The Chain of Pursuit

[Altamira]

OoC: This fic has been around a year in the making, and is still not done--and now it's hardly even recognizable from its previous versions, although the outcome shall be the same. A few people have read this version or a past version already, but I wanted to post it here now for anyone that is interested. Again, this fic is not finished, but comments are welcome at any time.

Timeline-wise, this is the most recent Cadenza-related piece to date, and will be until its completion.

(To fully understand this, I recommend at least reading "Bittersweet", "Her Rebellion", and Cadenza's bio in her old and new profiles, all of which can be found through my character thread. If you want to catch all the little references though, then reading any other Cadenza material will also help. ;])

IC:

The Chain of Pursuit

Cadenza had always found it ironic that the focus of most of Rubato’s most thrilling stories spent most of her time alone, strumming a guitar in her own private library in an entirely different dimension. Why the library, some asked (not fazed in the least about the different dimension aspect)? Honestly—it was because it was the only one of her rooms that wasn’t empty enough to make one feel lonely. But she also asserted that it had great acoustics.

Cadenza never really understood how the stories got started, but she amounted it to three things: for starters, there was so much crime in Rubato that it no longer was worth reporting in the newspapers. A wallet that didn’t get stolen would be more newsworthy. So the journalists needed something to fill their pages with. Gossip provided a nice, juicy something. Secondly, if you had a pretty face (and Cadenza had, in recent years, finally come to both appreciate and be bewildered by the effects of this), then you would be talked about around town, if only by the male population at first (a jealous female population was always soon to follow.) And lastly—Rubato possessed a king so concerned with being popular (after an all-too-unpopular war in the past where the city of Blancwood was pitted against the nation of Cernilia) that he’d latch onto any new trend and make it popular amongst the very small, but influential upper class (namely, Blancwood) just to gain any favor he could. So engrossed was he by this gossip and fashionableness of the dangerous, beautiful woman, in fact, that he ordered the pre-determined death penalty sentence just awaiting the cuffs to be clamped around Cadenza’s wrists (guilty before proved innocent, it went) to be negotiated and put under consideration until he devised a more fitting punishment that wouldn’t leave the masses (or he himself) without their icon.

Today was the day that he finally came to this controversial decision. And rather than sending Tracey de Carlo down with her crack-team of broad-shouldered, club-wielding ogres recently recruited from the Dome (they had on good word that ogres couldn’t handle the job, from some frightened vampire lord’s family mourning the recent passing of a fellow who had trusted said job to them), he arranged a formal appointment with the gypsy to discuss a compromise. Vaguely surprised, but if only out of sheer curiosity, keenly interested, the woman decided to make the trek to Blancwood Palace to oblige His Majesty’s request.

Blancwood was, as always, the only respectable and even nice city in Rubato. It was the capital and the hub of trade, the center of culture and education, and the only place ambassadors were invited to; it was like the one nice room you had time to tidy up before the guests arrived. Just…don’t step beyond the doorway—or you might lose a foot. For years, Cadenza had always thought it a wonder that the rest of the country didn’t just ransack Blancwood all at once. She figured it had something to do with the fact that the only reason there were things to steal was because Blancwood made or imported them. Without the city, the Rubatoians were more or less left with the sand and dirt.

An envelope addressed to one Anton Dionne of Sereia was practically burning a whole in the gypsy’s pocket as she walked, reminding her every second that she still had unfinished, personal business elsewhere in the country, but through sheer force of self-control, and perhaps a touch of amusement at seeing how easily the king could be manipulated, she put other matters on hold. There was always time later to skewer Dionne in the face, she thought. When the blacksmith gave her the finished gunblade she had requested seemed an ideal time.

When Cadenza finally reached the gates of the palace, she came to realize that she had never actually seen the place before. Sure, it was on the back of the zecca bills she had so painstakingly forged in the past, but she had never seen the real deal in all its three-dimensional glory. And standing now, a mere couple of meters away from the front courtyard, one thing became as clear as day to her—the palace was bloody immense.

The center building alone had to take up a fourth of the city, she guessed; and from it, wings in every direction sprawled out like arteries from a heart; a heart clogged with a cholesterol of people and courtiers and servants, and weaselly-faced advisers scurrying around with messages and stacks of papers. An army of limestone statues lined the courtyard that extended from the great, column-flanked front stairway, depicting past kings and other historical figures in sun-baked white. While looking at these statues, Cadenza noticed that the head of the last king—King Francis, who had lost the war to the Cernilian emperor, and lost most of Rubato’s prosperous land (and his people’s favor) in the process—had been broken off and shattered into sad little pieces by some hateful citizen, or mob of hateful citizens. If there had been any questions about why the current king wanted to be popular so badly, then this answered them. No one ever did learn how King Francis had died.

After a surprisingly short wait, the gypsy was shown through the courtyard into the palace by a bold courtier by the name of Gustavo, who tried desperately to distinguish himself amongst his fellow courtiers by displaying a touch of style, but who ultimately failed because of the two distinct impressions one got when they looked upon his flamboyant, puffy-sleeved imitation of a flamenco guitarist’s shirt; firstly, from the way he moved and whistled, it was embarrassingly apparent that there wasn’t anything particularly musical at all about him; and secondly, there was a certain quality about him that made him look less like a guitarist in that shirt, and more like one of those waiters dressed as pirates at the greasy seafood restaurants in Sereia. It wasn’t his fault, really—it was just the way he looked—the five o’ clock shadow, and the cologne stains all over his clothing that made it seem like he bathed in the stuff and had sworn off soap for life. You had to give him points for trying.

Gustavo led Cadenza through a series of winding halls that seemed to serve no other purpose other than to make those with appointments have to wait longer to see the king, until they finally came to a central hall Cadenza could have sworn they passed at least four times. The palace halls were all lined with flowering cacti and various pieces of modern art that couldn’t be distinguished from one another; so, for all she knew, they could have started in the central hall.

Awaiting them at the center of the central hall was Georgio Voss, leader of the Diet that put the “constitutional” in Rubato’s “constitutional monarchy”. The feeble old man, as smart as he looked with his sharp eyes and keen face, now seemed too weathered and exhausted by the trials of life to try and be any more than the king’s errand boy. He dealt (albeit poorly) with the famine and the poverty (the sort of things that acknowledging as one’s fault might make one unpopular), while the king focused on…well, things like this. Public relations. The shriveled husk of a once-great political leader greeted Cadenza with a hesitant smile and a nod before leading her in to see the king.

At his signal, two great, gilded doors were swung open, and in a booming voice that hinted at his old, outspoken self, he intoned, “King Ferdinand Leon Olmo II, I present to you, Signora Cadenza Vega Madrigal-Valentia of Santa Mariela.”

“I…never realized my name was that long.”

“Por favor, Signora Valentia, have a seat.”

“Right.”

Voss pulled out a red velvet-cushioned chair for the gypsy to sit on. Despite being announced in a direct address to the king, Cadenza soon saw that the king was, in fact, not there.

When asked, the politician explained this with a shrug of his rounded shoulders. “The king is a busy man,” he offered, shrugging again.

No one liked to sit in silence with a Madrigal—it was a little like dangling over a shark tank. You never knew when they would bite. As the old man stood in the doorway, trying desperately not to lock eyes with the criminal, the only noise that broke the deafening quiet was the occasional squawk of the king’s pet macaw.

Voss coughed, and straightened his hat. His gaze suggested there was something very interesting about the bloated cactus in the corner.

Much to his relief, King Olmo entered the room soon after and dismissed the withered sign of democracy. Voss exited in his tired, shuffling way, and shut the door to the now-noisy central hall behind him. Hammers clanged in the distance.

The monarch seated himself in his shimmering throne, before a desk covered in a sea of unread papers and stacks of files, and stared hard at Cadenza, seemingly oblivious to the sounds outside. He stared for a long time.

“Nossa senhora,” he exclaimed after a while (it was the Portuguese equivalent of shouting out “My God!”, and seemed to have more effect to a Rubatoian when said in the native language.) There was no follow-up explanation to this utterance, but he would later write that the gypsy’s eyes were blue depths into which he could have stared forever. Smiling, he spread his hands in a way that reflected the very Italian feel to northern Rubato, and gestured heavily as he began to speak.

“We’d…like to offer you a deal,” he said. This was rather straightforward, but from what he knew of the Madrigals, he figured he might as well not waste time beating around the bush.

“This…‘we’ being the ‘royal we’?” Cadenza asked, arching an eyebrow. It wasn’t something you ran across much in Santa Mariela, so you always had to check with these noble types. You could never be too sure.

“No,” Olmo said, “ah, no…this ‘we’ being the Head of the Police Department, Captain Moreno, and myself. It’s something we feel would be in everyone’s best interest.”

Cadenza said nothing, but her expression could be clearly read as “go on”.

