“I think I’d like an introduction,” she said.
Aggie looked surprised. “Alright, then. Jack, Katya Ivreski. Katya, meet Death’s Head Jack.”
“Come in if you want to talk,” said a dry, crackly voice from the car. “I always have time for pretty young women in need. But I’m kind of in a hurry and don’t have time to sit here and chat all night.”
With a rueful smile, Aggie opened the limo door for Katya. The darkness inside looked very dark.
Katya hesitated as her eyes fell on the homunculi. Suck it up, Kat.
She cringed at the proximity of the creatures, which leered down at her from either side (Aggie patted her on the back and said “Good luck”) and ducked into the interior of the limousine. It smelled of incense smoke and chemicals and was so dark she couldn’t see. A hand guided her, and she fell back into plush leather. It was more comfortable than anything she’d ever known. She hoped she didn’t ruin it with her wet clothes.
The car doors slammed shut, locking her in darkness. Tires squealed, and the limo shot off.
Someone lit a match, and light flared across the face of the only other occupant of the cab, the man who must be Death’s Head Jack.
Katya opened her mouth and screamed.
When the thing sitting across from her didn’t lunge for her and tear out her throat, Kat forced herself to stop screaming. Courage, girl.
It wasn’t easy. The thing was quite literally named. Death-black eyes glittered out of a decayed, withered face. The head had to belong to a corpse—yet when he spoke the flesh bunched and moved, surprisingly mobile.
At her fear and fascination, Jack laughed.
She tucked her legs under her and crawled as far away from him as she could get. She understood what the smoke was for now—to hide the stench of rot. And the chemicals must issue from Jack himself.
“Are you a Returner?” she asked.
Amused, he shook his head. He put his cigarette to his lips, and as he did she saw—her eyes adjusting to the dimness—that his hand was normal. That is, he had the hands of a living man, while his head was undeniably that of a dead one. And that just couldn’t be, not if he was a Returner. Returners were all corpse—in fact, they were usually composed of pieces of several. Besides, Returners were normally just mindless slaves. Reanimating the dead was a tricky process and mostly the brain was too far gone by the time it was brought back to life. It was said that only the mysterious and reclusive Dr. Reynalt could perform the procedure successfully.
“No,” Jack said, his withered lips curling around his cigarette. “I’m not a Returner, not precisely. But let’s leave that for now. I know my story. I don’t know yours. Do you want to join our little family—start working for me?”
Katya stared at his rotting head. She knew Jack could, if he wanted, slit her throat and throw her corpse from the car, and even if it landed at the feet of the most honest cop in Upper Lavorgna no one would lay a hand on him. Bosses’ men, especially the high ones, could get away with anything.
“We’ll see,” Katya said.
Smoke curled up from his cigarette. “You are pretty, I’ll give you that—wet and bedraggled and all.”
“I don’t need to be pretty.”
“No?”
She bit the inside of her cheek. “Listen, Jack. It’s been a rough night. It’s just, that’s not why I’m here. I didn’t want to meet with you to become, you know, a working girl.”
“Why then?”
She made herself sit up straight. “I want to meet with Boss Ravic.”
His eyebrows, what he had of them, shot up. “Oh?”
“Yep.”
“Well, as it happens, I was just on the way to the Factory to pay him a visit.”
She kept quiet for the rest of the trip. They moved east, away from the sea; Lavorgna was a port city, sprawling like a smoking, cancerous mass along this section of the Atomic Sea, but the Fifth Ward was deep inland, far from the water. When Katya was feeling bold sometimes she would climb a skyscraper and stare out toward the mad, boiling sea with its lightning erupting upward and noxious fumes oozing from its crashing waves.
Soon enough, more normal lightning flickered across the night, silhouetting the three thick towers of the Factory that jutted up proudly, belching smoke into the black sky. Katya knew the smoke was red, not black, and that it was just for looks, a constant symbol of Ravic’s power.
“Ever been inside?” Jack said.
She shook her head.
It wasn’t a real factory, of course, she knew, not since the fighting. A great hulking monstrosity, the building stood in a wasteland surrounded on all sides by bombed-out buildings. It too had been bombed, reduced to rubble, but Ravic had taken it over and rebuilt it to his own specifications. Now it was more castle than anything else, a huge mountain of metal and stone, and the hairs prickled on the nape of her neck as she approached it.
Ravic’s lair. She’d grown up in the Fifth Ward, the underworld of which he ruled with an iron fist, and all her life she’d heard stories of him and his barbaric ways. Now she was going to meet him.
Jack’s limo threaded through the bombed-out ruins. Bonfires blazed under jagged overhangs, and gangs of disreputable-looking people gathered around them for warmth, swapping bottles. They eyed the limo admiringly.
It pulled into the wide parking lot that surrounded the Factory. The only windows that looked out from the building were on its top floor; red light flooded out from them. A thousand autos and carriages cluttered the parking lot, and drunken rabble drifted to and from the Factory’s great hangar doors.
“We’re really going in?” Katya said, staring at that huge, red-lit doorway, like a portal to the hells.
Rough-looking people walked past the limo, some staggering drunkenly. They glanced at the homunculi and gave the vehicle a wide berth.
