Unrecognized Renewal
(This is the last chapter I’ll be posting from The City of the Bull. At this point I must either admit that I cannot bring myself to keep writing for a magical, symbolic setting with no consistent history, and skip genres to sci-fi, or, if somehow I continue, I must admit that I’m probably going to finish the thing one day and cease spoiling everything on tumblr.)
Two streetside stalls graciously left a crack wide enough for a fit person to walk through without turning their body. A sign resting astride them, advertising a well known clockworker's shop, physically buried behind these middlemen businesses. Such was this jostle. Having your own shop front, however well dressed, however renowned your address, that wouldn't save you from being crowded over by no-name hawkers of C-grade products. There was a second-mover advantage in locations with rent takers who can't keep their promises. Under overhanging eaves were two of those big bronze automata one would often see in the show windows of tinkerers and fixers. They sensed Holly's movement and turned to her, a bronze dragon opened its mouth and plumed sparks whose brightness almost masked the rather swollen chunk of jade substrate mounted in the head, but not quite. If this shop had a setter, their conceptual density was poor. Holly wasn't here to have any of her sparkworks taught, though. She would say she was here to have a gun restored, but that wasn't it either. She was here to read the people she met and tell her company whether they could be trusted to design, build and maintain their equipment. glass-covered cabinets displayed intricate bronzeworks and brassworks on thick wooden shelves, but Holly's attention was fixed on the 14-some year old girl behind the till, who's attention fixed on Holly.
Holly brought up the broken gun, muzzle away from the clerk, offering a handle nestled in a basket-guard of brass filigree. Some of those encircling brass filaments were decorative, some were armor, some were heat sinks, and some were functional gear sectors relating to the ejection mechanism, gyroscopic stabilization, bayonet positioning (forward for punching and downward for skull-cracking), and the carriage of ammunition in a great cylinder that encircled the user's hand, joining at the top, through two runs of gears and a firing chamber. The Caligula was a thing of immense beauty(or at least, so long as it did not immediately draw your attention to the crooked shape of the city's technological frontier, weapons so far ahead of everything else). This particular Caligula, however, was a carefully assembled pile of scrap. Most of the parts of this Caligula Precision Pistol had been, in their past lives in their original fittings, the point of failure. It immediately became clear that taking the time to assemble this frankenstien's monster of weakest links from the rummage shop on Pit had been worthwhile when the girl, perhaps apprentice or perhaps already in practice, even in her youth, showed every sign of recognizing the total profundity of the state of disrepair this piteous little thing in her hands. As she turned it over and over she appeared positively *aggrieved* by its condition. The shop had passed the test of competence. The girl looked up at Holly, disbelieving. "We... We aren't cheap. I mean, the owner of this gun was clearly very very uh, frugal, these are all bottom dollar parts.. most of these parts have turned at least 900 times.." "Yes. Oh yes no worries there, we're good for it, at least, we are now. My brother, he used to live rough down in the undergrowth. This thing was his only real friend during those times, you know, we think it actually saved his life more than once. It's got an identity now, to him, it was the only good thing down there, it was his ray of hope and in the end it brought him deliverance. It's very, very important to him that we keep all of these parts together, not just any Caligula will do, no, it has to be this one. We will pay whatever it takes." Still rather wracked, the girl paled as Holly spoke these words. For a few more moments she looked down at the gun prodded, pried, and twisted, and her face fell blank. "What is it?" "Nothing, we can do it." "Okay.." I chuckled, "so tell me what it'll cost". The sum was hardly astronomical. So, why... "You seemed to make a note of something just then. Didn't you? I don't shoot, personally, but the Caligula's always fascinated me, what can you tell me?" Holding this same expression of startle leaking through thin mask of blankness, "It's just, uh I think your brother must not have told you the whole story, sorry to say. The parts are from different prints, and most of the prints were very very recent, within the month, meaning that until very recently this gun didn't exist." This was not quite the story Holly was hoping to hear. "Really? Then how did they get so worn down?" "Well, I can't assume anything, this is just a guess, but it looks like what's happened is... You see when a factory goes into production, very early in the print they'll take a finished piece off the line and they'll put it in a testing apparatus, and it'll be induced to fire a thousand-some rounds. If it doesn't make it to a thousand, production will be brought to a stop because that's a sign that there's probably a defect in the process somewhere. Usually when they're done with those test guns they melt them down, but I guess it's possible that for something as intricate as a Caligula they can't really do that - I mean, for one if they tried to just melt it down the coolant veins would explode - so they'd end up on the tip instead. That's all well and good, you can get off-cut parts in the Pits, but half of the serial numbers on these are from prints that only happened in the past week, so, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, mam, but your brother's story can't be true." Holly smiled, endeared and impressed, and somewhat amused by the elaboration of the lie. Not much of the girl's story was really plausible. The company had not sourced its parts from an insider. Even if the heaps in Pits had testing scrap, Jarren and Marcel would not have picked them. Holly didn't know what to say next. The girl clearly knew that the Caligula had been assembled recently, but she was lying about how she knew. Of