“Exactly. Though that’s rather well-known these days, in no small part to my boss.”

Avery cast his guide a sideways glance. “Just what’s your name, anyway?”

“Call me Yoi.”

Avery’s attention fixed on a certain structure down a side-street, a squat, bulbous-looking building with an ornate façade and sinister-sounding music flooding from its open doors. Seeing the line of his gaze, Yoi said, “That’s a chapel to the gods of the Restoration. They’re a new cult in town. Don’t know much about them, but what I do know freaks me out.”

Avery remembered the hooded and robed priests smelling of rot at the Sisters’ temple. “You’re not the only one.”

“Here, this way.”

Yoi led up a dark alley. Avery hesitated, staring at the moss-covered alley walls but unable to make out much else. The alchemical lamps that lit the main street did not cast much illumination upon the alley, and Yoi hunched in shadow, not even his eyes, hidden as they were, visible as he turned back to face Avery.

“Well?”

Avery shoved a hand into his pocket and curled his fingers around the pistol. “Lead on.”

He followed as Yoi led him up the alley, then down another. At last they pushed in through the rear entrance of what turned out to be a sex club. If Avery had thought it was hot outside, it was nothing compared to the sultry, overheated interior of the establishment. Deep, stringy music played as he and Yoi emerged into a large room draped in darkness and wreathed with smoke from a myriad of cigars and cigarettes. Some of the smoke glimmered faintly and moved in strange patterns. The patrons—at least some of them—smoked something alchemical, Avery knew. They looked both dazed and entranced as they beheld the main event.

On a raised stage of sorts, several young men and women were engaged in an elaborate sex dance, moving languidly against each other as sweat rolled down their dark, glistening bodies. The stage below them was of stone, and it seemed to be alchemically heated; steam rose off of it, enveloping the performers, who half-danced, half-fucked as the mist drew beads of sweat from their pores and, Avery felt sure, clouded their minds with alchemical rapture. They were all beautiful, and all adorned with glowing tattoos which bobbed and flowed strangely in the mist-veiled erotic dance. Suddenly the deep, low plunking of the strings stopped, and rapid drumbeats replaced it. The lighting changed, became redder, and the performers ceased their slow movements and began pumping and thrusting and grinding their hips against each other at greater speed. A collective moan rose from the watchers.

“This way,” Yoi told Avery, shaking him out of a reverie, and marched up a curling, winding staircase. Dully, Avery followed. He thought he might have inhaled too much of that smoke—either that, or the dance had distracted him. Yoi showed him to the second floor and down a hall. Grunts and groans sounded from rooms to either side. At the end of the hall, they took a turn and entered a quieter area, and at the end of this passage Yoi knocked on a door, one rap, then three fast knocks.

“Come in,” said a voice, and Yoi cracked the door and beckoned Avery to follow him.

Avery blinked in the darkness, but then his eyes began to adjust. There were three sources of light in the room: two orange alchemical lanterns whose fluid moved with glacial slowness, casting roiling shadows across the walls, and a stout black man who must be Losgana Coleel himself. He was naked, so Avery could see just how many tattoos he bore (or could have had he cared to count), and there were quite a lot.

Coleel proved to be a man in late middle age, somewhat taller than average and with his belly, which once seemed to have been quite taut, going to fat. His face and bald head were clean-shaven to better display his tattoos (and the rest of him was shaven, too—every inch), and each one glowed. He had become his own best marketing tool. His entire naked, gleaming body was covered in tattoos each glowing a slightly different color, and the tattoos moved as he moved, leaving afterimages in Avery’s eyes. And Coleel did move, making love as he did to two separate women—girls, really. Both seemed to be enjoying it.

No one bothered to speak or look at Avery and Yoi, at least until they were done. Then, panting, the young women gathered their clothes and some money, which had been left on the counter, and made their way out, giggling as they left.

“Now,” said the blazing shape that must be Coleel, sitting up in bed and lighting an alchemical cigar; Avery could tell it was alchemical because the flame burned blue. “You must be the foreigner who’s been asking all over for me.”

Avery cleared his throat. He and Yoi had taken a seat, and Avery had been lost in a daydream, waiting for the threesome to finish. In his dream, it had been he and Layanna and Sheridan in the bed together.

“Yes,” he said. “I needed to find you.”

“Well? Yes?”

