Lutkevich: hand on the wheel, the AK up and pointed out the passenger side window. A chatter of bullets. Mookie ducks. Slides and slams his shoulder against the passenger side. Dents it. Soon as the bullets stop he throws open the door, slaps the rifle away with a meaty paw, drags Lutkevich part of the way out.

“You killed a girl in there,” Mookie snarls.

“Suck my dick,” Lutkevich says. Ballsy even still. “Time’s over, Mook. New regime coming in. The Boss is sick. The prick kid is nowhere to be found. They want you dead.”

Mookie closes the door on Lutkevich’s head.

The man screams.

He keeps opening and closing the door until his head is shattered skull inside the meat-sack of ruined features. A broken vase in a bloody sock.

And then it’s done. Both bodies, still.

Two of the Organization’s own men. Dead by his hand.

That’s a problem.

Somewhere in the distance: sirens. People hiding around corners, staring.

Cops. And soon: the Organization will come. They’ll want answers.

They’ll want his head.

Up here, he sticks out worse than a sore thumb. He sticks out like King Kong’s dick. They’ll find him soon enough if he hangs out here.

But…

Downstairs, they got nothing. He knows that place better than any of those assholes. Better than Werth, even.

Chapter 14

14

For as much as it is true that the Underworld is not a place of the spirit but rather a corporeal reality, that does little to negate the fact that the Great Below remains bound up with the energies of death. It has been seen from time to time that men who die upon the surface – men who die with purpose in their hearts, who die unexpectedly, who die in the hands of intense violence or grief-soaked tragedy – are given to leave their bodies as spirit and specter: a ghost of life, restless and insane. What is known is that these ghosts, when in proximity to a gateway into the Great Below, will eventually wind their way into that dark space. Wandering down, down, ever down. I’ve seen them here – the Cerulean gives me the sight. They move through the Shallows, toward the Tangle and through its catacombs. Though what happens if – or when – they reach the Expanse, I could not say.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

Nora throws open the door to her apartment. Hurries inside, slams the door, chains it, turns all the locks, goes to the windows and closes the blinds and the curtains.

Then she sits. On the couch. Hands on her knees.

She starts shaking again.

Casimir is dead.

It hasn’t caught up with her. Not yet. He’s dead. And the blood is on her hands. Not literally, not anymore, but…

They were going to change things. Together.

And now…