Karina Cooper - Corroded

I passed it by, reaching the other side of the rooftop and looking down into a wider lane.

I spied two kinchins huddled back to back behind a stacked bit of barrel, and not far, three men standing at loose ends. Of the three, only one had the broad shoulders of a man large enough to playact the role of a sky ship, and I grinned before I caught myself. I popped off three sharp whistles that bounced in the fog-damp lane.

The two other blokes turned first, but when Ishmael Communion moved, it was akin to the rolling of a mountain. He looked up, the shrewd man, and picked me out right quick from the casement hanging.

“Girl,” was his welcome rumble, “this is not the place.”

Ishmael was not a man easily missed, with skin black as tar and eyes nearly as dark. The whites of them were tinged yellow, as if permanently colored by the peasouper he lived in. His face was comprised of wide, flat features, thick lips and a broad, pugnacious nose that easily marked him as a bruiser.

A pick-lock and case cracker though he might be, there was little doubt that Communion would excel at arranging an opponent’s features in heretofore undiscovered ways. Those who failed to heed the warning learned it on the end of roughened, scarred knuckles.

Though he may have a face only his late mother could love, his voice was exceedingly deep, and his rather excellent grasp of the Queen’s English gave him a certain complexity unexpected from a rum dubber.

That he called me “girl” was not a slight. Like many in the streets below, he had no name for me, and had settled upon the moniker with simple acceptance. I’d never heard sting nor scorn within it, so I let it be.

I grimaced. “Don’t I just know it?”

“Who’s that, then?” demanded a tall, athletically shaped man beside Ishmael. Unlike the latter’s overalls and patched fustian coat, the man wore the common togs of a dock laborer, and his hat was left crookedly atop golden hair slicked back by sweat or damp. He glowered at me as if I were the intruder and not them, which I returned with raised eyebrows.

“Collector,” Ishmael rumbled, and left it—and his mates—there. He reached the bottom of the wall, so tall that were he to reach up with both hands, I wagered I could hang from the ledge and step on his palms.

“What, a girl?”

“ The girl,” whispered the third bloke, who was a sight younger but whose nose bore the distinctive scarring of a knife’s edge. No prize already, the scar left him looking angry and mean. But his smile, when he flipped it at me, seemed easy enough. “The only cross patch in the lot. Cor. Didn’t know you was friends, Communion.”

Ishmael ignored them to glower up at me, broad forehead beetling in. “You need down.”

As I said, shrewd man.

“I need help getting someone else down, rather.” I gestured behind me. “Maddie Ruth, come here.”

She’d been waiting patiently enough, but at my summons, she darted to my side.

I gestured down. “Communion, this is Maddie Ruth.”

His full lip protruded in studied thought, a ream of pink flesh stark against the coal black of his skin. “Mark?”

“I’d never,” she protested, as if she’d ever be the one doing the marking.

“Wayward kinchin mort,” I corrected over her confusion. “And so far out of her depth as to be swimming in it. I’m attempting to get her home.”

The two stared at each other awkwardly for a moment. Then, with a gusted sigh, he rumbled, “Right, then. Swing her over, I’ll bring her down.”

“Wait, I’m to what?” Maddie Ruth squeaked this protest. “I can’t climb.”

“It’s a poor collector who can’t,” I said. Not kindly but this really only served my point, didn’t it? I held out my hand. “Give me the net-thrower.”

“Why?” She drew back some, as if I had offered to steal it.

I resisted the urge to swat at her. “Because it will be dangerous enough climbing down without a heap of brass on your back, you daft patch, now hand it over.”

Sheepish, now, she shrugged from the straps and let the device clank to the rooftop.

“Hurry it up,” warned Ishmael, this time with an edge.

I peeked over to find them lacking one—the scarred youth—and the other nervously watching the end of the lane. “Expecting trouble?”

Ishmael had long since learned not to answer the more rhetorical of my questions. Of course we were all expecting it, weren’t we, with a brawl between gangs a stone’s throw away?

“Now,” I said, firming my tone, “you hold on here.” I showed her the grooved ledge. “Lay on your stomach, reach down with a foot until you feel the window casement beneath it. Treat each step like a ladder.”

Maddie Ruth followed my instructions, white-faced before she’d even eased over the edge. “Mind your eyes,” she called, though it shook with fear.

I was polite enough not to snort my critique of Maddie Ruth’s concern of modesty. Communion was too much a mountain to bother.

The third man was not so kind. Scarlet tipped Maddie Ruth’s cheeks as he laughed.

“Ignore him,” I suggested. I seized her wrists, holding her white-knuckled grasp in place. “Lower your weight, there’s a girl. Communion?” I used his surname out of deference for his crew, who might not take kindly to such close intimacy with a collector.

“More,” he suggested.

“Let your arms straighten,” I told her.

“But—!” A gasped word.

I squeezed her wrists gently, working to keep the pain of it from my face. The wounds on my palms were scabbing, and what didn’t itch burned fiercely. “I won’t let you go.”

Trembling, she scrabbled for purchase with her feet, slid down. When her weight sagged sharply, she bit off a high, warbling shriek.

The sound cracked across the lane and into the fog.

“Arseholes,” swore the dockman, just as Ishmael called, “Let her go.”

Without asking Maddie Ruth’s permission, ignoring the reassurance I’d only just delivered, I wrenched her white-knuckled fingers from the ledge.

To her credit, she didn’t scream again. Shocked soundless, I think. Her head vanished from sight, eyes so wide I could see the whites clearly, and then I heard a muffled, “ Oomph. ”

Followed abruptly by, “Get ’em, lads!”

“Two east by three,” came the roared, deep-voiced demand, loud enough that I could not mistake the source. I drew back from the ledge before I could be seen, seized Maddie Ruth’s apparatus in both stinging hands and hurried back across the rooftop, dragging the device.

I had no fear for her safety. Ishmael would protect her; he was a man to whom I would trust with my life. I had already done so, even, and this was a thing I still needed to thank him for. I wasn’t certain how to find the words. The acts by which Hawke had saved me still left me red-faced and conflicted, and to broach the one seemed a likely opportunity to embrace the other.

I was still too unprepared.

Too bloody sober, and I’d admit that much.

I wanted to delve into my pocket, to retrieve the bit of opium I had left and take a fortifying bite, but I had no time. That I did not feel the bite of anxiety was to the medicinal’s credit. It simply wasn’t enough, that’s all.

Once I touched ground, I would rectify this.

Slinging the device onto my back, grunting beneath its overly sturdy weight, I surveyed my exits quickly. Two rooftops east, I’d find a marker of three. Perhaps three windows, perhaps three chimneys. I’d know it when I saw it. Such things weren’t a map in the usual way. Them what lived on the street knew them different than a mapmaker.

I set off in the proposed direction, keeping my head low, my eyes sharp. In seconds, my back ached beneath the weight, and my estimation of Maddie Ruth’s fortitude rose a notch. To think she’d carried this on her back the whole time and barely gave a word.