Luckily for me, the thugs were so desperate to worm their way back into my good graces that they scurried ahead to prepare “my” boat (which was good, since I had no idea what it looked like). Apparently, Marne was too important to be expected to pilot it herself (which was even better, because I had no idea how to operate any kind of watercraft – a state of affairs I should probably rectify). Planted at the bow, chin lifted, I stared straight down the canal as if the bustle of city life around me were beneath my notice. As we motored around a bend, I caught a glimpse of two figures bundling a third into a gondola outside the Moon’s Embrace Spa.

Faith and Ash would get all the answers we needed from Marne and convey any crucial intel to me during Mass.

Back when we were planning the score, the two of them had had a minor dispute over where to conduct this interrogation:

“Faith, how good are the Sensorium’s mind powers?”

“Why, they’re as amazing as I am! Why do you ask?”

“Well, are we doing this in the Sensorium, or are we getting information in a more primitive way?”

“We’re getting information in the most enjoyable way possible, of course!”

“Uh….”

“I’ve already prepared a room at the orphanage!” A pause. A thoughtful pout. “Or is the railcar more appropriate?”

Hesitation from Ash, who really didn’t want to traumatize his underaged assets. “If we’re doing this at the orphanage, we should send the orphans out….”

An even more pronounced pout, as if he were spoiling all of her fun. “Maaaaaybe we should do this at the railcar then.”

“Yes. Just so you’re aware, you probably shouldn’t teach the children to torture people. Yet. I know it’s enjoyable, but – ”

“But from a practical perspective, how will they learn how to torture people if I don’t teach them?”

“The practicality is that they’re around ten years old, and that’s not okay! They can learn to murder people. That’s much more normal – that’s okay.”

I rather thought that Ash and the Patriarch would get along.

While a discreet gondolier was taking my crewmates and Marne back to Coalridge, the Hive thugs and I were motoring into the North Hook Channel. On my right lay the Docks, whose familiar skyline evoked a twinge of homesickness. On my left, we were passing the North Hook Lighthouse on the tip of Whitecrown, an ancient stone tower that had been retrofitted with electroplasmic technology and now blazed like ten thousand moons, guiding the leviathan hunters home. After that came the Spirit Wardens’ estate and Doskvol Academy, that derivative institute of higher learning that specialized in plagiarizing Tycherosian research (according to Ash). At the head of Bowmore Bridge, which sliced across the channel between Whitecrown and Brightstone, rose the Lord Governor’s stronghold, which Sigmund had been planning to breach before Faith convinced the Helker children to give her their mother’s papers.

And then, silhouetted against the moon and its sisters, loomed the turrets of the Hive’s island fortress. Short, stubby docks jutted out in all directions, swarming with little boats that carried Hive members to and from the mainland. Heavily fortified piers bristled with electroplasmic lanterns and patrols. As Marne’s boat bumped gently against the quay, a pair of guards marched down to meet us. In the harsh blue-white glare of the lights, they checked our faces and saluted me crisply. “Welcome back, Miss Booker.”

I saluted back but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the greeting. As I stalked up the path towards the main gate, one of the guards muttered, “What’s got into her?”

My thugs whispered back, “Tell you later. Stay out of her way tonight.” Then they scampered after me.

I allowed myself a thin smile. Time to infiltrate the Hive.

Meanwhile, back at the railcar, Faith and Ash hustled Marne into a special compartment that Faith had prepared after conducting extensive research into interrogation techniques. With Ash sitting in a corner and observing the proceedings, she played good cop-bad cop with herself, acting as both healer and torturer. Since Marne turned out to be extremely loyal to the Hive, it took some time.

Ash told me later that Sleipnir spent the entire night cowering under my desk.

