Prologue

        Julius stared at the mirror, and one man wearing two different faces looked back at him. It’d been like that for a long time, now. It used to be more than two; it used to be a dozen different faces would stare back. The faces had slowly whittled down, year after year, until now there were only two left. Julius would look in the mirror, no matter where in the world he found himself, and he’d try to decide which face looked more like him.

          He hadn’t come to a conclusion, yet. But it felt like he was getting close.

          There was a knock on the door.

          “One minute,” Julius said. Whispered, really, because his attention didn’t shift from the faces in the mirror. Both men in the mirror looked more or less the same, but they couldn’t have been more different.

          One of them had sad eyes. Expressive eyes. Etched in those eyes were a lot of things that had happened, a lot of things that those eyes had seen. The expression was worn, it was world-weary. An expression that had weathered plenty of storms and had come out the other side cracked and chipped for it all. He’d seen this face in people his whole life, the face of people who had lived a lot of life and found that life had lived them and they hadn’t lived life.

          The other face smiled. It was a smile devoid of light, but not devoid of life. There was a glee there, but it was a glee that pulled in the light from around it like a void. The smile wasn’t charming, or natural. The expression it wore seemed like an animal wearing a human mask, and it didn’t, or couldn’t, quite hit the right buttons. But where the other face seemed chipped, seemed worn; this face seemed whole. More than anything, this face seemed indestructible. Like it could walk down every path every other face he’d ever worn had walked and come out the other side of it all looking exactly the same.

          The knock on the door was more forceful this time. Both of Julius’s faces reacted to the knocking

          The face with the sad eyes looked to the door like an animal looking to the door of its cage.

          The face with the smile looked at the door, and its smile widened.

          The door pounded, and Julius walked towards the door.

          When he opened the door, the man outside look irritated. After he saw Julius’s face, the man looked surprised, then worried. When Julius grabbed the man, pulled him into the bathroom, and shut the door behind him, the man’s face looked scared.

          When Julius pulled out his knife, he saw the man’s face shatter like so many others had before.

          After Julius finished, he went to the sink and turned it on, washing his knife and washing his hands. He looked up at the mirror.

          For the first time in as long as he could remember, only one face looked back at him.

          And that face smiled.

Chapter One

          For some reason, dying was different this time. I’d been shot in the head (on two different occasions), shot in the chest, shot in the leg and the head (lotta getting shot), stabbed in the throat, beaten to death with a pipe, beaten to death with bare hands, hung from the edge of a building, and drowned in a river. Those had all went pretty much the same. Dying (at least in my experience) was a quick process; a hell of a lot easier than falling asleep and waking up. At a certain point someone hits an off-switch and it’s a smash to black, followed by feeling like somebody had thrown me into a bucket of ice with me doing my best not to piss myself as I came back to life in that empty basement, butt naked. This time they’d dropped a building on me, and while I had to give them points for creativity, I didn’t really see why this time should be any different.

          But it was.

          I’m… here. Stuck in some kind of in-between place. For the first time in quite a while, I wonder if I’m actually going to die. Like, permanently: life membership card revoked, no take-backs, kindly make your way down the stairs, sir.

          Something is wrong.

          Oh? I hadn’t noticed.

          I don’t need sass. Give me a minute and I’ll—

          I was pulled sideways at light-speed. It felt like someone stuck a hook in my consciousness and pulled me to the side so fast that if I’d actually had a stomach right now I would’ve thrown up. I could feel the City, everything that I’d known the last few months, stayed exactly where it was while I was pulled away through a blackness that felt like a blanket covering whatever was actually out there. There was a distance between me and everybody in the City that I cared about: Max, Dame, Ginny and Tom, the Bagel Guy, George the Pigeon Man; and between me and the people I’d been doing my absolute damnedest to stop: namely Julius, but also Marion, the Bone Collector, and Patriarch.

          Most of all, I could feel the tether between me and The Bleeding City being stretched to its limit. Whatever was happening to me was undoing whatever had happened to me to connect me to the City. To, as long as I was in the city, keep bringing me back from the dead to save it. I still had things to finish before this final fade to black.

          I had wrongs to, if not right, at least make my peace with.

          But if whatever was happening wasn’t fixed soon, that tether connecting me to The Bleeding City was going to snap. I would die. And if I died, The Bleeding City wasn’t going to be far behind. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know how to fix this; if I could just—

          Whatever fishhook was pulling me by the soul stopped, and the immediate stillness was more disorienting than getting pulled away at light-speed in the first place. I dangled for a second, still blind to whatever was around me, until a click turned on a dim light behind me.

          I looked around. I was sitting in a red chair, the cushion fraying and soft. There were wooden armrests on either side, a cup holder in each one. In every direction were more seats, all of them empty. The seats in front of me slowly sloped down, and the seats behind me rose until they met the wall. Back above those seats there was a rectangular hole in the wall. Through the hole, that dim light shone through.

          The dim light was a projector. I turned to face the screen in the front. I was in a movie theater.

          And on the screen was my life.