The market is circled by a roundabout, a broad thoroughfare. The city grows from the bottom, the oldest houses are at the top. They say underground caves painted with animals can be found at the top of the skyscrapers, high above the cobblestones. The Roundabout Market is a lucky formation, a clear air surrounded by thirteen towers. A dome, a birdcage. The canvas tarps cover the pop up shops on the pebbly concrete around the statue garden at the center, Cleared air, room to breathe. It's why space is at a premium, and why it’s temporary stalls in the market.

  The Roundabout Market is teeming with people coming off the subway. Above, through the tangled nets, people lean over the bridges made of steel wire, plywood, and hope. People in the windows of patchwork towers surrounding the market, people from higher levels buzzing down ziplines and darting into cover from the rain; or up the gondo, motors chewing the steel cable. Never a dull moment, all the moments we have left are as sharp as rusted knives.

  I look both ways as I exit the alleyway. On my right, the iron cw of an urbigator chews into the cobblestones as the chimeric construction vehicle crocodiles by me. The pilot in a huge coat which covers their nose and rge gsses peers out of the cab. A pack of jackals lurk together in the shadows, gleaming eyes watch me step into the market, under the xmas lights and bare mp bulbs with wires braided through water pipes. Some people have shut off their spotlights, others covered theirs with blue fabric. The crowd is shuffling and reluctant, they would’ve gotten on the subway before the rain began and now are wetly trudging to their destinations. Most people are disabled with a prosthetic; a hook, a skull pte, an intricate iron eye. Others sit in wheelchairs or eborate walking chicken-legged seats. I look for cutting weapons and I find them. Most have something keen at their belt or on their back, tucked in a boot or in their eyes. Most stick close to the merchant stalls, trying to stay out of the rain, though the merchants guard the precious dry space jealously.

  A ctter through the rain to my right. The picker in the yellow raincoat is making their way through the crowd toward an awning in the statue garden, pushing a shopping cart towards a table where a wiry man with a topknot stands. Lightbulbs and bottles, bicycle wheels and a broomstick fill the metal basket. Plenty of space to hide a missing head.

  “Any chance of an umbrel?” I call, approaching the small table the shopping cart had stopped at. A statue of Persephone in bright floral paints blooms above us, canvas hiding her eyes like a veil.

  The pair size me up, and then have a silent discussion of their financial status with their body nguage.

  “Rain gear’s actually at a premium right now,” says the wiry one behind the counter in his ancient poncho. He plucks a bck umbrel from beneath the metal picnic table and pces it between us.

  “Most of my liquidity is at home,” I say as rain drops on me. Nobody but a tinker needs a broken clock down here. Consensus day and night, that’s the watch word. “Can I owe you a favor?”

  “No joy there pal,” the short, weathered woman says, the spray of curly blond hair flowing from her yellow sou’wester. “Our boss works in favors, we work in currency. Lest you want me to escort you home, complete the transaction then. That costs a favor though, since it doesn’t fall under the, y’know. Purview of our employment. I’m Day shift, he’s Night.”

  I hold up my hands deferentially. “Alright, thanks anyway.” I turn to leave their shelter from the rain. A bluff.

  “Tell you what,” the wiry one calls, not ready to lose a sale. “I can offer you a fresh full newspaper. Fell from above just before the rain did. Perfect for holding over your head to stay out of the rain. Not quite as effective as our premium selection, but the paper should dry out after a few shifts, get to read up on Topside too.”

  I hesitate. “What’s the paper?” Like it matters.

  “New York Post,” says the woman in the yellow hat.

  I sigh. She’s lowballing me. “Sure.” I pull a pair of strike-anywhere matches from my pocket and pick up the paper. She taps the table and I pce another match. The woman takes one and the man takes the other two. I walk over to the shopping cart, noting her eborate wooden leg and say, “Got any handcuffs?” I start poking at the cart. In a fsh they’ve got their weapons drawn. Topknot has a railroad spike, twisted and fttened into a bde, and yellow raincoat has a red fire ax.

