Featured in The Copper Press, 11 March, 2157 A.M.

In Gibson, the fog never sleeps—it squats in the alleys like an unpaid debt, swallowing lamplight and promises with equal appetite. I was nursing the dregs of a lukewarm sanguine tonic in my office on Felstone Row when the knock came: three raps, deliberate as a judge’s gavel.

Clients don’t call at midnight unless somebody’s dead or about to be. I thumbed back the hammer on my pocket derringer—old habits—and opened the door.

She drifted in on a cloud of lilac perfume and rain-clung silk, veiled to the nose, hat brim shadowing eyes that caught the candle-glow like polished amber. Everything about her said money trying to look modest and failing by half.

“Mr. Caldwell Bitter?”
“Depends who’s asking.”
“One who pays in gold sovereigns, provided you find my brother before the constables do.”''

She produced a velvet purse that clinked like cathedral bells. I hired myself on the spot.

Her name was Miss Odette Duvall, and her missing brother, Elias, was an under-researcher at the Royal Shard College—bright lad who’d recently quit his post, broken into the department stores, and vanished with a crate of refined Shardisite worth more than the Crown’s winter budget.

Odette believed he wasn’t a thief; he was framed. The Civic Guard believed otherwise, and they carried muskets that didn’t fret about nuance.

I pried for particulars: Last known address? boarding-house near Rattlewharf. Companions? kept to himself, save a pen-pal named “Grin Jack.” Vices? absinthe, pulp novels, and—she swallowed—dabbling with empathic inks: outlawed formulas that let a scribe trap raw emotion on paper. Noir enough for me.

She slid five sovereigns across my desk—more than I make in a month chasing unfaithful spouses. Another ten on delivery. I told her to keep the veil; Gibson fog was hungry for faces.

Rattlewharf sits on the River Auspex where barges belch steam and migrants huddle round firebarrels, waiting for work or miracles. Elias’s boarding-house leaned like a drunk against two soot-black warehouses. The landlord, a skeletal tiefling with cough-weed teeth, unlocked the attic cube for a half-crown and a promise to testify he never saw me.

The room stank of ozone and burnt sage. Sigils charred onto the rafters pulsed wanly—containment runes cracked by over-pressure. On the desk lay a stack of *Steel-Sky Tales* back issues, each margin scribbled with manic notes: “EMOTION = ENERGY,” “ink + shard dust → resonance,” “A choir inside the page.”

There was blood on the floorboards—dark, old, pooled where someone had carved a rune of silence to muffle the screams. But the biggest tell was a torn envelope addressed to Elias Duvall, c/o Grin Jack, The Smoke Gardens. Inside, a single playing card: the Two of Masks, sprayed with dried violet ink that shimmered when the lantern passed. A scent of joy—pure, bright, addictive—floated off the card before the air quenched it.

Empathic ink, all right. Elias had bottled happiness, and somebody didn’t like the competition.

The Smoke Gardens aren’t gardens at all, just a sprawl of gambling dens and pleasure parlors beneath the eastern viaduct, lit by green Shard lanterns that never dim. Grin Jack ran a soirée club called The Soft Grin, where jazz-wizards coaxed spirits from brass to haunt the melodies.

I found Jack at a roulette table rigged with rotating spell-circles. He was human—mostly. Shard exposure had burnished his pupils silver and laced his veins with faint glow. His grin was too wide, as if sliced and restitched by an artist allergic to symmetry.

“Detective Bitter!” he crooned, palm skimming the brim of his cobalt fedora. “Your reputation precedes you like cheap perfume.” “I want Elias Duvall,” I said. “Preferably breathing.” Jack sighed. “Genius boy. Tragic appetites. He came here chasing *feeling*, Mister Bitter—pure, untaxed feeling. Hard to keep hold of sense when you’ve swallowed a page of laughter.”

He wouldn’t sell out Elias for free. But cheaters hate competition, and Jack read in my eyes the promise of broken knees.

“The boy’s hiding in Gearwright Alley, South Ward,” he relented. “But he’s not alone. The Ink Black Court took an interest.”

That name iced my blood. The Court were assassin-scribes who weaponized emotion—one brush stroke of despair will have a man jumping from clock-towers before dawn.

Gearwright Alley slithers behind the Royal Foundries, its cobbles slick with oil and alchemy runoff. I arrived near dawn; fog pooled knee-high, glowing faintly where it licked exposed Shard vents. A single lamp burned outside a shuttered press shop—inside, typebars clattered though no print order was posted.

I kicked the door. The scene froze like a macabre tableau: Elias, gaunt and wild-eyed, shackled to a compositor’s chair; three Court scribes hovering, hairless heads inked with moving glyphs. One held a raven-quill dripping sepia dread toward Elias’s heart.

