The Family Trade

“Miriam?” called Olga, “is that you?”

I’m still alive, she realized, wondering. Taking stock: If she was still alive, that meant the intruders weren’t. “Yes,” she called faintly. “I’m out here. Where are you?”

“Get in here. Quickly.”

She took no second warning. Brill crouched beside the splintered wreckage of the door, a brilliant electric lamp held in one hand, while Olga stood to the other side. Her face cast sharp shadows that flickered across the walls as she sca

“They’re not to blame,” Miriam said hoarsely, feeling her stomach rise. The smell of burned cordite and blood hung in the air. “Brill?”

“I bought Kara hither, my lady. I did as you told me.”

“She did.” Olga nodded. “To be truthful, we did not need your help with such as these.” She jerked a thumb at the darkened corner of the room. “There’s an alarm that Oliver does not know of, the duke insisted I bring it.” The red eye of an infrared motion sensor winked at Miriam. “But I am grateful for the warning,” she added graciously.

“I—” Miriam shuddered. “In the orangery. An assassin.”

“What?” Olga looked at her sharply. “Who—”

“They killed Margit. Sent a note to lure me there, but I was expecting trouble.”

“That’s terrible!” Brill looked appalled: The light swayed. “What are we going to—”

“Inside,” Olga commanded. Brill retreated, and after a moment Miriam followed her. “Close the door, damn you!” Olga called, and after a moment a timid serving maid scurried forward and began to yank on it. “When it’s shut, bar it. Then get that chest braced across it,” Olga added, pointing to a wardrobe that looked to Miriam’s eyes to be built from most of an oak tree. She stopped and turned to Miriam. “This was aimed at you, not me,” she said calmly, lowering her machine pistol to point at the floor. “They’re getting overconfident. Margit—” she shook her head—“Brilliana told me of the note, you are lucky to have escaped.”

“What am I going to do?” Miriam asked. She felt dizzy and sick, the room spi

“I don’t know,” Olga said thoughtfully.

A door in the opposite wall opened and Kara rushed in. “My lady! You’re hurt?”

“Not yet,” Miriam said, waving her away tiredly. “The killer in the orangery was of the Clan, he had a locket,” she said.

“That could tell us which braid he came from,” Olga said. “Have you got it?”

“I think—yes.” Miriam pulled it out and opened it. “Shit.”

“What is it?” asked Olga, leaning close. “Oh my.”

Miriam stared at the locket. Inside it was a design like the knotwork pattern she was learning to loathe—but this one was subtly wrong. Different. A couplet with a different rhyme. One that she knew, instinctively, at a gut level, would take her somewhere else if she stared at it too long and hard. Not to mention making her blood pressure spike so high it would give her an aneurism—if she tried it in the next few hours.

She snapped it shut again and looked up at Olga. “Do you know what this means?” she asked.

Olga nodded very seriously. “It means you and Brilliana will have to disappear,” she said. “These two—” a sniff and a nod at the barricaded doorway—“are of no account, but this—” a glance at the locket—“might be the gravest threat to the Clan in living memory.” She frowned uncertainly. “I had not imagined that such a thing might exist. But if it does—”

“—They must stop at nothing to kill anyone who knows they exist,” said Brill, completing the thought for her. She looked at Miriam with bright eyes. “Will you take me with you wherever you go, mistress? You’ll need someone to guard your back …”

Two hours later.

Painkillers and beta-blockers are wonderful things, Miriam reflected as she glanced over her shoulder at Brill. She’d managed to relax slightly as Olga organized a cleanup, marshalling a barricade inside the doorway and chivvying Kara and the servants into making themselves useful. Then Olga had pointed out in words of one syllable what this meant: that two factions, at least one of them hitherto unknown, were after her and it would be a good idea to make herself scarce. Finally, still feeling fragile but now accommodating herself to the idea, Miriam had crossed over. With her passenger. Who wore a smart business suit and an expression of mild bemusement. “Where are we?” asked Brill.

“The doppelgänger warehouse.” Miriam frowned as she transferred her locket to her left hip pocket “Other side from my own chambers. Someone should have cleaned up by now.”

Fidgeting in her pocket, she pulled out some cartridges. She shuffled quietly closer to the edge of the mezzanine and looked over the side as she reloaded her pistol.

“This wasn’t what I expected,” the younger woman said in hushed tones, staring up at the dim warehouse lights.

“Stay quiet until I’ve checked it out.” She let a sharp note creep into her voice. “We may not be alone here.”

“Oh.”

Miriam crept to the edge of the platform and looked down. There was no sign of movement below, and the front door of the warehouse—past the dismounted trailer that served as a site office—was shut. “Wait here. I’ll call you down when it’s safe,” she said.

“Yes, Miriam.”

She took a deep breath, then darted down the stairs lightly, her gun raised. Nobody shot at her from concealment. She reached the bottom step and paused for a couple of seconds before stepping off the metal staircase onto dusty wooden floorboards, then duck-walked over to the side of the site office, out of sight from its windows and the door. Creeping again, she sidled around the wall of the trailer and crouched next to the short flight of steps leading in to it. She spent about a minute staring at the threshold, then stood up slowly, lowered her gun, and carefully returned it to her jacket pocket. She rubbed her forehead, then turned. “You can come down now, as long as you come right over here. Don’t touch anything with your hands!”

Brilliana stood up and dusted herself off, lips wrinkling in distaste as she tried to shake the warehouse cobwebs from the sleeve of her Chanel suit. Then she walked down the stairs slowly, not touching the guard rail. Her back was straight, as if she was making a grand entrance rather than a low-life departure.

Miriam pointed at the steps to the trailer. “Don’t, whatever you do, even think about going in there,” she warned. Her expression was drawn. Brill sniffed, conspicuously, then pulled a face in disgust.

“What happened there?”

“Someone was killed,” Miriam said quietly. Then she bent down and pointed to something in the threshold. “Look. See that wire? It’s hair-thin. Don’t touch it!”

“What wire—oh.”

A fine wire was stretched across the threshold, twelve inches above the floor.

“That wasn’t here when I came this way three hours ago,” Miriam said tonelessly. “And nobody’s been to clear up what’s inside. Going from what Roland was telling me, that means that first, this is a trap, and second, it’s not the kind where someone’s going to jump out and start shooting at us, and third, if you touch that wire, we probably both die. Wait here and don’t move or touch anything. I’m going to see if they’re belt-and-suspenders people.”

Miriam shuffled gingerly over toward the big wooden doors of the warehouse—there was a smaller access door set in the side of one of them—with her eyes focused on the ground in front of her, every step of the way. Brill stayed where she was obediently, but when Miriam glanced at her, she was staring up at the lights, an odd expression on her face. “I’m over here,” she said. “I’m really on the other side!”