all that's left is a ghost machine {ignacio/valentino}

Standing in a starkly lit courtyard, three abandoned buildings stand on three sides of a waterless fountain adorned with angels holding ceramic jugs that pour dry, and stone fish gape empty mouthed and thirsty at the bright sky. Aristocrats lived here, once. Before the great draught some years ago. The rich, as it happens, followed the water to more fertile land in Seven, leaving behind their great mansions for the trees to reclaim.

The staunch figure of a bearded man smoking a cigar paints a black shadow high against the eastern building. He takes a few steady puffs as he looks out at the low sun, watching it shimmer as it gently touches the horizon. The hour is late, and darkness will follow like a sack pulled harshly over your face.

No one has walked past in hours. He's pleased about that, but the longer his acquaintance takes to arrive, the higher the risk of some unfortunate soul straying into this abandoned corner of seven and drinking in the pile of pale bodies wrapped in white plastic. He would hate for that to happen - adding to the pile now would mean more heavy lifting later.

The air smells stale, the faraway scents of sawdust and woodland flora are nothing but a memory here, where the musk of distilleries and breweries nearby linger on every corner and down every crawlspace. Ignacio Moya prefers it to the greener parts of Seven, people don't look at him funny - people daren't look at him at all. They know who he works for.

This is not a place you would usually find a Salazar. Servants and Serpents live very different lives, and it pays off to have someone who knows this unsightly part of town. Sure, his former guardians know how to get drugs, and weapons, and ammunition. They when to force another syndicate's hand with blackmail, and when with force. They can charm or cheat their way past any authorities digging in and around their business. They know how to start a war, and win it.

But after all of that, you still need someone to get rid of the bodies.

Ignacio keeps a gun ready, in the pocket of the mulberry jacket he wears so proudly. He dragged it off the back a dying man he had been sent to kill two summers ago. It was the lilac floral pattern sprawled up the sleeves that caught his eye.

He thinks it compelling how something so simple as a name being picked from a pool of thousands, that name ringing out so final, until another voice rises - a whisper against the roar of the Capitol amplifiers, and in an instant changes a District forever.

And like a match falling into the putrid pool of oil that seven had become, Jacinta burned everything that made sense in this futile reverie that the upper-classes had built. It was always going to end in the same way their empires were built - with blood.

His days have become drudgery, running together and blurring like watercolour strokes painting the chaos that has unwound since Valentino picked up a knife and cursed the name Jezebel into the night. Severed hands left on the carpet and a flower of blood blossoming on vintage wallpaper. Murdered lineage and dead children left in the wrath of the Salazars. This is the chaos that followed a whisper in the wind, on that day in the District Square, that day that changed everything. He doesn't mind though, he knows his reward is a pat on the shoulder and a peaceful night's sleep.

Ignacio spots his associate approaching, takes one last puff on the stump of his cigar and tosses it into the dry fountain. On the backdrop of a mountain of corpses, he waits for Valentino Salazar to approach.