⚠️ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠️ Click here to read Neon Blessing from the beginning!

A rickety access stair off the side of the road led below street level, a rusted railing the only thing between her and a ten thousand foot drop into the churning sea of waste at the bottom of the Diluvian. Everywhere, banners hung from the grates and pipes, extolling the virtues of the god at the bottom of the stairs.

Shiv couldn’t read the Eldest Tongue, but Raz used to tell her what all the banners said: Prince of Birds, Father of Thieves, Bright-Eyed, Swift-Tongued, Dark-Winged, Clever-Handed, Purse-Cutting, Theft-Fed, Ever-Hungry, Ever-Proud, Ornarch. The same symbols on every banner, repeated a thousand times, more and more frequently, as candles began to crop up along the railings and the heady scent of incense suffused the misty air.

A magpie sat on a pipe that snaked out of the wall, looking down at Shiv. “Hail, brother. I bring an offering for our lord,” she said, waving the uneaten half of the tart. The magpie chattered at her mockingly, then flew off. Fifteen years she’d known Ornarch, and she still didn’t know if the birds could understand her.

A few hundred feet down the path, under one waterfall and over another, lay the entrance to Ornarch’s home. It was once a drainage pipe, but it had long since fallen into disrepair, now the domain of rats, birds, and the god of the gutter. She hesitated a moment outside the pipe.

“Come in, Shiv.” His voice sounded frail, but was clearly audible over the roar of the water. She stepped inside, and laid eyes on her god.

Ornarch looked like shit. He’d aged twenty years in the month since Shiv had last seen him. His once-ageless face was carved through with lines, his raven-black hair faded to a dull grey. His threadbare black suit couldn’t have gotten any more dilapidated, but the wings that swept from his back looked tattered and mangy. Even his gilded earrings had tarnished. Only his eyes were completely unchanged: hollow voids that expanded as Shiv met his gaze, wider and wider, deeper and deeper, until points of light shone through an infinite expanse of nothing, and nothing else was real. Shiv had never seen the night sky anywhere but those eyes.

In contrast to his wretched appearance, his home was more or less unchanged since last she’d seen it. The pipe in which Ornarch held court was easily thirty feet in diameter, its curved floor dotted with the melted-down corpses of innumerable tallow candles. Censers dangled from the ceiling at regular intervals, smoke transmuting the industrial lighting into something soft and warm. A thousand black birds stared down at her with beady eyes.

God clung to a wheeled IV drip like a drowning man to a board. How he’d gotten it down here, she had no idea, and as far as she knew mortal medical technology did nothing for gods. The bag glistened red in the dim light of the drainage pipe, a line of crimson curving down and disappearing under a shirtsleeve.

“I brought breakfast.” She once again pulled the pastry from her pocket.

“Put it on the altar with the rest.” Ornarch’s altar was a flat stone carved with circling birds, piled high with worthless trinkets and stolen treasures in equal measure. Every god was fed by sacrifice, and Ornarch demanded a cut of his congregation's pilfered goods. She gingerly placed the tart atop a wallet and a jeweled locket.

“It’s been a while.” His lips didn’t really move as he talked. Shiv had seen him open his mouth all the way, had seen that cruel beak that jutted from the back of his throat.

“Yeah.” Unspoken, the fact that she’d lost her arm on a job he’d sent her on. The job she’d failed. A month of recovery, the burning pain of the blade parting her flesh, all for nothing.

“You haven’t been answering your phone.”

“I lost it.” Some time in the panicked escape from the botched job, it had slipped from her pocket.

Ornarch’s thin lips curved into a frown. “Well that simply won’t do.” He patted his pockets before procuring a thin box from nowhere. “The newest Obol model. Top of the line. Trackers removed.” He offered it to Shiv.

She hesitated.

⚠️ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠️ Click here to read Neon Blessing from the beginning!

Shiv pocketed the phone, then reached out and took Ornarch’s withered hand. “I’ll do it.”

Her god smiled. “I knew I could count on you.” With a twist of his long, thin fingers, a sleek black card appeared and found its way between her fingers. “Twenty thousand credits.”

Shiv nearly dropped the card in surprise. “Twenty thousand?!” The payout for picking a pocket was three digits at the highest: cards would be canceled long before they could be used, and there was always the risk that the mark might have augments or trackers. B&E paid better, but you needed to find a fence who could break into stolen electronics, and they were almost universally scum. The shit she and Raz had looted on the botched job could have been worth a hundred grand, even after a steep cut from both Ornarch and a middleman, but that had taken weeks of planning and cost her an arm. Twenty thousand up front was unthinkable.

