Page 47 of Green City Wars

“Look, I got places to be,” Skotch tells her. “That means I’ve got to go through you, so be it.”

She laughs, and as she laughs she pounces. That fast, and so much an organic part of the laugh that he barely even reacts. She hits him hard—they’re comparable, pound for pound, so she brings all the momentum at her disposal and slams him on his back. He feels her claws prick, shoulders, chest, throat. Her eyes gleam like the blade of a guillotine.

The rodents, her cult followers, make a quiet chattering sound, like they’re clapping politely at a deft golf stroke.

Skotch dips his ladle in the barrel marked “remaining energy” and it’s empty. Even so, he tenses up as much as he can, about to go for the eyes with his nails. About to bite the paw that pins him. To fight, the mad hissing fight of a raccoon with its back to the wall.

Tybelle laughs and steps back. “You’re no fun, Herr Washbear. I will chase you down and finish you, and your fat bird too, but not today. Not when you’re all washed out, Mein Herr, and no bear left in you. That’s no fun. Killing you now would be far too sad. It would be almost like work.” Her tail goes up, crooking at the end, a little happy flag. “I’ll be seeing you, Skotch. Give my regards to Saint Frances.”

18SANCTUARY

There’s a smaller crowd at the Chapel than he’s used to. Thirty Gehirner at most, and usually that would mean the Saint was absent and the protection of her presence was removed. She’s there, though, and Skotch has never been so glad to see a human in his entire life. There and dispensing aid to a straggle of petitioners. Which makes the overall sparsity of the locals worrying. Later for that, though. He has an invalid to hand off.

He gets a rat to punt the pair of them out across the water to the Saint. Lulu’s in no position to swim, after all. The nun looks down, registers who the patient is, and her eyes widen.

“Alas,” says the little box at the nun’s feet. “What has befallen her?” That weird ornate way it turns her words into ’Sprech.

“Sister,” Skotch tells the box, “honestly it’s better you don’t know. Just, ah, she was benevolent enough to take the hit for me and it has become my responsibility to get her patched up. I will make a donation, I swear. When I get paid.” Not that it feels like anyone’s going to be paying out on his current investigation, and so he’s basically lying direct to a saint, but sometimes you’ve got to play fast and loose with religion. It’s not like she’s the Divine Jeff or anything.

“All poor and hurt animals shall be tended to,” says the box. “As is my holy duty.” And he isn’t quite sure of the Deutsch behind all that, but she catches his eye, human on high to beast down low. They understand, together, that her duty is self-imposed, and her order finds her embarrassing, but here she is and she’s what he’s got. That some human’s gone funny in the head so she thinks she needs to take care of all God’s creatures, even when these creatures aren’t God’s at all, having been remade in the image of lesser creators. All that in a look, a testament to how well Skotch’s Strain was engineered.

Saint Frances sorts in her basket of supplies. She has a little tablet, scrolling down some reference there. Skotch reckons it’s probably a veterinary manual and she’s looking up bird facts. The Saint has a harder job than a doctor of humans, because her patients come with a wide range of intolerances, vulnerabilities, and resistances. You can’t give a frog drugs that were measured out for a rat. But pigeons have been human pets enough that there’s some literature, and soon enough there’s a little row of tiny capsules for Lulu to choke down, to fight inflammation and infection.

“Sister,” Skotch says, “I can’t thank you enough, but I have yet more to ask. I’m real sorry.” If he wore a hat, he’d be wringing it wretchedly in his hands. As it is, those hands just move one over the other, endlessly round and round. The nervous energy of a raccoon with nowhere else to go. “I need you to put in a call for me. A human call. Is that perhaps a thing you can do?” Because under no circumstances can a Gehirner make contact with a human, if they even had the means. But Saint Frances is the point where the two worlds touch. Skotch can speak to her box and it can speak to her earpiece and then she can speak to her tablet and, through it, to another human.

