I OF THE STORM- Ch. I & II

Lower Heaven 1

Dec 23

Lower Heaven is a five-part serial novel, I’m releasing it for free two chapters at a time every week on Wednesday. You can read from the beginning here, buy the books in paperback, or subscribe on Patreon for $3 a month to download the whole series so far and more.

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If you have any comments or feedback I’d love to hear it. Thank you for reading, viva la, and hope you enjoy! -Ben

Chapter I

Nineday, Fervidor 29

Year 245

Seven Days til the Coup of Meritoise

In the month of Fervidor, Heaven was at a crossroad. The last weeks of the wet season put the skies in a tirade as winds from the Poison Sea slammed into the humid wall that rose from the jungle, with Heaven on its lake-isle caught between. The crazed air whipped snakepox and other epidemics through the city to give the month its name, and going on six muggy moons soaking in the Great Valley’s low-grade monsoon, time itself felt waterlogged.

The Zuri, the jungle’s people, didn’t call this time of year Fervidor. The Zuri calendar had only 260 days, it didn’t follow the seasons. In fact, today, the 29th of Fervidor for the Heavenites, wasn’t on the Zuri calendar at all this year. The months at the ends of the wet and dry season had a few days each of untied time, days of cosmic unrest in indigenous eyes, time that didn’t buckle down to the routine cycles of the world written out by the universe. Fuzzy-time, border-time between.

Heaven’s calendar took no days off, butting the month of Meritoise right to the end of Fervidor without a second in between, even if the people who lived by that calendar really could use some time to slow down and figure some things out.

Felix couldn’t remember exactly how many untied days there were before the Zuri started counting again, and didn’t understand more than the broad strokes of Zuri culture and a few random bits of trivia. But he knew these unmonthed days were the reason for the increased foot traffic in and out of the bridge-gates, the strange rituals, the night-long parties echoing out of the Zuri Quarter. Adding to it all, this was one of the years the untied time period overlapped with the Festival of the Free, Heaven’s largest civic celebration on the first of the new year.

This was all of part of why Fervidor always and this year in particular felt like it was half over before it started.

No, that wasn’t quite it, Felix thought. There was something else. Perhaps that it had felt like Fervidor for months, and the impending end of the rainy season was only that— when the clouds finally broke, Heaven would only get faster.

But none of this stuff about weather and calendars that Felix had learned before he dropped out was important right now. Nor was his indeterminate anxiety. It was all a cover, a distraction for himself because he didn’t want to hear what his roommate Vic was saying without saying right now, though he had been saying a lot for the past block. But now Vic had stopped talking, which meant Felix needed to give a response:

“So you’re spending our money on a mercenary?” he said, summarizing the last few sentence fragments he had heard.

“Yah bruv— s’time, s’wot the pros do. But Im sayin, dis a good ting. We need it. Means were movin up.”

“But how can we afford to hire a guide if we can’t even afford cigarettes?”

“Bruv, ye listenin? Dis is gonna double up, mebbe triple up wot we bring home! Afta dis, we can buy ye enuff cigs to last a lifetime, juss truss me.”

Felix didn’t buy it, but whatever. Vic had been steady wheedling him to quit— at least since they started pooling their paychecks. Neither roommate could afford their craphole Opportunity Housing apartment alone, and between the two’s incessant loaning and IOUing, splitting of the solar bill and groceries, reciprocal bar tab clearance, etc., they had come treacherously close a few times to invoking their unit’s automatic Five-Day Notice for late payment. For safety they began cashing all their stubs together and keeping the money under common management, Vic’s.

“I’m just asking,” Felix said. “So what does one of these guys cost?”

“Dont. Ye ent good wiff numbahs, ye gonna throw my maffs off. S’all good, long as we make it til dis next month, den we can— oof. Head down, flya-lady up ahead. Dis one is Stormtouched for sure.” Vic repositioned his parachute pack on his back and slumped his neck as they approached.

They were walking towards a wide-mouthed tent. A bedraggled woman stood in the street before its flapping entrance, a ring of open space around her. Her dress was well on its way to rags, smeared and ripped. A wooden sandwich board with an illegible manifesto scrawled in hundreds of tiny red letters dangled heavy on her neck. She canvassed back and forth, the sign’s weight making her movements clunky, beseeching the crowd with a haggard mass of handbills.

