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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Vice surrenders

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in LA with Adam Conover at Vroman's, then on MONDAY in Seattle with Neal Stephenson, then Portland, Phoenix and more!

Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership. RIP, we hardly knew ye.

For those of you who don't know, Vice was a Canadian media success story. It was founded by a motley clique of hipsters, one of whom – founder of the Proud Boys – has since grown to be one of the world's great fascism influencers. Another perfected the art of getting young people to work "for exposure" even as he built a massive, highly lucrative media empire on their free labor:

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/vice-oral-history/

Eventually, Vice transitioned to a string of progressively worsening corporate owners, each more dishonest, predatory – and gullible – than the last. The company was one of the most enthusiastic marks for Facebook's infamous "pivot to video" – in which Mark Zuckerberg destroyed half the media industry by tricking them into thinking that the public was clamoring for video content, based on fraudulent viewing numbers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video

Vice went all-in on video, spending hundreds of millions to finance Zuckerberg's doomed attempt to conquer Youtube. But unlike other the rubes who got zucked, Vice found greater fools to scam, convincing giant, slow-moving meidia companies that the best way to get in on the Next Big Thing was to shower them with vast sums of string-free money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viceland_(Canadian_TV_channel)

And yet, at every turn, through a succession of increasingly incompetent owners who bought the stumbling, declining Vice at fire-sale prices and then proceeded to hack away at the wages and tools its journalists depended on while paying executives salaries so high that they beggared the imagination, Vice's reporters continued to turn out stellar material.

This went on literally until the last moment. The memorial posted by 404 Media rounds up a selection of major stories Vice's beleaguered, precarious writers produced even as Vice's vulture capitalist leadership were pulling the rug out from under them:

https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-vices-legacy-and-the-idea-that-the-internet-is-forever/

True to form, those private equity scumbags locked all those workers out of the company's CMS without notice – and then forgot to lock down the podcasting back-end. That allowed a group of Vice veterans – Matthew Gault, Emily Lipstein, Anna Merlan, Tim Marchman and Mack Lamoureux – to gather for a totally unauthorized, tell-all session that they pushed out on an official Vice channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKT4OtDEJRA

It's a hell of a listen. Not only do these Vice veterans have lots of fascinating history to recount, but they also describe the conditions under which those blockbuster stories of Vice's final days were produced. As the "visionary leaders" of the company paid themselves millions, they halted payments to key suppliers, from Lexisnexis to the interview transcription service the writers depended on. Writers paid out of pocket to search PACER court records.

Not only did Vice's reporters do incredible work under terrible and worsening circumstances, but the Vice writers who got out ahead of the total collapse are also doing incredible work. 404 Media is a writer-owned investigative news publisher founded by four Vice escapees – Samantha Cole, Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, which is both producing incredible work and sustaining the writers who founded it:

https://www.404media.co/

All of which leads to an inescapable conclusion: whatever problems Vice had, they didn't include "writers don't do productive work" and also didn't include "that work isn't economically viable*. Whatever problems Vice had, they weren't problems with Vice's workers – it was a problem with Vice's bosses.

Which makes Vice's final, ignominious punishment at the hands of those bosses even more brutal, stupid and inexcusable. According to the leaked memos emanating from the company's investors and their millionaire C-suite toadies, the business's new strategy is abandoning their website in order to publish on social media.

This is…I mean, this,..

This is…

Wow.

I mean, wow.

The thing is, the social media business model is a giant rug-pull. They're not even bothering to hide their playbook anymore. For social media, the game is to encourage media companies to become reliant on third parties to reach their audiences. Once that reliance is established, the companies turn down – or even halt – the ability of those media companies to reach their audience altogether. Then, they charge the media companies to reach their audiences:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

Now, this wasn't always quite so obvious. Back when Vice was falling for Facebook's "pivot to video," it wasn't completely obvious that the long con was to take your audience hostage and ransom them back to you. But deliberately organizing your business to be reliant on social media barons today? It's like trusting your money to Sam Bankman-Fried…in 2024.

If there was ever a moment when the obvious, catastrophic, imminent risk of trusting Big Tech intermediaries to sit between you and your customers or audience, it was now. This is not the moment to be "social first." This is the moment for POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), a strategy that sees social media as a strategy for bringing readers to channels that you control:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse

Predicting that a social media platform will rug the media companies that depend on it today doesn't take a Sun Tzu – as cunning strategies go, the hamfisted tactics of FB, Twitter and Tiktok make gambits like "Lucy and the football" look like von Clausewitz.

The most bonkers part of this strategy is that it's coming from private equity bosses, who laud themselves as the great strategists of the 21st century, whose claim on so much of our global capital and resources is derived from their brilliant insight, which allows them to buy "distressed assets" like Vice, "restructure" them to find "efficiencies" and sell them on.

The reality is that PE goons – like other financiers – are basically herding animals. Everyone's hit on the tactic of buying up beloved media companies – from the 150-year-old Popular Science to modern publications like CNet – and then filling them with spammy garbage in the hopes that Google will fail to notice and continue to award them pride-of-place on search results pages:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

The fact that these billionaire brain-geniuses can't figure out how to "turn around" a site whose workers a) produce brilliant, popular, successful work; and b) depart to found successful firms that commercialize that work tells you everything about their ability to spot "a good business opportunity."

PE – like other mafiosi – only have one business-plan, the "bust out," where you invade a business that produces useful things, force them to pay your chosen suppliers sky-high fees for things they don't need, extract massive fees for your "management" and then walk away from the collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck

#pluralistic #vice #motherboard #posse #apps #enshittification #media #chumboxes #botshit #bust outs #news bailouts

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fishmech · 1 year

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people really have grossly overestimated ideas of the societal popularity and acceptance of a niche crossdressing streamer/youtuber imo

can youse that insist on speaking like that just admit you're mad about like the popularity of that nerd among the 100 people whose posts you read tops instead of talking about him like hes a beloved international celebrity like cmon

#i don't even watch him #but it's like he just isn't that relevant to the world as a whole #most of his money is from one weird sugar daddy's obsession #outside the crossdressing The Content is thoroughly interchangeable video chumboxing

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sweetbodine · 9 months

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My kingdom for a "learn less" button.

#chumbox

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lolcaps · 1 year

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#chumbox

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lullabyes22-blog · 2 years

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Forward, but Never Forget/(XOXO)

Snippet:

The gloom of Zaun's history is brightened by colorful aphorisms.

Each one is a testament to the city's spirit, one of dysfunctional pride and dogged defiance. There are sayings common to the fishermen—a mummeling mudskipper—to refer to a man who talks a big game, but never hauls in a big catch. The miners have their own versions—cracking a vein into a vug—to describe a braggart who overstates his talents and gets buried alive for his troubles.

The Sumps are privy to the wickedest witticisms. A dribble short of a stained sheet—meaning an alleyside knee-trembler when you can't afford lodgings with a whore. Cunted up like a cuttlefish—meaning someone drugged and mugged in broad daylight. From the chumbox to the cumbox—meaning a petty con who is framed for murder.

