The alley smelled of piss and coal ash and something rotten that had been left to fester in the rain.

  Alice collapsed against the brick wall, and the word collapsed was doing charitable work. What she did was closer to a controlled fall, her shoulder blades hitting the masonry and her knees folding in the same motion, her body sliding down the damp surface until she was sitting in whatever filth coated the cobblestones. She didn't care. She had moved beyond caring approximately four minutes ago, when she had vaulted a low garden wall on the far side of the Swan's ruins, landed badly on her left ankle, and kept running on pure spite until the sirens faded to a thin wail behind her.

  She sat in the dark and breathed.

  Inventory.

  The word surfaced from somewhere disciplined and habitual, a reflex drilled into her during childhood fencing lessons. When you are hurt, you catalogue. When you catalogue, you do not panic.

  She started with the head. The left side, above the ear, where Thomas's hook had connected. The skin was split. She could feel the wet heat of it, the slow seep of blood matting her hair against her skull. The impact had rung her like a bell, and the reverberations were still there, a high, persistent tone lodged behind her left eye that turned the alley walls into something slightly liquid at the edges.

  Her ribs. The right side, low, where his body shots had landed. Not broken. She was fairly certain of that, because she had broken a rib once during a sparring accident at twelve and remembered the specific, nauseating wrongness of bone moving where bone should not. This was different. Deep bruising, the kind that would turn purple by morning and make breathing an act of negotiation for a week. She pressed two fingers against the lowest rib and hissed through her teeth.

  Her knees were shredded. She could feel it without looking, the raw, stinging heat of skin torn away by broken crockery during that final scramble across the floor. The hip toss had driven her back onto a scatter of shattered plates, and she had felt the ceramic bite through the fabric of her dress as she rolled. Her palms were worse. Glass, mostly. Small, bright points of pain that flared every time she flexed her fingers.

  Her sternum ached where his knee had pinned her. A deep, structural throb, like a bruise on the bone itself.

  And her jaw. The left side, where she had caught a glancing right cross during the middle exchange. She opened and closed her mouth experimentally. It clicked. It hurt. It worked.

  All things considered, Alice thought, tilting her head back against the wall and staring at the narrow strip of smoke-darkened sky visible between the rooftops, you're alive. Which is more than you deserve, given the quality of your decision-making this evening.

  She looked down at her left wrist.

  The Vitric Lover was still latched. The obsidian serpent coiled twice around her forearm, its ruby eyes dim, the tiny fangs sunk into the soft skin over her radial artery. She could feel it working, even now. A faint, rhythmic pull, like a second heartbeat layered beneath her own, drawing mana and blood in slow, measured sips. It was the reason she had been able to trade blows with a Tier 5 Inspector and walk away with her skull in one piece. It was the reason her fist had carried enough force to break the cartilage in his nose. It was the reason she had been able to stand in the wreckage with a revolver leveled at his forehead and keep her finger from pulling the trigger, because the Lover didn't just enhance the body. It soothed the mind. A cool, glassy calm that sat over her thoughts like a pane of ice over a frozen lake, keeping the panic and the rage and the screaming animal terror locked beneath the surface where they couldn't interfere.

  It was also killing her.

  She could feel that too. The drain was no longer subtle. Her veins felt thin, hollowed, as though someone had siphoned the density from her blood and left behind something watery and insufficient. The mana reserves she had rebuilt in the Cellar were gone. The reserves beneath those were gone. The Lover was drinking from the dregs now, pulling from a famished well, and the body was paying the tax.

  Off. Now.

  Alice reached for the serpent's head with her right hand. Her fingers were clumsy, the fine motor control eroded by exhaustion and glass cuts. She found the triangular skull, pressed her thumb against the hinge of the jaw, and lifted.

  The fangs retracted. The coils loosened, the obsidian going slack against her skin, and the serpent uncurled with a wet, organic sound that made her stomach turn. She peeled it off and held it in her open palm.

  The calm evaporated.

  It didn't fade. It was ripped away, a sheet torn from a bed, and everything beneath it hit her at once. The pain quadrupled. The headache, which had been a manageable pressure behind her left eye, detonated into a blinding, nauseating pulse that turned her vision white at the edges. Her muscles, which had been operating under the Lover's augmentation, remembered what they actually were—the overtaxed fibres of a sixteen-year-old girl who had fought too many battles for a single evening—and staged an immediate mutiny. Her arms went heavy. Her legs went numb. A wave of dizziness rolled through her so violently that the alley tilted forty-five degrees and she pitched sideways, her shoulder hitting the cobblestones, the Lover tumbling from her grip.

