The Hot Mess Collective, Vol. 2 Ch 12: The Price of a Story

The microphone had sat on her desk for two days. Cauldron had couriered it over in June in a foam case, a Neumann on a shock mount, her name typed on the packing slip and misspelled. She had recorded eleven episodes into it. The contract lay beside it now, folded back to page nine, and page nine gave Cauldron Media approval over subject matter for the length of the term. Thirty-one months remained on the term. She had read it enough times to know where the line broke.

The meeting had lasted nineteen minutes in a room on the fortieth floor where the glass ran floor to ceiling on two sides. Three of them across the table and a fourth on a screen. The one on the screen did most of the talking and the phrase he used was actionable exposure, and he used it four times. Nobody raised their voice. She had signed in at the desk downstairs on her way up and they had kept her ID in a plastic sleeve until she came back down for it.

The content memo arrived that same afternoon. Court fashion, three segments, a stylist booked already. A blind tasting of synthetic blood, six brands, forty seconds a brand, sponsor read at the top. A listener mailbag on dating across Court lines, which someone had put in the subject header as cross-Court curiosity. She had built four years of episodes out of the opposite of all of it.

Her producer sent four emails in two days. The first asked whether she had reviewed the memo. The second attached a revised recording calendar with her name in the Thursday slots through November. The third came forwarded from legal and had no body text, only the memo again as a PDF. The fourth asked if she was all right. She walked the apartment instead of answering any of them, desk to window to radiator and back, and the board in front of the radiator had begun to give under her heel.

Leo had called her from a stairwell on a Tuesday and she heard the fire door latch behind him before he spoke. He worked nights in receiving. He had gone through the manifests himself and photographed four of them on a phone he then left in a drawer at work, because he thought that was the safer place for it. She had told him his name would stay out of the episode. She had told him it would run in October and that he would be out of the block by then, another city, a lease in somebody else's name. He asked twice whether she was sure and she said yes twice.

The burner went off against the wood of the desk. The message opened and the counter in the corner started down from sixty.

There is a gargoyle on the pharmacy roof across from my window. Two days. It has not moved. They know I talked to you.

Then a second one under the first.

Going dark. Deleting the app. Sorry. Be careful.

The thread wiped itself at zero and left a home screen with an empty square where the icon had been. She read the empty square for a while. Then she went to the closet and pulled the duffel out from under the winter coats and put it on the bed.

***

The boots first. She had bought them off a stall on Fenner Street the year she still had a day job, and they had been resoled twice by a cobbler on the fourth level who took cash and never asked what she needed quiet soles for. Leather trousers gone soft at the knee. A grey tunic. A hooded vest that fastened flat and did not creak when she raised her arms. She left her rings in the dish by the door, took the burner and a velvet pouch from the back of the fridge, and pulled the door shut without turning on a light.

She went down. Past the levels where the corridors still had numbers stenciled at the junctions, past the last transit stop, until the handrails ended and the stairs were whatever the last tenants had poured. The air came up damp and stayed damp. On the ninth landing someone had painted PROTECTION over a doorway and listed three monthly rates in a column beneath it, and a fourth line under those offering a discount for cash.

On the eleventh level a goblin ran a counter under a rolled steel shutter and sold nothing she could see, and three men stood outside it not talking. Past a junction where the ceiling dripped into a bucket nobody had emptied, a woman sold paper cups of something hot off a crate. She had taped a sign to the crate that read NO CREDIT, NO EXCEPTIONS, NOT EVEN YOU. Two Fae worked the mouth of an alley off Ninth out of a picnic cooler, and one of them tracked Nori the whole length of the alley and said nothing. Nobody looked at her twice down there. The ones who looked at all looked at her boots first.

Leo had given her two addresses. The first was a warehouse off Karker's Drift that the manifests called a logistics hub. She did not walk up to it. She crossed the block on the roofs twice, once north and once east, counting doors and vents and the one third-floor window that had not been painted over. A dog barked four buildings down and kept barking for eleven minutes.

The tavern on Grell Row had no name over the door. A card taped inside the glass read CASH ONLY, and under it, smaller, NO COURT BUSINESS. The room held maybe fourteen people and nobody at the tables talked loudly enough to be heard from the bar, which was the whole point of the place. Two brokers she recognized from a story three years back sat against the rear wall and did not acknowledge her. Ticker had the second stool from the corner, the same as ever, a gnome whose tab had been open longer than she had lived in the Undercity.

She put the pouch on the bar next to his hand. Three vials, O-negative, 1972. He uncorked one and held it under his nose and did not drink it.

"A good year for that," Ticker said. "What are you buying."

"The warehouse on Karker's Drift. The bay door is double-warded. Who holds the lease."

He pushed the cork back in. "Vital Assets Management. A goblin called Grinner signs for them and takes the deliveries. He does not own anything. He carries it for people who do not sign."

"What are the assets."

"They walk in on their feet," he said. "They come out in the cold trucks."

She waited. Ticker turned the vial once in his fingers and looked at the bar top instead of at her.

"Do not sit on the west side," he said. "The west side is where the stone ones sit."