Silco's favorite is the most straightforward. It has spawned from the Undercity's depths: smoke and salt and shadow. It is hissed in the bars between empty shot-glasses and satchels clinking with coin. It is hollered in the clubs, blood-red spotlights striking off fists roped in muscles or pocked with needle tracks. It is spoken tenderly, as during late-morning lovemaking; it is whistled sharply, as one bids a dog to heel.

A disloyal motherfucker is born dead every minute.

Zaunites have a talent for poetry.

X-posted to both FFnet and AO3

AO3 - Forward, But Never Forget/XOXO

FFnet - Forward, But Never Forget (XOXO)

Summary: Zaun is free—and must grow into its unfamiliar new dimensions. So must Silco and Jinx. A what-if that diverges midway through the events of episode 8. Found family and fluff, politics and power, smut and slice-of-life, villainy and vengeance.

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hughmunculus · 6 months

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There is a kind of insidious trend in the thinkpiece ecosystem - especially the ones that end up in the glorified chumbox that is Pocket - of finding the secret narcissists, gaslighters, or toxic influences in your life.

And I can't help but wonder if any of these articles are actually interested in providing people the resources to help themselves at all, or if they're just trying to cynically get clicks by provoking peoples sense of paranoia when it comes to their relationships.

Because the easy answer to conflict is that communication is not necessary, that conflict is actually always harmful and comes from a place of pathological malice from people who can't or won't empathize with you.

If you're worried somebody is toxic for you, the best way to figure that out is to fucking talk to them, air out your anxieties and difficulties with them and either work through them or reach an impasse where you realize they aren't good for you.

But diagnosing and pathologizing people based on some random article you read in The Atlantic hurts not only people who genuinely have NPD, BPD, and other personality disorders by painting them all as antagonists, but it seriously damages your ability to empathize and communicate with other people.

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demonic-shadowlucifer · 5 months

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How to spot and identify Clickbait!

(PT: How to spot Clickbait!) Slight trigger warning for unreality-inducing elements. Ahh clickbait. We've all seen it before. While clickbait may be obvious to identify, sometimes it's not always the case. With recent hockey rumors being spread (Something I already talked about on my hockey blog @blusical), I've seen a lot of clickbait titles/articles pop up. And I want to talk about how to identify it. First though, what is Clickbait? Clickbait is typically a link or a thumbnail meant to attract attention and hook readers into reading an article or watching a video. This form of content is typically over-exaggerated or straight up misinformation. One thing to keep in mind is that not all clickbait is exactly malicious. Most of the time it's usually annoying, though it can sometimes be used for humorous purposes (Say, a comedic YouTuber titling a mostly humorous video with "Here's why your hockey team sucks"). However, some people can take it too far, and it can be used to spread false information and can also be used to give people malware. When it comes to reading an article, try to look for the following when avoiding clickbait. Title format. Most clickbait articles use an advertising technique called Chumboxing, which refers to advertisements that use thumbnail grids and captions to drive traffic. These articles may be formatted in ways such as "Parents HATE this simple trick", "Secrets that the FBI doesn't want you to know!" and vise-versa. Another thing to look out for is words that are capitalized. Most clickbait titles tend to capitalize random words, or sometimes the entire title.

Additionally, keep an eye out for language that tries to make you do certain things or make you feel certain things. Stuff that's like "This is what happens when you do [x]", "Here's why you shouldn't do this!", "Moments that will make you happy/sad/angry".

(Watchmojo's in a lot of these aren't they?)

Those titles can also be very fear-mongering and may cause paranoia and anxiety in many. Also be sure to watch out for any title that uses sayings like "speechless", "shocking", "expert", "[x person] says", "must do" or any similar sayings, since odds are, they're clickbait.

Lastly, look for context in the article title if there's any? So the title mentions an expert? Is there a name? It mentions an athlete? Which one? Which sport? Is there a quote in the article? Who said it? And why was it said? Thumbnails.

Clickbait articles and videos will also use thumbnails or pictures to get clicks. What do those look like? Some thumbnails can be very heavily edited. This is one thing to look out for when it comes to videos. Now, this isn't always a sign of clickbait. Since many YouTubers do it to get clicks. Say, a gaming YouTuber simply adding "OMG" in the thumbnail of a video of them playing Dangranronpa (if you know you know).

However there are some that go over the top. Such as unnecessary text in the thumbnail, a bunch of images mashed together, those useless red arrows, you get the idea.

(By the way there is just so much wrong with this that I don't even know where to start).

Some thumbnails may also include images that, while they match the caption, don't provide much context to what's being talked about Again, context people! These usually tend to be stock images (And with the rise of AI, it's also important to look out for AI generated thumbnails too!)

And then there's clickbait with thumbnails that aren't even relevant to the title.

Some websites to look out for/avoid (Please correct me if I made a mistake):

While every website posts clickbait at some point, some do it more than others. And a lot of the times it's typically misleading or downright malicious. Most of the infamous ones include: Buzzfeed. TMZ (As well as most tabloids) AddictingInfo Upworthy. Deadspin (That site also just has questionable content to begin with). ViralNova Huffington Post And probably others but those were the first ones that came to my head. Final notes:

Not every article or YouTuber that does these things is automatically clickbaiting. However if it does more than one of those things, or it does it more often than not.. time to become skeptical. Again, clickbaiting isn't exactly good or bad. Most of the time it's just annoying, and in some cases can be used for comedic purposes (But either way, just... don't do it lol).

#and yes i'm very aware of the irony of using “how to” and an exclamation point in the title lol #lets talk about stuff #clickbait #internet culture #internet problems #social media #social media problems #unreality #sort of

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artoklasia · 10 months

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Occlupanid Tags

A running list of the common tags used by this tag project. Artoklasia is a tagging experiment to observe the interplay of tag clouds for particular mature themes.

At the risk of my engineered charm of nuance and mystery, I have decided to add concept clouds to the tags list. Think of these less as strict definitions, and more of a general concept of what to expect from a given tag.

The most common CWs I do my best to tag for: blood, emeto, gore, nihilism, trypo, violence, unsanitary.

In order to guarantee this blog is only visible on PC to people who are 18+ and have opted into seeing Mature Content, I am officially giving my pinned post Labels.

Anointment: rain, oiled surfaces, orthotics, corsetry, posturing; saliromania

Apostasy: emeto, tissue rejection, violent/abrupt excretions

Apotheosis: terato, supernatural creatures, transformation

Asitophilia: pica, unsettling food

Aureole: haloes, fluorescence, crowns, horns

Bathwater: baths, tanks, bodies of water

Censer: respirators, particulates like smoke, smoking

Cephalophoria: headlessness, object heads

Chum for Chums: moodboard collages of a curated theme, chumboxes, clickbait

Devotion: (body) worship, intricate rituals, (religious) conceit

Discipline: BDSM

Elephant chan: the Elephant's Foot

Enkyoku na Seppun / 婉曲な接吻: contact transfer, contaminants; nyotaimori (previously "an indirect kiss")

Filament: fibers, threads, roots, wires, hair, rope

Flux: melt fetish body horror, melting, coagulating

Galatea: agalmato, objectum

Hagiography: conceit of sainthood/martyrdom. figures of interest

Hanahaki: Hanahaki disease; organs filled with foreign matter

Herakleophorbia: oversized things, macro

Kholodets / холодец: cross-sections, resin/gelatin suspensions, anatomical diagrams, dissections, fetish gear under plain clothes

Lace: lace, fishnets, mesh

Laces: corsetry aesthetic, shibari

Latex: vinyl, latex, esp. wetlook

Leaks: mirrors, masks, screens/monitors, reflective surfaces

Leather: only used when I can be mostly confident it isn't latex

Lichinka / личинка: tentacles, tongues, invertebrates, sex organs

Likhoradka / лихорадка: disease, symptoms, infectiousness; nosophilia

Louboutin: contrast-sole aesthetic, hidden linings/coatings

Myxomatosis: leporine, blistered, tumescent

Oblations: paraphernalia *****INDISTINCT TAG*****

Ontology: holes, voids; trypophilia

Optical Disc: distorted visuals, implicit of impaired/altered sensory input

Or the Crown Slips: edging, particular head tilts; symphorophilia, especially the rehearsal ("Chin up, Princess...")