Still trying to make amends for their (convenient) cowardice in the spa, the four thugs escorted me all the way to Marne Booker’s bedroom in one of the towers. Everyone was on high alert, as Djera Maha expected imminent Lampblack and Red Sash reprisal. (Our murders of Skannon Vale and Captain Clave probably hadn’t improved her peace of mind either.) Burly, bee-tattooed toughs patrolled the narrow hallways and stood guard at doorways, but I held my head high and mimicked Marne’s haughty bearing, and no one suspected a thing.

Turning a corner, I caught sight of Djera Maha herself down the hall and quickly assessed my nemesis. Pickett’s and Xayah’s murderer was muscular but not brawny, with broad cheekbones and a wide mouth and hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck. Doskvolian gossip held that while she’d never been beautiful, per se, she’d once possessed a certain gamine charm, with her long, straight, glossy, dark hair. Now that she’d hit her early fifties, her pixieish looks had faded to, at best, handsome, although she still took inordinate pride in dying her hair black. What scuttlebutt had omitted was that Djera Maha was a lot shorter than she appeared. She projected such an air of confidence that it rendered her height irrelevant.

I nodded at her politely but didn’t break stride. She nodded back and vanished into a conference room.

I’d passed the first test.

Now I just had to make sure that I could fool her in close quarters on the boat, too.

Up a winding staircase my thugs escorted me, stopping at last before a plain wooden door that resembled every other door in the fortress. “Here you are, Miss Booker,” their spokesman said. “We’ll be just outside, in case you need anything.”

I nodded curtly. “Dismissed.”

Even after I shut the door and locked it behind me, I kept up the Marne act, embodying her as fully as I could. Thinking like the second-in-command of the Hive, I noted that the window commanded an excellent view of Brightstone and the Docks, as a reminder of our reach. The bedroom décor was spartan, because Marne – no, I – had no use for fripperies. I favored plain, utilitarian furniture and – I checked inside the closet – plain, utilitarian clothing. My only indulgence was a series of framed, zoological prints of leviathan spawn that marched around the walls. They culminated in a particularly realistic oil painting of a leviathan in the Void Sea that hung right above the bed. When I changed into comfortable, cotton, blue-and-white striped pajamas and lay down, the leviathan’s tentacles gave the impression of extending out of the canvas to embrace my head.

Now that was disturbing.

As the moon swept across the sky, I tossed and turned, unable to sleep. I missed my bunk in the railcar, hard and narrow as it was, and the prickle of Sleipnir’s coarse fur through my pajamas as he pressed against my leg.

I missed Bazso’s bed in his new townhouse, the simple brass bedstead that I’d helped him choose. I missed the warmth of his body next to mine.

I even missed Sigmund’s ridiculously soft feather mattress, and the even more ludicrous canopy that draped over his bed.

Outside Marne’s room – no, my room – unfamiliar voices barked orders, and unfamiliar boots tromped across the floorboards. I considered wrenching my door open and commanding the guards to be quiet, but Marne was probably impervious to the noise.

As the moon and its sisters sank slowly towards dawn, I finally drifted off into a fitful doze.

Meanwhile, as dawn broke over Coalridge, Faith finally broke Marne.

Bright and chipper as ever, she beckoned to Ash, who looked somewhat worse for the wear. “Ashie dear,” she sang, “my lovely friend here wants to answer some of your questions. Right, Marne?” She patted the woman on the head.

Marne’s slumped, bloody figure didn’t so much as twitch.

As the sun’s fragments throbbed painfully behind the smokestacks, Ash started with our most urgent question: “Describe a typical day with Djera Maha at the Sanctorium.”

In a monotone, with her eyes shut tight to distance herself from the betrayal, Marne mumbled, “She attends the main service with everyone else. Then she goes to a private room for an individual session. After that, sometimes, with no pattern, she goes to the catacombs under the Sanctorium.”

But the catacombs were supposed to be for the clergy only, so why was a layman allowed access at all? “What does she do there?” Ash asked.

“Don’t know. Can’t follow. Haven’t been initiated into the Church’s mysteries yet. Soon, maybe.”

