BEFORE

Our better part remains
To work in close design, by fraud or guile
What force effected not: that he no less
At length from us may find, who overcomes
By force, hath overcome but half his foe.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1

4^TH ELEVENMONTH, 276 A.U.

THE CATHEDRAL COMMONS, CORMA

It was a wonder the aigamuxa was still alive. A wonder, but Haadiyaa Gammon did not go so far as to think it a miracle. Miracles ought to have more pieces turned the right way round.

It was a miracle that so many of the Reverend Doctor Phillip Chalmers’s notes had made it to the ground below the Old Cathedral of Corma intact, fetching up in threes and fours against the feet of trees and under the seats of park benches. Gammon had sent a constabulary page running up and down the Commons for the better part of an hour, gathering them up in a canvas evidence envelope.

She crouched beside the broken creature half-buried in a mangled hedge, staring at its juddering chest, the rickety bellows motion every moment on the verge of ceasing, then reached for the signal balloon in her jacket pocket. So many stories circulated of the aigamuxa being all but indestructible. Perhaps they were true. Perhaps you couldn’t hope for gravity alone to end a creature born to climb and stare down on the world from the soles of its feet.

Behind her, a gendarme whistled—the awed, two-note falling sound of a man who wasn’t sure if he wanted to step in closer or clear off altogether.

“Reason bless me, Inspector,” he muttered.

“Best hope it blesses him, instead.” The signal balloon lay across her hand, a foot of sturdy twine connected to a tiny, rubberized chute, an alchemist’s globe, and a cylinder of gas.

Gammon rose, backed away from the boxwoods, then checked around for tree limbs hanging in the flight path. She shook the globe hard for ten seconds—long enough to ensure the chemicals within would have agitated to a proper, sun-yellow glow—and pulled the cylinder’s sealing pin. The device sputtered, a tiny, blue-white tongue of heat licking her palm before she could cast the whole contraption into the air.

She shook out her singed hand and watched the bright bubble rise over their location and into the sight lines of their scouts posted all around the Commons.

The gendarme stared at her in naked confusion. “You’re calling a new medevac, Inspector? Why?” He patted his sidearm. “I’ve got what we need to sort him out.”

Gammon fixed the man with her iciest stare. He looked away and let his hand fall from his belt. “He’s wanted for questioning,” she said.

A new light hovered into the far edge of her vision. A red-gleaming globe, two hundred yards off and around the corner of the Cathedral’s porch. Gammon tracked the signal chute, reading the response in its color. No medical services available. Of course not. They’d had their hands full scraping the Alchemist up from the clerestory roof.

“Inspector,” the gendarme began.

Gammon looked back to the aigamuxa’s twisted body, curled up on itself like a dead spider. Was it only her imagination that the breathing had slowed? She spat a curse in one of the Indine dialects she knew only well enough to keep up with her chacheras’ running mouths when she visited her mother’s family. She finished in Amidonian, more for the gendarme’s benefit.

“The Constabulary crankcarts have stretchers on them. Get me three more men and a driver to take us north of the Commons. There’s someone I know who lives nearby.”

Jane Ardai sat on the edge of an examination table beside the trestle Gammon and her gendarmes had made for the broken aigamuxa, her head cocked like a puzzled bird. She studied the creature, now fastened to a steam-driven bellows that pumped its lungs. It lay surrounded by hanging pouches of fluids pushing substances Gammon had little hope of pronouncing into its compromised system.

Jane’s insolent mouth turned into a crooked smile. She patted the space beside her hip and crooked a finger.

“Haaaaaaaaadi,” she crooned. “What have I told you about bringing in strays?”

“That I shouldn’t.”

“And yet you do always bring me the nicest things.”

Gammon looked at the space on the table beside Jane and slid herself into the space between her knees, instead, pressing close to the physick’s apron.

One eyebrow above Jane’s perfect, coal-black eyes twitched. Her plump cheeks dimpled. “You were to join me for luncheon on Sabberday,” she murmured.

Gammon leaned closer.

“I’m so sorry. You wouldn’t believe—”

“I’ll give you hell for it later. Shhhh.”