“I believe you’re well aware of the fact that the current sentence laid out to you by the justice system is the death penalty—a very harsh punishment for a young lady, in my eyes. Captain Moreno and I have reviewed your history, taking a particularly close look at your years before turning to crime, and we were surprised to see all the potential you had for being a productive and positive member of society. You were a hard-working girl, and a model student, and you associated with upstanding members of our society like that soldier you married. But as soon as your father was arrested and put—”

“—Descupa, but we both know my history, I think, Your Majesty.”

The king initially felt a bit slighted by the interruption, but after a thoughtful moment, nodded and went on. “Yes…yes, you’re right. No need to dwell on details. The point is—you were on your way to a successful and respectable life. But after these…unfortunate circumstances arose, you were stuck on a road you could not veer away from ever again. Even if you ceased your criminal activities, you would still be arrested for those from the past—there was no stopping once you had started. Captain Moreno and I have thought of a way to change that.”

“Uh…huh.”

“To steer you away from this life, from which nothing good has come, we want to offer you a chance—a fresh start. Your past crimes? Swept under the rug. The police? Off your back. And, this might be what speaks to you the most, Signora Valentia, so listen close—you remember your dear old father, Galliard Madrigal, sitting there counting his last days on death row on la Isla do Noir? He will be released; free of all charges.”

They always said you never got something for nothing. Cadenza knew this all too well. “What’s…the catch?” she asked, knowing even as she said it that she was playing right into Olmo’s plan.

“The catch?” Olmo laughed. “Oh, hardly anything at all, Signora. Just a favor for the police. They’d like you to, in exchange for this great generosity and forgiveness, refrain from committing any further crimes. Any further crimes anywhere.”

This, Olmo noticed, seemed to strike a chord--and not the one he had hoped. Suddenly, the curious cat was gone, and replaced with a sleek, desert panther. A sort of silent, contained fury burned in those blue depths he had admired.

“This life, you know, that you say nothing good has come from—did you know in this life, I saved your life once? …Sort of.”

“…Sort of?” Olmo gulped. Something about the tone of that sentence made him want to check to make sure that he was, indeed, still alive. He laughed uncomfortably. “I’m still here, so obviously you were successful, right? Well…perhaps I was hasty earlier, and may I say that I truly appreciate your—”

“—I say sort of because the guy lost interest in killing you. And I gave up on defending you—it wasn’t worth it. I just happened to piss him off so much that he focused on beating me up instead.”

The King looked considerably deflated. “Oh. Well…thank you all the same.” He squirmed in his throne, which suddenly felt far less comfortable than it had before. “I see that, perhaps, these terms are not to your liking…?”

“Have you ever lived outside of Blancwood, Your Majesty?”

“No, in fact I grew up here as a boy, but I can’t say I see the rev--”

“—it’s rough, Your Highness. Things can’t be settled civilly. People walk into your house and steal things, or shoot your sister, or blackmail you until you’ve got nothing left to your name but your socks. It’s a nasty place, Your Majesty. That’s the Rubato I live in.”

Olmo didn’t seem to follow; it was a little like trying to explain the concept of sight to a blind man. “And in this Rubato, you’re saying that it’s necessary to commit crime?” the king asked, incredulous.

“In this Rubato, it’s necessary to do more than that. You’ve got to develop skills to defend yourself. You’ve got to fend off everyone—the police and the civilians.”

This was how you lied, Cadenza thought, mind racing from one slick word to another. You just took an idea and ran with it—and all the better if the person you were lying to had no way to prove it was wrong.

…Only, sadly in this case, she realized that what she was saying wasn’t wrong. Survival was what the crime came down to for many people. And if it hadn’t been for the Dome, then it may have eventually become the same for her.

“For example,” she continued, “lately, I’ve been working on a new skill to do just this with. You’re aware of my gypsy magic? Well, this is a new way to send force—to send kinetic energy—through shadows. Using this, I could just tap the armrest here…” and Cadenza drummed lightly on the crimson padding to illustrate, “..and by touching the shadows there, I could poke out your eye, by sending the force through the shadows on your eyeball. It would be as if had I just jammed my thumb into your eye—only from a comfortable distance here, where I don’t need to avoid any flailing, defensive arms, or gnashing teeth that could bite my arm before I got the chance. All I have to do is see what I want to touch or harm—and use the shadows near me to do so.”

Olmo had found himself reaching breathlessly up to reassure the well-being of his eye during this demonstration. He now sat, somewhat tensely in his chair, unsure of how to continue. “You’re saying this sort of….thing is necessary here?” he finally managed to ask. “You need that kind of power?”

“You’ve met the ogres in the police’s employ, haven’t you?”

The king nodded in dawning comprehension. His mouth felt as dry as a bone in the Pé del Fuego Desert; he needed a drink. As he poured himself out a glass of water from a carafe on a side table, he thought what he really needed was to look away from this woman who brought every ugly truth about his kingdom right to the suffocating proximity of his very own desk.

As he rose the cup to his lips to drink, he felt a sudden pressure on his shoulder, tensed up, and dropped the glass. It shattered into so many shards of fine Gardenian crystal.

“W-what?” he spluttered, whirling around with a manic whiteness to his eyes.

“That was your bird, Your Majesty.”

Olmo slowly panned his eyes over his cluttered desk to his right shoulder; and sitting there, absent-mindedly tugging at a loose burnt-orange thread on the king’s royal robes was his parrot, Columbus. The bird, feeling the king’s gaze on his feathery red head, turned two glassy little black eyes to look up from his work, and met a glare that could have fried the animal into a small, steaming twelve-piece dinner for a family of mice. Realizing he was about two seconds away from the palace kitchen, Columbus let out a squawk, and departed for the relative safety of the prickly, fat cactus in the corner.

Olmo ventured into the terrifying depths of the awkward silence, determined to come back alive. “You will, ah…forgive my feathered friend,” he said, plucking the errant thread from his robe as if he were disposing of a dissenter from one of his public speeches.

“Of course, Your Eminence.”

Having found a rope out of the chasm that seemed safe enough, he went on. “Do you…like birds?” he asked, eyeing the peacock feathers he had just noticed in her hair.

More than ever before after that little incident, Cadenza thought, in the privacy of her mind, where one could be as brusque as they wanted with kings. But aloud, she said, “They’re smart creatures, Sire, but shouldn’t we return to the matter at hand…?”

Not exactly what she wanted to say, but anytime you could indirectly make a king like Olmo look stupid was good enough for her.

The monarch relapsed back into the comfort of hand gestures as his mind struggled for words. “Ah…ah…yes, we should, Signora, thank you. We were, ah, discussing the alleged necessity of these crimes you commit, correct?”

“Correct, Your Majesty.”

“Every single one of them? For your defense?”

“Si.”

“Even the counterfeiting?”

“I had to pay off someone who was threatening me with bodily harm if I did not have their money. Many someones.”

For a second time, Olmo found himself squirming about in his chair. Beautiful women in his country being beaten to the point where they had to commit crime? That wouldn’t sound so good in the history books. His secretaries would have to put quite the spin on that. Maybe they could say the women had been poisoning small children or something.

He spread his hands, but finding themselves splayed before a panther, they retreated back to his face and fiddled with the curled end of a black mustache. “I see,” he said emptily. “Is there, perhaps, some manner of compromise we could reach then? No killing on Sundays, or…?”

Cadenza blinked, and found herself glancing at the spilled water on the desk for a reddish tinge of brandy—was she just being given permission to kill on six out of the seven days of the week? “No killing on Sundays?” she repeated.

“Well, ah, er…I don’t mean that would literally be one of the terms, but…what can we do? You have to give the country something in exchange for all of this.”

The gypsy looked blankly at Olmo. Was he really letting her set her own terms? Could anyone be this idiotic and still function?

“Ah! An idea has struck me—would you, Signora Valentia, consider the idea of having a life coach? Someone to guide you back onto the right path—and slowly, you will not feel the need to commit crimes at all. And to ensure this change, we will give you more-than-adequate lodgings here in Blancwood, so that you will need not venture into temptation in these rough parts of which you spoke. Would that be…satisfactory?”

“I…eh…I suppose it—”

“--Wonderful! We can have you living right by the palace, so that we may keep tabs on your progress easily. I’ll have a word with Voss, and he’ll be able to show you to your lodgings by, say…Lunes? The life coach should be able to see you shortly after.”

Cadenza was led out into the hall before she could get in another word.

She stood by the door, lips moving, replaying back the conversation and trying to find out just when exactly the tables had so abruptly turned. He was asking her about birds just a second ago, desperate for anything to break the tense silence—and now she was standing on the other side of the door, with an appointment with a life coach three days later. What the hell had just happened?

Too wrapped up in this line of thought was she that she was oblivious to the absence of the workmen she had heard in the hall earlier; gone were the hammers, and the wrenches, and the beams of wood, replaced by a suspiciously peaceful, dubiously ordinary hallway.

