The walk through the city was the kind of walk that would, in a more conventional story, be accompanied by dramatic music and meaningful glances exchanged between companions who understood the weight of what lay ahead.
In our story it was accompanied by the distant sound of someone arguing about fish prices three streets over, the rhythmic dripping of a pipe that had clearly given up pretending to be functional, and the absolute silence of Nara, who hadn't said a single word since we left the theater and was currently walking beside me with the hood of her tunic pulled so far forward that I could see nothing of her face except the very tip of her nose and the faint blush that remained around it like the last evidence of a fire that had burned itself down but hadn't quite gone cold.
I understood her emotions. I wasn't going to push. I had the good sense to know when a topic had concluded itself and when reopening it would generate outcomes that weren't useful to anyone.
I also had the good sense to know that we had a mission requiring functional participants and that functionality was more achievable for Nara if I simply walked beside her in companionable quiet and let the city do what it was doing around us.
The city was happy to oblige.
It had its own business and conducted it without reference to ours—the outer districts giving way to the mid-section as we walked. The buildings gradually became nicer, changing their character by several degrees, and yet the crowd kept thinning and thinning further until the streets were quiet in the specific way that streets in temporarily evacuated areas go quiet, which was to say not peacefully but with a quality of absence that the architecture hadn't adjusted to yet.
And that's when I saw it.
The greenhouse was enormous. Not enormous in the way that buildings were enormous, not even enormous in the way the arena had been enormous. It was enormous in the way that natural things were enormous—the way mountains were, the way caves that go on past the reach of light were—the kind of scale that the word hadn't quite made its peace with yet.
A dome of glass rose from the street around it in a perfect arc, its surface thick and clear. Through it, diffused and softened by the glass's density, was the glow of what lived inside—light that was warm, active, and alive.
The dome was packed—genuinely packed, it's interior so thick with trees, climbing growth, and layers upon layers of green that seeing anything distinctly through the glass was nearly impossible.
Shapes moved in there, in the deep part of the growth, things that were likely birds or other animals conducting their lives in complete ignorance of what the space was about to be used for.
The greenhouse lit the street around it from the inside like a lantern, casting everything nearby in that filtered organic glow. The buildings beyond it caught the light on their faces and held it there, the whole scene having a quality that was almost beautiful and would've been entirely beautiful if I didn't know what I knew.
Iskanda had shown me this place on her map during our sessions, her finger tracing the perimeter while she gave me data about the district.
The map had been detailed. The map had given me measurements, context, spatial relationships. But the map hadn't given me this—the standing-in-front-of-it reality of a structure that would take at least an hour to walk across from one end to the other, that made the people on the street near it look like punctuation marks on a page, that occupied its space with the absolute unargued authority of something that had been built by people who had no intention of being humble about it.
The security around the perimeter was loose in the specific way that security was loose when its purpose was appearance rather than function—scattered guards in the employ of the private attendees, men and women whose patrol patterns suggested they'd been given a general area and the instruction to look present without being briefed on why.
The buildings surrounding the greenhouse were completely vacant, their regular occupants having been relocated with the cheerful indifference of institutions that considered people secondary to events.
The emptied windows and dark storefronts gave the once popular district the particular quality of a place between its own moments.
The rest of the crew had already split off hours earlier.
Julius had been working—harder than I'd let him know I appreciated, because Julius's ego didn't need any additional support—on expanding his illusionary capabilities to the point where he could maintain a disguise not only for himself but for a small number of others simultaneously.
It was a significant technical achievement, practically speaking, and what it had enabled was the quiet, careful infiltration of the key buildings we'd spent hours identifying, the positions that offered sightlines into the portions of the greenhouse's interior that weren't entirely obscured by the growth inside.
Finding those positions had taken more time than almost anything else in the planning phase, discovered through patient observation over multiple preparatory visits, because the greenhouse's designers had, probably without knowing they were creating a security feature, planted everything inside with such density that the view from outside was effectively an impenetrable wall of green.
I sighed before staring down at my newest outfit.
I wore a tattered brown tunic that had been distressed by Brutus through methods I'd chosen not to observe, shapeless and vaguely damp in a way that seemed permanent rather than situational, the kind of garment that communicated I had fallen on hard times without requiring any supplementary information.
It reminded me, with the specific and unasked-for clarity that sense memory specializes in, of the clothes I'd worn back in the prison of the lowest layer, a memory I hadn't particularly missed. I quickly filed it back where it lived and turned my attention to the street.
My enhanced senses lit up then.
It wasn't dramatic when it happened—it was quiet, actually, a kind of internal brightening that arrived before the conscious identification of what had triggered it, the way you sometimes notice you've smelled something before you've figured out what it was. Someone was approaching from down the street, their footsteps steady and paced in the particular rhythm of someone doing a circuit they'd done multiple times already and weren't thinking much about.
I quickly took Nara's hand.
She startled slightly—the first visible response she'd produced in hours—and looked at me with her ears partially visible beneath her hood, but I was already moving, pulling her sideways toward the nearest alleyway without slowing my pace enough to suggest urgency to anyone watching.
The alley received us with the gracious hospitality of urban spaces that had been hosting things they're not supposed to know about for decades—narrow, damp, smelling of mildew, old garbage, and something organic at the base of the walls that had been there long enough to stop being identifiable.
We pressed back, not all the way, just enough to clear the mouth of the alley as I watched the street over Nara's hooded head.
The guard passed by us slowly, his eyes moving across the street in a measured sweep. He didn't slow. He didn't look at the alley. He continued down the block at the same even pace he'd arrived with, and thirty seconds later the sound of his footsteps had rounded a corner.
I let my smirk find its position.
"Right then," I said quietly, and felt Nara's hand loosen in mine as she exhaled. I didn't let go immediately—I gave it another beat, which was a small thing and probably didn't register, then released it naturally and gestured for her to follow me deeper into the alley, moving away from the greenhouse, the patrol route, and the gorgeous terrible luminescent dome that we would be entering through the most unglamorous method possible.
The alley connected to a smaller street, which connected to another, which got progressively narrower, darker, and more honest about the kind of neighborhood it was part of.
The buildings here weren't abandoned—they were too tired to leave. The sort of structures that had been built for a single purpose a long time ago and had since accumulated purposes the way old furniture accumulates things people don't know where else to put, the walls patched with materials that were the same color as the originals only by coincidence.
The beggar's den sat at the end of a narrow turn, tucked into the ground floor of a building that appeared to have given up on it's structural opinions at some point in the recent past and had settled into a kind of resigned functionality.
The door wasn't a door so much as a suggestion in the shape of one, its frame warped past the point of proper closing, the wood dark with age, use, and the particular finish that comes from decades of hands that had needed to touch something on the way in.
The windows on either side had been covered from the inside with fabric that had once been curtains and were now mostly texture, filtering the light from within into a dim, amber bleed that told you there was something alive in there without committing to specifics.
I took a moment to appreciate the range of settings my life had required me to navigate in recent months and found it, as ever, somewhat excessive and entirely on brand.
Without a second thought, I pushed the door open and stepped inside.