Clef’s voice cut through the blur: <Kid! Kid! Are you all right? Are…are you dead?>
Sancia groaned. Her back hurt like it’d been kicked by a horse. Her mouth was thick with blood—she must have bitten her lip as she fell. She stirred, pulled her face from the mud, and sat up, faintly aware of a tinkling sound.
She looked at her back, and saw her satchel of duvots was now little more than a rag. The mud around her was covered in shiny coins. She stared at this, trying to understand what had happened.
<You caught a scrived bolt right in the back!> said Clef. <Your big bag of coins stopped it! Holy hell, it’s a miracle!>
But it didn’t feel like a miracle to Sancia. This glittering metal in the channel mud represented the whole of her life’s savings.
<Did you mean for that to happen, kid?> asked Clef.
<No,> she said wearily. <No, Clef, I did not mean for that to happen.>
She looked back and saw a dark figure running along the channel toward her—the third man from the fishery building, probably. He must have been the one to fire the shot. He cried, “She’s over there, over there!”
“Damn it all,” said Sancia. She staggered to her feet and sprinted up the hill and off into the Greens.
Sancia ran blindly, thoughtlessly, drunkenly, hurtling through the muddy lanes, her head still spinning from the scrived bolt. Clef chattered madly in her ear as she ran, spitting out directions: <They’re up the street from you, two alleys down! Three more behind you!>
She dodged and turned to avoid them, running deeper and deeper into the Greens, her chest and legs aching with the effort. She knew she couldn’t run much farther. Eventually she’d stumble, or collapse, or they’d catch up to her. <Where can I run to?> she thought. <What can I do?> She was close to Foundryside by now, but that didn’t mean much. Foundryside Commoners would sell her out in a heartbeat.
<Use me, use me!> cried Clef. <Anywhere, anywhere!>
She realized what he meant. She glanced ahead, picked a building that looked secure and commercial—so hopefully it’d be empty in the middle of the night—ran up to a side door, and stuck Clef into the lock.
There was a click. She shoved the door open, darted inside, and locked it behind her.
She glanced around. It was dark in the building, but it seemed to be some kind of clothier’s warehouse, full of musty rolls of cloth and flittering moths. It also appeared to be empty, thankfully.
<Are they outside?> asked Sancia.
<Two are…Moving slow. I don’t think they know where you went, or they aren’t sure. Where do we go now?>
<Up,> said Sancia.
She knelt, touched a hand to the floor, and shut her eyes, letting the building tell her the layout. This was pushing her abilities—her head felt like it was full of molten iron—but she didn’t have a choice.
She found the stairs and started climbing until she came to the top window. She opened it, felt the wall outside, let it bleed into her thoughts. Then she slipped out the window and climbed up until she rolled onto the roof. The roof was rickety, old, and not well built—but it was the safest place she’d been yet. It might as well have been paradise.
She lay on the roof, chest heaving, and slowly pulled her gloves on. Every part of her hurt. The scrived bolt might not have penetrated her flesh, but it’d hit her so hard it felt like she’d strained muscles she didn’t even know she had. Still, she knew she couldn’t relax now.
She crawled to the edge and peered out. She was about three floors up, she saw—and the streets were crawling with heavily armed men, all waving and signaling to one another as they scoured the neighborhoods. It was the sort of thing professional soldiers did, which didn’t reassure her.
She tried to count their number. Twelve? Twenty? A lot more than three, and she’d barely escaped three.
Some of the men were being followed by a curious type of rig she’d heard about, but never seen: floating paper lanterns, which had been scrived so they levitated about ten feet off the ground, glowing softly. They were scrived so they knew to follow specific markers, like a sachet—you put one in your pocket and the lantern would follow you around like a puppy. She’d heard they used them as streetlights in the inner enclaves of the campos.
Sancia watched as the lanterns bobbed through the air like jellyfish in the deep, following the men and spilling rosy luminescence into the dark corners. She supposed they’d brought them in case she was hiding in the shadows. They were prepared for her, in other words.