“Step aside,” I growled, derringer out. The lead scribe smiled, eyes empty as erased chalk. “We only harvest what he owes.”

Things went sideways fast. One scribe flicked a brush across mid-air; a smear of *Regret* hung like a curtain. Memories pummeled me—lost loves, wrong turns, the war on Arctica. My knees buckled.

Elias screamed, throwing himself against chains. The Shard crate sat open beside him, crystals humming.

Pain cleared my head. I fired at an overhead pulley; sparks showered, setting the regret-ink ablaze with violet flame. Scribes shrieked, shadows writhing across their skin. I bull-rushed through the burning haze, cracked the derringer across a bald skull, grabbed Elias’s chair, and shoved for the exit.

Outside, fog quenched the flames but stank of burnt sorrow. We limped down-alley as bells clanged—foundry guards roused by chaos.

Elias wheezed, words tumbling. The Court coerced him: they wanted a master sigil—emotion so potent it could overwrite a city block’s will. Pure Shardisite was the ink, his empathic formulas the catalyst. They’d start the test run tonight beneath St. Gethin’s Clock-Tower during the Lovers’ Masquerade; one stroke of Envy would turn celebration into massacre.

Clock-Tower. Midnight. Ten hours to stop a city from eating itself.

St. Gethin’s rises over Gibson’s Old Square, gothic spires stitched with brass veins that pump steam to the quarter-hour gargoyle whistles. Masquerade revelers swirled beneath, masks of swan, wolf, and cherub glittering in gaslight. Music box orchestras cranked waltzes while vendors hawked sugar-glass roses.

We moved through the crush—a detective in oil-stained coat, a frail alchemist cloaked in borrowed shawl—toward the maintenance stair at the tower’s flank. Above, the clock’s argent face glared like a judgmental angel.

Inside, gears louder than church organs rattled the iron bones. Candle stubs marked a trail upward. Halfway, we found the Court’s supply: vials of color-slick ink labelled *Jealousy, Fear, Delight.* Each glyph inside writhed, hungry.

Top platform: five scribes arranging mirrors and sigil frames around the bell. Their leader, a tall woman whose eyes wept black, guided a runed brush across canvas stretched before the bell’s mouth. Each stroke darkened the city’s breeze.

I signaled Elias. He hefted the crate lid. Raw Shardisite amplifies everything—including explosions.

I stepped out, crossbow leveled. “Brushes down, monks. Class dismissed.”

They turned, robes rippling like wet pages. The leader hissed: “Ink is truth, Bitter. Let Gibson read itself.” She lunged. I loosed a quarrel; it shattered a vial of Delight at her hip. Golden mist burst, and for a blink she laughed—joy-drunk—before Elias hurled a crystal that cracked at her feet.

Shard resonance met empathic ink: thunder without lightning. The blast buckled joists; gears seized; bells shrieked. Scribes stumbled, ink splattering unreadable across copper floor.

I grabbed Elias, sprinted down-slope passage as the bell dropped a foot in its cradle, ringing a funeral peal that rattled stained-glass.

We reached an aperture looking west over the river. Fireworks began below—the Masquerade none-the-wiser—red comets mirroring crimson emergency beacons from constable skiffs.

“Jump,” I barked. “We’re six stories up!” Elias protested. “Better than six seconds from a clock-tower collapse.”

We leapt into a maintenance net strung for gargoyle wash crews, bounced, tore through, landed in a flower cart that forgave us with a bouquet of violets and shattered wheels.

Behind, St. Gethin’s bell jammed at one minute to midnight—the kind of omen poets will dine on for years.

Dawn spilled pearlescent across the smog. Elias sat on the river wall, ankles cuffed but alive, constables cataloguing Shard fragments behind him. I lingered by Odette’s carriage; she dabbed tears with lace but wore a smile wide enough to shame sunrise.

“He’ll face charges,” I warned. “He’ll face them with counsel, Mister Bitter—and gratitude.” She pressed the purse of sovereigns into my coat.

The Civic Guard thanked me with a nod—rare currency. The Smoke Gardens slipped back to vice; the Ink Black Court vanished like bad dreams at breakfast.

I walked Felstone Row, pockets heavier than conscience, shoes wet with river fog. Took the narrow stair to my office, poured a stiff measure of cheap rye, and stared at the city through leaded glass.

Gibson kept breathing—crooked, wheezing, but alive. Bells tolled eight. Somewhere a pressman rolled fresh broadsheets: “Mystery Blast atop St. Gethin’s—Terror Plot Foiled?” They’d spell my name wrong; they always do.

I locked the sovereigns in the desk, cracked a fresh case file, and waited for the next midnight knock.