Free Gears of the City by Felix Gilman

cracked, high-pitched and tired and nervous. “Just do what I tell you.” Then he was so ashamed of the look in her eyes that he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” without quite meaning to.
    She struggled again and he held her against the wall. “I just want directions,” he said. “I don’t want to. I’m just very lost.” He dropped the knife in the dirt. “Please?”
    N orth, through a maze of crisscrossing canals. The hollow clatter of the iron bridges echoed off wet stone walls. Engine thump and cold winds shivered the oily water. Ugly grey birds stalked in the low-tide mud. They called after Arjun in nearly human voices, shrill and cracking like children; they flapped heavily up and dropped on the railings beside him, shouting outraged near-obscenities.
    One, braver than the rest, got too close, flapping in his face. Its wings were like dishrags, its beak like a broken bottle.
Oiyu. Yu. Yu.
He slapped it out of the air, and it fell on its back wheezing.
    Thunders, Marta had called them. Because of the shouting. They offended him somehow, like an ugly and cynical joke. Atwhose expense?
Yu. Fackoff. Yu.
They hovered just out of his reach. Did they want him gone, did they want his attention? He hurried and flinched through their territory.
    He didn’t remember the canals from the night before, not at all.
    He crossed empty train tracks, plunging through thick weeds. He didn’t remember those either. The tracks ran northeast into the fog, and he thought of that homemade map in Ruth’s shop, the trains carrying the product of the city’s factories endlessly north to the Mountain, and for a moment he turned without thinking to follow the tracks; but the afternoon was wearing on, and the sun was getting low, and he was no nearer to Carnyx Street; so he crossed the tracks and left them behind. He didn’t expect to see them again.
    As the sun set a red light burned across high windows, sparked on steel bridges, limned the grey swell of gasometers, and—in the distance—lit something he recognized: the ancient dome of the Museum, softly brushing the sky, rising over the rooftops. It was the one curved and elegant thing among the jut and glower of the factories. There was a statue of something winged and angelic at its apex, red in the light of the setting sun. It was north by northwest, past a few last miles of tenement blocks.
    For a moment he remembered the Beast, and what it owed him, and he forgot Carnyx Street.
    He walked faster, hoping to get to the Museum before the night closed in.
    H e got there after dark. The angel on the dome was silver in the moonlight.
    The Museum itself was guarded. Five men on the steps, all armed; more around the sides.
    They were identifiable as Know-Nothings by … what? They had no clear uniform. Most but not all of them were white men, and young. They wore workers’ clothes, heavy coats. They showed a fondness for boots and flat leather caps that might have been a badge of membership, or the fashion of this part of the city. An irregular group of some sort—hired thugs? A gang, a movement, a party, not an army, not a police force. Arjun regretted not questioning the Low sisters more carefully.
    If the men loitering outside the Museum had anything in common it was that they appeared somewhat better fed than their neighbors, and better dressed. Their boots shone. They wore neckties or cuff links. The little luxuries of leather and color and boot polish marked them as a class apart; as men with a source of income into which it was best not to inquire too closely. A certain arrogance; a certain brutishness. They did not particularly look like evil men, but they looked willing to do evil things, and then laugh it off later as
just business.
    Arjun wondered why they didn’t just burn the Museum down; if they hated and feared what was in it so much, why not simply erase it, rather than keep it locked away, alive but rotting? For a moment he considered asking them. If he were