Go for the Throat – 23.c | Pale

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The foundling put the bow to her violin, below a hard white mask that covered her lower face.  She wore a long, slinky red dress that opened up around the feet, and a white fur coat, and snowflakes clung to her black hair.

“Uh,” Mal said, as the woman began drawing out a long, eerie note, giving away their position.

A finger was pressed to her lips by one of the foundlings next to her.  She considered snapping at the finger.  One of the ones from the town hall, who worked under Miss.

The woman stepped out of cover, past the frontline guys Stew had brought in.

After some hesitation and signaled communication, some of those guys hurried forward.  They worked in the factories, and hoarded metal.  That metal got melted down and put to work, with Stew’s enforcers getting plenty to keep.  Makeshift body armor was worn over winter clothing, to the point barely any skin showed, and a lot of that skin was scarred.

The lead enforcer was a woman, wearing an inch-thick steel plate on her front, welded to a collar, which her helmet was welded to, in turn.  Whatever wasn’t welded to another piece was attached with chains.  She carried a grouping of homemade shotguns on her right leg, doubling as armor, and a sliding steel door she’d pried away, attached handles to, and now carried as a makeshift shield, big and sturdy enough she could probably stand up to a small rocket.

The other three that hurried up and raised similar shields were in that same ballpark.  One had a large irregular metal blade and the other had a teenager following behind him, carrying what he needed for the cannon he’d slung around his back.

The violin playing began in earnest, with the armored enforcers guarding her from three directions while she trudged forward through the back field behind the Blue Heron.

Others started forward.  The Foundlings and Lost didn’t crouch, and looked very casual as they walked forward.

Someone bumped Mal’s arm.  A guy, smoking.  It took her a second to recognize him- and she didn’t, really, until she saw past him, saw his friends, and the woman in chains they were trying to keep under control.

He didn’t want to talk, with everything going on, so he waved, smiling awkwardly with one half of his mouth while keeping his cigarette in the other half.

She gave him the fingers and moved a little distance away.  Fucking nah.  She knew them.

Shortly after Kennet below had connected up to Kennet above -Mal liked the idea it had always been there- some middle aged woman who thought she was hot stuff had trawled past the hangout spots near the school for teenage boys.  Yeah.  A self-described ‘cougar’, to use the slang term.  She’d been so caught up in the ‘prowl’ she hadn’t noticed she was in Kennet below.  She’d apparently been of a mind to put up with anything, so long as she got what she was after, which led to the collar, muzzle, and chains, and all the boys had been interested in was having an attack dog.  Or an attack cougar.  So now she got nothing, which was good, and Kennet found had helped them make the black sheep ‘cougar’ rabid and a little more animal, which was just, maybe.

It was the sort of thing that made Kennet below make way more sense to Mallory than the alternatives.  What would even happen in Kennet above?  The boys would get spooked by the old lady’s overtures, cry and run home to their mommies, then cry some more?  Get tucked in nice for a nap?  Or worse, they wouldn’t, and the cougar would get what she wanted?  This way, at least, she’d become something that contributed to bigger dynamics.  There was no ecosystem up there.

Mal glanced around.  The foundlings and others who were moving forward here were leaving her more and more alone in the shadows of the trees.

Given the choice between being alone or being part of the group, she joined the herd that was crossing the no-man’s land between the trees and the building.  There was something going on, right?  Some magic, some trick to make them invisible, maybe?

She kept crouching, using the heaps of snow that had accumulated for cover- more like snow dunes than actual mounds of ground with snow over them, she quickly found out, as her arm went through one.

Mal could see a bogeyman- bogeywoman?  Creepy angel lady, winging her way through the air.  She dropped out of the sky, landing in the snow ahead of them.  Wings were stitched to the ends of wings.  They draped around her, and the snow was stained black on contact, like creeping mold was seizing it.

The lead enforcer reached for one of the shotguns, then paused.

The angel had a strip of rusted metal bolted to her jaw, comb-like narrow teeth extending upward, that she peered through with yellowed eyes.  She threw one arm back, making one wing fold and awkwardly bend, like a cape tossed back out of the way.  There were half a dozen people huddled in the blackened snow beneath, covered in sores, with black branches and bits of black stone embedded in the diseased and infected flesh.

Okay, they definitely weren’t invisible.

Mal looked back at the fifteen paces-long gap between them and the trees, considering her options.

The music played through the standoff, the violinist moving slowly because she wasn’t walking very fast, and the snow was deep.  The enforcers moved slowly because they were each carrying or wearing at least three hundred pounds of steel.

A flare of orange caught her eye.  The edge of the roof.

Edith, right?  Or- no, her name had changed, since the human part was dead.  The Girl by Candlelight.  The spirit was a ghostly white woman with a massive candle held across one shoulder, both ends burning.  Wax ran through her hair, and the ends were lit.  The snow melted around her, and it melted into black wax, which had little bowls with candles on them floating in them.  She was on a part of the roof that sloped, and the candles-in-bowls slid down the slope and were eased down to the ground by the slower-flowing liquid wax.

And there was one that they’d been warned about, when the Bitterstreet Witch had outlined who they might be fighting.  A man in overalls, a winter jacket, high winter boots, and a toque, who held a scalpel, and moved funny.

Mal hesitated, then glanced back over her shoulder, assessing her options.  The cougar boys were there, and if it was down to the cringe factor of being near them or being here and getting torn apart, she wasn’t ruling out the latter.

Mal knew them because they’d come by her stepmom’s place for her extra dog stuff and a cage.  Her stepmom had adored them, and they’d played up the act of being nice boys, which, like, read the room, stepmom.  There’s a snarling woman with a leopard-print top and a makeshift muzzle crouched in the corner of that room, which is our kitchen.  Don’t want to get close to them.  It was the sort of thing that wouldn’t fly now, with Verona and Lucy wanting black sheep handled a certain way, certain things kept more surface-level polite, whatever.  But this was one of the things that had been there before they’d laid down the law and grandfathered forward.

Either way, one of them in particular kept coming up to Mal, complimenting her tattoos, or her clothes, or offering her free snacks, cigarettes, and pot.  Probably buttering her up to get close to her stepmom.  She didn’t want to have to deal with whatever silently mimed bullshit they pulled right now, in the middle of this.

If she could get by them- yeah.  The cougar didn’t like the violin, that was playing more and more intently as they got closer and closer to trouble, so they moved further to the side.

She started to retreat.  There were plenty of buildings around here.  And shacks.  Every person from Kennet below was their own kind of ‘double check to be sure’, and so she glanced at some kids who trailed behind, struggling with what was close to being waist-deep snow for them, in places, saw how they were chain-smoking… she had to guess age.  Each grade level below high school and set of classrooms was a gang in the school.  Seconds, thirds?

Wait.  The cougar boys, and the thirds, and the seconds.  Some scattered fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths, eighths, and then high schoolers like the cougar boys.  And they had cigarettes in plentiful supply.

Mal knew better than to think a love of Kennet would get these guys to all play along.

It was the Vice Principal, who’d been hard to see past some of the administrative foundlings and the other kids, because she didn’t have her steed.  She was wearing a suit jacket and tie with a tutu-style poofy dress, eye shadow heavy, hair floofy, with lots of makeshift piercings and decorations, including bars running through eyelids.  A grouping of pens, jewelry, coins, and bits of paper had been hot-glued onto what might’ve been construction paper wrapped around cardboard, and pinned to her chest.  Oh, there were gold watches laid across her shoulders.  It was probably meant to be like a fancy military general might have.  The things at her chest would be medals from tours of duty, except they were things like tickets from winning one of the tournaments in the arcade, wedding rings taken from people she’d beaten up, and other odds and ends she probably thought looked cool.

The Vice Principal pointed.  Forward.  A silent instruction to stay with the group.

Verona had told Mal that this would be way too much for her and to hang back, so obviously she had to wait until Verona had passed through, then go through herself.  She’d pull off something cool, steal something as a memento and proof, and then lord it over Verona for a long while.  If she could find a boy to pair up with for a while, that was a bonus.

Mal looked at the angel, the Girl by Candlelight, the scalpel guy, and the gaunt goons who’d come with the bogeyman.  The violin playing filled the air, and some of the foundlings from the city office had papers in hand, held so they were rigid, and rapped them against their arms in sync.  The sound of the papers all together was like a snappy drum.

The scalpel paused, then ran off.  The angel flew off to the other side.

Was that because of the Vice Principal?

She casually reached for her tattoo gun, and the music intensified.  It reached a sharp pitch that made her flinch as her hand brushed against the handle.

So that was what was going on.

Mal straightened a bit.

We’ve got a nice easy walk over to the building, but then what?

It suited the Vice President to be part of a move like this, where the bridge was basically burned behind them.  Except it was more like they were on a boat, and the boat wouldn’t be guaranteed to make the return trip.

Okay.  She’d have to keep an eye on their security.  Whatever that looked like, when they couldn’t do much.

The wax flowing off the roof was making a small lake, off the back of the building.  It was darker than water would’ve been, with the candles floating in bowls drifting out until they hit the shore, where they melted snow into more wax.

Blocking the way.

Mal, a little more aware that her well being depended on the violinist, moved forward, careful, and bent down.  She extended a finger, then pulled back.

The wax was hot.

The Girl by Candlelight leaped down from the roof.  Or flew- it was a little vague, like she became momentarily liquid, a rush of flame streaking behind the wicks.

Circling around.  It took two cougar boys hauling back on the chain to keep their attack cougar from lunging for the Girl by Candlelight.  With the way she was moving, she’d wade straight into the hot wax.

They were being closed in.  Encircled by this sea.  Smoke rose off of candles and steam rose as snow sizzled and melted, and it made clouds.

The view past those clouds was a little vague.  Shifting.

At least very few of their people seemed to be panicking.  The enforcers in their welded steel armor didn’t give anything away.  The violinist played a mad, intense solo, the foundling administrators were unflinching.  There were people from Kennet below who were putting on a brave face, and it was only some of the kids- especially kids who were on their own, who were looking nervous.

It was better if they acted like they didn’t care, if it was a student from the sevens who was mostly surrounded by a group of twos.  Showing weakness could mean getting stabbed from a low angle, the moment the Vice Principal wasn’t looking.

Mal had to take her own advice, and stood straighter.