Pachy chan: the corium slags produced by the Fukushima disaster, where three separate reactors melted down

Pearls: pearls, teeth

Raiment: wearables *****INDISTINCT TAG*****

Rapture: the "O"; erotic nihilism

Therapy: parasites, (bad) medicine; trypophilia, formicophilia

Thriai: apiaries, honey curation, telling of the bees

Unction: sploshing/gunge/WAM; more messy/sloppy than anointment tag, though there's overlap

Underfoot: foot fetishism, footwear, corium slag

Satin: silk, satin

Saturnine: afterglow, necro, decomposition

Second Skin: wearables fetishism; second skin

Shuba / шуба: fur, velvet, velour, suede, moss, mold, matte textured surfaces

Stimulating: looping stim gifs

Surfeit: swelling, excess, tumescence; expansion

Synecdoche: setting porn, warning signs, environmental storytelling. abandoned places, urbex, exclusion zones

Syzygy: concentrism, convergence, overlay

Tryasovitsy / трясовицы: contagiousness, transcendentalism

Vagusblogging: appetites, (sensory) gluttony, compulsive behaviors; feederism

Vessels: containers, rooms, dishes; (clothes) stuffing

Wetware: clinical apathy, cybernetics, body hacking

Wetware Softhack: drug use, nerve tweaking, cybernetic malfunctions (historically I've also had a #Wetware Hack tag, but I've been trying to merge that tag into #Discipline)

With the devotion of an Earl Marshal: symphorophilia, especially the planning (Often blurs with #Or the Crown Slips.) "[He] thought of nothing else but her death, a coronation of wounds he had staged with the devotion of an Earl Marshal."

Wonderbread: (Wonder)bread, adulterated bread, extremely processed food products, hypercapitalist environmental damage

Wormwood: radiochemical symphorophilia, hazardous waste, apocalyptica

wundermöpse: I haven't decided whether to add this one to the mix or not

Functional non-aes tags

Chum for Chums: moodboards in this are made by me

Dimercaprol: my adult art

Fav: personal favs

Mine: content I've uploaded, compiled, and/or myself

Music: music tag

Peak B.A.L.: something of a best-ofs where I'm OP

We Just Don't Know: Catch-all nonsense. I started using it originally for raunchy shitposts, memes, and text posts I wanted to be able to reference again. Trying to use it less often and focus on the abstract for this blog.

In addition to the above, I've done my best to tag as many posts as possible with the contributing artists. If it's a publication like a zine, I try to remember to tag that, too. If you ever feel cheeky and want to help me source anything in my #Needs Source tag, you're lovely.

#we just don't know #update feb '24: i changed an indirect kiss

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robpegoraro · 5 years

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I'm (still) sorry about the schlock ads here

I’m (still) sorry about the schlock ads here

Yesterday’s announcement of a merger of Taboola and Outbrain–the dreadful duo responsible for those horrible “around the Web” galleries of clickbait ads tarting up many of your favorite news sites–provided yet another reminder of how fundamentally schlocky programmatic ads can get online.

But so did a look at this blog.

When WordPress.com launched WordAds in 2012, the company touted a more…

View On WordPress

#ad privacy #ads #advertising #chumboxes #clickbait #Outbrain #programmatic ads #Taboola #wordads

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lastknownlocation · 5 years

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I love these things. Modern art.

#chumboxes

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decamarks · 2 years

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these chumbox ads contain 4 of the most important parts of life:

beautiful women forecasting the weather (mother nature)

wedding fails (folly of humanity)

interesting maps (enlightenment)

animal collective merriweather post pavilion

#I DON'T EVEN REMEMBER WHAT WEBSITE I FOUND THIS ON

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lolcaps · 1 year

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#chumbox

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Privacy is not property

When all you have is market orthodoxy, everything looks like a market failure. Take privacy: giant, rapacious corporations have instrumented the digital and physical worlds to spy on us all the time, so some people think they should pay us for our data.

There's a pretty rich theoretical history explaining why this "data dividend" is a stupid idea. First of all, private information isn't very property-like. And not just because it shares all the problems of digital works (infinitely, instantaneously copyable at zero cost).

Private information makes for bad "property" because it is "owned" by multiple, overlapping parties who generally disagree about when and who to share it with. When you and I have a conversation, we both own the fact that the conversation took place.

What happens if I won't sell, but you will? Tech companies are *really* good at finding the cheapest seller of an information good, after all. For example, whenever you visit a "quality newspaper's" site, there's a real-time auction to bid on the right to show you ads.

Say there are 13 bidders for that right. One gets to show you an ad, but the other 12 get something too: your unique identifier and the fact that you read, say, the New York Times.

That fact is then sold on to garbage chumbox sites like Tabouleh, whose pitch to advertisers is "I can show your ads to NYT readers at 15% of the price that the Times charges." If the same fact is "owned" by lots of people, it's a commodity.

Buyers will find the lowest, least-discerning seller. What's more, you can't solve this by requiring consensus of all "owners" of a fact before it is disclosed - who owns the fact that your boss sexually harassed you: you or him? Does he get a veto over your disclosures?

Even if we could get property rights to work in privacy (which, for the record, we cannot), all we'd manage to do is transform privacy into a luxury good wherein poor people are coerced into selling their data for pennies, as Malavika Jayaram reminds us:

https://twitter.com/MalJayaram/status/1231373834458025984

Data dividends also require someone to set prices on data, and chances are that price will be set by a privacy-invading tech company or a regulator in thrall to them:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/why-getting-paid-your-data-bad-deal

And whatever the price, it won't capture the true cost, as Hayley Tsukayama reminds us: "Low-income Americans and often communities of color should not be incentivized to pour more data into a system that already exploits them and uses data to discriminate against them."

"Privacy is a human right, not a commodity."

It's not too late to end "pay for privacy," because, as Dipayan Ghosh says, behavioral data is "temporally sensitive" - companies need more of it all the time, meaning we can still push back.

https://slate.com/technology/2020/07/data-privacy-surveillance-law-marketers.html

To get this right, we have to stop pretending that data makes good property and that therefore markets will solve data problems. And just because data isn't property, it doesn't follow that it isn't valuable.