Ornarch waved a hand dismissively, rings glinting in the industrial glare. “Grease some palms, hire some muscle, buy a gun. Whatever makes the job easier.”

“Thank you, lord.” She hesitated a moment, realizing she had no idea where to start looking. “Do you have any leads?”

“How were Raz’s finances?”

“About as broke as me, I think. Those implants cost a lot.”

“So they’d need to sell off some of the haul to get away from here. They aren’t safe in the Diluvian, and fare out of here is pricey.”

“I’ll ask around.”

“Wonderful.”

“Any idea as to why they did it?”

“No. No clue.” She almost choked on the words. That was the worst part, the bit that kept her up at night. What could have been so important that they’d just leave her?

“Ah well. Good luck, Shiv.” The dismissal, unspoken, was irrefutable. She would do what he wanted, he would give her what she wanted. The conversation was over. For all his immortality, Ornarch was not a patient god.

Shiv turned to leave, the roar of water rushing up to meet her as she approached the exit of the pipe. Could she even kill them? In a fistfight, even down an arm, definitely. Guns were a toss-up given that neither of them knew how to shoot. But of course, Raz was a skulljack, and a good one at that.

Skulljack. It was a dirty word, the worst kind of mage. Raz’s brilliant blue undercut hid dozens of neurocranial implants–translators and antennae and arcane batteries–all bent towards one terrible purpose: the subjugation of the will. In that dingy waiting room before their first operation, she’d told them not to do it, but she’d come to rely on their skills in the years since: skulljacking took too long to be useful in a fight, but it was priceless in an interrogation.

Of course, skulljacking was easier the better you knew someone, and they’d grown up together. Over a decade and a half, she and Raz had bared every last rotten secret–had aired out every scrap of encryption around their souls. They promised they’d never fuck with her, but would she know if they had? Even if they hadn’t, how long could she hold out against someone who knew her first crush, all her fears, and everything she’d ever dreamt of?

As she climbed the stairs back to street level, her nervous thoughts sublimated into a mantra, repeated with every step. 

I’m not who I was a month ago. That woman could never imagine killing them. I can.

⚠️ SPOILER ALERT! ⚠️ Click here to read Neon Blessing from the beginning!

Shiv drew her hand back slightly. “What do you want?”

Ornarch silently took a seat in a plush armchair which appeared beneath him like a supplicant. He set the phone on the arm of the chair and folded his thin hands contemplatively. He met Shiv’s eyes for a moment, then spoke, his voice like velvet. “What happened that night, Shiv?”

Shiv went to open her mouth, but he was speaking again.

“It was supposed to be a simple burglary. You had a key. Raz had the building plans. You were both professionals. And you did half the job! A little bird told me the theft was reported to the Church. But despite that, you’re missing an arm, and Raz is, well, missing. Along with my cut of the money.”

Ornarch tilted his head like a vulture inspecting a roadside corpse. “Shiv, darling, my wonderful protégé… Did you get your share?” Unspoken, a simple fact they both knew: he would know if she lied.

“No.” After carrying her to Maggie’s couch, Raz had left, with all the money and without explanation or goodbye.

Ornarch leaned back and breathed a sigh of relief. He met her gaze again, grief lining his aged face. “Oh how they have wronged us, Shiv.”

“What do you want?”

“It’s a dreadful business. Tasteless, even. But we both know there’s an honor among thieves. You wouldn’t rob one of your brothers or sisters, would you?”

“No.”

“And I would never take anything from you, save for my rightful cut.”

“You never have.”

“And yet your little friend,” he said, putting the same venom into the word as one might put into “tumor” or “cop,” face twisting with contempt, “well, they seem to have forgotten about common decency.”

“What do you want.” It came out less as a question, more as a challenge.

“This really is a dreadful business, Shiv. You can take the phone now, no matter what you decide. A gift from an old man to his favorite daughter. To his loyal daughter.”

Ornarch had taken her in when her parents, long forgotten now, had left her to die. He’d first called her son, and then daughter, always proud of her in his distant, transactional way. She was suddenly very aware of the tattoos on her shoulder blades.

He continued, lips unmoving as the beak in his throat spoke. “And if a certain traitor happened to suffer their rightful punishment at your hands, well, I’m sure we could do something about that arm of yours.” Unbidden, a vision of cold steel and titanium flickered through her mind. An enticing prospect.

He held the phone out to Shiv. His nails were long, talon-like, in bad need of a trim. His hand felt ice-cold as she took the box from his grasp. “We rule these streets, Shiv. No one steals from us.”