Evening settled over the city and darkness fell over the courtyard. Rip fumbled with the gas lamps in the little cottage and discovered they were adjustable via a sort of rheostat. He brightened up the place and continued reading.

At last, a knock at the door came. He put his book down and answered it.

Outside, Blair stood on the stoop with Nancy behind her holding a tray with covered dishes and utensils.

“I hoped we could eat over here, Sergeant, if you don’t mind.”

She raised her eyebrows and moved her eyes to the side, as if gesturing to the maid.

“Sure. Come on in.”

He held open the door and they both entered. Nancy busied herself at the dining nook off the kitchen, setting down the tray and arranging plates on the table.

Blair smiled and looked Rip up and down.

“You know, this is the first time I’ve seen you properly dressed.”

“I clean up well. These clothes are a little loose, but your tailor assures me what’s coming tomorrow will fit me to a T.”

“He is quite good.”

“I’m sure he’s expensive, especially for a rush job. I owe you.”

She waved it aside and said, “You freed me and my friends from our cells. That is payment enough.”

“You said you were about to do that yourself, when you were pretending to be so distraught about the guard coming to get you.”

She darted her eyes over to Nancy, who paused in the process of setting down a pitcher of hot water and teacups.

“Yes, well, like I said. You made things ever so much easier. And my ploy was not guaranteed to work. Don’t sell yourself short, Sergeant. You proved eminently useful down there. I suspect if you decide to go through the enhancement process, that the colonel will offer you a spot on our team.”

They moved into the dining nook now that Nancy finished setting the table.

“I’ll just stay over here, if you need me for anything, dear.”

“We shan’t be needing you, Nancy. I do wish to have the foyer swept once more in case a court representative wishes to drop by tomorrow.”

“It’s plenty clean, dear. I worked on it earlier today.”

“Nonetheless, three people at least have come through the front door since then, including both myself and the Sergeant in our deplorable state following our time down in that steam vault. If you please, Nancy, I would greatly appreciate one more cleaning before you retire for the evening.”

Nancy did not look like she felt pleased with the idea at all, and rather reluctantly left the two of them alone, taking the tray with her.

“I will clear everything on the table in the morning, Sergeant, before breakfast. Just leave it out for me.”

He nodded at her as she walked out the door.

“I take it you don’t want her eavesdropping.”

Blair sighed, sitting down across from him at the table. He sat down too, his stomach rumbling at the sight of steaming slices of roast beef, along with green beans and mashed potatoes.

“Yes.”

“I figured. I have no experience with servants, but I have streamed some old TV shows. Eavesdropping on conversations seems to be a thing.”

“I love her, but ever since I joined the Venture Society, I fear she is living vicariously through my exploits. The problem is, much of what happens I dare not share with her. The actions I sometimes take, and the situations I often find myself in are not what one may consider ‘lady-like’ in polite company.”

“Ah. You are referring to your activities as a spy.”

She nodded and said, “Sometimes they can be rather unsavory, such as my efforts to encourage that filthy steam worker to open the cage door and try to have his way with me. My plan, as you can imagine, was to overpower him before aught came of it. Then I could have retrieved his keys and opened the colonel’s cage and Mr. Chance’s.”

“So at best I saved you from a few moments of ‘unsavory’ effort.”

She shrugged and smiled.

“Who knows? It might have gone far worse. He may have overpowered me and had his way with me before I could do anything about it.”

“Somehow I doubt that.”

“Either way, we’ll never know thanks to you.”

“I did notice your attitude changed a few minutes later. It’s like you were playing a role and then switched to this one you’re playing now.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Indeed. Much of spycraft is quite similar to play acting.”

She nodded back to the coffee table and the open books as they ate.

“Have you learned much about our world with the ones I selected for you?”

He nodded.

“I’ve skimmed through them, yes. From what I can tell, your version of Rome is quite different from ours. For one thing, the founding myth differs. On my world, Romulus and Remus were brothers, raised by a wolf. The city’s name became Rome and in time grew into an empire that split in half. The western half fell first, the eastern half a thousand years later.”

He paused for another bite of roast beef.

“This is good. Does Nancy do all the cooking?”

“Yes. She does everything except the gardening. I share a gardener with three neighbors, we all contribute to his salary. Do go on.”

“In your world, there were no brothers, just Remus. So the city was named Remus. The empire grew, as on our world, but never fell from I can tell. It just withered. You had no Dark Ages like we did. At least, not in the same way. Technology progressed into the steam age, but at some point, everything stalled out. After the steam vaults were built across Europe, a lot of knowledge seemed to get buried with them.”

She nodded and said, “That’s a fair summary. I suppose you could call that period our Dark Ages.”

“Later, your grand empires developed. Spain, Portugal, the Austro-Hungarians, and the Prussians are the bigger ones. The British Empire is known as Greater Umbria instead of Great Britain. Most of your holdings are overseas, rather than the Continent. There are smaller players on the world stage, like France, and in the east, the Russians, of course. I could not find much in your books about the Chinese or Japanese, so I presume they are still mostly isolationists. And my country, the United States, is still a distant colony. It’s lightly populated from what I can tell.”

“So you are a colonial, after all.”

“We became our own country almost three hundred years ago, and have helped the mother country quite a bit over that time, especially when called upon in times of war.”

“Hm. We rely on the American colonies for food and agricultural products, mostly. A few colonialists have assisted us greatly in times of war. We do have something of a meritocracy, particularly during wartime, that allows cream to rise to the top.”

Rip finished his plate while she spoke.

He said, “Those steam vaults . . . they power your cities, don’t they?”

“Yes. Every city of note is built on top of a large one. They provide warmth, and we have figured out how to run factories with them, as well as pump water and other necessities.”

“I noticed the one we came out of had no one living on top of it.”

She nodded.

“The rural ones, in recent years, have mostly been the source of the corruptive elements we’ve been seeing across the land.”

“Such as?”

“Rogue mechanicals terrorizing villages. Bands of corrupt steam workers pillaging the countryside. Sewer Troopers going positively mad. When something like this occurs, the Army and Venture Society teams are called in to put down the malevolent forces and restore order.”

“Have there been any efforts to uncover the cause of these incidents?”

She shrugged and said, “You saw how it is in a steam vault. Very few doors are marked, and they’re mostly all locked. They have regular patrols designed to ferret out intruders. And we only scraped the surface. We were on the top levels of the Gretna Green vault. They all go much deeper into the earth. To answer your question, yes there have been efforts to discern why the corruptions persist. But they have failed to produce results. The greater depths of the vaults remain a mystery in modern times.”

“And you can’t just block the exits or something?”

“It has been tried. The workers simply repair any damage, and remove the obstructions.”

She pushed her own plate back.

“It’s not as bad as you imply. The steam vaults have been overwhelmingly beneficial down through the centuries. Our entire society is literally built no top of them. They even help alleviate poverty. Anyone off the streets in Ethinium, for instance, can go work in the top levels of our city’s steam vault. They’re given food and a place to sleep. So, if you’re wondering why we don’t rush out and simply destroy all the ones where corrupt elements spew out of from time to time, there’s your answer. The scales remain tipped in their favor.”

“Fair enough,” Rip said with a smile. “Let’s hope it stays this way and doesn’t continue to get worse over time.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“How did you know it’s been getting worse lately?”

His smile broadened into a grin.

“Just a guess.”