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Dirty Dealings – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Dirty Dealings

Rachel Harrison

When you do the kind of job that I do, you become good at hiding things. It keeps you alive, moment to moment. Keeps you on the good side of everyone who has a bad side, until the moment you need to show them your own.

I was hiding a lot of things when they brought me in. My real name. My bad side.

Enforcer Drova wasn’t aware of any of it. Not what I was hiding, or how bad my bad side could be, until his blood shot up the interrogation chamber wall. Some of it hit the ceiling and the flickering strip lumens. Rain in reverse. Or at least that’s how I imagine it to be. I’ve never seen real weather. Never seen the surface. Had true air on my skin. None down here have. Our rain is runoff. Our sun is on a timer, if it comes on at all. All of the air has been breathed by someone else. Everything is dirt, or dirtied, including the people.

Though that applies to some more than others.

My knee is pressing hard on Drova’s chest. His eyes are wild and angry, but he’s bleeding too much to fight me. It’s all over his carapace armour and the uniform underneath it. It is spreading into the grooves between the flags of the floor. More runoff. More dirt.

‘You’re dead, Kora Zekk,’ Drova says. The words are blood-wet. He’s got one of his big, scarred hands over that wound in his chest. ‘You won’t leave this place unless you’re in pieces.’

I shake my head at him.

‘Who said anything about leaving?’ I say. ‘We’re just getting started.’

The job began before light-up. There’s no dawn down here in the Sunder. Because of that the word dawn is gone too, because it implies a rise. A swell. Not just the flicker and snap of lumens, quick and violent. Light-up. Like you might light up a lho-stick, or light up a target when you shoot them.

It took me a long time to get to the furnace-houses, because of the guns. The containers were big and unwieldy, and I couldn’t take the mag-lev because then I’d be seen. Reported. Dirt will report on dirt for a price, or for a favour, and the last thing I wanted was to blow the deal. Not after weeks of planning.

So I lugged the guns through back alleys, past the dive-bars and steaming, thronging markets, down through the dead middle levels that give the district its name, to the low-Sunder. Nobody alive now remembers what killed those middle levels. Could have been plague, or poison in the water or the air. Could have just been the people. The only thing everyone knows for sure is that there is nothing good to be found there.

I took Baud and Fule on the job as muscle. They were both thieves and killers. Hungry for credits and an excuse to hurt people. We took the old pilgrim’s walk to the furnace-houses. A long passage framed by tall ironwork arches, half eaten by rust. Like bones, cracked open by vermin. It was busy at one time, the pilgrim’s walk. Hundreds of souls flowed through it every day like wastewater through a pipe, but not now. Not after the old church collapsed through to the sinks.

I miss the church. It was a beautiful hulk of black iron and murky, badly set glass. The cleric who led service there wasn’t Redemptionist. He didn’t do it for fury, or fervour. He did it because he thought he could help the Sunder. Because he wanted to heal it. Clean it, through faith. When that old church was full of lit candles, it felt like how it must feel to walk out into the sun. Warm and golden.

But nothing golden lasts, not down here.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Dirty Dealings © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Dirty Dealings, Necromunda, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-930-0

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