By unanimous decision, all passers-by were pretending the woman didn’t exist. Some put up a hand to blot her from their vision, but most walked straight by and let her cadenced freestyle raving bounce off their ears.

“Keep movin bruv, dont stop.”

“Nope, wasn’t gonna.” Felix said, swallowing, fighting back a sudden chill. The flyer-lady raise her head, and leveled her scratchy voice at the crowd.

“MERIT, LOGIC, FREEDOM, PEACE! When will all the troubles CEASE!

MERIT, LOGIC, FREEDOM, PEACE, when will all the troubles CEASE?

LISTEN ALL! Twelve score and four years, twelve score and four— this is how long it takes, FOR THE PRINCIPLES OF OUR FOUNDERS TO BE FORGOTTEN!

You there, all of you, I know you hear me but you would steal my voice if you could,

Steal it and eat it, steal it and pretend you can’t hear me as you WALK AWAY—

I’m here, I will remain, I am your shadow, I will NOT BE QUIETED!

You who crave answers! You who crave the solution!

Listen to me and I will tell, but you won’t hear! Heaven EATS IT CHILDREN!

SWALLOWING ITS YOUNG!

And what do you do? WALK ON BY, FANCY ONES. DEAD ONES.

I’m sick! You listen and don’t hear, I scream and scream and scream and nothing comes out!

The children too, do you hear them? No! You’re not listening! They scream! I scream!

I have seen the terror, what COMES AFTER THIS? Oh, what comes after THIS?

YOU’LL ALL KNOW SOON.

I have seen the end on high! I have seen the terror and it swallows us all!

You and you and YOU. High in the sky where you fly til you die, whether you listen to what

you can’t hear, the terror will find you too!

YOU, TRUST ME, YOU, AND YOU!

YOU DON’T EVEN SEE THE TRAP THAT’S SET,

Until you let me open the ears of your eyes.

Oh yes.

Yes. Yes, there are answers! THEY know!

THEY know, you bet THEY do in their shiny towers, they know.

And I do too, from the end and beginning I have seen, from your blank faces!

And here I have written it, the answer, for all to read! Who knows more about the pain,

The terror of these years? You think you have answers? Speak to me! Come forth and argue!

But listen! No one will save you but if only, if only you would listen! YOU SIR.

Do you believe that the terror of change will come? Do you know it believes in you?

Do you hear me? Do you believe what the city is telling you?

MERIT, LOGIC, FREEDOM, PEACE—”

Her words became indiscernible as they got ten meters away.

“Ha, haven’t heard the ‘eating the children’ one before,” Felix wisecracked to Vic. “That’s creative.” He let his neck unclench as they passed into the big Zuri tent where Vic was leading them.

“Bad way to go, gettin et.” Vic said. “Nuffin ever gits ye in one bite. Ye git chewed up first, a bit atta time. Nasty.”

“’Scuse me! Hey, wait, scuse me!” a scratchy voice bounced off their backs, close.

Felix turned reflexively. The flyer woman was trailing them into the tent. He made eye contact with a pocked and wind-worn face, polished to a sunburnt shine. That wasn’t a Storm symptom, that was just what happened when you had no home, living under the constant elements of the city. Still she wasn’t old as she’d appeared at first. Behind the grime and wheeling stare was a young-ish face. They could have been the same class in the Youth Spire.

She halted as Felix did, stabilizing her signboards.

“Ayy, hold up, wha’g’wan!”

Felix gave a wave and returned the greeting. He tried not to look at Vic or the crowd-eyes fixating on them.

“Wha’g’wan.” he said.

“Not much! Great day. Hey, yer a Wizard, right?

“What makes you say that?”

“Felix. Lets go bruv—”

The woman raised her eyebrows because it was obvious.

“Felix? As in, Felicitiares? Wizard for sure. Tought so. Your type dont come down here much, so. Me? Im really out here, born on the LC, Logic Causeway, yah mean? Yent from a Causeway with a name like Felicitiares. Sorta a College-boy-Wizard-type name, innit.”