Cadenza took a small step forward into this hall, and her eyes were drawn upward, to a bright light affixed to a track that ran the length of the masonry ceiling. I…can’t say I recall that being there before, she thought. She took another step out, under the beginning of the track, and the light slid deliberately down from where it had hung dormant before to cast its glow like a giant spotlight on her head.

Hm. All right, let’s see here…

The gypsy took a tentative step to the side, and, as expected, the lamp-head swiveled to keep her in its circle—to keep her in the light. Someone had obviously done their homework here, she thought—but it was last month’s homework that was way past due, because if this was a test of her ability to drop into shadow, then they were still under the outdated impression that she needed there to be shadows already present for her to drop into beforehand.

So they had heard of her skills; that much was evident. But why the lights? There wasn’t any reason for her to have to drop into the shadows now; it wasn’t like she was being chased by buzz saws and giant boulders. Or, was… No. Don’t think “or am I?” Just don’t.

Cadenza turned to look behind her.

An ordinary white stone wall stared back at her. There were no secret trap doors or hatches for a boulder to come rumbling down anywhere in sight. She was fine—

--until a white burst flashed before her as she took a step forward. She blinked, and raised her hands up to rub her eyes. When her hands were about halfway to her face, as if she had just crossed unknowingly through an infrared sensor, the white burst returned.

It was a flamethrower.

Having just narrowly avoided having her hands welded onto the insides of her fingerless gloves, Cadenza dropped out of sight into a slim, circular silhouette on the ground, bordered by the intense glow of the spotlight. She glided along the floor, avoiding an honest-to-the-gods buzz saw that reared up from between two tiles in the floor, several trap doors down to the abysmal darkness below the palace foundation, and at least sixteen other hidden flamethrowers set off by the slightest hint of motion. When she finally had run the gauntlet and reached the end of the hall, Voss’ hunched figure shuffled in from around the corner, and gave her a broad smile.

“So what they say of your skills is true,” he whispered conspiratorially.

Something about a sudden traumatic experience seems to render one unable to speak in anything but questions. Cadenza proved this theory true now.

“What was that?” she gasped, ignoring the man’s wide-eyed stare of awe. “Has that always been there? It couldn’t have been, could it?”

Voss didn’t answer any of these inquiries; he merely removed his hat, and bowed in an almost pious way as if he had just been sent the solution to all his life’s troubles by the divine grace of God. Someone—someone holds power that can make Olmo tremble in his boots! he cried out in his mind. He could feel years of passionate, democratic ambition returning to him in a surge that made his old body quiver. This land shall have democracy yet—even if we have to scare the king into giving up the crown!

Cadenza glanced down at the short, grayed, turtle-like man, with a proud tear of pure, powerful emotion rolling down his cheek, and brushed past him towards the network of halls before she could be roped into sharing whatever this touching moment was with him.

Voss stood, holding his hat, staring after her in the overwhelming catharsis of twenty long years of suppressed frustrations and dreams.

When Cadenza had finally navigated her way through the palace and stepped back out through the great doors into the sunlight, something hit her. Not a thought, or a realization—something had literally hit her. It was red, and freckled, and to anyone on the outside watching, it looked as if that something had crushed her into tiny particles of sand underneath its cloaked weight.

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Cadenza reverted back from the shadows on the palace steps, and, pausing to catch her breath, gaped at the hulk of a woman that had just tried to reduce her to a stain on the sandy white stones.

When she had seen the red hair, this was not exactly who she had been expecting.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” she asked, moving back warily to accommodate the girth of the woman’s backside on the now very narrow-seeming stairs. The freckled mammoth slowly pulled herself up, struggling against the considerable forces of gravity as she strained to do so.

“Your parole officer,” she wheezed, in a much weaker voice than appearances suggested. “King Olmo wants me to make sure you don’t leave the city before Lunes.”

“Yeah? Well, King Olmo is a---“

“--Yes?” the large woman asked politely, pulling a pen and notepad out of a pocket lost somewhere in her bulk, “What would you like the King to know you think of him as?”

Cadenza stared at the pen, ready and waiting to write, and stumbled for words. “A…wonderful and benevolent ruler, of course,” she said aloud.

And in her mind, she added, And a dirty sonuvab****.

The parole officer glanced up at her as if she could almost hear the gypsy’s thoughts if she strained hard enough. Her little ears wiggled with the effort. “So…a good king then? Should I say you said this with strong admiration in your voice?”

“Yeah, sure,” Cadenza muttered, eyes still fixed on the pen until it disappeared back into the flab-filled folds of a blouse far too small for the torso it was stretched over.

Her notepad soon also lodged back into suffocating places Cadenza shuddered to think of, the officer smiled cheerily back up at the gypsy. “I’m glad we understand each other, Frau Valentia. Now, if you’ll just follow me…” she began, and she went on to give directions that were only heard in small snatches by passersby.

Cadenza nodded emptily at half-minute-intervals in the speech, or whenever the woman looked over at her; she could be agreeing to follow this lady to the bloody police station for all she knew, but that wasn’t important now, while her mind was still hung up around the bit of muttered German. It was there, in that slip of a foreign tongue, that she saw, branching off the main road, a nice, scenic little detour to Distraction Boulevard. And from there, she knew, it was just a quick drive on the way to Freedom. You just had to know where to go.

“Did you say…‘Frau’, ma’am?” she asked, wincing at her own pronunciation.

The officer paused, mid-diatribe on the confusing layout of the city streets, wearing the surprised and horribly pained expression of one who hears a word in their language spoken with the same delicacy and respect for pronunciation as one who thinks “ain’t” is a proper word to use in court before a judge when denying a serious accusation of murder (and is probably gnawing on a toothpick while doing so.) It was, she thought, a little like being slapped in the face, but by someone who didn’t have the politeness to at least leave a mark and give you the dignity of saying, “Yeah, well I might have been slapped in the face, but at least it was by someone who left a mark. No weakling could get within inches of this kisser” later when asked.

But then she remembered where she was, and remembered that she was no longer patrolling the stuffing lines at the bratwurst plant, and she looked at the boldface “POLICIA” emblazoned on her sleeve, a reminder that was always hard to miss (especially because every other person she passed on the street would point out to her that it was missing an accent on the first ‘i’, and then flick her nose when she looked down to check.) The freckled, pudgy rolls of her forehead smoothed out as she unwrinkled her brow from its position of disdain.

“Yes,” she said, to a Cadenza who had almost given up on this line of conversation when the officer had drifted down memory lane.

Seeing that it was picking back up again, the gypsy jumped back into action like a fisherman awoken by the tug of a fish on his line after hours of waiting.

“Where are you from then?” she asked, smiling interestedly. “Österreich, or…?”

“Stuttgart,” the woman spat, complete with full-on accent.

“Stutt-gart?”

“No—STUHT-gahrt.”

The sentence was punctuated by a sound like a wet sponge hitting skin.

Cadenza reached a hand up, and wiped from her now saliva-sprinkled cheek what she thought might have been, judging from the squishiness of it, a chunk of chewed meat. Meat that had been wedged in a molar and chewed for a week, maybe. It dissolved upon contact with the soapy sheet the officer handed her afterward.

“Oh,” the gypsy said, trying to get back onto the far-less-disgusting detour to Distraction Boulevard they had just veered off-road from. Tried—but she just couldn’t. She had recovered from many things in her life without much trouble; magical attacks, and whirling axes, and flamethrowers in palace walls; but this was another thing entirely. She would have preferred to have a thousand punches thrown at her instead of this.

As she finished cleaning her face of every last trace of the officer’s digestive juices, Cadenza spotted the royal insignia stamped on a package of more of the wipes peeking out from amongst the woman’s stomach rolls, and arched an inquisitive eyebrow.

The woman saw this, and soon the freckles on her face were stranded upon a beet-red sea of flushed cheeks. “Erm, well…that happens more than you might think, you see,” the large woman explained, as she bashfully stuffed the package back into place and fastened a gear belt somewhere Cadenza was glad she couldn’t see. “The King now requires that I have something for people to disinfect with afterwards. It’s only proper.”

“…Right.”

This was a detour Cadenza was not sure she had the stomach to take. The police station was suddenly beginning to sound pretty good.

“So, ah…” the woman ventured, trying desperately to return to a time before she had spat last week’s lunch on her charge, “I have not told you my name yet, have I?”

Opening her mouth when another chunk of meat could come flying at her at anytime seemed a risky prospect. Cadenza shook her head, but when the woman looked sheepishly at her, waiting for words, she muttered, “…Er, no. You haven’t.” It seemed best not to offend someone who (at least partially) held her dad’s fate in her hands too much.

Smiling at the reply, the officer went on. “It’s…ah, how do you all say it? Signora? Yes, Signora. Signora Montag.”

