The Heart Machine is a System in Superposition

by JoiBoy

Summary:

“Is it so obvious, then, that I don’t belong next to him?”

Or

When he’s had so many drinks, all the pleasure signals in his brain turn to pain signals, and Jayce is always such a pleasure.

Or

In the undercity, Jayce and Viktor are a thing amongst others.

Notes:

This fic is complete at 6 chapters and 25k words.

This was … a journey.

My warnings:
Medical inaccuracies (probably)
Scientific inaccuracies (definitely)
Medical trauma
I take the scenic route sometimes
This is *experimental*

Chapter specific content warnings in the end notes if applicable but this is pretty tame, confusing maybe, but tame.

Chapter 1: On the Topic of Men

The first hexdraulic descender has been installed between Zaun and Piltover. It only travels down to Zaun’s Promenade level. Jayce tries to act indignant about it in Viktor’s stead. Viktor listens, crushes and drops double the instructed dose of velocidrine tablets into his glass of warmed sweetmilk. It speeds up the absorption of the opiate and is an ill-advised practice by his physician, who tells him it’s meant to be absorbed slowly, the effects will last longer, and he may otherwise run his blood toxic. Viktor’s blood is already toxic, and if they only let him do his own intramuscular injections at home he wouldn’t have to do this. His hands are steady, he knows how to set a needle, he learnt the name, function and dose of every ingredient listed on the back of the packet—if he wanted, if they pushed him to it, he could make it himself—are they afraid he’ll take a liking to it? That he will liberally ignore the red marker on the barrel of the syringe, triple the dose, rub the liquid into his eyelids and the drum of his ears? Silly, he has a job to do, a job he would do better without pain. If they’re so afraid of putting pain medication into a Zaunite’s hands, give it to Jayce, let Jayce shoot the velocidrine into Viktor’s thigh, his hands are twice as steady. 

Viktor looks at Jayce’s hands, gesticulating. They used to be always coated in chalk. Now they’re clean, his nails are trimmed too—it might have something to do with Councilor Medarda, something about being careful, about not scrapping her soft linings when he pushes his fingers into her— 

Viktor sighs. “Jayce.”

Jayce looks at him. “What? Don’t you agree? They have the money to do it.”

“It does not matter whether the city has the money to do so if no one down there can afford to pay the fare,” he says, scooping more honey into his sweetmilk to cover up the bitter taste of velocidrine. “A hexdraulic descender any lower than Entresol level is a taunt, a joke of poor taste, it would get disassembled for parts and sold for bread and milk overnight.”

Jayce says nothing. They might come back to this when he’s found another argument in favor, right now Viktor can’t help but imagine it, looking out the bottle glass window of the bedsit he used to live in at the baron-owned dayhouse, to see the giant hexdraulic descender, all shiny and black, come to a stop at the centre of The Bowl— Zaun’s bottom most square where all of the undercity’s metaphorical shit is flushed. He would think the same thing every single one of the other three hundred persons living at the dayhouse would think, same as the hookers from The Dolzo across the square, or the performers of the Dom Raboty hall a street down, they would think; jam the gears, sabotage the hydraulics lifts, take out the maintenance crew or steal their uniforms; then, plasma-cutters? Hand-cranked bolt cutters? Blowtorch; Areas vulnerable to corrosion are junction points, fasteners, exposed pipes; For the top use grappling hooks and winches, hide the large parts in freight containers, the small parts in boots, underwear, in the pipes. They would think; hydraulic pistons, that’s high-grade steel, 20 to 30 silver cogs a piece, give of take; Gears and cogs are cheap but these are brass, steel, hexalloy , worth at least 5 silver cogs each; light fixtures equal glass, glass is always good, 3–5 silver cogs a sconce if new; the brass paneling goes for 10 bronze washers for the small pieces, 1 to 3 silver cogs the large ones; if they reach the engine the engine is jackpot, hex crystals galore, 30 golden hexes a gram .

Viktor’s heart speeds up, excited, as if he’s there amongst them, planning the coup, instead, he’s the one that built it. It must the velocidrine. He takes a breath. Jayce looks crestfallen between the mess of the lab, strewn blueprints like lost feathers on the floor. It’s worse than it used to be. Jayce hasn’t been around much to tidy Viktor’s mess, what between being a councilor and fucking a councilor. It’s laughable that they’re considered equals at that table, Jayce acts like a puppydog around her, one Viktor would very much like to kick, if his leg would allow him, if he didn’t suspect Jayce might enjoy it. It makes Viktor want to make even more of a mess. He takes another breath, wishes childishness remained with childhood, in Zaun, in the bedsit, his father’s sweat stained into the mattress they shared, the one he’d carved up the foam of to make a gulley the shape of his leg, to take the pressure off, on his side of the bed, where the gulley would continue to grow as he grew, as he continued to hurt, till his calf touched the springboard, and he had to sleep with a compression wrapping on, and his back brace on, and he’d wake with blisters, wishing he could burn the fucking mattress to the ground—and anyway, Viktor wishes childish things remained with childhood.

“Viktor.” Jayce’s voice is boyish in a way Viktor’s has never been. “Let’s go see it.”

“See what?” 

“The descender. It’s the first piece of hextech placed in the hands of the public. That’s what we wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” 

“Then come on.” Jayce gets up, puts on his coat, the new one, with the House Talis Hammers at the shoulders that make them seem even broader. “Let’s ride it.”

Viktor doesn’t get up from his barstool, Jayce is already fetching his cane for him, the keys, the gloves, the coin purse. Viktor follows him with his eyes.

“Ride it to where? To Zaun?” 

“Where else?” 

“But I thought the undercity was dangerous , Jayce.”

Jayce stops fluttering around. He steps up to Viktor and spins his barstool around, till Viktor’s back is to him. He places his hands on Viktor’s shoulders.

He leans down a little to ask, “where’s your coat?”

“I must have misplaced it.” Viktor shrugs into Jayce’s hands, they squeeze him.

“I’ve apologized already, haven’t I? Do you want to scold me again?” He says it lightly, with a breathiness that catches at the crown of Viktor’s head. Then he mimics Viktor’s accent crudely. “You’re a sheltered boy, Talis. Ignorant, prejudiced, you know nothing of the undercity.”

“You know me .” 

Jayce’s thumbs travel up Viktor’s nape to tease the trim of his hair, then down to stroke the knob of his spine. He’s been offering to give Viktor a massage for years. Viktor continues to refuse. Blacksmith fingers dip into the collar of his outstretched shirt.

“Maybe you’re dangerous too.” Jayce’s hands fall from his shoulders. “Either way, if you come you can prove me wrong about the undercity.”

“There’s nothing to prove.” Viktor takes his cane and stands up. “Zaun is dangerous.”

***

The descender looks like a symmetrical human heart, hollowed out for passengers to step onto its platforms like valves, hooked to vertical rails that will drop it into the underbelly’s pit. There’s a golden wolf at the top, and they’ve named the descender, in big bold letter, The Howling Wolf. Viktor cannot begin to explain how much he detests the name, finds it performative and a lazy attempt at virtue signaling, but he won’t tell Jayce that. He also won’t tell Jayce that soon enough it’ll be known as the Piltiee’s Pup, or the Dogtrap, or the Iron Muzzle, or something or other along those lines. 

It isn’t yet opened to public use, and a crowd forms everyday around Nostra Plaza to oogle the beast from behind iron barriers. A couple of nobles and aristocrats stand inside the circle, pawning at it. Neither Viktor nor Jayce can refuse them, it is their money after all. They’re already asking for private descenders to be built, from their private chambers to the meridian markets they trade in, from their dinning halls to the foundries they invest in, from their labs to the clubs they recreate in. Viktor would rather be pushed around in a wheelchair than comply, but he’s not delusional like Jayce, he knows it will happen, just like the weapons will.

Councilor Medarda and a noble by her side stand at the concourse. Viktor purposefully slows his gait, till even he can hear the clack-pop of his hinge like a cog that didn’t pass the quality check, but they’re spotted anyway. 

“Here to take her for a ride, Talis?” the noble says. 

He seems familiar. He’s taller than Jayce but not as broad. His skin is darker, his hair is white.

“What kind of chef doesn’t taste his dishes?” Jayce answers. 

“Ah, and you must be Viktor, the elusive second brain of Hextech.” The man shakes Viktor’s hand. “Jayce has told me a lot about you.”

Vicktor hums. The man is attractive, so he decides to pay attention. His tunic is white, blue, the sigil is a diamond like a window pane: Clan Ferros. 

Viktor says, “and you must be our benefactor.”

“Only by association,” he says with a smile that snags at his lips with more canines than incisors. “I was adopted into the clan a couple of years ago.”

“How humble,” Medarda says. “I’ve seen more of him than any of the other members this past year.”

“Well, I’ll admit we were trying pretty hard to recruit Jayce into our midsts.” He points towards Jayce who blushes like a child praised. “But it seems he went and decided to start his own revolution.”

“Yes,” Viktor says. “He seems to do that.”

The engineer at the door signals to them from platform number four. They step onto the descender. Viktor expects it to drop half an inch with their weight like the cargo lifts in Toxhamm would, but it stays still. They round the diamond plate deck to stand on the other side of platform number four’s ring. The crank is pulled, and after the bloated sound of decompression pulls them all tight with tension, The Howling Wolf starts its descent. 

Viktor leans against the railing that overlooks the slowly rising city, and hooks the toe of his cane into a vent. Jayce, standing across from him with Medarda catches his eye, and Viktor can read in it, clear as day, the thought— We should have put seating in here. How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I think of that? Viktor, why didn’t you —

Viktor turns to the Ferros noble. “You haven’t told me your name.”

The man’s face contracts minutely into a moue of self-conscious displeasure.

“Victoria Ferros,” he says. “But please, I beg you, call me Toya.”

Viktor smiles for the first time that day. “You’re from the undercity, aren’t you?”

“That I am.” He laughs. “What gave me away?”

“Hmm, perhaps it was the Ferros patronym,” he says. “A born and bred Piltie does not give up his last name even for a House. Ah, unless you married into it?”

Toya smiles. “I didn’t.” 

“But If I may be honest …”

“Please do.”

“I recognised you.”

Toya’s eyebrows lift.

“You used to perform, did you not?” Viktor tucks his chin, tilts his head. “In the music halls. Was it at the Yoke O-Ring? Or at Jacquard’s?”

“Anywhere they would let me,” Toya laughs again. “I can’t believe someone remembers that, how embarrassing.”

He doesn’t really seem embarrassed. Viktor remembers his young band of misfits playing covers of popular Scrapjazz and KEDJ vinyls. Industrial decay genres had been all the rage in his boyhood, technicolour music they liked to call it, heavy on percussion and chem-synths, contact microphones, soldered pipes and oscillators, singers went as far as modding their tracheas for voice distortions. It was aggressive, chromatic, and the best thing little Viktor had ever heard.

“You were good. Do you still play?” Viktor asks.

“Yes, in some speakeasies round the Promenade.” He gestures around them, they’re slowly reaching Zaun’s upper district. “That type of music never really took in Piltover.”

“A shame.”

“You’ll have to come watch me play sometime,” Toya says. “See if it’s as good as in your memories.”

Viktor indulges him. “Gladly.”

“Ah, but tell me, have you given project Danais some thought?”

Viktor slides his eyes briefly towards Jayce, still talking up Medarda, one of her hands on his shoulder. Jayce’s eyes briefly meet his.

“I don’t think I’ve been informed.” 

“That makes sense, it’s a pretty new proposal. Talis said he’d look it over after your current project was finished. Some sort of sound recording device was it?”

Viktor hums. “What’s this project Danais then?”

“An airship.” 

Viktor’s eyebrows lift. “Really?”

“Well, I’m sure you’ve heard news of Noxus’ new beast last quarter. We can’t let ourselves be outdone by those warheads can we?” 

“What’s this about Noxus?” Medarda, now a their side, asks, brows askew, smile permissive, Jayce in tow.

“Just some good natured, healthy competition.” Toya says.

“I’m sure.”

The descender lands in Redmarrow district, where Medarda walks out onto the landing dock to talk to Promenade’s wealthy horticultural merchants with investment enquiries. 

Jayce places his hand on Viktor’s shoulder, smile oddly stretched. “You two are hitting it off.” 

“What about you, Talis?” Toya says, voice booming, an unsubtle smile towards Councilor Medarda. “And here I thought we Ferros were your favorite house.”

“You just pay well, Toya.” Jayce says.

“Shall we let you two go back up, then?” Toya asks Jayce, gesturing to Medarda. “I thought Viktor and I could perhaps reminisce, take a literal walk down memory lane.”

“Actually,” Jayce says, unhooking Viktor’s cane from the vent in the floor and pressing his hand into his lower back. “Viktor was going to show me around today.”

“I was?” Viktor asks.

“You were.”

Viktor cocks his head. How much did body influence temperament? Had these two broad-shouldered men been born with Viktor’s chewed gum of a spine, would they still posture and preen like den lions? Viktor doesn’t want to walk down memory lane, his leg hurts and he never had much memories in Promenade anyhow, they’re all buried much lower down. He’d like to see Toya alone however, somewhere where he won’t have to look at Jayce and his councilor standing side by side, fitting into each other like cogs, where he won’t have to acquiesce when Toya shoulder’s him and says, they make quite the pair, don’t they? And Viktor will have to answer, yes, they do.

They’re interrupted by a shout emanating from the other side of the descender, and following it out appears the engineer, red faced, holding by the scruff a Chirean boy. The engineer accuses him of stealing, trying and failing to wrestle out of his hands a broken piece of iron mesh, holding him out like a hunted hare. He’s young, missing two of his frontal sharp-tooths, clasped hands the shape of mice paws, not yet grown into his claws. 

He clutches the iron like a family heirloom, but iron won’t sell for much in the markets, he should have gone for the brass paneling instead. The conductor asks Councilor Medarda if they should call an enforcer. Medarda regards the boy with pity, Toya with hesitance, and Jayce, inexplicably, is looking at Viktor.

Viktor walks up to the engineer. “If I may?”

The boy is dropped at his feet. Viktor knuckles his cane and stoops down to his level. The creature bares his teeth at him.

Viktor brings a finger to his chin and pretends to think. “Hmm, have I lost something?” 

