“Oh, pull yourself together,” Hollis hissed. “Shifty, indeed! What he looks like, Ashlan Ley, is a junkie on the verge of total breakdown, which is precisely what we want. The harder those two sweat, the more useful they are. Now hustle on in, and let’s find out what manner of plan they’ve concocted.”
The lobby was cramped, its walls speckled with yellowed dots of paste. The scraps of torn paper that clung to them looked like tiny, irregular flags, their shadows waving in the dim candlelight. Behind the counter, a sallow man with wild, silver hair sighed up and slapped a key on the wood. “Just the one night? Or what’s left of it?”
“Two,” said Rafe, staring down at the key. “But we—we’ll need a different room.”
Ashlan frowned. What was he playing at?
“Don’t like this one, huh.” The inn-keep pulled his lips back from his teeth. “Not this room.” He swiped up the key, peering at the number 17 as if he might find a flaw in its design. Then he shook his head like he had water in one ear, peering closely at Rafe. “What’s wrong with this room?” said the inn-keep. “Perfectly good. Warm and all. Nice view.”
They all stood perfectly still, like idiots.
“Does this boy speak for all of you? How old is he? Does he speak for you?”
He was looking at Ashlan.
She felt Hollis wriggling in her bag, and heard the pop of the button on his new knife’s leather case.
“Easy,” she whispered.
Not that she had the vaguest idea what else to do.
“My Ace speaks for all of us,” said Jassa. “And more. For Her.” She hoisted up her statue, giving the inn-keep an earnest smile that looked just as crazed as the carving.
He turned back to Rafe. “Ace, huh. You stayed here before, I gather? Because, you know, the old lady, the fruit-bat, Mrs. D, she had a—particular sort of clientele.”
Ashlan wondered what the hell was going on.
Rafe had said this was a place he knew, but he’d clearly never met this inn-keep.
But the inn-keep knew of him, or his people—which wasn’t working to their advantage.
Maybe he had a stash in one of the rooms he was now hoping to recover. If not, why would he risk all this attention?
“That what this is?” said the inn-keep, getting up, getting loud. “Because I’ve had enough of you people coming back to the roost, making sad eyes under your false lashes. Hasn’t been an oasis for the bent in this city for some time! Party’s over, you understand? I burnt whatever knick-knacks were left behind, just like the guards rounded up the last of your friends and burnt all of them—and that’s sad, yeah, but that sort of trouble is the last thing I need. So shuffle off, all of you,” he said, staring at Ashlan and Jassa, trying to decide if they fit the bill, “before I stop being neighborly and call the guards on you.”
Jassa was the only one of them who had an idea, it seemed.
Ashlan decided to run with it.
“Hey, you got us all wrong,” she said, smiling as she stepped up to the counter, her arms in the air. “I don’t know who you pegged us for, but this is all about luck.” She swiped up the key, rattling it in his face. “You know about luck, don’t you? The kid sure does. Seventeen’s his unlucky number. We’re gamblers, get it? Fortune’s playthings. Sure, he’s little, and he’s kind of spoiled—but we let the kid call the shots, because he always wins! And when he wins, we win. He’s like our, what do you call it, our insurance policy. Our lucky charm, or whatever.” She reached out and tousled his hair, and Rafe wrested his head away, his cheeks flushed.
“Lucky?” said the inn-keep, rubbing his nose.
“Oh!” cried Jassa, taking up Ashlan’s cue. “Very!” Stumbling over to the inn-keep, she dropped down to her knees by the edge of the counter, setting her statue on the floor and following it with a rattling fistful of dice. “See? Can’t argue with those. Lucky! That’s my Ace’s luck. Ha! That would have been four times the prize, had we bet at the table. Look there. And there!”
Hollis jabbed Ashlan in the gut again.
Reaching into the bag, she sighed, flipping another golden button onto the counter.
Was he naked in there?
