Apollo woke up in pain. Cold daylight was freezing her eyes. Her limbs ached from exposure. And she had an arrow in her back.
She was lying in the heavy cloth awning of a doorway that had broken her fall, that she had seen hazily from her vantage point above before she had pitched forward off of the roof.
Now they thought she was dead. The immediate challenge was making sure they weren’t right. She grunted painfully as she tried to lift herself onto her hands and knees, daggers shooting their way up her right arm. She fell back onto her side, gritting her teeth as she tried not to yell. Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes. Dislocated. She pulled herself up to her knees with her good arm and prepared herself.
She couldn’t stop herself from letting out a yell as the bone ground its way into the socket. Her eyes watering, she could barely see as she pulled herself towards the edge of the awning. It was all she could do not to pass out again. A dull ache in the arm drew her attention. She had broken her stitches fixing her shoulder. Alright. One thing at a time. She half fell off the edge of the awning frame, and then dropped, clattering into a collection of baskets and barrels. She sat among the chaos for a second, and then began to laugh.
When the pain got too much to laugh through, she forced herself to stand up. She reached around her back to the black crossbow bolt still sticking out of her back and tested it. It wasn’t a deep wound, the layers of boiled, waxed leather around her torso had seen to that, but it was a wound nonetheless. Not something she could just ignore. She left it where it was. The bolt itself would stop the worst of the bleeding. At least it wasn’t poisoned. The bleeding from her newly-reopened arm wound on the other hand was thick and fast. Apollo clamped her hand over it, as if she was trying to will the blood to clot faster, and staggered down the cobblestoned side street. Market. Market would help. Get to market.

Apollo was barely able to stand when she reached the market. As soon as she saw the first glimpse of the great square, though, her hazy vision began to clear. Get market get help. Get market get help. Market. Help. She realised she was repeating the words aloud.
She collapsed at the edge of the market, at the foot of one of the wooden stalls. An old man looked down at her over two sets of crude spectacles that were wired together to accommodate his beetlish eyes.
“Market. Help,” said Apollo.

The old man did what he could for her, which wasn’t much. All he had to offer were bandages and some herbs to chew on to dull the pain, which Apollo accepted gladly.
“Put it on Delta’s tab,” she said, chewing ferociously and feeling the hammering ache of her arm, her back begin to fade. Delta. The last she had seen Delta she was running away from the building. Apollo hoped she had made it out. But she had other business to attend to.

The Watchhouse was a dull-looking building made of wood that stood proud of the buildings on either side of it. Behind it, a wooden fence barbed with iron was guarded by two tough-looking watchmen.
Normally, trying the wounded-woman approach would involve Apollo pretending to be wounded. She limped towards the back gate, clutching at her bandages.
“Can you help me?” she asked in her most plaintive voice.
“What happened to you?” asked one of the watchmen, looking at his partner with a wink. “We’ll take care of you, won’t we?”
“Oh yeah,” said his friend. “Good care.”
Apollo smiled weakly and looked up at them. She was right next to them now. “Oh, good,” she said sweetly, and clobbered the larger of the two with his own truncheon. She aimed a swift kick to the groin of the other, following it with an uppercut that met his jaw coming down and sent him bodily into the air.
She grabbed a ring of keys off his belt and left the two watchmen snoring in the dirt, running to the back door. She rattled the handle. It was locked.
Finally, one of the keys clicked in the lock and she pushed the door inwards. The hallway was empty. She quickly limped along until she reached a door with an etched plaque reading CAPTAIN, and knocked at it.
“Come in,” said a voice. Apollo pulled the door open.
Inside, a military-looking man was sitting at a dark wood bureau writing on a piece of vellum with a heavy-looking official pen. He didn’t turn around when Apollo entered. Apollo noticed a small silver mirror on the shelf of the desk and made contact with steely eyes through it.
“Am I to assume my people have failed?” The man said.
“To kill me?”
“Or capture you. Our friends have offered quite a bounty for your head, whether it still rests on your shoulders or not. Sit, please.”
Apollo edged closer to the man, feeling a strong aura of danger in the air. Nevertheless, as if compelled, she sat down in the chair before her. He still didn’t turn around.
“Your friends?” Apollo asked. “The ones who are killing without mercy all over this town?”
“Do you think it that obvious?” the man said. “Our friends don’t wish Mutetown dead, Miss Ridley.”
“Then what do they want?”
“Domination. Assimilation. Power. Control. To take what is yours and make it theirs.”
“The people would never agree to that.”
“Absolutely not,” said the man. “Not in the current state of the town. Things are too easy around here. Too good for the common man. That is our goal, Miss Ridley. Not to kill your town, but to break it, piece by piece, until the people will give it up gladly. Violence in the streets. A failing police force that serves the rich and powerful. Assassins in the shadows.” A note of mirth came into his voice. “Why, it’s just like home!”
“This is insane,” Apollo said.
The man in the chair spun around suddenly. The steely eyes were the only feature of the blank expanse of pale flesh that was his head. When he spoke it seemed to come from somewhere inside his skull.
“You will see things differently when we take you there!” he said, the eyes wrinkling in a smile or a snarl that was unreadable. The door burst open and another watchman stepped in.
“Hello Miss Ridley,” said Rob. “I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”
And then everything went dark as he pulled a blindfold over her head.