Jane’s hush died away as her lips met Gammon’s. For a long moment, there was only the hungry press of their mouths and the breath that passed between them.

Finally, Jane pulled away. The physick’s hair had fallen from its disorderly bun in locks that smelled of iodine and lister soap.

“Tell me all about this one,” Jane murmured. “Nasrahiel, chieftain of one of the aiga tribes squatting in the Aerie. He tried to kill me. Tried to kill most every human he came in contact with tonight.”

Jane jerked back, the ironic serifs written across her face blotted away. “He tried to kill you and you brought him to me to fix?”

“I’m going to need him.”

“To make a second go of his plans?”

Gammon considered the creature on the table, tethered at death’s door. “I need him because of what his plan was. There’s more I need to know about it, and if I’m lucky—” she nodded toward the ragged bag of notepaper slouched beside the door, “—I’ll find something to convince him he needs to know more than he thought he did.”

Jane’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “So I’m only keeping him alive, bringing him back to consciousness?”

“I need him working—completely. Just as he did before, or near to it.”

Jane’s sour expression deepened, as if something more foul than usual wafted up from her lurid work.

“His legs—where his eyes are.” She stopped, sighing. “Haadi, this won’t be fast, or easy, or cheap.”

“I’ve always kept a little put away with you, just in case.”

“This is much more than a little.”

It was Gammon’s turn to look affronted. “I can find a way to pay—”

“And you will, love. But first, explain to me why I should want to take a monster that wants to twist your head from your shoulders and turn him from ‘off’ to ‘on’.”

Gammon frowned. “Is Julian here?”

“Out with a friend at the public down on Bleeker. Why?”

“This is the sort of story that goes better over a drink. You might not have enough to make it go down well if we split the bottle three ways.”

Resurrection Jane Ardai slid from the table and glared up at Haadiyaa Gammon, all five feet three of her radiating disapproval. “The next time you want to compensate for missing a luncheon, you needn’t go so far to get my attention.”

“If only you knew.”

“Jules has barely been gone an hour. There’s time enough for you to spin quite a yarn, and I want to see every stitch.”

Jane, Gammon reflected, had a very particular relationship to stitches. She might have sewn more things closed in her career than a whole garment district of tailors. After this job, that might rise to two garment districts. And like any good tradeswoman, she knew her price.

Gammon was sure down to her marrow she’d be a long time paying it.

7^TH ELEVENMONTH, 276 A.U.

OFF THE SHORES OF MISERY BAY, CORMA

The turnkey who dismissed Beatrice Earnshaw from her cell hadn’t been a real turnkey. Bess had only done the first three days of her sentence in the rusted hold of the prison hulk Accursius, but she’d seen enough to know real turnkeys in the employ of the Court and Bar never had such tidy uniforms. Every crease was pressed and every button stitched tight on this young man. Three days had been enough to teach Bess that even the newest, greenest guards and screws were outfitted in hand-me-downs. The dark-eyed young man who passed her a bundle of things as she stood shivering on the boarding plank to the skiff bound for the shore looked too unworn by that shabby place, full of screams and stinks. She’d stood holding the bundle, which contained something odd and jabby—something other than the rumpled ball gown in which she’d been arrested, interrogated, and perfunctorily tried—and watched, wordless, as the boy pivoted back toward his station on Accursius’s main deck.

He had, Bess realized, an odd hitch in his gait. His left side. Lamed, somehow. Surely not a real turnkey.

But hells. Bess wasn’t about to complain. “Beatrice Earnshaw” wasn’t even her proper name. Who was she to whinge about cutting the corners off the truth so it could wedge into tight spaces?

She sat as far from the other just-released prisoners as the rails framing the skiff allowed, and tried not to stare at the pair of aigamuxa chained to the ship’s oars, their eyeless brows furrowed against the push and pull. What might they have done? It wouldn’t have taken much more than just being aigamuxa to land them on that bench, she supposed.

