AFTER

Mayeline held the cards in her right hand, though it left her feeling a bit naked, only her wounded off-hand free to draw one of her knives. That off-hand wasn’t exactly what it ought to have been, at least not since a certain Amidonian toff had run a knife up it.

She flexed the fingers of her left hand slowly, trying neither to strain her stitches nor let her hand go stiff from lack of use. Three weeks and it still hurt. If she hadn’t known the blade wasn’t poisoned—it had been her own, after all—she might have suspected as much. Then again, the sawbones she’d employed had been more than a little drunk on the whiskey used to purge the wound. Reason only knew what corruption he’d sewn back into it.

“So are you playing, or admiring your bloody manicure?”

Mayeline looked up at Muragan through her lashes, knowing that head-tilt looked more ferocious than comely on her furrowed face. The Indine cutpurse flinched.

She smiled. “I’m thinking.” Her voice was a tumble of gravel, a souvenir of her years inhaling sulfur dioxide at the Cardiff refineries.

Whatever hand Muragan held, he didn’t seem in such a rush to play it anymore.

She closed the fingers of her left hand once more, dragging the gesture out until the other players shifted uncomfortably.

One by one, the cards fell.

“Forfeit,” called the Chaldean girl. Just a slip of a thing. She’d nearly been cleaned out, anyway.

“Forfeit.” The Gaul. The word fell thick from his tongue. Given the number of glasses turned over in front of him, Mayeline couldn’t be sure if it was an accent or sobriety he was struggling with.

Muragan growled something in one of the dialects of the Indines and put his cards down.

Kneeler, Scribe, Machinist, and two tengears showed in a fan before him.

“Three men and tens,” he announced.

Mayeline opened her right hand and let the cards fall dramatically, one after the next.

“Deacon,” she said, and it fell. “Reverend.” It fell. “Bishop . . . Scales . . . and the ninegear. Grand Experiment trumps all.”

The Gaul and Chaldean whistled softly. Muragan groaned, his hands in his hair.

“I was counting!” he cried. “The ninegear came out already!”

“Five hands ago,” slurred the Gaul mournfully. He stacked his chips, though it wasn’t much of an exercise, seeing as he had only six left. “Been a shuffle since.”

“A shuffle twice,” the Chaldean girl agreed. “We mulliganed the fourth hand when we all caught gears and no symbols.”

“No, no, I was counting. It was two hands back!” Muragan kicked away from the table, not trying to hide his hand reaching for the blade at his belt. “You’ve got cards up your sleeve, Mayeline.”

Mayeline crossed her arms across her bulky chest. “You mean to check ’em, then?”

“I mean to—”

“Excuse me !”

The Maiden’s Honor was a riot of noise, like always, but they could hear the voice over the din because it came from the bar, and it didn’t belong to Keeper.

All the heads at the bar turned toward the girl standing on it, her hands still cupped around her mouth.

The room fell silent.

Mayeline had been spoiling for Muragan to try something. She’d stored up enough pain and bad temper in her left arm, she had to do something with it soon and he looked ready to be the thing done. She glared at the bar, and the thought of introducing the little man to her good fist passed completely from her mind.

The hollering girl stood atop the lacquered bar, but even then, one could only spy her from the waist up. Shy of eight stone by more than a little mortar, pale faced, dark-haired, with a scar slicing across one elfin eyebrow. The perfect size for a second story job.

The girl squared her shoulders and scanned the room. “My name’s Rowena Downshire. This is Doc Chalmers.” She waved a hand toward a man of about Mayeline’s age with a soft chin and a treasonous hairline. He looked more like a vermin flushed from its burrow than any Reverend Doctor Mayeline had known.

“Rowena, please,” Doc Chalmers said. He tugged her trouser leg. “Cyddra said they won’t wait for us more than an hour, and this place—”

“I’ll do this with you or without you,” Rowena Downshire snapped back. Her rude little face went positively feral. That was when Mayeline remembered her.

She knew this girl. Oh yes. Stupid Douglas. His arm was still in a sling, but only because he was scaring up the last of the clink he’d need for a clockwork replacement. Busted clean through at the elbow by that old Leonine’s cane, the one Keeper called the Alchemist. “A limb destruction,” the sawbones had called it. Nasty business.

In a way, Mayeline had got off lucky with that long, slick slice up her arm. Another scar to tell a story about, once she decided how to spin its details. But she’d keep the arm, no question.

This girl and her pet Reverend weren’t likely to get off that lucky.

Mayeline rose. That was enough to make the heads staring at the girl turn, if only for a moment.

“Oy, Keeper!” she called.

The old Ibarran looked up from polishing a copper mule. “Yeah?”

“You’ve got a mess on your bar. En’t you gonna see to it?”

He shrugged. The mutton chops flanking his mouth did a little rope-skip. He spat into a jar somewhere down at his feet. Or maybe just on the floor. Nobody ever put their face behind Keeper’s bar, let alone their boots on it.