“Your name is…Mrs. Monday? Is…that just a coincidence, or…?”

“No, Frau, no coincidence. I deal with the business on Lunes—so I’m called Mrs. Montag when in the king’s employ. My real name is Frau Bratwurst—once ‘Queen of Bratwurst’, until the filthy people from the States of Cordelia started making their imitation bratwurst and took over the industry with their low, low prices. Now everyone thinks theirs is the authentic one.” She said these words as if speaking of the most grievous act of blasphemy to ever go down in human history. Her arms shook with quivering passion for a good two minutes afterward.

Cadenza nodded blankly. She figured that there was an appropriate response somewhere that some tactful soul could think of to that little memory—but gods be damned if she knew what it was. She was still too busy trying to figure out where the nearest mental hospital was—and wondering if they issued royal packages of wipes. This was a side of Rubato she wasn’t (and never wanted to be) familiar with.

Suddenly, as if all memories had subsided once her flab had come to a rest, Mrs. Montag turned, without transition, back onto Business Road. “I recommend you stay close to me now, Frau Valentia, and follow me to the station to get you fitted for your tracking device.”

And with those words, all side-musings came to a screeching halt. “Tracking device? You’re going to put a bloody tracking device--”

“—Yes, Frau Valentia—we’ve got to keep tabs on you if the two of us are separated. What if you need to use the ladies’ room, but it’s one of those that only admits one because it only has one toilet and no stalls!? I can’t follow you in! You could slip out a window—and then that starts all sorts of trouble. Sehr schlecht, Frau Valentia. Very, very bad.”

It was those damned German “ht”s, Cadenza thought. The lips puckered like a saliva-greased bazooka.

Mrs. Montag reached into a pocket and handed the gypsy a wipe. “Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Cadenza said, scrubbing vigorously at a cheek. “So tracking device? All right. Let’s go. The Blancwood station isn’t too far.”

From some embarrassed distance behind the woman, Mrs. Montag piped up, “Actually, it’s been relocated. It’s a good three miles from here.”

“…Oh.”

As they started walking through the city streets, Cadenza found herself wishing for a real bazooka shot to the head.

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Something smelled sweetly of flowers and…soap? It was, without question, not one of his officers. Captain Moreno looked up from the cleaning of his gun.

“Ah, Signoras Valentia and Montag. Buenas tardes. I trust we reached the station without incident?”

Cadenza glared daggers at a cheerfully-nodding Mrs. Montag, whose head bobbed up and down and sent ripples of fat scurrying under her double chins. The officer had enjoyed a particularly peaceful walk on the way to the station, full of stories of her days in the bratwurst plants back in Stuht-gahrt, and her nose hadn’t been flicked but once. She couldn’t recall a better day in Rubato.

The gypsy, on the other hand, was considerably less upbeat. Yeah—without incident. Right. And you’ll die without incident—if you don’t consider a bullet to the face an incident.

Moreno smiled at her, reloading his pistol. He obviously wanted to hear an answer from her lips.

Aloud, she politely said, “Yes, Captain.”

“Good. Very good. Well then, if you’ll step over there, Signora Valentia, to where Inspector Cruz is standing, we’ll have you fitted for your tracking device. We’ll also, of course, have to have your fingerprints and such on file, and need some personal information to secure your father’s release and your pardon. Just formalities, really.”

“…Of course.”

Cadenza stepped past the captain and locked eyes with the woman he had indicated as Inspector Cruz. She looked Cernilian (even if that meant she was essentially Rubatoian, any warm-blooded true Rubatoian could tell the difference.) She also looked quite amused.

Moreno chose this particularly tense moment to add, “Please, if you would, also relinquish all the various false government IDs you’re known to carry to the inspector as well, Signora. And of course, present your genuine ID.”

There was some rather unprofessional snickering from the inspector in the back. With various words a lady should never say in polite company running through her head, Cadenza fished around in her pocket, and withdrew three ID cards.

And there, in the palm of her hand, now being cut up one-by-one with a pair of rusty scissors were the lives of Marisol Altomare, blue-eyed, five-foot-five tall, female killer of the former Rubatoian ambassador, Scipio Ciatore; Giselle Venezia, blue-eyed, five-foot-five tall, female counterfeiter with connections in the Gardenian mafia; and Aline Rosario, blue-eyed, five-foot-five tall, female destroyer of the old federal prison. Three of her earliest and most obvious aliases, and ones that were hardly ever used with any sort of disguise; gone. Cadenza supposed she should have known the police would catch on eventually.

But that job of maybe a week had taken them at least twelve years.

As she glanced back up from the scraps of a teenage criminal’s imagination in her hands, she could see Moreno give her a slick smile. He’s about to add, “and all the false government IDs you’re not known to carry too, Signora.”

“And relinquish all the false government IDs you’re not known to carry too, por favor, Signora,” the captain said, holstering his pistol.

“Right. Sorry.”

Fifteen other cards rattled onto the desk before Cruz. Various other officers gathered around to gape as she went through the pile.

“You were Old Lady Hunchback? And that was her legal name?”

“You were that Middle-Eastern fruit-seller in Rancha Rosa too? I bought a star fruit from you everyday and never realized it!”

“I thought you were my sister for three months!”

Everyone immediately stared at the card currently poised between the scissor blades. The photo was of one of the vampires that had recently been known to come over since the Dome’s existence became common knowledge in Rubato.

“Huh?” they all asked in unison.

“Uh…never mind,” the outcrier said, scratching his head and backing slowly out of the crowd. “Er…you were the vampire that prowled the streets near my house!? Yeah…”

Officer von Blod had always been a little questionable to his co-workers. Suddenly, all those extra-rare burgers at the department cookouts made much more sense. They collectively took one step closer to the desk and pulled up their collars.

“All right,” Inspector Cruz said, hacking the last of the cards in half, “please present your real ID, and we’ll get to work on processing your pardon and your father’s release.”

“Okay.”

Cadenza reached towards her dagger, and everyone instantly reached for their guns. The only bullets, however, were the bullets of sweat that rolled down the backs of their necks until they saw that she was just pulling a card from what looked to be the shadows on the weapon’s hilt. A few cursed gypsy magic as she handed the card to Cruz.

“It’s the real deal,” the criminal muttered, sighing as she watched the Cernilian pore over the ID for the slightest trace of illegitimacy. After a few minutes, the woman confirmed the statement.

“Yes, it surprisingly seems to be legit. I bet this is the first time in ages that you’ve had to pull it out, eh?”

Cadenza laughed dryly. “Hah, yeah. Hilarious. Can we just get this all over with already and—”

The sight of her father’s prison file resolving on a buzzing computer screen cut the sentence short. Cruz scrolled down until the criminal record portion rolled past the abyss of dead pixels in the middle of the screen and came into the scope of relative legibility.

“One count of homicide. Hired a hitman by the name of Anton Lorenzo Dionne, from Pirlot, Cernilia, to kill one Giuseppe Vicente Monotolli of Monotolli Labs in Allegre, Rubato. Turned in by Dionne.”

He was betrayed! That pentelho Dionne was supposed to be a financial assassin, not a real one, and he was supposed to make Monotolli go bankrupt, not kill him!

That was what Cadenza wanted to say. But what she did say was more along the lines of a grumbled, “Unnh,” that sounded like she had just been kneed in the back and was being forced to comment on the feeling.

Real articulate, Cadenza. Yeah—the Cernilian can just feel your outrage. Everyone sees that Dionne is a lying bastard now.

Cruz went on coldly, completely indifferent to the gypsy’s little moment of self-loathing. “Brought in on the sixteenth of Marzo, thirteen years ago. Sentenced two months later. Began time at the federal prison on la Isla do Noir two weeks afterward. Moved to Death Row a month later.”

As she read the next sentence, the Cernilian’s gray eyes glanced suspiciously up at the gypsy. “Execution postponed twenty-two times, for indeterminate reasons,” she said, purposefully slow.

Cadenza’s face was a stone mask of impassivity.

Cruz grumbled and scrolled down to the bottom of the file. “Well, now, all is forgiven. I just need to input a few pass codes and…wah-lah! Your father will be a free man on Martes, as soon as you’ve had your first meeting with your life coach the day before. You are now also pardoned of all your crimes—in this country. Florheim still apparently wants you for some horse you stole two years ago…and the other countries have a bit more pressing claims. But you’re a free woman in Rubato.”

The inspector seemed to almost choke on these words. An eavesdropping intern somewhere tripped and spilled coffee all over Moreno’s dry-cleaning.

“Thank you,” Cadenza said, resisting the urge to grin.

Mrs. Montag sidled on up to her, holding a gadget that vaguely resembled a watch, if a watch looked like a rusty manacle with a bleeping metallic box affixed to it.

Come to think of it, that is what most watches look like here. The good ones.

