9.

28^TH SEVENMONTH, 277 A.U.

WESTGATE BRIDGE, CORMA

Bess held the printed spark, checking the message again, as if there was some chance it had magically transformed. She felt surreally certain the letters could have rearranged into anything. It wouldn’t have surprised her. Nothing surprised her, anymore.

“Don’t be so stupid,” she hissed, shaking herself. She stuffed the spark into her reticule and strode up the winding lanes of Westgate Bridge’s highstreets toward the Stone Scales.

“Every Dolly Moll pays her way as she can,” Resurrection Jane had said. She’d meant it, and seen to it that Bess paid her share to the rest of the girls in the eight months since her release from Accursius. She minded “Audrea Carringer’s” shop on the ninth and tenth of every month, sometimes turning its shingle so she could gather girls up from the back stoops of gentlemen’s clubs, armed with a parcel of sovereigns as powerful as a pair of chain-cutters. Clothing the opium-eaters, feeding their nearly orphaned brats, cleaning up the sick of both, and looking the other way when the best of intentions couldn’t put an end to the worst of habits. She had known all her life Corma was full of desperate, damned souls no amount of Reason could save. Hells, half the folk she knew lacked schooling enough to even read the knowledge the EC peddled as paving on the road to understanding Creation. Small wonder they kept finding ways of killing themselves by degrees. And then there was negotiating with Sticks, and Stones, and a half-dozen other slats in the city’s fencing network. For that task, Jane wanted more than results. She wanted miracles, and believed all in her employ should serve them up to her as readily as she scattered them over broken bodies.

When Jane told Bess that morning that she’d had a call for a Dolly Moll suited to a long-term job, Bess had just been grateful to leave behind scrapping with fences over this mechanical or that. Nasrahiel was built. It—he —seemed likely to hold together. Nothing Jane could ask of Bess now could be harder than finding all his bits had been.

She’d been wrong.

Now Bess stood before the grated window of the Stone Scales again, for the first time in nearly a year. It looked . . . very much the same. Bess herself didn’t. Though her hair had finally grown out evenly, it was only long enough to take a few pin curls in a tight coif that left her feeling practically naked.

“Walk in, or don’t,” she said, loudly enough that a man passing down the lane glanced up from his chronometer.

“Not you,” she muttered, glaring at his retreating backside. He hustled past the Scales in a way that suggested he was a newcomer to Westgate Bridge—full of rumors about the Alchemist and very few proper facts.

Bess knew at least one thing about the old man now. He needed something from her.

The bell over the door tinkled as she entered. Bess ducked into a room of shelves as tall as a man, spaced just wide enough for two to walk abreast. The shop walls were checkered with framed maps and shadow boxes of insects, or displays of bones, brass, and glass. It was a cacophony of oddments and formulae as sorcerous as scientific.

This time, the Alchemist wasn’t calling from the back room or the top of a ladder. He was there, just on the other side of the door, a ring of keys in his hand, not two feet from Bess’s nose.

Bess squared her shoulders and managed a curtsy.

“Master Alchemist. Sir.”

The old man’s stolid face shifted. It took Bess a moment to realize that flicker of expression, quickly smothered, might have been confusion.

“Beatrice,” he said.

And all at once, she was crying. The part of her that had snatched up his hand months before forced her to keep her chin up and her voice strong. But the kohl around her eyes was already stinging.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late in the day,” she said, her voice wobbling. “I meant to come before you closed up shop, but Jane said—”

“Jane. Of course. Come in.”

And this time, it was the Alchemist who took her hand, guiding her back toward the same damned stool at the same damned counter. Bess’s tears hiccupped into a sob. Once again, the old man crouched before her, but this time, he took the position more gingerly. Bess saw there was a cane tucked in the crook of his arm and wondered how he had come to need it.

He scowled over her again, pressing the pad of her thumb, watching the nail color take its color again (was she dreaming? was that why this was all so familiar?). This time, though, the scowl seemed . . . kindly? Was that even possible? Or had it been the same before, and she’d been too terrified to notice?

“I went to jail,” Bess said.

The Alchemist placed two fingers just below her earlobe, pressing for the pulse.

Bess closed her eyes and sucked in a slow, sobering breath. One look at him, and Blackbottom End came rushing toward her, the past surging uphill. Memories of Ivor’s hawthorn, and the prison hulk’s jailors, and the Trimeeni girl fucking the guards sideways, hoping a baby in her belly would keep her from the gallows pole. All of that because she’d set foot in this shop and taken a tonic and note that could have given her a whole different future. And she’d poured all three down the drain.

“I never meant you to come to harm,” said the Alchemist.

“I believe you.” She did. That was what made the crying so hard to stop.

