<Is a bad plan better than no plan? I’m not sure.>
<Sometimes you’re tons of help, and other times you’re no help at all.> She turned left, through the foundry yards. <Hey, Clef?>
<Yeah?>
Sancia tried to think about how to phrase these words, as they were essentially incomprehensible to any Tevanni. <Have…have you ever heard of something that can, like, turn off scrivings?>
<What? Why? Is…Wait, is that what you think happened back there?>
<Pretty sure.>
<Oh, hell. Well. No.>
Sancia grimaced. <Yeah.>
<That’s…really concerning.>
<Yeah.>
She glanced to the east, where the giant cloud of dust was drifting toward the moon.
<So is that,> said Clef.
<Yeah.>
Sancia kept to the rooftops as she made her way through Foundryside to Old Ditch. Her hands hurt like hell and her head wasn’t much better, but she had to make do. Every once in a while she’d peer down into the warrens and spy someone who looked large, well fed, well armed, and quite mean — and she’d know she wasn’t out of danger yet.
She briefly stopped in Old Ditch to hit up a once-favorite stop of hers: the Bibbona Wine Brewery. Everyone said the cane wine made there was atrocious, but they still did a brisk business — brisk enough to be worth her robbing the place every once in a while, back in the day. But then some clever bastard had not only installed a reinforced door in the brewery, but they’d also rigged up a timing system: three Miranda Brass locks that had to be unlocked within twenty seconds of each other — otherwise, they’d all re-lock. Even with Sancia’s talents, the hassle hadn’t been worth the payout.
But with Clef, it was easy — one, two, three, and suddenly she had two hundred duvots in her pocket.
<I guess this is the life we’d lead if a whole army wasn’t looking to cut you to ribbons, huh?> asked Clef as she crept away.
She quickly scaled the side of a rookery and scrambled onto the rooftop. <Something like that.>
Luckily, the Scrappers were in the first place she looked — an abandoned loft in Old Ditch. To her surprise, they weren’t in their workshop, but were instead standing on the balcony, staring out at the distant chaos in Foundryside. Sancia peered over the rooftop at them, then carefully started climbing down.
Giovanni screamed in surprise and fell backward into the other Scrappers as Sancia dropped down to the balcony. “For the love of God!” she said, standing. “Could you keep it down!”
“San?” said Claudia. “What the hell are you doing here?” She looked up along the wall. “Why were you on the roof?”
“I’m here to buy,” said Sancia. “And buy fast. And I had to take a safe route.” She glanced at the street below. “Can we go indoors?”
“No,” said Claudia. “All our lights are off. Nothing works, that’s why we’re out here.”
“Have you checked recently?” asked Sancia.
“Why?” said Giovanni suspiciously.
“We haven’t,” said Claudia. “Because the second we came outside, some scrumming buildings started falling down! The whole neighborhood’s gone mad!”
“Oh,” said Sancia. She coughed. “Ah. Very strange, that. But — can we, uh, light a candle, and go inside anyway?
Giovanni narrowed his eyes at her. “Sancia…I suddenly feel that your arrival, and all these disasters, seems terribly coincidental.”
Sancia spied someone in a steel cap walking down the alley below. “Can we please just go inside?” she begged.
Claudia and Giovanni exchanged a glance. Then Claudia said to the rest of the Scrappers, “Stay out here. Let me know if anything…I don’t know, explodes or something.”
Inside, Sancia quickly told them what had happened — or tried to. The more she talked, the madder it all felt. As she spoke, she washed her hands in the candlelight and wrapped her palms and wrists in chalk cloth. She didn’t like it much — she didn’t like any new clothing — but she knew she had to do a lot more climbing soon.
Claudia stared at her in disbelief. “You’ve got a whole goddamn campo army out looking for you?”
“Pretty much,” said Sancia.
“And…and Sark’s dead?” asked Giovanni.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Almost certainly.”
“And…” Claudia looked at her, frightened. “You say some campo lordling is running around…with some rig that can turn scrivings off?”
“It all happened fast,” said Sancia. “So I’m not positive. But…that seems to be what I saw. He hit a button, and everything just stopped. I’m guessing those buildings fell down because they were being supported by scrivings, in some fashion or another. And his soldiers expected it — that was why they switched to regular espringals, rather than scrived ones.”
“Shit,” said Claudia weakly.
“You really think this was all about your key?” said Giovanni.
“That I’m sure of.”
“Where did you hide it?” he asked. “Did you bury it, or put it in a safe drop, or just throw it away?”
Sancia thought about what to say. “Ah…”
Giovanni went white. “You don’t still have it, do you? You didn’t bring it here?”
Sancia’s hand guiltily crept up to her chest, where Clef was hanging from her neck. “At this point, bringing Clef here isn’t any more dangerous than my being here.”
“Oh my Lord,” whispered Giovanni.
“Goddamn it, Sancia!” said Claudia, furious. “I…I told you to stop taking house jobs! You’re going to get us all killed just by our knowing you!”
“Then get me out of here fast,” said Sancia. “I need to get to Sark’s and grab his emergency kit. I get that, and I can get out of Tevanne, and you’ll never know me again.” She took what she’d stolen from the brewery and dropped it on the table. “There’s two hundred here. You said I’d get a fifty percent discount next time. I’m calling it in. Now.”
Claudia and Giovanni looked at each other. Then Claudia sighed deeply, took the candle to a cupboard, and started pulling out a box. “You want dolorspina darts again — yes?”
“Yeah. These are trained soldiers. A one-shot stop would be damned handy. But do you have anything else? I need any fight to be as unfair as it can get.”
“There’s…something new I cooked up,” said Giovanni. “But it’s not totally ready yet.” He opened a drawer and pulled out what looked like a small black wooden ball.
<Neat!> said Clef in her head. <It’s…I don’t know, it’s like some kind of screwed-up lamp that pops…>
Sancia tried to ignore him. “What is it?”
“I rigged it up so it uses multiple lighting scrivings from the four houses,” he said. “In other words, you hit the button, throw it, and it makes an ungodly amount of light, flashing bright. Enough to blind someone. Then…”
“Then what?” said Sancia.
“Well, this is the part I’m not so sure about,” said Giovanni. “There’s a charge inside — no more than a firecracker. But I’ve made its chamber sensitive to vibrations so it feels like it’s playing host to a much, much larger combustion. It amplifies the noise, in other words…”