Bess’s prison jumper was an itchy, baggy mess stitched of old sail-cloth, repurposed from some air galleon whose sprits and mains were too shabby to hold wind any longer. They were full of enough holes, it was a wonder they could even hold in people. Every prisoner—no, ex-prisoner—had an Engine punch card pinned to their jumper’s front, giving their name, their release date, and where the Court and Bar had determined them bound to go now. Workhouses, for a sentence reduction. Temporary tenements, for the employable in need of a start back in everyday life. Names of family who had sworn to take them in and see to their good conduct in the future, for really lucky ones.

Bess had no idea what was on her card.

The skiff lurched on through the choppy Elevenmonth waters, cutting a furrow in the gray foam. The prison hulks Accursius, Proculus, and Salvius shrank in the wake until they seemed no larger than Bess’s hand, all hunched together on the high waves. Each ship was large enough for two thousand prisoners apiece. Accursius had held two thousand eight hundred and nine. Bess had taken turns using the bed with her two cell-mates. All of them had been sentenced to the rope, though the Trimeeni girl who had been there long before Bess arrived had just been taken off the swinging list, since physick had done an examination and found her pregnant. The second girl, a bucktoothed blonde from the south quays, murmured that the Trimeeni had been making eyes at every male turn-key on shift for a month trying to get a tumble out of them. Finally, it had paid off.

Bess had already been on her blood. No hope of Smallduke Regenzi having done her some unintended favor. And then, the boy with the bundle and the punch card for her jumper came, and everything changed, all at once.

Bess jerked free of her reverie as the skiff butted against the quay. The aigamuxa’s chains were slackened enough for them to clamber out and tie off the boat. Four guards split the task of disembarking, two watching the aiga, two marching the nearly released prisoners toward the security office at the dock head down a path shoveled through the building snow.

The security office was about the size of a cobbler’s tent in a bazaar, though it had walls and a proper roof holding up a shelf of city-gray snow. There was room enough inside for a tall, teetering table, the clerk sitting at it, and the mass of levers and switches and dials and pumps and brass and ivory that was the Algebraic Engine behind her. The guards plucked the ex-prisoners’ cards off their jumpers and passed them to the clerk through a narrow window. She fed them one by one to the Engine, which punched out a duplicate card with additional nodes and holes adding date and time of processing, the names of the guards—all manner of things, Bess supposed. The Engine would rattletrap out a set of orders from a printing reel whose pages bore a surreal resemblance to actual handwritten script, a font all in curlicues and serifs, linked awkwardly by a machine. Then the prisoner would be sent off with a shove on the back and instructions in hand.

The lucky ones could even read them.

Bess breathed in relief. That, at least, she could do.

One of the officers from the skiff jabbed Bess’s hip with his truncheon, nodding toward the security office’s window. She edged forward and tried not to flinch as the other officer snapped her card off its pin, tearing at her jumper’s seam.

The clerk inside the tiny, Engine-crowded hut looked older than the hulks themselves, a tiny, wizened lady whose puckered eyes and mustard-brown skin made it hard to tell where she’d come from, eons ago. No one, as Bess had learned in her years running for Ivor, actually came from Corma. It was a destination, or an intermediate stop—a fly trap, she thought bitterly—but not really a point of origin. Just a muddle of folk from all ends of the Unity, toeing or stepping over the line as survival demanded.

The Engine’s input slot snapped up Bess’s card. She heard the rattle-whirr-buzz of it being read, duplicated, modified.

And, she hoped, approved.

The boy with the limp had been so young, so tidy. Something was wrong, wrong, wrong—

“Here,” the clerk said. Bess looked down at the folded paper pressed into her hands.

If there had been anything unusual in the release orders, the old woman didn’t seem to notice, or care. She stared at Bess with a patience polished by Reason-only-knew how many years sitting on this stool, processing other people’s futures.

“Thank you,” Bess murmured.

She tucked the order sheet against her bosom and scurried a few paces off to try to do something with herself and her bundle of discharged things. The urge to tear open the folded paper and read her fate was almost unbearable, but Bess knew if she didn’t attend to her welfare in the moment, she might not live long enough to make good on the orders, whatever they were. Flakes of snow had begun to wander down from the iron-gray clouds again, half storm and half smoke, gathering over the city’s spires. The Elevenmonth wind cut straight through her jumper. She turned the drape-skirt of her useless ball gown into a sloppy sort of shawl, then tugged on her embroidered gloves, hoping they’d provide at least a little protection against the cold. Everything else in her balled-up kit was worse than useless, barring a lucky pawn at a secondhand clothier’s shop.

