Pointedly, with great discipline, she poured her coffee and took a sip before she set aside her cup in favor of the onionskin.

MEET HALF TWO AT LYLES STOP OS END

Which was how she found herself at the top of a set of treacherous stairs on a side street off Temple, beneath a buzzing neon sign that read LYLE’S TAPROOM.

Not her usual sort of haunt. Thanks be Martí had known the place and been able to take her there. Just another odd stop in the long line of them her work over the years had called for. At least at Lyle’s she would not be attempting seduction, or sedition.

The stairs were an adventure to navigate in pumps, but she made it down and let herself in. A bell over the door thwacked dully, short a hammer. A team of metro workers sat at the bar, still in coveralls, hard hats upturned on the floor beside their stools. The trolley lines had been under nearly constant construction since Lillian returned to the city, and the dusty teams were a ubiquitous sight.

A young man with a notepad and half a pint at his elbow scratched aimlessly at a table with the nib of his pen. Two middle-aged razors occupied the corner by the jukebox, veiled in a cloud of smoke.

Out of her eye-catching gala finery, Saeger looked more comfortable, and more compelling. Lillian had never been particularly susceptible to the sway of charisma, but Saeger certainly had … something. An intensity that made her difficult to ignore.

A useful tool, already winning her support among the more impressionable of the voting populace. Lillian could help her temper it with strategy, wield it to best effect. Hopefully that was why she had been invited here: to offer her opinions and advice.

A couple of hangers-on about Saeger’s age occupied the table with her: two men, likely brothers, and a broad-shouldered woman in a sheepskin jacket.

“Lillian,” said Saeger, and the informality struck Lillian as awkward but understandable. The surname might catch somebody’s attention.

“Opal,” she said, because a ministerial candidate was even more likely to be recognized than a minor scandal.

“Anything to drink?” Saeger tipped her pint glass. She didn’t introduce the hangers-on, and they didn’t move to do it themselves. Were they protection? Campaign team? Friends?

Lillian smiled and shook her head. “No, thank you. Or perhaps just a shrub?”

Saeger snorted. “I don’t think they do those.”

In denim and canvas and a collarless work shirt, instead of stiff raw silk, she also spoke more easily: the barest hint of a nasal city drone, and soft, almost nonexistent consonants that let her words run together. Her mouth had a crooked cant, so her sentences came out of one side. Lillian wagered it was the same side smoke came out of, when she had a straight lit up.

“Why Lyle’s, may I ask?”