The gypsy winced as Montag slapped the bracelet on like some sort of tetanus-ridden, medieval torture device. Once everything was set into place, she stood back and admired her work from a safe distance. “That’s good, Frau Valentia. Now we can keep track of you. Of course, I’ll still need to follow you until Lunes.”

“Right.”

“And you’ll still have to remain in Blancwood until then.”

“Wait, what? But I have the tracking device and everything!”

“I know, Frau, I know; but precautions must be taken. The king and Captain seem skeptical about you showing up for your first session with the life coach if you’re let out of the city. I apologize.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cadenza muttered, holding her arm up to gauge the weight of the tracking device. It was at least a good five pounds, she thought. Even in Blancwood they hadn’t figured out how to mass-produce any decent technological devices--cell phones were still being imported from the States of Cordelia and Stuttgart.

Mrs. Montag led the gypsy back over to Moreno, who flashed them a smile. “Thank you for your cooperation, Signoras. Law-enforcement runs much more smoothly when the citizens and the officers work together as a team.”

Cadenza couldn’t recall a statement that had made her want to hurl more. Maybe something Zorlo had said would have given it a run for its money, but nothing an iota less sappy. Moreno had a gift for fake pleasantness.

“Ciao, Signoras,” he said, smiling, and an intern with scalded hands showed them the door.

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Showtime, Cadenza thought as they stepped out into the sunlight. She got up to speed for her best outraged storm-off, stomping down the stairs for added impact.

And, as expected, Mrs. Montag was helpless to resist. She watched the woman stamp away with the kind of sympathy she had seldom shown to anything but unfortunate sausages dropped by clumsy workers on the stuffing lines. “Frau Valentia…I understand that you’re upset by this whole situation, and I’m really—”

“—Madrigal, okay? Call me Miss Madrigal! It’s bad enough that I’m being forced to stay in this city against my will, but I just came to the terms with the fact that my Signor Valentia no longer exists a few years ago, and before today I haven’t had to be reminded of that so many times in one afternoon!”

“B-but, it’s your legal name…”

“Both are, Mrs. Montag, both are! A married woman in this country uses both her maiden and married names, and I’d prefer to be called the former now, if you can understand that!”

That got her, Cadenza thought. Tears were welling up in the chubby woman’s eyes.

“I-I’m sorry, Miss Madrigal. And, please…you may call me Mrs. Bratwur—”

“—No, Officer Montag, no I can’t! Now can you please just give me a moment alone?”

She struck the perfect melancholy, pained note that time. Mrs. Montag was reduced to quivering mush.

“…Of course, Miss Madrigal. You…you just take your time, dear.”

The officer walked off, blowing her foghorn of a nose into a dainty, helpless little handkerchief.

Manipulating people, Cadenza thought as she stomped theatrically away, was a little like pool. If you just hit the ball at this angle, with just this touch of spin, then it would plunk! sink just where you wanted. The gypsy had never gotten the chance to play much actual pool (being a big-time criminal didn’t involve as much pool-hall hustling as one might hope), but she could appreciate the finer points of the game. Mrs. Montag was just a nice, round, red three ball now, teetering on the edge before a pocket, and emotions were the cue. Knock that one in, and from there, Cadenza just had to run the table.

Or just run.

Cadenza couldn’t remember the last time she had run through the Blancwood streets this fast; but there sure were a lot of choice memories to choose from. Running from Moreno when he was just an ambitious young sergeant with incredibly good aim; slipping out of the National Bank with Velhamar and a pack of police dogs on her trail and half her weight in zecca in a sack slung across her back; running to school with Paris after he had taken her to see her first snowfall and they were twenty minutes late. A place for good times, this city was. Somehow, Cadenza felt this wouldn’t be one of the memories that made the list.

She slipped up the shadows of a drain pipe and onto the rooftops, where she picked up speed. Back towards the palace was Avello, waiting out of sight somewhere, assuming he hadn’t wandered off to inspect an interesting heap of trash. He tended to do that. The trash at the Dome never had enough sand as seasoning for him—but Rubato’s stuff was just right. He’d find cheap, tasty little trinkets there he’d never find anywhere else.

As Cadenza performed flips from roof to roof that would make an Olympic gymnast look like a third-grader muddling through half-cartwheels in gym class, she wondered how long it would take the “Queen of Bratwurst” to figure out that she hadn’t just slipped away for a moment to cope with some emotional garbage. The officer was a bit…odd, granted, but she wasn’t as dumb as most of the cops she had run across in this country. She knew to reassert how her father’s fate hung in the balance, for one. The cruel b****.

The gypsy eventually came to a boutique that looked like the sort of place Gustavo might have bought his abomination of a shirt, and looked around. There was a distinctly dragon-like chewing noise coming from the alley in the back; and as she sidled along to investigate, she spotted the purple-winged lizard nosing his way through a particularly pungent dumpster.

“Avello.”

The dragon glanced up, lifting his head from his free lunch. A flamenco shirt was snared in-between two ivory-white fangs like a helpless, fashionably-challenged goat.

“You can finish the rest of those, and then we have to go. I want to take a quick detour over the ocean to drop something off before we head to Sereia.”

Avello whined, and gulped down two more shirts. He burped a frilly cravat, and then fluttered up to catch Cadenza as she leapt from the roof onto his scaly back.

“Ignore the extra weight—this thing’s like a small bowling ball, but we’ll get rid of it soon. Stay low for a while, and we’ll pick up altitude once we reach the desert.”

The dragon whined again, and soon they were off. Somewhere several blocks over, Mrs. Montag pulled a beeping device out of her pocket and stroked her double chins in deep thought.

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“Here, Avello. Here is good.”

Dragon and gypsy fluttered to a hovering stop a good mile above the churning teal tides of the Pacifica Ocean. And soon, Cadenza thought, the police would think she was sinking a good mile under those churning teal tides.

The rusty manacle of a tracking device slid off Cadenza’s wrist through the shadows, and dropped heavily, like a dead bomb, into the ocean. She watched it break the surface, with more of a plop than a splash, and satisfied that it was disposed of until someone at the station got wise to her diversion, she applied a little pressure to Avello’s side and they soared away again into the cloudy afternoon.

A certain, much-anticipated weapon was due to be ready.

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[Altamira]

Omar Vargas was a genius; but it was one of those geniuses you had to justify, like “in his own right”, or “in certain fields”, or “in some people’s eyes”. Really, it just meant that he was some insane guy with one redeeming quality—but it was a very redeeming quality. He made weapons (and jewelry, knickknacks, and keys, but that wasn’t talked about as much, for whatever reason,) and well…you just didn’t insult a guy who made weapons. He tended to know how to use them.

As Cadenza walked past a workbench with a chain necklace that closed by zipper resting on it, and a poker with a welded-on Bunsen burner laying against a steel leg, she shuddered to think what might have happened if Vargas had turned his…unique brand of genius towards something like plastic surgery.

“Eyes and fins everywhere, Señora,” a voice somewhere behind her said.

“W-what?”

The woman whirled around to see the grease-stained figure of Omar Vargas wiping off a super-hot hammer by a stack of crates. The hammer singed holes through the cloth in his callused hands.

“The city of Sereia, you know, she has a great many fishermen,” he said conversationally, setting aside the tool for a tin of polish. “They work on Jueves, and bring in a loada fish—and there was a riot for da food. Fish were everywhere. Someone hit me in the back of da head with a gill!”

Ah, there was an explanation, Cadenza thought. Imagination, startled thoroughly for a moment there, could take a breather now while rational thought took over. Rational thought always enjoyed a little tussle with a loon like Vargas. Made it take stock of itself; reminded the mind what it would be like without the power of reason.

“…A gill’s an opening a fish breathes through, Omar. You can’t be hit with a hole.”

“But I a’ was.”

Technically, both of them were right; but no one in bone-dry Rubato is really all that knowledgeable about fish. Even in coastal Sereia. Thinking they should be was like expecting people in the tundra to know a lot about exotic jungle flowers. The fishermen of Sereia, sure, they knew, because they lived and breathed and slept on the sea, and didn’t come to land save for when they remembered they had families to see, or their boats became too full of the week’s haul; but to everyone else, a fish was a strange little anomaly in the animal kingdom that needed water to breathe. No matter how hard they tried, they just couldn’t wrap their heads around that.

So when the fishermen had explained to Omar that what he had been hit with was a mass of filaments and tissues used to extract oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide, he simplified it to the little opening some people vaguely remembered there being on fish, whenever it was they had last seen one.

And now, both of them stared at the chain on the workbench, pondering what being hit with a hole might be like.

Realizing that this train of thought was taking them nowhere, Cadenza moved onto business. The gunblade idea was just weird enough for Vargas, and she had high hopes for the final product. “So, ah…the sword, Omar?”

“Uwah?” he muttered. The name didn’t seem to have the desired ring to Omar’s ears.

