Day 3

The Dripcanal was quiet so early in the evening.

Most residents in the area were still at work, or not yet departed to their night shifts. The main business attractions—casinos, bars, and… more seedy enterprises—were not yet open for business. These factors combined meant that the best time for shady dealings in the Dripcanal was just after lunch, rather than the dead of night.

And shady dealings were just about to unfold.

Sham sat on the thin worn carpet of an apartment building’s first floor hallway. Above his right shoulder was an open window, allowing in the air of the particularly warm third day.

‘Just before the storm hits tomorrow, if I remember correctly,’ Sham’s one remaining living skill mused.

At Sham’s side was his old partner in crime, Tripe, fidgeting from his position on the hard floor as they awaited their signal. Each man gripped a rusty brass revolver in hand.

Tripe, not able to help himself any longer, turned and peered out the window onto the narrow alley below. ‘You know, she’s a mad one, your new bird,’ he said.

‘She’s not—’

‘She bloody well is mad,’ Tripe insisted.

‘—my bird,’ Sham finished.

‘Oh. So you ain’t denying the “mad” bit, though?’

Sham reached up and grabbed Tripe’s jacket, pulling him back down towards the floor. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘He might see you.’

But Tripe resisted for a moment, waving down to one of the two figures in the alley below.

‘Sit down!’

The man relented, but not without clarifying, ‘She waved back.’

‘She probably just wants you to hurry up and fucking hide,’ Sham said. ‘I know I do.’

‘Jealous, are we?’ Tripe asked, sliding back into his position at the other side of the window.

Sham blinked. Slowly. Deliberately. Patiently. ‘What?’

‘Cos your bird’s waving at me.’

‘She’s not my… You know what, forget it. Just stay fucking hidden until he arrives, alright?’

Tripe raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

‘How’s the hostage?’ Sham asked.

‘See for yourself,’ Tripe replied, gesturing to the window.

Sham didn’t take him up on the suggestion. He knew what he’d see; Riot standing in the shadows of the narrow alley, obscured slightly by large metal bins, a young woman in front of her with a burlap sack over her head. Sham didn’t envy either of them—Riot for putting herself in harm’s way, or the woman with the thick fabric over her head in this uncharacteristically warm day.

‘She could get killed, you know,’ Tripe continued. ‘Ain’t you at all worried about that?’

Sham shrugged. ‘Nothing that the Loop won’t undo. She knows that.’

‘A death’s a death, though, mate. I don’t much enjoy remembering the explosion, much less a bullet to the head. A bullet to the head if she’s lucky.’

The leader of the resistance sighed, but said nothing.

Tripe took the sigh for what it was: exasperation. But he couldn’t seem to help but mutter, ‘Just saying…’

Minutes passed. An old lady poked her head out of her apartment door, disturbed by Sham and Tripe’s conversation, and stared curiously at them.

‘Not here for trouble,’ Sham called out to her, though the woman’s eyes drifted to the two revolvers.

She didn’t seem reassured.

It was Tripe’s turn to try, and Sham could virtually see the Magnetism skill check roll as he spoke. ‘Don’t mind us, young lady,’ he said. ‘We’re just here to keep everything ship-shape. We’ll be out of your lovely hair before you know it.’

Sham wouldn’t have believed those words could’ve worked if he didn’t see the old woman flash them a small smile, nod, and returned to her apartment. Tripe always had Magnetism, he supposed, if to a low level.

Tripe turned back to Sham, and the feigned posh accent dropped immediately. ‘So is this guy gonna fucking turn up soon or not?’ he said, gesturing to the window with his thumb. ‘Asa must’ve dropped the note off an hour ago. I know if someone had kidnapped my daughter, I’d be rushing to save her.’

‘You don’t have a daughter.’

The man shrugged. ‘Yeah, but if I did…’

‘Right.’

Sham was saved having to entertain this scenario by the arrival of footsteps in the alley below. Slow, deliberate footsteps. Of the kind that the the newly formed resistance had come to associate with Vince Perch, officer of Legion.