One of the enforcers dropped their shield onto the wax.  The violinist and two of the administrators stepped onto it, and the enforcer kicked it.  The pool of wax was shallow, and the shield skidded across it, stopping at the far ‘shore’.

The Girl by Candlelight rushed forward, eyes burning, and the violinist stepped into her way, playing, head tilted.

Two more shields were dropped in, one after the other.  Three in a row was enough distance to cross this ‘moat’.  They weren’t at the school, but they didn’t have far to go to get there.  Everyone crossed, with Mal taking care to hurry over before the cougar boys could follow.  She didn’t want to be associated with their cringe.

The Girl by Candlelight took off, flying.

Three big guns had been arranged around them, all had left.

The enforcer with the cannon aimed the weapon at the exterior wall of the school.  An administrator put a hand up, moving a finger to tell him to wait, head bobbing up and down with the music.  A second put a hand up, waving the finger through the air like a conductor with his stick, head also bouncing.  A third, head bobbing in sync with the others, put both hands up, counting down from ten.

Was that the timing, for a cannon to go off in sync with the music?  The violin built in volume and intensity.  Sweat flew off the violinist’s forehead as she whipped her head around, despite the fact it was as cold as shit.

He squared off, bracing himself, one leg bent, the other straight, back end of the cannon braced against the back leg, watching.

The sky brightened at a spot over the trees.

The countdown was at ‘four’ when the light swept over them.  It felt like a bomb had gone off, and the shockwave was hitting them all, but it wasn’t a bomb, it wasn’t fire.  There was no noise to go with it.  There was quiet, with the violin playing cutting through it.

The violin had been building to something, but did a little pivot, and countered the new scene.  Mal could feel her clothes rustling, and saw her winter clothes turning to something lighter and brighter, her tattoos peeling off- no!

There was a push and pull to match the violin’s sound.  A note played, long and loud, and it pushed back.  It paused, in the brief shift between notes, and ground was lost.

Mal stumbled as the landscape changed, dropping to her knees.  As she did, she felt the effect nearly take her.  Something warm and dark slid over her, like a pleasantly wet blanket, the space between her legs, between arm and body, between fingers, between chin and shoulder, it pulled, and it pulled in a way that crumpled her, folded her.  No pain, just more warmth and wet.

No thinking, just watching with a mind dulled, like a house wired with electricity, but no need for the lights to be on right now, because it was sunny and warm.  She was folded and compressed, her body split between two people, a boy and a girl holding hands.  She weighed a hundred and eleven pounds and all of her was crammed into that tight space, about half the boy’s chest, his arm, the girl’s arm, most of her upper body.

Like putting a foot into a shoe to find a dead and maggoty mouse in the toe, she found other things here, long dead.  Birds, insects, and mice.  Some were alive, some were dead but still aware, twitching, rustling, finding their own positions crammed into this place.  They reacted to her presence, and added pressure, with blind panic, rage, something else- and they bit, scratched, dug into her.  She reacted the same way, head and heart dulled, body reacting instinctively, twitching, digging in and clawing as much as she was able to, when there wasn’t an iota of space.  If pulling a hand away from a hot stove was flight, being crammed into a tight space with others who occupied it produced something fight.  Every inch of her.

The boy and girl smiled.  All was cushioned by warm wet pleasantness, like damp grass on a summer day, mind, heart, and body.  All- this neighborhood, the people, the grass, the buildings, it was nice.  Pleasant.  She could lose herself in it further.

Through senses that weren’t one of the ones given to her as a human, as if she was crammed in so tight that it wasn’t always certain where her nerves ended and other ones started, she could feel it.  How every inch of this place stretched over that bloody, desperate, crammed-in struggle.

She could lose herself in the sun, in the kiss, the comfortable, sunny clothing.

The boy and girl turned to one another, kissed, then stopped holding hands and went in separate directions.  Half of Mal was carried away in the boy, and half was carried away in the girl.  She was in their skin, in their bones, in their clothes, traces of her exhaled into this bright, sunny neighborhood when they breathed, to meet sun and grass.

There was a flash of a golden sunbeam behind the school with the blue windows.  Trees rustled.  Every person in the neighborhood turned to look.  Some started walking in that direction, and Mal could feel how the weight was being shifted, concentrated over there.  That was where the festival was.  That was where everyone was, of course they’d go.

A homemade shotgun fired.  Some heads turned to look at the source.  Nobody had acted like they had been shot.  Another shot followed.

Very, very far away, the cougar was released by the cougar boys, and threw herself into things.  Tackling someone just ahead of Mal, biting, clawing, for only two seconds before she was consumed, swallowed up by grass and one bystander.

Multiple things pushing back, and the shift of focus-

Mal had a leg sticking out.

She wasn’t nice.  She wasn’t pleasant.  She didn’t trust nice or pleasant.

She could-

She had an arm free.  She reached down, and with most of the rest of her still swallowed up, one a dozen feet away, and still walking, not even caring about the commotion now, she grabbed her makeshift tattoo gun out of the holster.  The ears that heard the violin weren’t hers.  The hands that would have covered those ears but still felt the music weren’t hers.

There was push and pull, still, weaker now that the focus was elsewhere, and she could- she timed for the pull.  The gun fired, vibrating, and raked a line across her arm.  It was a homemade tattoo gun, made by Verona, third edition, a Christmas present.  Part of the tube broke, and when she moved it, there were times the needle was jabbing past skin, into deeper tissues.  Another pull- another tattooed gouge- more of a u-shape.

The violinist moved closer to her, and the effect pulled most of the way away.  Mal was still attached to the boy, and a spooled-out, gory thread of her stretched between her legs, stomach, and right arm and the part that had her head and arm.

People with bags over their heads, sharp-toothed mouths drawn randomly across the bags, like some shitty pattern, were approaching.  They paused.

The scene shifted.  Mal was relinquished.  A picnic table long enough for a hundred people stretched out at the foot of the hill that led up to the school.

She knelt there, stunned, flinching faintly when there was movement to either side of her.

Her left eye didn’t work.  A lot of her felt cold.  Especially her head and left arm.  Her left arm-

She reached over with her right arm, rubbing it.  It prickled painfully, numb, and the blood wasn’t flowing properly from the wounds, neither the ones from the tattoo gun or the bites.

She couldn’t even get a good look at it.  Her left eye was blind, her arm hung limp, flesh of her hand blue where it lay against her hand, where the blood didn’t run a thick, goopy black-red, like blood from a corpse instead of from her.  She couldn’t even reposition it, because moving it made the pins and needles too intense.

She made her hand move.  It hurt.  She opened it wide, fingers splayed, then, with two attempts, clenched it into a fist, breathing through grit teeth.

That small amount of exercise got blood flowing.  Fresh red blood pushed the thick black dead blood out of the way.  She slapped her arm a few times.

One of the adminstrators turned, putting finger to lips.  Shushing her.

Are you actually serious?

She tried to focus on what was happening.  The bogeymen were coming in, lining up behind chairs.  One approached her, extending a hand, taking her by the arm, grip firm near her armpit, hauling her to her feet.  She tugged her way free, stumbled, still a little dazed, and watched as he pulled her chair out.

The others were settling.

One bogeyman broke apart a baguette of bread.

The violinist ceased playing, sheathing her bow.

The administrators rustled papers and sat down.

The Vice Principal took the chair at the one end.

Plates of cookies were being passed all around.

Clothing rustled as the bogeymen got settled in.

One remained standing, pouring out cups of tea.

A break from the suburbia, everything in rhythm.

–spread out her hand, clenched it, spread it out, clenched it.  Working the blood through her arm, so it felt like crushing agony instead of dead flesh.

She thought of Verona.  Verona’s hand.

“I do love tea parties,” the Vice Principal said, with a clap of her hands.

Bogeymen dipped their heads in acknowledgement, bag-covered heads ‘facing’ her, for lack of a better word.

“We are so glad,” one of the bogeymen answered, clasping his hands together.

The Vice Principal sat at the end of the table, and put elbow on table, looking at the administrators from Kennet found.  Miss’s hands.  “So.  You were with the violinist, now you’re with me…”

“Miss Principal, we must insist you show manners at the table.  You are a guest,” a bogeyman said.

“You already know what I had in mind, do you?” she asked the administrators.

They were silent.  Papers had been set down by their place settings.  One took tea that was handed to her.

“Miss Principal,” the bogeyman said.  “It’s rude to ignore your hosts, especially when they are letting you know the rules of the house.”

Is this a three strikes thing?  It feels like a three strikes thing.

The Vice Principal sat up straighter, hands in her lap.  She smiled at the bogeyman that was serving her, and took a piece of bread.  Then, to the bogeyman that had spoken, she said, “I apologize.”

Mal felt uncomfortable, hearing that.  Too weak.

She felt fucking uncomfortable about a lot of this.

“You can’t interrupt the violin music, right?” the Vice Principal asked.  “And now we’re here, and-”

“Miss Principal-”

“Hold on, hold on, don’t interrupt.  That’s rude,” the Vice Principal said, her tone getting more dangerous.  Which helped Mal ease up a bit.  “-now we’re here, and we’re eating bread, and I know from my meetings with the Kennet leadership, that’s a big deal, it is, it’s magical politeness, and I’m betting you twist those rules up, don’t you, waiting for someone to screw up before you punish them for breaking some obscure magic politeness rules.  I want my plus-one.”

The final line changed in tone.

The bogeymen were silent.

“You guys work for Miss, don’t you?” the Vice Principal asked the administrators.  “You take any magic lawyer ‘can’t do that‘s and make them stick better?”

Mal felt a thump.  She looked back.

The Vice Principal’s predecessor.  He’d been in charge of the school when everything had connected up, Kennet below materializing.  A hardass, a tyrant.  And under the Vice Principal, he’d been twisted up into something monstrous.

He forged his way across the field, oversized and clumsy.  The size of a house.  Clothes didn’t fit him, but the way weight hung off him, it didn’t matter- no bits were visible.  Old paint and scars covered him.  He spent a third of the time staggering on his feet, a third of the time crawling, and a third in the midst of falling or getting up, carried by momentum.

“He was not invited.”

“He’s my plus-one.  If I can plan a tea party and include people like him, I don’t see why you can’t.  Or… can’t you serve him?”

The man stomped forward.

“He was not invited, this can be treated as an act of aggression,” a bogeyman said.