  “You don’t pick the pickers,” Topknot says.

  I eye the fire ax, the way its bde is chipped at the edge. “I knew that, just saw something I thought I wanted. That’s nice knife, mind if I buy it off you?”

  “Not for sale, except for a bde of equal or greater utility,” Topknot says, “Most of that stuff has to be reworked down here, on account of perdurantism.”

  I shake my head, bnk.

  “If someone has a knife up there that’s really good, they’re going to fix it if it breaks. So we’ll get handles and bdes and stuff, we’ve gotta put it together”

  “What’s your name son?” I ask jovially,

  “St-”

  “You first,” the woman in the yellow hat cuts over, extending her hand in front of the younger man with the topknot.

  I take a small step closer, tip my hat and nod. “They call me Gavin Graves. I’m a gumshoe.”

  She looks at my bright blue and white and pink rubbery homemade sneakers. “So I see. The real stuff?”

  “Genuine article. Wasn’t easy scraping old tables for the chewing gum to get into the guild.” I kick the gravel beneath me. “Totally waterproof.”

  “Worth it to get sleuthing down here eh? You eat?”

  I nod. “Well enough,” I pass my hand in front of my skull, “This mess isn’t from going hungry.”

  “Ambitious, finding things in the city of the lost with the Department running things. Torado. Polly Torado, this is Sean Whithead. You looking for short term work?”

  “Always. But, speaking of the department, there’s a pair of dicks in that alley.” I jerk my thumb to the mouth of the alley. I see Torado gnce to the shadowed trash heap behind me. “Maybe make dust unless you’re ready to get the old up and down.”

  She offers her elbow and I elbow her elbow, then nod to Whithead. “I owe you one Graves,” she packs a few choice picks from Whithead’s stall, makes to move on, leaving Whithead to wrap up.

  I fall in step as she starts to leave. “I’ll cash that in. You see a woman in sandals, Torado?”

  She nods while she checks her cart, wet resistant raincoats and tarps above whatever else she’s carrying. “Close cut? Short overalls? She came past just before the Night Shift. I tried to buy her top, I’d never seen anything like it.” She moves her cart deeper into the market, away from the alley I’d indicated.

  I scrutinize Torado. Was the close cut comment a crack? “What’d she say?”

  “She didn’t say nothing to me, just brushed past like I was a nobody.”

  “Did she have handcuffs?”

  “No sir,” Polly says, tilting her head, watching me out of the corner of her eye.

  “You see where she went?”

  Torado nods to a patchwork stagmite of cottage, each only a few rooms across, skyscrapering up from the cobblestones and into the dark above. A neon that says ROOKERY lights a crew of soot-covered smokers stand on a nding beneath, taking a break from whatever hot bor scorched their canvas coveralls. “She went through that door.”

  “It’s unlocked?”

  “Not when I tried it. Let me repeat; she walked through that door.”

  I nod slowly. “Some kind of psychiatrist?”

  “Who knows.”

  “Know who works there?”

  Polly shrugs, picking up her pace as she heads towards a gondo. “Who knows. Rookery’s a high stakes card table on the fiftieth floor, but you gotta go gondo or be pretty light on your feet to do well up there. Sandal girl, probably not so much”

  “Did anyone follow her in?”

  Torado pulls her cart up to the gondo. A few other pickers are already in the old ski lift, filled with the treasures lost from life. The conductor looks ready to go as soon as Torado arrives, but she raises a finger and he sits back, lighting another cig. The gondo soon fills with dark clouds as other pickers light their own coffin nails. Torado deys at the door.

  “How long have you been down here?”

  “Ninety one. Nineteen, that is. Nineteen ninety one. Almost thirty x-mases.”

  Torado leans in close. “Couple hundred for me.” She says it so casually and her hand is nowhere near her ax. I still take a step back. I can’t see any fragmentation aside from the carved wooden leg. That meant she was good at being down here. “Want to know how I do it? Free advice I give to anyone, no charge.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I Don't Get Involved.”

  “What’s that meant to mean.”