Cadenza remembered then who she was dealing with; this was Omar Vargas, man who had forged her mom a bracelet with a bottle-opener on it, even though she never drank (smoked, yes, but never drank.) She knew she had to consider the possibility of there having been some other object Vargas knew as a “sword”; he tended to name his hybrids things that he forgot had already been taken for something normal. A sword therefore, for all she knew, could be a gourd and a switchblade to the blacksmith.

Really, the only constant was that as long as part of it was metal, it fell under the realm of potential Vargas inventions.

So, for his sake, she tried being a little more specific, “The, ah…gunblade, Omar?”

Sudden realization dawned upon the big, oil-stained face. “Ahhhh, the jack-in-the-box, Señora? You just a’ reverse the polarity on da metal with those magics of yours, and out a’ comes the gun part, da mouth open and ready to shoot at the world! ‘Course…the gun doesn’t actually pop out, but…it’s a nice name, am I right?”

The big, squinting eyes twinkled, and the loud mouth finally shut to smile a big, lovable idiot kind of smile. It was a smile you couldn’t deny. The mind behind it was too unpredictable.

Cadenza was always a little unsettled by the smile. She gave the only answer you could give: “…Right, Omar. It’s a lovely name.”

Good blacksmiths were hard to come by, she thought. No sense in getting in a fight with one because you couldn’t humor his insanity and compliment a name.

Omar was pleased with the answer; he put away the demanding smile like a man puts away a loaded gun, locking it up for later if it’s ever needed, and went to fetch the gunblade. “It came out beautifully, Señora,” he called as he rummaged around behind the crates, “Da special metal you provided is an amazing thing, and came out bluer than my mãe’s sapphire ring. Now, ‘course, you a’ say, ‘Omar, the sapphire on your mãe’s ring is fake!’ but I say, ‘It’s a’ still the bluest stone this side of the Minas Gerais mines!’ ”

“Bluer than blue, I’m sure, Omar.”

There was more rustling, and a few clangs of metal upon stone. While working on a piece, Vargas would treat it as gently as a baby; but once it was finished, he tended to lose interest and heaped it up with all the other finished products. Wait a few days to get your item, and well…you were lucky if it was still all in one piece. But on the bright side—if it did get broken, Vargas became wildly interested in fixing it again (for a fee, of course.)

“Ah, here she is, Señora. Still as shiny as when I finished her this morning.”

Vargas stepped out from behind the boxes, holding a straight-bladed, adamantine sword that was the very vision of craftsmanship. It was strong and double-edged, but light, and looked somewhat similar to some of the arming swords he had laying about, save for the little sliver of a divide between the top portion of the blade and the bottom portion of the blade, where it would swing open to reveal the mouth of a gun.

He held the weapon out to Cadenza with the air of a reluctant parent entrusting the keys to an expensive car to their child for the first (and hopefully not last) time.

“It’s yours now, Señora.”

Cadenza took the gleaming sword from his hand, and, her eyes aglitter with excitement, she cut a little flourish in the air with the kind of showiness the old swordmasters in Zhenghe would have frowned upon. The old swordmasters, she thought as she cut another little swath, were not watching how the light played off this brilliant piece of weaponry. And they were old. They had no flair.

“…It’s bloody beautiful, Vargas. You really outdid yourself.”

The craftsman in Omar beamed; but, as a weapons-smith, there was always that little shadow of concern weighing on his mind as to the end his works would be put towards. “I, ah…wouldn’t entrust such a weapon to anyone but you, minha amiga. You a’ know that…right?”

There was the unspoken worry there; Cadenza knew Omar well enough to tell. With an earnest face, she put it to rest: “I’ll be careful, Omar. You have my word. And you know that means something when I give it to you.”

Now the blacksmith’s entire mind was put at ease. The Madrigals may have lied and cheated countless other souls, he knew—but they had always been completely loyal to him. He had known the family since before their reign of crime, and had stuck by them all throughout it. And he was a friend of Galliard. That counted for a lot.

“Take care then, Señora. Sereia, she is a dangerous town. Many a’ gangs hang around these streets, and they are not like da ones you meet in da deserts. More like pirates, these chicos.”

Cadenza nodded; she saw no need to explain to Omar that some grunts that ran around playing pirate would hardly be any trouble for a teacher of the Dome, but she appreciated his concern anyway. It was true that she didn’t know Sereia well; but that just meant that the city was lucky. It meant most of their population survived week-to-week, and it meant that their cops didn’t have nightmares about gypsy magic whenever they closed their eyes to sleep. In fact, the best thing a Rubatoian city could be was a place that the Madrigals weren't well-acquainted with.

Unfortunately for Sereia though, the city’s luck was about to change. The gypsy had a single address in her pocket, and not the slightest inkling of an idea where Delfin Street was; and that meant she was about to get acquainted with the city real fast as she searched.

The woman nodded a farewell to Vargas, and then, whistling, leapt into the air and onto the back of a dragon.

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[Altamira]

“I, ah…can’t read the streets signs from up here, Avello.”

“Gragh?”

“No, no, if we go lower, we’ll attract too much attention. We’re getting too many looks as it is anyway.”

“Gragh-ragh.”

“Yeah, I think I’m going to have to go it on foot. Land in an alley somewhere and go find yourself some trash, okay? But no fish.”

“Ragh.”

“Okay, okay—one fish.”

Cadenza wasn’t sure how much one fish really was to a dragon (probably something akin to a crumb to a human), but she figured keeping her ride in good spirits was probably a wise move. And if it took one smelly sea critter to do it, then…so be it. She’d feed him a box of mints or perfume later to take care of the stench.

They touched down behind a high row of gray, moss-covered boarding houses and inns, where a particularly promising whiff of guts and brine hinted at a treasure trove of old fish to be found in the various dumpsters, if an adventurous soul (and nose) was willing to look. Against her better judgment, Cadenza left Avello there, and strode out into the streets, a free woman. Man, she thought as she walked along, it was sure good to be able to look a copper in the eye and blow him a raspberry (or flash a finger that didn’t mean anything here, but sure as hell meant something in other worlds. Ah, the joys of other cultures.) It was almost refreshing. Word apparently traveled fast, and all the cops could do was try not to reach for their guns.

Striding? Hah, no, I’m strolling. I’m out for a nice little stroll in the streets, and there’s not a bloody thing any of these cops can do about it. By the gods, I may be on my way to kill a man, but I’m strolling.

She nodded a particularly cheeky “hullo” to an officer, and turned onto a street known as “Cutelo Avenue”; Cutlass Avenue. The pirates Vargas had mentioned clearly had had their influence on the city; all the graffiti on this sign consisted of poorly-drawn skulls and crossbones, and, by one daring soul, an attempt at a pirate ship. Attempt, Cadenza said to herself, because it looked more like a wooden bathtub.

As she looked down it, she noted that Cutlass Avenue was full of buildings shaped like barrels of rum and old, creaking ships. Some, by the looks of things, might have even been made from barrels of rum and old creaking ships. But bars like these tended to be good sources of information (forget bored housewives--drunken men were terrible gossips), and Dionne, if she was any judge of character, would be someone that could only be traced through people like those found around here, so she proceeded down the street. The address was a good starting point, but Algretta had maintained that the man had other places of residence that they had no written record of. Whatever she found here would be invaluable help.

Every bar and inn the gypsy passed looked as if it was infested with an eternal plague of rodents and cockroaches, and most of the doors could hardly be made out among the moss and creeping sea-vines. After walking to the end of the street and back, hoping futilely to find somewhere not steeped in staph, she finally selected one bar that looked less diseased than the others (even if that wasn’t saying much) and sauntered up to free the rusted doorknob from the brown-green foliage. The rotting sign above the entrance read “The Buccaneer’s Boot.”

The pirates here had apparently given up all hope of concealment.

Most bars in Rubato had the same set-up; there was the run-of-the-mill, regulation idiot barkeeper, who, if a barfight broke out, would invariably be the first to go down and the last to get up (if he ever did get up); there was the skinny guy in the corner who obtained all his sustenance from bar pretzels and bowls of peanuts, and was always mumbling about that “damn old lady” he had at home; and then there was the group of thugs, dispersed about the room to some extent, but mostly gathered in a knot at the back, breaking bottles over each other’s heads and guzzling the piss-water the town called beer. Sprinkle in a few more pirates and a couple of misplaced ladies who apparently thought “The Buccaneer’s Boot” was a reputable place of business, and you had this tavern. Cadenza could run this place like a mob boss.

The first thing to do was loosen up the gang’s lips with a bottle of the good stuff kept underneath the bar counter.

She sauntered in, casting a look around to all to make sure that she was seen. It only took once glance-around. Beauty did that for you.

“A round of whiskey, barkeep,” the gypsy said, slapping down a forty-zecca piece as she came up to the counter. The man’s eyes widened at the sight of the coin; he had probably never seen so much money in one place in all his life.