The bogeymen began to rise from their seats.  Mal reminded herself where her makeshift tattoo gun was, even as she saw an administrator raise a hand a bit off the table, to gesture ‘stay’.

“According to Mince’s Handbook on decorum,” one of the administrators said, “1887, an invitation includes an implicit welcome for any life partners of your guest.”

“Her minion, and that rule is absent in the ’88 edition.”

“Addressed in Letters to Polite Patty a year later, and whatever the partnership is called, it fits the standards in chapter three…”

Mal looked around the table, searching for someone who was as confused at this as she was.  Even the Vice Principal was playing along, apparently.  Stew Mullen’s lieutenants in their heavy armor were too hard to read, with their helmets on, and her eye traveled down the table to the cougar boys.  One of them shared her look, clear on his face, which was good, she wasn’t crazy.

One of them winked at her, though, which ruined it.

Keeping some creepy-ass woman as an attack cougar on a chain?  Sure, whatever.  Everyone needed a thing, but they called themselves the cougar boys.

The cougar boys.

She cringed and put her still-stiff hand up by the side of her face.  Which reminded her that she was still blind in one eye.

The ex-principal had lumbered up to them, and had stopped behind the Vice Principal’s chair, confused.

The Vice Principal beckoned, and he bent down.  She undid the clasp on his head-enclosing helm.

It thunked to the ground, heavy.  His face was red, and his hair and beard were plastered to his face.  He stretched his jaw open, and it audibly cracked.  He eyed the table of food.

“-sets out standards for tiers of partner, and outlines how improper it is for a mere beau to crash any party-”

“-of a certain measure of class, if you recall Mince’s handbook, ’87 again, chapter four, where Mince outlines what a party is.  We are outdoors, in casual dress, some of us messy from what we may classify in the exercise and games class.  This tea party should be classified as an affair, with all the standards therein.”

“However it’s classified,” the Vice Principal said, “my guy’s been standing there without anyone even asking if he wants a seat.  Or tea, or any of that bread.”

“We can waive the seat,” one of Miss’s administrators said.

“Can we?” the Vice Principal asked.

“We can, but even a guest who arrives under mistaken conclusions should be given refreshments.”

“The guest is a boor.  He arrives in a shabby state of undress, sweaty and greasy,” a bogeyman replied.  “Ample excuse to turn him away, Mince’s notes, ’89.”

“Turn him away from the door, you know as well as we do.  We are outdoors, evidently.”

Do they?  Do we?  Is this real? Mal thought.

“The door in this case is metaphorical.  But if you wish to stress the fact we are outdoors, then we can turn to Persimmon’s Rules for Picnics, if you’ll allow.”

“A classic text on rules and decorum.”

Mal rolled her eyes.

“Persimmon writes that in a picnic in particular, a guest must be careful not to be a glutton, for the basket has only so much, and I must say, it’s a certainty you brought a glutton here, which forces a point of contention.”

“And we get to the heart of the matter.  We are within a minute or two of easy walking of a kitchen.  You seem to stand unprepared to feed a guest’s partner you had reason to expect.”

“We are prepared, and we must continue to take issue with the notion of him being a partner.”

“Yet you made no comment of the inclusion of the muzzled woman on a chain, at the far end of the table there.  Here you have a guest of class, a military leader and a warlord, and you’re not prepared to extend the same?”

“Again, we are prepared, if you continue to say we’re not we must take issue.  The point at issue is once we start to serve him, we’ll find ourselves at a stalemate that serves neither of us.”

Ohhhhh, Mal realized.  All this dancing around was them trying to avoid being put in a weird situation with trying to feed and serve a bottomless pit.  And apparently that mattered?

“When you’ve insulted a guest’s partner by calling him a glutton and a boor?”

“Can I say something?” the Vice Principal asked, abrupt.

One of the administrators nodded slightly.

“Kennet’s hardcore school handbook, rule one, bam.”

Mal tensed.

A bogeyman replied, “We’re not familiar with that text, they aren’t relevant-”

“Can I- what’s the word?  You’re a liar!” the Vice Principal said, leaning forward.  “It’s very relevant.”

“You’ll need to cite it and prove that.”

“I did.  Bam, that’s the citation.  That’s the rule,” the Vice Principal said.  She glanced back over her shoulder, frowning.  “Bam.”

The ex-principal startled, then lunged forward.  He swatted the table, upending it, slamming it and all the bogeymen sitting at one side of the table into the hill.  One of the administrators sitting to the Vice President’s right was only barely pulled out of the way.

“That’s the rule.  Bam.  I use it a lot.”

Mal got to her feet, tattoo gun in one hand, a knife pulled out from a belt sheath in the other.  The bogeymen were getting up, or pulling themselves out from under the table.

Two attacked people sitting at the end of the table.  Stabbing the lead enforcer where armor didn’t protect her.  The cougar on a leash was unmuzzled, and pounced.

The ex-principal put his weight onto the long table.  Wood cracked under his mass, but he took another step, and it didn’t crack, and compressed.

A deafening explosion startled Mal enough she fell down.

The cannon had blown a hole in the wall.

Trouble was coming from all directions, and the weird altered reality was pressing in.  Mal felt her heart leap in her chest.

Couldn’t wuss out.

But backing away was smart.

“To the hole!”

The Vice Principal whistled, and the big guy leaned forward, reaching out, and pulled that two-foot wide hole in the wall open, tearing the wall partially down.

The massive ex-principal was being swallowed.  His legs were becoming a crowd of people and a pair of cars parked on the grass.  He crawled away from it, punching at the air, only for his hand to get pulled into the effect.

The violinist began playing.  It seemed to take all of her effort to protect the ex-principal alone.  The effect encroached in around them from all directions, and it was all the intense violin playing could do to keep it from swallowing up her or the oversized man.

Mal and the rest of them climbed through.  Mal’s hands and shins scraped against the broken edges of the wall.

The big guy sat down, his back to the hole in the wall, him and the violinist outside, the playing muffled.

The room was so crowded Mal couldn’t see what the small space even was, and feeling closed in made her feel like she’d react like she had when compressed inside that weird warm wet space… so she was eager to get away.  Maybe too eager, moving before thinking.  A hatch opened in the wall, a tiny gnome-man fighting a squirrel and a rat with a tiny hat tumbled out, nearly tripping Mal, who did a little skip-hop to avoid them.

She glanced back to see the Vice Principal grab them before they could go under the bed, a space that glowed the same ominous orange as the world beyond the little hatches.  The Vice Principal hurled the gnome thing through the hatch.  The squirrel and rat threw themselves through the hatch, after it.

“Brownies,” someone said.

It was so distracting Mal barely realized she’d crossed the hall, which was punctuated by more glowing doors.  Some of the lights had broken, and shadowy figures moved this way and that.

She hauled another door open, to go inside there.  She left the door open, so she could see across the hall.  She struggled to catch her breath.

It didn’t look or sound like anyone had seen her or identified her as an invader as she’d crossed  It didn’t look like the ‘everything is bright and sunny grossness’ thing reached into the school.

A lightly furnished bedroom.  Like one of the barracks rooms that was at the school.  There were open trapdoors and hatches on the wall and even one on the blue-tinted window, painted to look like the outdoors.  Or what had been the outdoors.  It showed winter and outside she could only see a sunny outdoor barbecue in some really preppy neighborhood.  Fires roared on the far side of the trapdoors, and ominous shadows moved, with nobody quite showing themselves.  She saw some rodent and bird shapes race across, shadows cast from orange-tinted little hatches to the far wall of the room.  She saw the shadows of brownies.

She tensed.  There was a boy crouched in the corner.  She’d almost missed seeing him with her eye fucked up, the light playing tricks on her.  He sat there in his tighty-whiteys, pants around one ankle, flushed.

He was holding a girl’s underwear.  But he was masked.  The mask was almost the only thing he was wearing.

“Yo.  Foundling?”

“It’s not what it looks like.”

“I really don’t care.”

“I needed cloth… for reasons I don’t want to get into.”

“Don’t care.”

“Of someone that’s allergic to anything that’s not silk.”

“Don’t care, okay,” she said, absently, as she peeked out into the hallway.  A group of brownies were marching toward a hatch, carrying one of Sootsleeves’ little urchins, who was lashed to a pole with an apple in their mouth.  Pigeons were similarly lashed to the parts of the pole the kid didn’t require, with apple slices in theirs.

They were confronted by people from the other room, that had come in with Mal.  The brownies abandoned their prizes.

The coast was clear, it seemed.  A group of her guys were standing by a weird dead end at the end of the hall.  The other end of the hallway disappeared around a bend.

She felt a prick at her back.  Sharp.  The boy’s breathing was heavy on the other side of a mask made of interconnected blocks.

She went still.

“Don’t move, don’t say anything, don’t signal,” he said.  “Stay behind, be quiet and good, I’ll treat you as nicely as I can, given the situation.”

“What’s the situation?”

“We’ve been bound,” he said.  “Bound and spellbound.  But there’s leeway, still.  I get to use you before they get you.”

He took her knife away.  She let him.

He didn’t seem to care as much about the tattoo gun.

She hung back as the people who’d come through signaled, organizing.  They broke into two groups.

One of the cougar boys glanced at Mal in passing, but didn’t see the boy behind her.

The boy peeled away parts of the blocky mask he was wearing to expose his lower face, then pressed the silk underwear to his nose and mouth and inhaled, deep, before murmuring, “Good.”

“Yeah?  Good for you, bud.”

“Shhhh.  Now open your mouth.  Stick out your tongue.”

He put something on it.  Pills.  Her mouth was dry enough they stuck.  She didn’t have saliva.  She was already kind of fucked up from everything earlier.  Being caught by that weird neighborhood effect.

“Not in any way legal, but sometimes a guy has needs.  Swallow.”

The blade dug in a bit deeper.  He leaned into her, then used his foot to nudge the door to swing closed.  The side of his foot stopped the door at the last second, so it wouldn’t slam.

“Did you swallow?” he asked.

She tongued the meds into the side of her mouth, between cheek and gums.  Then she lied, “Sure.”

He grabbed another pair of underwear, and pushed it into her face, partially into her mouth.  “Keep that there.  Now…”

He maneuvered her so she stood with her back to the window.  He was holding a knife, and had hers in his belt.  He stood with his back to the closed door.

“Strip.”

