The Wardens marched into Cinder Row in two lines of five, boots striking the cobbles in perfect time, and the whole district stopped to watch them the way a field stops when a hawk's shadow crosses it.
They wore long grey coats, buttoned to the throat, and each carried a short cudgel at the hip and a lantern with a shuttered face. None of them looked at the furnace, or the iron, or the sixty strangers from the Hospice still resting on the steps. They looked at doors, windows, rooftops, the mouths of alleys. They were counting exits, and I knew it because I had been doing the same thing for a week.
At the head of the line walked a woman perhaps thirty-five, lean and sunburned in a place with no sun, her black hair cropped close to her skull. She stopped in front of me and saluted with two fingers to the brow.
"Sergeant Corvin," she said. "Captain Drum's compliments. We'll try not to be in your way."
"You'll be in my way," I said.
"Yes, sir. We'll try anyway."
I could not tell whether it was a joke. Her face did not move enough to say.
"Your people can sleep in the long hall on the east side," I said. "It has a roof and a stove. Marrow will show you where the water is."
"We brought our own bedrolls."
"Then you're ahead of the rest of us."
That earned me the smallest twitch at the corner of her mouth. She saluted again and turned to her squad with a short gesture, and the ten of them fanned out through the yard as though they had rehearsed it.
Marrow came up beside me, arms folded, her good eye narrowed on the retreating coats.
"Ten," she said quietly.
"Ten."
"The bunker's two hundred yards from the east hall."
"I know."
"And the girl is in the west one."
"I know that too." I kept my eyes on Corvin, who had stopped to look at the broken stack with its crooked collar of iron. "We have about an hour before they finish looking at the furnace and start looking at everything else."
◆
I found Lyra on the cold step behind the west hall, where she had sat the night before, with her cloak pulled up to her chin and her knees under it.
"They're Drum's," she said, before I spoke.
"Yes."
"They'll look in every room."
"Probably."
"Then I should leave."
"Where would you go?"
She did not have an answer, which was why I had come. I sat down beside her and told her what Marrow and I had worked out in the last ten minutes, and what we had not been able to work out. The bunker was too dangerous and too watched. The Hospice was a possibility, but Vell had just stepped into the open, and a hidden girl in her wards would draw eyes like a lit lamp. The Row itself had four hundred hiding places, and none of them would survive ten trained searchers with a week to look.
"There is one more thing," I said. "It's not a good thing. It's only the least bad."
"Say it."
"Your eyes."
She went still.
"It's the first thing anyone would notice. Not the glow, because you can keep that down. The color." I turned to face her. "Sister Vell keeps a store of linen bands for burn patients. People who've been blinded by furnace glare wear them for weeks. Half the Row has seen someone with one."
"You want me to pretend to be blind."
"I want you to pretend to be recovering. A girl with a linen band over her eyes who helps in the Hospice kitchen, carries water, and speaks to nobody. Wardens don't look closely at the wounded. They look past them."
She was quiet for a long time. I did not fill the silence. I had learned something from watching Vell, that the most useful thing you can do for a person who is deciding is to leave them room.
"It's a lie," Lyra said at last.
"Yes."
"You told me you were trying not to."
"I'm trying not to tell them," I said. "I'm asking whether you're willing to tell it for yourself. That's different, and it's your choice. If you say no, we'll find another way, and I'll pay for it."
"What would it cost you?"
"I don't know yet. That's why I'd rather you said yes."
The corner of her mouth moved, very slightly. It was not quite a smile. "That's the most honest request I've ever been asked to lie for."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's a yes," said Lyra. She pulled her hood back and tucked a strand of pale hair behind one ear. "But I'm going to be very bad at it."
"You'll be wonderful. Nobody expects a blind girl to make eye contact."
"Aren."
"Yes?"
"That was a joke."
"I know," I said. "I'm learning."
◆
Sister Vell fitted the band herself, in a corner of the Hospice kitchen with a pot of thin barley soup bubbling behind her.
She was brisk and gentle at once, and she did not ask a single question. She simply took a strip of grey linen from a drawer, held it against Lyra's face, and nodded. Then she wet it in a bowl of water that smelled faintly of chamomile, wrung it out, and tied it behind Lyra's head with a knot so neat it could have been stitched.
"Burn-glare," she said, to nobody in particular. "Happens to apprentices. They stare into the box without a visor. You'll have this on for three weeks."
"Three weeks," said Lyra, behind the band.
"Nobody will question it. If they do, you tell them the Sister said so." She stepped back and looked at her work. "You'll want to walk with your hand on a wall. And you'll want to say 'excuse me' every time you bump into something."
"That seems excessive."
"It's only excessive if it isn't convincing."
I watched from the doorway. Lyra stood with her hands at her sides and her face half hidden, and for a moment I felt a small, miserable pang of guilt. She looked like someone who had been folded and put away. Then Vell turned her toward the door, and I saw her straighten her shoulders, and the guilt eased into something steadier.
"Come on," said Vell, taking her elbow. "I need someone to carry the soup."
They went out into the yard together, a small grey nun and a blindfolded girl, and not one Warden looked at them twice.
◆
By dusk, Corvin's ten had searched every hall in the Row.
I followed them at a distance, because I could not stop myself. They worked in pairs, quick and thorough, and they did not touch anything they did not need to. They opened cupboards and closed them. They checked the roofs of the halls for hidden weight. They walked the length of the rail yard twice, tapping the ground with the butts of their cudgels, and one of them paused for a long moment at the pile of old cart wheels and then moved on.