And then, her hands found the jabby thing she’d been too afraid to search the bundle for earlier.

The pistol’s pearly, ladylike handle didn’t quite offset its ugly, snub nose. An alley piece, with just one shot and a hammer-trigger and oh, Reason, she needed to hide it straight away.

Bess still shivered as she put her back to a stack of barrels, cutting herself off from the wind whipping in from the sea. She wanted to jam the alley piece back into her bundle of cast-offs, but if she pulled the trigger by mistake, God only knew what trouble that would bring, even if no one caught a bullet. Looking all around, she wrapped it carefully and tucked the bundle the boy had given her under an arm.

Definitely not a turnkey. Had the gun been meant to help her, or get her into worse trouble? Bess had almost dropped the release paper as she swaddled the pistol. She knelt down, unfolded the note. Only the fear of losing it on the breeze kept her fingers clamped tight.

Gooddame Audrea Carringer, 108th on Lower Hillside, Street 19.

The boy had been too young, too fresh and decent. That strange limp and the release order coming of nowhere—

Hanged.

She was meant to have been hanged as a poisoner that very spring, as soon as the queue before her was cleared.

Hanged.

And now, somehow, someone had seen fit to set her free, and give her a gun, and send her to the exact address she’d been given the last time she’d been trapped. She hadn’t been wise enough to walk through the door the Alchemist had left open for her.

It could not possibly be a coincidence.

Bess scrambled to her feet and stuffed the order under her jumper’s belt. They were in the northernmost curve of Misery Bay, fully a mile north of Rotten Row and the sewer-mouth that was Blackbottom End. If she legged it hard, she might make Lower Hillside before the snow came down thick and after she’d unsnarled the questions tangled in her brain . . .

Bess ran.

The neighborhoods surrounding Oldtemple had had other names, four or five generations back, or so Bess had heard, when she ran packages for Ivor Ruenichnov of New Vraska Imports. The region itself had been not one place, but a fusion of many. Boroughs made up of Hasids and Tzadikim and Mohammedeans living at odd, jutting angles to one another, with a Jennite or Hindoo enclave slipped between, had been compressed together like so much silt turned into coal. The neighborhood name Bess had heard most often was Bet Navah, which must have meant something among those people. Now, folk just called it Lower Hillside.

It wasn’t nearly so pretty a name as Bet Navah, but the crowded streets paved with mossy cobbles had their own charm. And it was still far better kept up than the rest of Oldtemple Down.

Street 19 snuggled in a little valley of cross-paths and avenues that formed the borders of Oldtemple proper and the rest of middle Corma. It wasn’t properly a street, being too narrow to admit more than a single crank-rick or hansom carriage, and so it fared no better than the rest of the lattice of pathways around it, where earning a name was concerned.

Number 108 was a tiny, tidy ladies’ necessary shop, with demure, curtained windows taunting with vague suggestions of what fabric fancies awaited within. Audrea Carringer’s name glinted from a well-polished brass plaque beside the building number. The pasteboard sign propped against the glass showed the store was open another quarter-hour.

Bess entered, panting, and ran her fingers through her hair to pull out the sodden tangles left by melting snow.

She felt only the rough burr of the haircut she’d been given after her delousing three days prior, and winced. Accursius had taken so many other things, she kept forgetting about her hair.

“Holy Reason, get back on the mat, girl!”

Bess shrank backward. A broad-hipped woman with a pert nose and olive skin bustled around a corner where a kind of chifforobe had concealed her presence. Bess was only a little better than sixteen, but she was already a hand taller than the woman she presumed to be Audrea Carringer.

“Tsk. Here,” the lady said, snapping a dainty vanity towel from a rack of embroidered necessaries.

Bess opened her mouth to thank her, only to find herself being scrubbed as heartily as a terrier caught leaping in mud puddles. The woman sniffed and cursed in a thoroughly unladylike fashion as she roughed the girl up and down.