“I mean, yeah—but how did you know before he said my name?”

“Oh, simp! Wizards look at the buildings like they sometin special and put they hands in they pockets, like there ent nuffin to worry bout out here.”

This was ironic, considering the woman’s behavior, but apart from the unnerving look in her eye, she didn’t seem too Stormtouched when she wasn’t proselytizing.

She can turn it on and off. She must not have been struck directly, his head said.

He felt the crowd watch them talking. Vic was fidgeting next to him, deciding whether to give up and walk off.

“Hey…” Felix said to her, trying to affect kindness and not glance around— “You should probably get going. Take a walk to a different neighborhood. Try to find somewhere to sleep or go inside for a while. You look like you need a break—”

“Nope, nope, nope, nope!” She was weaving her head back and forth, talking over him. She spread her arms in a wide V, indicating the whole of existence. “Not tired. Can’t be. All this is ending soon, if we don’t act. Lots of work. Its gonna be okay though, I know what to do—just need your help, get some Wizard face time. Someone high up. I have ideas, right? Look, I arranged it in a logical-type proof, like the Wizards do, okay? Solvum One!” She pointed meaningfully at the first bullet point of her sign.

“Kay, Im goin.” said Vic, facing away with his body.

“Dude, wait just a second—” Felix said, squinting at the tiny text.

“Bruv, why!”

The flyer-woman barreled on, keen not to lose her audience, not breathing between her words.

“Here we go, ahem— SINCE HEAVEN’S FOUNDING,

TWELVE SCORE AND FOUR YEARS AGO,

And the signing of the DEMARCATION TREATY of YEAR FORTY TWO with the ROYAL ALIEN BLOOD EMPIRE,

Which set the City of Heaven’s border as the edge of the lake and NO FARTHER,

The city’s population has grown faster than THE FOUNDERS could have ever intended,

AS YOU MUST AGREE.”

“Sure, I mean—“

“SOLVUM TWO— As even SIMPS can see,

By the BROWNOUTS, FOOD PANICS, LAST SEASON’S STOLEN ELECTIONS, ETCETERA,

There is no MATHEMATICAL POSSIBILITY of the city’s still-growing population being supported within its borders.”

“For fooks sake bruv—”

“Right, right,” Felix said, trying to help her wrap it up, “Everyone knows that. Hey, we gotta—”

“Wait! No, don’t leave, I’ll skip to the good part, please listen! Here, here—SOLVUM EIGHTEEN!

Due the ongoing insta-BILITY!” she cried, finally finding her level—

“The expansion of the CIVIC WORKER POLICY,

The disconnect of THE ACADEMOCRACY from its people,

The growing COST of LIVING,

And the unwillingness of DECEPTIVE ZURI WARLORDS in the city to reign in their people’s RAPING, STREET MURDER, and CHEM PEDDLING,

There is NO CHOICE for RIGHTFULLY BORN HEAVENITES to RISE AND RECLAIM THE ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED SOUTH BANK,

RETAKING by ANY MEANS, THAT WHICH IS OURS BY RIGHT—AND HERITAGE!!”

She twirled, spitting vitriol at the largely-Zuri audience in the tent. As a final flourish, she thrust a handbill into Felix’s palm. He looked down at the stamped image—the silhouette of a dreadlocked head, with large drops of blood falling from the bottom and a badly-proportioned axe above.

GOOLI GO HOME, it read.

The crowd was listening really closely to them now. Felix dropped the paper like it was on fire, backing up and raising his hands.

Chapter II

Behold Felix half an hour ago, fumbling to roll Cigarette Prime, his first of the morning. He balances the pouch on his knees, rat’s-nest head rolled forward on his shoulders, honed in on twisting the brown dust into a smokable cylinder to complete his waking. The hangover makes the paper swim though, and every bash of the brakes spritzes tobacco flakes onto his lap. He goes on for a few more seconds, then his thumb tears his last scrunched rolling paper, and after searching all of his pockets for another to confirm he has none, he gives up.

