Someone’s been fucking around beneath the overpass again and it’s starting to piss Jillian off. You expect a certain amount of detritus, the odd condom or little glass vial, some anonymous dog or human shit, but lately it’s all chicken bones and black wax and pins. None of the others will touch the stuff, no matter that it’s clearly amateur bullshit, so she’s always the one to scrape it up, down on her knee pads hoping the pins don’t poke a hole in her latex gloves.

The smell from the river is vile, but what else is new. Summer days you can almost see it, a wavering miasma of piss and muck and oil, simmering just below the temperature of blood, but she grew up here, it’s no worse than the paper mills down to the south or the hog farms up top of the cliffs. In cooler weather, folks go kayaking, and if you squint your eyes and only look at the parts they’ve rewilded, it’s even beautiful.

When she’s packed everything up, all the regular trash and the new cosplay shit swept into the city branded bag, she digs a stub of sidewalk chalk out of her kit and scrawls several sprawling equations over the pavement, a basic charm against sandflies and mosquitos but it looks impressive if you’re an idiot. It’ll wash off in the first rain, but god willing she can at least save the lives of a few chickens.

There’s been a cold war going on between the Blues and the Greens for the last month, but so far it hasn’t really trickled out to the wider city. There’s a few more bodies floating in the canals, a few warehouse fires, but for the most part there hasn’t been much in the way of crossfire. Not much fashion for the types of splashy murders that make headlines, and it’s all reprisal killings, targeted assassinations, a knife in the crowd and grave dirt and coffin nails left under a doormat. Vicious enough, but not indiscriminate; business rolls on undeterred.

The first Jillian hears about it in the U District is from Rusty Nail, one of her regulars, a freelance hoddie who’s been hauling brick on the rebuild. Work’s been good, he says, too good, and when she makes a vague noise gives her the lowdown, or anyway his version of it. Sounds like the Blue leader has disappeared, or been killed, or maybe just run off with the boodle, and the Greens took the opportunity to start pushing, and between the internal power struggle and the external pressure the Blues are starting to boil over.

Next night Boilermaker, another regular, gives her a wildly different story: the Greens had an outbreak of pox and when it started to cross the river the Blues started enforcing a street quarantine and things are just barely this side of contained. “All the fires,” she says, “are plague houses. You watch, in a year the whole city’ll be a hotzone.”

for Isabel

Gangly, mathematical Sheila walks to clear her head, not fast or well, but persistently, a determined awkward shuffle that covers any amount of ground eventually. She’s got a map in her rooms of the city with each road she’s walked traced in red; it’s a dead heat whether she’ll span the city or finish her dissertation first.

There are three main forks of the river in Albion, tumbledown Albion at the bottom of the cliffs where the underground river ate the chalk to nothing to get itself more room for its wedding to the winedark sea, and the Student’s Quarter lies on a vague shape of land between two forks, too broad to be called an island. She pauses at the top of the Terpene Bridge and looks south; Green territory that way is flagged by bundles of rosemary, sage, and cannabis that hang from the wrought iron gates that block each doorway.

She could be feared—going into town is always a risk, the students are not best beloved—but she is awkward and innocuous and ragged and no one has bothered her yet. She fills her lungs with the moist air of the river, the oppressive heat of the summer, squints east at the sea, west at the cliffs, names the seventy-two Lords of Hell and the thirteen planets that rule them, and descends.

Sheila pushes the fur from her mathematician’s mind. It keeps recurring, soft and purring, vibrant, headless, and alive, an impossible luxury: the blanket that hugs you back! She hums the jingle to herself while she struggles with a proof.

Later, only temporarily broken, she goes for a walk in the building’s garden. Dark night outside and winter, but in here is endless summer, tropical heat, jungle humidity. Gemtoned birds flash from tree to tree, passing through and beyond the walls she can touch but can’t see. Her spine and ankles crack and pop. Standing hurts, but stretching is a luxury and an indulgence; she turns her face to the antipodal sun and lets it ease muscles cramped with worry.

Walking back she passes others climbing the white railings to the third floor. She has never dared, having no head for heights. Once, lonely, scared, she rose hand over foot to the bottom of the lower balcony, but visions of a short fall and the hard crack of the tiles against her skull drove her shaking down again. They hallo her and she waves back, silent but friendly. They understand.

Dawn finds her still working, eyes sandy, brain cloudy, still butting against logic’s iron gate. She will sleep at her desk later, for a scant hour; maybe that will help.