today we fail
My memory cave is underwater. A sea vault. I can’t stay too long. I’m surfacing, secrets like sediment settling in my wake. I pass old flashes of – I don’t know, remembrance or fantasy? The clinging past peels away. Runs like sweat.
I toss the covers off and dash open the curtains. The sun’s about to rise, making some creature – a cockerel, I realize; I haven’t heard a cockerel in years – delirious with delight. His trilling sounds like a horn. Like my bewildering panic made manifest.
I stagger into the hallway.
Venor and Felicity. Working together.
Firstday before last they had me on that boat. Nine days ago. And we’ve heard nothing of a fugitive captured, so Venor hasn’t found Zako on his impossible island up the coast near a pile of old oyster shells – not yet.
Is Felicity out there, right now, searching for Zako? Perhaps that’s why she left the Lugger in such a hurry. Is she hunting her twenty thousand krunan?
Or did she never make it back off that boat?
The cockerel is still at it outside. I have no idea where Kit went to sleep, so I walk down the passage calling his name like a second frantic bird.
He appears in rumpled vest and trousers, with an alacrity I’m coming to take for granted, though he’s still half asleep.
His thin bracelets are wound round his wrists. The bandage on his right forearm has come off – I can see stitches puckering the skin. The burn on his left is bare. It looks like an ordinary burn – like he caught it on the oven.
“Forgot about that prick.” He rubs bleary eyes, tilting his head to the honking noise.
“Kit…”
“Goldie thinks it’s a laugh, waking the whole street up before dawn.” Then he seems to realize something’s off. “What?”
“I remembered,” I blurt. “The grass worked. It was Venor – and Felicity. They took me on a boat. She was working for him. She was after Zako. She had a letter he sent to me…”
Thea’s wounds, I suddenly think. What if they have already found Zako? Are they keeping it quiet? Maybe Felicity claimed her reward and high-tailed it. Maybe the branders have been torturing Zako for days.
“Venor would crow if he got Zako, wouldn’t he? He’d want it front page of the Post. Wouldn’t he?” My fingers dig into Kit’s arm.
“Okay. Let’s not panic.” Kit has to raise his voice over the cockerel. Let’s not panic. Panic. Panic.
He leads me back to the window seat. I left the window open overnight. I take a deep breath of the cool morning air and start to fill him in properly about my boat ride.
“I knew she was bad news,” he can’t resist reminding me.
Felicity. Ferocity.
My imaginary friend. Who missed the food from her homeland and didn’t rate the buttocks on the naked globe-holder in Rundvaer Square and was in love with a man who died. She slagged off Venor. We slagged him off together.
I should be angry, but I can only feel an edgeless embarrassment, laced with nausea.
Kit pushes the window wider, into the growing light of the day. “Let’s focus on what we know,” he says. “On the boat, he wasn’t much the wiser. Zako may be … happy in the wild. If he’s not, we’ll know about it soon. He’ll be locked up where Blithe is. And we’ll be there tomorrow. They won’t kill their most-wanted boy quietly – it’ll be big news.”
I’m back walking that underground corridor with Senior Inspector Hove, past that room with the sign on the door. Deadhouse.
That big news may come too late. The branders killed Fidel Hemman before the news broke. And Venor wants to shut Zako up before he can tell anyone the dark secret he doesn’t even know he’s privy to. Thanks to me, Venor knows exactly how much Zako heard about his dodgy Life Record, about how he’s like the Kellins, vulnerable to forensic science.
“We can search Felicity’s room,” says Kit. “She could have left a clue there. And for all we know, Zako could be writing us another letter right now, telling us he’s happe. Worry won’t solve anything.”
I’m too scared to smile back. I just want him safe. I want him with us. Perhaps he could come here. The Reedstones could hide him, couldn’t they? Put this enormous mansion to good use.
Kit puts his arms around me.
Apprehension’s eating me alive on the walk to the Lugger.
“What do I tell Ruzi?”
“Nothing. Not yet. Nor the Scarlets.”
“Even if Venor might be coming for them next?”
“We don’t know he’s got Zako. We stick to the plan until we know different. Keep it simple.”
I swallow my reluctance, past the hard ball of unshed tears in my throat.
We go in through the courtyard to find Gracie rolling a round of pastry and Renny stoking up the stove. Her eyes twinkle at me in surprise. “Oh, we heard about your change of fortunes. How is it living a life of luxury?”
I hesitate. “I have a lot of space,” I say at last.
“Must be a change from Ruzi’s place. They wanted to buy Kit, you know – years ago. Mister and Missus S wouldn’t have it.”
“Why did they buy you?” Gracie says curiously. I mutter something about helping with their engineering schematics and drafting precise plans.
“Ohhh,” Renny interrupts. “Did you hear about your friend?”
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Felicity Greave—” she starts.
“If that’s even her name,” Gracie mutters.
“Mister S went by the station yesterday to tell them she’s been missing, since she’s been gone more than a week,” Renny continues.
“And she didn’t pay for the one before that and all,” Gracie chimes in.
