City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(79)

How she smiled when she said that.

*

In the morning, thinks Shara. Nearly sixteen years ago. …

In those sixteen years, Shara has taken more cases and done more work than nearly any operative in the world, let alone on the Continent. But though Shara Komayd was once a vigorous patriot, her fervor leached out of her with each death and each betrayal, until her passion to feed Saypur shrank to a passion to merely protect Saypur, which then shrank further into the mere longing to see her home country once more before she dies: a prospect she sometimes thinks very unlikely.

Repetition, conditioning, fervor, and faith, she muses as she sips tea in the alleyway. All come to so little. Perhaps this is what it’s like to lose one’s religion.

And, more, she has begun to question whether she is really in exile. She wonders: as disastrous as it was, could the National Party scandal still be on everyone’s minds? Is that really why she is being kept away? She wishes she had been smart enough to establish a few connections to Parliament while she was still in Saypur. (Though it’s true, she remembers, that all her experiences with the Divine make her about as dangerous and illicit as the Unmentionable Warehouse itself. There are many reasons, it feels, why her homeland could reject her.)

“Ambassador Thivani?”

She looks over her shoulder. Pitry stands at the mouth of the alley with the car parked just beyond; she must have been so lost in her memories that she didn’t even hear him arrive. “Pitry? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you working on Wiclov’s finances?”

“Message from Sigrud,” he says. “Mrs. Torskeny’s been moved. He says Wiclov and one other man have escorted her from her home. He’s given me an address, not much more.”

There is a clanking flurry as Shara packs all of her materials. She walks down the alley, grabs the silver coin, and jumps in the backseat.

They’ve already driven a quarter of a mile before she notices the coin has lost some of its luster. She holds it up to the windows to catch some light.

Her eyes open in surprise. Then she smiles.

The coin is no longer silver at all: it has been completely transmuted into lead.

*

Shara and Pitry enter a quarter of Bulikov decimated by the Blink: she watches, fascinated, as truncated buildings and tapering streets pass by. As they drive down one block, a laundry on one corner stretches, twists, and contorts itself until it is half of a bank on the next corner. One set of quaint home fronts feature unusually large and warped front doors that would not, one would imagine, have ever been fashioned with humans in mind. They must have simply appeared overnight, thinks Shara.

“Any progress with Wiclov’s history?” she asks.

“We think so,” says Pitry. “You were right about the loomworks. He is the confirmed owner of three of them in eastern Bulikov. But we noticed that at the same time Wiclov started buying the loomworks, he also started purchasing materials from a Saypuri company: Vidashi Incorporated.”

“Vidashi …” The name is only vaguely familiar to her. “Wait. … The ore refinery?”

“Yep,” says Pitry. He wheels the car around a winding curve. “It seems Wiclov has been buying very small increments of steel from them. Every month, like clockwork. Very arbitrary amounts, too—within one thousand fifteen hundred pounds and one thousand nine hundred pounds every time. We’re not sure wh—”

Shara sits forward. “It’s the weight check,” she blurts.

“What?”

“The weight check! The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has automatic background checks on purchasers of large quantities of materials! Oil, wood, stone, metal … We want to know who we’re selling to, if they buy large enough amounts. And for steel, the weight check amount must be—”

“Two thousand pounds,” realizes Pitry. “So the Ministry has never checked on him.”

The drugged boy in the jail cell confessed that they’d gone after Vohannes for his “metal.” Which leads Shara to wonder—why try to kidnap Vohannes if you’re already purchasing steel through legitimate means?

Unless I spooked them, she thinks. I wanted to stir up the hornets’ nest, didn’t I? They must not have acquired enough steel for whatever it is that they’re making. … So when Pangyui was killed, and a Ministry operative arrived, they got nervous, and desperate.

She stares out the window, her mind racing. What could they possibly be building? What use could someone have for so much steel?

She keeps thinking on it until she sees something peeking over the rooftops at her: a huge, black tower, a ten-story stripe of ebony against the gray night sky.

Her heart twitches.

Oh, no, thinks Shara. They can’t be taking her there. Not there …

She has not been to see this place yet. It seems unreal to believe it still exists.

Of all the things the Kaj threw down, why did he leave that still standing?

*

Pitry parks in an alley. The darkness in an old doorway trembles; Sigrud emerges from the shadows and paces across the street.

“Please do not tell me they went in there,” says Shara as she climbs out.

“Into where?” asks Sigrud.

“The bell tower.”

Sigrud stops, bemused. “Why do you ask?”

Shara sighs and readjusts her glasses. “Show me,” she says.