Free ARC: Peacemaker by Marianne de Pierres Page B

lights either way, so I jumped down and scrambled across the tracks to the other side.
    It would have been easier to go the tourist route through the Coast bus route, but longer, and fraught with drunks and excited tourists. My way was quick and quiet.
    A ditch, an embankment, another falling-down-fence and a long walk in the dark through an abandoned industrial site and I was standing on one edge of Divine.
    In all directions lights blinked, glared and haloed. Behind me, across the Western Quarter, those halos bled into a yellow-white aurora. In front though, Divine shimmered like a bleeding rainbow.
    I walked on, hand on my pistol, heading west according to my phone compass, towards Mystere, a dense plot of the Divine Province squeezed in to the lopsided triangle of Gilgul Street, Seer Parade and Mason Way. Not the real designated street names but those corrupted by the weight of local reference.
    Common myth was an authoritative reality around here.
    Dad had so much to say on the matter of common myths. He believed they were more powerful than any specific spiritualism or religion and that one day someone would realize that, stop waging wars on economic premises, and fight the real fight–the one about belief.
    I could get arcane too when I had a half dozen beers in me, but I was still young enough to think that that kind of talk was also just a mask over bitterness and disillusionment.
    Bitterness did bad things to people. Turned them into twisted up versions of themselves. Or husks, sloughed off and left behind to blow away in the wind.
    I never liked to think of Dad as bitter. But maybe he was, a little. Uncompromising, for sure.
    Plenty of local and foreign tourists came to visit to Mystere on a daily basis. It wasn’t exactly in the tour guide brochures but you only had to ask a cabbie where to get a palm reading, or a rental car dealer where to find the more offbeat local colour and you’d get the same instructions. Go to Mystere but make sure you stay inside the triangle.
    The long side of the triangle was Gilgul Street where every shop front had a layer of stalls in front of it like barnacles clinging to a jetty, hoping not to be swept away by the current (in this case the waves of people rolling past).
    One end of Gilgul intersected Seer Parade, the other, Mason’s Way. In the middle sat a wedge of hi-rise shopping, once glitzy, now gaudy and reeking of hashish and incense sticks. Clairvoyants and mediums competed like grocers, and the combined scents of street cooking and smoldering herbs slammed the back of my throat.
    I’d been there dozens of times over the years and each visit had me swallowing and sweating hard within minutes. The sweating was all about the way people looked at you in Mystere. Those who were selling wanted a piece of your mind-space. The rest were just wild eyed, either pushing to get in somewhere or pushing to get out. Whichever way you turned, once inside Mystere’s triangle, humanity became avaricious and urgent.
    I stood by a hydrant, using it as a buffer against the tide of foot traffic while I decided where to go. Vehicles weaved along the road, slowed to a crawl. You didn’t drive the streets of the triangle unless you were Delivery or Emergency; like Times Square without the homage to entertainment, or the wholesomeness. Instead of thirty-foot screens blinking and yowling, the landscape was bright with glow sticks and fairy lights and plain old fashioned wire-basket fires.
    I knew a clairvoyant halfway along Gilgul who knew people, so I stepped out into the throng and let it propel me in her direction. The difficulty was cutting across to the right doorway at the right time. The normal rules of engagement people observed in crowded places didn’t hold in Mystere. If you knocked into someone, they were likely to knife you, or kick you down so that you got trampled in the undertow. If you didn’t knock into them, you’d never make it across. Damned either way.
    I edged