Spade walked through the fog with his coat collar turned up and his hands in his pockets. The brim of his hat pulled down just far enough so the wet mist slid off instead of dripping into his eyes.

  He had been walking for at least an hour already, though it was the kind of night that had a way of stretching out like cheap taffy. He only half paid attention to his surroundings and every block blurred into the last one, with the same brick storefronts lit up by the same tired aetherlight signs flickering into the dark.

  Archer was dead.

  That fact sat in his mind like a brick in a wet sack. Heavy. Uncomfortable. Impossible to ignore no matter how he tried to shift it around. It wasn’t grief though. Spade wasn’t going to lose a minute’s sleep because Archer was gone.

  Miles Archer had been a lot of things. Loud. Greedy. Opinionated. And a little too fond of pretty women and easy money. But he’d also been Spade’s partner for nearly a year. He’d been the man that had taken Spade in when he’d come to the west coast of the Republic and had needed a job. Sure, Archer just wanted someone to help pay the bills, and liked having someone green around, so he could act the mentor all the time. But Spade had needed that job and Archer had given it to him.

  And now Archer was lying in a morgue somewhere with a hole in him and Spade didn’t know who shot him or why.

  Spade turned another corner without thinking about it. His boots clicked against damp pavement in a steady rhythm. A trolley bell clanged somewhere further up the hill.

  He pulled up his Cognizance skill as he walked and activated the Scene Recall ability. He could still see the road in front of him well enough, but now a ghost of another alleyway appeared overtop of it.

  He imagined Archer standing on the sidewalk, near the drop off and a shadow of a man appeared. Then he imagined another person standing just off the sidewalk, holding out a gun and a second appeared.

  Archer had been tailing Thursby.

  That was all Spade really knew. That and the fact that the night hadn’t ended well for Archer anyway. But that wasn’t everything, was it? Run the facts.

  They had taken the job from Miss Wonderly that afternoon around 2pm. For some reason she wanted them to handle it personally. And she had been lying through those neat white teeth of hers from the minute she walked into the office. Although about which parts, Spade had no idea.

  The story as it sat, was that Miss Wonderly’s sister, Ennie Wonderly, had run off with some dangerous man named Floyd Wedby. For some reason, her sister no longer wanted to see her, and Floyd was acting as a go between. Again, for some reason.

  That was what he knew. Or, at least, that was the story Wonderly had paid them to believe.

  Archer had leapt on the job the moment he had walked into the office, although Spade knew it was more so he could get closer to Wonderly than that he cared about the job itself. The bag full of Eagles was just icing on the mystery cake.

  Now Archer was dead.

  Spade stopped at the edge of an intersection and watched the fog drift across the empty street. The aether lamps hummed quietly above him, their faint blue cores glowing inside brass housings bolted to the poles. The republic had sent engineers to install those lights when the living flame had died in the city. The Darkest night. They were supposed to make the city feel modern. Safe. Civilized. But they just made the locals remember what had been lost during the war.

  And unlike the living flame, the aetherlights didn’t banish the fog, they accentuated it.

  Spade shifted his weight and looked at the scene again. He imagined the shooter as a taller man. This Wedby was the cleanest answer. Archer had been following him. And, if Wedby spotted the tail, and a careful man might, then maybe he decided to solve the problem permanently.

  But, if Archer was doing the tailing, how did he end up cornered at the dead end of an alley? Had he been chased? Why hadn’t he pulled his gun? He carried a .38 Iron Rune. A solid Brackett Runeworks service pistol that would have discouraged almost anyone. But he hadn’t even unbuttoned his coat.

  Not chased then.

  Maybe he had been surprised and led down the alley at gunpoint. It would explain why Archer never pulled his gun. But it still didn’t line up with what Spade saw at the scene.

  Anyone that could have got the drop on Archer, would have known better than to get so close before firing. Archer had been shot point blank, which left a lot to chance in those final moments. Wedby, wouldn’t have known what kind of skills Archer had and if he was good enough to spot the tail and get the drop on his partner, he would have been smart enough to keep his distance. The gun didn’t care how close he was.

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  He was still missing puzzle pieces. He knew that.

  It likely wasn’t the goons who had jumped him earlier. They never even drew a gun. That didn’t mean they didn’t have one, but why treat Archer any different than him? That wouldn’t make any sense.

  Spade started walking again.

  Wedby was still the cleanest answer he had, but you didn’t go around killing a private detective just for tailing you unless you had something serious to hide. Most men would try to shake a tail or pay someone to go rough him up. Killing invited the police into the matter, and the police had a habit of digging until they found something. Or took enough of your money to stop looking.

