Smoke and Fire

Chapter 4

After a long wait in strained silence, the door to Rurik's apartment buzzed and opened. Bjorn took the lead again, bringing them up to the second floor and then down a hallway that smelled like cigarettes, to door number seventeen. It was unlocked.

Unlike the outside of the tidy, middle-class apartment building, the inside looked exactly like Asha expected it should. Dozens of shoes kicked off just inside the door, bodies were strewn all over furniture like leaves on the ground, limp and slowly ageing but laughing because they were not quite certain of their lot in life.

There were a lot of empties lying around but mostly, the air was thick with Stavia, a relaxant sometimes prescribed by doctors. It was expensive and difficult to grow. She wondered how Rurik got his hands on it.

Laughter and music filled the spaces Stavia smoke did not. Someone had gotten a graphophone. It was the first time Asha had ever seen one not in the window of a music shop. It whistled out a woman's voice and a saxophone. She wanted to pick it apart, this seemingly magic thing that was made purely by technology, so she could understand what made it work the way she understood how bodies worked. It was best not to get too close, though. She couldn't fix it if she broke it and she certainly couldn't pay for it.

Rurik pulled out of the crowd and approached them. Asha had to look way up to see his face, he was so tall. He was going grey around his temples and in his beard, and his mouth had deep cracks around its edges. He had more scars than she could count, above his eyes, over his nose, around his cheeks, from getting cracked in the face one too many times. His knuckles, too, were knobby and tough-looking, like the hide of a beast.

His fearsome countenance used to scare her when she was younger, before Bjorn came along and introduced them, when she'd just see him on the streets of Ester. If she was honest with herself, he still kind of scared her now, though for different reasons. He had a demeanour as sharp as broken glass and there seemed to be an endless list of things that set him off. Asha tried to stay away from him when she could.

"Hey, brother." Bjorn had no such reservations and grabbed him around his shoulders and smacked his back roughly.

"No troubles getting here?" Rurik's accent came from the north and reminded Asha fiercely of wind and snow and miles and miles of ice.

"We saw the EU," Asha bubbled over like a tea kettle left too long to boil, unable to help herself. "They chased a boy down right there in the streets and almost washed him away. They put a collar on him and took him."

Rurik's eyes were flat and difficult to read as he let go of Bjorn and took a step back. "Again?"

"When did it happen before?" asked Asha.

A girl with copper hair and green eyes broke away from the other guests and sidled up beside them, a gossip's smile on her mouth. "That's the third one," she gushed. "They marched through Tent City last week and took that little scruffy girl, you know the one with the one-eyed dolly?"

Asha did know the one. She always carried it around by its dirty brown hair and skipped quartz down the centre of the street, hitting the shoes of pedestrians. Most people ignored her but sometimes, they'd back her into a corner and scream.

It didn't really surprise Asha to know that girl was magic. She was peculiar.

"Who else?" Asha asked.

"A lady that was always going into Madam Comfi's shop, buying her fortune," the redhead dished.

Madam Comfi did cheap tea and card readings for anyone passing through Wallace Avenue, Ester's unofficial black market for magics a person couldn't get at any reputable shop. Illegal crystals, unregulated charms, imported goods from across the Sapphire Sea that didn't pass regulations.