Dazed, Bess stared at herself, chafed dry and pulled in front of a tall mirror set in an elaborate brass frame. She hadn’t seen herself in a proper glass since her arrest.

It was so much worse than she’d imagined.

Before Accursius, Bess had boasted a tumble of russet curls and waves down her back. Now, her coiffeur was reduced to a ragged shave and some odd, long-hanging pieces of leftover hair. The tooth she’d chipped after bucktoothed Sadie thrust her face-first into the washing bowl on her first night shipboard snaggled, fang-like. She gaped at the spectacle she made, pale-browed, red-cheeked, her nails blackened by oakum and thumbs pricked by sail-stitching needles.

“You look a proper damned mess,” the woman-who-might-be-Car-ringer sighed, not ungently. “Keep the towel. It’ll do for a handkerchief if you need a cry. I put the kettle on an hour ago, after Jules let me know you had your walking card, so I hope you don’t mind taking your cup on the strong side. Ah, yes. There it is.”

The woman plucked Bess’s card from where it peeked out of her bundle and wagged it at her. “They pin these to released cons so no matter how stupid or mad the hulks have made them, they can’t lose their pass. But that doesn’t make it wise to carry it out in the open. Honestly. One would have thought Ivor’d teach you better.”

The name roused Bess from the shock of her own appearance.

“You—you know Ivor, Madame Carringer?”

“Knew. He’s dead now, and you’ll pardon me if I’m not sorry for it. There isn’t a bolt or hinge I put into his arm I wouldn’t gladly have taken back, but his money was good, and I needed it, at the time. Now whoever told you I’m Madame Carringer?”

Perhaps, Bess considered, she had run mad after all. Ivor’s arm? Bolts and hinges? She looked around, as if expecting the walls of the necessary shop to fall away like some prop-board set in a kinotrope play.

“There must be some mistake. I thought I had come to Madame Audrea Carringer, 108th Lower Hillside? Street 19?”

“You would have, if there were such a person. But it’s Seventh-day, and so it’s my shift, and so you have me.”

It was an answer, though it didn’t seem to fit the question Bess had asked.

The woman put her fists to her hips and shook her head. Then, for the first time, Bess noticed her glossy black hair was done up not with hairdressing pins, but with tiny, glinting clockmaker’s tools.

“You look about to fall over, Beatrice Earnshaw. How about you do it in an armchair while I turn the sign and teach you a little something about the Dolly Molls of Corma?”

“Is that . . . some kind of union?” Bess found her way to an armchair set near a little curtained stall.

The woman was at the door, drawing the curtains fully and turning off the gas tap to the lamp on the shop’s stoop.

“There comes a time in a young woman’s life,” she explained, “when she realizes the only people who will help her out of a tight spot are ladies who have been cinched up just as tight themselves before.”

And she smiled. “We’re a union of very particular skills and particular renown. Anyone looking for Audrea Carringer has been sent looking for us, even if she doesn’t know it.”

“And you’re . . . what? The president?”

“It’s Seventh-day, as I said, if you’d been listening. I handle Fifth-through Eighth-days, every month. It’s how I pay my dues back. How we all do. Any girls who are called in or sent to us on Fifth- through Eighth-day are mine to see to.”

Bess blinked. “Yours to see to?”

“Haadi told me you’d be in need of a position, once she pushed your papers through, and she knew I needed an extra pair of hands for a very, very big job.”

A very, very big job. They were just the sort of words Bess had learned to yearn for, and to dread, in her years running for Ivor Ruenichnov. Everything good or bad that had ever happened to her had started with some big job or other.

As casually as she could, hoping it passed for a nervous tic, Bess twisted the little vanity towel her hostess had left with her into a kind of short rope. She’d seen other girls do that in the community washroom, if someone showed signs of giving them trouble. If she was fast, she could simply run, and if not, she could loop the towel around the woman’s neck and pull tight.

“What kind of big jobs do you do?” Bess asked warily.

The smile reached the woman’s eyes at last. “Only the very biggest. My name is Jane Ardai. You’ve probably heard people call me Resurrection Jane.”

Bess’s fingers slackened. The towel fell back in her lap.

“The sawbones?”