Sham’s six-person team had concentrated all their efforts on this one officer over the past couple of Loops. They’d taken turns following him, staking out his apartment in outer Dripcanal, even accidentally bumping into him in bars and tea shops to get a better feel for who the man was. They’d seen how observant the officer of Legion was, how he missed no miniscule detail, and from that they’d pieced together his Perspicacity skill. From their interactions with him, from the way that Vince Perch had drawn the attention of servers, and from how they’d seen people leap out of his way, they knew he possessed some Command. It was likely that he possessed more skills too, if to a lesser degree, though they’d yet to determine them.

The resistance hadn’t been looking for Vince’s strengths, though—at least, not exclusively. They’d been looking for weaknesses; a way to separate Vince from his colleagues, to eliminate the man from the equation.

Finding the weakness hadn’t taken long, the team having tracked their target to his luxurious home in the Dripcanal every evening. There, the team had found the man’s reason for doing all that he did: his daughters. The two daughters he was providing with expensive private schooling and spoiling them with gifts. This was a man with a rough accent of the Heron Piers, who seemed to spend little on himself. The money wasn’t for him, Ariel had noted. It was all for his daughters. Who wouldn’t want a better life for their children?

It was Asa, the only parent in the team, who had known what they needed to do.

‘Where is she?’ the officer of Legion demanded from the alley under the window.

Tripe moved to look, but an outstretched hand from Sham stopped him.

‘Not yet,’ the resistance’s de facto leader mouthed.

The other man confirmed his agreement with a nod.

‘Or what?’ came Riot’s scripted reply. ‘You’ll tell your boss, will you? You think he would want to continue employing you when he learns how easily you can be manipulated?’

There came no response; Riot’s rhetorical question had hit the mark.

‘Nope,’ Riot barked, ‘Not another step.’

Tripe posed a question via the raising of his eyebrows. This time, Sham nodded, and the pair rose slowly to peek over the sill.

Their Target had approached Riot more than Sham had been expecting, putting himself a good ten feet past the window, and only twelve or so from where Riot held their hostage.

‘How much?’ Vince asked, and even Sham—Perspicacity-fueled no more—could hear the stress in his tone.

‘Excuse me?’ Riot replied, adjusting the grip on her brass revolver as she held it to the hostage’s head.

‘How much are you extorting me for?’ The officer took another few steps forward, closing the gap between him and Riot some more.

Sham adjusted his grip on his pistol; any further, and they might have to hop into action.

‘You sure you’re up to this? We haven’t got Vigour any more…’

I’m up to it, Sham responded internally.

‘Hmm…’

Down below, Riot was shouting again. ‘I said not another step! What part of that instruction wasn’t clear?’

Vince Perch took another step forward, testing her. ‘You know, I’ve met your sort before.’

‘“My sort?”’ Riot repeated.

‘Your sort. Scum. Vermin. At least those in the southern districts have the excuse of poverty. But you, you’re a Sunrise District girl, aren’t you? You haven’t got any excuse.’

There was Perspicacity at work here. Vince took another step forward.

Riot snapped the weapon to point at him, keeping her arm clutching the young woman in front of her.

‘We could get him, I reckon,’ Tripe whispered. ‘From here, we could get him.’

‘Hit him, maybe. Down him in one?’

Tripe shrugged. ‘Give me a Marksmanship vial and I could.’

‘It’s an option…’

Down below, Vince Perch stared Riot down. ‘I’ll bet that revolver isn’t even loaded,’ he said. ‘The thing about people like you is: you’re vermin, sure, but you don’t want to hurt people. Not really. That’d just raise the bounty on you.’

Another step.

Riot held the revolver firmly, pointing straight at the man’s chest. Another couple of paces, and he’d be close enough. Riot would be able to fire and down the man in one, not risking the man being able to return fire. That was enough; the job would be done, and the issue of Vince Perch would be solved.

But these things had a habit of not working out as planned.

Vince Perch halted.

Sham clenched his weapon tight. He prepared himself to leap out of the open window.

‘Just which of my kids do you have under there?’ he asked.

‘That’s a strange way of telling your daughter you don’t recognise her,’ Riot said.

‘Which of my daughters?’ Vince asked again.

Riot didn’t reply. Sham could see her lick her lips, working out the chances of a shot at this distance felling the guy in one. Those chances were good, but they weren’t perfect. And they needed perfect.

‘I know my daughters,’ the officer of Legion said. ‘If nothing else, I know my daughters. And they both would’ve cried out to me.’

They were off-script. It was up to improvisation, now.

