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don’t think…”
    The cook smoothed out her skirt. “Of course I do. And so do you.” She nodded toward the alley. “And now we’d better get out of sight before–”
    “Hey! Trespassers!”
    “ Before we’re seen,” Drina growled. Her hands disappeared inside her front pockets as she and Jing backed away into the darkness of the corkscrew alley.
    Three Codic soldiers, coming from the street, brought their rifles to their shoulders and stalked into the alleyway. The shadow of the buildings closed over them and their eyes slowly started to adjust. They rounded another corner. No one there.
    The first one called, “Come out! Hands up!”
    Nothing stirred in the shadows.
    The smallest man, barely two inches over five feet, started to back toward a wall. “I bet they skedaddled already. But where?”
    “Hands up!” the first one yelled again.
    “Have you ever been caught in a web?” a woman’s voice whispered from behind his ear. He felt the heat from her breath on his skin.
    A cord tightened around his throat. He’d never even felt it slide around his neck.
    The third soldier spun and fired. He hit his choking comrade in the chest. The bullet passed right through his body, but Drina had been twisted enough to the side that it bounced harmlessly off the brick building behind her.
    Jing slid a large, flat knife into the spine of the short soldier from behind. He sagged forward, eyes widening in surprise.
    The remaining soldier swung his rifle at Jing and heaved on the lever-action. The new bullet slipped into the chamber just as he stumbled forward, pushed by Drina’s unseen hand behind him. His entire body clenched at a sudden cold sensation. He squeezed the trigger and fired off into the sky.
    A heavy hand helped his collapsing body faster to the ground, and then Jing slammed his metal leg down onto the soldier’s skull and all the way down to the brick paving below. The skull popped apart with several splintering cracks.
    Jing sighed and scraped his bloody and brain-splattered heel against the ground.
    Drina pushed her long hair back behind her shoulders. “That was clumsy of us.”
    “We’ve gotten old.” Jing exhaled and held his metal leg up as high as he could. After a moment, he let it smash back to the ground. His single metallic footstep reverberated around the twists of the alley.
    “Out of practice,” she corrected, deftly replacing her silk cord back into her pocket. “I haven’t had the chance to kill too many people up on the mountain.”
    He frowned. “Too many?” He wiped his knife clean on a soldier’s trousers and replaced it into the metal casing of his artificial limb.
    The cook shrugged indifferently.
    He blew out a sigh. “I hope they were worth it.”
    “It was to keep the peace. And if you noticed, no one was ever murdered or raped at the Pitchstone.”
    “No one was murdered,” he repeated deliberately.
    She lifted her chin. “No one that I didn’t approve of.”
    “Oh right, because that makes all the difference. Did Mark know?”
    She shrugged. “He never asked . ”
    Jing pressed his back to the wall and glanced around the yard again. “She’s on that train, you know.”
    “Likely, but…”
    “We’re not certain, I’m aware. If we choose wrongly, we’ll have failed in our orders to protect her.”
    She pressed her lips together. “The others, they didn’t–”
    “Don’t you dare finish that! Don’t you dare.” His gaze softened. “And besides, I like the kid, orders or no.”
    “I know.” She jerked up a hand for silence and pointed.
    Strolling across the train yard as if on a walk in a sunny park, Cooper Smith, Esquire chatted casually with the soldiers. His glass cane clinked against the iron rails.
    “I want to know who he works for,” she whispered, drawing back toward the shadows.
    “I want to know his leads,” Jing countered. “How could he have guessed we’d come here?”
    Drina raised her eyebrows. “I think we can learn both.”