Far from it: the most valuable things we know of (human beings) are not property precisely *because* treating them as property would cheapen them. We humans are so valuable that we have a complex set of rules just for us.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property

My daughter isn't my property, but I have an interest in her. So does my wife, and her grandparents, and her teachers and school district, and Child Protective Services...and so does she. This "interest"-based system acknowledged the complex web of overlapping claims.

We have a whole discipline - one that doesn't intersect with markets at all - that describes these relations, with specialized concepts like "nurturance rights" and "self-determination rights" (thanks to Rory Pickens for introducing me to these concepts).

All of these points and more are made in "Why data ownership is the wrong approach to protecting privacy," a 2019 Brookings Institute paper by Cameron F Kerry and John B Morris, who relate them to pending legislation and relevant case-law.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/06/26/why-data-ownership-is-the-wrong-approach-to-protecting-privacy/

"By licensing the use of their information in exchange for monetary consideration, we may be worse off than under the current notice-and-choice regime...A property-based system also disregards interests besides property that individuals have in personal information."

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lullabyes22-blog · 1 year

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Forward, but Never Forget/XOXO - Ch: 2 - A Disloyal MotherF*cker

AO3 - Forward, But Never Forget/XOXO

FFnet - Forward, But Never Forget (XOXO)

Playlist on Youtube

Chapters: 1| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48

CH 2: Silco calls for an assembly with the chem-barons. A troublemaker is put in his place. Sevika moves up.

Tw: Depictions of violence and strong language

I broke so many bones But none of them were ever my own

~ "Bad" – Royal Deluxe

The gloom of Zaun's history is brightened by colorful aphorisms.

A disloyal motherfucker is born dead every minute.

Zaunites have a talent for poetry.

His motorcar swoops up the Lanes—a monstrous blur of shellacked metal. Inside, Silco sits in darkness and silence. The passenger room is emptied save for himself. Sevika rides in front with the chauffeur. She knows better than to engage him in small-talk.

Outside, it is almost completely dark. The bomb-shattered streets hold an eerie emptiness. The curfew is still in effect. The shelling has collapsed entire city blocks; poor workmanship has taken care of the rest. It is too dangerous to be outdoors. Plenty of things goin' bump in the night, as Jinx sometimes says.

Strangely, nobody has left town. Oh, there was the odd cold-footer here and there, sneaking past the city limits and into Piltover. Silco had ordered them shot on sight. Their bodies still dangle from Zaun's subterranean battlements, pecked clean by the crows.

But the locals have all stayed. Zooming down the streets, Silco spots faces hovering behind the windows, ghostly and candle-lit. Haunted, like huge portions of the Undercity. The rest of the streets are patrolled by his chem-suited blackguards. Those who can knock on any door, flout any law, break any neck, to keep the peace.

Idly, Silco traces the folding knife tucked into his boot.

Better blackguards than corpses.

Distantly, gunfire echoes through the desolation. Old scores are being settled. All else is black.

Silco sinks against the leather seat. The space beside him burns emptily. He wants Jinx here. He wants to show her the coal-heaps of devastation, then pour them into the furnace of their shared ingenuity. Plans to overhaul the infrastructure; plans to purify the air; plans to commercialize and privatize.

He remembers all those heady late-evening chats with his girl, sitting together in this motorcar. Once a month, they'd go on long neon-lit drives through the Undercity. Just the two of them, the chauffeur shut off behind the privacy screen. Moments that seemed to Silco like carnival-colored bliss—the half-open opera window a film-reel of breweries, shipyards, emporiums and casinos, the air scented with smoke and coffee and gunpowder and booze.

And Jinx.

Silco's mind drifts in itself. Six years, and she was always by his side: the shot in his eye and the song in his heart. Six years, and she'd helped him transform the Undercity from a black-and-white snapshot of dead-ends into a portrait in dazzling Technicolor, aglow with potential.

Just like her.

(We had good innings, didn't we, child?)

Six years, and Silco had risen as the Fissures' most prominent industrialist, a fixture even in Piltover's society magazines. Their acceptance was begrudging, the path riven with crimps and clogs. Undercity businesses were levied with taxes; its entrepreneurs were spurned. Silco's own steel mills made a fraction of the profits his Topside counterparts raked in. Fortunately, shortcuts belowground supplemented his income. Like any Zaunite worth his salt, he'd had brushes with Piltover's courts. Thrice, he was indicted for tax evasion; each trial resulted in a hung jury, and insufficient evidence. Nothing could scratch his reputation.

In Piltovan society, he'd established himself as a figure of humble beginnings. A self-made man who'd succeeded on the straight-and-narrow. He was never admitted to their more genteel sanctums, but he never aspired to them, either.

In a world of old money, he'd made his own.

Belowground, he and Jinx had relished the good life. Nothing flashy :a low-key pragmatism served the long-game. But he'd indulged Jinx after the privations of their past. Noxian cigars and single-malt whiskeys for him; imported glowpaints and handcrafted toolkits for her. They'd kept the Drop as their headquarters. But he'd bought properties at all three Undercity levels. Some were fronts. Others were legitimate.

Naturally, Jinx had her favorites. An augmentation parlor at Bridgewaltz called Inqued (She'd gotten her trademark tattoos there, a sixteenth-birthday gift he'd permitted despite his private distaste for body-art as the self-aggrandizement of poseurs and peons, unable to refuse her anything.) A boxing gym at Factorywood called The Grindstone (She'd gone there for nightly combat lessons, a grueling rigor designed to fine-tune her mind and muscles until she'd snapped blows at targets so fast you couldn't hit her with a puff of smoke). A Jazz club at the Skylight Commercia called Blue Note (She'd loved dragging him to the dancefloor to foxtrot, playfully lip-synching lyrics that are now branded into his memory along with the yearly ascent of Jinx's head to elevated portions of his three-piece suit: her forehead resting on the spot under his ribs, then between them, then right against his black heart as she'd croon, The stars get red and oh! The night's so bluuuuuuue.)

Afterward, she and Silco would tour the streets in his gleaming motorcar. And talk of Zaun.

(This 'thing of ours'—isn't that what you called it?)

Silco rubs his left temple with two fingertips.

Gods, all the years they'd spent, spinning webs and sowing chaos—what triumph it would be to share it now. To have Jinx tucked against his side as always, his arm around her, her blue head nestled under his chin. Hearing her mad little laugh and her peppy prattle. Seeing the glow in her eyes as he heaped those coal-lumps of hard labor into diamonds at her feet.

Instead, they are both robbed: Silco of the joy of Jinx's presence, and Jinx of the closure that she'd always coveted—proof that her bombs and brains and bloodthirst were the perfect chemical ingredients to catalyze Zaun's freedom.

She has freed Zaun. A fair one-to-one transaction; blood for blood.

Yet the cost is too high for one girl to shoulder.

(Let me share it, Jinx.)

(As we shared everything else.)

The motorcar rolls up to the fantastical façade of a six-story cathedral. It once served as a congregation for the Veiled Lady—a burnished honeycomb with hundreds of purple-stained windows. Once, amid the extravaganza of neighboring architecture—turrets, steeples, obelisks—it was obsequious. Now the nearby buildings have been razed by bombs. In the brutalized emptiness, the cathedral is all that remains.

