The Mile High Masquerade

They call it the Mile High City. A mile closer to God, and He still looks the other way. Take that as permission.

Denver is broke. The oil money built the towers downtown and went bust inside them; whole floors sit empty with the lights on. Somebody's been buying them and keeping them empty. Don't ask. The new airport east of town cost four billion dollars and can't open. Nothing here works, and nothing is coming to fix it. A city that can't look after itself will never come looking for you.

Last summer the papers called it the Summer of Violence, like it would end. It didn't. Metal detectors in the schools, kids buried every week, a coroner's office that writes down overdose and exposure and closes the file. The streets are full of people nobody counts — addicts, runaways, the ones with no one waiting up. You will not go hungry here. You will never once have to explain a body.

But none of it is yours. Denver belongs to the Camarilla — the Tower — and the Tower's hand here is the Prince. She keeps the Masquerade nailed down because her betters told her to, and a town that files its dead under gang suits her fine. You hunt here because you are allowed to. That word matters. It gets taken back.

And allowed isn't free. Every block worth feeding on belongs to somebody: granted under seal, entered in a register, priced at a boon a month and the manners of asking first. The one exception is the Rack, up in Five Points — no fee, three rules: nothing fatal, nothing remembered, nothing that's already someone else's. Everywhere else, hunting without leave doesn't break a law. It insults a landlord. Down here, that's worse. There's a map. It was drawn for your situation exactly.

Past the foothills, the Tower's writ ends. The mountains are full of dead silver towns — built in ten years, killed by the crash of '93, rotting back into the pines with the headframes still standing. Things den up there that stopped pretending to be human a long time ago. The starved. The mad. The buried. They don't kill to eat anymore. They kill because you came. Some nights a wind comes down off the peaks carrying something under the cold, and the oldest creatures in Elysium go quiet until it passes.

Stay down here, childe, where the lights are on and the noise covers you.