She gave him a long, lingering look.

“We’ll need something to keep that there,” he pointed the knife at her face.  She still had the underwear clamped in her teeth.  He reached over to the desk, where a roll of tape was.  “Strip.”

She raised one foot off the ground, then fiddled with the laces.  He turned his attention to the tape, trying to find where it started to peel it away.

So she, leg already raised, knee bent, kicked him square in the underwear.  Hard enough for nuts to be introduced to gut.  He banged against the door.

She spat out the underwear and pills, while he let out a long gurgling sound, doing his best to stay standing.

Around the same time, the door opened, hitting him, and sending him face-first into the bag of girl’s clothes.  Two girls looked as startled to see the two of them as they were to be interrupted.  It looked like the girls had rushed into the room to get out of the way of people in the hallway.

Two girls in the uniform for the private school.  Enemies.  Practitioners.  Not ones Mal had seen when Rook had been talking to them on the rooftop, while Verona, Lucy, and the other one were away.

“The fuck?” one girl hissed.

“Bind them now,” the other hissed, reaching for her waistband.

The boy lying on the ground in his underwear kicked the girl’s legs out from under her before she could get what she was after.

So he wasn’t bound?

Was this an opossum situation?

She didn’t have time to dwell on it.  She hadn’t had a moment to think, really, since leaving the trees.  She had a general sense of what practitioners could pull, by now, and she knew she couldn’t let either girl pull anything.  The boy was trying to handle the one girl, who was a bit older than him, and Mal was left to deal with the other.

She rushed the girl, hopping over the boy and the girl he’d knocked over.

Mal wasn’t a fighter.  She’d come out the loser in more than half the fights she’d been in.

No moment to think since leaving the trees, an edge of panic had dogged her since she’d been eaten by the sunny neighborhood thing, and she hadn’t even had a chance to figure out what to think about it before the boy in the weird mask and his underwear had held her at knifepoint.

She grabbed clothes and hair to pull the girl forward, while rushing into her, trying hard to get the girl’s head down, and get her own body in the way of the girl straightening up.

It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t graceful, it wasn’t even a fight– the closest she came was bringing her knee up to try to pop the girl in the face.  This was a scrap.

The girl tried to pull away, and Mal went with it, pushing.  They passed through the doorway, across the hallway, and into a barracks room on the other side of the hall.  The girl fell, and Mal had a moment where she stood tall.

“Goddess of bloody glor-”

Mal grabbed the nearest piece of furniture, a short bookshelf, and hauled on it.

“-uhh!” the girl gasped out an inarticulate sound as she saw the bookshelf start to tip her way.

She flipped onto her belly and scrambled to get out of the way.  In the process, she didn’t notice Mal wasn’t strong enough to actually bring the bookshelf down on top of her.

But it was a chance.  Mal jumped onto her back, twisting the one arm that wasn’t under the girl up and into an awkward position.

“I’m not one of the nice ones who offers surrender, sorry,” Mal said, leaning her body into that twisted arm to make the shoulder bend in ways it shouldn’t.

“Wouldn’t-” the girl grunted.  “Ask.”

Someone had gone to help the boy, it looked like.  Okay.

“You going to get around to breaking my arm?” the girl asked.  It sounded like she was trying to be brave, but the fear leaked in, and the fact she’d asked betrayed weakness.

Mal was pissed.  For a lot of reasons.  She’d come with a plan in mind, and it’d be a bit of glory, a bit of casual theft from people who deserved it.  A boy if she wanted the bonus points.  Except this didn’t feel glorious.  She wasn’t getting a chance to steal.  The only boys who paid attention to her were losers.

She thought about Verona.  The look on Verona’s face.  That tired edge.

She felt that.

Empathy fucking sucked.  She felt a flare of rage.

Rage was better than the alternatives right now.

She got her tattoo gun, which dangled from an elastic lanyard at her wrist, ready at hand.  Then she leaned harder into the arm to immobilize the girl, gripped her hair with one hand, and drew out words.  The girl struggled, which made the lettering shaky.  She focused more on keeping the needle at the right depth for the ink to stick.  If it punched in any deeper, it would gouge and maybe scar instead.

FUCK.  F near the temple, K near the center of the forehead.

YOU’RE.  Y near the ear, E by the nose.  A bit crammed in.  The girl shrieked.

The girl managed to twist free, making strangled scream sounds, and pushed Mal away.  She scrambled backed away, between bed and dresser, sobbing.

The hole in the wall with the back of the Vice Principal was just beside her.  She looked baffled to see it there, in her panic.

“Want me to finish the last word?  Supposed to be goddess.”

“You tattooed me!?”

“I wasn’t done,” Mal said, voice low, as she straightened.  She felt very tired all of a sudden, and sore.  “Just so you know, the plan is to kick you in the face until you say a lie and lose your magic for a while.  I’ll try to avoid scuffing the tattoo, since it’s fresh.”

“You tattooed me!”

“Hey,” Mal said.  She crouched down, and the girl flinched, arms going up to shield her face.  “Hey.”

“You tattooed me.”

“Yeah.  Oh, it’s prison ink.  There’s iron in it, so don’t think you can laser that off.”

“What?”

“It’ll overheat and burn.  And magic shouldn’t do too hot either,” Mal lied.

She saw the horror on the girl’s face.

“What the fuck do you think is happening?  Where do you think you are right now?” Mal asked.

“I don’t-” the girl stuttered.  She was dissolving into panic again.

“Hey,” Mal said, her voice soft.  “You were going to bind him?  You were going to bind me?  You’re worshiping this shitty goddess?  What do you think all of this is?”

The girl shook her head.  She was crying, one hand to the side of her face.

“People are dying.  People are in agony, every second right now, because of the people you’re working for.  How long have you been at this?”

“Since the New Year’s.”

“Fucking hell.  And they drag you out here?  All of you hate your parents that much?”

“They set up magic.  Magic called connection blocks.  To make our parents not worry too much about us being gone.  I threw in the word evacuation and they acted like it made sense.  Getting kids out of the town while it’s scary there.”

Mal snorted.

“Oh my God.  How am I supposed to show them my face?”

“Dunno.  Makeup or something.  Funny how you’re mentioning God when you’re meant to be worshiping this naked bloody lady.”

The girl didn’t seem to hear her.  “What did you draw?  It felt kind of aimless.  Did you scribble on me?”

Mal ignored that.  “How’d they sell that to you?  Hey.  How?”

“It wasn’t a sell- it-” the girl shook her head.  “It all went to shit, start of the school year.”

“I might take offense to that,” Mal said.  “Since that’s when me and my people showed up.”

“Sorry, I-” the girl hesitated, looking scared.

“I won’t, though.  Keep going.”

“It went to shit, they said our school might close.  People left.  Then it kept going to shit.  Gangsters in the streets, flipping cars, and people kept leaving…”

“Theirs, yours, the side you joined, they were flipping the cars,” Mal said.  She paused.  “Some were ours.”

“Then the riots a few nights ago, buildings burned down.  It felt hopeless, scary,” the girl muttered.  She wasn’t even focusing on Mal.

“Their hopelessness.  The team you joined, they did that,” Mal told her, still crouching, sitting on her ankles, tattoo gun held in one hand.

“I dunno, I- I guess they came to anyone who didn’t feel like sticking around.  Saying, you know, you want to not feel hopeless?  Helpless?  It’s friends, it’s feeling like you have power again.  It’s the opposite of hopelessness, it’s the opposite of years and years of… of feeling like there’s nothing but an overheated planet and old men getting rich by doing nothing about it.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

The girl gingerly touched her face.  “They didn’t tell us- didn’t tell all of us we might have to fight like this, until we were already here.”

“But you stayed, after.  You fought.  You had to know, that they’re shitbags, they’re hurting people.  Hurting your town.  Just because they’re not overheating the planet or whatever, doesn’t mean they’re better.  They’re hurting the people who are better.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Seriously?  The grungy guy in the red fur coat, the bloody goddess with the creepy dudes she totes around?  I’m not saying we’re all angels, on this side, that’s obvious, but seriously?  If you all can’t read the writing on the wall there, maybe you shouldn’t worry about the writing on your stupid face.”

“I didn’t know,” the girl said, quiet, looking down.

Mal used the end of the bed for stability as she pushed herself up to a standing position.  “Maybe you didn’t deserve that, then.  Whoops.  Maybe find me later, I’ll turn the words into flowers.”

The girl let out a small, incredulous sound.

“Or don’t.  I don’t care.”

“She wouldn’t deserve it, but she just lied, twice,” a voice croaked.

Mal turned around.

Toadswallow.  Mal hadn’t realized she had an audience.

“Yeah?”

“I suspect your bit of canvas over there thought you were going to gainsay her anyway, so she might as well get out ahead of the running with a convenient lie.”

“Huh,” Mal grunted.

“It doesn’t work that way.  The lie is meant to be more costly than truth.”

“Is me being a bit more pissed off about the lie part of that cost?”

“The lie will hurt what she was trying to save.  It will find a way to dog her, maybe to her home, her parents.  Those words you wrote specifically, I think, they’d hurt her connection to her goddess.  She’s well disarmed.  If you were one of my goblins, I’d give you a prize.  There’s an entire practice of goblin namecallers, who try to do that sort of thing by sticking crude words to someone, you could teach them things, you could learn things.”

“I’ve got some mojo, huh?”

“On this subject, it’s more her failing than your strength, my dear, a relationship to a higher power is fraught, easily damaged.  Let a temple get damaged in your sight, it permanently harms it, and wear those words-” Toadswallow croaked, pointing.

“What did you write on me!?”

“-Maricica may well be obliged to hold her graces back from this dipshit disciple,” Toadswallow finished.

“No mojo.  Damn.  That’s cool, though.  We can ruin the Goddess’s shit?”

“Desecrate it.  You have a little ‘mojo’, dearie, and you’ll get more, pushing yourself like this.”

Mal nodded.  She still felt shaky, adrenaline running through her.  She didn’t like it.

“You couldn’t have used a permanent marker?” the girl on the ground moaned.

“Permanent tattoo means a bit more.  Spirits don’t listen nearly as much to the unawakened, but if they’re going to listen some, that’s louder.”

The girl moaned.  It looked like she wanted to bury her face in her hands, but the raw tattoo hurt too much to touch.

Mal shook her head, angry emotions running through her.