"These buses get shakier every month." he says, slumping down, possibly able to sleep for a few more minutes before they got to the AeroHub. Vic thrust a cock-eyed look at him, the only kind he had, and squirmed to push Felix’s elbow off.

"Its ye hands bruv— dis bus ting ent even movin."Vic said in his deep Merit brogue, scratchy from rolling out of bed still.

A childhood veteran of the turf wars still raging through Heaven’s mangier bits, Vic’s oft-broken nose and upper face was crosshatched with headbutt scars. Untreated snakepox as a kid left his jaw looking nibbled. If he took his shirt off, his wiry torso was a scatterplot of daggerholes from years coming up in the Merit Causeway gutter gangs.

He had left all that behind, but in one fateful alley scuffle long ago, Vic caught a bricksock upside the head that cracked his left orbital and the eye had never set right again. He could still see from it, but it dawdled and wandered, leaving the other side of his face rigid with overcorrected muscle. The same golden hit had snapped off one of his front teeth, giving him a hole to spit through and make disapproving sounds with.

"Ah." Felix said, leaning his head back on his parachute pack and closing his eyes, crossing his fingers so he didn’t have to see if they were tremoring.

“Bruv! No sleepin, cummon. Were wastin daylite. Lets go, were almoss dere, were walking the rest of the way, lets git it."

Vic grabbed his parachute sack and piled out, pushing through and banging on the rear door until it hissed and opened. Felix followed him out, apologizing to everyone. They wove through the angry lanes of standstilled vehicles to the sidewalk and began forcing through the crush of pedestrians inward to the city-island. The bus had at least gotten them off the stone bridge of Merit Causeway where they lived and onto the island proper.

“Dis fookin festival traffic!” Vic said, turning back briefly as he cricked his neck and hoisted his hood against the rainy-season drizzle. They picked around the blocked intersection, feeling miniscule. The high-rises rose on all sides, matching every person with a ton of cement. Temporary fences and warning flags turned the thoroughfare to a work site.

Inside, between the slow-flowing puddles accumulating in the cobbles, orange-suited Civic Workers young and old were hard at work with festival preparations. The big day was happening in less than a week. Reason Plaza was always on the parade route, which meant it was a mess of tarpaulin-covered effigies and half-built bleachers for a month before, making transit from the Causeway neighborhoods into lower Heaven more abominable than usual.

Every year the Festival of the Free grew louder and grander, more bombastic in its patriotism. It needed to. There were two centuries of prior Festivals to top. This year’s was commemorating Heaven’s 245th birthday and was primed to be the biggest, free-est celebration ever.

For three whole days at the end of the start of the dry season, the whole city remembered its Founders, who against universal odds survived the journey over the Poison Sea and crash-landed on the lake-island they now called home. This improbable, disparate pack of refugees spread their gaze on the barren rock they had found, and they named it Heaven. Over the next two centuries they became its pantheon, their words, and ideas elevated to near-sacred.

The Founders had fled the Old Continent—a horrid place, the History Book said. Life there had been tyranny and oppression, ill-blooded dynasties, and unending machine warfare that molested the soil until it could feed nothing. Those times were unspeakably dark. Apparently. No one else from the Old Continent ever came across the Sea after them.

The journey was planned as a mass suicide. No one knew at the time of the voyage that anything lay behind the vast dark ocean. They sailed out on seven massive flying ships, the Arks, propelled by a mythical liquid fuel that the Old Continent had used to build its cities and then grind them to war-dust.

They expected nothing, as the story went, but feared more than death to remain. By the skin of sublime improbability, and rather as a surprise to the starving refugees, three of the Arks found something. After watching their sisters dip down into the steaming water, the last of the old fuel dwindling, the remaining Arks were delivered by miracle into the unknown.

A whole new continent. Unspoiled, bountiful, green. They landed on a delta island where the river colossus emptied its pure waters into the salty depths they had crossed. There they endeavored with their lives to make a place for themselves that rejected everything about their homeland, rebuilding their society from scratch, with the principles and systems they and other seekers had only been able to whisper about in clandestine meetings in the place from whence they came.

They crystallized on three ideas and created a civilization that honored each of its citizens. Those notions became the city’s Tripartite Ideals: Merit, Logic, and Freedom for all, which all of Heaven’s governing structures were built on.

