'All of my calls are social calls, Jacob.'
'Then you're here on business.' I stood up. Angela was the kind of girl who made society her business. Society and trying to run the city, whatever the cost. The clipboard man retreated to the corner of the room. He could be snide about famous people, but he knew to get out of the way when the players started to play. 'What business could you and I possibly have?'
'Let's at least pretend to follow the niceties, shall we?' she said. Her voice was like air emptying through a wet valve. 'How have you been? Keeping busy?'
'I've been great, Ange. Poor, kicked out, in a lot of fights and forgotten about. But great.' I smiled my happiest smile. 'Mostly I haven't been dead, Lady Tomb. How about you?'
She stiffened, if that was possible for a woman who was mostly metal and the memory of flesh.
'You can be clever if you like, Jacob. But there's no need to be rude.'
'You shot me,' I answered.
'You threw me off a balcony,' she countered.
'You fell off a balcony. I just happened to be there. Either way, I seem to have come out ahead in that deal.'
She raised her eyebrows, accompanied by a symphony of twitching from the spiders that lined her back. 'I suppose you did. Though I think we'll have to wait for the final account to be settled before we compare scores. Have we given up on being polite, then?'
'I have to be honest, Angela. I never put a great deal of effort into it.'
'No. I suppose not.' She pulled off the long silk gloves that she had been wearing and draped them over her arm. Her hands were extraordinarily thin, and held together by narrow splints of some glossy black material that shimmered whenever she flexed her fingers. 'I don't suppose either of us really did.'
She looked tired. Hard to see the girl I used to know in this contraption, the girl I grew up with, went to balls and summer estates with. But she was still in there, wrapped in brass and some ugly history. Most of our social circle spun apart on reaching adulthood. We were no different.
'What do you want, Angela?' I asked, quietly. She looked at me with her tired eyes, then snapped out of it. Pulled the gloves back on and straightened her back.
'You keep turning up in interesting places, Jacob. I'll admit, after our last little trouble, I was pleased that the Council was able to make a fool of you. That no one believed your side of the story. You disappeared into the city, and I was hoping that was the last of you.' She dragged her eyes away, seeming to notice the clipboard man for the first time. When she looked back at me, there was none of the little girl in her face. 'For a while I even thought you might have left the city.'
'I thought about it. But what would I do downfalls? I'm not a farmer.'
'No. Not much of a frontiersman, are you?' She cocked her head at me. 'It'll always be the city for you. But I had my hopes. Anyway. Then you started showing up, you and that bug.'
'Wilson. His name is Wilson.'
'I don't care what his name is, Jacob.' Back to Angela the nightmare, now. Angela the Tomb. 'You and your friend started making an appearance in certain reports that I get. And then you made a new friend.' She spread her hands wide. 'And now we're here.'
'Ezekiel Crane,' I said, nodding. 'Though I wouldn't call him a friend.'
'Is that his name? Because he's someone whose name I do care about.'
'Tall, thin guy, glasses?' I made an unfolding motion. 'I mean, really tall.'
'We've never met. To me, he's more a presence in the data than he is a person. It became clear about six months ago that someone else was moving levers around in the city. I've been looking for him ever since.'
'Well, you just missed him. That house you were at, just before the factory fire? He was there this morning.' I thought of the beetle-swarmed corpse, that voice. 'Or some part of him, at least.'
'House?' Head cocked again.
'I assume that was you, with the Badge. Down in Nettingway, by the bar where the iron girl found us. You know all about that chase, right, and the Badge cornering us in the factory? How she burned it down, and I got picked up.' I spread my hands in careful mimic of her action. 'And now we're here.'
Nothing for several heartbeats, her face and body carefully neutral. Finally she offered me her arm, like we were at a ball.
'You say the most fascinating things, Jacob Burn. We're going to have to talk this through, you and I.'
I took her arm with a bow. Halfway to the door, the clipboard man cleared his throat. This surprised me.
'There is the matter of the charges against his lordship, ma'am. We have a list here…'
'Kindly forward the citations to the Council, officer. Or just forget about them. I don't really care. Whichever is easier for you,' she said, giving the man the briefest of nods. 'And see that Mr. Burn's possessions are sent to him. Especially his revolver. I feel that the gentleman will have need of his revolver.'
'He wasn't armed, ma'am,' he said. Angela turned to me, her eyebrows arched.
'Jacob. That is so unlike you. It's as if I didn't know you at all.'
'Believe me,' I said, thinking of the iron girl's party trick hands, and the scattered bits of my weapon clattering off the floor. 'It wasn't intentional.'
'Well. I'm sure that's something we can correct.'
And with that we swept out of the room, and on into the street. Arm in arm. Just like we were children again, and not at all like we actually were.
Chapter Seven
Her carriage was waiting for us in the street outside. I saw good old Matthew on my way to the door, sitting stiffly behind a desk. He watched us go with a look of complete calm on his face, but his fists were clenched on his desk. I tried not to smile.
I felt a lot less like smiling once I was sitting in the carriage, alone with Angela. The interior had been modified to account for the Lady's peculiar form. Most of the compartment was open, with buckles that unceremoniously secured the bulk of the formal engine to the floor. What little space remained was given over to a padded bench. Once we were all as comfortable as we were going to get, Angela drew the curtains and then closed her eyes. The carriage lurched forward. I hung on to the bench and watched the Lady Tomb. She showed no interest in conversation, so I let my mind wander.
There were some cracks in my usual cheery, optimistic demeanor. Starting off with a morning swim among the dead had done little for my happiness, but it was the things that happened since that disturbed me the most. I've spent years getting into the kind of trouble you can shoot your way out of, and our friends from the river seemed, at their most basic level, to be that sort of trouble. There were probably more complicated problems behind them, but the straight-forward situation of a horde of living dead monsters crawling out of the river and ransacking the city could be handled with skills that I was very adept at deploying. I wasn't going to lose any sleep over that. Some teeth, maybe. But no sleep.
What bothered me more was what might be behind these attacks, and what various people in the city seemed to know about them. Take our friend Matthew, for example. Nevermind that he thought I was involved in some grand conspiracy. That's just a Badge thing. Ever since the trouble I got into with the Academy and the Algorithm two years ago, it had become a hobby of certain elements within the Badge to blame me for anything that stumped them. So let's just pretend that bias is shining through. The other stuff he said though, about the device and the fire at the docks, that I didn't like. Because of course there had been a device that Crane gave me. I didn't set it off, and it didn't start any fires, but it was a pretty good bet that whatever was in that canister had something to do with the Fehn and their newly discovered love of murder. Matthew said he had been in contact with the people who created that device. If that was true, then I'd give anything to have a conversation of my own with those people. Badge probably had them locked away, or hidden in some safehouse, depending on whether or
