Read The Plague Forge [ARC] for Free Online Page A

crowd filled the Chō-Han joint. Men for the most part, though Samantha could see a few painted women in the mix, arms draped around some of the players seated at the long dice table. The gathered audience for the game spilled out into the street in a rough half circle around the tiny gambling club.
    A sake bottle passed between the onlookers. From her shadowed vantage point across the street, Sam couldn’t see the contents but guessed it would be cider, being much easier to acquire or produce.
    “Some balls these blokes have,” Skadz whispered at Sam’s shoulder. “Look at them, they’re flaunting it.”
    “They better. I paid them to,” Prumble said. He stood in the darkness on the opposite side of the alley.
    Sam could barely see him, just a splash of wan yellow light on his round face. The cloak-and-dagger activity in the dead of night seemed to add a hardness to his features that she’d never seen before.
    “Ah,” the big man said. “Entering stage right, our pious and predictable Jacobite enforcers. Drawn from their station like moths to a flame.”
    “I’d rather be elsewhere,” Skadz said. “As in now.”
    “Patience, patience. Let the kindling catch.”
    Whether the crowd pretended not to notice the approaching patrol, or genuinely didn’t, Sam couldn’t be sure. Their excitement at the game within the tiny storefront was realistic enough. Bets were placed. The shirtless dealer waved down the murmur and silence fell.
    Sam could barely see the dealer through the crowd, but she heard him call out the result when the cups were flipped over. “Han!”
    Roughly half the crowd roared in delight, loud enough to wake those in the cramped apartments above the street. Sam could already see a few candlelit windows above, shadows of worried faces looking down on the gathering in disbelief. Gambling and drinking in the open like this just wasn’t done in Darwin anymore.
    There was a flurry of activity as the bets were settled, and then the enforcer’s whistle blew. The crowd turned almost in unison to face the approaching patrol. Sam held her breath in the brief silence that followed. Instinctively she appraised the Jacobites. A few held riot clubs; one had a wooden table leg studded with nails at the top. The leader, the one with the whistle, had a pair of pistols.
    “Get ready,” Prumble whispered.
    Sam glanced at their destination. An alcove, diagonally across the street, where a steel-plated door that was rarely unlocked would now be having its dead bolt turned by Prumble’s contact.
    When the violence came it came quickly. A shove, one Jacobite fell. The swing of that nasty table leg and a spray of blood. Then chaos as someone in the gambling room killed the lights. Concealed weapons came out; the crowd fanned. The Jacobites were taken off guard, unused to anyone standing up to them as the consequences were well established.
    “Go,” Prumble said.
    Sam did. She ignored the melee, ignored the cries of pain coming from both sides despite her natural instinct to step in and crack a skull or two. Instead she jogged across to the steel door at a half crouch, aware of Prumble behind her and Skadz bringing up the rear. Three paces from the door she saw it open and she kept moving straight inside.
    And just like that they were in. The door closed without a sound, cutting off the light coming in from the street. A second later fluttering candlelight bathed the entryway. The glow revealed the face of an Asian boy, no more than ten years old, Sam guessed. He looked bored. “This way,” he said with a heavy Malay accent.
    Per some unspoken agreement, Prumble fell in behind him. The boy led them up a few flights of stairs, then down a long hall that ended at an open window. Without even a glance back, the kid stepped out the window and clambered across a ramshackle bridge erected between this building and another just a few meters away. The bridge creaked and swayed when Prumble stepped onto it. Sam decided to