3. Lilith
LILITH
Morrow's shop sits behind a butcher's in Bridgemire, which means it always smells like old blood and the desperation of people who sell things they shouldn't have. I like Morrow. He cheats me exactly the same amount every time, which is its own kind of honesty.
The bell above his door makes a sound like a cat being stepped on. Morrow looks up—a wide, florid man with muttonchop whiskers and the expression of someone who has spent thirty years buying stolen goods and has never once been pleasantly surprised by any of them.
"Morning, Lil."
"Morning." I put the documents on his counter. Fourteen pages, waxed cord, cream-coloured paper. He unties the cord, flattens the first sheet, and his face does something I've never seen it do before.
Not fear. The space just before fear, where the body knows and the mind hasn't caught up. His hands go still on the paper. His eyes move to me, to the documents, back to me. He's breathing differently.
"Where did you get these?"
"Fourth-floor study. Merchant's quarter." I lean against the counter. "Job came through you, Morrow. You sent me there."
"I know I sent you there." He's turning pages now, faster. The column of names. The shipping routes. His muttonchops are doing something complicated. "Do you know what these are?"
"Shipping manifests. Thirty-two names. Seven transport routes."
"Do you know whose shipping manifests?"
I didn't look closely. Looking closely is a luxury I generally can't afford. Morrow's face is telling me this was the wrong time to economise.
"Fae," he says, and his voice drops. "Not the pretty ones.
The ones who move people instead of goods.
" He lays his hand flat on the documents like he's trying to stop them from getting up and walking away.
"Transit records. Omega girls. Provincial families, most of them.
Sold by the people who were supposed to protect them. "
Thirty-two names. Thirty-two girls who were somebody's daughter, somebody's sister, somebody's Elena.
"Who hired the merchant to hold these?"
Morrow shakes his head. "Don't. Don't ask any of it. I'll pay triple and you forget the address, these pages, this conversation."
I stare at him. "Triple."
"Triple."
Morrow doesn't pay triple. Morrow once spent twenty minutes arguing down the value of a silver candlestick while I stood in his shop bleeding from a gash on my forearm.
Morrow has haggled over ha'pennies. Morrow has haggled over ha'pennies while his tea went cold, which tells you everything about a man's relationship to money—he'd rather drink cold tea than pay a fair price for warm goods.
Triple means whatever I've stepped into frightens him more than his own cheapness, and that is a very high bar to clear.
I take the money. Count it—old habit, Morrow is honest about his dishonesty but crooked about his arithmetic—and the number is correct.
More than I've held at once in six months.
Rent, shoes, coat, and maybe coal if I'm careful.
My hands want to shake with the relief of it and I don't let them because shaking in front of a fence is a negotiating weakness, even after the negotiation is over.
"Forget them, Lil." He says it to my back as I reach the door.
"Course," I say. I don't forget things. That is one of my better professional qualities and one of my worse personal ones.
The walk home takes me through Cutler's Alley, which I've been using since I was thirteen. I know this alley the way I know my Bramah—every tumbler, every shadow, every angle of stone. The shadow under the broken gas lamp pools to the left because the wall angles outward. Always has.
Today it's pooling to the right.
I stop. My back finds the opposite wall before I tell it to. The brickwork is cold through my coat, damp from the fog, gritty where the mortar's crumbling. Knife in my hand—cheap, three inches, sharp because I keep it sharp, worth nothing to anyone but me.
I hold it and watch the shadow sit in the wrong place and try to think of a reasonable explanation.
Wind. Except there's no wind. Someone moved the lamp.
Except nobody moved the lamp. I'm tired and seeing things.
Except I don't see things. My eyes are as reliable as my hands, which is to say they are the only parts of me I trust without reservation, and my eyes are telling me that shadow is wrong.
Four minutes. The alley is empty. The fog presses in, wet and cold against my face, tasting of coal smoke and the river.
The shadow sits where it shouldn't, patient and deliberate, and I'm more frightened than I have been of any copper, any gang runner, any drunk with a grudge and a bottle. Those things I understand. Those things have locks I can pick.
This doesn't have a lock. This doesn't have a shape I recognise.
The shadow settles. Slowly, the way something that was leaning forward sits back. The pool under the gas lamp slides left, where it belongs. The alley looks normal. I'm standing in it holding a knife and feeling stupid.
Except not just stupid. There's a heat low in my belly that wasn't there before—a pull that sinks lower with each breath, liquid and terrible and without a name.
My thighs are pressed together against the cold wall and the pressure is—it shouldn't be anything.