To superstitious Zaunites, it is a miracle. To Silco, it is a passing convenience. The territory is a neutral zone for the Undercity's core crime families. The Big Five. When Silco first rose to prominence in the Lane's shadowy backwaters, they vied for control over much of its territories, with borders drawn in blood.

The list was a Who's Who of chem-royalty: swaggering bigwigs, criminal masterminds and bloodthirsty dons. Chross, a Piltovan-bred information broker and the leader of The Hush Company—an umbrous plugboard for illicit backstreet dealings. Margot, a former parole official from Stillwater prison, who had expanded her talents into literal human bondage, and now presides as the luminary procuress of the Vyx, her finger in every pie from flesh-peddling to fashion. Petrock, a veteran from the tail-end of the Noxus-Ionia wars, who rose in the ranks thanks to a bluntly ruthless streak and a propensity to shoot from the hip—literally. Crimson, one of the flashiest entrepreneurs in the Undercity, with a venerable Oshra Va'Zaun bloodline and a fortune invested in real estate and stock trading. Volkage, a third-generation steel mogul whose family had built their dynastic fortune in the ore mines, where his grandfather and Silco once drudged shoulder-to-shoulder.

Silco had ascended to the zenith by merging the Big Five into a core nucleus—a juggernaut that crushed any hint of rebellion. He'd structured them into a commission, like a board of directors. Each member was a head from the Big Five's families; they would periodically assemble to make decisions on the Undercity's goings-on. Territories were divided among each representative gang, cutting the turf out so there was no overlap—or potential for conflict.

All told? A workable arrangement.

The Big Five were ubiquitous in Zaun's public life: social butterflies at decadent soirees, their insignias as well-known as their faces, whether splattered in graffiti across the alleyside billboard of a moldering tenement at Sump-level, or staring from a gilded portrait frame at an air-conditioned saloon at the Promenade. Meanwhile Silco—the man who controlled the Undercity—remained a shadowy myth. Few knew him by sight. Rather, he was an object of feverish speculation. The all-seeing Eye. To some, he was a sinister string-puller and a mystical sorcerer rolled into one. To others, he embodied the Undercity's zeitgeist at its most corrupt and infernal: the Devil in a three-piece suit.

Yet it was on the streets that Silco's grip was most evident. At a moment's notice, he could call an assembly of chem-barons, and bring the Undercity to a grinding halt. Factories would shudder to stillness; shopkeepers would whip down their shutters; clerks would scurry out from their offices like rats abandoning a sinking ship.

Tonight is no different.

In the cathedral's courtyard, five luxury motorcars are arrayed like gleaming cockroaches. Giant diesel-powered generators rumble in the shadows to combat the power shortage. Armed blackguards stand at the stained-glass gates. As one, they snap to attention when Silco ascends the stairs, Sevika on his heels. Two men open the doors with smart salutes.

Sevika winks at the bigger one, and follows Silco into the cathedral.

The interior exudes a musty stillness. The rose-windows at the top floor are soot-speckled. Moonlight slants inside to pick up a violet patina of dust. The chem-barons sit at an oak conference table. In the unearthly radiance, they resemble a motley of waxwork figures. Their faces and finery are reflected in the mirrored alcoves lining the walls. Stylized poses of self-satisfaction replaced by dour moues of displeasure.

For three months, they've coasted on revelries a mile high. Now Silco has dragged them down to earth.

His footsteps barely echo through the darkened corridors. Yet the first glimpse of him sends a muted ripple through the room. Sevika pulls out a chair; Silco sits at the table's head with the slinky, unnerving grace that characterizes all his movements. For a moment, silence. The softer sounds of the cathedral envelop them. The chem-barons seem to be holding their breath.

Without preamble, Silco says, "You failed to convene at headquarters."

The chem-barons exchange low-key looks.

The dapper yet dithering Crimson says, "We were getting nervous."

"'We' who?"

"All of us. The atmosphere's too volatile. Better to meet on neutral territory."

"Wish granted." Silco gestures with a pale splay of fingers. "Provided you had the sense not to descend en masse."

A scattering of nods.

"Good."

Too many shockwaves passing through the Undercity. Too much paranoia. For security, Silco had ordered the five chem-barons—the core coterie of Zaun's wealth—to arrive one by one at each rendezvous spot, with intervals in between, and to always be accompanied by his blackguards.

History is crowded with coups. Especially belowground. The hierarchy here is one of viper against viper. A whiff of blood, and they all come slithering out. Silco has commanded them for years, and understands their natures. For three months, he's turned a would-be blind eye. He's watched them glut themselves on the spoils of war. Grow surfeited rather than sharp.

Easiest to catch off-guard.

"Well," he says, legs crossing as he leans back in slow appraisal, "Why the long faces?"

More glances, synced less by conspiracy than cowardice.

Margot, in a sleek black leather ensemble that lacks only a bullwhip, says, "We saw your latest decree to the Cabinet."

"Which one?"

"The taxes." She bites her lip. "Are you truly passing a tariff on imports?"

"Zaun must raise revenue."

Petrock scrubs mechanized fingers through his ashy beard, a series of matchstick rasps. "What about the duties on foreign vessels? That's fuckin' crazy. You expect my trading partners to honor it?"

"Make them honor it. Zaun's shipments must take precedence."

"What about—" Volkage, black hair curling down his cheekbone like a stylized oil-slick, scoffs, "—this Charter of Zaunite Rights. You jerking us around? Equal opportunity for education and ownership. Right to trade. You expect us to rub shoulders with the coal-heavers, now?"

Volkage's grandfather was a coal-heaver. A tough old bastard; he'd fought alongside Silco to unionize the mines.

Evidently, memory is not his grandson's métier.

"We must strengthen loyalty for the fledgling government," Silco says. "Zaunites have lent tremendous support to our cause. Right now, they are hungry and hurting. They need something to rally behind. A Charter of Rights is a good focal point. A new faith to follow. It's equivocal enough to make everyone feel included. But it also gives them a part to play. In bettering Zaun, they better themselves."

Chross peers owlishly at Silco over his miniature eyeglasses. "That's all capitally done, Silco. But our biggest concern is this, urm. Overseership of War and Treasury."

"What of it?"

"Is it legitimate? Full authority over us and all that?"

"Absolutely."

Chross' gray-mottled complexion turns inside-out. "That, urm. Complicates matters."

"Throws a wrench in our fuckin' spokes more like!" Petrock explodes. "Silco—why?"

"As a safeguard."

"Ours, or yours?" Margot says delicately. "As the Eye of Zaun, you've always turned a blind eye to our dealings. A sweet arrangement. For us, and for you. Overseership would sour it. You understand?"

"Of course."

Silco understands. The air was already pungent with their self-interest. Now it stinks with a fresh layer of fear. They entered the revolution on the same page as him. Now they are discerning brand-new paragraphs of fine print.

There is a lot about Zaun's long-term goals that Silco hadn't disclosed yet. They haven't questioned his reticence. Why would they? To them, Silco's needs are tantamount to theirs: pillage and plunder. They style themselves as predators. But at their core, they are parasites. They view the world in binaries of cash and carnage—a balance sheet with no human element. In doing so, they alienate the common people as potential pawns. They antagonize allies. Worse, they leave themselves exposed to the lures of bigger predators; ones who exploit their greed—hook, line and sinker—before devouring them.

