Burning Night: A Tale of the Everburning City

Chapter 6: Natalina

Good news was easy to see coming. Good news could be seen from miles off, and came so slowly that its vigourless arrival had stripped it of its lustre. Good news was boring and predictable. Good news was easy to take for granted, and hard to justify writing about.

Bad news, though, moved like a shadow and hit like a train.

"I want you working on the Foundry incident," her boss said, dropping a small note on her already crowded desk.

Somehow, between the beginning and the end of his sentence, Natalina Casper went from half-asleep to battle-ready.

"What happened at the Foundry?" she asked, already scrambling for her messenger bag.

"There was an incident. They shut the outflow lines down for almost three hours. If I knew more, I wouldn't bother sending a reporter," Vance Elderman, her editor and her paper's lead writer, said with a hint of irritation in his voice that suggested he hadn't had enough sleep.

"I take it my open assignments are on hold?" Natalina asked.

"Until you've dug so deeply that I stop smelling manure, keep digging. Everything I managed to pry out of my contacts in Oversight is on the note." He said, rubbing at his forehead with his thumb as he spoke.

Finally looking at him, she realized that Vance hadn't slept at all yet. The bags under his eyes were deeper and darker than usual, his hair was disheveled, his clothes were exactly the same as the ones he was wearing yesterday, and he hadn't even tried to wash the ink stains from his forehead or cheeks.

"I'm on it, boss," she said, standing up and reaching for her coat. A quick glance out the window caused her to grimace, as the rain pounded against the streets below.

"You're going to encounter a lot of stonewalling," Vance said. "Whatever the burning hell happened last night involves Research and Oversight. Neither of them are fond of sharing."

Vance had a gift for underselling dire warnings. The Bureau of Research and Development was built almost entirely on secrets, and Oversight shared about as well as most toddlers. Give either Bureau a couple of days, and they may have even covered this incident up.

It meant she was in a race against the two most secretive Bureaus in the City, and they had a six hour head start.

"I'm on my way out, boss. But try to nap a little," Natalina said, as she set the hood of her coat over her head.

"After this obituary," Vance promised.

"Who died?" she asked.

"Colonel Carla Darrower. One of the last heroes of the fifth. Brave soldier, so on and so forth. Come back with news, Caspar. Or..." Vance said, with mock menace.

"Or not at all," Natalina finished, as she stepped away towards the stairs.

******

Newspapers held a peculiar and tenuous place in the City. Although technically sponsored by Parliament, each paper acted as an informal intelligence firm for its sponsoring institution. In exchange for the supplies and access needed to make a newspaper, that paper was expected to provide information to their sponsoring bureau first, and to avoid potentially embarrassing stories.

Natalina worked for the Weekly Tributary, a paper unofficially sponsored by the Bureau of Analysis. As bureaus go, a bunch of researchers and statisticians are easily appeased taskmasters, but were terrible at opening doors. It meant that the Weekly Tributary operated with as close to absolute autonomy as anyone could in the City, but that autonomy came with all the assistance it implied.