The flickering of the yellow neon hangs the raindrops above the unnamed alley. It’s not quite Night Shift so the nterns still have their brighter filter; up through the twisting and patchwork towers. It’s like a rainstorm on a sunny day, but none of us will ever see the sun again.

  I am crouched under an awning in the depths of Our Fair City, hearing the rain ctter on the aluminum roof, examining the headless woman while I try to stay dry. I’d only ducked into the alley to try to light a cigarette and get away from the rushing end of the Day Shift crowd, all heading home. Not looking for trouble. Not like me. The alley is in disarray, newspapers and lost socks knocked from their cans. There are no Dead End alleys in Our Fair City, but the back of the alley fades into shadow.

  There are marks where she strained against handcuffs, but the only bracelets she’s wearing are the friendship sort. Cutoff jean overalls and a bck tube top. Spandex? Rare. Rare enough to fragment someone, even with all the risks? But it was still here. Her right ankle twists around the wrong way. She might have nded on it after she fell. Her toenails are painted blue, with little seafoam designs on them. She must have fallen from high up, a four, five story fall at least, but it could be ten hundred stories. No way to tell.

  That’s usually not enough to cut someone’s head off. Not so cleanly anyway. I take stock of the alley. There and there, the clothesline hangs between buildings, dripping water. The crumpled trash cans could have broken her fall. The spilled clocks ticking, a counterpoint to the rain. But she hadn’t stayed where she’d fallen. Someone had moved her. There are at least a hundred people on the nearby street who I could call. I stay silent.

  I didn't see the point of all this. Shouldn’t matter. When you lose your head, just get a pumpkin and keep living your afterlife. Unless– A doomed thought occurs. I need to check, at least. I pull a match from my pocket and strike it against my bare skull. Careful to keep the precious light from the rain, I lift her hand. Still warm. My shadow warps against the patchwork walls of brick and stone and concrete, but she casts no shadow. The light goes right through her. A gleam and a ctter as two coins fall from her hand.

  I pull a damp gasper from my shirt pocket and, mercy, lit the smoke with my guttering match. I eye the pair of pennies as I inhale, and a cough rumbles from a vestige of long vanished lungs. Am I coming down with something? Before the fire flickers out, I hear something move further down the alley. In the darkness beyond the flickering neon from the roundabout, a pair of mbent circles in the dark. Keeping the match close and staying still, I perceive a deeper shadow. I snap open the csp keeping my revolver holstered beneath my rain soaked trench coat, and extend my empty hand into the falling water.

  I let my fingers trace the fresh, varicose courses in the cobblestone while I wait for the shadow to move. There is a delta where her head would be, as if the rain had cut a hundred tiny rivers in the alley's floor. They creep uninterrupted up the brick, across the aluminum trash cans where her fall broke, like a vine cut into the metal and stone and was removed.

  I put my fingers on the pair of pennies and slide them towards me. Old, but that’s not unusual down here. Trying to catch the subway? I’m about to call out to the figure when the bells ring, signaling the start of the Night Shift. The Day Shift crowd which I’d traveled with has dispersed entirely, the square is just filled with pickers and traders. I’m so tired. I’ve been chasing lost things all Day Shift and I just want to go home. Maybe that’s why I’m caught off guard when–

  “Well, well, well-” my head snaps to the mouth of the alley and I snap my revolver out, standing, “look who the cat dragged in.”

  Well, I never trust someone who begins a sentence with three interjections, especially if I wasn’t talking to her to begin with.

  “Gavin Graves, Private Eye,” I say. “Stay back, there’s been an incident.”

  “Oh, I know you, gumshoe.”

  I’ve been made. I don’t dare look back into the depths of the alleyway for the gleaming eyes. I almost squeeze off a few rounds and try to bolt, to catch whoever had been watching me. But who knows where this alley goes. The bells keep ringing. I lower my pistol and tip my fedora.

  Framed against the dim lights of the now empty street, a thin dark woman in a long blue coat, tailored like a Victorian admiral’s with a matching blue headscarf is walking towards me with a precise tread. I don’t know her name but I know what the golden badge in the shape of a right hand means. Kulia, An accessibility worker for one of Our Fair City’s many disabled citizens.

  “Not today, Mr Graves.” Behind me, the chittering of a million unthinking mouths ughing as the kulia’s employer coalesces. I’d recognize the buzzing cacophony anywhere. Inspector Beelzebub. The Law. My old boss. I turn my pistol to the dark broken window behind me. Not that it was a threat to them.

  I shake my head as their kulia swaggers down the alley towards us. “Inspector,” she says, and it sounds like she’s genuinely happy to hear Beelzebub’s voice. Can’t rete. There are no puddles for her steel toed boots to march through. The raindrops have died already, but their puddles have not.

  The bells stop ringing and I can hear Beelzebub humming as they prepare to throw themself at me. “First on the scene of another incident, Graves. How much did they pay to fragment this one?”

  “Not this time,” I say, and step out from under the awning towards the body and into the rain where Beelzebub can’t follow. “I only just got here. Look. She’s fresh off the boat. The fragmentation is only here at the ankle,” I point at the twisted right ankle with my pistol, “and here at the neck,” I point. “The ankle wound could be consistent with a fall, but the neck wound. It’s a clean cut. Not a wild urbigator. Something sharp and precise. These gd rags aren’t worn enough to be from any old hock shop, and that’s spandex. Who wouldn’t take it? No weapons. No holsters even. Sandals. When was the st time you saw sandals down here?” I'm rambling. I puff smoke, hiding my face.