Predators like Silco.

In a tone of soft insinuation, he says, "Are you concerned I'll seize your holdings?"

Their hasty glances are eloquent.

"Tell me candidly. Have I given you reason, thus far, to distrust my decisions?"

More looks are swapped. Chross, the most ancient and artful of the lot, takes the stand. "You're a visionary, Silco. You've always thrived in risk. The rest of us? We're cut from the same mold as any Undercity entrepreneur. We like smoothness. We love money. We hate unpredictability."

"Revolution is unpredictable," Silco says with deceptive gentleness. "For you, I've also made it profitable."

"Oh, indeed." Chross lets off a tiny cough. "You've been mighty generous. We trust your future kindness will extend to our assets, not—"

"Not an Overseership halfway up our arses," Volkage cuts in, lip curling in a sneer. "Zaun's not Piltover. It doesn't need interference. It sure as hell doesn't need delusions of democracy."

Silco nods, as if considering. "Piltover was all about checks and balances. But we've seen what a first-rate job they did in checking and balancing us. That's why the Undercity is based on workarounds. Why Zaun exists at all."

"So you agree?"

"With what?"

"That Zaun should stay an oligarchy."

"Were we ever anything else?"

The We is a seductive lure. The chem-barons snap it up. A few of them crack smiles—Ah, Silco, such a joker. Then their smiles fade. Silco's expression is reminiscent of something that has crawled out of the abyss: his good eye gone as inky as the bad one, the edges of his lips curled to show teeth like a row of jagged tombstones.

"Piltover loves to sell the illusion of equality," Silco says. "Except we've already encountered its limitations. Those born Topside are more equal than those belowground. Worse, in treating everyone 'equally,' they elevate the incompetent and bury the accomplished. Oligarchies are spared that conundrum. Their aim is to empower those capable of making the best decisions—without delay. There is no efficiency in a structure where every ruffian has a say in rulership."

"Then why the edicts?" Crimson stomps his boot like a belligerent child. "A handful would be fine. But why bell by bell?"

"Because things are broken," Silco says. "They were broken under Piltover. The Council never lifted a finger in times of crisis. Under Zaun, there will be a system—at bare minimum—to respond to the crisis."

"What crisis are you talking about?"

Silco nearly pinches the bridge of his nose. Must he putrefy the room with Fissure gas again?

"The crisis," he says, in a voice unexpectedly honed to slit jugulars, "of cowardice."

Silence descends with sharpness. The chem-barons sense the mood shift; they sink uncomfortably in their seats.

Good.

Uncomfortable targets are untalkative targets.

"You want an oligarchy?" Silco says. "Then remember what oligarchies are for. Enforcing lifelong power. You cannot do that unless you rule through a semblance of foresight."

His eyes rake inexorably across the room.

"You've had three months," he says, "to do the bare minimum. Restore power to the blackout zones. Rebuild the shelled streets. Get rid of the rotten corpses. That was the bargain, wasn't it? Post-separation, your forces would plunder Piltover's leftovers to their heart's content. But afterward, you'd show incentive. Clean up the mess Piltover created."

The chem-barons say nothing. They resemble chastised schoolchildren. Except their silence isn't shame. It's self-preservation. Silco knows them too well for their own damned good.

"There are already riots in the Sumps," he says. "Unless the embers are stamped out, revolt will run rampant. The Zaunites feel abandoned in their hour of pain. People in pain seek refuge in nostalgia. In the past—Piltover. Edicts alone won't erase their memory. They need gas and electricity. Food. You were ordered to ration surplus for a reason. Not to line your pockets, or lavish on your parties."

"Why's it even matter?" Volkage glowers. "If those rats get feisty, smack 'em down."

"Smack 'em down, hmm?"

"Down and hard." Volkage slams his knuckles on the table in emphasis. Needless emphasis; a flourish of cheap demagoguery. "Sic the blackguards on them. That's what I'd do."

"How many blackguards?" The mockery in Silco's tone verges on mildness. "Fifty? A hundred? Five hundred?"

"I—"

"And do you know how many will be in the mobs? Or what they'll use for weapons? Half the able-bodied in Zaun served as our militia. The other half are raving mad with hunger. Tell us how to best them, so we can plan ahead. Oh, and the Firelights. We'll need to nip their antics in the bud, too. Can you arrange for that? That's assuming you aren't the first to die, at the hands of your own houseboy. But maybe you can avoid it. Same way you could probably whip your prick out and win blindfolded in a knife fight, right?"

Silco seldom descends to profanity. When it happens, it's a sign that the other side of him—the side nobody dares to reckon with—is stirring to life.

Volkage's face curdles into whiteness. But he is too proud or too stupid to back down.

"The riots aren't our doing," he says. "You're the First Chancellor. You deal with it. Better yet—make Jinx do it! Not like she's been good for much else lately!"

The room shrinks and the shadows lengthen.

The chem-barons begin perspiring. Silco tastes their buried fear. At his left shoulder, Sevika swallows minimally. Her fear is tangible too, but different from the others.

They know Jinx as she was before the bloodbath at Bridgeside: buoyantly bratty. Quick to flash a smile or fling an incendiary. They don't know Jinx as she's been the past three months: wreathed in an inertia that verges on bottomless. A girl who barely eats, who perpetually sleeps, and who spends bells staring trancelike at empty walls, her blue hair unbound and spilling like riverwater across the bed, her eyes wet as a drowner's.

Absently, Silco slips a hand into his waistcoat. He withdraws—not a weapon—but a sterling silver cigar case. Its engraved surface holds a mirrorlike gleam. It reflects the hundreds of stained-glass windows in the interior, their multitudes like an insect's compound eyes. Snapping open the case, he lights up a cigarette. Fragrant brightleaf fills the air; twin red pinpricks glow in his bad eye and the cherry's tip. Taking a drag, he says nothing for a moment. The chem-barons say nothing too, for different reasons.

After a handful of heartbeats, Silco murmurs, "A child to do a man's job."

The chem-barons brace themselves with a palpable tension.

"Pardon?" Chross says.

"A child to do a man's job.” His fingertips caress the cigarette. “Apt summation of your incompetence. A child won the war for you. Thanks to her bombs, Zaun broke free. Thanks to her knowledge of Hextech, we vaporized Piltover's forces. Thanks to her bravery, you sit here, in this room, wasting my time with your whingeing."

The chem-barons are silent. Margot opens her plush pink mouth, then closes it with a little pop. Chross rubs his creased forehead with a withered fingertip. Crimson pretends to be absorbed by his varnished fingernails. Petrock shoves his mechanical arms into his greatcoat. Only Volkage makes himself stay still, although he eyes Silco from a few yards of safe distance.

"If you don't like our whingeing," he says, "you sure as hell won't like what comes next."

It's a threat, and not a subtle one. Cute. Threats are a tool of the streets—effective in the short-term. But behind closed doors, they are sparingly used. Silco deploys them as a rare shock tactic to whip slackers into shape. But on the whole, he prefers finessed fins to flashing fangs.