“Shit,” she whispered.
<So—we’re safe, right?> said Clef. <We just stay here until they leave?>
<Why should they leave? Who’s going to make them leave?> She looked at the remnants of her pack. Not only were the coins gone, but so was her thieving kit. It must have fallen out as she ran. <We’re basically stuck on a scrumming roof, penniless and unarmed!>
<Well…Can we sneak away?>
<Sneaking’s not as easy as you think.> She poked her head up and took stock of her surroundings. The rooftop was bordered by three rookery buildings, one on either side and one behind. The two on the sides were both too tall and too far away, but the building behind was doable—about the same height as the warehouse, with a stone tile roof. <Looks like about a twenty-foot jump to the other rooftop.>
<Can you make that?>
<That’s a big maybe. I’d try it if I had to, but only then.> She looked out farther, and spied the white campo walls and smokestacks of a campo a few blocks beyond. <The Michiel campo’s just a few blocks away. I still have one of their outer-wall sachets from the job I took to get you, Clef. Maybe it still works. Probably does.>
<Would we be safe from them there?>
That was a good question. <I…have no idea, really.> She knew that a merchant house had to be behind this—that was the only force that could deploy a small army in the Commons just to find her. But which one? None of the assassins she’d seen had worn a house loggotipo—but it would have been supremely stupid for them to do that.
All this meant she could go to ground in the Michiel campo only to find out that the men down there were Michiel house guards, or someone employed by the Michiels. There was no place she could deem truly safe.
Sancia shut her eyes and rested her forehead against the roof. Sark…damn you. What in hell have you gotten me mixed up in?
Though she knew she was just as much at fault as he was. He’d been upfront about the job, and she’d still taken it. The money had been too good, and despite all her care and caution, it’d made her stupid.
But she likely wouldn’t have survived this long without Clef. If she hadn’t opened the box, she realized, she’d be trussed up like a hog right now, about to be butchered.
<Have I told you thank you yet?> she said to Clef.
<Hell, I don’t know,> said Clef. <I haven’t been able to keep up with all this crazy shit.>
Then she heard a rattling sound in the street below. She poked her head back over the edge of the roof.
An unmarked, black scrived carriage was slowly trundling down the tiny mud pathway in the Greens. Such rigs were about as frequent as a yellow striper here—and the sight of it made her uneasy.
Now what?
She watched with growing dread as the carriage approached. Anxious, she pulled off one glove with her teeth and touched a bare palm to the rooftop. It told her of rain, mold, and piles and piles of bird shit, but nothing more—it seemed they were alone up here.
The carriage finally stopped a few buildings down. The door opened, and a man climbed out. He was tall and thin, and not dressed ostentatiously. His posture was stooped—perhaps a man used to sitting, to indoors work. It was hard to see his face in the shifting lights of the floating lanterns, but he had curly locks that looked somewhat reddish.
And clean. Clean hair, clean skin. That gave it away.
He’s campo, she thought. Got to be.
One of the soldiers ran up to the campo man and started talking. The campo man listened and nodded.
And he’s the man running the show. Which meant he was probably the one who’d arranged the trap that had almost gotten her killed.
She narrowed her eyes at him. Who are you, you son of a bitch? Which house do you work for? But she could glean nothing more about him.
The campo man gestured at a rookery building to the left of the clothier’s warehouse—which Sancia didn’t like. But then he did something odd: he peered at the buildings around him, then reached into his pocket and took out something…gold.
She leaned forward slightly, straining to see. It looked like a round, golden device of some kind—like a big, awkward pocket watch, perhaps, slightly larger than his hand.
A tool made of gold, she thought. Like…Clef?
The campo man examined the gold pocket watch, and frowned. He kept looking at the tool, then up and around, and then back at the tool.
<Clef—can you see what that is?> asked Sancia.