by Y. S. Lee
The copies will dissipate as soon as Pravan leaves, but those two minutes are all Olivia and Rukmini need. While Pravan dances and Matthew repels security guards with blood blisters, they hoist up their beloved leader and rush her into the elevator that leads aboveground.
At last, Supriya releases the toxins built up in her, most of them in the open air, but before she turns away completely, she leans into the vestibule off the entrance to the tunnel, venting some of the poison into it. That will sicken the partygoers just enough to give them bad dreams and second and even third thoughts about pursuing.
And after that, the Mycologians will resume their fight to keep Industry’s greed at bay.
In the clearing where Supriya reigns supreme, the Amanita lounges regally on her throne of branches, leaves and flowers and moss forming a bower all around. She’s the focus of a much different celebration, one where her fungal kin, including a Panther Cap and a Death Angel, have come out to socialize with the hundred Mycologians. Supriya’s been busy in the years since she first summoned Rukmini and Pravan. Technology may be advancing, but she’s not yielding a centimeter.
Rukmini only wants to know one thing, though. She eyes her brother, then Supriya. “I’m still waiting to hear why you knew what Pravan was doing.”
She hasn’t yet fully forgiven her brother, but they’re healing. His promising to just tell her what’s going on with him in the future—not to mention groveling for a few hours—went a long way toward making her feel like they might be all right.
Angelica has at least begun returning his calls, so maybe there’s hope there, too—and for the understanding Pravan had been trying to build.
Supriya smiles enigmatically, which she knows full well Rukmini can’t stand. “The whole thing was my idea. I went to Pravan and suggested it.”
“What?” the three Mycologians who’d gone to rescue her yell as one.
“But you knew that would never work,” Rukmini adds.
“Of course I did. But how else would I have gotten all of you to finally talk to one another?” Supriya sips her cocktail, contented. “And now all my little secret agents are back in the mycelium, as it should be.”
Her words are met with shocked silence, then peals of laughter. “You have to admit, it was a good plan,” Pravan says. “I mean, we are all here now.”
“I suppose she out-heisted all of us,” Olivia muses.
Matthew snorts. “She deceived the Amethyst Deceiver!”
“I suppose she did,” Rukmini agrees, and with an enigmatic smile of her own, she immediately begins plotting a counterheist.
About Shveta Thakrar
Shveta Thakrar is a writer of South Asian–flavored fantasy, social justice activist, and part-time nagini. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, Interfictions Online, Mythic Delirium, Uncanny Magazine, Faerie Magazine, Strange Horizons, Mothership Zeta, Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, Clockwork Phoenix 5, Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold, A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, and Toil & Trouble. When not spinning stories about spider silk and shadows, magic and marauders, and courageous girls illuminated by dancing rainbow flames, Shveta crafts, devours books, daydreams, draws, travels, bakes, and occasionally even plays her harp.
shvetathakrar.com
@ShvetaThakrar
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A Spy in the Deep
The Casebook of Harriet George
Patrick Samphire
A Spy in the Deep
The Casebook of Harriet George
Mars, 1816
If Harriet George had ever thought that training to become a spy would be easy, she had been disabused of that notion within a week. Spy training in the British-Martian Intelligence Service, it appeared, alternated between unending, droning lectures in poorly lit rooms and exercises in appalling danger and stupefying terror. Worse, Harriet never knew which she was in for when she arrived each morning.
When she had been recruited for the intelligence service, she had been filled with confidence. And why not? She had been sixteen years old, had just solved the case of The Glass Phantom and the dinosaur hunters, and had caught a murderer. How hard could spy training be?
Within a week, she had realized that her previous success had been more down to luck than expertise. It had only been by chance that she hadn’t been eaten alive by dinosaurs. Spy training was a lot harder than she’d expected. Sometimes, she winced remembering just how unprepared she’d been. That was when she wasn’t wincing at the flying daggers, exploding booby traps, hideously murderous Martian creatures, and out-of-control clockwork mechanisms that made up a large part of her everyday lessons.
Now, almost a year later, everything seemed to be getting more difficult rather than easier. And none more so than her current exercise. She was crouched in a cramped, sweltering stone passageway trying—and failing—to disarm an absurdly complicated trap before she could be poisoned by gas, filleted by swords, swarmed by spear-spiders, or whatever delight awaited her today. She had solved the code scratched into the rock, aligned the dials, extracted the correct carved stone and reinserted it, but now the blasted lever WOULD NOT LIFT. A persistent ticking told her time was running out. Her hands were sweating, her hair was tangled across her face, and her dress was too tight around her chest. Why did she have to do this in a dress, anyway? The male trainees were free to wear trousers. Escaping from a hail of poisoned darts had to be easier in trousers.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Come on.”
Something touched her waist. Harriet jerked. Her hand twitched. The lever dropped. She threw herself backwards, colliding with the person behind her.
A block of stone, which must have weighed several tons, smashed into the passageway, throwing up a cloud of dust and sand. Harriet coughed and furiously wiped her eyes clear.
“That,” a voice said, “was the most pathetic display I have ever seen.”
