As soon as we crossed the boat bridge and climbed onto the old leviathan hunter, I sensed a change in the atmosphere. Although the Tangletown natives were still keeping a low profile in case the gangs started shooting, the Lampblack and Red Sash guards now formed a joint perimeter instead of patrolling separate parts of the deck. In the mess hall, security stood to attention just as alertly as before, but most of the gang leaders were starting to slump a little. Behind Mylera’s back, Xayah rubbed her eyes, and Ardashir, a senior sword master and their third-in-command, squelched a yawn before answering Henner’s question. Even Pickett’s shoulders had relaxed. Marginally, anyway.

Unlike their lieutenants, Bazso and Mylera hunched over the map, discussing something in low, intense voices. At our entrance, they straightened in unison to face us, resembling nothing so much as a pair of granite statues framing a temple portal. In the manner of a high priestess granting an audience to supplicants, Mylera began, “After long and careful consideration, we have come to an agreement. In order to seal that agreement, we would like to commission you to – ”

With his trademark bluntness, Bazso cut in, “We want you to kill Lyssa.”

It was an indication of a true détente that none of the Red Sashes even bristled at the interruption. Instead, an undercurrent of excitement swelled in the room.

“Lyssa?” I yelped. “You want us to kill Lyssa?”

“Just to be clear, we’re talking about Lyssa, the leader of the Crows, yes?” Ash asked, faking a little frown of confusion.

“Yes,” stated Bazso at the same time that Mylera retorted, “Is there any other Lyssa we would hire you to kill?”

“But I thought this was a trap for Isha!” Faith burst out. Her lower lip protruding in a beautiful pout, she wailed piteously, “It’s just another score! If I’d known that ahead of time, I could have stayed home and inventoried my ribbon box!”

Xayah and Ardashir, who must have remembered Faith from her brief tenure at the sword academy, gave her distinctly teacherly stares, while Pickett attempted to stab me with her scowl. Control your crewmate, girl, her cold eyes warned. You’re responsible for her conduct here. Mylera’s and Bazso’s faces might as well have been carved from stone.

Stepping forward and just happening to position himself so he blocked Faith, Ash initiated business negotiations. “You want us to kill Lyssa.” He drew out the target’s name, conveying doubt that they grasped the full magnitude of this commission.

While he set the stage for another epic haggling session, I casually drifted towards the table to survey the map. By now the section containing Crow’s Foot and the Docks bristled with red and blue chess tokens, but the biggest change was a thick black line running north-south and dividing the districts in two. The Red Sashes got a little more of the Docks, which made sense given their drug smuggling operations, whereas the Lampblacks got a little more of Crow’s Foot, which also made sense given all the brothels and cheap drug dens they had sprinkled across the district.

She is more reasonable than I expected her to be, Bazso had said of Mylera, and I was glad to see the proof.

A throat – Pickett’s, of course – cleared noisily. When I raised my head, two pairs of eyes – one brown, one blue – were fixed unwaveringly on me. Neither gang leader, it seemed, wanted me to get too close to the map, in case I “accidentally” knocked over and rearranged some markers to my own advantage. Slightly insulted, I sauntered back a couple steps.

Rather unfairly, in my opinion, no one objected to Faith roving throughout the mess hall, inspecting empty chairs and testing the springiness of their seat cushions.

Meanwhile, Ash was lodging a pro forma protest as a prelude to naming an exorbitant fee. “It can certainly be done,” he assured the gang leaders, lest they withdraw the commission and offer it to a different crew, “but assassinating a faction leader – especially a faction leader who is the ward boss of two districts – will be exceedingly risky, to say the least.”

At that, Bazso and Mylera exchanged incredulous looks. Bazso spoke for both of them: “You’re worried about killing Lyssa?” After you killed Ronia Helker? his raised eyebrows asked.

Answering both questions, Ash explained in a judicious tone, “We’re getting cautious in our old age.”

Neither gang leader looked impressed.

“So how much do you want?” Bazso demanded at the same time that Mylera inquired drily, “What would be required to overcome your cautiousness, then?”

With perfect confidence, Ash announced, “Eight coin, plus turf. As I’m sure you know by now, we’ve recently taken an interest in raising orphaned children – ” if Bazso’s eyebrows went any higher, they’d float right off his head – “and our railcar is getting a little cramped.”

Mylera gritted her teeth as if she knew exactly where this was going and didn’t like it one bit.

Beaming angelically at both of them as if he were certain they’d leap at the chance to display their benevolence, Ash called upon their innate altruism: “Naturally, Strathmill House would be most helpful to our effort to educate and rehabilitate the street children of Doskvol.”