Resurrection Jane’s lips pursed tartly. “Better than that, I hope. Haadi has quite a job for us, and I’ll need someone with your experience to help me gather up all the right parts from all the wrong sorts of places.” She crouched before Bess and rested a hand on her knee, precisely like a doting aunt, if the aunt were a mad-eyed physick known for replacing a pound of flesh with a stone’s worth of steel.

“We’re going to rebuild an aigamuxa.”

There were a great many things involved in rebuilding anyone, Bess was to learn, and Reason only knew how much more complicated the patient being an aigamuxa made the job. Jane Ardai—not, she was quick to correct, Doctor Ardai, and certainly not Reverend Doctor Ardai—seemed somewhere between perturbed and elated at the prospect. Bess Earnshaw had no opinion at all about her new situation, save that a very strong cup of tea had been sorely overdue. She followed her first with three more, and if Resurrection Jane minded refreshing the leaves and warming the pot over the pilot burner again, she gave no sign.

Bess held her teacup with two hands, as if it were an anchor. Jane Ardai’s explanation for herself and the not-quite-existence of Gooddame Audrea Carringer rolled in like high tide, wasing over the table between them.

“You’ve heard of the Savoyard’s Social Brotherhood?”

Bess nodded. Sweeps with any sense put in for a membership with the SSB as soon as they’d worked the chimney pots long enough to be eligible. “They take complaints about customers who won’t pay their bills and such to the Court and Bar on behalf of sweeps.”

“Among other things, yes. And there are the Mainspring Men for clockworking, the Dockworkers’ Union for longshoremen. That lot even takes aigamuxa, in some cases, I’ve heard. Have you heard of the union for—” Jane paused, considering “—ladies who are self-employed?”

Bess shook her head. “No, I don’t think I—” And then she came up short, realizing what being self-employed likely meant. “Oh. No, well. I mean, my mother was a mistress in a gentlemen’s salon. That’s where Ivor found me, all those years ago.”

“Girls in salons and clubs aren’t usually part of our merry number. Their line of work being in a proper shop-space affords some protections the independent contractors among us lack.”

“I don’t understand,” Bess interrupted. “I thought you were a saw-bones, not a bawd.”

Jane laughed hard enough, she had to set down her own teacup for fear of spilling on the lacey tablecloth. She’d put a meal together with almost frightening efficiency, whipping tea, kettle, cakes, and napkins from various cubbies beside the till as if she were rushing to collect the instruments needed to prevent someone bleeding out on the operating table. Then she had set into the meal, like a lioness gutting a kill— unselfconsciously thorough and mercilessly swift. That laugh was the first time Bess had seen her attitude of utter command broken. A smile, she realized, fit very well on Jane Ardai, sitting in the brackets of a round-cheeked, rather wicked face well accustomed to them.

“My sexual recreations have never given me much experience learning to please men. Well, apart from Jules’s father, I suppose, but that was a long time ago, and I should have known better. No, Bess. I’m no bawd, and despite what you were run down to the hulks for, I don’t think you are, either. Then again, most of the Dolly Molls aren’t, once you take a full and proper census.”

“And the Dolly Molls are—?”

“Us.” Jane gestured between them. “Lady misfits. Independents.

Oddballs in our trades. A few of us are bawds and escorts and such, yes. Registered courtesans or companions. But there are plenty of others, too. Midwives, alchemists, tinkers, peddlers, antiquarians, even Kneeler academics. All sorts of people who don’t fit, all of them ladies. We had to have some kind of an organizing principle, you understand. We’re utterly competent and damned important and still the world of the EC and the governors and their peerage can’t be bothered to give us the time of day. They’ll use our services, of course. But given even a quarter-chance, well . . .” She shrugged, sighed. “You’ve learned for yourself what they’ll do to us, if we become more trouble than they think we’re worth.”

“And Inspector Gammon arranged to send me to you?” And the Alchemist before her, too, Bess thought.