  She lay on the ground for three seconds. Four. Her cheek pressed against the wet stone, the cold of it almost pleasant against the heat of the split skin above her ear.

  Get up.

  She didn't want to.

  Get up, Alice.

  She got up. It was ugly. She planted both palms on the filthy cobblestones, pushed, got one knee under her, and levered herself upright with a sound that was closer to a whimper than she would ever admit to another living soul. The world spun lazily, settled, spun again. She braced herself against the wall, breathing through her nose, waiting for the nausea to pass.

  It passed. Mostly.

  She picked up the Lover from where it had fallen. The ruby eyes were dark, the obsidian cool and inert. She stuffed it into her satchel with the care of someone handling a venomous snake that was only pretending to sleep. She could feel the absence of it on her wrist. The skin where the fangs had been was smooth, the punctures already sealed by the artifact's coagulating effect, but the phantom sensation lingered. A pull. A want.

  Addictive. The word arrived with clinical certainty. It's addictive. You put it on and you are more than yourself. You take it off and you are less than you were before. And the distance between the two grows wider every time.

  She closed the satchel. She would deal with that later. She would deal with everything later. Later was rapidly becoming the most populated drawer in the cabinet of her mind.

  Next.

  Her right hand went to her face. The Visage Mask sat against her skin like a second skull, smooth and cool and seamless. She hooked her fingers under the chin and pulled.

  The mask resisted. Not physically. There was no latch, no clasp, no mechanism holding it in place. It simply... clung. A reluctance, as though the metal were loath to relinquish the face it had been wearing. Alice pulled harder, and it released with a faint, sucking sound, the air rushing in against her bare skin like a splash of cold water.

  She held the mask up.

  The featureless metal face stared back at her, empty. Blank. The eyes were hollow. The mouth-slit was a thin, expressionless line. It looked like nothing. It looked like a mirror with the reflection scraped out.

  More useful than I thought.

  When she had purchased it, the plan had been simple. Anonymity. A new face, a new voice, a way to move through the city without the ma?tre d's of the world recognizing the Westmere face. That had been the extent of her ambition.

  Then the wall of the Lacquered Swan had exploded inward, and ambition had been replaced by survival, and the mask had become something else entirely.

  She had put it on in the chaos. Grabbed it from the satchel, pressed it to her face, and felt the cold metal seal against her skin as the first gunshots split the air. A disguise. Nothing more. She hadn't intended to fight. She had intended to use the confusion to reach the breach and disappear into the street.

  But Thomas had been there. Florence's brother, the oblivious Senior Inspector with the charming smile and the blind spot the size of a cathedral, had been standing in the middle of the kill zone, and the cultists had been closing on him from all sides, and Alice had watched a man with a sawed-off shotgun draw a bead on him while he was mid-air, and she had—

  Don't think about it.

  The first mimicry had been Thomas himself. His fighting stance. His guard, his footwork, his combinations, absorbed through the mask's third function during the brawl, replicated and fed into her muscles like ink into a press. It had worked. His technique was efficient, brutal, built for a larger frame, and the mask had adapted it to her body with an eerie, seamless precision that made her feel less like she was fighting and more like she was being fought through.

  But then Thomas had adapted. Had read his own style reflected back at him, found the flaw in the borrowed architecture, and swept her legs out from under her like she was a first-year student who'd wandered onto the sparring floor.

  She'd needed something else. Something he couldn't predict.

  Alice stared at the mask. An unease spreading through her.

  The second mimicry had been her father.

  She hadn't planned it. The mask had a way of reaching into the deep structure of memory and pulling, and when she'd needed a fighting style that was alien to anything Thomas had trained against, her mind had offered up the only other combatant she had ever watched obsessively, compulsively, for years. Lord Westmere, who had boxed at the Royal Gymnasium in Kingsbury before she was born, who still sparred with his old trainer every Sunday morning in the private gymnasium of the family estate, whose footwork she had memorized from the gallery above without ever meaning to because she was not permitted on the floor.

  The mask had taken the memory and worn it.

  For thirty seconds, Alice had fought with her father's hands. His rolling guard. His syncopated rhythm. The looping overhand right that he threw with his whole body, the deceptive feints that made opponents commit to phantoms. She had felt his weight settle into her frame, his confidence filling her limbs, and for a hideous, vertiginous moment she had not been Alice at all. She had been him. The arrogance, the easy authority, the absolute certainty that the body would do what was asked of it because it had never been given a reason to doubt.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Alice shuddered. A full-body convulsion, involuntary, starting in her shoulders and running down her spine.