(Plus provide a fresh supply of orphans to swell our cohort, a public face for our crew, not to mention that turf toehold he’d coveted for mysterious reasons ever since the Skannon Vale score.)

From a back corner, Faith purred out that stereotyped think-of-the-children appeal, “Just think how convincingly, how conclusively, how categorically it would certify your civic spirit!”

Because after waging a bloody war that generated so many orphans in the first place, the gangs suddenly developed a desire to give back to the community?

Ominous rumbles rose from the lieutenants. Pickett’s clear, cold voice lifted above the grumbling: “Overpriced – ”

“You know,” Bazso rebuked Ash, “it’s not like we can’t do this ourselves. We just thought it would be better politically if neither of us were involved.”

I glanced at my crewmate sidelong, waiting for his comeback.

But it was Mylera who spoke first. “Six coin,” she proclaimed, silencing both gangs. Scrutinizing my face rather than Ash’s, she repeated, “We will offer six coin. No more.”

“Plus the orphanage,” Ash put in quickly.

This time, Mylera looked across the table at Bazso, who shrugged and spread his hands as if to say, You’d be the one getting new neighbors. Sour over losing a corner of her own turf, even if it were a tiny nibble right on the border between Crow’s Foot and Charhallow, Mylera turned back to us and agreed grimly, “Plus the orphanage.”

Ash flashed a hand-sign at Faith and me, requesting our approval.

Yes, I signed back.

“Whatever,” Faith shrugged, slouching over to join us.

While Ash finalized payment details with Bazso and Mylera, I murmured sarcastically, “Faith, are you still dejected, devastated, and disconsolate that this wasn’t a trap for me?”

Perking up at the chance to perform in front of two gangs instead the usual one, Faith struck an injured pose and declaimed shrilly, “I would never wish such a thing upon one of my teammates and allies!”

That got everyone’s attention. The Red Sashes, who unlike the Lampblacks had never experienced one of her extemporaneous orations, looked absolutely entranced.

With a wink for Ardashir and another for Henner, Faith delivered her punchline: “Even if it would have made life slightly more exciting.”

“Briefly,” I snapped.

“Weellll, it doesn’t have to be….”

Inured to her antics, Bazso didn’t even bat an eye, although Pickett did scowl ferociously, holding me personally responsible for this stand-up comedy in the middle of a serious parley between serious gang leaders. On the other hand, Mylera had never been exposed to our crew dynamics, so to speak, and she inquired with morbid curiosity, “Doesn’t Isha bring more entertainment into your life alive? Compared to the fleeting excitement you would derive from her death?”

Beside her, Xayah hid a groan and mouthed, Don’t encourage her!

It was too late. Putting one long, elegant fingertip to her lips, Faith donned a contemplative expression. “Thaaaaaat’s a good point….” Then she giggled and pouted earnestly at one of the gang leaders I’d double-crossed. “But the excitement I’d derive from her death would be immediate.”

“That’s a good point,” muttered Pickett, causing some of the other Lampblacks and Red Sashes to exchange smirks across the table.

So good to see that even former nemeses could bond over the entertainment value of my demise.

Catching my eye, Bazso gave me a tiny smile.

“Well,” Ash announced in a valiant attempt to steer everyone back on track, “assassinating a faction leader won’t be easy, so we’d better get started!” As we left the Lampblacks and Red Sashes to creak to their feet and pack up their belongings, he remarked sotto voce, “I need to update my mother on the imminent war in Crow’s Foot. There will be a bountiful harvest for our operations – perhaps I should teach the Insect Kids the life essence extraction ritual.”

I made a strangled noise, which only gave Faith an excuse to pound me on the back.

Ash just ignored both of us. “We have a lot of work to do.”

And indeed we did.

The Crows as a gang had existed for over a century, running extortion rackets at the Docks as well as a string of gambling dens across Crow’s Foot. In fact, the latter district had been named in their honor, if you wanted to call it that, and all operations there tithed either directly or indirectly to them. As a symbol of their authority, they made their headquarters in the old watchtower at the heart of the district, from which lofty perch they surveyed their domain.

More recently, however, the Crows had been plagued by a string of leadership woes that was slowly eroding their control of the districts. After Mardin ran the gang effectively for decades, he retired to open the Leaky Bucket before any young whippersnappers could murder him. He was succeeded by Roric, the ideal Doskvolian ward boss who ruled with an iron fist while remaining sufficiently dynamic to adapt to changes. But then he was killed by his young lieutenant Lyssa, who unfortunately had little leadership experience and even less of a long-term plan. It was she who had allowed Crow’s Foot to degenerate into all-out warfare between the Lampblacks and Red Sashes. With every passing month, the chaos eroded the Crows’ influence, although they continued to swagger about with their habitual arrogance, annoying all the newer, upstart gangs. (I didn’t like having to move out of their way any more than the next scoundrel.)