The boy’s eyes are round and prairie green. He un-fists the iron mesh, handing it out to Viktor. “Sir, sir, you lost this.”

“What are you doing?” Medarda asks, sounding genuinely intrigued.

“Ah, a game.” Viktor keeps his eyes on the boy. “Of sorts.”

Viktor and the Chirean boy begin an exchange of items to the rhythm of a rhyme.

“My love gave me something lost.” The iron mesh.

“My love gave me something found.” Two chocolate bars.

“My love taught me the word for home,” A smile.

“And spun my heart around.” A spin.

“My love gave me rust for luck.” A bent spoon.

“My love gave me bronze to bind,” Three bronze washers.

“My love gave me a vow once spoken, never to unwind.”

“Thank you.” The boy bends at the waist in an energetic bow, and before anyone can say anything he’s jumping over the descender’s rail and falling back into the crowds that birthed him. Viktor stands with difficulty, but even Jayce lets him help himself, and hands the iron mesh back to the engineer.

They all take the descender back up without another word, or stepping foot into the undercity.

***

Viktor is laying in the lab’s cot, grading papers as favor to six different professors, their six different classes; Physics; Chemtech; Math, Madness, and Magic; Quantum Quandaries and Other Confusions; Lab Rats Anonymous; Potionomics ; Do No Harm (Unless It’s Profitable)—

There were many Chirean families in Zaun, but the boy had reminded Viktor so much of that man—

He circles the words the students spelt wrong: anisotropy, catenation, ketenimines, clathrate hydrates, haploinsufficiency, necessary, symmetry, loose, their, they’re, there —

He hadn’t thought of him in years, not really, not since he’d left, he didn’t let himself—

He writes in the margins: no. good effort. close. show your work. this is creative, creativity is not the goal. no. no. simplify. show your work. do you even want to pass this class? this is bold, incorrect, but bold. no! try again! SHOW YOUR WORK—

He’s probably dead. He’d been working in the mines. But he hadn’t been that young, or had he? How did Chirean’s age? Had he had wrinkles? Hair? No, yes—grey? Big bat ears, yes, chipped maybe, did they get bigger when they got older, like humans? Why can’t Viktor remember his face? Did he forget? Was forgetting cruel?—

Viktor is crossing out entire paragraphs at a time on a paper about superposition and stability, systems in superposition exists harmoniously in all states simultaneously , that isn’t how it works at all, harmony is a misnomer, superposition is tension—states struggling for resolution, stability is an illusion, this kid is and idiot—

He remember’s his hands, large, scarred, burnt, black, making Viktor a knee brace, a back brace, a cane, with belts from his own pants, sailcloth from his worker’s uniform, wood from his kitchen table—

Now Viktor’s leg hurts, his ribs, there’s a new blister cutting through the callouses in the arch of his right hand—

Pain is the body’s way of signaling that something is wrong, Viktor’s knows what’s wrong, femoral anteversion, muscular dystrophy, spinal muscular atrophy, COPD, CRPS, Viktor knows what’s wrong, his physicians know what’s wrong, anyone who takes one look at him knows what’s wrong, pain doesn’t need to keep yelling, stop telling him, he knows, he can’t fix it, give up, shut up, it’s not his fault—

He writes their scores in red pencil, sixty-eight over hundred, forty-one over fifty, twenty-eight over fifty, zero, zero, zero — 

Whose fault is it then? People like to tell mothers and their cripple sons it isn’t their fault but he didn’t even know his mother, and someone must be at fault. Had she ever felt guilty for making him wrong? For failing him in the womb? When she saw him for the first time who did she blame? Did she regret him, hate him, wish he’d never been born—

Jayce sits down on the edge of the lab’s cot. Viktor hadn’t heard him enter. The papers on his lap go silent. He drops the pencil to the ground. Jayce is back from a run, so where he usually smells of rice pudding, Viktor can now scent at the back of his throat gone-off grain and wet sugar. 

Jayce says, “that thing with the kid. Toya told me Zaunites do it so children don’t have to steal—or like, so they don’t have to beg. Did you…did you ever have to…”

“Don’t be sentimental now, Jayce,” Viktor says, he throws an arm over his eyes. “It’s an urban courting rite, the bride and groom exchanged items, then, ah, promised eternal faithfulness and love. Children adapted it. It’s sweet, Jayce, not sad.”

“It can be both.”

“How feminine of you to say that.” 

Viktor feels the mattress dip over on each side of his body, senses Jayce’s shadow dropping over him, his sweat, his heat—his body should be turned into a renewable source of thermal energy.

“Did Toya ask you to join House Ferros?”

Viktor falters and Jayce takes silence for consent, his fingers pry Viktor’s arm from his face so Viktor can see him towering, teetering, considering, being frantic and manic outside of his body for everyone to see, instead of keeping the debacles inside, like Viktor, and Jayce might be Piltie but Viktor has better manners.

“You didn’t accept, right?”

“Why do you think I didn’t, Jayce?”

“What? Well, because—” He’s still holding Viktor’s wrist, swinging it like a puppet, Viktor knows exactly in that moment what he must’ve looked like as a child when he threw a tantrum. “I—”

“For a frequent public speaker you’re often not very eloquent.”

“Viktor.” He drops his head on Viktor’s chest, no thought for brass paneled back-braces or weak spines.

Viktor takes a breath that Jayce will feel, then the door is knocked on. 

“Is that for you?” Viktor asks.

Jayce glances briefly at the door, turns back to Viktor, says, “I do actually want you to show me around the undercity.”

Viktor presses himself up, presses Jayce away. It could be Medarda, a professor coming to collect his papers, Toya. He thinks of the possibility of seeing that man again, and is filled with pain. Pain is a signal that something is wrong.

“Only as far as Entresol,” Viktor tells him. “I won’t show you the Sumps.”

“Yes, ok.”

“No, I’m serious, Jayce.” Viktor stands, smoothing his clothes, smoothing his gait. “Do not ask me to, do not beg me to, do not corner me, do not mislead me into it. Can you promise me that?”

“I can promise you anything.”

Viktor opens the door, but whoever had stood there is already gone.

Notes:

I feel like I lost the plot several times writing this, both literally and figuratively. I have genuinely no idea if this will make any sense and I hope none of the characters are too ooc. I hate the practice of belittling your own work as damage control, but also I cannot post this in good conscience without disclaiming that I had such hard time getting through it and I think that content wise it isn’t my best work.

Also how do you even write characters who actually like each other from the start and get along and spend time together? Like I’m so used to writing difficult love interest dynamics that I didn’t know how to deal with these two idiots who have literally nothing separating them except their own stubborn illusions.

Also, the summary style is 100% stolen from peu_a_peu's Again and More So. It’s just so good, so intriguing, so titillating, so…

Anyhow, I’ll be posting fairly regularly as I want to move on with my life.

Thank you for giving this a chance !

Chapter 2: The Teacher Asks the Question

They step out into the undercity, past the mirrored crowd-control barriers around Zaun’s section of the descender. Jayce makes a show of looking around. 

“I didn’t know you were so interested in the undercity, Jayce.” 

“Yes, well.” He continues to survey the tall structures of the Promenade, crafted from lattice ironwork, the stained glass windows glowing red and orange and green with chemlights in bolted sconces, the polished steel lightwheels, the crystal houses wrapped around trees and oxygen. He seems to take notice of the people, draped, cloaked, plated, with uneven gaits and prosthetic arms, half-metal, half-man, half-face, half-mask, pale and dressed in colours with mirth in their eyes. “We should install seating in the descender, priority seating, and hand holds—straps for wheelchairs and luggage.”

Viktor stares at his back, the crowded muscle there, the brilliant cells there, the oxygen, the strength, the dumb things that rise from it into his chest, over his throat, out of his mouth.

Jayce turns around. “What? Don’t you think so?” 

“Sure, Jayce.”

***

Victoria. 

Names can reveal so much about a person, even if they do not pick them. 

Victoria. 

Zaun is too cosmopolitan for widespread religion, for saints and prophets and gods. Teachers on the other hand, Zaunites would bruise their knees and slit their wrists to gain their blessing, to become their apostle, to follow in their path. Some thousand lifetimes ago a woman named Victoire came to Zaun, when Zaun was still but a dirty orphan with snot down its chin, and taught Zaun the most important thing it would ever learn: chemistry. Victoire is one-third a legend and two-third’s a nursery rhyme everywhere but in the undercity. In the undercity, the only thing that will save you is a teacher. A teacher that finds you and notices your fat, juicy brain, and says, come, my boy, to the Academy, and I will give you a life. Generations of boys and girls birth out of the city’s underbelly sporting life-saving names like Viktor, like Vittorio, Vicarion, Victus, Victoria .

Zaun’s relationship with life-saving names doesn’t end there. If your child dies in the underbelly, wether that be a woman’s womb, or inside it’s valves and pipes, the next one must be given a name of the opposite sex, whatever they are born with between their legs. It is a must, to break the curse.

He tells Jayce all of this as they walk around the Blackmarina, because if Jayce is interested in Zaun, then names is where Zaun begins. 

“You seem to know a lot about him.” Jayce says.

“I’m simply assuming. Assuming plausible things according to patterns and theory is my job.”

Jayce replies with a hum and a smile over Viktor’s shoulder.

The Blackmarina is half a million square yards of stall and tent, seventy-five percent of the dual city-states’ trading business, seven thousand specialist vendors, three canals and nine bridges, thirty-nine languages shouted across the sprawl, fifty-six steam vents hissing, twenty-eight hidden trapdoors, forty-three stalls dedicated to knives and blades alone, eighteen tons of knock-off Machinelle chocolate bars, seven miles of rattraps, three managed colonies of mech-rats, three smuggling pits, one bolted Harpsichord, and twenty-three brass coins from a city that never existed.

There are enough Piltie and tourist alike in the Blackmarina that neither Jayce nor Viktor stand out, and Jayce is jovial today. Viktor is not sure what about, nothing particularly positive has happened, they’d made little progress on their portable phono-captor prototype, the Academy had served stewed mushrooms at breakfast that day, despicable , and Viktor still could not find his coat. Yet, that morning, Jayce had been awaiting him by the descender with a smile too white and carrying a satchel, as if he was some child on an extra-curricular excursion. Now, he dances from stall to stall, dropping coins, bronze and silver alike, to fill said satchel with a multitude of satin neck scarfs, a foldable multitool with too many unnecessary attachments, vials of universal lubricant, which was absolutely not universal, and as many vacuum-sealed packets of spiced, eel jerky as could fit. 

He picks up a lock picking set, it’s a kids set, with painted pink locks for practice, and tells Viktor about Maris, a fellow blacksmith from his time as an apprentice. She had strong opinions on doors, about how too many locks meant fear, too few meant arrogance. She’d stolen into his dorm room at the Academy once, taking his blueprints and notes with her and leaving a lockpick on his desk with the note: For when you stop trusting people .

At a watchmaker’s stall, he talks about a poet, Lysara, who really had nothing to do with watches, but she’d always be late to their rendez-vous, never by accident, because she would tell Jayce, whilst pulling him in by the lapels, If you’re not waiting for me, you don’t want me enough .

He asks Viktor about the empty glass pendants in one stall, because he’d been given one once, by an Academy researcher who specialized in energy resonance, Cyllea. It had been a gift to celebrate their one year together. Of it, she’d said If you break my heart, don’t touch it for a week . Jayce lost it in a lab accident and never found out what it did. Viktor’s not particularly familiar with chemglass jewellry, but knows these pendants are usually marketed as a chemical balancing act that enhances performance during sex, but that usually only induce the illusion of it. These pendants are empty like bulbs, Jayce says his was full of something black. Viktor guesses blood, hers, or theirs, and like most things Zaunites made, if he’d touched it after the break up, it would most likely have been unpleasant. He wagers chemical castration or a blood clot in his heart. 

“Did you break her heart?” Viktor asks.

“I don’t know,” Jayce says. “She never told me.”

The next stall sells hides. Thick hides made of clumped white fur that span the length of three stall tables. Jayce pauses before them, staring with the intensity of someone not looking at all, and Viktor runs his hand through the thick strands to find they’re as cold as the walls of a gallow-mine. The vendor addresses them in a language Viktor doesn’t speak and when Jayce looks up, the man cocks his head at him as if they’ve known each other forever. He wears a heavy red skin over his shoulders, hand painted pattern, hemmed with a chain of bone and wood. The man waves his hand to stir them from their reverie, and some of his fingers are missing, while the rest are covered by tight, glossy scar tissue. Viktor blinks when Jayce answers,

“No, sorry.”

Jayce moves along and Viktor follows, cane at his hip. They stop in front of a stall selling paperbacks. The stall is labelled Gutterpress Chernny Novels . Viktor regards Jayce from the corner of his eye.

“I was not aware you spoke a foreign language.”

“I don’t, I just understand a little bit.” He smiles. “International council and what not.”

“Is that so? What did he say then—”

“I’ve never seen these in Piltover, are they imported?” Jayce picks one of the books from the stall.

The books are pocket-sized with soft, cheap covers and terrible titles such as Venom in His Touch, Slaughter in the Smog, Thirteen Stitches Later. 

“They’re made here,” Viktor says, then: “they’re how I learned to read.”

Jayce’s wide eyes survey the collection of true crime fiction novels, inspired mostly by locally reported homicides and lust murders, with sensationalist covers of mangled women in blood-spattered underwear and the shattered faces of murdered shimmer addicts leaking oil from their eyes.

Then a voice from behind the stall says, “yes, and for you Vicky they’re half-off. Aren’t I generous?” 

Viktor looks up, and Yslen Presmman looks back. 

It takes a moment for Viktor to confidently place her. She’d never had a striking face, and she was well-fed now, with shiny gold earrings and shiny gold teeth. But she had her father’s eyes, invasive, spitty, heavy on the acid green, and Viktor would never forget those, even if nothing else of her looked like him. 

“Yslen,” he says.

“Vicky.” She tilts her head. “Aren’t you gonna ask how I’m doing?”

“I can see you’re doing well.”

“Right?” She opens her arms, motions to the terribly long stall of books. “Isn’t it great, Vicky? We’re all the rage with Noxian tourist now, something about all the violent narratives. Oh, but V, I haven’t seen you since you got swept up by that furry professor, tell me about yourself—are you dying, yet? And what about this fella, who are you, shiny?”