Yes, yes, Cadenza thought as the big oaf went off to find where he had stashed the real alcohol, get ‘em drunk, but don’t show off too much. You want their respect—but you don’t want them to think you’re rich. Thugs hate the rich.

A few of the roughnecks from the back murmured amongst themselves before stepping closer. They had heard the magic words--“free drinks”--and now they were ready to negotiate terms of business.

“You…look familiar, Señorita. Do we know you from somewhere?”

Group-speak, the gypsy noted. The gang thought together as a whole.

“No, Signors, I’m new in town.”

The men blinked. They had expected a request to be affixed to the end of that statement. There was always a request fixed to the end of that statement—the newcomer was supposed to tell you their purpose for coming to town. When the woman blatantly ignored this rule and didn’t give one, the gang speaker felt subtly unnerved.

“Was there…something you needed, Señorita?”

“Oh,” Cadenza said, taking a proffered glass as the barkeep returned, “A drink.”

“Just…a drink?”

“Just a drink. Bottoms up, boys.”

Everyone--as if puppets on strings pulled by those words--rose their glasses and drank.

Later, when the gypsy would ask them about Dionne, she knew she’d be pleased to hear that they were too drunk to remember the story for a cop later. Get them drunk, and then let them talk, so the whole conversation is just some bubbling beer suds later…

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Cruz stared coldly at a computer screen that could not lie. This, she thought, was not going to go over well.

“She’s twelve leagues under the sea, Captain.”

Moreno nearly spat his coffee at a quivering intern. The boy was covered in patches of burn ointment. “What?” he barked.

“That’s what the readout says. Now twelve-point-zero-zero-eight leagues, Captain.”

Moreno sighed. He wasn’t paid nearly enough for this. “Call Buffón and tell him to get his girl on this, will you? It doesn’t take a fool to see we can’t rely on that tracking device anymore.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“…And Cruz?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Don’t roll your eyes at me next time I give you an order.”

“…Sorry, Captain.”

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[Altamira]

The Queen of Bratwurst turned onto a street, and covered her nose.

“My goodness,” she called out to no one in particular, “what a strong scent! It’s worse than the rotting scrap heap at the plant.”

Off to her left, an ogre was lumbering down the sidewalk, toting a club and wearing an expression that managed to look both vacant and determined at the same time. Around his mighty green arm, he wore an armband with a police badge pinned on it. Something about the sight recalled something to the woman’s muddled mind.

“Hallo, son! Where might you be heading at so brisk a pace?”

The ogre stopped dead in his tracks, and glanced around. There was no one else on the street—well, at least no one out in the open. A few pickpockets were easing their way around to the safe of a fruit vendor; but there was no one else that one might call out to so jovially.

“Ungh?” he called back.

“I asked, young man, where you might be heading?”

“Grung.”

Dealing with the ogres was hardly different from dealing with the sorts of people Mrs. Montag once employed in her factories; they were big, inarticulate, and simple-minded. But they were also good workers, and she respected that.

And that made what she had to do next all the harder to do.

“Work? Well, we can’t have you going looking like that. Come here and let me scrub your face.”

“Grugh.”

The creature turned and lumbered over towards the woman obediently. When she produced a soapy sheet from a pocket somewhere, he shied away for a moment, but at her urging, he submitted himself to a thorough face-scrubbing. As the suds clouded his already limited vision, Officer Montag pinched a radio from its pouch on his belt and then shoved the beast onto the stone-hard floor.

“Sorry, dear,” she said above his whimpers. The soap was beginning to sting. “Duty calls.”

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Eight calls had been dispatched to her squad. All eight had answered back.

Something is wrong.

Normally, at least one or two of the ogres would forget his own strength and snap an antenna off or break a tuning knob; that was frustrating, and sometimes pricey, but expected. But this time, all had successfully received her message--and that was worrying. There had been the heavy breath upon the speaker as always, but…something was definitely wrong. The ogres hadn’t become competent that quickly.

Tracey de Carlo drew her pistol from its holster, waited for the shadows of a passing plane to sweep over the street, and made a mad dash into the city of Sereia. If her researches were correct, then this was the town where she’d find Cadenza.

And maybe a few people who had posed as her ogres.

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Sailors like to drink; it’s a well-known fact (and often the butt of many bad jokes.) And as it turns out, wannabe-pirates also like to drink. It goes with the image.

Although one that had always been able to hold her liquor pretty well, Cadenza had swapped her whiskey for water the past five rounds because: a) she knew that instead of asking questions, she would most likely be singing sweet but embarrassing songs about a zombie-turned-cop that she had warm-fuzzy feelings for if she had drank, and b) drunken guys couldn’t tell the difference between the two beverages. Water was cheaper. And the gypsy wasn’t looking to fund a second wing to The Buccaneer’s Boot anytime soon.

The woman glanced around the bar. Peanut-man had gone home to his “damn old lady”, the barkeeper was fawning over a sack of coins surreptitiously handed to him when no one was looking, and everyone else was drunk. Smirking, Cadenza sent around one last round of whiskey to ensure that any potential cops just pretending to be drunk, were, in fact, drunk.

Then it came time for business. She stood on a chair, and calling out to the dazed masses, she began, “How many of you know a man by the name of Anton Lorenzo Dionne?”

There was a general murmur of attention.

“He’s Cernilian, about six foot tall, black hair,” she continued. She didn’t bother mentioning eyes. The only way these kinds of people would have noted eyes was if at least one of them were missing.

“Har, he’s six foot where, Señorita?” This witty reply coming from a particularly proud-looking slob of a man, chewing on a bandana in the back.

The question bounced off the ears harmlessly. Normally, Cadenza might have grinned a little; the humor of drunks was always amusingly simple-minded but irreverent. But any joke in relation to Dionne quickly lost its charm for the sole reason of who it was about. She went on with the description; “Smokes a Cittá Royal. Wears dusty suits, but slick boots he cares for well. Supposedly maintains several residences, one of which is on 21G Delfin Street, in this city. Works as a ‘financial’ assassin.”

There was another general murmur making its rounds about. A few men raised eager hands, like students in class when the answers were still easy things like the sum of two and two, and you got gold stars for answering.

“I know, Señorita! Pick me!”

“Yeah?” she called to the man jumping up from his chair.

“21G Delfin Street is the Post Office!” he shouted.

Oh, it would be, Cadenza thought, it would be. How no one there noticed that he put the post office itself as the return address on his letter isn’t surprising either.

“What else do we know?” she called out, cupping her hands.

“He takes job offers at the intersection of Concha and Araças!”

“Good, good! And where is that in relation to this bar?”

“Two blocks south!” someone volunteered. He was promptly rewarded with a bowl of relatively fresh pretzels.

This line of questioning had taken them admirably far, Cadenza thought. She’d ride it out until it came to its inevitable screeching halt. “Yes, yes!” she said, “And how often is he there?”

Fingers were held up and counted before mumbling lips. Finally, one pirate’s face lit up and he shouted out, “Five times!”

“Nuh uh!” another one said, “You’re lying!”

The first one was elbowed in the gut as he tried to scarf down a handful of pretzels. All he caught of the other guy’s comment was “lying!” but that was enough to offend. “Mhno mph phnot!” he yelled between mouthfuls.

“Are too!” someone else joined in, just for the sake of joining in.

Cadenza could only sit down and numbly watch the fight that ensued, slightly awed by how quickly things had turned for the simple fact that the stupid always fascinated anyone who watched them long enough. After a few men with bloody noses were carted out, she futilely tried to salvage things by searching out the shouter of “Five times!” and asking him, “Five times a what? A week?”, but he couldn’t be found amidst the drunken heaps. Sighing, she left a tip for the bartender on the counter (he had a nasty welt on his head and probably wouldn’t wake up in time to get the tip while it was still there) and walked out into the evening gloom.

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[Altamira]

Tracey dashed out of the shadows of an alley, and flattened herself against a wall. Four of her ogres followed her, with considerably less use of the dashing and flattening motions. They sort of just stood around between some trash cans, making a vague attempt not to be seen by anyone who didn’t bother to distinguish the green, smelly piles of paper and fish bones from the green, smelly piles of flesh.

Thanks to various contacts scattered across the city, and some of her own detective skills, she had managed to trace Cadenza Madrigal to this neighborhood. And now, she couldn’t be more than a few blocks away. In what direction, Tracey hadn’t the faintest clue, but a few blocks was a few blocks.

She sidled along to the end of the street; there, she heard a rustling from some dumpsters behind an inn. She waved to her squad, telling them to follow at a distance, and, gripping her pistol in one hand, she inched around to the edge of the building.

A pained groan sounded behind her.

The sleuth’s eyes shot back. Mentally, she counted heads. One, two, three…three ogres. She swallowed hard, and tried to remember names. Hammerhead and Gragnor were there. Mumbler…she waited for one to speak. Yes, Mumbler’s here.

