My first visit to this house left me nervous. I came out with the impression of a house full of dark rooms, rooms that may be full of silent people or completely empty. It was a house of strange noises and unsettling quiet. That had changed, but not in a good way. Walking through the house now, I felt like I was sitting in a room with a dead man. No sound, and all the more maddening for the quiet.
There wasn't much to the first floor. The doors off the hallway were empty. There wasn't even dust to disturb. Crane was the tidy sort of criminal. Other than the staged items in the foyer, the hallway and the fireplace room, there was not one scrap of personal detritus. The whole first floor could have been deserted when we held our meeting with Crane. I began to think the whole thing was a set up, until we found the stairs and went up. Things were different upstairs.
It didn't seem like the same house. Everything was painted white, walls to ceiling; even the floor had been drenched in a thick, tacky coat of white paint. The stairs came up in a central room that was ringed by eight doors. Six of them had heavy padlocks that were hanging open. The two without were on opposite sides of the room. One corner of the room was littered with children's toys. Wilson crossed quickly to the toys and poked through them with absolute attention.
"They're all broken," he said with clinical detachment. "Some in quite ingenious ways. Do you think Crane had a child up here?"
"No. I think he kept those for himself, Wilson." I crept to the nearest door without a padlock and put my ear against it. Quiet. "How the hell do I know?"
"Don't you want to do the locked rooms first?" he asked.
"Those are obviously empty. Hopefully. They're hopefully empty." I shrugged and nodded to the door I was standing next to. "Come on."
Wilson put down his toys and stood behind me. The door opened easily. Inside was a bedroom, or something like a bedroom. A room with a bed, at least. A bed, a dresser, and two traveling cases, like you would take on a cruise. Their lids were bound in brass, and the wood showed a great deal of wear. The bed was iron, with a thin mattress and the barest of covers. It was the cheapest piece of furniture we'd seen in the house yet. Where the rest of the house had been compulsively tidy, the covers on the bed were twisted and stained, like they held a madman and his nightmares, night after night. There were no pillows. The dressers were empty.
"That leaves these," Wilson said, and bent to pick up the traveling cases. He scrabbled at the first for a while, fishing around in the tumbler, his face slack with concentration. Longest I'd ever seen him take on a lock.
"Having trouble there, master thief?"
"Yup."
"You want me to handle it?"
"Handle it?" His voice was barely a whisper, barely more than the inhalation of breath. "Shut up. I'll get it."
"Because it looks like you're having trouble there. With the lock."
He let the pick clatter to the floor and sighed.
"Jacob, you're just about the biggest-," he said, turning to look up at me. His eyes locked beyond my shoulder and his body stilled. "Ah."
"Ah?" I asked, then turned quickly. I couldn't see anything. "Ah, what?"
He stood and went to the bed, standing on the sweat-stained mattress to reach the ceiling. Something was nailed to the boards there, just above the theoretical sleeper's head. Wilson pried it free and peered at it.
"Ah," he said.
"What is it?" What I could see was that it was black, about the size of two hands together. He handed it to me.
A mask, black. There were words in iron etched across the face. Other than the eye holes, there were no other features.
"What the hell is this?" I asked.
Wilson came down from the bed and sat wearily on the chest he had failed to pick. I knew the look on his face. It was his scholar look.
"That is what we were meant to find." He drew a pair of reading glasses from one of the innumerable pockets in his vest, rubbed some river water off them, then returned them to the pocket. "We can look in the other rooms if you'd like, but that's going to be it."
"Doesn't answer my question, Wilson." I held out the mask. The words meant nothing to me. Even the letters looked funny. "What is it?"
"I'm not sure. But the lettering is Celestean. It roughly translates into 'Cull.' Or 'Purge,' I suppose. Yes, purge is probably a better translation." He ran his tongue across his hundred teeth, deep in thought. "The image imposed is of a tree stump, burned down to the roots."
"You read Celestean?"
"Tricky question. It's not really a language." He stood and took the mask, holding it at arm's length. "The Celesteans seemed to communicate in unformed ideas. Images. The pictograms we use to program foetal metal cogwork are a derivation of their form. The idea is to let the words interact with the unconscious part of your brain. They impose meaning directly into your…" he searched for the word. "Soul, I guess. Directly into your heart."
"That was perfectly clear," I sniped. He grimaced like a schoolmarm.
