In the next few days, as the rest of the Doskvol did the math and realized that the leviathan hunter fleet would return within a week, a wave of excitement swept through the city. In Brightstone, teams of servants scrubbed the grime off marble facades and polished all the brass doorknobs, while fishermen roved the streets crying out their wares. In Nightmarket, all the stores refreshed their window displays with a distinct nautical theme – little model ships in toy shops, anchor-shaped breads in bakeries, and in the fanciest patisserie, where the swankiest nobles ordered confections for their banquets, a three-foot-tall cake shaped like a tentacled demon, with a palm-sized fondant leviathan hunter next to it. Even in Coalridge and Crow’s Foot, little stalls sprouted like mushrooms, and everywhere in the city, hawkers were bellowing, “Chestnuts! Roast chestnuts!” and “Hot watermoss patties! Get yer hot watermoss patties!”

As Ash, Faith, and I passed a Charhallow candied mushroom vendor, who was doing brisk business with parents who splurged for their children once a year, Ash suggested offhandedly, “Let’s try to make this score a little more subtle than last time, when we threw Lyssa off the Crow’s Nest while standing on top of it. Although – I will admit that it was slightly exhilarating.”

“Only if we get float oil first this time!” I said.

“Certainly,” he agreed. “Now that the captain is coming home, her household staff will be re-opening her house and re-stocking her kitchen, which provides us with an opening to sneak in. A guillotine in her bedroom would be very dramatic – ”

Before he could get carried away by his own artistry, I interrupted, “Irimina wanted it to look like an accident.”

“Yes, yes, I’m still working out how to make that look accidental.” Because guillotines commonly materialized in leviathan hunter captains’ bedrooms that had been shut up for half a year? “All right,” he conceded, glancing at my expression, “we should learn more about her and her habits first. We could go to a pub to ask questions – although the people who know her best are currently on her ship.”

That wasn’t precisely true, since her family and servants interacted with her for the other half of the year and presumably knew her proclivities. Still, an even more effective strategy occurred to me: “There might be memories at the Sensorium.”

“That’s true!” Stopping dead in the middle of the alley, Faith beamed at me. “Why, Isha, I’m incandescent with joy! If I’d known you were interested, I’d have introduced you to Madame Keitel eons ago!”

When had I said I was planning to join her? “You and Ash can go. I’ll…reconnoiter another way.”

“Isha!” Ash scolded.

“I bet most of those memories are from her sailors,” I explained with disingenuous earnestness. “I’ll interview her servants.”

With that, he couldn’t really argue.

While my crewmates headed to the Sensorium, I donned a clean, plain, dark cotton dress that marked me as a shop girl from one of the more respectable Nightmarket establishments and went to the backdoor of the Clave abode. When the housekeeper met me in the kitchen, I explained that my employer – I carefully avoided specifying who it was – wished to send Lady Clave a selection of pieces for her consideration, and asked what might interest her.

The housekeeper shook her head regretfully. “Tell your master that he’s wasting his time, miss,” she advised. “Her ladyship isn’t one of those coddled noblewomen who can’t take five steps without running out of breath. When she shops, she drives herself to Nightmarket and walks around.”

I made a pathetic face at her. “Please, ma’am, my master isn’t one to take ‘no’ for an answer. Can’t you tell me anyway, just so I can tell him?”

The woman sighed and glanced around the kitchen as if calculating how much more work she needed to do before the house was ready for her mistress, but she stepped aside and let me peek into the hallway. It was decorated exactly as you’d expect of a leviathan hunter captain who wanted everyone to know that she was a leviathan hunter captain. Glass-fronted cases spaced at perfectly regular intervals along the walls displayed a clutter of ship paraphernalia, including what resembled parts from decommissioned ships. A battered but lovingly polished carved wooden wheel hung on the wall between a pair of old brass lamps.

Following my gaze, the housekeeper puffed up. “Those lamps come from the Lancer,” she told me proudly. “From when they remodeled the ship.” She gazed at them dreamily, as if fantasizing about the heroic life of a captain on the Void Sea, then shook her head at her own folly. “Tell your master that her ladyship likes nice furniture. That’s the dining room.” She pointed at a doorway, through which I just glimpsed gleaming mahogany chairs upholstered in deep red fabric. “She got that set half a year ago, when she sailed. She’ll be wanting to replace it with something fashionable.”

Thanking her for her time with perfect sincerity, I returned to the railcar to wait for my crewmates.

When the two of them got back, their disgruntled expressions said everything about the productivity of their afternoon. The Sensorium, as it turned out, indeed housed an extensive collection of leviathan hunter sailor memories – just not any that were useful to us. As I’d seen with the Clave housekeeper, Doskvolians were morbidly fascinated with the valiant sailors who battled isle-sized sea demons to harvest the blood that powered everything in the city, including the lightning barrier that literally kept us alive. For their part, the gallants themselves were all too eager to purge their memories of having no other human contact for months at a time, while surrounded by an ink-black sky that melded into the ink-black waves, out of which massive tentacles surged at unpredictable intervals, which the heroes would then attempt to spear with harpoons so they could catch the dripping, corrosive blood in specially reinforced steel barrels – all while watching the tentacles tear pieces off their ship and crush their friends to death. A terrifying experience and an indicator of Captain Clave’s steel backbone, to be sure, but not relevant to the score.

