The day after the fire at the Society was a blur. We must have made it back to the abandoned building where Laura and her friends had been staying, but I barely remember how. The memory of the basement loomed too large, smudging out everything else around it. I’m fairly sure Laura and I fell asleep instantly, because I distinctly remember waking up entangled in her arms on the hard wood of the first floor common area.
The story of what had happened spread much like the flames, along with the usual quantities of rampant speculation. There was no official news about the cause of the fire, not after only a day, so the most reasonable explanation to anyone who hadn’t been there was that it was just an accident. I don’t think I heard a single person suggesting that all day. A lot of people connected the dots to the story about the wanted Cassandran spy; but, of course, many people doubted that Tersine was a spy at all. It was, admittedly, difficult to believe, and easy to interpret as a corrupt aristocracy scapegoating an innocent professor. The more conspiratorial of the squat’s inhabitants assumed this was insurance fraud, or worse yet a false flag attack to justify a political crackdown.
I hit my limit of that sort of talk before noon, and dragged myself into the furthest, emptiest corner of the house, in order that I wouldn’t have to ride out another wave of heart palpitations and racing thoughts. I don’t know what it was about that night in particular. I’d been in life-or-death fights before, done horrible things that I thought needed to be done, and those memories hadn’t stuck with me nearly as long. Maybe it was the desperate flight through the smoke and heat, or the sense of betrayal when Alonhall had actually been about to let the Society stay, or the sight of Claudia kneeling in the abattoir.
Alonhall and Claudia vanished that morning, during the vague undefined space in my memory where anything could have happened. I hoped that that meant that Alonhall was doing what I’d told her to do, using her wealth and influence to save at least one human life. But there was no way to know. Maybe Claudia was being thrown in a workhouse, or interrogated for everything she knew, or she’d been left on the streets as soon as I wasn’t around to advocate for her any more.
At least Laura was there. I used her touch the way computer science majors use coffee, kissing, groping, grinding to make the pain go away for a little bit. That was another thing I didn’t know: if she knew I needed her, or if she was just horny. On some level it didn’t matter; I didn’t need to know her every thought in order to enjoy getting my hands under her shirt.
I froze, suddenly, forgetting about the warm feeling of her stomach under my palm. Laura noticed me going deer-in-headlights and slowly pulled away, letting my hand out of her clothes. “What’s happening to you?”
“We shouldn’t be wasting time like this.”
She muttered something profane under her breath. “Anna?”
“Yeah, Anna.” I forced myself to sit up and start putting my clothes on. “We kind of failed, didn’t we?”
“You mean, at the lodge last night? Considering we put that whole operation to the torch and got out in one piece, I’d say we succeeded.”
I shook my head. “But the goal wasn’t to fuck them up. The goal was to find out where Dr. Tersine’s lab is, where she’s holding Anna, and they couldn’t tell us a goddamn thing!”
My voice rose to a high point, a shriek echoing off of the walls of the room that made Laura cringe away.
“Let’s go find Unity. We need to figure out what we’re going to do next.”
Unity wasn’t hard to find, which was a nice change of pace. She, Delilah, and a few of Laura’s university friends were sharing some slightly stale bread and possibly-stolen meat, sharing stories about various escapades. Unity was in the middle of a story involving an ex-girlfriend of hers, three cops, and a fancy umbrella, one that had the rest of the room giggling and interrupting her with crude jokes.
“Unity,” I said, placing my hand on her shoulder. “We don’t have time for this. We need to figure out what we’re going to do next. Come on.”
“In the middle-middle of the story? Don’t do this to me, Emma! I was just about to get-get to the good part.”
One of the other women present I suddenly recognized as Tillie, the heavyset student who’d been organizing at the factory protest. She glanced at me, one eyebrow raised, and then to Laura, who was two steps behind me.
“In a rush, eh?”
“A bit, yeah. At least Emma is. We’re in deep shit at the moment, one of our friends is in trouble, and we don’t really know what to do about it.”
“And I’m only hearing about this now?” Tillie said, leaning forward over her table. “And here I thought we were friends.”
“It’s not exactly… look, it’s something really serious. Like, really serious. And we only wanted to get people involved in this if it was someone we thought we could trust.” I jerked on Unity’s shoulder, pulling her to her feet. “Now let’s go. You can finish the story later.”