Jayce, to his credit, doesn’t fluster, and answers with a councilor’s smile. “I’m his partner, Jayce Talis. Pleasure to meet you, Yslen.”

“Partner?” Yslen turns to Viktor again, and he’s reminded that he never liked her smile. “I knew I never did it for you, V, you only ever had eyes for da—”

“He meant lab partner.” Viktor interrupts, he starts to turn away. “Well, it was nice seeing you again but if you’ll excuse us …”

Yslen launches herself over the stall, splitting books into the air, grabbing his arm with the strength of something not human. Jayce tenses beside him, hands out. Viktor doesn’t think he’d win agains her.

“Oh, V, I’m sorry. Don’t be mad,” she says with the sincerity of a machine gun. “If you have a drink with me later I’ll tell you where he is, okay? You’re curious, right?” 

Viktor stares at her face, feels the unfriendly squeeze of her hand. She looks human, if for the odd twitch of her too-pointy ears when she gets upset.

“We’re going to see a friend perform at the Jib Boom,” Viktor says. “Later, after the factories turn over shift.”

She smiles. “I’ll see you there.”

***

To meet the ocean, Jayce and Viktor have to climb up . Up some bridges and up some dockyards till they reach the Iron Jetty, the main docking point for supply barges. The boardwalk there is slippery and black, and a few foodboats press their flanks up to it and roll up their storm blinds. Their oil lamps come on and slip unto the pavement, then, the fryers. They call to the hungry by the boil of brass pipes. 

There’s a lot of shellfish, which can be assorted into buckets, like of a candy display, glossy red, yellow and blue, tear-shaped, ear-shaped, worm-like. For the tougher shells, and an extra coin, they’ll lend out a mallet and claw-crackers. They can be had raw, boiled, or stir fried in black beer and kelp.

“It’s kind of funny,” Jayce says, splitting a clam with his thumbs. “How here, the ocean is above the city. It’s like the ocean is Zaun’s sky.”

The smoke makes Viktor cough. Smoked fish, smoked crab, smoked eel, with pickled onions and hot rice. They blowtorch the seaweed for crisp edges. They dunk everything in vinegar, black garlic, or spicy whale fat. Viktor inhales it like the fat might slick the walls of his throat and soothe the air when it meets his lungs. He takes a bite of skewered eel.

“We have a cautionary tale in the Sumps,” he tells Jayce. “Something about a boy who doesn’t behave, so the ocean, who is his father, lashes out, overflows, and drowns him, and the sky, his mother, cries and cries, and drowns him too.”

There’s meat also, at the Jetty. Fried bread slathered in melted lamb marrow. Some vendors torch the marrow table-side, right over your plate, and top it with peppers and radish and pickled offal. Or there’s dumplings, with all types of meat, pig-gull-rat, liver-kidney-heart, pan fried with their bottoms charred black. Jayce gets an assortment, and Viktor gets a blackvine sausage roll. The mustard is sour-sweet and there must be some chemical in it, for it turns Viktor’s lips numb and fills him with bliss. He hums in pleasure, and Jayce takes Viktor’s hand to his mouth and steals the last bite, shattering the pastry under his teeth, leaving Viktor’s hands empty and his fingers slick. 

Then, he asks, “do they still happen? Floods.” 

Viktor shrugs.

Jayce stops chewing, looking out over where the sun has already set, where mother and father have gone smooth-black and inky-black. His eyes set on the outline of a large wolfship coming in to dock at the marina further up the port. A foreign model. A trading ship. All Viktor can make out is the slim line of its bowed figurehead, like a sea snake reared up to strike.

“That girl. You said her name was Presmman. Why does she have a last name? I thought Zaunites didn’t.”

The boardwalk is now thick with foodboats, pressed against each other and bobbing like candles on a votive stand. The food piles as the heads of monsters would on silver platters, they threaten to fall to the sea; Brine-fried snappers served whole, pickled razorclams in shots of white alcohol, grilled crab legs the size of infant limbs—blackened shells split open, meat laced with orange fat—barrel-smoked hellboar, meat stews thick with collagen, fermented roe in decorated jars, crispy fairy wings in dipping sauce, braised pig shoulder, seared croc belly, jellied tripe, bite sized. The wolfship has disappeared from view but Jayce continues to stare at the empty spot of sea. 

“Her family owns the printing press for those books,” Viktor says. “She has a name, because she has a legacy.”

There are no options for vegetarians. 

***

Viktor doesn’t consider himself a funny guy, but he can take a moment to appreciate situational irony, the odd, semantic, self-fulfilling prophecy. He likes sitting in this speakeasy, called the Jib Boom, and knowing that it has gone boom at least three times in the three years during which Viktor frequented Promenade as a young adolescent. He likes sitting in it, and finding that yes, people do speak more easily in the speakeasy. Even to Viktor, even about things that aren’t hextech, the chemistry of intoxication, or why their fan is making that noise, and, could lightning be bottled?

Yslen says,

“Honestly, V. You’re doing well for yourself. I can see it, you look good, really. But, you know, if you want me to hook you up for your leg—You can just get a new one. Down in Rotthold, they’re really big on bodymods now. There’s a whole district if you have the money. And you have the money, right? I mean, you’re doing good now. I’m doing pretty good too, the market’s good, but it isn’t like up there. Do you want another drink? I bet you’re in a clan and everything. What clan are you in? That boy’s? I just think we could make good business up there with the Chernnys. Pities will like them. Murder and sex, what’s there not to like? It’s nothing shady, just books. I mean, they’re cheap, but we could make them fancy for the fancy people. But you know, we’d need money for that. I’m just asking for an in, Vicky. A contact. Dad, he never really cared about the books, about the company, always doing his own thing down there, I’ll probably take over from gramps instead of him, but I’ll tell him you helped. I’ll tell you where he is. I mean, he’s still down there, performing, but I’d really tell you where he really is. I’m glad I saw you again, Vicky. I’m sure he’d be happy too.” 

Yslen slides Viktor a paper over the tabletop. It’s a flyer for a performance, a couple of days from now at the Dom Raboty. The Dom Raboty is Sumps territory. In blocky black letters is the name La Peur. His stage name. 

Viktor isn’t going to go to the Sumps to see the play, but he keeps the flyer. Yslen keeps smiling. It’s a human smile, with human lips and a human amount of teeth. Those she’s taken to bed know better, have seen the grey, leather-skin of her back, long and pulling like a peninsula. Viktor and her … Well, he’d been too young, in pain, watching his own limbs fail him, wanting to feel wanted just once; she’d been too young too, restless, made of the anger that birthed every sump child, wishing to be in control of something smaller and weaker than herself—but Viktor had known about the mark on her back before they’d ever tried to sleep together.

Being half-Chirean was most-likely part of what had kept her from getting sick like Viktor down in the Sumps, however she’d once pushed a blade into his hand and showed him her back, saying that she would have rather been born a weak, dying shit like him than grow to be this ugly, half-breed freak. Angry and vindictive, Viktor had sliced some of the tough skin off like she’d wanted, but he’d had to stop when the squelch of blood on the mattress reached his ears, and when it began seeping into the synthetic liner that protected his leg from the chaffing of the brace, the one her father had made him. He’d been sick then, and some of it had landed in the open wound. When Yslen had fallen horribly ill with fever some days later, Viktor had been terrified—not of her death, but of her father finding out. If he realised what Viktor had done to her, he’d shut his door on him forever, and who would he go to then? Yet, even as the Chirean man unwrapped the shoddy handiwork that bound his daughter’s wounds, he never once questioned Viktor, either of them. He simply asked Viktor to bring in some vials and alcohol from the cabinet under the sink, he’d had him hold Yslen down, even as the wounds suppurated green and white and red, and Viktor wanted to be sick again, but he told Viktor to stay put, to hold tighter, to hand him the gauze, to wash the rag, he told Viktor to watch, so he’d know how to do it next time. Next time. Of course, he knew. He always knew everything. 

Viktor still couldn’t remember his face. He only remembered his eyes. Viktor had been fourteen. Yslen had been twelve.

Toya is onstage with two other musicians. He watches Viktor as he plays. He tells Viktor a lot of things with music. 

The drum machine pounds and hums, says, clicking its hi-hats like tongues. Nostalgic yet?

The snare cracks. relax.

The contact mic hums through the distortion chain. Have another drink. 

The bass drone licks through the amplifiers. You should come home with me.  

It’s as obvious as if it was being whispered into his ear. Viktor takes another sip of hot rum, then steals Jayce’s Myrrish Brandy across the sticky table. In his mouth the mix is salty, bitey, thick brine liquor.

Jayce is also talking. But where Yslen wants money and Toya wants sex, Viktor has no idea what Jayce wants. He doesn’t know why Jayce is there. Viktor feels heavy with all the food they ate when he looks at Jayce, and he can only down more drinks if he looks away. 

Jayce is saying,

“You know, we should come back sometime. I wouldn’t mind. It’s still—yeah, dangerous, and the whole thing with the drugs, but ... I don’t know, I liked it. Oh, should I reach out to that guy? Tell him I’m not interested?”

At some point during the market tour that afternoon Viktor had lost Jayce in the crowd. When he’d found him and clack-popped his way back to his exaggeratedly stricken face, Jayce had revealed in his palm a satin pouch filled with an array of assorted, colourfully designed pills, vials and powders. They’d been in the undercity for less than ten minutes, then. Jayce said it wasn’t his fault, that his mother had taught him never to resist if he was being threatened, to just do as they say. Had the guy been threatening him? No , but he’d been terribly insistent. The drugs were a sample pack, and the guy had given him his contact card. Jayce had promised to get back to him, but what did he do with these? He didn’t even know what they did.

Viktor had hooked his fingers over Jayce’s cupped palm and pulled the open pouch towards himself, peering down into it and pushing some of the pills around. Despite the unstable and short-lived nature of Chembarons, their trade hadn’t changed much since Viktor had last made his way through their streets. He pointed: That, there, it shimmered, so it was shimmer. This was RAKSO, another techmaturgical stimulant…hyper-agressive. There was a pill form too, ah, the vial was for intravenous—but Viktor wouldn’t recommend it. Here, those—what did they call them again? Smogshots? Tixie? Shockers? They were all alchemical mutagenics with…he’d waved his hand around…varying effects, uh, augmenting nerve connections to heighten sensory awareness, rewiring emotional responses, the like. Viktor had spied some flat, white, sugar-cubes that he’d picked up and put into his own pocket. Jayce had asked what those were for and Viktor told it him with his eyes that it was none of his business. He’d pointed to the crescent shaped pills that smelled sweet, said that, ah, these he remembered—Mooners, made with lithium compounds adapted from mood stabilizers. Hallucinogenic, dissociative and tranquilizing, and when he said tranquilizing he meant tranquilizing . Jayce would be out of order for two to three hours. He could guess what they were used for, right? If someone asked him if he knew the moon, just say no. 

And those? Jayce had pointed at little blue, powdery stars. Viktor had looked up at him, pursed his lips. LQX, also a mutagenic. It converted pain signals into pleasure signals in the brain. Jayce didn’t know why someone would want that. Viktor had told him to guess . He told Jayce that there was a brothel across from where he used to live that specialized in these practices, if he was interested, or, perhaps, his dear councilor might find it worth her time instead. Jayce’s mouth had twisted, alarmed, no, he didn’t wish to hurt her. Viktor knew that, told Jayce as much, closing the straps of the pouch shut, pressing Jayce’s fist closed with his hand, he’d meant it the other way around. 

Jayce keeps talking. 

“But, hey—this was nice, right? Fun. We gotta go back to the Jetty at some point, I barely got through half the food I wanted to try. Seriously, next time, we’re splitting everything—half and half. More food, less regret.” 

He laughs, fumbles Viktor’s heart.

“Oh—yeah, uh. I actually got you something. Not from the market. I wanted to give it to you this morning … And I know, I know—you hate it when get you things, but ... just, let me.”

From the bottom of his satchel, under the mounds of items he bought that day, Jayce unearths a gift, wrapped and everything. Viktor’s head starts to swim.

“I know you always want to pay me back, and you always say you have nothing of equivalent exchange but …”

He’s going to hand it to Viktor and Viktor is going to have to open it, and he won’t be allowed to refuse whatever it is, and he won’t be allowed to cry either, but he will, no matter what it is, because when he’s had so many drinks, all the pleasure signals in his brain turn to pain signals, and Jayce is always such a pleasure, and Viktor is a sad drunk.

“… If you knew your worth, Viktor, I could not afford your time.”

Viktor stands up, and all his drinks come tumbling down.

***

They all leave after the end of Toya’s performance. Viktor tells Yslen he’ll contact her, even if he probably won’t. He tells Jayce he’ll see him tomorrow, even if he wishes he could keep him tonight. He tells Toya it’s a shame he didn’t get to have a drink after his performance, but there’s an unopened bottle of blackmarket Widow’s Calva in his apartment, and it’s too strong to drink alone.

With his mouth on Viktor’s throat, Toya asks, “are you part of House Talis?”

With his hands dipping into old surgery scars, at the bottom of Viktor’s spine, Toya says, “House Ferros is still looking for a brilliant scientist.”

Unlatching Viktor’s brace, so that his spine can be forced to curve into the mattress, Toya asks, “do you like him?”

“I love him.” 

It feels like the first time Viktor’s spoken all night. 

He asks, “does it matter?”

With his mouth hovering just over Viktor’s own, Toya says, “no, I guess it doesn’t.”

When Viktor goes to the lab the next day, Jayce is not there. The wrapped gift, on the other hand, is on Viktor’s desk, with a note. 

The note says, Because you lost yours.

The gift is: a House Talis coat.

Chapter 3: What Does the City Say

PRecorderV4-ZID-14-12-998-TestSeq03

[Ha—haa, when it comes in through the—[ snap ]—grates, it—it sounds like ... the city’s breath—[…]—ing through its t-t-t—teeth.]

