His head reels. He tries to imagine it: his daughter murdering someone. She said she was going to change things. But murder? He knew she’d gone mean, was maybe mean for a lot longer than he ever figured, but killing someone? That takes something he didn’t know she had. You don’t walk into their house and pulp their brains against the floor just because you can.

And could she have done that? Not by herself.

But then: a little tiny flare of hope, like a lit cigarette tossed up into the darkness. Skelly says, “I don’t think she did it.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“I know bad girls,” Skelly says. “I’m a den mother to bad girls. Shoot, I’m a former bad girl myself. She’s bad, all right. Got a rattlesnake mind and bullwhip tongue. But I don’t think she’s evil. And that’s what it takes to kill someone. You gotta have a little evil lodged up in there. Maybe a lot of it.”

“What about you? You got evil in you?”

She hesitates. Steps closer. “Maybe a little.”

“Me too.” She presses herself against him. He smells her perfume. The lingering odor of an occasional cigarette behind it. He feels the heat coming off of her…

He shakes his head, pulls away from her. He says, “So I still need to find the killer. But I don’t know how. I’m fuckin’ lost over here.”

“Too bad you can’t just ask Casimir Zoladski himself.”

It hits him like a fist.

“I can,” he says.

“What?”can ask him. I know someone.” He waves her on. “C’mon. We need to head to Daisypusher. I gotta see a man about a ghost.”

Chapter 15

15

The gobbos are tribal. Possibly even hive-minded, as each individual gobbo seems confused, inept, like an ant who has wandered too far from the hill. But when together, they work together. They work as one. Tribal breakdowns do exist among them – some by belief, some by purpose, others by the way they look. Some gobbo groups are hunters, killers. Others are… well, I don’t know that “religious” is the word, but they seem to congregate only at temples, gurgling and howling their dread songs to the Hungry Ones, the gods of this place. Some gobbos are fat and gray. Others pale, milky white, or with a rubbery, rusty skin. For a long time I thought that the Naga were the opposite: lone creatures, smarter by themselves than when together, generally distrustful of one another and operating on singular agendas. I no longer know if this is true.

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

The two thug bodies fall like heavy rolls of carpet. They splash into the water of the sewer tunnel. Sorago quickly covers the manhole from underneath.

Two shadows emerge from the darkness of the tunnel.