Laura, though, wasn’t moving. She and Tillie were locked in some kind of nonverbal argument, a contest of wills communicated entirely via subtleties of body language and expression. I realized that I had no idea how long they’d known each other.
Finally, Tillie said, “You can trust me, can’t you? And pretty much everyone living here has to be someone we can trust. One word to the guard about a bunch of students living for free in an abandoned house and we’re gone as graves.”
Laura glanced at me. “She makes a good point. We’ve known each other years. Maybe she can help.”
“I don’t think…” I swallowed as Laura gave me a brief glare. “Maybe you have a point. But we aren’t telling them the whole thing, just the parts that are relevant.”
Laura nodded, then turned to the table. “Right, anybody who doesn’t want to get involved in some bad business, leave now. I won’t be mad.”
One woman got up from the table and shuffled into another room. She looked exhausted, probably something to do with classes, so I was very sympathetic. Everyone else was living somewhere on the spectrum between “grimly prepared” and “creepily excited,” so I started explaining.
“We’ve gotten caught up in a fight with this… smuggler, murderer, whatever you want to call it, she’s a real piece of work. And now she’s got one of our friends and is holding her for ransom. The thing she wants from us is something we can’t in good conscience give, so we’re trying to figure out where her hideout is so we can go in and rescue her. The problem is, we have some clues, but no proper leads.”
“Fuck me,” said one of the others. I feel like her name started with an L, but that’s about all I remember. “My second mother said that sort of thing happened to a friend of hers, before she dragged herself off the streets.”
“Yeah, it’s… It’s not good.”
“What are your leads?” Tillie asked. “You said you have something.”
It took me a few seconds of snapping fingers to remember, to put everything together in my head. “We know she’s on the other side of the river. It’s a big building, big enough to hold a lot of gear, a lot of people, that sort of thing. And not even our best contacts have any clue where she is, so she must have some way of keeping herself really well hidden.”
L-whatever flashed a shit-eating grin, leaned over to Tillie, and said, “Maybe that’s what’s in the factory. City guard’s been defending it for so long that someone just snuck in and set up shop, hah.”
Tillie chuckled. “I’m sure.” Upon seeing my expression, she added, “We were just there, doing the same as usual. So it’s in the mind.”
“Sorry that I couldn’t be there,” said Laura. “Anybody get hurt?”
Tillie shrugged. “Not badly. Stonewose didn’t show up. Some bruises, a broken nose.”
“And some nasty acid burns,” L-name-person said. “Just more proof that something needs to be done, really; the whole damn factory’s leaking something awful.”
She raised her hand, revealing an ugly red mark in the shape of a splash of liquid, with a weird pale discoloration around the edges. It looked vaguely familiar to me, but that was probably just because I’d taken chemistry before. Or at least, that’s what I thought. The moment L-girl showed off the burn, Unity froze.
“Do you-you remember what-what you got that burn from? As in, what it-it looked like?”
L-something nodded.
“Clear slime, right-right? Lets off fumes, makes you light-light-headed?”
And suddenly I remembered it too. Weeks ago, when this had all just started, when I’d run into Falem on a small dock by the riverside. After she’d used the psychic command phrase and left me in the dust, the only sign I’d been able to find of her passing had been a patch of weird goo that hadn’t done anything good to my skin upon contact.
“At the Red Chimney building,” I said. “That was the same stuff that you found there while you were searching through the boxes?”
Unity nodded. “Pretty damn sure. Look-look at the burn. Got that-that pale shit around the edges. Same stuff.”
The room went deathly quiet. I stared at Laura, Laura stared at Tillie, Tillie stared at me, Unity stared at L-whatshername, she stared at Tillie. Half of us were realizing the sheer magnitude of what we’d just stumbled upon, and the other half were just confused as hell.
“I think you might be right,” I said. “I think Ter—fuck it, I think Doctor Tersine is operating out of the abandoned factory.”
“Tersine?” said Tillie. “The electrobiology professor that got accused of being a Cassandran spy?”
I rolled my eyes. “She is a Cassandran spy, or at least she claimed to be. She’s also a murderer and a fanatic, so honestly even if she were working directly for Bluerose I’d still qualify her as a gold medalist in the field of being a despicable human being.”
“How do you know all that? And Laura, how did you get involved in all this?”
Laura grinned. “That’s a seriously long story. The short of it is that Shortcake here got me into it. And when a girl like this is in trouble? You can bet me that I’m in it for the long haul.”