[Testing, testing—one, two, three.] [ click ]

[Spoken clarity check—Jayce Talis, field unit test number three.] [ click ]

[Environmental field conditions: ambient hum, low wind, trace static.] [ click ]

[Checking for echo decay … For the record: Viktor is refusing to participate in the acoustic trial.] [ click ]

[Okay. Voice pickup at conversational volume, walk—[…]—ing pace, heart-t-t rate slightly e-le-vated.] [ click ]

[Checking for proximity effect: approximately 2 metres from target: Viktor, what’s the name of the street you grew up on?][…][ click ]

[Checking for proximity effect: approximately 1,25 metres from target: Did you learn that nursery rhyme at school? Are there schools here?—wait, no, let me ask another question, was it your paren—][…][ click ]

[Checking for proximity effect: approximately 0,25 metres from target: If I stand this close and whisper, can you still hear me?][…][ click ]

***

Viktor doesn’t know how they got here, at the mercy of a stranger’s kindness, three chimes past tallest moon, clothed down to under-shirts, under-wear, under-braced, in an unfamiliar bedroom overlooking Entresol’s Grimmsbrau Plaza. Well, he knows how, he just doesn’t understand why. 

The recorder had worked. They’d finish it somewhere in the throes of night, a long time past last call, almost an entire day ago, after all Academy doors had been shut and at a time when it had seemed amiss to speak too loudly. Jayce had been ecstatic, Viktor merely relieved, for he’d started having nightmares about the project that he remembered abstractly as metal and gears, but which he could still feel morning-come, a cold-hot grind of steel inside his body, outside of it, as if his teeth were made of gears, and turned, turned, turned inside his mouth. 

Sometime around noon the next day Jayce had convinced Viktor to make the excursion down to Entresol, Zaun’s industrial district. Just for the afternoon, he’d said. Some lunch, we walk around a bit, take some sound samples, we go back home. By home he meant Piltover, of course, the Academy, the lab, their elbows knocking into each other as they unnecessarily tried to fiddle with a gadget on the same desk, at the same time. Jayce assigned Viktor this home with no second thought, but he knew, were he to ask Jayce why he really wanted to visit Zaun, it would go something along the lines of, I want to see where you grew up, I want to see your home . So, which was it?

They’d learned several things that first half of the afternoon. The hex crystal in the recorder was fine and stable, but the rotating wax-graphite discs on which the grooves were dug to record sound weren’t. Any audio recorded while they moved distorted and jostled. They had to stay perfectly still around the little box, bracketted bodies steeled to shield it of the stalking, tunneling thing that was Zaun’s wind.

Their own voices picked up well, the cry of gulls perched on awnings marginally well, and only if the wind carried it to them, in a downward pressurized, sticky moan that the device recorded too.

***

PRecorderV4-ZID-14-12-998-AudN39

[My, look at that. Technology’s really something else these days, isn’t it? You said you work up at the Academy? Not often we get one of ours up that high—must have a hell of a brain on you. So you two been down here all day? Recording sound, was it? I’d lose track of time too if I had toys like that to play with.]

[Yes, I apologize again for imposing. We—I should know better, we shouldn’t even have come so far down in the first place.]

[Been a long time, then?]

[…] [It is more so that… my friend—he seems to believe there is something to be found here.]

[Something to be found?]

[He does not understand.]

[…]

[When you are taken to visit someone’s childhood home ... you expect—something he will not get. Anecdotes filled with affection. Funny, meaningful, strange—stories. He wishes I’d tell him look, that’s where I knocked loose my first tooth on the pavement, this is the soup kitchen we went to on off days with my father, here, meet this good sir, old family friend, taught me to disassemble my first coin metre. He’s waiting for me to paint him a picture, to point out where I stand in it, the colours, the faces, all the ways that it’s changed.]

[Your friend, I don’t think he’s looking for funny stories. He seems like a happy-lucky sort, sure—but to be working at an academy like yours, he’s not stupid. I think he’ll understand if the stories aren’t the cheerful type. My son—I’ve told you about him, haven’t I? Works as an orthomechanical surgeon at STITCH. One of the youngest to make it official, got a medal from the Upper District Board and everything. They’re doing real work over there, not just replacing limbs—integrating them, autonomous function. You should meet him, remind me. You’d like him. Brainy like you—]

[Ah, you mentioned.]

[Well, I asked him once if his patients ever got nervous—y’know, about someone poking around inside their bones, slicing them open, all that, especially since he’s so young. And he said, 'I just tell them about you.' About me, and this neighbourhood. He tells them about his first date with an older woman when he was fifteen, how I caught him and grounded him for a week. Says it helps them feel like they know him. Because there is nothing quite as intimate as knowing where someone was made, where they took their first breath, shed their first tears, gave their first kiss. What I mean is, your friend—meeting the city is like meeting the parents.]

[Well, it isn’t like that—]

[Like this, like that, whatever way it is. He wants to get to know you better. You get that, right?]

[Yes, however—] […] 

[However…?]

[I spent years despising this place. I wanted out—I wanted more. And I got it. I have not stepped foot in this city in over ten years, despite the fact it is always just beneath my feet. The people who raised me—I have not spoken to them since. I persuaded myself this was normal. Who would want to come back to this? Wasn’t getting out what everyone wished for? This man I know, from the undercity too, successful, part of a house—he comes here routinely to play with his band, to visit his companions, finances projects to finance change. I cannot say whether he would proudly call it home but, I—I’ve pretended this city does not exist from the moment I stepped out of it. I hate when people speak of it, even if it isn’t to mock its name. I hate that I turn away when it is. I am ashamed for wanting to leave, but I would leave again. Jayce wants me to show him the city, but I have no right to look back upon it now and pretend that I know it.]

[…] [You know, we don’t get to choose our cities any more than we choose the womb we crawl out of. You didn’t pick it, no. But it picked you. Raised you. And no matter how much you scream that you hate it, that it doesn’t see you, call it every name under the sun and run away from under its roof, you’ve got every damn right to walk back in and say, 'I’m here. Deal with it.' A good city, a real one, she doesn’t hold a grudge. You walk back in, and she still makes room for you at the table. Just like any decent mother would.]

[…]

[Listen, I clocked you the moment you walked in this morning. You may think you abandoned this city, but it’s part of you, nothing you can do about it. It’s as mine to love, as it’s yours to hate.]

[I did not think I was so telling.]

[No offense, love, I’ve never seen a born and bread Piltie walk so crooked as you.]

[…] [Is it so obvious, then,] 

[that I don’t belong next to him?]

[ click ]

***

Viktor suggested then that they try recording someone else speak. Yet, as they’d kept to their slow trek down the winding city streets they’d picked up little more than the shuddering of pipes, the click-clack of Viktor’s in-step and cane, and a couple of snores from some mid-day curb drunks. The undercity had been surprisingly quiet so far, but Entresol was an industrious level, Viktor had reasoned, it was time for the post lunch nap, which was, really, a perfect time to call it a day. We should have lunch here, Jayce had said instead, and pulled him toward a semi-shuttered window with a menu chalked on. 

Before they could begin reading the noodle list, a middle aged woman erupted from the clanging-open window, hair pink and voice noticeably modded to a jovial, touristy, upper-city bark. From a bronze plate she gave them to sample a litany of sauce cubes: one sorrel flavored coulis, a borscht-inspired, tomato, vinegar, beetroot, meat dip, an olive and soy cheese pesto, and a churnpaste made from ground liver, garlic, egg yolk and salt. They were her first clients, she’d said, after they’d tried all the cubes.

In conversation she took the scenic route, where in she told them the noodles she would serve them she usually sold in dry packets that she manufactured herself in her living room, but that since her son had flown the nest she’d decided to open up her own little noodle revolution, her words, all the sauces were home made in her kitchen, and they’d find that she grew the plants herself in the cultivar, where she finally sat them down, and which was empty but for them, the plants, and an assorted collection of mismatched, decorated chairs that circled the tree in the centre of the room. It wasn’t very big, but from the still shiny reflection of the coloured glass around them, that entire section of the home was new—a show of fresh wealth. 

She told them her name was Lyre. 

***

PRecorderV4-ZID-14-12-998-TestSeq01

[EchoForge? It does not forge anything, Jayce.]

[It forges memories! What would you call it?]

[The Hexsonic Transcriptor Mk. I.]

[That’s not a name, that’s binomial nomenclature. Are we classifying a new species?]

[The Portable Wax-Resonance Capture Unit. Wait, no, perhaps—the Rotational Phono-Capture Unit.]

[Viktor, you’re just describing it.]

[Because that is what a name should do.]

[A name should be sexy—or, or at least have some more feeling to it. Tell me, how does it make you feel ?]

[Incredibly aggravated if you must know. And there is nothing sexy about ‘EchoForge’ or ‘Memory Catcher’ or—what was that other atrocity?—‘Whisperwell.’ Although, I am surprised you have yet to suggest something equally gaudy with your own name tacked on.]

[Well, I was trying to be—we’re making history, Viktor, not just filing patents.]

[Then let history be the judge of its name. We should be refining it, not arguing semantics.]

[Right. Fine—Actually, no, you’re totally right—]

[Of course I am.]

[—we haven’t even tested it in the field yet. We should do that. Like, now.]

[And by field I assume you mean the undercity? What has gotten into you, Talis? Why is it every conversation as of late ends with this?]

[I, just—the intelligence bureau wants it for field research, Vik. We need real conditions. Works fine here, sure—but what happens when it’s jostled around? Or the air density down there, with the particulates—it might interfere with crystal feedback. Sound carries different in tight spaces, right? Echo loops, signal bounce. We’ll get a cleaner read on how it holds up to distortion. I mean what if altitude levels mess with it? What if the crystal destabilizes?]

[…] [Then let us hope it does not explode.]

***

When Viktor suggested they make their way back up to Piltover after lunch, Jayce insisted they were still missing the full vocal range of the undercity. Animals, he said. Ambient fauna. They still needed the nonhuman resonance layer—birds, vermin, whatever that thing was howling near the canal. 

Viktor prided himself on his patience, not so much his magnanimity. Out of spite he did not inform Jayce that apart from the couple of gulls they’d crossed on their way down, the only wild fauna in Zaun were Zaunites themselves, and he did not mean this as insult. 

When he was little, yet older than the rest, Viktor had been a cockerel. A boy paid to beat sticks on the dayhouse windows to wake the labourers at the split of dawn. It was a job for the littlest of boys and girls, yet Viktor had tapped his stick for long after he’d towered over his peers. He should have been a crane, at that age. Walking on tall sticks through the sludge of the Sumps, gathering chemtech waste, metal scraps and broken machinery for resale, wearing a hand made mask, made of torn burlap and a tin grate smothered in carbon ash, cased in a shoe-rubber shell, fastened with electrical wire and belts to the crown of his head. But he couldn’t walk on stilts, he could barely walk at all. So he went in on all fours instead—hands and knees, because back then his leg didn’t hurt, it was just twisted and ugly and useless, but it didn’t hurt—like a trained mouse, with a leash around his waist, into the smallest tube and pipe, heaving behind him a canker-spar heavier than his own self, till he could not tell right from left, to unclog the backed up pipe, and when the pipe shuddered and, suddenly, blew, and the water rushed out to make space inside Viktor’s lungs, he’d tug on the leash with all his might, and hope they pulled him out in time. He’d still worn the burlap mask in the pipes, and it had made blisters under his ears, where the skin there remained tough even today, like the skin of his knees, elbows, palms, the burn chemical. When his lungs had started going bad, he’d had to stop. 

It’s the story all his physician’s want him to tell, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t tell Jayce either, doesn’t like his sad face if it’s about Viktor. Doesn’t tell him how the street cats here are prepubescent teenagers that over-charge foreign travelers with self-invented tours of the undercity’s bloodiest murder sites, that the finches and the magpies are the dropboys that scale up window ledges to deliver mail at kitchen windows in exchange for food and scraps—that the fireflies are the shadow-people, moving from street to street, from sidewalk to sidewalk, lighting every gas-lamp, keeping the Promenade from falling into darkness. 

But this wasn’t unique to the undercity, he knew. He knew a Zaunite Chirean with more humanity than any Piltie upside of Nostra Plaza. And Jayce, afterall, was more animal than any shadow in Zaun. He was emotional, reactive, laying claim through touch, through coats thrown over shoulders, pack-oriented, wolf, belly-up, rabbit, his father, his mother, territorial, Viktor’s father, Viktor’s mother, they’re dangerous , he was a builder, a maker of dams, nests, tools, with claws, teeth, tusks, big smile, to intimidate, to accommodate, to attract a mate, spine, rattling tail, sweat dropped into the earth, sex-obsessed, for family, pleasure, he wanted to make his home inside another body, Viktor was sure, it was in his pheromones, androstenol, bombykol, 17,20β-P, the large eyes, the gold eyes, the slit in his teeth, so animal, he came from the sea. He went for a walk, picked up the stick, and didn’t let it go.

***

PRecorderV4-ZID-14-12-998-AudN08

[So, the coat, do you—uh, like it? Have you tried it on?]

[It… fits well.]

[Cool. Great. So, actually, I wanted to give you anoth—]

[Why is it not gold, like yours?]

[What?]

[The detailing. It’s silver… A status thing, Jayce? You and Medarda do make gold look noble. Still, I was under the impression you meant it— all that ‘we’re partners’ business you like to insist on.]

[No, no, Viktor, that’s not—]

[I’m joking, Talis.]

[…] 

[So? The silver?]

[I…I like it on you.]

[ click ]

***

A homeless man had set up on the following curb, a brass and nickel mouth organ slotted like an implant in his cheeks, humming a melody Viktor found familiar. Jayce had stopped to record the man and Viktor’d leaned on a wall to take some weight off his leg. The velocidrine he’d crushed under his teeth between noodle bites was starting to wear off. When the musician finished his piece, Jayce tried to give him a couple bronze washers, but the man mutely declined him, and instead handed Jayce a flyer. A performance show at the Dom Raboty. The same Yslen had given Viktor. The last performance was tomorrow. When Viktor had once again proposed they make their way to the surface, Jayce had finally, blessedly agreed.

On their way there however, they’d paused one last time, just past a public washhouse—a large stone pool, surrounded by an iron gate—where three women had been scrubbing furiously at the garments between their hands as if they were running out of time. They soaked head-rags, tall socks, sweaty prosthetic linings, bloody bandages to re-roll and reuse, till the foam had turned brown and left shorelines up their forearms and wet spots on the bellies of their shirts.

