New York City was America’s greatest disappointment. For decades – centuries, even – the port city had been a worldwide marketplace, a cinema darling, a masterpiece of architecture and engineering. Its greed, its opportunity, its complicated relationship with immigrants all came together to form a complex American bellwether. This, at least, did not change after the birth of orchestration.

“Name?” the man behind the customs counter said, through half an inch of bulletproof polycarbonate. The office sat on the Jersey side river, about forty miles up from the George Washington bridge – a necessary stop for anyone attempting to take a bus into the city. Security had become tighter on the Jersey waterfront as abandoned land was sold off to private contractors and large corporations. Now that customs matters were handled by private firms, reaching Manhattan island meant subjecting oneself to extensive searches and a flatly predatory permit system intended to keep people in as much as out. That or acquire a fake, as Will had. The man at the kiosk was shaved bald, wearing a nondescript black uniform Will did not recognize, and wielded piggish contempt like a bat. They had locked eyes almost as soon as Will entered the line, and the man had scarcely looked away since.

“His-Will-Be-Done Sariel Pavia,” Will replied, evenly, handing the man his open wallet. It was the only thing he had been allowed to keep on him besides the pile of crucifixes around his neck, which were permitted to stay only by virtue of how long it would take to remove them. The man glanced at the tattoos on Will’s knuckles as he slid the ID out of the wallet with a practiced motion. Will, for his part, tried to be nonchalant and genial, though he was badly out of practice at both. He was not naturally intimidating (Will was tall and muscled but gaunt and wiry in a way that lent him a certain pitiful, ghoulish quality), but he had learned the hard way that law enforcement rarely gave him the benefit of the doubt. He slid hand into the jingling mass of crosses on his chest, fingering each one he found for comfort.

“Purpose of your visit?” the man intoned, picking out a dense form and clicking his pen for emphasis. Will considered. “Business or pleasure, Mister Pavia.”

“Business,” he decided.

“What kind?”

“God’s business.” The man behind the counter shifted uncomfortably.

“How long will you be in town – for business?”

“Until the day of its completion.”

“Any estimates?”

“None.”

“Where will you be staying?”

“House of friends.”

“These friends have names?”

“Friends of God. Yet unknown to me.”

“Mmm. Are you an orchestrator, Mister Pavia?”

“Yes.” The bald man set his jaw and straightened up, in an attempt to make himself larger. Will still stared down at him. He saw a familiar fear behind the man’s façade – Will’s back itched and his fists clenched in recognition. Felt like home. This, at least, would be gone in the city.

“Could you list the class on your orchestration license and the state in which it was issued?”

          “Yes.”

“…Please do so.”

“Class A orchestrator. New Mexico.”

“There are several weapons in your things, Mister Pavia.” Will tensed.

“What faith requires.” The man subtly touched the phone on his desk.

          “You a Casterite?”

“Yes.” The man nodded slowly. His hand opened, then closed, gripping the receiver. A moment passed between the two men. Will felt suddenly naked without his jacket, without the familiar heft of a sword, without a knife to thumb in anticipation. To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, said some faraway part of himself. He looked down at the 2 T 2 3 tattooed on his knuckles, letting the verse anchor him. He forced himself to breathe, and sent out a silent prayer for protection.

“Any firearms?”

“No.” The hand hesitated, clenched, hesitated, and released the phone.

“Your items are at the next table down. Here are your forms. You’ll need them when you arrive.” The man waved him along stiffly, his focus already fixed on the next person in the queue.

Will began to don his regalia. The thousands of beads and chain links that bore his crosses clicked and hissed as he slid his arms into the worn and decorated motorcycle jacket, which was itself dotted with wax seals that affixed hanging strips of canvas crowded with psalms and verses. He checked the pockets habitually, finding in turn his needles, his thread, an athame, his lighter, a full-size Bible, and some gauze. Sliding his hand into a hidden hole in the jacket’s lining, he found excess medical supplies, his actual wallet, another knife and a box cutter, a pair of brass knuckles, and his childhood Bible. His sheathed sword slid into its usual place under his backpack, its familiar weight filling a nagging hole in his sense of self.