Finesse clearly isn't Volkage's métier either.

"Zaun's free from Uppside's grip," he says to Silco. "It's ours now. We'll drag it from the muck on our time, at our speed."

"So far, I've seen only the muck."

"I'll happily show you worse, you one-eyed sack of shit."

From the chem-barons: a collective wince. Silco makes a sound of morbid curiosity in his throat.

"Will you?"

Volkage, trapped in the live target of himself, struggles to match Silco's stare. "You've gone too far. First the trade edicts. Then the taxes. Then the bloody Overseership. None of this is why we hitched our star to your wagon."

"Indeed not."

"We expected more influence, once Zaun was ours. Not less! You're trying to reduce our holdings. Trying, with double-edged tactics, to take what's ours. And what for? To share with the commoners? What right do they have to our riches? Hell, what right do you?"

"Think carefully. You'll remember."

"You remember! Your past and your place! You won the war with our backing as much as Jinx's bombs. You'd be nothing without us. You are nothing, once the Undercity's in our hands." His eyes beseech the other barons, a desperate pitch to turn the tables. "Why spread ourselves thin? Better to spread our wings. Leave him in the dirt—and fly to greater heights!"

"Show me," Silco says.

Volkage stares.

"Go on." Silco smiles, a tepid reflex turned terrifying. "Fly."

"What—?"

Volkage is not allowed to finish.

From her spot behind Silco's seat, Sevika charges across the room, a purple-hazed blur wielding a steel-tipped blade. It whistles as it slices the air—right through Volkage's left arm. Sinew separates like butter under a hot knife. Blood splatters. Shrieking, Volkage staggers backward. His bicep dangles from his shoulder by the barest twist of tendons. The right arm lifts to ward off the blade. Sevika grabs his wrist with her human hand, snapping it sideways. Bones crunch. Volkage lashes back and forth in her grip like a skewered eel.

"No!" he howls. "No!"

Sevika drags him toward the largest window. Diffuse moonlight strikes off its purple-stained scrollwork. Volkage howls again—an ear-splitting pitch—before she tosses him out with tremendous force.

Glass explodes into a hundred blazing pinwheels. Voklage swandives through empty air. Splinters glint madly in his wake. He crashes into the wilderness of barbwire encircling the cathedral's gate. His body dangles spreadeagled in the thorny bier. Tiny trickles of blood run down his skin. His eyes hang lifelessly open.

Death by a cracked neck, or a million papercuts.

Dustmotes swirl in the silence. Humid wind pours through the shattered window. In the fogged sky, crows circle.

"Huh," Sevika muses. "Couldn't fly after all."

Silco's lips twitch at the corners. The remaining chem-barons stay welded to their seats. Their mouths are soldered shut; their eyes are glued to Volkage's far-flung corpse.

There is a scrape of chair legs across tiles. Silco rises, half-languid, half-looming. The cigarette drops; he grinds the butt under his boot heel.

"Run the mouth," he says, "ruin the mood."

There is an excruciating silence, in which the chem-barons appear to quantify their own lives with internal clock ticks. Then Chross—bless his survivalist's soul—offers a tight-lipped smile.

"Chem-whelps do get fresh, don't they?"

"Insufferably so."

Crimson fiddles with his cufflinks, "I'm glad that's done. Been wanting to shut him up myself."

"Is that right?"

Margot hastens to nod. "We'd never tolerate such disrespect."

"A third-rate pillock." Petrock tugs the bristly scrim of his beard. "Shoulda taken him out sooner."

"Or later," says Silco neutrally, "I'd rather not make a habit of this."

The chem-barons sneak glances at him. There is no humor in Silco's expression. But his body-language is easygoing. No explicit threat necessary; the subtext is enough.

Don't try this again.

Chross pastes on a big smile, and Crimson manages a nod. Margot titters and Petrock grunts under his breath. Somewhere in purgatory, Volkage's spirit takes posthumous notes.

Moonlight winks off the dead man's chair. Silco runs a spindly, sharp-tipped finger along the arm.

"I'm reminded," he says, "of an old phrase."

"Don't skeet where you eat?" Margot suggests.

"The other one."

"Even trigger fingers get the hiccups?" Petrock says.

"Older than that."

At the window, Sevika's lighter sparks. She's withdrawn one of Silco's brightleaf tobacco rolls from her inside pocket. The cherry reflects two orange dots in her dark eyes.

Exhaling smoke, she says, "A disloyal motherfucker is born dead every minute."

Silco crooks a finger. "That one."

The chem-barons sit in burgeoning silence. Their eyes follow Silco as he cuts a lazy circuit around Volkage's empty chair.

"Zaun," he says, "cannot abide by disloyalty. Not from Volkage—or anyone else. You've enjoyed three months of debauchery, while the city burned. You'll get three months more, to douse the fires of your own laziness. Rebuild the ruins. Rehabilitate the people. No more, no less. Petrock—" he turns to the weapons dealer, his features hardening to brimstone, "Gather new recruits. I want them cracking down on the weak-spots in our territory. Find any compromised perimeters where the Firelights are hiding. Smoke them out, and kill them."

Petrock gives him a clipped soldier's nod. His orders have been issued; he's pleased to rejoin the fray.

"Margot—" Silco's good eyelid shades as if they are alone with the door dead-bolted behind them. "Start opening the gates of your establishments. Convert them into shelters and women's clinics. The sufferers will need them in the coming months. If a girl's belly is big with an Enforcer's baby, get rid of it. If it's too late, drown the brat in the Pilt. We'll take neither their leavings nor raise their bastards."

Margot lowers her eyelashes obligingly.

"Chross—" Silco turns with a flicker of bitter amusement, "You've been busy gathering intel. On myself, and everyone in our orbit. Don't deny it. Do me a favor instead. Summon your experts in politics, film, and espionage. The ones with bright minds and brighter ideas. I want a directorate sent to my office next week. Thereafter, every week. We'll go over current affairs and plan statewide coverage. A nation is as great as its media machine, and those who run it must be loyal."

Chross thumbs his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose and cheerfully smacks his lips.

"Crimson—" Silco wields his steel-tipped glower like a headmaster's cane. "Get your damned cronies in line. Send me every entrepreneur with deep pockets and a head for real estate development. I want them to rip apart the system Piltover's left behind. Redistribute the resources. We've succeeded thus far in privatizing much of our enterprise. Now I want the biggest privatized companies tricked out and made competitive."

Crimson fiddles with his waistcoat before mumbling assent.

"Volkage—oh." Silco pulls a face of farcical regret. "Already flew the coop." He traces the empty chair again. "I meant to discuss our brand-new bank with him. I had good news. The Bank of Zaun will lend any and all new businesses loans, so they can finance themselves on competitive terms. We'll even throw in a modest liquidity injection here and there."

They chem-barons exchange looks. Silco marvels at how brightly greed makes their eyes shine.

"That is capital news," Chross says.

"Hear, hear!" Crimson cheers.

Silco smiles thinly.

