“Okay, hold this. Hold it tight, okay?” Skinner said. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Mummy,” Jaine Akori said. She was six, and clever, but much more proficient at Indt than she was at Trowthi. “Aikiat da aga da’an?”
“Mummy what?” Skinner asked, holding Jaine’s hand closed around the stack of hundred-crown notes. She had decided to keep only two hundred from her first payment from Emilia Vie-Gorgon. She suspected that, now that the assassination attempt had failed, and now that Skinner could identify Emilia as being involved, the second payment would not be forthcoming.
“Bring to mummy,” Jaine said. “Jana agad. Osheed?”
“Osheed is right, honey,” Skinner replied. Eight hundred crowns would take the Akori a long way, and two hundred might be enough to give Skinner a head start, at least. She had no illusions about what would happen now. “And what do you tell mummy?”
Jaine obediently recited the message Skinner had given her. “Thank. You. Very. Much. From. Miss. Skinner.”
“And if she asks where I went?”
“You had to go. To be safe. You can’t come back.”
“And?”
“Uhmmm. Don’t follow!”
“Good girl.” Skinner patted her on the head. “You wait here for mummy to get home, okay?”
“Okay! Where are you going?”
Skinner shrugged. “I don’t know. But even if I did know, I don’t think it would be a good idea to tell you.” The girl said nothing. “Though I guess I could probably tell you, and it wouldn’t matter that much. Never mind. Wait here for mummy, okay? And make sure you give her the money. Okay?”
“Gan. Okay!”
Skinner left the house in Bluewater for the last time. It was, as to be expected in Trowth during the summer, raining. Not the razor-sharp jags of calcium that would rattle on the roofs in late summer, fortunately, but a steady, warm rain that, if not for the stifling humidity, would have been quite pleasant. Rain clattered on slate roofs and cobblestones and had soaked her through to her socks in a few moments.
The truth was that Skinner didn’t know, at all, where she would go. She didn’t have any friends left in the city and now the trains were all closed down, so she couldn’t even go back to her family if she wanted to. As a woman alone, she couldn’t rent lodgings except in the most dismal and dangerous of locales, and she wasn’t sure how to find those anyway. But she absolutely could not stay with the Akori.
It’s not that she doubted that Emilia Vie-Gorgon could get to her without any collateral damage. Killing an emperor was one thing; killing an unemployed knocker living in a ghetto with a family of immigrants was something altogether different. It’s just that Skinner wasn’t fully certain that Emilia would bother not causing collateral damage. After all, wouldn’t a bomb serve to disguise who the target was? Anonymous bombs obscured even their own intentions. Was it to kill a person? To cripple the gendarmerie? To strike out against the Empire, or against the indige?
The very thought made Skinner wonder just how much Emilia had been involved in the other attacks. It was hard to say, because what little Skinner knew of it had only come from the broadsheets-and one could fully rely on the papers to exaggerate outrageously whatever scant details they managed to get a hold of-but the thought had accompanied a mounting terror. If Emilia was involved, the extremity of her willingness to do harm was staggering. Commissioning a scandalous play was almost absurdly childish compared to what the Vie-Gorgon girl was capable of.
And Skinner knew that Emilia was involved in the assassination attempt. There was no way that she would permit Skinner to live.
Skinner let her telerhythmia rattle along the walls as she found her way towards the heart of Trowth. She knew that people often confused the sound of telerhythmia with the sound of a heavy rain, but no knocker had difficulty sorting them out. The telerhythmia was clearly sharper and crisper, the echoes jumped out at the ear and snagged attention in a way raindrops didn’t. She made her way through mostly deserted streets, guided by her preternatural senses, until she came to the cramped doorway that led to Backstairs Street.
Backstairs might have actually been a street at one point, a short connecting alley between a courtyard and Watchmaker’s Close perhaps, but once Irwin Arkady had catastrophically changed the topography of Trowth, someone had had the bright idea to build a staircase here. What Backstairs had been called before it was a stairway was a piece of information lost to the abysms of history and apathy. Skinner paused at the top of the stair, stretched her clairaudience down its length. She heard nothing but the labored breathing of a far-off transient and the omnipresent drip of water and leaking pipes.
The Arcadium wasn’t the best choice, it was just her only choice. The summer meant she had little chance of freezing to death, and the sheltered tunnels would provide some protection from the worst precipitation that Trowth had to offer. All she had to worry about was catching scrave from a plague rat. Or being attacked by a vampiric foglet. Or being stabbed by a beggar. Or, obviously, being found and murdered by Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s assassins.
But at least she wouldn’t be rained on.
As she stood at the top of Backstairs Street and prepared to embark on her new life as a vagrant, she checked again for the footsteps that had been following her for the last half-mile. Footsteps, much like telerhythmia, jump out to a knocker’s ear; they were a sound that floated right to the surface of the world’s sea of noise. It was a mistake to try and take a knocker by surprise if you were just going to follow them. Two sets of steps, evenly-spaced. Heavy, purposeful. Booted feet, men’s feet, walking steadily towards her. Skinner reached out with her clairaudience to ascertain what she could about the men. One ground his teeth. One was smoking. Based on a man’s gait and how high above the ground his breathing was, Skinner could estimate his height. Based on the volume of his footsteps, she could guess at his weight. These men were both much bigger than she.
“There,” one said, softly, not realizing how absurd it was to whisper while Skinner was listening for him. “There she is.”
At least, Skinner told herself, it’s not a bomb. She fled into the Arcadium.
Pogo Akori eventually established the story of Skinner’s absence, at no small difficulty, from his sister Trine. Trine, of course, wanted to go after the Trower-woman right away. She called him a heartless monster when he said no, said his soul had turned to black filth like the soul of a Trower, that his grandfather would be ashamed of him, and offered many other colorful and cruel insults. Pogo remained philosophical on the subject. Was the Trower woman in danger? Perhaps. But it was her danger, and she would know best how to solve it. If they pursued her into the night, they would likely do more harm than good. And, after all that, Skinner had been trying not just to preserve herself, but to preserve the Akori, as well. If they followed her and were harmed, would this not make her sacrifice meaningless?
“We will do what we can when we can,” Pogo insisted, “But we will not follow her, because she asked us not to.” And that was that.
When a tall, rangy Trower man in a deftly-tailored but somewhat rumpled suit arrived at the Akori household later that day, Pogo was true to his word. While his family glared at the stranger, Pogo insisted in broken Trowthi that no, only indige lived here. No one named Elizabeth Skinner. No Trower women at all. The man believed him, or seemed to, and his face took on a disappointed air as a consequence. He offered his apologies and left them with a pamphlet that he had drawn from a pocket inside his coat.
Pogo Akori, in order to improve his command of the Trowthi language, spent a great deal of time reading, and this practice had given him a keen hunger for words-a hunger that had only sharpened since the day that the Emperor had shut down all of the presses. Maybe the stranger was a murderer, but Pogo had sent him on his way with no clues as to Skinner’s whereabouts; he considered his obligation discharged, and so there was no point in not enjoying the chance to read.
He settled into his chair while the children shrieked and the matriarchs gossiped as they cooked, and began to leaf through the pamphlet the man had left. Pogo saw, with some surprise, that it was the script for a play.
It was called Theocles.