  Torado leaned on her elbow and counted on her fingers. “Don’t mess with the cops, don’t mess with the outws, don’t mess with people's food and don’t mess with their money. If you’re a picker, mess with the pickers.” She leaned over close. She was a few inches taller than me. “People on the topside only stop getting power ‘cus they die. Doesn’t happen down here. And they can make your afterlife a hell if they want to.” She kicks the side of the smoky gondo with her wooden leg, and in a moment a motor rumbles and rattles. “So listen close Graves. Hand to the sun the st person I saw go anywhere near that particur doorway was you. Don’t worry though, I never snitch.” She grins and steps into the smoky gondo.

  I swallow. Force of habit. Trying to quit gulping like an idiot with a throat. “Where will you be next Day Shift?”

  “Here, grabbing what I can. Feel free, meet me by the fountain, can’t make it too long, I have to meet my boss.”

  “I might stop by, bring a bit of my liquidity along and pick something nice,”

  The door to the gondo slid shut as smoke billows out. “Not if I pick you first!” Torado cracks from the smoke. Her picker comrades ugh broadly as if this were the highest comedy. The gondo’s teeth chew the metal wire as the gondo filled with a high quality assortment of new things ascended to higher floors within the city.

  I watch the gondo go. I missed something. She’d known something. Should I have pressed them harder? I try to find my way back to Whithead’s table, but no, dice. Sean’s stand had been repced with a few hooligans pying a dice game of some kind, gambling with whispered words and shared gnces.

  I oriented myself towards the Rookery. I watched the gals in coveralls go in a fourth story window under the red neon sign. I shielded my head with the newspaper to get a better view. High up, a series of wires from up above descended to a well lit and expansive balcony, and a nearby lift cable dangled with the heavy stone counterweight. There’s precarious and then there’s homemade elevators. I’d rather not take my chances going up so many flights without my grappling hook.

  As I near the door beneath the skyscraper of cottages, I feel like I’m being watched. The Jackals have gathered; small packs of the king’s dogs. I peer down the alley and see a sea of blue coats. Cops and kulias, a tarp for Beelzebub to be comfortable beneath. I turned away. I’d have to come back when there was less heat. I fold myself back into the crowd. I didn’t see any heads turn to me, but I still turn my coat up, cover my skull with my newspaper.

  I weave my way parallel to the edge of the roundabout, making my way to a rope dder just out of sight. Once I'm up off the ground, I can see the whole Roundabout Market. The buildings weren’t id out by a rational hand, and taking a normal, rational route would tip my hand if the rising feeling of a watcher was something to be believed.

  Some entrepreneur, carving out their thin slice in this thin valley between towers forty feet off the ground, has strung together neon tubes spelling out “CODS 0 VER HE AD PASS AGE ” in disparate neon above a gatehouse. I pause, and peer at the window. There is a young boy. His face has been burned, and he has no eyes in his sockets. He won’t get older and he won’t heal, not really. But sitting at the desk in front of him is a small toolkit. Despite neither of us having eyes in our face, he looks right back at me and smiles broadly.

  “Good evening, sir.” I tip my hat, and pce the arm clock on the window sill.

  “No tribute at shift change,” he says cautiously, looking around for a trick, a trap. Nothing of the sort.

  “Tell Mr. Cod that I appreciate the passage but the toll is for you.”

  He furrows his brow, but nods. As I walk on, I hear the sound of a screwdriver being put to the old clock. I think of it as surveilnce on credit. Lots of folks think just cuz you don’t have eyes you’re not looking, and a bridge across the Roundabout this well maintained is worth having ears on. The fragmented words disappear behind me.

  I can see her building through the rain, across the street. The thin rope bridge crosses the road. I brace my hands on these slick chords and begin walking, steadying myself. A fall like this isn’t enough to make you lose your head, I think. I look down at the bone dry cobblestones. Coming out of the alleyway like bugs, cops charge into the market, grabbing and arresting people. A shout starts. Gunfire. Somewhere topside, the rain was dying. A fall like that would hurt.