“She knew I’d be here this time of the month. There are no dues you pay, in the usual sense, for the help of your fellow Dolly Molls. It’s not about money. We staff this place round the clock, and a few others—satellites, of a sort—so there’s always a place to send for help. There isn’t any ‘Audrea Carringer’ now, though there was about sixty or seventy years ago. She was the first of us. Now, for a few days every month, we take our turns being her at one of the safehouses, and keep ready to be of use to whosoever comes.”

“The Constabulary knows about the Dolly Molls?”

“Once Haadi came along, yes. There was never the right sort of person at the helm before. But we took a bit of a gamble on her. It’s paid off very well—or did, until she tendered her resignation. Now we’re back to keeping our heads lower.”

“This isn’t the first time someone gave me your—this, I mean— address,” Bess admitted. “I used to deliver packages in Westgate Bridge, out to the Stone Scales.”

Jane Ardai’s brow lifted. “The Alchemist. Well. There’s someone I haven’t heard from in a long, long time. Not since Rare.”

Bess frowned. “Since what?”

“He adopted a girl who’d had a very bad go of it, years ago. Her mother had been one of ours, and we couldn’t leave her without a family after what had happened. What kind of sisterhood would we have been? It almost worked out.” She sighed. “Almost.”

“So he really was trying to send me to help,” Bess murmured.

“Oh, yes.”

“I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.”

“I think,” Jane announced, “you need one last cup of tea, and to learn a little something about the work I need done. But the second part can wait until after you’ve had a hot bath.”

Bess made her way to the apartments tucked up above the garment shop. (There were crates and shelves of garments in a little room off the kitchen stair—though it stood to reason the clothes and goods within were meant for outfitting wayward Dolly Molls rather than selling for a tidy profit. She wondered where the money to keep the place going came from. A question for another time.) She cranked the hot-box, setting the alchemical material within aflame and stoking the tanked water up to temperature. A few minutes later, she was sliding into a hot bath, pointedly ignoring the bruises and scratches tattooing her body. The bath was heaven. Her body barely felt like her own. Her mind most certainly wasn’t, colonized by questionsthat refused to keep silent.

Why did Gammon throw me in the hulks if she meant to set me free? Then again, had she? Bess didn’t think so. Not from the start, anyway. She’d spent enough time in the interrogation rooms of the Constabulary’s central office, the City Inspector could easily have dropped a hint that Bess wouldn’t have long to worry over her situation.

No, Gammon hadn’t planned to spring Bess. So why do it at all? So she could play errand-runner for her Dolly Moll friend? There had to be more to it. The question jabbed at her, like the alley pistol she’d left on the vanity’s edge.

Gammon must have assumed Bess would be safer traveling to Old-temple Down with a gun in easy reach—and had also gambled that Bess’s anger at the conviction and prison time wouldn’t move her to use the alley piece on Resurrection Jane.

Down the winding stair to the shop below, the sawbones’s voice joined in conversation. Two other voices. A man’s, or perhaps an older boy’s. And—

Bess’s hands closed on the lip of the tub.

Gammon.

She had little enough hair that a rough pass of a sudsy soap cake over her scalp was enough to finish her toilet. Bess climbed from the bath, still steaming, jerked the chain to drain it, and dressed in the frock and shawl she’d taken from the storage room.

She scarcely bothered to towel down. The edges of her vision had gone hot and blurry. Tears, but furious and full of acid. If they were going to burn her, she’d make sure their flames touched at least one other person.

The voices took on clarity as Bess descended the stairs.

First, the boy, tenor and relaxed. “. . . afternoon, give or take a few hours. It might be better to leave them waiting a bit than turn up early and seem overeager.”

And Gammon. Bess pictured her in her Constabulary blues, straight as a mast, her voice prickly with splinters of caution. “Don’t be too sure of how far you can push them, Jules.”

Jane cut in tartly. “Yes, it’s bad form to rely on someone for help and then stand them up without the least explanation.”

“Jane, I meant to answer your invitation—”

Bess rounded the foot of the stairs into the shop’s fitting salon, finding the sawbones with her hand raised, cutting off Gammon’s response. She wasn’t wearing her Constabulary blues after all. Indeed, she looked more like a groom or valet than a copper, knee boots and trousers capped off with a fitted jacket whose pin-tucks were better suited to a man’s chest than a woman’s. No epaulets. No hat. No gun straps and no jacket heavy with braids.