I’m fairly sure I blushed, at least a little bit. “We can talk about the ‘why’s later. Right now, we need to be sure about a few things. How would Tersine have made the factory into her base if the place is watched by the cops all the time?”
“They never go inside,” Tillie said immediately. “They’re just as scared of the toxic chemicals as we are. All she’d have to do is be reasonably quiet and she’d be out of sight.”
“Okay, that explains that. How has she been getting in and out? Maybe if we can figure out how she did it, that can give us an access point of our own.”
There was a brief pause, hesitation while we each all created our own theories. A few ideas were thrown out, then discarded in rapid succession. It was Unity who said, “Remember Nemesis? Under Amrinval? Does-does New Alderburg have much of-of an undercity to it?”
Laura shrugged. “Not much, but a decent amount. It isn’t exactly easy to do that kind of construction here, so close to the river. I could check the University’s maps, though.”
“I think she must have an access tunnel,” Tillie said. “If there was any other way to get past the cordon, we’d have already figured it out. So it must be something she could keep hidden, like a back door.”
“I think we might be onto something with this,” I said. “Thank you, Tillie, thank you so much. We’ve been trying to figure this out for…weeks, so many weeks. When we save our friend, it’ll be entirely thanks to you.”
“Please, no need to thank me,” she said, raising her hand dismissively. “If you can find a way into that factory, I’ll be wanting to come along. Cassandran spy or otherwise, that factory has been spreading suffering around this city for years.
“That’s… yeah, that might be helpful.” I looked around at the little room and realized something. Tillie had her people, the members of her little political club who looked up to her as an organizer; but I had my people too, Unity and Laura, who were looking to me in the same way. “Okay, if we’re going to do this, we can’t just rush in like we did before. We come up with a plan. And when the Blackbird gets here, we might start seriously getting somewhere.”
Alonhall didn’t arrive until nearly midnight. I refused to sleep until she did, leaving me alone in a dark and empty house, pacing back and forth in a state of growing panic about where she could have possibly gone off to. The first sign of her presence was a soft click as she unlocked the front door.
“Alonhall?” I hissed.
“Yes,” she said. “Come out here, I shan’t be stopping long.”
I did as she asked, stepping out into the cold and dark. It was, all things considered, a very pretty night, with an almost-full moon casting its silvery rays upon the cracked cobblestones. Alonhall was in her Blackbird getup, but silhouetted against the dark I could see that she’d added a large pack to the outfit. Something was wrong.
“What’s happening?” I said.
“This is going to be my last night in New Alderburg,” she said. “I leave in the morning.”
“What the fuck? No, you can’t just do that, not right now. We think we’ve figured out where Tersine’s base is, we’re planning how to sneak into it, we need you for this.”
“Do you? It seems to me that you figured out the mystery without my input.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t matter! We still need you. You’re the one who knows how to fight, who knows how to do the stealth infiltration stuff that we are going to need if we want to rescue Anna! And you have the filament engine, in case…”
Falem, and the psychic commands she’d placed inside me, went unsaid. But then, it didn’t need to be. Alonhall sighed, and I was shocked to hear how earnestly weary she sounded.
“I’m glad you think so highly of me,” she said. “Yes, Emma, all of that is true. But there are other things that I can do that nobody else can. As the Blackbird, I have a high degree of political influence back in Grantval. And I need to make use of that, quickly, before things spiral out of control.”
“Like they’re not spiraling out of control already?” I said. “We need your unique skills here. To stop Tersine.”
“I didn’t want to have to scare you…” Alonhall muttered to herself. Then she straightened up, pulled her shoulders back, and let the black shadow of her uniform fall over me. Gone was Joyce Alonhall, the fop; now only the Blackbird was speaking.
“Two members of Parliament have been killed in an arson attack, Emma Farrier. That would be bad enough. But others have survived an arson attack, and they may very well begin telling stories of a small woman with only a stubble of hair and a determination to do what is right that borders on the insane.”
I let out a breath and forgot to inhale again. The Society consisted of the highest members of New Alderburg’s political structure, its most influential citizens. What the fuck had I done?
“If I begin moving now— not tomorrow, or within the week, if I begin putting things into motion immediately—then I may just be able to divert the blame away from you. If I do not, you will face a firestorm that will make a reikverratr look pathetic.”
