Rook

“How could you?” she said. “How?”

It was what they’d pla

He turned his head slowly back, hand to his cheek. She met his eyes, such a hot fire-blue against the white hair, and for one brief moment was confused by the confusion she could see inside them. His lip was bleeding.

Amber made a feeble attempt to move away, but Sophia didn’t allow it. She was supposed to berate René now, to complete the scene they had created, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything. Everything that had been making her tick was stuttering, all her i

“Comfort me,” she ordered Amber, in barely a whisper. “Don’t make me drag you. Do it. Now.”

Amber whimpered, but she put an arm around Sophia’s shoulders, walking her to the corridor door, the crowd parting for them like wheat in the wind. Sophia opened the door, shut it behind them, and then grabbed Amber’s hand.

“Run,” she commanded.

They ran around the curving hall, past the noisy kitchen full of people Sophia had never seen, and to the door at the very end. Sophia pushed up the drop bar, opened the door, and shoved Amber through it.

“These are the stairs to the ground. You can go all the way down to the street, or take the air bridge on the eighth floor.” Amber stared at her, goggle-eyed. “Unless you want to stay here with LeBlanc?”

The girl shook her limp curls. Then she shook them harder.

“Do you have somewhere you can go? Can you hide, or get out of the city?”

“Yes, Mademoiselle, I …”

“Then go. And here.” Sophia reached between the edge of her bodice and the top of her skirt and drew out one of her sheathed knives, shoving it into the girl’s hands.

“Thank you,” Amber whispered.

“Go!”

When Amber started moving, Sophia shut the door, dropped the bar back into place, and ran again, down the hall and up the back stairs, pausing before the corridor that led to her room. She darted her head around the corner. What she could see of the hall was empty, so she flitted quickly through the shadows, drew out the knife strapped around her ankle, put an ear to the door of her room, and then opened it cautiously. Except for the table on its side, the room sat ordinary and deserted, as if it hadn’t just experienced the catastrophic collapse of her entire life. Spear and the forged gate passes were gone.

She jerked open the cupboard, found her fluffy underskirt hung among the other dresses, and drove her knife into the white cloth with a ripping tear. The firelighter was in a sack of burlap that was now in her hand, and there were men’s voices coming to her door. Benoit, she thought, and probably Émile. She darted silently to Madame Hasard’s co

Sophia paused. It was excruciating being in this room; it nearly stopped her ticking altogether. She thought of Tom, and Je

She leapt up onto the ledge and looked down. The bucket was dangling one level below on the nearest rope. Hoping that meant the other bucket was near the bottom and full, she reached out, and that was when the door to the water room opened. Madame Hasard stood looking in at her, vivid hair piled high for the party, one red eyebrow raised.

Sophia met her gaze, grabbed the rope with both hands, and jumped. The rope swung out as she got a foot wrapped around, she bounced once off the bricks, and then she was gone, dropping down the shaft, water splashing somewhere below, leaving her stomach where she’d started. She passed the closed lift door for the flat below, and the next open one, showing a man’s turned back, and glanced up. The top of the shaft was still lit and growing smaller, but no one was trying to cut her rope. Surely Madame Hasard carried a knife? But Madame wasn’t going to have time to cut anything.

Air whistled around Sophia’s ears. She wondered if she would be able to keep her grip when the rope came to a stop, or if she was about to take a cold, wet bath in a cistern. She hung on, saw the bottom coming, got her knees bent, and the rope stopped with a jerk that nearly wrenched her arms from their sockets. But she was able to swing her feet to the edge of a cistern and hop down, and as René had said, landing her boots on the stone floor of the building’s cellar.

She looked around, wary, ready to reach for her sword, but no one was there. She took a moment to lean against the wall, the great turnstile of the four-man lift creaking somewhere behind it, probably taking people up to her engagement party. She had to think.

René knew her plans, and now through his mother, he would know she was gone. And yet the rope had not been cut, and there were no gendarmes waiting for her now. Which only confirmed what Spear had said, that they needed to catch her in the act, probably to satisfy Allemande’s twisted sense of justice. She remembered the look on René’s face just that middlesun, when he’d talked about losing the flat. What would she have done, what had she pla

She walked quickly across the cellar and found the grate in the floor, just as he’d described, lifting it away to show a circular drain. The hole bore straight down into the ground, rungs of metal making a ladder down into a dark that was blacker than where she stood. One touch without her glove and she knew the surface was concrete, like some of the laddered tu

She descended two rungs, dragging the grate back over the opening, and started her way down, thinking. The farther she went, the faster she went, rung after rung, quicker and quicker, despite the fact that it made no difference whether her eyes were opened or closed, or that she was in a deep hole that she couldn’t see the bottom of. She was smiling again, the reckless sort. Because she had just changed the plan.