Seven minutes later, Will was on the bus. It was nearing capacity, full of people (and two or three servitors, carrying luggage) waiting to begin the hour-long drive down the Palisades and into the city. Nobody sat next to Will. The bus was ancient, apparently reconnoitered from some unrelated public transportation system perhaps a decade back, and the visible surfaces were choked with graffiti and garbage. The driver wore the same nondescript black coveralls the man at the kiosk had worn, with the addition of a matching baseball cap. At Will’s window, a large stylized noose was scratched into the glass. A boy of six or seven stared from across the aisle, taking in Will’s regalia, squinting to read each line written on his hand wrappings, white on his left and red on his right. Will’s face relaxed as he watched the boy mouthing to himself, “THERE IS A FOUNTAIN / FILLED WITH BLOOD DRAWN / FROM EMMANUEL’S VEINS / SINNERS PLUNGED BENEATH / THAT FLOOD LOSE ALL / THEIR GUILTY STAINS”. Will hummed the song when their eyes met, and the boy hid his face in delight until his mother gathered him up with a terrified glance and a pointed whisper as the bus started to move. Will’s scowl returned, armor and intimidation in one expression, and he turned out to the view, staring past the fingerprints on the glass and out over the water to the city beyond.

New York’s atmosphere of constant renewal and unusual tastes made the torch of Liberty a welcome sight for the first generation of orchestrators, and they came from all over the world to ply their trade or seek shelter from its stigma. As orchestrators moved in, native New Yorkers moved out, and the city grew starved for business, then jobs, then money. New York had weathered sudden waves of strange newcomers before, and it had lived through worse riots than the ones that shook it in the late eighties, but all of these plus a mass exodus was not something the city was prepared take on the chin. Census takers saw more than a century of population growth undone in mere months as New York became the orchestration capitol of the world. America, in denial of its own withering, busied itself with finding new colloquialisms for its prodigal son: Long Pork City briefly spiked in popularity after the bust of a ring of cannibals in ’87 and Necropolis was popular throughout the late 80s and early 90s, but as Atlanta picked up the slack and became The Golden Peach in the new century, New York settled into its identity as The Rotten Apple.

As humanity’s moral compass shifted to compensate for its new abilities, orchestration’s sudden status as an industry put money back into the city, creating a sharp-edged bubble of gentrification that stretched from Broadway to Central Park and no farther. Beyond was an urban wasteland, a snarl of streets whose low homelessness rate correlated directly with how full the stocks of the local corpsemongers were. Looking at it now, out the window, the skeletal half of the city obscured the sickly orange light of the living half like a particularly thick copse of dead trees, and at some angles the only hint that people still occupied it was faraway light on the smooth black water. The scene framed the moon with curated precision, a razor-perfect crescent over an obsidian landscape, the city too close for stars. Will sucked the stale air in through his teeth and wondered how anyone could think the beauty of Creation was only an accident of physics.

When his mother was asleep, the boy stole another look, then a longer gaze, then he slid to the edge of the seat with exaggerated caution. In the odd light of the nighttime roadway, the boy’s skin was the color of damp stone.

“What are you?” he whispered, “A gangster?” His eyes shone with anticipation. Will shifted to address him fully, leaning forward and back in time with the bus as it made the turn onto the George Washington bridge.

“A sharp twoedged sword,” Will recited. The boy breathed out.

“Wow,” the boy said, “Really?”

“Yes,” Will said, blinking at him. The boy seemed to be waiting for something. When the silence grew uncomfortable, Will added, “A metaphor.”

“Is that a real sword?”

“Yes.”

“I’m seven.”

“Yes.”

“Are you a necromancer?”

“A healer,” he said, feeling the scowl climb back up his neck. The slur didn’t bother him so much as the implication.

“You don’t make serfs?”

“To make a man into a beast is a terrible thing. A sin.”

“Lots of people do it.”

“Great and small will be judged. According to their works.”

“Are you a priest?”

“No.”

“You talk like Sunday School.”

“Intended effect.”

“But you have tattoos?”

“Yes.”

“Let me see your hands!” The boy leaned forward suddenly, reaching out to grab Will’s fingers and for a second he was someone else, someone bigger and stronger and somewhere else. Then the boy had his own face again, and fear filled it, and the boy was tumbling backwards and – falling away, somehow. Will had exploded up in his seat, his knuckles white and hungry, as he commanded the boy not to touch him in a dull waterfall roar he himself did not hear.