Or justified by. The yearly Festival of the Free was silly pompous icing on this cake of death, Felix thought, staring around. After two centuries, those three words were scant more than the boilerplate on coins and government archways. All the way up, to the highest echelons of the glorious Wizard Community, they all know. Only simps see this as anything but a street-clogging, self-congratulatory show of civic pageantry designed to repeat the Dream of Heaven to the next generation until they can repeat it to themselves. But after 244 years, Felix reasoned, the Wizards were obligated to make the Festival a little larger every year. What would it say if they didn’t?

There were yells as they squeezed between the chainlink barricades and temporary work lamps pinching the traffic. Felix glimpsed the hold-up. A flatbed loaded with lumber had whinnied over. A soggy brigade of workers in orange coveralls were pulling the beams out of the road. He watched the team of drenched, jumpsuited old men, legs ready to buckle, scraping a wood block off the cobbles that took six to carry. Mixed into the work crew were stooped women and children, doing their best.

If you looked close you could read the blue numbers tattooed on their necks, so he didn’t.

Overseeing the Civic Workers were five City Corps Rangers in their hard-shouldered black jackets, rain driplets falling off the tripartite arm bands on their elbows and down the scope of the strapshot on each of their right wrists, there if the law needed to be kept. Half of the squad was commanding the batches of CWs, the rest fended off the honking, hapless traffic. Up by the flashing traffic lamp a Wizard monitor hovered above the scene. The cloaked form stood in a levitating cloche, a metal-and-glass chamber domed at the top and flat-bottomed like a bell, translucent with running water. The floating bubble sloped the rain off the Wizard, who was supposed to be watching the armed Rangers, but Felix was pretty sure the figure was reading a paperback instead.

Red mixed into the mud puddles the CWs splashed through, seeping out from the overturned tram. Everyone proceeded at a workday pace, no ambulances were coming. Whoever was underneath that mess of building material had accepted this as a risk of their service.

All of the Civic Workers had made the same deal. The Civic Works Program was a social initiative introduced by Wizard visionaries generations ago to combat the city’s unemployment problem. It provided anyone who fell to homelessness with a job, a bed, and three square meals a day. In return, you just did the work the city assigned you.

It had been a better deal before they moved the free housing out to the big barges at the far end of the lake, back when the workers planted trees and picked up trash for their service. But CWP work was still better than dying of exposure or getting your brainstem reformatted by the next Storm that passed over. Everyone was eligible for the CWP—hence the mixed ages of the crew. Setting up the Festival was light-work. Anyone more able-bodied was out on the floating farms, or building new Opportunity Housing, or had been assigned other helpful tasks. By volunteering yourself to the CWP (or by being prescribed duty for a crime) you became an overhead cost on the municipal ledger for as long as your contract ran or was renewed. A lot of people ended up turning to the CWP in times of need, and the program had been scaled up recently. The benefits continued: the Wizards even threw in a nifty orange jumpsuit and a free bit of body art. Everyone in Heaven was born with a Social Identification Number, but only Civic Workers got their SIN tattooed into their neck for free.

Felix sleepily soaked up the scene, gently knowing that CWP work would be his destiny in a couple of years if he didn’t die some quicker death first. He smiled at it, trying to enjoy his downward spiral for what it was, while it lasted. The bannered words above the workers’ heads encouraged all to embrace their roles as defenders of Heaven’s virtues. Felix didn’t think he’d even defend himself at this point, honestly.

“So wot do ye tink dem ol Founders have to say bout all dis? Fookin Festival traffic’s a fookin mess erry year, innit?” Vic said, brow creased as they pushed through the stymied crowd.

“They’d probably be looking for the nearest Ark and the next continent.”

Vic laughed and said something but Felix missed it, stepping around the waiting commuters at the next bus stop.

The two made their way through the densest point of the bottleneck and finally got a square meter of space to themselves.

“Right den—been tinkin bout a ting. Lissen. S’it betta to be a slut, or a slave— wot ye tink?”

“Are those my only two choices?”

“Yeh bruv, basically!”