“No! And left all her things here. Anyway, turns out she’s not a reporter for the Evening Gazette. You’ll never guess.”
I shake my head dumbly.
“She’s a bounty hunter!” Renny declares. “She had to register with the branders’ station when she came here.”
“Really?” Kit manages convincing surprise.
“Mister S thinks she was after your young friend – Zako Taler, that they raided us over.”
“Bizarre,” Kit says.
“I didn’t know,” I stutter finally.
They tell us what Mister S learned at the station. That Felicity made tracking down fugitives to claim rewards into a career. She’s older than I thought – in her mid-thirties. She used to do it in Skøland but moved to Makaia with the first wave. Once she collected four big bounties in a year.
“Well,” says Gracie, “I never warmed to her.”
“No,” Renny agrees. “She was snobby about the clerks too.”
Kit lets me in to Felicity’s room while he goes to consult the Reedstones’ source about prisoners at the branders’ station.
It doesn’t feel like a room unoccupied for a week. The bed’s neatly made, nightclothes folded under the pillow. Her clothes hang in the wardrobe. A spare pair of shoes sits beneath them, sideways. A wardrobe ghost. There’s a dark, hooded cloak in fine light material I’ve never seen before. And there’s her pale dress – the one she wore to that fundraiser in Rundvaer Square. It was her, going up those steps. I don’t find her little red notebook or her amber ring – she’d never be parted from those. No Zako letter.
Her leather case full of vials isn’t here either. At the bottom of her small trunk, I do find a stack of wanted posters, clippings and a silverprint.
The clippings are about Zako’s attack on the Magistrate. Nothing new there.
The silverprint is Felicity, looking younger, standing beside a Skøl man I don’t recognize. Tall and fair, holding something aloft – a piece of wood, or a huge bone, perhaps the bone of some giant beast. I can’t tell. I wonder if it’s the man who gave her the ring. Perhaps he’s not dead, I realize, with a new sting of embarrassment. Perhaps that was a lie too.
I’m interrupted in my musings when Kit returns. The Reedstones’ source is adamant that Zako isn’t in the branders’ station. They have no children in custody. Certainly no savages.
“He could still be in the Registry,” I say, with an odd note of hope in my voice. It’s that, or he’s free, or he’s dead.
Kit gives me two more locks to practise with. I head back to Opal Alley with them as he settles down to scrub the soil from a sack of potatoes.
I spend the rest of the afternoon practising. It’s much harder than Kit makes it look. I’m no dab hand, but I can do it – given enough time. If I can’t get this right, it’s all over.
Ruzi appears after work, looking unkempt. I realize his stubble’s more grey than black. When did that happen? My hair’s grown too, I suppose. I haven’t cut it since the winter.
“He got you back!” He’s surprised to see me, like he didn’t really believe Kit would be able to wrest me from the clutches of my new employer-slash-owners. His smile’s shaky. “You’re allowed to stay here, are you?”
“They’re giving me a lot of freedom. I’d still like to stay here … if that’s okay?”
Are his eyes shining? “Course it’s okay.”
He makes us a pot of fikka and some fried eggs, goes for biscuits from downstairs to celebrate.
Lavender shortbread, like the ones we had with Zako in the Thirdmonth. “They don’t do the jam ones like your mother did. Do you remember those?” He breaks off a chunk of his and crunches it. “Like little suns.”
I don’t. And then I do.
Circles with crinkled edges, sandwiched together, apricot jam bubbling through the hole cut in the centre of the top layer. Apricot jam for my apricot girl.
“Your mother was like the sun.” He presses his breastbone. “A heart that just made fire. More and more. She had to let it free.”
“I don’t understand.”
Why? I said to Pa. I don’t understand why.
She was sad, he said. She was angry. Feelings like demons she couldn’t escape.
Ruzi’s chin dips. “It’s not a thing to understand, Mor. It’s just another thing that is.”
I’m up before the sun next morning, sick with apprehension. My mind’s worn a rut going over and over the plans we finalized with the Reedstones yesterday.
In the small mirror above the sink, I pin my curls back severely, darken my eyelids with soot, then outline my eyes with my softest charcoal pencil. I bite my bottom lip until it looks a little redder and cover my hair under a wrap like the ones the Skøl servants favour – black with a stiff front and broad ribbons tied under the chin. I bought it months back in Ammedown Alley, meaning to tear it apart and remake it when I found the time – which was never.
Now I know how a horse wearing blinkers feels, but I think I look older, and it gives me a bit of extra courage. Like a helmet.
At the Lugger, I tell Renny I’m volunteering for the lunch deliveries today.
“It’s for Glister Reedstone’s research on different architectural styles,” I say. “He wants me to draw the foyer for him.”
“You look fancy,” Gracie notes. “I like the new…” She wiggles one of the ribbons under my head covering.
“Your eyes are a picture,” Renny adds.
I feel shy with them both smiling at me. “Thank you.”
I’m still slow with the lock picks, but it will have to serve.
Today we succeed, or today we fail.