"Congratulations on the win," Eliza said, entirely unbothered by the homicidal energy radiating from the girl's jaw. "You certainly live up to the name. Very dramatic. I enjoyed your performance against the Icebreaker. Resourceful."

  She gestured to the empty stretch of leather bench beside William.

  "Sit down. Boxer, move over. You're monopolising the booth."

  William shifted to the far end with the careful, measured movement of a man making room for something volatile. Alice didn't move. She stood rooted at the edge of the table, her breathing controlled but heavy, the knuckles of her hanging hands still bone-white.

  "I don't understand," Alice said. Her voice was flat, stripped of inflection, vibrating at a frequency that suggested the calm was costing her.

  William blinked, glancing between them. "What—"

  Alice ignored him. Her mask stayed fixed on Eliza's porcelain.

  "I said I don't understand. You toyed with me. You forced me to fight, played with me like a cat with something half-dead, and then you just... forfeited." She leaned forward and placed both hands on the edge of the table. The wood groaned. "What do you want from me?"

  Eliza clapped her hands together once, a single sharp sound of genuine delight.

  "Straight to business. I like that."

  She gestured again to the seat, the tone shifting from amused to instructional in the space between syllables.

  "But before we get to the what, I think introductions are in order. And do sit down. You're blocking the candlelight. It's terribly rude."

  Alice hesitated. Then she lowered herself onto the far edge of the bench, her spine refusing the backrest, her body angled toward the exit like a bird that hasn't decided whether to stay on the branch.

  "Thank you," Eliza said, with the warmth of a hostess welcoming a guest who had arrived at gunpoint. "I appreciate the cooperation. It saves everyone time."

  She lifted her wine glass in a loose, illustrative gesture. "I'm Sheltie. The nervous wreck beside you is Boxer, my partner for the evening."

  Then she leaned forward, a precise, practised degree, and let the lapel of her high-collared coat fall open by an inch.

  The silver eye of the D.A.A. caught the candlelight. Cold. Authoritative. Unmistakable.

  Alice stared at the badge.

  Then she groaned. It was long, loud, and entirely undignified, the sound of a woman who had been bracing for a catastrophe and received a bureaucracy instead.

  "Of course," she muttered, squeezing her eyes shut. Her hands rose to rub her temples and clicked uselessly against the lacquer of her mask. She hissed through her teeth, dropped her hands, and slumped backward on the bench. The rigid tension that had been holding her upright simply left, like a rope cut. Her shoulders fell. Her spine conceded to the leather.

  "You people," she sighed. "Because today hasn't been long enough."

  To anyone else in the Cellar—the smugglers, the fixers, the unregistered necromancers nursing their drinks—that badge would have been a death sentence. But Alice was registered, and while she didn't have her documents on her right now, she was still legal. The D.A.A. didn't mean chains; it meant forms.

  It was annoying. It was absolutely the crowning indignity of a day that had included being trapped in a box of solidified air and punched at by a woman who could level buildings. But compared to the alternatives her panicked mind had assembled on the walk over here—a cult looking for a vessel, a syndicate settling a score, a serial killer with excellent taste in masks—the government was practically a gift.

  "So," Alice said, opening her eyes. The panic was gone. In its place was a flat, depleted candour. "Am I under arrest?"

  "We are in the Cellar, Miss Dragonslayer," Eliza said. "Imperial law has difficulty penetrating these walls. We are both merely patrons enjoying the amenities." She swirled the wine. "I am not here to arrest you. I am here for a conversation."

  "A conversation," Alice repeated. She looked at the lounge around them—the high-rollers still radiating malice from every adjacent table, the woman in emeralds whose stare could have stripped paint. "Here? In the open? Everyone in this room is looking at us like we burned their village. We are comfortably the most despised people in the building. And you want to discuss sensitive business with an audience?"

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  Eliza didn't look around. She raised one hand and snapped her fingers.

  "Boxer."

  William exhaled—a slow, controlled breath, the kind that precedes something practised. He placed one gloved hand flat on the table and let his gaze soften into middle distance.

  The air around the booth tightened. A dry, prickling static crawled across Alice's skin, and then the world tilted. Not physically, but acoustically, as though someone had pressed a pillow over the ears of reality. The roar of the pit, the clink of glasses at the bar, the angry murmurs drilling into their backs—all of it vanished. Not into silence, exactly, but into a thick, pressurised hush, as if the booth had been submerged in deep water.

  "Don't worry," Eliza said, her voice landing crisp and close within the bubble. "Nothing gets in. More importantly, nothing gets out."