"Hold still," he said, then held the mask about an arm's length away from my face. "Look at the words without looking at them. Unfocus. Just let your head talk directly to the…"
"Look, this is bullshit. You told me what it means. Cull. I get it. I don't need to…"
It fell on me like a nightmare. The room disappeared and I was filled with the smell of blood and fire. Ashes in my mouth and the sky was coiling cinder. The earth below me sagged under the weight of blood and my veins crumbled like dry leaves. I gasped, but the only air was thick as steel wool, and just as harsh. On my knees and I could feel the life being dug out of me, out of my heart, out of my blood. Behind me I felt death reaching back for generations, rooting out everything I had known or been or remembered. It was like a fire that burned through time. And before me, nothing, nothing, just the empty night and nothing.
And then I really was on my knees, and Wilson was shaking me with both his stone-hard hands. The mask was on the floor between us, the words in my head coiling like that sky of cinder. I hurled myself back and banged into the cheap iron of the bed.
"Well," Wilson said, standing. "That's the thing about the Celesteans. They said different things to different people." He carefully picked up the mask and wrapped it in a bit of sheet he tore from the bed. I realized I was still staring at him, and tried to compose myself. "Don't. Just relax. Let it get through you. Let it go."
I watched him numbly as he went around the room. He got the chests open, finally. He went through them meticulously, unfolding and then refolding things, rearranging the contents, open pouches, sniffing, closing. My mind was a smooth stone in a babbling brook, the room around me sliding coldly over without penetrating. It was minutes before I understood the things I looked at. I stood.
"What the hell is that thing?" I asked. My voice was harsh, like I'd been crying.
"What we were supposed to find," Wilson answered. "The question is why. And if we were the ones who were supposed to find it, or if he left it for someone else."
I rubbed my hands together and stretched my shoulders.
"I'm ready to go," I said. Wilson shook his head.
"Not yet. This is what we were meant to find, but…"
"I'm ready to go, Wilson. As in, we're going."
He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. It hurt.
"Jacob. This isn't the worst thing we've seen. It's likely not to be the worst we'll see before this is over. You need to pull yourself together."
"Sure. But first we're going to go somewhere else." I made for the door. Wilson stopped me.
"First we're going to search the rest of this house. Then we can go."
"You said that we wouldn't find anything else. That we were meant to find that. So. We found it."
"We did." He gestured to the chests. "But what about those?"
I looked over his shoulder. "Looks like clothes to me."
"Yes. Clothes that have been recently packed, and then left behind." He spread his hands in a question. "Why?"
"I don't know. Maybe he forgot them."
"Jacob. Is there anything about Ezekiel Crane that makes you think he would just forget his clothes?"
Grudgingly, I admitted he was right. I didn't say anything, though.
"Which means that he left them behind. By mistake or by plan. And there's nothing in them to make me think it was planned. To me it looks like he brought them here from some great distance, unpacked them while he was here, and then repacked them with the intention of taking them somewhere else. And then he didn't."
"So," I said, slumping my shoulders. "We search the rest of the place."
Wilson nodded. I gave the bundled lump of the mask one more nervous look.
"Locked rooms first, please?" I said.
"That's fine with me. And look," he said, then opened one of the chests. There was a revolver laying on top of the carefully folded shirts. "A present."
I tossed my water-logged iron on the bed and holstered the new revolver. Didn't bother checking the load, or the balance. Just hoped I wouldn't have to draw it. Mostly wasn't sure that I had the heart to draw iron right now. The Celestean nightmare was still howling at the edges of my mind. I didn't trust myself with a weapon. Distastefully, Wilson picked up my old pistol from the bed and stowed it in his coat.
"Always leaving things around, Jacob. You should know better."
"Whatever," I said, heading for the door. "Let's get this over with."
Whatever had been locked in those rooms was long gone. The rooms were devoid of furniture, although the windows were boarded up from the inside. The paint on the floors showed heavy wear, like someone spent all their time pacing back and forth, window to door to window to corner to door. That was the only difference in each of the rooms, actually. The pattern of wear on the floor was of varying complexity. And all of the rooms smelled, though not unpleasantly. Like fresh soil, and the harvest. It reminded me of summers in my youth, out on the estate. Back when we had an estate, and I had summers. Wilson stood in the door to each room, sniffing carefully at the air and studying the floor. He never went in. After the third room I got tired of standing in the hallway and pushed past him into the room. He frowned, but let me go.
"So, he was keeping someone in here?"