Harriet pushed herself up and twisted around. Reginald Pratt, Viscount Brotherton stood looking down at her, sneering.
“You blasted idiot!” Harriet exploded. “You could have killed me.”
“Not if you knew what you were doing. But then, you’re not much good at this, are you, George?”
Reginald Pratt had already been a trainee spy when Harriet had joined the British-Martian Intelligence Service, and he had finally graduated in the last month. If he had been unbearable before that—which he had been—then it was nothing compared to the way he was now. It wasn’t the fact that he considered himself better than everyone else. Harriet could deal with that. It was the cruelty that hovered just below the surface, and his delight in the failure of others. Harriet could see why the British-Martian Intelligence Service had been so pleased to recruit an agent already able to move in the highest levels of British-Martian society. But that didn’t mean she had to like him, and it certainly didn’t mean she had to put up with him.
“What do you want, Reggie?”
Reginald’s face twitched and his expression darkened.
You really hate being called that, don’t you? The first time they had met, Reginald had instructed her to call him Lord Brotherton. No chance of that. He’d set her skin crawling from that first moment.
“The director wants to see you.”
Harriet’s mouth suddenly became very dry. “Sir Clive Rose?”
“Not the director of the service, idiot. Why would he want to see you?” His eyes slipped over her as though she were a week-old ragfish. “The director of trainees.” A tight, humorless smile creased his face. “You’d better hurry. You’re already an hour late.”
Harriet’s jaw dropped. “Why the hell didn’t you—” She cut herself off at the sudden delight in his eyes. “You can tell her I’ll be there very shortly.” She flipped a hand as though to brush him away. The look of transparent fury that flashed across his features gave Harriet a warm feeling of satisfaction.
She waited for Reginald to stalk of
f, then made an attempt to straighten her dress. It was futile. Her sister, Amy, would have been horrified to see her like this. She was covered in dust and dirt, and her dress was unforgivably creased. After their parents had died, Amy, along with Amy’s husband, Bertrand, had tried to raise her as a proper, dignified young lady. As far as Amy and her husband knew, they had succeeded. If Amy could see her now…
This wasn’t the first training exercise she’d managed to mess up. The satisfaction she’d felt at Reginald Pratt’s irritation was quickly replaced by dread. She knew there were several black marks in her file. Had she failed one time too often? After the affair with the dinosaur hunters and the Glass Phantom, she’d known she had a natural aptitude for this. It was just that, somehow, that aptitude seemed to have gone missing since she’d started her training. I can do this. I know I can. So why couldn’t she prove it to anyone?
Amy and Bertrand, of course, had no idea that Harriet was training to be a spy. They had been told that Harriet was one of half-a-dozen live-in companions of the eccentric Lady Felchester, a widow whose husband had made a fortune in the Mars-Earth trade. She funded and ran the School of Martian Entomology at Tharsis University. Even on Mars it was unusual for a lady to teach at a university, but as Lady Felchester funded the department singlehandedly, the university deans tried to think about it as little as possible.
It was all a cover, of course. While the department was real and Lady Felchester was indeed an expert on Martian entomology, she was also the director of trainees at the Tharsis City branch of the British-Martian Intelligence Service. A good proportion of the trainees passed through the School of Martian Entomology, either as students or as companions to Lady Felchester.
Harriet hurried through the quadrangle towards Lady Felchester’s study. The morning mists had cleared from the flanks of Tharsis Mons, and the mist birds, which had a habit of dive-bombing her head whenever she forgot to wear a sufficiently robust hat, had gone with it. The Martian spring was well underway, and the warmth had finally reached the upper slopes of the mountain. Harriet found she was sweating again. The warm weather. That’s all it is. She should have chosen a lighter dress.
Lady Felchester was sitting behind her desk in her study when Harriet reached the tower room. Worse, Reginald Pratt was lounging in a comfortable chair to one side. Blast the man! He must have decided to hang around for her humiliation. She could just imagine the stories he had been telling Lady Felchester. The worst thing was, most of them were probably true.
Harriet straightened her back and studiously ignored Reginald.
There were bugs everywhere in this study, specimens collected from across Mars. In display cases, in bottles, crawling and fluttering in glass tanks, a nightmare of poisonous, venomous, ravenous creatures in every possible shape, and some shapes Harriet would have assumed impossible before she’d come here. The job might be a cover, but Lady Felchester had a passion for all types of creepy-crawlies. She could name every single one of them and tell you where they lived, what their lifecycle was, and how they would kill you.
“I apologize for my tardiness, Lady Felchester.” Harriet was pleased her voice didn’t shake.
Lady Felchester closed her notebook, smoothed it flat, then looked up at Harriet.
“I have told you, Miss George, that I prefer to be addressed as Lavinia or Mrs. Cartwright in private. It is our actions, not our ranks, that matter in the service.”