  The kulia rubs her chin and stares at the dead woman.

  “You certainly do have a special insight into the criminal mind,” Beelzebub hums from the shadows.” Quite a fall, wouldn’t you say, kulia?”

  The kulia takes her cue and nods, drawing a bck umbrel from the loop at her belt. For a moment, I’m sure she’s going to frag me up. Unsheath a long shiv or fire a hidden snub. I’m bracing myself. I begin to raise the pistol and–

  too te too te

  She’s smiling, looking up into the rain. “Quite a fall,” she lowers her eyes to me, “Wouldn’t you say, Graves?” She looks into my empty eye sockets and I choose to meet her gaze. The smile is cold.

  I take this as the demand it is. I need to say the words. “A fall.” Then, because I can’t help needle Beelzebub when they’re trying to push a narrative, “Where’s her head?” I cross my arms. “Do you think, I mean.”

  The millions of humming bodies which make up Beelzebub buzz and swarm out from the darkness under the awning, organizing themselves into something that’s only shaped like a human in a sharp green suit. They step under their kulia’s umbrel. They can’t hold still enough to make a face, so it is a bnk mask of twisting and swarming. My pistol feels impotent against them. I can feel their stray bugs intrude, skittering beneath my coat and shirt. Looking for, what? A conspicuous sword? A head, lodged in my ribcage? They have no idea how uncomfortable that would be, and no conception of personal space. Just because they’re a colony of millions of bodies, they think the rules of “don’t go through people’s pockets while you’re talking to them” don’t apply!

  Maybe that’s why they’re a cop.

  I peer at the kulia, who’s eyes betray her hesitation. The slip of a mask. My eyes aren’t the sort to be seen.

  “Why don’t you just ask her, Graves?” Beelzebub shifts their attention from me to the body on the ground. Flies and beetles swarm across the woman. I shudder. I’d never seen a stiff outside a coffin when I was alive, but this was too close to what I’d imagined.

  “She’s not in there,” I say simply.

  The kulia tilts her head, suddenly inquisitive while Beelzebub churns. “What do you mean?”

  Can’t bme the kid, new in town, maybe one X-mas dead. “Her spirit’s out of bance,” I expin. “No shadow, which means her soul’s missing too. Soul and shadow, the glue that keeps a mind together. Shouldn’t be a problem but for whatever reason she was more attached to her head than the rest of her.”

  I can rete, but I don’t want to say that. I’m trying to say it cold, the way that Beelzebub always liked my inductions. I want to show Beelzebub that this is an actual problem. Death after death.

  “A broken AKH?” Beelzebub uses the Egyptian word, reforming under the bck umbrel. The parts of them are still as they think. Then, they shake the shape of their head. “No, I don’t think so. Someone must have dispced it.” The human shaped pilr of insects begins to colpse, filling the veins in the stone. “This looks like an unfortunate accident and an imbance of the humors followed by scavengers. Go home, Graves. We’ll take it from here. Put her back together.”

  I look at the pair of them. “All the king’s locusts and all the king’s women, eh?”

  The facsimile of a mouth moves, and the joke of a head pretends to look me in the eye as they sink “End of Day Shift. Get some rest. I’ll buzz you if I need anything.”

  Someone turns off the streetlight on the roundabout with a loud click, and the gray evening light is repced by the blue of a cloudless night. The ck of natural lighting in Our Fair City never changes, but it’s nice to pretend. There is a shifting of doors opening, people beginning to head to their Night Shift jobs. A screech of the subway leaving the old Penn Station, nestled at the edge of the market. I take a long drag on the cigarette and blow it into the shifting mass of Beelzebub. The insects react to smoke like they’re hearing a gunshot just a little too close. The image of a human being in a sharp green suit unravels beneath the umbrel, and Beelzebub just looks like a swarm of insects.

  “I swapped back,” I lie, “Night Shift. Just st week, actually. We’ll be seeing more of each other.”

  The kulia rolls her eyes. “Wonderful. Got your paperwork on you?” She extends her gloved right hand. I can tell she wishes she could use the umbrel herself, but I know how well Beelzebub pays.

  I pat my pockets. “Must’ve left it at my friend’s pce,” My papers are in my pocket, but they’d quickly reveal the lie.

  “Friend? Your handler?”

  “He’s alright, kulia.” Beelzebub says smoothly, holding out the form of a hand to her shoulder. She flinches at the swarming touch. “Let’s welcome our shift-mate. Please let us work, Gavin. Unless you have anything else you’d like to add?"

  I hate when they say that name, and I shake my head. The kulia nods and kicks a small arm clock from where it’s fallen. The clock tumbles then slides to rest at my feet, the small bells ringing. “For your time.” The second hand strains to tock forward. She smiles genuinely, like she’s waiting for me to ugh at her pun, and her face grows serious when I stare back at her, my immobile skull bnk as ever. “Let the department handle this.”

  I pause. I pick up the clock and slip it in my pocket, never one to sniff at a well deserved tip. I shrug my coat colr over my neck and head to the mouth of the alley.

  “Hey, Graves!” Beelzebub calls from behind. “Don’t leave town!”

  Their ughter echoes from the alley at the old joke. I squeeze the pennies in my pocket. No time to investigate.

  Our Fair City. I walk into the square and duck away from the alley. There’s people who call it hell, but I'm not sure there is anywhere else to go