Viktor had closed his eyes, dug his hand into the curve of his cane—imagined a device that could capture Zaun’s streets in more than fragments of noise, its darkness, the smell of its oil, the faces of these women, two of which bore the telltale undercity palour, so unused to sunlight their skin seemed to produce it’s own glow, bioluminescent, that of midwater creatures, mesopelagic blue eyes, two spots on their cheeks, red like the blood-bolus stomachs of a bloodybelly comb jelly. The third one must have been from a Chirean pipe-walking family, generations of living like mole people, with skin super-cool, ultra-black, zinfandel in the light, the biggest eyes Viktor’d ever seen. He wanted to capture their likeness and it weighed on him in an unsurmountable way that even if he could do so, and did so, he wouldn’t know who to share the image with, who would look at it and understand the immensity of what Viktor had felt seeing those women—the oil, the darkness, the streets—and know, like he did, the unwelcome creep of nostalgia for that offered nothing worth missing, for a childhood he could not bare to look back on, for a mother he’d never even met. 

***

PRecorderV4-ZID-14-12-998-AudN15

[ River was a tinker, his father tinkered too,

River made a gadget, and his father made the …

Piltiees on the overlook, sneering from their rock,

If you want their favor, then you’ll have to show your …

Pocket full of mooners, two bolts for a pack,

If you do not like it, you can shove it up your …

What’s not yours is ripe to steal,

And River keeps turning his cog and wheel. ]

[Did, uh, did you sing this one too when you were a kid?]

[I did.]

[ Trixie had a shimmer rat, she thought it was so silly,

She tied it up with copper wire and swung it by the …

Billy fought a sumpborn beast, thrashing in the grass,

He swung his wrench with all his might and hit it on the …
Nothing is fair, but the bold always try,

And River won’t stop till the gears all fly. ]

[ click ]

***

Viktor had been leaning heavily over his cane once again, leg slowly, dreadfully, coming awake, as Jayce replaced the wax-disk for a new one on the recorder. Over the usual opening hours painted onto the washhouse’s gate was pasted on a paper warning of early closure for SD . Viktor felt this was supposed to mean something to him, but could not remember what, not until both him and Jayce were standing back before the the manual chain lifts that had lowered them down into Entresol earlier that day, and realised simultaneously that it was, for all intents and purposes, out of service. The chains were unloaded from the lifts and were being greased by an older man, chain by chain, link by link, each the size of Viktor’s head. He told them everything was closed for Seventhday , and the lifts had been closed two bells ago. 

Viktor turned around, finally noticed the men and women and creatures heaving sacs of scrapsteel, foundry slag and mortar mix, patching tenement walls and filling gaps in the cobblestone, stretching boltcloth over broken roofs, filling them with insulating foam, installing sheet metal awnings over the community courtyards, switching out dripstone filters in the water cisterns, mixing resin paste—tree sap mixed with ash mixed with oil—to glue the fractures in the water pipes.

[ Chnk-chnk-cnk ]

[ Clank-click-clack-click ]

[ Krak-a-rak ]

[ mmmmmmm ]

[ That plank’s rotten. Toss it! ]

[ Clank-click-clack-click ]

[ Chnk-chnk-cnk ]

[ Krak-a-rak ]

[ mmmmmmm ]

[ Oi! That’s my hammer, you thieving little rat! ]

So went the sounds of Seventhday, the community work day where the entire city shut down to expand and renovate its infrastructure.

Jayce had turned to Viktor with the same expression he donned in the lab when something between them exploded and he was waiting for Viktor to explain it to him, what happened, why did it do that, what should they try next?

There were, of course, many ways up and down Zaun if the lifts were out of service. The cargo pulleys, lowering down materials from scrap yards in Promenade, and their illicit counterpart, stretched steel lines mounted with cargo cable cars, stealthily hidden between buildings, inside cultivars, up chimneys, carrying anything worth of value to the undermarket: drugs, weapons, prosthetic nerve wire, green plants, earthworms, medication, coffee, bleach. All owned and controlled by the barons. All ruled out by one look at Jayce in his double breasted councilor suit, his nice white teeth, pretty, worth-a-lot-of-money face. There were mile long switchback stairways bolted to the sides of the glowglass factory towers; bolted-together ladders and rope bridges popularly swarmed with kids eager to lead you through the safe routes only they knew—because they’d sabotaged the others—in exchange for a friendly fare; old, steep droves leftover from mining sites, and manual climbing routes for the more adventurous folk. All ruled out by Viktor’s dead weight of a leg. Zaun was more vertical than it was surface wide, it was a tall pipe, a centipede with ladders for legs, a tall human body, a rack of ribs, a waterfall, antenna, organ pipe, book spine, rusty alloyed bolted splendour. 

Viktor’s hand squeezed around his cane for it had begun to shake. Zaun had birthed and raised Viktor from the very bottom of its entrails, yet no part of Viktor’s body had ever been made for this city. There were probably hundreds of other mile-long stairs, ladders and droves in the city, and Viktor would not make it up any single one.

***

PRecorderV4-ZID-14-12-998-AudN21

[WOMAN 1: So they’re recognising the brothels now? That means the girls are safer, right?]

[WOMAN 2: Safer? No. It just means the enforcers get a discount.]

[WOMAN 3: More than a discount. They get coupons. Like ration slips.]

[WOMAN 1: You’re joking.]

[WOMAN 3: Swear on my last lungful. Little booklets. Rations, like they’re picking up bread. I saw one last night—walked in, waved his slip like he was ordering off a menu.]

[WOMAN 2: And did she take him?]

[WOMAN 3: She took the coupon. Barely looked at him. Spent the whole night staring at the ceiling, I bet.]

[WOMAN 1: And the brothels just … go along with it?]

[WOMAN 2: Why wouldn’t they? Department of Corrections gave it the stamp. Even sends their own medical personnel down to inspect the girls.]

[WOMAN 3: Medical personnel. That’s a laugh.]

[WOMAN 1: They don’t actually check the girls?]

[WOMAN 3: Oh, they check them, alright. Just not for their health.]

[ click ]

***

They’d retraced their steps back to Lyre’s noodle shop hoping she might be willing, despite the shut down, and on account of their being her sentimental first customers, to serve them dinner before they went off looking for an inn. They found her serving cold drinks to the workers waged in a tumultuous war with the uneven pavement of her street, and from the look on her face when she spotted them, she knew exactly what had happened. Without turning back on her modded tourist’s voice, she invited them to spend the night. 

They learned, stepping into her living room that Lyre didn’t only make noodles. Her home had been converted into a mini-factory with rubber conveyor belts and a belt-fed sealing rig that looked like it had been welded from four different models, chugging along beneath a long shelf of numbered tins. Plastic bins of colourful powders sat beside baskets of thin, cured, rice paper wraps, and a wire rack in the corner displayed rows of ceiling height freezer boxes. The window had been half-replaced with heat vents, and a collapsible drying rack hung above the couch—it all smelled of clam glue, pepper oil and noodles. She showed Viktor her wares: dry noodle packets, gloves, cigars and sludgies—alcoholic strawberry ice-pops.

She said they could take her son’s room. It was the size of their supply closet in the lab, a walk-in vaultette. Half the far wall was a green-glass window, there was a bronze fan bolted to the wall over the mattress, the floor tiles crackled under their feet, separated by the summer heats from grout and glue, the same star-cross pattern Viktor grew up stepping on, and in the doorway alone he could feel too much of Jayce already.

Jayce, being Jayce, made a joke, pretended to be comfortable, placed a hand on Viktor’s shoulder. They should have left the under city the first time Viktor brought it up, they shouldn’t have come down here at all. 

He told Jayce as much and stepped out of the room.

***

PRecorderV4-ZID-14-12-998-AudN10

[So, you didn’t have any pets? Like, not even a trained rat or something? Is that a thing, here? Pets, trained rats?]

[No.] [I think we should get going.]

[No, to what? You having pets? Pets in general? Trained rats?]

[No to everything.] [Jayce, if we’re done here—]

[But I saw those mechrats in Promenade, they’re kinda like pets. Did your parents just not…?]

[Jayce.]

[Please don’t get mad. You’ve never told me about your family.]

[…][You need to think of the undercity less like a society of families, parents, children, etcetera. It is more like, ah—a wildlife reserve—animals birth and hatch alone, ready to work, ready to survive, from the moment they take their first lungful of air.]

[But you’re not an animal. Children don’t survive alone—]

[ click ]

***

They’d had more noodles for dinner, and sweet-milk candies and strawberry slushies. They’d left Viktor’s teeth tight with processed sugar, and he ground them as the days miles let themselves accumulate into his leg, uniting the way councilors did around their fancy roundtable to pass verdict, except the verdict was always the same for Viktor. Jayce was humming the song they’d heard on the street, the wordless song from the mouth organ grafted into the homeless man’s cheek. He hummed and didn’t look Viktor in the eye. Viktor tried to remember what Lyre had said—something about funny stories, something about meeting his parents—is that what Jayce wanted? He tried to remember exactly how she had worded it, but the words swam to the rhythm of Jayce’s tune. The last of his medication had worn off since what he’d taken of it at noon, and he hadn’t thought to bring any extra, because they should have been home hours ago. From across the table Jayce tried to get Viktor to pass him something, Viktor wasn’t sure what, wasn’t sure of anything, only that Jayce still wasn’t looking at him. His words swam like words did in song. Viktor wanted them to stop singing.

I climbed out the iron quarry, will you pass me the salt? sorry, yes, here you go, he remembered the words now, I climbed out the iron quarry, more wine? no, I’m good, with my spit a shade of copper, tra-la-la, a children’s song, always a children’s song, Viktor? what about you? With my spit a shade of copper, tra-la-la, no, no, he got up from Lyre’s table and his limp deepened, with my spit a shade of copper, it was his body letting him know, Viktor? You’re so fucking weak, I walked past a cherry plum tree, and whoever sung him that song he didn’t remember, I walked past a cherry plum tree, are you okay? where do you think you’re going? Can’t even take a little pain, gleaming bright with quartz and opal, tra-la-la, making a fool of yourself, gleaming bright with quartz and opal, tra-la-la, so weak, Viktor? they should’ve let you die, gleaming bright with quartz and opal, listen to him, like a shout nestled in his ear, so worried about you, sending all the liquids inside him sloshing, so I threw some stones to shake it, so fucking stupid, you’re going to die and he’s worried, so I threw some stones to shake it, look at his face, he’s looking at you, and down came a rain of rubies, tra-la-la, this is how he’ll look at your body when you’re dead, and down came a rain of rubies, tra-la-la, why don’t you just tell him? And down came a rain of rubies, just fucking tell him! That you’re weak, with the sound of falling turquoise, that you’ll die, with the sound of falling turquoise, and he’ll leave, because he won’t want to see it happen, marched in boots of gold and leather, tra-la-la, like your mommy did, marched in boots of gold and leather, tra-la-la, like your daddy did, marched in boots of gold and leather, they couldn’t even look you in the eye, they all grabbed me by my shadow, Viktor starts to cough, they were embarrassed, they all grabbed me by my shadow, they could never love you, but they left my body standing, tra-la-la, and they didn’t want to try, but they left my body standing, tra-la-la, because you were programmed to die, but they left my body standing, and who would ever choose to love that? 

***

PRecorderV4-ZID-14-12-998-AudN40

[Where’s your friend gone?]

[I’m not sure. I think he’s mad at me.]

[…]

[What?]

[I noticed this earlier but you don’t have an accent.]

[An accent?]

[Aren’t you from the ice seas? Many outlanders down here from your region, they have such a distinct accent, but I guess you must have left when you were young.]

[…] [My mother and I left when I was still a child. I’ve never been back.]

[It’s quite far away isn’t it? But that invention of yours, the recorder, couldn’t you use that technology to contact your homeland somehow?]

[I’d never thought of that actually.]

[Do you not have anyone left there you’d want to contact?]

[I…have a sister. Or had. I’m not sure. But if I saw her today I don’t think I’d even recognise her. Maybe she doesn’t remember me.]

[Well you shouldn’t assume that. Was she younger than you?]

[No, older by a number of years.]

[Then I’m sure she remembers.]

[…] [I have this one memory of her on the bank of the northern coast. It must have been summer because the seas were thawed, and she was rubbing seal fat over her skin and clothes. I couldn’t really see her face because she had a swim bladder over her mouth, filled with air. I remember she had a spear three times her size in her hand and how she wrapped her braid around her neck, like a guard. Then she turned around and jumped into the seas.] [Divers died often back home, it was one of the more dangerous jobs. But because she jumped in so casually I didn’t realise, I thought it was just a normal thing to do. She said nothing to me, or to anyone. Simply dived in. I’m not sure she even looked at me before she did.]

[I’m sure she was looking.]

[…] [Viktor reminds me of her sometimes, the girls in the village. The girls with the long tresses down their backs, long fingers and long toes. Those girls with the perpetually hunched shoulders because they felt their spines were too long, till the men left the room and they began to play, they stretched out their lengths, uncurled their vertebrae, laughed long and tall, towering their limbs over each other’s heads, until it seemed they could reach the sun. ]

[I’m sure she knew you were looking.]

[I want to tell him about her. About Yadulsk . About the ice seas. About the ice that never melts. Mother doesn’t like to talk about it. She says she doesn’t miss it. I’d like to take him there with me, and we’d look for true ice, find a way to…harness it, maybe. We’d feed it into hex tech. Maybe we could create a core that never overheats, a conduit that doesn’t degrade—Viktor would find a way, he’s really smart, you know. So incredibly smart, I can’t even—I can’t…I don’t know how to—I…]

[Yes. I know.]

Chapter 4: On the Son Loving the Sun

Notes:

Y'all are gonne like this one.

**content warnings in the end notes.**

That’s how they end up here. Jayce curled over his body the way a mother would over her child—how much does Jayce want to know him? Down to the fluid sack his mother carried him in? He’s whispering I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry. Down to the twist in his bone? ViktorViktorViktor. The first hair to spout under his pit? VikVikVik. The first foreign tongue to enter his mouth? 

“I’m okay, Jayce.”

A flinch, his head clicks up.

“No. No you’re not. If you were you wouldn’t have passed out just from standing up—Gods, Viktor.”

