Tomorrow, the Killing by Daniel Polansky

sighed unhappily, then disappeared, coming back after a few minutes with the promised glass of lemonade. Then she busied herself preparing for the evening trade, cleaning tables, sweeping the floor, activities that required illumination and thus made further repose impossible. I busied myself in the pages of a history tome I’d picked up a week earlier.
    After a while a soot-faced boy came calling my name. I waved him over and he passed me a small slip of paper.
    The Queen’s Palace.
    I set in into my pocket, and dug out a tarnished bit of silver. ‘This is for you,’ I said, ‘for coming out here in the heat. Make sure Eloway keeps his greedy little hands off it.’ The runner smiled and disappeared.
    ‘Who was that?’ Wren asked from behind me. One thing he hadn’t lost since I’d fished him out the gutter was his preternatural capacity for quiet. He’d have been fierce at second-story work, though I supposed it was my job to keep him out of that sort of line.
    ‘Your replacement. I need someone working for me I can rely on not to disappear all day.’
    ‘Adolphus had me putting up fliers,’ he said, his face red from excitement and not just the heat.
    ‘Putting up fliers?’
    ‘For the Association. For the big rally they’re having next week. To remind the Throne of the sacrifices they made for the country, and to renew the bonds of fellowship too long allowed to remain fallow.’
    He’d learned these last words that morning. I disliked hearing him parrot them. ‘And where’s the man himself?’
    ‘They’re having a meeting at the local chapter. They want to vote Adolphus chair.’ He puffed his chest out, proud of the giant’s accomplishments. Under different circumstances I would have found it rather touching. ‘They say he was a hero, that he held the line at Aunis all by himself.’
    ‘Did they now?’
    ‘They said I couldn’t stay. They said it was for veterans only.’ This slight appeared not to have bothered him. ‘They seem all right to me.’
    There was no reason to be angry at Wren for following his father’s orders. I found that I was, all the same. ‘But then you don’t know anything, so your opinion isn’t worth as much as mine.’
    It was a cheap shot, but it set him down a notch. ‘I was just doing what Adolphus told me.’
    ‘Adolphus is a grown man, and can make his own mistakes – you’re a child who eats off my sufferance. So long as that continues, what I say gets the last ring in your ears.’ I sipped through my lemonade, wishing it was liquor. ‘You see Yancey before you decided to enlist?’
    He nodded, no longer smiling. ‘Said he’s got a gig in Brennock, at the Pig and Fiddle.’
    ‘He say when?’
    ‘After eight.’
    ‘If Adolphus is too busy playing soldier to take care of his responsibilities, then they fall on you. Go help Adeline with dinner. And don’t ever make me wait on a message again.’
    He gave me a pretty good eye-fuck on the way to the back, but he went. It seemed like today was my day to be the prick. A lot of days are like that, if we’re being honest.
    I took up a spot in the yard and re-lit the joint I’d fallen asleep over. When that wasn’t enough I rolled another, and when that wasn’t enough I figured nothing would be, and settled back to watch evening cross the cityscape.

13
    I ate an early dinner then started off for Brennock. It was half a trek, and I broke up the monotony with a hit of breath when it felt appropriate, as it often did.
    This section of the city was mostly industrial, cavernous mills and foundries with little nightlife to speak of. Yancey’s having to play there was a sign of the blight that had overtaken his career, a sharp reversal from the decade of uninterrupted success his talent and drive had earned him.
    While playing a private party a year back some noble had said something or done something that made Yancey decide to arrange his face into a different pattern – an understandable impulse, if