Chapter 11

He had come to see the city as a living thing. Her roads were blood vessels, each building, each doorway, a cell. The network of roads, walkways, and tramways carried her lifeblood, her people, to each cell, deposited them there, and then swept them up again when they emerged, rejuvenated or exhausted, to see them through into the opposite state.

And if Solace’s roads were veins and her people blood, then the wires were her nervous system, carrying impulses and information to and from her individual building-cells. Anyone, anywhere could receive anything through the wires, provided she or he knew how and where to look. Provided they could properly tap into the impulses that electrified their host-city and made her writhe.

He knew how. He’d known how a long time—it was one of the only things he was really sure he knew, anymore. The wires were his greatest awareness. They were his nerves as much as Solace’s, and he heard and saw and felt and tasted everything that she did, when he wanted to.

What he had seen today was the face of another one of his city’s missing, so he had searched, wracking her resources until he found what he wanted, in the midst of No Town in the north, climbing out of a street-level sewer entrance. He’d twisted the information out of Solace, and she’d given it to him in a burst of all-too temporary euphoria.

She was his goddess, their connection his love-making, her replies his ecstasy. He knew how to make her dance, sing him her secrets. She was his only love.

He relayed the information she’d given—a simple address—to the supplicant; left the answer at his doorstep in a shower of sparks that no one saw or heard, though they may have caught the trace scent of ozone as it was artificially filtered through the building. It was the moment he lived for, when he gave the solution, fixed the problem, and no one applauded.

She was his love, but this was his life.