Lore rounded the last corner before the old storefront came into view. Scarlet jackets, polished guns. A cart carrying mostly empty boxes. Jean-Paul’s red hair. He looked up to see her, a stocky middle-aged white man who’d been running for Val since before Lore came along, and though his expression was carefully neutral, fear sheened his eyes and made them nearly animal.
Too late, too late, too late.
For a moment, Lore couldn’t do anything but stand there. As one of the guards turned toward her, she ducked into an alley, pressing her back against the grimed brick, breathing hard enough to sting her throat.
“Shit,” she spat, quick and hoarse. “Shit.”
Holding her breath, Lore peered out of the alleyway. It looked like Jean-Paul had made it through the checkpoint without being searched, but then the bloodcoats had realized their error and caught him right when he reached the storefront. Even if she’d gotten here on time, it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Jean-Paul, to his credit, managed to keep that calm expression even as the bloodcoats poked through the boxes. The big man had his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on his feet, a simple trader just waiting for the search to be over. He kept his head tipped down under the brim of his hat to hide his terrified eyes.
She should abandon him. She knew that. It was one of Val’s earliest lessons. If a job went south, it was every man for himself.
But she couldn’t make herself run. Jean-Paul had a husband and a young son, and if he was caught, he’d be sent to the Burnt Isles. Lore couldn’t just leave someone to a fate like that.
“Shit.” Lore cursed one final time, landing hard on the t, then ducked out of the alley and into the crowd.
The bloodcoats didn’t pay her any attention as she sidled up, as inconspicuous as she could manage. One of them, a burly man with a curling mustache beneath his small, pale nose, held up a dummy box full of nearly sprouting potatoes and cocked an eyebrow. “If you were making my deliveries, old man,” he sneered, “I’d be very concerned you were skimming them.”
The boxes with the contraband were always on the top. The bloodcoats never expected it, always checked the boxes on the bottom first, assuming the poison would be as hidden as possible. That way, if you were found in the middle of a job, chances were the lode had already been moved to the drop point.
“Alaric needed boxes,” Jean-Paul said, deadpan. Alaric was the name they always used if stopped and asked whose business they were about. “Wanted to store something. The potatoes were just to hold them down on the cart.”
All the boxes were off the cart now. Curly Mustache’s cohorts started poking through the new ones. One, opened, full of nothing but more mealy potatoes. Two. Three.
“You’re telling me a merchant hired a cart to haul boxes of old potatoes from the Southwest Ward to the Northwest?”
Six boxes left. Three of them held mandrake. Sweat slicked Lore’s back.
“Not my concern how he spends his coin,” Jean-Paul answered.
A fifth box opened. If Lore was going to do something, it had to be now. She just didn’t know what. There were too many of them to take with a dagger, especially once she lost the element of surprise, and she’d never been much good at brawling.
A creeping feeling began in her palms, the tips of her fingers. Pins and needles, an acute awareness. Mortem waited in the stone beneath her feet, the brick and dead wood of the storefront, the cart, the poison waiting in the still-hidden mandrake. It was a low hum, a string she could grasp and pull, and it’d be so easy…
A bloodcoat reached for a sixth box, the end of his bayonet cracking open the lid. In the shadows beneath, Lore saw green.
She rushed forward, banishing the call of Mortem, speaking before she even knew what words were on her tongue. “You found them!”
Jean-Paul and Curly Mustache turned toward her, the bloodcoat she’d interrupted looking up with a curious wrinkle in his forehead. She snatched the box, open lid pressed to her chest. “Father sent me, I’m so sorry I’m late.”
Curly Mustache cocked his head. “Would your father perhaps be Alaric, girl?”
Damn her breasts. She thought this shirt would be baggy enough to obscure them, but she’d never had the kind of chest that was hidden easily. “Yes,” Lore said, standing up straighter, making her smile wider. “He’s been so upset, I’ve broken too many jars trying to load them one by one, we need the boxes immediately…”
She backed up as she spoke, rapid-fire words and smiles, inching the contraband closer to the old storefront. The trapdoor inside would lead to the catacombs, and the uncanny map in her head said the tunnels nearby were empty. If she could just get the boxes through the door—