There is no sweeter siren's call than the melody of money. He's never forgotten it as a sumpsnipe; he's never forgotten it as a kingpin. Just as he's never forgotten what a persistent thorn the chem-barons have been in his side, throughout his struggle to drag Zaun from Piltover's stranglehold. Now they expect tribute. Give them too little; they'll seethe and scheme. Give them too much; they'll suck the treasury dry. Better to trap them in a limbo of their own languishing. Grant them high-flying lifestyles on enormous credit. Then, bit by bit, impoverish them in their efforts to maintain it.

Once dependent on Zaun's largesse, they will be locked inside his jaws.

"Pity," Margot says. "If you'd opened with this juicy tidbit, Volkage might've lived."

Silco cants his head. "We shall overcome."

"Fuckin' right!" Petrock claps Silco on the back. "For Zaun!"

"For Zaun."

Sevika has found a handful of golden chalices in storage. She sets them on the table and drains her flask into their cups. Silco lifts his own in a toast to the chem-barons. The other arm folds behind his back, easier to conceal the pale-fingered flash of deuces. An old hand-signal used among the deaf—and recognizable only to Sevika. She smiles, unseen.

Silco's own lip twists sideways. "I've a final bit of good news."

"By all means," Chross says. "Share."

"It concerns the Overseership of War and Treasury."

"Oh?"

"Specifically the newcomer at its helm."

This catches the chem-barons off-guard. Still, they endeavor to seem relaxed.

"Anyone we know?" Margot asks.

Translation: Anyone we can threaten or bribe?

"Somewhat."

"Ooh. A dark horse?"

"Hardly." Silco smiles, and aims his smile beyond their shoulders. "One of our own."

Volkage's empty chair is scraped back. There is the sound of someone sitting heavily down, and laying their boots across the table.

As one, the chem-barons turn.

Sevika sits in Volkage's spot, a half-full cup laid across her outstretched knees. She scratches her cheekbone with the other hand, plucks the rolled cigarillo from her mouth, and exhales smoke through a white arc of teeth. Beneath her casualness, there is a disciplined stolidity to her body that signals that she is ready to sit there a long, long time.

"Loyal Zaunites," Silco says, "meet our official second-in-command."

The chem-barons stare speechlessly. Sevika tips them a wink.

"Sevika has served our cause since the beginning," Silco says. "She has shown diligence and daring. Above all—loyalty. I can think of no one better suited to serve you in turn. She will bring a steady head and a strong arm to her role. From here on in, you will answer to her as to me. Is that understood?"

Four heads nod as one, struck to silence. They eye Sevika like a dragon circling over their castles.

An apt comparison. Silco cannot completely curb the chem-barons' influence. Doing so curbs his own. Better to give them liberty within limits. It affords him the opportunity to study them, gathering dirt and gauging deceptions. Sevika is best suited for the task. She speaks the language of the Lanes; compromise without corruption. She will grant them leeway in their short-term goals. Meanwhile, Silco will lock them down in the long game. Her aerie of control, versus his perpetuity of power.

Power.

He need no longer wrest it from Piltover. He will solidify it right here.

Sevika's dark eyes meet his. Whatever passes between them is devoid of the sedative of sentimentality. Theirs is a transaction of blood debt squaring blood debt, the signatures set in stone. A tombstone, inked with old names. The coldest, hardest print of them all.

Sevika lifts her cup, and says, "To Zaun."

The chem-barons follow her lead. They toast each other and drink. Inevitably, adrenalized alcohol has its way with reticence. One by one they approach Sevika. Taking her measure, as she takes theirs. In five minutes, they are lapping at the shores of conversation. Five minutes more, and they are submerged in waves of shared laughter.

Bargains will be struck tonight. The status quo, precariously balanced, will teeter into a new state of equilibrium.

(So will you, Jinx.)

(In time.)

Silco tips his own cup back, swallowing. He stares out the broken window, wet with blood, to a darkly glowing Zaun.

***

The motorcar drives back through slickly humid streets.

The curfew is still in effect. But the power grid has been restored. A ramshackle row of neon signs reflect off tainted puddles; the road is mottled with pools of green, pink, purple.

Their fitful radiance shows up the shelling damage in detail.

Silco stares out through the milky glaze of his opera window. His reflection in the glow of passing gas-lamps is halved by scar and shadow: the sharp-cut smoothness hidden away, the cicatrices on morbid display. His bad eye, ringed in red, resembles impure blood.

Unblinking, it takes in the burnt-out exoskeletons of buildings. Here and there, entire chunks of concrete have been blasted away. The iron piping shines like bare bones, poulticed in spots, in others dripping into the streets like pus. Silco fixates on the black divots across the roads and the tangled electrical wires on the walls: burst blisters and collapsed arteries.

The Undercity is like a plague victim. Yet he senses its breathing. The surface is disfigured, yet beneath that, life thrums hot and implacable. Fresh green saplings spring from scorched-over soil, don't they? Zaun is no different. Eventually, it will disgorge a new version of itself into existence.

(Soon, my lovely.)

Up front, Sevika says, "Sir."

"Hm?"

"We've got company."

Silco elbows forward to stare between hers and the chauffeur's heads. Sure enough—a commotion at Bridgeside. High-intensity spotlights blaze down the river's harbor, making the dirty water iridescent with chemical rainbows. A troop of blackguards on armored hoverboards float above the basin, the blades of their rotors whirring in double-time. The spotlights break into spears off a ship docked at the port, glinting off its polished hull and spotless gangplank.

A ship with Piltover's crest at the masthead.

"…the fuck," Sevika mutters. "Why's Uppside here?"

"It's their envoy."

"What?"

"I told you. There were negotiations in the works."

"They came to us? Used to be the opposite."

"Used to be."

But no longer.

Once the ceasefire commenced, Piltover and Zaun had locked diplomatic horns. A fruitless state of affairs for both parties; they found themselves mired in arguments for weeks. Zaun was smaller, more vulnerable; the delay would weaken its resolve and drain its reserves, before wearing Silco down into making concessions. Had he sent emissaries to Piltover, it would've been worse. Zaun would be trapped by the Council's favorite tactic: delay. They would make promises, waste time, and enervate his emissaries into getting their own way.

Silco has no patience for that.

He'd moved against Piltover with the riskiest ace up the sleeve. Silence. Ignored their decrees, sent back their missives. In doing so, he dealt a blow to their pride. No response meant no access. No access meant no information. Topside was already paranoid. They suspected that Zaun would renew its attacks. His silence left them frustrated—the frustration a fine veneer over fear.

Played sparingly, the move had benefits. But Silco couldn't let the Topsiders flounder in the grey-zone forever. Sooner or later, their trigger finger—to quote Petrock—would get the hiccups. Zaun is still wounded. So are its people. They can't afford a reprise of the war. The odds may be less kind this time.

So, at the eleventh hour, Silco answered Piltover's missive. He'd determined the conditions of the negotiations. On his terms. On his turf.

The new order of things.

His mood, at a mordant baseline, soars a degree higher. The sight of Piltover's ship in Zaun. Their immaculate metal in his blackened waters. It is bloody spectacular. It is the stuff of Topside's nightmares. A promise of more nightmares to come.

Softly, he says, "Ready the entourage."

"Casuals, or formals?" Sevika asks.

She means—Armed to kill, or armed to guard?

"Mix it up."

"You expecting trouble?"

Silco unleashes a slow smile.

"We'll see."