The Cellar's lounge was an exercise in contradictions. It had the hushed, velvet intimacy of a royal sitting room, and it shared a wall with a pit where men beat each other unconscious for copper pennies. The air was scrubbed clean of the blood and sweat that saturated the lower levels, replaced by aged mahogany, cigar smoke, and the particular scentlessness of real money.

  Eliza sat in a high-backed leather booth tucked into a shadowed alcove, a fresh glass of crimson wine resting in her gloved hand. She was humming, a soft, discordant little tune, her head swaying to a rhythm only she could hear. A woman enjoying her evening.

  Across the candlelit table, William was coming apart at the seams. He perched on the edge of the plush bench with the rigid posture of a man sitting for a portrait he hadn't agreed to, his eyes cutting toward the entrance of the lounge every few seconds. The rented tuxedo was half a size too large in the shoulders and appeared to be engaged in a slow, deliberate campaign to strangle him at the collar.

  "You're doing it again, Boxer," Eliza murmured, taking a slow sip. "Sit still. You look like something small and edible."

  "With all due respect, Sheltie," William whispered, leaning across the table, "we are surrounded by things that eat small edible things. And they are all looking at us."

  He wasn't wrong. The lounge was sparsely populated, its remaining patrons mostly high-rollers licking their wounds after the disaster in the Level 3 pit. Eliza's stunt had cost the collective patronage of this room a small fortune in dead wagers. The atmosphere expressed this through the medium of sustained, venomous eye contact. A woman in emeralds hadn't blinked in what felt like two minutes. A large man with a gold tooth was gripping his tumbler the way one grips a weapon one hasn't yet decided to use.

  "Let them look," Eliza dismissed, swirling the wine. "They're mourning their wallets, not their honour. And you know the rules as well as I do."

  "No fighting in the lounge," William recited. "Neutral ground. I know."

  "The Cellar values its upholstery far too much to permit a brawl in here. If anyone draws a weapon or starts building a lattice, the Floor Managers will reduce them to a stain before they finish the syllable. We are perfectly safe."

  "Safe," William repeated, in the tone of a man being told the bridge will probably hold. He checked his pocket watch, snapped the lid shut, and checked it again. "Are you sure she's coming?"

  A pause. Then, quieter: "After what you did to her?"

  Eliza held the wine glass up to the light, inspecting the sediment with academic interest. "I don't know."

  William choked. It was not a dignified sound. He coughed into his fist, pounded his sternum, and drew fresh glares from three adjacent tables.

  "You don't know?" he managed, staring at her. "You terrorised that girl. You forfeited a match in front of a thousand people, painted a target the size of a barn door on our backs, and you cannot guarantee the girl is going to walk through that door?"

  "I cannot force her, Boxer. We are outside the Empire's jurisdiction. I have no badge here, no authority to compel a witness. If she takes her winnings and disappears, I can hardly chase her through a pocket dimension by her collar."

  William's eyebrow twitched. "You can't force her," he repeated, each word landing like a coin being placed on a counter. "Sheltie. Twenty minutes ago, you trapped her in a cage of solidified air. You physically turned her head to make her nod. You weren't exactly soliciting voluntary cooperation."

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Eliza considered this. The porcelain mask tilted a degree to the left.

  "Fair point," she conceded. "I may have gotten a touch theatrical."

  "Theatrical."

  "I might have had a bit too much wine before I decided to jump in the ring," Eliza added, lifting the glass in mild acknowledgement. "The atmosphere down here is infectious. One gets swept up."

  "You got swept up," William said, in the flat voice of a man cataloguing evidence for a future inquest into his own sanity. He slumped back against the booth and dragged a hand down his face. "This is my first assignment with you. How does Senior Inspector Bannerman manage this?"

  "He complains less." Eliza took another sip. "Also, he's boring."

  William didn't rise to it. He smoothed the tablecloth beneath his fingers—he'd been creasing it into a precise accordion fold without noticing—and when he spoke again, the nervousness had been pushed to one side. Not gone, but managed. Shelved.

  "Why her?" he asked. "You never actually answered. You saw her standing in the pit and you went rigid. You said we had our first clue. But a clue to what? Is she a suspect?"

  The playful tilt left Eliza's posture like heat leaving a room. She straightened. The porcelain mask turned toward him with the slow, mechanical precision of a turret acquiring a target.

  "The King's Road," Eliza said. "The crater. Yesterday."

  "The meteorite?" William frowned. "The one you said was not magical phenomena?"

  "I said the background mana was lower than a tavern hearth. I said there was a faint trace of pyromancy near the road, and I dismissed it as a spark charm. Pathetic, I called it." She turned the glass by its stem, watching the candlelight catch in the crystal. "I was wrong."

  "Wrong how?"

  "When I grabbed her wrist in the arena, I felt it. The heat. The specific frequency of the mana, the grain of it, the way it sits in the air. Denser now. More volatile. She's been practising, or she's been fighting, or both. But the signature is identical." Eliza's gloved finger tapped once against the rim of the glass. "That girl was at the epicentre of an explosion that vaporised a carriage and two draught horses. And considering she is walking around Dunwick without so much as a bruise—"

  She let the silence do the work.

  William's jaw worked. "So you believe she's the one who caused it? She blew up the carriage?"

  "She could be," Eliza mused, tilting the glass so the wine caught the light. "But do I believe she's the architect of a coordinated kidnapping operation? No. That doesn't track."

  "Why not?"

  "The Jackal." She said the name the way one might identify a species of beetle, with recognition but no particular regard. "He's a superstitious thug running a crew of deserters and mundane cutthroats. His entire authority depends on being the most dangerous man in the room. He would never tolerate a mage in his ranks. A caster upsets the hierarchy. You bring a wizard into a knife fight and suddenly the man with the knife isn't the one giving orders anymore. The Jackal understands that instinct, even if he couldn't put words to it."

  She set the glass down with a soft clink on the marble coaster.

  "And her behaviour is wrong. If she were part of a kidnapping ring—cult money, black-market cargo, the whole sordid apparatus—she would not be down here getting her ribs cracked in a Level 3 pit for gambling chips. Criminals are greedy, but they avoid being beaten to death for pocket change unless they have no other option."

  William processed this. The accordion folds in the tablecloth had returned; he smoothed them flat again.

  "So she's a witness," he said. "Not a perpetrator."

  "She's a witness who does not want to be found," Eliza corrected, "which makes her considerably more interesting than a perpetrator." She lifted the wine to her lips, paused, and redirected her gaze to a point roughly six inches above William's left shoulder. "But theory is always cleaner than testimony. Why don't we ask her ourselves?"

  William went still.

  The air around the booth changed. It was a subtle thing, a shift in temperature, a degree of dry warmth that hadn't been there a moment before, carrying the acrid undertone of superheated sand and the sharper note of sweat that had cooled and dried and cooled again. The scent of someone who had recently been on fire and had not yet had the opportunity to bathe.

  He turned.

  Alice stood at the edge of the table. She had not announced herself. She had simply arrived, materialised at the border of their candlelight the way a headache materialises behind the eyes: already fully formed by the time you notice it.

  The black lacquer mask hid everything above the jaw, but the jaw was doing enough work on its own. It was set at an angle that spoke of teeth clenched hard enough to crack enamel. Her hands hung at her sides, the fingers not quite fists, curled inward, knuckles pale, as though she were holding something back by force of will, and the will was fraying at the edges.

  She looked like a bomb with an opinion.