  Never again.

  The persona had clung. Even after she'd switched to the voice mimicry, even after the fighting style had been discarded, there had been a residue. A faint, paternalistic weight behind her thoughts, as if her father were standing just over her shoulder with his hands clasped behind his back, observing. She had hated it with a ferocity that surprised her.

  And the voice. The final gamble.

  Sheltie.

  Alice had used her voice as a last, desperate throw. Pinned beneath Thomas, her pyromancy snuffed the instant it formed, her augmentation fading as the Lover drained the last of her reserves. She had needed one second of hesitation. One moment of confusion to break his grip and land the punch. So she had reached for the most recent voice in her memory—the sharp, clipped vowels of the woman in the porcelain mask who had cornered her in the Cellar—and prayed that a Senior Inspector would recognize his own colleague.

  It had worked. Thomas had frozen, his hands going slack, his mind stuttering over the impossibility of hearing his coworker's voice from behind a stranger's mask. One second. That was all she'd needed.

  Alice turned the mask over in her hands. She could still feel Sheltie in there, somewhere. A faint, acerbic presence lodged in the metal like a stain that wouldn't quite wash out. The clipped cadence. The lazy superiority. The sense of being amused by everything and impressed by nothing.

  I don't like you, Alice thought at the residue. I don't like you at all.

  She stuffed the mask into the satchel beside the Lover.

  Last. The Thieves' Glove.

  She peeled it off her left hand. The leather contracted as it released, returning to its stiff, worn shape. She flexed her bare fingers. The glove had done less than the others. One charge, spent at the critical moment, pulling Thomas's service revolver from his holster and depositing it into her grip across ten feet of open air while the man stood there clutching nothing and looking, for one deeply satisfying instant, completely bewildered.

  Worth every chip.

  She put the glove in the satchel. Closed the flap. Buckled it.

  The alley was quiet. The sounds of the city filtered in from the street beyond, muffled and distant. Sirens. The low murmur of a gathering crowd. The clatter of carriage wheels on cobblestones as the constabulary mobilized.

  Alice leaned against the wall and let the anger come.

  It arrived without ceremony. No slow build, no simmering resentment. It was simply there, fully formed, as if it had been waiting behind the door of the Lover's artifical calm and had walked in the moment the lock was turned.

  Damn him.

  Thomas Bannerman. Senior Inspector. Florence's brother. The man she had killed for.

  She had put a bullet through a man's skull to save his life. She had stood in the wreckage of his city's most prestigious restaurant and bled for him, fought beside him, absorbed blows meant for him. And the very first thing he had done, the very first instinct that fired in that dense, duty-addled brain, was to grab her wrist and try to identify her.

  Not thank you. Not are you hurt. Not even who are you, delivered with the basic human decency of someone addressing a person rather than a suspect. He had seized her like a constable collaring a pickpocket, his fingers closing on her wrist with the automatic, proprietary grip of a man who believed that a badge entitled him to any body within reach.

  Lucky your sister saved my life, Alice thought, the fury cold and sharp and perfectly articulated.

  She exhaled. The breath shook.

  Any goodwill she might have harboured for the Department of Arcane Affairs—and there had been some, before today, an acknowledgment that someone needed to police magic and that the institution, however flawed, served a necessary purpose—was gone. Burned to ash and scattered. She had dealt with two of them in a single day. Sheltie, who had puppeteered her into a fight and then cornered her with the predatory charm of a cat toying with a mouse. And Thomas, who had repaid a debt of blood with a fist and an interrogation.

  They're all the same. Every last one of them. Badge and a mandate and the unshakeable conviction that anything they do to you is justified because they're the law and you're not.

  She pushed off the wall. The anger was useful. It burned where the Lover's calm had been and it kept her vertical, which was more than her body wanted to do on its own.

  Alice walked to the mouth of the alley.

  The street beyond was packed.

  She had expected quiet—the late-evening lull of a residential district winding down. What she found was a river. Dunwick's citizens were pouring from their homes, their pubs, their boarding houses, drawn toward the pillar of smoke rising from the middle of Kingsgate like iron filings to a magnet. The crowd moved in a single direction, a dark, murmuring tide of wool coats and flat caps and shawls, their faces lit from below by the handheld lanterns and the distant, flickering orange of fires that hadn't been put out yet.

  Alice stepped into the current and let it swallow her.