Viktor notices that he’s been stripped down to underclothes and braces. That he’s in Lyre’s son’s room, on his bed, a distraught Jayce at his bedside like a debtor on his knees before a baron’s favour.

 “This is my fault. I’m so stupid, we should’ve gone back the first time, I—”

His clothes are in a pile near his foot, drenched in sweat.

“I didn’t even think about how much we were walking, I didn’t even thing about your leg, I just wanted to—I wanted ... I feel like I always fuck up with you.”

“You do not.” Viktor says, trying to push Jayce a little off him, to create the illusion—with how Jayce won’t let him avert his gaze, it can only be an illusion—of distance. “Well, perhaps you do sometimes. But Jayce, you do not coddle me. I do not want you to start now.”

“Then you should have said something earlier. You need to say it when you’re in pain, you need to talk to me, you, you—”

“I am in pain.”

“What?”

“Right now, I am in pain.”

Jayce finally pushes off. All the light in the room is tinged bottle green by the window panes. 

“Shit, right. Ah, here—” From a desk he brings Viktor two little white pills and a glass of water. “These are … She called them jaw drops, I think.”

“Noctazene.” Viktor swallows them without second thought. “Where did you get this?”

“Lyre, I told you. She said they could help, her son’s a surgeon or something, her house is full of drugs.”

“Thank you.” 

Jayce curls and uncurls his hands on the mattress, shifting towards Viktor a little closer each time. He’s still in his clothes, but he’s taken off the jacket and silk cravat. They’re under his knees.

“You know,” he starts. “Lyre was telling me about how her son works in some district where they do a lot of prosthetics … How maybe you could, I don’t know … Have you ever thought about …”

“Cutting my leg off?”

“Yeah.”

“All the time.”

“So …”

“Why did you bring me here, Jayce?”

“You fainted, where else was I going to bring you?”

“No, I mean Zaun. Why do you keep insisting on coming here with me?” Viktor knows the answer to this, had already agreed, sometime while his lights were off, that he’d tell Jayce whatever he wanted, but he wants to hear him say it.

“I know nothing about you.”

“What nonsense are you spouting, Talis? You know me best.”

“Viktor, I don’t even know if you have parents.”

“Of course I have parents. I wasn’t born from thin air.” He wasn’t a miracle despite that look Jayce gave him sometimes.

“But you never talk about them, about your leg, or about Zaun. I know … I know I wasn’t the most open minded about the place when we first started working together, so, I thought maybe you didn’t talk about it because you thought I didn’t like it. I thought, if I showed you I’d changed, if I showed you I wanted to know, I thought you’d talk to me.”

Jayce didn’t have cards up his sleeve, he moved too much, and they all came tumbling down, leaving a track that lead right up to his breast pocket. Wherever he looked, cards fell. One was on Viktor’s sternum right now, where the outline of his back brace formed white waves beneath his shirt, that rose and fell like breathing sand dunes. One was near his neck, bellow his ear, where Viktor could feel the damp hair cling between skull and mattress. One was always precariously perched on his cheekbone, the one with the mole. To assume and to know were vastly different things. Jayce must know this too.

“…I was sixteen when the professor took me in from the undercity. He brought me to several physicians, they wanted to fix my leg.”

“But I thought your leg was a congenital deformity. Weren’t you too old already?”

“Most of my growing was already finished by then, I imagine. But they had new technology, new methods they wanted to try. Perhaps they thought I was still—malleable enough. They attempted quite a few things. Corrective bracing, traction rigs, weighted straps, manual turning by bone-setters, splints. Braces. What I ended up with were bruises, blisters, repeated dislocations, nerve damage. There’s pain now there did not use to be. Then, they wanted to break the bone, realign it manually, pin it back into place.”

“Tell me you didn’t go through with it.”

“Six times.”

“What? Viktor—”

“It … would not get better. It would not heal. Every time, the pain got worse. And they kept telling me—there was always something else they could try. After the osteotomy, it became about fixing what they’d already broken. They did my tibia. A partial hip reconstruction. Soft tissue release. A revision osteotomy. Nerve ablation.” He couldn’t help it, his hand traced his hip, his eyes on the gap in Jayce’s teeth, trying to recount it without remembering it, keeping his eyes from trailing off into the left. “It got infected after the last surgery. My knee joint swelled—they told me if the tissue started to necrotise, they would have to amputate. No warning. Simply—I would wake up, and it would be gone. I had no say in it.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“I was terrified, Jayce. I begged the professor not to let them take my leg. So we waited. I survived the fever, and my leg did not rot. But after that, I refused. No more surgeries.”

Viktor witnesses the physical battle Jayce wages against his facial muscles to avoid putting on an expression he’d hate, and in the midst of that it seems he settles for simply forging on. He says, “but, you’re still in pain, right?”

“Some days it is okay. But … I don’t exactly follow my prescriptions. Some days, getting out of bed is simply not possible.”

“Viktor …” Pity and hesitation cloud him for a second. Viktor looks away. “I know it’s probably not the simple choice I’m making it sound like, and I get that. I do. And I know prosthetics aren't exactly common practice in Piltover but ... Lyre was telling me—her son, Gearjack, he works over at that STITCH & SPLICE place, and apparently the barons have been pouring money into research lately. She said she knew a boy, a merchant’s son, born with a bum eye, that’s now walking around with a new one—sharp enough to count the rivets on a bridge, to see heat in the dark, splits the world into colours. She said Gearjack thinks they’ll be replacing kidneys and lungs next. What I mean is ... they’re giving out new legs down here every day. Might be worth—thinking about. Lyre said she’d introduce you.”

Viktor’s eyes slip left, he remembers the burn of the anesthesia, how he choked on it every-time they put him under. “I do not think I could go through that again.”

“It would be your choice this time.”

His last surgery, amidst the countdown and the choking, he’d hoped for a bright, guilty moment that he wouldn’t wake up, that the last thing he’d experience was the sear of the needle, the expansion of his veins, the smell of alcohol on gauze pads and ether oil, the worried face of his professor. “I’ve heard the phantom pain could be just as bad…”

“I can’t promise you that it won’t be … but you’d be able to walk. Without a brace, without a crutch. Maybe, maybe you’d be able to run.”

“I have…” Viktor brings his arm up over his eyes. “I have never once run in my life.”

One of Jayce’s hands comes to rest over his arm, but he doesn’t try to pull it off. 

“It’s great. You should try it,” he says.

Jayce changes into a shirt belonging to Gearjack, tight at the shoulders, a The Blights team sport logo emblazoned into the front pocket. Viktor is not sure whether Jayce intends to fit himself into the small bed together with him, but he’s also not sure he should ask. He pulls himself onto his elbows to shuffle a little further inside, then presses his weight down onto his right leg and winces.

“Are you okay?” 

Jayce was wasted on science, he should have been a Jundra player in the grand Noxian arenas with the speed at which he’s kneeling back at Viktor’s side.

“The, ah, Noctazene, isn’t as fast-acting as my regular medication,” he says.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Well, I’m not supposed to lie down with the brace.”

Jayce doesn’t need to be told twice. He’s unstrapping the contraption around his leg faster than Viktor’s ever managed, starts to slip off the tight lining, then slows. 

“Are these from the surgeries?” 

Jayce’s hands hover over a pale pink line, 30cm in length, on his outer right thigh from hip to mid-thigh. Viktor nods, then flinches when Jayce presses his hand down against it. When his leg tenses he feels Jayce’s fingers meet the brass bolts in his bone through the skin. It stays flush there for a while, as neither of them say anything, then drags up towards the tip of another scar that cuts through the first one diagonally, the correctional surgery scar. It’s irregular and patchy, skin tight from shoddy cauterization. His fingers trace the pinholes between the two scars like a game of join the dots.

“Jayce.”

“Do they feel weird when I touch them?” he asks as he runs all five fingertips of his other hand over the narrow, dipped incision along his tibia, up to the knee. 

“Most of them are numb…”

Jayce rests his hand there, at the knee, then cups the back of it, caresses down the slope of his slightly raised calf, starts to squeeze. Viktor jolts and comes up onto his elbows. Some of them are sensitive, he wants to say, but he knows his voice will shake. 

Jayce doesn’t falter, he finds the tail end of Viktor’s pelvic scar, T-shaped, dark, dense and ropey, and pushes up Viktor’s underwear until he’s revealed most of it, one long line up the lateral hip, one slightly behind the crest of the ilium, leading from glute to hip, down to the dip that leads between Viktor’s legs. From the grain and heat of Jayce’s palm, Viktor knows every weapon and tool he’s ever melded, feels his body become the helm of a hammer and the hilt of a sword. When his hand squeezes then, wrapping quick and present around the meat of his thigh-hip-glute, Viktor’s hand shoots down to still it, and he falls back with difficulty onto the mattress.

“Jayce ... ”

He can’t seem to say much more and Jayce stills for a second, as if waiting for the rest of the sentence, but when it never comes, his hands come alive again, rubbing in large, slow strokes up and down Viktor’s leg, hip to shin.

“I have a scar up my forearm,” he starts, and of course, Viktor knows this, has seen it, like a burgundy rope pressed against his arm to measure him, wrist to inner-elbow. “It was from a smithing accident when I was an apprentice. The scar didn’t heal well at first, and it always felt tight and numb. I always thought numb was a good thing when people said it before. But it isn’t really. My physician told me massaging it regularly would help, and it did.”

Viktor takes in a controlled breath through his nose.

Jayce’s hands seem to press in a little harder. “Have you tried?”

“No.”

“Not even during physical therapy?”

“I did not attend much.”

Jayce’s hands, finally, blessedly, pause.

“Do you have more?” he asks.

“More what?”

“Scars.”

Viktor said he’d tell him anything, right? “… On my lower back, from the neurectomy.”

Jayce pats his leg. “Turn around.”

He hesitates, but as the day might attest, Viktor wasn’t very good at telling Jayce no. He exhales, then slowly and shakingly twists unto his stomach. Jayce’s hands pull up his shirt with no qualms of their own. Viktor’s not sure when he agreed to this. Jayce’s thumbs rub over the scar. Viktor hasn’t seen it much, knows it’s short, precise, cool to he touch. Two thumbs dig in and Viktor buries his head between his arms. He’s being mapped. Jayce will make him thousands of coats now. Trousers too.

“Where else?”

“There’s one near it, near the, ah, sciatic nerve.”

His underwear gets pushed down slightly over his hip. Jayce’s hands rub more skin than the small scar encompasses. Touches down into the mass that is Viktor. Into depths he didn’t know he had. He tries to relax, but unease mixes with guilt mixes with heat and the unrelenting stroke of Jayce’s hands, who don’t lift from his skin anymore as they move again from scar to scar, bridging them. Pleasure is so foreign to this part of his body Viktor feels he is dying.

“What about the ones from your tissue release? Where are those?”

“Back of the thigh … inner thigh.”

Jayce’s hands don’t so much hesitate, as savor their way there, cataloguing their travel, as if he might have to present Viktor’s anatomy to the board of councilors for approval. They reach the scar down his hamstring first. It’s uneven, pale, and barely visible. Jayce treats it like a chasm he needs to fill with his own flesh. 

Then his fingers pry upwards, inwards, dip. Viktor thinks he feels Jayce’s hands shake, but it might just be him. He presses warmly to push Viktor’s thighs a little more open, a thumb pushing the hem of his boxers marginally up, then a pause—it’s Jayce looking, he realises—till his fingers find it, meet, caress, press, right between his legs. Viktor’s hands fist into the sheets. 

“Talis.” It’s the first part of a warning, bitten into the mattress.

Jayce cradles the joint of his inner thigh, so that a thumb is pressing under Viktor’s ass, and four flat finger nip and knead the soft places beneath, bumping, devastatingly, into things they should not, cutting every breath short, pushing every though off the ledge. Viktor tries to keep his back from arching, but he lets slip past a noise not fit for company. 

Madly, Jayce says, “would you let me record you?”

Viktor shakes his head, whines again.

“Please,” is mouthed into his hip.

It’s not much of a warning anymore when Viktor says his name again, coloured in outrage, pleasure, betrayal, shock, knowledge and the ingrained reflexive habit of not letting himself have nice things.

Jayce stops, removes his hands slowly, and then his head comes down over Viktor’s back. His hands, where they’ve landed near his leg, are definitely shaking. After the audible pop of seconds go by, Viktor finally relaxes again. Knowing them, unless it’s about science, they don’t have to talk about it.

When Jayce realises he’s leaning on Viktor’s back brace, he pulls off, asks, “what about your back, are you supposed to lie down with that?”

“… No.”

Jayce doesn’t help him remove this one because Viktor doesn’t let him. 

“You have blisters on your ribs,” he points out.

“Ah, it seems I do.” He unlocks the last of the latches in the brace and dislocates it from his body. Some of the outer ribbing is poking through the cloth, he’ll need to have a new one made soon. Jayce is still staring at him. “Please cease making that face, I am not in pain anymore.”

“Okay,” he says. “Thank you for talking to me.”

Viktor pats the side of the bed and Jayce gets on. Slowly, he lies back, meets Viktor at the shoulder with his own, throws a blanket over them both, lets Viktor keep the pillow. He’s warm like any blacksmith is warm—after conspiring with fire so much, fire recognises them as their own. Maybe Viktor should have kept his back brace on after all, because his chest is starting to ache. He’d never quite let himself accept how much of a comfort Jayce’s presence was to him. His insides, so carefully kept together by the brace threaten to pool out of his body through his ribs.

He licks his lips before saying, “we can go to the Sumps tomorrow.”

“You said you didn’t want to go.”

“I have changed my mind.”

“Viktor. You don’t have to.”

“Why? You do not want to meet my family anymore, Jayce? Don’t want to see where I really grew up?”

“I …” Viktor feels a hand slide next to his own, fingertips trace him gently, like a new device that must be checked for explosive capability. He lets it happen. Jayce says, “I do. I really do.”

“Then tomorrow we go to the Sumps.”

“Okay.” Jayce’s hand squeezes his own once, tightly—for a second they’re holding hands—then he lets go. “Okay, okay, then—”

Jayce leans up and paws at something on the floor, something that must be his coat. He turns back toward Viktor, takes his hand, places something thin and cold in it.

“Here,” he says.

