The sparrow islands, a tight grid of narrow alleys between warehouses and seedy factory dwellings, where any half-wit could lose himself, even with a pack of bloodhounds on his tail. There were no gas lamps on those streets.
That will do.
I ran and jumped, rolled and ran again, then slid the length of a downspout and was across the road before the man with the crowbar knew I was there. I bolted down the side of the deserted fish market and scaled the iron rungs set into the back wall. In seconds, I was across the roof and clambering out over the scaffolding of the theater.
Fevel was still coming, but I had pulled away from him during that last transition. If I could make it over the pub’s fire escape before he had me in sight, I was home free.
Well, not home free, but not dead or dragged back to Morlak, which amounted to the same thing.
My heart was thumping with the exertion of the chase, but I was in my element up here, scrambling, swinging, gripping, and hoisting over iron and brick and stone. And though a mistake might send me to my death, I felt strangely composed, far more than I would have been on the ground. My conscious mind was silent now as other parts of me—arms and legs, fingers and the toes in my boots—took over. I focused on each step, each handhold, each shift of weight, so that the whole escape felt choreographed.
Just the leap from the fire escape to the painted iron girders of the railway bridge to go.
If challenged to attempt it any other night, I might have hesitated. Fatally.
Not tonight.
I touched the two-headed coin around my neck, then broke into a sprint along the gantry of the staircase. At the end, I planted my hands on the rail and vaulted into nothing, turning slowly in space so that for a moment I looked bound to land in a bloody heap in the street, and then I was grasping the metal of the bridge and swinging gracefully up.
I knew before I dropped into the sparrow islands that I had shed my pursuers.
Which is why it was doubly alarming to round the corner, smiling to myself, only to have two white men step out of the shadows before I had even seen them. I feinted right, but one of them deftly seized my wrist, twisted it up between my shoulder blades, and pinned me face forward against the wall.
“Miss Sutonga,” said the other in Feldish, the man in the linen suit who had been watching me earlier. “What an exciting life you lead! We’d be obliged, however,” he added with polite formality, “if you abandoned your plans for the rest of the evening and came with us.”
CHAPTER
7
THE MAN IN THE linen suit blew a shrill whistle, and moments later a black carriage appeared, driven by a man in a top hat. He did not look at me or the two men as they bundled me inside.
They were both big men, but they moved with studied efficiency. One of them—the one in the linen suit—had a long pistol with a flared barrel, the other a slender but heavy-looking truncheon, though neither had felt the need to brandish their weapons when apprehending me. They did not wear uniforms or any kind of insignia, but they were not Morlak’s men.
“There, now,” said the one with the pistol once the carriage rolled off. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” He smiled, but his eyes held mine with a chill frankness that kept me in place better than his comrade’s vise grip on my arm.
While I had been oddly composed when running from the gang on the rooftops, these two, with their quiet professionalism, scared me. What would happen next, who they were, or what they wanted with me, I had no idea.
My eyes flashed to the door handle.
The man with the revolver inclined his head. In a voice as impassive as his face, he said, “Let’s not make things more difficult than they need to be, shall we, Miss Sutonga?”
“How do you know my name?” I asked as the carriage slowed, then turned and resumed its former rattling pace.
“All that will become clear,” said the man evenly.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Neither man responded, watching me now as if I had not spoken at all. I had no choice but to sit and wait.
I wasn’t sure how long we drove. Ten minutes? Twenty? Once a woman laughed—a high keening that sounded like a shout of pain until the end—and once I thought I heard the driver talking as the carriage stopped, but none of it gave me a sense of where we were. I used my free hand to release my hair and tipped my head forward so that it fell about my face like a veil.
When we finally stopped, the one with the truncheon produced from his pocket a black velvet bag with a drawstring. “Put this on, please,” he said, tossing it to me.
I looked at it, feeling stupid and afraid. “Put it on?” I echoed.
“Over your head,” said the man with the truncheon. “It’s a blindfold.”
I hesitated, suddenly so frightened that I could barely move.
“Put it on,” said the man, his voice still low and uninflected. “Or we will put it on for you.” He said it matter-of-factly. If there was any emotion beneath the words it was boredom, and somehow this scared me more than if he had threatened.