The inn-keep was nodding now. “All right,” he said, grinning. “All right. So you had a good night, and he’s riding high. Just a boy. He’s just a boy! I didn’t mean to be rude, you know, it’s just that you don’t look like you have coin. Let’s get you another room, then. Nothing but the best for the golden child!” He flipped a key to Rafe, who caught it as it fell. “Anything you need, you just let me know. Full service for you lot, all right?”
But Rafe was already on the stairs, jumping them seemingly at random.
“You still don’t think this is shifty?” she whispered, climbing up behind him.
“No shiftier than the rest of you,” said Hollis.
Ashlan ducked down a hall, finding the keychain swinging from the lock. Pulling it free, she stepped inside a large, dusty room, where Rafe was shrugging out of his cloak, setting things on a crooked table.
“What was all that about, Rafe?”
“Does it matter? We’re alive.”
“Not for lack of trying.”
As Jassa closed the door, Hollis rolled from the handbag and hopped right up, showing no sign of cramp or fatigue, though he’d been curled up in there for hours on end. He was nothing if not well-built, she thought as he pulled his little knife from its case. It looked like a rapier in his hand, an impression that only strengthened as he began to lunge and parry.
Ashlan sat back on one of the beds, her feet on the floor. “You cut me, Runt, and I’ll boot you right in the face.”
“Hah!” He swiped at a corner of the blanket beside her, loosing a burst of feathers. “I’ll lop off your toes for trying, giantess.”
Jassa dropped her blue sack and began to set up her things in the corner, speaking to her dice as she arranged them in front of Left-Handed Luce.
Ashlan cracked her knuckles. “All right, you’ve pushed this string long enough, Ace. Let’s hear this plan of yours.”
Rafe stared down through the window at the street, looking sweaty and haunted.
There was no stash in here after all, Ashlan thought, watching him. He was just in a state. He’d seen how much his neighborhood had changed and gotten spooked, just like her.
Then he’d panicked, and brought them all through the lion’s jaws.
He’d better have something sensible to say for himself now.
“They sent us out to find organs, right. Human organs, to trade the Puppeteer for tlak. The fresher they are, the more we get paid. So, Ashlan, you’re going to be our mark.”
Of course she was. Whatever the plan, she was always the mark.
“We met you while we were harvesting. Far from Eth, the last surviving member of your clan, wandering the wood, looking for help. Now you’ve seen the light, and you want to join the Assemblage. Because you’ve seen what I can do.”
Hollis held his blade up to the light. “And what is that, exactly?”
“He plucks the strings of Fortune’s harp,” purred Jassa from the corner, “and makes them sing.”
“Aha,” said Hollis. “And when was this, exactly? I must have missed it.”
“Look,” said Rafe, turning, “it doesn’t matter what you two think of me. She’s my Deuce now, and I’m barely an initiate. That’ll be remarkable enough to them. And Jassa will bolster her claim with tales of my extraordinary luck, which she’ll send ahead in a letter. Sounds like that inn-keep will help us send it—there are couriers running before dawn in this neighborhood.”
“A letter?” said Ashlan, feeling uneasy. Jassa had pulled out her notebook, and was using Rafe’s new knife to cut out the pages she’d been writing.
“The Assemblage moves its base of operations every fortnight. There’s always someone at the pub on Lank Street, but it would be dangerous to trot you in unannounced. You might end up disappearing in a way that doesn’t serve the p
lan, is what I mean. And besides, I’d rather—” He set his jaw. “They think I’m a child. Just like that man downstairs does. That’s—the only way I’ve ever been able to pass. So I’m not walking in there without a solid introduction from my Deuce, saying how things have changed. Without it, none of this works.”
Jassa gave him a fawning look, and Ashlan resolved to read the letter closely. But this seemed to be more about Rafe’s ego than anything else, so she let it slide.
“Most important, though, is that I’ll have plenty of proof—a harvest of human organs in the sack, and another set, even fresher, inside you. That’s what you’ll look like to them, going in—a full purse for the Assemblage, and a body with no ties to the city for the Puppeteer, still steaming. And that’s what they’ll care about. How much tlak we’re about to bring them.”
“Okay,” said Ashlan. “So you, what, knock me out?”
