“And it still tells the right time?”
Tanish beamed. Last time he had been working a clock with Fevel, they had left the timepiece off by three and a half hours. When the owner complained, they climbed back up and reset it twice more, wildly wrong both times, too embarrassed to admit that neither one of them could tell time. Eventually Morlak had done them a diagram and they had had to climb up at double the usual speed to set the mechanism. Even so, they had left the clock four minutes slow, and its chime still tolled the hour after every other clock in the city, so that the gang jokingly referred to Tanish Time, which meant, simply, late.
“Well?” I demanded, releasing the hair I keep tied back while I work. It fell around my shoulders and I ran my fingers roughly through it. “What’s so important?”
“It’s your sister,” said Tanish, unable to suppress his delight that he was the one to bring the news. “The baby. It’s time.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, my jaw set. “Are they sure?” I asked. “I wasted half of yesterday sitting around out there—”
“The runner said they’d brought the midwife.”
Today of all days, I thought. Of course it would be today.
“Right,” I said, half to myself. “Tell Morlak I’m going.”
My pregnant sister, Rahvey, was three years my senior. We did not like each other.
“Morlak says you can’t go,” said Tanish. “Or—” He thought, trying to remember the gang leader’s exact words. “—if you do, you better be back by ten and be prepared to work the late shift.”
That was a joke. Rahvey and her husband, Sinchon, lived in a shanty on the southwest side of the city, an area traversed by minor tributaries of the river Kalihm and populated by laundries, water haulers, and dyers. It was known as the Drowning, and it would take me an hour to get there on foot.
Well, there was no avoiding it. I would have to deal with Morlak when I got back.
Morlak was more than a gang leader. In other places, he might have been called a crime lord, and crossing him was, as the Lani liked to say, “hazardous to the health.” But since he provided Bar-Selehm’s more respectable citizens with a variety of services, he was called simply a businessman. That gave him the kind of power he didn’t need to reinforce with a stick and brass knuckles, and ordinarily I would not dream of defying him.
But family was family: another infuriating Lani saying.
I had two sisters: Vestris, the eldest and most glamorous, who I barely saw anymore; and Rahvey, who had raised me while Papa worked, a debt she would let me neither pay nor forget.
“Take my tools back for me,” I said, unslinging the satchel.
“You’re going?” said Tanish.
“Seems so,” I answered, walking away. I had taken a few steps before I remembered the strangeness I had felt up there on the chimney and stopped to call back to him. “Tanish?”
The boy looked up from the satchel.
“What happened to the Beacon?” I asked.
The boy shrugged, but he looked uneasy. “Stolen,” he said.
“Stolen?”
“That’s what Sarn said. It was in the paper.”
“Who would steal the Beacon?” I asked. “What would be the point? You couldn’t sell it.”
Tanish shrugged again. “Maybe it was the Grappoli,” he said. Everything in Bar-Selehm could be blamed on the Grappoli, our neighbors to the northwest. “I’ll go with you.”
“Don’t you have to get to work?”
“I’m supposed to be cleaning Captain Franzen,” he said. “Supplies won’t be here till lunchtime.”
Captain Franzen was a glorified Feldish pirate who had driven off the dreaded Grappoli three hundred years ago. His statue stood atop a ceremonial pillar overlooking the old Mahweni docks.
“You can come,” I said, “but not into the birthing room, so you won’t see my sister perform her maternity.”
He gave me a quizzical look.
“The stage missed a great talent when my sister opted to stay home and have babies,” I said, grinning at him.
He brightened immediately and fell into step beside me, but a few strides later stopped suddenly. “Forgot my stuff,” he said. “Wait for me.”
I clicked my tongue irritably—Rahvey would complain about how late I was even if I ran all the way—and stood in the street, registering again the void where the glow of the Beacon should be. It was like something was missing from the air itself. I shuddered and turned back to the factory wall.
“Come on, Tanish!” I called.