But Riot was nothing if not creative. She loosened her grip on the woman with the sack tied over her head, and the hostage sprang forward.

‘No!’ Riot cried out, reaching forward for the woman as she rushed out of her grasp.

In the excitement of the moment, Vince Perch forgot about his doubts. He ran forward to meet his apparent daughter, his fatherly instincts kicking in as she came within his grasp, and he spun to put himself between daughter and revolver.

Vince Perch hoisted his daughter to the cover of a nearby bin, shielding himself from Riot’s revolver but unaware of the two men in the building above—two men who still had a shot on him. The officer of Legion moved his hand to the burlap sack, and Sham’s heart skipped a beat.

It was time.

As Vince Perch removed the sack from Mona’s head, Sham and Tripe jumped from the window, landing with a heavy thunk atop the large bin below. They raised their weapons, ready to fire, as Mona flashed a wide smile to the member of Legion.

‘Hi!’ she said, then punched him in the nose.

Mona took a step back, raising the revolver hidden inside her jacket, but she wasn’t quite fast enough.

Vince Perch grabbed her shirt, yanking her back towards him, then grabbed the weapon from her hands. ‘Nice try,’ he said.

‘Sham?’ Mona asked, swallowing the fear that tends to stem from your own weapon being taken from you then pointed at your head. ‘Do you have a shot?’

‘Not a sure thing,’ he replied.

‘Any… bright ideas?’ Tripe asked.

Before Sham could respond, he found that Riot had already leapt into action.

The small woman charged, with all her weight, at the other side of the metal bin next to Vince and Mona. Its squeaky wheels gave way just enough for the bin to collide with Vince’s back—hard.

Mona pressed the advantage, turning on her captor as his grip on the revolver loosened, and managed to rip it from his gasp.

The officer of Legion blinked the pain away and saw the four weapons pointed squarely in his direction. It didn’t take Perspicacity for him to know when he was defeated.

Vince spat blood onto the dirty ground of the alley as he raised his hands in surrender.

‘You weren’t wrong,’ Sham said. ‘We wouldn’t put your daughter in harm’s way. She’s a fucking child; we’re not monsters.’ That was only one reason, of course. The other was that it meant that this whole situation made Vince a fool. And if it made him a fool, then he would surely not tell his Loop-remembering boss. Their schemes all fell apart if Enoch Chambers learned of them.

‘Vermin,’ Vince spat through bloodied teeth, ‘was the word I used.’

‘Yeah, we might still be that.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Where is she?’ Sham repeated. ‘Right now, she’s shepherding a good friend of mine to a hospital, having seen her tumble on her way home from school. You’ve raised a fine young lady.’

Vince Perch snarled. ‘And you’d deprive her of her dad, would you?’

‘Among other things.’ Sham nodded to Riot. ‘You three get out of here. I’ll finish this.’

Tripe and Mona hurried away, but the short-haired woman lingered behind. ‘See you back at the start?’ she asked.

‘Always.’

Revolver gripped in deceptively still hands and pointed at the man they’d hunted, Sham took a step forward.

This time, it had been messy. It wouldn’t always work out that way; no matter how much they tried to preserve the tiniest elements of the Loop, there were always changes. Even though Vince Perch wouldn’t remember this ambush next time around, any number of millions of seemingly inconsequential factors could tip him off to their schemes earlier on in the meeting—be that the presence of a passer-by, an irrepressible cough from Mona, or even just the changes in the wind.

But if Mona had been just a little faster, if she’d been just a little quicker on the draw, she would have had him. Vince Perch would barely have had enough time to recognise that Mona wasn’t his daughter before the trigger was pulled. And at that close range, there was no chance of missing. That was it: that was the answer to the question “How do we kill Vince Perch?”

Next time, Mona would have Fleet of Foot in her system.

‘You gonna remember this, Recollection?’ Sham asked, not worrying what the man in front of him would think.

‘Of course,’ came the reply.

‘Good.’

Sham paced forward some more, narrowing the gap between he and his target, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing was fired.

But both men smiled nonetheless. Vince for the reason of his apparent survival, and Sham because this was the confirmation: the plan could work. They could kill Vince Perch.

But not this time.

As Vince scrambled for his own weapon—still in its holster after all this time—Sham closed his eyes.