The Trade of Queens

on some of the high brick walls: the stern-jawed face of a balding, white-haired man. CITIZEN BURROUGHS SAYS: WE WORK FOR FREEDOM! Miriam hunched her shoulders against an imperceptible chill, pushing back against the bench seat. Erasmus had spoken glowingly of Citizen Burroughs. She found herself wishing fervently for him to be right, despite her better judgment.

Miriam covered the last hundred yards, from the deceptive safety of the car to the door of Burgeson’s tenement building, feeling naked despite the contents of her bag and the presence of her backup team. It was odd: She couldn’t see any bodyguards or observers, but just knowing Erasmus wouldn’t be able to travel alone left her feeling watched. This time, however, she had a key. After turning it in the lock, she hastily closed the door behind her and climbed the stairwell Burgeson’s apartment shared with half a dozen other dwellings.

His front door was locked. Miriam examined it carefully—it had become a habit, a kind of neurotic tic she’d picked up in the year-plus since she’d discovered her distinctly paranoid heritage—then opened it. The flat was much as it had been on her last visit; dustier, if anything, sheets covering most of the furniture. Erasmus wasn’t here yet. For no reason she cared to examine too closely, Miriam walked from room to room, carefully opening doors and looking within. The bedroom: dominated by a sheeted bed, walled with bookcases, a fireplace still unraked with spring’s white ash caked and crumbling behind the grate. A former closet, a crude bolt added inside the door to afford a moment’s privacy to those who might use the flushing toilet. The kitchen was big and empty, a tin bath sitting in one corner next to the cold coal-fired cooking range. There wasn’t much here to hang a personality on, aside from the books: Burgeson kept his most valued possessions inside his head. The flat was a large one by local standards—family-sized, suitable for a prosperous shopkeeper and his wife and offspring. He must have rattled around in it like a solitary pea in a pod. Odd, she thought. But then, he was married. Before the last clampdown. The lack of personal touches … How badly did it damage him? She shivered, then went back to the living room, which with its battered piano and beaten-up furniture gave at least a semblance of domestic clutter.

It was distinctly unsettling to her to realize how much she didn’t know. Before, when she’d been an unwilling visitor in the Gruinmarkt and an adventurer exploring this strange other-Boston in New Britain, she’d not looked too deep beneath surface appearances. But now—now she was probably going to end her days living in this nation on the other side of time—and the thought of how little she knew about the people around her troubled her.

Who are you dealing with and how do you know whether you can trust them? It seemed to be the defining paradox of her life for the past year or so. They said that blood was thicker than water, but in her experience her relatives were most likely to define themselves as enemies; meanwhile, some who were clearly supposed to be her enemies weren’t. Mike Fleming should have shanghaied her to an interrogation cell; instead, he’d warned her off. Erasmus—she’d originally trusted him as far as she could throw him; now here she was, waiting for him anxiously in an empty apartment. And she’d wanted to trust Roland, but he’d been badly, possibly irreparably, broken. She sniffed, wrinkling her nose, eyes itching—whether from a momentary twist of sorrow or a whiff of dust rising from the sofa, she couldn’t say.

The street door banged, the sound reverberating distantly up the stairwell. Miriam stood, moving her hand to the top of her handbag, just in case. She heard footsteps, the front door opening, familiar sounds—Burgeson breathed heavily, moved just so—and she stood up, just in time to meet him in the living-room doorway.

“You came,” she said, slightly awkwardly.

“You called.” He looked at her, head tilted sidelong. “I could hardly ignore you and maintain that cover story?”

“Yes, well—” She caught her lower lip between her teeth: What will the neighbors say? “The commissioner is visiting his mistress again”?—“I couldn’t exactly come and fetch you, could I? Hey, get your breath back. Do you have time to stay?”

“I can spare a few hours.” He walked past her and dragged a dust sheet off the battered sofa. “I really need to sell up. I’m needed in the capital almost all the time; can’t stay here, can’t run the shop from two hundred miles away.” He sounded almost amused. “Can I interest you in a sherry?”