"Maybe. It doesn't seem like security was terribly good."
"A padlock doesn't strike you as good security?"
He shrugged his complexity of shoulders. "Those windows could be opened pretty easily. The nails are tiny and the boards aren't flush." Grimly he walked into the room and went to the window. With two fingers he tore a board free and peered out into the light. "Easy enough to undo."
"Remember the toys. Maybe these were kids he had in here. They wouldn't have been strong enough to do that."
"Cheery thought," Wilson said with a sigh. "The foot traffic isn't consistent with that. Big feet made these tracks. Heavy feet."
"Maybe. So if the window isn't any good, why the lock on the door?"
"Maybe it wasn't to keep people in here. Maybe it was to keep people out of here."
"You think Crane had a lot of curious visitors?" I asked.
"Don't you find him curious, Jacob?" Wilson set down the board and quickly exited the room. "I think you're right. I think it's time for us to be on our way. This place makes me oddly uncomfortable. Let's finish up."
The last of the locked rooms provided no additional insight. Without much hope, we turned the knob on the second of the unlocked rooms and threw open the door. It was the smell that got me first, before the door was even fully open. That butcher's smell: spilled meat and blood.
There was only one body, in the center of the room, arms and legs spread and chest bloody. Wilson bounded into the room, steel out, spider arms flickering across the floor and walls. I had the new revolver in my hand. The balance was good, I noticed without noticing, the nightmare forgotten.
"No one else," Wilson said. "Come on."
Of course Wilson didn't recognize him. He'd only seen Gray the one time, on the docks. And the way Gray Anderson looked right now, his own mother would have turned aside.
His eyes were twisted in fear and shock, but the rest of his body looked perfectly relaxed, in spite of the blood. Someone had shoved a ball of twine into his mouth. He was dressed in the Wright's vestments, simple brown and black. I always knew Gray claimed to be a Wright who got away from the Algorithm, but I had never imagined him dressed like this. I wondered how he would have felt, to be found like this. Also wondered why someone had taken the time to dress him up, just to kill him.
There was a single wound, an improbably large puncture wound to the center of his chest. The weapon that made it was still there. From here it looked like a copper tube, plugged with glass. Around the injury was a sticky ring of blood, dry and black. Nasty.
Wilson was ignoring the body. Naturally, because the rest of the room looked like a mad scientist's drunken fantasy, in the process of being dissected. Brass pipes lined the walls, stacked to various depths and of progressive height. Bits of the ceiling had been knocked out, to accommodate the larger items. Each pipe was enclosed in a tangle of tubing that led to the next pipe, or fed from the previous one. Each pipe was open at the top, and cut at an angle, away from the center of the room. Something was passing between the pipes, a sound, like a hurricane heard from far away.
"I don't think this is what he was expecting, when we took this job," I said. Wilson was circling the room, touching the pipes lightly with the talon tips of his spider arms. "Guess I couldn't get him out of this trouble."
He stopped and looked down at the body, recognized him finally. "He was coming back here, wasn't he? After we left on the boat this morning?"
"Yeah. Damn it, Gray. Why couldn't you just be happy living in shitty little houses, doing shitty little jobs?"
Wilson came and stood next to me. He laid an arm across my shoulders.
"Because he isn't you, Jacob. Most folks want to better themselves."
I shrugged his arm off. "Maybe don't give me shit right now, Jacob. This guy was my friend."
"You're a terrible person to friend, Jacob." He turned back to pipes. "Friends of yours keep ending up dead."
"Show a little respect for the dead guy in the room, man."
"Dead guy'll still be dead tomorrow. There's something with these pipes."
"Is there something about them that could have shoved a copper tube through Gray's chest?" I asked. "Because if not, I'm not sure they're immediately relevant."
"Could be," he answered, shrugging. "See if you can find some kind of valve. Or a control panel. Or maybe — "
He stopped moving, but his voice continued around the room, ghosting from pipe to pipe, quieter and quieter. Wilson turned to look at me. Rather needlessly, he held a finger to his lips. Quiet. Got it.
The anansi's voice tumbled away into silence, but the background hurricane kept rolling. I bent my head to it, trying to pick up snatches of sound. My eye was drawn uncomfortably to Gray's restful corpse at the center of the room. Maybe his voice, the last seconds of his terrified life, caught up in this garden of pipes and held forever in brass? I shivered and put a hand on Wilson's shoulder. Pulling him close, I whispered directly into his ear.