Toadswallow was distracted as his girlfriend leaned in to whisper something in his ear.

“Hey,” she snarled at the girl on the floor.  She used her toe to prod the girl’s chin, to raise her face, so the girl would look up at her.  The girl roughly pushed the foot away, in a flinching sort of way.  “Girl.”

“I have a name.”

“People are fucking dying,” Mal reiterated.  “Getting hurt.  So don’t go bitching about a scribble on your face.  You played your part, however small.”

She feigned a kick, and the girl shielded her face.

Mal shook her head and turned away, angry.

Others had subdued the other girl.  People slipped past her to handle the girl she’d tattooed, to tie her up, or something.  One of them was one of the people hosting a shrine spirit, head hanging forward, scalp torn open.  They breathed heavily.

Her arm throbbed.  Her left eye was still blurry and dim.

Empathy feels lame but I feel you, buddy.

She felt upset, and that upset came from a place she didn’t like or want to dig into.

She was here to prove Verona wrong, to steal some shit, score some points…

That uneasy anger stirred at that.

She faced down the boy who sat on a bed in his skivvies, wearing the block mask with the ends of the underwear sticking out the sides, where the blocks had been reconnected over nose and mouth, trapping it inside.

“Is he trustworthy?” she asked.

“No,” Toadswallow said, behind her.

“He held me at knifepoint, threatened me, then stopped this one,” Mal said, pointing to the other girl, tied and gagged, sitting on the chair by the desk.

“It’s complicated.  I’d guess he was holding a knife and you happened to be at the end of it.  He might not have realized.”

“He stuffed underwear in my mouth, told me to strip.”

“Perhaps because you needed it, dearie?”

“I needed underwear?”

“And your hands were full?  The mouth works.”

“One of my hands was full.  He took my knife.”

“Maybe he needed it, and your other hand?  Ah,” Toadswallow said, taking note of the injury and the discolored skin, bruised where it stuck out of the sleeve.  The mark from the lines she’d drawn with the tattoo gun was badly inflamed, the blood oozing still, in places.  “You had no free hands.”

She narrowed her eyes, looking at the boy.

“What he said is sounding good,” the boy said, pointing at Toadswallow.  “Let’s go with that.”

She folded her arms, tattoo gun in one hand, tapping against her bicep.

“Anything else, I plead the fifth.”

“We’re Canadian.”

“I want to plead the fifth anyway.”

She turned to Toadswallow.  “So there’s an explanation for everything?”

“We’ve got the east wing, they’ve blocked the way to the rest of the building.  We’re making some inroads, but we’re losing people.  We have ten different things we need to do, without the people to do it.  It’s up to you if you’re willing to help the boy.  It’s fine if you say no.  The Vice Principal would work well, but we need a leader,” Toadswallow said.  “And I’m not it.”

Some other goblins had made it into the hallway.  Peering around Toadswallow.

I just came here for a lark.

Did I just come here for a lark?

She looked across the hall, at the girl with the bleeding face.  The fucking stupid fucking idiot.  Senseless.  She’d done all this because she felt hopeless?

A thousand half-formed thoughts ran through Mal’s mind.  Her world was Kennet.  Everything she liked, everything she hated, everything unfinished.  The boys she liked, fucking friends, weird friends.

She thought of Verona- times when Verona had been lowest.  Because of this.

She felt angry again, in a way she couldn’t put words to.

She looked to the side.

Some administrators were talking to- to Belangers, by the looks of it, with the blue color scheme to their clothing.  Not any of theirs.  Had these ones hidden out?  Or come in?

“And you need me?” Mal asked, finally.

“You’re one of the best options we’ve got,” Toadswallow said.

“And with this guy, what?  I’m supposed to trust him no matter how sketch he sounds?”

“Mm hmm.”

She looked at the boy.  She nodded.

“Strip,” the boy said.  “Get on the bed, and you’ll definitely want this.”

He handed her a container.

“Lube,” the boy said.  “I always carry this with me.”

She turned to Toadswallow, glaring.

He smiled ear to piggy ear.

Her heart leaped into her throat when, just when she was most helpless to do anything about them, a bunch of brownies ran past.  She was stuck, fighting to get traction, clothing pulling as she worked through the gap.

A group of rats ran by, which really wasn’t better, in terms of the claustrophobic feeling and the reminders about being crammed inside that wet, weirdly pleasant space.

Hands pushed on her from behind.  One touched her butt, and she managed to kick them in the head.  A pretty good connection.

It took a couple minutes, but Mal, having stepped onto the bed, managed to squeeze herself through the largest hatch.  She squeezed through the narrow corridor, and dropped down to the ground on the far side.

She’d stripped down to a t-shirt and the pyjama shorts she’d been wearing under her jeans because she’d run out of clean underwear and didn’t want to do the laundry.  Both articles of clothing had been soaked in the lubricant, which she’d slathered all over the rest of herself.  She’d still scraped ribs and hips raw at the sides, climbing through.  She adjusted the mask she’d improvised out of a handkerchief, to help deal with the smoke, here.

She clapped her hands, once.

Someone tossed a handbag they’d emptied and stuffed with her things at her.  She’d greased up enough that residual grease on the floor of the corridor helped the bag slide to her.  She pulled it over her shoulder, then crouched.

Blazing ovens and fires nearby illuminated her.  Many of her tattoos were on display, on bare arms and legs.  There were plenty she didn’t remember giving herself.

She still had plans.  Ideas.  She needed to interconnect them.

Sliding fingers over them, she composed herself, catching her breath.

Boy Suspicious had gone ahead, and as she crouch-walked down a corridor so small her shoulderblades grazed the ceiling, he popped out ahead of her, chewing on something.  The silk underwear had been converted into a mask that helped him breathe.

“Whatcha eating?” she asked.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“You know there’s a bunch of stories about eating things in these places?  If a dumbass like me knows…”

“Doesn’t matter.  It’s not food,” he said, before finishing chewing and swallowing.  “Let’s go.”

She was the skinniest, smallest person who could be trusted, who knew enough about enough different Other things and practice.  Or- well, she’d picked up things.  Like drawing the line on her skin with the tattoo gun.  Which shouldn’t necessarily have been a thing, if she didn’t practice, but maybe it had given her that one percent edge.

Her arm throbbed.

She looked down at the wound, ragged and angry, the lips of the gouge standing up and peeling back a bit.  She’d gotten a bandage, but then when she’d been slathering herself up, it had gotten gross and come off.  She’d handle it later.

The pills had been strong prescription painkillers.  Allegedly.  She wasn’t getting much out of them.

And her eye was still fucked.

Fires roared at the base of massive pots, some of which had boiled over.  The lubricant doubled as protection from the flames, which was a big reason she’d gone for full coverage.  The cloth face-covering only barely helped, and did nothing to help her eyes, which watered and blurred as fast as she could clear them.

A lot of it had been left untended.  She could hear the fighting out where the pot tenders had probably gone, a neighboring room.

Huddled in shadows, smoke rolling away from nearby fires, helping to hide, it, was a rat.  The rat raised a flag, using it to signal, pointing.

They were almost to the rat, crouch-walking, when it squeaked, flag swatting her shin.  It barred her way, or barred it as much as a rat could.

It motioned, and they hurried to hide between a pot and the wall, heat radiating off of the simmering fires beneath that pot.

A group of brownies ran by.  Some little moth-winged fairies fluttered past, accompanying them.

She gave it as long as she could before escaping that heat, skin prickling in a way that felt like it might reveal itself to be a mild burn later.

The rat directed them.

A ladder that had been grown out of the wood of the wall ran up the wall to a catwalk, which was similarly naturally curated wood, some of which still had coppery wire wrapped around it, controlling the directions it curved as it grew.

When Boy Suspicious was near the top, she climbed too.  She wasn’t heavy, but the wood creaked, threatening to break under her weight.  It was meant for the brownies that ran these kitchens, who were easily a tenth of her weight.  She found the most stable point, waiting, so she didn’t drag Boy Suspicous down with her if she broke it.

From her vantage point, she could see across the tops of the pots.  Lots of similar dishes were being cooked.  Many walls had massive mirrors, or sometimes many, trimmed in coppery decoration, with the rolling clouds of steam from nearby pots and smoke from fires playing off one another, wiping the slate clean, hinting, drawing out images.

There’d been a fight here, and this particular lab had been abandoned, the scraps moving elsewhere.  She could hear the screeches, hisses, and bird noises.

Didn’t matter.  A pigeon was at the top of the ladder, holding a flag, pointing.  Boy Suspicious paused to collect a shard of mirror that had broken in fighting earlier, and surreptitiously slid it into the back of the waistband of his underwear.

He saw her looking and turned his body so she couldn’t see.

She climbed, and the pigeon bounced, pointing.

At the top of the catwalk, weird as it was, she still needed to crouch.  There wasn’t much space between the extended platform and the ceiling.  Her greased shoulder squeaked briefly as it rubbed against a mirror.  She felt a chill, and saw her reflection, wide eyed, looking startled.

In the course of the fighting, Sootsleeves’ minions had found a few ways to navigate this place.  They’d reported back, Boy Suspicious had heard, and this was what he’d wanted of her.

Or as he’d explained it, he wanted to drag her off to an isolated location with no direct communication in or out.

The heat from the fire was bad near the ground, but the heat and limited vision from the mingled steam and smoke was worse up above.  Mal could see the shifting fog on the mirror that ran alongside the catwalk, and through it, she could see that even though there were fifty pots here, each massive enough to drown a car in, managed with long wooden spoons with handles reaching all the way to the catwalk, there were more.  She could see through the mirrors to another version of this space, with details slightly different.  Pots with different things floating in them, pots managed by brownies in that world that weren’t present in this one.

It was the same, from room to room.  There were rooms with gardens, ingredients being grown under jars with glowing fairies in them, rooms where ingredients were processed into spices, chopped, or carved.  Many more rooms where dishes were being prepared.

It looked less like they were making things to order and more like they were preparing literally everything theoretically possible at every moment, variations covered by the spaces behind mirrors.

Mal looked into a mirror, and saw herself.  Wearing different clothes, with different tattoos, arranged in different ways.  Like she’d focused on doing sleeves, an idea that had crossed her mind once.

She looked, studying the surroundings.

