Corroded

Difficult to avoid it. A young girl seeking to become a collector, a man’s profession at the very least and an unforgiving one at the worst.

I’d learned quite a bit on my first official bounty, and subsequent collections had only refined me. That I was alive still was not entirely a matter of skill.

“Use your eyes, girl,” I told her, grasping a ledge and leveraging myself over the top. My hands ached with the effort. “Does it appear as if the Black Fish Ferryman give a toss what your they suggests?”

She was quiet for a long moment, following behind me with slightly more racket in every footstep. Creaking leather, shuffling boots and the occasional loud breath as she pushed herself harder than I expect she thought she might have to.

Was I ever this naive?

I had to think so. No wonder Hawke’s first inclination had been to dismiss me, those five long years ago.

We walked in silence for some few minutes, my gaze sharp on the shrouded rooftops around us just in case the Ferrymen had roped a bantling into playing the spy for them. Then, thoughtfully, I asked, “Why are you with the Menagerie, Maddie Ruth?”

I could all but hear her shoulders move, emphasized by the squeak of still-stiff leather. “The work is steady.”

“What work?”

“I keep the clockwork running, make sure all the circus mechanisms are in good order, and when there’s the occasional tumble from the high places, I know enough common medicine to help.” She listed them off as if she were highlighting her own references, and I bit off a smile before I succumbed to it. “Beside all that,” she added, “Mr. Hawke took my pa in when no one else was willing. Seemed only right to stay when pa finally died of his ague.”

A sobering thought. On the one hand, that the Veil allowed a stray girl and her sick father to stay painted a rather optimistic picture of the faceless voice threatening to turn me over to the flesh tables. On the other, Maddie Ruth had no apparent family to keep her off them.

“What took your pa?” I asked her.

“The bliss.”

Not an uncommon issue, for them who did not handle the opium well. I said nothing to that, and heard no warning. As I said: arrogance.

I meant to ask if she was treated well—and heaven help me if she’d said no, for I had no plans in place to remedy that—when a cacophony of shouting erupted somewhere below.

I shushed her with a hiss, hurrying across the narrow tenement casing. Nimble, keeping my body ducked low, I leapt the small divide and left her to make her way over at a slower pace as I dropped to my stomach and crawled to the far edge.

What I saw in the thinner fog almost forced me to laugh out loud; a shift of amusement that abruptly turned grim as Maddie Ruth fell to her knees beside me.

“What is it?”

“A puzzle,” I said, not truly an answer, but I hadn’t worked it out yet, myself.

Men brawled in the street below, large and small, thin and wide. Black skin, pale skin, young and old. I saw perhaps half a dozen faces I wasn’t certain I recognized, and a little over a dozen more fighting them. I watched a large man pin down a lanky youth and drive a fist like a brick into his jaw, delivering a facer that would crunch bone. Two more chased a squat man whose bare-armed tattoos were already abraded and bleeding—likely a tumble to the rough cobbles.

There was no charm, no grace to the event. This was no gentlemen’s game of fisticuffs. Them what would stagger away would do so bleeding.

The hollering I’d heard came not just from this scrap in the middle of the street—empty, I suddenly realized, with carts left abandoned and doors closed along the way—but from the surrounding lanes and crossroads.

We’d stumbled upon a patch brawl. But why on earth was I looking at Brick Street Bakers in Ratcliffe?

More, if they were here, where was Ishmael Communion? I found it impossible to imagine the Bakers would move into another district so openly without Ishmael’s knowing. The man was not only a prominent member of the crew, but he was built like one of the Queen’s own warships—large, bulky and packing a fierce wallop.

The fact that he was among the finest rum dubbers of the black art—that is, a master lockpick, whose skill could be considered an art—often made him a useful ally.

I regarded the man as a friend. If he was here, he could help me smuggle my unwelcome companion out of this nonsense.

“Let us go,” I whispered, and rolled from sight.

The trouble with Cat’s Crossing—once one eased past the difficult footing, the often treacherous upkeep and the likelihood of carriers to report on one’s movements—was the getting down. To the unwary, reaching the street below was often a matter of misplaced footing.

Reaching the street alive took some finer care.

As I searched for a way down, Maddie Ruth found a bare bit of stone to squat upon and hugged her knees. The cacophony of fighting men surrounded us, drifting up like echoes of some ghostly battle.

“Why are they fighting?” she asked me.

“I haven’t the foggiest.”

“But this isn’t Baker land.”

“T’isn’t Ferrymen, either,” I pointed out, peering into a narrow alley in search of those subtle accents often put in place by Cat’s Crossing particulars. Things that seemed so normal were often anything but. Such as the wash line, which very likely hadn’t seen wash in ages.

Nothing here, save the alley walls themselves. I could creep down them easy. Maddie Ruth would not.

I passed it by, reaching the other side of the rooftop and looking down into a wider lane.

I spied two kinchins huddled back to back behind a stacked bit of barrel, and not far, three men standing at loose ends. Of the three, only one had the broad shoulders of a man large enough to playact the role of a sky ship, and I grinned before I caught myself. I popped off three sharp whistles that bounced in the fog-damp lane.

The two other blokes turned first, but when Ishmael Communion moved, it was akin to the rolling of a mountain. He looked up, the shrewd man, and picked me out right quick from the casement hanging.

“Girl,” was his welcome rumble, “this is not the place.”

Ishmael was not a man easily missed, with skin black as tar and eyes nearly as dark. The whites of them were tinged yellow, as if permanently colored by the peasouper he lived in. His face was comprised of wide, flat features, thick lips and a broad, pugnacious nose that easily marked him as a bruiser.

A pick-lock and case cracker though he might be, there was little doubt that Communion would excel at arranging an opponent’s features in heretofore undiscovered ways. Those who failed to heed the warning learned it on the end of roughened, scarred knuckles.

Though he may have a face only his late mother could love, his voice was exceedingly deep, and his rather excellent grasp of the Queen’s English gave him a certain complexity unexpected from a rum dubber.

That he called me “girl” was not a slight. Like many in the streets below, he had no name for me, and had settled upon the moniker with simple acceptance. I’d never heard sting nor scorn within it, so I let it be.

I grimaced. “Don’t I just know it?”

“Who’s that, then?” demanded a tall, athletically shaped man beside Ishmael. Unlike the latter’s overalls and patched fustian coat, the man wore the common togs of a dock laborer, and his hat was left crookedly atop golden hair slicked back by sweat or damp. He glowered at me as if I were the intruder and not them, which I returned with raised eyebrows.

“Collector,” Ishmael rumbled, and left it—and his mates—there. He reached the bottom of the wall, so tall that were he to reach up with both hands, I wagered I could hang from the ledge and step on his palms.

“What, a girl?”

“The girl,” whispered the third bloke, who was a sight younger but whose nose bore the distinctive scarring of a knife’s edge. No prize already, the scar left him looking angry and mean. But his smile, when he flipped it at me, seemed easy enough. “The only cross patch in the lot. Cor. Didn’t know you was