"Why do you think Crane would leave this contraption behind?" I asked. Wilson's voice, when he replied, smelled like insect wings and dust.
"Because it's heavy, idiot." His lips hardly moved when he spoke, though his teeth were bared. I was reminded of just how many teeth he had. Wasn't usually this close to them. Their bright white enamel was veined in black that seemed to pulse with each word. "You don't just lug equipment like this around every time you get spooked."
"Which means he might come back for it? Or that he planned to be here for a while?"
Wilson shrugged. The noise in the room was picking up. He squinted at me nervously.
"Or that he doesn't mind it being found. Like the mask. He wants someone to find this." He looked around at the pipes and their tangled feet. "I can't for the life of me tell what it's meant to do, though."
"Can we get back to the dead guy at…" I stopped, because something tapped against my foot. I looked down to see a ball of twine, sticky with spittle and blood. I looked over at the body. It was looking at me, running a dry tongue over its lips. Gray's lifeless, bloodless lips.
"You have forgotten so much about us, Veridon," it said. "What we are. What we do." The body struggled to one elbow, it head lolling across its chest. "How we do it. I am disappointed."
The pipes behind me jangled as I backed into them, my hand clenched around Wilson's shoulder. He shrugged me off and shuffled around the perimeter of the room. The body followed him with one lazy eye, then turned back to me.
"Although I hadn't expected to see you again, Jacob Burn. I really thought the river would take you. Appropriate, I suppose. Unexpected." It coughed, and dryness filled the air, like a tomb unfolding. "Your friend can stop that."
I looked up at Wilson. He was fiddling with the pipes, though he didn't seem to have much direction. Just pulling on tubes, rattling brass. He shot me an angry look and kept at it.
When I looked back at the body, something had changed. The face was bulking up, the skin blossoming in a frost that spread until the skin was pale and bright. The skull lengthened and became narrow. I was reminded of The Summer Girl, the child becoming the woman becoming the singer. The body locked eyes with me and smiled.
"He doesn't have to. It was just advice." The voice expanded, filled the room, the words resonating through the air and into my bones like lightning, close and dangerous. "Something to keep him from hurting himself."
Wilson stumbled back, falling over, his head coming to rest against the body. That heavy voice rolled with laughter, and the legs began to twitch. Wilson jumped up and circled back to me. He gave a meaningful look at my hand. Of course. The revolver. What was I thinking?
I raised my iron and sighted. The body watched me do this, calmly, appraising each action. As I cocked, it nodded once, the smile unwavering. The report shook the room, flash and bang washing out the spiritual whirlwind of the pipes. When I lowered my hand, part of the body's face was missing. I watched as it grew back, like water closing over a blade. The edges of the wound skittered as they sealed shut.
"Just so, Jacob. Just so." He pushed himself into a sitting position, all his weight on one thin arm. He looked at us like a drunk, fallen in the street and propped up, his legs numb on the ground. "So much has been forgotten. Cut out from the history books. Much like the Burns, yes? Much like the many fallen families."
"I know you," I said, recognizing the long face, the narrow mouth. "Ezekiel Crane. I know who you are."
"You do and you don't," the body answered. The voice seemed to vibrate out of the pipes around us, music from an organ, and descend upon the body. I felt like I was hearing the voice in my bones a half breath before the dead man's mouth formed the words. "Your father may know me, but again. Not really."
I fired again, because I'm an optimist. Bullets sometimes work the second time. This one passed through his arm and dented a pipe beyond. The voice warbled for a second, then came back, louder than ever.
"I meant for the river to have you, Jacob. But it might be better this way. More honest." Struggling to his feet, the body hunched forward as he addressed me. "This way, maybe you can be more than just a joke I tell myself." Straightened up and looked me in the eye. "Maybe this time around, you'll be the one wearing the mask."
Wilson jumped forward and put his knife once, twice, three times, fast, into the chest. The body laughed, staggered, and then swatted the thin anansi aside. His knife clattered between the pipes, out of reach.
"I'm not going to kill you. Tried that, and it didn't work. So maybe you're some kind of cosmic gift, Jacob. Jacob and his annoying bug friend. Maybe, in time, you'll understand what I'm doing. Why I'm doing it. You're not the one I expected to come here, although I'm sure they're on their way." The body rested his hands on his hips and looked toward the door. "We can wait, if you want. Not what I would do if I were you. But it's your call."