course, calling her bluff would raise alarms, and Holly could do better. "You saw right through it. I apologize about the deceit, we knew you were good, we just had to be sure you were exceptional. You know, any tinkerer will tell you they're exceptional, everyone will tell you that they'll do a better job than the last guy at keeping all of your equipment in a reliable state. Hard, tragic experience has taught us that they're frequently lying. We had to be sure you were for real, you see." "Oh. I understand." An acknowledgement but not an embrace. She'd just been taken into a lie on top of a lie. That was mutual knowledge, On a certain level the girl must have realized that if Holly knew the real story behind the gun then she probably knew, or would soon discover, that the story the girl had given wasn't it. Holly was playing the fool, but the girl chose to let the lie hang over her, because she sensed that cutting it down would bring something deadly down on her head. Holly was ready to take a closer look. "We just wanted to see what you could handle. We don't really need you to repair the gun, of course", and she held out and open hand, tilted just so that when the girl quite eagerly went to hand the accursed wreck back to her, Holly could pause and say "Wait.." and their hands would rest together for a moment, but things did not go as Holly expected, because the first thing that Holly saw when her empath digits crept through the girl's hand and into the mind of {RESTORER {RENEWAL JA-MEL} REN}, was that Ren was looking back into Holly as well, but not in the same way as an empath. Ren was not an empath, that had been obvious from the start. Ren was something that Holly had never even heard of before, someone who was not an empath, but who sensed enough to withdraw, and the connection was severed, Ren still holding the Caligula, shocked eyes receding away to the safety of the back room with its automated doors. Holly, connective impulse reeling, showed not frustration, but anguish, and fortunately, Renewal Ja-Mel stopped before triggering any security mechanisms, and asked "What do you want?" "We just want someone we can trust. I'm sorry. I'm a trusted empath, did you see that? Could you tell? I would never harm you. For all the coarseness I've shown you I would never bring anything vile through these doors." Shaking her head "I couldn't see that, but I'm *not* touching you again." "Please can we just talk? You know I wouldn't be in this city if I wasn't trusted." Ren turned away into the back-room, as if to seek guidance from someone else, then she turned back, and declining to look Holly in the eye, she decided; "Outside." Ren pulled the handle of some unexplained mechanism by the door as she followed Holly out of the store. Ren would not allow this strange woman to draw her beyond the thoroughfare, but she still did not know where she was going or whether she'd ever really come back. They walked up a flight of steps on either side of a fountain, and rested their backs against the florid stone frame that rose behind it as the crowd flowed around them on all sides. They spoke without looking at each other. Ren said "You're the only one outside of the family who knows." "And I'll remain the only one who knows, if that's important to you." Time passed. "When you have something, in this city, either you exploit it or you get exploited." "Yes. But that's not damnation. It's just a matter of finding a way of exploiting it that you can live with. I build friendships in places they should never be. I walk with enforcers, and yet, if I really think about the consequences of our actions I see more construction than destruction, they’re violence incorporeal, but generally, I get them jobs that ally them with order, coordination, and understanding. It seems to me that you, as someone who can reach into opaque systems and steal dependable insights, you could do exactly the same, with practice. But you're not just limited to reading people. You can go even further." The crowd churned. "I think it's just my father's fear, that I feel when you say these things, out here. I remember when I was little and he would give me some part and ask me what it was for, and I would tell him everything I could feel in it, everything, and back then he thought I was just a genius, that I'd gotten it from his books, we were excited by it, you know, there was nothing bad in it. Eventually he realized there was more to it than genius, that I'd been reading his books but not the words in them. But I always knew what I was doing, and I wasn't scared before he gave me his view, and honestly I don't really think I'm scared now. I'm.. wound up, but I'm still just excited." Holly reached out a hand. Ren responded; "No. What did you see, when you looked into me before?" "I saw you reading me, but not like an empath. I figured the rest out. You see purposes, don't you? And purposes are inextricable from origins, so you see history as well." "Yes." Ren breathed, "*Wow*" "Do you see *all* of the history?" "No. Not easily. It's all sort of from the perspective of the object, and I only see the beginning, as you said, the origin. I don't really know why you made that gun." "We wanted an excuse to draw out all of the talent your shop had to offer so that we could get a look at everyone." "You succeeded. It's just me now. My dad got arthritis and my sister's gone away to study. Mam's not a tinkerer." Holly turned to her "You can't work in repairs and restoration for the rest of your life. What else can you read, aside from people? Can you heal? Can you read systems? Substrates? Can you read places?" Places. Ren refused to answer, but those wide and telling eyes answered despite her. Holly looked over the girl again. White. Black shoulder-length hair with a slight curl, a crescent nose, even as her frightened eyes watched the coiling body of the patron spirit of this city undulating over everyone's heads, there was a fire in them, the spark of the awakening malcontent, sure that things were not as they should be in the city of the bull. Holly was concerned. "I think there might be a hole in you that wont get filled until you make an attempt at reforming this city. You can leave it, but you wont forget it's here, fermenting, pluming its rot across the continent. Nobody does."