Rafe shrugged. “Bash your skull in, probably. More convincing if they see your brains.”
How nonchalant he was. He was expecting her to protest, and he was expecting Hollis to side with him.
“Fine,” she said, refusing to give him the satisfaction. “But what about Hollis?”
“They’ll check your bag.” Rafe sat down on the bed beside her, his lips curling up at the edges. “So we need a way to get Hollis in, and to get you both to the Puppeteer.”
Hollis looked, for all the world, like a child eager to hear the end of a bedtime story.
“Okay,” said Ashlan. “So—”
“So that’s where this comes in,” said Rafe, holding up his oversized needle.
“Congratulations!” sang Jassa, giggling.
“I’m—missing something,” said Hollis, frowning.
Ashlan wasn’t.
“They want to gut me again,” she said, closing her eyes, “and sew you up inside.”
Hollis stepped back. “That’s—a bit much. Isn’t it? That is, a handbag is one thing, but—to be entirely surrounded by—by—”
“Unless you have a better idea,” said Rafe, “this is the plan. They’ve told us, time and again, that the Puppeteer wants fresh harvests, and untraceable ones. They don’t give a damn about quakes—it’s the trail leading back to the murder they want to avoid. So you’ll play the perfect mark, Ashlan, and after you fall, we’ll run your body right over to the Puppeteer. And when he goes to collect his prize, Hollis strikes.”
“With my knife at the ready,” he whispered, stroking the flat of his blade. “All sewed up inside, ready to meet the warm jelly of his eyes! Yes. And we’ll have a code word, Ashlan Ley, so I know when to slash my way out. How about—Father.”
“You’ve warmed right up to this idea, haven’t you,” she muttered, taking a deep breath and pushing it out slowly.
Carrying Hollis might be the nastiest thing she’d ever done to her body, and she’d done a lot.
I am a vessel, she thought, nothing more. I will carry them all, and then Tanka will allow me to sink.
Just a little longer.
Just a little more of Rafe’s bullshit.
That didn’t mean she had to go out of her way to make it pleasant for him, though.
She thought back to the farmhouse, when he’d cut her open. She remembered how shaken Rafe had been.
He’d barely been able to watch Jassa scoop her clean.
“All right then,” she said, clapping her hands. “If that’s the plan, that’s the plan. Runt, give me your knife.”
Rafe, sitting beside her, moved back.
She held out the blade. “Get the sack ready,” she said to Hollis, then pressed the hilt into Rafe’s palm.
He looked at her, startled. “What?”
“Sun’s almost up,” she said, standing squarely in front of him, pinning his knees between her legs, tugging her shirt off. “You’re the big man around here, right, Ace?”
She saw the tremor in his hand.
“So carve the fucking roast.”
Grasping him by the elbow, she yanked it in, hard.
There was a pop as the blade punctured her belly, then a hiss as she dragged his fist across.
The pain was brilliant. It was hers.
She could hear Jassa’s dice rattling in the corner.
Ashlan leaned close to his ear.
“Attaboy,” she whispered.
—Lady of Perpetual Revolution—
Rafe was pacing, sweating, sniffling, his boots off so he didn’t flinch from the sound of his own footfalls. Withdrawal had its claws in him, but he was stuck in this room, unable to do a thing to help himself—other than wait.
Jassa had somehow fallen asleep in the corner, curled like a dog around her hideous statuette, somehow able to sleep, though her tlak-sickness had to be as bad as his own. Ashlan, meanwhile, was sitting on the bed, hunched over her stomach. Every time he passed, she glared, and she cringed whenever Hollis moved inside her.
It was worse for Rafe, though, than for both of them combined—because for some reason he’d gone and brought them here, to this horrible, haunted imitation of Mrs. Dallow’s Cut-Rate Boarding House.
What had he been thinking? What had he hoped would happen when he’d led them up this street, when the fire that licked his bones was just beginning to smolder?
It had barely been sensible at the time. But he’d wanted to be safe.
