Chapter One (continued) — The Gag Flats

The transit line that served the Gag Flats was technically the same line that served every other district in the Neutral Span administrative zone. In practice, it was a separate emotional experience. The cars were identical — the same slightly sticky seats, the same pre-recorded stop announcements, the same ambient smell of someone's lunch from three commutes ago — but somewhere around the district border the ride acquired a quality that Kael had never been able to put into words precisely. It was the feeling of physics deciding to take a personal interest in you.

He stood holding the overhead rail, file tablet in one hand, and watched the window. The buildings outside had stopped obeying perspective. Two of them appeared to be the same building from different angles simultaneously. A street lamp was walking, slowly and with apparent purpose, in the direction of a fire hydrant that was doing its level best to look casual.

"The transit authority has been flagging this line for six months," he said.

"Mm." Elara was reading something on her own tablet. She had not looked up since they boarded.

"They keep filing incident reports with us. We keep forwarding them to Genre Zoning. Genre Zoning keeps tabling them."

"Mm."

"The lamp is walking."

"It does that."

Kael looked at her. She was still reading. He looked back at the lamp, which had stopped to gesture meaningfully at the hydrant.

"Does it resolve?" he asked.

"Define resolve."

"Does the lamp get where it's going? Does it — " he paused, watching — "does this have an ending?"

Elara looked up. She considered the lamp for a moment with the expression of someone reviewing evidence for a case they had already closed.

"It depends on whether anyone tries to intervene," she said. "If you ignore it, it usually works out in about six minutes. If you interact with it, it escalates." She looked back at her tablet. "Don't interact with it."

The train stopped. The automated voice announced Gag Flats Central, Gag Flats Central in a tone that managed to convey that it, too, had opinions about this destination.

They stepped onto the platform.

The first thing Kael noticed was the sky. It was a specific, saturated shade of blue that did not occur in nature and suggested that whoever had decided on the color had been working from a paint swatch labeled COMEDIC DAYTIME. The clouds were round. Not "roughly circular," not "cumulus, which are often somewhat spherical" — round, like someone had drawn them with a compass.

The second thing he noticed was the mech.

It was approximately four stories tall, humanoid in shape, and had been designed — in some prior life, in some other district — to be an imposing piece of military infrastructure. It was painted in the colors of whatever corporation had commissioned it, which had been bold and intimidating colors once and were now somewhat undermined by the fact that the mech was sitting down on the pavement with its enormous metal knees pulled up to its chest in a posture that could only be described as sheepish.

On its head was an anvil.

Not lodged in it, not embedded in it — on it, balanced with the geometric perfection of something that had been placed there by a universe with a sense of humor and no intention of explaining itself. The anvil was the size of a compact vehicle. It had the word ANVIL stamped on the side in block letters, which Kael had learned was a Gag Flats thing, the district's physics apparently requiring that objects be correctly labeled at all times as a courtesy.

Around the mech, a crowd of locals had gathered. They were watching with the relaxed interest of people who had seen this sort of thing before and found it mildly diverting. A child was eating something purple on a stick. An elderly woman had a folding chair. A man near the front was holding a sign that read THIS IS FINE in letters too neat to be ironic.

Kael opened his file tablet and found the incident report. 0847 hours. Mech operator (commercial class, permit #GF-774) reports anvil impact from unidentified aerial source. No fatalities. Structural integrity of mech: unclear. Operator: distressed. Anvil: extant.

"Unidentified aerial source," he said.

"That's what they always say." Elara was already moving toward the mech, badge in hand. "Nobody ever sees where the anvils come from. It's a district-wide phenomenon. Genre Zoning has a twelve-year backlog of anvil sourcing requests."

"Twelve years."

"They keep getting hit with anvils during the hearings."

Kael wrote that down. He wasn't sure what form it belonged on but it felt like the kind of information that should exist somewhere in writing.

The mech operator had descended from the cockpit via an emergency ladder and was sitting on the curb with the expression of someone who had made choices that led here and had not yet finished processing all of them. He was a young man, early twenties, in the orange coveralls of a commercial mech contractor, and he was holding his helmet in both hands and staring at the pavement in the specific way that people stared at pavement when they were trying to decide if any of this was their fault.

Elara crouched in front of him. Kael stood slightly behind her and opened the relevant claim form.

"Mr. — " Elara checked her tablet — "Doss. I'm Vance, Department of Continuity Compliance. This is Maren from Mutual of Multiverse. Can you walk us through what happened?"

