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did it go?” Rake asked.
    “It went as well as expected.” Nicholas’s
voice came out muffled through the mask. The knife throwers didn’t
wear any, but he preferred not to risk his health. “The mayor was
so impressed with his thirty percent, he forgot to ask for an
advanced fee for booking the theater, so we don’t owe anything to
Aurore.” The five percent he failed to mention would go straight
into his pockets as compensation for his trouble.
    “Good, good.” Spinner nodded and set aside
the piece he was working on. Fei Lin stopped behind him and peered
over his shoulder.
    “The downside is,” Nicholas said, careful
not to get in her way, “they’ll send tons of agents to snoop around
the place, and there’s no way to keep them out.”
    “We have nothing to hide,” Spinner said,
wiping his forehead with a dirty cloth, and picked up another metal
part.
    Yeah, right . They made a point of
hiding them in plain sight, but there were still secrets.
    “If they have agents to spare, we can use
them to tighten our security,” Rake said, though it was hard to
tell if he was serious. “I’ll make some new masks for them.”
    If they agreed to wear them … but the masks
also stood for tickets and were mandatory to access the circus
grounds. After their yearly visits, the locals knew they couldn’t
enter without them.
    “Anything else?” Spinner asked.
    “The building is old,” Nicholas said, “and
while it’s maintained and in good shape, it won’t easily
accommodate our acts. Our stage workers will have to work non-stop
to have everything ready in time.”
    “They will.” Rake didn’t need to say more.
They could count on the auxiliary personnel to do their work.
    Rocket Girl—Nicholas had trouble thinking of
her and using her full name when he couldn’t see her inside that
mountain of metal—stopped on the other side of the table with her
hands on her hips and watched them, obviously unhappy with the
interruption.
    “What’s the prognosis for the client?”
Nicholas asked. “I saw him outside, and he didn’t look well.”
    “He’s not,” Spinner said. “Whoever he pissed
off did a good number on him.”
    “Any chance you can fix him?”
    Both Rake and Spinner stared at him. Anyone
else would have winced under those glares.
    Nicholas held up his free hand. “Don’t look
at me like that. I’m the one who negotiated with Armstrong. That
man is a gunner. If we don’t deliver, he’ll come after all of us,
guns blazing. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not get shot.
Tailcoats are expensive, you know.”
    Spinner adjusted the dials on a plasma
cutter. “It’s true that he’ll be pissed if we fail. But the arms
are busted. It was done by someone who knew what he was doing. The
damage was tailored to affect the use of his hands … and cause as
much pain as possible.”
    “So it can’t be done?” Nicholas asked.
    “Don’t underestimate us—”
    “Spinner.” Rake gave the smaller knife
thrower a pointed look.
    “Okay …,” Spinner said, aggravated. “We can
control the pain, and we can restore the muscles … to a fashion.
It’s the nerves of which we’re not sure. All of the paths we’ve
tested are shot. If we need to re-grow everything from the
shoulders down, we’ll need a whole month for the client to regain
the use of his hands, longer for proper fine motor skills.
Obviously, that won’t do. If we can find some paths still working,
we might be onto something, but even then, we need to make sure the
re-grow speed is fast enough to meet our deadline. We need at least
a day to figure that out.”
    Robot Girl tapped Skinner on the shoulder
and pointed at the digital clock on the wall. She spoke little
English besides the gibberish they had identified as a Mongoloid
dialect, and she didn’t speak at all while wearing the
robo-suit.
    “Yes, we need more time.” Spinner nodded
with a smile.
    She shook her head and probably rolled her
eyes inside the helmet. She