Iron-Vein City hits you with smell before it hits you with anything else.
Coal burn. Chemical rain. Something underneath both of them, warm and organic and very wrong. The draft horse starts fighting the reins half a mile out. I don't blame it.
The city sits in a crater.
The outer walls are stacked ironclad hulls, three layers deep, welded together so badly they look like they might fall over on a slow Tuesday.
Inside them, black smokestacks punch at the sky and the deep industrial presses run twenty-four hours a day, boom boom boom, like a second heartbeat for a city that already has too many problems.
There's a line to get through the gate. A long one.
I wait in it for two hours. I do not cough loud enough for anyone to hear. I watch the guards ahead, learn their patterns, identify the one who'll give me trouble.
He's big, brass rebreather over his face, the kind of man who has a tiny amount of power and maximum investment in keeping it.
His name, I find out when I reach the front, is Tarn.
"Entry tax," Tarn says. "Ten silver."
"Don't have it."
"Then the line's behind you." He reaches for my horse's bridle like it's already settled.
"Don't." My hand drops to the LeMat. Not drawing it. Just introducing it to the conversation.
Tarn goes still. He looks at the under-barrel, the custom second muzzle that doesn't belong on a standard revolver.
"I'm bringing Silas Vance's stock to Bio-Baron Vexar," I say. "You want to be the man who held up his delivery?"
The name Vexar does something physical to both of them. The partner at the back quietly lowers his rifle.
"Let him through," the partner says. Low and quick, like he's embarrassed about it.
Tarn's pride fights his survival instinct for about three seconds. Survival wins. He steps aside.
I ride through the gate tunnel into the noise and heat and chemical stink of the city.
The Lower Dregs greet me like an old wound. Buildings crammed together, weeping chemical water from every joint.
People with rusted mechanical limbs and hollow eyes trading handfuls of copper for tiny vials of synthetic calm.
A man in a doorway holding a tin cup, staring at nothing, shaking in the way you shake when you've been on the cheap Euphorionite too long.
I find a public board and read down the notices until I see the one I'm looking for.
HALF-DOSE FINCH. COMPOUNDING PHARMACY. FLOODED BASEMENT. EAST OF THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE. NO WALK-INS.
No walk-ins.
I'm going to be a walk-in.