The two of them passed street lamp after magelight street lamp, artificially brightening the dawn’s early light coming through the Farm Tower on their left, one of Heaven’s twelve Colleges, the massive sloping plateglass monuments to human accomplishment, biggest buildings on the island, you couldn’t miss em. Felix couldn’t look up at the artful ziggurat, all passive solar leans and overhangs. He didn’t have faith he was really even awake, looking around, waiting for reality to kick in. He was still running on autopilot, four hours of sleep and whatever last night had left in his bloodstream. Mornings like this, he swore he was walking through a fantasy world.

Vic, a bit more ready for the day, fleshed out his premise as they hiked through the drizzle.

“See, bruv, I figga— were alla slut or slave, when it gits down. Rilly. All mans gotta work, pay rent, yeh? Most mans out here: slaves. Mandem wake up, go to work, do wot a bossman say. Git fired if ye dont. Same ting, erry week. He tell ye work harda. Ye say yeh yeh, do a lil more, til he leave, but ye dont care, ye work by the hour—clock-ridin, pullin good steady slave-wage, innit? En bossman dont rilly care, longs his bossmans happy. He gotta lil slave-wage too, more en you, cuz he manages mans.”

“Sounds right.”

“True yeh? Yer job, bruv? At the boot store, bruv? Total slavin. All dem goons ye work wiff. On a slave ting. Day in. day out. Fooked if ye dont show up. I ent clownin it, I done worse, bare worse.

“But, like… aren’t those just normal jobs?”

“Not anymore, not if ye goes broke workin em! Only makin the dosh dey let ye, and its nevah enuff. Mebbe ye useda could, one time. An dats why erryone tinks its juss normal, innit, but no one out here getting ahead. Someting always comes up. All dem slave mans dont realize. Waste ting. Dey ent even know bout the Wuss-Wen bruv.”

Here Vic was referring to the WSWN—the Way Shit Was Now. The two of them had talked about it so much they come up with an acronym one drunk night. The mutual distrust, the hardness in everyone’s eyes, waiting for the next disaster, expecting stagnation at best. Not everyone named it, but you could see them feel it, heard them talk about or around it in different ways. You couldn’t avoid it. Life in Heaven was getting bad, and if you asked anyone older than you, it used to be way better.

Felix didn’t know if that was true, but the city was for sure busier than when he was young. Nothing ramped down anymore. Even when the traffic turned the roadways to slow paste for hours every morning and night, hordes rushed about at their business. They were being caught in the upwell of it now, adding to the morning crowd going out to work the day. The avenue was already well-peopled with first-shifters and the local operators who sold coffee, umbrellas, corn flautas, tobacco, good luck candles, bug shrouds, chiclesticks, news rags, lottery tickets, and pigmeat-stuffed croissants to them.

“Hey, do you mind if we stop?” Felix said, spying his brand of rollup tobacco in a vendor cart.

“Bruv, no, we ent got no dosh, and no time, cummon—“

Vic didn’t slow down. Felix had to double-step through the crowd to catch up, almost hanging the edge of his heavy pack on a sidewalk tortilla press, apologizing profusely. He held his breath as he swayed away. The smell of hearty food made him sick this early.

“It juss dont work, dem type jobs It dont, s’why I neva done em.” Vic continued when Felix found him, puffing.

“Ye cant spect to make it. Only stay still, or fall behind. An dats wot we been doin bruv, dats why I been tinkin— we gotta get in a different lane. Take dis Ranger gig serious. Ye know wot dat means.”

“B…be sluts?”

“Peak sluts bruv! Like I was saying lass night, innit? We ent workin for no wage no more. The Rangers Guild is my break, and I been takin it too slow, playin it safe. Treatin dis like a slave type job, no. We gonna take dis freeknifin ting serious bruv, startin today. We makin moves. We takin risk, and gittin rewards dis time. Onna slut ting. Beeg ting today, truss.”

“Uh huh,” inserted Felix.

“Yeh—yeh!” his friend went on, amping himself. “To be real bruv, we been gittin fooked on dese last few trips out to the jungle. We ent gittin nuffin for all dis work. Honest, we been playin the game all the wrong ways.”

