Walking through the city with Will had been easy, even pleasant. He said nothing as they clambered down the fire escape and into the dead streets, striding off at a brisk pace that her shorter legs struggled to maintain. He slowed when asked, but had to be asked a few times – he was, it became clear, a little bit excited. It was quiet for the first few blocks, foot traffic being rare and flighty on this side of the city, but when streetlights became more frequent people followed shortly afterwards. This was the side of the city Pit knew: they actually passed by her apartment, though she did not mention it. The homeless man she bought bagels for when she had spare change moved to greet her and then abruptly blanched at the Casterite by her side. This was a pattern that became clearer and clearer as the sidewalks became more densely packed – people gave Will a wide berth. If he noticed, he did not mention it. He only stared straight ahead, keeping his eyes on the point of the horizon that the thing they shared pulled them towards. She could see the building in question very clearly now: it burned like a torch in her mind, wreathed in a halo of attractive force that she felt more than saw. The thing was getting tired, she could feel it panting against her backmost thoughts. She tried to tell it that it could rest, that she knew where she was going now. It didn’t respond. Will grunted at a pedestrian who nearly walked into him. The man looked up, a curse caught in his throat, and he moved on hurriedly.

They walked on, skirting Central Park on her advice. The quarters on each side adhered to the wealth gradient and were quite safe, but the braving the Park at night gave her pause. It was, from what Pit understood, the place to go if you were an uptown corpsemonger looking for bodies at downtown prices or just wanted to unwind with a good old fashioned neo-pagan blood orgy. The typical talk about orchestrators, just inflated. Mainly though, the Park had been mainly just a poorly-maintained blotch of land in the middle of the city that she had been taught to avoid from an early age. It was sadder and less scary during the winter and fall, when the obscuring greenery fell away and the park could be seen for what it was during the day. Skeletal trees grew at odd angles in the rocky soil, an anemic dusting of garbage caught in the exposed roots, wide patches of raw dirt visible in between, all of it the flat grey of New York winters. At night, it regained some of its former dread: the rational part of Pit liked to think that most of what she heard was just frightened gossip, but still, some deep-down part of her curdled at the thought touring the Park at night. Most people she knew, coworkers and the like, regarded it much the same. It could be seen in between buildings as she walked, all of it the stark black of bare, unlit trees – moonlight hardly even bothered with the place. She supposed there could be a blood orgy going on in there, somewhere where the trees were thicker. Somewhere deep inside, she could see searchlights pointing up into the belly of the sky. She wished the subways still ran. Will walked straight, without looking.

Gradually, neon and brick gave way to more smug neon and brick as gentrification set in, and then slick glass high-rises and office buildings with last names. Pit was officially out of her element. Pedestrians became less frequent, servitors became more common, walking or stumbling as they were able. Orchestrators with them, sometimes. She tried not to stare and largely failed. Often, people have family members or childhood friends who are capable of orchestration, but Pit was always somehow one step away. All the orchestrators she knew were friends of friends, or people who never embraced the fact. When a group of wealthy-looking drunks passed by, all sharing the same long scarf of embroidered and gently writhing intestine, she and Will both paused to watch them pass.

“First time in the city?” She had asked.

“Yes.”

“How’s it feel?”

“Like a crusader entering Jerusalem.”

“Okay.” Orchestration had made her ill when she was a little girl, the anatomical impossibility of it tightening a knot of nausea in her child’s gut, but by the time she was an adult, she had seen enough on TV and in photographs to be acclimated. It had been around longer than she had, after all. Seeing a piece in person had always been surreal and jarring, though, and she suspected it always would.

Eventually, they were just there. It felt less important in person than the thing in her head made it out to be – it was just a high-rise, a nice one a block back from the Park on the southernmost side, with a gleaming marble lobby and a carefully put-together man behind the front desk. It was blessedly warm after nearly an hour’s walk in the October cold. The man behind the desk greeted her cordially, if a little down his nose at her outfit, but something behind his smile died as Will stepped through the revolving door behind her.

