The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [68]
Even now people can't decide whether it was deliberate or not, whether he let it out to the militia that he'd be there, that he'd be stealing weapons from one of their caches, in the city centre, in Perdido Street Station, just so they'd come for him and he could show he could get away from them. Me I don't think he'd be so cocky. I think he just got caught, but being who he was, being what he was, he made the best of it.
He ran for more than an hour. You can go a long way in that time, over the roofs of New Crobuzon. Within fifteen minutes news had spread and I don't know how, I don't know how it is that the news of him running moved faster than he did himself, but that's the way of these things. Soon enough, as Jack Half-a-Prayer tore into view over some street, he'd find people waiting, and as far as they dared, cheering.
No I never saw it but you hear about it, all the time. People could see him on the roofs, waving his Remaking so people would know it was him. Behind him squads of militia. Falling, chasing, falling, more emerging from attics, from stairways, from all over, wearing their masks, pointing weapons, and firing them, and Jack leaping over chimneypots and launching himself from dormers, leaving them behind. Some people said he was laughing.
Bright daylight ― militia visible in uniform. That's a thing in itself. He went by the Ribs, they say, even scrambled up the bones, though of course I don't believe that. But wherever he went, I see him sure-footed on the slates, a famous outlaw man by then, and behind him a wake of clodhopping militia, and streaks in the sky as they fire. Bullets, chakris from rivebows, spasms of black energy, ripples from the thaumaturges.
Jack avoided them all. When he shot back, with the weapons he'd just taken, experimental things, he took men down.
Airships came for him, and informer wyrmen: the skies were all fussy with them. But after an hour of that chase, Jack Half-a-Prayer was gone. Bloody magnificent.
The man who sold out Half-a-Prayer was nothing. You wonder, don't you, who could bring down the greatest bandit New Crobuzon's ever seen. A nonentity. A no one.
It was just luck, that was all. That was what took Jack Half-a-Prayer. He weren't outsmarted, he didn't get sloppy, he didn't try to go too far, nothing like that. He got unlucky. Some pissant little punk who knows someone who knows someone who knows one of Jack's informers, some young turd doing a job, whispered messages in pubs, passing on a package, I don't sodding know, some nothing at all, who puts it together, and not because he's smart but because he gets lucky, where Jack's hiding. I truly don't know. But I've seen him, and he's nothing.
I didn't know why he gave up Half-a-Prayer. I wondered if he thought he'd be rewarded. Turned out he'd have said nothing if they hadn't hauled him in. He'd been caught for his own little crimes ― his own paltry, petty, pathetic misdemeanours ― and he thought if he delivered Jack, the government would look after him, forgive him and keep him safe. Idiot man.
He thought the government would keep him out of our hands.
Most of what Jack did weren't so obviously dramatic, of course. It was the smaller, savager stuff that had them out for him.
It ain't that they were happy about the big swaggering thievery, the showings-off. But that ain't what made Jack a thorn they had to pluck.
No one knows how he got the information he did, but Jack could smell militia like a hound. No matter how good their cover. Informers, colonel-informers, intriguists, provocateurs,