She tracked the location of one in the mirror, hanging from a section of the ceiling to dip a long-handled spoon into the mix and taste it.  Her eye fell on a chandelier-like twist of wood with lights on it, that helped illuminate up above where fires weren’t as present.

Twin glowing eyes shaped like ‘x’ marks opened with four eyelids, peering around from the middle of the twist of wood.  Camouflaged.

The eyes glanced past them, and she wondered if they were shaped like ‘x’s because it somehow protected against the heavy smoke and steam.

It didn’t make them much better at seeing, though.  Maybe they didn’t need it.

The eyes closed.  Or stopped glowing.

She looked back at the mirror, and the brownie thing was gone.

She started to move, then stopped as a bell rang, high, and brownies came out of places she’d had no idea they were in.  Hatches and hiding places.

Fairy-lights were snuffed out, lights flared on, a dozen bowls were already being filled with what might have been butter chicken, passed from brownie to brownie with lightning speed.  They worked in twos, one passing it along, bowls moving so fast they had to face the wall more than they faced the ceiling, to not lose their contents, the other ones adding garnishes, and silverware.

Rapidfire, high-pitched voices screamed out, and bowls were discarded.  Like they’d picked a dozen sub-variations to fit the order, then narrowed it down by specific criteria.  Tossed bowls clipped the ground and went into little disposal hatches along the sides of hallways.

Two bowls made it as far as the midpoint of the hallway.  An artificial, non-orange light poured out of some door Mal couldn’t see from her current angle, some distant and modern music playing.

At which point mice, a pigeon, and an urchin crashed into the brownies and food was spilled, dish broken.

That distant hatch slammed, music and light cut off.  Fifty different brownies screamed in unison.  Ones further down the catwalk, around the corner, and in the next room came out, throwing themselves down toward the tops of the steaming pots, gripping the edges with bare feet and hands, preparing more bowls, while others went to deal with the invaders and clear the way.

Boy Suspicious grabbed her arm, hand sliding on skin.  They ran, ducking low, so the railing could provide some cover.  At each turn, one of the rodents or pigeons was hidden and waiting to direct them.  As they went that direction, the animals followed, matching them.

They turned a corner, ran down a hall, and then had to pause.  A mouse dashed ahead, waved a flag at the exit to the hallway, and a signal was given elsewhere.

It sounded like a hundred glasses shattered.

Brownies screeched and went running in that direction.

Clearing the way again.

They passed over a bridge that ran over various drinks, in what looked like an alchemy setup a thousand times as complex as Verona’s in the kitchen.  Below them, they could see various goblins going another route, to a different destination.  They had the girl that Mal had tattooed with them as a hostage, it looked like.  As they passed by, decorations on the wall clanged and rang.  Anti-goblin wards, alerting brownies.  Allegedly there were some anti-spirit wards and other things too.

Not so many anti-human wards, for Mal to trip.  Part of the reason it had needed to be her.

“Shit,” Boy Suspicious muttered, under his breath.

She followed his gaze.

At a catwalk to their right that ran against the wall, parallel to the bridge, there was a group of brownies matching their movements.  As Boy Suspicious slowed, and Mal, running behind him, was forced to do the same, the brownies matched their speed, coming to a near-complete stop.  Some fanned out, and started climbing things.

“If things get bad, I’m leaving you behind,” Boy Suspicious said.

“Right.  I guess I’m supposed to… thank you?”

He turned, looking over his shoulder, and gave a half-smile, snorting and rolling his eyes.

“Sure.”

She reached into her bag.  Tattoo gun.  She liked having it with her.  Bits and bobs for the gun.  Wire, ink, sandpaper.  And some things she’d bought at the market.

She pulled one out.

A goblin candy.

She held it over the side of the bridge.  Over one of the huge vats of fruit juice.

Every brownie froze.

They moved back and out of the way as she and Boy Suspicious came down the bridge.

When she reached the end, she shifted position, ready to lob it underhanded in that direction.  Some brownies were scrambling to get below, ready to catch it.  As more collected, the others got braver.

She moved, fist closed around candy, which was behind her head.  They scrambled to prepare for a long-distance lob, instead.  Buying her and Boy Suspicious a few more seconds.

Sweat mixed with the lubricant and rolled down her.  It was black, almost, from the smoke that filled the air, and the grit she’d picked up working her way through the hatch.

“Hey, Boy,” she said.  “Reach into my bag, and grab another candy?  We can relay this, maybe.”

Brownies continued to prowl around her.

She turned to look at him.  Boy Suspicious wasn’t there.

“Fucking…”

A distant crash made brownies startle.

Part of the group preparing to either catch the candy or come after her split off, running away.

She took stock.

“A bit shorthanded?  Stretched thin?” she asked.

She backed through the doorway and stopped at the way to the next room.  If there wasn’t an option…

It was a room that, mercifully, had a high ceiling.  Very high.  Shelves went a few hundred feet up, hidden in a haze of shadow and mist at that height.  On every shelf, it seemed, there were preserves.  Mirrors on either side were angled to reflect variations on those preserves and pickled things.  Even the floor was a mirror, to enhance just how tall and deep this pantry was.

Brownies followed her in, keeping a fifty foot distance, tense.

A distant bell rang, with another immediately following.  Brownies scrambled to action, popping out of more hatches.  Some high above grabbed things, dropped them for others to catch, which were whipped through hatches.  Quick, mechanical motions.

And, in the wake of it, the brownies finished that job, and there were twenty more brownies suddenly paying attention to her.  They screeched, and others replied, screeching, high-pitched voices chattering, overlapping one another, like they didn’t even take turns talking, they just communicated all at the same time.

They got brave, closing the distance.  So she tossed the candy, quickly reached for more- something in one of the candies poked her finger, and she tossed a handful more.

Some bounce off shelves, others banked off jars.  But some didn’t.  At least one plopped into a jar.

And brownies shrieked.

They threw themselves as a group toward the shelving unit, pulling jars off shelves, tossing them down.  Others caught them.

She ran, glancing back.  She saw candies raining from the sky.  Not the ones she’d thrown.

They’d fallen into the mirror below and had come out the ceiling, different, maybe.  Or there was a complete other her who had done the same thing above.

It unnerved her.

Ninety nine out of a hundred brownies seemed preoccupied by the pollution of their preserves pantry.  Others did chase.  Squirrels and mice and one scrawny kid came to the rescue, intercepting them.  Most of them.  Mal punted one of the ones who got close, carrying a bucket of boiling tea.  She had to vault, kind of, grabbing a railing to get the clearance necessary to avoid wading through the spilled tea.

A pigeon flew ahead of her, flapping madly and making awkward landings to pivot fast enough to round the corners.

She saw Boy Suspicious.  He was opening a hatch.

“Nice one, guys,” she told the animal helpers who’d come this far.  She put out a hand for a high-five and a pigeon headbutted it.

“Shhhh…” Boy Suspicious whispered.

The hatch moved.  It looked like a painted picture.  A girl from Sootsleeves’ territory, wearing a rat hat, put her hands up, and mimed shadow puppets on the wall.  “Hisss, rawr.  Ggraaah.”

Mal could hear distant voices.

She moved to Boy Suspicious’s side.

“You made it,” he whispered.  “Let’s operate under the assumption I didn’t use you as bait.”

“Sure.”

“And that I knew you’d be okay.”

“Whatever.”

She peered through, and got a view of what might’ve been the main classroom.  A bunch of kids in the private school uniforms, like they couldn’t be bothered to change into regular clothes, then some others.  Bogeymen, maybe.  A guy with a big cannon made of twisted metal.

Boy Suspicious pointed.  Mal had to crowd him out of the space to get the angle to see.

There were a bunch of their people there.

Boy Suspicious had said they were bound and spellbound.  Used in the same way that someone might say they had burn victims.  Not everyone was burned, not everyone was spellbound.  But ‘they’ had been compromised.

She saw the victims.

“Here, I’m pretty good at this,” he murmured.  He dragged his fingernail against wood.  “You’d be surprised how many girls I’ve lured to a window in the dead of night.”

A head turned.

“More power to you, bud,” she replied, still whispering.

“A lot of them aren’t with us anymore.”

Someone came.  A foundling woman, with a living fox and living fur coat, a fluffy mask at her eyes.  Glowing diagram work encircled her neck, and her eyes matched that glow.

As she rounded that set of bookshelves that blocked their view of the rest of the room, Boy Suspicious moved the hatch to a nearly closed position.  He scratched again, making a faint sound.

Riding that line between being alarming enough that someone would say something about it and alert the room, and minor enough it could be ignored.

The woman moved close enough to notice the gap between the painting and the wall.

Boy Suspicious threw the hatch open and lunged.  He caught her around the neck, then pulled back.  Choking the woman with furs, covering her mouth to keep her quiet.

His eyes widened, as he looked at Mal.

Oh.  Fuck.  I’m supposed to do something?

She got her tattoo gun.

It was on a half-second before Boy Suspicious kicked her.  The jarring of the kick made her let go of the trigger.

The boy grunted.

Mal could see that the woman’s living fox fur collar with a fox head near the collarbone had reared up and bitten him.

She leaned in, and instead worked with an awkward angle, trying to find a gap where the boy’s arms weren’t in the way, working with a broken tube that the wire fed through.  She reeled out wire, snipped it, then quickly rubbed it on sandpaper at an angle.  She didn’t have her jeans on, to rub away any burr.  She tried using the back half of the sandpaper.

The way the device was built fed ink through to run down the wire, the wire, shaved down to a point, would pierce skin, depositing ink at a layer.

He was losing his grip, trying to hold on with greased arms.

She worked as fast as she could.  She didn’t know how these things worked, but there was a diagram, she knew lines did something to block stuff… so she used the tattoo gun without the motor, poking out the tattoo as fast as she could, against a squirming subject.

Trying to get enough of a line, crossing that diagram… not too obvious, maybe.

Because that woman was in enemy territory, and she wouldn’t fit through this hatch.

She went back to fix a part where the line was more dotted than consistent, and the glow broke.  The diagram remained, burned onto skin, but with a somewhat jagged black line interrupting it.

The boy carefully released the woman.

She turned, and looked at them with damp eyes.  Her fur collar raised itself up and licked the Boy Suspicious’s bloody arm, like an affectionate dog.

He moved his head, motioning, and she nodded.

Casually, she walked away from them, fixing her collar to hide the missing glow.