It's brick, fog, fear. There's no reason my body should be doing whatever this is.
I shove off the wall hard enough that the grit scrapes my shoulder blades.
I hate feeling stupid more than I hate feeling afraid. Fear is useful. Stupid is just expensive. Whatever that was—the heat, the pull—that's neither useful nor expensive. That's insanity. And I don't have time for insanity. Insanity doesn't pay the rent.
"Lovely chat," I tell the alley. "Let's not do this again."
The alley doesn't respond. I walk fast. The knife stays in my hand until Brick Lane absorbs me and the Tuesday market wraps its noise around me like a coat.
Shopping. The good kind, the kind where the numbers actually work.
A full loaf of bread instead of the usual half.
Cheese. Milk for Tommy because the boy is growing and his bones need it.
Two apples for Marcus. A scrap of blue ribbon for Elena's hair—her birthday was last week and I gave her nothing, which she noticed and forgave immediately, which is worse than if she'd been angry about it.
Home. Marcus lit the fire, bless him, which means Marcus used the last of the coal, damn him, which means I need coal, which means the arithmetic has already shifted. Poverty is a lock that re-tumbles itself every time you think you've cracked it.
Elena is at the table reading a book she stole from the lending library.
She didn't steal it well—cracked spine, water-damaged cover.
A competent thief would have taken one in better condition.
I've offered to teach her technique. She says stealing books is different from stealing bread and that she has principles.
She has principles and wet feet. I have questions about the exchange rate.
"Shoes," I say, and put two shillings beside her book.
Her head snaps up. She looks at the coins, then at me, then at the coins again. Her eyes go bright. She doesn't say thank you—we don't, in this family—but she touches the money three times like she's checking it won't disappear, and that's the same thing.
Marcus comes in from the hall, sees the apples, pockets one for later.
He is sixteen and saving food is so automatic he does it before he registers that there's enough.
He'll eat the other one where Tommy can't see because Marcus has decided, in the private mathematics of being the second-oldest, that the youngest eats first and the rest of us negotiate.
Tommy is on the floor drawing. Same picture he draws every week—our family, all five of us, in front of a house with a garden. Da is in the picture. Da is always in the picture, tall and smiling, his hand on my shoulder.
"Did you hear from Da?" he asks, without looking up.
"Not yet. I'm sure he'll write soon."
The lie slides out easy and clean. My best work always does.
Da isn't going to write. Da left six years ago for his legitimate family—right surname, proper house, children who aren't bastards—and hasn't opened a door in our direction since.
I've filed him in the same drawer as unpickable locks: theoretical.
A thing that exists in a category I don't visit.
Marcus catches my eye across the room. He knows. He's known for at least two years. He says nothing, because we have an agreement, Marcus and I—we lie to Tommy together and we never discuss the cost of it.
The bread is good. The cheese is good. Tommy drinks half the milk in one go, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, grins at me. The grin is so like Da's that something behind my ribs clenches hard enough to bruise.
"Not hungry," I say when Elena pushes the bread toward me. This is a lie but the kind that feeds people, so I count it differently.
They fall asleep in stages. Marcus first—always a surprise, the boy reads for twenty minutes and drops like he's been hit. Elena next, with Tommy curled against her, his drawing on the floor beside the bed. Five figures. A garden. A door that stays open.
The flat goes quiet. Coal fire burning down to red. I sit on the floor and I don't think about locks.
I think about locks.
The one last night that opened before I finished. Morrow paying triple without a fight. The shadow in Cutler's Alley that leaned the wrong way and corrected itself like a child caught staring.
Someone planted those documents. The job came through Morrow, and Morrow's scared of whoever put them there, and whoever put them there wanted me.
Only me. A nineteen-year-old thief with fast hands, an empty jar, and three children she'd do anything for.
That's not a job. That's bait, and it's very good bait, because it's shaped like everything I need.
I should be frightened. I am frightened. But underneath the fear there's something else—a low, sharp itch in the palms of my hands, the one I get when I'm looking at a lock I haven't seen before. The itch that says: I want to know what's inside.
Bad instinct. The kind that gets people killed. The kind that has kept me alive for six years because the locks I couldn't resist were the ones nobody else could open and the things behind them paid the best.
Outside, the fog presses against the window. Somewhere in it—and I am almost sure now, the way you're sure of a draught before you find the crack—something watches.
"I can see you," I whisper. Probably a lie. Almost certainly a lie.
But the shadow at the edge of the gaslight shifts, just barely, like something that heard me and is deciding what to do about it.