Gammon turned her hooked nose Bess’s way. The pained look Gammon had been wrestling with settled in properly.

“Well,” Jane said, seeing Bess’s arrival. “I’m not the one in need of your apologies, in any case. You’d be better off saving them for my new apprentice.”

“Miss Earnshaw,” Gammon began.

Bess lifted her chin. “Inspector.”

“Just Haadiyaa now. I’ve resigned my post.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“You’ve every right to be furious with me.”

Bess puzzled over the word. A tear was already running down her cheek. “Furious?”

“Angry,” Gammon explained, “didn’t seem sufficient to the task.” A long silence. Bess held Gammon under her gaze, like a creature pithed in an EC lab. It said something that she didn’t try to slip away from Bess’s stare. “Clearing the charges against you was the last official act I took.”

“I suppose you had very good reasons for letting me dwell for days in a lightless hole, fending off turnkeys’ paws and bunkmates’ fists. I suppose you were busy.”

Gammon shook her head. “I can’t claim I did the right thing in the first place, but I did what I might to make good on it later. I’m sorry.” She turned plaintively to Resurrection Jane. The other woman dusted her hands and sniffed.

“Oh, I’m not saving you from this. You know my feelings about that Regenzi nonsense.”

“We need your help,” Gammon said instead, turning back to Bess. Bess frowned. “For something to do with an aigamuxa. Rebuilding it?”

“Properly speaking, I’m the one who needs your help.”

Bess followed the voice to the boy leaning by one of the gas lamps ensconced on the wall. Tall and whipcord-thin—eye to eye with Gammon, and she was no trifle—his hair kept slipping into his eyes, more in a moppish manner than a fetching one. The eyes had the same shape as Jane Ardai’s, suggesting one of the Asian provinces bordering Old and New Vraska across the Western Sea. Bess squinted, then recognized him as the too-young, too-tidy turnkey, the pomade washed from his hair.

“I’m Julian. Jules, to most people,” he explained. “I run Mother’s shop.”

Bess tried to visualize him settling ledgers for the ladies’ necessary shop.

“I keep my proper business on East End, near Deacon’s Lane north of the Commons,” Jane explained. “Jules is my machinist.” The next came out not with a mother’s pride, but cool, professional haughtiness—the sort of tone Bess had heard over and over again at Regenzi’s ball. “He’s the finest prosthetics engineer in all of Amidon.”

Jules rolled his eyes and unseated his hip from the wall. Bess noticed a hitch as he resettled his weight. His left trouser leg seemed slightly less occupied, less filled-out, than the right, though he stood without a prop and crossed the distance to take Bess’s hand without a pause in his gait.

Bess was in no mood to play at niceties. She invited herself to a good look at Jules’s leg, ignoring his proffered hand.

He let the hand drop, lifting his trouser leg a few inches, instead. A bundle of pistons and cables passed down into his boot and stretched up toward the knee.

“The whole leg, clear down from my hip,” Jules said. “There was an accident during my delivery, and nothing for it but to amputate.”

Bess stared. She knew she shouldn’t, but— “He’s your son and. . . your patient?”

Jane raised an eyebrow. “Lucky to be one, too. Though after he outgrew my second design, he wouldn’t let me draw up his new legs anymore. Jules has a much finer sense of craft than I do. He does all his own work, and most of my clients’, too. I only perform the installations. And now I need him designing some very unusual things.”

“For the aiga.”

“Not just any aiga,” Gammon said. “The one we’ll need to keep a war from breaking out.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will,” Jane said. “Julian can’t waste time finding and negotiating part costs when he’ll need to be working on prototypes for hours every day.”

“You’ve worked with fences before, Bess?” asked Jules. “Ever come across one called Sticks?”

She almost laughed. “That old lanyani fraud? Every bird knows him, around Blackbottom End. He up-charges by at least fifty percent and tries to make you feel grateful when you get him down to forty.”

Gammon raised an eyebrow. “And what have you gotten him down to?”

“Fifteen.”

Julian grinned at Inspector Gammon and Resurrection Jane. “She’s perfect. When can she start?”