“Oh my gods,” moaned Faith, flopping into my chair as if she lacked the energy to reach her own, “Isha, how could you have been so cruel as to send us there? All the memories were so boring! All I learned was secondhand gossip that Clave runs the Lancer with an iron fist, and her crew is too terrified to interact with her beyond the bare minimum. But I didn’t even get to watch her terrorize the crew!” Turning to Ash, she demanded in the same breath, “Did you get anything else? I kept getting tentacled monsters! Tons and tons of tentacled monsters! Plus one purplish-green radiant glowing tentacle that was sort of a cutie – but I don’t think that counts.”

With an exhausted sigh, Ash confessed, “I got more of the same.” He rubbed his temples, then fumbled around in the cabinet for a headache cure. “I’m never going on one of those ships. They’re extremely deadly – and also extremely dull.” All of a sudden, his eyes lit up in a by-now familiar way. “Although it is a very high-risk career…. Maybe there should be an insurance business….”

“Wouldn’t you go bankrupt paying out to all the families?” I pointed out. Personally, I couldn’t imagine any kind of premium that could offset all the deaths.

“I suppose….” Reluctantly he relinquished his dreams of leviathan sailor life insurance. “What did you learn about Lady Clave’s tastes?”

I gave them a quick rundown of what I’d discovered, finishing with, “Some of the ship parts have electroplasmic components. I don’t know if we can take advantage of that?”

“Why yes!” cried Faith, bouncing up in her – or rather, my – chair. “Of course we can! Electroplasm explodes so nicely! Actually, you know what explodes even better?” She didn’t bother to wait for an answer. “An explosive device!”

Ash looked between her and me, then gulped down his medicine. “Is there a servant – the butler perhaps – who recommends pieces for her to buy?”

“No,” I told him regretfully. “She shops in Nightmarket herself. The store delivers the piece the next day.”

With a casual shrug, Ash dismissed his own idea. “Ah, that’s a little harder, but we’ll manage. We can figure out which piece she buys, then rig it to explode before it’s delivered. Perhaps we can use a remote trigger?”

Still bouncing up and down, Faith cried, “I believe tradition is to use ghost possession and do horrible things to the victim afterwards!” In a flash, she collapsed like a broken puppet. “But I’m sort of bored of that now. A good, old-fashioned explosion could be just the thing to spice up our scores.”

“We had to spend a lot on a tinkerer last time,” Ash warned, referring to the electroplasmic device that we’d used to take down the Crows’ ghost wards.

Pretending he hadn’t spoken, Faith barreled ahead, “We’ll add some pink confetti to the bomb!”

Pretending she hadn’t spoken, I proposed to Ash, “What if the piece Lady Clave buys has a rotor that could go wrong and explode?” That ruled out furniture (unless I’d missed something about contemporary furniture trends while buried in Coalridge and Crow’s Foot), so we’d have to focus on naval-themed objets d’art.

“An explosion wouldn’t happen accidentally,” he objected, “unless it’s an extremely experimental piece.”

I recalled the paraphernalia in the captain’s display cases. “How about a piece of decommissioned ship that wasn’t treated properly afterwards?” Too bad I had no idea which bits of leviathan hunters were prone to exploding once removed.

Unfortunately, Ash knew as much about ships as I did. “That’s possible?”

“It could be contaminated by demonic acids! I hear leviathan blood causes…problems in the people it comes in contact with,” put in Faith cheerily.

Well, mostly it made them euphoric, and then it gradually transformed them into scaly aquatic monstrosities – if it didn’t kill them first. There was a reason the government discouraged leviathan blood drug abuse.

Following his own train of thought, Ash mused, “It’s very rare for people to die from explosive artwork in their homes, but I’d love to find a way to make this lethal.”

“What if the piece has a bad circuit?” I asked, which basically exhausted my knowledge of electroplasmic devices. “When she turns it on to show her friends, it electrocutes her by accident.”

“We don’t have to do it in her house,” Ash said reluctantly. “Irimina will be in a lot of trouble if we don’t get this right.”

After we debated whether it would be more or less suspicious for an accident – say, a runaway goat cart – to befall Lady Clave while she was out shopping, Faith settled the matter with a remarkably sensible argument. “It would look more suspicious if something happened to her in Nightmarket. On the one hand, the runaway cart had to be directed at her. On the other hand, she purchased that piece of experimental artwork herself. How could the maker have known exactly what her tastes are, based on her household staff’s comments and an analysis of current trends in interior decoration?” She made a pretty little moue. “I hear pink ribbons are in style. Especially after they appeared on the side of an orphanage on a canal.”