“What…?” Viktor brings it up between both hands, a short silver chain with a pendant sun.

“It’s a bracelet. You don’t have to wear it but I want you to have it.”

“Jayce, we have spoken about this—”

“I didn’t buy it. It’s like, 20 years old. It probably isn’t even real silver.”

Viktor doesn’t know what to say. He thumbs the silver sun.

“I found it at an inn, 20 years ago. I told you, about—about traveling with my mom. We found it in the room we were staying in. It must have been left by whatever patron came before us. My mom said it suited me, because she said I was her sun—one of those things mother’s say, you know?”

Viktor couldn’t say he did know. 

“Silver isn’t really my colour.” Jayce says, eyes continue to map the side of Viktor’s face. One of those pesky cards at the corner of his lip, another mole there. “But I think it suits you.”

“The sun? Really, Jayce.” Viktor resists the urge to look back, who knows what his face might do. “I think there are few things less symbolic of my person.”

Viktor sees Jayce smile from the corner of his eye.

“Then at least you’ll think of me.”

It’s a little outrageous, to hear him say it, because they probably both know, Viktor’s always thinking of him.

Notes:

Content Warnings:
Medical trauma
Allusions to past suicide ideation

 

So, did ya like it ?

Chapter 5: In Lieu of a Father

They duck into the Dom Raboty, marked by a spray of purple paint over the door, and Viktor fears the Chirean will be standing right behind it, looming and waiting, for that elusive thing Viktor must say to him that Viktor’s been waiting to find, the perfect excuse for his absence, an apology he can’t find the beginning of, a greeting worth the wait—but behind the door is a tall and narrow hall, empty but for doors on either side, at the end of which another door that leads to an uprooted cultivar—the tree died after the Grey leaked inside many years ago, its body cut down, made into the stage, the wood spotty and dark with the disease, the glass panes painted a dark blue, only a little streetlight coming through. They sit on the weathered pews, and watch, as there are no curtains, as the actors and stagehands prep and stretch and grease their face with paint. There is quite a crowd that afternoon, as it is the last day of the performance, and Viktor is glad for it, hopes to hide himself in it, use their bodies as blinders so that his his eyes may not travel to find the Chirean man he cannot face. 

They do anyway.

A little bubble of anxiety rises to lodge in some primordial crossroad to his limbic system. It’s been over a decade since Viktor’s last seen him, the last instance of which he does not remember but must have happened, right? The actor smiles to a stagehand, and his ears move with it, and he seems at home inside the blue dome, as though nothing is amiss, and perhaps nothing is. Viktor had, in some attempt at derivative self-loathing, contemplated the idea that the man would not recognise him anyway. That his memories of their time knowing each other had felt important and life-changing to Viktor only, the way meaningless moments feel important and life-changing to children, he had only been a child after all, it might have all been in his head. 

He looks the same. Viktor hadn’t known earlier what the same would mean, yet now it seems obvious what he looked like. Perhaps he was not quite as tall as he’d seemed to little Viktor, maybe his grey fur was a little greyer, skin spottier in the pink of his ears—were his eyes still as green? It was difficult to tell in the no-light. Viktor wants to see him up close, wants to know the truth of it, but he doesn’t want to be seen. He doesn’t know yet, what he will say.

“Is that him?” Jayce asks.

“Yes.” 

The Chirean gets onstage, the patrons quiet down, the play will start soon.

“Okay.” Jayce seems disconcerted by the man—older, broader, saw-blade teeth, the long bridge of his nose like a cross in the middle of his face. “So, this is basically like meeting your father?”

“Perhaps I might have been something like a son to him.” Viktor cocks his head lightly, contemplates this. “But to me …”

He had been the only person to give the disabled sump boy the time of day, so, naturally…

“Shank was the one I wanted to marry.”

***

There is no set to speak of, save for a fractured pane of green glass, bolted upright by an iron rod, mirroring the undercity’s windows. The lighting rigs are left visible, as are the stage marks, painted in white oil, crossed out and painted again.

The story is of a couple, a woman, dressed as an enforcer—it isn’t a costume, the uniform has been stolen, or taken off a corpse—an a man, lowly goon to a Chembaron, played by Shank. 

There is a boy between them, crossdressing as the couple’s daughter, holding a doll and Viktor recognises the Chirean boy from their first day on the hydraulic descender immediately. His heart lurches, and he sits up straighter. Jayce has recognised him too.

The child’s name in the story is SHEN TE—she is the only one with a name throughout the play. Her mother will only be referred to as BATON-KEEPER, her father, as THE GOON. 

SHEN TE doesn’t face the actors, only the audience.

SHEN TE

Do you know the story of Romeo and Juliette?

(pause)

Say yes.

The audience, some unsure, most snickering, answer yes. The Chirean boy speaks with a clarity and confidence that makes Viktor doubt for a second it is the same boy they’d met on the descender. He’d been so meek, more mouse than bat, the inside of his mouth misshapen with gummy teeth, the small snarls that had escaped his throat, Viktor had realised only in retrospect was his voice, so that he’d only understood what had been said after it’d been said, like a language where the subjects comes at the end of the sentence, forcing listening ears to hang on, to pay attention. 

SHEN TE

Well, this isn’t that. My parents are both from the same rathole. But they tried really hard to make it Romeo and Juliette with a happy ending. Said they could be on different sides of the law, and stay loyal to each other. This is what happened after.

Some quality of that voice remained true in the boy’s stage voice, the quality of held breath, but now it unfolded before the audience, pouring out of his river mouth, liquid nitrogen, and they all freeze to listen.

The actors come to life like machine puppets fed with a bronze washer. Shank looks different under the stage lights. Whenever BATON-KEEPER speak, drums play, when THE GOON responds, a jazz note holds. 

Heat builds in the periphery of Viktor’s head, like an incoming headache, but it mixes with the rhythm of the drum set, the gold of light.

They need to get ahead is what they’re saying, for SHEN TE. BATON-KEEPER is a new recruit, her superiors don’t trust her, they’ll find any fault to throw a Zaunite off the force. THE GOON is doing all the dirty work, the last rung of the ladder, his hands are steeped in blood, if an operation goes wrong he’ll be the first to go, at this rate he won’t make it to his daughter’s eight birthday. They need to get ahead, for SHEN TE.

***

There is a cast party after the show, doubling as union celebration for the actress and one of the stagehands. Viktor and Jayce are invited to join. Viktor, for the first time, puts up no pretense of protest to remaining longer in the undercity, and Jayce, for the first time, seems reluctant to stay but does not say so. 

The shanties of the Sumps are intense, an uneven amalgamation of vertical metal ribs, like the shored carcass of a monster whale, or the uneven shear of hair at the back of his father’s neck. They walk from the Dom Raboty to the dayhouse entirely from within them, flank to flank, forehead to forehead, never stepping outside. The air is cleaner in than out, and it’s a safe geography for those that know how to navigate it. For every shop, bedsit or hallway they cross there are windows on the inside, glass traps in the ceilings and the floors, from which gossip and looks and bread are passed from one bedsit to another, down or up or side to side. The halls are crowded like a street. The gold of Jayce’s coat reflects off the grey white of the eyes they meet. It’s late afternoon, but no natural light reaches these parts, the windows give only to streetlight, some passerbys emit their own light. 

It is the coldest part of the entire connected cities. Summer never makes it so far down, and in winter the moisture freezes over, pipes burst, tiles crack, the city turns a cloudy white, mossy pavements and corroded grilles and wrought iron balconies, like they’ve been coated with a thin spidery web made up of a million minuscule crystals of ice. Topside, it’s not winter yet, but down here it might as well be. Jayce, despite his poorly hidden reluctance seems fascinated by the cold of it. He places the palm of his hand broadly on the overheating carcass of a boiler, pulling away slowly, palm red, replacing it atop a broken, frozen piece of aluminum pane. He doesn’t flinch or cramp and leaves behind little layers of palm-flesh onto the metal. 

The couple sign the union ledger, listing what each party brings to the table—skills, tools, outstanding debts, ongoing obligations—inside one of the dayhouse’s bedsits, lent out for the occasion. A band plays in the hall, food is grilled by an open window, and hot, alcohol-heavy drinks are served in metal cups by the stairwell. A syndicate proxy reads the terms aloud to all witnesses present: the merging of chem-token and standard wages, shared access to non baron-owned facilities, newly negotiated agreements with the housing syndicate, the mutual transfer of liability in case of theft, damage, or breach, and the recalculation of total labor hours owed to the house. 

Viktor sits in one of the chairs in the hall, staring at Shank who’s preparing some kind of speech, some sort of show. He’s not sure where to begin, how to begin. 

Do you remember…?

or

That time when…

or 

He always used to… 

or

Do you still…?

Jayce holds his metal cup awkwardly, and follows Viktor’s eyes with his own.

***

ACT ONE

A stair set is dragged onstage by visible ropes. It’s missing the left bannister. There are chalk instructions on each step: “SPEAK HERE”, “HESITATE”, “LOOK UP”. There is a landing halfway up on which the family stands.

SHEN TE

My parents begin to exchange information. You must help them climb the ranks. 

Dock Seven. A rival shimmer tank. They dock at dawn.

Who is promoted? 

The audience hesitates, Jayce stares at Viktor, uncomfortable. Participative plays aren’t very popular in the uppercity, but Viktor is having fun. He calls out,

“The BATON-KEEPER.”

Voices echo him until the BATON-KEEPER takes a step up the stairs.

SHEN TE

Scheduled inspection at the Blackmarina in two days.

Who is promoted? 

“THE GOON!” The audience calls. THE GOON steps down.

SHEN TE

Three enforcers take bribes at the inspection gates.

Who is promoted? 

It goes on like this until both parties have reached opposite sides of the staircase. Shen Te remains on the middle landing. THE GOON is his baron’s right-hand now, BATON-KEEPER has become district captain.

***

They’re pressed closely together on the bride and groom’s slender new mattress, a union gift still wrapped in cellophane, precariously balancing their drinks on their knees and shielding them from expressive hand gestures. Viktor doesn’t know any of the people pressed up to him, yet they all share in the rapture of the fire-breather’s show. 

Shank has been asked to perform an improv piece by the couple, who threw him the prompt creative pains and inebriated as he is, with spit and drink down his chin, a lit match to his mouth, he scorches the bedsit’s ceiling between every verse.

“If we, fickle, lazy human creature, were not so in love with loving, if we could stand to bear the end of infatuation, if we could come to appreciate the boring middle, then perhaps we would not procrastinate so much.”

The fire comes close to their faces, Viktor hears the ends of his hair singe. Jayce somewhere next to him spills some of his drink, an unhappy sound in his throat, and isn’t it strange? Jayce usually loves the heat. Summers and the sweltering heat are his paradise on earth. He never turns on the fans and lets himself sweat through his clothes, lets them dry, and sweats through them again till the lab is a reflection of his microbiology, the smell of his sweat parsed even onto the pages of their notebooks. 

Viktor leans into him, whispers.

“When Yslen and I were children, we’d dress in bedsheets and learn the lines of his newest play.”

“The boring middle is where you find out if you’re actually a writer, is a sentiment that proposes the idea that real sustainable happiness starts where infatuation ends. The boring middle, devoid of entertainments, where our monkey brains loathe to sit and play, a slog you can cross only if you are build of habits, is called life.”

Fires catches the edge of a tarp behind their heads, and starts to spread up the wall. The guests, more infatuated still, roar and clap. Jayce pays no attention to it, even though he would usually be the first up and near an open fire. During that brief time Viktor had taken up smoking again Jayce had bumped into him constantly in an uncharacteristically clumsy way, and he now sported a collection of small round burn scars down his forearms. His hands were so scarred from unsafe handling of his fire tools his marketing team had started adding gloves to his public speech uniform. 

“We became his performers, his props, his critique partners. He took us very seriously.”

“Interruptions, those of which life are made inevitably, indissociable as life is from death, which we will spend our life fighting, will break the strides habits have formed. But however fickle we may be, no matter how lazy, and in love with loving, identity will keep us coming back.”

“I missed this.” Viktor says, drink sloshing over his fingers in the sudden upheaval of the crowd around him. “I didn’t realise I did.”

Drink is stained down the front of Jayce’s jacket. He makes another unhappy sound in his throat.

***

ACT TWO

The stairs are dragged off stage and are replaced with a mattress by the stagehands. SHEN TE sits at the edge of the stage, facing the audience as her parents start to strip behind her. 

Jayce whispers into Viktor’s ear. “Wait, are they really going to—”

Shank cups the actresses’ breast, she put a hand between his legs. 

SHEN TE pulls a woolen sock onto one of her hands, the other holds up her mop doll. 

SHEN TE

I heard them one night, between the screaming and the moans. 

SOCK

You’re never here anymore. 

MOP DOLL

You and SHEN TE should move upside with me.

SOCK

What about my work? 

MOP DOLL

You don’t have to do that anymore, I have authority now, we could have a new real life.

SOCK 

This is my life. 

The puppets kiss. 

***

The young Chirean actor’s name is Montee. Montee spends the evening shyly inching closer and closer to Viktor, never directly in his line of sight, pretending to look elsewhere whenever Viktor catches his eye. He’s stuffed his face with sugarpoppers and cream pastries, hoarding them under the furniture to protect them from a group of younger kids. He crawls under Viktor’s chair during the teeth-filling ceremony, bride and groom laid side by side on a pair of tables as liquid bronze is poured into their molars. It’ll be filed flat and smooth, and make it difficult to clench their jaws in anger, to bite into hurtful words, to chew out the person they’ve chosen to love for life. Jayce watches wide eyed from the other corner of the room, Viktor can see the bulge of his tongue in his cheek, running over his own pearly whites.

The boy under his chair munches noisily, runs his fingers over the metal splints of Viktor’s right leg, click and clacks it under his baby claws. Viktor sees his head peak out from under the chair, looking up at Viktor, but when Viktor looks back, he quickly dives back under and takes his hand away from the splint. A while later it starts again, his fingers finding the joints and then dipping under to squeeze at Viktor’s leg.

“Mister,” Viktor hears. 

“Yes?” 

“Why is your leg only half metal? And not all metal?”

Viktor meets Jayce’s eyes from across the room, flush with drink, confused at the boy under Viktor’s chair. 