“Uh huh.”

“Uh huh.” Vic repeated. He stopped and speared Felix with a look from his good eye. He sucked the spot where his side teeth weren’t.

“Bruv, will you fookin wake up? Act like ye bout to be somewhere.”

“Bleh, sorry.” Felix rattled his head for show. “Those sangrias last night really got me.”

“Lightweight.” said Vic. “Cummon. Keep up.” He forced a few steps ahead, then slowed for Felix, sauntering behind.

Felix really hadn’t meant to get drunk last night—but a ten-hour shift stocking boot boxes made it not even a choice, more of an instinct. The evening previous was the start of his two day break after a solid ten-day week of manual labor, so yeah. And it wasn’t all his fault. Vic had come out too and drank almost as much and didn’t stop him. He shouldn’t be surprised at least.

Trying to infuse a little pep into his step and clear away the liquor cobwebs, Felix bounced back to Vic’s side.

“Hey! No worries, man, I’m feeling good. We’re going to kick ass. All good! We’ll pull hella slugs. Not like last time.”

Vic puffed out air. “We ent goin for slugs dis time. Like I said. Lass night, rememba?”

“Oh. Oh yeah right.”

They hit Perimeter Boulevard. The crowds were already bad. Causeway commuters had to inject themselves into the uncompromising band of traffic running either way on the multi-lane road, which encircled the entire island. The big boulevard’s name was a misnomer now though, as several blocks of development had been extended out over sections of the lake, including the AeroHub they were curving towards, to catch a flight out of town.

They crossed one of the biggest intersections in the city, taking a whole five minutes to pick through the fragmented crosswalks. If Felix looked up and to his left right now, over the traffic, straight down the fat line of Meridian Avenue he’d see the Edifice, the city’s original College, the pyramidal high seat of the Academocracy built into the small mountain in the lake-island’s middle, its glassy facets staring back— so he didn’t look. The Wizards who worked and lived there were Heaven’s most elite and learned, the best equipped to make decisions and laws for all, ascended by their peers to positions of power as their level of excellence dictated.

The Perimeter/Meridian/Merit Causeway interchange was more fraught than ever. The roadway was bricked in here too. A menagerie of vehicles: slow-rolling autocarts delivering goods from one part of the city to another, and smaller, splendidly-different solar-magic autos and cabbies that filled all of the space the trucks didn’t, making the actual roadway unwalkable for pedestrians keen to keep both feet.

A heavy sample of Heaven’s denizens clotted the wide sidewalks. Unassuming, bespectacled professionals swept past hand-tatted Causeway kids tribed on corners. Couriers on all manner of one-wheels, zip scooters, and bikes sliced between and through.

Merit Causeway was adjacent to the South Bank, so you got a lot of Zuri too. Early on, right after the Founding, some enterprising Zuri tribesmen had encamped on the island’s southwest crescent, forming a trading camp of their own that became a permanent colony in Heaven’s territory. This unresolved city planning issue remained so until Heaven’s city limit grew to encapsulate the South Bank, also called the Zuri Quarter, and questions began to arise around how much space the indigenous settlement really needed.

Felix scanned for any big clusters of totem outfits—panther capes, squawkodile masks, phoenix feathers—ceremonial garms Zuri youth gangs put on prior to committing political actions, also prime content for the untied calendar days and election cycles. He didn’t dislike Zuri people; he had nothing against them. But with the WSWN and all the rage bubbling around the South Bank, you had to stay alert.

They battled left, north down Perimeter. Above the people and buildings they could see the Aeromobiles lifting off and touching down from their morning’s destination.

Through the churning, Felix had been working on a new problem: he inferred from context they were doing something different on this next jungle journey. Vic must have told him at some point last night, but the space in his mind where the details should be was embarrassing opaque fuzz. Not knowing what they were parachuting out of an Aero to go do was a pinch unnerving. He used his lack of info to try to discover two things at once.

“Hey, so… we’re not not going after Zortell slugs this time because of last time, are we?”

“Nah bruv.”

“Because those cliff ropes can get tangled really easily, and take all day to untwist, and I’m sorry, and I know that now.”