  She kept her head down. One more bruised girl in a dark dress, moving against the flow, unremarkable, unnoticed. The crowd parted around her without seeing her, their attention fixed on the spectacle ahead.

  The gossip washed over her in fragments.

  "—heard it was demons. Actual demons, summoned right into the dining room—"

  "—don't be daft, Margaret, demons aren't real—"

  "—political assassination, mark my words. Half the Lords of Commerce eat at the Swan. Somebody wanted someone dead, and they got what they paid for—"

  "—my cousin's a fireman, he says the whole west wall is gone. Just gone. Like the Lord reached down and scooped it out—"

  "—cultists. Burlap hoods. Great Earth, they're calling themselves—"

  "—who?"

  "—does it matter? They're all mad. Every last one of them—"

  Alice did not particularly care. The words entered her ears and exited without leaving a mark, her mind too battered to process anything beyond the immediate logistics of remaining upright and moving forward. Her thoughts had been reduced to a narrow corridor. Left foot. Right foot. Don't fall. Don't stop.

  But one thought persisted, low and bitter and unreasonable.

  Great Earth. Damn them. Damn every last one of them.

  Not for the dead. Not for the injured. Not for the political fallout or the coming crackdown or whatever fresh hell was brewing beneath the burlap hoods and lunatic minds. Alice was too exhausted for altruism. Her grievance was smaller, pettier, and therefore more durable.

  They had attacked the Lacquered Swan on the one night she had decided to eat there.

  She had ordered the highland stag. Blood rare. Gratin potatoes. The eighty-four Valois. A full-course meal at her father's favourite restaurant, the first "real" meal she'd had since arriving in this coal-stained city. The bread had been perfect. Warm, dark crust, salted butter. The roasted marrow bones had arrived glistening and fragrant, and the consommé had been a clear, golden perfection that caught the candlelight like liquid amber.

  She had taken one bite of the stag. One. The knife had parted the flesh and the juices had pooled on the plate, and she had raised the fork to her lips and tasted something that was, for a fraction of a second, the best thing that had happened to her since she left home.

  Then the wall had exploded.

  She would remember that bite. She would remember it because she would never know what the second one tasted like. The plate was somewhere in the rubble now, buried under plaster and chandelier and the remains of a hundred-year-old ceiling, and the eighty-four Valois was a dark stain soaking into the floorboards of a crime scene, and the daughter of Westmere had been robbed of the only thing she had asked of this miserable, violent, ungrateful city.

  A proper meal.

  I will not forgive this.

  The crowd thinned as she moved further from the disaster. The streets narrowed, the gas lamps grew sparser, and the noise of the mob faded behind her like a tide going out. She was somewhere in the lower commercial district now, the shopfronts dark and shuttered, the cobblestones gleaming with the residue of the afternoon rain.

  The smell hit her before she saw the cart.

  Pastry. Hot fat. Browned meat and onion gravy, cheap and aggressive, cutting through the coal smoke with the blunt confidence of food that knew exactly what it was and harboured no aspirations of being anything else.

  Alice stopped walking.

  A handcart was parked at the junction of two lanes, wedged beneath the overhang of a tobacconist's awning. A plank counter jutted from the front, and a small coal brazier glowed beneath a battered tin warmer stacked with golden-crusted pies. A hand-painted sign hung from the awning, the lettering cheerful and slightly crooked:

  PIEMAN PETE'S—HOT PIES, COLD PRICES

  The proprietor was a stout man in a flour-dusted apron, his sleeves rolled to the elbows despite the chill, his face ruddy and animated. He was leaning across the counter, deep in conversation with a regular, a dock worker by the look of him, who was eating a pie with one hand and gesturing with the other.

  "I'm telling you, Reg," Pete was saying, his voice carrying the nasal enthusiasm of a born storyteller. "My mate Danny was on the street when it all went to hell. He saw the whole thing. Says there was a ghost."

  The dock worker snorted through a mouthful of crust. "A ghost."

  "A phantom," Pete insisted, jabbing a flour-dusted finger for emphasis. "White cloak, head to toe. Moving through the smoke like it wasn't even there. Danny said it was fighting and killing whatever living thing it saw. He said it moved like nothing human."

  "Danny drinks."

  "Danny drinks on Saturdays. This was a Monday. He was stone sober and he saw what he saw." Pete crossed his arms, his chin jutting with the wounded dignity of a man whose source was being impugned. "A phantom in a white cloak. Kill everything. You watch, Reg. It'll be in the papers by morning."

  He turned to reach for a fresh pie.