The young man looked up. He had the eyes of someone who had spent the morning absolutely certain his day was going fine.

"I was doing a delivery," he said. "Standard route. Package drop in the Gag Flats, commercial district. I've done it forty times. I know where the — " he gestured at the general concept of Gag Flats physics — "the zones are. I know to stay on the marked paths. I was on the marked paths."

"And then?" Kael said.

"And then there was a sound," the operator said. "Like. You know the sound something makes when it's falling from a very high altitude and gaining speed."

"I'm familiar."

"And then the anvil."

"Did you observe the anvil prior to impact?" Elara asked. Her voice was neutral in the practiced way of someone who had trained herself out of the flinch.

"It came from directly above," the operator said. "Straight down. I was looking at my delivery screen and then the instrument panel went dark and I felt the — " he mimed something with his hands that communicated structural impact — "and then the mech sat down. It sat down on its own. I didn't do that. I want that on the record. I did not instruct it to sit."

"It's on the record," Kael said, and put it on the record.

He straightened up and looked at the mech. The anvil sat on its head in the round blue Gag Flats light with the serenity of something that had arrived exactly where it intended to be. The mech, for its part, had not moved. Its posture continued to convey sheepishness at a scale of four stories.

Elara had walked back to the mech itself and was examining something near its left leg — a seam in the pavement, a hairline crack that ran from the point of the mech's impact in a direction that shouldn't have been possible given the geometry of where they were standing. She had her hand near it but not touching it. Her expression had shifted in a way Kael was only beginning to learn how to read — less investigator, more something else entirely. Something that watched rather than assessed.

"Vance," he said.

She didn't look up. "The anvil didn't come from above."

"The operator said — "

"I know what he said." She straightened. Her voice had the careful flatness she used when she was deciding how much to say. "The crack propagation is wrong. If something dropped straight down with that mass, at that velocity, the impact pattern goes outward. Radially. This goes — " she pointed — "that way. One direction. Which means the force didn't come from above. It came from — "

She stopped.

Kael looked where she was pointing. The crack ran toward the district border. Toward the edge of the Gag Flats and whatever was on the other side of it.

"That's the Cozy Quarter border," he said.

"Yes," Elara said.

"Anvils don't come from the Cozy Quarter."

"No," Elara said. "They don't."

They stood there for a moment. Behind them, the crowd watched the mech with the patient contentment of people who had nowhere better to be. The child with the purple thing on a stick had finished it and was now pointing at the anvil with the directness that children brought to structural anomalies.

"Maren," Elara said.

"Yeah."

"What's the active claim count in the Cozy Quarter right now?"

Kael checked his tablet. He scrolled. He scrolled some more.

"Seventeen open," he said. "All filed in the last three weeks. That's — " he checked the baseline — "that's four times the quarterly average."

Elara looked at the crack in the pavement. She looked at the border. She looked at the mech, sitting with its enormous knees pulled up, wearing an anvil with the resigned dignity of something that had been made an example of by forces it didn't understand.

"We're going to need to go to the Cozy Quarter," she said.

Kael thought about the forty-five minutes on hold with Magical Forestry. He thought about his mousepad. He thought about his plant, which was dying at a rate that suggested it had made a decision and was simply seeing it through.

"I'll file the preliminary on the mech first," he said. "Give me ten minutes."

"The operator's policy — "

"Commercial mech, Gag Flats delivery permit, anvil impact from unidentified source." He was already writing. "Section 12, Paragraph F: Toon Physics Collateral, Standard Class. I can approve it field-side up to a certain threshold. He'll be covered for the anvil."

"And the sitting down?"

Kael looked at the mech. The mech continued to sit.

"Emotional distress," he said. "It's a gray area but I've argued worse." He finished the form and transmitted it. "Okay. Cozy Quarter."

Elara nodded once, already turning toward the border.

The operator looked up at them as they passed. "Is it — " he started. "Is this going to be okay?"

Kael looked at the crack in the pavement. At the border. At Elara's back, the scorched shoulder of her coat, the way she was already moving like someone who had been expecting this specific wrong thing for longer than she'd said.

"We're working on it," he said, which was both true and the most honest thing he had available.

He followed her toward the Cozy Quarter, leaving the mech sitting on the pavement in the round blue light, wearing its anvil with the patience of something waiting to be part of a larger story it hadn't been told yet.