The city felt like a gauntlet he was running. He was hiding everything at once, so much that there was no room to think. Back at Tanka’s treehouse, it had seemed like Jassa and the freaks would be the source of all his danger, but now he could see what a threat he posed to himself—compromised by withdrawal, he was terrified to speak, to act. He felt constantly on the verge of slipping out of character, revealing some facet of himself that had to stay concealed.
In his panic, he’d headed straight for the familiar. I know a place, he’d told them, and walked toward Mrs. Dallow’s, driven, perhaps, by some half-formed hope to show off to the boarders that people were following his orders now, or to prove to Jassa and the freaks that there were people out there who knew and respected him.
It was only when he saw the street that the obvious struck him.
Everyone at Mrs. Dallow’s knew him as crosswise, making this a decidedly curious place to prepare himself for passing as an uncrossed boy-child.
Yet it made a certain sense. No one knew more about battling through the outside world in the armor of make-believe than a bunch of bent orphans.
All of whom, as it turned out, had lost the battle—chased away at best, killed at worst. This place wasn’t Mrs. Dallow’s any more.
But Rafe, too crazed to change his course, had plunged inside regardless, and now here they were, two rooms down from 17, a hallway removed from the pansy-pantry where he’d gotten himself hooked.
The memory of that first high seized him now, and his hands started shaking, moving him one step closer to total uselessness. He had until nightfall, he guessed, as did Jassa, who was flinching and murmuring in her sleep—like a dog, he thought again, like a barely-conscious animal.
A terrible thought struck him. Was she too unsteady to pull this off?
He paced back to the far wall, leaning his palms against it, panting.
Now he was simply ricocheting from one fear to the next. He had to steady himself. He tried to breathe.
But Ashlan’s breathing was louder—as she shifted her weight, cursing at her belly.
She’d need to hold it together, too, and she hadn’t stopped complaining, either in word or in deed, since he’d finally managed to sew her up. Everything hinged on her performance, and Rafe had no evidence that she had the skills to pull off a con of this magnitude.
His whole plan felt riddled with fractures.
He stared at the wall, shutting them all out of his mind.
And ricocheted again, from the sight of the peeling wallpaper.
He and Gingerbeard were fighting. Screaming, red-faced. Little Gem was pounding on the wall, shouting back at them
for quiet.
But they couldn’t stop. As if possessed, they ran through their invisible tally-sheets of wrongs done, promises forgotten, crimes of negligence, acts of love spurned or ignored.
Then they fell, after hours of this, into bed, without touching.
Where they stared at the walls. The peeling, dingy, once-purple floral paint of the wallpaper, coming down in brown-glued sheets.
Our house will be fancier than this, though.
This was how the game began.
Our house will have a dumbwaiter in every room.
Hot and cold running rosewater.
They’d describe it, in detail, for hours, hauling themselves out of the nightmare of their conflict and back into this recurring dream. Their House for Wayward Bent Folk, where the two of them would take better care of their crosswise orphans than Mrs. Dallow ever had.
Rafe wouldn’t have to be a courier any more, pretending he was a child. Gingerbeard wouldn’t have to dress like a man and tend bar.
The kids will call you Mister Davin.
Will you be Missus Beard, then?
Naturally, love.
As if that word were the triggering rune that ended their enchantment, Gingerbeard would lay a large hand on Rafe’s back, and the two of them would be safe again.
Rafe shoved the memory away, staggering back from the wall.
It didn’t matter, he realized as a wave of nausea assailed him, that he couldn’t get high. He’d settle in a heartbeat for the tlak to simply take away this sickness, this infirmity, this constant swooping of his mind. It would leave him exhausted, miserable, and miles from where he wanted to be, but he wouldn’t be like this—so vulnerable he felt flayed.
He flexed his hands, turning to Ashlan. “We have to get out of here,” he said, with enough force that Jassa roused, red-faced, from the floor.
“Where,” said Ashlan under her breath, kneading her stomach with both hands, “do you suggest we go?”
Rafe stared at her, momentarily unable to put her question in context. Too much was happening—too much in his mind, still more in his body.
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