A muffled snort escaped from Reginald. Lady Felchester turned to him, an eyebrow rising, and Reginald dropped his gaze. He might have outranked Lady Felchester socially, but it would have taken a far braver man than Viscount Brotherton to try to pull rank in this study. Harriet forced her surge of pleasure at his discomfort not to show on her face. A moment later, though, Lady Felchester’s words sank in. It is our actions that matter. All her delight drained away. Harriet had let herself down with her actions, not just today with the failed task, but in a dozen other failures over the last few months. She just hadn’t been good enough. Don’t beg. She would never change Lady Felchester’s mind. Don’t demean yourself.
“You have been training with us for almost a year,” Lady Felchester said. “It is at this point that we usually send recruits on their first true mission. Something simple, within Tharsis City, to take the skills we have taught them out into a real environment.”
Usually. Usually.
“Unfortunately”—here it comes—“we are not able to offer you such a mission.”
Harriet nodded. Of course not. I understand, she tried to say, but she couldn’t make the words come out. Failed. She had failed.
“You mission will take you rather further afield. I have been assured by certain parties that you have the instincts necessary to carry it out.”
Harriet stared. “But…I thought you were going to…”
Lady Felchester tipped her head enquiringly to one side.
“Nothing.”
“Speak less, my dear. Listen more.”
Harriet couldn’t look at Lady Felchester. If she did, she might let her emotions get the better of her. She wasn’t being kicked out. Not yet. She fixed her gaze above Lady Felchester’s head and found herself staring right at a…thing…with a long, yellow, spiky body, a cluster of fins and wings, and what looked like a dozen gaping mouths. It made her skin prickle with primitive terror. For all Harriet knew, it might have been staring back at her from its nest of leaves, only she couldn’t tell where its eyes actually were. She quickly looked back at Lady Felchester.
The director of trainees was peering quizzically up at Harriet. “Is there a problem, Miss George?”
“N—.” She cleared her throat. “No, Mrs. Cartwright.”
“As you are aware, the British-Martian Intelligence Service has been tracking a smuggling ring that has been selling restricted artifacts to, among others, the Emperor Napoleon. The Emperor has turned his eyes to Mars, and we believe he plans to invade. We cannot allow him access to any further Ancient Martian technology. We have not been able to track down who is behind the ring. Until now. We have had word that an informant has retrieved information that may lead us to the ringleaders. Your mission will be to meet this informant, retrieve the package of information, and return it here. You will be supervised throughout your mission and assessed on the retrieval of the package carried out without raising suspicion or giving yourself away. It is a straightforward mission, but it is of utmost importance and it is essential that is completed efficiently.”
Harriet’s lips were dry. “Who…who is going to supervise?”
“That,” Reginald said, “would be me.”
Of course it would.
She forced a smile onto her face.
“Your brother-in-law, Bertrand Simpson, will this morning have received an invitation to attend a ball held at the Louros Hotel beneath the waters of the Valles Marineris. He will not be able to take your sister with him”—that made sense; Amy was six months with child and certainly not up to travelling hundreds of miles across Mars to an underwater hotel—“so he will ask you to accompany him. You are fortunate that, despite being my companion, I have allowed you two weeks off. The informant will already be at the hotel. He will be carrying a copy of the Tharsis Times dated the twelfth of April, 1816. You will make contact and retrieve the package. That is all. Do you have any questions?”
Harriet shook her head.
“Good. Then be prepared to leave in two days. I trust that I don’t have to remind you that we are relying on you.”
Reginald followed her out of Lady Felchester’s study. Harriet kept her eyes firmly fixed ahead of her. Right now, she couldn’t bear to see the expression on his face.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered into her ear. “If you make a mess of it, I can step in and save you.”
“Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you? And then you’d love to tell everyone all about it.”
He sniffed, sounding offended. “Reports have to be accurate.”
Unless you
would come out badly. Harriet had seen Reginald’s reports before.
“I shall be attending as myself,” Reginald said. “I received an invitation some months ago, of course. It is the event of the Season. We shall have to pretend that we don’t know each other. Someone of my station could never”—he paused and sucked his lip—“associate with someone like you.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Harriet said, letting acid slip into her voice. “I think I can manage that very well indeed.”
So it was that, two days later, Harriet and her brother-in-law, the Honorable Bertrand Simpson, arrived at the Clockwork Express station beneath Tharsis City. Tharsis City had been built over the ruins of an Ancient Martian city on the slopes of the extinct volcano, Tharsis Mons, where it had grown, spreading and branching and twisting, only to come to an abrupt halt at the Tharsis Cliffs, an escarpment which plunged hundreds of feet. Anchored to and hanging from the cliffs were Tharsis City’s famous hanging ballrooms, unbreakable Ancient Martian structures enclosed with steel and glass.
Below the cliffs were the Tharsis Botanical Gardens and the Clockwork Express hub, from which glittering bronze tracks arced out across the surface of Mars, from Ophir City in the east to Chinese Mars in the south. Clear glass elevators descended the cliff face.
They were still high up the mountain here, two full miles above the Pavonis plain. Far, far to the east, Harriet thought she could just make out the glittering waters of the Valles Marineris at the limit of her vision.
“I say,” Bertrand said as the elevator doors closed. “Did Amy tell you that I’ve been promoted to Deputy Chief Inspector? It turns out that catching jewel thieves, murderers, and smugglers does get you somewhere after all.”