The Alchemist levered himself up, leaning into the counter, and disappeared beyond its drop-leaf. Crockery and a hissing noise suggested he was putting the kettle on. He came back a moment after, holding a jam jar with a measure of something brown and fierce-looking at its bottom.

Bess took it, her fingers touching his. Neither said a word.

Bess sniffed. Brandy. She threw it back all in one go and winced. A blooming warmth followed a moment later.

“Shouldn’t you . . . ?” she gasped, “Shouldn’t you wait for the harder stuff until after lockup?”

“I’ve turned the shingle already.”

He settled beside Bess on a stool like her own. “So you found your way, after all.”

“To Gooddame Audrea Carringer.”

The Alchemist nodded. “I am glad you are well, though I wish it had come about differently.”

Their eyes locked for a long, uncomfortable time.

“I’m well enough,” Bess agreed, at last.

The old man frowned, more custom than ferocity in the look. “Resurrection Jane sent you here.”

“You called on her. Asked if there was anyone she could spare from the Dolly Molls. The job she gave me’s been done for some time, and I’m no use in her lab.” Bess folded her hands, trying to arrange herself properly. She nearly fumbled the jam jar, then set it on the counter. “She said you needed a girl for the shop for a while. Is it because of your, um?” She gestured vaguely to his leg and the cane resting against his thigh.

“I’m leaving Corma and will need someone to take over the Scales while I’m gone.”

Bess felt her jaw go slack and cinched it back up with a snap. “You mean run the whole shop?”

“I’ve contacted my current suppliers and arranged for the stock to be replenished once a week, based on the usual consumption. There are customers who take deliveries and their schedules to mind. I’ve prepared their prescriptions in large supply and set them aside for regular distribution.”

“How long do you mean to be gone?”

The old man’s hand tapped the head of his cane. “What I mean and what may come to pass are different things. Two months, most likely. This should be only a little more complicated than running a market stall.”

Bess couldn’t help it. A bark of laughter, sharp and incredulous, escaped. “I doubt that. May I . . . ask why you’re leaving?”

“A client.”

“I wasn’t aware you made house calls?”

The Alchemist’s face curdled. “I might live the rest of my days without hearing that quip again and die a happy man.”

Bess was about to apologize, but the rattle of a key meeting the Scales’s lock closed the door on her words.

The lop-gaited old hound Bess remembered from her previous visits trotted through, with someone else—a girl, or a small woman, or—

“Rowie?” she gasped.

The door framed Rowena Downshire for only a moment before she bolted forward and threw her arms around Bess’s neck, toppling her stool back against the hinged counter. Bottles rattled off their racks to roll along its scarred surface.

For a time, they were a knot of limbs and yelps and faces pressed to noses and utter confusion. At some point, a scratching sound took Bess’s attention, and she looked up from staring at Rowena’s face—where had she gotten that scar across her eyebrow?—to find it had been a simultaneous clearing of throats, baritone and tenor. The first belonged to the Alchemist.

The second man was a stranger, except . . . Bess straightened up, untangling herself from Rowena. She’d lived above New Vraska Imports and ducked behind the curtains of gentlemen’s club suites too often not to know him.

“Master Meteron,” she said, dropping a curtsy as well ordered as a bundle of sticks. Bess cast a reproving glare at Rowie, hissing for her to do the same.

Rowie wasn’t giving the quality his due, and Meteron didn’t seem to care that Bess had tried. Instead, he took Bess by the arm and pulled her up, not as gently as he might have done.

“Ann—” the Alchemist said, his voice full of caution.

“If you’re not in the hulks, it’s her doing,” Meteron said.

Bess stared, confused. “You mean Resurrection Jane?”

His brow furrowed. “I mean Gammon. I have some unfinished business with her. Where is she?”

Bess looked between the three almost-strangers. Rowie, looking clean and fed and utterly perplexed; the blade-eyed Master Meteron, with his hand closed too tightly around her arm; and the Alchemist, whose dark hand closed on Meteron’s shoulder, pulling him away. Meteron glanced back at the Alchemist and, reluctantly, released Bess, still waiting for her response. She wasn’t sure what she’d done to make him angry—or if Gammon had angered him, why she ought to answer for it.

“I think, perhaps,” she said slowly, “things are a bit more complicated than I realized here?”

Rowie’s darting eyes caught Bess’s. You have no idea, they said. “I’ll put out supper, and maybe we’ll let her explain?” she said to Meteron and the Alchemist. “Okay?”

Silence.

Bess felt her hackles rise. The dog, forgotten, whined at her feet.

Suddenly, arguing over clink with Sticks and Stones seemed an acceptable pastime. So did minding the opium-eaters and hustlers done wrong by their pimps. Nearly any job Jane Ardai might have given her seemed preferable to the hornet’s nest she’d unknowingly bestirred.

“You do that, girl,” the Alchemist told Rowie. “I expect this is going to take some time.”