Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(9)

He died in a mining accident with four other Lani men. He was trying to reach two apprentices who had been trapped by a rockfall, but the new passage they opened released a pocket of gas. There was an explosion. It took a week to get to the bodies after the shaft collapsed, and I was not allowed to see him. His remains were burned, as is our custom, and the ash strewn over the river, save for one fragment of bone that was interred in the hard, dusty grounds of the temple.

Two years to the day.

I have been alone ever since. I believe the two apprentices were found unharmed.

Tanish came with me to the grave, eyeing me sidelong and careful not to make noise. Partly he was trying to show respect, but it was also the place that left him subdued. He had seen enough death for one day. I would have told him to leave me to my thoughts, but a family of hippos had taken over the riverbank below the temple, and a Lani woman had been killed by one of them when she went to draw water only a couple of weeks before. I didn’t want him wandering alone, so I let him hover awkwardly at my back as I found the marker and knelt down, sitting on my heels.

Someone had placed crimson tsuli flowers on the grave, bound with gold cord. They were fresh and lustrous, hothouse grown at this time of year. Expensive.

Vestris.

It had to be. I felt a quickening of my pulse as I sensed my sister’s presence, and my eyes flashed hungrily around the graveyard as if she might still be there. But she was gone, and my disappointment felt suddenly shameful. Deflated, I adjusted the flowers and focused on the stone marker, feeling young and alone.

Family is family.

Except when it’s gone.

I said nothing, feeling the coin I wore on a thong around my neck.

All steeplejacks wore something that connected them to their past. It was a claim to a version of yourself that wasn’t about the work. Berrit’s had been his sun-disk pendant. Mine was an old copper penny Papa gave me. It had been misstamped and bore the last king’s head on both sides. The Seventh Street boys thought I kept it for luck, because I could flip the coin and always guess correctly what would come up, but I didn’t. I kept it because Papa gave it to me and because when he did, he said, “Because it’s rare. Like you, Ang. One of a kind.”

He thought I was special. I wasn’t, but he believed otherwise, and that almost made it true.

Now I turned the coin over and over in my fingers, and the face embossed on its twin sides became his in my mind so that I pressed it to my lips and closed my eyes like a little kid who thought that wishing might bring him back.

I had never lived in Rahvey’s house, but those refuse-blown streets with the sour smell of goats and the stagnant reed beds by the river were all too familiar. Whenever I went back to the Drowning now, all I found was what was gone, the spaces Papa had left behind him. No wonder I hated the place. It was a land of ghosts, of absences.

I had learned long ago not to cry, no matter the hurt in your hands or your heart. Tears in the city gangs meant fear and weakness, and they were punished without mercy. I knew that, and I knew that after this morning, Tanish needed me to be strong.

But this was hard.

Harder than I had expected. It had been, after all, two years. The grief at first, coupled as it was with shock and horror, had been almost unbearable, but over the subsequent weeks and months, it lessened. In my childish imagination, I figured it would continue to fade, like a distant ship sailing beyond the reach of vision until it disappeared entirely. But it hadn’t, and I saw now, kneeling on the sandy dirt and staring at the roughly carved stone that bore his name, that it never would. I would always be straining to see him, reaching for him, and he would never be there. I would carry his absence like a hole in my heart forever.

I remembered Berrit, a boy I had not known, who died on Papa’s anniversary, and a single tear slid down my nose and fell onto the dusty earth as if I were watering a tiny seedling. I wiped the trace away before turning to Tanish, who was gazing about him, looking glum and a little bored. He had not seen.

I laid a fistful of wild kalla lilies on the grave next to Vestris’s tsuli flowers and set my face to meet the world, but as I half turned to Tanish, someone called.

“Anglet!”

I recognized the girl as one of those who did errands for Florihn, the midwife. “What?” I called back, though I knew what was coming.

“It’s started!” cried the girl.

*

I FOLLOWED HER TO Rahvey’s house, where Sinchon was sitting on the porch, scowling. As I approached, a roar of agony came from inside, a woman’s voice—though one so pressed to the limits of human endurance that I heard no sign of my sister in it. I didn’t speak to Sinchon, but yanked the door open and stepped inside.

It was even hotter than it had been earlier, and Florihn, crouching between my sister’s legs, shot me an irritated look when I entered, as she had the first time. At the far end of the bed, Rahvey’s red, glistening face was a rictus of pain.

As I set my things down, she began to scream again, an unearthly, animal sound like the weancats that prowled the edge of the Drowning when prey in the hinterlands was scarce. I winced, the hair on the back of my neck prickling, but Florihn just grinned.

“That’s right,” she said to Rahvey. “You cry it out.”

As soon as the contraction passed, I said, “I thought there would be no baby today.”

From her place between Rahvey’s legs, Florihn scowled at me, then refocused on Rahvey and said simply, “Now.”