someone beat him all over with sticks, too. He just sags there on the floor, and honestly nothing sags quite like a raccoon.

A subordinate squirrel ducks out and then ducks back. Lulu gets a shot of something, and if it won’t help her live it will at least let her die easier if that’s the path she’s on. Skotch doesn’t feel he’s got the credit to demand exploratory surgery right then, and probably he couldn’t even explain what that was. His grasp of the concept is receding away from him like a drowner in deep water.

He flinches. One of the squirrels has prodded him with a gun. He realises Brass-Shirt had made a start on his questions. Tries to recapture what was said, fails. Tries to ask the officer to repeat himself. Fails with that, too. In the end just makes a pitiful gesture, pulling at his lower eyelid. What comes out of his jaws is just a chattering sound where fragments of words get ground up like meat in the teeth of the separator.

Because of the different delivery methods, the squirrels don’t immediately understand, but then one of them obviously recalls the slightly uncomfortable way that Skotch’s Strain is set up. The same orderly nips out and back in, this time with an ampoule in his hands.

Hansard has a cup. An actual goddamn honest-to-goodness acorn cap cup, or at least one printed to look like an acorn cap. He decants most of the ampoule into it, then hands the almost-empty tab to Skotch.

“Bottoms up,” he suggests, and sips at his own draught of intellect merrily. Skotch fumbles, drops the thing, scoops it up desperately. Tilts his head back, eyelids peeled back. A drop, just a drop, into his right eye. The clarity of thought comes almost instantly, with the understanding that it’s only a passing phase, a moment’s respite.

“There’s more where that comes from,” says Brass-Shirt. “If we like your answers. So, Skotch?”

“That’s me.” The words still coming thick and rusty, but the little drop of oil doing its work to get the gears moving again.

“You want to tell me just why the hell the Grays were throwing such a party in your honour, son?”

Skotch blinks, takes a deep breath. Very aware of Lulu, her breathing easier now, her whimpering retreated further into her breast. Very aware of the guns, and that Hansard Brass-Shirt’s genial manner is just one more sheath you can hide a knife in.

“I’ll tell you,” he says. “Everything I can. But you’ve got to agree to fix her up. She’s not with the Grays—I mean, she came to fetch you guys, so you’ve got to know that. She’s not just any pigeon. She’s owned. She dies, it’s trouble.”

Brass-Shirt swills the thick Plangent in his tiny cup. “The way I see it, it wasn’t us who shot her. It was the Grays,” he points out. “That means the trouble devolves to them. I don’t see any reason to stop the world taking a big old dump when my enemy’s downhill of me.”

“That’s not how Rule One works,” Skotch tells him fiercely. Aware that it’s half that, and half him not wanting Lulu to die, but that only the first of those will carry any weight with these brigands. “Rule One craps on all of us. We do not make them take notice of us, right?” And he’s aware that Gehirner flirt with the edges of Rule One every day, from stealing food scraps out of the bins at Franz-Ferdinand’s to the Rattenkönige and Maulers trading services for human currency on the dark web. But the sanctity of human pets is a point in the doctrine where there isn’t any flex. And Lulu just about counts.

“You’re getting no promises out of me,” Brass-Shirt says, but Skotch can see his big plume of a tail flicking about, giving the lie to his composure. “We don’t have anyone who knows birds anyway. But maybe there’s someone. We’ll make enquiries.” He nods, and that same put-upon squirrel dashes out again. “So maybe you talk. Why’d the Grays grab you, son?”

With a drop of Plangent inside him, Skotch is able to get out a coherent story. More than that, he’s able to edit before the words come out. Brass-Shirt seems a sharp edge, so he doesn’t try to either play too dumb or get too clever. He keeps the stuff about Meece on the slender side, though. Helps that he doesn’t actually know the full truth himself, but he doesn’t trouble the Reds with his speculations, either. Doesn’t mention Sly, or whatever it was Sly knew that Skotch, now, won’t find out. Cuts down the cast of characters so names like the Baron’s and Muther Murnau’s don’t directly feature. The Grays grabbed him, but they were working for the Country Club. An escaped mouse. Somehow the whole thing turning into something between a circus and an auction.