The city by the river had stopped pretending it remembered what morning felt like.
There were only fires now to measure the hours: rooftop braziers puffing O-shaped breaths of oily smoke; Aztec cauldrons that hissed bone down to sparks; strings of cheap candles taped in apartment windows like a constellation someone impatient had drawn with a marker. The horizon was a slow bruise that never finished darkening. People navigated by habits—turn left at the burned bakery, right at the statue with the missing head, straight until the road forgets it was paved.
The Seeker and Nakamura sheltered in the belly of a warehouse whose brickwork had learned to weep soot. The windows had shattered weeks ago, leaving a gumline of glass along the frames. Each time the light under the Seeker's ribs pulsed, the shards caught it and flashed like teeth. Nakamura sat with his back to the door, pistol loose across his knees, eyes coiled tight with the kind of wakefulness that has to keep being paid for.
The scar would not behave. It warmed and cooled and warmed again, as if laughing softly where his fingers pressed. The scaffolding Kali had forced into him—those beams of myth and habit lashed together across centuries—rose whenever he blinked and collapsed whenever he tried to grasp it. He was a man made of splinters, holding still on purpose.
A grin appeared in the glass.
At first he thought it was his own mouth, distorted by angles and grime. Then the grin extended past human anatomy. The reflected teeth were too white for this city. The glass flexed like a still pond. Something stepped through, shedding reflection the way a dog shakes off water.
Coyote landed on a crate with showman's grace, chewing on something sticky that smelled like fried dough and altar fruit in the same breath. Grease glistened on his fingers. His hair—some days it was hair, some days fur, this was a hair day—was slicked back like a bad idea.
"Well," he said, discovering crumbs on his sleeve and deciding to keep them, "if it isn't my favorite straight man. How's the act treating you?"
Nakamura moved in an instant—pistol up, weight forward, all tendon and intention. The Seeker raised a palm without looking. Bullets could kill men. Coyote was a rumor wearing a body.
"What do you want?" the Seeker asked. His voice came out raw, as if the last few days had been filed across his throat.
"Want?" Coyote licked sugar from his thumb and made an appreciative sound. "I want nothing. I give. Punchlines. Timing. Perspective, if you insist on paying extra for the thing that ruins jokes. And you—lucky, lucky you—are the best setup I've ever been handed."
The scar answered with light. Betrayal has a temperature.
"One more word and I'll—" Nakamura began, and did not finish, because there are sentences even professionals can't complete when the target tilts his head and you can suddenly see the long canines behind the grin.
"You'll what?" Coyote said amiably. "Shoot me? You can't shoot the punchline. You can only deliver it." He leaned toward the Seeker, close enough for the breath of rotting fruit. "That drum under your ribs? That isn't destiny. That's timing. The laugh track, dear boy. The gods are just dying to see if you hit the mark."
Outside, the city conducted its broken orchestra. The iron chimes of Marius's sect counted the same four bars forever. Norse drums answered with a pulse big enough to walk inside. From the markets near the river came the Aztec beat, fire and breath and the sound bones make when they decide to be instruments. It piled into a wall of sound that made silence feel like a private luxury.
Coyote cocked his head toward the noise. "Listen to them. Every sect auditioning for a role in a play that closed before they were born. The stage is ash, and they're still shouting their lines. That gap between intention and reality? That's where the humor lives."
He did not wait for permission to start telling stories.
"A king wore a crown he swore was gold," Coyote said, licking a fleck of glaze from his wrist. "He polished it with lamb fat and page boys. He slept under it because the weight helped him dream correctly. When he was old, he melted the crown to recast it into a statue of himself kneeling before the divine, very tasteful. It puddled. Wax. He drowned in it. The historians called it tragedy. He would have laughed if he'd had a mouth at the time."
He barked mirth. The Seeker's scar flared in time, as if some inner percussionist approved the beat.
"A priest copied scripture for fifty years," Coyote continued, eyes bright. "Every flourish precise, every dot chaperoned. So precise that the ink turned jealous and soured itself. Poison in increments. One night, mid-word, it killed him. The last syllable is a cliff you can fall off. Pilgrims travel across oceans to look at that unfinished line. They expect to hear a choir. They hear a cough. Perfection bites."
He slapped his thigh. Somewhere outside the warehouse a nervous laugh rose, contagious as rain. There's always one ear tuned to the wrong frequency.
"A child asked which god was real." Coyote lowered his voice, intimate. "Every god answered through her mouth at once. She choked on certainty. The crowd did what crowds do—they applauded. Curtain. Bow. Flowers thrown. Hysterical, if you like that kind of thing."
"You're sick," Nakamura said. It wasn't reflex. It was diagnosis.
"No," Coyote replied, widening the grin to show a little more tooth than politeness requires. "I'm honest. Honesty is the cruelest joke."
The light under the Seeker's coat spilled into the room, silver as paper you can read through. Refugees in the street saw it. Whispers flitted—prophet, heretic, chosen, curse—like birds at a harvest. A woman crossed herself and the prayer looked tired. A boy pressed his forehead to the doorframe and dared the light to come out and touch him. A man spat as if to season the moment.