He moved the hatch partially closed, then scratched.

Mal hurried to trim, extend, and sand the wire.  She poured alcohol over the end of the setup, then wiped it.

Not that this was hygienic, but maybe it’d make the difference between an ugly infection in a day or an infection in an hour.

They’d already drawn someone else in.  A guy.  Some bruiser from the undercity.  Maybe one of the Bitter Street Witch’s.

They repeated the process.  More awkwardly this time, using the cover of a bookshelf.  The mice and pigeons and things had carefully looked for a vantage point this good.

But it was harder.  The man was bigger, Boy Suspicious had an injured arm, slick with blood and lube.

The woman with the furs reversed direction, and discreetly lent her aid, helping to pin the guy against the wall.

Mal was a little quicker this time.

Hatch closed.

Scratch.  Scratch.

The woman with the furs and the bruiser moved to the side, pretending to talk in murmurs.

“You are weirdly good at that,” Mal noted.

“At luring people into compromising positions?”

“Sure.”

“It’s a specialty.  I’m getting to use a lot tonight,” he said.  He reached down to his shoe, and pried off the toe.  He leaned out of the hatch, over to the bookshelf that stuck out and away from the wall, as a subdivider for the larger room, and placed the block there, between books.  “There.  Another specialty.  It’s a hidden camera.”

“Sure dude.”

He scratched, paused.

People walked by.

Scratched, scratched again.

Someone came.  He moved the hatch to a nearly closed position again.

A girl, this time.  With a domino mask.  She glanced to one side, at the pair, as if wondering if they’d noticed.

She reached the picture, and he grabbed at her-

She ducked it, evading, backing off.

The woman with the furs and the bruiser came at her.  Cornering her.

She moved, hair flying as she found a gap-

Boy Suspicious managed to grab her hair, pulling, and then grabbed her head.  Pulling her neck into the edge of the hatch.  She coughed and made a gurgling sound.

“What’s that?” someone asked.  The guy with the cannon.

Mal did what the Sootsleeves kid had done before, and hissed, making screeching sounds.  Boy Suspicious made a squealing noise.

The woman with the furs stepped away, eyes rolling, shaking her head, as she fluffed the furs at her neck.

“Fucking brownies, putting me on edge.”

The girl fought, struggling.  Slippery.

Mal couldn’t get an angle at that tattoo.

The bruiser pinned the girl, holding her arms.

Boy Suspicious dipped low, he pulled his mask and the silk underwear away from his mouth, and he planted a kiss on her.  Four, five seconds long, as Mal got hair out of the way and got to work.

“The fuck?” the bruiser whispered.  “You know her?”

“Yeah.  My sister.”

The bruiser looked at Mal.  She gave her head a tight shake.

“I thought true love’s kiss might work.  Sometimes does for this sort of thing.”

The bruiser looked like he was going to say something.  Mal shook her head again.  Poking.  It wasn’t enough to cut off the lines that were there, the line she was drawing had to be its own thing.

“Let’s just simplify things and say it’s brotherly love and that that can be true love’s kiss too.  I really love my sister.”

“Okay, whatever,” Mal hissed.

She did what she needed to do.

The diagram broke.

“Something’s wrong,” someone at the far end of the room said.

“Hey,” Boy Suspicious whispered.

“Hey,” the sister replied.

“Dad?  Was he able to find-”

She shook her head.

“Can we-?”

“Or-?”

“Fuccck,” he whispered, his fingers tracing his sister’s hair, tucking it behind her ear.  “We-”

He paused.  Pointing.  The sister’s eyes flicked right.

The hidden camera?

“Wanted to get more,” Boy Suspicious whispered.  “Planned to try true love’s kiss on dad.”

“Of course,” the sister replied.

“Four soldiers, two o’clock.”

She nodded.

“Three… two…”

The girl dashed to the side.  Boy Suspicious threw himself to the other side, pushing Mal.

The soldiers opened fire immediately.

“That’s all-”

A bullet punched through the wall below the hatch, an inch from the top of Mal’s thigh.

“All we can do.”

The gunshots had brought brownies.

They scrambled.

Pigeons and rats were ready to meet them.

They passed a hatch some rats were drawing attention to.  She peered through, and saw an angle of one of the hallways.  Not the one she’d been in.

She could hear more gunshots.

If anything counted… any distraction at all…

She reached into her bag and got more of the crap she’d bought.

A lighter.  A firework.

She dropped it through.  Moving on.

They were running out of space.  It might be that Sootsleeves’ people weren’t able to put up as much of a fight, or that they’d reached a point in this huge, sprawling labyrinth of a place that was too far away from that help.  Brownies got close enough that Mal had to punt one.  Another gouged her leg with a fork in passing.

They weren’t fighters any more than she was, but there sure were a lot of them.

“I think-” she grunted, panting for breath.  The accumulated aches and pains were catching up with her, leaving her feeling drained.  “We need to go out the next hatch that won’t get us instantly killed.”

“Coo!” A pigeon cooed its reply.

“CooOoo?” Mal asked, trying a sound she’d heard from the pigeon that worked under Verona, getting warbly in the throat in the middle part.

“Coo!  Coo!”

A rat stood by one hatch, forelimbs crossed.

“How dangerous?”

It held its limbs up, each at a diagonal, rat’s right, her left.

“Uhhh.”

She checked the coast was clear behind her  It wasn’t.

She hauled the hatch open, saw she had a view from the ceiling down, looking at Seth Belanger, who sat at a long table, surrounded by cards and things.

He looked up at her.

She pulled a box of spiders out of her bag and threw it at his head, shutting the hatch before she saw the result.

Sootsleeves’ contingent were leading the way, down a side path.  The ran through a larder where a very tall man, human, was sitting, sorting labels.  He looked at them, dazed, watching them go by.

Not a good place to work if you’re tall.

A brownie came out of a hatch, biting her leg.  She kicked it off.  Mice and a squirrel followed up, attacking it, so it couldn’t come right back after her.

Hatch open, low to the ground.

Boy Suspicious ran forward, then dove, arms out above his head.  Relying on momentum and the residual lubricant to let him glide through.

This contingent of rats, mice, squirrels, and pigeons all flooded out.  A little girl in rags, even, came out of a side path, a jar of apples under her arm.

Mal slowed, pulling out some of the last stuff out of her bag.

She’d done what she could.  She wasn’t sure she had a lot of fight left in her.  She’d keep some, to beat a retreat, but for now, she unloaded tricks, modified mousetraps, candies, and other things, spilling them out onto the floor.  One was a stinkbomb- she almost dropped it and let it roll away, but she managed to catch it.  She had to throw it hard.

It detonated.  She hurried to get clear before the expanding gas cloud reached her.

“Coast is clear!  This is a good spot!” an urchin shouted.

She dove through the hatch, relying on momentum and lube.  To Boy Suspicious, the rats, the mice, squirrels, pigeons, and orphans.  The edges of the hatch door scraped at pits, ribs, and hips as she slid through.  It might’ve been a two minute struggle if she didn’t use momentum.

But momentum meant a violent tumble through to the other side.  Nobody caught her, because of course they didn’t.

She slammed the hatch shut, jammed the tube of her tattoo gun into the gap, and broke it off, hoping that would pin it closed.

Everything was quiet.  She used a windowsill to help herself stand, and looked through.

They were in the building behind the school.  This had been one of the vantage points they’d been trying to take.  They were supposed to have this and the eastern wing.

This was a good vantage point.

“Fuck,” she groaned.

This was very quiet.

She turned around.

No Boy Suspicious.  No rats, pigeons, squirrels, or urchins.  No brownies.

She turned around again, toward the window.  She startled.

The Carmine Exile, wearing his red furs, sitting askew in his throne.

Mal backed away a few steps.

She was alone, facing him.  Bleeding.  Blood soaked into her the t-shirt where she’d rubbed ribs raw going in and out of hatches.  Her arm bled in multiple places.  She’d been bitten in the leg.  She was blind in one eye.  She had nothing much in her bag.  A noisemaker, a firework, some candies that she could toss into the mouth of something that wanted to eat her, maybe.

“Mallory,” the Carmine Exile said.

“Mr. Big red sloppy dick, huh?  And not in a good way.”

“You are Verona’s friend.  Still pushing that?  It’s not even clever.”

“It’s not meant to be.  The dumber it is, the better.  Repeat it often enough and it might stick, right?”

He gave a halfhearted grunt.  “Not really.”

“Goblin namecalling?”

“It’s not really important, is it?” he asked.

She fell silent, studying him.  She eyed her escape route.

The room was becoming more Carmine.  Blood bled through the paint on the walls in the same way it seeped across the fabric of her shirt.

“Let’s talk,” he said.  “Verona’s friend.”

“You and her get along in some weird way, right?” she asked, restless, nervous.

“A little less every time she pulls some of her shit.”

“You say this is important but… I’m not.  I’m not important.  I’m some loser from Kennet below.  I give old women heart palpitations.  I don’t even rate with guys from Kennet below, and I’m easy.  I don’t ask for much.  Just ridiculous good looks, a sense of humor, and money.  The closest I get is some fucking cougar boy, and I don’t know if he wants me as a pet, another member of his stupid fucking gang with a cringe name, or if he likes me as a girl.”

Charles didn’t much look like he cared.

“I’m not important,” she reiterated.  “But I guess I’m important to Verona on some small, shitty, third-rate level, so… is that your angle?”

“I’m matching their angle, for the moment.  The three girls are talking to people too, right this moment.  A mirror to this conversation I’m having with you.”

“Talking to bloody, lubed up, scantily-dressed girls?”

“They’ve got a plan, they don’t want me to know.  I’m left to infer, and maybe to do something about it.”

The last words had a bit more weight.

Mal glanced at the door.  “Can I opt out?”

“Fuck.”

“We’ll see how ‘fuck’ of a thing that is,” he said, shifting position slightly.  “I’m still unable to draw all the power I want.  It’s frustrating.  But we have the edge.  My side.  I’m arbiter of conflict, so I can see those things.”

“Sure,” she replied.  Her heart pounded.

“World powers are calling soon, to offer me power, security.  I could easily be five times as strong fifteen minutes from now, with power enough to waste, enough guarantees from outside sources that I don’t even need to watch my back or guard my borders.  Or it could happen tomorrow.  It depends when they call.  It’ll make up for what I lack.  The question is, can your side break down my side, find a weak point, take a key actor out of the equation, before then?  The chances are slim, but they’re there.”