Apollo allowed herself to be lead away by the men. As they ascended a flight of stone steps that clacked under the captain’s heels she began to think. To plan.
“You’re going to send me to them, then. Alive?”
“We won’t hurt you, Miss Ridley,” the captain said. “To tell you the truth, we’re all very interested to see what they want to do with you. Our friends are very eager to begin a relationship with us that will be of, hm, mutual benefits.” He laughed hollowly.
“These friends of yours sound very interesting,” Apollo said. “I’m almost excited to meet them. I’m sure they’ll make better company than you and your attack dogs.”
“Don’t be so flippant, Miss Ridley. I’m sure you will find that I – and my attack dogs – will take on more positive qualities in your memory. Rest assured our friends are very excited to meet you.” He leaned in close, so that Apollo could hear the uncanny sussuration of his breath escaping via means unknown. “In fact, they asked for you specifically! It was a shame to lose our man Dorman. But of course, what better way to get you involved than to drop a dead body on your doorstep?”
“It was all a setup,” Apollo muttered.
“Oh my, yes.” The captain said, putting a hand on her shoulder to turn her around and lead her up a second flight of stairs. These ones were wooden and less worn down than the others.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To the cells,” the captain said. Apollo heard the other set of footsteps stop, Rob’s hand release her left arm. “What is it, constable?” he asked. “This isn’t the way to the cells, sir. This is the way to- to that room people don’t come back from.”
“Oh, dear. Robin, what have I told you about this?”
Apollo heard a mechanical thunk with a wet splotch in the tail, followed by the sound of a big man slowly collapsing to the floor, as if every impulse in his brain had been annihilated in one instant.
“What a shame,” the captain said. “But he was about to make a fuss. I told him not to.”

The next flight of stairs was stone again, a smooth, sharp-edged stone.
“I was just wondering,” Apollo began.
“How we’re going up the third flight of stairs in a two-story building? Oh, please, Miss Ridley. You’re thinking in such three-dimensional terms. Nearly there now. Come on.”

The blindfold was pulled away from her eyes, and Apollo saw the wicked glee in those of the captain. He held a crossbow loosely aimed at her in his left hand, the wind-bolt pulled taut and an evil-looking black bolt in the notch.
“I’ve never seen a bolt like that before these last few days,” Apollo said. “Now they’re everywhere.”
“You’ll see a lot more of this stuff where I’m sending you,” the captain said. “Stay there, Apollo Ridley, and if you even think of moving…” he tapped the bow. “And this one is poisoned. Could have been a bad business, that ambush. Luckily we were able to send our own man to take you out of the picture without taking you all the way out, so to speak.” He backed away and opened a drawer in a chest by the window, and Apollo realised the landscape outside wasn’t one she recognised. The red sky glittered through the window pane, light rolling across black mountains in the distance and fields that seemed to glow gold like torchlight. Quite a view.
The captain found what he was looking for in the chest and lifted it. A black podium in the center of the room held something Apollo couldn’t identify. Whenever she looked at it her eyes seemed to lose focus, leaving the object an indistinct blur that seemed to posess an inner light. The captain walked over to the shimmering blur and raised a black shard of the same material the crossbow bolts were made of.
“You like it?” he said.
“I can hardly see it,” said Apollo.
“You will,” the captain said, and struck the blur with the shard. A horrible shrill screech filled the air at that moment, sending Apollo reeling back. It was all she could do not to collapse, but in that second of swimming vision she glanced up and saw the object, now the only thing in focus.
“Oh, God!” she cried. As long as she lived she would never forget the sight of it. The captain brought the shard down again. Another horrible screech. This time Apollo kept her focus on the captain. He too was reeling from the screams of the terrible thing on the podium.
“One more for luck!” he shouted over the ringing echoes of the screech and raised the shard again. As he brought it down, Apollo pushed off from the wall and charged. The screech was devastating, nearly sending her to her knees, but she held fast. When the captain realised what was happening it was too late. She wrenched the crossbow from his hands and shoved him away. Behind him, across the big window, a black substance was beginning to spread from all four corners.
“You ready to meet your friends?” Apollo said, gritting her teeth. The captain raised his hands.
“Apollo, don’t do this. I-”
She pulled the trigger. The string of the bow went taut. The black bolt thudded into the captain’s stomach and launched him backwards, into the window. Then something strange happened. Where the black substance had appeared, his limp body seemed to meet no resistance, passing straight through where the window had been. His upper torso was less lucky, slamming into the pane and shattering through it. As the glass spiderwebbed and broke into pieces, the black substance, which Apollo recognised now as a gateway, seemed to break apart with it. Each part of his body was confined to a single fragment, which separated as easily as broken glass, leaving behind only what had hit the unabsorbed glass as it disappeared. The screaming, flailing remnants continued on their path out of the window and fell for a long time.
Apollo fell to her knees and retched, but nothing came out except a thin acidic trickle. She closed her eyes, stood up and left without looking at the blurry object again.

Apollo sat in the empty teahouse and sipped from another cup of tea.
“Are we safe now?” Delta asked, pushing aside the silk divider and coming in from the back room. “Is it over?”
Apollo shrugged. She had searched all over town for the assassin and found nothing. Officially the captain of the watch had lost his mind for unknown reasons. All the deaths were being traced to his bow. The one Apollo had used to end him.
“I don’t know if it’s over. But until it is, I’ll be here with you, Delta.”
Delta smiled. Apollo took her hand reassuringly.
The sun went down on Mutetown the same as it always did that night. It also set in a red sky behind black mountains.

The sun did not set in the place Apollo had glimpsed through the gateway.