"We'll wait," I said. "Whoever it is, at least they don't hide in dead bodies and try to kill me."
The body smiled and cocked his head at me.
"Don't they? Isn't that exactly what they do, Jacob? Isn't that exactly what they've done?"
I fired again, this shot hitting his throat. The eyes bulged for a second as the soft column of flesh reformed. I swear I saw the briefest vision of wings, fluttering across the gaping wound.
"You've got to stop doing that, Jacob. I'm patient, but it won't last forever. Maybe I reset this encounter. Kill you and your friend, and let the proper people find the mask. I try to not question the universe, but you're proving to be a little difficult."
"Summer Girl," I said, realization washing over me as I lowered my revolver until it was pointing at the glass plug in his chest. "But I've heard that song."
Three fast shots, then the hammer fell on an empty chamber. The lead buried itself into the glass. It was the second shot before Crane realized what I was doing, dead hands jerking over his chest. Too late. Just a bit too late. The pipe burst, and his life came fluttering out on dry paper wings.
The room filled with a cloud of insects, pouring from the body's newly reopened wound. Smooth, black and shiny, like jeweled honey, buzzing angrily out of his chest. The body flailed and jerked, but the face was supremely calm. Almost pleased. He gave me one last look, utter satisfaction, and then the illusion fell away in sticky slabs of false meat. The facade collapsed, pulled away from the animated flesh, and the body tumbled once more to the floor. The cloud of insects swarmed across the pipes, sucking the last whispering madness from their echoes, then fell to the ground. Dead.
"Maker beetles," Wilson said, running his toe through the dry husks. "Huh."
"So he's some kind of cogwork carrier?" I asked, kneeling down by the body. A few stragglers crawled up out of his mouth. The wounds Wilson and I gave him were back, ragged flesh torn open by bullet and blade. "Some kind of artificer trick?"
"Not like any trick I've ever seen," Wilson answered. He pried open the mouth with curious fingers, then felt around the bloody plug in his chest. The brass tube came free with a sucking pop. Nothing special about it, just a glass vial sheathed in metal. Only thing of note was that it had been driven violently into my friend's chest. "Nothing but what you'd usually find inside a dead man. No cogwork, no foetal metal. Nothing to run… whatever that was."
He tossed the vial to the ground and watched it roll away.
"What are we doing, Wilson?" I asked. "What the hell is happening here?"
"From the sound of it, someone is coming to find this mask." He fished his knife out from the machinery, gave the body one last look, and then headed to the door. "And I'd like to be well gone before they get here."
It was Gray's face looking back at me, once again. I cycled the chamber of my revolver, dumped the shells onto the floor, and then reloaded. I wasn't a good friend. Wasn't a good person to be friends with. You end up dead, then you end up coming back from the dead, and I have to shoot you in the chest. Not a good friend.
Wilson was already downstairs before I left the room. I think I was the only one who heard the pipes laughing as I clattered down the stairs. But I probably didn't hear that. Probably just in my head.
A Maker Beetle is kind of a leftover miracle. A scrap from something that came before us, that we don't fully understand. The only people who had any knowledge of such things belonged to the Artificers Guild, and they only knew the bare minimum. There was a time when the Guild was a broader interest, with offices at the Academy of Thought and Practice, and apprentices and masters and a bustling trade of scientific inquiry. Now all that was left of that was the Council-sanctioned Guild. They were mostly for entertainments, like The Summer Girl or the other engram singers, who performed a very specific series of songs or plays, the memories clipped from the original players and recreated for generations.
Those memories were somehow stored in the beetles. Wilson tried to explain it to me, once. How Wilson knew is its own mystery, and maybe he didn't really know, because I couldn't really understand it. But basically, a memory could be engraved in the queen beetle, the pattern of the singer and the song, what it felt like to be that person and do that thing. And then the queen could be implanted in an engram singer, and her hive of maker beetles would… well… remake the singer into that memory. There was a lot of cogwork involved, since the singer need to be able to accommodate a whole hive of scuttling beetles. The details of how those machines worked was a closely guarded secret within the Guild. Understandable. The Academy didn't advertise how they made the PilotEngine, either.
The end result was a memory that could be played out in flesh. With the help of the beetles, an engram singer could become a specific singer, and perform a song exactly as it was sung decades ago. Even hundreds of years, as long as the queens were well bred. That's what the Guild did these days. Breed queen beetles, maintain hives, and teach little girls to sing like memories.