“Ye prolly coulda guessed— Nah, nah bruv. Not you. S’wot I said— slug-huntin s’juss slave work disguised as good slutty Ranger work. Steady buys, low sells, any mook can do it. Dis ting, dis a new wave for us bruv. Dis new ting gonna nab us some real dosh. Stacks bruv— loots. Just keep it hush til we out dere, specially round the AeroHub, bare folk would kill for dis come-up we got.”

“Oh, def,” Felix said, no closer to finding out. Which was actually fine. No matter. He firmly believed that nothing really mattered at all in the world, but this especially. Vic was the licensed Jungle Ranger here, and usually had it under control. He’d shot most of Felix’s suggestions down during the year they’d known each other, which was fair, because Felix knew nothing about hunting that his friend hadn’t taught him. So it really didn’t matter what they were going after or what he thought of it.The less of his brain he had to use, the better. He was just along for the ride, providing moral support, observational humor and was perfectly fine with that.

The AeroHub in lower Heaven lay behind a high fortressed fence, spiked at intervals with control towers, their roofs a-flip with semaphore panels, blazoned in saturated primary paint to cut through the wet season mist. The hubbub of souls funneling into the ticket queues was flattened by the roar of an Aeromobile taking off every minute or so, rotor-winged bulk jumping the height of four stories and forward into the sky as if pulled by a string.

“Yep, s’gonna be good!” Vic yelled, plugging his ears as a set of nearby rotors screamed up to speed.

“S’all gonna go good today! No worries. S’not you! Juss rememba wot I told ye lass night!” When the noise died off, Vic had continued to the end of the block as Felix started to cross the street to get at the end of the AeroHub line. Vic doubled back and made a two-tone sucking sound at Felix, getting him to follow.

“Not there yet— Round dis way a sec mate. Were rentin a guide.”

Vic kept walking like he knew where he was going, Felix followed. Vic started explaining the thought process behind hiring someone else to help them hunt in the jungle. Which until now had just been a thing with the two of them and that had been okay, but whatever.

They kept straight so that the AeroHub barrier was on their left. Across the street the block-and-timber structures that marked lower Heavenite architecture were starting to end, now spersed with thatch huts and yurt tents. Some were splayed open as stores or cantinas. They strolled on the edge of the Zuri Quarter proper now. A few blocks in and the gridded road system would totally disappear into its own circular ditch-and-path system that the inhabitants militantly refused to have paved, an effort of much contention between they and Wizard officials whenever the Quarter flooded, as it often did in rains like these.

“Mebbe if dey built some real houses, nobody would wanna clear em all out.” Vic muttered off-hand. It was something he’d said before. Felix just grunted, as he had no real opinion.

They reached the far corner of the AeroHub, where it shot off the edge of the island on an artifice of concrete piers. On the adjacent block, the space adjacent to the AeroHub overpass had been claimed by a hall-sized red tent.

Felix knew by rumor that Zuri were known to hire themselves out to Rangers and other adventurers, like them, outbound on jungle hunts in this place. Felix had been tagging along on commission hunts since Vic passed the Ranger’s exam at the beginning of the wet season, but they had never come through here before.

“So you’re spending our money on a mercenary?” Felix said, summarizing the last few sentence fragments he had heard. Vic explained more, and Felix spat off a few retorts, knowing Vic had already made up his mind, and he had probably agreed too at some point, so he had no choice but to shut up and go along. He half-listened and responded, a second’s lag behind, with what he hoped were at least half-glib remarks. He let his mind wander back off, trying to let Fervidor just pass him by.

Vic was still talking, but it was the sound of a shouting female that brought him back. The dirty flyer-woman paraded with sign twenty meters ahead, the crowd parting like a school of fish around her.

Her eyes rove around, to the slums and the people surrounding, past the South Bank tents to the glass towards on the skyline, through all the innovation, the walls of the landlords, the ticking clocks, the traffic jams, looking for something else, some lost thread Felix couldn’t find either. He knew that for a short second as their eyes locked, her seeing what he saw, then straight through again.

“Oof. Head down,” Vic said. “flya-lady up ahead. Dis one is Stormtouched for sure.”