“Paid me fifty sovereigns for three minutes standing,” he drawled. “Got two left. ” He nodded at the girl. “Talk faster.”

The Downshire girl pursed her lips, jerked her leg out of her colleague’s grasp, and looked around. Her fingers worked into fists, gathering something up from the air. Courage, probably.

“Who here’s looking for a job?” she shouted.

A general murmur. A woman at the back barely managed to answer through a rough laugh. “You’re not so bad!” she howled. “I’d take you home for free!”

The girl’s face burned like a cinder, but she kept going. “I’m on the charter of the Corma Company.” She pointed to Mayeline’s left. “That’s our table, number forty-nine. I need to hire on two campaigners to get my partners back.”

The Chaldean at Mayeline’s table leaned in, talking to no one in particular. “Can she do that?”

“Takes half or better of a group to agree to add people on their charter,” Muragan answered. “If she and that wet handkerchief are the other half, it’s legal.”

“Where’d these partners go?” another voice called.

The girl turned, trying to find the voice. She settled on speaking to the room at large. “One of them’s been taken by the Logicians. To Vladivostoy, where Bishop Meteron does his work.”

“If it’s a legal arrest—if he’s gone beyond what the charter protects—” someone at the bar suggested.

“It’s not legal,” Rowena cried. “They’ve taken the Alchemist.”

A murmur traveled through the room. Nobody needed to ask why the old man had been taken. The Maiden’s Honor and half a dozen other campaigner haunts had been percolating stories about the Bear of Amidon for longer than most in the room had been in the business. No one had seen him in a decade, and then he was back, grayed and limping, maybe, but still fierce and strange and as dangerous as his namesake. Someday, someone would find out how he managed to know everything about anything. It seemed that “someone” had turned out to be the fanatics with scalpels and microscopes.

A few folk at the bar looked down at their drinks and muttered vague consolation. But Mayeline hadn’t forgotten the plot so quickly.

“And what happened to the other?” she asked, weaving closer to the bar through a maze of chairs and tables. “You said there were two.”

“Taken to Fog Island.”

The bar boiled up with noise—shouts, laughter, chairs scuttling back. Keeper tried to haul the girl down, one callused hand wrapped clear around her skinny forearm. She leaned away, was grabbed at by Chalmers, and all they managed was to send her tumbling behind the bar in a crash of bottles and glassware. The two women tearing it up in the fighting pit had lost interest in each other. They clambered up the ladders, bloody and staggered, to see what had drawn away their crowd.

Mayeline reached the bar in time to see Keeper looming over the girl. His voice barely cleared the din, though she was only paces away.

“You get your fool arse off my floor and out of my pub!” he snarled. “Fog Island? Fog Island? We don’t talk about that place here!”

To his credit, the Reverend Doctor Chalmers had scrambled round to Rowena’s side, trying to shelter her with his body. He was talking, though what was said, Mayeline couldn’t hear.

Rowena put a hand on the Reverend’s chest and shoved him back. She popped up like a jack in the box, seething. “I have one minute left.”

Keeper glared at her. The tumult through the Maiden was dying down, all eyes turned toward the girl whose head and shoulders alone peeked up behind the bar’s brass rail. The hulking barkeep stared storm-fronts down at her. Mayeline doubted the half a hundred people jostling either to get out of the pub altogether or get closer to its bar could see the flecks of glass prickling Rowena’s right arm, or the swell in her lip from the fall. She held her ground, teeth gritted against the pain.

“One minute,” the girl repeated.

Keeper subsided.

The girl ignored the Reverend’s bleating and swiped a path of crockery aside, clearing her space on the bar. With a nimble vault, she took her pulpit again, almost treading on the fingers of the patrons leaning too close.

“This is the Alchemist and Anselm Meteron I’m talking about,” Rowena called. Her arm was bleeding freely now, dripping down her knuckles. “You know them. Some of you have even worked with them. I can get them back, but I need your help.”

“Nobody leaves Fog Island!”

Didn’t matter who’d shouted that. It was true. No one left the island, even in a body bag.

“They didn’t before, maybe,” Rowena said. “I mean to change that.” Mayeline’s arm throbbed again. Anselm Meteron. She could almost laugh. Anselm fucking Meteron.

“What’s the take?” Mayeline bellowed. The rest of the Maiden’s clientele seemed to have solved their problem with the topic by turning their backs on the girl.

Rowena’s head snapped toward Mayeline, like she’d spotted an island after days adrift. She looked around, then crouched down on the bar, eye to eye with Mayeline as she edged forward.

“I remember you,” said Rowena, studying Mayeline warily. “How’s your friend?”

“Waiting on a new arm.”

“Master Meteron’s the one who cut you.”

“I know.”

Mayeline glowered at the girl. If she apologized—if she tried to make nice over it—then fuck her. Mayeline would walk away. She had to see for herself if the girl had sense enough to do more than just play at being tough.