“How long does she stay?”

“Usually a few hours. It’s always the last thing she does before we get back on her boat.”

Filing that away for further investigation, Ash returned to our list of questions. “How many people go with you to the Sanctorium every week?”

Marne’s eyes stayed shut. “Usually about ten. Half a dozen of Djera’s closest associates and family, including her nephews when they’re not off killing people. Which they usually aren’t, because sixth-day Mass is too important. Plus four bodyguards.”

“I’m worried about Djera Maha,” Ash pronounced disingenuously. “Are there any threats to her in the Hive? Any disloyal members?”

Her eyes slitted open at that. “No. Everyone in the Hive is completely loyal.”

“Except for you, of course.”

She attempted some feeble defiance, which Ash brushed aside.

“So,” he went on. “Berthing capacity at the Docks. You have a lot of it. Why?”

She went silent for so long that Faith had to step back in.

Eventually, my crewmates pieced together what Marne knew – which still wasn’t everything. Djera Maha had simply informed her that the Hive needed enough frontage to dock a leviathan hunter – specifically, the Lancer – which would arrive “in the near future” with large stone pillars from Iruvia. (So that was why the dockers were preparing “extra industrial-strength” cranes.) Presumably Karth Orris had known what the pillars were for, but Marne hadn’t been second-in-command for very long and wasn’t privy to all of Djera Maha’s plots. She didn’t know where the pillars were supposed to go, either, except off the Lancer and onto a barge for transportation to their final location, which in canal-ridden Doskvol didn’t exactly narrow down the options. All we could infer was that the destination had to be able to accommodate giant cranes.

On my behalf, Ash asked, “Has the Hive been involved in the Church stirring up feelings against Iruvia?”

Not that Marne knew of, although she did have a vague sense that those inflammatory sermons were somehow connected to the pillars.

“How long have you been planning this? Does the Imperium know about it?”

“About a year now,” she confessed, meaning that the plot had begun shortly before we formed our crew. “Don’t know if the Imperium knows.”

Trying to draw her out, Ash mused, as if to himself, “I suppose it’s all moot anyway, since you don’t have the ship.”

Marne’s eyelids fluttered in a facsimile of her old arrogance. Obviously she believed that the Claves would win the battle for legal ownership of the Lancer. “Although it doesn’t matter. We can just kill Irimina like we killed her parents.”

At that, Ash sucked in a breath. “Who killed Irimina’s parents?” he demanded.

“Karth. Karth Orris did.”

Faith’s eyes lit up, a very smug smile twisting her lips.

Ash pressed, “So how did Karth die?”

It was all very mysterious, and Marne gave a garbled account of events, but the crux was that Karth Orris had died in a Church ritual that went tragically wrong – at the same time that we’d caused a Church ritual to go tragically wrong. Although Djera Maha had no proof, she’d known that the Lampblacks and Red Sashes were mobilizing against her, so she’d assumed they were responsible and taken appropriate action.

I hoped that Mylera never learned that I’d caused her best friend’s death, even indirectly and unintentionally.

Ash, naturally, had a different take on the affair. “So we avenged Irimina without realizing it,” he remarked. “We’ll have to celebrate with her when this is all over.”

He finished off by extracting information to help Tess impersonate Vhetin. Then he and Faith turned in for a few hours of sleep before we assassinated the head of the Hive in the seat of Church power.

Back on the island, I lay in a tangle of bedsheets, watching the sun’s fragments burn themselves back out. Then I dragged myself out of bed, donned my best suit, and bluffed my way through Marne’s sixth-day morning routine via sheer bravado. Every time a thug hinted timidly that I normally preferred to do something a different way, I snapped, “Don’t I have a right to change things?” or “Do I look like a hull to you?”

It worked.

Three hours after dawn, I found myself in the middle of Djera Maha’s entourage, walking down the pier with her closest family and subordinates to board her boat.