Bruce doesn't have time to do more than make sure he sees Jim leaving - beyond that, it's up to a higher power of fate and timing.
Ketch Heath, on the official city map, ends at a point. In reality, there are no clear divisions, no lines on the ground or any neat borders where grass ends and dreary fog-covered dirt begins; the buildings continue, tacked onto streets that haven't been kept up in hundreds of years, cracked and overgrown - shanty towns and wooden structures intersperse the framework of things both old and hauled in through the fog. To miles past what passes for the border in between the edge of the canton and the Spatters, down a crumbling alley, a meeting is taking place.
The area is otherwise deserted - there's not much viable, picked clean and dirty, and the occasional lookout that can be seen peering through cracks in old boarded up windows assume anyone not dressed like a Militia agent has been invited. (Because who else would know where to go, and when?)
Inside a ramshackle building lined with plastic sheeting and lit up with glowing orb lamps, something between an auction and a political negotiation is taking place: children, tiny-bodied and blank-eyed, being bartered for. One couple is discussing a lengthening of their contract. The slavery is hauntingly creative, from sexual sadism to plans harvest nightmares to sacrifices, destroyed and healed, destroyed and healed again. But there are no children on the premises; they're kept somewhere else, set up to be delivered to clients in secret, one at a time.
The ringleaders take great care to hide their tracks when the meeting is over - northward, to the cliffs before the coast, and the catacombs deep in the rock, where the fog border pulls only at the edges.
no subject
Ketch Heath, on the official city map, ends at a point. In reality, there are no clear divisions, no lines on the ground or any neat borders where grass ends and dreary fog-covered dirt begins; the buildings continue, tacked onto streets that haven't been kept up in hundreds of years, cracked and overgrown - shanty towns and wooden structures intersperse the framework of things both old and hauled in through the fog. To miles past what passes for the border in between the edge of the canton and the Spatters, down a crumbling alley, a meeting is taking place.
The area is otherwise deserted - there's not much viable, picked clean and dirty, and the occasional lookout that can be seen peering through cracks in old boarded up windows assume anyone not dressed like a Militia agent has been invited. (Because who else would know where to go, and when?)
Inside a ramshackle building lined with plastic sheeting and lit up with glowing orb lamps, something between an auction and a political negotiation is taking place: children, tiny-bodied and blank-eyed, being bartered for. One couple is discussing a lengthening of their contract. The slavery is hauntingly creative, from sexual sadism to plans harvest nightmares to sacrifices, destroyed and healed, destroyed and healed again. But there are no children on the premises; they're kept somewhere else, set up to be delivered to clients in secret, one at a time.
The ringleaders take great care to hide their tracks when the meeting is over - northward, to the cliffs before the coast, and the catacombs deep in the rock, where the fog border pulls only at the edges.