I let out a breath I had been holding since noon. Kaelen and I had dragged the wheels back over the hatch that morning, with a layer of dirt and slag on top. It would not survive a determined search, but it had survived a competent one.
"You're sweating," Kaelen said, at my shoulder.
"It's the furnace."
"The furnace is two hundred yards away."
"Then it's the nerves."
"That I believe." He watched the Wardens fall in at the edge of the yard, lantern lids closing in a neat ripple. "They're good."
"Yes."
"Better than the Academy guard. Better than anything I've seen in the Upper City." He was quiet for a moment. "Drum trains them himself."
"That's what Marrow says."
"A man like that doesn't pack witch-fire in a furnace."
"No," I said. "He has people for it."
Kaelen looked at me sharply, and I shook my head.
"I don't know. I want to be careful. I don't want to build a case out of one word."
"It was a good word."
"It was the color white." I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand. "I keep thinking about how I'd explain it away. Someone at the Forges tells him. Hask's inspector smelled it on the cart. Greaves has a clerk who talks. Any of them could have passed the color along."
"But you don't believe that."
"I believe it might be true. I don't believe it's the most likely."
"Then what do we do?"
"We watch," I said. "Quietly. And we don't change a single thing we do."
◆
Sergeant Corvin stopped me at the furnace steps a little after dark.
She had been waiting, I think. She stood with her hands behind her back and her cudgel hung on her hip, and when I came within ten feet she turned toward me and spoke in a low, even voice.
"A word, sir."
"Of course."
"Not here."
She led me around the corner of the cold smithy, out of the lantern light. The stone wall was cool against my shoulder. Somewhere on the other side of it a Warden coughed, and a bucket clinked, and the sounds of the yard went quiet and far away.
"Captain's orders were specific," said Corvin. "Inspect the furnace. Guard the district. Log every person who enters or leaves." She did not look at me. "I've done all three. I'm telling you because the third wasn't in the Council's terms."
"No."
"The Council said watch the furnace. It didn't say watch the people."
"Then why are you telling me?"
"Because the Captain also said not to." She paused. "Not to tell you."
I did not move. Behind my left eye the ache gave a single hard throb.
"You could have kept quiet," I said.
"I could have."
"Why didn't you?"
Corvin looked at me then, for the first time. Her eyes were very dark and very steady, and there was something in them that I could not read.
"My brother was at the Row fourteen months ago," she said. "He was a Warden. He was on the night watch when the furnace burned." She said it flatly, without heat. "They told me it was an accident. They told me he'd been standing too close."
"I'm sorry."
"You didn't know him." Her jaw tightened. "I've been in the Captain's service eleven years. I've never questioned an order. And on the night of the fire, a lot of people told me a lot of things, and I believed them, because I'd been trained to." She breathed in. "Then this morning the Captain told me exactly how to scrub the nozzles. And I thought: how does he know what the powder does to cast iron?"
I did not say anything. I could feel my pulse in my temples.
"He's a soldier," Corvin said. "He never worked a forge."
"Maybe he read about it."
"Maybe he did." She did not sound as though she believed it. "I'm not accusing him, sir. I wouldn't know how. I'm telling you because someone ought to know, and because I'd like to have been asked, fourteen months ago."
"I'll remember it."
"Don't remember it," said Corvin. "Use it. Carefully."
She saluted with two fingers, and walked away into the dark.
◆
Kaelen found me at midnight, sitting on the furnace steps with a cup of cold tea and a headache.
He did not say anything at first. He sat down beside me and handed me a small round loaf, still warm, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. It was the first food anyone had given me in nine hours, and I ate it without tasting it.
"The Wardens have gone quiet," he said.
"Good."
"Not good. They go to their bedrolls at ten, every night, like a clock. Tonight one of them didn't."
I stopped chewing.
"I was on the east wall," said Kaelen. "I saw a coat go out the back of the long hall around eleven. Alone. Not toward the gate. Toward the old cooling towers."
"Which one?"
"Second from the left."
"You followed?"
"I stayed on the wall. I thought you'd rather I did." He gave me a flat look. "I counted out loud so I wouldn't lose my nerve. It was nineteen minutes."
"And?"
"A light," said Kaelen. "From the top of the second tower. A little flash, twice, with a pause in between. And a minute later, one flash back from somewhere in the Row."
"From where?"
"The roof of the long hall. Right where Corvin put her men to sleep."
I set the loaf down. My hands, I noticed, were perfectly steady.
"A signal," I said.
"Yes."
"Between someone in the Row and someone in the tower."
"Yes."
"Both with mirrors."
"I couldn't see," said Kaelen. "But yes. I think so."
I sat there with the cold cup in my hand and the warm weight of the bread in my stomach, and I thought about three grey stitches in a corner of folded cloth, and a Broker who said watch what people know that they shouldn't, and a Captain who knew the color of a powder he had never seen.
"It could be anyone," I said slowly. "It could be one of Drum's men acting alone. It could be someone using Drum's coats. It could be the Broker, or a stranger, or all three."
"That isn't a plan."
"No."
"What is it?"
"A question," I said. "And I think I'm going to have to climb a tower to ask it."
Kaelen was quiet for a moment.
"I'll bring the rope," he said.