Ash Like Vengeance, page 1
ASH LIKE VENGEANCE
J.L. DELAVEGA
ASH LIKE VENGEANCE
By
J.L. Delavega
Copyright © 2023 J.L. Delavega
Edited by Tee Tate.
Cover Design by MiblArt.
All stock photos licensed appropriately.
Map illustration by Cartographybird Maps.
Published in the United States by City Owl Press.
www.cityowlpress.com
For information on subsidiary rights, please contact the publisher at info@cityowlpress.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior consent and permission of the publisher.
CONTENTS
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Arrival
Part I
1. Adelaide
2. Tesla
3. Adelaide
4. Tesla
5. Adelaide
6. Tesla
7. Adelaide
8. Tesla
9. Adelaide
10. Tesla
11. Tesla
12. Adelaide
13. Tesla
14. Tesla
15. Adelaide
Part II
16. Tesla
17. Adelaide
18. Adelaide
19. Tesla
20. Adelaide
21. Tesla
22. Adelaide
Chapter 23
24. Adelaide
25. Adelaide
Chapter 26
27. Tesla
28. Adelaide
29. Adelaide
30. Tesla
31. Adelaide
32. Adelaide
33. Tesla
34. Adelaide
35. Adelaide
36. Adelaide
37. Tesla
38. Adelaide
39. Adelaide
40. Tesla
41. Adelaide
42. Tesla
43. Adelaide
44. Tesla
45. Adelaide
46. Adelaide
47. Adelaide
48. Adelaide
49. Tesla
50. Adelaide
51. Adelaide
52. Adelaide
Part III
53. Tesla
54. Adelaide
55. Tesla
56. Tesla
57. Adelaide
58. Tesla
59. Adelaide
60. Tesla
61. Adelaide
62. Tesla
63. Adelaide
64. Tesla
65. Adelaide
66. Tesla
Chapter 67
68. Adelaide
69. Tesla
70. Adelaide
71. Tesla
72. Adelaide
73. Adelaide
74. Tesla
75. Adelaide
76. Tesla
77. Adelaide
78. Adelaide
79. Tesla
Exit
Sneak Peek of Spears and Shadows
Find Your Next Read
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
Additional Titles
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For my grandma.
ARRIVAL
My name is Adelaide Revere.
I am twenty-two, hair like moonlit bone.
It’s been one hundred and twenty-six days since I buried my sister Vesta outside Winchester, and my eyes are still gray. I don’t have the pestilence. But all this time I’ve been seeing blood, breathing smoke.
There are only two colors now. The ground in Hannah, black. Everything else, steeped in red.
But red is the color of revenge.
Welcome back.
PART ONE
STORMS AT DUSK
ONE
ADELAIDE
The Stranger splays up the four corners of the alley, iron smoke. Not a dead end, it just looks like one. Four corners make people buying dangerous things feel safe. She spills out of me more often these days, blacking out edges, tired of this bullshit. So am I.
My spoon chime lists outside the curtain clouding the alley entrance from the air market and soup camp, empty promises. Never sell from the same spot two days in a row. People who want what I have just have to know what to look for.
Sunlight comes through breaks in the wall and over the peaked roofs, red, slanted. It’s always dusk in Hannah. The refinery towers on the fool-made hill breathe out black smoke with a stability even the wind doesn’t have the strength to clear.
Every crack bleeds black ash, lips and fingernails crusted with it. A second skin that never washes off.
The man in front of me breathes heavily, and I draw my thumb around the pommel of the knife hidden against my back. Four passes. Five…
He doesn’t really see me. His gaze drips across the muzzle locked around my jaw to the gray skin of my neck.
“Fool’s gold, fox, stop holding out on me.”
On my table lie the things I’ve stolen. Two clip-point knives and one folding. A string of keys for those who can’t pick locks, sleeping tablets, sugar, a tin of butter, my last two Ven crystals. They look black, not blue, in this wasted light.
This picker doesn’t get to know about the revolver I stole yesterday. I know what he’s after.
You can spot a powder licker by the gray stain on their lower lip and tongue, clearly under the skin, unlike the flat black of refinery ash discoloring me.
There are many.
I show a corner of the waxed paper packet stuffed up my left sleeve, hold up five fingers, then open my palm. Fifty, gold standard. This is a solid week’s wage for a second-shifter like him, gone like water.