“Good thing it wasn’t deeper,” Rowena said, smiling crookedly. Mayeline felt her own grin turn feral. Reverend Chalmers’s face blanched at the sight of it. Good. If he was some shit-pantsed tosser, that was no more than she expected. At least there was hope for this girl.

“Good thing,” Mayeline agreed. “Meteron’s rich, en’t he?”

“Richest bastard in Corma. Maybe in all Amidon.”

“So what’s the take?”

The girl sat back on her heels, wary again. “Are you interested in his money, or getting a chance to cut him back?”

“Both, maybe. But I’d have to help you get him to have a chance of doing for him, wouldn’t I?”

“Twenty-five thousand sovereigns.”

“From the richest man on a whole continent?”

“Fifty.”

“Don’t waste my time, pup.”

“Seventy-five, or I’m gone,” Rowena snapped.

Mayeline raised an eyebrow. “And what makes you think you can just afford to walk away?”

“This en’t the only pub on this island. You en’t the only campaigner looking for hire.”

But the girl’s voice, wobbly at the edges, told Mayeline she’d been to those pubs already. Probably that same night. It would explain why word of her coming hadn’t run ahead of her yet. There’d been no time. And table forty-nine at the Maiden’s Honor might be home to the Corma Company, but they’d been gone long years and drawn blood when they came back. There wasn’t a lot of love to be had for them.

This Rowena Downshire was clearly out of options. “But you’d want to get your Bear first, right?”

Rowena looked down at her boots, then slid off the bar on the patron side, shouldering her way toward the railing of the fighting pits. The women from the last round had slunk off to nurse their bruises with a pint. Two men were climbing down to take their place.

Mayeline followed. The Reverend Doctor scrambled round the bar to stand on Rowena’s other side, casting suspicious glances Mayeline’s way.

“We would, um,” he said, rolling the air with a gesture. His gaze landed in the pit just in time to see a Leonine man drive his fist into his opponent’s solar plexus. “We’d like to get him first, if we could,” he continued hastily. “But we need Master Meteron.”

“He’s the brains of the operation,” Rowena finished. “We need him to get Bear back, because I don’t even really know for sure where he, where they—” She dug her palms into her eyes, like pressing out a headache, and sighed. “We don’t know for sure what to do about him.”

Mayeline studied the fighters in the pit. Not bad, if a little too ready to stay in the clinch with each other. They wouldn’t make much of a show.

“The Old Bear really your da?”

Mayeline couldn’t say why, but the answer mattered to her. Not enough to shave even one sovereign off the seventy-five thousand promised, but . . . enough for something.

“Yeah,” said the girl, in a voice that didn’t wobble. She turned to face Mayeline—pale and dusty and fat-lipped from her fall, blue eyes just a little too bright, a little too close to going wet. “He’s my da. He’s my whole world.”

They stared down into the pit. The Leonine polished off the other man, some washup straight off the anchor yards. The victor stood there, shirtless and panting, collecting himself.

“Seventy-five for the lot,” Mayeline mused. “Both jobs, innit?” Rowena jerked, as if coming loose from a nightmare. Her eyes had filled, but they weren’t spilling over. She reached to pass a hand over them, saw the blood on her fingers, and scrubbed her hand down her trousers, instead.

“If you’ll take both. Yeah. Seventy-five.”

Mayeline considered the Revered Doctor Chalmers. “You can swear to that, EC man?”

He nodded. “On my honor.”

“Well, we’ll see what that’s worth,” she muttered. “Fog Island. Meteron must have really stuck his dick in the wrong place.”

“Sort of,” Rowena answered. “I, um, don’t suppose your experience has taught you anything about the ramifications of using a legal charter to employ oneself in the illegal release of a prisoner from Lemarckian authorities?” Chalmers inquired.

Mayeline noticed Rowena rolling her eyes. Clearly she’d been round this bush with the Reverend already.

“Stands to reason there’s enough legal and illegal kicking around in that situation that it all gets a bit gray.” Mayeline chuckled. “Research it, if you want. It’s what you’re supposed to be good for, yeah?”

Chalmers bristled. “And if we’re to give you a fortune on which any reasonable person could comfortably retire, I should ask what you’re good for.”

Mayeline tapped her bandolier of blades. “You’re not very good at making deductions, are you?”

The girl threw up her hands, silencing them both. “Stop. Just stop. I’ll go to stupid bloody Fog Island myself if it means I don’t have to listen to you running your mouths at each other.”

Chalmers blinked in surprise. Mayeline tilted her head. The girl crossed her arms in a clearly borrowed pose, aping a toughness a little too large for her tiny frame. Mayeline remembered that look when she and Douglas had tried to buy her up, hoping they could fit her down a chimney and into a second story job. The Alchemist had worn that toughness like a tailored glove. All the tears gathered in Rowena’s eyes had disappeared, poured back inside her.

He’s my da, she’d said. He’s my whole world.

Mayeline sighed. “Best get my name on the charter, then. The notary’s open all night.”

End.