Ten minutes later, they were locked in the security office. It was a Spartan room that radiated implacability, a classic symptom of workspaces where personalization was outright forbidden. Will brooded in one corner, handcuffed, face still red from shouting, and Pit jittered in the opposite corner, trying to watch him and the door at the same time. She was a little overstimulated. The bellhop had been asked to escort them to their destination, in light of Will’s small arsenal, and when they weren’t sure who they were looking for, security was called and asked to search them. Will had rounded savagely on the officer who tried to pat him down, and the surprised guard had pushed him away in a defensive gesture. Will apparently hadn’t seen it that way, and split the man’s lip with an easy right hook. Pit and the guard had yelped at the same time. It had all been one smooth motion, more reflex than fight, and Will danced away from the guard’s enraged attempts to give him one better with his hands up. The bellhop tackled him, the guard cuffed him, and they were both dragged into the office while the staff reviewed the footage and decided what to do. Pit had begged them to call the woman who lived on the top floor, an orchestrator with four arms, but she wasn’t sure they had heard her over Will’s bellowing. Even if they had, she doubted they’d give her the benefit of the doubt. So they waited, Will in his corner, Pit watching the door.

There was one of those little pull-down curtains on the front of the door – an item which Pit had been sure had only existed in old detective movies until this moment – so her view was limited to an inch-wide gap on either side. She glanced at Will, assessed his mood (bad, but not dangerously bad), and sidled up to get a better look at the outside. The man behind the desk was holding his chest and checking his pulse, evidently still shaking. The guard stood next to him, leaning on the desk, holding a napkin up to his lip and laughing through his teeth. The bellhop was nowhere to be seen.

“Sorry,” she whispered. They didn’t hear her. One elevator slid open, made faint by the distance and the door, and a tall woman stepped out. Through the slit in her dress, she could see that one leg was a kind of matte white prosthetic that made only a cursory attempt to emulate the shape of the limb it replaced. Like its owner, it looked sleek and functional and powerful. Unlike its owner, it tapered from the knee down into a kind of inorganic hoof. On the edge of Pit’s field of view, she turned to speak to the men at the desk. As her profile lined up, something clicked, and Pit was stabbed her with recognition. It was sharp and sudden, an overwhelming feeling ofknowing her, but it wasn’t her, it was something in her and above her, something reaching her from far away. Pit’s own passenger bucked as if stung, and she realized it wasn’t her own recognition she was feeling. She pulled herself away from the door, flattening herself against the wall next to it. Will looked up, curious. Eyes still wide, she shook her head at him. He stood. She shook her head more vigorously. He did not sit down.

“Nothing,” she said, still not daring to look out again. She had grown almost ill on the thing’s fear, her blood was sour in her veins and her thoughts grew thick and knotted trying to understand what she was receiving. It was passing now. She swallowed. He stepped forward.

“Tell.”

“’God’ didn’t like some lady in the lobby.” His eyes narrowed. She suspected, rightly, that he was trying to figure out how well he could swing a sword with handcuffs on. Pretty well, they both decided independently. He reached up for the hilt and she shook her head with desperate exasperation.

“What the hell are you doing?” His eyes narrowed further. He gripped the hilt with both hands, but did not pull.

“Still there?”

“I don’t know! Sit down,” His eyes flickered, uncertain, “If you pull that fuckin’ sword on some random lady, we’re both going to jail. And that thing in your, uh, our? My? That thing in our heads is gonna be trapped along with us. Okay? No swords.” He released the blade. She pointed to the chair, and he sat again. She peeked out the window. The woman had gone, it was just the staff again.

“She’s gone.” He relaxed a little, allowing his shoulders to fall. He looked at his hands. He breathed out.

“To the man with the hammer,” he said.

“What?”

He shook his head.

“Can I ask you something?”

He looked at her.

“When you first saw this… Thing. In me. You were so – reverent.”

He nodded.

“Not anymore?”

“Thought you were a Madonna With Child. A woman crown’d in stars, thought you were beholden to His plan. But you’re just as…” He swallowed, “As lost as I. Not reassuring.”