In my driest tone, I said, “You mean gamin chic?”

She burst into giggles.

“I like the idea of explosive artwork,” Ash said again. He had to raise his voice to compete with Faith’s laughter. “Especially since we could frame the maker – ”

It was perhaps evidence of her genuine feelings for Irimina that Faith cut off mid-giggle and immediately reminded him, “Our instructions were explicit. Do not frame anyone.”

He sighed. “Fair enough. If this particular artisan were to have several other, minor explosions go off in his work – ”

“Let’s not get the artist executed,” pouted Faith. “I have a thing for innocent artists.”

Not to mention that if we got the artist executed, she’d probably feel obligated to find decent homes for all his children too, and Irimina probably didn’t want to adopt any more.

In the end, we decided to spy on Lady Clave’s shopping expeditions and install an explosive into whatever piece of artwork caught her fancy.

But first, we needed an explosive. Since Ash balked at hiring the overpriced tinkerer a second time, it fell to me to wrangle a bomb from our only contact with both the resources and possibly the motivation to help.

Dressed as a young middle-class couple, said contact and I met in Jayan Park for a romantic stroll among the glowing toxic trees.

“Sooooo, Sigmund, I had another idea for how to distract the Imperium,” I wheedled, making sure to keep my voice low. Any passersby would assume that I was trying to cajole my doting husband into buying a particularly expensive piece of jewelry that might very well bankrupt us.

Tipping his head very slightly to one side – a signature gesture he should really squash – my brother raised both eyebrows. “What is it this time, dear?” His tone managed to convey affection, exasperation, and trepidation all at the same time.

He wasn’t really pretending.

Flirtatiously, I slipped my arm through his and tugged him towards an arbor overgrown with spiky vines. “My crew is going to blow up a leviathan hunter captain!”

“A what, dear?” He frowned and pursed his lips, the very picture of an accountant balancing his annual budget. More quietly, he asked, “What’s your cover?” When I didn’t answer immediately, he prompted, “Obviously, Iruvia did not blow up this captain. So what story are you planting? Who gets blamed?”

“No one. It will be an accident.” Another couple ambled towards us, and we squeezed to the side of the path to let them pass. “Oooh, look, isn’t that bush pretty?” I squealed, pointing at random.

“Don’t touch that, dear! It’ll kill you!” Sigmund grabbed my arm and exchanged a commiserating masculine eyeroll with the other young man. Then he towed me down the path, muttering under his breath, “We could make more hay out of this.”

“It will be a tragic, tragic accident,” I said before I could stop myself. Well, at least I hadn’t said “a tragic, terrible accident,” which was probably what Faith would have gone for. “Afterwards, the ship will go to someone wildly unsuited for the job.”

Sigmund’s silence summarized his opinion of my so-called distraction for the Imperium.

“It’s either that person – or a sixteen-year-old child. So I suspect the Lord Governor is going to have an opinion on the matter. And the City Council. And the courts. And the newspapers.”

At that, he blinked, acknowledging the point. “Yes, but I still think we can make more hay out of this. We can frame someone like – ” he cast about for an effective scapegoat – “Ulf Ironborn,” he finished triumphantly. Lately, the big Skovlander had been stepping up his attacks on businesses that discriminated against his countrymen, and the newspapers were shrieking about domestic terrorism.

“I like that idea,” I said cautiously, “but unfortunately one of the parameters of this assignment is to make it look like an accident.”

In response, I got a scathing glare, as if I should have wriggled out of such constraining parameters. But finally, as we neared the far end of the park, Sigmund reluctantly assented. “I can get you something.” Then he grabbed my arm and forced me to face him. With deadly intensity, he ordered, “This cannot trace back to Iruvia.”

“It won’t,” I snapped, insulted.

Releasing me, he stalked ahead. “I don’t know how I am going to explain this to the Patriarch, but I will figure that out later.”

I had to hitch up my skirts and half-run a few steps to catch up. “Tell him you’re inciting internal turmoil in Akoros to distract the Imperium from…its plans.”

Although he slowed to match my pace, my brother didn’t meet my eyes. “That’s only sort of my mandate.”

Right. Because his primary mandate was to recover Grandfather and kill me, and his secondary mandate was to spur Skovlan to rebel. Helping his wayward sister wrangle a pardon from House leadership didn’t exactly make the list.

“Think of it this way,” I coaxed, “you’re taking the initiative.”

He drew a deep breath, then let it out very slowly. “I’ll get you your bomb, Signy.” From his tone, that subject was closed.

Figuring that anything else I said would only push him to revoke his aid, I batted my eyelashes at him and said sweetly, “Thanks, brother.”

He didn’t answer, but he did drop an absent kiss on my forehead. Then he attached himself to a group of Charterhall University students who were sketching trees for some botany class, drifted around a bend in the path, and vanished.

A couple days later, I found a palm-sized bomb in one of our dead drops.