“On her ring,” Skotch says, indicating Lulu’s leg, “you see his details. The guy who’s her employer. Schreiber, his name is. He needs to know.”

“It shall be done,” says the box, to her murmured reply. “Bless you, Skotch. You are a beast of virtue.”

He tries to parse that, and can’t, quite. Wishes he was sharp enough that he’d caught what her actual words had been. “Sister, I am the reason she got hurt. And then I made it worse. I dragged her halfway across the city, even. This is all my fault, and I don’t even know if there’s any way that I can fix it.”

She regards him—sympathetically, he thinks—but he isn’t sure just what came through, via the box, and what was lost. He was made in her image but it’s a poor copy. His makers never really intended him to have anything to say to them.

He has a desperate sense of needing to close up business. Which means he’s going to have to finally go to where Meece has been hiding. Assuming the little squeaker is even still there. Which also means that Skotch needs a plan for what to do with him. Who to sell him to, if Skotch is being both grim and honest with himself.

Szerky’s knife smile appears in his mind as he hesitates at the edge of the water, and he kicks away from the idea instinctively. Oh, she’s the doyenne of elegance, but she’s murder. A femme fatale with all the pretence stripped away. When the farms send out a killer they don’t mess around. And she’d make him rich, maybe, if he just decided that nobody ever designed him to have a conscience. Or maybe she’d cut his throat for him as a bonus, and keep the payment for herself. He reckons that’s quite likely, and he reckons that whoever is working as her catspaw in the city will probably learn the same lesson the hard way. For which he has no damn sympathy at all, honestly. Anyone who lets a fistful of buttons blind them to what Szerky is deserves all they get.

And speaking of catspaws … Tybelle and Murnau’s people, then? Is the cat a more admirable killer than the stoat just because she brings a note of psychopathic whimsy into the mix? Would Meece appreciate being gobbled up by someone who is, at least, amused by the whole business rather than grimly serious? Honestly Skotch feels there isn’t much of a silver lining to the mess, from a mouse’s perspective.

Which leaves him with … but there he has to stop his train of thought because there’s a frog waiting to get on. Lumping himself out of the water to sit almost companionably beside Skotch, like they’re old friends. Not even holding a gun this time.

“Herr Fischer,” Skotch notes. “You made it. I thought the cat got your tongue.”

Fischer’s broad mouth gapes in nothing much like a smile. The aforementioned tongue moves inside, like a worm, but has little to do with the words his throat forms. “Herr Bandit is kind enough to remember me in his prayers. Perhaps it is through his good thoughts that I survive.” He tugs at his red neckerchief, wet from the water but it looks like blood. “Herr Bandit brought a great deal of trouble to our manor.”

“You put in an order for that trouble when you grabbed the mouse,” Skotch notes.

“Yes, the mouse. Whom Herr Bandit grabbed back.”

“I was just getting between him and the cat. He’s in the wind now.” A lie, and by now Skotch reckons Fischer and just about everyone else in the whole damn city knows it’s a lie, but he still mouths it. “Is there some non-mouse-related favour I can do for you, Herr Fischer?”

The frog dabbles his broad feet in the water. “Herr Bandit does not wish to catch up on old times.”

“You would think I was known for going round with a sack full of rodents, the way everyone wants a mouse off of me,” Skotch complains.

Fischer gives a croak of amusement. “Dead rodents or live ones, does Herr Bandit have in his sack?” A bulbous, golden eye fixes Skotch sidelong.

Skotch takes a deep breath. Feels himself on a precipice. Or at least understands he’s had his toes to this edge, this drop, for a while now. Prepares to cast himself from the heights. Feels the plunge in his stomach, that falling fear most non-avian Strains have. “If it was a dead mouse I was selling, I’d have done it by now, I guess. Which cuts down on my potential customer base. Herr Fischer, when you’re running around like I’ve been, you can’t keep your ear to the ground. They’re still all hunting the mouse, right? The stoatweasel especially?”