About Cordelia’s end he knew only as much as the next person—whatever he’d heard on the wireless, or read about in the paper. She had been killed in a tactical strike turned sour. Someone had tipped police to a major Catwalk cell receiving a visit from the Spotlight herself, and set the hounds on Cordelia’s scent. But what was supposed to be a swift assassination turned into a neighborhood skirmish in the capital city of Nuesklend, just a few miles from the embattled Cliff House. The Catwalk had built a strong base by that point, and instead of a single shot to the head and a body swiftly removed, uncooperative citizenry turned the thing into forced entries, raids without warrants, door-to-door fighting, and finally gunfire in the streets. The result was significant collateral damage, most of it thanks to the Ospies. It looked bad. It made Cordelia into a martyr, and put wind in the sails of a revolution that eventually pushed Acherby from power: first, after he stepped down, and second, after a surviving member of the Catwalk shot him on the curb, on his way out of the country.

In his imagination, Aristide saw Cordelia backed against a wall, behind a crumbling barricade of bullet-riddled furniture. She wore an almost cosmetic streak of blood on one round cheek, and she met the Ospies’ guns with a haughty smile and a few shots of her own. When she collapsed, she fell forward as if she were taking a bow. Red had always looked good on her.

He wondered if the memorial captured anything like that.

One of the cab doors opened then shut, and Daoud was at his elbow, closer than he had yet dared to come on land.

“So that is it,” he said, soft voice almost lost in wool and the howl of the wind.

“It was,” said Aristide, and climbed back into the car.

After a brief stop to collect mail and drop off baggage, Aristide and Daoud hailed another cab and navigated the potholes and sawhorses of the city streets to reach the Amberlinian offices of Cross-Costa Imports.

Even in his heyday, he hadn’t kept a proper brick-and-mortar spot to do his business. Why, when he had friends and colleagues in all parts of the city, and could catch a cab or a streetcar to call on them? When there were restaurants, teahouses, opium dens, and absinthe bars that could as easily play host to a rendezvous?

But when one was working across continents, he certainly saw the utility in it. A central hub for the telegraph and ticker tape, a place to take radio calls and direct all the company’s correspondence. It was less glamorous than the lamp-lit Crabtree House or the glass-and-silver fountains of Amanti’s, but it also drew less attention. Appear to operate above the table, and folk rarely looked beneath.