In the silence immediately after, he touched a crucifix in apology, drowning in ritual the blooming emotion that filled his feet and fists with an electric red intent. He breathed in and out, sealing away the kicking rage in his guts with practiced technique and wiping away tears that he hardly noticed. The boy’s mother began to scream. It rapidly became the general consensus on the bus that he would be walking the rest of the way across the bridge – Will got the feeling he would have been thrown off bodily if he hadn’t been carrying a sword. He didn’t mind. It was a brisk evening in the middle of October, crisp but not yet cold, and the George Washington Bridge was entirely empty this time of night. It was good to walk, to be totally occupied with putting one foot in front of the other, while his mind methodically incinerated a carefully ignored backlog of fears and uncertainties. He felt like a knife being sharpened. It felt good. Looking down the bridge, towards the unlit face of Washington Heights, the landscape he had seen from the window was more immediate, its clarity a veiled threat. This was the difference between seeing a tiger in a cage and a tiger in the wild – it was no less beautiful, but far more real. Somewhere, a clock struck ten.

He hadn’t felt the call in a long time. He had gotten so used to it pulling him constantly forward that its absence left him with a cold cosmic fear where divine certainty once stood. When it first came to him as a child, a tickling presence in the back of his head, it was unlike anything he had ever felt before, filling him with a warm and fuzzy satisfaction. It had never quite been a voice, and never quite a feeling, never anything he could definitely ascribe to one sense in particular, but it was always there, and it was always unshakable in its conviction. It spurred him on and held him at night, it whispered possibilities into his subconscious, it was a holy fire on his blade when the time came to use it. It was a far away thing, but he loved it as much as he had ever loved anything. It was God. And then it was gone. When it had finally urged him to leave home, when he had completed his work there, it pulled him across the country and towards New York with absolute clarity. He had a job to do there, he knew. In muddy dreams he saw a woman with four arms, a machine made of meat. A villain and a sinner and a sharp, approaching darkness. Not even visions, just concepts. It was only in the past two weeks or so, when the call was suddenly gone, that he realized he did not know why he went or what he was to do when he got into the city, but he walked on anyway, knowing that the call would come back to him when it was time. When he was ready for the next step. Nothing happened when he reached the end of the bridge, nor when he walked down the expressway, nor when he took his first steps onto West 165th.

A Lazarus billboard dominated one side of the nearby Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, large enough to see by moonlight. YOUR BODY, YOUR VISION, read the bottommost text. Some of the upper lines had been obscured by an incredible feat of spraypainting – a noose had been drawn around the neck of the man in the ad, some thirty feet wide, and the tagline for the ad itself had been so thoroughly blacked out that Will couldn’t even begin to guess what it once was. ALEXANDER LIVES had been scrawled in its place, sloppier and less carefully than the rope. The hospital itself sat and sagged like wet drywall, and garden boxes on the campus grounds now spilling over with an overgrowth of low, sinewy vines. Windows here and there flickered with orange light. Will imagined they were trashcan fires.

He had to piss. He had been trying to put it out of his head, but there are limits to how long one can put these things off. He had learned this lesson the hard way, the impacted bowel way, when he was fifteen. That, he decided, was far worse than the minor embarrassment involved in facing his own humanity. Still, as he approached an unassuming nearby wall, it was embarrassing. It was a matter of appearances, he thought, unzipping. How can an ordinary man put the fear of God into someone? He liked to think of himself as a force, a destroying angel. These are not things that need to take a leak. He remembered being a child and watching a movie visible between the curtains of a neighbor’s house. He could hear no sound and he never knew the title, but he could tell that it was about some kind of metal man, a robot, pursuing a boy. And he was unstoppable. It was glorious. The man was fast, he was strong, he was adaptable, and he never, ever stopped. He watched and watched until one of his brothers found him and dragged him home, to face his father. He zipped back up.

And then, he felt it. Like headphones popping on, there was no fade-in or attempt to greet him. The thing was no longer far away, it was close, and it was screaming.

He took off running.

Next Chapter: III-Pit