Free The Horns of Ruin by Tim Akers

speakers."
    He folded the box away and got two of his boys to take it
back to the wagon. One of the whiteshirts was in the alley, spinning up the
Justicar's rig to call in a team to cart off the bodies, when the ground began
to rumble. We all knelt down and looked up.
    The makeshift room was open to the sky, hidden only by a
collection of pipes and other business from the surrounding buildings. I hadn't
given it much of a look when we got there, distracted as I was by the carnage
and the stink. Now that rumbling grew into a roar and the sky was blocked out
completely as something rushed over our heads.
    The monotrain. We were tucked away just under some of the
elevated tracks, our teeth rattling as the train went past. When it was gone I
looked at Owen and jerked my chin up.
    "Which circle was that?"
    "Must have been the Hamilton Stone," he answered.
"You were on the Pershing when you were attacked."
    "They meet up," I said. "Those circles
intersect, north of here."
    "Yeah."
    There was some junk in the alleyway, crates and an old
discarded manifold. I dragged those into the room and piled them up, then
clambered to the level of the tracks.
    "You really shouldn't do that," Owen said.
    "You'll make a great mom someday." I pulled
myself onto the tracks and squinted around.
    As with all buildings in the city, the surrounding
structures had an open framework at the level of the train. It wasn't
necessary, as the impellor could go right through them, but people didn't like
living in the constant surge of those engines, and why build walls if you don't
have to? I felt that surge now, my bones vibrating as it pulsed through me.
There, between the iron grid of the open buildings, far away at the center of
this particular monotrack orbit, I could see the impellor tower, shimmering
sickly in the moonlight.
    "They were waiting," I said. "Waiting for us
to come by."
    "How could they know you were coming this way?"
    I looked over at Owen. He had clambered up beside me, his
hands white on the railing at the edge of the tracks.
    I smiled. "You really shouldn't be up here," I
said.
    "Gods help me if I implied you would make a good
mother someday. Gods in heaven help me."
    "They couldn't know. Whether they were waiting for us
to come by the boulevard, or ride by on these tracks." I shook my head.
"They just couldn't know."
    "Unless someone told them. Someone who knew where you
were going and how best you might get there."
    "Someone from the Library? Maybe. But we didn't come
this way, even though we planned to. And they still found us."
    "Not this batch, though." Owen looked down at the
mess of bodies, and his nervous patrolmen trying to organize them. "But
another. Which means they could have been watching multiple routes."
    "Which means we'll find other groups like this,
watching other tracks?"
    Owen looked thoughtful, twisting to peer along the track
and around at the city. "Maybe. Maybe if we make a map of other paths you
could have taken. I've had enough fun up here, for now."
    He climbed down, leaving me alone with the periodic pulsing
of the distant impellor. The rails began to rumble again, and I sighed and
followed him down. The train came by a minute later, but I barely heard the
roar.

    This is how I usually spend my nights when I spend them
with men. We crawled through alleyways, we rumbled down boulevards, we stopped
monotrains so we could walk on the tracks and poke through alcoves and cringe
when the impellor's invisible surge washed through our bones. It was filthy.
    We found two more places where we'd been watched, where
someone had sat and waited for the Fratriarch to come by. Mostly they were
improvised rooms, cobbled together from driftwood or old crates, hidden in
alleys and under tracks. We found another of those communication rigs, this one
still active. We shut it down and took it. I felt something when I was close to
it, like a voice in my blood, but then it faded. There were signs these guys
had been there for days. At