He reaches back. The Stranger locks my hand around the knife until his reemerges from his pocket with money, not a weapon. I count it by touch, eyes not leaving him. Gold standards weigh more than silver.
He follows the powder with his tongue, the buzz under his skin a hive of stone beetles. He grabs the second it lands on the upturned crate between us, fingers rubbing the package the way men touch women.
Courage powder.
My mother was a user.
“You’re a devil—” The cough turns on him, retching phlegm onto the ground. The refinery dust gets into everything. I taste it in my throat, in my lungs, in my sleep. There’s no escaping its touch. The curse of industry.
“When will you get more?” His weight shifts to the other foot like a mood. “You’re cheaper than the other dealers.”
Then you shouldn’t have told me what it’s actually worth.
Unfortunately, getting this powder isn’t like picking rocks off the ground. I know where to find it, but bodies used to being dulled by chemicals become sharp like the Stranger when they’re not. I’m careful. Wait, take these little envelopes from pockets when it’s safe and sell it back to them.
Miners buy this more than alcohol, more than knives or stolen meat and sugar. They give me every last string in their pockets for this gray dust that weighs less than the wax holding the paper shut.
I drop my wares into the pockets lining my skirt.
He doesn’t even bother to leave my sight before ripping through the wax. His tongue flicks across cracked lips, gray and filmy.
It’s my mother, his body, melting and becoming hers. Her face is a blur except for the gray-blue stain on her mouth as she turns her back on me. She couldn’t hide it from me then, when I wasn’t even old enough to reach the countertop of the sideboard. She can’t now.
The Stranger crashes over me, my thoughts a glass shattering. She’s black and rolling, water that’s sat in sun, become warm.
I blink her out of my eyes.
The miner hunches on the ground, the blood pulsing from his neck a little weaker with each heartbeat. Red spray coats my right side, itches down my shoulder, an arrow pointing to my hand and the knife in it.
The lines between the Stranger and I have grown so thin. Why waste my energy stopping her? He was here buying from me to numb his worthless existence, slow death.
He got what he wanted. Faster.
I empty his pockets, then reach past the curtain and remove the spoon chimes from the crusty nail protruding from the overhang, clenching them before they jangle.
The air market swallows me with smoke and carpet tents. No one follows, the Stranger is sure. But they will, the boss’s men.
The alley level drops off at the Slash, the packed road of old slag that splits Hannah like a scar. My cold ash gaze runs up it to the source. The refinery hill, built on the bones of old Hannah. The Slash Gate, small below it, but it’s not. Nine massive logs pinned together by steel bands, sea
I keep my shoulder between me and that side of the street, always. My mother’s ghost drags nails against splintered walls as she wanders, blind, faceless. Old Hannah is where she sleeps. I don’t go looking for her, the Stranger a hard, direct wind that erases me when I come this close.
Six hundred and fifty steps.
The spike-toothed outer wall doesn’t just keep pickers out of Hannah. It’s a belt circling another world. This one is singed like air after a lightning strike. Leather and skin salt, the hard muzzle encasing my jaw.
I’ve been here four and a half cycles. That’s four and a half months if you’re from the east. I made them bring me in after the ambush in Winchester, the boss’s men, sent to collect the crystal everyone thinks we stole. I lied. It was the only way to keep them from killing me.
The sun is a scarlet blot in a dishwater sky, staining stacked dwellings red and people to shadows. I’ve been outside all day, but it can’t burn me past the ash cloud.
I pass under bottle chimes limp on the eaves. The sound of glass breaking is supposed to scare off ghosts, but there are too many people. We’re all haze ghosts in a bloody nightmare.
The low twang of strings escapes through a saloon’s lattice door. Always music and drunken voices in the air. Moaning and laughter. No escape from the pressure of noise in my head except for the Stranger’s black.
The triangle bell strikes behind the uneven rooftops, followed by the salesman’s yell. “Fresh hanging! See a ration thief hang, only two silver standards!”
Arson used to be the Rim’s only real crime. In Descendants, you pay right people to have someone hanged. The rest of the Rim, you do it yourself. Here, you pay to watch.
