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the time I reached the miners' camp. Outside the bunkhouses, the guards sat on empty ale barrels, playing cards and rolling dice. There were a doc in the camp, and I went to him, begged on my knees. I told him how we'd buried Baby Alice the week before, and now here was our mam, our rock and our refuge, burning up with the fever, her fingers already slate tipped with bad blood, and wouldn't he please, please come back with me?
    He didn't even put down his whiskey. "Nothing you can do 'cept stay out of its way, young lady."
    "But it's my mam!" I cried.
    "I'm sorry," the doc said, and offered me a drink. In the camp, there were shouting. Somebody'd come up snake eyes.
    It were Master Crawford give me the Poppy for Mam. "I was saving this for the End Times, like the Right Reverend Jackson said. But I'm an old man, and your mother needs it a sight more than I do."
    I stared at the red-and-black cube in my palm. I had half a mind to swallow it down myself, live out the rest of my days on some colony in my mind. But then I were scared I'd be trapped in a forever night of nothingness, and me the only livin' thing.
    I fed Mam a little to ease her passage and put the rest in my pocket. Then I lit the kerosene lamp and kept watch through the night. She never said nothing, but curled in on herself till she lay whorled against the bed linens like a fossil in the rock. I heard Master Crawford died during the winter. Died in his sleep in the pale workroom, under a blanket of down. 'Tweren't the fever or his heart or his veins tightening up.
    It were just that his time had run out.
     
    Over the next few weeks, I learnt a lot about the Glory Girls. Josephine and her sister Bernadette had run away from the working fields. The overseer's bullet found Bernadette 'fore they even reached the mountains, but Josephine got away, and now she wore a thread from her sister's dress woven into her coarse braids as a reminder. She could set a broken bone as easily as she cooked a pan of corn bread, said it were about the same difference to her.
    When Amanda's uncle got too friendly in the night, she found refuge doing hard labor in the shipyards. She'd spent long hours there and knew how to find the vulnerable spot in all that steel, the place where the Enigma could take hold and do its work. She were able to find timetables, too, so the girls would know which trains to hit and when.
    Fadwa were a crack shot who'd honed her skills picking off the scorpions that roamed the cracked dirt outside the tents where she lived with her family in the refugee camps. The authorities took her pap to who knows where. Dysentery took the rest of her family.
    That left Colleen. She'd been a debutante with fancy ball gowns, a governess, and a private coach. Her daddy were a speculator what had invented the Enigma Apparatus. He were also an anarchist, and when he tried to blow up the Parliament, that were the end of the gowns and the governess. They arrested her daddy for treason. 'Fore they could collect Colleen, she took the Enigma and fled on the next airship.
    I felt a might sorry for all of them when I heard their tales. It were an awful feeling to have nobody. We had that in common, and I had a mind to come clean, tell them who I were and stop lying. But I had a job to do. At first, I done like Chief Coolidge told me, stalling on the repairs while trying to sniff out details from the Glory Girls and their next robbery. But they wasn't trusting me with that yet, and I figured it couldn't hurt to know more about the Enigma Apparatus. Besides, my pride were on the line, and I figured I'd better make good on my reputation as a girl what could fix things. Soon I were hunched over that device, from rooster crow till long after the moons scarred the skin of the sky. I'd figured out most of the gears, but them sputters of light around the serum vial vexed me.
    "Simple windup won't do. Near as I can tell, she needs a jolt to get her going," I said after I'd been at her for a