We watched them arrive at Crane's house from a couple blocks away, sitting in the second floor of an atrium bar. An automaton pillar in the center of the atrium was playing out all the bawdy scenes from "The Fifty Nights of Winter" in clacking, whirring earnest. Even the painted wooden whores looked embarrassed. Wilson and I drank coffee and looked out the window.
They arrived in a sealed carriage. The engine was nice and new, brass plates shuffling behind the baffles in quick time. Not the kind of carriage you usually saw in this district. Which was sloppy. It was memorable. Unless they didn't care if people knew they were dealing with Crane.
Three figures went inside, dressed in heavy black coats and hoods. No-one I recognized, although at this distance I wouldn't have recognized myself in a coat and hood. Not a minute later one of them came out and signaled down the road. More carriages, bearing the sigil of the Badge.
"Council people, then?" I asked. There weren't a lot of other patrons at this hour, but I kept my voice low.
"Could be. Badge has become awfully mercenary in the last couple years." Wilson drank from his cup and grimaced. "Could just be someone with the right amount of coin."
I murmured something about getting a price list and finished my coffee. The waitress came by to fill the cup, all smiles and bust. When she was gone I turned back to the window.
"So where next? To the Artificers? I don't know anyone in that set."
Wilson held his cup about halfway to his mouth, staring idly out the window. Not sure he was seeing anything.
"I'd rather not. We have other leads to follow. The mask, for example."
"What was that about, do you think? What Crane said?"
Wilson shrugged. "Maybe you'll be wearing the mask this time? Who knows. I think our friend Crane may be a little insane."
"Yes. A little," I smiled. "It was the bit where he animated my dead friend so he could have a conversation with us that sold me on it. Before then, you know, with the thing where he changed all the Fehn into mad corpses, that wasn't quite insane enough."
"You have very high standards, Mr. Burn," Wilson said.
"I have to. Look at the people I hang out with."
Wilson snorted and put his coffee down. "I take it you've recovered fully from looking into the mask, then?"
"Not at all," I answered, shivering. "Not even a little."
"What did you see?" he asked.
I told him, as best I could. It was the feeling of being rooted out and cast aside that was the hardest to communicate. I felt like a tree, torn out at the root and thrown on a fire of absolute heat. The brightest fire ever imagined. Just talking about it made me sweat.
"Well. That's not completely different from what I saw. Just more," Wilson paused, considering his next words, trying not to look me in the face. Finally he raised his eyes. "More personal. Like it was written for you, and not me."
"Written for me? That's good to know. Should we go around the city showing it to people, to see how they react? Maybe we could figure out what it means by triangulating how terrified different people are of it. We could start with my dad, couldn't we? He's been a bit mad in the head ever since…" I stumbled. Ever since I had lost Emily, ever since he had finally, utterly thrown me out of the family. Ever since he swore he would never see me again, and shut himself up in the house, and refused to acknowledge he even had a son. Ever since then. "Yeah. Maybe that extra bit of madness would do him some good. Do you think?"
Wilson wasn't listening to me. He was absolutely still, the coffee cup gripped firmly in his fingers, staring out the window.
"Wilson? Are you even hearing me?"
"Jacob. The young lady out there, the one talking to the Badge. Does she look familiar?"
I looked. All smiles and bust.
"No wonder no one's refilled my cup," I spat. As we watched, the girl turned and pointed back to the bar. The Badge turned with her, then set off towards us at a trot.
"Time we were going," Wilson said. We stood and took two steps toward the iron corkscrew stairs that led to the main floor, and the exit. There was someone standing at the top of the stairs, looking at us. Waiting for us.
She was young, or at least had the body of a young woman. Dressed scandalously in pants and a vest, all cinched closely to her form. It reminded me of how factory workers secure every flap of clothing, to keep it from the hungry machines. An odd contrast. The vest was covered in button-flap pockets, and her belt was wide and black. Many weapons hung at her hips. She wore bulky gloves that contrasted sharply with the grace and cut of her form.
Her face was bound in an iron mask, fitted with brass around the eyes and along the jaw. Eyes hidden by matte black goggles that flexed and whirred as we stood there, staring at each other. A single thick braid of dark hair coiled down her back. She reached toward me, and put a hand to her belt.
"Back door," Wilson barked, and we jumped across the floor, toppling narrow tables in our wake. She followed us through the broken glassware, the jangling forks, and the yells of the Badge who were just now reaching the iron stairs.