Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,43

you’re going to need more than a charming smile and me in your pocket to get in there.>

She sighed and rubbed her eyes.

She turned left, through the foundry yards.

Sancia tried to think about how to phrase these words, as they were essentially incomprehensible to any Tevanni.

Sancia grimaced.

She glanced to the east, where the giant cloud of dust was drifting toward the moon.

said Clef.

* * *

Sancia kept to the rooftops as she made her way through Foundryside to Old Ditch. Her hands hurt like hell and her head wasn’t much better, but she had to make do. Every once in a while she’d peer down into the warrens and spy someone who looked large, well fed, well armed, and quite mean—and she’d know she wasn’t out of danger yet.

She briefly stopped in Old Ditch to hit up a once-favorite stop of hers: the Bibbona Wine Brewery. Everyone said the cane wine made there was atrocious, but they still did a brisk business—brisk enough to be worth her robbing the place every once in a while, back in the day. But then some clever bastard had not only installed a reinforced door in the brewery, but they’d also rigged up a timing system: three Miranda Brass locks that had to be unlocked within twenty seconds of each other—otherwise, they’d all re-lock. Even with Sancia’s talents, the hassle hadn’t been worth the payout.

But with Clef, it was easy—one, two, three, and suddenly she had two hundred duvots in her pocket.

asked Clef as she crept away.

She quickly scaled the side of a rookery and scrambled onto the rooftop.

Luckily, the Scrappers were in the first place she looked—an abandoned loft in Old Ditch. To her surprise, they weren’t in their workshop, but were instead standing on the balcony, staring out at the distant chaos in Foundryside. Sancia peered over the rooftop at them, then carefully started climbing down.

Giovanni screamed in surprise and fell backward into the other Scrappers as Sancia dropped down to the balcony. “For the love of God!” she said, standing. “Could you keep it down!”

“San?” said Claudia. “What the hell are you doing here?” She looked up along the wall. “Why were you on the roof?”

“I’m here to buy,” said Sancia. “And buy fast. And I had to take a safe route.” She glanced at the street below. “Can we go indoors?”

“No,” said Claudia. “All our lights are off. Nothing works, that’s why we’re out here.”

“Have you checked recently?” asked Sancia.

“Why?” said Giovanni suspiciously.

“We haven’t,” said Claudia. “Because the second we came outside, some scrumming buildings started falling down! The whole neighborhood’s gone mad!”

“Oh,” said Sancia. She coughed. “Ah. Very strange, that. But—can we, uh, light a candle, and go inside anyway?

Giovanni narrowed his eyes at her. “Sancia…I suddenly feel that your arrival, and all these disasters, seems terribly coincidental.”

Sancia spied someone in a steel cap walking down the alley below. “Can we please just go inside?” she begged.

Claudia and Giovanni exchanged a glance. Then Claudia said to the rest of the Scrappers, “Stay out here. Let me know if anything…I don’t know, explodes or something.”

Inside, Sancia quickly told them what had happened—or tried to. The more she talked, the madder it all felt. As she spoke, she washed her hands in the candlelight and wrapped her palms and wrists in chalk cloth. She didn’t like it much—she didn’t like any new clothing—but she knew she had to do a lot more climbing soon.

Claudia stared at her in disbelief. “You’ve got a whole goddamn campo army out looking for you?”

“Pretty much,” said Sancia.

“And…and Sark’s dead?” asked Giovanni.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Almost certainly.”

“And…” Claudia looked at her, frightened. “You say