The Merchants’ War

which was an evidently empty ticket office. It’s not the station, she realized, near- hysteria bubbling under.

“Into the waiting room,” she snapped, bringing the revolver out of her pocket. “Move!”

The inspector stared at her dumbly, as if she’d grown a second head, but Erasmus nodded: “Do as she says,” he told the man. The inspector shuffled into the waiting room. Erasmus followed, his movements almost bored, but his right hand never left the man’s shoulder.

“How long ’til they get here?” Miriam demanded.

“I don’t know!” He was nearly in tears. “They just said to make you wait!”

“They,” said Erasmus. “Who would they be?”

“Please don’t kill me!”

The door to the ticket office was ajar. Miriam kicked it open and went through it with her pistol out in front. The office was indeed empty. On the ticket clerk’s desk a message flimsy was waiting. Miriam peered at it in the gloom. DEAR CUZ SIT TIGHT STOP UNCLE A SENDS REGARDS STOP WILL MEET YOU SOONEST SIGNED BRILL.

Well, that settles it. Miriam lowered her gun to point at the floor and headed back to the waiting room.

“—The Polis!” moaned the inspector. “I’ve got three wee ones to feed! Please don’t—”

Shit, meet fan. Even so, it struck her as too big a coincidence to swallow. Maybe the Polis are tapping the wires? That would do it. Brilliana had figured out where she was, which train she was on, and signaled her to wait, not realizing someone else might rise to the bait.

Burgeson’s expression was grim. “Miriam, the door, please.”

“Let’s not do anything too hasty,” she said. “There’s an easy way out of this.”

“Oh please—”

“Shut up, you. What do you have in mind?”

Miriam waved at the ticket office. “He’s not lying about my cousin: she’s on her way. Trouble is, if we bug out before she gets here she’s going to walk into them. So I think we ought to sit tight.” She closed the door anyway, and glanced round, looking for something to bar it with. “I can get us both out of here in an emergency,” she said, a moment of doubt cutting in when she recalled the extreme nausea of her most recent attempts to world-walk.

The first car—more like a steam-powered minivan, Miriam noted—rounded the back of the station and disappeared from sight. Almost two minutes had passed since they reached the station. Miriam slid aside from the windows, while Burgeson did likewise. Boots thudded on the ground outside: the only sounds within the building were the pounding of blood in her ears and the quiet sobbing of the ticket inspector.

“Mr. Burgeson!” The voice behind the bullhorn sounded almost jovial: “And the mysterious Mrs. Fletcher! Or should I say, Beckstein?” He made it sound like an accusation. “Welcome to California! My colleague Inspector Smith has told me all about you both and I thought, why, we really ought to have a little chat. And I thought, why not have it somewhere quiet-like, and intimate, instead of in town where there are lots of flapping ears to take note of what we say?”

Across the room, Burgeson was mouthing something at her. His face was in shadow, making it hard to interpret. The inspector knelt in the middle of the floor, in a square of sunlight, sobbing softly as he rocked from side to side wringing his hands. The appearance of the Polis had quite unmanned him.

“Like this: parlez vous Francoise, Madame Beckstein?”

Miriam felt faint. They think I’m a French spy? Either the heat or the tension or some other strain was plucking her nerves like guitar strings. Somehow Erasmus had fetched up almost as far away as it was possible to get, twelve feet away across open ground overlooked by a window. To get him out of here one or the other of them would need to cross that expanse of empty floor, in front of—

The ticket inspector snapped, flickering from broken passivity to panic in a fraction of a second. He lurched to his feet and ran at the window, screaming, “Don’t hurt me!”

Erasmus brought his right hand up, and Miriam saw the pistol in it. He hesitated for a long moment as the inspector fumbled with the window, throwing it wide and leaning out. “Let me—” he shouted: then a spatter of shots cracked through the glass, and any sense of what he had been trying to say.

The bullhorn blared, unattended, as the inspector’s body slumped through the half-open window and Miriam, seeing her chance, ducked and darted across the room, avoiding the lit spaces on the floor, to fetch up beside Burgeson.

“I think they want you alive,” he said, a death’s-head grin spreading across his gaunt cheekbones. “Can you get yourself out of here?”

“I can get us both out—” She fumbled with the top button of her blouse, hunting for the locket chain.

“After how you were last time?”

Miriam was still looking for a cutting reply when the bullhorn started up again. “If you come out with your hands up we won’t use you for target practice! That’s official, boys, don’t shoot them if they’ve got their hands up! We want to ask you some questions, and then it’s off to the Great Lakes with you if you cooperate. That’s also a promise. What it’s to be is up to you. Full cooperation and your lives! Hurry, folks, this is a bargain, never to be repeated. Because you’re on my manor, and Gentleman Jim Reese prides himself on his hospitality, I’ll give you a minute to think about it before we shoot you. Use it carefully.”

“Were you serious about waiting around for your friends?” Burgeson asked ironically. “Is a minute long enough?”

“But—” Miriam took a deep breath. “Brace yourself.” She put her arms around Erasmus, hugging him closely. His breath on her cheek smelled faintly stale. “Hang on.” She dug her heels into the floor and lifted, staring over his shoulder into the enigmatic depths of the open locket she had wrapped around her left wrist. The knot writhed like chain lightning, sucking her vision into its contortions—then it spat her out. She gasped involuntarily, her head pulsing with a terrible, sudden tension. She focused again, and her stomach clenched. Then she was dizzy, unsure where she was. I’m standing up, she realized. That’s funny. Her feet weren’t taking her weight. There was something propping her up. A shoulder. Erasmus’s shoulder. “Hey, it didn’t—”

She let go of him and slumped, doubling over at his feet as her stomach clenched painfully. “I know,” he said sadly, above her. “You’re having difficulty, aren’t you?”

The bullhorn: “Thirty seconds! Make ’em count!”

“Do you think you can escape on your own?” Burgeson asked.

“Don’t—know.” The nausea and the migraine were blocking out her vision, making thought impossible. “N- not.”

“Then I see no alternative to—” Erasmus laid one hand on the doorknob “—this.”

Miriam tried to roll over as he yanked, hard, raising the pistol in his right hand and ducking low. He squeezed off a shot just as Gentleman Jim, or one of his brute squad, opened fire: clearly the Polis did things differently here. Then there was a staccato burst of fire and Erasmus flopped over, like a discarded hand puppet.

Miriam screamed. A ghastly sense of deja vu tugged at her: Erasmus, what have you done? She rose to her knees and began to raise her gun, black despairing fury tugging her forward.

There was another burp of fire, ominously rapid and regular, like a modern automatic weapon. That’s funny, she thought vacantly, tensing in anticipation. She managed to unkink her left hand, but even a brief glance at the locket told her that it was hopeless. The design swum in her vision like a poisonous toadstool, impossible to stomach.

Erasmus rolled over and squeezed off two more shots methodically. Miriam shook her head incredulously: You can’t do that, you’re dead! Someone screamed hoarsely, continuously, out behind the station. Shouts and curses battered at her ears. The hammering of the machine gun started up again. Someone else screamed, and the sound was cut short. What’s going on? she wondered, almost dazed.

The shots petered out with a final rattle from the machine gun. The silence rang in her ears like a tapped crystal wineglass. Her head ached and her stomach was a hot fist clenched below her ribs. “Erasmus,” she called