Sancia sat huddled in the passenger seat, gripping her wrist where she’d hidden Clef. She stayed quiet. Her skull was pounding terribly, and she had no idea what in hell was going on. For all she knew this girl was the queen of Tevanne, and could have her head lopped off with but a word.
She tugged at the bond on her ankle. It held fast, of course. She’d considered using Clef to undo it during the fight—but that would have tipped off the captain to the fact that she possessed something that could break scrived locks, so she’d refrained. She bitterly regretted the choice now.
Gregor sat in the cockpit with the girl, wrapping up his injured arm. He peered up at the rooftops outside. “You saw them?” he asked. “The flying men?”
“I saw them,” said the girl. Her voice was oddly calm.
“They have spies everywhere,” he said. “Eyes everywhere.” Then he sat up. “Did…Did you check this carriage? They put this thing on mine, this scrived button so they could follow me! You should pull over, now, and we should—”
“That won’t be necessary, Captain,” she said.
“I am deadly serious, Miss Berenice!” said Gregor. “We should pull over now and look over every inch of this carriage!”
“That is not necessary, Captain,” she said again. “Please calm down.”
Gregor slowly turned to look at her. “Why?”
She said nothing.
“How…How did you happen upon us, anyway?” he asked, suspicious.
Silence.
“They weren’t the ones who put that button on my carriage at all, were they?” he asked. “It was you. You put it there.”
She glanced at him as she piloted the carriage through the Dandolo southern gates. “Yes,” she said reluctantly.
“Orso sent you to follow me,” he said. “As I went to catch the thief.”
The girl took a long breath in, and let it out. “It has been,” she said with a touch of fatigue, “a very eventful evening.”
Sancia listened closely. She still didn’t understand what the hell they were talking about, but now it seemed to involve her. That was bad.
She considered her options. <Goddamn it, Clef, wake up!> she said. But Clef was silent. If he was awake, she could pop the bond off her ankle and jump out of the carriage the first chance she got. She supposed she could dart Dandolo, or both of them, and steal the key to the bond. But she’d been in an out-of-control carriage once tonight, and had no desire to repeat the experience. And either way, both options left her abandoned on the Dandolo campo—and without Clef, her life there wasn’t worth a copper duvot.
So she stayed put, and waited. An opportunity would present itself eventually. Provided they all stayed alive.
“So it was Orso’s box,” he said, triumphant. “Wasn’t it? I was right! He had you ship it into my waterfront, under your name, didn’t he? And he…” He stopped. “Wait. So if you put the scrived button on my carriage instead of our attackers…how did our attackers find us at all?”
“That’s simple,” said the girl. “They found you because they were following me.”
He stared at her. “You, Miss Berenice? What makes you say that?”
She pointed up. Gregor and Sancia slowly looked up at the ceiling. “Oh,” said Gregor quietly.
The roof of the carriage sported three large, ragged holes, and one bolt point was lodged in it as well. “I assume you wondered why two of them split off from the main attack force,” said Berenice. “They chased me for a block or so, but left when they heard the screaming.” She glanced backward at Sancia. “There was a lot of screaming, it seemed.”
“What makes you so sure they were following you?” said Gregor.
“They certainly knew which carriage to shoot at,” said Berenice.
“I see. But how did they know to follow you to begin with? Certainly they couldn’t have followed you all the way from the inner Dandolo enclaves.”
“I’m not sure yet,” said Berenice. “But this was planned. They intended to kill all of us at once, I suspect. Everyone involved…” She trailed off.
“Involved with me,” said Sancia quietly. “With the box.”
“Yes.”
“Everyone involved…” said Gregor. “Orso’s back at the campo?”
“Yes,” said the girl. “So he should be safe.”
Gregor peered out the window. “But if you go high enough over a campo wall,” he said, “you don’t trigger any of its warding scrivings—do you?” He looked back at Sancia. “That’s what you did at the waterfront, correct?”
She shrugged. “Basically?”
He looked at Berenice. “So if you have a rig that can allow you to fly, you can sail right over all the campo walls—and no one would ever know you’d done it.”
“Damn,” Berenice said quietly. She pressed the accelerating lever farther forward. The carriage sped up. Then she cleared her throat. “You back there,” she said.
“Me?” said Sancia.
“Yes. There’s a bag at your feet. Inside is a strip of metal with two tabs at the ends. Let me know when you find it.”
Sancia rummaged around in the satchel in the passenger seat. She found the strip of metal quickly, and recognized a few of the sigils on the back.
“Got it,” she said. “It’s twinned, isn’t it?”
“It is,” said Berenice.
“How’d you know that?” asked Gregor.
“I, uh, used a scriving like this to blow up your waterfront,” said Sancia.
Gregor scowled and shook his head.
“I need you to tear off both tabs,” said the girl. “And then I need you to scratch a word on the back of it—not the side with the scrivings, that’ll ruin the rig.”
Sancia tore the tabs off. “Scratch something in it? With, like, a knife?”
“Yes,” said Berenice.
Gregor handed Sancia his stiletto. “What word?” he asked.
“Run.”
* * *
Alone in his workshop, Orso Ignacio reviewed the ledger page he’d hidden among his scriving materials.
He’d concealed it quite cleverly, he thought. Much like his door, he’d scrived the book to sense his blood, so that only he (or someone with a lot of his blood) could read it. The instant he touched a hand to the covers, a slot in the spine opened up, and he could slip out the page hidden inside.
A page that was covered with figures. Extremely bad figures, he now thought as he reviewed it. Amounts he’d pilfered from this department or that department, jobs and tasks that had been paid for but did not really exist. Discovering any one of these figures would lead to serious charges. But discovering all of them…
I got stupid, he thought, sighing. The idea of that key was too good. And now…
Then there was a tinny ping! noise from his desk.
He sat up, dug through the papers, and found the twinned plate.
One tab had popped off. He stared at it. That means Dandolo has found the thief.
He watched the plate closely. Then, to his dismay, there was another ping! The second tab popped off.
“Oh shit,” he moaned. “Oh God.” This meant that Dandolo had the thief—and the thief had the key.
Which meant he was going to have to start calling in favors. Favors he desperately did not wish to call in.
But before he could move, something strange happened.
The plate twitched. He turned it over, and saw that something was happening to the back.
Someone was writing there, gouging letters deep into the metal, and it was not Berenice’s clear, perfect script. This was harsh and jagged, and it spelled out one word.
“Run?” said Orso, perplexed. He scratched his head. Why would Berenice message him to run?
He looked around his workshop, and he didn’t see anything he needed to run from. There were his definition tomes, his scriving blocks, his test lexicon, and the open window on the far wall…
He paused.
He didn’t remember opening the window.
There was a creak from somewhere in his workshop. It was something akin to the creak of a floorboard as you walk across the room—but this did not come from the floor. It came from the ceiling.
Orso slowly looked up.
A man was crouched on his ceiling, in full defiance of gravity, dressed in black, wearing a black cloth mask.
Orso’s mouth dropped open. “What in he—”
The man fell on him, knocking Orso to the floor.
Cursing, Orso struggled to get up. As he did, the man calmly walked over to Orso’s desk, snatched up his page of secret accounts, walked back, and kicked Orso in the stomach. Hard.
Orso collapsed again, coughing. Then his attacker slipped a loop over his head, and pulled it tight around his neck. He gagged and his eyes watered. The man hauled him to his feet, the cord cutting into his windpipe, and whispered in his ear, “Now, now, poppy. Don’t struggle too much, eh?” He jerked the cord back, and Orso nearly blacked out. “Just come along, then. Come along!”