  Alice looked past the shimmer at the edge of the field. Near the bar, a waiter dropped a tray of glasses. She saw the shatter, saw the shards scatter across the floor, saw his mouth shape a curse. Heard nothing.

  "A Sound Mage?" Alice asked, glancing at William. "That's niche. Isn't that usually bards and theatre technicians?"

  "He's not a Sound Mage," Eliza corrected. "That's blunt work. Boxer is a Sensory Mage. An Illusionist, technically."

  Alice frowned, watching the faint shimmer around the booth—heat haze on a winter night. "That doesn't sound better. Is he tampering with their heads?"

  "Nothing so crude. He isn't touching their minds; he's manipulating the field around us. Think of it as a prism. He intercepts the light and sound leaving this radius and scrambles it. To the room, we're perfectly visible and clearly speaking. But the fidelity is scrubbed. If they try to read our lips, the image warps. If they try to listen, our voices flatten into the ambient noise. We are intelligible to each other and unintelligible to everyone else."

  "Sheltie." William's voice was tight, clipped. "You just disclosed my affinity. That is classified personnel data."

  "Anyone with functioning eyes could deduce you're some flavour of Illusionist the moment the air started shimmering, Boxer. It's hardly a state secret."

  William opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again with the expression of a man adding another entry to a very long internal ledger.

  "Anyway," Eliza continued, gesturing at him with her glass. "Boxer. Bring it out."

  William sighed, a sigh that carried the weight of professional resignation, and reached into his inner coat pocket. He withdrew something solid and set it on the table with a heavy clack. A box, no larger than a fist, crafted from dark, polished ebony and inlaid with spiralling veins of silver filigree. It looked expensive and antique. It also looked entirely mundane, which in this building meant it almost certainly wasn't.

  "And that is?" Alice asked.

  "A truth detector," Eliza said, running a gloved finger along the silver inlay. "An artifact recovered from a smuggling ring in the Southern Isles last year. A music box, technically. As long as the speaker tells the truth, the mechanism turns and the melody plays. The moment a lie touches the air—"

  She smirked and flipped the latch.

  The lid sprang open. Inside, a tiny ballerina of spun glass stood frozen on a pin, arms raised in arrested pirouette.

  "I have two hands," Eliza stated clearly.

  The dancer moved. She turned on her axis with a delicate, mechanical grace, and a tinkling melody unfurled into the booth—high, crystalline, like rain striking glass.

  It wasn't just a sound. As the notes washed through the tight confines of the booth, Alice felt something lift from her shoulders. The dull, throbbing exhaustion that had been grinding at the base of her skull since the carriage ride simply dissolved. It was invasive and immediate—a warmth that sank into the muscles of her jaw and unwound them against her will, a calm that didn't belong to her settling into her chest like a hand pressed gently over her heart. Her breath hitched. The tension she'd been carrying since the arena drained out of her like water through open fingers.

  "And they are clean," Eliza added, her voice unchanged.

  SNAP.

  The lid slammed shut. The music died. The warmth was ripped away, and Alice felt colder and heavier than she had before the box opened, as if something had been briefly returned to her and then confiscated.

  Eliza patted the lid. "Sensitive little thing. It despises metaphor."

  Alice stared at the box. Then she shifted her gaze to Eliza's hands—sheathed in pristine white silk, spotless, elegant.

  "How literal is it?" Alice asked, her voice dry. She nodded at the gloves. "You have dirt under those?"

  Eliza's hand flew to her chest. Her posture rearranged itself into a portrait of scandalised virtue—spine straight, chin lifted, a flush of theatrical outrage colouring her cheeks above the porcelain.

  "My," she breathed, clutching her gloved hands together as though shielding them from Alice's gaze. "Demanding to see a lady's bare skin within the hour? I didn't take you for a deviant, Miss Dragonslayer. Keep your eyes to yourself."

  Alice stared at her. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

  "I... beg your pardon?" she managed. "You cannot possibly think I was—"

  She stopped.

  The air in the booth changed. Not gradually. Instantly—the atmospheric equivalent of a door closing.

  Eliza dropped the act. The scandalised debutante vanished mid-breath, discarded like a costume between scenes, and what remained was something still and angular and paying very close attention. She leaned forward, elbows on the table, her porcelain mask tilting a fraction of a degree. The playfulness hadn't disappeared so much as hardened—calcified into something with edges.

  She didn't offer a segue. She didn't ease into it. The question landed in the silence like a stone dropped into still water.

  "What is your relation to the incident on the King's Road yesterday?"