Nakamura snapped the connection by grabbing the Seeker's shoulders. "Breathe," he ordered, not gently. "You're not a candle. You're not a symbol. You're a man. Look at me."
Coyote leaned around Nakamura's shoulder and made a sympathetic face that was all sympathy's evil twin. "Wrong. He's the straight man. The setup. The joke only works if he refuses it. Trust me. I've been in this business longer than your calendar likes to admit."
He sprang from the crate with joy's cruel velocity and beckoned. "Come. The show's on."
They stepped into the street and the sky staged one of those performances that make people write scriptures later.
From the north, wolves leapt cloud to cloud, their bodies all black idea and bright tooth, rending thunder into ribbons. Each bite spilled a bucket of lightning down over rooftops; it hit antennas and weather vanes, jumped gutters, licked at laundry lines as if tasting what mortals wore closest to their skin. In the south, meteors of emerald fire fell from Aztec hands and set markets ablaze, onions and oranges sending up a smell of sweet rot and smoke. Above the river, a band of dusk held like a bruise that's been pressed too much—Amaterasu's locked door. Across that locked door, Thoth inscribed hieroglyphs in burning air, each character making a sound you felt more than heard before it flaked away like ash you can't catch.
The air tasted like pennies and old feathers. Ash fell like the exhausted snow invented by cities. You could hear it landing if you held your breath: a million soft yeses, or nos, depending on your upbringing.
Mortals answered the sky with cheap imitations and paid full price. Norse zealots scissored lightning down by stabbing the air with glass-tipped spears and were struck for their accuracy, hair leaping in a brief halo before smoke smudged the edges. Aztec priests fed their own robes to their fires and charged, roaring, as if their burning bodies were arguments that could be won. Marius's squads of nine went door to door, lanterns shuttered and then flung open—white blades of light slicing prayers into approved lengths. A techno-cultist crouched at the base of a dead streetlamp, stripping copper wire out like he was gutting a fish, swearing that a circuit could be made that would kindly relieve them of gods altogether if the gods would stand still and be measured. The gods did not stand still.
The Seeker saw the pattern under the spectacle in flashes—the scaffolding he could not keep, glimmering like the hint of a structure whenever a wolf bit or a meteor flared. The beams never agreed with each other and yet somehow held the same sky at a distance. Every clash hammered another nail into wood too wet to take it. He wanted to fix it. He wanted to walk away. (Both urges are very popular in collapsing buildings.)
"This isn't war," Nakamura said quietly. The pistol hung from his hand like a tool designed for a different trade. "This is demolition."
"Now you're catching up," Coyote purred. "They think they're protagonists. Stand them far enough away and every story turns into a comedy. Even the ones with proper funerals."
The Seeker went to his knees because there are positions the body chooses for you when the argument in your chest gets louder than your spine. "Then what am I?"
Coyote beamed with the delight of a teacher finally asked the question he designed the lecture around. "You? You're the straight man. The timing. The scar isn't destiny. It's the laugh track. Wrong place, wrong fire, right survival. Now you get to be the only one who can't stop the laugh."
The light tore out of him.
It burst through coat and buttons with an obedient cruelty, drowning torches and braziers and false suns alike. The square recoiled. Eyes went wide. Knees hit stone. A stone hit him. Voices climbed each other's shoulders until the meanings fell off. Prophet. False flame. Chosen. Heretic. The syllables wore the same mouth.
The sound that came out of him belonged to nobody useful: a cracked laugh welded to a sob. For one dangerous heartbeat he desired it. The part. The role. The relief of surrender. He imagined saying yes and watching the city line up its hunger into something tidy. He imagined being carved into doctrine. He imagined rest.
Horror arrived more quickly than comfort. "I am not yours," he told the sky, and the street, and the trickster, and the part of himself that loves an easy answer. He said it louder. "I am not theirs."
The glow did not care. It soaked his fingers and made promises in his name without consulting him.
The city answered with small stories because that's how cities reply.
A woman crawled toward him, dragging a child across grit, her hair burned into a crown of ash. "Bless," she begged, and her mouth turned the s into three syllables. She tried to push the child's head toward the light like a bread loaf toward an oven. The boy pulled back and laughed, then hiccuped, then laughed again, because laughter is how small bodies misfire in times like these.
Behind her, a man spat at the Seeker's boots and missed, the spit catching his own chin. "Curse," he croaked, with the pleasurable certainty of a diagnosis that punishes the patient and absolves the speaker.
Three teenage boys started to giggle because the sound of Coyote's laugh had infected the air and their throats had no immunity. Soon half the square was laughing with them, a high uneasy note that made rational people check their pockets to make sure their sanity was still there.
A market woman held up a jar and announced in her best sales voice, "Bottled blessing! From the Bright One! One coin, two blessings!" Her jars were full of candle stubs and hope. She sold out before the firefighters reached the corner. No one asked for a receipt.
