Free Black Bottle by Anthony Huso

installed the crimson glass. Prostitution candles still littered the building. Taelin didn’t even know what they were until one of the squatters explained fast burners.
    There had been drugs and violence and profiteering here, not to mention the questionable myth of the bortghast. Some urban specter the homeless siffilated about.
    To the positive, St. Remora lay only ten minutes’ walk from her aunt and uncle’s house. And she had successfully filed for the city to patch the building’s circulatory system on the basis that the church qualified as an historical landmark. Happy to trade the ancient foreclosure for a public record with his name stamped on the building’s promising new future, Mayor Kneads quickly capitulated, pulling down the last board and handing her the key (a moment captured by litho which subsequently made front page). Only when they flipped the power back on did she notice that the cathedral’s facade had not flared with oily orange and brown-green light.
    Rather it had glowed dimly all along.
    “Yeah,” the man from the city had said with something between boredom and condescension. “We don’t really know where those draw juice from. There’s a file on ’em down at public. You can check it out for yourself if you want.”
    The story behind the garish colors was that two decades ago, some eccentric investor had installed the dials asymmetrically across the building’s front before letting the loan lapse. He had replaced the rose window with a cluster of glowing clocks that didn’t seem to have much to do with telling time. The metholinate boilers in the basement did siphon some of their power into turbines that charged chemiostatic anomalies at the front of the building. Every time the boiler fired, the eleven large hermetic dials flickered with a slight surge of luminosity. But boilers or not … the dials never dimmed completely.
    Taelin hated them. Come spring, if she could spare the money, she would have them torn out.
    On the second of Tes, she bought detergent and wire brushes and put the squatters to work. Those who wanted could stay, with the provision that they earned their keep and followed her rules. Grinning dutifully, several bedraggled souls helped her scrape candle wax from the floor and scrub where campfires had blackened the frescoed ceiling.
    In the afternoon, Taelin caught Palmer smoking beggary seeds on the postern steps.
    When she scolded him, he handed them over with nothing more than a tilt of the head and a shrug of the shoulders. She was surprised by his acquiescence but pleased as she slipped them into her pocket and guided him back inside.
    The two of them spent the next couple days bringing some of the original polish back to the front doors. None of the imagery related to Nenuln, but Taelin didn’t care. The carvings and paint offered bright alternatives to worm gang graffiti and soot. All she needed was a warm, relatively clean place to shelter her flock.
    The flock consisted of nine people, three of which had been squatters. Taelin fed them twice a day so that, with the boilers restored and the windows replaced, the comfort of their former haunt far surpassed what it had previously been.
    On the sixth, Taelin woke up to the smell of Palmer’s body, right next to hers. He smelled of beggary smoke and was difficult to rouse. Her room didn’t have a lock, a detail she knew she would have to remedy later that day.
    When she finally got Palmer awake, he smiled sheepishly. She frowned and told him kindly but clearly that this was her space and that he couldn’t just plop down and sleep wherever he wanted. He looked confused with the sunlight blasting his bright blue eyes, pale skin and orange hair in a mad snarl on top of his head. A scrawny Naneman, wasted by the streets, but with a decentness and a sincerity still present in his eyes. He didn’t argue, just nodded quietly and gathered up his clothes.
    She made him breakfast. Tebeshian coffee for