Snotty was missing.

Confused, Gragnor struck a match off Hammerhead’s arm and waved it around in the dark alley. Tracey immediately shouted at him to put it out, but it was too late—the match came alight again, but this time, the flame had come from what looked like a Bunsen burner welded onto a metal poker.

“Oi, Señorita. First a’ time in Sereia?”

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He replaced the ring in the box, and shut it tight.

Just a few things to be taken care of. A few last jobs so that no one wonders. And then…

His eyes traced along the curve of the dark wood, to the last red-ash bits of the cigar beside it. The last few letters, a swirling, golden “al” of the tobacconist name, were all that were left of the thing aside from those ashes.

…and then what? How do I begin?

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Tracey staggered back, leveling her pistol at the big, oil-stained face that appeared in the matchlight. The man looked only marginally sane.

“What do you want?” she demanded, but the man’s eyes were not on her. He was looking to the alley; to the dumpsters beyond, and then suddenly his gaze swept angrily to Mumbler who gave a particularly metallic sounding crunch.

“One of these things made da lunch of some of my metal,” he said slowly, poker raised. His gaze flickered back to the dumpster for another second at the sound of claws scrabbling on stone, but shot back before Tracey felt free enough to follow with her eyes and look. Hammerhead and Gragnor thought they spotted something purple there, like maybe a wing, but their color vision wasn’t the best, so they shrugged it off and turned around to stare at Mumbler. It wasn’t often that they weren’t all in trouble together; they couldn’t remember the last time they were on the outside of the group to be punished.

“I’m…sorry. I’ll repay you later, okay? Right now I’m on--”

“One thousand zecca!”

“W-what?”

“That’s a’ how much your friend ate! One thousand zecca worth, like they were metallic churros!”

“A-ah, all right, I’ll, ah, make out a check tomorrow, to, ah…”

“Omar Vargas!”

“R-right, but ah…just, right now I need to investigate something before it runs away, and…”

Mumbler had gone unattended for too long; no one noticed how he had been eyeing the poker whirling about in Omar’s hand, doing tantalizing little figure-eights in the man’s madness. The ogre’s mouth had begun to water as he watched it—and now, with the spicy, fiery tip held right before him, he just couldn’t resist.

He bit the Bunsen burner straight off, and crunched.

Tracey and Vargas’ faces snapped to him, eyes gone alarmingly wide. The breath catching in their throats was audible; Hammerhead swore that the inspector had nearly choked for a moment there.

No words came for a long, tense minute.

And then the blacksmith gave a terrible growl, and pounced. Man and ogre rolled down the dusty street for meters, fists flying and hot metal bits scattering, and then footfalls chasing other footfalls could be heard going off down the street as steel crunched and clanged.

Tracey was just about to turn around and inspect the dumpsters behind the inns when she heard another footstep, like a boot lightly tapping on clay shingles.

“So these guys are your Baker Street Irregulars, are they?”

The girl’s head jerked up, as if on a string, and stared at the figure of Cadenza Madrigal on the roof of an inn. She felt goosebumps run along her arms.

These ogres are just as bad as the pirates in the bar, Cadenza thought, watching as Hammerhead dimly glanced around for the source of the voice. After a pathetic second, Gragnor tapped him and pointed up.

No, actually—to be fair, they aren’t. These ogres are smarter. And that was just about the nicest thing Cadenza had ever thought about any copper who wasn’t dead and named Johnny.

Tracey had nearly gone into adrenaline-induced convulsions. Her gun pointed at various points on the roof, none of which coincided with Cadenza’s actual location. “H-h-h-n…”

“Oh, come now, Inspector. I thought you’d seen me enough times that we’d at least be at the level of witty repartee now. If not already exchanging blows.”

“Y-y-y…”

Cadenza watched as a flash of purple shot up from behind the inns and into the next alley. Everyone else was too focused on her to notice.

Tracey was just begging for someone to cut off her yammering with another remark, so to speed things along, the gypsy went on, “Well, your boys can’t arrest me now anyway, Red—I’ve got a perdón from King Olmo himself.”

“Y-you’re violating your parole!” the sleuth finally burst out, the redness draining from her face like the air from a stressed balloon.

“Oh,” Cadenza said incredulously, “am I? I thought Mrs. Montag was behind me this whole time. Guess that reek was just rotting fish then.”

Tracey said something else, but the woman wasn’t paying attention. She had to pull Avello’s fat out of the fire here as Omar had tried to; if she didn’t, she’d be right back on the most wanted list for a count of “Having a Pet Ravage an Officer”.

It wasn’t a very common crime for anything but dogs.

“Look, de Carlo,” she continued, waving off the girl’s ramblings with a hand, “I’ll be back in Blancwood in time for my first appointment with the life coach. I just had to pick up a present for my dad for when he gets released the day after.”

“And you couldn’t find it in Blancwood?”

“It’s a case of Sereia’s special rum, Red. They only sell it here.”

Hammerhead nodded emphatically in agreement with this. Gragnor smacked him across the forehead.

“Okay, okay,” Tracey said, pacing away, “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, Madrigal. Benefit of a lot of doubt.”

Cadenza watched as the girl walked up and down the alley, hands held behind her back as she pondered things over. The little sleuth seemed to think she knew how to play the game; and hey, if it wasn’t going to harm her any, she wasn’t about to disillusion the fool.

Tracey went on, chest and voice puffed out with feigned confidence. “I’ll give you the rest of the night,” she said, “but after that, you have to return to Blancwood, or…or we’ll be back for you. Understand?”

The stammer hadn’t helped her image here at all, but the girl forged on, trying to brush it aside. “One night, okay? And no more.”

Cadenza smiled broadly. Tracey wished she could read the thoughts behind that smile. “Sure,” the gypsy said. “One night and then I’m back to Blancwood.”

“Good. I’m…glad we understand one another.”

As satisfied as she could be that the matter was settled, Tracey whistled to Hammerhead and Gragnor, and then marched off into the night to retrieve Mumbler (and, when she was far away enough out of Cadenza’s sight, call Moreno to make sure the deal she had just made was all right.)

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Mrs. Bratwurst made her way along the stalls of fishmongers, eyeing their goods with the sort of disdain only one chief of industry could show towards a rival. It was a little like a McDonalds manager strolling through a Taco Bell, she thought; both sold food for the unwashed masses, but if people were spending money with them, and then they weren’t spending that money with you. It didn’t matter that one sold burgers and the other tacos. Or, in this case, one sold fish and one used to sell sausages.

“So, ah…Sir, what do you call these little things on their sides?”

The man questioned followed the line of her pudgy finger to one of his fish.

“Pardon, Señora?

“The slits on the poor dears’ sides…what are those?”

The fishmonger scratched at his moustache, and ran an appraising eye over the bodies of his wares. “The, ah…gills, Señora?”

Montag shot him a disgusted look. “Do you always scratch that crumbduster of a moustache over your food? You could get stray hairs in the…the gills!”

“Uwah? Get away! Get away from my stall! I will not have the cleanliness of my goods questioned here!”

Offended more than she could remember being in quite some time, Officer Montag scuttled away from the enraged fish seller and proceeded along to the stalls where pieces of shell jewelry were being hawked. With her head turned back towards the mustachioed merchant to ensure she wasn’t struck with an unexpected mackerel or whatever it was they had in these parts, she didn’t see that she was about to run straight into a redheaded girl and two ogres.

Her bulk hit the pavement with a resounding thud!

“Gragh?” Hammerhead said. He wasn’t used to being knocked flat on his back so easily.

“You just bumped into some lady, Hammerhead! Apologize right away!”

The ogre looked up at his employer, and grumbled. His aching bottom seemed to think that this lady should apologize to him for the making the world shake.

“Officer Hammerhead, you heard me!”

“Righ-ragh.”

“Hammerhead!”

“…Gragh-morg,” he muttered reluctantly, not meeting Montag’s gaze.

“Thank you, Sir,” she said, and then looking up, she added in what she thought was a quiet tone, “Sometimes these beasts don’t know any better. Not too bright in the head, you know.”

She slowly became aware of the two huge, green hands that had wrapped themselves around her wrists.

“Where are you from, ma’am?” the girl asked, pointedly ignoring how her lackey was mistreating the woman.

“I’m an officer here,” Montag said with some hostility, “but I’m originally from Stuttgart.”

Meat sprayed across Tracey’s face. A disinfectant wipe was not offered afterward.

“Stuttgart, eh?” Tracey went on, talking through the sinking feelings of disgust and embarrassment as she raised a hand to clean her face, “What pea-brained idiot names these countries?”

The parole officer struggled forward to deliver a firm reprimanding smack for that insult, but Hammerhead’s grip proved to be too strong. She growled.

“Well,