I took a step back, fighting off a lightheaded terror by sucking in a deep breath and reminding myself that I had faced worse. Reminding myself of what I had destroyed by lighting that fire. “I—Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Pay it no mind,” said the Blackbird, slightly more casual than she had been.
“I’ll let everyone know that you’re leaving, then,” I said.
She nodded. “Thank you. But don’t go just yet; there are a few more things that I must impart upon you yet.”
“Like what?”
“When I forced you to stand down in that basement, I felt more resistance in your mind than I ever had before. If I am forcing you to face Falem without my help, then I want to test you one more time.”
For a moment, I was confused. Alonhall and I hadn’t discussed mental defenses in weeks, so there shouldn’t have been a change. And then I remembered what she had said the first time: I had great potential, but my foundations were a mess. Perhaps because, until recently, I had been in denial about who I was on the most basic level?
“Okay. Let’s do this.”
The Blackbird took a step back, retrieving the filament engine and giving it a few quick presses with her index finger. Then she looked up, and although she was fully concealed behind her mask, I could tell her eyes were on me.
Every muscle in my body contracted, a tight paralysis falling over me, with only the slightest flexibility allowed to me around my chest so that I could continue to breathe. Alonhall didn’t need to speak the challenge; I knew well enough what I was supposed to do. All I had to do was make my own mind stronger than hers, force my body to obey myself, not her commands.
Before, I’d hardly even known where to start. But now, I could feel something different, a steady mental presence distributed across all of my voluntary nerves, giving a single command to hold tight. Now that I could sense my enemy, I fought her, at first throwing my willpower at her, trying to order my body to move. But after a moment I realized that the Blackbird was more powerful than me, that I would have to be more careful. I started where her grip was weakest, around my chest, and focused on the subtle movements of my diaphragm and lungs as they inhaled and exhaled shallow breaths. All I had to do was overpower that one part, and the rest would crumble. My mind was not as strong as hers, but I knew where I was, and this was my body, my mind, under my control.
I took a deep, invigorating breath. The Blackbird’s control melted away as though it had never been there at all. Then I turned my attention elsewhere, to the very tips of my fingers on my left hand. There her control was absolute, the command to hold still having no room for exceptions; but it was still her command, wasn’t it? And if I could break it in one place, why not others? One finger bent, then another, then all four fingers. I’d formed a fist, and a few seconds after that I could roll my wrist.
And then it all fell apart. I only lost focus for a second. It was only natural that it happen eventually, my brain balking at the effort and diverting itself to thinking about what it would be like to fight Falem the same way. And the moment I did, the moment I forgot where I was, it all came slamming right back into place.
After several seconds of utter paralysis, panicking internally at my own failure, the Blackbird’s grip vanished. She swore under her breath, then said, “You’re not ready. Clearly you’ve had some kind of revelation about yourself, I won’t intrude by asking, but it’s not enough.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. This isn’t about me. This is about… it’s about…” She fell off, head going down to her chest. “Emma, dear, I need to give you a warning, but I am afraid that if I do, you’ll be too terrified to keep going.”
“I can’t know that unless you give it to me,” I said with a shrug.
“Very well then. Falem is the single most dangerous being I have ever met, and I am afraid that going up against her—against it—will only lead to your death.”
“Didn’t you fight her?” I said. “At the Red Chimney building, you dueled her, one on one.”
“Yes, Emma, and that is exactly how I know the sheer scale of the threat she is. I was fighting it, but Falem was not fighting me. She was stalling, and doing so took hardly any effort on her part. If she had wished to kill me, I am almost certain that she could have done so.”
It sounded absurd. But there was no insincerity in her voice, only a quiet awe at something that she couldn’t fully comprehend. Scared the hell out of me.
“Okay. I’ll stay away from her, as much as I can,” I said. “Is that everything, then? Do you need to go?”
The Blackbird nodded, then backed away. I stayed where I was, watching her go; which was probably what made her stop after three steps. “There was just one more thing, actually,” she said. “Claudia wanted to thank you for saving her life.”
I nodded in acknowledgement. If Claudia were there, maybe, I could have said something. But the truth was I was never going to see Claudia again; I would exit her life as suddenly as I entered it. Just as suddenly, Joyce Alonhall vanished into the night.
I wonder if Emma can rig something up to short circuit Falem