Avery cleared his throat. “Actually, my friends and I have come a great distance and overcome many obstacles to find you.”

Coleel grinned. “You are clearly not a negotiator. A negotiator would start by sounding uninterested, not desperate.”

Do I sound so desperate? Avery tried to sound more casual. “We need to locate a great deal of ghost flower nectar—fresh, if possible.”

Coleel studied him. “I would’ve let you go on embarrassing yourself if I’d had any to sell. It would only have driven the price higher. Sadly, I sold the last of it some weeks ago. The prices had gotten ridiculously high, what with the shortages brought about by the war, and I could no longer resist.” He shrugged his broad shoulders and blew a cloud of smoke against the ceiling, where it spread outward in a loose star pattern, then broke up. Avery thought of the Starfish even then driving toward the coast.

“There must be some way,” he said. “You must have a hidden store, something.”

“I’m afraid not.” Throwing, at last, a silken sheet around his middle, he nodded to Yoi. “Fetch me some food, will you?”

Yoi nodded and moved away, leaving Avery and Coleel alone. Avery hoped this would be the time when Coleel would confess to having exactly what Avery needed, but Coleel only smoked and looked contented. At last, though, he frowned.

“Why is the nectar in such demand at the moment? I had to go on the run, my whole life disrupted, once I learned the Octunggen wanted it. Then I hear about you asking around. I realized you couldn’t be with them but must represent some separate group, also interested in the nectar. Tell me, what am I missing?”

“Ah.” Avery nodded. “That’s why you were willing to see me.”

Coleel waggled his cigar. “Would you like one? They’re quite nice—and expensive, I don’t mind saying. I may be on the run and in hiding, but there’s no reason not to enjoy oneself, is there?”

“You must have done quite well, selling that nectar.”

“Apparently, I could have done even better. Please, tell me—how. Someday this damned occupation will end, and I’ll be able to go back into business. If there’s better profit to be made, I’d like to make it.”

“There’s only one use my party is interested in,” Avery said, “and it can only be done once. I’m afraid there’s no more profit for you … beyond what I’d be willing to pay to acquire the nectar. I assure you, I’ve arranged with my government to be able to pay quite a lot.”

“And what government is this?”

“Ghenisa.”

“You’re some agent of theirs? Forgive me for saying so, my friend, but you don’t look like a spy.”

“No spy,” Avery said. “Just a representative.”

“Of course, I suppose real spies don’t look like spies. That would rather be the point, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m not a spy,” Avery maintained, then thought of Sheridan. “And you’re right, they don’t look like it. Please, tell me where you acquire the nectar; where do you harvest the ghost flowers?”

“I have several villages in the jungle that collect it for me. I refine it here.”

“Then contact these villages. Have them send in a shipment.”

“With the fighting? No. They won’t come, not that they would, normally. I send people to collect it from them, not the other way around, and right now my people are scattered or dead. Some have fled, some have joined the fighting. Some continued working for me till last week, when I got word about the Octs and their lackeys moving against me. And you won’t tell me why?”

If I did, that would REALLY drive the price up, Avery thought. He made his voice firm. “I need access to the nectar.”

Coleel had studied him before, but now he looked Avery, slowly, from top to bottom, then back up. “If you’re not with Octung, and I can’t imagine you are, then are you with … the Resistance?” Avery caught the faint note of hope in his voice. Coleel, master negotiator, had tried to hide it, but it was there, hidden just beneath the surface.

This was something, Avery knew. Now if only he could figure out how to use it. “And if I were allied with them?”

Coleel shifted, and for the first time he looked uncomfortable. Suddenly Avery realized something, and when he did he almost laughed. The threesome Coleel had forced him to watch had not been a case of Avery catching him in the act at all—no, quite the opposite. Coleel had arranged for him to enter the room during the loveplay in order to seem more confident—in order to lever himself onto a platform from which to negotiate. It had been a bargaining tactic, no more, no less … though he had seemed to enjoy it.

All of this meant that there was something Coleel wanted. And Avery was beginning to suspect it had something to do with the Resistance.

“How are they doing, the Resistance?” Coleel said, and Avery thought he was trying to sound more casual than he felt. “Are they still winning against Octung?”

“It won’t be long now until their victory, I’m sure of it,” Avery said, since it seemed to be what Coleel wanted to hear, and it might even be true.

“I used to have a friend among them, a Colonel Gitteen. Is he still around?”