“Sorry.”

She heard the soft ding of the elevator opening. The woman that came out couldn’t have been more different than her predecessor: short and heavyset, with skin and hair darker than Will’s and large, intelligent eyes. Both legs appeared to be hers. She was wearing some kind of long, black robe, tasseled with a golden rope that was knotted to emulate barbed wire – the massive extravagance apparently designed to distract from the t-shirt and leggings she wore underneath. As she moved to the men at the desk, a second pair of arms spread in greeting from beneath the robe. She looked just like Pit dreamt she would. The nearby-thing wove through her thoughts like an excited dog, evidently recovered and energized even more than it had been when she first saw Will. Its presence grew faint for a moment and Will looked up, suddenly interested, and moved to the door beside her. Then it did it again, and the woman looked over at the door, a little confused.

She seemed to have a nosebleed? A pencil-thick line of red trailed from her left nostril down to the top of her lip. As she turned back, the security guard came around the desk, pointing to his swollen lip and then to the door and saying something angrily. She laughed it off, holding a hand up to his mouth and offering a handshake with the other. Pit could see, even from here, the folded bill pressed in her palm. The guard took her hand, looked down, touched his lip, hesitated, and glanced back towards Pit and Will. His lip was no longer swollen. He said something to the man behind the desk, who balked visibly until the woman shook his hand as well. Then he was a little more amiable.

The guard unlocked the door, and the woman watched with all four hands on her hips as Pit and Will stepped tentatively into the lobby.

“I didn’t know you guys were in town,” she said, amused, “You should’ve called first.” The security officer undid Will’s handcuffs.

“Yeah, well,” Pit said, starting strong and unsure where to go from there, “Um. We – didn’t.” She was caught off guard, trying to decide which pair of arms was the original two. The part of her brain that was still working on making the whole situation believable said they should hug, or something, but she didn’t know what Will would do with that. There was a silence.

“It’s so good to see you again…” Pit started, faltering when she realized she didn’t know the woman’s name, “My – friend.” The inkling, having been dulled and dazed by the events of the past hour, came screaming back.

“Well, have you guys eaten? Do you want to go out for a drink, or just stay in?” Pit looked at Will, who was already looking at her.

“Let’s order in,” Will said, working to suppress his accent for some reason, “It’s been a, a long – trip.” The woman clapped her hands together in pairs of two, perfectly synced, and tried to get them moving towards the elevator.

“Excellent! I know a great all-night Chinese place that delivers,” she said, pushing the up button and fishing for something in her pockets, “Sound good?” As the doors opened, she pulled out a key, which she inserted into a slot and turned. A readout at the top of the car said PENTHOUSE. Pit had never been in an elevator with a full digital display before – she had seen them in movies as set dresser’s shorthand for affluence (alongside lap-sized computers and indoor water features), but never in person. Frankly, before this moment, she hadn’t even really been sure they were something people actually had. As the doors began to close, Pit heard the guard whisper, “Fuckin’ Frankensteins, man.”

The door closed, and Pit glanced from the woman to Will and back again. The woman just blinked at her.

“Um. Hello,” Pit said. The elevator began to move.

“Oh my god,” the woman said, melting her constructed demeanor with a laugh, “You guys didn’t even know my name? How were you expecting to get in here?” Pit did not have an answer, and communicated as much through a series of small sounds. At a loss, she put out a hand to shake. The woman took it with one hand, the other three remaining planted on her hips. At this distance, Pit could tell that her nosebleed was actually a tattoo.

“Um, I’m Pit. This is Will.” Will glanced at her sharply.

“His-Will-Be-Done.”

“Pit?”

“Pit. Yeah. Patricia, then Pat, then Pit. It got – shorter.”

“Cool. And Will?”

“His-Will-Be-Done.”

“Is that your name, or are you praying, or…?”

“Name, yes. His-Will-Be-Done.”

“O-kay,” the woman said, looking them each over, “But who the hell are you?”

Next Chapter: VI-His-Will-Be-Done