  Alice was standing directly in front of the counter.

  She hadn't made a sound. She had simply arrived, the way exhausted people sometimes did, drifting into position without the energy to announce themselves. Her hair was matted on one side with blood that had dried to a dark crust. Her dress was torn at the knee, the fabric stiff with plaster dust. Her face was pale, smudged with soot, and her eyes held the flat, thousand-yard focus of someone who had recently been elsewhere and was not entirely certain they had come back.

  Pete yelped.

  "Lord above—" He staggered back a half-step, one hand clutching his chest, the other braced on the warmer. "Lady! You can't just—standing there like a—Smokes, you nearly stopped my heart."

  Alice looked at the pies. She looked at Pete.

  "Pie," she said.

  Pete blinked. He glanced at the dock worker, who shrugged. He looked back at Alice, took in the blood and the dust and the expression that suggested she was approximately three seconds from either collapsing or committing violence, and decided that customer service was the safest option.

  "Right," Pete said, reaching for the warmer with the cautious movements of a man who did not want to startle the predator. "Steak and onion. That'll be ten copper pennies, little lady."

  Alice reached into her satchel. Her fingers, stiff and clumsy with glass cuts and dried blood, closed around the first coin they found. She flipped it onto the counter without looking, took the pie from Pete's outstretched hand, and turned away.

  "Oi!" Pete called after her, indignation overriding caution. "Bit rude, little lady! A 'thank you' wouldn't kill y—"

  He looked down at the counter.

  The coin sat in a small puddle of grease. It was gold. Not the dull, clipped brass of a half-stag or the tarnished silver of a shilling. Gold. A full Crown, stamped with the Imperial eagle, worth more than Pete's monthly salary and every pie currently in his cart combined.

  Pete picked it up. Bit it. Held it to the lamp.

  "Nevermind," he said softly, pocketing the coin with the reverence of a man handling a holy relic. He raised his voice toward the retreating figure. "Nevermind at all! You have a lovely evening, miss! Come back anytime! Pete's is open till midnight!"

  Alice took a bite.

  It was passable.

  The pastry was thick, closer to a wall than a crust, and the filling was more gravy than meat, the onions soft and sweet in the way that spoke of long, slow cooking in rendered fat. It was honest food. Workman's food. The kind of thing that tasted best at two in the morning after a shift, eaten standing up in the cold, when standards were low and hunger was high.

  Alice had grown up eating pies made by a private chef who sourced his butter from a specific dairy in the Westerlands and his flour from a mill that ground it three times. She had eaten game pies at diplomatic dinners, pork pies at country estates, and once, memorably, a truffle and pheasant pie at the King's table during a state function that her father had attended and she had been dragged to under protest.

  Pete's steak and onion was not in the conversation.

  She took another bite and stopped chewing.

  The hunger was gone. Not satisfied, just gone, replaced by a fatigue so total it had swallowed every competing need. Her jaw ached. Her stomach was uncertain. The pie was warm in her hand and she couldn't remember why she was holding it.

  She tossed it into the gutter. The pastry split on impact, the gravy pooling between the cobblestones, and a stray cat materialized from beneath a dustbin with the speed and precision of a creature that had been waiting its entire life for this exact moment.

  Sleep.

  The word was a commandment. It overrode the anger, the pain, the injuries, the residual taste of Sheltie's persona still clinging to the inside of her skull. It overrode the image of Thomas's face when he heard the wrong voice come from behind the right mask. It overrode the memory of her father's stance settling into her body like a hand into a glove.

  Sleep is the only priority.

  Mrs. Gable's Boarding House. Baker Street. A bed with a patchwork quilt and a lumpy mattress and a grime-streaked window that let in the morning sun. It was across the city. It was impossibly far.

  Alice looked up the street. Empty. The gas lamps painted long, wet smears of light on the cobblestones, and the only movement was the distant silhouette of a constabulary wagon heading toward the smoke.

  No carriages.

  Of course not. Every cab in the district would be heading toward the disaster, drawn by the promise of fares from gawkers and fleeing patrons. The streets were drained. She was alone, swaying slightly on her feet, in a part of the city she couldn't quite name, with no transport and no energy and a body that was making increasingly specific threats about what would happen if she didn't lie down in the next ten minutes.

  She considered sitting on the curb and waiting for morning.

  She considered lying down in the gutter next to the pie.

  She considered, briefly and without real conviction, crying.

  The voice came from behind her, quiet and unhurried.

  "Are you in need of a ride, young lady?"