  So Wedby. But a Wedby with something more valuable than one runaway sister. Which would explain Wonderly’s lies in the office, if she knew what that something was. Had the sister and Wedby stolen something from the family before running away maybe?

  Spade turned down another block. Ahead, a flickering aetherlight sign shone, lighting up the fog around itself like a fuzzy halo.

  APOTHECARY <—> 24 HOURS

  He paused to look up at the angrily buzzing letters for a moment, shut down his Cognizance skill and pushed through the glass door. A bell jingled overhead with a tired little sound.

  The shop smelled like antiseptic and old wood. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, packed with bottles and boxes and jars of powders or balms. Behind the counter a thin man in a gray vest and a round little hat looked up from a newspaper.

  “Evening,” the man said.

  Spade nodded once and removed his hat long enough to shake the fog off it.

  “Evening.”

  He walked along the shelves for a minute, looking for what he wanted. The clerk watched him the way night clerks watch everyone everywhere. Eventually Spade grabbed a large bottle of Dragon Distillery Whiskey, then returned to the counter and pointed at a box of his cigars behind the counter.

  The man put both the box and the bottle in a paper bag and took two eagles for his effort, handing back a few marks in change. Spade nodded to the man and stepped back out through the front door, letting the fog swallow him again.

  He lit one of the new cigars outside the shop. The System stirred faintly in the back of his mind, but he ignored it, busy thinking about the puzzle he had found himself in. Archer was dead and Wedby the most likely shooter, whatever his reasons.

  And Miss Wonderly stood right in the middle of it all in some way he couldn’t make out. And the sister too of course, whatever she had to do with it. And then there was goons that had given him the beating.

  And now the police.

  Which is why Spade had thrown out that Wedby was from Albion. Without another suspect, his friends down at the station were going to start looking his way a little too closely. And when they found out he had been sleeping with Archer's wife things would have started getting dicey. So, if the gun fit…

  A pressure was building in the back of his head. He paused for a moment and saw the system message was flashing. One of his passive skills had triggered on something. He sighed and pulled up the message.

  The system wasn’t any better than the police in this city. It had its own agenda and was corrupt in a way that he couldn’t quite figure. Worse maybe. The system was supposed to have been provided by the gods to help man. To give them access to magic and abilities beyond their ken.

  But that was a cartload of horseshit. Spade had seen enough in the war to know that was a lie. Gods used it. Men used it. And it ruined both of them the same way. Everyone benefited from the system equally. And in the end, everyone was screwed over by it, just as equally. No matter what anyone said, it just didn’t care about men or gods or sides.

  A motorcar rolled past slowly, its headlights cutting pale tunnels through the fog before disappearing around a corner. He started walking again as he looked at his message. Like it or hate it, fighting against the system never ended well for anyone.

  Pattern Recognition, one of the Cognizance skills passive abilities, had picked something up apparently. Another set of footsteps. He cursed. He hadn’t heard it himself, lost in his thoughts as he was and wondered how long he’d had a tail. Were the goons back? Maybe they wanted to know what the police had told him now.

  He turned toward his neighborhood at the end of the block. It was well past 3 am by now and time to call it for the night anyway.

  Now that he knew it was there, he could pick out the faint taps of another pair of shoes on pavement. It was hard to tell how far away in this fog, but when he paused at the corner and glanced back he couldn’t see anything at all. Whoever was tailing him now must have some sort of skill that helped cut through the fog.

  His earlier beating had left a dull ache in his ribs and he wasn’t eager to repeat the experience, but there was really nothing else to do now but carry on. His apartment was close and sometimes you just had to wait for the world to show you its hand.

  One thing was sure though… For a simple job of tailing some guy to a woman, this case sure was getting crowded.

  A few blocks on, his building appeared out of the mist like a tired old prizefighter with crumbling brick walls and a rusty iron fire escape. A dim light burning over the entrance showed two shapes walking out through the front door.

  Spade slowed so they didn’t see him coming and stepped back into the deeper shadow between two buildings to watch. If he wasn’t mistaken it was Tom Polhause with somebody, but he didn’t want to talk to the police any more than he did anyone else tonight.

  They walked across the front of the building, talking. Tom pointed up towards Spade’s darkened apartment window as they discussed something. Then, after a few minutes, they got into their car and crept away into the fog.

  Spade pushed himself off the wall where he had been leaning and headed for his front door. The air felt colder than it had earlier and he supposed that was appropriate for the events of the night. He sighed as he made his slow way up the steps of his building. Tomorrow was another day. Tonight he just wanted a stiff drink and a soft bed.

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