Grinner came out of a card room on Bell at half past one. He stood a head above the doorway and walked down the middle of the street, and the street moved for him. She stayed on the roofs, two buildings back. He stopped at a fryer cart and ate out of a paper cone while he walked and dropped the cone in the gutter outside a laundry. He turned onto Karker's Drift and unlocked a steel side door set into brick that had no ground-floor windows at all.

She took the roof opposite, east side, behind a vent housing. Tar paper still soft from the day, a dead pigeon at the parapet, a folding chair somebody had left out and broken. The warehouse windows were painted from the inside and the paint had run in the corners. When the streetlight caught the bay door at an angle the wards came up green over the metal and then went again.

A window down the block went on and went off. Behind her a generator cycled every eleven minutes and she counted six cycles. Her legs went to sleep and she shifted onto her heels, and the tar paper took her weight without a sound. Once, a shape crossed the roofline four buildings west, and she went flat and stayed flat for six minutes until it was gone. Nothing came down the street in an hour and a quarter but a bicycle.

The truck came at 3:40. The refrigeration unit ran the entire time it was backing in and kept running after the engine cut. VITAL ASSETS MANAGEMENT in vinyl on the door, a DOT number underneath, the plate mounted crooked over the bumper. The bay door went up on a chain drum that screamed at the halfway point. Grinner came out first. Two more came out behind him and took the corners of the bay and stood there.

The lift gate came down and eleven people came off it in grey jumpsuits. They came slowly. Two of them were human and she did not know what the others were, and the manifests had not said either. One had to be turned by the shoulder toward the door and then went on his own. Grinner put his hand flat on a man's back and left it there for three steps.

She shot forty-one frames. The vinyl lettering and the DOT number and the crooked plate. Grinner three-quarters toward her under the bay light, his hand on the man's back, the grain eating the left half of his face. A wide frame of the line going into the dark of the bay. The light was bad and the phone was worse and she took eleven more, and then the door came down and the street was empty.

Dawn was coming up grey through the haze when she got her key in the lock. The apartment smelled like nothing at all after eight hours down there. She pulled the vest off over her head and dropped it on a chair and the damp came off it into the room. Rhys sat on the sofa. A mug stood on the table in front of them and a spoon lay on a folded napkin beside it. No lamp was on anywhere.

They had argued in the kitchen before she left. Rhys had said don't, and then said it a second way, and then a third. She had put her boots on while they were still talking. Their head came up when the door shut.

"You went."

"I went." The phone was already in her hand. "And I got it."

She held the screen out. Rhys did not take it. They sat back and put both hands flat on their knees and looked at her instead of at the picture.

"That is a face and an address and a plate," Nori said. "Legal cannot send a letter to a plate."

"How many of them were down there."

"Three."

"And how many of you."

"It was a roof across a street," Nori said. "I have been on that roof before. I was never on the ground and never inside. Ticker told me where the stone ones sit and I sat on the other side of the block from it."

"You checked the exits." Rhys stood up. "That is not the same thing as not going. You told me you were making a call. I have been sitting here since ten."

"They took the show." Nori set the phone face down on the table. "Page nine. Thirty-one months. I can do six brands of synthetic blood for thirty-one months, or I can put something in front of them they cannot say no to on paper."

"You talk to two hundred and forty thousand people at once," Rhys said. "That is the thing you have and nobody else in this city has it. You spent tonight lying on tar paper."

"It is not a thing I have if the show does not exist."

"The show exists. You would have to say something else on it for a while."

"Fae hemlines."

"For a while," Rhys said.

"Leo deleted the app tonight." Nori stayed standing. "There is a gargoyle on the pharmacy roof across from his window and it has not moved in two days and he has been watching it from his kitchen. I told him October. I told him he would be in another city by then."

Rhys looked at the phone lying face down. "Does he know you went down there."

"No."

"Would he want you to."

"He wants to stop being watched," Nori said. "I can't do that from a booth."

"What do you want me to do with it," Rhys said. "You are holding out a photograph. I cut your show. I don't cut warehouses."

"I want you to look at it."

"I want to know what happens the second time. There is going to be a second time. You have a second address and you have already worked out when you are going."

Nori did not answer that.

"Or you liked it," Rhys said. "You came through the door holding the phone out. You have not taken your boots off."

Nori looked down. The boots were still on. The floor under her had gone dark in two places where the damp came off her, and she stood in it and said nothing, and the refrigerator started up in the kitchen.

Rhys picked up the mug and set it down again without drinking. "I have cut every episode you have made in four years," they said. "I can't sit in this room while you plan the next one of these."

"Rhys."

"Two weeks," they said. "Maybe longer than that. I don't know yet."

They took their jacket off the hook by the door and stood a moment holding it before they put it on. The latch went over softly. She heard them on all four flights and then the street door.

The sun cleared the building opposite and cut across the floor, and the dust turned in it. Nori sat down where Rhys had been sitting. She turned the phone over and went through the frames one at a time, forty-one of them and then the other eleven, and stopped on the wide one, the line of grey jumpsuits going into the dark of the bay. She plugged the phone in at the wall. A skin had formed across the tea in Rhys's mug, and she carried it to the sink and poured it out and left it upside down in the rack.

***

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