“Do you think my leg should be all metal?”

“Well I think they look cooler.”

“Maybe I’ll get an all-metal leg, then.”

“Is it painful?” Asks the boy. “Are you afraid?”

Viktor looks down, Montee has peeked his head out once again.

“It’s a big decision.” 

“Shank says you were always bad at making decisions.”

“He said that?”

“Well, he said when you were my age you were afraid of making the wrong decision, so you never made any. He told me that because I want to keep performing in his plays here, but he says I have talent and that I should find a teacher in the uppercity, but he said it’s my decision.”

“I see.” Viktor looks up again to find Jayce coming towards them, slowly maneuvering his way between guests and chairs and spilled drinks. 

“Is that cowardly?” Montee asks. 

“Perhaps.” Viktor tilts his head. “Perhaps, we’re both a little cowardly.”

“Yeah.” Montee says, and dips back under the chair. When Jayce approaches he scurries out from under it and into the crowd.

Jayce stoops down between Viktor’s legs, digging his elbows into his thighs and looking up at him with glassy eyes.

“Do you want to have kids, V?”

There are many responses Viktor could give to this. He likes men. He’ll probably die before he’s forty. No one deserves his genetics. Instead, he brings a hand to Jayce’s hair—which is how he knows he’s a little drunk too—and runs his fingers through the strands like petting a dog.

“I had to bandage my father’s hands once, when he’d burned them at the foundry. He never complained they were sore, but he could not open his drink, and kept dropping the bottles on the floor. He let me, which I had not thought he would, and it was probably my first time holding his hand. I remember it felt like a thin bag of milk, filled with bones. I felt the age in it, I felt the weakness, I felt the death.” Over his lap, Viktor mindlessly traces Jayce’s skull with his fingers. “The cushion to it was sparse, bunched into soft knots that glided along the bone, I pressed into it and could feel my own hand on the other side. It scared me. I knew I would be alone soon.”

Jayce’s face is buried in his arms, rolling and pressing more of his head and hair into Viktor’s fingers.

“I think a child deserves to hold his father’s hand and feel something large and strong.”

He clenches his hand, scrunching the hair there.

“I think a child deserves a father that can carry them to bed when they fall asleep.”

He smoothes it back out again.

“I think a child should fall asleep knowing their father will always keep them safe.”

Jayce shakes his head, eyes closed, wraps his arms around Viktor’s back, buries his nose in his middle, utterly innibriated. 

“I think all a child needs is a father who’s ready to love them.”

***

ACT THREE

The actors separate as the puppets do and come to stand behind SHEN TE, one on each side of her. They’re still naked. The colourful moving lights distort the shape of their bodies like a badly lit cabaret.

Two stagehands walk up to BATON-KEEPER with a new uniform in their hands. They start to dress her. 

BATON KEEPER

I’ve been promoted to Private Forces.

To a councilor’s house.

She steps into a pant leg and holds on to a shoulder.

BATON KEEPER

My daughter could eat silver, breathe gold.

The vest is ill-fitting, too tight, and squeezes together the fold of her stomach. She’s adorned with badges.

BATON KEEPER

This is his last chance. My councilor’s bed is warm too.

The stagehands switch to THE GOON. 

THE GOON

I know she’s fucking the councilor.

They pull up his underwear, sock each feet.

THE GOON

She thinks she’s so hight and mighty now.

She thinks she’s better than this—than us.

He’s gesturing to the audience. An expensive coat is thrown over his shoulders. He dons a golden cane. He is a baron now.

THE GOON

I made this city mine, this is where I belong.

The stagehands leave and SHEN TE stands up. She cradles the mop doll and the sock in her arms. She stares at the audience.

SHEN TE

Mother will leave tomorrow. Father will stay. I have to make a decision now. 

Who should I pick?

The audience’s confusion barely lasts this time. Shouts erupt. Some are crying for the BATON-KEEPER, some for THE GOON. Someone yells to leave them both, the imbeciles!

“What do you think?”

It feels like a trick question from Jayce’s mouth.

Finally THE GOON seems to win out. Nobody likes a cheater. 

SHEN TE holds up the sock. The audience quiets. The boy’s stage presence has thickened throughout the play, dressed in girls clothing, swamped in their affirming girlhood, the large skirt grounding, the intimidating animal power of it, the vitality of folds, the joy of embroidered purple suns. It isn’t a costume, it has belonged to a child, and imbues him on stage with the life lessons stitched into the fabric. He speaks, no—sings—with a round voice, or oval, or a round-edged rectangle, yes, that is what the note sounds like, a round-edged rectangle that grows as the note saddens, rounding even more, the way fruit rots or trees are blown towards the sky by hurricanes, or waves tower above the hole you’ve been buried in. 

SHEN TE

I stay at my father’s side, 

I join the baron’s trade when he dies at my mother’s hand.

I frequent brothels and fall for a whore,

She’s with baby, knocked up by baton-man.

I try to pull her out, but a rival gang buys her for weight.

I have to choose—her or my baron?

I’m selfish like my parents, I want to play both games.

I loose an arm to the stint gone wrong,

She dies anyway.

I raise her baby, she’s mute, 

I’ll never tell her from where she came.

Shouts erupt again. I told you! What about the BATON-KEEPER? Try the other one!

SHEN TE holds up the mop doll. 

The audience quiets again. On stage they forget he is juvenile, they forget yesterday he was hairless and depended on his mother—or perhaps, like Viktor, on some other willing woman’s tit and mycoprotein-based substitutes. On stage he is full grown, on stage this is his ultimate form. He is his own specie, an embodiment of every life stage. Shank has taught him well.

SHEN TE

I go with my mother, become an enforcer,

My father dies under my brigade.

I fall for a council woman, like my mother had,

And take her house and sigil.

But she marries a man for power—says I can kiss her still, tells me I should learn to share.

But I’m selfish like my parents, and I want her for myself.

If I can’t have her, nobody will,

Her husband’s body is found upstairs.

It’s too late, 

I’ve taken her daughter, we’ve left the city,

She will never know her name.

The audience remains quiet.

SHEN TE

Which side will I pick?

BATON-KEEPER and THE GOON step up next to her. Shank smiles, breaking character and says,

“Which side will she pick folks? Vote by coin—flat washer for the BATON-KEEPER, bend it for THE GOON. Polls close when the band starts.”

The lights come on in the room and the volume rises as everyone stands to pat their pockets and mutter their outrage at one option or the other. Of course, Jayce wants to vote, they get in line, a line which ends with Shank and the little actor, still in his dress. They’re taking the donations, they’re greeting the patrons, he seems familiar with most of them. Viktor holds a still flat washer in his hand. Should he bend it? He’s forgotten already which option was for which, the line goes by quickly, he’s looking at the boy—perhaps a grandchild? But he looked nothing like Yslen, another child then? It was possible, Shank wasn’t that old yet. There are four people before them in line. Is he jealous that a child might have taken his place? Sad that he’s had another child and Viktor wasn’t there for it? Three left in line, and Shank’s already spotted him. His smile has slackened, his eyes are wide. What face should he make? What should Viktor say to him? Hello, it’s been a while? A simple, Shank, all frank and solemn and adult? Two people left. Or, I ran into your daughter, she said I should come, she said you’d be happy to see me. One more person between him and his entire childhood, and it all refuses to leave Viktor’s throat, the words hide behind his skirt, they don’t want to say hello to the stranger.

“Viktor.” Shank says, all frank and solemn and adult.

It’s how Shank has always said his name. Of course. He isn’t a stranger. The words elbow each other out of hiding, race up his chest to be first out of his mouth, but there’s a hold up at his heart, and under that pressure, like a geyser, his liquid body swells up, Viktor’s never cried in front of anyone before. He drops his head.

“I didn’t come back.” he says.

Shank hugs him like he’s still only a little kid. All the pressure inside him releases slowly, and it wasn’t a geyser after all, just a little bit of air, caught and shaken inside a soda can. Crushed between those arms, the soda can relents. 

“You’re here now.”

***

The rain came in slowly, languid, as if the sky was drooling awake, dripping off the chin of Entresol and into the Sump’s open mouth. Guests quiet periodically when they turn to the window, then turn back and resume cackling. A man cracks open the glass to peer down into the street, at the overflowing drain lids like they’re wads of spit on the ground, bright and luminous from streetlight colours: fresh, bronzy copper; wet, old, verdigris copper. Viktor feels something like anticipation. 

Next to Viktor, Shank is saying to Jayce:

“When he was a small boy, Viktor always walked around shirtless. His daddy was desperate, came to me saying the boy said it was dark inside his shirt and was afraid to put it on over his head.”

The window is closed again, latch pressure locked, wax cloth sealed into the corners of the window sill. Then, a flood shutter comes down over the window completely, breaking the streetlight that filtered into the room, leaving them to the glow of a gas lamp on the floor. The bride lights candles in the neck of empty bottles, handfuls of them cluttered into the hallway.

“He hated cultivars too, saw a tree once that bore a lot of fruit, which isn’t very common of our trees, and when he saw that the fruit fell and rotted he cried, said he was sad because no one ate the fruit the tree had made, and wasn’t that just so sad for the tree? The fruits were poisonous mind you, but little Viktor wouldn’t have it.”

Viktor feels his body sink, closes his eyes against the slow slip of water noise and leans his head on Jayce’s shoulder. Around him the party goes on. A choreographed dance is happening kitchen-corner to the beat of someone’s’ drum. Several children are being laid to sleep on piles of cloth or side by side chairs. A handful of guests continue to pick at half empty food plates, speaking with their mouths full, spilling drinks down their neighbor’s shirt.

“But he was always so creative, building little automatons out of scraps before he could even read, little ships mostly. He loved boats. Said when he was older he’d build his own big ship and live on it, and when I asked him why he said because then he’d live on the ocean, and the sun always shined on the ocean. Because on the ocean no one could keep you trapped in one place, and because he wouldn’t need to walk as much on a boat, the boat would walk for him. My favorite is when he said his boat would be the fastest boat on the sea, so it didn’t matter if he couldn’t run a race with the other kids now, because one day he’d win all the races with his ship.”

Viktor pushes away from the two men. He walks out of the small, stifling bedsit, out of the hall, slowly down the stairs, till he has to stop at the door out of the dayhouse, locked down for risk of flooding. The rain has gotten stronger outside, and Viktor simply wants to go home. He thinks of his lab, his cot, his goggles, Jayce’s fingerprints on the chalkboard. 

“Are you leaving?” 

Viktor turns around, finds Montee staring up at him somewhat accusingly.

“Ah, no.”

The boy moves up to him in a quick slide, fists Viktor’s hand in his own, pulling in the direction of the hall. “Then are you staying? With us I mean.”

“With you?”

The boy nods. “You’re from here Shank says, like us … So are you going to stay?”

“I don’t live here.”

“But you could.” The boy shakes their hands up and down to make his point. “Your job is to build stuff, right? You could build stuff here, there’s a lot of stuff to build and invent yet, Shank says.”

“I see…” Viktor lets his hand slide out from between the boy’s own to help himself into crouch with his cane. Montee watches him patiently. “In that case how about I agree to come back often?”

Montee narrows his eyes. “How often?”

“When I can.”

“And when you can’t?”

“Then … how about you come topside instead? The academy I work at has an arts division, perhaps I could talk to them and we could find you a professor.”

In the darkness of the hall the boy’s two green eyes are bright yet unmoving, at his young age they’ve already learned to betray nothing and to take no word for promise.

“Okay,” he says simply, but lets a small fanged smile travel Viktor’s way, and as he turns says, “I’ll tell Shank then.”

Viktor stands by the door a little longer, pressing his ear to the door, listening in on the rain until it lets up only slightly. There haven’t been any sirens to warn of floods. So he unlatches a metal pin from his cane and uses it to pick at the door’s lock until it clicks open, and a small wave of water rushes through, inky and warm, through the door’s mouth and between his shoes like teeth, into the hall’s throat behind him, from the cotter pin canal, stretching between the legs of Entresol’s factories—reminding Viktor of his father’s piss in the toilet bowl, cola-coloured from heat and labour, his muscle cells dissolving inside his kidneys. The rain has crushed the scent of sewage and oil and even as a boy, Viktor found this was always the best time to breathe. The rain that reaches the Sumps is rain that’s already performed the show and is looking for the backrooms, it reaches tired and spent, slick with the filth of a mile of awnings, gutters and roofs above, grey and acidic with exhaustion, fat and slow but hopeful, never pausing till it finds the idyllic crevasse it’ll rest in forever, for the moisture of the Sumps is pervasive, or if it’s lucky the crack between pavement stones it’ll seep through to finally, finally, after such a long journey down, go back to the earth. 

Viktor takes a step closer to the rain.

Then there’s a click somewhere behind him, the sound of chugging water, and between his feet a small toy boat appears, bobbing merrily out into the rain by itself. Viktor turns and Jayce smiles at him from the hall. 

“Shank found it.”

Viktor stares at the little boat he made as child. He remember this one he’d tried to fashion after the illustrations of fish in a storybook, armored in crystal, with helmets of gold and velvet fins, swimming between reeds and yellow button water lilies. But instead it was made of scrap alloys, had swam only in sewage water and was now completely rusted over.

Jayce steps up next to him and they both stare at the boat.

“Rust for luck,” Jayce says finally, with a sheepish smile. Then he clears his throat. “Are you, uh… are you planning on staying?”

When Viktor stares at him Jayce doesn’t meet his eyes. When Viktor stares at him, he desperately desires to return home, and he can’t imagine the day when home is not Jayce and his fingerprints on the chalkboard. 

“I wanted to thank you, for letting me come here with you. I know it wasn’t easy…” He runs his hands through his hair. “But, ah, please don’t—”

“Do you consider me part of House Talis, Jayce?”

“Yes”

“Does that make me the second member?”

“Yes.”

“Then.” Viktor leans his head against the door frame, and watches Jayce down the slope of his cheek. “Should I take your name too?”

Jayce blinks. Even without the jacked of gold, Jayce would always be the brightest thing these Sumps had ever seen, the brightest thing in Viktor’s life.

“…Would you?”

***

POST ACT

After the show Viktor asks Jayce, “Who did you vote for?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well did you give a full bronze washer or half?”

“I gave a golden hex.”