Farther out, more furniture. Then the desk. It was heavy, wide. The desk chair was on the opposite side, between the desk and the window-she knew there was a window, because she could hear the wind whipping against the glass. Around the side, carefully, and she made sure to fix its corners in her mind. Behind the desk, and she lightly bumped into the chair. It was wheeled, and rolled slightly when she touched it. She felt her back brush against heavy draperies.
Now, to find the letter. Slowly, and as quietly as she could, she began opening the drawers. Each one squeaked and scraped against the desk slightly, but also particularly. No two drawers or doors or spots on the floor ever sound quite the same. There, third one down on the left. There was neither time nor means to sort out which letter, precisely, she was looking for; instead, she grabbed the first four and stuffed them into the pocket of her dress.
“…candles for the study.”
Skinner jerked her head up. Someone was coming down the hallway. She suppressed the urge to snap her telerhythmia around the room looking for a hiding place, instead reached out with her hands. The desk? How high is it off the ground? Would they be able to see me under it?
“I thought Miss Emilia said she didn’t like candles in there.”
“Her mother wants candles in all the rooms, don’t ask me why.” The door handle rattled as someone grabbed it. “Oh, she’ll chew you out for this, it’s supposed to be locked all the time.”
The drapes, move behind the drapes. Skinner stepped as close to the window as she could and pulled the heavy drapery around herself. Her hiding place would either be effective, or laughably absurd-leaving the hem of her dress exposed at the bottom, or lying across her face so that its shape was clearly visible. The door opened, footsteps brushed softly on the thick carpet. I left the drawer open. Shit. The servants chattered aimlessly as they worked, presumably putting new candles in candelabras throughout the room. No way to get to it. How will I know if they’re looking towards me?
Matches were lit, and the smell of sulfur filled the air. They’ll see me for sure, now.
“Such a waste,” muttered the first speaker at the front of the desk, not a yard away from Skinner. “Candles…just because she likes to see the windows lit up at night.” Closer now, he’d moved around to the back. “Wish I were rich enough to burn candles at all hours.” There was nothing between him and Skinner except for that thick drape. She could reach out and touch him if she wanted. The drawer’s particular voice resounded as the servant closed it.
The pause that followed brought Skinner’s heart into her throat. It could not have lasted longer than a fraction of the breadth of a breath, but Skinner must have spent a day, a month, a year with her chest pounding, biting her lip and gritting her teeth, waiting for the man to snatch the draperies away and demand an accounting of what she was doing in Emilia Vie-Gorgon’s study.
Such an apocalypse never occurred, and instead the man, after a moment’s hesitation, left the candlelit study and closed the door behind him. Skinner breathed a sigh of relief whose force surprised her, as though she might have inadvertently expelled her soul, then after using her clairaudience to make sure the hall was empty, followed the servant out.
She hadn’t taken more than two steps into the hall when yet another voice addressed her, triggering yet another precipitous drop of her stomach.
“Miss?” The sternly polite and politely suspicious voice asked. Emilia’s major domo. “The guests aren’t supposed to be up here.”
“Yes. No,” Skinner replied, smiling. “I was a little lost, I was trying to find…”
“I fail to see what you could have been looking for that you thought might necessitate you leaving the first floor,” the man said, his voice icy with official indignation.
“Yes, well.” Grimacing inwardly at the straightened circumstances that forced her into such a pass, she adopted a hang-dog expression and morosely tapped at the silver plate that sealed off her eyes. “It’s easy for me to get turned around, you see.”
“Oh,” the major domo said, his voice dropping with the certainty that only knowledge of the most exquisite faux pas can bring. “Oh, oh, yes. Of course, I’m sorry. Do you…can I help you back to the party?”
“If you would,” Skinner said to him. “That would be lovely.”
Twenty
“We need to discuss your recent actions,” the Moral Responsibility officer said. Beckett couldn’t remember the man’s name and this, somehow, disturbed him more than the hearing about his fitness for duty. “Some of the reports coming in are disturbing. Your superiors are worried.”
“Stitch is worried?”
“Mr. Stitch is only your direct superior. The people that I work for are superior to him,” the man said with a quiet sneer. He had a sheaf of papers in front of him. Beckett stopped listening. His mind wandered back to the last night’s raid. It was vivid in his imagination, Bluewater in all its rotten, sagging, destitute glory.
Bluewater was where the poor indige lived. The wealthy hetmen of the indige clans had mansions and townhouses lining the streets of Indigae, where imported gullah-trees and glowing phlogishrubs were maintained at great effort and expense. Indigae was a safe, clean neighborhood, well-patrolled by gendarmes, well-tended to by the city’s many civil services, and far from the poison-smoke-spewing factories at the west end of the river Stark. Indigae was so lovely a neighborhood, in fact, that if it were not for the immense social shame incurred by being seen amongst the indige, even the Esteemed Families would have maintained residences there.
Bluewater was not any of those things. The wide boulevards of Indigae were narrow, crowded streets in Bluewater. The little gardens were patches of dead grass or shimmering blue slime-mould on the cobblestones. There were no gendarmes in Bluewater, and if order was kept by the gangs of thugs and criminals that ruled it, it was only by accident. The neighborhood dissolved from warehouses full of cheap imports, warehouses converted to densely-inhabited, multi-family barracks, and warehouses that were too rickety and unsound even to support squatters, into factories that spewed black smoke, blue smoke, green smoke. Factories that dumped brightly-colored heavy metals into the rivers White and Crook, which had long been covered over by Trowth’s incessant development. The two swift and underground tributaries took the bright-colored and psychoactively charged mud into the Stark, where it sank to the bottom and bred strange species of fish and lizard.
Bluewater was a wretched place, a place whose inhabitants had yet to see the runoff of wealth from their more successful cousins in Indigae. The indige there were easy prey for Anonymous John and his men, for Dockside Boys and River Rats, for Starkies and the Old Trows. Bluewater was as thoroughly villainous a neighborhood as Trowth had known, and who could blame the indige for choosing gang life, smuggling, drugs, and robbery over the meager existence that they might be fortunate enough to eke out in this disused corner of the city?
“Your violent behaviors…Mr. Beckett?”
Beckett snapped back to himself, looked around the room, recollected the situation. “What?”
“You’ve always had a reputation for brutality, of course, but recently…some people are concerned that you’ve become a danger to the organization.”