forward. The Tidemakers raised their hands, and then, over all of it, like the keening cry of a woman in mourning, the plague siren began to wail.
The church went silent. People paused, their heads up, ears attuned to that sound, a sound they had not heard in more than seven years. Even in Hellgate, prisoners told stories of the Queen’s Lady Plague, the last great wave of sickness to strike Ketterdam, the quarantines, the sickboats, the dead piling up in the streets faster than the bodymen could collect and burn them.
“What is that?” asked Kuwei.
The corner of Kaz’s mouth curled. “That, Kuwei, is the sound that death makes when she comes calling.”
A moment later, the siren could not be heard at all over the screaming as people shoved toward the church’s double doors. No one even noticed when the first shot was fired.
T he wheel spun, gold and green panels whirring so fast they became a single color. It slowed and stopped and whatever number came up must have been a good one, because the people cheered. The floor of the gambling palace was uncomfortably warm, and Nina’s scalp itched beneath her wig. It was an unflattering bell shape, and she’d paired it with a dowdy gown. For once, she didn’t want to draw attention.
She had passed unnoticed through her first stop on West Stave, and through her second, then she’d crossed over to East Stave, doing her best to move unseen through the crowds. They were thinner due to the blockades, but people would not be kept from their pleasures. She’d made a visit to a gambling palace just a few blocks south of this one, and now her work was almost done. Kaz had chosen the establishments with care. This would be her fourth and final destination.
As she smiled and whooped with the other players, she opened the glass case in her pocket and focused on the black cells within it. She could feel that deep cold radiating from it, that sense of something more, something other that spoke to the power inside her. She hesitated only briefly, recalling too clearly the chill of the morgue, the stink of death. She remembered standing over the dead man’s body and focusing on the discolored skin around his mouth.
As she’d once used her power to heal or rend skin, or even place a flush in someone’s cheeks, she had concentrated on those decaying cells and funneled a slender sheath of necrotic flesh into the compressed glass case. She’d tucked the case into a black velvet pouch and now, standing in this raucous crowd, watching the happy colors of the wheel spin, she felt its weight—dangling from her wrist by a silver cord.
She leaned in to place a bet. With one hand, she set her chips on the table. With the other, she opened the glass case.
“Wish me luck!” she said to the wheel broker, allowing the open bag to brush against his hand, sending those dying cells up his fingers, letting them multiply over his healthy skin.
When he reached for the wheel, his fingers were black.
“Your hand!” exclaimed a woman. “There’s something on it.”
He scrubbed his fingers over his embroidered green coat as if it were simply ink or coal dust. Nina flexed her fingers, and the cells crawled up the broker’s sleeve to the collar of his shirt, bursting in a black stain over one side of his neck, curling under his jaw to his bottom lip.
Someone screamed, and the players backed away from him as the broker looked around in confusion. Players at the other tables turned from their cards and dice in irritation. The pit boss and his minions were moving toward them, ready to shut down whatever fight or problem was disrupting game play.
Hidden by the crowd, Nina swept her arm through the air and a cluster of the cells jumped to a woman beside the wheel broker wearing expensive-looking pearls. A black starburst appeared on her cheek, an ugly little spider that rippled down her chin and over the column of her throat.
“Olena!” her heavyset companion shouted. “Your face!”
Now the screams were spreading as Olena clawed at her neck, stumbling forward, searching out a mirror as the other customers scattered before her.
“She touched the broker! It got her too!”
“What got her?”
“Get out of my way!”
“What’s happening here?” the pit boss demanded, clapping a hand on the baffled broker’s shoulder.
“Help me!” the broker begged, holding up his hands. “There’s something wrong.”
The pit boss took in the