Even more annoyingly, the one time I actually wanted to find them, the Crows contrived to make themselves remarkably scarce. Dying my hair dark brown and disguising myself as an Akorosi, I skulked around all their usual haunts without success. It took days before I came across three of them extorting a drug dealer, Bryl, on Cinder Street, a sight that afforded me no small amount of satisfaction. (Bryl and I had harbored a cordial hatred for each other ever since Bazso sent me to shake him down for a tardy tithe. I’d considered such make-work beneath my dignity as a swordswoman, while Bryl had considered being held at sword point by a pretty young woman to be far, far beneath what his masculine pride could tolerate.) Lounging against a streetlight, I prepared to let the scene play out.

“But I’m tellin’ ye, I don’ keep any slugs on me,” the drug dealer was whining.

One of the Crows, a tall Severosi fellow in a tricorn hat and what resembled a scavenged Imperial Fleet uniform jacket, just sneered down at him. “And what are you suggesting?” he snorted, echoing my thoughts exactly. “That instead of demanding immediate cash payments from your customers, you have them open a line of credit at the Bank of Doskvol?”

“No, no,” sniveled Bryl, rummaging through his pockets and turning them inside out in a comic display of poverty. “I don’ have nuthin’ on me.”

“Hey, you there! What’s the meaning of this?” bellowed a voice that every scoundrel and business owner in Crow’s Foot knew intimately well.

Down the street pounded Bluecoat boots – our friendly local constabulary come to demand their share of the extorted sum. Stiffening, the Crows began to edge into the shadows.

Taking a leaf out of Ash’s book, I swung into action. “Oh, officers!” I cried, scampering up to them. “Officers, I’m so glad to see you!”

Those were not words heard very often in Crow’s Foot – particularly not by this pair.

Since I wasn’t dressed nearly well enough to pull off my crewmate’s favorite I’m-just-an-idiot-aristocrat-who-blundered-into-the-wrong-district wheeze, I whimpered, “My dog ran away! She’s about yea big – ” I waved my hands wildly, describing an animal that could range in size from a large rat to a small goat – “and she’s sort of a darkish greyish brown, and she has a long tail….”

Running footsteps behind me plus the constables’ impatient shuffle signaled the Crows’ escape. A quick sideways glance showed that Bryl had also slithered back into his hole. Ah well. You couldn’t have everything.

To buy the Crows even more time, I kept blathering, “Her name is Spot. She sometimes comes when you call her, but usually she doesn’t, not because she’s dumb – she’s really smart! – she just has this very definite personality….”

One of the constables finally took me by the shoulders and firmly moved me aside. “Excuse us, miss. We don’t have time to look for runaway dogs.”

Babbling apologies for wasting their valuable time, I waited for them to turn the corner. Then I set off after the Crows, whom I found in a pub celebrating their narrow escape. The tall Severosi recognized me instantly. “There she is!” he called cheerfully. “Our savior!” He waved me over to the bar and introduced himself as Skinner and his companions as Noggs and Stev. After they “bought” me a drink (i.e., recommended to the bartender that she offer a beer on the house to the young lady who saved them from the Bluecoats), we debated the merits of various ales until I artlessly mentioned my employment status, or lack thereof.

Not meeting my eyes, Noggs hedged, “Lyssa isn’t really initiating any new Crows just now….”

“Is the membership full already?” I asked, not even needing to feign disappointment.

“Oh, no, no,” Stev responded instantly. “There’s no such thing as too many Crows.” (I was pretty sure Bazso, Mylera, and probably the Hive too disagreed on that point.)

Glaring at our neighbors until they conspicuously turned their backs and edged their stools aside to give us privacy, Skinner gestured for all of us to lean in. Quietly, he explained, “Lyssa and Bell – that’s our second-in-command – have been holed up in the Crow’s Nest for a few days now. Someone’s planning an assault, we think.”

My eyes widened at such a preposterous notion. “An assault? Who would dare assault the Crows?”

“Exactly.” Noggs rolled his own eyes. “I say we show ‘em we’re not scared of anything.”

Stev gave him a quelling look. “Still, it doesn’t hurt to be careful, so most of the gang is currently in the tower to defend it if need be.”

“Ah.” I acted as if I were considering other employment options. Setting down my empty mug, I said, “Well, thanks for the drink – ”

“Wait.” Skinner put a hand on my arm to stop me from sliding off my stool. “You’re quick and resourceful. We could use someone like you. Hang around unofficially for now, and once everything settles down, we’ll get you initiated properly.”

And that was how I joined my third Crow’s Foot gang.