At the end of the block a religious functionary with a clipboard attempted to write the light into a form: section, line, subclause. He underlined anomaly three times as if that made it legal. The ash landed on the paper and turned the word to smudge.
Nakamura hauled the Seeker backward by his coat collar, voice raw. "Fight it. Don't let him write you." His eyes flicked toward Coyote and away. A confession flickered over his face then hid—he had, for a blink, weighed the comfort of turning his friend over to the machine of certainty if it would stop the bleeding. He looked ashamed of even having had the thought. He did not apologize aloud. They were busy.
Coyote lay on his back in the rubble, rolling like a dog that had found something deliciously dead. Blood made a careful red line out of the corner of his mouth. He laughed until he coughed and then laughed at the cough. "Funniest thing in the world," he gasped. "You can't win. You can only play your part."
A Norse bolt arced low and struck a zealot square in the chest; for a moment he glowed magnificent, then crumpled like theater cloth. An Aztec plume of green fire leapt from a priest's hand and twisted sideways as if changed its mind, kissing his own robe and turning worship into a very bright lesson. Marius's nine forced a line of shopkeepers to their knees and had just begun a catechism when a child tugged the hem of the squad leader's coat and offered him a coin for a blessing. The man did not know whether to laugh or be angry, so he did both in sequence and felt poorer for the exchange.
The Seeker's light dimmed from unbearable to merely indecent. He tasted iron. The laugh-sob inside him downgraded to a tired breath. His hands shook.
"Every silence," he whispered, trying the words on his own mouth before letting them into the air, "is still a line in the joke."
"Eloquent," Coyote said, propping himself on an elbow. "You'll make a beautiful martyr." He glanced at the sky as if checking cues. "Or a very funny villain. Depends on lighting."
"Enough," Nakamura told him, surprising himself with the ferocity in the word. He stepped between the Seeker and the trickster as if his body were a door that could hold. "If the punchline is inevitable, then timing is all we have. We choose where it lands."
Coyote stopped laughing because the line pleased him. He bowed, mock-sincere. "At last, a man who understands craft."
The iron chimes struck their stubborn rhythm. A gust brought the scent of someone boiling bones for soup two streets away—the old woman who believed a coal taken from a sanctified brazier made broth remember how to be holy. A techno-cultist near the lamppost shrieked as his freshly wired circuit bit him; the lamp flashed once and died, modest as a failed saint.
The Seeker looked down, expecting to see his chest burned through. It wasn't. That felt rude. He pressed the heel of his hand into the scar until the world fuzzed at the edges. He imagined, briefly, stealing a boat and letting the river decide whether to keep him. He imagined hiding in a tunnel where metaphors cannot fit. He imagined, absurdly, reading in bed by a lamp that did nothing but be a lamp.
He imagined saying yes to the city and waking to find his mouth issuing decrees in someone else's cadence. The horror returned, useful as a spine.
"Get up," Nakamura said, and it was not an order so much as an act of faith. "We move. The joke can follow. It always does."
The Seeker stood. His legs were the unreliable sort of honest, but they worked. The laughter in the square began to thin into coughs. The ash kept falling. The wolves had eaten what they meant to eat and ran, bored, toward a different promise. The meteors rehearsed another entrance and changed their minds. Thoth drew a final line and shook out his hand. The bruise of a horizon did not heal.
Coyote flickered. One moment he was a ragged boy picking at the heel of a loaf. The next, a shadow that remembered how the Seeker stood and imitated him with exaggeration. Then a small, neat dog begging without shame. Then himself again, all grin and evidence. "I'll see you at the next scene," he said cheerfully. "Try to miss your cue. It makes the audience love you more."
"Go to hell," Nakamura suggested politely.
"Daily," Coyote said, and stepped back into the window. The glass did not crack. It admitted him like a guest who knows the password.
For a long breath the warehouse mouth framed nothing but smoke and crippled light. The Seeker loosened his fingers from his chest. The scar answered with a final warm pulse and then behaved, as if a joke had taken its bow and left the stage.
They did not trust it.
They crossed the street. A girl selling sticks of incense painted a neat flame on the toe of the Seeker's boot with red chalk, then offered him the chalk as change. He took it, because you accept small economies when the world is big and wrong. They turned down a lane where someone had chalked a hopscotch grid and no one had had the heart to erase it even as blood dried between squares.
Behind them the square resumed its argument in a lower key. Ahead the river made its unspectacular music, hands slapping hands, water remembering the route for both of them. They walked toward it because there was nothing else that matched the shape of stepping.
The Seeker did not look back into the glass. The glass did not, this time, look back into him.
He tested the sentence one more time, under his breath, an oath too small to register on any god's equipment. "Every silence is still a line in the joke."
The line stayed. He carried it like a stone you keep in your pocket to remind your hand it is yours.
Above, ash kept falling. Below, the river pulled its patient thread. Between those two, a man with a light he did not want kept walking, and the city, which had seen worse and better than prophets, laughed the thin laugh of people who have to—because the alternative has teeth.