The offer fades into another. Cabbage, flesh, moon readings. Behind it all, the throb of the refinery heartbeat, ceaseless and crushing me from the outside in.
Nine hundred.
The plank stamped with a thousand black dust handprints wobbles when I open the bathhouse door, just like yesterday. Miners ONLY. No Refinery fuckers.
Sweat and moisture are flaying the paper off the black walls.
The long room creaks, even under my soft feet, privacy stalls made of calico sheets and the crack of dice hitting the throw boxes between tubs. I go through the coats foolishly abandoned on hooks inside. Ammunition and silver standards, one protection skin and a comb. No courage powder today, but nine of the eleven people here wear the stain on their mouths. Wool scrapes my hand as I withdraw from the pocket.
Twenty-two.
Deeper, down where the shadows breed with each other, the last stall that belongs to the girls is made of real walls. I pull the chain attached to the overhead pipe and flush stale water into the shallow sink basin. It turns from yellow to brown as blood and ash melt down my neck and arm.
The Stranger catches on the gaze of the wheat-haired girl who always rocks in the hammock. Smoke on her lips, crochet hook in her hand, red ink star points and constellation lines running up her arms to her chest. She smiles at me.
A line of loose water runs inside my cotton camisole, biting like an itch the deeper it travels.
The door at the top of the unbalanced stairs peels open. Thadie lets her client out first, hiking the shawl of crocheted lace up her bare shoulder. She doesn’t skip a breath as she notices me and closes her fist, slowly bringing it to her smile. He paid.
I let him pass, steps bowing above and below me as Thadie hops over the unlucky twelfth stair.
“I wasn’t sure when you’d get here, so I had to start without you,” she says.
That’s why the first thing I sold her was a knife, even though I doubt she’d be able to use it on something alive.
“Got anything good today?”
Eight.
Her room is sticky with wax, lit by candles not crystal, bundles of herbs bound in cloth dangling from the eaves, jars of dirt sold to miners for protection underground. The scents leak out and snag on the loneliness stuck in me, twisted as roots. Dried sage and powdered minerals, Navy’s lab.
I hope she and Raleigh made it out of the Delta Sol canyons. I hope they don’t feel guilty for leaving me behind. It was the only way. I wouldn’t want Navy here, even to have her with me.
“I’ll take this.” Thadie exchanges my sugar for a glass vial, orange with flash fire.
I twitch as she reaches toward my head.
“Sorry, I wasn’t—that was instinct.”
So was mine.
“You have something in your hair… Oh, wait, I think it’s—blood?”
Probably.
Feet startle the stairs.
“I’m taking a ten-minute break, so keep your pants on,” Thadie calls. “I’ll come get you when I’m ready. It’s been so nice…” She closes her eyes with a little sigh. “Not having to fight with anyone. Especially nice not getting punched in the face and robbed.”
The bruise that made her hire me is almost gone. Only a thin yellow moon haunts her eyelid below a break in her eyebrow where it split on impact.
She rubs the dark brass globe of her moon diviner, cradled in the drape of her skirt like an egg. “Will you please let me tell your future today?”
I shake my head. You don’t see anything with diviners, you lie with them. Grandma is special enough to see through this world to whatever’s on the other side of it. She’s the only one I would maybe let look into my future, and she’s never offered. If she’s seen anything, she’s never bothered me with it. She’s always let me be what I am, never tried to make me into anything for her own satisfaction.
“They never stop, do they? That was not ten minutes.” The shawl drops off Thadie’s shoulder again as she stands. “Hello there, handsome.”
The buckle clank of his steel-toed mine boots halt. He smells like fear to the Stranger. Piss to me. “Why is that fox up here?”
Because I want you to see me.
“Don’t worry, she protects me.” Thadie offers her hand. “Come on, I’ll take care of you.”
My shadow on the stairs makes them think twice about slitting her throat when the door closes.
“She won’t hurt you.”
Unless he tries to rob her.
Thadie sets the bell clock hanging by the door. “This five-minute sleep will be the best you’ve ever had.” The swing of her solar quartz pendulum snags shards of blue out of candlelight before the door shuts me out.
This is the difference between people like her and people like us. We would have sold him this hypnosis lie and robbed him of everything else he carries while he slept. The missed opportunity still rubs me against the grain.
I set my leg against the opposing rail.