“You can.” The thought of Erasmus moving out, moving away, disturbed her unaccountably. As he rummaged around the sideboard, she sat down again. “A sherry would be nice. But I didn’t rattle your cage just for a drink.”

“I didn’t imagine you would.” He found a bottle, splashed generous measures into two mismatched wineglasses, and brought one over to her. He seemed to be in high spirits, or at least energized. “Your health?” He sat down beside her and she raised her glass to bump against his. “Now, what motivated you to bring me to town?”

They were sitting knee-to-knee. It was distracting. “I had a visitor yesterday,” she said carefully. “One of the, the other family. The Lees. He had some disturbing news that I thought you needed to know about.”

“Could you have wired it?” He smiled to take the sting out of the question.

“I don’t think so. Um. Do you know a Commissioner Reynolds? In Internal Security?” Nothing in his facial expression changed, but the set of his shoulders told her all she needed to know. “James Lee came to me because, uh, he’s very concerned that his uncle, the Lee family’s elder, is cutting a deal with Reynolds.”

Now Burgeson’s expression changed: He was visibly struggling for calm. He placed a hand on her knee. “Please, do carry on.”

Miriam tried to gather her thoughts, scattered by the unexpected contact. “The Lees have had a defector, a renegade from our people. One with a price on his head, Dr. ven Hjalmar. Ven Hjalmar has stolen a list of—look, this is going to take a long time to explain, just take it from me, it’s bad. If the Lees can get the breeding program database out of him, they can potentially give Reynolds a couple of thousand young world-walkers within the next twenty years. There are only about a hundred of them right now. I don’t like the sound of Reynolds, he’s the successor to the old Polis, isn’t he?”

“Yes.” Burgeson took a deep breath. “It’s a very good thing you didn’t wire me. Damn.” He took another breath, visibly rattled. “How much do the Lees know? About your people?”

“Too much for comfort.” Despite the summer humidity, Miriam shivered. “More to the point, ven Hjalmar is a murderous bastard who picked the losing side in an internal fight. I told you about what happened to, to me before I escaped—”

“He’s the doctor you mentioned. Yes?” She felt him go tense.

“Yes.”

“Well, that tells me all I need to know just now. You say he’s met Stephen Reynolds?”

“That’s what James Lee says. Listen, I’m not a reliable source; I don’t usually bear grudges but if I run into the doctor again … and then there’s the question of whether James was telling the—”

“Did he have any obvious reason to lie to you?” Burgeson looked her in the eye. “Or to betray confidences?”

Miriam took a sip from her glass. Now Erasmus knew, she felt unaccountably free. “I met him while I was being held prisoner. He was a hostage against his parents’ behavior after the truce—yes, that’s how the noble families in the Gruinmarkt do business. He helped me get away. I think he’s hoping I can save his people from what he sees as a big mistake.”

“Yes, well.” He took his hand away: She felt a momentary flash of disappointment. “I’m sorry. He was right to be afraid. Reynolds is not someone I would want to put any great faith in. Do you know what the Lee elders have in mind?”

“Spying. People who can vanish from one place and reappear in another.” Miriam shrugged. “They don’t have access to the United States, at least not yet, not without the doctor—they don’t have the technology transfer capability I can give you, and they don’t have the numbers yet. But they do have a track record as invisible assassins.” She shivered and put the glass down on the floor. “How afraid should I be?”

“Very.” He took her hand as she straightened up, leaning close; his expression was foreboding. “He’s having me followed, you know.”

“What, he—”

“Listen.” He leaned closer, pitching his voice low: “I’ve met men like Reynolds before. As long as he thinks I’m in town to see my mistress he’ll be happy—he thinks he’s got a hand on my neck. But you’re right, he’s dangerous, he’s an empire-builder. He’s got a power base in Justice and Prisons and he’s purging his own