Mal shrugged.  “You know which side I’m rooting for.  So what’s the deal?  You kill me, make an example, throw them off their game?”

“It’s funny.  The plan of attack is so close to what the girls do.  Maybe because the girls were selected by Miss.  And a lot of this is Miss.  You have the heavy hitters, straightforward, brutal when they need to be, sometimes when they don’t… Kennet below.  You have people who come by weird angles, who try to break rules while they do it.  Constantly moving, evasive… Kennet found.  You’ve seen that in action.”

Mal shrugged.

“And waiting in the wings, devising a plan, hoping it will be enough.  The girls.  Kennet above.  Parallels.”

“Cool.”

“Miss isn’t a strategic mind, but she has a sense for these balances, for reaching deep.  Kennet found is hers.  The foundlings and Lost she’s collected around herself, they’re much like her.  She’s invested in them.  The administrators have worked as her hands long enough they can bear power out to others.  She’d bury us under hundreds of foundlings, half of which have peculiarities that need to be accounted for.”

“Go us.”

“The girls did that.  Creating that world.  That realm.  It’s cut off from me.  A lot of my power that I could use elsewhere, it’s harder to pin down your Boy Suspicious, your Red Cent, or your Doll of Many Colors.  They can enter this state where they’re willing and able to do violence, but it’s segregated, carefully, from my reach.  They created a whole side of Kennet.  It’s really remarkable.  The three girls and Miss, and they’re Miss’s creations too, in a way.  Miss owns all of that.  A great achievement for a Lost who wasn’t that much more potent than your Boy Suspicious.”

Mal eyed the door again.

“There’s no leaving, Mal,” he said, his voice low.

She went still.  Her heart was beating faster.

“It took me becoming Carmine to do something similar.  To make Kennet below.  To make other inverted spaces.  To make you.  You’re mine.  Like so much of that is Miss’s.”

“You going to call yourself my daddy?” she asked.

He straightened how he sat, and dropped one foot to the floor.  “It’s up to you-”

“Whether you’re my daddy?” she asked.  It was dumb, forced, but she didn’t want him to have all of the momentum.  “You going to take me to a ball game, throw the ball for me in the backyard, I don’t know why my head goes to balls, maybe it’s because you’re a big sloppy dick, and not in the fun way.”

She was rambling, nervous.  Trying to talk over him.

“You’re mine,” he said, before she could figure out a way to keep going.

“Rejected.  I want emancipation.”

“I made Kennet below angry, more willing to respond and fight back against a distorted system.  Individual strength.  Where struggle could mean something.  Because it has to mean something.  You’re mine, you fall under my domain, you were created at my hand, your anger is an echo of mine.  You are, in a significant way, my daughter.”

“Gross.”

“Powers like me, we get to decide if we want agents or not.  How we spread our influence.  How we adjust balances.  I made you to be and do something.  Now I have to decide… is it worth keeping?”

“If I say yes, can I go now?”

“A big part of what we do- what me and the other Judges do, or have our agents do, is smooth out wrinkles, handle stray Others, keep everything flowing smoothly.  The inversions, undercities?  Kennet below?  The denizens that have sprung forth?  They -you- are wrinkles.  I can justify them, saying they contribute forces and energies the world needs.  And I can take them away.”

“Just like that?” she asked, snapping her fingers.

“Not a snap of the fingers.  But… it wouldn’t take long.”

“Spending power just to scrub us?  A failed project?”

“No,” he said.  He met her eyes.  “I would gain power.  I’d no longer be on the back foot.  I’d be at full strength.  A little stronger than I was, even.”

“Cleaning up your own mess?”

“Collecting on a longer-term investment,” he said.

“And you come to me?”

“Being entirely honest,” Charles said, heaving out the words like a sigh.  He turned his attention to her.  “I’m talking to a lot of people right now.  A slice of me to each of them.  This rates slightly above average, because you know more about what’s going on.  You’ve seen more, you’ve been a helper, a messenger.  And you’re Verona’s friend.”

She swallowed.

“Conversations with hundreds of Denizens.  Putting the same idea forward.  Asking them the same questions.  Kennet below can’t be scrubbed entirely, it’s tangled up in the demesnes.  Some are out of reach, they’re tied up in other things.  You were all collectively harder to reach, some tangled, some not, clustered together.  The Bitter Street Witch and the Belangers, contracts.  Market vendors.  The Family Man.  Not that I would.  He’s being useful.”

“I don’t suppose I’m so lucky?”

He shook his head.

“I guess I should’ve opened that stall in the market to do quickie tattoos, huh?  Might’ve counted?”

Her voice changed a bit on the last word.  She looked out the window.  The landscape outside was shattered.  Blood seeped in through the cracks.

“Might not’ve,” the Carmine replied.  “Might’ve.  We’ll never know.”

“Snuffing me out, huh?”

“It’s up to you.  If you swear allegiance, I could enforce it.  Bind you to me.”

“Or you snuff me out?”

“Either I have the added power from a loyal servant, more developed than the quick creations I made to help set Maricica in place, or I have the power from unmaking you and all the others who say no.  Either way, the debt is gone.  The wait until I get that call is easy.”

“And I don’t even factor in?”

“Yes or no, Mallory?” he asked.

“I had plans,” she said.

“Then join me, see them through.”

“Tattoos,” she said.  “I was going to do this super intricate, detailed, full-body thing, where all the shitty tattoos suddenly make sense.  I could have some done with ink that glows under a blacklight.  So you see it and you go, ohhh, it all makes sense.  But I need to get way better first.”

“That doesn’t matter right now.  Decide.”

“What’s your decision?” she asked.  “You asshole.  What are you doing?  What are you even about?  What are you doing?  What the fuck is your dream?  You- you’re all about hating the big guys on top, right?  You give us this anger, this- fuck, nobody gets power without earning it.  Nobody’s born to it, we’re all shit and we start pretty low to the ground, and if we get there, it’s by clawing our way up through the rest of the shit.”

He was silent.

“Fuck government, right?  Fuck anyone who isn’t giving us incentives, paying close attention, fuck all that.  So we make our end of the town… we get there.  There’s a balance.  The warlords are doing cool things.  Fuck law, fuck practitioner families- that’s the bug that crawled up your ass, right?  The big gross ass-crawly bug?” Mal asked.

He stared at her, expression unreadable, mouth mostly hidden by his thick red beard, red hair messy.

“And you side with them.  You were working with Musser before you even won that fucking contest.  You sided with those assholes.  And you wonder why we don’t follow you anymore?  Say something!”

Those two last words came out as a roar.

“I can promise you I’ve wrestled with this far more than anything you could bring up now, if you had all night.”

“You’re all about justice?  Bloody justice?  That’s the whole reason you got forsworn.”

“You paid attention.”

“Talked to Ronnie-”

Her voice cracked a bit.

“-because she got me curious about our origins.  Where we came from.”

“Some.  You fucking asshole.  Where’s the justice in this?”

“There’s more injustice in a world where people like me do nothing.”

“Fuck you, fuck that bullshit.  Fucking- you wanted to protect the kids?  At the school here?  And you fuck that up too?  How many kids have gotten hurt.  Or scared?  How many of us are you going to wipe out of existence?”

“Not wiped out of existence.  Recycled.”

“What are you even about, Carmine?  You come in, saying you’re going to burn it all down, you’re going to be change, and you do this?  You sign on with them?  World powers?  You… you put us through all of this?”

She turned away, then turned to him, shouting, “Fuck you!  What even are you doing, now!?  You got power and you’re holding onto it!?  Fucking no better than a Burger Bin manager with an overinflated sense of importance, fucking lording your shitty power over people, destroying lives for a little chub-chub in your fucking red pants?”

“If I have power over a long time, I can change things further down the line.  If I stop, if I give up, or if I fail, I can’t trust someone else will come along to try to fix what’s broken.  Then everything is lost.”

“Wasn’t the whole difference between you and Miss that you wanted to get it done faster?  Guess you kind of cocked that the cock up, you fuck.”

“There are still other differences.”

“Fuck you.”

He nodded.

“Your answers aren’t good enough.”

“They’re the answers you get,” he said.  He stood.

She backed all the way up, until her back touched the wall furthest from him.

“I want a second opinion,” she said.

“Others have already asked for the second opinions of other judges.  Opinions have already been given.  The Alabaster, even, is forced to concede that the inverted spaces are firmly in my domain.”

“Fuck off with that.”

“Mallory, there’s more people swearing at me, more people arguing.  Trying different angles.  You said it well.  You learned me better than most of the others did, you said things I’ll think about for months to come.  You stood out.  But this is going to have to happen, and you have to give your decision.  Do you want a future, fighting for change under me, or will your legacy be that you mutilated a scared girl earlier tonight?”

“I did other stuff.  Saved people.”

“You did,” he admitted.  “Take a second.  Consider.”

She thought.  How the night had begun.

“If I hadn’t come, tonight-”

“I would still be talking to you.  I’m talking to everyone that sprung forth from the inverted spaces.  You’re getting distracted.  Consider,” he said.

She thought.  About the offer.  About her earlier plans, to do this for a lark.  To steal a trophy, maybe bag a boy.

That wasn’t the real reason.

Kennet was her home.  She was invested in the fight.  In the hints that there was something good.  Something better, fun, dark, dangerous, bright, airy-fairy-Lost, whatever.  It was cool.  It was an answer to what the girl she’d tattooed earlier had said.  About hopelessness.  A real answer.

She met his eyes, then opened her mouth, “Fuc-“

The tattoo gun clattered to the ground.

Charles ran fingers through his hair.  He un-divided one more part of himself.  With each one that said no, he drew multiple slivers of himself together.

Many to the same place.  Where the Alabaster was staring him down, expression grim.

With each one that said yes, he spent a bit of power, to ensure it, lock it in.  Making them his agents, in some small part.

“I hope you lose,” the Alabaster said.

“Not exactly a vote of confidence from the people I’m trying to save, is that?” he asked.

“Give me the fucking power you owe.”

Balancing the scales, finally.

Some more said yes.

A few more said no.

He was back at full capacity.

Then a bit more.  Enough to invest in his Lords.

The Alabaster was gone.

And he started spending the power he’d been waiting for.

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